One of my favorite topics lately has been the challenges faced by information control regimes. Jerry Brito and I are writing a big paper on this issue right now. Part of the story we tell is that the sheer scale / volume of modern information flows is becoming so overwhelming that it raises practical questions about just how effective any info control regime can be. [See our recent essays on the topic: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.]  As we continue our research, we’ve been attempting to unearth some good metrics / factoids to help tell this story.  It’s challenging because there aren’t many consistent data sets depicting online data growth over time and some of the best anecdotes from key digital companies are only released sporadically. Anyway, I’d love to hear from others about good metrics and data sets that we should be examining.  In the meantime, here are a few fun facts I’ve unearthed in my research so far. Please let me know if more recent data is available. [Note: Last updated 7/18/11]

• Facebook: users submit around 650,000 comments on the 100 million pieces of content served up every minute on its site.[1]  People on Facebook install 20 million applications every day.[2]
• YouTube: every minute, 48 hours of video were uploaded.  According to Peter Kafka of The Wall Street Journal, “That’s up 37 percent in the last six months, and 100 percent in the last year. YouTube says the increase comes in part because it’s easier than ever to upload stuff, and in part because YouTube has started embracing lengthy live streaming sessions. YouTube users are now watching more than 3 billion videos a day. That’s up 50 percent from the last year, which is also a huge leap, though the growth rate has declined a bit: Last year, views doubled from a billion a day to two billion in six months.”[3]
• eBay is now the world’s largest online marketplace with more than 90 million active users globally and $60 billion in transactions annually, or $2,000 every second.[4]
• Google: 34,000 searches per second (2 million per minute; 121 million per hour; 3 billion per day; 88 billion per month).[5]
• Twitter already has 300 million users producing 140 million Tweets a day, which adds up to a billion Tweets every 8 days[6] (@ 1,600 Tweets per second)  “On the first day Twitter was made available to the public, 224 tweets were sent. Today, that number of updates are posted at least 10 times a second.”[7]
• Apple: more than 10 billion apps have been downloaded from its App Store by customers in over 77 countries.[8] According to Chris Burns of SlashGear, “Currently it appears that another thousand apps are downloaded every 9 seconds in the Android Marketplace while every 3 seconds another 1,000 apps are downloaded in the App Store.”
• Yelp: as of July 2011 the site hosted over 18 million user reviews.[9]
• Wikipedia: Every six weeks, there are 10 million edits made to Wikipedia.[10]

• “Humankind shared 65 exabytes of information in 2007, the equivalent of every person in the world sending out the contents of six newspapers every day.”[11]
• Researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, estimate that, in 2008, the world’s 27 million business servers processed 9.57 zettabytes, or 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information.  This is “the digital equivalent of a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times a year.” The study also estimated that enterprise server workloads are doubling about every two years, “which means that by 2024 the world’s enterprise servers will annually process the digital equivalent of a stack of books extending more than 4.37 light-years to Alpha Centauri, our closest neighboring star system in the Milky Way Galaxy.”[12]
• According to Dave Evans, Cisco’s chief futurist and chief technologist for the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group, about 5 exabytes of unique information were created in 2008. That’s 1 billion DVDs. Fast forward three years and we are creating 1.2 zettabytes, with one zettabyte equal to 1,024 exabytes. “This is the same as every person on Earth tweeting for 100 years, or 125 million years of your favorite one-hour TV show,” says Evans. Our love of high-definition video accounts for much of the increase. By Cisco’s count, 91% of Internet data in 2015 will be video.[13]

Yesterday, if you paid attention reeeeally carefully (1, 2, 3, 4), you probably figured out the D.C. Circuit had ruled that Congress hadn’t given the Federal Communications Commission power to regulate the Internet and that the FCC couldn’t bootstrap that power from other authority. It was a rare but welcome affirmation that the rule of law might actually pertain in the regulatory area.

But the Open Internet Coalition put out a release containing threat exaggeration to make Dick Cheney blush:

“Today’s DC Circuit decision . . . creates a dangerous situation, one where the health and openness of broadband Internet is being held hostage by the behavior of the major telco and cable providers.”

That’s right. It’s a hostage-taking when consumers and businesses—and not government—hammer out the terms and conditions of Internet access. Inferentially, the organization representing Google, Facebook, eBay, and Twitter believes that Internet users are too stupid and supine to choose the Internet service they want.

What these content companies are really after, of course, is government support in their tug-of-war with the companies that transport Internet content. It’s hard to know which produces the value of the Internet and which should gain the lion’s share of the rewards. Let the market—not lobbying—decide what reward content and transport deserve for their roles in the Internet ecosystem.

As I said of the Open Internet Coalition’s membership on a saltier, but still relentlessly charming, day: “[T]hese companies are losing their way. The leadership of these companies should fire their government relations staffs, disband their contrived advocacy organization, and get back to innovating and competing.”

Be prepared next week for a cacophony of hand-wringing and prognosticating about retail sales figures reported on “Black Friday.” Retailers traditionally count on holiday shoppers to put them “in the black” for the year with a surge of purchases on the Friday after Thanksgiving.

But if you really want to understand this year’s retail sales picture, wait til the Monday after Thanksgiving. “Black Monday” is day a lot of people return to work, fire up the computer, and begin their online holiday shopping. 

Recent reports suggest that the recession has boosted rather than harmed electronic commerce, for one simple reason: the Internet makes it a lot easier to find the best price for many common purchases. Numerous recent posts tell this story:

Harsh Economy Can’t Shake Love for Online Retailers

Internet Supermaket Booms in Bad Times

Is Online Shopping Affected by a Recession?

The most popular online sites on STORES Magazine’s list include those of established merchants, such as Walmart, Best Buy, JC. Penney, and Target. They also include the pure online plays, such as Amazon.com, eBay, and Overstock.com.  Craigslist — the site where I hunt for used and free stuff — made Stores’ “Top 50” list for the first time this year.  That’s surely a sign that the recession has been a boon to online shopping!

I’ve spent a lot of time here deconstructing and criticizing the proposals set forth by the Free Press, the radical media “reformista” group founded by the prolific Marxist media theorist Robert McChesney.  I have been trying to shine more light on their proposals and activities because I believe they are antithetical to freedom of speech and a free society.  That’s because, as media scholar Ben Compaine has noted, “What the hard core reformistas really want, it seems, is not diversity or an open debate but a media that promotes their own vision of society and the world.”  That’s exactly right and, more specifically, as I argued in my 2005 Media Myths book, the media reformistas want to impose this control by taking the fantasy that “the public owns the [broadcast] airwaves” and extending it to ALL media platforms and outlets.  In other words, McChesney and the Free Press want an UnFree Press.  To cast things in neo-Marxist terms that they could appreciate, they want to take control of the information means of production.  And it begins, McChesney argues, by all of us having to give up this “sort of religious attachment to the idea of a ‘free-press'” from which we all suffer.

Some people accuse me of “red-baiting” or “McCarthyite” tactics when I use the “M-word” (Marxism) or the “S-Word” (socialism) to describe McChesney, the Free Press, and the movement they have spawned.  But these are labels with real meaning and ones that McChesney himself embraces in his work. In his 1999 book Rich Media, Poor Media, he says that “Media reform cannot win without widespread support and such support needs to be organized as part of a broad anti-corporate, pro-democracy movement.” He casts everything in “social justice” terms and speaks of the need “to rip the veil off [corporate] power, and to work so that social decision making and power may be made as enlightened and as egalitarian as possible.”  What exactly would all that mean in practice for media? In his 2002 book Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle against Corporate Media with John Nichols of The Nation, McChesney argues that media reform efforts must begin with “the need to promote an understanding of the urgency to assert public control over the media.” They go on to state that, “Our claim is simply that the media system produces vastly less of quality than it would if corporate and commercial pressures were lessened.”

If you want additional proof of his intentions, then I encourage you to read this lengthy interview with McChesney that appears in the new edition of The Bullet, an online newsletter produced by the Canada-based “Socialist Project.”  (If you ask me, there’s something strangely appropriate about a socialist newsletter named “The Bullet” in light of the millions of people who died while living under socialist tyranny!)  Anyway, let’s ignore that and focus on what neo-Marxist media reform entails according to McChesney.  Because never before has he laid his cards on the table as clearly as he does in this interview.

The “Struggle” for “Media Democracy”

In the interview, as in all his work, McChesney speaks repeatedly about the Marxist concept of “struggles,” which  usually refers to class struggles and worker struggles. But McChesney’s work focuses on “media democracy struggles” as part of an overall struggle for “social justice.”  He says:

Instead of waiting for the revolution to happen, we learned that unless you make significant changes in the media, it will be vastly more difficult to have a revolution. While the media is not the single most important issue in the world, it is one of the core issues that any successful Left project needs to integrate into its strategic program.

In other words, media reform is part of The Big Struggle. The Big Struggle is the effort to overthrow free-market capitalism. And the struggle for “media democracy” is crucial to that, you see, because we are all just pawns whose minds are being manipulated by some far-off corporate puppet-masters in New York and L.A., who are, of course, just feeding us nothing but pro-capitalist propaganda 24/7.  Thus, we have to burn the village to save it, McChesney says:

Many say that corporate journalism, based on profit maximization, best serves a free and democratic society. The position is incorrect. The connection of capitalism to journalism, which has always been fraught with problems, has always been unstable. The relationship between capitalism, journalism, and democracy has never been a sure thing. In the U.S, the notion that capitalism is the natural steward of journalism and should be left alone to provide for a free and self-governing society refers to a period that began during the 19th century. This period ended when owners realized they could make a lot of money by turning journalism into big business. Corporations are not in a position to generate and pay for quality journalism. The news is not a commercial product. It is a public good, necessary for a self-governing society.

In other words, down with private media!  McChesney basically declares that the entire history of private media in America to be one gigantic case of market failure and must be abandoned.

Subsidies to “Save Journalism”

But what’s going to replace private media once McChesney and his media reformistas have moved the regulatory wrecking ball in?  In a nutshell, he wants massive state subsidization of the media:

Once we accept this [the supposed “public goods” nature of all media], we can talk about the kind of media policies and subsidies we want. What are the best ones? How should they be implemented? We are now trying to answer those questions and organize around them.

Herein lies one of the great ironies of McChesney’s work: He spends a great deal of time arguing that the entire history of American media has basically been one big government-created construct (monopolies, entry barriers, subsidies, etc), only to turn around and advocate massive state intervention and subsidies as a solution!  McChesney plays revisionist historian and even tries to paint Jefferson and Madison as media socialists because postal rates from the founding period on down have been reduced for print media mailings. Somehow, McChesney reads this to mean that “the U.S. state has always played a direct and indirect role in facilitating and legitimizing the corporate media system.”  Which is rubbish. The idea that postal subsidies have created “the corporate media system” is preposterous. McChesney is on stronger ground in arguing the state has occasionally helped foster and then protect monopolies, but that is a function of the very “public utility” regulatory regime that McChesney favors! [More on this point down below.]

Meanwhile, in true Rahm Emanual-ian “you-never-want-a-crisis-to-go-to-waste” fashion, the Free Press has started a new project to “Save the News” and move America “Toward a National Journalism Strategy” by endorsing a lot of the same regulations, subsidies, and tax credits that McChesney and John Nichols recently advocated in their Nation magazine essay, “The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers.” As I noted in my City Journal response to that essay back in March, you can file this all under “socializing media in order to save it,” complete with Soviet-style 5-year plans dictated by some faceless elite inside a Beltway bureaucracy. Oh, and there’s the little matter of $60 billion price tag that taxpayers will be left footing.  (But hey, what’s another $60 billion these days?)  Even Free Press favorite Dan Rather is on board with his plan to have President Obama give us “The News America Needs” by “form[ing] a commission to address the perilous state of America’s news media.”  Perhaps once the car commission folks get done driving the U.S. auto industry into the ground they can shift gears, so to speak, and see what they can do to steer journalism onto a supposedly better path.

Down with Advertising

If McChesney and Free Press don’t succeed in destroying private media with their regulatory plans, there’s always Plan B… bleed free market media operators and Internet companies dry by taking away their mother’s milk, advertising.  McChesney argues that “the Internet is increasingly hyper-commercialized” and it is “open[ing] our entire lives to 24/7 injections of advertising messages.”  Thus, wouldn’t you know it, yet another “struggle” is in order!

We need to organize against hyper-commercialism. This is an easy-sell for the Left. We understand that advertising is not something done by all people equally, but rather, done by a very small group of people working on behalf of multinational corporations. Advertising is commercial propaganda…  Advertising is the voice of capital. We need to do whatever we can to limit capitalist propaganda, regulate it, minimize it, and perhaps even eliminate it. The fight against hyper-commercialism becomes especially pronounced in the era of digital communications.  […] There is a fundamental crisis when you are in a world that is entirely commercial, in terms of the integrity of speech and thought. We are at the tipping point and we need to struggle directly against it.

Struggle, struggle, struggle!

Of course, McChesney will have plenty of allies in this particular struggle as Washington continues to wage a war against advertising of all sorts. Of course, there really is no free lunch in this world and something will have to pay for serious news-gathering (and entertainment, for that matter). Of course, McChesney and his Free Press allies will, no doubt, respond that still more subsidies are in order!  There is, apparently, always someone else in their world to whom the buck can be passed.  [But I wonder: Who would be left to pay all the taxes needed to support public media if McChesney’s “struggle” to overthrow The Man succeeds??]

Net neutrality & Infrastructure Nationalization

And don’t for one minute think that McChesney and Free Press are only out for the old media operators.  They’re out for private broadband and Internet players as well.

When speaking about the centrality of Net neutrality regulation to this “struggle” and coming “revolution,” McChesney does a nice job reminding some of us why we have been so concerned about politicizing a debate over network engineering when he says: “What we want to have in the U.S. and in every society is an Internet that is not private property, but a public utility.”  Ah yes, because public utilities have been soooo efficient and innovative in other contexts!  Please.

In advocating increased regulation or state-ownership of communications networks or broadband companies and connections, McChesney seems utterly oblivious to the fact that the very state power he advocates on one hand is the same state power that private parties can corrupt on the other.  He says, for example, that “Our struggle to make the Internet into a public utility conflicts with the interests of telephone and cable firms,” because “Their power rests upon their ability to successfully buy off politicians.”  How does he not see the contradiction?  He’s certainly right to fear that public officials can be co-opted by private interests. (Read up on your public choice theory, buddy!)  But I suppose McChesney believes that his perfect socialist state will be immune to these pressures because it will be run by enlightened, public-minded philosopher kings… you know… like himself.  But that’s nonsense.  See my old essay on the fantasy of “Building a Better Bureaucrat” or Tim Lee’s old essay on “Real Regulators” for more details on why it never works out that way in practice. Or, better yet, since I know he would never read anything I penned on the subject, I encourage McChesney to take a hard look at the definitive 2-volume Economics of Regulation by a far more experienced progressive Democrat, Professor Alfred E. Kahn. In Kahn’s masterwork, you will find the following words of wisdom (and caution) from someone who spent a lifetime studying these issues:

When a commission is responsible for the performance of an industry, it is under never completely escapable pressure to protect the health of the companies it regulates, to assure a desirable performance by relying on those monopolistic chosen instruments and its own controls rather than on the unplanned and unplannable forces of competition. […] Responsible for the continued provision and improvement of service, [the regulatory commission] comes increasingly and understandably to identify the interest of the public with that of the existing companies on whom it must rely to deliver goods.

McChesney makes one final point about Net neutrality that is worth highlighting. When asked whether he had any reservations about making short-term alliances with new media companies or Internet operators such as Google, eBay, Amazon, and Microsoft in the push for Net neutrality regulations, McChesney says: “Absolutely.. But I’ve learned, by participating in over a decade of specific media struggles, that when you are in the short-term and you are fighting to win, sometimes you make tactical alliances.” Nonetheless, he notes, ” the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.” And, so, the ends justify the means in terms of striking short-term alliances with those evil, blood-sucking capitalists.  I hope the folks at Google, eBay, Amazon, and Microsoft are reading McChesney’s radical thinking on communications policy and realize that he and his Free Press reformistas will eventually turn their sights on them just as soon as they are finished socializing the infrastructure layer of the Internet.

Conclusion: Against Media Tyranny

In a very strange sense, I admire Robert McChesney.  He is a man of principle.  And he isn’t ashamed to advocate his principles publicly (whereas some of his Free Press disciples do a very nice job disguising their true intentions).

That being said, McChesney’s principles are dangerous ones. Very dangerous.  They are antithetical to a free society, freedom of speech, and technological progress.  At its core, as I noted in my old essay, “Your Soapbox is My Soapbox,” the repugnant morality behind this “media access” movement is that nothing is truly yours.  “Media democracy” means everything is up for grabs.  Here’s how I put it in that old “soapbox” essay:

Imagine you built a platform in your backyard for the purpose of informing or entertaining your friends of neighbors. Now further imagine that you are actually fairly good at what you do and manage to attract and retain a large audience. Then one day, a few hecklers come to hear you speak on your platform. They shout about how it’s unfair that you have attracted so many people to hear you speak on your soapbox and they demand access to your platform for a certain amount of time each day. They rationalize this by arguing that it is THEIR rights as listeners that are really important, not YOUR rights as a speaker or the owner of the soapbox. That sort of scenario could never happen in America, right? Sadly, it’s been the way media law has operated for several decades in this country. This twisted “media access” philosophy has been employed by federal lawmakers and numerous special interest groups to justify extensive and massively unjust regime of media regulation and speech redistributionism. And it’s still at work today.

Indeed, McChesney has taken this old “media access” movement that Jerome Barron, Owen Fiss, Cass Sunstein and others pioneered long ago, and advanced it to a whole new level, and to its logical conclusion.  The aim is not just to co-opt someone else’s soapbox; it is to smash their soapbox into pieces. It is to tear the very fabric of the First Amendment into shreds and rebuild “media democracy” around the principles not of true freedom, but of state servitude.  You only have as much freedom to engage in speech, reporting, or entertaining as your media overlords will allow.  And God help you if any of it proves popular because then they will really want to crush you like an ant!

I’ll close this rant the same way I concluded my earlier “soapbox” rant:

This arrogant, elitist, anti-property, anti-freedom ethic is what drives the media access movement and makes it so morally repugnant. Freedom doesn’t begin by fettering the press with more chains, it begins by removing those that already exist and then erecting a firm wall between State and Press. The media access crowd has succeeded in breaching that wall with seven decades of misguided and unjust regulation of the press. The movement back toward a truly free press begins by understanding the error in their thinking, rejecting that reasoning, and then embracing, once again, the original vision of the First Amendment as a bulwark against government control of speech and the press.

I’ve been working closely with PFF Adjunct Fellow & former ICANN Board member Michael D. Palage on ICANN issues.  Michael had this to say about the ongoing saga of ICANN’s attempt to create new gTLDs.

During the recent ICANN Board meeting in Mexico City, the Board authorized the creation and funding of an Implementation Recommendation Team (IRT).  This team was to be comprised of “an internationally diverse group of persons with knowledge, expertise, and experience in the fields of trademark, consumer protection, or competition law, and the interplay of trademarks and the domain name system to develop and propose solutions to the overarching issue of trademark protection in connection with the introduction of new gTLDs.” This IRT is tasked to produce a report for consideration by the ICANN community at the Sydney meeting.

The IRT consists of 24 members:

• Chairwoman Caroline G. Chicoine; and
• Seventeen members; and
• Six ex officio members:  Four IPC-elected officers and two-GNSO elected Board Directors (Bruce Tonkin and Rita Rodin Johnston).  

I have a number of friends and colleagues serving on this team and I wish them well in their important endeavor.

I’ve previously proposed a number of rights-protection mechanisms that IRT should consider.  Today, I offer a few suggestions that I hope will guide IRT as they embark on their important work tomorrow.  In particular, I hope they’ll implement some of my suggestions intended to make the IRT process more transparent-so the rest of the global Internet can follow along with their important work and provide constructive input where possible.