The New York Times paywall is officially coming down:
The Times said the project had met expectations, drawing 227,000 paying subscribers — out of 787,000 over all — and generating about $10 million a year in revenue.
“But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com.
What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.
Or as I put it last year:
The columnists of the New York Times got a lot more attention from the blogosphere before they went behind the Times Select paywall. In the long run, the Times will have to either tear down their paywall, or their columnists will fade into obscurity. Why should people pay to read the Times’s anointed pundits when there are as good (or at least nearly as good) pundits whose work is available for free?
I think it’s only a matter of time before the Journal crunches the numbers and reaches the same conclusion.
Julian has a great write-up of the push to extend copyright protection to the fashion industry:
Even when the ubiquity of a style harms the sales of particular garments by widely-copied designers, however, it need not lower sales for high-end fashion as a whole. Instead, it may cause lateral displacement, as the fashion elite seek out less common looks. That could yield what legal scholars Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman have dubbed “The Piracy Paradox”: Copying that harms individual designers may be a boon to the industry as a whole, as it popularizes trends and then burns them out, speeding up the fashion cycle and spurring demand for new styles. “When a successful restaurant opens up on a street that’s never had a restaurant before, there’s a way in which the second business is parasitic on the first,” says Raustiala. “But in the United States, we call that capitalism and competition.”
As the copyright office’s own analysis noted, there’s no data showing that knockoffs have done any net harm to high fashion, and the explosive growth of fast fashion has coexisted with a massive luxury boom. Betsy Fisher, who owns an eponymous clothing boutique in Washington D.C., suggests this may be because knockoffs create “fashion groupies,” serving as a kind of gateway drug to couture for the teens who are flocking to fast fashion.
And be sure to tune in for this week’s podcast, which will feature an in-depth discussion with Julian and Prof. Sprigman about this issue, as well as Sprigman’s recent victory in the Golan decision.
I want Microsoft’s
market share to diminish to significantly less than 95%. I can’t say that it
has to be precisely 50% or whatever number, but it has to be significantly
less than 95.
– Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for Competition Policy
Today’s decision from the European Court of First Instance
affirms the broad role that competition policy has in Europe.
You can slug through the lengthy court opinion, but these press conference
Q&A comments of Neelie Kroes (including the above quote) are revealing.
They show the true intent of the European Commission’s competition policy
regulators: competition policy is about
micromanaging software development and dictating market evolution.
Here’s the largest buzzword from both Kroes and the EC’s
press statement: interoperability. Again, a quote from Kroes, this time from
her prepared statement:
In confirming the interoperability part of the Commission’s decision, the
Court has confirmed the importance of interoperability for consumer choice and
innovation in high tech industries. If competitors are unable to make their
products "talk to" or work properly with a dominant company’s
products, they are prevented from bringing new innovative products onto the
market, and customers are locked into the products of the existing provider.
Sure, interoperability is often an important feature of IT
— if it’s market-driven. Otherwise,
it smacks of the sort of “infrastructure socialism” that Adam Thierer and Wayne
Crews have cataloged in their book.
Continue reading →
The Department of Homeland Security’s Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee meets Wednesday at the Hilton Arlington (Ballston), 950 North Stafford Street in Arlington, Virginia.
Focus: Fusion Centers.
Should be HOT! Or not . . . Agenda here.
Lauren Weinstein wrote a post on his blog this weekend entitled Detecting and Proving Network Neutrality Violations. The basic thesis: “Without an appropriately broad infrastructure to collect and process metrics associated with network neutrality, it is difficult to understand how anyone can reasonably assert that we would know if and when violations were taking place . . . .”
Undoubtedly. And such an infrastructure should be built in tandem with give-and-take about what consumers most want and need in terms of broadband Internet access services. That is, we need to know what “violates” net neutrality – or, if some non-neutral broadband network serves consumers better – what violates the rules for that network.
Weinstein challenges: “Not even the anti-neutrality folks should be able to logically argue against what might be termed a ‘trust, but verify’ approach.” (I’ll take “anti-neutrality folks” as a careless formulation meaning “opponents of net neutrality regulation” – and accept the challenge.)
I think Weinstein is correct in this. The community of Internet users should run a network of monitors to determine when ISPs are deviating from their Terms of Service and customer expectations, including expectations with regard to neutrality (or non-neutrality), along with all the other dimensions of Internet access service that matter.
Given that the Internet is a communications medium, that community is well-equipped to name, shame, and punish violators of consumer interests and demands. Government regulations that freeze network design in law would focus all the discussion on legal and regulatory mandates, not the best network design, or the true interests of Internet users.
Google’s Peter Fleischer commences their call for global privacy standards saying, “As I’ve noted before, everyone has a right to privacy online.” Wrong.
Privacy is a good, not a right. Government standards to protect privacy (if even possible) would be a set of entitlements, not a vindication of rights.
More on what privacy is here.
At a time when most people agree that Google or Apple have replaced Microsoft as the tech industry’s top player, government regulators on two continents are going retro, pushing old antitrust arguments. This backward-looking thinking threatens innovation for all companies and needs to stop now.
While the technology community has moved from obsessing over operating systems to focusing on Internet search and digital media government regulators are stuck in the past, wasting taxpayer time and money. A case in point is a group of states, led by California’s Attorney General and former governor Jerry Brown. This week, they told a federal judge that Microsoft’s “market power remains undiminished,” a statement that must make the execs at Google and Apple giggle with glee. For those who see the transition to Web-based services taking off, it’s a total joke.
[…]
Read more here.
This week the Federal Communications Commission failed to muster 3 votes to deregulate the broadband access services of Qwest Communications, as it has already done for Verizon in early 2006. The nature of the relief we’re talking about is analogous to the commission’s reclassification of DSL as an “information” service rather than a “telecommunications” service in 2005. In both cases, the effect is to free broadband providers from onerous common carrier regulation, allow them to tailor their offerings to customer needs and not be forced to offer their services to competitors at regulated, cost-based rates for resale.
To be fair, the relief Verizon got didn’t garner 3 of 5 votes. Verizon’s petition was filed pursuant to Sec. 10 of the Communications Act, which provides that a forbearance petition (a petition which asks the FCC to forbear from applying a regulation) will be granted automatically unless the commission denies it for good reason within one year plus a 90-day extension. That didn’t happen, so Verizon’s petition was granted automatically. This procedure may not sound like an ideal way to conduct public business, but Congress enacted Sec. 10 because of a long history of FCC foot-dragging. The commission is a political animal, and many former staffers are employed by the companies the FCC regulates.
Continue reading →
Adam’s been generating a lot of debate with his recent posts questioning the propriety of sharing your wireless broadband connections and urging telecom companies to experiment with metered broadband access.
Seeking to continue the discussion, Adam asked Ben Worthen, the Wall Street Journal reporter who kicked off the latest discussion of wi-fi piggybacking, and Mike Masnick, who’s been on issue for years, to join myself and TLFer James Gattuso for an in-depth discussion of the economics and ethics of piggybacking.
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.