Jim Henley helps the NYT out by revising their story on Tim O’Reilly’s slightly silly proposal for a blogging code of conduct.
Another sharp insight from Lefsetz:
When you’re a wannabe, when you’re starting out, you give your music away for free. Forget the fact that you want to be paid. The problem is, nobody knows who you are to buy your music. Your free campaign is a way to get traction. Revenue is down the pike!
Kind of like Google. There was no revenue at first. Just the truly great search engine. They got eyeballs, and then they came up with their advertising model. There’s already a business model in music, live, merch and the recorded music sales you can garner, but it pays to look at Google. Google is constantly releasing new products, that are free to use. Google News. Google Earth. Google Video, Blogs and a whole host of other features. You see they want you hooked, they want you to be a member of the club. They’ll figure out how to make money off you later. Funny, but this strategy not only decimated Yahoo, it put a huge dent in Microsoft’s online strategy.
Via Chris Anderson, Bob Lefsetz provides a reality check to those who think that music distribution needs a “business model”:
I’m positively stunned at the blowback from business regulars about that chap giving his music away for free. Oldsters can’t understand the economics!
I’ll clue you in, THERE ARE NONE!
This is your worst nightmare. People who can follow their dream on sweat equity. Who with their computer and the money from their day job or mommy and daddy can compete with you. It’s like the North Vietnamese, all our military might couldn’t defeat individuals who would fight to the death. Same deal in Iraq.
As a parent of two kids under the age of 6, I can very much relate to the questions going through Clive Thompson’s head. The Wired columnist’s latest essay is entitled “You Grew Up Playing Shoot’em-Up Games. Why Can’t Your Kids?” Like Thompson, I’m a first generation (Atari & Intellivision-era) gaming fanatic who is now raising third generation (PS & XBOX-era) gamer kids. (In case you are wondering, I define second generation gamers as the Nintendo NES & Sega-era.)
But also like Thompson, even though I’ve played just about every type of video game imaginable, I now find myself wondering how and when to introduce my kids to the world of gaming, including games with violent themes or action. Thompson begins his own introspection with the following funny story:
I was playing a round of Gears of War, trying to redo a level on “insane” mode, and the walls were painted with guts. I slaughtered my way to the boss, revved up my chainsaw, and sliced into his chest — releasing a fractal fountain of gore. Woo! At that instant, I heard the front door to my apartment open, and in walked my nanny… with my 15-month-old son, his eyes agog. Daddy, I could see him thinking, what are you doing?
Oh, nothing, son. Just kicking back with a mass-murder simulator. That’s all! So I hastily clicked off my Xbox 360, and avoided the nanny’s eyes. But it got me thinking: Eventually he’s going to want to play video games. And then I’ll have to face the traditional child-rearing quandaries that games present. When will I hand him his first controller? Will I let him play the gory combat games I love so much — and, if so, when?
Over at TCS Daily today, Derek Hunter points out why a la carte regulation is going to backfire for those who support it in the name of “cleaning up” cable and satellite television:
Smaller religious and family cable stations do not subsidize MTV, VH1, and other channels some people may find objectionable. Rather, the opposite is true, MTV, VH1, et. al, subsidize the small religious and family stations. By bundling them all together, it exposes the smaller channels to people who otherwise wouldn’t choose them, netting them more potential customers. If providers were forced to offer channels individually, the small networks with few subscribers would fizzle out due to lack of exposure. Given the choice between channels, the majority of people would not pick those small channels, their potential audience would shrink dramatically, and less audience means smaller revenues. So that “solution” would actually make the problem worse.
That’s exactly right and I discussed why a la carte regulation would have such unintended consequences in my December 2005 PFF paper, “Moral and Philosophical Aspects of the Debate over A La Carte Regulation.” As I pointed out then:
By attorney Lars Liebeler, in CNET, a discussion of recent antitrust actions here and abroad, in particular scrutiny of the Novell/Microsoft agreement.
Each generation has its antitrust bogeyman from Standard Oil down to AT&T & IBM. The short-run obsession in policy circles with a single company (when policy properly conceived ought to be anonymous for the best results in the long run) invites gaming the system, and results in exceptions dominating what ought to be the rules to an alarming extent. Principled resistance to this tendency is very weak in the EU, where fines are seized on to feed growing armies of bureaucrats in Brussels and the trend is fueled by anti-Americanism.
Japan has 7.2 million all-fiber broadband subscribers who pay $34 per month and incumbent providers NTT East and NTT West have only a 66% market share. According to Takashi Ebihara, a Senior Director in the Corporate Strategy Department at Japan’s NTT East Corp. and currently a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here in Washington, Japan has the “fastest and least expensive” broadband in the world and non-incumbent CLECs have a “reasonable” market share. Ebihara was speaking at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, and his presentation can be found here. Ebihara said government strategy played a significant role. Local loop unbundling and line sharing led to fierce competition in DSL, which forced the incumbents to move to fiber-to-the premises.
Julian has some more smart things to say about network neutrality and the Pizza Hut analogy:
Suppose an ISP wants to build out infrastructure to support 100mbps service in an area that doesn’t currently have it. Problem: There are customers who might like that higher speed access for a few purposes, like streaming movies, but not enough who are prepared to pay the premium to upgrade their whole connection, so it’s not cost effective for the ISP to make the investment. One solution might be metering: You let customers pay for the bandwidth they use, paying a bit more for bursts of higher speed needed to access specific sites with a lower flat rate for the majority of the time, when they’re just reading news and checking email. The problem is that consumers seem to have largely rejected metering: People want to pay one rate for their access, and not have to think about their usage level on a day-to-day basis.
I was on vacation last week when ICANN handed down its latest rejection of the “.xxx” top-level domain (TLD). I just wanted to make two quick points about why I find this decision quite troubling.
First, it’s obvious that some critics of the .xxx TLD oppose the proposal because they think it somehow legitimizes online pornography or will lead to the proliferation of even more cyber-porn. I find this argument bizarre and naive. As John Dvorak makes abundantly clear in his recent PC Magazine column, Internet pornography is not going away and it is almost impossible to imagine how the .xxx TLD could have done anything to make it more accessible. Dvorak rightly asks: “How hard is it to find porn on the Net? Go to any search engine and type porn. Open your e-mail box. Who are these people kidding with this argument?”
Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. The shows’s panelists this week are Jerry Brito, Braden Cox, Andrew Grossman, Adam Thierer, and Tim Carney. Topics include,
- the NAB lobbying hard against the Sirius-XM merger
- EMI drops DRM on its songs in the iTunes Music Store
- Verizon changes its wireless broadband terms of service
- the FCC will soon report to Congress on TV violence
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.