In the latest issue of Heartland’s IT&T News, S.T. Karnick has an excellent article about the decline of media consolidation fears:
Leftist critics complained about the corporatization and consolidation of the media as an unwelcome phenomenon in the ’60s and thereafter, and they were correct to point out there would be deleterious effects. There may indeed have been an initial increase in sameness of movie and TV productions and a loss of creativity and vitality in the book publishing industry, especially in the fiction section.
Market-oriented analysts simply replied by saying the consolidation was good because it was what people wanted and they wouldn’t do it if it didn’t make sense. That was not the correct response, however. People do stupid things, and corporations do stupid things too.
Continue reading →
Gary Shapiro has commented on my recent post about the Cary Sherman article. He posted the full text of the 2002 speech from which Cary Sherman plucked a few words to quote. It’s worth checking out.
Jim Harper and I have a new project in the works that you might be interested in. There’s been a lot written in recent months about peer production, the term Yochai Benkler coined to describe decentralized, non-commercial projects like Linux and Wikipedia. We think that someone needs to write a paper explaining the the phenomenon and relating it to the ideals of economic freedom that we focus on here on TLF.
And just for fun, we’d like to try a little experiment: can a paper about peer production be produced using peer production? We’ve set up a wiki, and we’d like to invite the libertarian open source geeks of the world to stop by and help us explain what peer production is, why it works so well, and how it’s related to economic freedom.
If the project takes off, we plan to pitch it for publication by a major think tank. Please join us! Contribute a sentence, a paragraph, or a whole section. Peer producing a paper about peer production… it’s so meta!
This is an impressive exercise in issue-dodging on the part of the RIAA’s Cary Sherman:
The “Digital Freedom” campaign claims that the entertainment industry’s goal is to “outlaw new digital technology and devices.” This kind of knowingly false and incendiary rhetoric is designed to distort the issue and thwart solutions by demonizing us. The fact is, we are not only music fans, but technology fans, too. We celebrate advances in technology and recognize the importance of finding new ways to deliver content.
Instead of redefining fair use to promote a short-term free-for-all, let’s embrace the existing concept to allow for long-term growth of technology, while valuing and protecting the content it carries. That benefits us all.
Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me that this is an example of “outlawing new digital technology and devices”–in this case, satellite radios with record functionality. Yet, Sherman manages to write more than 800 words without even mentioning satellite radios. In fact, I don’t think he mentions any of the policy debates that have occurred since the Grokster decision. It’s as if the RIAA just laid off all of its lawyers and lobbyists in the summer of 2005, and for some reason, that darned CEA just keeps picking on them for no apparent reason.
The Samba team is not happy about the Microsoft-Novell deal:
One of the fundamental differences between the proprietary software world and the free software world is that the proprietary software world divides users by forcing them to agree to coercive licensing agreements which restrict their rights to share with each other, whereas the free software world encourages users to unite and share the benefits of the software.
The patent agreement struck between Novell and Microsoft is a divisive agreement. It deals with users and creators of free software differently depending on their “commercial” versus “non-commercial” status, and deals with them differently depending on whether they obtained their free software directly from Novell or from someone else.
The goals of the Free Software community and the GNU GPL allow for no such distinctions.
Furthermore, the GPL makes it clear that all distributors of GPL’d software must stand together in the fight against software patents. Only by standing together do we stand a chance of defending against the peril represented by software patents. With this agreement Novell is attempting to destroy that unified defense, exchanging the long term interests of the entire Free Software community for a short term advantage for Novell over their competitors.
The GPL, at its heart, is about reciprocity: you’re permitted to distribute the software, without restrictions, provided you respect the equal freedom of others to do the same. Although Novell itself hasn’t done anything to directly restrict users’ freedom under the GPL, this agreement is clearly a step in the direction of making non-Novell users of GPL’ed software second class citizens under patent law.
It’s debatable whether the Microsoft-Novell agreement violates the letter of the GPL, and it seems unlikely that anyone will be able to prevail against Novell in court. But I think it’s pretty clear that Novell’s actions violate the spirit of the GPL. It will be interesting to see if the free software community is able to effectively punish Novell through ostracism.
Brooke Oberwetter and I have been having an interesting discussion here and here about network neutrality. I want to start by emphasizing that I wholeheartedly agree with Brooke’s broad point that technologies change over time, and so we should be skeptical of proposals to artificially restrain that evolution by giving government bureaucrats the power to second-guess the design decisions of network engineers. Doubtless the Internet will evolve in ways that neither of us can predict today, and we don’t want the law to stand in the way.
But Brooke went beyond that general point and offered some specific examples of ways she thinks the Internet might change. Her main contention seems to be that the end-to-end principle is overrated, and that “the only reason they’re so revered is because they are simply what is.” I think this is fundamentally mistaken: people have good reasons for revering the end-to-end principle, and abandoning it would be a very bad idea. I’ll discuss some of her specific arguments below the fold.
Continue reading →
I’m trying to wrap my head around the scenario I criticized earlier today, where a broadband ISP charges individual sites for faster speeds.
Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that Comcast imposes a half-second delay into the loading of any website that doesn’t pay a special high-speed access fee. The fee might be $1 for every 100,000 page views. This website gets roughly 100,000 page views per month, so we’d owe about $1/month to Comcast if we wanted to avoid having our site load slowly for Comcast customers. A site like Techdirt, which gets roughly 100 times as much traffic as we do, would owe Comcast about $100/month if it didn’t want its traffic slowed. Google, which gets 100,000 times as much traffic as us, would have to pay about $100,000 per month. Clearly, such a scheme could bring in tens of millions of dollars in additional revenue each year.
Of course, it would be ridiculous for us to send Comcast a $1 check each month. Especially since we would presumably be expected to do the same thing with Verizon, AT&T, Charter, Sprint, Qwest, and dozens of smaller ISPs. Running a “high speed” web site would require writing dozens of checks to dozens of different network owners.
Continue reading →
I’ve never understood the point of making you turn off electronic devices on airplanes. I mean, if there are electronic devices out there that interfere with onboard navigation on planes, shouldn’t we be doing something more aggressive about it than simply asking nicely?
Last week, my friend Brooke was kind enough to link approvingly to my post on the phantom threat of network discrimination. Brooke agrees with me that those who think “Verizon is just itching for the opportunity to detect and block every packet of data it carries that mentions the Second Amendment” are nuts.
She goes on to offer an example of a case where network discrimination would be beneficial:
One fear, however, didn’t make Tim’s list; it’s the fear that the ISPs will do exactly what we think they’ll do, which is to introduce tiered pricing for content delivery…
Suppose some new tech-tinkering über-geeks come up with a search engine even better than Google. Because they lack brand recognition, they need to keep expenses at a minimum while word of mouth slowly spreads about their better quality. In net neutrality America, they cannot keep expenses down by opting for lower quality delivery than that offered by Google. Delivery speed is not a viable option for competition; everyone has to ship at the $11 rate. Now imagine that one of the über-geeks is a trust fund baby. He’s so sure that his product is superior, he invests his trust fund in über-geeks, Inc. so they can buy higher speed delivery than Google offers, thus giving Google a serious competitive run for its money. Sadly this too is not an option in net neutrality land.
Prices and price flexibility are essential to competition. The fear that content competition will suffer without regulation is absurd on its face. Indeed, net neutrality regulation will rob new innovators and content creators of the very tools that would make challenging already established businesses possible. It’s little wonder then that the already established businesses–like Amazon, E-bay, and Google, to name a few–are fighting for net neutrality tooth and nail.
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.