I don’t know the ins and outs of Wikipedian politics, but according to The Register, trouble is brewing at Jimmy Wales’s social knowledge project. The controversy surrounds the recently exposed mailing list of high-level wikipedians–the uber-editors of the encyclopedia–who have supposedly exercised their powers for the dark side.
To quell the outcry of any critics, I want to specify that I’m not one of the many wikipedia skeptics out there, but that may only be because I use Wikipedia in a very limited way. Typically, I use the wiki as a resource to refresh my knowledge of esoteric scientific terms when I run across them in articles. Just recently I looked up Apsis and Sidereal time when reading something about the recent downgrade of Pluto. But these entries are precisely the kind of thing that Wikipedia is best at. Most folks realize this and understand that the the more controversial the topic, the less reliable the Wikipedia entry.
But should we be concerned about the over-lords of wikipedia? In the short-term maybe, but in the long-term the mercurial market for web readership will render the ultimate verdict. Larry Sanger, a co-founder turned critic of wikipedia has founded Citizendium, a site that openly admits to expert editing of entries, in hopes to compete with the Wiki-wonder. Other wiki-challengers have cropped up including Helium, which also uses editors and uses an un-anonymous author model. Of course there’s the obviously conservative Conservapedia, for those who like their knowledge pre-biased. And we can’t forget about the old main-stays of the knowledge market like Britannica.com and Encarta.com, which serve up expert-written entries for free.
Competition will keep Wales’s Wiki honest, or it will fail to attract traffic and donations–left to slowly fade away in prominence and PageRank. But, since Wikipedia has only gained popularity in recent years, it’s safe to say that the public still finds wiki-wonderland useful, even if it’s not the democratic knowledge-workers paradise it was once made out to be.
Greenpeace has released the latest edition of its quarterly Guide to Greener Electronics. While I haven’t read the study in full and I don’t know exactly what goes in to determining the one through ten ranking that Greenpeace assigns to various famous tech companies, I did find their graph (see below) a little odd. Look how close together one to three are! Then look at the space between seven and ten–it’s half the graph! By making three numbers take up half the graph, a greening tech company can move quite a way across the “dial o’ green” if it moves from a seven to an eight, but a move from three to our doesn’t result in such a pronounced leap.
Adopting cleaner technology standards and practices is important, don’t get me wrong. But such a blatantly misleading graph makes me question the legitimacy of this entire quarterly report. Can we get some unbiased research into this area of tech please?
NOTE: Some comments have shown me that I wasn’t clear in the original post just how manipulative these graphs are with the data. It’s important to note that past graphs show a rank of 5 as the midpoint of the graph. The most recent graph shows a rank of 7 as the midpoint. This way, companies that have actually gotten greener appear to be back-sliding.
“Information wants to be free,” claim those who decry the overpowering grasp of copyright law. But they cannot mean what they say. Information wants nothing at all. The epigram speaks not to what information wants, but rather to what people want: people want information for free.
So restated, the catch-phrase still rings true. Who would not prefer to get information–that increasingly vital good–at no cost? But, alas, information never comes for free. We can only account for its costs as fully as possible, try our best to minimize them, and allocate them fairly.
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Scott Cleland over at The Precursor Blog is an ideological ally on many issues, most prominently, network neutrality. Scott has come out strongly against government intervention on a host of issues, but the Google/Doubleclick merger is not one of them. Last week Scott posted a long set of talking points supporting Senators Kohl and Hatch who have called for heightened scrutiny of the deal.
But the blackboard economics that are being applied to the deal just don’t relate to reality. A brief look at recent history should stem any worries that Scott and the incredulous Senators may have.
The history of the Internet is littered with former giants like AOL, AltaVista, and Lycos that lost significant market share or went bust because they couldn’t keep innovating. Yet these companies were also labeled monopolies or, more euphemistically, as “market dominant.” In 1999 the Motley Fool called Yahoo! “the dominant brand of the Internet.” Recently, Boston Business Journal recounted that “Lycos Inc., once one of the biggest Web portals on the planet, is now a shadow of its former self with a mere 70 employees in Waltham.”
The real competition to Google-DoubleClick may not even exist yet—Google itself was a grad student science project a decade ago. Startups can grow exponentially in a short time on the web. Look no farther than Facebook, a $10-billion gorilla today, that didn’t even exist four years ago.
Ultimately, concerns about online market consolidation are unfounded. They depict the web advertising market as static—yet the last decade has shown the dynamic nature of Internet commerce. How can one claim to find an iron-clad monopoly in a market that is best described as hyper-competitive?
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Microsoft’s Kim Cameron writes on the big UK identity breach, calling it an “Identity Chernobyl.” Choice observation:
Isn’t it incredible that “a junior official” could simply “download” detailed personal and financial information on 25 million people? Why would a system be designed this way?
To me this is the equivalent of assembling a vast pile of dynamite in the middle of a city on the assumption that excellent procedures would therefore be put in place, so no one would ever set it off.
There is no need to store all of society’s dynamite in one place, and no need to run the risk of the collosal explosion that an error in procedure might produce.
Similarly, the information that is the subject of HMRC’s identity catastrophe should have been partitioned – broken up both in terms of the number of records and the information components.
Were our REAL ID Act implemented, we would have similar piles of identity dynamite placed around the country waiting to explode. The proposed regulations implementing REAL ID punted on the security and privacy issues, perhaps “on the assumption that excellent procedures would therefore be put in place” by states.
Final REAL ID regulations are expected Real Soon Now.
Tomorrow, at Vanderbilt Law School, I’ll join a panel discussion on The Future of Copyright, part of the Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law’s symposium, User-Generated Confusion: The Legal and Business Implications of Web 2.0. My presentation: User-Generated Content, Copyright Policy, and Blockheaded Authors. Rest assured that, though I deploy such phrases as “seizing the means of reproduction” and “the specter of copyism,” that says more about my love of wordplay than it does anything about Marxism. You can download the PowerPoint file here.
[Crossposted to Intellectual Privilege and Agoraphilia..]
I recently completed a draft of Copyright as Intellectual Property Privilege, 58 Syracuse L. Rev. __ (2007) (forthcoming) (invited). Here’s an abstract:
We often call copyright a species of intellectual property, abbreviating it, “IP.” This brief paper suggests that we consider copyright as another sort of IP: an intellectual privilege. Though copyright doubtless has some property-like attributes, it more closely resembles a special statutory benefit than it does a right, general in nature and grounded in common law, deserving the title of “property.” To call copyright a “privilege” accurately reflects legal and popular usage, past and present. It moreover offers salutary policy results, protecting property’s good name and rebalancing the public choice pressures that drive copyright policy. We face a choice between two ways of thinking about, and talking about, copyright: As an intellectual property that authors and their assigns own, or as an intellectual privilege that they merely hold. Perhaps no label can fully capture the unique and protean nature of copyright. Recognizing it as form of intellectual privilege would, however, help to keep copyright within its proper legal limits.
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Minor abuses at the FCC, such as the one mentioned in my last post, warrant at least investigating how the FCC assesses fines, if not looking for ways to reform the FCC’s governance of broadcasting. But when we look at the incredible distortion created by the central planning of broadcast spectrum the case of dramatic and rapid reform becomes very clear.
More specifically, the FCC is now placing caveats on the 700Mhz auction–perverting the one reform, auctions, that have worked to replace bureaucratic preference with market forces. The XM/Sirius Satellite radio merger is also a symptom of the disease of FCC regulation. Satellite spacing requirements, spectrum allocation, and the inability for terrestrial firms to sell their spectrum assets and move skyward are all standing in the way of more competition in satellite markets.
This squandering of a natural resource has inspired many FCC reform projects–the predecessor of all this work is Coase’s “The Federal Communications Commission” from the Journal of Law and Economics (one of the most cited papers of all time), but more recently the FCC itself has released working papers mapping out the road to markets. There have also been broader plans like CEI’s Communications Without Commissions as well as highly informative work coming out of Cato on the stumbling blocks that might be encountered in the process of privatization.
The intellectual work has been done on this issue, but for reform to actually occur, the issue of the FCC and its inefficiency and threat to American competitiveness needs to be pushed to the forefront of the public debate. CEI is working on a paper outlining the litany of abuses that have come out of the FCC and just how much of the communications potential of the United States goes unused because of the lack of markets in spectrum. Others need to join the fight as the XM/Sirius and 700Mhz issues move forward. If the road to reform is obvious and the benefits made known, Congress might act, but not until we force the issue.
Slashdot reports that the “multiply” feature on Excel 2007 doesn’t work. (Seriously) A Slashdot commenter describes Microsoft’s response:
Microsoft already has a patch in the works to help users overcome this issue. Whenever the user types a ‘*’ in a formula, an animated sprite of Charles Babbage’s head will pop up. It will show this bubble caption:
“It looks like you’re trying to multiply two numbers. I can help show you how to use the Method of Finite Differences to find a good approximation of your answer using only addition and subtraction. Would you like me to bring up a wizard so that we can get started on finding an appropriate power series?”
As the US and EU regulators bear down on Google we’re already seeing changes in the marketplace where the Googlers currently have the lead. Yahoo! is catching up to Google with several innovations in its email client. Unlimited Storage, a built in RSS reader (not separate and clunky with a just-added search function), push email for the iPhone, better contacts that syncs with the iPhone, built in SMS, and drag and drop functionality are all unique to Yahoo! mail, at least for the moment. There’s no doubt that GMail will catch-up, but that’s exactly what competition is meant to do, force competitors to improve or perish. Read more about it at LifeHacker.
Hat tip to my colleague Wayne Crews for sending me the link.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.