A classic piece here by Farhad Manjoo of Slate about how “the Internet of 1996 is almost unrecognizable compared with what we have today.” It’s a fun look back at just how far the Internet has come over the past 13 years. I love this passage:
We all know that the Internet has changed radically since the ’90s, but there’s something dizzying about going back to look at how people spent their time 13 years ago. Sifting through old Web pages today is a bit like playing video games from the 1970s; the fun is in considering how awesome people thought they were, despite all that was missing. In 1996, just 20 million American adults had access to the Internet, about as many as subscribe to satellite radio today. The dot-com boom had already begun on Wall Street– Netscape went public in 1995 — but what’s striking about the old Web is how unsure everyone seemed to be about what the new medium was for. Small innovations drove us wild: Look at those animated dancing cats! Hey, you can get the weather right from your computer! In an article ranking the best sites of ’96, Time gushed that Amazon.com let you search for books “by author, subject or title” and “read reviews written by other Amazon readers and even write your own.” Whoopee. The very fact that Time had to publish a list of top sites suggests lots of people were mystified by the Web. What was this place? What should you do here? Time recommended that in addition to buying books from Amazon, “cybernauts” should read Salon, search for recipes on Epicurious, visit the Library of Congress, and play the Kevin Bacon game.
God, do you remember those days? I sure do. I penned a piece last month about the amazing technological progress we have witnessed over the past decade.
Meanwhile, we have a whole town full of clowns here in DC looking to regulate the Internet and digital technology for one reason or another. All these would-be regulators need to step back and appreciate just how well markets have been working and why regulation would be a disaster for technological progress. Viva la (Technology) Revolution!
Interesting article here (“Not All Information Wants to Be Free“) by Jack Shafer of Slate. He notes that many people focus on why “pay wall” business models don’t work online, but few people discuss those models that do (i.e., the ones that successfully get customers to pay for access to content behind the wall). Shafer walks through some of the ones that have worked and concludes:
Not all successful paid sites are alike, but they all share at least one of these attributes:
1) They are so amazing as to be irreplaceable.
2) They are beautifully designed and executed and extremely easy to use.
3) They are stupendously authoritative.
Succinctly stated, the pay-per-view sites are damn unique, offering content or a service that consumers are unlikely to find elsewhere. Of course, that’s a pretty small universe of sites, and unless you content is extraordinarily unique and time-sensitive, I have a hard time believing that a pay wall model will work for most sites.
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This catfight between Ron Rosenbaum of
Slate and Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine about the future of journalism in the Internet Age is quite a heated affair. But what I found most interesting about it is that it reflects one element of the Net “optimist — pessimist” divide that I have been writing about here recently. Specifically, it touches on the divide over whether the Internet and digital technologies are reshaping the media marketplace and the field of journalism for better or for worse.
Rosenbaum is playing the pessimist role here and asking some sharp questions about the advice being dished out by “Web futurists” and “new-media gurus” as it relates the reversing the decline of the journalism profession. Rosenbaum says that the problem with Jarvis is that:
he’s become increasingly heartless about the reporters, writers, and other “content providers” who have been put out on the street by the changes in the industry. Not only does he blame the victims, he denies them the right to consider themselves victims. They deserve their miserable fate — and if they don’t know it, he’ll tell them why at great length. Sometimes it sounds as if he’s virtually dancing on their graves.
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“Hasn’t Steve Jobs learned anything in the last 30 years?” asks Farhad Manjoo of Slate in an interesting piece about “The Cell Phone Wars” currently raging between Apple’s iPhone and the Google’s new G1, Android-based phone. Manjoo wonders if whether Steve Jobs remembers what happen the last time he closed up a platform: “because Apple closed its platform, it was IBM, Dell, HP, and especially Microsoft that reaped the benefits of Apple’s innovations.” Thus, if Jobs didn’t learn his lesson, will he now with the iPhone? Manjoo continues:
Well, maybe he has—and maybe he’s betting that these days, “openness” is overrated. For one thing, an open platform is much more technically complex than a closed one. Your Windows computer crashes more often than your Mac computer because—among many other reasons—Windows has to accommodate a wider variety of hardware. Dell’s machines use different hard drives and graphics cards and memory chips than Gateway’s, and they’re both different from Lenovo’s. The Mac OS, meanwhile, has to work on just a small range of Apple’s rigorously tested internal components—which is part of the reason it can run so smoothly. And why is your PC glutted with viruses and spyware? The same openness that makes a platform attractive to legitimate developers makes it a target for illegitimate ones.
I discussed these issues in greater detail in my essay on”Apple, Openness, and the Zittrain Thesis” and in a follow-up essay about how the Apple iPhone 2.0 was cracked in mere hours. My point in these and other essays is that the whole “open vs. closed” dichotomy is greatly overplayed. Each has its benefits and drawbacks, but there is no reason we need to make a false choice between the two for the sake of “the future of the Net” or anything like that.
In fact, the hybrid world we live in — full of a wide variety of open and proprietary platforms, networks, and solutions — presents us with the best of all worlds. As I argued in my original review of Jonathan Zittrain’s book, “Hybrid solutions often make a great deal of sense. They offer creative opportunities within certain confines in an attempt to balance openness and stability.” It’s a sign of great progress that we now have different open vs. closed models that appeal to different types of users. It’s a false choice to imagine that we need to choose between these various models.
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Writing at Slate, Tim Wu tries to make Obama out to be the real Big Government candidate on media policy, who will deliver “if not a chicken in every pot, a fiber-optic cable in every home.” By contrast, Wu implies that McCain is just another pro-big business lackey who doesn’t understand “that the media and information industries are special—that like the transportation, energy, or financial industries, they are deeply entwined with the public interest.” Wu goes on to say:
Ultimately, most of the difference in Obama’s and McCain’s media policies boils down to questions about whether the media is special and a dispute over how much to trust the private sector. Camp McCain would tend to leave the private sector alone, with faith that it will deliver to most Americans what they want and deserve. The Obama camp would probably administer a more frequent kick in the pants, in the belief that good behavior just isn’t always natural.
First, as a factual matter, Wu is just wrong about McCain being some sort of a radical hands-off, pro-market liberalizer on media policy issues. Oh, if only that were true! But for those of us who have been in DC covering telecom and media policy for many years, it is widely understood there is no nailing down John McCain on any tech, telecom or media policy issue. He’s been all over the board. While he has sponsored or supported
some deregulatory initiatives on the telecom front in the past, he’s also been a supporter of other regulatory causes. His battles with broadcasters and cable, for example, are well-known. Most recently, McCain has been leading the effort to impose a la carte mandates on cable and satellite operators.
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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.