At the Media Center’s We Media conference, held Wednesday and sponsored by the AP, Al Gore gave a speech in which he argued that “American democracy is in grave danger and “that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America’s fabled ‘marketplace of ideas’ now functions.”
Gore laid much of the blame at the feet of commercial television, pointing out that TV viewing accounts for “almost three-quarters of all the discretionary time that the average American has.” He also says that “[t]he US Press was recently found in a comprehensive international study to be only the 27th freest press in the world.”
While Gore’s portrayal of the earlier days of our democracy seems overly idealized, his critique of today’s broadcast journalism as “dumbed down and tarted up” (Dan Rather’s words) strikes me as generally valid. The same is true of his suggestion that much of this is due to “the imposition by management of entertainment values on the journalism profession” and his claim that “[t]he greatest source of hope for reestablishing a vigorous and accessible marketplace for ideas is the Internet.”
Gore’s short history of our nation’s “marketplace of ideas” reads as follows, starting with the Age of Print:
Inexpensive metal printing presses were almost everywhere in America. They were easily accessible and operated by printers eager to typeset essays, pamphlets, books or flyers. Television stations and networks, by contrast, are almost completely inaccessible to individual citizens and almost always uninterested in ideas contributed by individual citizens. Ironically, television programming is actually more accessible to more people than any source of information has ever been in all of history. But here is the crucial distinction: it is accessible in only one direction; there is no true interactivity, and certainly no conversation.
Citing German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, Gore suggests that the era in which public discourse has become increasingly dominated by broadcast and cable TV represents “the refeudalization of the public sphere.”
Gore also makes a point about the power of video:
Make no mistake, full-motion video is what makes television such a powerful medium. Our brains - like the brains of all vertebrates - are hard-wired to immediately notice sudden movement in our field of vision. We not only notice, we are compelled to look. When our evolutionary predecessors gathered on the African savanna a million years ago and the leaves next to them moved, the ones who didn’t look are not our ancestors. The ones who did look passed on to us the genetic trait that neuroscientists call “the establishing reflex.” And that is the brain syndrome activated by television continuously - sometimes as frequently as once per second. That is the reason why the industry phrase, “glue eyeballs to the screen,” is actually more than a glib and idle boast. It is also a major part of the reason why Americans watch the TV screen an average of four and a half hours a day.
At the end of his speech, Gore had some comments about the Internet, which I think understate both its current and future impact:
It is true that video streaming is becoming more common over the Internet, and true as well that cheap storage of streamed video is making it possible for many young television viewers to engage in what the industry calls “time shifting” and personalize their television watching habits. Moreover, as higher bandwidth connections continue to replace smaller information pipelines, the Internet’s capacity for carrying television will continue to dramatically improve. But in spite of these developments, it is television delivered over cable and satellite that will continue for the remainder of this decade and probably the next to be the dominant medium of communication in America’s democracy. And so long as that is the case, I truly believe that America’s democracy is at grave risk.
Gore closes on a cautionary note regarding regulation and a potential rewrite of legislation governing the telecom, media and Internet sectors:
The final point I want to make is this: We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Worldwide Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it because some of the same forces of corporate consolidation and control that have distorted the television marketplace have an interest in controlling the Internet marketplace as well. Far too much is at stake to ever allow that to happen.
We must ensure by all means possible that this medium of democracy’s future develops in the mold of the open and free marketplace of ideas that our Founders knew was essential to the health and survival of freedom.
To the extent Gore is correct in his critique of the “age of television” and his belief that “the greatest source of hope for reestablishing a vigorous and accessible marketplace for ideas is the Internet,” the more significant are his cautionary words with regard to the regulatory treatment of the Internet and any potential rewrite of the Telecom Act. The same is true on the business side, in terms of the importance of developing viable models that can financially support a broadband Internet-invigorated marketplace of ideas.
Personally, I have more faith in the entrepreneurs than in the politicians, so here’s hoping the latter do more good than harm in nurturing an environment that promotes entrepreneurial initiative and healthy competition in the incredibly creative global network we call the Internet.
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 3:33 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Michael J. Balhoff and Robert C. Rowe have put together a 211-page report entitled “Municipal Broadband: Digging Beneath the Surface.” Regardless of whether one agrees with its conclusions, the report seems like a worthy read for anyone seriously wanting to understand muni-broadband issues. The authors’ firm, Balhoff & Rowe describes itself as “a specialized professional services organization focused on providing financially-based solutions to challenging policy problems.” According to the New York Post, the study was “sponsored by the major telecom and cable companies.”
The problem with the current state of the municipal broadband debate, says the report, “is that most of the accounts and analyses are generally superficial and cannot be evaluated because of the absence of data…To achieve a balanced presentation, this report was designed as a data-centric compilation of the financial history of municipal initiatives, legislative/policy sources, and the insights of the independent financial community.”
The report’s conclusions are summed up in a final section which suggests that:
[M]unicipalities should commit to a graduated and managed-risk process. Local leadership should first evaluate policy principles, including (a) actively supporting pro-competitive systems and regulations, (b) avoiding competition with a functioning private sector, (c) minimizing risk to public assets and monies, and (d) targeting solutions to social or other specific problems. Then the municipality should commit to a graduated process to stimulate private investment, including employing tactics to attract private investment on the basis of the government’s roles as a major broadband user, regulator, director of capital flows, and provider of infrastructure. If the municipality is not successful in supporting or stimulating private-sector activity, it is then reasonable to consider whether to dedicate limited public capital and assume greater risk in building and operating networks.
A useful exercise might be to evaluate new models—such as those planned by Earthlink in Philadelphia and proposed by Google for San Francisco (see IPD posts here and here)—in light of the study’s data and analysis.
The Post quotes Bill St. Arnaud, senior director of advanced networks for Canarie, a Canadian government-sponsored high-speed network based in Ottawa:
“If taxpayers are funding the network, than the incumbents have a valid argument,” [said St. Arnaud], “But if EarthLink comes in and says, ‘We’re going to do it ourselves at no cost to taxpayers,’ ” then those arguments are moot.
Before founding Balhoff & Rowe, Balhoff spent 16 years as head of the Telecommunications Equity Research Group at Legg Mason. Rowe was previously chair of the Montana PSC and has served as President of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) and on a number of telecom-related regulatory groups.
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 11:52 AM | Print | Comments (0)
A comment came in regarding an earlier item I posted on the RIAA’s litigation tactics, drawing my attention to a cogent synopsis of the rise and fall of Napster written by an insider. Don Dodge was VP of Product Development at the P2P powerhouse starting in 2000 and now is a business development executive at Microsoft.
Napster was clearly ahead of the market, and Dodge warns entrepreneurs that pioneers are almost always unsuccessful — it’s the fast followers who rake in the dough. He also sheds light on a puzzling issue: why didn’t the record companies take advantage of Napster’s 50 million audience to jumpstart their own online efforts? The short answer is that the record companies didn’t have the rights back then to sell music online.
In retrospect, the reality was that they couldn’t have made a deal with us even if they wanted to. The record labels existing contracts with the artists had no provisions for digital distribution of individual songs. The payments to artists were all based on CD sales through the normal channels. It took them several years to rewrite their contracts with artists to get to the point where today you can buy a single song via digital distribution.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:36 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Sprint-Nextel filed a patent infringement suit against Vonage, VoiceGlo and theglobe.com two days ago, simply saying the companies infringed on certain patents related to VoIP. As is true in most matters of litigation, but more so when it comes to patent issues, the plaintiff is releasing few details, even in the complaint itself.
Olga Kariff at Business Week’s Techbeat has read the 13-page complaint and concludes…nothing really. “Nowhere in the lawsuit does Sprint explain exactly how Vonage infringes on its patents, which sound frightfully broad,” she writes.
But she does speculate that perhaps Sprint-Nextel is using litigation as a tactic to find out the true value of Vonage, which is moving ahead with an IPO even as the chatter rises that Vonage will sell out to a deep-pocketed buyer.
VoIP pioneer Jeff Pulver is likewise perplexed at Sprint-Nextel’s motives given that he doesn’t see a lot of intellectual property that Sprint-Nextel could claim is proprietary.
And I have to believe that even if Sprint Nextel can prove some kind of far-fetched patent violation, there should be plenty of “prior art” that would pre-date any of the Sprint Nextel claims from 2001. For the record, it has been over twenty years after voice was first sent over the ARPANet. From what I remember, Vonage built their service around various SIP RFCs. Does this mean that Sprint Nextel thinks they invented SIP? I wonder who will be next in Sprint Nextel lawsuit parade.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:10 AM | Print | Comments (0)
InterActive Corp. CEO and Hollywood mogul Barry Diller was a keynoter yesterday at Web 2.0, and according to this item from Dan Farber at ZDNet’s Between the Lines, Diller’s not afraid that user generated content will erode the audiences for traditional TV, film or video games. Why? Because talent is rare and it always draws a mass audience.
On the entertainment front, media mogul Diller doesn’t believe that user generated content is going to impact the television, film or game industry. “When you get into forms of entertainment, talent always wins out. There isn’t that much talent in the world. An audience of 8 to 12 people might be interested in someone’s individual expression, but the process of people with talent and expertise making entertainment products won’t be displaced by 18-year-olds making videos, except maybe on ‘Funniest Home Videos.,’” Diller said.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:47 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Blogs We Read
