In a discussion of a House Energy and Commerce Committee Staff Working Draft Bill, Jeff Pulver suggests that the concept of Net Freedoms may not amount to much if a “fair price” and “non-discrimination principle” are not attached to end user access. He also encourages “obvious allies” to work together on behalf of end-users and innovation.
So, here is the problem. The current debate largely sidesteps the concept of end-user empowerment and ignores the perspective of retail customers, including retail customers capable of self-provisioning communications services for themselves and their own communities of interest. No one seems to be talking about precluding discrimination between various end users. Now that an end user can download an open source IP-PBX and become their own service provider, no one is talking about how to ensure that the end user may control their own communications experience. Everyone is giving lip service to the concept of “Net Freedoms”, but unless there is a fair price associated with unfettered access to the Internet, Net Freedom might not amount to much. Without a non-discrimination principle attached to end user access, nothing will keep a control of a last-mile facility from charging one rate to a pizza parlor (an end-user who does not threatened the last-mile access provider’s core business - voice, video, data delivery), and a much higher, debilitating rate to a VoIP application provider (an end-user vying to offer services that might compete directly with the last-mile access providers core business).
The obvious allies appear to be the edge device vendors, the application providers, the end-users, and the consumer advocates. I would like to see us come together and become a meaningful force as we enter Communications Policy War, Round II. Unless we work together, I fear no one will speak for the end-users and for those that want to harness and maximize the power [of] the Internet to revolutionize the communications experience.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 10:47 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Fortune takes a look at AOL’s resurgence in this week’s issue, and attempts to answer the question of why the former online goat is now suddenly a sleek mink, with lots of would-be big name investors vying for a piece of AOL. The piece, penned by Stephanie Mehta and Fred Vogelstein gives great credit to AOL chief Jonathan Miller for bucking the AOL-heads’ objections to transitioning the tanking service to a free portal model.
There’s also an amusing sideline piece, “Where Are They Now?,” which gives an update on what the former AOL stars of yesteryear, including CEO Bob Pittman, are doing now.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:43 PM | Print | Comments (0)After the Online Freedom of Speech Act was defeated in the House by a 225 to 182 vote, the Federal Elections Commission has included blogs in the rules that cover campaign finance laws. The Online Freedom of Speech Act was intended to block such an FEC move. (More here.)
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:01 PM | Print | Comments (0)Courtesy of Smart Mobs, this (warning: highly) academic article that shows that contrary to what you might think, search engines actually give great exposure to little-trafficked sites, serving as egalitarian pathways to knowledge.
Search engines have become key media for our scientific, economic, and social activities by enabling people to access information on the Web in spite of its size and complexity. On the down side, search engines bias the traffic of users according to their page-ranking strategies, and some have argued that they create a vicious cycle that amplifies the dominance of established and already popular sites. We show that, contrary to these prior claims and our own intuition, the use of search engines actually has an egalitarian effect. We reconcile theoretical arguments with empirical evidence showing that the combination of retrieval by search engines and search behavior by users mitigates the attraction of popular pages, directing more traffic toward less popular sites, even in comparison to what would be expected from users randomly surfing the Web.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:51 PM | Print | Comments (0)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation released a report last week that concludes that “suing music fans is no answer to the P2P dilemma.” Entitled RIAA v. The People: Two Years Later, the report recaps the litigation instigated by the recording industry since its first wave of lawsuits in September 2003.
The targets were not commercial copyright pirates. They were children, grandparents, single mothers, college professors—a random assortment of the tens of millions of American music fans using P2P networks. On the two-year anniversary of the lawsuit campaign, the recording industry had sued over 11,500 Americans for file sharing (as of November 2005, the number is over 15,000). The industry shows no signs of slowing its lawsuit campaign, with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announcing approximately 700 new suits each month. The lawsuits, however, are not working. Today downloading from P2P networks is more popular than ever, despite the widespread public awareness of the lawsuits. After two years, one thing has become clear: suing music fans is no answer to the P2P dilemma.
EFF hits the record industry on its most vulnerable point: the targeting of sometimes innocent parties and the lawsuits filed against those who are unable to financially fight the record companies or even cough up the “settlement” fees demanded by the RIAA and others to avoid litigation. (Seriously, can’t the record industry dodge this kind of PR bullet by designating some kind of ligitation “traffic cop” who weeds out the most needy cases and wisely chooses to forego litigation in those cases? Whatever happened to exercising some kind of reasonable judgment?)
Tim Lee at the Technology Liberation Front , like Adam Thierer at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, takes the EFF to task for not offering a workable solution to this problem.
People who don’t like the RIAA’s litigous agenda need to come up with a workable alternative. Too many people on the anti-RIAA side like to criticize every attempt to enforce current copyright laws without suggesting alternative enforcement mechanisms, and without proposing an alternative legal regime.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:20 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Podcasts have, to date, been little more than an interesting audio add-on with little or no revenue-generating capacity. Google, so far, hasn’t jumped on the podcasting bandwagon to affix its ubiquitous ads to the audio downloads. But a company called Fruitcast has stepped into the breach, setting up an adsense-like advertising system for podcasts.
Podcasters can sign up to the service for free and Fruitcast will then insert a 10 to 15-second advertisement to the beginning or end of the podcast. When someone listens to a podcast, the podcaster gets a share of the ad revenue, which starts under a bidding system at $.10/podcast. (From Solutions Watch courtesy of Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection.)
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:08 PM | Print | Comments (1)
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