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Commercialization Of The Internet
Anonymous Coward writes "For those anti-corporate tech-heads out there, Excite is running an article about how companies are taking over the net through the use of the courts, trademarks and deep pockets.
From the article, 'Big corporations have a significant and growing presence on the Internet. In March, just 14 companies controlled 60 percent of users' online time, down from 110 companies two years earlier, Jupiter Media Metrix found.'
A final thought from the article,
'This is the last remaining communications medium that allows the small person to participate,' said Barbara Simons, past president of the Association for Computing Machinery. 'To lose that would be a great tragedy.'"
In even the fairly recent "past" (1994?) was how any jow schmoe with some university webspace was on equal footing with a multinational. Not anymore. Granted, the net has a lot more USE now, I mean, its more than just a passion for tech oriented young men, but we've lost the edge we once had. I'm sure everyone knows this, and I will get modded redundant, but who cares. I want the old school URL's back. Shit like www.university.edu/physicsdep/387434/2w0843273/geo rge.html
Should such an overtaking of the internet happen, there is always the going back to building our own. And come to think of it, it'd probably cause some innovation to happen. You know making things streamline and faster, no ads... etc..
So how would we replace the university backbones that began the internet?
Hasn't there already been some efforts in this direction?
Do we have to be concerned about anti-ad-free networks or laws banning such?
GNU/Linux/GPL began a direction of user/consumer options. How might this play out with
commercial free internet?
Should we begin now or push more for commercial free networks, or wait?
People need to see beyond the Web; it may be the primary medium you look through when you open up Internet Explorer, but it's primacy is being quickly supplanted by new distributed technologies. Articles such as this are terribly short-sighted.
"The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for 'entrepeneur'." -George W. Bush
Meanwhile, the busiest sites are increasingly run by a handful of companies, giving them greater ability to control what users read, view and say. By running the message boards and chat rooms, such sites can delete unpopular viewpoints or reveal identities of anonymous critics
Now would be a great time to just shrug your shoulders and refuse to contribute to a world where you have no place.
The only freedom we have left is the freedom not to condone, encourage, or participate.
Until there is freedom, let there be silence
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
I agree that commercialization of the net can generally be bad. (More spam for everybody).
But at the same time, it's good to know that there are alternatives to all the commercialism on the web. What we need to be fighting for is to ensure that the open protocols of the net remain open, and that I don't have to have a Passport/Sun doohicky to buy a book if I don't need it.
Come to think of it, I rarely browse commercial sites unless I am looking for something. Commercialism tends to be counter to what the internet was ideally supposed to be, a repository for information.
Ever notice how stories on Yahoo, ZDNet, MSNBC and others mention things, but really never provide links to anything that they are talking about? That's because some marketing moron decided that it's best to 'lock in' a surfer to their specific 'content channel'. I say screw that. Link the hell out of everything and let the content stand on its own.
exactly. most of the "joe shmoe" venues vanished because they couldn't pay their bills. when you can't make payroll or pay for your bandwidth you also go away (not just when a behemoth buys you).
it's not the fact that big corporations have taken over the net so much as they're the ones who have survived the recession. the lawsuits aren't so much a result of their new power as the increased attention they're paying to the net. six years ago if you told fox that someone has a web page with screenshots from one of their shows they probably wouldn't have known what you were talking about, and now they do (and care).
frankly i think the net is as democratic now as ever, just in a new way. i no longer have to rely on tripod or xoom or the globe or whoever else has gone out of business: i can set up my own webserver under my own domain on my home dsl to voice my opinions (try doing THAT six years ago).
"Mister Potato-head --MISTER POTATO-HEAD! Backdoors are not secrets!" (War Games, 1983)
But isn't this also the first communications medium that allows the small person to participate? (Other than largely ineffective channels such as pamphlets and megaphones.) Maybe things are just returning to the way they were prior to 1994.
You have to wonder how much of the problem revolves around the migration of a large group of people onto the Net who don't appreciate the free, communitarian culture they were entering.
While reading the article, I was reminded of the big bust-up that occured when Paramount went after all the unofficial Star Trek fansites prior to establishing its own official site. The community of Trek fansites had a lot in common with the early community of the Net as a whole (probably because a lot of our founding non-gender-biased parental figures were Trekkies themselves), it was cohesive, well-connected and had a sense of the common ideal of the free flow of information. These qualities allowed it to collectively "take offense" at what Paramount was doing, with the result that Paramount did permanent damage to the Star Trek franchise.
These days, it seems that the various communities online are a lot more internally isolated and aren't aware of the proud heritage they inherit, with the effect that whenever there's a corporate crackdown on a single fansite, there's no way for the community to which that site belongs to find out and react as a whole.
Perhaps we should start establishing community ISPs that provide cheap, high-quality access (on the back of inexpensive or volunteer labour) to the masses and distribute with each new account some material about the early history and ideals of the Internet, a sort of "online civics" course to indoctrinate the masses. I'd work for one.
I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere in the boardrooms of the world there are people who would like nothing better than to have the internet regulated to the point where you need to be licensed to operate a website... The Australian government looked at doing this to anyone in Australia who wanted to stream video over the net but then backed down - for now, anyway.
I don't believe it will ever happen, I don't think anyone would ever even suggest it publicly; but the biggest thorn in these companies sides seem to be the public's unwillingness to stay in the officially sanctioned "walled gardens" they have set-up, and you can be sure that somewhere there's a few rich old white men who daydream about walling off the whole damn thing and turning the entire internet into a kind of SuperAOL...
Kee-rist. You hang out exclusively at the commercial sites, don't you? That's the only way you could be so ignorant of the wealth of small sites that publish information that you simply couldn't have access to in any other format.
Slashdot is a commercial site. Commander Taco isn't footing the bill. Slashdot lives and dies by its corporate backers. It's a prime example of the concentration of power.
Go take a look at http://www.vacman.com/. There's no way you'd have that as a resource if it weren't for the very low cost of Internet publication. Yes, I realize the guy may be a bit loony: that's not the point.
Is this site costing the fellow a shit-load of money? No (not until I got him slashdotted!) Could he ever have been effectively published on paper? No. Is it a site that corporate interests wouldn't mind seeing disappear? Yes.
The mediacracy would like to see free, informative little sites like that disappear. Vacman is costing the media companies money. The free dispersal of information is the antithesis to their making of money.
Hell's bells, man, the big publishing houses are currently making noises about having libraries pay them licensing fees on the books they stock!
Free/cheap information has to be eliminated if the media wish to continue to make a buck!
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Corporations are already treated as full individuals in almost all regards, save voting rights (and even that could be called into question.)
The corporation exists as an individual, because it protects the people who run the corporation. A corporation can kill thousands of people through shoddy plant maintenance and untrained personnel (US Carbide: Bhopal), and no human individual goes to jail. Even were the case to go to court and the corporation found guilty, the most that can happen are financial penalties: with no corporeal body, there's no way to throw the corporate entity into jail.
There are two ways to take things:
A) Really start punishing corporations as individuals. Bring back the death penalty: if a corporation is found guilty of murder, then kill the corporation. Naturally, the unemployment of tens of thousands of employees may be an issue in this case!
B) Abolish the corporation-as-individual rights. Regress things back a few hundred years, to the point where owners and directors were held personally accountable for the consequences of their decisions and the actions of their employees.
Anyway, point is that you're on the right track, but going the wrong direction for the goal you want to score. Treating corporations even more as "full" individuals would result in the directors/owners/etc being more protected, but would place the corporate entity at greater risk; treating them less as individuals would likely reduce the risk to the corporation, and increase the risk for the directors/owners.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
That is what regulated common carriers, such as your local telephone company, are for. It doesn't have to be federalized, just regulated. This is usually done at the state level. The telephone company can't disconnect me for having views that people find offensive. On the other hand, my ISP can cancel my account for any or no reason. This isn't a big problem with dial-up ISPs, where there are plenty of competing ISPs. It's in the broadband arena that the problems are more serious. There are likely to be few alternatives for the broadband customer. Cable companies tend to have the attitude that their customers are mindless proles, who should be happy that they are allowed to surf the web in the company's "walled garden". They dream of partners, synergy and pay-per-view.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In the UC case, shoddy plant maintenance and a shocking reduction in staff training -- a cut from six months of training, to a quick two weeks! -- led to a tragic chemical leak that resulted in 20000 deaths, another 120000 people requiring medical treatment, and a generation of grossly deformed children.
Sounds trite, but accidents like these are inevitable consequences of our civilization. Its our nature as human beings to maximize our effectiveness while minimizing our use of resources. Sure, its sad and terrible what happened. So was Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 250,000 people died there--A quarter of a million people burst into flames, got buried by rubble, got impaled on things, or just plain disintegrated--But most historians agree that it had to be done. Japan wouldn't have given up, and a ground invasion would have cost at least 500,000 lives, some estimates as high as 750,000. See what I mean about "inevitable consequences" ?
The example of Ford and the Pinto you pointed out isn't that unusual. All companies make decisions regarding cost-effectiveness. If you dont like the decisions they make, you can buy from another car manufacturer. Its your responsibility as a buyer to thuroughly research your choices before putting your name on the dotted line and putting your money on the table. Of course, thats not to say that the people who died in Pintos deserved their fate -- It merely states that perhaps they would have been wise to question the motivations behind the design of Ford's products. Any mechanic will tell you that the engines Ford automobiles are generally difficult to repair. That translates into added cost to you, because in the long run, you'll be paying disproportionately more for labor. This doesn't mean that Ford is evil and makes their engines difficult to maintain because they take delight in seeing you shell out more money than others. Its your choice, ultimately. You didnt have to buy the car. You didnt' even have to buy American.
I'm tempted to not even bother with your third example, Kerr-McGee and Karen Silkwood, as its pure speculation, conjecture and Hollywood bullshit. Stranger things have happened out of pure coincedence, a woman driving home drowsy after a long day at work not withstanding.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
I have been warning about this problem on WIPO.org.uk for some time now.
Virtually every word is trademarked, even the common words you learnt with your A B C's - apple, ball and cat. MOST share the same words or initials with MANY others in a different business and/or country. For example, the World Trade Organization (WTO) shares its initials with six trademarks - in the U.S. alone (please check). Caterpillar tractors claimed 'cat' is 'their' trademark on the Internet - even though hundreds of trademarks use the word 'cat' - again in U.S. alone (see for yourself).
Conflict with trademark and domain name is IMPOSSIBLE to avoid. Yet, the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO.org) and the United States Department of Commerce are hiding the simple solution. It was ratified by honest attorneys - including the honourable G. Gervaise Davis III, UN WIPO panellist judge.
Please visit WIPO.org.uk to see.
set up wireless networks, neighborhood networks, anything that is OURS and not THEIRS!
right now i wuld love to see a medium that anyone willing to pay an up front fee can get online for no additional cost.
we can have this if we want it, you know.
no spam, no banners, no popup ads
use ipv6 and ipsec, and your all set.
it is our internet, we allowed this to happen to it.
what do we do? we cant take it back, so build another one.
a nonprofit provider would work...
i say everyone pitch in and create such a thing.
i bet that AOL and the telcos provide better service REAL fast.
i bet those spams stop, REAL fast.
and i bet you wont see another X10 popup ad ever again.
on another thought... i suggest that the small isps, the ones willing to provide a good service for less install spam killing software to kill popup ads and banners.
this is just what i want to see, and im sure some others will agree with me.
My experience with the major telco. I'm in Missouri, and decided two years ago I wanted DSL. So I called around and found a company that was small, local, friendly, and didn't answer the question "Do you support Linux?" with a no. I paid my $150 for them to do what they had to to get it turned on. Around 3 weeks later they finished the site survey, got the line laid, and had a tech drop off the DSL modem and *nic. I had everything wired to go. I then spent the next 4 months waiting for SWB to throw a switch. During the entire period I recieved around 6 (paper, sometimes including CD) DSL advertisements from SWB and two phone calls asking me to use their DSL service.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.