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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
The reason why 14 companies control that much of the Internet access today is the fact these are the companies that have survived and have the resources to support large numbers of users connecting to the Internet.
What's very interesting is many of these companies own the means to connect to the Internet (DSL/cable connections) or own the backbone of communications lines used for Internet traffic.
For example, Amazon as a retailer has to compete with every other bookshop on the onternet - this competition is good, and keeps prices down. Low proces allow poorer people to buy. The digital nature of amazon means that anyone can work for it anywhere in the world (excluding the manual work in the warehouses). This is a democratic, meritocratic process.
As for the effect on the internet itself, well, look at all the services available - hotmail, msn, aol, yahoo, cnn, bbc, these are the bread and butter of the internet.
But most importantly, the Internet prior to commercialisation was an ivory tower. It was exclusive and exclusing. It has been the commercial companies that have pushed it out into the mainstream and made it a resource accessible by everyone - much to the chagrin of the Internet 'old timers', who still contemptiously sneer at AOLers and such 'low life'.
Moaning about commercialisation of the internet is just a front for elitist snobbery, for wanting the old, university and academic dominated internet back, for people who want to exclude the majority.
This hypocrisy must not be tolerated.
You may be annoyed that the sort of internet *you* like is no longer mainstream, and is relegated to dusty old newsgroups and places like slashdot, but that's just tough; don't try and exclude the majority under the pretense of 'stopping commercialism', the only great force of equality known to man, Capitalism.
I have been in the Digirati for 15 years, but as an artiste, not a programmer or sysadmin, and it has always dismayed me how the mainstream 'hacker' opinion is so exclusionary, and hypocritical.
Now that this culture is finally a tiny majority on the internet, it seems to view itself as persecuted by commercialism, which (in a small sense), it is, as it has been sidelined.
But creating this anticommercial, anticapitalist, antiequality and antiegalitarean agenda will only lead to tears.
Wake up!
clickedy-poo
It's because the other 96 went out of business...
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
I manage a non-profit site geared toward people interested in the TI-89, a Texas Instruments graphing calculator, at www.ti-89.org. I do not have any illegal material there, and I clearly state that I am not in any way related to TI in my disclaimer. My website is simply a fansite that promotes interest in the TI-89, and in the message boards I've noticed that it has influenced several people into buying TI-89s.
This did not prevent them from sending me a letter threatening lawsuit if I did not sign an trademark "license" with them for the use of the letters T and I, placed consecutively. The letter stated that it was their trademark and that I would have to remove it or face lawsuit. They also wanted me to turn over the domain name as well, and the license they sent me was extremely restrictive.
I refused to agree with this agreement because it said that I couldn't say any negative things about TI or any of their products and had several other clauses restricting what I could say. I felt that this was censorship, and even though I haven't put anything negative about TI on my site, I didn't want my opinion to be biased toward them.
Anyway, that was the last I've heard from them (for now, at least). My site remains, and with over 100,000 visits it surely generates interest in TI's products, generating revenue for them. Luckily, they probably came to the conclusion that such a fansite was probably more beneficial to them than detrimental, and that sending threating letters wouldn't accomplish anything. If they decide to threaten me again about this, though, I might choose to simply remove my site, and thus the interest it generates for them, from the Internet. I simply do not have as deep pockets as they do and could not afford a lawsuit.
Then again, perhaps they were just sending me a form letter. I once received a letter from someone asking for advice about what to do, since Dell threatened him about his domain name, which had the word Dell in it. Consequently, Dell was his last name, and he had just as legitimate a right to the domain name as they did (even more legitimate, in fact, since he registered it first); they probably just chose to send out a form letter to all domain names with the word Dell in it.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
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)
Corporations care a lot about the legal process. They write letters and checks to their congresscritters. Do you really wonder why corporation-favouring legislation keeps getting passed?
If you don't like it, change the system. For example, make it hard for corporations to give money to congresscritters. Make it hard for corporations to use the legal system.
Ever thought how different things would be if having a corporation not only protected the founders from liability, but also limited their rights use the legal system? Say a special clause where if a corporation loses a case against an individual, that it has to pay 10x legal charges plus 5x the individual's normal yearly salary plus another two years of the individual's legal expenses in any case the individual decides to start?
Hmmmm...
fifth sigma, inc.
We have the National Science Foundation to thank for allowing commercial traffic across what was then known as NSFNET in 1991. Does it really come as a surprise to anyone (especially the ACM) what has come to pass? There will be no undoing the deed that's been done.
Not even Internet2 is safe from rampant commercialism, as is evidenced here.
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.
Access to the Internet should be federalized and regulated like the utilities - freely available to anyone who has the equipment to connect. Yes, our tax dollars should fund it - then free speech would be safe from the corporate interests.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
There's no two ways about it: the Internet must become commercialized.
Not because we, the joe-blow users of the Internet want it commercialized. Rather, because it is the biggest threat to the mediacracy since the invention of the printing press.
And what makes the Internet even more threatening than the press is that the actual publishing is as good as cost-free. At least with paper, you have the overhead of layout, paper, and shipping. With the net, you have the overhead of... nothing.
The media conglomerates simply aren't going to allow that. They can't afford to.
And I believe the government isn't particularly happy about it, either. If you care to dig, you can get all sorts of truthful information about the bad-ass things our governments and corporations are doing.
An information-empowered people are a dangerous people: they know things they shouldn't, they can coordinate too easily, and they get smarter.
Between the media conglomerates and the government, you damn well bet that the glory days are over!
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
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>If every Joe-Schmoe or Maw-and-Paw-start-upcompany was as
>good as the larger companies than 60 percent of the net wouldn't
>be controlled by said companies.
With all due respect, that's bullshit. The mom-and-pop ISPs often provide far better service than the big companies. Smaller subscriber bases typically mean better customer support. Try getting support out of AOL, MSN, etc. and then try getting support from your hometown ISP. The local guys are going to provide better service every time, because they don't have to support millions of customers.
But the mom-and-pop ISPs don't happen to own a massive cable television network on which they can run an incessant stream of commercials for their online service, free of charge. Anyone else who subscribes to Time Warner Cable knows what I'm talking about. AOL and RoadRunner commercials on every channel, every 15 minutes. It's impossible for momandpop.net to compete with that.
The mom-and-pop ISPs don't have millions of telephone subscribers whose bills they can stuff their advertisements into each month. I can't remember the last time my BellSouth bill didn't include a 5-page pamphlet explaining the wonders of DSL.
The mom-and-pop ISPs aren't going under because they suck. They're going under because they can't compete in a market dominated by bloated companies with billions of dollars to spend on advertising.
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
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.
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Maybe that's because most of the 110 companies had business plans that basically said were going to spend millions of $$$ to run a website. You need to take in more revenue than you have expenses to run a successful business. Or should the VC's just continually pour money into money losing companies? It's a common fact that 95% of all business cease operations within their first 3 years. This is nothing different.
Well why don't the mom and pops start letting advertisers onto their networks and start stuffing their customer's mailboxes with spam? It'll bring more revenue in and make them more competative.
I have found many communications mediums that allow the small person to be active.
1. Tin-Can to Tin-Can, AKA PPPOTC
2. Copy machine to street corner
3. Projection on laser tracked white balloon
4. Soap Box
5. Spray paint on large wall
6. RFC 2549
7. Bumper sticker
I could come up with others but that's just what I found on the top of my head.
Granted numbers 2, 3, 5, & 7 allow for only one way data transmission but that still leaves 3 bi-directional methods for use by the little people.
Ascii artist &
Chomsky is well respected around the world by whom? Only by his likes, the same crackpots.
Chomsky is a kind of Pavlov's dog: if this is something originated in USA, it must be bad.
It's not really a suprise that ownership pool of webviews has shrunk. Essentially, only the largest corporations still have money to throw away. It's not as if *anyone* is making money off the internet. Basically, everyone involved is taking a bath, from the connection providers to the content providers. (Yea, yea, a few people took the money and ran, but I'm talking about making a profit, not suckering investors.)
Only a large company still has money to throw down the drain into supplying cheap bandwidth and free (okay advertiser supported) web sites in the hopes that some day, this will magically make money.
The last few years has, in my opinion, seen the largest transfer of money from investors to customers (in the form of below cost services) in the history of commerce. No suprise only the wealthy can afford to continue giving away money to their customers.
Dontcha just love how this article infers that corporate involvement is directly synonymous with a loss of personal freedom?
With companies, as with government, we all boo and hiss them to death because they make nice targets. Its a constantly renewable whine of "They take money from us!!!" or "They're trying to take my freedom away!!" when in reality, both institutions are providing you with services you both want, and need.
You pay taxes so you dont have to drive on a Fred Flintstone road in an unsafe car designed by 9 year olds. You pay your phone bill because youre tired of going down to the Western Union office and sending a telegram whenever you want to say hi to your folks or see if your girlfriend wants to go to dinner.
The government, and corporations, are made up of you and I. They are not unthinking, uncaring robots that kidnap old people, puree them in a big blender, and sell them back to you as baby food. For example, I used to work for IBM. Big Blue. Perhaps the single largest corporate entity in the world. Did a big black raincloud show up on your radar because of it? With the money I earned, I was able to buy a nice ring for my girlfriend, move to a better neighborhood, get a better/nicer car, and actually sleep at night without freaking out when it comes to bills and rent. Many of you do the same thing...So if you think companies or governments are evil, doesn't that make you evil by definition? After all, you're 1/600,000th of IBM, or 1/350,000th of Hewlett-Packard, or 1/4th of VA Linux Super Research Mario Systems World Software Boy Storage Forge.
Think. Then react. Not the other way around.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Even though MSYAHOL has captured 60% of the Web's audience, this doesn't mean that the audience of the "weird" sites has grown smaller. I'm quite sure that while their "market share" has decreased, the actual numbers have increased.
You have a point here. I'll agree that AOL and Earthlink started small and built on a niche market. They were fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing.
As for Time Warner (RoadRunner), other cable companies (Comcast, Shaw, etc.) and phone companies (DSL), this argument doesn't hold water. These companies didn't start out as mom-and-pop ISPs and grow big because they gave good service. They jumped into the ISP biz with billions in pocket, with absolute control over their service areas, and with millions of eyes to deliver their ads to. This isn't survival of the fittest, it's more like getting a winning hand because you stacked the deck.
While cable and telcos may have started small in their own markets, they're now monopolies in their own right, and this was true long before they knew what the internet was. They didn't make their money selling connectivity, they made it selling TV and phone lines, often as the sole providers of those services. They can afford to undercut the other guys (in cases where there are any). And they're regulated, to boot; which makes the possibility of them disappearing about zero.
That's pretty stiff competition.
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
That's exactly how I still code HTML to this day.
:-)
{ShamelessPlug}
Check out www.osxadm.com. I haven't put any real content up yet, but the HTML forms are done.
The only difference between my pages in 1997 and today is that I use a BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" tag now.
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...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Isn't The Rest Of The Web Still There?
There are still .EDUs. Most ISPs give out 10 free megs or more. If you have broadband and you don't upstream too much, you can run a server. If your project is software, you can host it on places like SourceForge. If your project is the least bit interesting, you can probably find someone who will host it for nothing.
There is still plenty of room for the Internet as it used to be: Obscure, intellectual and hostile.
Just because there is a WalMart in the suburbs doesn't mean there isn't a coffeehouse in the city. Just because everybody else drinks Starbucks mocha, doesn't mean you can't drink home-brewed kombucha from a thermos.
The old culture is still there. Those who want it will always seek it out. Yes, it is no longer the brightest star in the sky. Maybe the other stars are as bright as the Sun, drowning things out; but there will always be people who surf above the atmosphere, in the blackness of space.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
...it looks like you've just been slashdotted!
You're using her as bait, Master!
Isn't it a tad bit hypocritical to criticize companys like AOL for owning so much of the traffic when this is what VA has done with your site? The way I see it is that the consolidation has kept many organizations alive that wouldn't be otherwise. And just because they are owned by the a larger company mean that they lack journalistic integrity? Freshmeat, News Forge, Slashdot, Source Forge and Themes.org used to be independent before being bought by VA. Would they still be around now without being bought? Maybe, but I doubt it considering the advertising shake up. The control has not be gained from nefarious means, just out of survival.
What always gets me are studies done on web site use, showing that people are more and more frequently going to more commercial sites. Of course! When was the last time you went to a person homepage? What sort of ratio is this compared to places like Slashdot and CNN.com?
The web being the ideal "person to person" communication device is obviously incorrect. The telephone does a better job that the web. Various chats do a much better job than the web, and they have been around longer than the web. Email is another great example.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
And at the end of the article, we find this gem:
It's like reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about how commercialism is ruining Christmas.
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Statistically all statistics lie in some form. Journalists statistically don't have any degrees besides journalism. Few journalists statistically know more about statistics than statisticians.
My point? You can infer anything from statistics, thats like the first chapter of a statistics textbook. So web eyeballs have narrowed their focus to a smaller number of websites in a given amount of time, big deal. If you go a little farther back in time you'll see the exact same thing as today, a majority of web users visited a handful of websites. Why? Lots of reasons. The biggest is only a smaller number of websites offered content the majority of web users even wanted to look at. Then there was a boom of websites that all offered the same thing packaged a little differently, some put blue bows on their piles of shit whilst others wrapped their shit in red bows. People liked the red bows more and thus now most of the blue bow sites are gone. Before the boom there were a handful of sites because no one thought much of the internet, now there are a handful of sites because people overvalued the internet.
Some people think this is a new concept and rant and rave and some who read slashdot whine and moan about it. Somehow the government and corporations are controlling people's minds. Read into your history a little bit. Around the turn of the last century there were dozens of newspapers in San Fransisco. It had grown so fast and was inhabited by so many different sorts of people that for a while it supported these several dozen newspapers. Then people began to homogenize and so did the different newspapers and publishing groups. Now you've got a handful of local newspapers in San Fransisco some with much larger circulations than others. See the correlation here? The web is going to be varied but there is also always going to be points where alot of people go to. Just because you've got a phone book with a million listings doesn't mean you're going to call them all, unless you're war dialing. Same goes for websites in directories.
Besides basic economics and social structures pervading the web researchers are often times not very well versed in the regions of the internet. Most research completely ignores IRC networks and message boards some of which are like slashdot and have nearly a bajillion people reading them per day. As well as IRC networks (which I know have declined a little bit in popularity) researchers seem to ignore instant messaging systems and their effect on the web. Alot of web users have abandoned e-mail lists, IRC networks, and message boards in lieu of instant messaging systems. I bet alot of people on analog modems probably IM more than they surf the web anymore. It doesn't require a whole lot of bandwidth and can be done on even old slow computers.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
You're forgetting about ignorance.
Many people, especially new users, are simply not aware of the diversity of the internet. They're locked into the content their ISP's portal delivers them. And why not? It offers news, weather, shopping, everything. There's even that little search box which makes you think you're searching the net.
The average user has no clue that they're trapped within such a narrow view. And for those that do, most don't realize that they should care.
And Microsoft doesn't rule you? Well then, consider yourself to be within a very tiny majority. Try and find an ISP that will support any OS other than Windows. Try and find an ISP that will even answer a simple question like "what's my mail server address" if you happen to let it slip out that you're not running Windows, instead of the usual "We don't support that"...click.
To even realize that there are other OSes out there puts you into a very tiny majority. I'd doubt if even 1% of the population could name an OS other than Windows or Mac, and most of the rest would only be able to name Linux thanks to the stock market hype surrounding it two years ago.
Yes, the internet still does offer the freedom that it always has, but freedom is useless if you aren't aware of its existence. Be glad that you are enlightened enough to realize you have a choice, but realize also that very few people are.
--
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." - Homer Simpson [1F10]
I can't get that excited about fan sites having trademark problems. Most of them lack any significant original content. (There's fan fiction, but most of it sucks.)
Pressure applied to sites that criticize companies is more of a problem. But most of that is bluff. I run Downside, which was very negative on doomed dot-coms back when they were riding high. I've received threats from companies I mentioned, but nobody ever actually did much. Read the Associated Press libel manual for guidance, then go ahead and criticize.
The biggest disappointment to me in the last decade of the Internet has been the lack of good online journalism. I'd hoped that disintermediation between journalists and readers would lead to reader-supported investigative reporting. Nothing like that has happened. We have online columnists, yes, but not hard-news reporters.
One thing you're neglecting is the cost of publishing on the Internet. A corporation can pay for a couple of T-3's, a bunch of expensive servers and the engineers and publishers who will put up their massive web sites.
A small publisher may be incredibly popular, but the costs would make it so that publishing would become increasingly difficult, there's a cap on how popular they can be. Too many people come to their site and their ISP will hit them with a bill they can't afford.
The central problem is the "cost" of publication falls more upon the publisher than the consumer. P2P publishing networks like MojoNation and Freenet change this trend. Resiliency is determined by consumer popularity, not how big the corporation publishing it's bankroll is. Usenet publishing is free, but ephemeral. Only a corporation could collectivize Usenet. Currently one has a monopoly on this collectivization, Google, and it does not archive binary posts.
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.
Your point about content dying as it gains popularity is a good one- the cost of providing huge bandwidth can price a site out of people's range. This doesn't consider options like permitting mirroring, or simply acknowledging that some people won't be able to get access to the content. You'll note that usenet, which you mentioned, is all mirroring and propagating. So is P2P.
The reason the Web has a particular value is because it's a 'property', a fixed location with lots of software that's been out there for years that knows how to go look up 'www.foobaz.com' if you ask. The fact that this is usually (not invariably!) the same server in the same physical location, is not an advantage, it's just the LABEL that is the advantage, hence all the battling over trademarks etc.
If commercial interests manage to genuinely stomp out all personal interests on the WWW, then maybe you can call that death. I have a bit of a hard time seeing fan Trek sites and the like as genuinely personal interests... a lot of the stuff that's being stepped on is, to some ways of thinking, genuinely the property of somebody else. Yes, 1000 trek fan sites is an amazing thing, yes having Paramount step on them is a shame, but if I am a science fiction writer who is NOT Star Trek, maybe I am not as full of sympathy. I might see people thronging to pay attention to the usual corporate malarkey and putting up lots of sites at their own expense and writing fanfic based on that stuff- supposing it's good- is it really such a great thing that people waste their energies getting all excited over corporate rubbish rather than creating their own artworks based on their own ideas? I guess that's debatable.
There are some possible benefits to having the corporations really tighten the screws on powerless individuals. In some of those cases, the powerless individuals happen to be expending energy in celebrating the productions of the corporation. Trek, Harry Potter, etc. Is it so wrong if the corporations' true colors show, and they undercut their own cultural proliferation?
For everybody else- well, hopefully you will always be able to buy _some_ space on the Web and _some_ kind of label/domain-name to direct people to. Hopefully it won't descend to where you can't even put two English words together in a new way without it being judged too similar to some company's words. All this is not new- it's just being fought over again on the new turf.
But why? I mean, when I design new pages now, I remove the BGCOLOR attribute. BGCOLOR is clearly marked as deprecated in the specs, and should only be used in a transitional period, and I think the tranaitional period has lasted more than long enough. From now on, I think one should use the Strict DTD, either 4.01 or XHTML 1. There is no use for BGCOLOR anymore (eh, actually, I think there never was.... :-) ). Instead, use an (external) stylesheet. It's easy to turn off for the users, and it'll be easier for users to make your pages suit their taste.
Other than that, I agree with your philosophy. The pages I write now are XHTML 1 (it should be completely backwards compatible) and comply with at least two levels of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. I think that if everybody did that, the web would be a lot more usuable for everyone (it was a huge blunder by the W3C to market the Accessibility Guidelines as being something only for people with disabilities).
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
the normal user is (sad to say )a damn soccer mom using aol, shopping at amazon, and logging on to bigbrother.com for 30 bucks a month
Come on. You can't possibly know what the "normal user" does and neither does anyone else, because no one's ever done an in-depth survey of 1000 people or so to see exactly what web pages they were visiting and why. So, 60% of internet time is spent at 14 companies. At least five of those companies have a bewildering array of subjects and content, not to mention links to the other 40%, which could be anywhere. No one, to my knowledge, has actually recorded (on paper, not a log), what these people were looking at - or how long they were looking at it. If I do a web search on Yahoo for Dickens and find David Copperfield and download it, mere web logging is going to show that I spent 50% of my "time" (actually connections) at Yahoo and 50% at Project Gutenberg. But whose content is going to occupy more of my time?
Not exactly. You can hog more bandwith just downloading MP3s and MPG files, than I ever could by running a web server.
The TOS agreements given by the cable companies are discriminatory towards people who want to provide "content". I don't want to download Brittney Spears MP3s, I want to distribute my own recordings for free via my own servers.
The ISPs should be charging for bandwith - as this is the thing that's limited - and not worry about what runs of my own servers.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
I am not a bit troubled that Buffy the Vampire fans cannot have their website. To use Buffy's metaphors, if you go to sleep with vampires, you wake up with bruises on your neck. And if you insist on creating your identity out of corporate material, your identity is going to be at the mercy of the executives who made that material. If think that this is an educational experience. Now, if you had a satire on Buffy, that would deserve first ammendment protection, and will be a completely different game.
Likewise, I am not bothered that some portal does not give a link to alternet. Alternet is there, and people who feel the need for it can find it. Part of the value of alternative networks is that they spread by alternative means.
It is wrong to judge alternative media by eyeballs. For an ad driven network, eyballs are everything. But the impact of an alternative source of information can be far greater than the number of people who actually use it directly.
-- look, cheese ahoy!
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.
>What do you do if your cable company blocks all
>inbound traffic, and only allows you to use 80,
>25, and 110 out? (Keep in mind that tunneling is
>not an option for the average user.) Do you go
>to the "competition?" And what do you do if the
>phone company puts the same filters in place?
Start my own ISP and clean up..
I guess that I'm especially lucky, then. On the support pages of my ISP, there are configuration instructions for:
Commercialization isn't really bad. All corporations care about is money and so they are going to do anything possible to get it from consumers. If there are two websites that sell the same product, corporations are going to try and improve their website as much as possible making it easier and better for consumers to use. If they do that then consumers are more likely to come to their site and buy things from them. Competition in this form helps the consumer. Now if a consumer only supports a big compnay that company will become a monopoly and I think everyone here on slashdot knows what happens to the quality of products that come from a monopoly.
So in short support the smaller stores that come onto the internet and help promote competition.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
This isn't about technology. This is strictly about the legal system. If I rented a storefront and put up a neon sign that says "Come here to discuss TI calculators" and used the place to hold nightly discussion groups at no charge, and their legal department found out about it, they'd probably get just as upset and pull exactly the same nonsense. The only difference is they're not likely to actually see a sign like that so it's likely beneath their attention, while they can easily search all the domain names and generate a list of people to threaten.
I'd like to see innocent people who get these stomp letters from the lawyers start initiating lawsuits against the company for harassing them. Perhaps it would make companies sit up and take a little notice of what their corporate lawyers are doing and perhaps even put a leash on them for a change if a few corporations could be made to pay out large settlements because their lawyers tried to intimidate someone into giving up their right to free speech.
What does that have to do with anything?
Are you really that dense? The moderator who gave it a +1 Insightful got it. Why didn't you?
Okay, for the short bus crowd, I present a simplified explanation: The article was about large corporations controlling the net with lawyers, legal actions, and money. Then the Associated Press, a large corporation that published the story, cited copyright law and implied legal threats to prevent people from putting copies of the story on their own web sites.
Did you even read the article before posting? It's times like this that I wish Slashdot had a sign at the entrance saying "Your IQ must be at least this high to go on this ride."
The government is what is stopping free speech and openness on the Internet.
A company may sue you, but it is the government that actually steals your money (at the point of a gun) and gives it to the company.
No government enforcement of corporate whims, no problem.
The corporations are just doing what the law says they need to do (be as competitive as possible). If murder were legal, companies would be obligated to do that if it would benefit their shareholders. Companies aren't allowed to be moral.
The courts have no such excuse. They are the law (effectively, even if not "in theory") and their job according to the Constitution and the natural rights of man is to protect our interests.
They have failed.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
I haven't been to CNN, ESPN, EBay, MSNBC, Yahoo!, Excite!, ZDNet, Barnes and Noble, blah blah blah blah blah, etc etc etc, in months, and don't expect to for -- when?
Never.
Who cares?
Somebody needs to get beyond this kinda cr*p:
and realize that there's one whole hell of a lot to the Internet that Jupiter Media Metrix isn't even the faintest bit aware of, and that there's a whole lot more that you can do with the Internet than just buy sh*t.
Those "14 companies" don't "control" one second of the time I spend online.
The only people who take that kind of drivel seriously are those who don't do anything but consume, anyway, so the only Internet they know about is the "commercialized Internet"...
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
I was just posting questions to get people to think. That particular question is based on the events that have caused some of us to lose freedoms, at least for awhile.
:)
It's not like there hasn't been effort to outlaw GPL, you know.
Monopolization is bad. Anything which is so structured as to foster a tendency towards monopolization is bad. Monopolies are bad. Even a single predominant company, even when it isn't a monopoly, is bad. True, a predominant company can ameliorate it's effects, if it wants to. But the sheer dominance is bad. Mandrake improved Red Hat by making it less dominant. (Not smaller, not less profitable. Less dominant.)
... nearly always a bad move). Unfortunately, the current laws and customs in the US encourage businesses to behave in a domineering and oppressive manner towards their customers. Companies which don't have good competition are able to behave this way and still flourish. But they sure build up a mass of resentment. Consider IBM in the 1960's. It was THE quality computer dealer. It made good machines, and gave honest return for cash. But it was high-handed. It took IBM decades to partially rebuild it's image. They're still working on it. MS has been a god-send for them, because of MS nobody hates IBM. But they still remember IBM as the company that gave good value for money. (Well, I do, anyway.)
... except for their expensive daa's (much like the current dsl vs. T1, only the technology required to get around them was even more laughable).
Commercial entities are only seen as bad when they are seen as oppressive (or when people are so desperate that they ignore ethics
But IBM isn't dominant. It's larger now than it ever was. It's profitable, perhaps even more so than ever. (And it may be more influential! This is bad, dangerous, because the damage isn't noticed. But it may not be, and it's unfair to assume. But it's also unwise to assume -- either way.)
Still, a monopoly, or an essentially dominant company is an automatically bad thing. Sometimes people take awhile to notice this. Some people never do. For decades people bemoaned the loss of the unified Bell system (even though each of the pieces is still a monopoly an any particular geographic area). But until the breakup, modems were acoustic couplers, at their rediculous slow speed. Bell didn't see any reason to allow direct connections
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
My sister was shifted from @home (I think!) to AT&T. She was disconnected. When she called, she was told that she hadn't paid. She authorized a credit card payment. That was over a month ago. She still has no service. When she calls, they tell her it's her hardware. It's the same hardware that worked before. They don't tell her she needs a new modem or something. They tell her things like: unplug your modem, wait for 5 minutes, and then plug it into a different outlet. This set up was working until they switched. (I tried that anyway. Made no difference, as I expected, but if you don't try you aren't certain .)
... slowed (dial up connection at ~ 4800 baud is still available).
My feeling: They have the cash because they have been stealing it.
If there were decent competition, then they couldn't get away with this. As it is, I've recommended that she look into some other service provider in the neighborhood. But I don't live down there, and we are both employed full time, so finding an alternative may take awhile (we want the new one to be better than the old, even though that doesn't seem difficult). Fortunately, this is in Silicon Valley (Sunnyvale), so there are almost certain to be alternatives. But meantime her thesis is
But I sure won't be recommending AT&T to anybody except a DA or the (state) Attorney General. (I'm a bit upset with them!)
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I happen to agree with most of the ideas in this article, but it is terrible journalism. If there's one idea I wish journalists could learn, it's: There are two sides to every dispute.. Usually we see AP publishing an article about how "pirates" are costing the music industry billions. With lots of quotes from record executives, trade associations, legislators. And no attempt to ask normal people how they feel. No investigation of the alleged moral right to confine information.
This time the biased shoe is on the other foot. We hear a bunch of complaints about the corporate closure of the net. And yet the reporter didn't bother contacting any of the alleged villains for a balancing quote. Nor did the reporter talk to the ordinary people who lean heavily on corporate-provided content.
I expect to receive some backlash (if anyone reads this) because the complainers are substantially right, and we know it. But that doesn't excuse one-sided reporting.
You are not being controlled.
I am not being controlled.
Joe Sixpack is being controlled.
In the OLD net, there was no Joe Sixpack. You and I surfed the web, went where we chose, found cool sites by crackpots and had a laugh or two.
NOW, Joe Sixpack may get wired, and go on the net. He's not going to find the crackpot sites. He has virtually no chance to. He uses the ISP's search engine, which directs him to the highest bidder.
You may think that's the crackpot's problem. And also Joe Sixpack's problem. Not yours. Not mine.
AOL doesn't rule you? I hope you don't use Netscape. Microsoft doesn't rule you? I hope you don't use MSN. You use Opera? I guess you're okay then. Until Microsoft buys Opera. Microsoft sure as hell CAN and WILL make changes to IE - someday, mark my words, that will make it impossible to view certain pages. AOL will do the same. Eventually, this trend will split the net.
You'll see situations like last year, when cable networks on the west coast were shut out from providing Disney content - because Disney was "playing hardball" with contract negotiations - but in reality, they were de-valuing Time Warner's Cable assets. But it was the consumer who was caught in the middle - locked into a service - PAYING for that service, but unable to get content. Not due to technical reasons, but due to corporate tussling which has nothing to do with them.
The same thing will be played out on the internet - soon enough. The players are already in place (forgive the pun, because the "players" are Quicktime, Real, and WIMP).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
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