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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.
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
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
>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.
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"?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
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.