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Industry Threatened by Innovation at the 'Edge'?
penciling_in writes "In an article on CircleID, Bob Frankston, best known as the co-developer of the legendary VisiCalc and Lotus Express, shares his concern regarding industries desperate effort to control 'the edge' -- VoIP, P2P, Video on Demand... 'The commoditization of the transport is making it increasingly difficult to make money just because you own the pipe. The cable industries have a long history of owning the content and demanding a share in companies whose signals they deign to carry. As gatekeepers they have the ability to command a high fee for passage. The problem is that the scarcity is going away and with the shift to narrowcasting (as in Video on Demand) there is no scarcity. Instead they must own the content themselves if they are to retain any advantage.
The Comcast/Disney issue (see: Comcast Family Protects Power) is portrayed as a media consolidation and convergence but that doesn't make sense. With transport becoming increasingly abundant it is easier for new players to enter the market and we should see increasing divergence once millions of people can experiment with new ideas.'"
He forgot to mention RIAA/MPAA's attempts to control the very way we can use their products after we legally purchase and pay for them.
Why don't these companies wake up and realize the paradigms have changed? It's not like there isn't ample opportunity to make money with the new technology. Why stick to the failing methods of yesteryear?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
He's got a more generic article about what he means with "edge". It looks to have a bit more generic reading value than the article referenced here on slashdot.
Reinout
Reinout van Rees
From the article: "During World War II cargo planes would drop supplies on Pacific Islands for later retrieve. Islanders without an understanding of technology joined cargo cults in hopes of petitioning their gods for more."
So when I'm uploading a bunch of files, and screaming at a slow connection, can I now claim I'm having a "religious experience"?
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
When new technologies appear and make things more convinent, someone who was making money off the older technology loses out. Some companies want to simply protect their revenue without either pre-empting the change in technology or changing after a new technology has been adopted by the mainstream.
If VoIP became mainstream, how many telephone companies would go bankrupt? how many would fight tooth and nail to implement measures that would ensure that they got a piece of the pie?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
The Internet is designed such that any single network node can be obliterated and the network will continue to function by rerouting itself around the problem. Whole networks can be destroyed or otherwise cut off from the main network and the main network will still continue to function (as well, the cut off network will continue to function within itself).
This is basically his premise of how technology adjusts itself around attacks against it by industries that seek to limit it. However, what I think he fails to take into consideration is that given enough time, enough laws can be enacted that any technology that would work its way around a company's defenses would be illegal to possess or at the very least execute. We are already seeing this type of legislation coming into effect with such things as the DMCA.
I have been pwned because my
Content-delivery ain't what it used to be. Joe Bob Basement Studio can put his mp3's in the same pipeline that Mega-Record Pimp Corp can.
.mp3 track these days, far and wide, to all and sundry, and it can be done very, very, effectively.
...
The difference is, whether people will pay attention to you or not - not whether they -can- through whatever means are available, but whether they will.
At ampfea.org we've been gathering together, as a crew of Artists, to present a united front and stable base of operations for use by our individual members to use for promoting their artistic efforts.
This is the future. There's no -need- any more for media giants banded together to share/consume resources for promotion, there is now the need for Content Producers to cut through the dreck and get good material online, and deliverable. It costs nothing to promote an
I see the day when those 80's Golden Dreams of media control in the hands of the people is actually feasible. Lets hope we avoid some of those other predictions
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Communication will increasingly become cheaper/free. What is communicated matters more than how you communicate. So, in near future we will see a flat rate for communicating using Landline telephones, mobiles, broadband. Iam talking about convergence as people use a variety of devices to communicate and a variety of modes of communication (wired, wireless, IR, etc). The industry will fracture so fast that Verizon will be flat-footed before it can say cheese. Traditional companies can hope to survive only if they change into content providers soon.
-------- Cluster bombing from B-52s is very, very accurate -- the bombs always hit the ground.
If you look at the songwriters' attempt to shut down radio stations back in the first half of the twentieth century, there's a great deal of similarity with the current file-sharing situation. BMI, ASCAP and other licensing schemes grew out of this (and the EFF has just proposed a similar licensing scenario which would place a great deal of the (fairly light) burden on broadband ISPs, who could then offset that by raising costs slightly. Not a bad idea -- but at the same time, it's one of a very small number of times that something like this has been proposed in the last century. The old model is still perceived as viable simply because so many people see it as viable; sadly, the only thing that will finally put it to rest is time and boring effort.
Social progress, much like scientific progress, often moves forward one funeral at a time.
Dance like nobody's watching. Sing like you're in the shower. Fuck like you're being filmed.
Why is "industry" so surprised? This is what capitalism is supposed to be about; the inefficient are driven to extinction and new, more efficient players take their place. They have to take the good with the bad and shouldn't be allowed to legislate protection everytime the wind blows their way.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
My attitude on this matter so far has always been the same.
Free Market.
Face it. The music industry in its current form is dead. The only reason that they're getting away with suing people is because the government is letting them with crap like the DMCA, something I personally think was entirely developped to stunt the inevitable change of the global market.
CDs are obsolete as a distribution form. The internet is cheaper, quicker, easier. CDs used to be a marketable product: People wanted music in a decent high-quality format and CDs were the best thing available for it.
But now that's changed. CDs are no longer worth the same money that we pay for it because it has less value. So why are the governments bending over for the music industry and outright saying "I don't care what they're worth now. They were worth $20 20 years ago, they should be so now too."
When Henry Ford invented the assembly line, cars dropped radically in price. We're looking at the new economic revolution, and it's digital. An exceptionally cheap means of distibuting any digital media, be it software, music, videos or anything along the way. But the fact that it's not patentable or marketable has a lot of these now obsolete industries going crazy. Granted, the software industry always had to cope with this, and Microsoft did a great job at it by basically cramming their product down everybody's throats to the point of dependency. But the fact of the matter is that these distributors of software and data are becoming more and more obsolete the more accessible stuff is becoming through digital media.
And of course, lobbying seems to have forced the government's hand to agree with them, and so technology as we know it isn't being given the breathing room it needs to flourish, and so these companies are refusing to adapt, with disasterous results: Suing 12 year old girls, awful mediocre music giving us outright reason to stop listening to radios and stop buying CDs, buggy software with no less than 3 major worms in the last year hitting a bunch of people and making everybody pissed off with their computers (honestly. Your computer didn't do anything wrong. It did exactly what it was supposed to in that situation. Maybe next time you'll think twice before you shell out $150 to those boys in Redmond).
But of course, in this so called "Capitalist" society we're going to completely refuse the concept of the Open Market because it seems now that people will actually have to play the game of supply and demand instead of venture into Count-Zero like mafia-war tactics of Big Business. And of course we can't let that happen because... well... I can't think of any reason other than to let the rich get richer. 1984 here we come!
This is why I support open software. This is why I download my music. This is why I waste hours on the internet trying to learn as much as possible about computers. Because I ultimately want to help this world progress into something better than it is now, rather than let it perpetuate itself into staleness.
Karma: Non-Heinous
Imagine purchasing your shows direct from the producing company. One new copy made available per week. Mine to download and then view when I felt like it. No 'channels' or 'networks' in the traditional sense.
No adds.
Or another scenario; I live in a large city ( > 4 million). Only the very largest of companies can afford to advertise. With narrowcasting a sort of advertising model could be supported where a small business might only choose to advertise in a 2km radius - or maybe only to profiled recieptients.
Dunnno.... but things have got to get better.
AC
You might not know but the inventor of print, Gutenberg did not want to print large volumes of books - he wanted to print books that would look similar to the hand-copied ones (hence fancy font and illuminations) - see the Gutenberg bible - these were the incunabuli
He wanted to make much money. Were it not for his followers that stole his invention and started mass production of books (very similar to those we now nowadays - set up in antiqua typeface) that cheap books started to exist and made wide dissemination of knowledge possible.
If there were patents in Medieval Times, surely Gutenberg would obtain a one, and no print as we know it would be possible.
You can defy gravity... for a short time
...what he is saying is not new. In past eras it was the rush to vertically integrate all soup to nuts related items (and some not related items) into a single conglomerate that supposedly trumpeted the 'efficiency' of a larger player, when in fact all it really amounted to was a stock inflation that eventually sank and resulting in spinning off or eradication of units that were formerly productive entities on their own.
While written long before the issues brought up in this article, a great read about similar behavior and how it pertains to public policy is Corporations and Political Accountability by Mark V. Nadel. Personally, I like the Comcast/Disney deal, because chances are Comcast will not know how to run it and the gelatinous radioactive mess that results will cause Disney to become a footnote in entertainment history.
The problem of content and transmission today have to do with one thing - making money for someone. Everybody thinks in terms of paying for either bandwidth speed or throughput, or paying for content exclusive to one provider. This is not going to get us anywhere.
What I envision is much simpler - pay for a piece of hardware once(high speed wireless transmitter/receiver with intelligent peer routing), and then the bandwidth is not paid for by anyone, because there's no traditional infrastructure to set up. If a company would just make this type of equipment it could set free all those who currently are beholden to their ISP/cable companies for "giving" them a certain amount of bandwidth in exchange for $$$. If you make these wireless internet nodes in such a way that they auto-aggregate and reorder themselves based on surrounding nodes, you would effectively have unlimited bandwidth (to the limit of transmission tech of course) not monopolised by anyone. Much like Bittorrent, the more nodes you had, the faster it would be. Conversely, you could have high power models for remote areas to transmit/receive further.
It's a paradigm shift in thinking (since the very notion of not needing to pay constantly for access is foreign to most), and I don't have all the technical answers to this sort of idea, but surely the idea itself has merit?
Visceral Psyche Films
Nah, the Teenage ones are too bust on Kazaa
Why try to invent anything, someone will just come up and sue you, claiming the have a patent on it.
It is much better to take an existing product and put a clock in it.
You certainly do not need a so-called Internet Service Provider.
So, what would it take to create your own access point?
RFC 1958 - Architectural Principles of the Internet
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
It's not that he forgot, it's that this topic actually doesn't fall into the domain he's discussing. He's talking about re-conceptualizing the end-to-end substrate of the internet, and hinting at some simple technical protocols/implementations to accompany and bolster such a shift in conceptualization. The goal of this shift is to enable innovation again. This does have some similarities to the topic you suggest, but only to the extent that there are technical and legal issues, and that big companies want more money at the expense of the public... which pretty much includes just about everything.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Considering the gov in the US started the entire FUD based game on hackers in the mid 80's and steroided it up, what do you see now...? Let me give you an example...
- High Performance Computers and Export Control Policy: Issues for Congress
- A Primer on E-Government: Sectors, Stages, Opportunities, and Challenges of Online Governance
- Computer Attack and Cyber Terrorism: Vulnerabilities and Policy Issues for Congress
All studies pointing to the same thing read the titles... A Primer on E-Government: Sectors, Stages, Opportunities, and Challenges of Online Governance, throw that in with consortiums like CALEA, and you get a handful of companies that get to dictate what is "law" now it sounds fair but law according to whom? It the UK tried to pass their law here, Americans would be in an uproar (or too busy looking at Martha Stewart), so what makes you think other countries should/will stand for our rules. Talk about the potential for fallout.So if you think it's about the DMCA only, or MS only, you're really short sighted. It's about anyone willing to kick up some cash for those in office. Hey one hand washes the other. And for those who don't believe or think it's some "tin foil on the head" -what you misconstrue and call - conspiracy, I suggest you look into the words perception management, cognitive dissonance on google. There are studies done daily in hopes of finding a way to make you believe whatever they'd like:
MoFscker
The chapters alone should tell you more or less what its about... "How to shape the public's mind and hope forget the truth 101"
1. War and perception: the battle to enable American power
1.1 The evolving American calculus of war
1.2 The media, casualty intolerance, and asymmetric warfare
1.3 The public information battlespace after 9/11
1.4 Perception management in support of Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom
2. Shaping the public discourse on civilian casualties: case studies
2.1 Spinning the Iraqi market place bombings
2.2 Framing the air attack on Baghdad Waging lawfare Strategic bombing and the illegality of air defense
3. Framework propositions on war casualties and collateral damage
3.1 Claims about "precision attack" and the "new warfare"
3.2 Claims about damage limitation efforts
There are too many to list. I have docs along these lines pertaining to compsec, ecommerce, you name it. I'm just too tired to look through my entire FOIA which is why I pointed this one out, it was just written last week. When I find it, if I remember when I wake up I'll post it for anyone interested in how the gov tries to shape your mind while they fiddle with policies, standards, and laws.
MoFscker
My attitude on this matter so far has always been the same. Free Market.
The only thing I'd add would be that that my attitude has always included: the public good. Regulation of the free market - e.g. antitrust legislation - are sometimes necessary for the public good.
The reality of our current broken sociopolitics is that regulation under the auspices of the public good is often used for the opposite result, namely for the profit of corporations at the expense of consumer choice and even of basic freedoms. Likewise, the free market concept is often successfully invoked by corporations to achieve detriments to the public good. So in terms of implementation, perhaps neither "free market" nor "public good" has a particularly better record. But in a parallel universe where politicians are noble and corporations behave, the public good takes precedence over the free market, and sets policy for it.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
The way you laid out the text of your post, I actually expected it to rhyme.
We can't enjoy high speed access through fiber and have it uncontrolled by gov't or corporation. But I'd be happy if I only had a decent contract with my ISP. Why can't we just pay a flat fee per megabyte? No more exceeding my unlimited bandwidth, no more services I can't opt out of.
Were it not for his followers that stole his invention and started mass production of books (very similar to those we now nowadays - set up in antiqua typeface) that cheap books started to exist and made wide dissemination of knowledge possible.
If there were patents in Medieval Times, surely Gutenberg would obtain a one, and no print as we know it would be possible.
It's an interesting hypothetical situation but you've got the outcome wrong!
(For the moment, let us ignore the chicken and egg problem of actually making copies of such a patent.....)
Patents only last for, at most, 2 decades. Let's say Gutenberg did patent his press. Once the patent expired everybody would be legally entitled to make their own press.
In the mean time, because Gutenberg has had to put down a detailed description, with diagrams, of how the printing press works, far more people will have got the opportunity to see how to build their own. Moreover, others may then seen ways to make it better.
In other words, instead of it being a trade secret, and hence kept hidden away slowing down the spread of printing, a patent would have helped speed up its adoption.
With all of our rampant cost cutting and large scale manufacturing we are rapidly entering an age in which the most expensive part of a product is the carton it's shipped in and the shelf space it occupies.
Look at phones. I am usually they guy who bitches about de-regulation, but I have a flat fee I pay that allows be to yak for an unlimited amount of time to anywhere in the US. The billing and tracking what call goes where costs more than providing the service, so many new providers are just charging a flat rate.
The same is true with roadways. The first highways were toll roads. Now, everyone chips in a little in tax money, and the roads are free. Well at least everywhere but the Northeast.
I used to love college because you had the meal plan. You pay and assload of money up front, but you get to stroll into the cafeteria and eat however much, or little, however many times you wanted.
To tell you the truth, the most expensive part of a resteraunt these days are the staff, rent, and utilities. The huge portions are so you don't feel ripped off for paying $10/plate. How long till some large chain starts a "membership" club. Pay a flat fee, and eat as often as you like. Just think of the line at checkout. There wouldn't be one.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Artificial Intelligence -- not just the Cable Industry -- is another battleground where innovation at the Edge threatens the entire Industry Establishment, yessiree Bob Frankston right-on bro'.
Artificial intelligence has been solved at the edges and fringes of the field and not by the dinosaurs of the AI Establishment.
The Edge is bypassing the AI Establishment -- just like in the collapsing free-for-all of the Cable Industry.
With accusations of kookery at the Edge, the AI Establishment (DFKI etc.) is fighting back and trying to discredit the Edge of AI, mais la verite est en marche, et rien ne l'arretera!
Artificil intelligence is evolving and multiplying in 'Net-wide Diaspora from the Edge back into the foundations of the AI Industry. Join in, or watch from the Edges?
We need a revolution.
There's many about here both left and right, but i think we can all get more of what we want if we overthrow authoritarianism, that is, corporate fuedelism, and their phoney government structures.
My god!, even more bored housewives who are going to take their clothes off...
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
I have been involved in a wireless ISP providing high speed Internet access to people in rural areas who can't get DSL. As innovative as our product is, as we use Motorola Canopy to get to the customers the phone company didn't want to spend the money on, our backend is still provided by...that same phone company. The phone company makes about 18,000-plus a year just on its T1 line to us. We get more customers and need another T1 or to go to a T3. The phone company makes even more off of us.
So the moral of the story is, don't discount owning the pipes. Some people may find a way around part of your business, but you can still stick it to your remaining customers for quite some time and get away with it!
Transporter
I'm going to be wearing a hockey mask when I go off on everyone...
Is the very idea behind innovation. Make something expensive cheaper. Undercut a monopoly. Create new competition. That's how capitalism works. Yet nobody calls the cable companies pinko commies.
Why can't I use my PC as a server? Why does my cable company ISP (and, I'm sure, most ADSL companies) get away with saying that "you can't use your PC as a server" policy.....the download speeds are sort of okay, the upload speeds are pathetic..I know people can use their PC's as servers (I think that most ISP's (in their contract with you) state that if you run a server, you'r screwed...these are the policies of outdated models...I should be able to have a server (you'd think so, with all the money it costs per month for so-called high speed internet access) on my PC..it's stupid that I when I want my own web page, I have to shell out $ to my ISP or somebody else to get one (and get billed $ for so many web accesses to it). This reeks of an overpriced model of access to the internet based on outmoded pricing structure that this article plainly states....these companies want and like, their old comfortable revenue generating models rammed down our throats and what us to be nice docile consumers (old cable model, one-way information flow (no creativity)), that's why people are not watching TV anymore, they are surfing on the net...why should I have to do what some bloated company wants...I am not here to make other people rich...this model of the service providers (cable TV and radio) can go into the garbage can of history for all I care...people should demand cheap realistic, yes, I can use my PC-as-fast-server,(not expensive $/bit one-way, based on some sort of expensive cell-phone type pricing structure) internet access...I am sure that as the pipes get 1000's of times faster in the future, (ie: cheap fiber to the door hardware), the concept of paying say, $40/month for internet access of say 1 gig/day is going to look very quaint in, say the next 5 to 10 years...these companies only want your money and will do anything (twist goverments, buyup and consolidate the whole panet if they have too)...it's unfortunate that some governments (bush, for instance) will probablly let this happen. Arn't the new internet standard supposed to make running your own server (from your PC) really easy to do, but most cable co's and tel co's don't like this?
Hay, Mentifex, long time no see. I'd say that we missed your relentless punting of your pet project, but well, we didn't. I'm sorry to see that you still sound like a stuck record, and still think you're writing an AI in JavaScript. Have you made much progress at the actual coding since last you flooded Slashdot with this off-topic punditry?
Some might call you a troll, but to be a troll requires a level of cynicism and self-awareness that I really don't think you possess.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Man, VideoOnDemand and VoIP are sooooooo 90's.
:slashdot: THE ms zealot's site since 2002.
I remember the excitement in the networks laboratory when we first set our eyes upon VideoOnDemand. Because it was thought then that the wave of the future is to turn computers into stupid receivers like TV. This is old and out of fashion.
The heart of the problem is that the layered approach to networking separates the costly parts (all those fibers, wires, switches, & routers) from the valuable parts (all the applicaitons and content). The internet does such a good job of running any application on any physical network, that nobody is willing to pay extra for transport. I don't care if I get my broadband via DSL, cabole, wireless, or the powerlines. And since transport involves such high sunk costs, once companies overbuild networks, they find they have no choice but to charge less than their debt payments just to make some money.
What people do value is the applications, software, and the content. Therefore, the only way to make a profit on the transport layer is to own some of the application layer. This is why AOL bought Time Warner, Comcast wants Disney, etc.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
- If I want to make a copy of my cd in case the original gets scratched it's my right to do that and when I bought that CD I damn sure never agreed to a license that said I couldn't.
THEN FUCKING BACK UP YOUR CDs. I have every single one of mine in 256kbps MP3 form, ripped from the very CD I own, and noone's come after me yet.THE ONLY PEOPLE THE RIAA IS (supposedly) GOING AFTER ARE UPLOADERS - IN OTHER WORDS, THOSE WHO SHARE FILES WITH OTHERS. Why do so many people gloss over that issue?
So your phone, cable set-top box, and your PC modem are all just noted on the internet.
:D
What's the problem?
The current problem is the telcos problem, one of charging inconsistently for equivalent bandwidth depending on its use.
Simply charge *everyone* an appropriate rate per megabyte of bandwidth. Problem solved. It doesn't have to be an *expensive* rate, just one appropriate to the costs involved + margins.
An aside to this scenario means that someone who had to pay extra bandwidth due to some insecurity in their OS may be able to sue the OS manufacturer.
Disney should do a "way out west" start-up. Way out West goes into communities and does a modified Block-based greenbox with fiber to the home. Then they allow up to 50 other companies to install Fiber with content to the greenbox (or to use their CO). This minimizes the monopoly and creates a true competition. If Disney takes this approach, they will be able to take away all much ot the territory from Comcast.
Remember, Comcast has monopoly licenses that come up for renewal almost monthly.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"The horse is dead, either f*ck it or walk away, but stop beating it."
In India... This has come about because the telephone companies can bribe the Govt
/. about their search service is another example of this, and in an interesting way, it may represent an attempt at owning content. (Word on the street is that Verisign's money is talking in Congress again - notice they're smart enough to move this forward in an election year?) Per the original post's comment:
India has no monopoly on corrupt politicians (hey, can we outsource ours to you too?). Look at the 2002/3 Ag Bill and its rural broadband provisions. Hyped by Sen. Harkin and others as a way to finally bring high-capacity service out of the city, it ended up being yet another givaway to the same incumbant local monopoly carriers that have refused to deliver broadband for the past 10+ years.
How did this happen? When the rules got written, the usual ILEC lobby influence got them structured to essentially require that you're a monopoly local phone company to qualify for the government bucks. Many around here have been taking the money, but other than nice vacation homes in Vail for company execs, there's no broadband happening.
The recent Verisign ploy reported in
Instead they must own the content themselves if they are to retain any advantage.
This has been a subject at the lower levels of telecom of some contention for several years. Genuity, when it was acquired by new owners, dropped peering with Exodus (large hosting company), demanding Exodus pay Genuity for transit to its masses of dialup customers. Genuity's perspective was that as it owned the eyeballs, Exodus should pay Genuity for all those valuable eyeballs to see their hosting customers content (apologies for horrible oversimplifications!).
Exodus saw it the other way around - Genuity's customers had less of interest to see on the Internet (and subsequently an inferior product compared to other ISPs like AT&T Worldnet, etc.) when Genuity didn't have the "Exodus" channel.
Minor battles over content vs. eyeballs have been fought, most to a stalemate. Verisign's *.com ploy, however, appears to raise the stakes. A consolidated ISP response, rerouting the *.* traffic elsewhere (e.g. independent search engines - I'd be happy to redirect my network's eyeballs to google.com or another site in exchange for compensation, instead of letting Verisign seizing the business).
However, if this content vs. eyeball battle starts to heat up, it could lead to some fragmentation. We already have an increasing amount of content providers requiring registration and payment (which I would believe is an appropriate way to address content value - let the consumer decide).
Determined by fiat at the network level via Verisign wildcard misdirection or service provider content blocking, it's likely to balkenize the network further.
The above is one Slashdot view on inertia in modern business, judging from its moderation value.
The other view, of course is that when it comes to outsourcing of tech jobs, inertia is good.
NOTE: I am commenting on the views of Slashdot as a whole, as reflected by its moderators. The parent poster may or may not believe this second view.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
big deal. another disruptive technology. just like linux/OSS is changing the IT world, so to is this. big deal. that is the nature of market economies. one sector grows and matures and displaces another sector, only to have the exact smae thing happen to them. you want to live in a controlled economy. i certainly don't.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Reading this kind of thing always depresses me. Because of the Cold War and fear of Communism, we Americans have degenerated into a mindset where prosperity and plenty is considered a "problem." Economics is said to be the study of scarcity and how humans deal with it.
I hope someday that humanity realizes the folly of such thinking and seeks to make a society or technology that can transcend economics, not stay in thrall to it.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
from Comcast's perspective because IIRC Disney also owns ESPN. ESPN and the Disney Channel are the two most expensive basic cable channel groups, responsible for much of the annual cost increase in cable rates. If Comcast owns Disney then the "cost" of Disney's channels is suddenly a much smaller problem.
I "solved" this problem by going with the $10/mo economy cable TV plan, which has broadcast networks and not much else. Heck, and even that's only because I have a Comcast cable modem. Up yours, Mickey Mouse!
There is something you should know. Henry Ford did NOT invent the assembly line. He simply took advantage of it to streamline his car bulding process. If fact Ransome Eli Olds invented it, used it to produce cards and Ford only improved on it. But since Ford was so popular that myth still lives on today.
http://www.aeragon.com/02/02-04.html
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
You raise an interesting point: the only way an entrenched technology can fight innovation is if its supporters can get a government to intervene on its behalf.
The easiest way for an entrenched company to fight innovation is to do nothing: if your products require a large investment in capital then you probably won't have to fight innovation from anyone but other large companies, and if your products also require a large R&D budget then you probably won't have to fight innovation from anyone but other large companies in your field.
The second easiest way is to discourage competing innovations by demonstrating them to be a losing proposition for your competitors. If a significant competing project comes out of a smaller company, you sell your version at a loss, thus forcing your competitor to sell theirs at a loss, until they leave the market or are forced out of business. This will cause you to lose money in the short term on one product at a time, but will save you money in the long term as other companies realize they can't make money competing with you and decide to stay out of "your" markets in the first place.
Note that the second method is nearly impossible if you aren't already a monopoly in some markets and is technically illegal if you are; fortunately any legal costs and fines that result are unlikely to be substantial, and just act to slightly increase the cost of "dumping".
> Instead they must own the content themselves if they are to retain any advantage.
Nope. The ownership of any data pipe -- and particularly that "last mile" cable into everyone's house -- is a tremendous natural advantage just by itself. If they can't figure out how to turn that advantage into profit, then they need to step aside and give the business opportunity to people who can.
On the contrary, it's the content that's the cheap commodity here, and content is almost on the verge of becoming a free natural resource like water.
At most, I could expect to have 4 data pipes into my house (cable, DSL, powerline, and wireless). But my choices for content are limitless -- including my ability to use P2P to get almost any music or software I want for free. And as bandwidth improves, free P2P will also expand into VoIP and on-demand video.
The only company guaranteed of getting money from me will be my data-pipe provider. For everything else, I will have free alternatives.
The Internet is designed such that any single network node can be obliterated and the network will continue to function by rerouting itself around the problem. Whole networks can be destroyed or otherwise cut off from the main network and the main network will still continue to function (as well, the cut off network will continue to function within itself).
And the core still works that way. But it's different at the edge.
You buy a connection to an ISP. Unless you're a commercial customer paying the big bucks for a redundant feed you get one wire to one box. If something goes wrong with that wire or that box, you're cut off. If something goes wrong with that ISP you're cut off. If that ISP decides not to route the packet stream associated with some service it wishes to deny you, you're cut off (at least from the STANDARD way of using or providing that service).
If you have a second feed from a different internet provider the two feeds will have different IP addresses, and the routing information that lets the rest of the net know they're both you won't be propagated. No automatic failover for you.
Meanwhile your feed first tunnels to a subscriber management box, which exists to automatically configure and meter your connection. They were originally deployed to simplify and speed up configuring your connection. But to do that job they had to be the automated packet traffic cop. They amount to a reverse-firewall, protecting the network against your use or more service than you paid for, use of services that the ISP doesn't want to provide, and monitoring what uses you DO make of your connection.
So you can see why ownership of the internet utilities by major entertainment content-provider conglomerates has implications for internet freedom - especially where it potentially trashes the content-providers' business model.
The manufacturers of subscriber management promote them as giving the ISPs the opportunity to provide "added-value services" at the edge, on the model of telephone extra-cost options like call forwarding, 3-way calling, etc. But most added-value services can be provided anywhere on the network. The services that can only be added on the edge are limited. Typical examples:
- Quality of Service (QoS): Policing your packets and allowing through only as many marked for high-reliability, low-latency, low-jitter transport as you've paid a premium price for, so you and others like you don't swamp the common backbone, or overuse the high-quality bandwidth the ISP paid its backbone connection for.)
- Broadcast content (a limited number of very popular high-bandwidth channels transported once at high QoS over the ISPbone and exploded out to multiple users).
- Video-on-demand: A high-bandwidth high QoS personal channel from a content provider's server - at an extra fee.
- Parental control: Limiting and monitoring the internet usage of particular hosts on the home network - with the control implemented beyond the reach of machines the victim can reconfigure.
- Law-enforcement monitoring and network wiretapping.
The commercial internet is a very different design from the original concept of a robust network of endpoint peers.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
and so.. are you proposing that... this is a problem? housewives are great, and i think they should all be naked.
I appreciate your comments about "Unfettered access to the internet" I always wondered how this was done.
Thanks.
but there's always the possibility of civil disobedience. If a large portion of the people simply ignore the new laws, the cost of enforcing them becomes prohibitive. This is why the MPAA has been so careful in their assault on individual file-traders. They are hoping that by making an example of a select few, they can deter others from trading music. They aren't widening their assault because they couldn't afford the legal burden it would incur. Prohibition is a good example of how even governmental force can be derailed quite effectively by civil disobedience.
Before you wave the no-gubmint flag, consider that one function of government is to finance and run operations that are socially valuable and yet commercially unworkable. There isn't big profit in highways, fire departments and sewage treatment plants. It's hard to deny that we need it. If it becomes impossible to make money running pipes, they could become regulated. Or the government could buy up whole systems and contract out the maintenance at an acceptable profit. If things change, deregulation is always an option down the road (look at telcos).
In any case, the telephone companies (by which I presume you meant the private telecom co's such as Tata Indicom or Reliance) couldn't have bribed the government, simply because the international phone line segment simply wasn't open in the past; Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (which, I might point out, literally means, 'Overseas Communication Corporation Limited') still had a monopoly over that segment even after cellular services and metro landline services were privatised years back in 1996. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, BSNL, (or the even bigger, MTNL) has always been limited to intra-national telecom services.
In either case, VSNL has been privatised, and the government is mostly out of the system except for a fair bit of chaos it left in its wake, mostly to do with the manner in which the licences have been given to particular telecom circles (for instance, Mohali and Chandigarh are two seperate telecom 'circles', despite being a single topographically unified metropolitan area) and technologies (WLL versus mobiles), but there's always the quasi-judicial Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to look into that.
India most definitely has a corruption problem, but unfortunately, that's not the case here. The reason why things haven't changed until 2003 has mostly been an ancient evil known since Newton, an evil habit known as 'inertia'.
More than mere navel gazing.
In India? Who would have figured?
By the way, isn't India the only country remaining in the world that supports slavery outright and by birth? (Because, you know, people deserve to experience the karmic consequences of their past actions, after all.) Let's all outsource there.
You (meaning you, the reader) are a bunch of politically correct exoticistically bedazzadled liberal rational accomidating post racist idiots, contributing, by the was, to human misery. Get the hell out of India.
Please don't mention India around me... It's really messing with my karma.