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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.
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
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
...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.
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.
If someone were to do this with reasonably high quality (say a 300-400MB DivX file for a single 40-60 minute episode, $25 or so per "season"), I might start watching TV again.
Right now I just wait until the series I want is out on DVD and buy that. I lost my patience for commercials when broadcasters started split-screening them into the ending credits of the few shows I was still watching.
I would be willing to pay more (e.g. $30+ per season) if I could get a discount when the DVDs were released if I wanted high quality copies.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
There are many independant artists who are far better than anything in the RIAA stables, but there are far more producing crap.
The problem with the emerging model you're talking about is finding a way to for the end users to find music they like.
Of Course You have.
And it surely is as well for the masses of people that have the Operating System "Word" at work and the Operating System "Internet Explorer" at home.
These kind of people may be able to understand CNN.com ( TV news), eBay ( flea market) and amazon ( mail order retail).
But I seriously doubt, if they ever understand the idea behind sites like slashdot or groklaw. And I suspect they thoroughly misunderstand P2P filesharing services.
Evidence: When BMG bought Napster, I thought they'll made it a subscription service for small money and just count (on the central servers) how often which song was downloaded and then routed the income accordingly to musicians and their expenses.
But no, it was killed off.
Which lead to decentralized filesharing systems.
Seems like EFF is a little late? Or are Record Labels already distressed enough?
chess
I see one problem with a completely free network. This creates a limited resource ( by the number of nodes, ... ) that can be used by anybody as much as they want without charge. This is very much like Air. If there were no environmental regulations, every factory would blow out any dirt they can because it is a little bit cheaper for them.
In a shared wireless network there would be leechers that modify their access points to use all the bandwith of their neighbours making the network useless for others.
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
how many would fight tooth and nail to implement measures that would ensure that they got a piece of the pie?
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. If government can be kept from interfering in the market, the best (in terms of cost/benefit ratio) technology will always win in the end.
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.
Not only that, in India VoIP is mostly illegal(you cannot connect to PSTN). This has come about because the telephone companies can bribe the Govt, and Govt also does not want VoIP coz it will mean lost revenue to state own telecom mammoth BSNL which has more than 100 Million Subscibers.
It is a classic case of corrupt govt and greedy industry screwing the consumerMy Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
in India VoIP is mostly illegal(you cannot connect to PSTN). This has come about because the telephone companies can bribe the Govt, and Govt also does not want VoIP coz it will mean lost revenue to state own telecom mammoth BSNL
I'll bet you it becomes illegal not to connect voip to the pstn as the pstn walled garden whithers in the next couple decades.
At some point, the pstn is going to be little more than a central dns server which will point dialed calls to the right client on the net. That's what the article is about, really-- the death struggles of industries which are obsolete today, but who will linger for a long time. While they linger, they will use any means necessary to try to maintain their current position, even if it's a kamikaze move like walling themselves off from VoIP, which over time is the same as saying, "We are not part of the internet." They should be taking this opportunity to become the innovators in enabling the pstn to interact with the internet, but instead they are taking this opportunity to make it clear they are obsolete.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
Why should a *monopoly* need superbowl ads and an army of salespeople, anyways?
That's the point. They are losing their monopoly. That means they are no longer going to be able to collect monopoly rents.
When the telephone and cable tv monopolies were granted in your locality, it was based on the idea that it would be inefficient to build more than one phone system and more than one cable system in your locality. Now the cable system is just another TCP/IP network and the phone system is just another TCP/IP network.
What happens when the phone company sells video and the cable system sells voip? Worse yet (from the corporate perspective), what happens when the end users realize their cable (or satellite) tv, cell phone, home phone, etc., are really just nodes on the internet and begin to treat them as such? What happens when big bandwidth, omnipresent and too-cheap-to-meter wireless connectivity to the net becomes commonplace?
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
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.
- 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.
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
Definitionally, as well as practically, the Internet is a very specific arrangement of routed IP networks that have peering or customer/vendor relationships. Your access point must have at least one routable IP address on one of these networks. Period.
For Internet access, any physical connection (DS0/DS1/DS3/OCN/Wireless) you have to a local exchange carrier, e.g. the global communications infrastructure, is moot without a business or consumer relationship with an ISP.
You can run your own IP network between your own sites, but you're not going to read /. from there.