Slashdot Mirror
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
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
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
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?
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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."
CDs are a bad example because they are legal to copy for backup or in order to put them on a different type of media for your use - At least, they are today. DVDs on the other hand, there is no legal way to back them up, due to the DMCA. So it's a valid argument in spite of your counterexample. What you are doing is perfectly legal in the US, but copying a DVD is not. Let's also not forget region coding, which some might say is anticompetitive.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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".