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The End of Free
The Atlantic has up an insightful piece from its print edition called Closing the Digital Frontier. Michael Hirschorn takes readers through a jaundiced version of the familiar story of the rise and dominance of the "Information wants to be free" meme, then claims that the era of freedom is now over. "...the phrase Information wants to be free... became perhaps the most powerful meme of the past quarter century; so powerful, in fact, that multibillion-dollar corporations destroyed their own businesses at its altar. ... But now, it seems, things are changing all over again. The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold sway, signals a radical shift from openness to a degree of closed-ness that would have been remarkable even before 1995. ... It’s far from a given that this shift will generate the kinds of revenue media companies are used to: for under-30s whelped on free content, the prospect of paying hundreds or thousands of dollars yearly for print, audio, and video (on expensive new devices that require paying AT&T $30 a month) is not going to be an easy sell. Yet lack of uptake by young people will hardly stop the rush to apps. There’s too much potential upside."
The open-source mentality, in theory if not always in practice, proved useful for the tech and Internet worlds. Facebook and Twitter achieved massive scale quickly by creating an open system accessible to outside developers, though that openness is at times more about branding than anything else—as Twitter’s fellow travelers are now finding out.
As Diaspora and a number of other projects are illustrating, Facebook is far from openness. The API, in my opinion, is little more than a glimpse of what actually goes on inside the behemoth that knows all.
This article seems to be spot on at times and just completely at odds with how I see things at others like:
Even so, Google still needs for the Web, however it’s accessed, to remain central—because without contextual search advertising, Google ceases to matter. Smart phones in general, and the iPad more pointedly, are not driven by search.
(emphasis mine) How incredibly shortsighted. During the World Cup game yesterday, I used my smart phone to search for no less than five pieces of information. And what are iAds? Nothing more than a contextual advertising model based on what you've downloaded as I see it. Sounds awfully similar to Google's model.
Now, instead of farmers versus ranchers, we have Apple versus Google. In retrospect, for all the talk of an unencumbered sphere, of a unified planetary soul, the colonization and exploitation of the Web was a foregone conclusion. The only question now is who will own it.
That's not the only question, it's merely the most monetarily important. I can think of tons of questions to go with your analogy. Who are the Native Americans now? Will one "owner" arise or can multiple coexist like the farmers and ranchers? How much will the government intervene and when? After this is all hashed out will there ever be peace? When it's all said and done, what's the next frontier that will be fought over for profit or will there ever be another one?
My work here is dung.
expensive new devices that require paying AT&T $30 a month
Wait, $30 a month for Internet service on a $300 phone or $600 tablet? Yeah, that's real steep, as opposed to, say, $30 a month for AOL on a $1,500 Windows 95 PC a decade or so ago.
The devices are actually a heck of a lot cheaper now than they were when the Internet took off. They're more capable and easier to use, too. Access is no more expensive, and it's wireless. Look for the cost - of both the devices and bandwidth - to continue to decline over time. This will help users to afford quite a bit of content, in the same way folks who cancel their cable TV can afford a Netflix subscription and a substantial number of downloads from iTunes or Amazon and still end up money ahead (and see exactly what they want to see when they want to see it).
It seems to me that this article is completely based around the iPhone and the AT&T data plan subscriptions. Does this guy forget that desktops/notebooks will still outnumber smartphones 20k/1? Almost everyone that owns a "Smartphone" owns at least 1 (if not more) expensive desktop/notebook computers that are connecting to the internet through the cable company. Also, I get the feeling that the smartphone subscription model might just be a re-hash of what happened in the early days of the AOL-style dial-up internet. Maybe things will start up this way and open up into much more free content and services as the market grows....just like the original internet did. Horrible article.
You can have the source.
http://meego.com/downloads
What's happening in fact is the proprietary mobile telcos are under pressure from all directions. Google and even more significantly, Nokia. Apple.... yeah... well...
The Internet is still there. The PC is still there. You now have all that moving mobile. It's more, not less.
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Instead of this piece of fluff (which should have been titled "The End of Freedom"), it's better to re-read The Right to Read by RMS: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html. He saw this coming back in 1997.
With all due respect, the vast majority of 'information wants to be free' touting users today seem to be those happily downloading from TPB et al the content supplied by those "business interests". Or in other words, its justification for a given behaviour.
I just recently paid $140 for a refurbished Kindle that has unlimited wireless Internet access on it. Yeah, the interface on the "Experimental" web browser is a bit kludgy but I can check my email, sports scores, and basic stuff like that for free. Amazon is betting that enough people use Kindle's purchasing system that it pays for the limited web usage they offer. If they are right and the web browser remains free, other services may adopt similar strategies of giving away basic Internet access in exchange for locking you in as a potential customer.
Indeed, but the NPR model seems to still be holding up pretty well. They don't waste money trying to get absolutely everybody to pay, simply to get as many people as possible to pay, then not nag people during the rest of the year. On the net, it tends to be easier, because you can offer an ad version to those that can't or don't want to directly contribute, and give those that do an ad free version plus perhaps some minor perks.
Well, Rupert Murdoch has attempted to be the first to start to charge again for his newspaper content. But the conventional wisdom is that if you offer your content for free, then start charging again while your competitors don't, that you're going to be the sacrificial lamb who ends up crashing and burning. Certainly, if Murdoch succeeds, his competitors will be more than happy to follow suit, but no one else is exactly lining up until they see that he doesn't fall on his ass.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I think that's a safe assumption just based on how much income they usually have compared to people over 30.
But they often have a larger Discretionary income.
I no longer really use it that much, but when I did use my iPod Touch to get App-store apps, the VAST majority of the apps that I downloaded and used were in fact, free. Not as in speech, but as in beer at least. It seems like for the vast majority of things that I wanted, there were either people willing to donate their time, or who were hoping to recoup their costs via another method (IIRC, Fandango had out a movie show time listing app for free that was subsidized by the ability to buy tickets online to most of those movies).
Look at Android: a very popular cellphone OS that is in fact, Free.
I personally see "Free" taking off even more now. PARTICULARLY on desktop PC's. Smartphones, with their varied landscape, are essentially teaching users to deal with different platforms. If they can get to the web, manage their photos, and perform basic services, then they're fine with that. If the UI is a little different between new phones, then no biggie. Many content providers are doing the same too. They can't code their websites to IE6 and claim "most everybody is using that anyways". These days LOTS of people will be hitting that site with a phone, and hence sites are by necessity going to have to be coded to be more tolerant of various browser rendering engines. Once that user mindset is starts to bleed over into desktops a bit, I think a tolerance for something "a little different looking" will come. When that tolerance gets here, the Linux option on a new PC is going to look very nice if the user can save $25-50 on the total cost.
In short, I think we're just moving from a de-facto single vendor model to a fractured model. Sure, some new pay solution will arise here, but I think the door is wide open for OSS here too.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I think the 95% drop in the price of movies rather more supports the common interpretation of that quote then your attempt to rewrite it.
Of course you are ignoring a very important part of that quite to suit your agenda. That part being "the right information". Most information
has no real value. It's just entertainment dreck. That's why it is so easily devalued. It isn't "the right information". It isn't the "right
information" for anyone because it really is meaningless.
So it gets easily devalued when measured against all of the other n+1 variants of the same sort of thing.
Thus they all get thrown together in a big bin at Walmart priced at a 95% discount when compared to what they would cost in 1985.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You're mostly spot on. "information wants to be free" has always been idiotic without concise definitions of "information" and "free". Copyrighted materials will always have strings attached; the question is whether the holder of the strings can figure a way to cash in. Let's face it - people usually put genuine valuable labor into things they copyright. That's why they want to sell it. Information like "Spain won the world cup" is also valuable but it isn't copyrightable. This is the kind of thing people want to find out over a relatively free internet. The term "relatively" applies because people are generally paying for access via direct ISP fees or phone contracts or perhaps advertising supported access. The point is the internet was never free. Students pay for access via tuition, libraries offer "free" access supported by local tax dollars. SOMEBODY has to pay for the infrastructure, just like somebody had to pay for studio time to produce a song or movie or whatever. There's no such thing as a free lunch and the best we can hope for is an advertising supported model that will cost you some eyeball time as they force you to watch commercials.
It's also stupid to talk about the internet as a single entity when it's a vast collection of entities. People do own or control parts of it but even so, if you want to monetize it you have to have something worth paying for and some way to persuade people to pay for it. Ad support again? Depends on what you're selling. Google gained success by realizing that you can't own it all but you can provide the ability to find it, but it's all supported by ad revenue, too.
"Free internet access for all" ignores the fact that it cost money to provide access and more money to create content. The real question is how will the content providers - news organizations, movie studios, musicians, etc., get paid. Otherwise all you're talking about is leaving the door open to an empty house.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
So many people talking about "information wants to be free" do not seem to understand what "information" really is, and the difference with "data".
Information wants to be free - that adagio stands, has always stood, and will always stand. The problem is that people do not know how to distinguish between data and information. The data is just a representation of information.
Take for example this post: as soon as I posted it it becomes a piece of data on some server rented by the /. company. Just that: data. How to get to that data? You need a computer with Internet connection. Now that connection may become more expensive, getting to a web site may become more expensive (e.g. subscriptions), but the information that I give here wants to be free.
For example the following sentence: "Spain won the world cup football 2010 by beating the Dutch team in the finals 1:0". That contains information on the world cup football. It is also a piece of data. Getting to that piece of data (the actual sentence) may become more expensive, the information in it (winner of the world cup, score) can be re-told over say the phone when someone who read this is talking to a friend. That information bit never got more expensive. It wants to be free. The information spreads because people like to talk to one another (irrelevant of the medium), and they like to tell each other things the other party didn't know yet. To discuss facts, to discuss bits and pieces of information they learnt through other channels. Such as the world cup line above - it won't be new to many people here but that's not the point. It's a bit of information that is stored in a chunk of data.
On the other hand, data is just that. Lots of numbers, letters, whatever. An LP contains two immensely long wavy grooves, typically representing some kind of music. An mp3 file could be a digital representation of the same sound. Both are different representations of the same data, they may each not be free (cost of the record, restrictions by DRM).
The adagio also says WANTS TO. Information is, thus, not necessarily free. It wants to be free. In the extreme this is seen by the "Streisand effect" where attempts to stop spreading information leads to more people spreading it, including the information bit that someone is trying to block this spreading. In the digital world this often happens by the direct copying of digital files containing said information, previously it often resulted in headlines in the news papers talking about it - all with the same information, all with a different wording (the letters on a news print are a form of data in itself, and as we all know the newspaper you have to buy but who won the elections you hear for free from your friends).
So who-ever wants to use this adagio, please remember these core points here:
And please stop discussing pricing of data plans...
NPR is different. They aren't demanding anything unreasonable, don't take political sides and report accurate REAL news. Use Fox News as a polar opposite.
I always thought "information wants to be free" was in the sense of the TV model. The information is there at no cost, but you still have to put-up with advertising to cover the expense. Like here on slashdot where I have ads across the top of the screen.
BTW I thought it was funny when people complained the 1996 and 2002 US Olympics were too "commercialized" with all the ads around the stadiums. That is probably true but on the other hand, those were the only Olympics that didn't bankrupt their host cities (see Athens or Montreal - still haven't paid off the debt).
It's nice to give stuff away for free, but *somebody* still has to pay the bill. I'd sooner it be the rich corporations rather than poor little-old me. So please - give me more ads. I'll do anything to avoid monthly bills (plus the taxes included therein).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>You don't see how a PDA could be more useful than a pen and notepad? Even for taking notes?
I do, such as being able to do a "find" or "Search" function, but I don't see how it's worth the +$1999 pricetag over a paper tablet or notebook. In practical terms that dollar amount equates to 100 hours of overtime at hell..... er, I mean work. I'd rather just do the Find function manually.
It's somewhat similar to how I don't think it's necessary to pay +$10,000 for an Acura with self-opening doors, when its cousin the Honda is just fine. I can open the doors manually
.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Actually, the original statement was referring to free as in beer, not free as in not secret. The original argument boils down to:
The "libre" variant of it is a much weaker argument. It boils down to:
So technology makes it easier for people to make your embarrassing thoughts, words, and deeds available to people who you don't want to know about them. That doesn't really mean that the information wants to be spread around everywhere, though. It is still perfectly possible, even in a technological society, to avoid that information exposure. Just remember two rules:
And keep those rules in mind when you're deciding whether or not you're going to go to that 4/20 party or get drunk and dance topless on the bar in front of the Girls Gone Wild cameras or give your social security number to somebody who doesn't really need it or tell your deepest, darkest secret to all your friends. If you pay attention to those two rules, your private information won't want to be free any more than it would be in an earlier stage of technological evolution.
In short, it isn't true that all information wants to be liberated. It's more accurate to say that as technology advances, the divide between private and public information is further eroded. Occasionally this might mean that some private information falls into the chasm due to apathy, but far more frequently, this means that public information is really public and is much harder to pull back to the private side once exposed. It also means that people tend to be a lot more guarded about their most private information, which means that the truly private information wants even less to be liberated, and on the average, it's a wash.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Free isn't going away if Google gets its way.
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