The analogy here is recipes: and do you see them trying to copywrite their *ingredients*? This is like Neman Marcus trying to copywrite salt because it's used in their famous cookie recipe.
The recipe, what the companies are doing, is all about *arrangement* and *cooking* and what you *do* with those ingredients -- not the ingredients themselves. The "raw materials" are a commodity that is not patentable or recipe-able: salt is salt. Red salts and other exotics are red salts, called that because they're a different thing, but classifiably the same at this level: perceiving salt.
One type of salt is different from another, but salt of the same type, *is* the same, effectively, for our systems. In fact, we go so far as to call the other molecules in red salt, "impurities", which just goes to show you our concept of what red salt is, is totally bulletproof despite the VAST variance in *actual* molecules in real-world examples of red salt. Because our *concept* of salt is the same across salt types: red salt, green salt, "regular" table salt, sea salt. Therefore, all that variance is one example of information in our heads. In our patent systems, in our legal systems: it's one thing. THe fact is that an informational example cannot control all *actual* examples of its constituent parts. We're going through this with music, art, entertainment, and now genetics. It's the question of our times. Does our terms capture all there is to capture about the natural world, and, therefore, are they complete? If so, claiming the terms means claming the realm. Well, it doesn't.
Someone loading faster than someone else is not the point. Paying to make others' accessibility worse by comparison, is.
Excite owns the network, they have the right to establish a special for-pay layer of routing. But the fact is, that allows money to buy you voice. And that's a travesty. Excite is the one establishing this inequity within their sphere of control, and that means Excite is committing the travesty.
Now, it's unclear from my reading of the article whether Excite makes *extra* connections for partners, or whether it actually prioritizes partner packets over others across the same network; it's unclear whether Excite is actually punishing non-payers [effectively].
But in the larger scheme of things, even extra-network special channels penalize those non-partner non-payer sites. Excite pours resources into their "fast lane", higher-barrier-to-entry channel when those resources could have been used for their standard channel.
Rather than have two channels now and let the standard catch up eventually (or maybe never), you prevent that second channel from forming. Is this right? Morally, yes. Ethically, no. Interestingly, this is no doubt exactly the morale for involving government in regulation! Yet I abhore regulation.
The fact is that for good to triumph ("good" as in lack of inequity accessing the network), the outcry against must make the moral overwhelm the practical. Excite must see its customers will be so upset if they implement this special channel, that they'll leave and thereby destroy Excite's ability to offer the special channel in the first place. This requires that Excite's core business be their standard channel. But the standard channel can be simply left in the dust and the fast lane made its primary revenue-source. Then the public loses its power over the network completely, except for marginal influences.
Lovely scenario, mm? But it might happen unless Excite decides to be bigger than their corporate britches, as I see it. Just a splash of cold water...
Slashdot Mirror
The analogy here is recipes: and do you see them trying to copywrite their *ingredients*? This is like Neman Marcus trying to copywrite salt because it's used in their famous cookie recipe.
The recipe, what the companies are doing, is all about *arrangement* and *cooking* and what you *do* with those ingredients -- not the ingredients themselves. The "raw materials" are a commodity that is not patentable or recipe-able: salt is salt. Red salts and other exotics are red salts, called that because they're a different thing, but classifiably the same at this level: perceiving salt.
One type of salt is different from another, but salt of the same type, *is* the same, effectively, for our systems. In fact, we go so far as to call the other molecules in red salt, "impurities", which just goes to show you our concept of what red salt is, is totally bulletproof despite the VAST variance in *actual* molecules in real-world examples of red salt. Because our *concept* of salt is the same across salt types: red salt, green salt, "regular" table salt, sea salt. Therefore, all that variance is one example of information in our heads. In our patent systems, in our legal systems: it's one thing. THe fact is that an informational example cannot control all *actual* examples of its constituent parts. We're going through this with music, art, entertainment, and now genetics. It's the question of our times. Does our terms capture all there is to capture about the natural world, and, therefore, are they complete? If so, claiming the terms means claming the realm. Well, it doesn't.
Excite owns the network, they have the right to establish a special for-pay layer of routing. But the fact is, that allows money to buy you voice. And that's a travesty. Excite is the one establishing this inequity within their sphere of control, and that means Excite is committing the travesty.
Now, it's unclear from my reading of the article whether Excite makes *extra* connections for partners, or whether it actually prioritizes partner packets over others across the same network; it's unclear whether Excite is actually punishing non-payers [effectively].
But in the larger scheme of things, even extra-network special channels penalize those non-partner non-payer sites. Excite pours resources into their "fast lane", higher-barrier-to-entry channel when those resources could have been used for their standard channel.
Rather than have two channels now and let the standard catch up eventually (or maybe never), you prevent that second channel from forming. Is this right? Morally, yes. Ethically, no. Interestingly, this is no doubt exactly the morale for involving government in regulation! Yet I abhore regulation.
The fact is that for good to triumph ("good" as in lack of inequity accessing the network), the outcry against must make the moral overwhelm the practical. Excite must see its customers will be so upset if they implement this special channel, that they'll leave and thereby destroy Excite's ability to offer the special channel in the first place. This requires that Excite's core business be their standard channel. But the standard channel can be simply left in the dust and the fast lane made its primary revenue-source. Then the public loses its power over the network completely, except for marginal influences.
Lovely scenario, mm? But it might happen unless Excite decides to be bigger than their corporate britches, as I see it. Just a splash of cold water...