The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: January 22, 2012

Official News page 10


WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton

Hi everyone - Winding Down is back at the start (well it's nearer the start than the end) of the new year. I started to write about the SOPA and PIPA bills in the US legislature, but somehow it all ran away with me and I ended up devoting this issue to a look at the forces bearing down on the Internet at this time. I haven't given any URLs, because it's really tech/Internet op-ed material. I hope you find it interesting, and for those of you that don't I will be back with a much more newsy version of Winding Down next week :)

So... cry 'Havoc', and let slip the dogs of war!


Analysis: The Internet in 2012 - seconds away, round two

The semi-demise of the PIPA and SOPA bills in the USA, taken together with the even more recent Megaupload affair, raise important questions about the nature and future of the Internet which go well beyond the posturing of some of the partisans involved.

On one hand is the important question of how you ensure that those who could be loosely categorized as 'cultural' workers - artists, writers, musicians, designers, and the like - can earn a living from their trade. On the other hand are the people who built, run, and use the Internet who feel they are being treated unfairly. On the gripping hand*, we have Big Media, who, correctly, fear the demise of their business model and their grip on cultural workers who provide the flow of material that creates the profits. Finally, there is the collection of multi-trillion dollar gorillas on the block - national state governments. OK, that's four hands, but as my old maths teacher once started off with a problem for the class to solve, "Martians have twelve tentacles..." Most earthlings have four limbs, so you can use your arms and legs to keep count.

In all true and serious problems, at least two of the parties have legitimate and serious grievances which are, in the given situation, incompatible. So, let's take a look at the problem from each of these parties' perspectives.

For the cultural workers the problem is fairly simple. It's not so much that it's possible to make perfect copies of digital work; people have been able to make perfectly acceptable copies of both analog and digital work for quite a long time. The problem the Internet poses is one of easy free distribution of the copies. There is a world of difference between passing a copy of a new song around a few friends and putting it on the Internet for free for thousands, if not millions, of strangers to download. Incidentally, it's worth pointing out that art, like science, is built on the work of those who went before. What would have happened if the first artist to use perspective had patented it? Or Picasso had patented Cubism?

The second group is those who use and run the Internet. The Internet derives from a set of specifications that took no account of the fact that it might become transnational, or that its traffic might be worth trillions of dollars. For that reason it never contained the built-in checks and balances that other communications facilities did. Actually, there are three sub-groupings in this category - the ordinary users, the ISPs who provide the connectivity, and the big organizations that actually use the Internet to do business, like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter. They all have different objectives, but at the moment they all have an interest in keeping the Internet open.

The third group is the media companies. They would actually prefer the Internet to be closed down completely. The music business is probably the poster child for this category. Their business plan was, and is still, based around control of the production and distribution of music - mostly popular music in its widest sense. Originally, there were a lot of smaller labels, which benefited from the music boom of the late 50s, 60s and 70s. By the mid-eighties most of the small independent labels had sold out to what are now the big conglomerates. Interestingly, it was about this time that the music business as a whole started to decline. It was saved by the rise of the compact disk, and a large percentage of the profits for the next ten years came from people replacing their vinyl with CDs - i.e. old recordings, not new ones. By the time this process was over the Internet as we know it today had come into existence, precluding the possibility of pulling the same trick again with a new format such as Blu-ray (the name was obviously invented by someone who couldn't spell).

The music business immediately blamed their fall in profits on 'piracy' over the Internet. Combined with this was the strong possibility that with the loss of control over distribution, they would lose control of the artists they depended on for their lifeblood. The chance of this happening was amply demonstrated by the rise of the Arctic Monkeys and, to a lesser extent, by the already established Talking Heads. The other media businesses watched the process with horror and vowed that the same profit slump wouldn't happen to them. Thus the intransigence of Hollywood, and the desire of the book publishers to control the move to e-books. None of these media businesses have been able to figure out a new business plan that would allow them to continue to operate with the sort of profits they have been accustomed to making in the past, and thus have, in their terms, a legitimate grievance against the Internet. Whether anyone else thinks the grievance is legit is another matter!

And finally, there is the government. Not just any government, but all national governments. The two most obvious ones to look at are those of China and the USA, so we will look at their motivations.

China has its own Great Firewall which represents an attempt - with some success - to exert control over what information its citizens are permitted to obtain. The Chinese Communist party has always understood that, like the use of force, control over information is vital for the maintenance of its position. It has no intention of allowing the Internet to change the boundaries of its power.

The USA Federal government is in a different position. The farsighted founders of the country established a system of checks and balances between the executive branch, the legislature, the judiciary, and the individual states. The exact balance has varied over time, but by and large the system has worked amazingly well - especially when you consider that those who wrote the constitution had no prior art to call on! Perhaps the key aspect from the point of view of Internet users is the freedom of speech that the First Amendment (The Bill of Rights) guarantees. It's perhaps worth quoting it for those of my readers who are not US citizens: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Like all governments the world over the US government would like to extend its control over its citizens. There is nothing sinister or conspiratorial about this - politicians believe they know what's best for their constituents, and wish to protect them against what they see as threats, be they cultural, mental, or physical. Inevitably politicians see this as needing more control. And the Internet, of course changes everything, because it allows (if people choose to use it) a flow of information that is unmediated by the likes of newspaper or television editors. Indeed the recent SOPA/PIPA brouhaha has reminded US politicians that they need to keep their voters happy as well as raise money from sponsors, if they want to stay in office. For some, this wasn't a happy discovery, and they wouldn't be unhappy to see their voters' newfound freedoms limited just a little - for their own good, of course. Remember also that I've not even looked at other governments who also have similar interests in controlling aspects of what their citizens have access to.

What the outcome of all this will be is impossible to say. Whatever it is it won't be a single simple solution. Perhaps a look at English history might give a hint. In that case, the final outcome of the English Civil War was a compromise between the aspiring upper middle classes and the aristocracy to effectively share the spoils of government. We still have a monarchy over here, but we also have a parliament which makes the laws. It's a weird system, but it kinda works, sometimes. It's my betting that the eventual operation of the Internet will reflect similar compromises, and probably different compromises for different nations.

Of course, these are not the only problems the Internet faces! But I think that's enough 'politics' for now, and I will reserve a discussion on how the big Internet businesses would like to balkanize it to provide 'walled gardens' around their customers for a future article.


* Try reading "The Mote in Gods Eye" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle...


Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Spamato spam filter...

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
22 January 2012

Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan.

Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.


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