Industry Threatened by Innovation at the 'Edge'? 160
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.'"
common sense people (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:common sense people (Score:5, Insightful)
Too bad half the time they end up just stealing the ideas, though
Re:common sense people (Score:2)
I will actually use the preview button
Re:common sense people (Score:1, Informative)
The Slashdot view on "inertia" (Score:2)
The above is one Slashdot view on inertia in modern business, judging from its moderation value.
The other view, of course is that when it comes to outsourcing of tech jobs, inertia is good.
NOTE: I am commenting on the views of Slashdot as a whole, as reflected by its moderators. The parent poster may or may not believe this second view.
Re:common sense people (Score:2, Insightful)
that's a different topic (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:common sense people (Score:5, Insightful)
The FSF attempts to control the way I can use the source code of GPL programs I obtain in the same way that the RIAA attempts to control their artists copyrighted materials.
If you don't like the licensing - then don't use the product. No one forced you to buy that Spice Girls CD!
Re:common sense people (Score:5, Informative)
How in the world is "we gave you this for free, you have to extend that same curtesy to others" even in the same ballpark as "you are not allowed to safeguard your property, if it breaks you'll just have to buy it from us again"...??
Both are control's, that much is true. But that's like comparing a murderer with a firefighter just because both wield an axe. CD's don't come with a license agreement that says you can do this... you can't do this... you can do this under these circumstances... etc. The FSF uses licenses which are openly available to read before you use the product, the RIAA uses legal mauvering and threats after the fact and it uses those techniques to control actions that have been determined by law to be legal! 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.
Just fucking do it. (Score:1, Insightful)
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?
Re:Just fucking do it. (Score:2)
Re:Just fucking do it. (Score:2)
Re:Just fucking do it. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Just fucking do it. (Score:2)
True -- for now. I was refering to the DMA that comes with DVDs and iTunes mostly. How long before we see CDs (or the new audio DVDs) with the same shit?
Re:common sense people (Score:5, Insightful)
They are adapting to new technologies, and that is the problem. Under the 'failing methods of yesteryear', you would buy a record and then be able to play it when and where you wanted, subject to copyright law's restrictions on public performance. When you'd listened to it enough you could sell it to a secondhand record shop, or maybe even donate it to a library.
What the record / movie companies would like to do is to use new technologies to stop all that. They are moving with the times, just not in the way that you would like. Progress is not always a good thing.
Re:common sense people (Score:2, Insightful)
Well to my knowledge there have ALWAYS been laws about broadcasting copyrighted material after you legally pay for them, or is there something I'm missing? People steal from shops every day. They have been doing it for centuries, so according to your way of thinking
Re:common sense people (Score:2)
This gets +2 insightful? WTF are the mods smoking? I was referring to the fascist DMA that come
Re:common sense people (Score:2)
(tin foil hat time)
I also believe that the *AA's serve as the gov's main propaganda machine, and it serves their interests as much as anybody's to protect these industries. The main reason the Soviet Union fell is because their gov't lost their monopoly on information due to satellite TV. The Americans don't want the same thing to happen to them. Copyrights/patents serve as the weapon of cho
More generic article of him (Score:5, Informative)
Reinout
Now I understand (Score:1, Funny)
So when I'm uploading a bunch of files, and screaming at a slow connection, can I now claim I'm having a "religious experience"?
Re:Now I understand (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Hrmm (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
You're not very creative (Score:4, Interesting)
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".
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Insightful)
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 consumerRe:Hrmm (Score:3, Insightful)
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 t
Nope. (Score:2)
Popular misconception, but no longer true, and not even accurate, even considering the earlier situation. VoIP has been legal in India from April 2003 onwards; thank a certain Mr Arun Shourie for that.
In any case, the telephone companies (by which I presume you meant the private telecom co's suc
Re:Hrmm (Score:2)
How many educated people work for the old school telephony companies? These companies are not innovating much these days. They are just laying wires. Those educated people laid off from telephony companies can get jobs at those VoIP companies or IP-support companies because the demand on IP software and networks would have increased greatly. Great news!
Re:Hrmm (Score:1)
*None* of them. They all make insane amounts of money doing little more than advertising and selling, and they'd continue to make money, albeit less, by selling the physical 'pipes'. Why should a *monopoly* need superbowl ads and an army of salespeople, anyways?
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Hrmm (Score:2)
What happens
The consumer wins.
Yes, the phone company and cable company will end up competing for our business. And, of course, the phone companies will have to press the government to get rid of the lop-sided taxes that afflict telephone bills (at least here in the U.S.; I'm assuming other countries have similar insidious taxes, whether line item or not).
But if I have cheap high BW service to my house, then I'll start using more services, such as pointing my web browser at work to connections to video
Re:Hrmm (Score:2)
His analysis is akin to the design of the Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Architectual Principals of the Internet (Score:3, Informative)
Re:His analysis is akin to the design of the Inter (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [politrix.org]
- A Primer on E-Government: Sectors, Stages, Opportunities, and Challenges of Online Governance [politrix.org]
- Computer Attack and Cyber Terrorism: Vulnerabilities and Policy Issues for Congress [politrix.org]
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 [go.com]. 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:
Re:ps... (Score:2)
It's different at the edge (Score:2)
And the core still works that way. But it's different at the edge.
You buy a connection to an ISP. Unless you're a commercial customer paying the big
The time for Artists to gather together is NOW! (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [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
Re:The time for Artists to gather together is NOW! (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with the emerging model you're talking about is finding a way to for the end users to find music they like.
Re:The time for Artists to gather together is NOW! (Score:5, Interesting)
That's what I'm saying: its not getting the material to the end-user, that is easy now in this digital age, for anyone. Its cheap. Super cheap.
The problem is, getting the attention of the end-user. There's too much other stuff going on to compete for that persons attention.
Artists banding together to solve this problem, technologically, I imagine is the worst nightmare of the Big Media Board
The means to do this are now in our hands, as artists. What's needed, is more artists, banding together collectively, and then doing it. There are no longer any technologically significant barriers to this problem.
Re:The time for Artists to gather together is NOW! (Score:2)
I don't think artists banding together that will help the customer at the end of the day (after all artists banding together might become just as bad as industry groups are now).
I suspect the future will probably be more geared towards collaborative filtering (by the masses, not by people who
Re:The time for Artists to gather together is NOW! (Score:3, Interesting)
That's easy to solve using existing technology too, there is not reason why I shouldn't be browsing something like ampfea.org and awarding a (+1 funky) or (-1 off-genre) to tracks that people have posted.
All it needs is a critical mass of users and content creators.
Re:The time for Artists to gather together is NOW! (Score:2)
Some albumns that were released independantly are getting increadible coverage [grey albumn], I think part of the problem is the dearth of good music over the last few years (I'm only 20 but I have access to historical records, I recognize a drou
Change the business model (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Change the business model (Score:4, Interesting)
The costs of transmission will decrease for every new technology as it is used and matures. However, it isn't cheap to maintain a large network since it becomes less expensive, but it never becomes cheap.
Technology is only one variable; people, law, markets, etc. all have to be factored in. It isn't so easy to predict the death of an organization since it has options for staying alive that you didn't consider. As much as I don't like Verizon either (especially the old Nynex part), they have managed to stick around.
Being a content provider is no guarantee of success. There have been more than a few spectacular failures of media companies (Vivendi comes to mind as a recent one).
On a side note, I have always wondered why the 5 or 6 largest ISPs never tried to build a true cartel (aside from the law).
Re:Change the business model (Score:4, Insightful)
According to my view of capitalism, free markets lead to oligopolies and monopolies--at least that's my theory. So the day WILL come when only a few ISPs are left. The reason it hasn't happened now is because there are too many ISPs. That is to say, the market is pretty much what one would call perfect competition. There are far more than 5 or 6 ISPs. You can't collude under perfect competition so that's why it hasn't happened. But in a few years I expect a few ISPs to kill the rest of the competition and dominate (like in most mature industries.) At that point, you'll see collusion.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Re:Change the business model (Score:2)
Some of the small fry get bought out, and some grow hugely and become Big Boys themselves. From time to time one of the Big Boys dies off. But the bigger the Big Boys are, the more room there is around them for fresh ideas that they won't adopt. There is probably
Re:Change the business model (Score:2)
Large corporations will erect barriers to entry. It will not be easy for small companies to enter or to survive. Typical barriers to entry taught in business schools include patents, vertical integration, signing exclusive contracts, locking up customers (eg. airmiles, proprietary file formats), among others. It will be difficult for small companies to succeed. Furthermore, large companies automatically have larger clout, and, perhaps more importantly, economies of scale. The existenc
Re:Change the business model (Score:2)
The paradox of monopolies is that their huge revenue is so enticing to upstart competitors that monopolies ATTRACT competition. For example, Microsoft has a defacto monopoly on desktop OSes, but the huge market makes Apple, Sun, and Linux drool as they fight for a sliver. A small sliver of a big pie can be very profitable for a small company.
Re:Change the business model (Score:2)
The niche markets that you are talking about (I'm assuming that's what you are referring to with the profitable markets for small companies) is too small for it to matter. Yes, small companies can capture the
Re:Change the business model (Score:2)
I don't share your view that there will be some "peak" in monpolization (what you call consolidation) followed by a decline. Corporations are more powerful now than ever! The few large ones control more wealth and have greater influence than at any point in the past. This goes for all industries. There are less airplane companies now than ever (Boeing and Airbus primarily); there are less car companies now than ever (many of them mer
Re:Change the business model (Score:2)
Wrong. Traditional telcos need to start thinking longterm and do quality analysis and forecasting of technology trends. That means no more 3G bullshit in order to drive up their share price or what was the point of that panopticum.
They should invest in those technologies that would allow to provide the cheap quality access i
This is not news (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [eff.org] 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.
That's raw capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Xix.
Re:That's raw capitalism (Score:4, Interesting)
> 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.
well, it's a slippery slope: once you start
taking the good, and then take the bad,
and then you take them both and there you have, the facts
of life, the facts of life.
especially when the world never seems, to be living up to your
dreams and
suddenly you're
finding out the facts of life are all about you.
yooouuuuuu.
that's why the industry is so surprised:
it's obvious that it's going to happen, it just
wasn't clear to them that it was eventually going
to happen to *them*.
Re:That's raw capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
The pop-Darwinian overlay you put on it is simplistic: competition itself leads to "monopolies", even if that of species. The drive to survive will include the drive to exclude *all others* from their food-sources. In other words, winners monopolise.
In fact, monopolies abound in capitalism - in the patent market, for example. Other include the monopolies granted by King James I. A more recent example would be the shipment of ice from Connecticut to the West Indies and India in the last century. The entrepreneur involved got himself into a monopoly and made a lot of money.
I agree that the RIAA et al should not be allowed to use legislation to consolidate their position, but this is a moral view which is probably unpopular with said legislators and with the organisations - the drive to monopolise being seen as a legitimate business strategy. IMV,the role of the legislator is to ensure that the winner-takes-all Darwinian situation *does not* arise, thus avoiding the catastrophe of an industry collapsing under it's age. But that requires foresight and common-sense, and looks almost like a Planned Political economy which is probably something you hate as well.
h
Re:That's raw capitalism (Score:3, Insightful)
Wh
Re:That's raw capitalism (Score:2)
Re:That's raw capitalism (Score:2)
Evolution requires heredity and mutations. In the capitalism world mutations (change) are looked down upon.
Re:That's raw capitalism (Score:2)
Your evolution algorithm is totally broken. There are DOZENS of species of high-order predators on Earth. None of them monopolizes the food sources (with the arguable exception of humans, which are THE alpha predator of this rock)
Evolution has checks and balances built in. Too many wolves==not enough deer==fewer wolves==more deer==more wolves. Circle of life.
I'm a big fan of laissez-faire capitalism. However, no corporation in the history of the plan
Re:That's raw capitalism (Score:2)
The eco-rats would possibly even argue that all monopolies arise from market intervaention and regulation (aka an imperfect free market). The granting of patents and allowing the creation of guild such as the RIAA would if anything s
Why not take capitalism into account? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
and the public good (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Why not take capitalism into account? (Score:2)
You say that these companies have to play the "game of supply and demand." Well, they have always played that game. It's just that they gained power over time and skew the market in their favour. It is my opinion that you can't do anything to combat that under capitalism, unl
fyi (Score:2)
http://www.aeragon.com/02/02-04.html
Direct purchase (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Direct purchase (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Direct purchase (Score:2)
The way they get you though is the delay before it comes out on DVD. You're right, it would be a great business model as you described it.
Jason
ProfQuotes [profquotes.com]
Re:Direct purchase (Score:2)
Farscape was estimated at $3,000,000 an episode.
Even if you ignore the production and distribution costs of the media, you're still looking at more like $75 for 26 episode season if you're going to try and cover the production costs.
If you include all the failed shows too (or if you prefer, think of it as factoring in the risk o
Parallels to the history of print (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Parallels to the history of print (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't be silly! Of course there would be print today.
The Gutenberg/RIAA (hey, maybe they'd even call it project Gutenberg) foundation would monitor it all and make sure that the "right" things were done. Your newspaper would cost $15 or so and you'd have to make sure that when you were done with it you either shredded or burned it so that nobody else could ILLEGALLY read it.
Quoting from a newpaper, book , or magazine would of course be out of the question. The Internet would represent a big threat, in fact the GRIAA would attempt to pass laws that ALL written content be on PAPER DAMMIT! and not appear on our video screens. Both Democrats and Republicans would fall all over themselves to help the GRIAA maintain law and order, after all, our laws are recorded on paper, in writing, and all of that would be property of the GRIAA. Can't afford to piss them off (and besides, Orin Hatch is no doubt an author as well as an accomplished composer and would have all sorts of personal reasons to wish that GRIAA violators would have their houses burned down).
I think things will change. When a lot of the old farts at the head of these industries (and our government) die, and probably not before. Lets hope they are all heavy smokers and drinkers. Actually I think it's a safe bet. (Except for Orin that is).
No! Printing would have spread more rapidly! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
suffice it to say.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
How about a distributed wireless network? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:How about a distributed wireless network? (Score:5, Interesting)
While some may settle for, let's say, 10Mb/s bandwidth they get from sharing their "neighborhood" wireless connections the physical wires directly to the cable/phone/ISP will be faster due to their really expensive hardware and fiberoptics which they own. We all will have a tough time putting Cisco routers in our houses.
All of us here seem to have this otaku for wireless and free internet service so we can download our free content and free music which will all be produced for free of course.
We will find a way to live in a globalised world with more competition and commodities and a balance will be found around the monopolies we see today.
One could make the argument (easily) that our country (the US)is a monopoly and soon, if not already, we will be experiencing serious and unexpected competition which will drive many of our standards of living downward or sideways at least. It will make these industries that are threatened by the edge actually threatened more frequently and more rapidly.
Re:How about a distributed wireless network? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Someone just sues you, (Score:5, Funny)
It is much better to take an existing product and put a clock in it.
Article raises an interesting question. (Score:5, Interesting)
You certainly do not need a so-called Internet Service Provider.
So, what would it take to create your own access point?
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Article raises an interesting question. (Score:1)
Unforunately they call themselves Internet Service Provider and tend to do silly things like:
Swamping You with CDs containing superfluous Access Software and broken Browsers, harras You with Hard Coded Homepages that put you to their blinking, ad-infested unnecessary Portals.
On the plous side, You'll also get an E-Mail adress and some Web-Space.
So do not let confuse you by bells and whistles.
Your ISP is really what you want.
In Europe, it is also usual to
Re:Article raises an interesting question. (Score:5, Informative)
So if you really want your own access to the Internet, where you are in control of as much as you can be without having an international network, these are the steps:
First, you have to aquire IP addresses. This used to be a relatively simple process (or so I'm told). You can either get them from the people who give you connectivity (read: your ISP).
However, you say, we don't have an ISP. So we have to go get them from the source. So, you'll have to get them from one of the regional IP providers. In this case, it'd be ARIN (in North America at least). You can pick them up for the bargin basement price of $20K for a /20 (2^12 = 4096). Oh, and part of the paperwork is to prove you'll use it all.
Actually, after poking around, I've found that is the route you have to go if you are an actual ISP. It appears you can apply directly for IP's yourself. For a /24, that'll cost $2,500, plus an additional $100/year. If you want to have the numbers be publically routable, you'll probably want an AS number ($500 initial fee, plus $100/year). You can apply for these, buy you need a pretty good reason it appears, all of which must be justified periodically on why you get to keep the IP's. Also note, that these IP's are very likely to be filtered by large ISP's, because the routing table is getting too big, so they just drop routes that are for too small a block of addresses. So there will be significant parts of the Internet that can't get to you.
Now, you have IP's reserved especially for you. However, you have to actually get get physical access to someone or something that will allow you to connect to the Internet. Most people do this by an ISP. However, that again is out in this case. So, now, you have to setup a peering agreement with someone.
Essentially, a peering agreement is a deal where several groups throw in together, and line of physical data lines to some one else on the internet. They create a Point of Presense (PoP) where that data line is terminated. Each group gets access to this PoP to get connected to the Internet at large. Now, they all agree to pay the fees associated with the lines. One of which is to pay the company that owns the line (unless they paid to have it buried). They have to pay for the physical space that houses the equipment. They also have to pay the entity at the other end of the line.
That entity is the PoP's ISP. Normally, in this case they are referred to as a "Transit Provider", as opposed to an ISP. The fees associated with this are contractually drawn up by the entity you are connecting to. Normally, it's done by the byte, or by a threshhold of bandwidth utilization.
If really big transit providers (Tier 1 ISP's) construct a peering point, generally no money changes hands. However, at this point, you are an ISP to other large ISP's, as opposed to having one.
In the end, unless you are an ISP (and have a global worldwide network), you MUST have an ISP. It might be a no frills, IP transit only arrangment. However, in the end, you must have an ISP. Unless you can convince someone who currently has access to the Internet to lop off some numbers and give them to you. However, they are still the entity providing you Transit, and in some sense are your ISP.
Where I work, we have UUNet (WorldCom) as our ISP. They are the have the single largest network in the world. They give us unfettered access to the internet, but they are still an ISP. They give us a block of 128 IP addresses, and we have T1 connectivity for about $1,200/month (roughly, between them and the phone company). Technically speaking, we setup a peering agreement with UU
Re:Article raises an interesting question. (Score:2, Insightful)
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 Interne
Welcome to communism (Score:2, Interesting)
With all of our rampant cost cutting and large scale manufacturing we are rapidly entering an age in which the most expensive part of a product is the carton it's shipped in and the shelf space it occupies.
Look at phones. I am usually they guy who bitches about de-regulation, but I hav
AI Edge Will Bypass Industry Establishment! (Score:1, Interesting)
Artificial Intelligence [wikipedia.org] -- not just the Cable Industry -- is another battleground where innovation at the Edge threatens the entire Industry Establishment, yessiree Bob Frankston right-on bro'.
Artificial intelligence has been solved [ai-forum.org] at the edges and fringes of the field and not by the dinosaurs of the AI Establishment.
The Edge is bypassing the AI Establishment [blogit.com] -- just like in the collapsing free-for-all of the Cable Industry.
With accusations of kookery at the Edge [nothingisreal.com], the AI Establishment (DFKI etc.) is
Mentifex is back (Score:2)
Some might call you a troll, but to be a troll requires a level of cynicism and self-awareness that I really don't think you possess.
Re:AI Edge Will Bypass Industry Establishment! (Score:2)
NOOOO!!! (Score:4, Funny)
My god!, even more bored housewives who are going to take their clothes off...
Just owning the pipes counts for something... (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Just owning the pipes counts for something... (Score:2, Interesting)
Transporter
Entrenched industries being threatened (Score:1, Insightful)
We should be able to have our own servers (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:We should be able to have our own servers (Score:2)
Transport vs. App Layer, Cost vs. Value (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
In fact,... (Score:4, Informative)
Remember, Comcast has monopoly licenses that come up for renewal almost monthly.
Information Highway (Score:4, Interesting)
"The horse is dead, either f*ck it or walk away, but stop beating it."
another disruptive technology (Score:2)
I Hate American Economic Theory... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:I Hate American Economic Theory... (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't confuse "theory" with "policy". Economics is a science, not a policy. There are only American Economic Policies, not necessarily American Economic Theories. It is possible to use economics to explain why America expends and allocates its resources in the manner dictated by its policies. There will always be a scarcity (real or perceived) in a world of finite resources. Technology only helps in improving the efficiencies in use and expenditure of the resources, thus prolonging their existence. Te
Comcast buying Disney makes sense (Score:2)
I "solved" this problem by going with the $10/mo economy cable TV plan, which has broadcast networks and not much else. Heck, and even that's only because I have a Comcast cable modem. Up yours, Mickey
Nationalization is another answer (Score:3, Interesting)