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November 19, 2005
The Internet Metaphor Battle: Place vs. Plumbing
As mentioned earlier, Bruce Schneier has reported on what he calls the real story behind Sony's rootkit misadventure: "the collusion between big media companies who try to control what we do on our computers and computer-security companies who are supposed to be protecting us." ZDNet's David Berlind agrees that's noteworthy but says the overall digital rights managment situation is the larger issue.
"Sony's rootkit, as bad as it was, isn't the real story. The way the entertainment cartel is applying DRM as a whole is the real story. They're applying DRM in a way that the Sony fiasco was inevitable. This wasn't the first time lack of DRM interoperability manifested itself in the end-user experience in an ugly way, and it won't be the last. ... Unbeknownst to most people, what started with music (let's just say audio) already applies to video and it's not going to stop there."
Where will it stop? With total corporate control if we're not careful, and we're not just talking audio, video and text. That's not how Berlind put it but it's a fair description of the bleak future painted by Doc Searls in the passionate plea for activism pointed to by Berlind. Doc is in rare form and no wonder: he's a modern Paul Revere trying to spur his beloved community to action before it's too late.
"Are you ready to see the Net privatized from the bottom to the top? Are you ready to see the Net's free and open marketplace sucked into a pit of pipes built and fitted by the phone and cable companies and run according to rules lobbied by the carrier and content industries?
"Do you believe a free and open market should be 'Your choice of walled garden' or 'Your choice of silo'? That's what the big carrier and content companies believe. That's why they're getting ready to fence off the frontiers.
"And we're not stopping it."
Doc's scary links document the threat to the Internet as we know it and explains why the words we use are so important.
"In this debate the radicals are the carriers. We need to fight them, just as Larry and crew need to fight the copyright extremists: by re-framing the subject. To start we acknowledge the necessity of the transport metaphor; but also its insufficiency. Of course, at its base level the Net is a system of pipes and packets. But it's not only packets, or 'content' or anything for that matter). Understanding the Net only in transport terms is like understanding civilization in terms of electrical service or human beings only in terms of atoms and molecules. We miss the larger context."
Read Doc's essay, then read his blog for responses and contributions from other folks. I'm no visionary but I worry that Doc is right. After all, corporations do whatever necessary to make a profit. If telcos and cable companies need to gate every little stretch of the Internet to thrive, they'll do it--if we let them. (For a historic perspective on how corporations exercise power, don't miss Ted Nace's book "Gangs of America" for educational and entertaining reading.)
Posted by Deborah Branscum at November 19, 2005 04:43 PM
Comments
Public companies such as Sony don't just do whatever is necessary to make a profit. They are not merely greedy. They are legally obliged to make shareholder value their first priority. I don't mean to paint them as victims, but society does have them between a rock and a hard place. We can't expect them to behave any differently than they do now on their own. They must be regulated into submission, bill by bill and ruling by ruling, or we must change their fundamental nature. What's scary is that they understand all of this better than any of the rest of us do, and they are funded.
Posted by: Pete at November 20, 2005 11:48 PM