The Internet has destroyed rock. Children no longer develop social graces. They don’t hang out anymore. I’m financially stable. I’m okay. But what about the kids trying to make it in this business? If you’re not an established band, if you don’t have a hit single, they’re gonna drop you. There are a lot of people out there as talented as we were, but they can’t sustain being in a rock ‘n’ roll band for long without success. We were able to, but we’re going to die out.
– Stevie Nicks, of Fleetwood Mac, decrying the supposed impact of the Internet on the high culture of corporate rock.
Google has announced an “agreement” with Verizon which, if it became effective, would limit Internet neutrality to services existing on today’s Internet. Future services could be restricted. Does that seem consistent with this announcement produced by Google in 2006?
A level playing field, according to which all traffic flows with equal priority to all points, and with no data sources being favored in exchange for money or other consideration, is critical to maintaining the openness of the Internet. This level playing field is called network neutrality (although more nuanced applications of the terms are sometimes used). It is this openness that allows initially small operations to be accessible to all users which leads to the success of new ideas, including ideas that weaken or destroy the then-curent successes.
A good example of the benefits of network neutrality is Google itself. Back in the early days of the Internet, the most popular search tool was AltaVista, which launched in 1995, and by 1997 AltaVista was running more than 80 million searches a day. Then it all went bad. Why? One word: Google.
But consider what might have happened had AltaVista, owned by Digital Equipment Corporation, cut a deal with the then major internet backbone providers to either speed AltaVista search data or slow down its search competitors data. Google might not have a stood a chance.
Now there have been reports (here, here and here, for example) that Google and Verizon have been engaged in talks that could spell an attack on network neutrality. Each denies that agreements have been reach, but all the denials are weak and more in the nature of non-denial denials than reliable endorsements of net neutrality. From The Economist:
Let’s leave aside for a second the question of just how terrible of an idea [a Google/Verizon agreement] is, and just how likely it is to throttle innovation by small actors on the web as it prioritises the work of better-capitalised companies. Let’s focus instead on a more basic question: why does America have regulators?
If companies always agreed with regulators’ rules, there would be no need for regulators. The very point of a regulator is to do things that companies don’t like, out of concern for the welfare of the market or the consumer.
Unless and until the full details of any such agreement are released to the public, we should be wary of the motives of both Google and Verizon. We should also insist that regulators insist that the public utility of the Internet not be destroyed by huge corporations acting purely in their own self interest Support a strong FCC
I think it’s still within our power — before social media and the internet completely slice our brains into tiny little packets of jelly that are only good for reading 40 words at a time and assimilating tiny bits of information — to realize that we’re losing something. And that it’s important to step back — to know ourselves better, to know the people around us better.
– Gary Shteyngart, novelist. By the way, I am currently reading Shteyngart’s first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook. Terrific.
The Prop 8 ruling (see below) was first published to Scribd, a site for sharing documents. According Scribd, the decision is the most viral document every posted to their popular service, and received more than 150,000 reads per hour.
How would you like Internet service providers to begin to charge more for premium service? And what would an Internet made up of various private agreements between large companies without public input or standards? If this sounds good to you, you will love this.
Google and Verizon, two leading players in Internet service and content, are nearing an agreement that could allow Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content’s creators are willing to pay for the privilege.
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The prospect of a Google-Verizon agreement infuriates many consumer advocates, who feel that it would concentrate in a few corporations control of what to date has been a free and open Internet system in which consumers decide which companies are successful.
Verizon Communications Inc. and Google Inc. have agreed to a deal over how Internet traffic will be treated, two people familiar with the agreement said Wednesday.
The deal centers on a set of rules, called net neutrality, that determines how Internet traffic moves over land lines and to wireless devices involving payment by Internet companies seeking a faster traffic.
Verizon will not block or slow Internet traffic over land lines but could do so to wireless devices, one source said.
Update: I have said it before, but I will now say it again. Google is evil.
A coalition of public interest groups that included Public Knowledge, New America Foundation, Media Access Project and Free Press issued this statement:
As the major public interest groups in Washington involved in the struggle to protect an open Internet, we are united in our dismay about an agreement reportedly reached by Verizon and Google. It is unseemly and inappropriate for two giant companies to decide the future of the Internet and how Internet will work for millions of users. It would be inappropriate for Congress and the FCC policy makers to use this agreement as the basis for public policy.
The public and policymakers should not be fooled. This agreement cannot be enforced by any governmental agency and will provide no protection against the types of abuse we seen from large Internet Service Providers. The Internet belongs to all of us, not to Verizon and Google. There is widespread public support for an open Internet.
We call on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to abandon its ‘negotiations’ with Google, Verizon and other large companies. Instead, the Commission should move ahead with legally enforceable, binding rulemaking that would govern not only the open Internet, but also ensure the Commission’s authority to reform Universal Service, and to make policy in cybersecurity, privacy, device compatibility and other critical issues involving broadband services.
The Wall Street Journal has published a series of reports that reflect a comprehensive review of the current state of Internet tracking. It shows, sometimes in startling detail, just how much information is being tracked, analyzed, and sold without the knowledge of users of the Net.
The Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry.
The study found that the nation’s 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred. The nonprofit Wikipedia installed none.
Tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to “cookie” files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them.
These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months.
This is the kind of coverage that will get the attention of average users and, hopefully, the Federal Trade Commission. It is time at long last to make all Internet tracking “opt-in” so that users explicitly decide whether to waive their privacy or not. Users should have this basic right. And it is bad enough that the data is collected, but there are generally no limits whatsoever on the use of the collected data by any person for any purpose.
I have been warning for sometime that Facebook’s complicated and difficult privacy settings are unfair to users who have difficulty understanding, let alone managing, their data on Facebook.
Now it turns out that data on 100 million Facebook users is being shared via Bit Torrent on the Net. Not by Facebook, but by some sketchy individual. Facebook replies that it is all data that users have allowed to be published to the open Web. A more correct statement is that it is data that users had no idea how to protect, due to Facebook’s carelessness with such data and unduly complex privacy settings they expect their users to manage.
The list, which has been shared as a downloadable file, contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user’s profile, their name and unique ID.
If you have a Facebook account, get out now.
Update: Coincidentally, Gawker today released an entire paparazzi profile of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder. Although I am no fan of Gawker, this coverage something I like to call “instant karma.”
If it feels a little naughty to take such a close look into Zuckerberg’s life, remember that this is the executive who pushed the private information of Facebook’s hundreds of millions of users progressively further into the public sphere. Facebook turned users’ friends lists into public information; it asked them to either publicize their likes and interests or delete such information entirely; it removed the option to conceal their profile photos; Facebook even let some partner websites tap into profiles without asking. The list goes on and on.
Paggy Nelson writes about the new etiquette developing around individuals who are always connected to networks, via their cellphones. She calls it the “etiquette of the flow.” We want to be connected and satisfying that desire is changing the rules of etiquette, and fast. Worth a read.
We’ve moved from the etiquette of the individual to the etiquette of the flow.
This is not mob rule, nor is it the fearsome hive mind, the sound of six billion vuvuzelas buzzing. This is not individuals giving up their autonomy or their rational agency. This is individuals choosing to be in touch with each other constantly, exchanging stories and striving for greater connection. The network does not replace the individual, but augments it. We have become individuals-plus-networks, and our ideas immediately have somewhere to go. As a result we’re always having all of our conversations now, flexible geometries of nodes and strands, with links and laughing and gossip and facts flying back and forth. But the real message is movement.
Certain times and locations have been crucibles for the rapid development and proliferation of ideas; for example, 18th century coffeehouses, or the 19th century’s café society. But now we assemble virtually, via the mobile technologies of the conversations themselves. The new coffeehouse is not a place per se, it’s a feature.
Eventually I learned to stop worrying and love the flow. The pervasiveness of the new multiplicity, and my participation in it, altered my perspective. Altered my Self. The transition was gradual, but eventually I realized I was on the other side. I was traveling with friends, and one of them took a call. Suddenly, instead of feeling less connected to the people I was with, I felt more connected, both to them and to their friends on the other end of the line (whom I did not know). My perspective had shifted from seeing the call as an interruption to seeing it as an expansion. And I realized that the story I had been telling myself about who I was had widened to include additional narratives, some not “mine,” but which could be felt, at least potentially and in part, personally. A small piece of the global had become, for the moment, local. And once that has happened, it can happen again. The end of the world as we know it? No — it’s the end of the world as I know it, the end of the world as YOU know it — but the beginning of the world as WE know it. The networked self is a verb.
GeoCities is no more. But in its day it was super popular. However, GeoCities sites were often explorations of the garish and annoying. It pushed bad design more consistently and vigilantly than virtually anywhere else.
If you miss GeoCities you can now view any site or page inC-like format using GeoCities-izer. Click here to see this page remade into total crap.
Jeffrey Rosen describes a fact of life in the Internet era in a great article from the New York Times Sunday Magazine. He describes the permanence of information (text, photos, videos, tweets, etc) on the Internet and what that does to culture. Everything posted about a person remains virtually forever, and usually accessible by anyone.
The problem she faced is only one example of a challenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions of people around the globe: how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever. With Web sites like LOL Facebook Moments, which collects and shares embarrassing personal revelations from Facebook users, ill-advised photos and online chatter are coming back to haunt people months or years after the fact. Examples are proliferating daily: there was the 16-year-old British girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook, “I’m so totally bored!!”; there was the 66-year-old Canadian psychotherapist who tried to enter the United States but was turned away at the border — and barred permanently from visiting the country — after a border guard’s Internet search found that the therapist had written an article in a philosophy journal describing his experiments 30 years ago with L.S.D.
According to a recent survey by Microsoft, 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research about candidates, and many use a range of sites when scrutinizing applicants — including search engines, social-networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal Web sites and blogs, Twitter and online-gaming sites. Seventy percent of U.S. recruiters report that they have rejected candidates because of information found online, like photos and discussion-board conversations and membership in controversial groups.
One of the great historic strengths of America was the ability of people to head west (literally or figuratively) and start life again with a more or less clean slate after making decisions with adverse consequences. Now the smallest error lives forever. This is a major change in the social fabric and one that will have unforeseeable negative effects in the coming decades.
We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts.
In a recent book, “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,” the cyberscholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger cites Stacy Snyder’s case as a reminder of the importance of “societal forgetting.” By “erasing external memories,” he says in the book, “our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.” In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually forgotten. By contrast, Mayer-Schönberger notes, a society in which everything is recorded “will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.” He concludes that “without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.”
It’s often said that we live in a permissive era, one with infinite second chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.
Disintermediation is the process by which a process middleman in a process is eliminated. Remember what the Internet did to travel agents? Who uses a travel agent these days? And how about bricks-and-mortor book stores?
Well, we are (finally) getting closer to disintermediation of the cable TV companies. The Internet is a terrific platform for delivering content directly to end users. As users buy increasing numbers IP-enabled gadgets for use in their homes, cars and everywhere else for that matter, the days of cable companies providing programming via a wire are likely numbered. Connect your TV to a computer, pick up your iPad, fire up your cellphone, and you already can access a ton of entertainment available on demand and without traditional broadcast or cable TV signals. No tuner required, just a web browser or entertainment app.
Wired’s Epicenter notes a milestone in the process of Cable TV obsolescence. Hulu, already an extremely popular Internet TV (IPTV) service, appears close to piloting a new service that would provide a huge collection of TV programs for $10/month. This would include CBS, Viacom, Time Warner’s television studio divisions, Fox, NBC Universal, ABC, ABC Family, Biography, Lionsgate, Endemol, MGM, MTV Networks, National Geographic, Digital Rights Group, Paramount, PBS, Sony Pictures Television, Warner Bros. and more, including Wired.com.
For ten bucks, one wouldn’t expect the level of programming cable and satellite offer for larger monthly bills. But if paid Hulu works, the networks will have proof that the internet can circumvent cable and satellite companies and they could easily add more expensive content tiers down the road.
If the networks prove they can charge consumers directly, and consumers are happy to supply their own “cable boxes” in the form of game consoles, television-connected computers, set-top boxes, tablets and so on, it’s difficult to see why networks would tolerate cable and satellite providers grabbing a slice of profits, just for sending the shows through one pipe rather than the other.
Cable and satellite are classic middlemen. When the internet meets the middleman, the middleman tends to disappear — or at least be replaced by a thinner middleman. We’ve seen it with record stores, classified ad-dependent newspapers, video-rental stores, bookstores and any other business that delivers something that the internet can deliver more efficiently.
The “thinner middleman” as far as IPTV is concerned could be ISPs, which already charge more for faster data plans capable of delivering better-looking video. But as multipurpose providers, they’ll never command as large a slice of the pie as cable/satellite companies did with their television-only pipes.
Think about it. Wouldn’t you love to replace your current cable television provider with a $10 monthly fee? And wouldn’t you love to access the programing on your computer-connected TVs, your iPad, your computers, your cellphone, etc.? And, via IPTV, you can also access hundreds of alternative programming sources, like this, that no cable provider carries at all. The fabled universal jukebox that would let you call up any media on demand is closer every day.
Or do you want to be wired to your cable provider and its monthly bills?
Update 6/29/10: Hulu Plus is now here. Or at least it is here enough that you can ask for invitation to try the preview. The iPhone and iPad apps are now available in the iTunes app store. Looks great to me.
Can you remember the beginnings of the Internet? Or at least the beginnings of the popularization of the Internet. Way back then, in the mid-90s, there were a few new publications called “webzines”. The term reflected the underlying assumption that writing on the Net was different, yet the same. Magazines were familiar and webzine were the same, but very very different because they were “published” on the web. This was bad terminology in that writing is writing, whatever the medium, be it chiseling in granite, pressing ink on paper or using a pen.
Anyway, one of my very favorite “webzines” was called Feed. I loved it and read it without fail. But then it fell off the interwebs. But rejoice: the full archives of Feed are back. And some of its writers continue to be very well known, including the novelist Sam Lipsyte, Wonkette’s Ana Marie Cox, media theorist Clay Shirky, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, Talkingpointmemo’s Josh Marshall, and many others. For example, here is an early post from Josh Marshall.
The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital website is reporting a major privacy hole in both Facebook and MySpace.
Facebook, MySpace and several other social-networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers’ names and other personal details, despite promises they don’t share such information without consent.
The practice, which most of the companies defended, sends user names or ID numbers tied to personal profiles being viewed when users click on ads. After questions were raised by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook and MySpace moved to make changes. By Thursday morning Facebook had rewritten some of the offending computer code.
Google has launched a new tool showing the number of requests that it receives from various governments around the world. These requests fall into two categories: requests for information about users and requests to remove information.
The tool is interesting. And it shows the shockingly high number of information requests generated by some countries, particularly the United States, which is number 2 behind Brazil. Russia didn’t even make the list.
An editorial today in the New York Times calls on other companies to transparently provide the same information. This is a great idea. Those who believe in limited government should demand that this information be provided so that the extent of governmental information gathering about citizens is more fully known.
