Keen on Media - Andrew Keen interviews Richard Bennett on Net Neutrality

Who isn't confused by the byzantine complexities of the network neutrality debate? Richard Bennett (bennett.com/), long time network maven and fellow of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), is one of the few experts able to cut through confusion and present the net neutrality debate both accurately and simply. So we caught up with Bennett in Washington DC this week to get his take on where we are and where we are going with net neutrality.

 

Richard Bennett from andrewkeen on Vimeo.

In an effort to make online media more accessible to students, UCLA will be adding a custom Clicker program guide to its MyUCLA portal website.  The program guide will help students find programming made available by movie studios and television networks, as well as videos produced on campus.  The site will let them know if content is not available legitimately.

While UCLA does not yet have a system in place for students to submit their own video content, Jonathan Curtiss, manager of technology development for UCLA student and campus life, said the My UCLA portal is "likely to be one of the most visited campus sites", and that it will "provide them with a kind of in-your-face opportunity" legal online video.

This effort may prove to be a more effective way than installing blocking software to combat piracy, because it provides a much simpler way for students to access the content they want.  It stands to reason to think that many students would rather find what they are looking for in minutes, rather than spending hours scouring torrent sites and waiting for downloads of questionable quality, all the while worrying about running afoul of the law.  Also, when one takes into account the staggering growth of sites like Hulu.com, it's easy to see why something like what UCLA is attempting just might work.

Additional sources here and here

Arts+Labs advisor Andrew Keen comments on the opponents of "TV Everywhere", and explains that they are just writing another chapter in an ever-expanding book of conspiracy theories:

"Some people don't like TV Everywhere, Comcast's and Time Warner's plan to bring cable TV to the Web.  They are just paranoid.

Allow me to explain. In his 1964 Harper's Magazine essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter argued that American politics has often been a stage for excessively conspiratorial and suspicious minds from both the left and the right. What disturbed Hofstadter most of all was the sanity of the paranoid. "It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that make the phenomenon significant," he explained. By infecting normal people, Hoftstadter worried, the paranoid style had made conspiratorial fantasy a troublingly recurrent feature of American political culture."

Read the entire article at TechCrunch

Rick Carnes, President of the Songwriters Guild of America, responds to Free Press over their reflexive opposition to new business models that allow creators to protect and sell their content.

In an article yesterday in the Washington Post (Monday, January 4, 2010), Free Press and other public advocacy groups called for an anti-trust probe into TV Everywhere.

For those who haven't heard, TV Everywhere is Time Warner's authentication system whereby certain premium content would be available to subscribers. In other words, you can take your home cable subscription online.

Consumers have been waiting a long time for this. Access to premium content whenever and wherever they want it has been a sort of digital Holy Grail.  To date, lack of access to some premium content has routinely been cited as an excuse for the fact that the vast amount of music and movie content is illegally downloaded using P2P services. With the advent of new and exciting services like Hulu, Vevo, and now, TV Everywhere, the chance to view and listen to the very best content legally is here. No more excuses.

That is why the protests by Free Press and others against TV Everywhere are so confounding to a Songwriter like myself. These groups allege "collusion" to "keep video content behind a subscription-based pay wall."

That 'Pay-Wall' always seems to be the problem for these groups. They want it all, they want it now, and they want it for free. But I've never written a free song. Every one cost me something: a couple of years without being able to heat my house; a future hanging by a guitar string; no health insurance; no pension; writer's block; and the occasional broken heart. I always kept coming back for more because I knew that if I put the right words and music together then I could get paid enough to make it all worthwhile.

Without that 'Pay Wall' I can't make enough to afford to keep writing. No one pays for a ticket when there are no 'Pay Walls' keeping them out of the concert. Creators should not have to ask permission to innovate and earn fair compensation by selling our work.

The public advocacy groups are so concerned about anyone becoming a content 'Gatekeeper' (even with their own content!) on the internet that they are willing to limit the freedom of creators in favor of an internet full of gate crashers.

On February 8, 2005 (commenting on the Grokster decision) in an interview for CNet, Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge wrote, "Public Knowledge believes that online content stores that are easy to use, reasonably priced, permit flexible uses and have large catalogs will win consumers' hearts and pocketbooks, and prove once again that technological development is better left to the marketplace."

Five years later, TV Everywhere sounds a lot like an attempt to create that reasonably priced, flexible use, large catalog, content delivery system.

But it isn't free, so now the Public advocacy groups are against it.

Is that 'Pay Wall' the only real problem for these Groups? If not, then they need to stop giving mere lip-service to the idea that Creators need to be compensated and make some concrete, workable proposals about how that compensation system would work for those of us in the real world.

Just saying no to everything, or Everywhere TV, isn't helping to solve the problem.

Everybody demands new business models for the internet until somebody actually tries them....at which point, some groups can't take yes for an answer.  Yes, Free Press and Public Knowledge are back to attacking attempts to find new business models for the internet.

TV Everywhere is a new approach that gives subscribers more access to the content they pay for in more places at no additional charge...and yet still protects and fairly compensates content creators.  So, of course, Free Press and Public Knowledge take a break from talking up "innovation without permission" to let everybody know they don't approve of this innovation and think the government should put a stop to it.

So, they want to replace the alleged "corporate gatekeepers" with "non-profit gatekeepers" who know exactly what content owners should be required to do with their video.

And I do mean "non-profit". Free Press' report, "TV Nowhere" (PDF), recommends an amusingly bad model for the cable industry.

Newspapers have been forced to compete and to give consumers what they want -- access to content, widely available, sometimes under subscription, sometimes free. If a newspaper refuses to make its content available online, or does so only at high rates, another newspaper can gain revenue by making its content available at more reasonable rates or giving it away for free and relying on ad revenue. Most newspapers haven't charged or required subscriptions to their content because they fear being undercut by their competitors.

The Arts+Labs New Media, New Networks policy forum is here. (Recorded Oct. 29th, 2009)

New Media, New Networks Presented by Arts + Labs and GSPM's Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet from GSPM on Vimeo.

This past Friday, Public Knowledge's Gigi Sohn sent an email urging people to tell the FCC not to consider intellectual property/copyright (content and creative rights) issues in its broadband strategy.

[T]the FCC held a Broadband workshop last week, at which I and representatives from the MPAA and a major Hollywood studio spoke. Hollywood would like the FCC to make copyright filtering a part of the National Broadband Plan. Filtering technology is a blunt instrument that will needlessly censor lawful web traffic while compromising the privacy of all Internet users. For more on copyright filtering, just read our whitepaper or watch the latest episode of In the Know.

Hollywood already has plenty of copyright enforcement tools at its disposal. The FCC doesn't need to ask your Internet Access Provider to filter web traffic for the studios. Tell the FCC that copyright should not be a part of our National Broadband Plan by visiting Broadband.gov and submitting your feedback.

Gigi Sohn and Public Knowledge want to prevent the FCC from considering creative rights and the digital economy by pretending that this is all about "filtering".  It's not. 

Instead, this is about exactly what Gigi Sohn and Public Knowledge have said is the solution to piracy: new business models.  But simply saying "new business models" does not solve the problem.  In order to get beyond vague generalities and discover the specific new business models that actually work, we're going to have to experiment with a variety of approaches.

That's where the FCC comes in.

Content companies and network providers simply want the FCC to allow the market to experiment with a variety of solutions.  We don't want scare tactics to foreclose the possible solutions - the new business models - that may emerge. 

The FCC should take creative rights into account - not through blunt mandates, but by not interfering with the creativity and entrepreneurial nature of the internet.

Creators should not have to ask Public Knowledge's permission to innovate on the internet; the FCC should protect that right.

This afternoon, Arts+Labs filed reply comments in the FCC's ongoing inquiry on creating a "National Broadband Plan for Our Future."  As the following excerpt indicates, Arts+Labs reiterated in its reply comments that the broadband strategy should be "a matter of practical priorities:"

Importantly, we also must remember that the first goal of our broadband strategy should be to connect every American to broadband service.   Other attributes of connectivity are attractive and important, but we believe premature until we first deal with the more important job of inclusivity. 

As Google observed in putting connectivity ahead of ultra-high speeds in comments filed on June 8:  "Our first priority should be to get all Americans online, enjoying always-on broadband capabilities."   
 
Similarly, Internet Innovation Alliance co-chair Larry Irving remarked just a week ago when discussing the benefits of connectivity:  "But none of this is possible without adoption; you have to log on to reap - and even to recognize - the benefits." 
 
In sum, we urge the Commission to design a national strategy that is grounded in the practical, to listen to what consumers want, and to drive broadband adoption by focusing on meeting the needs of real consumers in the real world.   Esoteric arguments about Internet culture, management, and international rankings may seem to matter in Washington, D.C., but what users in Peoria and Scranton really care about is safe access to affordable broadband
service, and the quality content, information and services that creators make available.  
 

I haven't been able to get my hands on a review copy of Chris Anderson's new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, so I'll pass on making any commentary about its contents, but I do want to point something out that I found interesting in Mike Masnick's review of the book at Techdirt.

Mike discusses the various ways in which "free" can be sustainable, including bundling, cross-subsidizing, and other typical solutions to goods with a declining marginal cost.  But he also mentions non-monetary payment, which Anderson apparently talks about a bit in the book:

You can pay people to write -- just as Encyclopaedia Britannica does. Or you can get other people to write for non-monetary rewards -- as Wikipedia does. The latter is a lot more efficient a solution, and the difference in productivity and output is quite evident. It's not saying that there is no business in paying people to write, but it's a very different business than the indirect business model, and it's the economic efficiencies that come into play.

Money, at times, is a transactional lubricant. It helps us make transactions faster than bartering three pigs for two trees, a goat and a bushel of corn. At other times, though, money can be friction. It can limit transactional effectiveness by acting as a kind of crutch. That's where non-monetary benefits can suffice (or do a much better job) in rewarding people for their actions. In those scenarios money gets in the way and actually makes a transaction less efficient.

Fair enough.

But what I found interesting is that at the end of the post, Mike addresses the accusations of plagiarism that have swirled around the book and concludes, "If Chris can take the works of others and make it into something more valuable, aren't we all better off because of it?"  We very well may be.

But even if building on someone else's work is a net good and carries a price tag of $0.00, there is a customary form of non-monetary payment in formal writing --the kind of payment that is critical to Mike's and Anderson's arguments.  That payment is proper attribution.  Academics have standardized formats for attribution; bloggers offer "hat tips" to attribute sources and ideas; and twitterers "retweet" clever or insightful comments to credit the author: attribution is the "transactional lubricant" that rewards good ideas in written work.

Mike says he "would have preferred it if that such mistakes in attribution did not happen, mainly because it's a distraction, but the issue is a minor one." He also says, "I don't think it takes away from the quality of the overall work at all."

But the very opposite should be true if we accept the idea that non-monetary payment is the best way to compensate authors for the use of their words and ideas.  The book is certainly still valuable if for no other reason than that it sheds light on many of the difficult business decisions that face content creators, but it should definitely weigh in our assessment that the author doesn't recognize a real-world application of the very concept he espouses. 

Adam Thierer at Tech Liberation Front has had two great posts in the last two days about Free Press's new crusade against metered billing, which has attracted support from Rep. Eric Massa (D - NY).  Thierer argued first that the effort "is based on a combination of outright lies and blatant economic ignorance." Harsh, but he makes a compelling case:

Metering broadband access is not an effort "to restrict Internet use," as Free Press claims. Rather, like every other metered system under the sun, it's an effort to price a scarce resource in such a way so as to maximize use.  Broadband operators don't sit around all day scheming to find ways to decrease network usage.  They wouldn't make any money that way!!  They need to find business models that encourage increased uptake while also investing in and growing their networks to meet new demand and competitive challenges.

Very true. As with the net neutrality debate, people seem to start from the assumption that network operators want to actively devalue their own product, which makes no sense. Quite the contrary, network operators want to offer their services to a wider range of people, including those who might want to pay less for using less broadband.  Right now, there is a disincentive for such users:

Unless it is your goal to allow some particularly aggressive users to be subsidized by all other users, it is sometimes sensible to price usage based on demand.  If you don't, you potentially create a perverse incentive for a small handful of over-grazers to to be feeding at the trough at everyone else's expense.

It was a very good post in defense of some of the myriad reasons ISPs might want to move to metered bandwidth, and you should read the whole thing.

Unconvinced?

Check out Adam's second post on the subject, in which he cites some of Free Press's own work documenting the potential benefits of metered bandwidth.