by Flemming Funch
Doc Searls has an excellent and long article, "Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes". Basically the net as we know it is in grave danger if the large telco carriers that own most of the pipes it runs on manage to get their way. You might think that the net is just this common free space where we all can share and communicate. But some very large companies think it is merely their property, and their delivery mechanism for their content that you'll have to pay for. And if we don't watch it, they might get their way, by getting their business plans put into law. Well, U.S. law at least, but that unfortunately sets the tone for how things work. This quote from Edward Whiteacre, CEO of SBC, epitomises the problem: Q: How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google, MSN, Vonage, and others?
A: How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?
The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!
He was asked this, as far as I remember, because SBC started blocking VoIP (voice conversations over the net) on their network. Which they think they have a right to do, because they don't make money off of them. Well, they do - people pay for their internet connection, but SBC also sells phone service, and they don't want competition. So, where we think we're free to do whatever it is technically possible to do on the net, these guys have in mind to only let you do things they get paid a cut of. I.e. they regard the net as the vehicle for big companies to deliver paid content to you, the consumer, rather than as your way to peruse the information you're interested in.
One of the many good points in Doc's article is that the battle is about semantics. Not "just semantics", but it is semantics in the sense that one side is somewhat succeeding in positioning the discussion to be about ownership and property. They "own" the pipes, the copyrights, the content, and everybody else are freeloades who'd want to rip it off for free. And law, particularly in the U.S., tends to be on the side of property owners. Here's from a previous article, particularly about copyright, discussing that beyond the legal and political contexts there is the metaphorical: The third is metaphorical. I believe Hollywood won because they have successfully repositioned copyright as a property issue. In other words, they successfully urged the world to understand copyright in terms of property. Copyright = property may not be accurate in a strict legal sense, but it still makes common sense, even to the Supreme Court. Here's how Richard Bennett puts it:
The issue here isn't enumeration, or the ability of Congress to pass laws of national scope regarding copyright; the copyright power is clearly enumerated in the Constitution. The issue, at least for the conservative justices who sided with the majority, is more likely the protection of property rights. In order to argue against that, Lessig would have had to argue for a communal property right that was put at odds with the individual property right of the copyright holder, and even that would be thin skating at best. So the Supremes did the only possible thing with respect to property rights and the clearly enumerated power the Constitution gives Congress to protect copyright.
Watch the language. While the one side talks about licenses with verbs like copy, distribute, play, share and perform, the other side talks about rights with verbs like own, protect, safeguard, protect, secure, authorize, buy, sell, infringe, pirate, infringe, and steal.
This isn't just a battle of words. It's a battle of understandings. And understandings are framed by conceptual metaphors. We use them all the time without being the least bit aware of it. We talk about time in terms of money (save, waste, spend, gain, lose) and life in terms of travel (arrive, depart, speed up, slow down, get stuck), without realizing that we're speaking about one thing in terms of something quite different. As the cognitive linguists will tell you, this is not a bad thing. In fact, it's very much the way our minds work.
But if we want to change minds, we need to pay attention to exactly these kinds of details.
"The Commons" and "the public domain" might be legitimate concepts with deep and relevant histories, but they're too arcane to most of us. Eric Raymond has told me more than once that the Commons Thing kinda rubs him the wrong way. Communist and Commonist are just a little too close for comfort. Too social. Not private enough. He didn't say he was against it, but he did say it was a stretch. (Maybe he'll come in here and correct me or enlarge on his point.) For many other libertarians, however, the stretch goes too far. Same goes for conservatives who subscribe to the same metaphorical system in respect to property.
So the work we have cut out for us isn't just legal and political. It's conceptual. Until we find a way to win that one, we'll keep losing in Congress as well as the courts.
Doc wrote another excellent article with David Weinberger, called The World of Ends, essentially arguing that the net is a neutral medium that connects up a lot of ends. It is about connecting everything to everything, with zero distance. The things to connect might be us having a conversation, or it can be you making a purchase in a store. Doesn't really matter. The net itself is stupid, and just acts as the connecting substrate. It is a place, to connect up end users. And that's what works. If anybody succeeds in re-defining it as merely their distribution mechanism, which they can slice up and monetize like they feel like, it starts not working any longer. While the Net's nature is a world-wide place, the Web's nature is a world-wide publishing system. The Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist who wanted a simple way documents could be published and read, anywhere in the world, without restriction by physical location or underlying transport system. That's why it has hypertext protocols, "languages" and "formatting" standards. It's also why we "write", "author" and "mark up" "documents" called "pages" and "files" which we "post", "publish" or "put up" so others can "index", "catalog" and "browse" them.
To sum up, the Net has all these natures:
1. transport system (pipes)
2. place (or world)
3. publishing system
--and others as well. But those aren't at war with one another, and that's what matters most.
Right now #1 is at war with #2 and #3, and that war isn't happening only in the media and in congressional hearing rooms. It's happening in our own heads. When we talk about "delivering content to consumers through the Net", rather than "selling products to customers on the Net", we take sides with #1 against #2. We unconsciously agree that the Net is just a piping system. We literally devolve: our lungs turn to gills, our legs turn into flippers, and we waddle back into the sea--where we are eaten by sharks.
Hopefully it doesn't end up happening. Law makers might see the light and not just hand ownership of the net to a few corporation. We might collectively understand the matter clearly enough to not allow it. And there might be technological solutions that take it in a different direction, and bypass the monopolies. Community wifi networks, for example.
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