Tag Archives: Net Neutrality

Book Review: The People’s Platform: Taking back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

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I just finished reading “The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age” by Astra Taylor  I really found this book to be interesting. I believe it offered a very different critique on the digital age than Evegny Morozov’s “Click here to Save everything” where he focused on the arrogance of the algorithm and total solutionism of the movement, Taylor focused on the cultural cost of our digital economy. I think combined the philosophizing of Morozov with Taylor’s discussion of the value of culture and the economic forces behind these changes is an extremely powerful argument. Alone they are both excellent, but I think they offer balancing points that compliment each other well.

First of all, I don’t think everyone will like this book. I don’t think a lot of my readers will like large portions of the book. However, even the most libertarian will agree with some portions of it. I think that’s the power of this book. It’s not really fair to one side or the other, although is really obvious she has a bias – which she wears pretty proudly. Knowing this bias is there allows the reader to decide which portion is Occupy Wall street dreaming or which is really a problem (of course one can go too far either direction).

Taylor’s cultural argument is powerful because we are all part of that economy. We all consume cultural artifacts or perhaps, like myself, make them. The fact that these have been commoditzed to a cost of nothing while still valuable is something we deal with daily. The choice between pirating a movie, renting, streaming it on Netflix, or buying it all are choices we decide on a regular basis. I think that even the most hardcore pirate buys a lot of cultural goods.

Many of us, even if we don’t produce cultural goods, know someone that does. You might watch a video game streamer, you might have a friend or two that are in various bands, you might read my blog or another friend’s blog. All of these people want to use these artifacts to either live on or perhaps enhance their career in some fashion.

However, in the digital space most of the companies that share or distribute cultural activities are funded by ads. Twitch makes most of it money from ads, Google makes $50 billion/year on ads, Facebook makes the most money on an ad whenever a friend “Sponsors” that ad with or without our active agreement to “sponsor” the ad.

Taylor argues that we need to help develop a cultural public space that helps create value for other cultural goods that you may not actually consume (which is why I wrote this blog).

Many of the ideas in the book are anti-corporation, but not because they make money. Instead, it’s because they make money in ways that aren’t obviously ads and that control our cultural destiny. She is pro-net neutrality, she supports companies making profits from ads, but she argues for more transparency that an article is actually sponsored.

Her argument isn’t that we should tear down companies, but instead that we pull back some of the power that these companies have simply taken without any real conversation. We need to look at the ethics behind the algorithms they are using and understand their biases. We need to enable true conversations about these topics. Ad driven content leads to self-censorship and lower quality products.

Is this book perfect? Not by a long shot, but it really made me think about some topics and I think that we need to have more conversations about not just ads, but also about why companies behave the way they do. We need to find a better balance than we currently have.

I rate the book 5/5 for making me really think about topics

Should we celebrate about Google joining net neutrality fight?

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It’s time we be skeptical of high tech companies that support policies that we want. Today, a large number of tech companies came out against the FCC’s plan to allow internet fast lanes. They aren’t as bold as Mozilla in their claims, they don’t push for the most extreme best for the consumer perspective. We, as consumers, have to understand there’s a reason for this. These companies (and there are a lot) wrote the letter without stating what their position actually is, just that they are for a “free and open internet.” This is essentially a dream statement for a lawyer/lobbyist, because “free” and “open” can mean a variety of things based on that company’s perspective.

These companies are willing to push for a free/open internet insofar as it enables them to make money. We have to understand that. Many of these companies are looking to disrupt incumbent market players and are leveraging the internet to enable them to do that.

Normally, I’d be really excited about all these companies coming out in favor of net neutrality. However, because of their tepid support, their lack of recommendations of what to do to address the net neutrality issue, and tardiness to the conversation I’m concerned as to what their actual motives are for this debate. This is a very different discussion than SOPA, where just coming out against the bill was enough. In this case it’s not, we need them to provide clear direction on what the FCC SHOULD do instead. This provides the FCC a path forward and a way to drive the conversation. Without that, essentially there’s no clearly articulated alternative during THIS debate. Yes, they’ve made an argument before, but they aren’t this time.

I also am concerned by this turn of events because of the recent report that Google and the NSA had a very close relationship. In very strict version of net neutrality deep packet inspection wasn’t possible because there was no way to actually do it. The first step to packet discrimination is knowing what’s in the material. Truly end-to-end net neutrality precludes the ability to eavesdrop and snoop on content being passed along the IP backbone. Any sort of relationship between the NSA and arguably the largest internet company in the world necessarily limits the full extent that Net Neutrality can actually be implemented.

Furthermore, we also must remember that a large number of these companies that are now for Net Neutrality were also for CISPA which includes handing over data to the government. Which, based on Google’s relationship with the NSA, they essentially did anyway.

So, it’s a good thing that these companies came out for Net Neutrality because truly only the power of their lobbying can overcome the FCC’s proposal and push Comcast and Verizon into accept the new rules. I don’t think that we citizens could do it on our own.

(if you want to try to fight corruption that’s sort of on display here, check out Mayone.us)

Lack of Net Neutrality will be a competitive liability in the future for the US

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Net Neutrality could be dead in the US and I think that this creates problems for companies that do business in other parts of the world. Or rather, it creates incentives for companies based in the US to focus on non-US markets for conducting business. There are several reasons for this. Let’s take this from a Netflix perspective, assuming they were able to get the same catalog they currently have in the US and took it into Europe (this has been difficult for US companies while it’s been easier for EU companies to come into the US – see Pandora and Spotify as references). Let’s assume that can happen and they have they opportunity to continue to work in one region or the other.

The EU has recently enacted end-to-end Net Neutrality as the law of the land. So, Netflix traffic cannot be slowed down because of the volume. It cannot be slowed down because it is Netflix traffic, all traffic if it needs to be groomed happens at the same time (likely random or everything gets slowed down). Netflix cannot be charged by the ISP to ensure specific speed to guarantee quality of product, if Netflix wants to control this, it’s up to them (they could manage this through increased buffering before the video starts, for example). The average internet speed is significantly higher than in the US, so the quality will be higher and the need for buffering lower, because the speed can account for dropped packets much more effectively. This means if they charge 8 Euros a month, they are able to keep more of that.These conditions would also apply in Argentina.

In the US, Netflix traffic is now subject to the whims of the ISP. the ISP can slow down traffic based on the time of the day, based on the source of the traffic (using deep packet inspection). They can and have charged Netflix for equal access as, for example, Comcast Xfinity’s streaming service. The US has some of the lowest average internet speeds in the industrialized world. Netflix charges $8/month they have to pay Comcast to ensure that their service meets their end users requirements.

As a company that makes money based on the fact that they are able to deliver high quality content (where the price of said content is continually rising), I would prefer to operate in the EU rather than the US. I will have significantly less issues with the ISPs because they can’t discriminate my traffic and I won’t have to pay to make sure that they do not discriminate my traffic. This means that my quality will increase and my cost per user will not increase as it will in the US. I would begin focusing on providing local language content as well as the best content I can provide from the highest quality sources in the world.

As we start moving towards higher speed requirements in our applications, this will become a larger problem. I know of people online that have issue streaming up to Twitch and Mixify as well as streaming the content to their computer. This is a problem now. We will be moving into significantly higher quality video and games (PS4 streaming a game to your console, that will require a lot of bandwidth and low latency $$$$$). Furthermore, if we start having more tele-medicine we’ll need higher quality video feeds to ensure best results.

These are all examples of applications we know of that will suffer from a lack of net neutrality. As we get people that develop applications for gigabit connections, we’ll start to see net neutrality as paramount. These companies will not be able to afford the required costs for the internet speeds required for effective applications.

This means that the EU and other net neutral countries may become the source of innovation for these applications or companies that create them in the US will need to move to markets like the EU for a user base that can fully exploit their application.

We’ll effectively be playing on an Xbox 360, when high quality PCs are out there. We’ll be at a serious disadvantage.

FCC, Net Neutrality, and the Internet as a platform

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The proposed FCC rules for Net Neutrality are pretty terrible. The Verge has a pretty good write up on them, here. Is this a good or bad thing? Personally, I think this is terrible for the future of innovation as I’ve written about before in a few spots, most recently here. I also think it depends on what you think about the role of the ISP. If you think that the role of the ISP is to provide a conduit to the internet and simply pass data to you, then Net Neutrality is for you. If you believe that the ISP should actively play a role in the content you seek, then Net Neutrality is not for you. If you think that the ISP has a role in shaping the way data flows, has the right to extract as much money out of the internet ecosystem, then you probably don’t think that Net Neutrality is the right thing either.

I believe that this comes from a fundamentally different world view on how the economy should function. There are a lot of people out there that truly believe that organizations have the right to maximize profitability. I don’t really think that’s true. I think that organizations have a role to play and those that exploit platforms like the internet are drains on the economy and limit our ability to innovate.

Many of the developers of the initial internet protocols strongly believe in net neutrality. Ranging from the guys that used to run Xerox PARC to Tim Breners-Lee, there’s a lot of different push back against non-neutral positions.

I think from an evolutionary economics standpoint, technology platforms of the past have been wildly successful because they’ve been able to continually lowered in prices which increases accessibility. This drives further adoption of that technology as a platform encouraging more companies to compete to make that technology platform. Some historic platforms are roads (shocking), steel, silicon chips/processors, and now the internet.

Roads have been pretty much government sponsored and open for just about anyone to use. In Portland, the Blue Line MAX line has driven $7 Billion in new development, the largest for a new commuter line anywhere. Computer chips are near and dear to my heart as I’ve worked at a few companies that make them. I think that we can all see in our daily lives how these chips have dramatically changed the world. That the company that makes chips (Intel) is worth a lot less than a company that leverages those chips (Microsoft). The combination of these two companies has essentially driven a great deal of the modernization we’ve experienced in the last 20 years in the US.

In the last 10 years the internet has driven the worlds most valuable companies. It has more quickly shifted how companies engage with their customers and powerful retail based stores have fallen on extremely hard times (Sears/KMart,etc…). My job is only made possible because of the internet I work with people in different states every day.

The fact that it will soon be government policy to enable a company to seek as much money from every user of their platform is only going to hurt the entire ecosystem. If my service stays the same but my price continually increases, that means I can’t afford to buy services that I want online, so I’ll switch to other options or drop the options all together. This will kill competition and negatively impact consumer choice. Furthermore, if I’m paying for Netflix and Comcast and Netflix is forced to pay for access to Comcast customers, then Comcast is charging everyone. I’d expect massive quality upgrades on a continual basis or something in return for all this extra cash flow. Instead it will likely go to investors in the form of higher profits.

The EU goes Net Neutral

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If the EU had voted against strong Net Neutrality laws there would have been a serious problem between a few national governments and the supra-government of the EU. A few years ago the Netherlands became the second country in the world to fully support Net Neutral principles. Furthermore, the EU level Telecom and internet lady is Dutch, Neelie Kroes. She’s been very vocal supporting Net Neutral and “Internet Freedom” since I started following her a few years ago.

I’m not really surprised by this law passing. The EU has been under less influence of many companies than the US government. Additionally, net neutrality inherently has more privacy built into the system. It limits the requirements of deep packet inspection – because there’s no shaping based on the content of the packets, just the amount of packets. Ideally, this will mean that there is less capability in the network for deep packet inspection.

This could lead to some difficulties in the differences between US ISPs and EU ISPs. I’m interested in the ramifications of throttling across the different continents. Clearly someone getting content from a company in the EU won’t want it to be throttled in the way that Netflix has been. It could create some legal ambiguity and issues. I’m going to be watching how all of that resolves.