The Decline and Fall of Net Neutrality
The Wall Street Journal unleashed a firestorm yesterday with its article on the apparent collapse of the net neutrality coalition that included — well, just about everyone except the telecoms: free speech advocates, major technology companies, the FCC, and the Obama administration. As I was reading it, a couple of things jumped out at me. First, the Journal claimed that Lawrence Lessig had recently softened his position on net neutrality. A Stanford Law professor, Lessig founded Creative Commons, an organization dedicated to promoting and defending a set of licenses providing voluntary, less restrictive alternatives to current copyright. As a well-known advocate of open source software and free culture (and an Obama advisor, the Journal is quick to point out), it would be quite a blow indeed were he to abandon net neutrality.
Luckily, a hop over to Lessig’s blog clarifies his stance (which, he says, hasn’t changed in years):
I distinguish between “zero price regulations” (such as Markey’s bill (which I say I am against)) and what I called “zero discriminatory surcharge rules” (which I say I am for). The zero discriminatory surcharge rules are just that — rules against discriminatory surcharges — charging Google something different from what a network charges iFilm. The regulation I call for is a “MFN” requirement — that everyone has the right to the rates of the most favored nation.
This is precisely the position that the Journal breathlessly attributes to me today. It represents no change — no “softening” no “shift” in my views.
Now no doubt my position might be wrong. Some friends in the network neutrality movement as well as some scholars believe it is wrong — that it doesn’t go far enough. But the suggestion that the position is “recent” is baseless. If I’m wrong, I’ve always been wrong.
Ars Technica, with their own quick response, points out that what Google is trying to do — the lynchpin of the article — does not seem to violate net neutrality principles in the first place. They point to a helpful post from Google’s Public Policy blog, which addresses the WSJ directly:
Some critics have questioned whether improving Web performance through edge caching — temporary storage of frequently accessed data on servers that are located close to end users — violates the concept of network neutrality. As I said last summer, this myth — which unfortunately underlies a confused story in Monday’s Wall Street Journal — is based on a misunderstanding of the way in which the open Internet works.
…
Despite the hyperbolic tone and confused claims in Monday’s Journal story, I want to be perfectly clear about one thing: Google remains strongly committed to the principle of net neutrality, and we will continue to work with policymakers in the years ahead to keep the Internet free and open.
P.S.: The Journal story also quoted me as characterizing President-elect Obama’s net neutrality policies as “much less specific than they were before.” For what it’s worth, I don’t recall making such a comment, and it seems especially odd given that President-elect Obama’s supportive stance on network neutrality hasn’t changed at all.
Unfortunately, the Journal’s article succeeded in stirring up dust rather than clarifying the issues. The type of “edge caching” that Google is attempting does raise some important questions about how close ISPs should be to major content providers. But rather than delving into the possible impact of this particular innovation, the Journal tries to paint a picture of the demise of the net neutrality coalition that just isn’t based in reality, as far as I can tell.
UPDATE: To be fair, a WSJ blogger did follow up with a more balanced and detailed discussion of edge caching. He points to yet another post on Wired, which offers some helpful insights:
So is the WSJ right? Well, while it seems logical to argue that edge caching gives those that use it an unfair fast lane on the web, the reality is that, without edge caching, the whole web might be quite a bit slower.
YouTube and Copyright
YouTube has always had a complex relationship with copyright laws. While the quality of user-generated content for the video-sharing website has always been inconsistent, it was catapulted to popularity largely by virtue of widespread copyright violation on the part of its users. As YouTube weathers lawsuits over this fact, it has also been developing a solution that, to some extent, will allow it to have its cake and eat it too. Google (which acquired YouTube in 2006) has been rolling out a “fingerprint” technology that allows it to automatically find infringing material. What’s interesting about this technology is what YouTube does when it finds the copyright violators.
Recently a friend of mine was unable to post a video because YouTube had determined, automatically, that it used a copyrighted song for the soundtrack. But this is just one possible course of action. A few days ago I received an email letting me know that a video I had posted back in July contains copyrighted material (Donna Summer’s “If You Got It Flaunt It”). But rather than deleting the video, YouTube informed me that the copyright holder (UMG) had opted to leave the content on the site, but will apparently be collecting royalties from advertising shown on the video’s page (read more about the system here).
This policy strikes me as a sensible solution to the problem YouTube faces, and an encouraging sign that we can enforce copyright while also allowing for creative reuse of existing art. Of course this strategy depends on a distribution system that has an incentive to encourage this kind of reuse and an incentive to protect copyright holder’s rights. In many situations, these incentives won’t exist. But the more prevalent they become, the more comfortable people will be with the “free” exchange of culture.
River of Wood
Logs jamming Kemi River during general strike (Photo by Mark Kauffman for LIFE Magazine, 1949)
A friend turned me on to the fact that Google is hosting over 10 million images from the LIFE magazine archives. Enjoy.
Google Becomes a Bookseller
Google announced a couple days ago that they have reached an agreement with the Author’s Guild and the Association of American Publishers on their controversial book scanning project. Ars Technica has a good summary of the agreement, but in a nutshell Google is entering the business of digital book distribution in a big way. They will (continue) scan(ning) out-of-print books stored in a number of partner libraries, and make them available via a subcription service. The publishers and authors will earn revenue from long-neglected works, and Google will position itself as a major book distributor specializing in items on the far end of the “long tail.” As part of the agreement, Google is ponying up $125 million to create a Book Rights Registry, which will help track down the copyright owners of these esoteric texts — everyone gets paid.
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