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Will the internet end up controlled by big business and politicians?

·         The talk is always about "governance" or "regulation", but really it's about control

·         the big question has been whether the most disruptive communications technology since print would be captured by the established power structures

·         In Dubai, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)

o   a venerable UN body employing nice-but-politically-dim engineers and run by international bureaucrats of average incompetence, staged the grandly named World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12)

·         But because the ITU is a UN body on which every member country has a vote, some regimes construed the conference as an opportunity for enabling governments to begin getting a grip on controlling the net

·         some countries saw revised IT regulations as a way of enabling them to levy charges on the giant western companies that currently dominate the net

·         others saw them as a chance to control content flowing electronically across their frontiers

·         few saw them as a way of loosening the grip that western countries (particularly the US) currently has on the organisations that are critical to the technical management of the internet.

·         The underlying reality was that most western countries simply refused to buy into the agendas of the authoritarian and/or developing countries who sought to use the conference as a means to the ends that they desired

·         WCIT-12 was a significant event in the evolution of the internet

o   it demonstrated that the war to control the network not only goes on, but is increasing in intensity.

·         Instagram, a photo-sharing service that Facebook recently acquired for an unconscionable sum, abruptly changed its terms and conditions.

o    hapless users of the service were required to agree that Instagram could use any or all of their photographs for advertising and other purposes, at its sole discretion.

§  caused such a storm that the company rowed back

·         people saw this as just another illustration of the old internet adage

o   if the service is free then you are the product.

·         Others saw it as evidence that Facebook is determined to "monetise" its billion-plus users in any way it can.

·         it demonstrates the extent to which giant internet corporations will try to control their users.

·         Tim Berners-Lee,  "There are probably 200 million people now who think that Facebook is the internet."

·         As WCIT-12 showed, they may be having trouble getting a grip on the net, but they won't give up on the project.

·         What Barlow didn't reckon with, however, was that another gang of control freaks would also get in on the act – the Facebooks, Googles, Amazons and Apples of this world

o   they're making more progress than governments at the moment.

·         Each of these started out as gloriously anarchic, creative, open and vibrant technologies

o   but eventually each industry was "captured" by a charismatic entrepreneur who offered consumers a more dependable, consistent proposition.

Why power has two meanings on the internet

·         The 80/20 split = the Pareto Principle.

·         normal distribution is rare.

·          In its place, we see the distribution of which Pareto's Principle is a special example: a small number of people/sites/words/etc account for most of the action, with a "long tail" getting very little of it.

·         instead of most websites having an "average" number of inbound links, a very small number of sites (the Googles, Facebooks and Amazons of this world) have colossal numbers of links, while millions of sites have to make do with only a few.

o   call this a "power law" distribution

·         Everywhere you look on the internet, you find power laws

o   the Guardian's online comment forums; 20% of comments are provided by 0.0037 per cent of the paper's monthly online audience

·         there are millions of blogs out there, a relatively small number of them attract most of the readership

·         Clay Shirky : "In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution".

·         relentless consolidation of mass-media ownership into the hands of giant conglomerates means public sphere had been steadily shrinking in the postwar era

o   this has worrying implications for liberal democracy.

·         How can we overcome the tyranny of power laws

Lessons the tech world learned in 2012

LESSON 1 Tweet in haste, repent at leisure

·         Lord McAlpine has become a leading innovator in internet law

·         The allegations saying he was a child abuser has changed the began landscape in the UK

·         The smart move was to discriminate between different classes of users

o   Those with 500 or fewer followers could get in touch with McAlpine's lawyers and, upon payment of a small fee to charity, escape with a pardon

o   More substantial tweeters were required to pay heftier damages or face the full force of m'learned friends in court.

·         It could be said that the unruly internet beast is being tamed.

·         if a broadcasting network such as the BBC can be held responsible for what it transmits, surely Twitterers should be too?

LESSON 2 Valuing technology companies remains an inexact science

·         Facebook shares fell 24% in the first three days of open trading

·         Another example:

o   October 2011, HP bought the Cambridge-based company for $11.7bn. Last month, HP announced that it was taking an $8.8bn write-off because it had realised that Autonomy was not worth anything like its purchase price. HP claimed that $5.5bn of the write-off was explained by the discovery of "accounting irregularities"

LESSON 3 Raspberries come in unexpected flavours

Newsweek unveils final print edition

·         80-year-old US current affairs magazine Newsweek has revealed the image that will grace the cover of its last-ever print edition.

·         The death of the print edition was caused by falling advertising revenues, as audiences moved online.

·         From the new year, Newsweek will be a digital-only publication.

·         Editor Tina Brown described it as "a new chapter" for the magazine

·         Newsweek's first edition was published on 17 February, 1933

·         At its height, it had a circulation of 3 million, but declining readership and advertising revenue saw it fall into losses.

·         The move to a digital edition will allow Newsweek to cut costs such as printing, postage and distribution

·         it will lose money from print advertisers, who traditionally pay more than their online counterparts

Why US newspaper publishers favour paywalls

·         becoming increasingly prevalent at newspaper websites across the United States

·         Eleven of the country's largest-selling 20 newspapers are either charging for access or have announced plans to do so

o   include America's top four titles: the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

·         The Globe & Mail article also says that more than 35% of US newspaper readers are regularly discovering some restrictions in their online surfing

o   though most papers allow visitors to access several articles for free before hitting a wall. This so-called "metered model" is the most popular form of charging.

The Writing is on the paywall – but the end of the print is not quite nigh

·         Everybody knows that print newspaper sales are plummeting while unique visits to the same papers' websites go soaring on

·         The Telegraph, the Guardian and many of the rest are down overall between 8% and 10% year-on-year: but their websites – with the Mail breaking 7 million unique browsers a day

·         As for news and current affairs magazines – which you'd expect to find in the eye of the digital storm – they had a 5.4% increase to report. In short, on both sides of the Atlantic, although some magazine areas went down, many, even in an economic blizzard, showed vibrant growth.

·         And you can discover a similar phenomenon at work when it comes to reading books

·         Already 360 US papers – including most of the biggest and best – have built paywalls around their products