Paul Boutin

Slate just posted my personality test for spam filtering.

I wrote to Doc Searls and David Weinberger with specific questions about their World of Ends site. David blogged his reply, while Doc’s answers are below.

From: Doc Searls
To: Paul Boutin
RE: World of Ends

Who is World of Ends intended for? “Anybody who’s into being all dumb about the Net” is not the answer I’m looking for here. What people and companies did you have in mind while writing? Who would you most like to see reading it?

CEOs, IT professionals, legislators, regulators… plus the employees and citizens by whose grace they obtain clues about the Net.

Also everybody else who wants to point to the plainest possible explanation of what the Net is, and the principles on which it was built. Seemed to us there wasn’t one.

Also, as Larry Lessig and others have pointed out, the entertainment industry has done an amazingly good job of characterizing the Net’s virtues as a threat to their intellectual property. Worse, those who understand and advocate the Net have been losing battle after battle against the entertainment lobby’s successful characterizatoin of certain commercial rights (such as copyrights) as simple property.

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/archives/2003_01.shtml#000889
http://www.aotc.info/archives/000160.html#000160

We need to turn a tide of common wisdom here. What should be obvious isn’t, oddly. We wanted to make it obvious, or at least move things in that direction.

What sort of “reasons to buy music from you” would you want from the record companies? Is there a specific model you favor, or are you saying the solution has yet to appear?

I favor a model in which the record industry intermediates fairly and broadly between first sources and final customers — between artists and those who enjoy their work. What we have now is what Joni Mitchell called “the star-making machinery behind the popular song.”

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/09/04/133117.php
http://doc.weblogs.com/2002/06/22#theMachineInTheGhost

My friend Bill Goldsmith, of KPIG and Radio Paradise (the father of Internet radio, basically) told me an RIAA representative told him point-blank that their industry was interested only in making and selling “blockbuster” artists, and they had no interest in doing that except through a system — running from recording through production, promotion and distribution — that they controlled. They want to control the studios, the performance venues, the warehouses, the radio stations and the stores.

These guys have made it abundantly clear that they have zero interest in sub-blockbuster artists, which they consider loss leaders and packing material. It costs enormous sums to make blockbusters. It’s a woefully inefficient system, even for the successful artists. Ultimately it will fail. Other systems will replace it. The Net will play a huge part, inevitably. But I can’t predict exactly what that those systems will look like. It’s a lot easier to predict he end of the dinosaurs after the asteroid strike than it is to predict the subsequent success of other species.

The Future of Music Coalition has lots of ideas, though…

http://www.futureofmusic.org
http://www.futureofmusic.org/articles/netbusking.cfm

Specifically who and what actions do you refer to in the passage about “government types … tinkering with the Internet’s core?”

The Library of Congress, the copyright office, the patent office, the FCC, the attorney general, and the legislators by whose grace and guidance bad laws and decisions regarding the Net are made.

You say telecoms should “bite the bullet.” Which bullet, i.e. what exactly should they spend on or write off at this point?

The bullet is the Net and its virtues. Not its threats. Imagine what would happen, for example, the cable and DSL broadband providers made their basic services symmetrical, and stopped blocking Port 80 so nobody can run a server (unless paying a premium for “business” service). Suddenly anybody could set up a server in their own home — so they could show pictures and movies to other members of their families, among other things. They could do VoIP, of course. Lots of other stuff. Suddenly the intelligence now in the network would become optional premium services that could be offered a la carte to customers. Directory listings. Call histories. Statistics. Whatever.

If there’s a market for network intelligence, sell it outside the network. But start by respecting what the network was designed to do in the first place.

I’m not saying these guys should charge nothing for bandwidth. Hell, charge for it by the packet. Just don’t shut down opportunity for invention and innovation by pre-conditioning the whole system around notions of one-way distribution from the few to the many. That’s what ADSL and cable are doing right now. We’ve hardly experienced it any other way.

I’m now paying $99 to a hosting service in San Antonio because Cox, one of the most enlightened carriers, blocks Port 80 on our household service (a rock-steady 3MB downstream and 300Kb upstream), and limits me to five IP addresses and a still-asymetrical 1.5Mb/250Kb “business service” out of the home. The former costs $30/month, the latter $109. I’d gladly pay them the $99 now going to ServerBeach for actual packet traffic on my own pipe.

If it’s more efficient to host closer to the backbone, fine. Why not get into that business, then? There are lots of opportunities for these guys, if they stop seeing the Net’s basic design as a problem.

“The value of open spectrum is the same as the true value of the Internet.” Help me out there. Most of the Internet’s value doesn’t come via wireless.

Not yet. Meanwhile, I’m writing and sending this over a wireless connection. I connect wirelessly on the road. My laptop rarely uses wired Ethernet.

Are you saying open spectrum would create such a huge value add to the Internet it would render the current value irrelevant? Or are you just saying the benefit would be worth the writeoff?

The true value of the net is its openness and ubiquity. Wide open wireless carries the Net to its ubiquitous limits. By opening up spectrum, the same resourcefulness we’ve seen with wi-fi would be expand dramatically and create countless commercial opportunities as well.

Want to listen to any internet station you want, anywhere you go, including in your car driving down the road? No reason it can’t happen, other than lack of ad hoc spectrum for use by whoever wants to provide it.

Spectrum doesn’t have to be finite. This is one of the great persistent fallacies. But it’s a whole ‘nuther subject.

You’ve basically said ads on Web pages aren’t worth the effort.

I think we were talking about banners.

How should Google make the money to fund itself instead? Or should they just keep taking money from chumps whose messages they know are being ignored?

Actually (speaking for myself here) I *like* what Google is doing with advertising. They’re actively trying to see if there really can be a demand market, among end users, for advertising. They want to see if the paid results that appear unobtrusively on their search pages can be truly worthwhile for both those who pay for them and those that use them.

I got a friend to start blogging yesterday using Blogspot, Blogger’s free blog service. It’s paid for by advertising. She’ a known authority on intuition. She hates advertising, and said she’d pay not to have it on her blog. But when she saw the first Google ads — two little text things inside the blogspot banner on the top of the page, both pointing to intuition-related advertisers she knew and liked — she said, “Those are right up my alley. I actually *like* those listings.” Welcome to one of the real reasons Google bought Pyra. No reason, by the way (somebody at Google told me yesterday) that the same can’t run on Radio Userland and Moveable Type blogs. If the users want them.

BTW, from what I gather, Google’s advertising customers are generally quite happy.

Note the innovation here. Not coming from those who spent zillions to “capture eyeballs.”

Despite the earlier action on this list, I sense that very little of this seems aimed at Microsoft per se. Am I right?

Right.

–