A response to a post
Oct. 25th, 2006 12:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garotePosted in response to a response to a previous post. Whoo!
My good man, we have had information economies since we have had information, and a means - any means - of commoditizing it. :) (There is great argument over what the term "information economy" even means ... my definition is a liberal one.) The only difference between now and the past is the level of independence that types of content have gained from types of containers. We used to only be able to broadcast morse code via wire, and the airwaves were right out. Nowadays we can broadcast damn near anything via wire and airwaves alike, and manage the ways and means it is stored with much more flexibility.
But just because the costs are not apparent at the granular scale doesn't mean that the costs are irrelevant. Consider what total junk the internet would be if we couldn't get electric power (or just couldn't pay for it). Consider the manufacturing costs of the high-end switching equipment that forms the backbone of our networks (and again, who pays for it). Consider how, as the breadth of our information supply increases, exponentially more processing time is required to derive useful results from it. It still is an economy of service and scarcity - it's just got a big bendy electronic joint in the middle, and at one end of that joint you have a bunch of programmers sitting at keyboards ... and among them the occasional fruit loop who thinks he's part of a "post-materialist revolution" on account of how much his job is like the one George Jetson had, where he would just push one button over and over until his finger got sore, and then clock out for the day.
Also, I'd never make the claim that, just because I can duplicate certain bits and bytes indefinitely, the media I have duplicated has no reason to be scarce anymore. In terms of economics, I think the argument should be approached from the other end:
So you can duplicate certain bits and bytes indefinitely. Why would you? What would be your reason for doing that? Are you doing it to keep a backup? That seems wise. Are you doing it to give it to someone else for free? Okay; whatever flips your cookie... Are you doing it for a fee, or so that your friend can avoid a fee? Congratulations, you are participating in an economy of scarcity. In the first instance, you're attempting to enforce one - and in the second, you're attempting to subvert one!
Welcome to the murky for-profit fist-fight of the "new economy", where we encounter such weird edge cases as fake "name brand" bags, patented gene sequences, generic drugs, and boxed copies of Windows XP h4x()r Edition selling for two bucks each, next to the hotdogs on a street vendor's cart. (Ol' Mr. Dibbler will even throw in Madonna's last album for free, and that's cutting his own throat; he swears.)
For what it's worth, I predict that the internet will eventually be paved over by amalgamated content providers, as we all undergo an intimately related transition: Our home computers will be replaced by set-top boxes that browse the web and run iTunes, and are all-too-aware of the latest high tech encryption and DRM schemes. We will pay one cent a month for each AIM account we have, ten cents per minute of video we watch, ten cents per minute of audio we download, and 40 bucks a month just to keep the thing online. And one hundredth of a cent for each google search we invoke.
I suspect these boxes will all be running OS X.
It's not a terrible future, not really ... though it is a significantly less flexible one. And we can pretty much kiss our "post-materialist" Valhalla goodbye. :)
My good man, we have had information economies since we have had information, and a means - any means - of commoditizing it. :) (There is great argument over what the term "information economy" even means ... my definition is a liberal one.) The only difference between now and the past is the level of independence that types of content have gained from types of containers. We used to only be able to broadcast morse code via wire, and the airwaves were right out. Nowadays we can broadcast damn near anything via wire and airwaves alike, and manage the ways and means it is stored with much more flexibility.
But just because the costs are not apparent at the granular scale doesn't mean that the costs are irrelevant. Consider what total junk the internet would be if we couldn't get electric power (or just couldn't pay for it). Consider the manufacturing costs of the high-end switching equipment that forms the backbone of our networks (and again, who pays for it). Consider how, as the breadth of our information supply increases, exponentially more processing time is required to derive useful results from it. It still is an economy of service and scarcity - it's just got a big bendy electronic joint in the middle, and at one end of that joint you have a bunch of programmers sitting at keyboards ... and among them the occasional fruit loop who thinks he's part of a "post-materialist revolution" on account of how much his job is like the one George Jetson had, where he would just push one button over and over until his finger got sore, and then clock out for the day.
Also, I'd never make the claim that, just because I can duplicate certain bits and bytes indefinitely, the media I have duplicated has no reason to be scarce anymore. In terms of economics, I think the argument should be approached from the other end:
So you can duplicate certain bits and bytes indefinitely. Why would you? What would be your reason for doing that? Are you doing it to keep a backup? That seems wise. Are you doing it to give it to someone else for free? Okay; whatever flips your cookie... Are you doing it for a fee, or so that your friend can avoid a fee? Congratulations, you are participating in an economy of scarcity. In the first instance, you're attempting to enforce one - and in the second, you're attempting to subvert one!
Welcome to the murky for-profit fist-fight of the "new economy", where we encounter such weird edge cases as fake "name brand" bags, patented gene sequences, generic drugs, and boxed copies of Windows XP h4x()r Edition selling for two bucks each, next to the hotdogs on a street vendor's cart. (Ol' Mr. Dibbler will even throw in Madonna's last album for free, and that's cutting his own throat; he swears.)
For what it's worth, I predict that the internet will eventually be paved over by amalgamated content providers, as we all undergo an intimately related transition: Our home computers will be replaced by set-top boxes that browse the web and run iTunes, and are all-too-aware of the latest high tech encryption and DRM schemes. We will pay one cent a month for each AIM account we have, ten cents per minute of video we watch, ten cents per minute of audio we download, and 40 bucks a month just to keep the thing online. And one hundredth of a cent for each google search we invoke.
I suspect these boxes will all be running OS X.
It's not a terrible future, not really ... though it is a significantly less flexible one. And we can pretty much kiss our "post-materialist" Valhalla goodbye. :)
Re: heh
Date: 2006-11-05 11:35 am (UTC)Lower it to, say, 25 cents a month... And I'll shrug my shoulders and say "Okay, I can live with that." But that's not the point I'm interested in making. My point is: They know. They know how many instant messages you sent, because the network keeps a count, no matter where in the country you take the phone. That count has nothing to do with the distributed mechanism that the phone network operates by. It's a kludge. It's extra communications overhead grafted on to the network just for the purpose of determining how much money to charge you.
Now think of your electric service. Every house on your block draws electricity from the same communal grid. If you live in the 'burbs there's a glass box bolted to the side of your house with a sensitive little plate spinning around in it, and a row of dials telling exactly how much energy you have used. This, too, is a kludge. Except this time, the mechanism is not grafted onto the network, up on the poles where you can't see it - it's in front of your face. But electricity obviously isn't free, so you have no problem paying more than your neighbor if you leave your dryer running for a month.
Now here's, to my mind, the big billion-dollar question: What stops the router in your cable modem, or the switch back at the cable company's data center, from tracking bytes sent and received, and charging you based on both? Absolutely nothing, as far as I know. And if the price is right, this arrangement can be quite palatable. An ISP could deploy to a wider audience using the same network infrastructure, and charge a lower monthly fee, making up the difference in profit by charging more to a fraction of "heavy users", while simultaneously discouraging those heavy users from taxing the network for everyone else. The scale that works best for the vast majority of internet users is to charge almost nothing for downstream traffic, but charge aggressively for upstream traffic. Implement a pricing scale like this, and viola: You have created a financial deterrent to piracy between consumers. Especially if you add the even-more-artificial kludge of charging based on the number of sustained simultaneous connections.
At the same time, consumers wishing to host data for business purposes, legal collaborative purposes, or just for the sake of vanity, can offload their crap to their hosting box at their ISP - where it will run the gauntlet of automated and aggressive anti-piracy scrutiny that any decent-sized ISP can muster.
This arrangement does not interfere with your online gaming, your collaborative programming, chatting, and emailing. It doesn't interfere at all with web surfing or shopping. All of that can still be highly encrypted as well. And if the price is low enough and the service is reliable enough, this can become the standard fee structure. It's also fairer: You're charged according to your level of usage.
But I can guarantee you, it will be the death of non-commercial peer-to-peer networks, which is the fuel under the fire of media piracy online. The only stronghold remaining will be the newsgroups - and as they fall under the tiered pricing structure, they too will begin taking their anti-piracy edicts seriously and begin trimming their feed, simultaneously amputating most of their customer base (who is only there for the piracy, after all).
Re: heh
Date: 2006-11-05 06:00 pm (UTC)Online gaming uses upstream bandwidth quite heavily, for example, if you're hosting an FPS server. And that also uses a lot of sustained connections.
You're also forgetting the legitimate uses of BitTorrent: distributing popular stuff without costing the author much. If I transfer 2 TB of my own public-domain music, for example, right now it wouldn't cost too much. I could seed it myself and maybe transfer a few gigabytes myself. Under your plan, yes I could buy a box to host it on, and it would survive the anti-piracy audit... but I'd have to pay for 2 TB. So quite some legitimate use of the internet is lost here.
Re: heh
Date: 2006-11-05 08:59 pm (UTC)As for hosting an FPS server, you're right ... that would definitely be affected by this pricing. Perhaps we'd need to work out some "trusted computing"-like system for moving server daemons to our ISPs, though that would be very messy and restrictive. OTOH, battle.net-style setups that use proxies would be unaffected.