GregHowley.com

This is liable to be a monster of a post - one of my rare political rants. Luckily, most of it isn't likely to be too controversial. I've found myself irked about some matters of late, so I thought I'd discuss them here. Net Neutrality, Copyright, and the runaway capitalism that's taken over inside the United States. I'm trying to work from a rough outline of thoughts, and I'll do my best to stay organized.

Net Neutrality

Well before last week's terrible appeals court ruling, there were stirrings and hints that Net Neutrality was under threat. AT&T's policy of allowing paying websites and services to bypass their users' data usage caps. Throttling of BitTorrent traffic because portions of it are illegal.

What I think many people fail to understand is just what The Internet could become if Net Neutrality disappears. Sites like mine - personal blogs that aren't safe under the umbrella of Google's Blogger service or Wordpress.com - would most likely become a thing of the past. That quaint period from the nineties up until the teens when The Internet was free and open and controlled by people rather than by corporations. At present, telecoms like Verizon and Comcast are flipping out over how Netflix is getting a "free ride" - customers are streaming Netflix videos, and Verizon/Comcast aren't getting a dime from Netflix! Apparently, it's not enough that people like me are paying Comcast upwards of $75/month for internet service only. They want more.

The issue is that while I've always viewed my internet connection as just a pipe to bring me data the same way that my water pipes bring me water and my electrical wires bring me electricity, the FCC hasn't classified broadband that way. They could, but they haven't. Right now, broadband is considered an "information service". If the FCC reclassifies broadband as a telecommunications service, then Net Neutrality will be required by law. As it should. But for the meantime, this is still a hot topic and needs to be addressed.

I've long been of the mind that data pipes should be municipal in the same way that electrical lines and public water are. Our data infrastructure is becoming as important as many other types of infrastructure. Imagine if one or two companies controlled our roads or our power grid and could tell their customers how they were allowed to use those things. You have exceeded the speed limit, and your Time-Warner Freeway access has been terminated. Please choose another road. It's a capitalist dystopian nightmare. I understand that the companies involved have a significant investment in the infrastructure, but this isn't new ground. Who laid the original phone lines? Those are now publicly owned. There must be some precedent. I don't have the answers, but I believe that solutions can be found. Infrastructure should belong to the public.

And another thing while I'm ranting in this area. Bandwidth isn't a scarce commodity, so why are broadband and wireless providers creating false scarcity? Why are data speeds being throttled after a certain limit? It's because they want customers to pay more. It seems to me that this is the kind of thing that could be eliminated by free market forces and actual competition, which we don't have due to oligopoly.

Copyright

This is something I think about often, and I could likely write an entire post about this subject alone. I have an elderly family member with a philosophy degree who often cites the fact that piracy of copyrighted content is illegal but not immoral. And given the apparent very high percentage of Americans who download or stream music, movies, and television programs illegally, he is not alone in his opinion. The movie industry, for one, goes to great lengths to push the notion that piracy is stealing. But nobody believes it. It's painfully obvious that they're acting in an attempt to protect their profits, which is also baffling given that it is absolutely not clear that illegal downloads affect sales. What does reduce piracy? Good alternatives. Netflix. Spotify. Redbox. Pandora.

Copyright Week happened recently, and it was one of the things that spurred me to write this article. The EFF's six principles for copyright are:

1. Transparency: Copyright policy must be set through a participatory, democratic and transparent process. It should not be decided through back room deals or secret international agreements.
2. Building and Defending a Robust Public Domain: The public domain is our cultural commons and a public trust. Copyright policy should seek to promote, and not diminish, this crucial resource.
3. Open Access: The results of publicly funded research should be made freely available to the public online, to be fully used by anyone, anywhere, anytime.
4. You Bought It, You Own It: Copyright policy should foster the freedom to truly own your stuff: to tinker with it, repair it, reuse it, recycle it, read or watch or launch it on any device, lend it, and then give it away (or re-sell it) when you're done.
5. Fair Use Rights: For copyright to achieve its purpose of encouraging creativity and innovation, it must preserve and promote ample breathing space for unexpected and innovative uses.
6. Getting Copyright Right: A free and open Internet is essential infrastructure, fostering speech, activism, new creativity and new business models for artists, authors, musicians and other creators. It must not be sacrificed in the name of copyright enforcement.

Cory Doctorow, an author and futurist whose writings and opinions I hold in highest regard, wrote up this article recently on BoingBoing, in which he examined the data behind books available on Amazon.com, grouped by their year of original publication. It turns out that while there are plenty of new books available, those published within the past few years, and there are plenty of very old books which were established as public domain before copyright got truly crazy, there aren't many books available in the period between - 20th century literature. Read the article - it's fascinating, and illustrates a facet of the problem with copyright.

I took my daughter to the library last week, and it occurred to me that libraries are absolutely antithetical to the notion of modern copyright. You can just go in there and borrow a book, or even borrow a movie or video game! And you pay nothing! It's absolutely scandalous! I'm actually a bit surprised that we haven't seen Hollywood, the RIAA, and other trade organizations lobbying to outlaw libraries. I guess that wouldn't be popular, so the way they'd go about it is to simply cut funding, which I'm sure is being done. Sneakily. Behind the scenes. It's awesome that library audio books are going to be dropping their DRM. This is probably the first time I've considered the importance of libraries, but after this revelation, I'm going to consider myself staunchly pro-library.

I've also got to mention a recent episode of The Simpsons, entitled Steal This Episode. Not only is it amazing that the show is still good after more than 20 seasons, the episode does a fantastic job of making fun of both pirates and the movie industry.

I sincerely crave a good discussion of piracy and the situation in which the civilized world currently finds itself. I want to hear points brought up on both sides and weighed. I want to discuss the morality angle, the technology angle, and the financial angle. Obviously, content producers need to be able to earn money to continue their work. But few people would claim to be pleased with the movie-going experience or the cost and the price structure of cable television. I've often hunted for podcasts where these matters are weighed and discussed, but I've come up empty-handed.

Capitalism

Before I begin on the subject of capitalism, I must make it clear that I think capitalism and the free market is a good system. The best system we've got. Communism is unworkable and doomed to failure. I'm not an economist, so I don't know how it is that China is still solvent. In my perspective, the whole capitalism versus socialism thing is a black-to-white scale with many shades of grey, and extremes are not good. I'd never advocate for a push towards the far end on the socialist side of that scale. Market incentives are required to maintain productivity. But the U.S. has gone so far towards the capitalism side of the scale that it has in many ways become a problem.

I feel like we had it just right in the middle to late part of the 20th century, post-WW2. The 50s, the 60s, and the 70s. Nowadays, it's all megacorporations and oligopolies. Income inequality has gotten out of hand. I'm not going to make the mistake of thinking that we can ever go back - things never move backwards, only forwards - but it'd be awfully nice if the middle class could make a return to prelevance.

I follow the blog of David Brin, a man I firmly believe is an honest-to-goodness genius, and he makes so many good points on economic matters. For instance, he points out that uber-expensive goods and services are a boon to society, as they recycle money. The notion that vast sums of horded-away capital can be recycled via these ridiculously overpriced items is something I'd never have realized. It gets the money out of the bank and back into circulation, which is what I'd think the economy needs.

That was a long and only somewhat organized rant, but it's something I've been wanting to get out into writing for some time. I hope that at least a handful of people read this and find some value in it, even if the value is only in disagreeing and offerring up points that I may have missed. I always welcome dissenting opinions.