The British ISP industry has spent a small fortune of its customers’ money fighting the people who would, in a saner world, be its business partners – only to suffer a crushing defeat. On Tuesday Lord Justice Richards threw out BT and TalkTalk’s judicial review against the 2010 Digital Economy Act.
Yet as trench warfare goes, they may consider it worth every penny.
The public preview of Windows 8 has won “rave reviews” according to the Daily Mail, the newspaper that claims to reflect Middle England and is proudly conservative in every sense of the word. The Mail, it’ll have you know, is a feisty opponent of “change for the sake of it”.
So not only do I fear that somebody has spiked the water supply at the Kensington HQ of Associated Newspapers, the Mail’s publisher, I’m puzzled about what it is in Windows 8 that merits a “rave”.
For, apart from an outbreak of violent electromagnetic storms that zap our PCs at random, nothing is going to disrupt ordinary users as much as the design changes Microsoft wants to introduce. So detached from reality has Microsoft become, it touts every one of these disruptions as a virtue.
The idea that seized the imaginations of the bien pensant chattering classes in the Noughties – “Peak Oil” – is no longer relevant. So says the commodities team at Citigroup, and policy-makers would be wise to examine the trends they’ve identified.
“Peak Oil” is the point at which the production of conventional crude oil begins an irreversible decline. The effect of this, some say, is that scarcity-induced prices rises would require huge changes in modern industrial societies. For some, Peak Oil was the call of Mother Earth herself, requiring a return to pre-industrial lifestyles. One example of this response is the “Transition Towns” network, a middle-class phenomenon in commuter belt towns in the UK.
But in a must-read research note [PDF] issued this month (which is also implicitly critical of the industry) this is premature.
Thanks to “unconventional” oil and gas, which can be tapped thanks to technological advances, Peak Oil is dead.
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The leader of the French National Front party, Marine Le Pen, wants Hadopi scrapped and replaced with a blanket licence to compensate creative industries. The extreme right party’s freetard-friendly gambit has caused the Socialists, who also oppose Hadopi, to rethink their policies.
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A mob that’s filled with self-righteous fury isn’t very discriminating.
In 2000 an angry crowd attacked a paediatrician after he was mistakenly named as a paedophile. Last year the Olympic cyclist Chris Hoy was abused by football fans who mistook him for match referee Chris Foy. And last month, a small Scottish farm certification agency, SOPA, received torrents of abuse from ‘digital rights’ campaigners who were upset about the United States’ proposed Stop Online Piracy Act.
Once it’s got its blood boiling, the mob needs new targets. Now it’s set its sights on ACTA, an international treaty to combat counterfeiting and piracy. Rallies will take place tomorrow. ACTA lost its digital copyright provisions long ago, but the mob hasn’t noticed. Many of the claims made for ACTA are completely false.
Even Ars Technica, which fomented the anti-SOPA campaign, has felt obliged to correct the anti-ACTA myths that are circulating on social media. The website recently lamented that the internet is “awash in inaccurate anti-SOPA”, busting the myths of the anti-ACTA crusaders.
ISPs are not obliged to monitor traffic, Ars points out. ACTA contains no web-blocking provisions or graduated response regime. It won’t block generic drugs.
In fact, as I pointed out at the time, ACTA is a non-binding agreement that doesn’t, in any case, apply to countries such as the UK, which have their own IP enforcement initiatives. The passage of the Digital Economy Act in 2010 made the entire discussion moot.
I recently asked the Dark Side what they hoped to get from ACTA.
“Nothing. The trademark and counterfeiting people really need it. There’s nothing in it for us, or for any copyright holders,” one entertainment industry lawyer told me.
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It’s 2020, and a young girl is doing her homework…
“Daddy, what’s a press licence?”
“Oh, that. Well a press licence allows you to call yourself a journalist and get into official events, for official journalists.”
“What for?”
“Well you get into events held by the government or a company, or for example a football club, and can then write about them.”
“So it’s like a parking permit. But I don’t understand. Everybody is writing about everything anyway. On the internet. Why would I need a press licence?”
“Well, sometimes you need to ask somebody a question in person.”
“What for? Will they tell you the truth, then?”
“Probably not.”
“So they can give you official version of something.”
“Can’t they use the internet to do give out that official version of something?”
“Er, yes. And they do.”
“Hmm. So what if you have a question they don’t want to answer?”
“Well… I suppose you can hear the answer they don’t give you in person. Although usually that is never reported, except when it’s a really silly question and everyone has a big laugh together. That’s how we hold people to account – it’s a very important job.”
“So can people who ask awkward questions not attend?”
“Not anymore, I’m afraid.”
“I don’t understand why you need a permit? How did it happen?”
Windows Phone might be the most impressive bit of software Microsoft has produced – but it isn’t setting the world on fire. The iPhone and Android go from strength to strength – the latter proliferating so widely even Google doesn’t know how many Android systems are out there. (It can’t count the Chinese forks which don’t use any Google services and don’t phone home.)
This discrepancy puzzles people. Reviewers like WinPho a lot – it’s clean, fast, functional and forward-looking. The social media integration is very clever. Operators have a soft spot for Nokia and WP7 too, because – if for no other reason – they dislike and distrust Google and Apple even more. So what’s the problem?
Three weeks ago I raised the prospect that there may never be a third smartphone ecosystem – something upon which Nokia has bet the company. Many markets only have room for two leading players – and in the technology platform world, many have only one. On the margins the niche players are little islands. No matter how impressive WP is, if the needle doesn’t move, then it too becomes a marginal player. Ecosystems can perish more rapidly than they arise. If Windows Phone is to avoid the same fate as WebOS then the dynamic has to change.
But what might this be?
Angry copyfighters barraged a small Scottish food certification agency with abuse last week – in the belief they were protesting against hated US anti-piracy legislation.
The Scottish Organic Producers Association – whose website is at sopa.org.uk – was perplexed when it found itself on the receiving of dozens of nasty and illiterate emails.
Remarkably, nothing about the site’s design – including pictures of sheep, vegetables, Angus cattle and fruit – did anything to suggest to the furious freetards that they’d got the wrong SOPA – or that something might be not quite right.
I am going to propose something that may sound radical, but really isn’t. Legislation like SOPA ideally isn’t necessary in an ideal world, and this idea comes about through voluntary agreement. The Stop Online Piracy Act was proposed because of a tragic impasse, a lack of agreement between two powerful and deeply entrenched sides. Although one side has moral force on its side, being ‘right’ doesn’t mean it’s going to ‘win’. Like a classic game theory tragedy, both sides are losing.
To understand why I shall tell you a story. If management sages and internet gurus annoy you – it’s a story you might enjoy.
When he died in 1903, the prolific Victorian journalist and author Herbert Spencer was thought to be one of the cleverest people in the land, and England’s greatest philosopher. Such was his reputation, there was a clamour to bury him in Westminster Abbey. But in reality, Spencer was a hard-working clot, whose reputation fell more sharply and quickly than that of a disgraced fraudster.
Spencer knew all the right buzzwords, but was loathe to read past the first chapter of a book. Spencer even carried ear-plugs in case he was exposed to interesting new ideas, as he feared intellectual stimulation might keep him awake; he often inserted the ear-plugs midway through a conversation. He masked all this, and his books were phenomenally popular, because he stuck to opaque but calming generalisations. Rather than resolve a matter, his generalisations allowed him to waffle around it. (He also heaped on masses of detail to sidetrack the reader). When the novelist George Eliot complimented the old man on the lack of wrinkles on his forehead, Spencer replied that he’d never encountered anything that ever puzzled him.
Spencer may have been the Victorian Malcolm Gladwell, or Tom Peters, or Tim O’Reilly. Generalisations are a great way of avoiding looking at what’s really going on, and tackling a subject with arguments from first principles. Social media has turned this kind of showy avoidance of reality into a massive multiplayer game. Twitter is an ocean in which armies of cliches swim pass each other. You can even badge your avatar to remove any doubts in the audience about nuances in your position: ‘STOP SOPA’ being the most recent. SOPA has indeed been stopped, or fatally gutted.
While the legislation is now moribund, the underlying concerns behind SOPA haven’t gone away. No amount of bloviating is going to resolve this. The main provision of SOPA (and PIPA) is website-blocking, which has no friends here at El Reg. But SOPA will return next year, and the year after, until the issues have been tackled head on. The STOP SOPA stickers will return. It’s all avoidable and getting quite tedious.
In the Panglossian worldview of Silicon Valley, everything is perfect on the internet, it’s the best of all possible worlds, and any tinkering with this robs humanity of its last Utopian hope. This is a view of the world that actually owes much to religion, or the desire to recreate the certainty of religion. It’s faith-based, and isn’t a view grounded in reality, especially the reality of doing business. On the internet, fame may arrive quickly, but financial reward doesn’t follow. It’s the only area of business where this is true.
Humiliatingly, Nokia was forced to deny rumours last week that it was planning to break up and sell its crown jewels to Microsoft. Normally a company can remain impervious to Twitter-born gossip, particularly from a known antagonist.
Acknowledging the rumour simply gives it a chauffeured ride around the internet. But not this time: the ‘Microsoft buys Nokia’ story fulfils so many conspiracy theories, thousands of people wanted it to be true.
And the notion of Microsoft buying a hardware company and ripping up its licensing business has become much less outlandish after Google’s acquisition of Motorola’s phone business. Ah, but that was desperation, I hear you say; the Chocolate Factory had miscalculated its IP strategy catastrophically, and it had to grab what patents it could at almost any price.
But there’s a whiff of something – it isn’t desperation, more like earnest exasperation – around Microsoft’s phone business these days. Redmond has got an excellent product, for the first time, and people who have a Windows Phone love using it. But there just aren’t many of those folk around. The phones aren’t shifting. Christmas has come and gone, and while we wait for some reliable channel figures, Nokia’s flagship seems to have made almost no impact on the UK market. It’s the phone that leaves no footprints.
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