Copy Link
Add to Bookmark
Report
Netizens-Digest Volume 1 Number 352
Netizens-Digest Tuesday, January 25 2000 Volume 01 : Number 352
Netizens Association Discussion List Digest
In this issue:
[netz] interesting article from observer on aol/time warner merger
Re: [netz] interesting article from observer on aol/time warner merger
[netz] FWD from IFWP mailing list
[netz] Re: FWD from IFWP
[netz] Governments trying to turn everyone into netcriminals not netizens
Re: [netz] Governments trying to turn everyone into netcriminals not netizens
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2000 07:35:00 -0500 (EST)
From: ronda@panix.com
Subject: [netz] interesting article from observer on aol/time warner merger
I am reposting this from the cyberurbanity list with the introduction by
MichaelP as it is an interesting recognition that netizens need rich
and diverse discussion to flourish rather than corporate controlled
narrow content brought to us by the few powerful entities that are
trying to make the Internet into their own commercial form of single
network:
Following is the post iby MichaelP:
- -----------------------
> MichaelP <papadop@peak.org> wrote:
>[I wrote this prologue because of my involvement with one particular
>community-owned radio station - if that doesn't mean anything outside the
>U$ context please read the main piece. MichaelP]
>It used to be said that "Content is king" and that it didn't much matter
>how content reached its audience. But what's now much more clear is that
>the distribution method is paramount - setting up the pipeline is what
>matters, and that what reaches the audience through the pipeline is
>irrelevant EXCEPT THAT WHEN THE PIPELINE CONTROLLER ALSO CONTROLS THE
>CONTENT.
>I wish I could say that our community stations will survive as long as
>they have the right to broadcast. And just as we seem to be reaching the
>point of being able to generate our own news content from open internet
>sources, along comes this Time Warner/AOL merger. For me this poses the
>threat that our ability to use the internet freely will soon be gone.
>Do we need to think about forming an underground internet?
>Just some thoughts -- Here's a brit piece about the proposed merger.
>Cheers
>Michael
===============================
THE OBSERVER (London) Sunday January 16, 2000
Special report: Time Warner/AOL merger
Andrew Marr
Is the future big? One day companies like Time-Warner/AOL may be give us
everything we want, but not what we need.
=========================
Here is the vision, or the nightmare: one single mega-corp, an American
giant, which delivers down its cable, to your own home, every intellectual
morsel (it thinks) you need - the films, sit-coms and documentaries it has
made; the news it makes; the information and e-mail services it controls;
the chat-rooms it monitors; the celebrities it has made famous. Enough
moving pictures and words to last a thousand lifetimes.
This is the fantasy of total control, the dream of domination, that has
allowed the world's largest ever merger last week, the coming-together of
Time Warner, with its world news from CNN, its 5,700 films, its Time
publishing empire, and 120 million magazine readers, its TV shows such as
Friends and ER and its cable channels; and America Online, the world's
biggest Internet provider.
To understand quite what these corporate giants are up to, you need to
remember that super-fast cable links will make what we now call the
Internet seem as limited as the first hand-cranked telephones now look in
the world of mobile telephony. Before long, you will not only be able to
carry the Internet around with you on handsets, but your home will be able
to receive huge quantities of films and words through high-speed cable or
broadband links, 24 hours a day. There will be no need to hook up, no
wait, no dial tone.
Thus, within days of the new century beginning, some of the most familiar
cultural divisions of the twentieth century already look as if they are
starting to blur, to fuzz at the edges. Telephone companies? Television?
Radio networks? News companies? Entertainment companies? The Internet
itself, as a separate thing? All these categories are swimming into one
another through the logic of corporate mergers and the tech nologies of
voice recognition, broadband, faster cable and webcasting.
Before you feel your head swim, recall that this is therefore, above all,
a political matter. The super-company will be able, in theory, to offer
you a kind of complete media bubble, an all-in-one service that
anticipates your preferences and gives you what you want, when you want
it. Or what you think you want. For this is extraordinary power and, if
this capitalist fantasy was realised, it would only start with news and
entertainment. Your provider of laughter and of glimpses at the outside
world would soon become your banker, or a good friend of your banker. Its
advertisers would be your suppliers.
Its world-view would, no doubt, look varied - even the Murdoch empire,
running from Bart Simpson to William Rees-Mogg, is pretty eclectic in
style. For the new super-company, there would be no aggressive ban on
other sources of infotainment. There would be no need. Its perpetual
household bubble would be just thick enough to make it a bother to go
elsewhere. The convenience of a single huge supplier, a hypermarket of the
imagination, and the cross-promotion that allows, would keep rivals out,
huddled in the obscure shacks on the wrong side of the tracks. AOL's Steve
Case has virtually admitted as much.
Nor should we assume that governments would be alarmed by the emergence of
the media/entertainment/commerce super-company. In some ways, politicians
would like them for making life simpler. They would be easier to cut deals
with. Their products would be sanitised and their political views would be
predictable. Already, AOL faces a vociferous hostile alliance (see
www.aolsucks.org for instance) accusing it of censorship, a row that
became white-hot last September when the company kicked the American Civil
Liberties Union off its sites. The more the Net is in the hands of a few
giant outfits, the less anarchy, the more control, the easier for
political establishments everywhere.
This, of course, is the utter negative of the world the Internet pioneers
hoped to create, as unlike the original vision as Microsoft's Seattle is
unlike the simple farming economy the first Western settlers dreamed of as
they jolted down the Oregon Trail. The Net offered, and still offers, the
ideal of individual anti-corporate power, a world-wide wash of free
information, serendipity and random friendship.
So it is hardly surprising that, after the corporate American
back-slapping, thinking America quickly signalled alarm. Consumer groups
started talking of 'a giant media and Internet dictatorship'. Writing for
the Internet magazine Salon , the former Netscape employee Jamie Zawinski
argued that 'this should worry people in the same way and for the same
reasons that the sheer size of the media corporations should worry them.
This kind of vertical integration makes it harder for the public to hear
anything but the corporate party line...'
And Mark Crispin Miller, of New York University, argued bitterly:
'Conflict of interest is now so widespread that the phrase almost has no
meaning any longer. AOL will now have every reason to cram its offerings
with Time Warner product. AOL will tend to guide us toward sites that
feature the latest Warner Brothers release, the TV shows and the movies
that Warner Brothers produces...' And another commentator chipped in that
'content may be king, but access to the home is king-maker'.
Some readers may be wondering by now how much all this affects them - a
column about US corporate mergers attacked by US liberal critics. First,
we live in an Atlantic culture. Second, when it comes to the really
powerful media influences, Britain's monopoly laws are the monopoly laws
that Washington chooses. Here, we have comparatively tiny media companies
struggling to merge, to grow from minnows to little trout. Even the BBC is
small compared to the killer-pike breeding on Wall Street.
But this is not an inevitable 'force of history' event. Every time, so
far, that some government, group or company has dreamed of total control,
and every time thinkers have wailed that this is The Future, then The
Future has fallen apart. This time, a day after ecstatically hailing the
AOL-Time Warner merger as 'a marriage made in heaven', Wall Street
stripped $30 billion off the companies' joint value - about a seventh of
their value, which is some going for a 24-hour second thought. Why? Partly
because companies all have their own cultures, and Time Warner is already
a ramshackle empire. Case looked like a tubby, cold-eyed predator in a
feeding frenzy as he embraced Gerald Levin of Time Warner. The financial
world concurs that, in reality, smaller, junior AOL is devouring the more
senior company. But this may be a hard meal to digest: corporate history
is littered with takeovers that failed to deliver.
Nor have either governments or consumers been quite as easy to manipulate
as the control fantasists hoped. Microsoft, which had seemed too big for
the ordinary rules, has been stopped in its tracks by government lawyers.
Monsanto has been gutted by the consumer revolt across Europe. Murdoch's
notorious boast that British national newspapers would soon be reduced to
just three titles - the Times, the Daily Mail and the Sun - looks, today,
merely quaint.
Keeping the Internet open and free matters. The more easy, star-struck
capital, and converging technologies allow super-companies to emerge, the
more we need democracy to fight for variety and fair markets. And we need
it for one reason above all - the single glaring omission in this article
so far, the essence without which all the excitement about share prices,
mergers, corporate strategy and technological innovation means nothing at
all: content. We need variety and danger to get a better, livelier social
conversation - in short, to make ourselves more intelligent.
We can produce faster, brighter, neater, cheaper ways of delivering
pictures and words. But outside science we cannot, it seems, produce any
great new stories, works of musical or dramatic genius, fresh social or
political thinking or unexpected insights. Our thinking and story-telling
are getting as grey and slow as our technology is fast. And so it will
stay as long as the corporate giants lumber across our dreams.
=================================
*** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest
in receiving the included information for research and educational
purposes. ***
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2000 12:24:48 -04
From: kerryo@ns.sympatico.ca (Kerry Miller)
Subject: Re: [netz] interesting article from observer on aol/time warner merger
Michael Moore <TVNAtFans@aol.com> wrote:
"Ten years ago tonight, just three days after Time Inc. officially
merged with Warner Bros., Warners opened "Roger & Me"
nationwide on over 300 screens (eventually placing it in over
1,300 theatres).
On Monday of this week, Time Warner announced they will
merge with America Online, creating the largest corporate
merger ever.
"Back in 1990, when the Warner Bros. first merged with Time, a
reporter asked me what I thought of it, considering the
anti-corporate nature of my film and the obvious irony of who
was distributing it. I said then what I will say now about this
week's news:
"In a democracy, it is dangerous to have The Few control what
The Many will see and read. The electorate is able to come to
the best decisions when they are presented with ALL the
alternatives and ALL the information available to them. Less
knowledge -- i.e. ignorance -- insures that bad decisions will be
made. The strength of a free society is maintained by the
diversity of voices and the free flow of information. If you limit
that flow, if you restrict that access to knowledge and ideas and
points of view, then you make the society less free. "
[...]
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 00:35:50 -0500 (EST)
From: jrh@umcc.ais.org (Jay Hauben)
Subject: [netz] FWD from IFWP mailing list
The following appeared on the IFWP mailing list. It seems appropriate for
this list as well. I also do must of my browsing using lynx as do many
other people. What a mess for us.
> Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains
> Organization: Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma
> Subject: Need to Register Domains by Template
> From: wb5agz@dc.cis.okstate.edu (Martin McCormick)
> Message-ID: <Iv4h4.8$nc.72@news.onenet.net>
> Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 21:00:24 GMT
> NNTP-Posting-Host: 139.78.100.219
> X-Trace: news.onenet.net 948229224 139.78.100.219 (Tue, 18 Jan 2000
> 15:00:24 CST)
> NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 15:00:24 CST
> Xref: ns3.vrx.net comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains:9863
I am the technical contact for Oklahoma State University. Every
few months or so, someone wants to register a domain for an organization
that is supported here but is not part of the university such as a .com,
.org, or .net domain. In the past, I always just got the critical
information such as names, addresses, and billing contact information,
added any information of ours such as our DNS addresses and my name as I
am usually the technical contact for any domains supported on our name
server, and filled in the template to send off to Internic.
I have now been asked to register a new domain which will be done
under the new system with all the private companies. No problem, right?
Well there is a slight problem. I use lynx as a web browser
because those of us who are blind have pretty good luck with lynx on
well-behaved web sites. The sites I have visited so far could write a
manual on how to break lynx. Is there any of those companies who will
take an Internic-style registration template via ordinary email so that I
can still do what should be a simple task without having to do Heaven
knows what to make things work?
Martin McCormick 405 744-7572 Stillwater, OK OSU Center for Computing and
Information services Data Communications Group
- -------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 11:22:58 -0500 (EST)
From: Jay Hauben <jay@dorsai.org>
Subject: [netz] Re: FWD from IFWP
There were two follow ups on the Discuss list of ISOC-NY to the post about
text browsers and domain registration:
> From owner-discuss@isoc-ny.org Fri Jan 21 13:18:07 2000
> From: Lucia Ruedenberg Wright <lucia@lrw.net>
On Fri, 21 Jan 2000, Jay Hauben wrote:
> The following appeared on the IFWP mailing list. It seems appropriate for
> this list as well. I also do must of my browsing using lynx as do many
> other people. What a mess for us.
this is a shameful development.
Lucia
> > Subject: Need to Register Domains by Template
> > From: wb5agz@dc.cis.okstate.edu (Martin McCormick)
>
>[snip intro]
> Well there is a slight problem. I use lynx as a web browser
> because those of us who are blind have pretty good luck with lynx on
> well-behaved web sites. The sites I have visited so far could write a
> manual on how to break lynx. Is there any of those companies who will
> take an Internic-style registration template via ordinary email so that I
> can still do what should be a simple task without having to do Heaven
> knows what to make things work?
- ------------------------------------------------------------------>
From: dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)
<<this is a shameful development.
Lucia
>>
But an expected one, given that everyone is apparently trained to
like glitzy graphics rather than typing.
If I see another site that makes me select from a long menu for the
state I am in, probably needing to scroll because NY is far down the list,
I will scream.
Not to mention being asked for the expiration date of a credit card, and
finding some idiot Web programmer who thinks I will find it easier to
scroll down two wretched menus to click on October and 2001, rather than
type in 1001 which is what it says on the credit card.
- --------------------------------------------------------------------_
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 14:40:43 -0500 (EST)
From: ronda@panix.com
Subject: [netz] Governments trying to turn everyone into netcriminals not netizens
Have those on the Netizens list seen the news about police
invading the home of the Norwegian teenager and arresting him?
The Internet has been built as a resource sharing system, not
an exclusive you keep off system.
To claim that the actions of this teenager are criminal
shows that the activity of government/s on the
side of the big corporate entities against those who are trying
to have the Internet as a means of sharing resources is a serious
inbalance.
Why don't the companies create their own private networks for
their exclusive proprietary products, rather than trying
to have the government/s take the Internet which was built with
so much public and contributory efforts for the companies.
There is no protection for the public's right to the Internet,
only for those who are trying to take the Internet away from
the public.
This doesn't build citizenship nor netizenship.
And it was Norway that was important in the early research
to build the Internet.
Clearly there is a serious problem that isn't being acknowledged,
if teenagers are being considered international outlaws by the
powers-that-be because they want some rights on the Internet as
well as the powerful corporate entities that feel they own everything
and can act at will with no regard for the rights of any citizen
any where in the world.
Following is the article that was online about the raid on the
teenagers house.
Ronda
- -----------------------
from http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/d121152.htm
[INLINE] Forside / news in english Scandinavian Online
Teenager Jon Johansen is at the center of international controversy.
Police have raided the Larvik home of a teen charged by some of the
world's biggest entertainment companies with ripping off their music
and films. The boy broke the code protecting videos and CDs.
Entertainment industry giants including Sony, Universal, MGM and
Warner have sued the 16-year-old Norwegian, accusing him of hacking
his way through the codes meant to protect their products from
downloading.
They also charged he then publicized the code on the Internet. The
teenager published the code on the home page of his father's company.
His father is also charged.
Special police units and prosecutors thus staged a surprise raid on
the teen's home to secure evidence. They then questioned him for
several hours on Monday.
The charges carry fines and prison terms of up to two years.
(Aftenposten)
Annonse Annonse
Utgiver: Aftenposten A/S, Oslo, Norge. Telefon +47 22 86 30 00. Alt
innhold er opphavsrettslig beskyttet. © Aftenposten.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 12:28:44 -0800 (PST)
From: Greg Skinner <gds@best.com>
Subject: Re: [netz] Governments trying to turn everyone into netcriminals not netizens
> Have those on the Netizens list seen the news about police
> invading the home of the Norwegian teenager and arresting him?
> Why don't the companies create their own private networks for
> their exclusive proprietary products, rather than trying
> to have the government/s take the Internet which was built with
> so much public and contributory efforts for the companies.
The kid broke the law. What he did would have been illegal even
on a private commercial network.
------------------------------
End of Netizens-Digest V1 #352
******************************
