Douglas Rushkoff :The AOL and Time Warner merger was doomed from the start

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Douglas Rushkoff :The AOL and Time Warner merger was doomed from the start

Typically sane piece by someone who really understands the Net. Excerpt:

“When AOL bought Time Warner, the New York Times asked me to write a comment piece. “What does it all mean?” my assigning editor asked.

What I wrote was that AOL’s purchase of Time Warner heralded the end of the dotcom bubble. AOL was cashing in its casino chips. And just like the gambler who trades in his coloured plastic disks for real cash, AOL’s Steve Case understood that his run was over and that it was time to trade in his stock certificates for those of a company that had genuine assets.

The New York Times refused to run the piece. They told me I was misreading the landscape to such an extent that for them to publish such a view would be irresponsible. See, all the experts – at least all the experts the Times was listening to – believed that the AOL purchase of Time Warner indicated “new” media’s domination of “old” media. Interactivity would take over. Time Warner’s only hope of getting in the game was to be absorbed by a new media company. ..”

Life in a Googlefish bowl

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Life in a Googlefish bowl

What are the long-term implications of a search engine as powerful as Google? For one thing, people can find out an awful lot about you — including things you thoughtlessly posted to a web site aeons ago when the Web was young. “Much of that kind of information used to be protected by “practical obscurity”: barriers arising from the time and inconvenience involved in collecting the information. Now those barriers are falling as old online-discussion postings, wedding registries and photos from school performances are becoming centralized in a searchable form on the Internet. ” [ More…]

Jonathan Zittrain on how filtering for spam etc. undermines the E2E principle

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Jonathan Zittrain on how filtering for spam etc. undermines the E2E principle
NEWS.COM piece.

“Saudi Arabia, for example, is quite open about the fact that all network traffic going into and out of the kingdom is routed through a central farm of proxy servers. Instead intermediaries could do this so long as they can be enticed–or coerced–to apply exceptions to the end-to-end rule of “whatever this data is, help get it to where it’s going.”

Documenting the new crop of discerning Net couriers among the old-time end-to-enders isn’t easy. Any number of problems might prevent someone from reaching a requested Web page or other Internet resource, including network congestion, misconfigured servers or broken routers.

How, then, can you know when a blockage is due to the explicit filtering of content somewhere within the network at someone else’s initiative? To complicate matters, filtering can take place anywhere along the line that extends from one’s own computer to one’s ISP to intermediate carriers to the destination’s ISP to the destination server itself. ”

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Paul Andrews: “What happened to .NET? Microsoft’s flagship strategy for ‘any time, anywhere computing from any device’ has sunk like a stone. By now we were supposed to be seeing initial .NET applications, but the new rallying cry seems to be for Palladium, a security initiative that has met with the same skepticism and resistance from the developer community that .NET inspired. At its worst, Palladium looks to be a sop to Hollywood and its efforts to control digital content.” [Scripting News]