Freedom to link

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Terrific Guardian column by Jeff Jarvis.

Linking is not a privilege that the recipient of the link should control – any more than politicians should decide who may or may not quote them. The test is not whether the creator of the link charges (Murdoch’s newspapers will charge and they link). The test is whether the thing we are linking to is public. If it is public for one it should be public for all.

We in the media tend to view the internet in our own image. But the internet is not a medium. Instead, as Cluetrain Manifesto author Doc Searls argues, it is a place. Think of it as a public park. You may not be selectively kept out because of your association with a race, religion … or aggregator. “Linking,” says Bartlett [Struan Bartlett, founder of NewsNow, an aggregator that Murdoch papers are now blocking from linking to their content], “is a common public amenity.”

I fear that what is really in danger here is the doctrine of openness on which ­journalism and an informed society depend. Pertinent are the arguments around ­Google’s Streetview, which takes pictures of buildings and the people who happen to be in front of them. Some object that these photos violate their privacy. But they are in public. What they do there is public.

I understand that people caught on Streetview might not want us to see them strolling into a drug den or brothel. But if we give anyone the right to restrict our use of that image or information, then we also give the mayor the right to gag us when we want to publish a picture of him skulking into that opium parlour.

What’s public is public – that is, we, the public, have a right to observe, point to, share, and comment on it. And the internet is public.

Right on, man! (As we ageing hippies like to say.)

Now the French government is advising people to stop using IE

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Well, well. Even I’m surprised by this.

Following in the footsteps of Germany last week, France is now advising its population to use an alternative browser pending a patch for an Internet Explorer vulnerability.

The French Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) published an advisory on Friday January 15 stating “pending a patch from the publisher, CERT recommends using an alternative browser.” In the advisory Internet Explorer 7 and 8 are both listed despite Microsoft confirming the vulnerability is only exploitable on Internet Explorer 6.

Last week the German Federal Office for Security in Information Technology (BSI) issued a similary advisory urging its population to stop using IE. According to the BSI the flaw will, put simply, “perform reconnaissance and gain complete control over the compromised system.” The BSI noted that even running Internet Explorer in Protected Mode isn’t enough to stop the flaw. Microsoft issued further insight into the vulnerability this morning in a company blog posting. The software giant confirmed the exploit is only effective against Internet Explorer 6.

Wonder if French and German users will pay any attention to this.

The Balkanisation of the Internet

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Even the New York Times is catching up with the reality, as evidence by this piece in today’s online edition.

As the Internet grew, it became fragmented and linguistically diversified. It developed borders, across which it now works in different ways.

In Spain, for instance, you can share music and movies with virtual impunity; in France, doing that is likely to cost you your Internet connection.

In China, meanwhile, it may soon be nearly impossible to use Google. The company, saying the security of its e-mail had been breached in a campaign to spy on Chinese dissidents, announced last week that it would stop censoring Google.cn, its Chinese Web site, and might have to withdraw from China.

No matter what happens in the fight between Google and Beijing’s leaders, one thing seems clear: the company is not going to be able to turn the clock back to 2006. That year, Google itself helped to fracture the Internet by creating Google.cn.

The Death of the News Package

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Perceptive post by Adam Tinsworth about why newspapers have been so traumatised by the Net.

A discussion yesterday with some of the Cardiff postgraduate journalism students reminded me of one of the elements I think is missing from the paywall discussion: a really deep examination of exactly what people really paid for when they bought a print newspaper or magazine.

The reflexive journalistic answer is “news” as, after all, the clue is in the name “newspaper”. My contention, though, is that we journalists have a bias towards the news element of the publication that our readers do not share. We got into journalism to “do news”. They were buying a mix of news, features, comments, comics and crosswords that added up to a valuable package of information and entertainment in one handy portable product. And the cheaper bits of the paper to produce cross-subsidised the more expensive bits (ie: news). Oh, and the advertising paid for more of it than the cover price did…

So, in essence, we never really charged people for news. It was just part of a wider offer.

Spot on. Print newspapers are value-chains which linked unprofitable products (news) which have (or had) the capacity to attract readers with profitable activities (advertising) which earned revenues that were directly or indirectly proportional to circulation. In the old days, readers had to buy the whole package — they couldn’t have news without the ads, or vice versa.

But one of the features of the Net is that it dissolves value-chains — it enables profitable cherries to be picked off. Which is exactly what Craigslist did with classified ads, which in any event work better online than in print because they enable people to search for what they want rather than wading through columns of small newsprint.

The Net has had an analogous impact on other industries too. In the 1930s Ronald Coase showed that an important determinant of how companies developed was the transaction cost of doing things that were essential to supporting their core businesses. If the transaction costs were low, then companies outsourced the activity. If they were high, then they took it in house — and grew vertically, as it were.

The arrival of the Net radically altered that calculation. In many cases B2B transactions costs reduced, because they could be conducted online — and in many cases automated by software. As a result, vertical integration no longer looked so smart — and outsourcing became much easier to do. Thus was born what Manuel Castells calls the ‘networked enterprise’. The rest is recent history.

Mandelson and the laser

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This morning’s Observer column.

Lasers are … a critical part of our technological infrastructure, yet no one involved in the research that led to them had any inkling of what their investigations would produce. The original idea goes back to a paper Albert Einstein published in 1917 on “The Quantum Theory of Radiation” about the absorption, spontaneous emission and stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. For 40 years, stimulated emission was of absorbing interest to quantum physicists, but of little interest to anyone else – certainly to nobody in government.

Which brings us to Lord Mandelson, now in charge of all government funding of universities and academic research. He has no personal experience of research in science or technology, but, like many people whose minds are unclouded by knowledge, has strong views on these matters.

LATER: BoingBoing picked up the column (thanks, Cory) and among the comments there was a link to an interesting article which reminds us that when the first working laser was reported in 1960, it was described as “a solution looking for a problem.”

The banal network

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Travelling over the Christmas break, we had lunch one day in a cheap and cheerful eaterie in the midlands. It’s a good, non-nonsense, inexpensive carvery which, on the day we visited, was thronged with families having lunch. The first thing I noticed on our table was this card. To me, it signifies how far the Internet has come from being something weird and exotic to being positively mundane. When restaurant chains like this take it for granted that many of their (mainly working-class) clientele have a Facebook account, then you know that something’s happened.

I’m reminded of an observation that Andy Grove, then the CEO of Intel, made in 1999. “In five years’ time”, he said, “companies that aren’t Internet companies won’t be companies at all”. He was widely ridiculed for this prediction. Was he really suggesting that every fast-food joint and shoeshop would have to have online offerings? No: what he was trying to convey was the idea that, by 2004, the Internet would have become a utility, like electricity or the telephone or mains water. Most companies do not, for example, generate their own electricity. But if they’re not on the electricity grid (or the telephone network) then they’re at a severe disadvantage. So every company would, Grove thought, have to come to terms with the new reality of Internet-as-utility.

As it happens, he was a bit optimistic about the time it would take. But this Toby Carvery ad shows how perceptive he was.

Apple with Balsamic vinegar

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We went to lunch at one of our favourite restaurants the other day and, before ordering, were given the standard board with bread plus butter and Balsamic vinegar in olive oil. This led us to wonder if the management knew we were slaves of OS X. Purists will argue that it must be coincidence — it lacks the mandatory bite out of the right-hand-side of the image. Still…

What the Google spat reveals about China

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James Fallows — who recently returned to the US after a stint in China, whence he used to send very perceptive dispatches — has an interesting perspective in The Atlantic about the Google decision.

He thinks it represents a significant moment — “Significant for Google; and while only marginally significant for developments inside China potentially very significant for China’s relations with the rest of the world.”

In terms of its impact on Chinese Internet users, Fallows thinks that it’s not such a big deal.

In terms of information flow into China, this decision probably makes no real difference at all. Why? Anybody inside China who really wants to get to Google.com — or BBC or whatever site may be blocked for the moment — can still do so easily, by using a proxy server or buying (for under $1 per week) a VPN service. Details here. For the vast majority of Chinese users, it’s not worth going to that cost or bother, since so much material is still available in Chinese from authorized sites. That has been the genius, so far, of the Chinese “Great Firewall” censorship system: it allows easy loopholes for anyone who might get really upset, but it effectively keeps most Chinese Internet users away from unauthorized material.

The real significance, he argues, is that it may signify that China is entering its own “Bush-Cheney era”.

There are also reasons to think that a difficult and unpleasant stage of China-U.S. and China-world relations lies ahead. This is so on the economic front, as warned about here nearly a year ago with later evidence here. It may prove to be so on the environmental front — that is what the argument over China’s role in Copenhagen is about. It is increasingly so on the political-liberties front, as witness Vaclav Havel’s denunciation of the recent 11-year prison sentence for the man who is in many ways his Chinese counterpart, Liu Xiaobo. And if a major U.S. company — indeed, Google has been ranked the #1 brand in the world — has concluded that, in effect, it must break diplomatic relations with China because its policies are too repressive and intrusive to make peace with, that is a significant judgment.

[…]

In a strange and striking way there is an inversion of recent Chinese and U.S. roles. In the switch from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, the U.S. went from a president much of the world saw as deliberately antagonizing them to a president whose Nobel Prize reflected (perhaps desperate) gratitude at his efforts at conciliation. China, by contrast, seems to be entering its Bush-Cheney era. For Chinese readers, let me emphasize again my argument that China is not a “threat” and that its development is good news for mankind. But its government is on a path at the moment that courts resistance around the world. To me, that is what Google’s decision signifies.

This echoes something that Mark Anderson has been saying for ages — now reprinted on his blog:

Too often, today, sloppy thinkers and Western optimists assume that China is just a Big America, or a Big Vietnam, or a Fast India – or their Next Big Business Partner.

Wrong. At a time when the world thinks the communist model has been proved obsolete, China remains a communist country. In fact, under the current leader, Hu Jintao, human rights in China have recently suffered and are now in serious decline, according to Amnesty International-USA, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch, and others.

China has tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of human censors monitoring citizen clicks and comments on the China government–controlled Internet. When my friend’s teenage daughter (a U.S. citizen) taught English there last year, police came to her apartment and grilled her about specific computer entries she had made. When one of Australia’s top mining firms, Rio Tinto, refused to allow China’s Chinalco to double its ownership interest last year (to 18%), China arrested local CEO (and Australian citizen) Stern Hu and three managers, who remain in jail today, under espionage charges. China denies any connection. In politics, thought, and business, China remains a police state.

We all refer to China as “China” now, as though it’s just One of the Gang, like “Ohio” or “Denmark”; after all, it’s a member of the G7, right? Just another market economy finding its way in the global river of events —

No, it’s not. And it isn’t in the G7. In fact, it isn’t even part of the G8, which includes Russia.

So now ask yourself: When is the last time you called Communist China, Communist China?

You’d better get used to it. There is no indication that the Chinese Communist Party has any intention of giving up any power at all, or of changing its power structure. In fact, discussion of anything political is basically off limits inside China; it is not done. Ah, you heard that there were some small moves toward shadow property rights in China? Sorry, that move has recently been reversed.

Mark goes on to itemise what he sees as the main tenets of Chinese policy. In his (bleak) view, they are:

1. Steal Intellectual Property.

2. Use Slave Labor Rates to Become the Low-Cost Producer of All Goods and Services.

3. Sell Stolen IP Back As Global Exports.

4. Industrial Policy: Subsidize Key Industries.

5. Prevent (or Restrict) Unwanted Imports.

6. Use Currency Manipulation to provide artificial aid to your export companies.

7. Price for Export, Suppress Domestic Consumption, and use domestic savings to drive the above policies.

8. Create the Appearance of Free and Fair Trade, Without the Fact.

9. Encourage Foreign Direct Investment – But Don’t Allow Controlling Ownership.

These are just the headlines — you need to read the full post to get the detail.

Google, China and staying on message

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Just before 6pm yesterday I had a phone call from the Comment Desk of the (London) Times. Would I be interested in writing an OpEd piece about the Google business and how it shows that attempts to censor the Internet are doomed? I replied that I wished that were true, but that, sadly, it isn’t, and that the moral of the Google furore is that determined governments can effectively censor the Net. I’d be happy to write a piece explaining this, I said. “Oh”, replied my caller, “that’s very interesting. I need to go back to my editor to discuss it. I’ll phone back later.”

Needless to say, he didn’t. But this morning the paper ran a rather good piece by George Walden arguing that Google was right to do the original deal, and is right to threaten to quit now, and expressing the hope that the Chinese will reach an accommodation with the company. Somehow, that seems like a faint hope. And if the Chinese do decide to talk to Google, then we will know that something has really changed in the Middle Kingdom.

LATER: Just to underscore the point I was trying to make to the Times guy, the New York Times this morning reports that:

Google’s declaration that it would stop cooperating with Chinese Internet censorship and consider shutting down its operations in China ricocheted around the world on Wednesday. But in China itself, the news was heavily censored.

Some big Chinese news portals initially carried a short dispatch on Google’s announcement, but that account soon tumbled from the headlines, and later reports omitted Google’s references to “free speech” and “surveillance.”

The only government response came later in the day from Xinhua, the official news agency, which ran a brief item quoting an anonymous official who was “seeking more information on Google’s statement that it could quit China.”