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 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 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: > 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 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 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) <> 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 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 ******************************