[iwar] [fc:Commercialization.May.Limit.Internet]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-12-27 21:32:13
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2001 21:32:13 -0800 (PST)
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Commercialization May Limit Internet

12/25/2001 6:00 AM EST

By ANICK JESDANUN 

Shannon Burnett's unofficial Web site for "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" fans
used to offer video clips and insights into plot and characters.

No longer. Corporate lawyers took care of that with a complaint of copyright
violation. Burnett removed the material, though she believed she had legal
grounds for using them.

"You look at the fact that this is 20th Century Fox," Burnett said. "I'm a
25-year-old married mother of two. I don't have what it takes to go up
against something like that."

The episode last summer drove one more stake through the Internet's
noncommercial heart.

Big corporations have a significant and growing presence on the Internet. In
March, just 14 companies controlled 60 percent of users' online time, down
from 110 companies two years earlier, Jupiter Media Metrix found.

As the Internet becomes more commercialized, companies are able to use the
courts, trademarks and copyrights, proprietary technology and deep corporate
pockets to control what Internet users do and say, threatening the openness
that made the Net unique.

Policy decisions and technological developments in the next year and beyond
could give big business even greater power in the online world.

"Clearly when the community did not toss spammers off the face of the earth,
it was a lost cause at that point," said computer scientist Ed Krol,
referring to senders of commercial mass-mailers.

Krol, who wrote one of the first guides to the Internet, knew it intimately
in the early days when it was a place for researchers at universities and
governments to talk about their professions, hobbies and other interests
with little interference from lawyers or corporate executives.

After the National Science Foundation lifted commercial restrictions in
1991, companies like Amazon.com opened up storefronts on the Net. America
Online flooded mailboxes with promotional disks and brought millions of
newcomers online.

Today, the Internet as most people know it is a world of pop-up ads and
online registration forms, a world where your credit card serves as your
passport.

Not that commercialization is necessarily bad.

"What you have now is this incredibly exciting place, where people can
learn, teach, shop, improve their health and stay abreast of activities,"
said Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of
America.

Even though a few companies now dominate, creating tensions with
noncommercial interests, Microsoft Corp. general counsel Brad Smith said
more diverse content is out there and being viewed regularly, made possible
by corporate-driven technologies.

The Internet's pioneers never intended to restrict commerce. The
architecture was designed to be topic-neutral, meaning data packets are
handled the same way whether they are commercial or noncommercial.

That neutrality permitted noncommercial innovations like the Web, as well as
commercial developments like instant messaging and e-commerce.

The problem comes when policies, laws and technologies are overlaid on that
framework and allowed to chip away at the Net's neutrality, said Lawrence
Lessig, a Stanford University law professor.

"There is a role for commercialism," Lessig said. "The concern is how the
commercial interests might want to change the features of the Internet to
better protect themselves."

Soon after Hollywood studios discovered the Internet, their lawyers went
after unofficial fan sites.

Some online materials, such as downloads of complete episodes, clearly cross
the line. But disputes are often over gray areas - snippets or summaries -
that courts rarely get to resolve because fans back down first.

Internet lawyer Jorge Contreras acknowledges that Web sites can be boring
when stripped of images, sounds and video. But like it or not, he said, the
law as written favors the studios.

The entertainment industry won a few key lawsuits this year.

Music distributors forced Napster's music-sharing service offline. Movie
studios also won an injunction against a site that linked to software for
undoing copy protections in DVDs.

Trademark holders won the rights to several ".com" domain names, including a
site meant to criticize entertainment giant Vivendi Universal. They also got
favorable registration procedures for new domain suffixes such as ".info"
and ".name," though the latter was supposed to be for individuals only.

Meanwhile, the busiest sites are increasingly run by a handful of companies,
giving them greater ability to control what users read, view and say. By
running the message boards and chat rooms, such sites can delete unpopular
viewpoints or reveal identities of anonymous critics.

As well, technologies for digital-rights management promise to restrict what
users can do with information they buy. The newly launched industry-backed
MusicNet service won't let customers transfer songs to portable players, and
tunes expire after 30 days.

As cable modems grow in popularity, Internet content and access are
increasingly controlled by the same company - the cable provider. Add to
that emerging technologies for giving preferential treatment to certain
types of data, such as video.

Jeff Chester, executive director for the Center for Digital Democracy, fears
the combination could one day let cable companies restrict access to
competitors and give preference to their sites and applications they favor.

Likewise, wireless service providers can spotlight preferred partners.

Emerging services like Microsoft's .Net could give companies even greater
control over names, credit card, personal schedules and other information,
as they would be centralized under a proprietary system.

The closed systems are "not consistent with the spirit in which the Internet
was born," said Vint Cerf, who led the team the developed the Net's
nonproprietary framework, called TCP/IP. "On the other hand, I'm pragmatic.
The Internet has to pay for itself. Otherwise it wouldn't work anymore."

Harvard University law professor Jonathan Zittrain says the Internet's
newcomers may welcome the centralization, just as vacationers may prefer the
closed environment of Disneyland over the open but unstructured Woodstock.

Plenty of noncommercial content still exists - though it can be hard to
find.

While Verizon's wireless Internet service has prominent links to MSNBC, ABC
News and The New York Times - it doesn't offer the alternative AlterNet. And
many search engines, including powerhouse Yahoo, give better billing to
sites that pay them.

"This is the last remaining communications medium that allows the small
person to participate," said Barbara Simons, past president of the
Association for Computing Machinery. "To lose that would be a great
tragedy."

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