There were legitimate complaints, in the early years of file sharing, that there were no practical, legal alternatives that permitted consumers to purchase digital content. Those complaints can no longer be taken seriously. Now, it’s easy to get songs for 89 cents, albums for $5, 48-hour movie rentals for $2, endless apps for a couple bucks, access to Netflix’s vast streaming database for less than $10 a month…. Yet unauthorized and unpaid downloads continue to number in the hundreds of millions. Can it really be that less than $10 a month is still too much for access to so much content? How low, exactly, must the price point be before there is no longer a legitimate excuse for not paying it? What if that price can’t sustain the people who create the content?
People are still getting paid, with digital file sharing—the search engines that direct you to the files, the programs that enable the downloads, the ISPs that provide the bandwidth, the electric companies that power the computer. But among these winners, Lanier’s chief targets in Who Owns the Future? are what he calls the “Siren Servers,” which capture vast amounts of value that was once more evenly distributed throughout the economy, partly by preying on the willingness of many millions of people to provide content for free (or “free,” in his telling).
Lanier’s question is whether large masses of people deserve to somehow share in that value more broadly, given that it derives from their effort. It’s by now a well-worn cliché that Facebook’s hundreds of millions of users are not its customers but rather its product, a giant focus group that provides corporations with fine-grained data to parse and eyeballs for advertising. For individual Facebook users, the deal seems all right: a full-featured suite of social networking and data-hosting features at the cost of giving your data to strangers. Whether it works for society is a different question: The market value that siren servers create inevitably accrues to capital-intensive but low-employee companies, linking innovation to job destruction. (...)
His solution is, essentially, to rewind the Internet, and reverse a decision he considers momentous and destructive. For Lanier, the fundamental flaw of the Internet is that its links are not two-way—that is, by default, a link leads forward to another page, but that page does not by default contain a link back to pages that link to it. What Lanier laments is that linkbacks, trackbacks, pingbacks, and similar are not embedded in the basic technological architecture of the internet.
Two-way linking, Lanier argues, would be a key instrument of reciprocity on the Web, fostering a culture of mutually beneficial cooperation and due credit. Lanier, walking the talk, traces his idea to Ted Nelson, a network theorist who envisioned something like the Internet before it existed. The essence of network life would be linking reciprocity, Nelson believed, because only this made networking fair for all participants.
Having perceiving the inadequate distribution of wealth our digital networks have fostered, Lanier dreams of an Internet where not only are links reciprocal but so is wealth generation. In the (overlong) last section of Who Owns the Future? Lanier describes his proposal for introducing this sort of reciprocity, a system wherein micropayments are constantly shuffled between online participants as each uses another’s data. The point is to cut people who aren’t holding stock in Google in on the action. The network would have embedded within it a financial transfer system that remunerated people for their data, whether personal or creative or annotative. Two-way linking, married to a system of automatic micropayments, makes this possible. “If the system remembers where information originally comes from,” Lanier writes, “then the people who are the sources of information can be paid for it.”
Today’s pure amateurs, who never derive any money from online interactions — which must describe the large majority of internet users — would in Lanier’s system be eligible to earn when they, say, logged onto Facebook or posted to YouTube. The more views, the higher the payment. Whenever a company scrapes users’ data, the users would be remunerated, depending on how much it is used. Meanwhile, as these users read blog posts or view videos, they would automatically pay for it, though some of that cost would be subsidized through advertising and through the value that flows to them when their data is scraped by Google Analytics.
by Freddie deBoer, TNI | Read more:
Image: Found on a wall in Ljubljana. Unknown artist. 11th June 2009
