Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Internet

How Internet Monopolies Are Destroying the Web

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On December 6, 2017

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The actual enemy of entrenched interests is not the right, or “Russia” (a country with half the GDP of California), it is the left, who are the people who would tax them and break their power.

Thus, it is not surprising that when Google decided to attack “fake news” they hit the left.

The estimated declines in traffic generated by Google searches for news sites are striking:

I have noticed declines in my own search traffic, though I’m a bit player.

The left, in general, favors high tax rates and either very strict regulation of large corporations or breaking them up. Google, certainly, needs to be broken up, at the least back into its constituent parts (i.e., sever the search engine from everything else.)

But Google is a particularly bad actor: For years it has been evident to everyone in the space that they are hoovering up most of ad revenue. In the early 00s, until 2006/7 it was fairly easy for relatively small websites to make money from ads. That went away as Google cornered much of the market and it’s only gotten worse since then.

Google’s relationship to web sites is almost identical to railroads and farmers in the 19th and early 20th century: Without railroad shipping, farmer’s products couldn’t make it to market, so the railroads set rates that maximized their profit, driving many farms into bankruptcy and keeping most in penury. They took virtually all of the profit.

For smaller, and even mediums-sized web sites Google (and Facebook, to a lesser degree) are in the same position. They determine who gets traffic, especially to newer web sites without established audiences. Because without them you get little to nothing, they get the money.

That means, in effect, that Google and Facebook and other similar companies, exist by taking away the value of other people’s labor–value without which they would have no business or profits. The web’s content comes first; Google’s “finding” it comes second.

There is a lot of gloating in the tech world about how good they are with information, but the basic information problem has not been fixed. Finding what you want or need or what would suit you best is really hard when there are so many options, and no one has figured out how to do it.

This is, at least in part, a matter of incentives. It is in Google’s interest to match you to whatever site benefits Google most, not the site that benefits you most. Just as Amazon doesn’t show everyone the cheapest alternatives for their search (if you can pay more, why show you cheap?), Google wants to make money for Google, and serving you is only important to the extent it makes them money.

As Google has gotten older, it feels as if their results have gotten worse, because they are now in a monopoly situation in most Western countries. People use Google to search, there is no major alternative.

Unregulated monopolies are bad. Unregulated, bundled monopolies are worse (as in, Google and Facebook buying up other market dominant firms, like YouTube).

This problem, combined with the FCC getting rid of network neutrality, is going to destroy a ton of livelihoods (no, not such money as I get from donors; I’m grandfathered in). It has already made the net far less interesting. Every year more stuff is on the Web, yeah, but it’s more mainstream commercial stuff. The weird web of the 90s and early 00s withers.

And it withers because it is in the interest of almost every big actor, from Facebook to Google to the major ISPs, that it does so. They don’t all have identical interests, no, but they all want a Web where either everyone pays a toll, or you have to go to them to get a specific type of content.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Oppressive Precedents Used Against Nazis Will Be Used Against the Left

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On August 17, 2017

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All right, so the Daily Stormer got kicked off GoDaddy, went to a new hosting company, and then got kicked off that one. Victory? Even the guy who did it isn’t happy he did it.

I am reminded of when PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard all decided to stop accepting payments for Wikileaks, after they published Collateral Murder. (I know many on the left now hate Wikileaks, but at the time these leaks were considered beneficial to the left wing, since it hit a Republican war–Iraq.)

There’s no question that the Daily Stormer amounts to Nazis, I’m not even going to say “neo,” but if you think this won’t be used against the left, well…

NY Governor Cuomo isn’t a Nazi, but he is one the biggest assholes around, having conspired to make sure that Democrats didn’t take control of the NY State legislature, for example, among many other strategies.

Yeah. Look, historically, censorship laws and so on have always hit the left harder than the right. Any law which can be used against the left will be used against the left.

Protecting the rights of people you hate is the price of protecting your own rights. If you take rights from Nazis, you will be taking them from yourself. At the very least, be sure they are specifically targeted at Nazis, similar to Germany’s laws. If they aren’t, they will be used against you.

As for private power: Concentration of power into a few oligopolies has made private actors able to effectively censor with as much efficacy as government. When Google decided to hit “fake news” somehow that meant that the World Social Website got hit hard.

Concentrated private powers that censor are almost as bad as governments that censor. In some ways, it is worse, because we pretend that places like Facebook, Google, and Twitter are not commons, but private, and thus grant them immunity from things like the first amendment, even though they control most of what people see.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Something Genuinely Good the Internet Has Allowed…

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On August 2, 2017

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…is Sci-Hub, which hosts scholarly articles. SciHub, to be clear, is illegal in the US and other countries.

Sci-Hub can instantly provide access to more than two-thirds of all scholarly articles, an amount that Himmelstein says is “even higher” than he anticipated. For research papers protected by a paywall, the study found Sci-Hub’s reach is greater still, with instant access to 85 percent of all papers published in subscription journals. For some major publishers, such as Elsevier, more than 97 percent of their catalog of journal articles is being stored on Sci-Hub’s servers—meaning they can be accessed there for free.

Science, and scholarship in general, is supposed to be about the open sharing of information. What’s happened instead is that journals were bought up by a few companies, and access was made expensive. Getting a single article usually costs between $10 and $15 in my experience, and most are behind paywalls. University libraries have some access, though few can pay for all journals, but not everyone has access to university accounts.

(This is similar to accessing, say, Statistics Canada, which is also behind a paywall for most things. This limits who can effectively research Canadian subjects. Full access costs thousands of dollars. One can imagine what effect that might have on not just who uses the info, but in what sort of research is done with the information.)

Again, Sci-Hub is illegal. It is also entirely in the spirit of science and scholarship. Information doesn’t want to be free, but scholarly information should be, both because scholarship advances more quickly when everyone has access, and because (normative statement) everyone should have access to scholarly and scientific information.

Also, given that peer reviewers are not paid for by journals and that most research is done with public money, and, well, the internet now exists, the argument for subscription journals is weak. They restrict access to information in a way which is bad for researchers (who usually want their work read), as well.

So. This is one of the things the internet has done that is truly good. Note that it is illegal.

(Meanwhile Russia has made using VPNs and proxies illegal, which is far more important and harmful than expelling a few diplomats…well, as long as expelling those diplomats isn’t one of the steps towards a US/Russian war.)

Code is NOT law, but sometimes people can use it to the do the right thing.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

How Terrible People Normalize Injustice

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On April 25, 2016

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There is a proposal to raise jail times for web piracy from two to ten years in the UK.

The key phrase in the above piece is “…other serious offenses, including rape and rioting.”

So, the writer, Matt Burgess, is saying web piracy is a serious offense, akin to rape.

Do not pretend a professional writer (and his editor) don’t know what they’re doing. It leaped out at me immediately. It appears to condemn, but the language normalizes.

Though this line is buried in the text, it is the pull quote used on twitter.

Our media is, overall, a detriment to society. I mean this quite seriously.

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The Late (Internet) Telecom Revolution Is Not Such a Big Deal

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On December 18, 2015

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Look, I know the Internet is great. I like it, it’s changed my life. But it’s not big a deal when you compare it to other technological revolutions. This is true even if you throw in increases in computing power (which were happening long before the Internet was opened to the public).

Let’s get it out the way: The one, unqualifiedly great thing the Internet has done is provide access to information. Movies, books, news, technical papers–all of that. Today, I can find out information which I would have needed to visit a library to find out in 1990. Often, I can find out information I would have need a university library to find.

This is a great, good thing, especially as the Internet spreads to the third world, where access to good libraries is often sparse.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year.  If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)

What else, though?

  • The Internet’s effects on the GDP are minor at best. The GDP in first world countries (and most third) has been growing anemically through most of the “Internet age,” and most of the increases that did occur can’t be traced back to telecom. Housing, finance, etc…all those sectors can boom and bust just fine without telecom and high-speed computers.
  • Productivity effects are elusive. They just aren’t showing up–and people have looked.
  • Online communities are great, I love them. But to the extent they replace offline friends and communities, they are a net negative, because offline friends are more beneficial to people’s happiness and health than online friends.
  • As Ha Joong Chang points out in 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, the Telecom revolution isn’t nearly as impressive as what washing machines did: liberate women from most domestic drudgery.
  • As Telecom revolutions go, it isn’t even as impressive as the telegraph, if one wants to be strict about this.
  • The Telecom revolution did make it possible to outsource and offshore work that couldn’t be before, but the period from 1945 to 1970 still saw most third world countries growing faster.
  • The largest country which benefits most from outsourcing is India. Mysteriously, in the past 30 years, the average number of calories eaten in India has dropped.
  • The Telecom revolution is not as important as electrification, municipal sewers, the automobile, the airplane, air-conditioning, the mechanical loom, the steam engine, antibiotics, or even washing hands before surgery.
  • As one of its negative side effects, the Telecom revolution enables a panopticon surveillance state which is far more intrusive than what Orwell imagined in 1984 or which the Stasi created in East Germany.
  • Most of the big wins in telecom have been things like Amazon, Uber, AirBnb, and so on. They reduce costs, but they do so by also reducing earning, thus aggregating the majority of earnings to themselves. They are primarily upwardly redistributive. Efficiency gains are often real, but they go to a very few people.

None of this is to say that the Telecom revolution is not important. It is, and it has had vast effects on our lives. It will continue to do so as it’s logic is run through. But as technological revolutions go, it is neither the most important in recent history, nor is it the most beneficial. It is nowhere near as beneficial as the revolution in sanitation was during the 19th century, for example. It does not change how we live nearly as much as automobiles and trains did, or washing machines or air conditioners. (When asked how Singapore has succeeded, Lee Kuan Yu said it would have been impossible without air conditioning.)

Perspective, people, perspective.

The Internet and Telecom revolution could yet make the world a vastly better place, but they haven’t so far. Information doesn’t “want to be free” and the rise of the Internet has seen a vast tightening of copyright and patent laws, rather than a utopia of free information you are actually allowed to use.

Early radio adopters were like early internet adopters; they saw it as a democratizing force, a force for the people, etc, etc. When the Titanic sunk, it was claimed (falsely) that the ships SOS messages couldn’t through because smaller, private radio users were tying up the lines. Radio frequencies were then auctioned off to the rich. The same path (minus the hysterical lies) was followed with the television spectrum.

In the US and many other countries, a few large companies control the pipes. A few App stores do most of that business, and the advertising revenue goes to search engines (aka. Google).

So, Telecom Revolution: Important, yes. Good?  Yes and no.

The next coming of the washing machine, or the washing of hands, or antibiotics?

Not yet.

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Wikileaks And The End of the Open Internet

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On December 4, 2010

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Let’s just state the obvious here: we’re seeing the end of the open internet with what is being done to Wikileaks.  It’s one thing for Amazon to toss them, it’s another thing entirely to refuse to propagate their domain information.  This has been coming for quite some time, and Wikileaks is not the first domain to be shut down in the US, it is merely the highest profile.  Combined with the attempt to make NetFlix pay a surcharge or lose access to customers, this spells the end of the free internet.

The absurdity, the sheer Orwellian stupidity of this is epitomized by the State Department telling students at elite colleges not to read the leaks, or they won’t get jobs at State.  As if anyone who isn’t curious to read what is in the leaks, who doesn’t want to know how diplomacy actually works, is anyone State should hire.  In a sane world, the reaction would be the opposite: no one who hadn’t read them would be hired.

This is reminiscent of the way the old Soviet Union worked, with everyone being forced to pretend they don’t know what they absolutely do know, and blind conformity prized over ability.

Meanwhile a worldwide alert is out for the horrible Julian Assange for rape, aka: not using a condom.  I certainly won’t defend not using a condom when your partner wants you to, if that’s what happened, but those guilty of such crimes don’t usually have worldwide manhunts called against them, do they?  Meanwhile the squishy left wrings its hands and wails.  Let me put it to you this way: no one who was willing to put themselves out there the way Assange did is not a massive risk taker.  Going into this he had to know that eventually he would be locked up, discredited, killed or some combination.  Prudent men and women who would never do anything stupid (like sleep with groupies) would not have created Wikileaks in the first place and would not have leaked the inflammatory material that Assange has put out there in the second place.

In the spirit of a rambling post, let’s move back to the internet.  Leaving aside censorship, which is older than writing, and is banal, boring and predictable, especially from states on auto-pilot to authoritarianism like the US, the economic model to use when thinking about the internet is the old railroads of the 19th and early 20th century.  The railroads were the only way to get your products to market if you weren’t on the coast, a major river or canal.  They were hated, loathed with a passion, by farmers.  Why?  Because they took all the surplus value, all the profit.  If you weren’t willing to pay, you went out of business.  Even if you were willing to pay, you wound up in hock to them.  You worked for the railroad, period.  All or virtually all of what would have been profit went to them.

When the only way to get your product to market is an unregulated monopoly or oligopoly they will take it all.  The result isn’t just unprofitable businesses, it’s failed businesses and businesses that never get off the ground, because they can’t afford to pay the freight, or more accurately, the vig.  Oligopolies in between producers and consumers always strangle the economy.  Always.

And, on top of p0litical repression of free speech, that’s what’s coming to the internet near you.  The essentially free and open internet is dying and it will soon be dead.

(Note: text changed from Hilary Clinton to State department telling students)

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