[Politech] Jonathan Weinberg on how to create “Net drivers licenses”
[priv]
This is what the Microsoft Network experiment was. M$ leased dial pools from major ISP’s and tried to get into the Internet business. They had spotty control of the desktop, in that they owned it, but had no access to it to leverage it into delivering services. It can be considered a failure because of entrenched ISP’s [who] were already offering more user-centric cheaper service and MSN was doomed. AOL had the right idea from a technology standpoint, and they hedged their bets on local ISPs dying out because of not having any real services. The jury is still out on that one.
What has happened is massive entry into the market by cable providers, who have a business model that is right in between cellular companies and ISP’s. They have the wire, the network, the content and the services. With things like bandwidth caps and proxies, they are slowing closing the loop around the desktop, while dangling the carrot of integrated services like pay-per-view as an incentive to get users to give up control of their desktops.
These alleged “licences” will be little more than phone numbers, but their value is that, like phone numbers, they provide a control connection, which the service providers (and law enforcement etc) can access the user to deliver services to them, and enforce policies against them as part of the agreements.
I have purposely made ambiguous use of the words “control connection” as in this context, the meaning of an empirical control, (or known
constant), an out of band link, and political control, all converge.
After all, property is just information, but media is control.
This notion of “internet driver’s licenses” was an interesting (but lousy) idea, now disowned by the RIAA, though allegedly floated by “an industry type”.
Empowerment or control? Relationships or contracts? How do you want to be treated today?
There’s an angle to this I’m too tired to work out, but it connects the telco business model (of trying to find a revenue stream from a service whose costs approach zero), the cable companies who already have inroads into content and distribution, and the folks being asked to buy these services. Do we want an integrated service with content and connectivity or do we want to buy it a la carte?