Hello my friends!

It is that time of year: the holiday season. More importantly, it’s time for me to take a vacation. I’ll be abandoning this blog for the next three weeks while I’m overseas with the family.

I’d like to thank you, sincerely, for your comments, your readership, and your attention. If you ever feel moved, inspired, or irritated by something you read here, I am always grateful to hear about it. With your support, I look forward to continually improving the blog next year.

No matter what you celebrate, I wish you health, love and happiness. And I’ll see you next year, starting the week of January 12th!

All the best,
Kaila Colbin

Google has long been a staunch advocate for net neutrality: the idea that Internet service providers should not be able to adjust transmission speeds according to the type of content being transmitted. This stance is certainly logical: adjusting speed for bandwidth-hogging content could certainly affect some of Google’s properties, like YouTube.

So you can understand why there was a bit of finger-pointing this week — specifically, by the Wall Street Journal — when it seemed Google was trying to get a ‘fast track’ for itself by partnering with ISPs to co-locate servers directly within their facilities. The article’s authors, Vishesh Kumar and Christopher Rhoads, made it clear from their tone what they thought of the plan:

Google’s proposed arrangement with network providers, internally called OpenEdge, would place Google servers directly within the network of the service providers, according to documents reviewed by the Journal. The setup would accelerate Google’s service for users. Google has asked the providers it has approached not to talk about the idea, according to people familiar with the plans.

Asked about OpenEdge, Google said only that other companies such as Yahoo and Microsoft could strike similar deals if they desired. But Google’s move, if successful, would give it an advantage available to very few.

Understandably, Google immediately came back on its Public Policy blog, calling the WSJ piece “hyperbolic” and “confused”. Richard Whitt, who made the post on behalf of Google, also says he doesn’t remember making a comment attributed to him by the Journal, and refers to several others quoted in the original article who had objections to it.

Net neutrality says that the highway can’t dictate which cars get to go which speeds. If you drive a Hyundai, you have the same opportunity to hang out in the fast lane as someone who drives a Porsche. At the same time, the highway also can’t dictate where you live — and, by extension, where you get on or off the highway. So if you choose to live one exit away from your work, you’re going to get there faster than someone who lives ten exits away, no matter what kind of cars you both drive.

Based on my admittedly limited understanding, it appears that Google’s proposal falls more into the second situation than the first. That is, Google appears to be trying to put the physical source of content as close as possible to its physical destination, so this is not an issue of net neutrality.

At the same time, most websites don’t have the resources to even begin to optimize for this problem. You don’t spend your time moving your servers in with your ISPs until you have a big enough setup and a big enough audience and — let’s be honest — a big enough bank account to make it worthwhile. Even though the option is theoretically available to anyone, practically it’s only available to a small few.

So a violation of net neutrality? Perhaps not. But it’s not necessarily a bad thing that people are jumpy when it comes to Google.

Google is great because it helps us access the greatness that is the Internet. If the Internet were only Google, I don’t think it would be so great. What do you think?

Pardon me while we take a short break from our regularly scheduled blogging…

I had a brilliant idea for the holidays. I thought it would be great to take some of my favorite Christmas music — like the Barenaked Ladies and Sarah McLachlan doing a God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen/We Three Kings combo — and make a little compilation to give away to 15 or 20 people.

Of course, being the upright, law-abiding citizen that I am, I immediately sought permission to proceed. I started with APRA, the Australasian Performing Right Association, in the hopes that they could just send me a bill for $100 or whatever and I’d be legit.

My hopes were in vain. APRA told me they only handle the writing of the songs. In a way, this was good news: most of the songs I wanted to include — like Metallica and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra doing Carol of the Bells — were “traditional”, and therefore out of copyright. For those few songs that were in copyright, the fee was $0.05 per song, per copy, for a total of around $4.00.

I can handle $4.00.

Unfortunately, the buck didn’t stop with APRA. In addition to compensating whoever wrote the song, I’d also have to compensate whoever performed the song — like Patty Loveless doing O Come All Ye Faithful. To address that, I had to get in touch with RIANZ: the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand. RIANZ, in turn, said that I had to contact each label independently, and intimated that I may not be successful.

Refusing to be defeated, I contacted the New Zealand office of Universal Music, recording label for many of the songs I had chosen to include — like Sting doing I Saw Three Ships. I emailed them the full list of songs and the exact usage I intended. I made it clear that these were giveaways and advised them of the quantities.

I received the following message back:

Thanks for your email. Unfortunately, we are unable to approve any Universal tracks for this kind of use. Sorry I cannot be of any further assistance

SLAM!

And they wonder why people download music illegally? Do they think that, by refusing me permission to pay them money to distribute these compilations, the intended recipients will now go out and buy the original CDs instead?

Meanwhile, Joel Tenenbaum is facing fines of over $1 million for sharing seven songs on Kazaa when he was a teenager, and the MPAA is trying to force ISPs to disconnect anyone it suspects of piracy. So they won’t let us pay for music, but they’ll punish the heck out of us for “stealing” it…

Come on, music industry. Get it together.

I have been saying for some time now that our biggest unsolved problem is not a need for more information, but more assistance in finding what we want, when we want it, without getting bogged down in the infinite content made possible by UGC and Web 2.0.

In other words, what the market needs right now is clarity, not quantity.

Ideally, one type of entity that should be able to assist in clarifying the landscape is thinktanks. Ostensibly independent organizations, whose job it is to, well, think, these groups should be acting as advocates for us, collating, analyzing and synthesizing information so that we mortals can bypass all that messiness and cut straight to the heart of the matter.

Would that it were so.

Two weeks ago, a new thinktank was launched: The Future of Privacy Forum. Now, if ever there were a topic that called for clarity, online privacy is it. Nobody knows where the lines are or how gray is gray, and only the die-hard evangelists have any idea what data portability even means.

This Future of Privacy Forum is just one of several — there are also SafeCount, the Network Advertising Initiative, and the Center for Democracy and Technology, for example. The FPF (they don’t call themselves that, but I’m a lazy typist) was founded by Jules Polonetsky, former AOL Chief Privacy Officer, and is funded by AT&T. Where it gets a bit tricky, though, is in its first recommendations: delete your cookies and use AskEraser.

Wendy Davis at the Daily Online Examiner points out the inherent conflict of interest with this recommendation: AT&T has a long-running feud with Google over net neutrality and privacy. So is the FPF merely a way for AT&T to take a one-step-removed dig at the search giant?

At the same time, SafeCount and the Network Advertising Initiative both point out that cookies are what allow us to access all of that great free content. The “complex advertising and marketing mechanism” warned of by the FPF is the same mechanism that makes sites like YouTube possible.

Finally, just today, the Center for Democracy & Technology called on the Obama administration to pass new privacy laws, starting with a new definition of PII (personally identifiable information). We need one, by the way. Privacy and anonymity are two different things.

Anyway, all these recommendations are starting to make my head spin. What we need is a thinktank of thinktanks. What do you think?

We humans are greedy buggers.

Unfortunately, the Internet has only enabled us.

We now believe that pretty much everything — and especially everything information-oriented — should be available, on demand, in full, for free. And please bear in mind that I am at the front of the near-endless line of people clamoring for free stuff: definitions, research, how-tos, expert opinion, quality content.

I want it all. I want it all. And I want it now.

But, at the risk of degenerating into an incredibly tired cliche, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. It costs money to deliver all that free stuff. For some costs, such as the generation of content on Wikipedia, the price is spread over so many people that we’re all able to carry our share of the load without remuneration. For others — such as servers, bandwidth, and the professional services of writers, bloggers, and designers, to name a few — we need money, and it has to come from somewhere.

So from where does it come? For certain things, we’ve all agreed to an explicit price: the price of our Internet connection, for example. In other instances, the price is implicit, with the most common exchange being advertising. “We’ll give you this great content for free, and in exchange someone else will give us money to show you something else great that you might buy.”

It’s an uneasy truce, this exchange of advertising for content. Back in the day when all we had was a handful of TV channels, we didn’t know any better. But now, thanks to TiVo and On-Demand and user-in-control, we no longer accept advertising passively. The problem is that we as consumers haven’t really offered up anything better — and we still want the content.

Take Twitter, for example. Twitter has no business model, and its users definitely want it to keep going, but they don’t want the experience ‘ruined’ by advertising.

Excerpt from Technosailor.com:

Twitter… is a beautiful thing that allows for the free exchange of ideas and views. People converse and challenge each other. They unite behind causes, events and people. It?s great. However, recently, several ?indecent? examples have cropped up. Specifically, with monetization of Twitter. Monetization of Twitter, depending on how it?s done, is polluting the common area. It is an obscene money grab, and I?m tired of it.

Comment on What Matters Online:

Twitter could lose its character if we start being forced to consume messages from advertisers.

On TechCrunch, more than 46% of respondents said Twitter should be kept ad-free.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know I’m a fan of Jamie Oliver, and one of the reason I’m a fan is because he looks at the whole system, not just the easiest blame target. When he talks about chickens, he points out that battery farms exist because the grocery stores demand it, and the grocery stores demand it because people demand cheaper chicken, and the people demanding cheaper chicken have no idea what has to happen in order for that chicken to be delivered for two pounds fifty.

In that same TechCrunch poll referenced above, a further 24% said they’d pay for an ad-free version. Shouldn’t this be our option? With advertising, we place a value on our attention as consumers by using it to pay for content. We are effectively admitting that we are receiving something of value and we have to provide something of value in return. Of course, we could always provide cash instead.

Who do we think we are, if we think we shouldn’t have to pay at all?