Channel between the devil and the deep blue sea
The growth of the internet has been largely driven by free content. The dominant facilitator of access to that content today is Google, which makes money from the traffic generated by people using it to find stuff on the web.
It is now at the centre of the debate over how we will access content over the internet in the future, the result of which may well affect the way we do business and the kinds of technology people buy.
Google dominance
A YouGov poll of 100 UK internet entrepreneurs including Carphone Warehouse’s Charles Dunstone, EasyJet’s Stelios Haji-Ioannou and Bebo’s Michael Birch, found that 44 percent of those polled see Google as the biggest threat to the growth of their internet business.
The entrepreneurs were gathered for the third annual Founders Forum event, held last week at the Four Seasons hotel in Hampshire.
Google’s dominance was of particular concern because most of the group thought the economic slowdown would accelerate migration to the web. Half of them saw it as a positive development, but 29 percent predicted it would impact negatively on their business.
Viacom vs. YouTube
The gathering took place as the highly divisive copyright issue was grinding towards its day in court in the billion dollar Viacom-YouTube lawsuit in New York. At stake is Google’s apparent desire, through YouTube, to acquire the same dominance of advertising based on video that it has in search.
The suit will be watched closely by content providers in the UK, including the culturally dominant BBC, who favour the most restrictive interpretation of intellectual property rights (IPR).
The European Commission has so far beaten back French attempts to impose a burden of enforcement on ISPs, but the measure may sneak in through the back door in a new Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) likely to be signed at the G-8 summit in July.
The anti-ACTA view is strongly set out on the IP Justice site. If the agreement were even half as draconian as its opponents fear, it would impose social controls in the West akin to those exercised by the regimes in Russia and China, the main offenders in the field of IPR infringement.
Why it matters to the Channel
The IPR issue has become a can of worms that threatens innovation. The desire of music and movie majors to protect their interest has led them to throw their considerable weight onto the scales in favour of IPR absolutism, and to criminalise every aspect of infringement.
Less commented is that the trial lawyers, whose campaign contributions make them major players in any US election, have an enormous vested interest in extending the reach of patent and copyright laws, and in keeping them as complex as possible.
That is the central issue at stake in Viacom vs. YouTube. If a middleman – YouTube in this case, but by extension all social networking sites and ISPs – is judged to be acting as a culpable facilitator in the commission of a crime, that could mean the practical end of internet freedom.
In addition, any increase in the scope and severity of IPR enforcement will play into the hands of the opportunistic patent jackals. Large firms can afford the cost of vexatious litigation, but indies could find it impossible to obtain affordable liability insurance.
And, as the Weee fiasco showed, EU governments are strongly inclined to favour the corporations that can afford to lobby them, and which can provide deserving politicians and officials with generous sinecures when they retire. Indies cannot compete.
Out of the frying pan…
The unquestionable right of creators to benefit from their work, taken to the extreme proposed by traditional content oligopolies, threatens to throttle the biggest explosion of creativity in the history of humanity. That’s the frying pan.
The fire is Google’s soaring ambition – which may be a pipe dream, given that TV and movie producers are unlikely to follow music down the primrose path of giving too much power to a single (iTunes) middleman.
Famous cases make bad law. Google may deserve a kicking, but the greater threat, we think, lies in the fact that the only way traditional content providers can hope to plug the gaping hole in their business model is to make the ISPs liable for the traffic they carry.
And that is the proverbial thin end of a wedge that a host of other vested interests and their tame politicians would like to see hammered into a medium they fear because they do not control it – yet.
