| Streamingmedia / Convergence of media WEBEDITOR: Daniela Salvemini and Nina meilof |
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Internet policy is hard to enforce, but there is no harm in thinking it through. On the other hand, whatever order there is in the Net is generally the result of focussed self-organization: namely that the elements that constitute the medium, technology, market, infrastructure, policy and consumers, fall into place rather quickly and often better than expected. The focus comes from recognizing and applying best practice rather than on imposing "law and order". That being said, there may be a kind of "natural law of TV" which is rewritten by the predictable development of "Web-TV":
WebTV (or whatever name the genre will eventually go by) bears much more evidence of TV's maturation as a medium than either HDTV or digital TV. Indeed, digitization affects all media to homogenize their substance and allow convergence. TV is no exception. Digitization swallows all contents and supports today, the way literacy and the press did before. High Definition is not TV's, but cinema's destiny. HD is slow in coming to TV precisely because definition is not the quality people require of TV first. Like the Internet, what TV wants and gets is ubiquity. WebTV has the merit of combining the advantages of both dominant media of our time: the connectivity of the Internet and the collectivity of television. Both are also screen-based media which displace the locus of information-processing from the head to the screen. The mind is emigrating from the privacy of the head to engage into new forms of association and behaviors. Beyond the technological paradigm shift lies a fundamental psychological restructuring, as has always been the case when a major new medium reached a critical mass of human processors. As we move on-line en masse and individually, as we rely more and more on organized networked data for instant quality information and knowledge, as we connect more and more with like-minded people in just-in-time associations, we are going soon to recognize that we all belong to one or many more network supported "mental" communities. This is much more than the "virtual" ones we have been told to expect because mind communities are based on human relationships rather than on technology. So we will use WebTV to carve our own networks in the collective offerings of larger psychological communities of mind. So what kind of policy can we consider for that new psychological reality ?
The paradox of the Internet is that while it is addressed to the individual user wherever he or she is, what it provides has no boundary, and thus is global. So whatever legislation is being considered has to be inclusive and global. The main issues hence are to identify what is "public" as opposed to private domain in global terms (in that respect the question of "domain name" debated in the DNS.com discussion group is of the highest relevance if not always of the highest congruence). Just as western society at large eventually developed a charter of human rights a little over 50 years ago, we should now consider what would be the items and contents of an international charter of information rights. And world governments should agree on providing a global or many global public consulting venues and also offering global public services to that effect. Another global concern affecting the immediate and the future state of connected communications is the issue of software patents and copyright. As the system becomes a seamless unified environment, world agreements must be considered to balance the individual rights to intellectual property with fair use and distribution. In software as in medical, pharmaceutical and engineering innovation and practice, local patenting practices often put a stranglehold on individual talent. Another issue, more controversial perhaps, goes under the general notion of the "bit-tax". The bit-tax is much resisted in the US generally, but supported in Canada and the Netherlands by many, and particularly by Dutch economist Luc Soete from the university of Maastricht. Soete suggested in the recent economic Forum in Davos where the emphasis was on big business becoming "responsible" that as the bulk of the earning power of the economy moves from hardware to software and from off to on-line, the bulk of public revenue should also take its source there. At the very least, it was suggested that a modest bit-tax be levied for the support of infrastructural and economically viable access to networked communications in underprivileged countries. One marketing temptation that might affect Web TV adversely would be for big media concerns to put a proprietary stamp or conditional relationships of use on portals and access within specific channels. Legislation should ensure that "vertical integration" is not allowed to any single TV and Internet access provider. In other words, I would not want to be in a situation where because I am tuned to one TV channel, this limits my navigation abilities to a preselected sequence or number of sites Local governments should do everything they can to avoid granting exclusive rights of occupancy to a handful of access providers the way they have tended to legislate cable and TV channels. The Chinese model of controlling web access by licensing agreements is a dangerous precedent in that direction. Nor do I feel more confident about the American way that seems to say: "Let the market forces do the self-regulation". That's ok for you when you control the whole show, as the US communication empire does, but it leaves all the others in the lurch. Today, practically all Internet communication transits via the US (including messages sent from Ottawa to Montreal or Vancouver, for example). That is not a comforting thought, even less so for Europeans. In the end, we may continue to trust that the focused self-organizing principles that have governed Internet evolution so far will prevail for the better, but focus here is the operative word. The Internet works and has successfully resisted vertical biases in its information control flows but mainly because people with brains and hearts have kept paying attention. The N5M invites just that kind of attention. A footnote on the Next Five Minutes: Derrick de Kerckhove websites |