David S. Bennahum wrote:
>Your distinction about consumer-hours being the only scarce resournce
>online and that therefore controlling access to the home is a natural
>monopolistic objective makes sense.
>There is, however, another essential
>variable in the equation that's missing, which acts as a bulwark against
>monopoly control, and that's ownership of the "network operating system."
Dear David,
Please note that, generally speaking, one monopoly does not cancel
out another. A case can be made, for example, that the OPEC-Cartel (to the
extent it's effective at all) simply _adds_ to the chain of oil-price
markups -- it doesn't neutralize the Seven-Sisters-Cartel, nor wrest
market-control from it.
As J D Rockefeller demonstrated, in his classic confrontation with
the oil producers, DISTRIBUTION RULES -- other players fits into their
system.
>for a corporation to monopolize cyberspace, control of the "local
>loop", or access to the consumer, is not enough. The corporation must also
>control the standard for multimedia communications itself.
Secondary note: there won't be a single corporation that
monopolizes cyberspace -- it'll be more like a gang of them, reminiscent of
the Big-Three TV Networks era, or the Hollywood Studios stystem of the 30s,
or even the Seven Sisters, archetype of the multinational
distributor-cartel phenomenon.
To your main point: I don't think the gang would need to control
the OS. They do need commodity-terms rights to it. But they only need to
control a _single_ Straits, so long as all traffic passes through it, in
order to control the info-product marketplace.
Suppose someone, say AT&T, _did_ own software which everyone else
was obliged to license to sell or operate a cyber-server, or a
cyber-capable pc. By the MS-DOS model, the market-structure impacts would
be:
(1) Hardware vendors would be forced into a commodity marketplace.
(2) Communications vendors would have to cough up an AT&T royalty.
But there's no reason to expect that the AT&T royalty would modify
the architecture of the Cyerspace Inc regime, as described in the Straits
of Consumption message. No more than a Dolby royalty changes the movie or
CD distribution system, or who runs them.
>The point is, in plain English, that at least AT&T understands how
>important it is to own the basic protocols of the future "network utility."
Yes, if they could get a piece of all the action, as Gates does
with pc's, that'd be quite a successful business coup. But the phrase
"network utility", which refers to only the lowest level of cyber
architecture, reveals the limits of AT&T's thinking here: they're not going
for control of the info-marketplace, just a piece of the action.
>We must... keep producing truly "open" standards -- i.e.
>standards whose source code and copyright are not exclusively owned by a
>corporation. This is an immediate, and essential antidote to the very
>real, non-hypothetical, threat of a return to monopoly, a la Bill Gates, in
>network communications.
The most such an effort could hope to accomplish, IMHO, is to
slightly lower cyber prices by giving away public software and destroying
the AT&T-OS marketplace, as happened with Unix. The bigger Cyberspace Inc
monopoly would be completely unaffected by such a standards coup.
---
There are many interesting topics in the standards domain we could
talk about if you're interested. I predict that the Baby Bells will
collaborate on protocols (or already have), and voila, that will be the
standard, PERIOD.
An interesting question is what will happen to
Internet-as-we-know-it when telco circuit-oriented technology is deployed
in synch with drastic tarrif restructurings. They have bootstrap & timing
problems here, and we have various ways of responding.
Stay in touch,
Richard
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Posted by Richard K. Moore - •••@••.••• - Wexford, Ireland
Cyberlib: www | ftp --> ftp://ftp.iol.ie/users/rkmoore/cyberlib
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