MediaSavvy

Pipe companies shouldn’t be allowed to own the content that runs on their pipes.

I’ve been saying all along that it’s bad business and that pipe company shareholders are ill-served by their ventures into the content business. But it’s beginning to interfere with the proper operation of the first amendment.

A bunch of really big companies, including Amazon, Microsoft and Disney, are petitioning the FCC not to change the rules that govern cable and DSL access monopolies. They’re afraid these monopolies are going to limit what equipment can be used to connect to the Internet and what content we can see. There is already plenty of evidence that the telcos want a share of Internet content for no other reason than consumers go through their networks to get to it.

Independent producers (and Democratic FCC commissioners) want to keep the FCC from making it easier for distribution oligopolies to squeeze them out. Lawrence Lessig shows us that the squeeze has been going on for a couple of decades already.

Comcast, the largest cable company in the US, won’t permit competitors like DSL companies to advertise on their systems.

In the eighties, the cable monopolies used their clout to get a controlling share of every new cable channel they agreed to carry. The deadening sameness of cable programming isn’t surprising. All the creative decisions were made to please an industry whose core competencies are political payoffs and digging holes in the ground.

Lessig points to an excellent interview with Barry Diller, where Barry says that the guys that own the pipes into our homes are going to end up owning all the content. If the FCC permits pipe companies to discriminate against content in the name of competition, there will be a lot less competition in the content business ten years from now.

Apple has built a great music store, but it’s not enough to get me to switch.

For the cost of a “CD” from Apple’s music store, I can by a real CD from Amazon.

Apple’s CD has DRM built in. A real CD isn’t copy protected (yet).

Apple’s CD doesn’t come with liner notes and lyrics. A real CD has all its information.

Apple’s CD uses 128bit lossy compression. A real CD sounds better.

Apple’s CD can only be played back on iPods. A real CD can be made to play back on all MP3 players, including iPods.

A lot of Apple CD’s don’t have all the tracks. A real CD has all the tracks of the original (and sometimes more).

David Galbraith is right that Apple’s music store hasn’t changed the economics of the music business. It may be a big step forward, but until the business itself is changed, consumers are still going to take it in the neck. In the meantime, I intend to insist on physical CD’s without DRM.

Google is a search company. “Duh!” you say. But, The idea has been going around that Google is becoming an advertising company:

Google is an advertising company. Search is a fairly finite field in computing – and Google’s research team is now bigger than any University’s – they have this area sewn up. What they don’t have sewn up is the technology and services required for advertising, and this is how Google makes its money.

That’s wrong. Google is a search company. Overture is an advertising company. The difference is obvious when you look at what they deliver to their users. Overture delivers ads, Google delivers search results.

The idea that Google is an ad company stems from a misunderstanding of the content business. While a content company may get most or even all of its revenue from advertising, it never forgets that its user loyalty flows from its quality of service and content. And no one knows better than Google how quickly that loyalty can shift to someone else.

That doesn’t mean that Google won’t be working hard to advance that state of the art in online advertising. But the meme “You’re not a X company, you’re a Y company.” is one of those things that have given management consultants a bad name.

Sterling Hughes is right. The Web is becoming too complicated for its own good. I have a long list of new technologies I have to learn if I’m going to understand how to build “modern” web pages.

One big reason for the triumph of the Web is that it was so easy to build sites with HTML. New standards and theoretical purity are beginning to stand in opposition to the beauty and simplicity of “good enough”. The good news is that “good enough” usually wins in the end.

Sterling’s post inspired Jeremy Zawodny’s praise of Moveable Type for its simplicity and hackability. It’s difficult to think of a single piece of software that is as loved as MT. Certainly there are no other content management systems are as loved by their users.

I love CSS because it has simplified my site design, markup, and therefore maintenance immeasurably and has inspired me to play around with site design and structure. I felt the same way about tables for a month, but eventually changing table-based designs made my head hurt.

Steve Yelvington says that unless readers are willing to accept Javascript, they’re unwelcome on most newspaper Web sites:

Another common complaint is “it doesn’t work with Javascript turned off.” Well, here’s a wake-up call: Since we often use Javascript to deliver advertising, users with Javascript disabled aren’t particularly welcome. They’re not participating in the fundamental free trade that enables news sites to exist: Your attention (which I can sell to my advertisers) in exchange for my content.

Why turn away readers?

Steve says it’s a limitation of Open AdStream, which is used by most newspaper sites. It seems to me that this is not the users’ problem to fix by welcoming Javascript. It’s the publishers’ problem to fix by figuring out a way to serve ads to users to who choose not to let you run programs on their computers.