The latest from TechCrunch
- It's the Community, Stupid!
- Symbian Sputters Towards Open-Source Irrelevancy
- WikiLeaked Diplomatic Cables Confirm China's Politburo Was Behind Google Hacking Incident
- WikLeaks Reports It Is Under A Denial Of Service Attack
- Sites With Government Seized Domains Are Moving On, On Twitter
| It's the Community, Stupid! | Top |
| Last week’s guest on Press:Here was Tim Wu, author of the new book Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires . Wu also wrote this guest post for us about why we should all fear Steve Jobs. In general Wu — who gets credit for coming up with the term “Net Neutrality” — has a really important mission whether you agree with him or not: Raising alarm bells that the Internet, like every mass communication medium that has come before, could one day become strangled and controlled by a handful of companies. From what I’ve read and from our conversation on and off camera last Thursday, Wu seems to stop short of saying what has happened before on radio, telegram and television will happen with the Internet, saying it could happen. The question, he says, is whether there is something inherently different about the Internet from a technology standpoint that keeps it inevitably open. I think what keeps it from happening is something else: The community around the Internet and the age of modern entrepreneurship in which we live. Unless the FCC totally screws up on Net Neutrality, big Internet companies just don’t have the luxury of shutting upstart rivals out. You want to be cynical and say money drives policy in Washington? Fine. There is more money on the side of the Internet being open than the Internet being closed. Wu argued that there is nothing different about entrepreneurship today in Silicon Valley than there was back in the early days of the telephone or the radio, and– channeling my inner James Carville– I argued why he was wrong. Here’s the gist of my argument, which we didn’t have to time really get into on camera: 1. Invention versus iteration . There was probably more raw invention in early waves of communications industries because a lot of Internet companies have been able to stand on the shoulders of giants. Try inventing the consumer Web without copper lines going to homes and businesses and try inventing all of that without, say, electricity. As the Web gets longer in the tooth, there’s less sheer OH-MY-GOD! innovation and more iteration. Facebook was a version of social media that worked, not the first social media site; same with Google and search. And unlike a lot of the other waves Wu talks about, at this point the consumer Internet is almost purely software development, not hardware and manufacturing; it’s mostly design and user experience not hardcore circuitry and science. This may sound like a knock, but when it comes to commercialization it’s not. The more revolutionary the invention, the harder it is to fund it, manufacture it, commercialize it and get broad distribution for it. The lower the barrier for disruption, the more it occurs and the fewer opportunities large incumbents have to keep markets closed by, say, sucking up manufacturing capacity or raw materials. The assets for the web are smart coders and venture cash. The former tends to flow out of big companies seeking new challenges and new stock options. There’s no shortage of the latter– in fact there’s an unhealthy glut of it. When new upstarts are awash in an industry’s natural resources, it’s hard for incumbents to keep them out. 2. Lines of credit versus venture capital . Wu argues that modern venture capital isn’t a differentiator because there were ways of financing companies in earlier waves of technology, like lines of credit. Come on. Really? There is a world of difference between an entrepreneur able to put up enough personal collateral to secure a line of credit and an industry where thousands of VCs have $20 billion-plus burning a hole in their pocket looking for high-risk, no revenue opportunities in which to invest. By definition it opens the concept of being an entrepreneur up to huge new swaths of the global population. That means at a minimum that more companies are started, and that means there’s more opportunity to start the next Google or Facebook. The barrier of financing for a smart idea is all but eliminated. How different would, say, early Hollywood have been if any kid with an idea for a movie studio had millions of dollars in funding? It creates huge, constant pressure on incumbents to keep users happy and — as mentioned earlier– incentivize the best employees to stay because suddenly jobs at startups not only offer stock options but they have enough cash to pay competitive salaries. And if one hot company gets traction it means hundreds more are started the next day by VCs who want “their YouTube,” “their Foursquare,” or “their Groupon.” This much money with the sole purpose of backing new companies starts to become a game of odds. Every VC would have to be utterly inept not to accidentally back the next great Web mogul. There is a fundamental difference in how banks and VCs make money and what keeps them in business. Lenders want companies to do well enough to repay debt, and then take bigger loans to continue building their business. Venture capitalists want continual waves of industry disruption. When you have power and money behind breaking not protecting big companies, it’s a different scenario. Building a huge company is never easy, but entrepreneurs at the center of the Web are hardly the Davids going up against Goliaths that entrepreneurs were in previous information ages of the past. 3. The culture of pioneers versus the culture of young-eating-the-old. Wu’s argument is that when a technology is new, aggressive entrepreneurs flood in, many go out of business and a few survive to become the big winners. He is right that there is nothing unique about that cycle generally. But the uniqueness of Silicon Valley is that it no longer relies on returns from the pioneers of huge new industries, it relies on the young continually eating the old throughout an industry’s life cycle. Witness the lack of mourning when a former giant falls on hard times. Witness the lack of asking for bailout dollars. Witness the constant churning of talent, press and attention towards new things. The hype cycle is a bad thing in a lot of ways for Silicon Valley. But the one good thing that it does is continually champion the new over the old. Overall, Wu and I agree more than we disagree. If the future of the Internet were up to Google, Apple, AT&T and the federal government, I’d be concerned too. But $20 billion a year in venture capital and thousands of people starting companies all over the world every year aren’t going to cede anyone that right. The biggest evidence of that is Facebook. If the Internet were copying the trajectory he describes, we’d have our winners and they’d be AOL, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and Google– end of story. I doubt AOL, Yahoo or eBay would argue they are protected oligarchs, and Amazon would be in the same state had the company not dramatically pivoted into new areas. Google dominates, in part, because it is the youngest of the bunch and iterated in business model and product after watching the older search and portal companies. And Google is now feeling the heat from companies like Facebook and Twitter. Mobile Web may prove to be another matter, but there are just no signs to support that the early pioneers of the Web have an advantage that makes them immune to younger challengers. Indeed in a lot of verticals, late 1990s companies have already tried to flex these muscles Wu fears, and they’ve largely failed. Look at travel where online travel agents who had protected inventory fought sites like Kayak who wanted to spider their travel listings. The big portals tried to do this pre-Google, de-emphasizing the search box in favor of people staying within their walled virtual department store. Google disrupted that by making the idea of sending people away from your site more lucrative. Google got very little time to bask in that. Just a few years later, one of Google’s biggest challenges is trying to find ways to match the dramatic rise of Facebook, when it comes to keeping their key employees and finding their own answer to social and casual games. Consider the industry that has done the best job using a closed system and high-paid lobbyists to kill startups: Online music. VCs funding nearly any online music company in the last decade could have just made out the investment checks out directly to the labels, and the result would have been much the same. These companies were almost all bled dry with royalties, and then killed. One of the only reasons Pandora has survived is because it catalyzed its loyal users to break congressional fax machines with complaints about proposed legislation that would put the company out of business. But even in this industry where protectionism has killed so many great startups, the labels haven’t “won” because they are still slowly dying. They continue to lose money, because of users like Pandora’s who demand they work with new entrants, rampant and uncontrollable piracy and VCs who continue to fund new music startups like Spotify despite a graveyard of failures. It’s not just the power of the Internet– it’s a powerful community of hackers, entrepreneurs and VCs who send wave after wave of challenges to an industry that they believe should be more open. Wu says somewhat dismissively in the clip below that everyone always thinks there’s something so different about their own time. While it’s good to sound potential alarm bells, I’d argue that believing that industries and consumers never change is just as flawed of an outlook. There’s a clip of the show below, go here to hear Wu talk specifically about the state of Net Neutrality. | |
| Symbian Sputters Towards Open-Source Irrelevancy | Top |
| Remember two years ago when Nokia open-sourced the Symbian mobile operating system? The thinking was that cell phone manufacturers who depended on the Symbian OS could help keep it going. But it was already too late. The iPhone’s iOS and Android started to take over. Even die-hard Symbian supporters abandoned ship. As the fanboy blogger Symbian Guru explained last summer when he decided to give up on Symbian : I also can't continue to support a mobile operating system platform that continually buries itself into oblivion by focusing on 'openness' while keeping a blind eye towards the obvious improvements that other open platforms have had for several iterations. Now Symbian is delivering itself another blow—this time self-inflicted. The Symbian Foundation, which hosts all the open-source code, big fixes, and documentation for the OS, is shutting down its websites on December 17. The Symbian OS will still technically be open-source, it will just be impractical for many developers to look at it or improve it. According to a post on the Symbian Foundation’s developer blog, the open-source code and other information currently on its websites will be made “available in some form, most likely on a DVD or USB hard drive upon request to the Symbian Foundation. . . . A charge may be levied for media and shipping.” In other words, the Symbian OS will be open only in name. What good is open-source code if it is not available online, where it can continue to evolve? For all practical purposes, it will become an artifact of the age of feature phones. Nokia will no doubt continue to develop the Symbian OS for its own purposes. But what a way to show disdain to the open-source community it professed to embrace only two years ago. Of course, there is nothing stopping someone else from hosting all the code and documentation going forward on an independent site. Will any developers care enough to take on that task? CrunchBase Information Nokia Symbian Foundation Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| WikiLeaked Diplomatic Cables Confirm China's Politburo Was Behind Google Hacking Incident | Top |
| Details about the U.S. State Department cables obtained by WikiLeaks are starting to come out. Although WikiLeaks itself may be under a denial of service attack , it provided several newspapers around the world access to the raw documents it is preparing to release later today. The New York Times just posted it’s first article summarizing the contents of the cables and highlighting the most newsworthy ones. Among the 251,287 U.S. diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks, there is one set which deals with the massive computer attack on Google and other companies which was first revealed last January . At that time, Google went public with its contention that the attacks came from the Chinese government, and resulted in Google temporarily pulling out if China. They returned in a more limited way last summer. According to the NYT, some of the new leaked cables point directly at China’s Politburo for instigating the original attacks: A global computer hacking effort: China's Politburo directed the intrusion into Google's computer systems in that country, a Chinese contact told the American Embassy in Beijing in January, one cable reported. The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government. They have broken into American government computers and those of Western allies, the Dalai Lama and American businesses since 2002, cables said. The cables should shed some more light on why the White House and State Department backed Google so vociferously at the time. CrunchBase Information Google WikiLeaks Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| WikLeaks Reports It Is Under A Denial Of Service Attack | Top |
| @wikileaks WikiLeaks We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack. about 5 hours ago via web Retweet A lot of people, including many governments, have problems with WikiLeaks , the site dedicated to publishing sensitive and often classified documents. (Read more background on the controversial organization). The site is currently under a distributed denial of service attack, according to a Tweet from the WikiLeaks account. The site seems to be withstanding the attack so far. It is up right now . The DDOS attack comes just as WikiLeaks is preparing to release another set of U.S. government documents—this time diplomatic cables which may prove so embarrassing that the State Department decided to warn foreign governments ahead of their release. But WikiLeaks reports via Twitter that even if the site goes down, newspapers around the world will publish excerpts from the cables: @wikileaks WikiLeaks El Pais, Le Monde, Speigel, Guardian & NYT will publish many US embassy cables tonight, even if WikiLeaks goes down about 4 hours ago via web Retweet So who is behind the DDOS attack—government spy agencies, the Russians, 4chan? It is obviously a conspiracy. Different people will have different theories, including that WikiLeaks itself is behind the “attack” to draw attention (and sympathy) on the eve of its latest big leak. But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt for now, until proven otherwise. Update : The New York Times published its first series of articles on the leaked documents along with selected cables . CrunchBase Information WikiLeaks Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Sites With Government Seized Domains Are Moving On, On Twitter | Top |
| Last week while everyone was waiting for the COICA bill to move through Congress, the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency one upped the Attorney General and seized domain names from a group of over 70 copyright infringing websites . A visit to the blacklisted domains now results in the ominous looking message from Homeland Security below. While the graphic is pretty scary, Market Ticker’s Karl Denninger points out the websites themselves and the servers they run on have not actually been seized , just the domains. “That’s a lot of staff attorney time and trouble to get a big fat nothing out of it, which is exactly what they get going down this road. Why? Because all they can do is redirect the domain pointers which will do exactly nothing when the sites re-register under a top-level domain not under the US Government’s jurisdiction – and there are lots of them.” Domains under US jurisdiction currently include anything controlled by Verisign which puts .com site owners in a legal relationship with the United States. According to Denninger, all afflicted site owners need to do is move to a non-US controlled top level domain in order to dodge further ICE seizures. Some have already started to migrate to other domains, though it’s likely choices like .net won’t be any safer. Torrent-Finder owner Waleed Gad El Kareem said he switched his site over to Torrent-Finder.info the moment he saw the ICE message on Torrent-Finder.com, posting the new site’s address on Twitter. @gadelkareem Waleed GadElKareem Torrent Finder is now http://www.torrent-finder.info November 25, 2010 11:49 pm via Digsby Retweet Hip hop site RapGodfathers has aggressively followed suit with its own .info address, using Twitter to get the word out about the move and asking people to retweet as well as @replying fans with its new domain. @RapGodFathers RapGodFathers.info Everyone please retweet our new link, lots of people still don't know about it. http://www.RapGodFathers.info #RGF about 21 hours ago via web Retweet Onsmash seems to have not made the move over, but is soliciting emails from fans on Twitter who oppose the domain name seizure as well as tweeting out stuff like “THEY CAN NEVER STOP US!!!” I’ve emailed them and sister site dajaz1.com about possible plans to move to a different domain and am waiting to hear back. @HofOnSMASH Hof // OnSMASH ARTISTS: If you oppose the seizure of @ OnSMASH pls send an email to gmail .com”>freeonsmash@ gmail .com & express why. Your participation is appreciated! about 21 hours ago via web Retweet Even the counterfeit sites have caught on, an email I sent to www.2009Jerseys.com was met with the following auto response, “Notice: The original Domain Name has been suspended, please visit the new domain name www.2009Jerseys.net, We apologize for the inconvenience. If there is new information, we will first time inform you.” The people behind Dvdcollects.com have decided to focus all their energy on the yet unfettered Bestcollects.com according to their Facebook page. If it really is that easy to pick up and move on its hard to believe that the other 70 or so sites won’t find friendlier domains on which to land, rendering ICE’s efforts ultimately futile. If anything, the seizures serve as lesson to all possibly infringing sites — Steer clear of the .com top level domain. | |
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