This presumptuous title just came into my mind after reading over a few articles over the ol’ net. This may be obvious to some, but looking at some current headlines in the IT world, I can just feel something brewing; something might change the way we use the internet, in a big way.

The problem, briefly

What I’m talking about is the current controversy around net neutrality(NN). Although the repercussions were easy to see in retrospect, the need for the regulation of the flow of information over the internet is something that hit me in the head. It all makes sense! The gist of the problem is that one camp says there should be discrimination (which I will discuss later) over what kind of data flows over the internet, and the other camp that says that everything should be considered the same (hence the ‘neutral’ in net neutrality).

The current situation

The fathers of the Internet (by fathers I do not mean just Tim Berners-Lee, who btw is for NN, but rather everyone that contributed to make the net what it is today) never in any document discussed the issue. It has been assumed that the Internet was neutral up until now. Arguably, that is what has made the Internet what it is today:

1. Non-discrimination: Every bit is equal.
2. Interconnection: It is required for operators to connect to each other in many accessible points.
3. Access: Anything on the network may connect to anything else on the network.

Although those rules are not observed in all cases (how about firewalls, and how about traffic shaping?), these are the broad guidelines which depict the big picture of the internet. On a macro scale, it is all about those 3 rules. This is the internet we know and love. Without those, there would not have been as much innovation, and recently virtual democratization a.k.a Web 2.0.

The opponents & their plans

The people that don’t want NN to continue are mostly Telecom & Cable companies. As opposed to the highly regulated Telecom business, the Internet is the Wild Wild West to them. Their argument is… they provide the cables, why can’t they profit from it… more. One of the things they want to do for example:

1. Discrimination of bits, for example to favor VoIP because of latency sensitivity.
2. Toll taxes to access certain parts of the internet.
3. Priority to certain destinations over the internet.
4. Other regulations they might make up to “cover some losses”.

The list could actually go on, but enough said, basically, they want corporate control over what we currently deem a public common. The Telco’s have even gone to the extent of putting up bogus websites to try and attract some sympathy from naive internet surfers (when was the last time you heard that expression? =).

Some hardware companies have opposed net neutrality also. I do not know the reason, and I wouldn’t want to extrapolate, but I can see how money could be made with all the packet filtering and so on.

The Proponents

A strong group FOR net neutrality is the coalition of Amazon.com, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google. (It sure feels good to be on Microsoft’s side, doesn’t it?) Others are also for net neutrality, and in my opinion are fighting more for the ideology because they don’t have as many stakes in the game. (Imagine Google needing to pay for everybody that visits their website… of course they are gonna be for net neutrality!). And to mostly everybody’s relief, the groups recently won a battle. Interestingly, there is a little group in Sweden called Piratbyrån who are advocates of piracy.
They use the non-discrimination rule (same as in NN) to say that pirate websites should be allowed to run because bits are bits and shouldn’t be discriminated against.

My conclusion

Morals aside, I totally understand the point of view of the Telcos. I mean, they have a point with latencies and optimizing performance and all that. But the problem is… Telcos are corporate entities. They use the greedy algorithms hardcore. Come on… They are in there for the money, to have something good to report to the investors and to show revenue, profit and growth. On the other side, many of the proponents are ALSO undeniably driven by the same reasons.

In the middle you get the little buggers(Piratbyrån) that use that are the modern equivalent to the hippies (nothing wrong with hippies, I love them), and who may be a little bit too idealistic.

The theory at last

All this stuff above was to explain my unified theory… a lot of rambling eh? So here we go:

1. The main people FOR NN are awfully lot like what would be the centre-wing. (My very bad description of a mixture of moderate right wing and moderate left wing, combining the efforts of Mr Corporate guy and Mr Sort of Grassroot guy).
2. The people AGAINST NN are akin to the right wing (To describe something like right + extreme right, in french political terms). Funny enough, in the recent legislative showdown, all 13 who voted against NN were republican.
3. The little hippies are like the green party. In Mauritius, they would be akin to the MR, if you know what i’m talking about.

I’m a young fellow with a knack for the moderate-idealistic view, so I’m in category number 1.
Who are you with?

I was watching a 20-minute video documentary over at YouTube and I found it rather interesting; it was about a beat called the ‘Amen break’.

It is a 6-second drum loop and is arguably the most important 6 seconds in contemporary music. To summarize the doc, these 6 seconds have been used as-is, modified, disassembled and recomposited into hundreds if not thousands of other songs. Whole music genres have been based on those short 6 seconds: Jungle and Drum n Bass. The beat has penetrated mainstream pop-culture and has been used in TV commercials, hiphop and even pop music. How much money did the Winstons (the original creators) make off it? Nada and zilch.

Seeing there was some cash to be made, Zero-G Sounds has apparently appropriated the beat a few years ago. Now this raises a few important issues:

• How were they able to appropriate some sound samples that were either in the public domain or otherwise widely available for at least 15+ years?
• Who actually owns the copyright for the sound? The owner of the rights to the original song (from 1969) or Zero-G?
• Can we copyright a subset of something not ours and make it our own?

I won’t be able to answer those questions and depending on whose lawyer we talk to, we’d get some legalese mumbo-jumbo interspersed with ‘i own you’, ‘pay me’ and ‘i’ll sue your bum’. What I’m interested in discussing instead are the repercussions occuring if Zero-G had a time-travelling machine:

Imagine they went back to 1969 and copyrighted those 6 seconds. Would Jungle and Drum and Bass have happened? Would this beat be in popular culture as it is now? I can answer that, and the answer is ‘probably not’. A whole underground sub-culture flourished from this blatant copyright violation, culminating with the Britney-Spears-kind-of music engineers going to the next level and using the coveted beat.

People stole these 6 seconds from the Winstons. Big Deal. Studios have been booked, CD’s have been pressed, records have been sold. At the end of the day, the record companies were laughing all the way to the bank. In effect, money has been made with something similar to open source in spirit. Result of the rip-off: the world has become a culturally richer place and some individuals actually got fatter in the wallet!

Although copyright is VERY important, Amen break is the living example of how open source WILL make the world a better place.

Some companies like ID Software have been notorious in offering their code to the public a couple of years after their games have been shipped. The internet is based off open source software. The list goes on with examples that open source things CAN make money.
Other companies should take note, especially publishers, record labels and the like; if they try to ignore their instinctive greediness (geekiness: by greedy i mean the algorithm family) they could actually walk away quite a lot heavier in bills if they’re smart (Novell & Red Hat are good candidates). After all, greedy algorithms do not return the most optimal solutions in most cases.

On your next fun project (be it music, pictures or code), you can share your stuff while still protecting yourself using the creative commons. Open source is good, open source is fun.
Amen, brother!

Although I haven’t been able to indulge much into procrastination lately (yeah right!), the habit is easy to come and rob my living hours from my otherwise productive life. And by productive I don’t mean work; I mean not doing things that don’t contribute to anything in my life. You know what I’m talking about; vegging out in front of the TV instead of working hard on projects, playing videogames instead of pursuing constructive hobbies and browsing the internet instead of typing a report due soon(under the pretense of ‘research’).
This article by John Perry, prof of Philosophy shows that PHL profs do more than fight on word definitions or logical syntax. It is a very insightful essay, written by what appears to be a friendly, nutty guy. He indeed illustrated a way to satisfy both aspirations of a normal human being at any given moment:

• being productive at an important task
• doing anything except the said task

Ah-ha! You recognized yourself didn’t you? Well, here are examples of clever ways to effectively waste time and do a lot of things:

1. Read articles and write your thoughts on them instead of working on projects.
2. Go to the XXX department and file numerous forms/requests instead of working towards the impending deadline.
3. Contribute to that open-source thingie on SourceForge instead of filing those damn tax forms.
4. You get the point…

Yeah, as it turns out, you WON’T do your main task anyways, so instead of wasting your life and piling calories by eating your own snot in front of the tube, you might as well do something which will contribute to your growth.

Conclusion

• Wasting time is good, if you ‘waste’ your time productively (oxymoron, i know).
• There are a number of tasks to be done at any given time, doing the least important one when the most important one is due might actually make yourself look ‘productive’.
• John Perry played ping-pong, read his newspapers and pigged out on snacks to avoid work and in turn was acclaimed for being ‘close to his students’. What a fraud.
• This blog is good for me =)
• Man I’ve done so much stupid things just so I wouldn’t be productive.

Go forth and be productive amigos.