Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

World Summit on the Information Society

WSIS is underway in Tunis, Tunisia. The big discussion is over the governance of the internet. Check out the live webcast. I see alot of government officials and Jean-Philippe Courtois, the president of Microsoft International, but there’s nobody on the slate from activist and non-profit organizations interested in open access, lessening the digital divide etc. hmmmm.

“Network neutrality” is an important concept that librarians should
understand. The issue arises because broadband network service providers
(e.g., cable and telephone companies) have the technical ability to filter,
slow, encumber, and block users’ access to the web, web sites, individual
web pages, particular kinds of services or files. If the FCC mandated
“network neutrality” it could limit how much and what kind of filtering and
blocking could be done. (See What is Network
Neutrality and Why Should Libraries Care?)

Recently there has been a small whirlwind around comments by Ed
Whitacre, the CEO of the large telephone company, SBC. He says that
companies (such as Google and Yahoo) that make money using SBC’s broadband
connections should pay him.

How do you think they’re going to get to customers? Through a
broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they
would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do
that.
— At SBC, It’s All About “Scale and Scope” interview with
Edward Whitacre, edited by Patricia O’Connell, Business Week,
November 7, 2005

This shifts the discussion from one of mandating network neutrality to
one of monopoly control of broadband access. There are some interesting
comments and discussion on this new issue here:

• Network neutrality v. platform competition, by Susan Crawford, October
  30, 2005.

  After two days of impassioned speeches about network
  neutrality, I am beginning to think that we’ve been drawn onto the wrong
  battlefield…. I think the real fight should be over rights of way and
  platform competition. There’s a clear lack of competition in the last mile
  – that’s where choice has to exist, and it doesn’t now.

• Net Neutrality and
  Competition, by Ed Felten, Freedom to Tinker, October 31, 2005

  If SBC gets paid by Google, it’s because SBC faces less
  competition and hence has more market power. As Susan Crawford observes,
  Mr. Whitacre speaks with “the voice of someone who doesn’t think he has any
  competitors.”

• Net Neutrality Will Triumph, by Dana
  Blankenhorn, November 1, 2005.

  The fact is that Whitacre is a Bellhead, playing an old game
  of monopoly based on media power. The Internet routes around such games.
  And the Internet is the market, not the dial tone.

• Why We Need a
  Democratic Information Network in Minneapolis, New Rules Project.

  There is an alternative. Publicly owned, open access networks
  can ensure a competitive market for broadband. Indeed, they may be the only
  way.

Links: Nov 11, 2005″ href=”http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/11/links_nov_11_2005.html”>O’Reilly Radar > Links: Nov 11, 2005

In his Friday list of interesting links, Tim O’Reilly includes a note about the technology news web site,
digg, which covers some of the same territory as slashdot and
tech.memeorandum.
O’Reilly, commenting on the different way these sites work, says, “There’s an interesting battle looming between collective wisdom and artificial intelligence, personified by Digg on one side and Memeorandum on the other. One harnesses users’ editorial judgement, the other replaces it. I think we’ll see a lot more sites like Digg coming.”

How do libraries fit into this? So far, we’re not doing much with social bookmarking (along the lines of del.icio.us) or automated classification (along the lines of Google news and memeorandum).

ongoing á Word Processing Blues

Tim relates his problems with an old MS Word file and how he solved it with Emacs (an open-source multi-platform text editor [and much more] that has been around since 1976] and CSS.
He concludes:

[A]ssuming you had a Web editor with a good change tracker, why would anyone want a word processor any more?

Yo, Libraries: say No to DRM
The Doc Searls Weblog Saturday, November 12, 2005.

Recently there have been a number of newspaper articles, each exclaiming how a local library is providing audiobooks. Most of the time these articles refer to services offered through NetLibrary.
One article
(Spinning tales
By JENNIFER GISH,
Albany NY TimesUnion, October 31, 2005)
explains that, “NetLibrary launched eAudiobooks in January. So far, the service has been picked up by 300 library systems nationwide….”
When you look closely, what you find is libraries using a commercial service that limits access and use of materials: You can’t listen on Apple’s popular iPod, you can’t save files to CD, the books
“expire” after 3 weeks, etc.

Now Doc Searls weighs in with his comments
on this situation. He suggests that libraries should just say no to Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies that cripple use: “We’re not going to offer digital audiobooks until the rightsholders get their fears out of the way and offer something that’s as open and works with every MP3 player.”