To: Nettime
Subject: Re:
Mackenzie Wark (Wed 07/26/00 at 02:17 AM +1000):
The pipe guys will be king.
bingo.
with the proviso that ‘the pipe guys’ are a very heterogeneous lot with explicitly conflicting interests.
this was less so under a PSTN (public switched telephone network) regime, because they were ‘smart’ networks, in the sense that the devices at the core determined what went where, when, and how. as a result, there are certain common ‘class’ interests in the PSTN world, which is why the ITU is such a force to be reckoned with. but the net is a ‘dumb’ network: its primary design goal is to ensure that packets are delivered point to point, so ‘intelligence’ is pushed to devices on the periphery. thus there are the backbone providers, the routing registries, the naming registries, the caching providers, ISPs of various shapes and sizes, decentralized services, redundant services, and so on and so forth. these forces don’t see eye to eye at all.
that’s why ICANN is so bloody important: its goal is to transform this mass into an orderly regime by enmeshing the component forces in a rigid contractual framework. ICANN’s justification is that it seeks to guarantee the ‘stability’ of the net; but that ‘stability’ disguises the possibility of the power to force divergent interests to cooperate in, for example, the suppression of certain kinds of traffic. if they were farther along in this program, napster would be a candidate for such suppression; but more advances services like freenet, which will take longer to mature and implement, will very likely confront a more homogeneous and organized regime.
in that regard, you should think very carefully about the generic implications of opposition to something like napster, on whatever basis. if ‘artists’ rights’ are invoked to suppress napster now, that will serve as a precedent for suppressing other services later on, on the basis of some other purported violation. and it’s quite clear how ‘intellectual property’ could come to serve as a terminally generic justification for suppressing various kinds of traffic: as we have already seen in the domain-name fights under ICANN’s UDRP, all it takes is a single complainant to torpedo everything transacted or made available under a domain. we’ve seen this happen in other ways, with ECN servers being confiscated in italy, with thing.net’s webserver being knocked off the net by etoys, with altern.org in france just now, with steve jackson games years ago — the list goes on and on.
under the circumstances, shaky arguments about how artists aren’t getting paid because of napster (they weren’t getting paid anyway) or photocopies handouts playing an instrumental role in perpetuating the marginalization of intellectual labor…they don’t convince.
cheers, t