Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Media Page 7 of 10

And So Net Neutrality Ends in the US

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On December 14, 2017

67 Comments

Not unexpected. This will make direct competition with entrenched players nearly impossible, as they will be able to buy access to customers, and upstarts won’t. The Internet as a place where anybody could start a new business will constrict.

Oligopoly and monopoly providers (and many areas effectively have only one ISP) will extract even higher profits (understand that high speed internet profits are about 100 percent already) and will either hold anyone who wants to get to customers hostage for access or will force retail customers to pay premium rates for relatively unfettered access.

The fight will continue in court, and can always be overturned by elected officials.

Public internet, by a heavily regulated utility provider, is one solution down the road. The other to do what was done in the days of dial up and force providers to let other companies sell access to the internet through their networks.

To a remarkable degree, the internet is a natural oligopoly. It doesn’t make sense to drive multiple wires or set up multiple sets of towers–that’s irrational. As such, it needs to be regulated as a natural monopoly, with forced upgrades, set levels of profits (a low, single-digit number, inflation-adjusted) and regulatory knee-breakers who are not allowed to work for industries they ever regulated. (Meaning, you can go from industry to regulation, but not vice versa.)

These are, as usual, mostly solved problems. The world has had public or regulated utilities for ages and we know how to make them work if we want to.

Right now we don’t. We want private actors to make unregulated monopoly profits and to shut down innovation and the creation of new work and jobs.

So be it.

(See also, How Internet Monopolies Are Destroying the Web.)

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

How Internet Monopolies Are Destroying the Web

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On December 6, 2017

31 Comments

The actual enemy of entrenched interests is not the right, or “Russia” (a country with half the GDP of California), it is the left, who are the people who would tax them and break their power.

Thus, it is not surprising that when Google decided to attack “fake news” they hit the left.

The estimated declines in traffic generated by Google searches for news sites are striking:

I have noticed declines in my own search traffic, though I’m a bit player.

The left, in general, favors high tax rates and either very strict regulation of large corporations or breaking them up. Google, certainly, needs to be broken up, at the least back into its constituent parts (i.e., sever the search engine from everything else.)

But Google is a particularly bad actor: For years it has been evident to everyone in the space that they are hoovering up most of ad revenue. In the early 00s, until 2006/7 it was fairly easy for relatively small websites to make money from ads. That went away as Google cornered much of the market and it’s only gotten worse since then.

Google’s relationship to web sites is almost identical to railroads and farmers in the 19th and early 20th century: Without railroad shipping, farmer’s products couldn’t make it to market, so the railroads set rates that maximized their profit, driving many farms into bankruptcy and keeping most in penury. They took virtually all of the profit.

For smaller, and even mediums-sized web sites Google (and Facebook, to a lesser degree) are in the same position. They determine who gets traffic, especially to newer web sites without established audiences. Because without them you get little to nothing, they get the money.

That means, in effect, that Google and Facebook and other similar companies, exist by taking away the value of other people’s labor–value without which they would have no business or profits. The web’s content comes first; Google’s “finding” it comes second.

There is a lot of gloating in the tech world about how good they are with information, but the basic information problem has not been fixed. Finding what you want or need or what would suit you best is really hard when there are so many options, and no one has figured out how to do it.

This is, at least in part, a matter of incentives. It is in Google’s interest to match you to whatever site benefits Google most, not the site that benefits you most. Just as Amazon doesn’t show everyone the cheapest alternatives for their search (if you can pay more, why show you cheap?), Google wants to make money for Google, and serving you is only important to the extent it makes them money.

As Google has gotten older, it feels as if their results have gotten worse, because they are now in a monopoly situation in most Western countries. People use Google to search, there is no major alternative.

Unregulated monopolies are bad. Unregulated, bundled monopolies are worse (as in, Google and Facebook buying up other market dominant firms, like YouTube).

This problem, combined with the FCC getting rid of network neutrality, is going to destroy a ton of livelihoods (no, not such money as I get from donors; I’m grandfathered in). It has already made the net far less interesting. Every year more stuff is on the Web, yeah, but it’s more mainstream commercial stuff. The weird web of the 90s and early 00s withers.

And it withers because it is in the interest of almost every big actor, from Facebook to Google to the major ISPs, that it does so. They don’t all have identical interests, no, but they all want a Web where either everyone pays a toll, or you have to go to them to get a specific type of content.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Oppressive Precedents Used Against Nazis Will Be Used Against the Left

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On August 17, 2017

48 Comments

All right, so the Daily Stormer got kicked off GoDaddy, went to a new hosting company, and then got kicked off that one. Victory? Even the guy who did it isn’t happy he did it.

I am reminded of when PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard all decided to stop accepting payments for Wikileaks, after they published Collateral Murder. (I know many on the left now hate Wikileaks, but at the time these leaks were considered beneficial to the left wing, since it hit a Republican war–Iraq.)

There’s no question that the Daily Stormer amounts to Nazis, I’m not even going to say “neo,” but if you think this won’t be used against the left, well…

NY Governor Cuomo isn’t a Nazi, but he is one the biggest assholes around, having conspired to make sure that Democrats didn’t take control of the NY State legislature, for example, among many other strategies.

Yeah. Look, historically, censorship laws and so on have always hit the left harder than the right. Any law which can be used against the left will be used against the left.

Protecting the rights of people you hate is the price of protecting your own rights. If you take rights from Nazis, you will be taking them from yourself. At the very least, be sure they are specifically targeted at Nazis, similar to Germany’s laws. If they aren’t, they will be used against you.

As for private power: Concentration of power into a few oligopolies has made private actors able to effectively censor with as much efficacy as government. When Google decided to hit “fake news” somehow that meant that the World Social Website got hit hard.

Concentrated private powers that censor are almost as bad as governments that censor. In some ways, it is worse, because we pretend that places like Facebook, Google, and Twitter are not commons, but private, and thus grant them immunity from things like the first amendment, even though they control most of what people see.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

On Charlottesville: Why the Center Is Okay with Nazis but Hates the Left

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On August 13, 2017

61 Comments

Look, the Charlottsville march of Nazis (they had the swastika and the salute, they’re not alt-right) showed very clearly the difference between how Nazis and left-wingers are treated. Left-wingers march, and the riot police are in their faces. Nazis march, and the police don’t even intervene while they are beating up counter-protestors.

Then, of course, we have the Nazi who drove his car into the crowd, and much of the media calling it a “clash with counteprotestors” (no) and saying things like “amid violence” rather than “in an act of terrorism.”

The center, which includes what is laughably called the “center left,” may condemn Nazis, but they certainly prefer them to left-wingers. They can do business with Nazis. The people they hate are those they call the “alt-left” in an attempt to pretend that wanting universal healthcare and cops to not kill blacks is the same thing as being a Nazi.

But the reason is simple enough: Centrists make a lot of money from prisons and for-profit healthcare.

The left–people who want single payer healthcare and less people in prison–are a direct threat to the center.

A lot of people get confused about Nazis: When Hitler got in power, he broke the unions, and the socialists, and lowered wages. “National socialism” is not socialism. Corporate profits went up and wages went down; it was good times for business.

So the center, including the center left, is essentially okay with Nazis. If they have to choose between Nazis and the sort of scum who want everyone to have healthcare at the cost of corporate profits, or to reduce profits on prisoners, well, they side with their self interest.

It has always been thus, and it will always be thus.

(Update: Do I need to say that people who blame Russia for this are tendentious morons? Sadly, I think I do.)

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Something Genuinely Good the Internet Has Allowed…

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On August 2, 2017

35 Comments

…is Sci-Hub, which hosts scholarly articles. SciHub, to be clear, is illegal in the US and other countries.

Sci-Hub can instantly provide access to more than two-thirds of all scholarly articles, an amount that Himmelstein says is “even higher” than he anticipated. For research papers protected by a paywall, the study found Sci-Hub’s reach is greater still, with instant access to 85 percent of all papers published in subscription journals. For some major publishers, such as Elsevier, more than 97 percent of their catalog of journal articles is being stored on Sci-Hub’s servers—meaning they can be accessed there for free.

Science, and scholarship in general, is supposed to be about the open sharing of information. What’s happened instead is that journals were bought up by a few companies, and access was made expensive. Getting a single article usually costs between $10 and $15 in my experience, and most are behind paywalls. University libraries have some access, though few can pay for all journals, but not everyone has access to university accounts.

(This is similar to accessing, say, Statistics Canada, which is also behind a paywall for most things. This limits who can effectively research Canadian subjects. Full access costs thousands of dollars. One can imagine what effect that might have on not just who uses the info, but in what sort of research is done with the information.)

Again, Sci-Hub is illegal. It is also entirely in the spirit of science and scholarship. Information doesn’t want to be free, but scholarly information should be, both because scholarship advances more quickly when everyone has access, and because (normative statement) everyone should have access to scholarly and scientific information.

Also, given that peer reviewers are not paid for by journals and that most research is done with public money, and, well, the internet now exists, the argument for subscription journals is weak. They restrict access to information in a way which is bad for researchers (who usually want their work read), as well.

So. This is one of the things the internet has done that is truly good. Note that it is illegal.

(Meanwhile Russia has made using VPNs and proxies illegal, which is far more important and harmful than expelling a few diplomats…well, as long as expelling those diplomats isn’t one of the steps towards a US/Russian war.)

Code is NOT law, but sometimes people can use it to the do the right thing.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Lying Liars, the Media, and Broken Democracies

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On May 5, 2017

29 Comments

I want to return, briefly, to something simple.

You can’t make good decisions if you have faulty information. If you are being fed lies, and you believe them, you’re sunk.

I want to emphasize two numbers:

  1. 70 percent of Americans thought that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.
  2. 89 percent of stories about Jeremy Corbyn in newspapers during one period were found to misrepresent his positions.

As a result:

  1. Americans supported the Iraq War (at first, with notable exceptions).
  2. Brits do not support Labour, because they have been told a bunch of lies about its leaders.

In both cases, you are dealing with a media problem. In both cases, the media amplified and failed to correct various lies–or made them up wholesale.

The media likes to claim that they are the Fourth Estate and that they are required for a healthy democracy. But an unhealthy media, a dishonest media, makes things worse, not better.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

(Scorn) So, You Read It in the Newspaper

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On April 11, 2017

41 Comments

Picture of Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn

Commenter Mark From Ireland once relayed that, for an older generation, the idea that newspapers or the media were honest was greeted with scorn.

A study from last year found that only 11 percent of newspaper articles presented Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s views without alteration.

I hope you’re shocked by that number. It means that newspapers were lying about Corbyn’s views almost 90 percent of the time.

Cases like this are common, though rarely this extreme. When people talk about how the Fourth Estate is essential to the functioning of democracy, I laugh. A media which lies 89 percent of the time is worse than no media at all.

72 percent of Americans didn’t wind up thinking Iraq was behind 9/11 in the run up to the Iraq war because the media called out the Bush administration’s misleading statements, but because they amplified them.

The media has its own agenda. If it agrees with a politician, it will amplify his voice; if not, it will attack savagely.  You can see this with Trump, in highlight. The media savaged Trump for his Muslim ban, but they cheered on his missile attack on a Syrian airbase.

Someone like Corbyn is far more of a threat to the powers that be than Trump could ever be. Corbyn wants to re-nationalize vast chunks of the British economy. Trains are a good example, and before you get on your privatization high-horse, the facts are simple: Privatized trains cost more, have higher debts, still require government subsidies and have worse service. They are more expensive and worse on all significant metrics.

Much like privatized medicine, which, by the way, has been proceeding under the Tories per the usual plan: De-fund public healthcare and invite in “private partners” to help. Richard Branson, for example, who bought and fucked up British trains, is involved in health care in the UK.

Corbyn also, as Mandos pointed out, doesn’t believe in bombing people.

Horrors! He is against using nuclear weapons and has said he would never do so.

This man is a serious goddamn threat to how things are done. My God! He wants to build huge amounts of council housing, so that ordinary people don’t have to pay usurious prices and service mortgages.

What would the UK economy be without peons servicing overpriced mortgages?

A UK economy with a lot less fat bankers, anyway.

So, if it is necessary to lie about Corbyn 89 percent of the time, well, that’s what the media will do. They are owned by a very few people, and they do what they’re told. Heck, at this point, most of them even believe in it.

As for Trump, I disagree with a great deal of his platform, but notice that he is being rewarded when he sticks to the Washington consensus (massively favorable media coverage for going after Assad) and gets negative coverage when he acts against it.

You may think that the Washington consensus is better than Trump on some things, and worse on others, and still notice what is happening and judge it to be a negative that the media and deep state (who are together on this) are working so hard to stop a President doing what he was elected to do.

The media campaign against Corbyn has worked. I judge this not by the poll numbers, though they are bad, but by the fact that “casual left-wingers” think he’s a dud. Whenever I interrogate them, their reasons are weak, even wrong. But for a normal consumer of news who isn’t digging, who assumes that the news is essentially correct, the impression is terrible. It’s one fuck up after another.

For example, a little while ago Corbyn released his taxes and the coverage was that he had cheated.

He hadn’t. Some outlets corrected those stories (which no one sees) and most didn’t, and the damage was done.

Lie. Lie. Lie.

And so a man whose policies would cost billionaires massively, who would fund health care, and give wheelchairs back to cripples, is unpopular in the face of someone as monumentally as incompetent and vile as May.

Break them up. Shatter them into a thousand pieces. Enforce ownership rules. Make many of them into cooperatives. And drive their owners into the ocean, wailing in terror. It is what they have earned.

And it will be nearly impossible to have a good society so long as they retain their power.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

 

The Press Is Trump’s Enemy, Not the Left’s Friend

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On February 20, 2017

44 Comments

The enemy of my my enemy is not my friend. It often isn’t even my ally, but just someone with whom I have something in common.

Roosevelt on the Press from F.D.R. and the Press

FDR wasn’t that left wing, yet the press savaged him relentlessly. Corbyn is relentlessly savaged and lied about by the British press, and his political beliefs are basically 60s liberal with a side of anti-nuke.

The media works for its owners. As of 2000, 80 percent of US media was owned by six companies, and that percentage is higher now. The media serves the interests of the people who own it and anyone else’s only incidentally and insofar as those interests don’t contradict the owners. Furthermore, and at this point, almost all journalists and editors in the US media are Ivy League grinders.

Such people are deeply, personally, offended by the idea that someone like Trump, who just does not know how to act and who is rich despite being everything that parses as incompetent and gross to them, is President. Trump is not part of the club; despite being rich, he never has been. His father was rich, he was rich, but he comes across as nouveau riche, a parvenu, without taste or class. And his followers, in whose company he revels, are culturally beyond the pale to virtually anyone who was conditioned in an Ivy League school, and who jumped through all the hoops to get into an Ivy League school (a process which requires the unfortunate subject to be a grind and a brownnoser from elementary school all the way through high school).

Just as the intelligence community’s opposition to Trump does not make them good guys, the press’s opposition to Trump does not make them good guys. For all the screams about “fake news,” the worst purveyors of false news in the past 20 years were the mainstream media who sold the Iraq war for George Bush; with the most prestigious newspaper in America, the New York Times, making the flagship effort.

As a result, by the time Iraq was invaded, 72 percent of Americans thought that Iraq had been involved in 9/11 and a majority thought they had WMD and were a threat to America.

Now that’s fake news.

The media has been relentless in mocking any real left wing candidates as well. Kucinich, who ran for president multiple times, was treated as a joke. Oddly, he had been a successful mayor–he was both a successful legislator and a successful executive, but somehow he wasn’t credible.

For anyone who wants a better, more egalitarian world, with greater welfare for all and true respect for democracy, the best case scenario of the Trump/media fight is for them to destroy each other, and the media to be even further discredited, so that it can be broken back up into thousands of pieces. Even in that state, the majority of media outlets will be the enemy of all decent, kind individuals. However, that way they will be less powerful, and there will be room for a larger minority to advocate for something other than oligarchy and empire and all the evils that flow from both.

Remember, it is a rare person or institution that doesn’t serve the interests of whoever controls it, and if you cut a person’s paycheck, you are paying for control over that person. That is literally what the check is for, and if the person doesn’t act in the interests of their owner, they get fired.

The media is not your friend. They are the bought and paid for workers for oligarchy. That is their job. On the side, where the oligarchs don’t care much, they may do some good, but if “good” and “pushing the interests of their owners” conflict, they will always side with pushing the interests of their owners.

Trump cut the TPP. Trump wants to renegotiate NAFTA. Trump wants huge tariffs on various countries. He wants to kick out undocumented immigrants, who work for bad wages in shitty jobs for people who don’t want to pay enough for people who aren’t scared of ICE to do the job.

There are oligarchs who support Trump’s plan, to be sure (see Fox, various others), but there are plenty who don’t.

That doesn’t make Trump’s plans good, nor by itself does it make them bad. It just means that giants are fighting above our heads. To them, we are ants, and ifm while they fight each other, they happen to step on some ants, that isn’t important to them.

Trump: Not your friend. Media: Not your friend. Intelligence agencies: Not your friends. This is true even if part of their current interests happens to coincide with yours.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

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