[BookPost]

Book Post here! If you listen to the Lanier interview, or read his recent books, he spells out the connection between free internet and the advertising model. I’m not a tech person, but it was my experience that in the 90s there was very little support for building revenue models into how people receive digital information. Those who were betting on the digital economy and building the monopolies we have now understood that their earnings would come from monetizing user information. “Advertising” is a shorthand for this. If fighting against authors wasn’t on people’s mind when they were building the web, they weren’t thinking ahead. The outcome has been that there is no solid mechanism hitching revenue to those who generate intellectual property.

[shantly]

> The outcome has been that there is no solid mechanism hitching revenue to those who generate intellectual property.

But how could there be? With 1985-2000 tech, and remembering how pretty much every DRM scheme so far's either failed miserably or been so invasive and flakey that it'd never have been accepted for mass media, and that even the failures have made "legitimate" products worse than their pirated counterparts. We have subscriptions—that hasn't helped much. We can very effectively gate off pages from those we don't want to see them.

It's not Information Freedom folks trying to stick it to those who want to charge money for writing any more than the record industry was trying to weaken the social value of semi-skilled music-playing family and friends. Both happened but that wasn't the point, it's just how things shook out.

I'm very open to arguments that either of those was bad and maybe even that their harm isn't made up for by the benefits the two technologies provide, but to whatever extent the Web is anti-author or anti-creator it's not some conspiracy (in the usual sense—I don't mean that as a slight) but just what it is. The printing press hurt some people. Recorded music hurt some people. Film and talkies hurt some people. I don't think anyone developing film audio recording & sync technology, or even those involved in its use, were much interested in harming a bunch of silent film actors per se, right? But how would you even develop that tech without doing so? You'd make it way different and much worse somehow, I guess, if it could be done at all. Same here.

[BookPost]

Thank you for your reply! I don’t mean to point fingers, just trying to look at the structure. The built-in incentives and pace of technological advance pushed digital communication toward consolidation and estrangement of revenues from creators. It looks from this side like, had Google and Facebook not developed an overwhelming advantage in the acquisition of user data, advertising would still be generating value for newsrooms and that would be going to writers. Had Amazon not used predatory pricing to undermine competition (bookstores) and merchants (publishers), Bezos might be less rich but we might have a competitive online retail market that returned more value to the source. It seems possible that an idealistic vision of the benefit of open communications might have clouded from view the dangers posed by hinging revenue to the collection of user data (the ease of spreading disinformation, the decoupling of revenue from content creation). Funding businesses and technologies that collected revenue (easily, unobtrusively) from users might have led to a more healthy, democratic, transparent digital environment. Not trying to look back and place blame, just understand causes and imagine a constructive future. Welcome a more informed understanding!

[BookPost]

P. S. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/15/opinion/book-piracy.html