Tag Archives: Internet

Internet competition

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My friend Adam Holland pointed me over to Galen Gruman’s article at InfoWorld, which points to the problems that arise when carriers have considerable pricing power:

Users are being forced to sign up for separate data plans for each device. The cellular carriers advertise their data plans in data buckets, such as $25 for 2GB of iPad usage at AT&T and $20 for 1GB of iPad usage at Verizon Wireless. But you also pay separately for access on your iPhone or other smartphone. That means multiple-device users are asked to pay a lot more, forcing most to make a choice between the two.In both cases, the pricing is illogical and punitive. For their DSL and TV services, neither AT&T nor Verizon (half-owner of Verizon Wireless) charges per computer or per TV, but that’s what they’re doing for mobile devices.

Of course, I’m sure that both AT&T and Verizon would love to charge per computer/TV for home Internet use as well (and AT&T is currently in the process of instituting data caps on home users).  As with so many mobile and broadband ISP policy issues, the fundamental problem is that many ISP operate as monopolies or oligopolies.  Accordingly, there are only two major impediments to their pricing structure:

  1. Government regulation
  2. More competition

Government regulation is, of course, is notoriously tricky.  Indeed, it is often counter-productive as established ISPs use vast lobbying budgets in an attempt to regulate any new competitors out of existence.

But more competition is great when it’s possible, and, fortunately, sometimes new market entrants do appear with offerings that put pressure on established providers.  To use a personal example, my wife and I use a Clear Spot for our only Internet service here in the Boston area.  It’s not perfect (ping times are high), but it’s only about $50/month and is fast enough for high quality Netflix streaming.  Moreover, the Spot’s 4G interface/Wi-Fi router allows us to use the Internet within our apartment or anywhere within Clear’s 4G network.  Among other things, this means we can use an iPod Touch “on the go” (just like an iPhone) and “tether” both of our laptops (no additional fee) and connect up to five more Wi-Fi devices (eight total).

Best of all, because Clear’s service is wireless, we don’t have to subscribe to Comcast even though they are the only ISP providing service to our building.  Maybe that’s why they sent us a letter this past week offering cable+Internet for less than $60 a month indefinitely (not as a temporary promotional price).  I guess the market really does work when the market really does work.

Raw broadband data

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Curious about what your broadband Internet options are?  Ars Technica has a write-up on the U.S. government’s recently released National Broadband Map:

The map indicates that up to 10 percent of Americans still don’t have access to broadband speeds that support basic broadband uses like video and video conferencing, notes the DoC’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration.”There are still too many people and community institutions lacking the level of broadband service needed to fully participate in the Internet economy,” intoned NTIA Chief Lawrence Strickling, following the map’s release.

But the good news is that the National Broadband Map is very accessible and lots of fun.

Indeed it is.  Have fun exploring the data.

Is search engine optimization key to Huffington Post’s success?

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This article suggests the Huffington Post’s value (exhibited in its recent sale to AOL) is based more on search engine optimization than on news or citizen journalism:

In addition to writing articles based on trending Google searches, The Huffington Post writes headlines like a popular one this week, “Watch: Christina Aguilera Totally Messes Up National Anthem.” It amasses often-searched phrases at the top of articles, like the 18 at the top of the one about Ms. Aguilera, including “Christina Aguilera National Anthem” and “Christina Aguilera Super Bowl.”

As a result of techniques like these, 35 percent of The Huffington Post’s visits in January came from search engines, compared to 20 percent for CNN.com, according to Hitwise, a Web analysis firm.

Mario Ruiz, a spokesman for The Huffington Post, said search engine optimization played a role on the site but declined to discuss how it was used.

Though traditional print journalists might roll their eyes at picking topics based on Google searches, the articles can actually be useful for readers. The problem, analysts say, is when Web sites publish articles just to get clicks, without offering any real payoff for readers.

This is an ongoing issue with online news providers: simply producing good journalistic content doesn’t get the same number of clicks as celebrity and gossip-laden stories. And as the article suggests, some search engines, such as Google, may fight back by reducing the rank or placement of pages or sites that rely heavily on popular keywords.

But aren’t these sorts of practice inevitable when making money on the Internet is based around page views and clicking on advertisements? The goal has to be simply getting the most viewers rather than providing the best or more complete or most useful content.

Potential expansion for domain suffixes

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Even amidst discussions that the Internet has run out of addresses, there is talk about expanding the list of available domain suffixes beyond the current 21 options. It sounds like these proposals would allow for all sorts of suffixes and this, inevitably, leads to questions about who would get to control certain domains:

This massive expansion to the Internet’s domain name system will either make the Web more intuitive or create more cluttered, maddening experiences. No one knows yet. But with an infinite number of naming possibilities, an industry of Web wildcatters is racing to grab these potentially lucrative territories with addresses that are bound to provoke.

Who gets to run .abortion Web sites – people who support abortion rights or those who don’t? Which individual or mosque can run the .islam or .muhammad sites? Can the Ku Klux Klan own .nazi on free speech grounds, or will a Jewish organization run the domain and permit only educational Web sites – say, remember.nazi or antidefamation.nazi? And who’s going to get .amazon – the Internet retailer or Brazil?

The decisions will come down to a little-known nonprofit based in Marina del Rey, Calif., whose international board of directors approved the expansion in 2008 but has been stuck debating how best to run the program before launching it. Now, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is on the cusp of completing those talks in March or April and will soon solicit applications from companies and governments that want to propose and operate the new addresses.

Sounds like we could have some battles on our hands for particular suffixes. Perhaps the companies or organizations with the most money will win.

But many of the options in this article are set up as “good” options versus “bad” options. If given a choice, how many people would want the .nazi domain to be controlled by the Ku Klux Klan? And some of the other options presented in the story, such as whether someone who wants musicians and agents to be able to get .music addresses while the music industry wants to control this for their larger purposes, are less clear. ICANN, the organization who controls the domains, says they have considered this: “For people who might propose controversial domains – such as .nazi, which ICANN officials have worried about – approval will be based on the applicant’s identity and intentions, and on the grounds of “morality and public order.” How in the world will they be able to do this in a way that is satisfying to multiple parties? Is there a way to decide this before the domains are sold or are we simply in for long rounds of litigation?

Getting not pwned by technology

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David Rowan over at the UK edition of Wired has an article about the advantages of renting out what you own:

There are assets all around us with high “idling capacity” that are essentially like an ATM machine. People use the extra cash for everything from offsetting car payments to taking the holiday they could not otherwise afford. Collaborative consumption is an easy way to become a micro-entrepreneur.

Rowan argues that the Internet is fundamentally changing the way that people think about ownership:

Now that collaborative spirit [of the sort that launched auction website eBay] is spreading to all sorts of other industries as ubiquitous internet connections bring us together in creative new ways. The peer-to-peer model has lately moved from auction houses and online classifieds to car-sharing, jewelery lending, even online banking — and each time it’s cutting out a traditional incumbent.

In an era when environmental concerns are making conspicuous consumption harder to justify, start-ups are targeting customers keener to pay for access to goods and services rather than actual physical ownership — and new web-based networks are letting all of us be both lenders and borrowers.

As the articles notes, however, such systems can only thrive within an environment of robust trust.  It’s one thing to sell a used laser pointer to a total stranger with the expectation of payment (like eBay’s first sale).  It’s quite another to open one’s dwelling to total strangers who find you through Couchsurfing.

One thing that the Wired article doesn’t address is the official legal barriers to much of these sorts of collaborative activities.  Hospitality, car rentals, banking:  these are highly regulated industries with a host of rules designed to protect incumbents by erecting barriers to entry.  While this may not be a large issue currently, it will be interesting to see how established industry players (or revenue-starved state and local governments) start responding if and when “collaborative consumption” becomes a truly major economic force.

Untimely end for source of Internet meme about Internet

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The NBC employee who released footage of Bryant Gumbel, Katie Couric, and Elizabeth Vargas struggling to define the Internet back in 1994 has been fired. So much for (corporate) information wanting to be free.

But I also don’t quite understand what all the fuss has been about. Sure, their conversation sounds silly to us today. But this was only 16 years ago. If anything, this clip and its popularity demonstrates how quickly the Internet has become an part of everyday life. Back in 1994, the Internet was not used by the common American. My family got AOL in the next year or two, I remember a friend’s family having Prodigy around this time, but most people had no access and realistically, no need for access. Couric, Gumbel, and Vargas were like many Americans: just trying to figure out what this new technology was and how it was used.

More broadly, this released video fits with patterns of more modern people laughing at or commenting on how much better life is now compared to the past. From the vantage point of 2011, we can see the benefits of the Internet and we are bombarded with messages from companies suggesting we need even more of it (in our phones, in our treadmills, etc.). But anytime new technology is introduced, it takes time for the mass public to figure out whether it is a good change or not.

On the hidden or out of the way yet sometimes thriving web forums

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This is something I have noticed recently in several sites I visit frequently: there is a little community of consistent posters who have been drawn together and slowly get to know each other. While one of these sites, the Ask Amy column posted on the site of the Chicago Tribune, is not exactly hidden, The Economist discusses some web groups that have formed in really hard to find or unlikely places:

The programming crew had accidentally created a community of the sort that crop up all over the internet. Most online discussions take place in discussion forums designed to allow people to create an identity and interact in threaded, chronological conversations. But the hidden recesses of the web provide enough soil to root entire worlds, too. Wherever one person may post words which more than one other may read and respond to, a world is born.

Read the article to hear how devoted fans of Douglas Adams founded a group in a forum that was an afterthought and how some people unhappy with Sonic Drive-In’s service found each other.

Sounds like a start to a very interesting research study: what exactly motivates people to (1) seek out these spaces and (2) then continue with discussions and getting to know each other. The description of what happens in these settings in out of way parts of the Internet is hilarious:

It’s been thirteen years of hosting an accidental community. It’s somewhat like ignoring the vegetable drawer of your fridge for a year, then opening it to find a bunch of very grateful sentient tomatoes busily working on their third opera.

I would guess that the people who participate in groups like this are a limited number of total web users. I wouldn’t tend to be drawn to such forums: read a comment section of any blog or news story and you would likely find the conversation to be quite tedious or inflammatory. But I can remember the heady early days of AOL when chat rooms were the exciting feature of the Internet (and content took forever to load).

And these groups can be like real-life groups, meaning that they become territorial and protective:

Another surprise is that they will treat growth as a perturbation as well, and they will spontaneously erect barriers to that growth if they feel threatened by it. They will flame and troll and otherwise make it difficult for potential new members to join, and they will invent in-jokes and jargon that makes the conversation unintelligible to outsiders, as a way of raising the bar for membership.

It sounds like there is a starting period when the group might be somewhat fluid as people stumble unto such forums. But once the group coalesces and becomes a collective entity, others are not welcome and sharp boundaries are drawn to limit the influence of outsiders. So if one wants to become part of such a group, does one simply have to be lucky or have good timing?

Another question: what do the users get out of participating in such long digressions?

More info on how Internet helped movement in Tunisia

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There have been a number of news stories that have suggested that the Internet played a role in the recent political movement in Tunisia that ousted the government. In an interview with Wired, the director of the Tunisian Internet Agency (ATI) gives more information about what happened:

During its 15-year existence, the ATI had a reputation for censoring the internet and hacking into people’s personal e-mail accounts. All Tunisian ISPs and e-mail flowed through its offices before being released on the internet, and anything that the Ben Ali dictatorship didn’t like didn’t see the light of day…

The revolution began Dec. 17 in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, when 26-year-old fruit vendor Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest the humiliating tactics of local officials. The suicide jolted Tunisians. They began to protest in the streets — and clash with police.

Around 100 people died throughout the country. The media, controlled by Ben Ali’s advisers, reported only that criminals were looting.

But videos of the protests, riot police and their victims appeared on Facebook, and bloggers began reporting the daily events with first-hand accounts, photographs and videos. This information helped drive the uprising, and the government responded by allegedly hijacking Tunisian Facebook passwords.

At the same time, hackers began to attack the Tunisian government’s control over the internet. They bombed the ATI’s DNS and website, and tried to bomb the e-mail centipede gateway. The National Computer Security Agency — which fights hacking, phishing, viruses and fraud — took on the activists who tried to overload government websites with distributed denial-of-service attacks.

“When the hackers did DDOS they did a good job, and Anonymous did a good job,” Saadaoui says, smiling. “But not on everything. They weren’t able to take down the DNS, they weren’t able to take down the main servers or the network, but they were able to DDOS websites. They were able to bomb Ben Ali’s website.”

And there is some interesting talk about the future of the Internet in Tunisia: completely open or will the government still have some control in order to block sites that go against conservative Islamic teachings?

So it sounds like the Internet was used in two ways by those in the revolutionary movement:

1. The spreading of information through sites like Facebook. This would help keep people coordinated as well as alert the outside world to what was happening.

2. A number of hackers took the opportunity to attack the government’s Internet infrastructure. They had some success though they couldn’t bring the whole system down.

Is this the way future social movements will happen: through quick information spreading (Facebook, Twitter, whatever comes next) plus hackers trying to disrupt government activity? It would be interesting to know more about these hackers: have they attacked the government before, were they just waiting for an opportunity like this, were they coordinating their actions with those of protesters on the street?

Tactics of Egyptian protesters in a pamphlet

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News from Egypt is trickling out. The Atlantic has translated part of a pamphlet that supposedly was distributed to protesters in recent days. While it is unclear how many protesters might have these, it is an interesting look into the tactics of protests and social movements.

Some thoughts:

1. There is information here on the broader goals of the movement plus more specific information about how to combat riot police. The end goal of the protests is to take over government buildings.

2. The final translated portion has some warnings about not letting the pamphlet fall into the wrong hands, particularly not posting it on the Internet or sharing it through Twitter. (Since the Internet has been shut down in Egypt, this may not be an issue now.)

2a. Could we get to a point where Internet usage is considered a human right? Should governments be able to ever shut it down or restrict access?

2b. If The Atlantic can get its hands on this, surely the Egyptian government already has.

3. This pamphlet must have taken some time to put together. Where did it come from and who put the time into it? This suggests people were preparing for this moment.

4. It must have been an interesting editorial discussion regarding which portions of this to translate in order “to balance the historic nature of the document and protest with the safety of protesters. Publishing this excerpt was the compromise at which we arrived.”

Does social media, like Facebook and Twitter, lead to revolutions (like recent events in Tunisia)?

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Early news reports about the recent uprising in Tunisia have suggested that social media played a role as participants used such technology and organize and coordinate activities. (See this AP story with the headline of “Jobless youths in Tunisia riot using Facebook.”) In the midst of a lively debate over whether social media actually can lead to revolution (see the earlier post on Malcolm Gladwell’s recent thoughts on this), a sociologist provides a short overview of how he thinks sociology has addressed (or has not addressed) this question:

When the debate does pick up again, though, I wouldn’t mind seeing a few new wrinkles added into the mix. What all of the above writers share, I would argue, is, first, a notion of collective action overly-indebted to definitions of action and coordination provided by economics, and (second) a somewhat a-historical focus in digital technology. One of the problems with the debate as it is currently structured is that other academic disciplines, particularly sociology, have largely stopped asking questions about the relationship between the media and social movements. Indeed, sociology has largely stopped asking questions about the media at all. (I’m generalizing wildly here, of course, but as evidence I would point you toward the cogently argued and well-titled article by Jefferson Pooley and Elihu Katz, “Why American Sociology Abandoned Mass Communication Research.”) A second problem with the current debate lies in the fact that more complex theorizing about the nature of technological artifacts has yet to penetrate the mainstream debates over the roles played by technology in political protest.

There are, of course, exceptions. When it comes to deep and important thinking about media and social movements from a sociological perspective I’d point you toward work by Francesca Polletta and Edwin Amenta at UC Irvine, W. Lance Bennett’s work on political communication and protest, and especially research by Andrew Chadwick, and John Downing. In his discussion of “organizational repertoires” and their relationship to media, just as one example, Chadwick draws on a lengthy tradition of thought in classic social movement research aimed at understanding the role “repertoires play in sustaining collective identity. They are not simply neutral tools to be adopted at will, but come to shape what it means to be a participant in a political organization. Values shape repertoires of collective action, which in turn shape the kind adoption of organizational forms.”

In short, a primary advantage provided by a core sociological perspective on social movements is that they bring values and culture back into our conversation, problematizing notions of what collective action even means in the first place.

I would be interested to hear how other sociologists would respond to this, particularly those who study and write about social movements. Just being part of a Facebook or Twitter conversation or group doesn’t not necessarily lead to collective action. So when does organizing through social media turn from just an online activity to rioting in the streets?

Here is a bit of the AP story talking about how Facebook was used in a country where some Internet uses, such as YouTube, are regulated, but Facebook is not:

Video-sharing sites like YouTube and Daily Motion are banned in Tunisia, where newspapers are tightly censured, but Facebook abounds and videos posted there are quickly spread around.

One in 10 Tunisians has a Facebook account, according to Ben Hassen, whose movement is also on Facebook.

“It’s a form of civil resistance,” he said.

How exactly did this happen? And with a limited number of people in the country on Facebook, how did this become something larger? Sounds like a start to a research paper…