As I put it above, a while back:

This whole issue is driven by a fight between content-providers versus telecommunications companies over who will pay for the cost of upgrades to network infrastructure. The telecommunications companies want to pit the content-providers against each other, essentially in an auction for best service, and hence extract more money. The content-providers don't want to play that game, and want to make sure the telecommunications companies can't even try it.

This is worth BILLIONS of dollars, and both parties know it. You can see the lobbying money in all the astroturf and camp-followers. But it's got nothing to do with freedom, democracy, or making little girls cry because their website is slow.

"Net Neutrality" peaked today. I don't mean that it's "over". But now is a watershed moment when some driving interests behind it - that battle between enormous corporations - have reached a compromise among themselves. Everyone, welcome to the moment when the pawns and the catspaws (that's you) have served their purpose, and are shortly to revert back to being ignored ranters on blogs, mailing-lists, and in obscure academic publications. The civil-libertarians are about to be, if not exactly cut loose, regarded as no longer useful.

And personally, I am extremely happy not to have donated my time and energy to Google. Google is not your friend. Google is not your buddy. Google is a mammoth company with multibillion-dollar interests. A corporation will not hesitate to use and discard free-speech arguments as part of its lobbying, abandoning them whenever convenient. I hope all the people who volunteered to be unpaid lobbyists have derived a deep emotional satisfaction from that work. Because if you didn't get anything else, that's all you'll end up with. If I had told some of the activists who tried to "recruit" me, what would eventually happen as we see here, I'd probably just have been attacked.

I've become very cynical. Today's Google-Verizon deal is an example of why.

I was going to "retweet" the explanation on twitter by "Wittylama":

Not only is #Wikipedia down, but also Commons and everything by WMF. the AirCon is down in the server room in Florida - Overheating.

But the restrictions of Twitter put me off - it's not conversation!.

Update: There's a "wikimediatech" status feed

Update2: And it returns ... if you even noticed ...

"money quote" (literally and pun intended):

Lawley said he thinks the new address could easily attract at least 500,000 sites, making it — after ".mobi" — the second biggest sponsored top-level domain name. He expects to make $30 million a year in revenue by selling each .xxx site for $60 — and pledges to donate $10 from each sale to child protection initiatives via a nonprofit he has set up.

Value-add, so this post is not just an echo of the news - there's a "Full summary and analysis of dot-xxx comment period" on the blog of the XXX-domain registry, for example detailing all the campaigns which took place.

I've been following this controversy in detail. Sadly, the reporting of it is turning into a game of journalistic "telephone".

Important, co-founder Jimmy Wales did not "resign" overall. He did voluntarily give up some special technical editing status he had (in the face of some very strong pressure to have that status stripped from him for using it in a pre-emptive way which garnered widespread disapproval). Basically, in Unix terms, he resigned his super-user/"root" bit on the servers. It's not clear if this is more than symbolic, if he can politically restore that status once the attention dies down. It is certainly embarrassing for him.

Since I'm often a critic of Wikipedia, I'll point to a public message by the former Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/058020.html

"Jimmy [Wales]'s is behaving like a vandal and breaking the very notion of our "power in the hands of the community""

I'd say "chaos" is the wrong word - "intense factional infighting" would be more accurate (though when it comes to running Wikipedia, what else is new?). Although there are many interrelated topics, the gist of the dispute is how to handle some sexual material on Wikimedia Commons, a hosting resource (not Wikipedia _per se_), which is, let us put it, of less than obvious immediate educational value, in the face of _Fox News_ making an issue of it. Civil-libertarians will be familiar with such disputes.

The best single message I've found is this one, from a current Wikimedia Foundation board member:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/058301.html

"And I am firmly against reducing the content on Wikimedia to only that which is acceptable for children. The world's knowledge contains a lot of things that are shocking, divisive, offensive, or horrific, and people should be able to learn about them, and to educate others. Not including these things doesn't make them go away--it only makes it more difficult for interested people to learn from a source that tries to be neutral and educational. I don't think Wikipedia will ever be (or should ever be) "safe", for the same reason your public library will never be, either."

Disclaimer/plug - see the column I wrote for the _Guardian_ more than an year ago when a different Wikipedia pornography controversy was in the news:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/dec/18/wikipedia-jimmy-wales

"The combination of moral-panic-mongers willing to practice a politics of personal destruction and the ability to anonymously advocate for one's favorite fetish on one of the world's most widely read websites leads to constant low-intensity conflict. Wikipedia trades off quality control for greater production. That same design flaw is manifested in extremely weak and failure-prone mechanisms for determining the boundary between provocative and profane."

For people unfamiliar with this, a "form 990" is an IRS disclosure form required for charities. And it's often full of interesting financial information. Definitely worth a look if you're interested in the internal workings of an organization. Particular in terms of what people are paid.

We finally get to find out what Sue Gardner, Executive Director, receives for being ringmaster of the wiki-circus: $150,000 base salary, $6,350 benefits, and $18,700 of what looks to be a one-time housing relocation expense.

That's decent money in general in the midst of a recession, but in a relative sense, it strikes me as quite reasonable for the position, especially in Silicon Valley. The salaries of any technical people aren't given this time, per their FAQ "The requirements for inclusion on this schedule are more specific than in prior years. [requirements then specified]". But it can't be all that much, given those requirements.

It does point out again, though, that there just isn't a whole lot of money in the nonprofit per se. Apparently the way to (try to) get rich is using Wikipedia for publicity, to promote oneself for lecture fees, or a venture-capital funded start-up.

Respondents to the fourth "Future of the Internet" survey, conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center, were asked to consider the future of the internet-connected world between now and 2020 and the likely innovation that will occur.

I was one of the survey participants. I ended up with one quote in the report, in the section about reading and writing. The marquee item was querying about Does Google Make Us Stupid?, and I suppose it's just as well that I didn't get quoted there. I remind myself that Google doesn't need me to defend it.

The full responses I wrote for all the Pew survey questions are below:

# Will Google make us stupid?

The article is one of a long line that presents technology as somehow destructive to the essence of humanity (i.e. "making us stupid"). Centuries ago, this was phrased as corruption of the soul. The modern way of expressing it is pseudo-neurology - "Thanks to our brain's plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.". It is an exceptional specimen in that it itself references predecessors of this type, having similar objections to writing or the printing press. But the reason it's part of this survey is that it's tapping into the fears and anxieties of many people who find technological advancement frightening, for changing beliefs about what machines can and cannot do ("as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.").

I don't want to sound blindly optimistic, or be too hard on the piece. There are important points about social values being made. But the cost of getting attention for those points is allying them with a framework which appeals to a very reactionary mindset.

# Will we live in the cloud or the desktop?

This is The Return Of The "Thin Client". Every few years, some company gets the bright idea that simple access to high-powered back-end processing is the wave of the future - and of course, the company is going to get rich by providing those clients and matching back-end processing. It's great in theory, not so great in practice. Maybe This Time It's Different, and it's finally going to happen. But network delays and outages have always killed this idea in practice.

# Will social relations get better?

I voted positive, but I really don't like the phrasing of the question. Consider this: "In 2020, when I look at the big picture and consider my personal net worth, savings, home value, and other wealth, I see that the [modern banking system] has mostly been a [positive|negative] force on my financial world. And this will only grow more true in the future.". There's much material glossed over by such a question.

Note the population surveyed might not be the best sample. In my hypothetical query above, asking it to investment bankers will give a different distribution than foreclosed homeowners.

It's a big topic. Just think of it as new ways to meet - AND EXPLOIT - human needs.

# Will the state of reading and writing be improved?

For heaven's sake, It's clear NOW that the Internet has enhanced and improved reading, writing, and the rendering of knowledge. You have know how to read, it encourages writing, and people can exchange knowledge. Don't confuse this with the business models behind serious publishing, encyclopedias, and universities. The future of books is tied into whether there is a social/business model that supports writing for intellectual content rather than as marketing brochures or advertising-bait.

# Will those in GenY share as much information about themselves as they age?

It should be blatantly obvious that getting married and having kids reduces both the inclination and opportunities for "widespread information sharing".

"Not a soul down on the corner
That's a pretty certain sign
That wedding bells are breakin' up
That old gang of mine"

# Will our relationship to key institutions change?

"Popularity Data-Mining Businesses Are Not A Model For Civil Society"

There's a whole cottage industry now of hucksters trying to sell governments, businesses, non-profits, on supposed Internet magic pixie dust that makes citizens and consumers work for the organization for free, and inversely, peddling snake-oil to powerless people via a sales-pitch that it'll give them influence against powerful organizations. Fundamentally, these people are speaking nonsense, which should be evident to anyone who has ever heard volunteerism promoted as a solution to lack of funds.

# Will online anonymity still be prevalent?

At least in the Western world, there are very strong legal protections for the right to act anonymously, at least in terms of political speech. It would require an extreme social shift to remove them. It could happen, but that would mean a major upheaval with far-reaching implications.

# Will the Semantic Web have an impact?

The Semantic Web is like Artificial Intelligence. It's always just around the corner in theory, and disappointing in practice.

# Are the next takeoff technologies evident now?

It's very difficult to figure out what'll take off in the real world. Everything from technological details to market conditions to social trends has to come together, which means there are very few right paths among many wrong ones.

# Will the internet still be dominated by the end-to-end principle?

I can't explain this all in a comment box, but ... the Internet does not really work the way the writer of the question thinks it works. Trying to understand network management in the current political climate is worse than debating national health care systems (that is, there's extensive distorted, agenda-driven, misinformation).

I'm going out on a limb here. All the initial punditry I see is of the type What Does This All Mean? I wish there was more Why Should We Believe This?

Supposedly:

"I couldn't find a professional job in my chosen field because I didn't have my PhD yet. I didn't have a lot of spare time on my hands because I was still making corrections and preparing for the viva and I got through my savings a lot faster than I thought I would."

Unable to pay her rent, Magnanti's mind turned to other things. She told the Sunday Times she wanted to start doing something straight away, "that doesn't require a great deal of training or investment to get started, that's cash in hand and that leaves me spare time to do my work in". Her solution was prostitution.

I DISBELIEVE.

To be specific - I have no trouble imagining someone turning to high-class prostitution to make ends meet. I have enormous trouble swallowing the idea that someone who finds herself doing it out of financial need immediately starts up a blog presenting it as a funny and amusing adventure. No way.

You can even see her covering what would be obvious the holes in the story:

"Some sex workers have terrible experiences. I didn't. I was unbelievably fortunate in every respect. The people at the agency looked after us appropriately and instructed us appropriately and weren't going to put us in harm's way if they could possibly avoid it."

It's not about "harm's way". What has thoroughly convinced me of the fakery is that just about every single blog I have ever seen which was written by someone in a service industry, whether a waiter, bouncer, comic-book store clerk, whatever - has had a strong component of hating moronic customers. In retrospect, "Belle de Jour" reeks of someone making it up.

And I'm not the only or the first person to think along those lines. See this old article "Belle doesn't ring true"

One of the things that makes me most suspicious about Belle de Jour is that I've never met a working girl who has kept a diary. The girls I knew were not proud of it. Most were unmarried young mums struggling through life, and they certainly didn't advertise what they did - it was their terrible secret. I think the only person who would write a diary like this about prostitution is somebody who intended to have it published, and in all likelihood somebody who had this published wouldn't be on the game. ...

A while back someone asked me why I was so critical of "Belle de Jour". I tried to convey how it was the worst sort of faked sincerity. Blogging was sold as authenticity, but fabrication was the reality (a different sort of high-class prostitution). C'mon folks, let's try to exercise a little critical thought, instead of being manipulated all over again.

A recent _Wired_ Twitter article, quoting Twitter's CEO:

Do you understand how money flows to the Internet? When you know that Twitter is a vehicle for directing information and traffic to large audiences, you realize there’s obviously a huge business.

Microsoft Bing search:

Because today at Web 2.0 we announced that working with those clever birds over at Twitter, we now have access to the entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search for you to play with (in the US, for now).

Google blog:

In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged — real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.

Me: (a while back, for which I was much flamed)

People aren't being connected by the 'real-time messaging service', they're being bundled up and sold.

Once more - I refuse to be a sucker again. I will not play the latest rigged game where the house makes a fortune, the touts get their commission, while the players are fodder for it all.

People are still reading blogs, and other content. But for the creation of amateur content, their heyday for the wider population has, I think, already passed. The short head of blogging thrives. Its long tail, though, has lapsed into desuetude.

See also The Rise of the Professional Blogger

The blogosphere was supposed to democratize publishing and empower the little guy. Turns out, the big blogs are all run by The Man.

There's a predicatable reaction to articles like these - reading it absurdly as saying nobody would ever post again, redefining the word blogger to mean low/unpaid corporate writer who rants, discounting the article because of the author, and so on. But it's quite measurable. Not by text string searching an index, which is going to be full of spam and echoing, but examining various indicators.

One strong indicator is to look at what the professional attention-sellers are doing. Remember, these people have as their careers figuring out what's the top manipulation tool, what trend they should promote. That's their job - and if they don't do it with reasonable skill, they don't succeed. So while they're hardly infallible (any trend-hyping is going to invove many duds), they are evidence. It's not canary in a coal mine, but more at if you see a pack of predators cluster in a particular territory, it's likely they think that's the best place to find prey (which, remember, is YOU!).

It's no secret much of the A-list has gone a-twitter That's an objective measurement. Another data-point comes from Shelley Powers noting blog reader-program development has ceased

I finally installed the Gregarius feed aggregator, even though it is no longer actively supported. I only need a web-based feed aggregator, and so far I've not been able to find a single one that is still actively being supported. Not a single one.

In fact, most of the feed related software seems to have been discontinued in Fall of 2008 - just about the time when Twitter use exploded. I knew that Twitter was popular, but I hadn't realized what an adverse impact it is having on how we find, and read, information on the web.

And it's been generally noted that the bubbly blog money has disappeared.

So, hypesters, developers, investors - all basically have now abandoned the former gold-rush. Stick a fork in it, it's done.

Coda: One marketing A-lister recently sent out a Twitter message about my article regarding why I refuse to be a sucker again, commenting "[Seth Finkelstein] is not happy about Twitter, for the same reason he wasn't happy about blogs".
I wanted to respond "Well, wasn't I right both times?". But of course, for either blogs or Twitter, A-listers reach orders of magnitude more people than me, so being right is something of a pyrrhic victory.

But the peHUB site ("A Public Forum for Private Equity") now has a short article on it: RSS Is Dead, So Is The RSS Fund. Key points:

The firm launched with a press release touting "the creation of a $100 million fund," but that was basically a PR stunt. ... [they] wanted to raise $100 million, but had only $20 million from a cornerstone

The firm made a series of investments, in companies like Attensa, KnowNow (defunct) and Edgeio (assets sold to Vast.com). But new deals stopped when RSS Investors ran out of cash, and the decision was made to close up shop.

I'm not sure what the moral of the story is, beyond the obvious that the attempt to make 100 million dollars justifies every cynical thought I've ever had or written regarding blog-evangelism and the huckstering which drives it. I suppose a more politically astute person than me could have sold them some snake-oil and cheerleaded all the way to the bank ("Oh yes, RSS is a world-changer, people can write *blogs*, so buy my data-mining start-up ..."). But as we see, that game doesn't work well even for the players (though still much better for them than all the digital-sharecroppers).

As put in a statement:

Why did WikiFur move?

Our current host, Wikia, is a for-profit company funded by venture capital. They have been able to expand rapidly as a result, and provide both technical and community support. This has usually been beneficial to WikiFur.

However, there comes a time when every business has to start making money. To increase revenue, Wikia applied new adverts which intrude into the content area, pushing aside existing content. We believe this significantly detracts from the design of these pages. To date, WikiFur readers have been spared the worst of these - see Wookieepedia (without an ad-blocker) for an example of what it would be like.

Wikia also imposed major changes to the user interfaces of hosted wikis, in a deliberate trend towards a branded look. They wish to be seen as an integral part of the site, rather than the providers of a hosting service to separate communities.

The changes mean that Wikia's service no longer met our needs, so we decided to part company.

Hat tip: Fan History’s Blog, which has this interesting additional aspect:

Since the move, we've seen a drop in traffic (Google was our number-one referrer), but editing has remained active, so we're happy. From our past experience with other language projects, we know they'll find our new location soon enough.

Good luck, folks. Let's see how Google treats you in the future.

One of several mysteries to me has been why the Internet Archive's opposition to the Google Books Settlement has recently been getting so much attention from professional law/policy types. Don't misunderstand my point regarding that attention, I'm all for it. But, in my experience, those kinds of public spirited projects are the type of thing that typically get obscure mentions in journal articles that nobody reads, usually trotted-out to justify the writer's visionary hobbyhorse. Proof - has anyone heard of Project Gutenberg recently?

So, when I read BBC - Tech giants unite against Google:

Three technology heavyweights are joining a coalition to fight Google's attempt to create what could be the world's largest virtual library.

Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo will sign up to the Open Book Alliance being spearheaded by the Internet Archive.

They oppose a legal settlement that could make Google the main source for many online works.

"Google is trying to monopolise the library system," the Internet Archive's founder Brewster Kahle told BBC News.

A-ha! Mystery solved. Moneybags. Indeed, very large moneybags. If it were just librarians and civil-libertarians and free-culture people, nobody else would care. They'd just be kicked, at best. But big corporations are different matter. Their concerns are taken seriously.

Now, I'm not saying anything about the causality, or pawns, or making any statement about the morality of such a coalition. An enemy-of-my-enemy strategy can be good politics, even necessary against a behemoth like Google.

However, I suspect if before this was announced, I had speculated that all the attention to the project was a sign that something like this was potentially in the works (remember, these sorts of arrangements don't happen overnight, they can require months of negotiation) - I would have been roundly denounced as cynical in the extreme.

Again, I wish the endeavor well. I just find it darkly amusing to note the various forces at work here.

Bonus: Group-groom to/from Doc Searls - Unsettling books

1) Tom Slee - "Googling Barbie Again". He said it, not me:

"[Law Intellectual BigHead] made a big deal of the Google search results for Barbie in his book ... where he claimed that, whereas other search engines gave you only sales-related Barbie sites in the top ten, Google's "radically decentralized" algorithm revealed an entirely different picture of Barbie. ...

The one big change in the last 18 months is that the remaining countercultural site from 2008 has now been pushed over the edge to page 2 of the search results, displaced by two Google-owned collections of links (News and Videos). ...

... It should be no surprise that as the web has become mainstream, and as corporations realise the necessity of investing in their web presence, the web begins to look more like other mainstream media. Perhaps more evidence that the Web's counter-cultural moment is over.

2) I should have noted a while back Walt Crawford's long Cites & Insights discussing Perspective: The Google Books Search Settlement.

The agreement could be a lot worse. The outcome could also be a lot better. I'm sure Google would agree with both statements, as it finds itself in businesses where it has neither expertise nor much chance of advertising-level profits. At the same time, the copyright maximalists didn't quite win this round. We'll almost certainly get somewhat better access to several million OP books—and will have to hope (and work to see) that the price (monetary and otherwise) isn't too high.

I was reminded of it today given that the Harvard Berkman Center is running a workshop on "Alternative Approaches to Open Digital Libraries in the Shadow of the Google Book Search Settlement"

3) David Weinberger inadvertently[Updated] provides a small lesson in how PageRank isn't everything in terms of Google ranking, in noting Britannica: #1 at Google

Today, for the very first time in my experience, The Encyclopedia Britannica was the #1 result at Google for a query ... It's good to see the EB making progress with its online offering, but I'm actually puzzled in this case. The query was "horizontal hold" (without quotes), and the EB page that's #1 is pretty much worthless. ... So, how did Google’s special sauce float this especially unhelpful page to the surface? ...

(I see it as #2 now, under a wiki.answers.com). I keep trying to tell various people that Google's ranking has multiple variables, but the simplistic model seems very difficult to displace.

[Update: David Weinberger commented: Seth, it was[n't] an "inadvertent" lesson. It was totally advertent. My reference to "secret sauce" intended to imply that Google's algorithm is complex and proprietary. And in the case I mentioned, those algorithms seem to have failed, for the top listing is unlikely to help anyone interested in the search terms ("horizontal hold").]

Oh, how far the mighty imagined Google-fighter ("killer" was overhype) has fallen. The late, only slightly lamented, Wikia Search project (Wikipedia-style search) shut down months ago. The URL was redirected to another site of Wikia Inc, a question-and-answers wiki. But there was at least a paragraph on the front page indicating Wikia Search had existed. However, on June 17, even that paragraph was removed. All that remains about Wikia Search on that page now is a tiny icon, a virtual puff of smoke, into which it has vanished.

Speaking of "Wiki answers" sites, in the name dispute between Answers.com's "WikiAnswers" site and Wikia's "Wikianswers" site, Answers.com has recently gotten a trademark registration on "WIKIANSWERS". Though the argument may possibly turn out to be academic. Even many months after launch, Wikia's site is getting less than 1% of the traffic of Answers.com's site.

Consider this statement:

JIMMY WALES: No, it's not one that we had encountered in quite this way before, but because The New York Times was very successful in having their media blackout, it was pretty easy for our volunteers to look at it and say, well, really under the rules of Wikipedia we've never considered ourselves a wide open free speech forum where people can post speculative things. We just look at it and we say, well yes, there was one report here and a couple of blogs, but really it's not being reported anywhere else, so who knows.

Now, of course, I knew that it was true because The New York Times contacted me to ask what could be done about it, but it's not my obligation to report everything I know, just as it wouldn't be for anybody.

Note the first edit to add the information about David Rohde's kidnapping sourced it to an Afghan news report.

Compare the following message on a Wikipedia discussion list:

... When we want to protect a non-reporter, we are told that since Wikipedia is just republishing information that is already out there and causing damage anyway, the person will probably have been hurt just as much without the Wikipedia article. And of course, Wikipedia is not censored, and that the five pillars of Wikipedia require the free flow of information and can never be compromised.

Certainly, someone who tried to suppress information in the same way, but was not Jimmy Wales or otherwise important on Wikipedia, even if they did it to save a life, would be accused of edit warring, told that they are abusing the rules, and taken to Arbcom and banned. Of course, in the process they would be told that their idea that they are saving a life is speculative and can't be proven. If one such person were to justify their actions by claiming that terrorists can't use the Internet well, we would reply "nice idea, but you really have no proof for that. You're just speculating. You don't know that that's true. Now stop the edit warring and the rules abuse-- we can certainly prove *that*."

Where you stand depends on where you sit.