Users will suffer as corporate bullying over online practices
increases.
This column marks the eighth anniversary of Getting Wired. If it is
extraordinary now how distant those heady early days seem, it is
even more striking how profound the reaction against the optimism
and creativeness of that time has grown in the last year.
While the rest of the UK economy seems to be getting by or better,
high tech remains firmly stuck in the doldrums. Nowhere is this
more evident than in the online sector, which once seemed at worst
to be able to do no wrong, and at best to be the panacea for all
business ills.
Amidst all this gloom, however, there are a few encouraging signs.
Amazon.com looks as if it may at last have sorted out its business
model; eBay goes from strength to strength; and Google - by now
more or less established as the unofficial heart of the World Wide
Web - not only continues to provide its excellent service free of
charge, but has begun a programme of expansion without diluting its
vision or dissipating its core strengths.
XML, too, has made notable advances this year. Once so strange and
exotic, it has become almost as standard as HTML - to the extent
that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has even made it the
mission of one of its working groups
"to complete
the transition from HTML to XHTML", the reformulation of
HTML as an application of XML.
Despite such progress, this last year has also seen the W3C lose
something of its role as the wise, disinterested oracle of all
things Web. Notably, the organisation suggested that companies
might be prepared to offer patented technologies for use by the
online community provided they could charge licence fees. The
fig-leaf for this shameful shift in policy was the requirement that
such licensing should be on "reasonable and non-discriminatory"
(Rand) terms .
Although the furore this provoked was enough to force the W3C to
tone down its proposals, they are by no means dead. Worse, they are
but a small part of a larger and profound shift that is taking
place in all sectors of the Internet world.
Emboldened by the disarray of the proponents of the new economy,
some of the most reprobate old-economy companies and sectors are
attempting not only to regain terrain lost to the online revolution
of the late 1990s, but even to win new territory from their
weakened foes.
The Rand proposal was fairly mild compared to other goings-on in
the world of copyrights and intellectual property. The past year
has seen the
Recording Industry
Association of America (RIAA) take an increasingly
aggressive attitude towards those it believes have infringed its
copyrights.
More recently, a bill introduced in the US House of
Representatives,
based on an idea from the RIAA, would give copyright
owners the right to break into the computers of P2P (peer-to-peer)
users if it is suspected that
they may
have infringed copyright. This is the online equivalent of
vigilantism, and provides the perfect symbol of just how far the
mood has shifted away from that encapsulated in the "content wants
to be free" mantra blithely invoked during the early years of the
Internet boom.
It is hard to tell which is cause and which is effect, but it is
striking that this upsurge in corporate bullying is taking place
against a background of ever-greater deployment of the only
credible check and balance to the more rapacious kinds of
corporatism in the digital sphere: free software.
Not only have top-flight free programs such as
Openoffice,
Mozilla,Ogg Vorbis and
Eclipse been released
to growing acclaim this year, but more and more companies and
national governments are waking up to the broader benefits of open
source software beyond the obvious attraction of its low purchase
price.
As a result, the next year promises to be an important one, as the
forces of reaction try to clamp down on the Internet, while free
software zealots try to defend its liberties. Unfortunately,
business is likely to find itself in the middle of this
intellectual and legal battlefield, with all the resulting
uncertainty that this implies.