Zuckerberg And Facebook Throw The Open Internet Under The Bus; Support Section 230 Reform

from the because-of-course dept

This shouldn't be much of a surprise, unfortunately, but it appears that once again Facebook is the first to crack under political pressure, and has decided to sell out the open internet and free speech online. In testimony Mark Zuckerberg is planning to give tomorrow to the Senate Commerce Committee, he's going to say a few nice things about Section 230, immediately followed by him saying the company now supports reforming the law. The praise for Section 230 is accurate, but it doesn't much matter when he takes it back immediately:

However, the debate about Section 230 shows that people of all political persuasions are unhappy with the status quo. People want to know that companies are taking responsibility for combatting harmful content—especially illegal activity—on their platforms. They want to know that when platforms remove content, they are doing so fairly and transparently. And they want to make sure that platforms are held accountable.

This ignores that people are unhappy for contradictory reasons. Some are unhappy because sites are taking down propaganda and disinformation. Others are upset that they're not taking down propaganda and disinformation (or not taking it down fast enough). NOTHING will satisfy everyone. Pretending that there's some magical reform that will work is crazy talk.

But here's the real problem. Whatever nuance there is to be discussed here, whatever recognition of the problems this will cause, the following paragraph will be seen as declaring open season on Section 230 because "even Facebook supports changing the law."

Section 230 made it possible for every major internet service to be built and ensured important values like free expression and openness were part of how platforms operate. Changing it is a significant decision. However, I believe Congress should update the law to make sure it’s working as intended. We support the ideas around transparency and industry collaboration that are being discussed in some of the current bipartisan proposals, and I look forward to a meaningful dialogue about how we might update the law to deal with the problems we face today.

This is nonsense. It is working as intended. It's allowing companies to make their own decisions, and to experiment with different moderation regimes. That many people are unhappy with those choices is the very nature of content moderation. It's not like Congress is going to step in and create rules that work any better. It will only create rules that work worse.

At Facebook, we don’t think tech companies should be making so many decisions about these important issues alone. I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators, which is why in March last year I called for regulation on harmful content, privacy, elections, and data portability. We stand ready to work with Congress on what regulation could look like in these areas. By updating the rules for the internet, we can preserve what’s best about it—the freedom for people to express themselves and for entrepreneurs to build new things—while also protecting society from broader harms. I would encourage this Committee and other stakeholders to make sure that any changes do not have unintended consequences that stifle expression or impede innovation.

And, yes, he's repeating what he's said before, knowing full fucking well that any regulations that Congress puts in place will simply serve to lock in Facebook's position. Facebook can handle the compliance costs. The upstart companies that might disrupt Facebook will have a much harder time.

Make no mistake about it: this is Mark Zuckerberg pulling up the innovation ladder he climbed behind him.

This probably isn't a huge surprise. Facebook's vocal support for FOSTA -- the law that amended Section 230 and put lives at risk -- was only a first step. I was told, point blank, by a Facebook lobbyist that the company needed to support that "minor" change to Section 230 or Congress would have passed something even worse. And here we are, with Congress seeing Facebook's initial caving not as a way to be satiated, but rather as the go-ahead to continue dismantling the framework of an open internet.

And, once again, here's Facebook, happily willing to go along with it.

Facebook is throwing the open internet under the bus -- in part gleefully, as so-called "critics" of Facebook stupidly demanded "reforms to Section 230" incorrectly believing that 230 was a "special subsidy" for Facebook. Facebook doesn't need it any more, but all of the people who called for such reforms are now going to help cement Facebook's position of dominance.

Unfortunately, this is likely to be the focus of tomorrow's hearing, with Senators taking this as permission to destroy the open internet. It is likely that they will ignore fellow panelist Jack Dorsey giving the opposing message that Section 230 is necessary to enable new competitors and free speech on an open internet:

As we consider developing new legislative frameworks, or committing to self-regulation models for content moderation, we should remember that Section 230 has enabled new companies—small ones seeded with an idea—to build and compete with established companies globally. Eroding the foundation of Section 230 could collapse how we communicate on the Internet, leaving only a small number of giant and well-funded technology companies.

We should also be mindful that undermining Section 230 will result in far more removal of online speech and impose severe limitations on our collective ability to address harmful content and protect people online. I do not think anyone in this room or the American people want less free speech or more abuse and harassment online. Instead, what I hear from people is that they want to be able to trust the services they are using.

That's the right message and an accurate one. And it will be stomped on by the message from Zuckerberg agreeing to throw the open internet under a speeding bus.

Filed Under: free speech, jack dorsey, mark zuckerberg, open internet, section 230
Companies: facebook, twitter

Donald Trump Now Wants To Repeal Section 230, Which Will Actually Make The Stuff He Complains About Worse

from the our-president-is-a-fool dept

We've already discussed how the President has been urging Congress to make "complaining about the internet" a key election issue for Republicans. This is why Congress has introduced 17 different bills about Section 230 this year, combined with two separate proposals from the White House itself. But apparently, even that is not enough for our completely clueless President. On Tuesday after facing a bit more mild moderation concerning dangerous lies about COVID that he had posted, he announced that he wanted to "repeal" 230 entirely.

This was in response to both Facebook and Twitter taking action after Trump's accounts falsely claimed that the flu is more deadly than COVID-19 (a truly incredible bit of disinformation coming directly from the President, a man still sick with COVID-19). Facebook removed the post while Twitter put a misinformation warning on it. And this is why Trump is upset and wants to "repeal 230."

To be fair, this is the same thing that his opponent in next month's election has been saying, with his equally ridiculous and foolish calls to "revoke" Section 230. Both of them are wrong. Neither of them seem to understand what Section 230 does or why repealing or revoking it won't help with whatever they think they're doing.

But since the President is the latest to spout this nonsense, it should be pointed out that if he got his wish, it would create the exact opposite of what he thinks will happen. Rather than putting pressure on social media companies to leave his nonsense, lies, propaganda, and disinformation alone, it will make them more likely to pull it down to avoid being taken to court and having to deal with questions of liability.

It's an ironic statement since, without the existence of Section 230, Trump very well might not be able to tweet it. If Congress were to remove social media platforms' liability protection, then companies like Twitter and Facebook would have no choice but to remove users' ability to post content at-will. Instead, moderators would have to vet and approve content to make sure that it wasn't potentially libelous.

This would exacerbate the very problem that many conservatives have with social media—namely, that Twitter (and to a lesser extent, Facebook) sometimes takes aggressive action against provocative right-wing speech, by labeling the content as misleading or removing it outright.

For whatever reason, both Democrats and Republicans seem to think that "Section 230" is Facebook/Google/Twitter. And if they don't like a move made by any of those companies they think the "solution" is to harm 230. This is wrong and shows a fundamental lack of understanding about how 230 works, what it does, and what would happen if it were changed or removed. It is ridiculous that the President calls for this in response to those sites trying to limit the damage caused by the President himself, and it's just as ridiculous that this seems to be one area that the President and his opponent actually agree on: that the open internet should go away.

Filed Under: donald trump, intermediary liability, joe biden, open internet, section 230
Companies: facebook, twitter

Understanding The 'Splinternet'

from the how-our-digital-world-fractures dept

In recent years, technologists have coined the phrase “splinternet” to describe the internet’s supposed evolution from a unified, borderless realm into a fragmented set of parallel internets, divided by national borders.

This assumes that the internet was, at one point, global in some meaningful sense. But the reality has always been more complex. From the stark digital divide for students during COVID-19 to Western companies enacting overly broad regional blocking in the name of “security,” the digital world never floated freely on a flat plane, untethered from political and geographical boundaries.

Yet, talk of a splinternet points to an important question: will the internet be more like one world (with some bumps along the way), or will it have semi-permeable borders that are tricky and expensive — perhaps even impossible — to cross?

To know whether (or how) the internet is becoming more fragmented first requires reliable methods for measuring internet fragmentation. The Daylight Security Research Lab has been working on this challenge for over a year with UC Berkeley’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity.

The internet is not a singular technology. It’s an ensemble, cobbled together from a variety of complementary tools and protocols. Each protocol sits on top of the one beneath it, creating "layers" of technologies that, together, we colloquially call “the internet.” In a recent column in the New York Times, for example, Shira Ovide describes fragmentation among companies providing digital services in India. This competition happens at the "content layer," which hosts the applications we interact with.

But this content layer locality is only one dimension of fragmentation. “Below” this layer, IPv6, an upgraded internet protocol system — the basic addressing system that allows computers to connect to the internet — rolls out unequally across the world. As older IPv4 addresses (in the style of 127.0.0.1) become increasingly scarce, internet outages could hit countries with low IPv6 penetration. Upgrading to IPv6 requires private- and, in some cases, public-sector investment so this divided access to the internet will break along lines of wealth.

“Above” these technical layers, regulations like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Russian data locality laws fragment the internet at the "legal" or "social" layer. Russia’s laws require data about Russians to be stored in Russia and have enabled the Putin regime to disconnect from the wider internet as part of a “preparedness” drill. However, the GDPR has yielded a more subtle, bureaucratic flavor of fragmentation. As of 2018, about a third of major U.S. news sources blocked visitors from Europe to avoid GDPR regulations. While the policy merits of the GDPR can be debated, the regulation has undeniably made national borders matter more for the way data flows throughout the world.

Fragmentation can come at any layer of the internet stack. To capture this multifaceted reality, the Daylight Security Research Lab built a dataset to measure internet fragmentation through proxy measures based on four different layers of this stack.

Rather than revealing a world moving in one direction from "global" to "fragmented," the research reveals a more complex reality. Internet governance decisions produce diverse types of fragmentation. Some countries may have lots of data locality laws, while their content-layer patterns align with global norms. Other countries may exhibit the opposite pattern.

Across the five layers of the stack, the research mapped these fragmentation profiles with surprising results. On the one hand, countries expected to be different were surprisingly similar. Ask what Norway has in common with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, and Bahrain, and someone might guess, “aside from oil, not much.” However, these very different countries have very similar, country-specific browsing habits, degrees of network non-neutrality (e.g., government or ISP interference) and work on similar infrastructures. While the specific browsing habits are almost certainly different between Norway and Saudi Arabia, the way in which they are different from the supposedly “global” internet is itself similar.

On the other hand, similar countries can have a surprisingly different internet. Per popular imagination and some recent reports, China’s model of the internet — one in which blocking is pervasive and centralized— has set a precedent that other Belt & Road countries, like Laos and Indonesia, are following. But the data challenges that assumption. In fact, China stands out from all of the seven Belt & Road countries that were analyzed. China has more data locality laws, a higher degree of content layer locality and significantly higher observed network interference.

As the shape of internet governance changes, barriers and enablers to using these services shift as well. It becomes easier to carry out speech, commerce and other digital activities in “blocs” of interoperability, and harder to move across the borders between those blocs. For an app starting today in the United States, it may be easier to block users from EU countries than to learn about and comply with EU regulation. Imagining this small-scale conflict playing out on a larger scale, regulations can (and do) produce fundamentally different experiences on the internet.

In the meantime, as you read anecdotes claiming the internet is becoming one way or another, or that changes have some good or bad effect, remember the eternal truth about any complex system: it's complicated.

What are we to make of the weird parallels between Norway and Bahrain? And what does this multifaceted reality mean for businesses or policymakers? Our ability to answer these questions is limited by our lack of a common language for discussing the phenomena. To know what’s down the road for the web, we first need to measure it.

Nick Merrill directs the Daylight Security Research Lab at the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. His research is focused on identifying potential harms of technology, and to help others do the same.

Filed Under: borders, censorship, infrastructure, internet, interoperability, jurisdiction, open internet, splinternet

Trump's Plan To Turn US Global Media Operations Into State-Sponsored Breitbart... Could Threaten The Open (And Encrypted) Internet

from the everything-is-terrible dept

Earlier this week you may have heard about the so-called "Wednesday night massacre", in which the newly Trump-appointed head of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), Michael Pack, got rid of the heads of the various divisions he now runs:

The heads of four organizations overseen by the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) were all dismissed Wednesday night -- a move likely to heighten concerns that new Trump-appointed CEO Michael Pack intends to turn the agency into a political arm of the administration.

In what a former official described as a "Wednesday night massacre," the heads of Middle East Broadcasting, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Open Technology Fund were all ousted, multiple sources told CNN.

Two days earlier, the top officials at Voice of America (the other major part of USAGM) resigned after Pack made it clear that rather than being an independent, non-partisan media operation, he intended to turn the various media operations he controlled into Breitbart-style propaganda machines, pushing the President's messaging.

Now, there are some who have claimed that the radio operations, like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, have always been forms of American propaganda. On the whole that's an inaccurate portrayal. They have built up a pretty strong reputation over the years of being useful, independent news agencies, and it's a shame that their reputation is likely to be smashed because our President and his allies are so insecure they feel the best way to accomplish their goals is to control everything and push lies and propaganda.

But, even more concerning is that the fallout from this could have a tremendous impact on the open web and encryption technologies. That's because while much of the focus is on the various media parts of USAGM, we should be much, much, much more concerned about what is perhaps the less well known part: the Open Technology Fund. Open Technology Fund has been the (not "a" but "the") main funder of key elements of the open internet over the past decade. Originally a subset of Radio Free Asia, it was set up to help fund the development of internet technologies that would help activists and dissidents route around censorship and government surveillance. It has helped fund part of the Tor Project. It's funded Simply Secure, which helps a variety of different projects targeting vulnerable populations ensure their efforts are designed with safety and privacy in mind. It's also helped fund important security audits of basically every key piece of technology that protects the internet from unwanted intrusions and surveillance.

In short, keeping OTF doing what's it's doing is hugely important. And that's why it's extremely worrying that OTF's CEO, Libby Liu, was pushed out as part of this purge, in part because of the new direction Pack is pushing OTF to move in:

"As you all know, OTF's flexible, transparent, and competitive funding model has been essential to our success in supporting the most secure and effective internet freedom technologies and innovative projects available," she wrote. "I have become aware of lobbying efforts to convince the new USAGM [U.S. Agency for Global Media] CEO to interfere with the current FY2020 OTF funding stream and redirect some of our resources to a few closed-source circumvention tools."

A group of very concerned folks have now set up a page at SaveInternetFreedom.tech, with a sign-on letter for Congress, asking it to continue to back the Open Technology Fund to continue to do its important work supporting open technologies that enable people to communicate online safely.

Despite OTF’s important work, there are serious concerns that the new leadership within the USAGM will seek to dismantle OTF and re-allocate all of its US government funding to support a narrow set of anti-censorship tools without a transparent and open review process. Moreover, these technologies are closed-source, limiting the number of people around the world who are able to access them and making the tools less secure, thus jeopardizing the safety of users and the global public's trust in US-supported internet freedom technologies. Such an approach also fails to recognize the numerous threats to internet freedom and the much larger set of actions that are required to help those being targeted by repressive governments.

Around the world, intrepid journalists and dedicated activists are taking great personal risks to further freedom and democracy. OTF's open, fair, competitive, and evidence-based award process ensures that those brave individuals have the best tools and technologies available to protect themselves. OTF funds open-source technologies and has funded over 100, independent, third-party security audits of internet freedom technologies to ensure only those with the highest security standards are supported with US-government funds.

Authoritarian regimes have made it clear that they are willing to do whatever it takes to control the internet. It is crucial that the US safeguards the internet as a democratic space for free expression. We urge Congress to respond to these escalating attacks on freedom of speech by protecting the internet through its continued and strong bipartisan support for OTF.

The changes regarding the various US broadcasting components is concerning enough, but most people hopefully can see those for what they are. The threat to an open, private, and secure internet, on the other hand, could have devastating consequences.

Filed Under: encryption, michael pack, open internet, open technology fund, propaganda, radio free asia, radio free europe, security, tor, usagm, voice of america

EU Looking To Regulate Everything Online, And To Make Sites Proactively Remove Material

from the if-you-thought-Copyright-Directive-was-bad,-just-wait-for-Digital-Services-Act dept

One of the reasons that Techdirt and many others fought so hard against the worst ideas of the EU Copyright Directive is that it was clearly the thin end of the wedge. If things like upload filters and the imposition of intermediary liability become widely implemented as the result of legal requirements in the field of copyright, it would only be a matter of time before they were extended to other domains. Netzpolitik has obtained a seven-page European Commission paper sketching ideas for a new EU Digital Services Act (pdf) that suggests doing exactly that. The Act's reach is extremely wide:

The scope would cover all digital services, and in particular online platforms. This means the clarification would address all services across the internet stack from mere conduits such as ISPs to cloud hosting services; while a special emphasis in the assessment would be dedicated to updated rules for online platforms such as social media, search engines, or collaborative economy services, as well as for online advertising services.

A core aim is to replace the e-Commerce Directive, passed in 2000. This is presented as "outdated", but the suggestions in the paper are clearly a continuation of attacks on the fundamental principles underlying the open Internet that began with the Copyright Directive.

One of the problems for the EU when pushing through the upload filters of Article 13/17 in the Copyright Directive is that Article 15 of the e-Commerce Directive explicitly states that there is "No general obligation to monitor". Constant surveillance is the only way that upload filters can work -- if you don't monitor all the time, you can't be sure you block everything that the law requires. Furthermore, Article 14 of the e-Commerce Directive emphasizes that "the service provider is not liable for the information stored at the request of a recipient of the service". That's subject to certain conditions, such as being required to remove material that infringes on copyright, but only after being informed of its presence on their servers. The new Digital Services Act wants to force Internet companies to move beyond reactive behavior:

a binding "Good Samaritan provision" would encourage and incentivise proactive measures, by clarifying the lack of liability as a result of Such measures

The paper goes on to repeat the EU's earlier attempts to pretend that upload filters are not a glaring example of general monitoring -- something that EU courts may well be asked to rule on. The leaked document says:

While the prohibition of general monitoring obligations should be maintained as another foundational cornerstone of Internet regulation, specific provisions governing algorithms for automated filtering technologies -- where these are used -- should be considered, to provide the necessary transparency and accountability of automated content moderation Systems.

That's a classic: affirming that general monitoring is prohibited, while bringing in rules for proactive automated filtering technologies -- aka general monitoring. It would tilt the playing field even more in favor of big, mostly US companies, and would guarantee that the EU never produces its own digital giants like Google or Facebook. The other main proposal of the paper is to bring in mandatory pan-European rules for tackling online hate speech and disinformation, drawing on ideas in national laws:

Uniform rules for the removal of illegal content such as illegal hate speech would be made binding across the EU, building on the Recommendation on illegal content and case-law, and include a robust set of fundamental rights safeguards. Such notice-and-action rules could be tailored to the types of services, e.g. whether the service is a social network, a mere conduit, or a collaborative economy service, and where necessary to the types of content in question, while maintaining the maximum simplicity of rules.

Simplicity? - hardly. This all sounds like a recipe for a completely unworkable set of complex requirements that once again will favor big companies with deep pockets and big legal departments. The authors of the leaked note have managed to come up with an option for making these plans even worse: creating a "central regulator" for the whole EU to enforce this locked down, permissioned Internet they want to create. Although this is only an internal paper, not a formal proposal from the EU, it shows the kind of really bad ideas that are already floating around the European Commission, and being seriously considered there. If you thought the EU Copyright Directive was bad, just wait until you see the new EU Digital Services Act.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: copyright directive, digital services act, e-commerce directive, eu, filters, general monitoring, intermediary liability, notice and action, open internet, takedowns

Section 230 Keeps The Internet Open For Innovation

from the keep-in-that-way dept

Sex-trafficking victims in California are suing Salesforce, claiming the company helped the now-defunct website Backpage, a classified ads website, in enabling prostitution. Whatever your view on the harm to the plaintiffs, this suit could hurt American innovation. By holding Salesforce accountable for the actions of its customer, the suit opens the door for other innovators to be held responsible when users post illegal content – a dangerous precedent in today’s internet era.

The question of who is responsible for online content is a difficult issue. Intermediary liability protection is the common-sense idea that internet platforms are not responsible for content posted by users. Enshrined in Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, this law allowed American companies to be the innovators of the internet. In fact, the internet as we know it functions because of Section 230. Without Section 230, any site hosting user-generated content would have to screen every submission to avoid lawsuits.

On a practical basis, doing this in real time would be impossible due to the sheer amount of content created: Twitter alone hosts 350,000 tweets per minute; 200 billion tweets per year. Similarly, YouTube would be liable for any of the content its 1.9 billion monthly users might upload. If any single user post could lead to legal action against the social media platform, that platform would shut down.

Today's internet experience would be virtually impossible.

And so Section 230, the cornerstone of today’s innovative internet, was considered inviolable – until 2018, when Congress was approached by groups representing victims of sex trafficking (and quietly backed by Hollywood studios, the hotel industry and others who saw the chance to weaken online competitors that were taking their customers and disrupting their businesses). While some groups advocating for sex-trafficking victims opposed it, many of these proponents pushed FOSTA/SESTA into law, which allows trial lawyers to sue social media sites that “facilitate” sex trafficking – and, although undoubtedly well-intentioned, the bill takes aim at Section 230.

Though (oddly), the Salesforce lawsuit doesn't invoke FOSTA/SESTA, the law's hastily written language was so broad and vague it could potentially impose liability to any website with a comments section. And immediately, internet services began pulling down popular forums featuring consumer-generated content. Other websites eliminated sections or imposed broad filters. Congress made the internet experience less rich for users and more difficult for entrepreneurs, all while doing very little to protect actual victims of sex trafficking.

For all the damage done to free speech online, FOSTA/SESTA has had little upside. Backpage was seized by the FBI before the bill was signed into law, proving that FOSTA/SESTA was not necessary to take down wrongdoers. More, FOSTA/SESTA forced sex traffickers underground, making it harder for authorities to identify and rescue victims.

Fortunately, our nation knows how to choose freedom over fear and innovation over regulation. Consider the successful SOPA/PIPA protests of 2012, which pushed back against overbroad copyright laws that would have crushed the burgeoning digital economy. Thanks to the protests, websites with user-generated content continue to flourish today.

Section 230 is the legal foundation of the internet – not a shield for criminal liability. But it remains an important protection to encourage entrepreneurs and innovators to start internet businesses. We can't allow misguided rulemaking and ruinous litigation to discourage that. We must keep the internet open for innovation.

Gary Shapiro is president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the U.S. trade association representing more than 2,200 consumer technology companies, and a New York Times best-selling author. He is the author of the new book, Ninja Future: Secrets to Success in the New World of Innovation. His views are his own.

Filed Under: cda 230, fosta, innovation, open internet, section 230
Companies: backpage, salesforce

The Next Step In The Podcast Wars: Two Companies Looking To Be The Netflix Of Podcasts Start Fighting

from the this-is-not-good-for-anyone dept

A few months back, we wrote about the concern that Spotify buying Gimlet Media and supposedly betting big on podcasts could signify the end of the open era of podcasts. The fear was that Spotify would ramp up the effort to put many podcasts behind its paywall, and silo off certain podcasts. To be fair, Spotify would hardly be the first to do so. Stitcher has been doing something like that for years. But, of course, there are other players in the field as well. Over the last few months there's been a lot of buzz around a company called Luminary which has raised somewhere around $100 million to, in its own words, become the Netflix of podcasting.

The idea behind Luminary is that it would offer up an app that could access all the usual podcasts via RSS feeds, but that it would also push people towards a monthly subscription fee that would include some "premium" ad free podcasts that it would develop itself. Over the past few months, it's been clear that Luminary has been putting that $100 million warchest to work, announcing premium podcasts from the likes of Trevor Noah, Malcolm Gladwell, Russell Brand, Adam Davidson, Manoush Zomorodi, Hannibal Burress, Conan O'Brien's team and a lot more.

And this week the company finally launches, and apparently Spotify is blocking Luminary from offering all of its podcasts, even the ones that are freely available for everyone else from Gimlet:

When it rolls out to the public on iOS, Android, and the web, Luminary’s podcast app will be missing some of the industry’s biggest shows, including The New York Times’ The Daily and Gimlet Media shows like Reply All and Homecoming. Shows by Anchor’s network of smaller creators won’t be on the app, nor will series from Parcast, both of which are owned by Spotify.

By withholding their shows, the Times and Spotify are setting Luminary up to fail — or at least struggle to get off on the right foot with users. It certainly seems like the first shot fired in the inevitable premium podcast war and could destabilize one of the first buzzy, well-funded entrants before it can make a dent in the industry. The decisions that happen now will reshape the way podcasts are distributed in the future.

As John Bergmayer rightly points out, there's no one to like in this situation. Part of the wonder of podcasts is that it was a totally open system, built on an open protocol in RSS. But the effort to put a paywall around it and push for exclusivity in order to bundle exclusives means that we're killing off the open part of podcasting and pushing proprietary silos. And that's a real shame.

Perhaps it was inevitable that this day would come, but at a time when the world would be a better place if we were moving towards open protocols, it's disappointing that we're continuously moving away from them.

Filed Under: exclusives, locked up, open internet, paywalls, podcast, podcasts
Companies: gimlet media, luminary, spotify

EU Puts An End To The Open Internet: Link Taxes And Filters Approved By Just 5 Votes

from the a-sad-day-for-the-open-internet dept

Well, it was a nice run while it lasted, but the EU Parliament has just put an end to the open internet. By the incredibly thin margin of just five votes, the Parliament voted against any amendments to the proposal -- which was a necessary step to fixing or deleting Articles 11 and 13. After that, they voted to approve the EU Copyright Directive, including the terrible versions of both Article 11 and 13. This is an inauspicious day and one that the EU will almost certainly come to regret. While we now need to see how each of the member states will implement the actual laws put forth in the Directive (meaning the damage in some states may be more mitigatable than in others), on the whole the EU Copyright Directive requires laws that effectively end the open internet as an open communications medium. Sites that previously allowed content creators to freely publish content will now be forced to make impossible choices: license all content (which is literally impossible), filter all content (expensive and failure-prone), or shut down. Sites that used to send traffic to news sources may now need to reconsider, as doing so will inexplicably require payment.

At best, the EU--for all its complaints about Google and Facebook--has just locked both companies into a dominant position. They can afford this. Others cannot. And, the legacy gatekeepers in the media and entertainment business will quickly pivot to seeking to export this model elsewhere.

The MEPs who voted for this are up for election in two months, and hopefully the EU shows them the door, but in the meantime, today is a sad day for the open internet. I am sure that some will be celebrating on the false belief that this will magically "help artists." It will not. You just handed more power to giant companies, and took it away from creators. In time, one hopes, those who mocked the protesters and activists and actual experts will come to realize just how much they destroyed today.

Filed Under: article 11, article 13, censorship, closed internet, copyright, eu, eu copyright directive, eu parliament, filters, free speech, link tax, open internet

Does The Spotify Gimlet Purchase Signal The End Of The Open World Of Podcasting?

from the hopefully-not dept

If you follow this kind of news at all, you probably have heard that Spotify has recently purchased two podcasting companies: Gimlet Media and Anchor. Gimlet makes a ton of high quality, highly produced podcasts (it's like the HBO of podcasting), while Anchor is a combination of a podcasting advertising network and a set of tools to let anyone create their own podcasts easily (it's like the SqaureSpace of podcasts). On the one hand, it's good to see podcasts getting some attention and interest, and Spotify is clearly one of the largest services for listening to audio files -- though much more so on the music side.

My concern, however, is about the potential walling off of the podcast world. The whole concept of podcasts from the early days was the idea that anyone could create them and anyone could access them. That's been changing a bit of late. There have been a growing number of exclusive and walled off podcasts, including on Spotify (but also on Stitcher with its Stitcher Premium and Slate with its Slate Plus program -- and likely others as well).

And obviously, it's nice to see experimentation around business models regarding podcasts, but as some are already pointing out, this could be another nail in the coffin for the idea of an open web.

In an interview about the Gimlet deal, Gimlet's co-founders insisted that they didn't think it was going to lead to this sort of fragmentation for existing podcasts, but future podcasts might be a different story.

Alex Blumberg: Yeah, I mean, well, Spotify said themselves this morning on the earning call that they have no intention of taking the shows that are out there that Gimlet produces and putting them behind a paywall. So those will continue to be freely distributed.

Matt Lieber: Or make an exclusivity to Spotify, the existing shows.

Alex Blumberg: Yeah. Yes. The existing shows will not be made exclusive to Spotify. They will continue ... you’ll continue to get them where you get them now. And yeah, going forward, I think it’s going to be a mix. This is a new world, and we’re trying to figure out how it works. And so it’ll be a mix of exclusive things that we make exclusively for Spotify, like we’re doing right now with Mogul or things that are windowed or things that are a mix of the two. I think there’s gonna be a lot of experimentation.

Frankly, the idea of windowed podcasts doesn't bother me that much -- releasing versions a bit earlier to subscribers seems like a reasonable business model for some kinds of content. But creating full exclusives, building a fragmented world of podcasting with walled gardens sounds like a disaster for the medium. There are already people complaining about all the walled gardens in video entertainment content. We don't need to add to that with podcasts, when the podcast world has already shown that an open, standards-based system built on RSS works just fine.

Filed Under: exclusives, open internet, paywalls, podcasts, rss, walled gardens
Companies: anchor, gimlet, spotify