#media/article#media#infrastructure digital public space
Link:: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/the-case-for-digital-public-infrastructure Author:: Ethan Zuckerman
- “Our responses to the challenges of the contemporary media ecosystem are marked by failures of imagination. So long as we are wedded to the idea that a few large companies will set the rules for speech and discussion online, we will constrain the solution space of possible interventions. My goal is neither to eliminate the powerful internet platforms nor to cede the future to them – it is to imagine possible futures where surveillant advertising delivered by monopoly providers isn’t the only available option to build a thriving future of democratic communications.”
- looking back at how we have dealt with new media technologies before
- radio: 1912-1927
- “The business model for radio was not easily apparent, especially as early broadcasters worried that advertising in such a sensitive medium – one that reached into the privacy of the very home! – might offend sensibilities. That worry evaporated in 1922 when AT&T entered the broadcast market with a new business model known as “toll broadcasting.” For AT&T, which sold time on its phone networks to long-distance callers, radio was a natural extension of their existing business, connecting a caller to many listeners instead of one.”
- IN the US, “Radio Act of 1927, which created ninety-six assigned frequencies on the radio dial. Due to this frequency squeeze and other policies designed to “professionalize” broadcasting requiring a sixteen-hour broadcasting day, by the 1930s nonprofit broadcasters commanded less than 2 percent of the market.“
- Government policy restricted the size and encouraged more monopoly
- US fit mold of capitalism. in USSR, fit mold of Soviet structures.
- “Because most Soviet citizens could not afford radios, loudspeakers were installed in public squares, factories, and in all places that large numbers of people would commonly gather. The spread of radio as a propaganda tool paralleled the industrialization of the Soviet Union; as workers moved from farms to cities and factory towns, they came into closer contact with the pervasive voice of Radioperedacha, the Soviet national radio broadcaster.”
- as private radios become popular, wired radios were a thing where “their sole control was a volume knob, since tuning was both unnecessary and impossible.”
- in UK things were also different: “But while American broadcasters had a long period of comparatively low regulation, the Post Office in the United Kingdom intervened in radio almost immediately, with the postmaster general declaring in 1922 that “it would be impossible to have a large number of firms broadcasting.”19 Instead of department stores, telephone companies, and churches competing to create this new medium, the Post Office charged the BBC with the responsibility of creating content for the nation.”
- chose a government agency instead of allowing company to do it
- “The BBC had several enormous advantages over their U.S. counterparts. Not only did it have an enviable monopoly, it had a guaranteed revenue stream from the annual license fees levied on each radio receiver sold. The stability provided by this funding allowed the BBC’s first director, John Reith, to declare a social mission for the company above and beyond market demands: radio was to be the British citizen’s “guide, philosopher, and friend,” seeking to “inform, educate and entertain,” in that order.”
- “critical part of the BBC model was the independence of the corporation from government control ver programming”
- fiscal independence gave them freedom to pursue social mission
- radio: 1912-1927
- three models for the internet
- “a particular business model is not inevitable but the product of political, economic, and cultural forces.”
- “The adoption of display advertising as a default business model led to a rush of interest in sites that generated many pageviews, as those pageviews represented billable ad views. Asking users to create content, as early homepage hosting sites Geocities and Tripod27 did, was a more efficient way of generating pageviews than using professionally edited content, as social networks later discovered. The problem with social media and participatory publishing, advertisers found, was that ad performance was terrible: Very few people who saw ads clicked on them, and far fewer purchased products. In order to better target these ads, advertising networks began collecting detailed behavioral data on their users, tracking their movements from one website to another. Social networks like Facebook could go a step further, combining behavioral data with information their users posted on their websites, creating complex profiles of information on web users that could be used to better target ads.”
- personalized ads came out of business need step by step
- “The power of large web companies like Google and Facebook comes not only from their dominance of online business models but also from their ability to direct attention, the fundamental currency of the media world. As Facebook has become a key source of referrals to new websites, news companies have begun publishing directly to Facebook and sharing a fraction of the revenue Facebook generates from the accompanying advertising. The net result is that these publishers are no longer wholly on the web – a significant part of their publishing is in the closed, un-auditable ecosystems controlled by the platforms. This phenomenon has dangerous implications: The “pivot to video” many news organizations attempted, firing writing staff in the process, was predicated on false information from Facebook designed to encourage the publishing of more video content”
- China is the opposite where companies have no control
- “Chinese online culture is rooted in bulletin board systems based around local universities, where online conversations are rowdy and free-flowing, stepping up to and occasionally across government-mandated red lines. That spirit has continued as China has built its own set of social networks, starting with the Twitter-like Sina Weibo and continuing with WeChat/Weixin, which superficially resembles WhatsApp. Censorship is baked into these platforms, as platform operators must monitor online content and remove offending posts or risk losing their operating licenses. But Chinese netizens have reacted to this environment with creativity, developing complex visual vocabularies to talk about forbidden topics, employing humor and wordplay to carve out freedom of expression under censorship”
- “Unlike state control of radio in the USSR, which led to drab and boring propaganda, China’s unique forms of control have led to a hypercapitalist concentration of monopoly power and wealth surpassing the wildest dreams of American monopolists and the darkest nightmares of privacy advocates”
- WIkipedia consistently ranks in top sites and has a different business model: no advertising, no user tracking, and no selling of user data
- “While Facebook and other social networks rely on their users for content – your status updates and baby photos are ultimately Facebook’s core product – Wikimedia recognizes user labor as a valuable contribution and celebrates the effort as such.”
- US public media has done well in complimenting existing media and remaining as trusted sources
- how to bring about [[public service digital media]]
- “Their imagination was paired with a revenue model that supported innovative experiments and an institutional structure that allowed successful experiments to thrive and failures to fade away.”
- Need willingness to think creatively about what a public service media built from scratch would do and how to fund it
- Not a new idea: “In May 2019, Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Romer proposed a progressive digital ad revenue tax designed to encourage platform companies to explore models other than surveillant advertising, like subscription-based models.47 The Romer model is designed to discourage companies from using surveillant advertising, so the tax is likely to be significantly higher than 1-2 percent and increases with the size of surveillant ad revenues earned by a company.”