#informationisapublicgood — Public Fediverse posts

We need a permanent solution for universal broadband access

The Affordable Connectivity Program, which subsidizes internet access for low-income households, is set to run out of money by the end of the month.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/5/24121022/universal-broadband-access-fcc-usf-acp

#technology #tech #web #internet #communications #internetisaright #communicationisaright #informationisapublicgood #broadband #affordableconnectivityprogram

@danyork There's an inherent conflict between useful and large, where a further problem is that financially viable relies on large by way of advertising.

This leads to An Inevitable Spiral of Suck. Or #Enshittification as @pluralistic so eloquently puts it.

#EzraKlein has been looking at attention, media, and journalism this past year, with a notably segment this past February: "How the $500 Billion Attention Industry Really Works" (14 Feb 2023), interviewing Tim Hwang. Specifically: "If you’re able to aggregate a lot of attention online, we just have this almost religious faith that there’s just some way that you’ve got to be able to turn this into money. You will become a Google. You will become a Facebook.... [T]he flip side of that [is] that if you come to a V.C. and you say, I want to do a subscription business model, they’ll say, well, I don’t know — we don’t have a whole lot of examples of that really blowing up, so why don’t you just do advertising?" https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-tim-hwang.html

There's also A.G. Sulzberger interviewed by David Remnick at the New Yorker, with some powerfully-motivated argument:

I think there’s often sort of an imaginary person who wants to read these sources but is being boxed out of reading quality news because of the cost. I really don’t believe that is a real population in any significant number.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/a-g-sulzberger-on-the-battles-within-and-against-the-new-york-times

(In the audio version of the interview, Sulzberger compares this to the cost of a Starbucks coffee, though not, say, McDonalds or Dunkin Donuts.)

I'm increasingly convinced that rolling a basic news service including the local and national newspapers of record into basic Internet service, at rates indexed to local cost of living, is a preferable, viable, and necessary alternative to advertising-supported, subscription-based, or a'la carte media pricing. Actually, I'd like to see that extended to all published content. The per-household costs would be low, particularly against the $600/person annual cost advertising alone represents.

#Advertising #media #subscriptions #InformationIsAPublicGood #UniversalContentSyndication

The HN thread I'd linked above gives an example of how it's possible to usefully set a tone or narrative on a discussion.

HN's seen a number of Z-Library items posted in the past few weeks, as first domains were seized and later it was announced that two principals were arrested in Argentina, apparently at the behest of the US DoJ and FBI.

Several of those threads had been diverted, at least for a time, by copyright maximalists. I see that as disappointing.

I've been thinking about and studying the question for quite some time (a few decades in some form or another), I've come across, or come up with, a few alternative suggestions, and I've seen many of the standard, often bogus arguments for the present system.

So when a new post showed up, drop a considered, well-cited, bit onto it that anticipates the usual BS, address the usual attacks (the "Son of Sam Law" one was particularly juicy), and at least in this one small way, slant the narrative toward the side of light for a change.

My main and first drop was here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33698018

It also helps to keep your ego out of the discussion (as much as possible), and see challengers as opportunities.

And of course, if anyone wants to suggest improvements to my approach, I'm open to them.

#ZLibrary #Copyright #InformationIsAPublicGood #UniversalContentSyndication

Z-Library Responds to U.S. Crackdown, Asks Authors for Forgiveness

Z-Library has responded to the U.S. criminal indictment against two of its alleged operators and associated domain name seizures. The remaining team members still haven't confirmed the involvement of the two Russians but say they are determined to keep going. Z-Library also promises to take the complaints of authors seriously and asks for their forgiveness.

https://torrentfreak.com/z-library-responds-to-u-s-crackdown-asks-authors-for-forgiveness-221121/

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33697748

The really heartbreaking thing is that a mere $5.25 per month for a typical household could provide unrestricted access to everything ever published, whilst replacing all present US bookstore sales.

#CopyrightIsBrainDamage It imposes tremendous #DeadweightLosses and makes Letting People Read a Federal Crime.

#ZLibrary #Copyright #InformationIsAPublicGood #UniversalContentAccess #UniversalContentSyndication

@babelcarp UCS is my own label for a proposal I've made, and previously linked my own description here in this toot from yesterday: https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/109169456092632336

(I'm inconsistent in terms, and occasionally refer to it as "universal media payment syndication", though UCS seems to be what I've mostly settled on.)

The initial proposal and a starting definition: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/

Searching the terms will turn up multiple further posts there, either refining the concept or pointing to other similar proposals:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=universal+syndication&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all

I'd suggested ISPs / mobile data providers as the gateway / billing point after that though occurred to me as an alternative to a governmental / tax-based approach a few years later in an HN comment. I've repeated that a few times, not sure this is the first instance but it's one of several substantively similar suggestions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26893033

Other variants / discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adredmorbius%20universal%20%28media%7Ccontent%29%20syndication&sort=byDate&type=comment

UCS similar to numerous other suggestions, including those by Richard M. Stallman https://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-license.en.html, "\@cabalmat" (Phil Hunt) https://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-for-the-uk/, and Nobel-laureate economist Joseph Stigletz who's said "knowledge is a public good":

Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Global Public Good," in Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, Marc A. Stern (eds.), United Nations Development Programme, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 308-325. http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343.pdf

@kensanata

#UniversalContentSyndication #InformationIsAPublicGood

Edit: That's UCS not USC as I'd originally had it. My inconsistency on nomenclature is ... consistent. Also markdown.

@babelcarp Also, since you raise the bogus argument, let's dismiss it: this isn't about not paying journalists: what I'm proposing is specifically a mechanism that will ensure that journalists, and other writers and creators, DO get paid.

For a world which seems hell-bent on marketising all aspects of life, when it's blindingly obvious that the market isn't working, there's a remarkable reluctance to assign blame where it's due: on the market and its failure.

There's never been a significant direct market for journalism. Benjamin Day proved this when he created the penny press in the New York Sun in 1833.

I've mentioned Hamilton Holt's excellent 1909 essay / speech on the significance, and consequences, of advertising in news, Commercialism and Journalism. It's short, pithy, hugely informative, and highly readable.

https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft

As for television news, many of its features and failures are evident in the 1972 book News from Nowhere by Jacob Jay Epstein. Technology's changed some parameters since then, many (such as time constraints and audience maintenance) it's only worsened.

http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=14C940300F3D0EA68652013E3046A701

Newspaper readership in the US has been in a long--term, largely consistent decline since the 1950s. This is NOT a new development, though the endgame is now here.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2010/05/moderating-declines-parsing-the-naas-spin-on-newspaper-circ-data/

Overwhelmingly, the best journalism is either largely publicly-available as government- or philanthropically-supported organisations (national broadcasters, The Guardian, Pro Publica, and recent US experiments with the Chicago Sun Times and Baltimore Beat, f'rex). OR the original bastion of solid news: business- and finance-oriented publications, the one place for which demand actually exists. And a handful of large national papers of record (e.g., the NYT, WashPo, LA Times), though even those are running rough.

Information is in the economic sense, a public good. Treat it as one for it to work.

@kensanata

#InformationIsAPublicGood #Newspapers #Media #Journalism #UniversalContentSyndication

@vortex_egg Thinking some more on this ...

... the notion of a market in which quality tiers are served based on bids based on perceived benefit and costs of provisioning might be one approach. Details naturally remain to be worked out.

But in the "clickbait" tier, if a GPT-3 ML/AI would be sufficient to supply a steady stream of memes, with sufficiently low negative social externalities, the profit motive for entering into the niche would remain quite low.

In-depth investigative journalism would be bid within a distinct an separate marketplace, sufficient to cover costs of production and maintenance.

#UniversalContentSyndication #prevalence #InformationIsAPublicGood

A Modest Proposal: Universal Online Media Payment Syndication

A constant challenge for any creative type is making a living. And it's hardly a new problem. In the case of broadcast media, commercial sponsorship has been the primary model for the past 94 years, along with a few others: public / membership model, pay-per-view, subscription, and sponsorship by a public or religious institution in the case of college and religious stations. A payment syndication model might address many existing frustrations of publishers, journalists, authors, musicians, and artists....

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/

To my earlier suggestions, I'd say: roll an all-you-can-eat print media subscription to all broadband and mobile digital subscriptions. $100/yr broadband, $50/yr digital (quite possibly lower), scaled by wealth. All the books, news, and articles you can stand. Pro-rated payments on a quality metric scale to creators.

#UniversalContentSyndication #InformationIsAPublicGood #dreddit #advertising #micropayments

@kensanata All the more so because we're already paying for it.

Worldwide, advertising is a $500 billion industry.

If you consider that the Global Rich -- the populations of the US, EU, Canada, Japan, and Australia, more-or-less, comprise about a billion people, then by some rough and complex maths, the cost is $500 per person, per year. And yes, the rest of the world gets to ride free. If we just want to treat Internet advertising, the cost is $100/year. Indexed to income, you can apply these to the $30k average income of these countries to get the effective rate, 0.33% for all Internet advertising, about 1.6% for all advertising total.

And remember: that's not an additional household cost, it's replacing the amount already spent in advertising through goods and services.

Based on US Bureau of Labour Statistics data for communications workers, the amount would make much more money available for professional authors and other creatives, even extrapolating out worldwide. Again, take the money off the top, distribute it to those actually producing works, and cut out all the complex, privacy-invading, inefficient, anxiety-inducing payment apparatus.

• Professional authors and writers (including copywriters, excluding journalists, editors, and technical writers): 136,500 positions, median pay $59k
• Editors: 117,000 positions
• Reporters: 54,000
• Technical writers: 52,000 (presumably most directly hired)

That's roughly 300,000 positions. An off-the-cuff estimate of 1 million positions worldwide seems within reason. And we might also include musicians and film-makers. The tax income would be sufficient for a $500k annual salary.

(From: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4r683b/repudiation_as_the_micropayments_killer_feature/)

@njoseph

#UniversalContentSyndication #advertising #InformationIsAPublicGood #PublicGoods #InformationEconomics #Economics