Telco and Cable Companies in the Internet Era

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Doc Searls is correct that internet providers should be racing to offer internet services rather than trying to resuscitate dying products:

Phone and cable companies will never be Internet companies. Never. Nor will Newspapers or TV networks. But the latter don’t matter as much, because they don’t deliver Internet service to homes and businesses. Phone and cable companies do. The Net depends on them.

If Phone and cable companies took the trouble to provide unencumbered symmetrical service — same speeds up and down — and stood prepared to help individuals and businesses of every size use the Net in original ways that they see fit — to engage in Free Enterprise in the open marketplace the Net truly is — countless ways of making money on service to those customers would manifest themselves to the providing companies.

For example, I would gladly pay $100 per month for a block of six IP addresses, no port blockages, and 1Mb of symmetrical service to my home. I would also gladly pay more on a tiered basis for higher levels of traffic and higher grades of provisioned service. Also perhaps for hosting. Offsite data backup (a potentially huge business for which high upstream speeds are required). And perhaps much more. And I’m sure there are millions of small businesses out there that would be glad to do the same. But most of us are stuck with a choice between 1) a shitty asymmetrical service from a phone company that wishes it could still charge for time and distance; and 2) and a shitty asymmetrical service from a cable company that wishes it were still just in the TV channel delivery business.

Locally, TDS, to their credit does offer 4MB symmetrical dsl service (4mbps up and down).

Bob Iger and Apple Save Network TV?

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Mark Cuban:

On the ITunes Store, you can buy the latest episode to Lost and some other shows the day after they air on Network TV. in this case ABC, for $1.99. Sounds simple and reasonable. Not anything earth shattering right ?

I think this is correct – but – I’m not sure about the pricing. Some of it is not worth much, while other shows/documentaries (PBS?) are quite well done.

The New De Young

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Zahid Sardar:

With its elegant low-slung copper-clad building in a sophisticated garden setting and gravity-defying, twisting tower, the M.H. de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park will achieve every museum’s goal — to educate the public — about art as well as architecture.
Not since Frank Lloyd Wright’s futuristic Marin Civic Center was completed in 1957 has the Bay Area seen a significant new civic structure that does not affect a classical or postmodern pose. For architecturally conservative San Francisco, it’s the equivalent of St. Louis’ 1960s stainless steel arch, a gateway to bigger, more exhilarating ideas in a post-Bilbao Guggenheim age.

Listenomics

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Bob Garfield:

Why? Because the information society is reversing flow. What began as an experiment among a few software nerds has, thanks to the Internet, expanded into other disciplines, notably media and law. But it won’t stop there. Advertising. Branding. Distribution. Consumer research. Product development. Manufacturing. They will all be turned upside down as the despotism of the executive suite gives way to the will, and wisdom, of the masses in a new commercial and cultural epoch, namely: The Open Source Revolution.

“We’re tired of the 20th-century model of being passive consumers of mass content,” says J.D. Lasica, author of Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation. “We’re transitioning to a new kind of culture. More participatory, more open, more interactive where the locus of control passes.”

Lasica, who believes for example that by now Mickey Mouse should be in the public domain, doesn’t think he’s demanding anything outlandish.

Berlind on Getting Ripped off By DRM

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David Berlind:

Secondary in my mind (not by much) to the DRM goal vector is the technology vector. This is where Hollywood’s need to protect its turf has turned into a gift from heaven for the technology companies that incessantly seek out market control points through the use of proprietary technologies. To you, proprietary generally means one of two things. Lack of compatibility or increased cost to get compatibility. Today, the different DRM technology makers are in a race to drive as much DRMed content (DRMed with their different DRM technologies that is) into market as possible. By doing so, they are securing the future of their playback technologies because you’ll always need them to access your content. In this context (driving DRMed content to market), Microsoft is the tortoise and Apple is the hare

Yin and Yang: Gates & Jobs

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While Bill Gates visited the UW Wednesday (more from the Badger Herald), Steve Jobs introduced new imacs, ipods (with video playback) and the ability to buy and download video online, via the iTunes music store (lookout Netflix). John Markoff and Laura Holson have more on Jobs introductions:

But Mr. Jobs, Apple Computer’s co-founder and chief executive, concluded a 90-minute presentation at a theater here by framing his plans in the broadest possible terms. “I think this is the start of something really big,” he said. “Sometimes the first step is the hardest one, and we’ve just taken it.”
Apple is not the first company to enter the market for digital video. A range of efforts are under way by consumer electronics companies and studios looking for ways to make high-quality digital video available on computers and hand-held players.

View the presentation here (Wynton Marsalis plays toward the end, which is simply wonderful).

KPMG Tax Shelters: A Very Strange Indictment

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Robert Weisberg and David Mills:

The recent indictment of some KPMG partners makes for very interesting reading. In the months leading up to it (and the now-rumored indictment of other tax advisors on similar grounds), numerous news stories suggested the KPMG accountants had somehow knowingly participated in tax fraud by creating fake losses for wealthy clients. Whether or not this proves true, the indictment makes no such allegation. While the accountants and their clients may have done some bad things, the notion that their behavior is criminal, and even sufficiently criminal to threaten the very existence of this major firm and its thousands of jobs, casts doubt on the fairness and judgment with which the federal prosecutors have exercised their discretion.

Why did they do so in this case? Probably for the simple reason that they are — quite properly — offended by the proliferation of newfangled and economically questionable tax shelters, yet at the same time exasperated that Congress shows no interest in legislating these shelters out of existence or enacting a clear “business purpose” requirement, in spite of repeated requests from the Internal Revenue Service. The prosecutors seem to be venting their frustration over this failure to act by fashioning felony charges out of ethereal legal material.