by SlicerITST » Tue, 27 Dec 2011 17:26
The openess of the internet is the biggest arrow in the knee to large corporations. This SOPA seems to me a next step in trying to reach a closed network. Not because of copyrights infringement and the loss of revenue that is derived by that. But because of the potential money that could be generated when having a closed network.
The issue remains that the internet is too spread out to make lots of money from it. There are simply to many alternatives for the product you are selling or service you are offering to be viable. Of course there are some well known examples where it did work but this was mainly due to the uniqueness of their product (or just dumb luck).
Why does a superbowl (or FIFA World Cup Final for that matter) commercial cost a bucketload of money? It is a concept we are all quite familiar with. Since a large crowd of people is watching from only a few sources the advertiser can reach a lot of people at once. Now apply the same principal to the internet. There you have a huge crowd scattered all over the place with some hotspots. I could even go into audience targeting but that will be a long story. Lets just say that with fewer sources available an advertiser will be more able to reach his target audience. He'll throw hair product commercials towards some bald men as well but the advertiser doesnt mind that as he reached more then enough men with hair. On the internet target audiences are pretty poor defined. There are only a few(relatively) hot spots where an advertiser is sure his target audience will pass by.
So if there would be a way to gather people into less hot spots on the internet advertising would reach the right kind of people and that is what will make the big difference.
And dont think this is a new subject at all. It has happened before with systems we know very well, although it being on its own scale. Think about things like newspaper, radio and tv. At first you might think these are not comparable to the issues of the internet right now but it is all about start up/running costs. At one point large companies started backing certain newspapers that where favorable to them (and smaller newspapers got eaten up), countries created organisations that distribute radio broadcasting frequencies and starting a small tv station is impossible with a big starting budget.
These tactics are being employed as we speak to stop the progress of the internet and basically turn it into a source with a restrictive number of channels.
Firstly, large ISP's (with government backing) want to restrict what goes through their lines (removing the net neutrality)
Secondly, domain owners without backing of large companies will be unable to pay the huge increase of running costs. This increase is either because they have to spent money to appeal in court to a decision made against their website or have to increase their number of paid staff to be able to remove any copyright infringement in time. (SOPA)
And lastly, which i havent seen yet but could be a direct cause of the net neutrality being removed is stopping anyone without a large funding behind him of requesting a domain name by increasing the prices of domain names.
I hope this rant makes sense. Feel free to comment me on any mistakes in thinking i might made.
\'Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare.\'