Robber Barons

In the 13th Century, one of Europe's great channels of commerce was the Rhine river. Along it flowed the bits of its day - wood, coal, iron, wheat, wool. The raw stuff of commerce, just as bits are ours today.

Along the Rhine lived powerful, wealthy Barons - you can see their footprints still 800 or more years later - those fairy tale castles we've seen in films and Lufthanser posters. And these Barons got their money to build their castles by taxing the flow of commerce past their shores. They didn't cut the wood, or grow the wheat, smelt iron. But the wheat and wool and iron passed through their channels, and if you wanted it to flow, you paid their tax. They were the original "Robber Barons".

Since then the term has been applied to others, most famously in the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th century, but never more fittingly to a new breed. The Rhine is now the internet, and the barons are the recording industry, the film industry, increasingly telecommunications companies, publishers, all of whom would tax the flow of commerce, and more significantly, restrain it, simply because they can. The world they are comfortable with is changing, and they'll do all they can to stop it happening. The chief weapon in their arsenal is getting governments, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to pass laws protecting their interests. "Cry baby capitalists" some have called them, who need the "nanny state" (I'm sure conservatives hate it when you use their own language against them, hey maybe I'm in breach of copyright for using the term in an unauthorized fashion) to protect their outmoded business practices, all the while happily using the web to grow their businesses. You know, that unpatented, unencumbered invention someone gave to the world, which they seem to have no qualms using when it suits them.

I'll suggest than when history reflects on this period, say 1990 to 2020, it won't see terrorism, or Iraq, or oil as the primary themes. It won't see the so called "clash of civilizations" of Islam and Christianity. It will see openness versus control. It will see DRM, versus the remix culture. It will see open standards versus "industry standards".

If we cast our minds back hundreds or thousand of years, what do we, as a civilization, recall? We recall Homer, and Dante, we recall Bach and Pythagorus, not corporations and governments and lawyers (we only know of that lot as characters in literature, they are creations of culture). Because all we really have is "culture". Music, and literature, film, television, games, software, and whatever else we might dream up a year or a decade, or a century hence. And it's these which the new robber barons fear, unless published on their own terms, for their own benefit,

Imagine paying a license fee to use certain words or phrases - to say, or write "to be or not to be", or "hasta la vista, baby". Yet this is precisely what the recording industry, and hollywood, and rest assured others want to come to pass. Imagine paying more to your telco to use certain web applications, or perhaps even google, because that's what some of them want. Actually, they want Google and others to pay them more to use their networks to deliver information and services. They are like the robber barons of the Rhine 800 years ago, taxing the flow of commerce because they can.

And only in the last few days have we seen major news organizations wanting to stop Google (and others, no doubt) aggregating news, like the fantastic Google News despite that making it easier for us to access their sites, which is surely what they want us all to do? Again, they want complete control.

A decade ago, Microsoft, Apple, AOL, Compuserve and others all sort to provide their own walled off mini webs. All failed, despite their wealth, their partnerships with huge powerful content producers, despite seemingly holding all the cards.
A decade from now, will these last ditch efforts of incumbents in so many industries to seek protection through legislation, or the abuse of their monopolies succeed where earlier attempts to co-opt the openness and universality of the web and the internet failed?