Damian Tambini
Many of the 1.5m rural British households who can’t get broadband internet access are hoping for great things from Britain’s digital minister, Stephen Carter. Carter’s Digital Britain review, due to be published this summer, includes plans to help provide internet access at speeds of up to 2Mb/s to every British home. (2Mb/s is roughly fast enough to stream programmes from the BBC’s iPlayer).
But behind these proposals lies a potentially troubling idea: in exchange for fresh investment in digital infrastructure, telecom companies could be allowed to tighten their control over how the internet is used, and what gets distributed over it. On 10th March Carter, a former adviser to Gordon Brown, was grilled by MPs over his plans for “net neutrality”—the principle that the internet should be equally accessible for all users and services. “What you are proposing,” a parliamentary committee chief said, “seems to alter the philosophy of the internet, which is that it has been controlled by its users.” Carter replied: “My own view is that that is changing.”
As the former boss of communications regulator Ofcom, Carter has spent much of the last year trying to bring together what he calls “the pipes and the poetry” of communications policy. He’s trying to broker a long-term deal for the huge investment—estimated at between £5bn and £29bn—needed for the next phase of Britain’s internet development. Universal access is just one part; the bigger prize is a new generation of broadband infrastructure, tens or even hundreds of times faster than today’s connections.
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Edward Gottesman
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Market failure has been much in the news of late, but one notable breakdown has attracted little attention: spam. Some 200bn junk emails are sent daily. More than 40bn come from the US and Canada, and about 6bn from Britain. Estimates vary, but the best guess is that more than 90 per cent of all email is spam.
What causes this stupefying supply for which there is no apparent demand? The answer is simple: sending an email is free. Yet billions of junk messages take a toll in complex and haphazard spam filters, productivity losses and misuse of increasingly crowded bandwidth. Spam is used to spread viruses and sell fake or fraudulent goods. Moreover, there is an increasing risk that spam will make legitimate email a form of second-class post.
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Andrew Currah
“The newsroom was electric,” an editor told me after the discovery of nine-year-old Shannon Matthews, who went missing for 24 days in February 2008. “Minutes after publishing the story, we watched the clicks go up like a petrol pump. In just an hour, we had 60,000 hits!”
As newspapers and broadcasters move online they are finding new ways to judge what makes a big story. Using the latest “web analytics” technologies, publishers can now monitor the trails of the “clickstream”—a measure of what their users are choosing to read, watch and share. Newsrooms now feature both giant flat screens suspended from the ceiling and small desktop widgets that shower staff with a relentless flow of web statistics. Never before has the marketplace of journalism been so visible.
This brave new world has positive aspects. Media companies can offer precisely targeted “behavioural” advertising, allowing their clients to aim messages at well-defined groups of users. Some are even using the tools of neuroscience to measure the subconscious foundations of the clickstream—drawing on biometric data (brainwave activity, eye tracking and skin response) to assess the effectiveness of online advertising formats. When advertising budgets are being squeezed, such innovations may save the media industry’s skin.
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Jaron Lanier
It is strange to be an elder, a museum piece exhumed from the past, at the tender age of 48. But that’s what happened to me in early February when I went to the 25th anniversary of TED, perhaps the world’s most exclusive conference.
At $6,000, tickets to TED—which stands for technology, entertainment and design—are surprisingly hard to come by. The event gathers some of the most clever and powerful people on the planet to give 18 minute talks on their specialism to an audience of peers. It attracts everyone from Bill Gates to Daniel Libeskind, creating a gathering comparable to the World Economic Forum in Davos.
TED talks, filmed at the conference, have taken the online world by storm. I was an early practitioner and innovator of the format—mine was an exaltation, an almost evangelical cry of optimism, for science, technology and the future. (In truth, I was emulating the rhetorical style of Alan Watts, a mid-20th century British philosopher of eastern religious ideas.)
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Peter Bazalgette
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Are you reading this online? If not, what did you last read on the internet? Perhaps you browsed a vintage wine list, planned a holiday or—more in keeping with the times—investigated which newly nationalised bank offers the best rates. Would you object to advertisements popping up for Chateau Latour, Caribbean resorts or Bradford & Bingley? Might you feel your privacy had been violated by new companies able to record your surfing habits and feed you adverts based on where you had been? Or would you welcome this as a useful service?
Six months ago I thought the biggest obstacle to “broadband Britain” was our inadequate infrastructure—limited bandwidth, copper wires into houses and slow speeds for the downloading of bulky data such as video. But there has been real progress since then. In September 2008 British Telecom announced a further investment of £1.5bn into broadband networks in return for concessions from its regulator Ofcom. Yet increasingly privacy, not pipes, is the real source of contention in the online world. Technology now exists to track everything we do online. This makes advertisers excited. There’s an old industry adage: half of all advertising is wasted, but no one knows which half. Now we may be on the verge of finding out. Advertisers are willing to fund much of the information and entertainment we receive in the future—but in exchange for knowing precisely how and when we have received their promotional messages. Such intense scrutiny alarms some consumers and is leading to a state of war between commercial pioneers and privacy campaigners. At stake is a potentially huge expansion of the online economy.
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Becky Hogge
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What did you do when last on the net? Perhaps you emailed a client a confidential quote? Or contributed pseudonymously on a web forum? Or, more in keeping with the times, anonymously uploaded to a whistle-blowing website copies of the $450,000 bill run up by executives of AIG? If you did, Peter Bazalgette isn’t interested. He sees the internet as a giant shopping mall, which is a shame. Yes, the net has revolutionised commerce over the last decade. But daily communications, and even civic engagement, all now take place online. What we do over our internet connections reveals more about us than any other activity.
Mistaking the biggest innovation in communications technology since the Gutenburg press for a high street shopping parade is just the first error in Bazalgette’s ill-informed apologia for Phorm—the dangerous new behavioural tracking technology currently being trialled by the UK’s biggest internet service provider (ISP), BT. Much of what Bazalgette writes about the advertising industry—that it currently funds much media production and may fund more, that it aspires to engage consumers using increasingly integrated and fine-grained targeting techniques—represents an uncomfortable reality that most normal people have grudgingly learnt to live with. It may come as a surprise to Bazalgette to find out that, as the head of one of the privacy campaigns he namechecks, the Open Rights Group, I believe that people should be free to choose what relationships they establish with media outlets or corporate brands. And this should include how much they wish to reveal about their everyday lives.
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Peter Jukes
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I’ve spent much of the last year on the front line of one of the most contentious presidential nomination contests in memory—without moving from my London desk. I have been part of something historic: the first great political battle to take place in cyberspace.
For many in Britain, blogging, especially political blogging, is a bit of a disappointment. Many of our political sites are tacked on to party websites, or are simply online versions of established media outlets. They tend to be either controlled, conformist and rather dull, or unmoderated rants, the kind of online graffiti rightly parodied by Private Eye.
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Andrew Keen
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The modish idea that social and political life is now driven by the “network” has been given an intriguing new twist by a couple of contemporary Levantines—Turkish Sufi cleric Fethullah Gülen and the Greek impresario Arianna Huffington (née Stassinopoulos), editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post (HuffPost) website. Gülen was last month crowned Prospect’s top global public intellectual thanks to an online mobilisation of his followers. Huffington, meanwhile, is using her personal network not only to transform online publishing but also to redefine public intellectual life in a digital age.
Born in Athens in 1950, Huffington arrived at Cambridge University in the late 1960s as an awkward teenager and went on to use her large social circle to get herself elected president of the union in 1971. Two years later, she published an anti-feminist polemic, The Female Woman: An Argument against Women’s Liberation for Female Emancipation, which was translated into 11 languages and branded her as the blonde, willowy anti-Germaine Greer publishing bombshell. Times columnist and fellow Face the Music panellist Bernard Levin refused to marry the then conservative Huffington in the late 1970s, a snub which led first to her move in 1980 to the US and then to her 1986 marriage to oil millionaire and then Republican congressman Michael Huffington. This very public union formally ended in 1997, and a year later Michael Huffington came out as bisexual.
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Jonathan Zittrain
The internet and the PCs attached to it are sometimes known as “generative” technologies, meaning that they allow anyone to build and share new uses for them without the approval of “gatekeepers.” Yet today, malicious code that seemed of little significance when it first appeared—such as viruses, and the spam email now known to everyone with an email account—threatens to drive people away from the internet and towards sterile, stand-alone appliances that can be manipulated only with the acquiescence of their manufacturers.
Our open technologies are now routinely subverted. One common type of “malware” compromises PCs to create “botnets”—networks of infected machines open to future instructions by the malware’s creator. Such instructions may include directing each infected PC to become its own email server, sending spam by the millions to addresses harvested from the hard disc of the machine or gleaned from internet searches, with the process typically going unnoticed by the PC’s owner. One estimate pegs the number of PCs involved in such botnets at 100 to 150m, or a quarter of all the computers on the internet as of early 2007. A study monitoring botnet activity in 2006 detected the emergence, on average, of 1m new bots per month. MessageLabs, a company that monitors spam, recently stopped counting bot-infected computers because it could not keep up. It says it quit when the figure passed about 10m. And since not all bots are active at any given time, the number of infected computers may be much higher.
Modern worms and viruses routinely infect vast swathes of internet-connected PCs. In 2004, the Sasser worm infected more than half a million computers in three days. The Sobig.f virus, which replicated through email, was released in August 2003 and within two days accounted for around 70 per cent of all email in the world. In May 2006, a virus exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft Word propagated through the computers of the US department of state in east Asia, forcing the machines to be taken offline during critical weeks prior to North Korea’s missile tests. As these numbers show, viruses are not simply the province of computing backwaters. The war is being lost across the board.
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Tom Chatfield
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Mogwai is cutting down the time he spends playing World of Warcraft. Twenty hours a week or less now, compared to a peak of over 70. It’s not that he has lost interest—just that he’s no longer working his way up the greasy pole. He’s got to the top. He heads his own guild, has 20,000 gold pieces in the bank and wields the Twin Blades of Azzinoth; weapons so powerful and difficult to acquire that other players often (virtually) follow Mogwai around just to look at them. In his own words, he’s “e-famous.” He was recently offered $8,000 for his Warcraft account, a sum he only briefly considered accepting. Given that he has clocked up over 4,500 hours of play, the prospective buyers were hardly making it worth his while. Plus, more sentimentally, he feels his character is not his alone to sell: “The strange thing about this character is that he doesn’t just belong to me. Every item he has he got through the hard work of 20 or more other people. Selling him would be a slap in their faces.” As in many modern online games, co-operation is the only way to progress, with the most challenging encounters manageable only with the collaboration of other experienced players. Hence the need for leaders, guilds—in-game collectives, sometimes containing hundreds of players—and online friendships measured in years. “When I started, I didn’t care about the other people. Now they are the only reason I continue.”
When Mogwai isn’t online, he’s called Adam Brouwer, and works as a civil servant for the British government modelling crisis scenarios of hypothetical veterinary disease outbreaks. I point out to him a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, billed under the line “The best sign that someone’s qualified to run an internet startup may not be an MBA degree, but level 70 guild leader status.” Is there anything to this? “Absolutely,” he says, “but if you tried to argue that within the traditional business market you would get laughed out of the interview.” How, then, does he explain his willingness to invest so much in something that has little value for his career? He disputes this claim. “In Warcraft I’ve developed confidence; a lack of fear about entering difficult situations; I’ve enhanced my presentation skills and debating. Then there are more subtle things: judging people’s intentions from conversations, learning to tell people what they want to hear. I am certainly more manipulative, more Machiavellian. I love being in charge of a group of people, leading them to succeed in a task.”
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