Consider the simple fact that for any of us to read this blog, the content has to be handed off by countless machines that none of us own and none of us directly financially contribute to the operation of. Yes, there are financial arrangements for “transit”, and more gentlemanly “peering”, however ultimately everything “works”.

If you provide content on the internet and you are worried about it being used freely, you should either lock it up behind a pay-wall or via encryption, or simple pester governments enough into creating laws for a new class of property, and new form of theft, and a new idea of punishment. It looks like media companies, with their immense wealth, are taking the latter route and essentially making the world slightly less freer without considering philosophical ramifications of the laws and regulations.

If you content is valuable enough, the price should be reflected in your transit costs. End-of-story! A “media strike” where publishers refuse content to Google is a perfectly valid response, however I think that the media producers are too jealous of each other for this to happen.

This is an interesting problem. A problem that should be solved at the level of the internet, not at the myopic, technically-illiterate level of government.

For an excellent introduction to the true nature of the internet, please read the following article on ArsTechnica http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/09/peering-and-transit.ars/ After you have warmed up to that, perhaps you’ll pick up a book on the Border Gateway Protocol and impress you friends with nuances of our modern age at cocktail parties.

Thanks for another interesting article Frédéric.

Excellent summary and analysis of the issues.

Your recommendations for Google are in the spirit of the wisdom of Wired’s founding editor Kevin Kelly who has, according to @wiredUK this month, concluded that technology is an unruly child. “There’s no bad children, just bad friends,” he says. “So it’s about training the technology, rearing it as if it were children.”

Google technology (and those who make and run it) needs to grow up. And, it’s clear, that’s not going to happen unless those who’ve been around for a while longer, such as WAN & the other ACAP affiliates, exercise some “tough love”.

François

Now, imagine, for a moment, a world in which ACAP was respected in the same way that many services respect robots.txt. Imagine, for instance, not only news sites but also every spammer, advertiser, blogger and charlatan on the web was free to define the “abstract” that would be shown by search engines. (Note: The science of constructing correct “abstracts” from content is one that has been the subject of thousands of academic studies…) I think you’ll see that it would not be a good thing…
Imagine further that ACAP, by putting limits on the length of time an abstract was valid, the times of day that crawlers could work, etc. was able to impact the design and implementation of *every* search engine on the web (not just the big ones). What you’ll realize is that it would be massively harder for new entrants to the search field to build systems that might one day compete with the existing big ones. And, it would be harder for any search engine to innovate in how it serves the needs of its users. Do you really want to make it that much harder for new information discovery systems to be built and improved? Are you willing to allow the news publishers to bend the entire web in order to serve their purposes?

The system we have today works for most publishers even if the news publishers haven’t yet figured out how to work within it. The web would not be the wonderous tool that it is today without information discovery tools such as search engines. How much are we willing to break in order to compensate for the failure of the old-line news publishers to build compelling products?

If publishers’ IT departments are not competent enough to perform this transition, then my firm is more than happy to provide necessary technical consultation.