[Air-l] net neutrality by another name, oecd report

[Hugemusic]

Hi all,

Yeah, look, I'm glad this one came to light because I found another example 
of the other day that seems to be being ignored ...

Via discussion on the [musicthoughts] list, it came to my attention a couple 
of weeks back that database cacheing is having a similar effect as this in 
the music discovery space.  It works like this:

Large music databases, iTunes, CDBaby, Amazon, etc, use a cacheing device to 
improve the efficiency of their searches.  This device makes the most 
popular search results more readily available than the rest, which works 
well for most searches (on a zipf curve distribution).  However, it 
significantly disadvantages the less-popular artists/results - to the point 
of virtual exclusion - for example, on searches for versions of "The Lord's 
Prayer" in iTunes, in which the versions by the more popular artists drown 
the versions by less popular artists ...

That may not be all bad, but it has gotten to the stage in iTunes that even 
searching for artists by name leads to a 0 result ... and that's a disaster 
for "Long Tail" artists.  For example, last time I searched for my band, 
"Bun' Ber E", in iTunes, it took four efforts before I got a positive result 
... now THAT is effective obliteration of the same kind as payola ... and it 
allows Apple to manipulate the market by including paying acts in the cache 
at the expense of popular but non-paying acts (I don't know that Apple is 
doing this, I'm just observing that it's technically possible to do so ...)

This phenomenon efectively creates artificial scarcity and returns the 
market to pre-digital conditions, working to the strengths of the hegemony 
... IMHO

WDYR??

Cheers,
Hughie


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Marcelo Thompson Mello Guimaraes" <thompson.marcelo at gmail.com>
To: <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
Sent: Sunday, April 29, 2007 11:40 PM
Subject: Re: [Air-l] net neutrality by another name, oecd report


> This is very lucid, to say the least. In my perhaps mistaken perception,
> debates that focus only on the narrow part of the hourglass architecture 
> to
> call this 'network neutrality' do not encompass but a limited perspective 
> of
> neutrality (and of the network). For these debates ignore the complete
> ecology of games implicated in the other layers, they are not neutral at 
> all
> (this not to question if neutrality can exist in any instance). 
> Furthermore,
> are we neutral when we make evaluative choices, and, mostly, when from 
> these
> choices we devise... principles? In other words, was the choice for the
> end-to-end principle any landmark of neutral political concern?
>
> Good news.
>
> MT
> OII
>
> On 4/29/07, Jeremy Hunsinger <jhuns at vt.edu> wrote:
>>
>> I thought some of you might find this interesting/useful.
>>
>> Internet traffic prioritisation:
>> Internet traffic prioritisation is an increasingly important policy
>> issue as bandwidth demands increase and Internet applications require
>> higher levels of quality of service to function well. Debates about
>> traffic prioritisation, particularly in the context of “network
>> neutrality” discussions, have been divisive. The study provides
>> background for national debates by examining the role of traffic
>> prioritisation in networks and highlighting associated policy and
>> regulatory issues.
>>
>> http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/43/63/38405781.pdf
>>
>> jeremy hunsinger
>> Information Ethics Fellow, Center for Information Policy Research,
>> School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
>> (www.cipr.uwm.edu)
>>
>> wiki.tmttlt.com
>> www.tmttlt.com
>>
>> ()  ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail
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>> http://www.stswiki.org/  sts wiki
>> http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/  Learning Inquiry-the journal
>> http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/  Transdisciplinary
>> Studies:the book series
>>
>>
>>
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