While computers and digitization have fueled the flames of disputes surrounding intellectual property, the networked applications used to share and collaborate have also become a contested field. The revolutionary possibilities of the Internet lay particularly in the fact that it allows direct interaction between users, that it promised to be a platform where freedom of speech and association was built into to the architecture. However without most users noticing, the architecture is being changed and the topology of the network is being remade in such a way that not only serves the interests of Capitalism, but also enables monitoring and control of it's users on a scale never dreamed of before.
The Internet took the corporate world by surprise, coming as it did out of publicly funded universities, military research, and civil society. It was promoted by way of a cottage industry of small independent Internet service providers who were able to squeeze a buck out of providing access to the state-built and financed network. Meanwhile, the corporate world was pushing a different idea of the Information Superhighway, producing monolithic, centralized "on-line services" like CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL. What made these different from the Internet is that they were centralized systems that all users connect directly to, while the Internet is a peer-to-peer network and every device with a public Internet address can communicate directly to any other device. This is what makes peer-to-peer technology possible and is also what makes independent Internet service providers possible. While both users of CompuServe and the Internet had access to similar applications, namely email, discussion groups, chat groups and file sharing, users of CompuServe where completely dependent on CompuServe for access to these, while users of the Internet could gain access through any service provider, and could even chose to run their own servers. Platforms such as Internet Email, Usenet and Internet Relay Chat where based on a distributed structure that no one entity owner or controlled. This was fine for the public institutions and NGOs that where the most enthusiastic adopters of the Internet, however capitalist investors where unable to see how such an unrestrictive system would allow them to earn profits. The Internet seemed anathema to the capitalist imagination. The original dotcom boom, was characterized by a rush to own the infrastructure, to consolidate the independent Internet service providers and take control of the network. Money was thrown around quite randomly as investors struggled to understand what this medium would actually be used for, however the overall mission was largely successful. There mission was to destroy the independent service provider and put large, well-financed corporations back in the driver's seat. If you had an Internet account in 1996 it was likely provided by some small local company. Ten years later, while some of the smaller companies have survived, most people get their Internet access from gigantic telecommunications corporations.
The World Wide Web is a technology that runs on top of the Peer-to-Peer Internet, However, it is unlike the classic Internet technologies mentioned earlier, it is neither distributed, nor peer to peer. The web is a Client-Server technology. The publisher of a website runs the servers and has exclusive control over the content and applications their website provides, including control of who should or should not have access to it, the users run only a browser, which is client software used to access the website. A website is far more similar to CompuServe than it is to a peer to peer system. The publisher has full control of the content and options available to the users. The web started innocently enough as a platform for publishing text on-line Very quickly, however, it became the focus of the commercialization of the Internet, from modest beginnings as a companies began to put brochure's on-line, the commercial web took off with the development of e-Commerce. So far, the web had not yet taken over on-line sharing. People used the web to browse a book store, but continued to employ distributed technologies to communicate with other users. However soon enough the web, funded by venture capital, would move in and make websites operate by large corporations into the primary on-line social platforms. The Internet itself would disappear behind the web, the users would never again leave their browser. Web 2.0 emerged as a venture capitalist"s paradise where investors pocket the value produced by unpaid users, ride on the technical innovations of the free software movement, and kill off the decentralizing potential of peer-to-peer technology.
Wikipedia says that "Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O"Reilly Media in 2004, refers to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services, such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies, that emphasize on-line collaboration and sharing among users." The use of the word "supposed" is noteworthy. As probably the largest collaboratively authored work in history, and one of the current darlings of the Internet community, Wikipedia should know. Unlike most of the members of the Web 2.0 generation, Wikipedia is controlled by a non-profit foundation, earns income only by donation, and releases its content under a copyleft. It is telling that Wikipedia goes on to say "[Web 2.0] has become a popular (though ill-defined and often criticized) buzzword among certain technical and marketing communities."
The free software community has tended to be suspicious, if not outright dismissive, of the Web 2.0 moniker. Tim Berners-Lee dismissed the term, saying: "Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means." He goes on to note that "it means using the standards which have been produced by all these people working on Web 1.0." In reality there is neither a Web 1.0 nor a Web 2.0. There is only an ongoing development of on-line applications that cannot be cleanly divided. In trying to define what Web 2.0 is, it is safe to say that most of the important developments have been aimed at enabling the community to create, modify, and share content in a way that was previously only available to centralized organizations that bought expensive software packages, paid staff to handle the technical aspects of the site, and paid staff to create content which generally was published only on that organization's site.
A Web 2.0 company fundamentally changes the production of Internet content. Web applications and services have become cheaper and easier to implement, and by allowing the end users access to these applications, a company can effectively outsource the creation and the organization of their content to the end users themselves. Instead of the traditional model of a content provider publishing their own content and the end user consuming it, the new model allows the company"s site to act as the centralized portal between the users who are both creators and consumers. For the user, access to these applications empowers them to create and publish content that previously would have required them to purchase desktop software and possess a greater technological skill set. For example, two of the primary means of text-based content production in Web 2.0 are blogs and wikis, which allow the user to create and publish content directly from their browser without any real need for knowledge of markup language, file transfer or syndication protocols, and all without the need to purchase any software.
The use of the web application to replace desktop software is even more significant for the user when it comes to content that is not merely textual. Not only can web pages be created and edited in the browser without purchasing HTML editing software, photographs can be uploaded and manipulated on-line through the browser without the need for expensive desktop image manipulation applications. A video shot on a consumer camcorder can be submitted to a video hosting site, uploaded, encoded, embedded into an HTML page, published, tagged, and syndicated across the web all through the user"s browser. In Paul Graham"s article on Web 2.0, he breaks down the different roles of the community/user into more specific roles. These include the Professional, the Amateur, and the User (more specifically, the end user). The roles of the Professional and the User were, according to Graham, well understood in Web 1.0, but the Amateur didn"t have a very well defined place. As Graham describes it in "What Business Can Learn From Open Source," the Amateur just loves to work, with no concern for compensation or ownership of that work; in development, the Amateur contributes to open source software whereas the Professional gets paid for their proprietary work.
Graham"s characterization of the "Amateur" has an odd similarity with "If I Ran The Circus'" by Dr. Suess, where young Morris McGurk says of the staff of his imaginary Circus McGurkus:
My workers love work. They say, "Work us! Please work us!
We"ll work and we"ll work up so many surprises
You"d never see half if you had forty eyses!"
And while "Web 2.0" may mean nothing to Tim Berners-Lee, who sees recent innovations as no more than the continued development of the web, to venture capitalists, who like Morris McGurk daydream of tireless workers producing endless content and not demanding a pay cheque for it, it sounds stupendous. And indeed, from YouTube to Flickr to Wikipedia, you"d truly "never see half if you had forty eyses." Tim Berners-Lee is correct. There is nothing from a technical or user point of view in Web 2.0 which does not have its roots in, and is not a natural development from the earlier generation of the Web. The technology associated with the Web 2.0 banner was possible and in some cases readily available before, but the hype surrounding this usage has certainly affected the growth of Web 2.0 Internet sites. The Internet has always been about sharing between users. In fact, Usenet, the distributed messaging system, has been operating since 1979! Since th, Usenet has been hosting discussions, "amateur" journalism, and enabling photo and file sharing. Like the Internet, it is a distributed system not owned or controlled by anyone. It is this quality, a lack of central ownership and control, that differentiate services such as Usenet from Web 2.0.
If Web 2.0 means anything at all, its meaning lies in the rationale of venture capital. Web 2.0 represents the return of investment in Internet start-ups. After the dotcom bust (the real end of Web 1.0), those wooing investment dollars needed a new rationale for investing in on-line ventures. "Build it and they will come,' the dominant attitude of the "90s dotcom boom, along with the delusional "new economy,' was no longer attractive after so many on-line ventures failed. Building infrastructure and financing real capitalization was no longer what investors were looking for. Capturing value created by others, however, proved to be a more attractive proposition. Web 2.0 is Internet Investment Boom 2.0. Web 2.0 is a business model; it means private capture of community-created value. No one denies that the technology of sites like YouTube, for instance, is trivial. This is more than evidenced by the large number of identical services such as DailyMotion. The real value of YouTube is not created by the developers of the site, but rather it is created by the people who upload videos to the site. Yet, when YouTube was bought for over a billion dollars worth of Google stock, how much of this stock was acquired by those that made all these videos? Zero. Zilch. Nada. Great deal if you are an owner of a Web 2.0 company.
The value produced by users of Web 2.0 services such as YouTube is captured by capitalist investors. In some cases, the actual content they contribute winds up as the property of site owners. Private appropriation of community-created value is a betrayal of the promise of sharing technology and free cooperation. Unlike the dotCom boom era, where investors often financed expensive capital acquisition, software development and content creation, a Web 2.0 investor mainly needs to finance hype-generation, marketing and buzz. The infrastructure is widely available for cheap, the content is free and cost of the software, at least that much of it that is not also free, is negligible. Basically, by providing some bandwidth and disk space, you are able to become a successful Internet site if you can market yourself effectively. The principal success of a Web 2.0 company comes from its relationship to the community. More specifically, the ability of the company to "harness collective intelligence," as O"Reilly puts it. Web 1.0 companies were too monolithic and unilateral in their approach to content. Success stories of the transition from to Web 2.0 were based on the ability for a company to remain monolithic in its brand of content, or better yet, its outright ownership of that content, while opening up the method of that content"s creation to the community. Yahoo! created a portal to community content while it remained the centralized location to find that content. EBay allows the community to sell its goods while owning the marketplace for those goods. Amazon, selling the same products as many other sites, succeeded by allowing the community to participate in the "flow" around their products.
Because the capitalists who invest in Web 2.0 start-ups do not often fund early capitalization, their behaviour is markedly more parasitic as well. They often arrive late in the game when value creation already has good momentum, swoop in to take ownership and use their financial power to promote the service, often within the context of a hegemonic network of major, well-financed partners. This means that companies that are not acquired by venture capital end up starved of cash and squeezed out of the club. In all these cases, the value of the Internet site is created not by the paid staff of the company that runs it but by the users who use it. With all of the emphasis on community created content and sharing, it"s easy to overlook the other side of the Web 2.0 experience: ownership of all this content and ability to monetize its value. To the user, this doesn"t come up that often and is only part of the fine print in their Facebook Terms of Service agreement or it"s the Flickr.com in the URL of their photos. It doesn"t usually seem like an issue to the community and is a small price to pay for the use of these wonderful applications and for the impressive effect on search engine results when one queries one"s own name. Since most users do not have access to alternative means to produce and publish their own content, they are attracted to sites like Facebook and Flickr.
It should be added that many open source projects can be cited as the key innovations in the development of Web 2.0: free software like Linux, Apache, PHP, Ruby, Python, etc. are the backbone of Web 2.0, and the web itself. But there is a fundamental flaw with all of these projects in terms of what O"Reilly refers to as the Core Competencies of Web 2.0 Companies, namely control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them – the harnessing of the collective intelligence they attract. Allowing the community to contribute openly and to utilize that contribution within the context of a proprietary system where the proprietor owns the content is a characteristic of a successful Web 2.0 company. Allowing the community to own what it creates, though, is not. Thus, to be successful and create profits for investors, a Web 2.0 company needs to create mechanisms for sharing and collaboration that are centrally controlled. The lack of central control possessed by Usenet and other peer controlled technologies is the fundamental flaw. They only benefit their users, not the absentee investors, as they are not "owned." Thus, because Web 2.0 is funded by the same-old Capitalism, Usenet is mostly forgotten. While everybody uses Digg and Flickr, and YouTube is worth a billion dollars, PeerCast, an innovative peer-to-peer live video streaming network that has been in existence for several years longer than YouTube, is virtually unknown.
From a technological standpoint, distributed and peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies are far more efficient than Web 2.0 systems. Making better use of network resources by using the computers and network connections of users, P2P avoids creating bottlenecks created by centralized systems and allows content to be published with less infrastructure, often no more than a computer and a consumer Internet connection. P2P systems do not require the massive data centers of sites such as YouTube. Distributed systems also tend to have greater longevity. Usenet has been subsumed, in some way by Google, who owns the largest Usenet archive and the most accessed Usenet web-based client, Google Groups. However because of the distributed nature of Usenet, other means of access continue to exist in parallel, and while it's role as an on-line platform has lost prominence, many newsgroups remain active, notably the Church of The SubGenuis newsgroup, alt.slack, continues to be an important social forum for the popular US-Based mock religion. The lack of central infrastructure also comes with a lack of central control, meaning that censorship, often a problem with privately-owned "communities" that frequently bend to private and public pressure groups and enforce limitations on the the kinds of content they allow. Also, the lack of large central cross-referencing databases of user information has a strong advantage in terms of privacy.
From this perspective, it can be said that Web 2.0 is capitalism"s pre-emptive attack against P2P systems. Despite its many disadvantages in comparison to these, Web 2.0 is more attractive to investors and thus has more money to fund and promote centralized solutions. The end result of this is that capitalist investment flowed into centralized solutions, making them easy and cheap or free for non-technical information producers to adopt. Thus, this ease of access compared to the more technically challenging and expensive undertaking of owning your own means of information production created a "landless" information proletariat ready to provide alienated content-creating labour for the new info-landlords of Web 2.0. The mission of Web 2.0 is to destroy the P2P aspect of the Internet and to make you, your computer, and your Internet connection dependent on connecting to a centralized service that controls your ability to communicate. Web 2.0 is the ruin of free, peer-to-peer systems and the return of monolithic "on-line services." A telling detail here is that most home or office Internet connections in the 90s, modem and ISDN connections, were symmetric, equal in their ability to send and receive data. By design, your connection enables you to be equally a producer and a consumer of information. On the other hand, modern DSL and cable-modem connections are asymmetric, allowing you to download information quickly but upload slowly. Not to mention the fact that many user agreements for Internet service forbid you to run servers on your consumer circuit and may cut off your service if you do.
Capitalism, rooted in the idea of earning income by way of idle share ownership, requires centralized control without which producers have no reason to share their income with outside shareholders. Capitalism, therefore, is incompatible with free P2P networks, and thus so long as the financing of Internet development comes from private shareholders looking to capture value by owning Internet resources, the network will only become more restricted and centralized. And while the information commons may have the possibility of playing a role in moving society toward more inclusive modes of production, any real hope for a genuine, community enriching, next generation of Internet-based services is not rooted in creating privately owned, centralized resources, but rather in creating cooperative, P2P and commons-based systems, owned by everybody and nobody. Although small and obscure by today"s standards, with its focus on peer-to-peer applications such as Usenet and email, the early Internet was very much a common, shared resource, Along with the commercialization of the Internet and the emergence of capitalist financing comes the enclosure of this information commons, translating public wealth into private profit. Thus Web 2.0 is not to be thought of as a second generation of either the technical or social development of the Internet, but rather as the second wave of capitalist enclosure of the Information Commons.
The third wave of enclosure is already coming into view, Cloud Computing provided by large corporations such as Google and Amazon, where customers do not own their physical infrastructure, is further centralizing the infrastructure of the Internet, and legislation such as the "Telecoms Reform Package" presented to the European Parliament, seeks to make it possible for service providers (large telecommunications conglomerates) to decide which websites there users are able access. Capital is showing us their vision of the future of the Internet, and the future looks a lot like CompuServe: Monolithic, centralized, mediated, controllable and exploitable, and , naturally, operated by a few large corporations.
Virtually all of the most used Internet resources could be replaced by P2P alternatives. Google could be replaced by a P2P search system, where every browser and every web serverr is an active node in the search process; Flickr and YouTube could also be replaced by PeerCast, BitTorrent and eDonkey-type applications, which allow users to use their own computers and Internet connections to collaboratively share their pictures and videos. However, developing Internet resources requires the application of wealth, and so long as the source of this wealth is finance capital, the great peer-to-peer potential of the Internet will remain unrealized. In order to develop alternative ways of producing and sharing we need an alternative to venture capital and it's logic of capture and exploitation.
There has been error in communication with booki server. Not sure right now where is the problem.
You should refresh this page.