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@gmail.com> To: <air-l@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@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)
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