[p2p-research] Information Feudalism

[Samuel Rose]

> Information feudalism and permanent rent in the cloud
>
> Cory Doctorow?s editorial in the Guardian has an implicit warning.
> Cloud Computing may be the vehicle for extracting permanent financial
> rents, in a form of license-based feudalism. Cory also thinks it is
> unwise to rely on a corporate cloud in times of financial turbulence.
>
>


This is something that Paul Hartzog ( http://paulbhartzog.org/new/
)has thought about for close to 10 years, in the form of both "Peer
Net" distributed networking protocols, and "Knowledge Commons"
distributed database storage concepts that he's been working on.

We applied many of those concepts to the current work that we are doing.

One of the things that we want to do is include compatible open
standard specs for load balancing, distributed data integrity,
redundant synchronized mirroring/copying of data, etc

We're meeting with some veterans of Open Standards, and data
management to round out current FLOWS specification, and possibly map
out some of this new territory. Right now, FLOWS can allow for a
networked component to act as a "microservice". If there were a way
for many to mirror these "microservices", and systematically load
balance, plus allow for redundant failover, then it's possible now for
collaborative groups to provide service infrastructure that stands
outside of grid computing.

This doesn't solve the problem of where those "microservices" are
themselves hosted. But, practice of distributing a networked utility
redundantly across diverse networks really only then has a point of
failure of the whole internet itself collapsing.

Physical points of entry to the internet itself are largely corporate
controlled (although they don't currently exercise their full capacity
to control, they could). Software of course won't solve this problem.
And, I have not seen many efforts to think about how to solve this
problem, honestly.

I did see some really low cost ballon radio broadcasting circuits made
by these folks: http://stillepost.org/content/ and xbee radio/arduino
is cheap enough that it is possible that building blocks exist to make
a massively distributed mesh net (though I don't know how you cross
the oceans with this, maybe open source bouys, or submerged objects?)

Personally, I have come to be of the opinion that to influence change
of public policy, it is often needed to create the building blocks
needed to deploy the systems that you are interested in seeing. When
it is possible to create and deploy those systems, public policy
makers have at least a more difficult time arguing against them.

Thanks for the link, Alex.



> (Information Feudalism is the thesis implicit in Jeremy Rifkin?s Age
> of Access that holds that we are entering a regime where the freedom
> of property makes place for the unfreedom of licensing, in effect
> placing limits on what we can do with the things we purchase,
> resulting in a new kind of capitalist serfhood.)
>
>
> Cory Doctorow:
>
>
> ?Since the rise of the commercial, civilian internet, investors have
> dreamed of a return to the high-profitability monopoly telecoms world
> that the hyper-competitive net annihilated. Investors loved its pay-
> per-minute model, a model that charged extra for every single
> ?service,? including trivialities such as Caller ID ? remember
> when you had to pay extra to find out who was calling you? Imagine if
> your ISP tried to charge you for seeing the ?FROM? line on your
> emails before you opened them! Minitel, AOL, MSN ? these all shared
> the model, and had an iPhone-like monopoly over who could provide
> services on their networks, and what those service-providers would
> have to pay to supply these services to you, the user.
>
>
> But with the rise of the net ? the public internet, on which anyone
> could create a new service, protocol or application ? there was
> always someone ready to eat into this profitable little conspiracy.
> The first online services charged you for every email you sent or
> received. The next generation kicked their asses by offering email
> flat-rate. Bit by bit, the competition killed the meter running on
> your network session, the meter that turned over every time you
> clicked the mouse. Cloud services can reverse that, at least in part.
> Rather than buying a hard-drive once and paying nothing ? apart from
> the electricity bill ? to run it, you can buy cloud storage and pay
> for those sectors every month. Rather than buying a high-powered CPU
> and computing on that, you can move your computing needs to the cloud
> and pay for every cycle you eat.
>
>
> Now, this makes sense for some limited applications. If you?re
> supplying a service to the public, having a cloud?s worth of on-
> demand storage and hosting is great news. Many companies, such as
> Twitter, have found that it?s more cost-effective to buy barrel-loads
> of storage, bandwidth and computation from distant hosting companies
> than it would be to buy their own servers and racks at a data-centre.
> And if you?re doing supercomputing applications, then tapping into
> the high-performance computing grid...