[p2p-research] Information feudalism and permanent rent in the cloud

[Janet Hawtin]

Information Feudalism is also a book by Drahos and Braithwaite(?)
about the global ratchetting of copyright and patents on information
using trade agreements.

On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 11:35 PM, Alex Rollin<alex.rollin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
> (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...
>
>
>
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