[p2p-research] Information Feudalism

[Michel Bauwens]

Hi Paul,

Sam is referring to your ideas here, is there some way to find out about
them or to have you do a little write up,

I'm hoping that now that you have more time, you can participate more with
our collective work and learnig,

Michel

On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 9:34 PM, Samuel Rose <samuel.rose 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.
> >
> >
>
>
> 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...
>
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