Territory is possibly something everybody protects – from animals to Nobel laureates.or the former it’s a hunting zone, for the latter – a scientific interest, but the way we are attached to a territory and are eager to protect it certainly comes with genes.
And not out of mere aesthetic feelings, we do it because a territory feeds a wolf, an academic and a company. As a result, when companies started working on the Internet, they just went on using their policies of capturing and keeping, though not markets this time but sites and domains, looking at them as fortresses with their sales and brands inside. It’s a good and a sensible strategy, but will it be adequate tomorrow?
The Internet is an informational system and information isn’t a good we are used to selling and buying. Our world is based on principles of Hammurabi Laws: if you had an apple and I took it from you, now I’ve got an apple and you haven’t. It was true when the price of copying was very high. To make a copy of an apple you would have to plant its seed and wait for years until you had an apple tree. But as the price of making a copy decreased, owners of information had to face the problem of illegal copying which lead to copyright and patent rights. Thus the problem was solved for the time being – copying was still quite a profitable deed, but the law could find those guilty of copying and punish them. It was possible even to reveal Pravda’s printing-works, let alone private copiers.
But what happens when the price of copying almost reaches zero? It turns out that nothing can keep information in the hands of its owner, not even copyright or patents. Hammurabi laws jar with the very nature of information and lose the battle. If we forget about the form of information as a product and focus on the root of the problem, we develop a strong method we can use to understand the processes that are moving the world.
But let’s try to go even deeper into it. Imagine a book copied manually by monks in an abbey, with pictures drawn by hand. It would cost a fortune on its own, but then you also had to deliver it to the customer by caravan, down the not-too-safe roads and pathways of medieval Europe. And the cost of delivery would make a rather big part of the final price of the product. So we see that the price of information is based on a number of different costs. And the Internet revolutionized the delivery of information.
By the way, the Internet is a unique thing. Technically it already existed long before the web, but it was too complicated for ordinary people to use. It was already cheap to transfer data, the technical price was already quite low, but the system wasn’t yet popular.
Why was it so? Because the cost of delivery of information includes something else besides just the price of oats for the medieval horses or IP packages on the Internet. The cheaper the transport, the more it requires human resources. The easier the interface is, the less time it takes to process the information and train your staff. You thought that Microsoft beats their competitors with their “incredible code”? With all the disadvantages their products were just the easiest and cheapest to work with.
So, we separated the cost of delivering the information from the cost of its production, we saw that there is both technology and manual work involved in delivering of information. The progress seems to have stopped at this point. Technology improves, but the process of copying and delivering information to the customer still requires manual operations and has to go through a ‘copy/paste’ stage – the text is copied from one source and pasted onto another. This operation involves manual work, a human, and this is expensive.
Remember when the net just started to develop, some sites tried to introduce automation into stealing headlines from news agencies. They wrote special programmes that “pulled out” text from other sites, but they appeared to not work because should a tiny change in the original text occur, the thief-site’s design would be completely distorted. This operation can’t be done properly by a machine and that makes it rather expensive. Crime doesn’t pay. Not yet.
The solution came from quite an unexpected source. Alongside the world of corporate and entertainment sites, a world of live journals was developing rapidly. Many readers at LiveJournal.com became tired of having to jump about between hundreds of their friend’s diaries to learn what was going on. To make it easier, the RSS (Real Simple Syndication) standard was developed. It helps gather information from other diaries, reads it with special readers or builds a page that contains all the information from all of the sources – “RSS feeds” – that you are signed up to. The system is quite simple, it’s based on the powerful XML and was meant merely for entertainment purposes. Who could know that it would change the world?
The trick is that this kind of standard makes copying information from other sites possible without human assistance. It became popular and now the RSS sign can be seen on many business sites. Most people see this new technology as a positive thing, but still just as a small comfort compared to all the complicated new technologies and breakthroughs. But this little sign can make it possible to copy and deliver information automatically, without manual work, and its potential influence is huge.
Let’s consider just one situation. Say there’s someone who writes very interesting articles and puts them on the net. To make it easier for his readers, he allows access to them through RSS sign up. At some point he wants to know how many people read him (say he wants to sell advertising or he found a sponsor who wonders as to the scope of the project). There are a number of free counters that can show traffic at the site.
It’s different with RSS readers though. If you want to know the traffic it’s better to send RSS feeds via a special service – FeedBurner for example. One of its services is traffic counters. But imagine that someone got an RSS and put it up on his site which is also available through RSS on another site, that is also available through RSS and so on. The article we were talking about can get very far away and the author won’t know it. Of course, RSS keeps the name of the author, the path of the source site, the copyright signs, but the problem is that nobody can tell how far this piece of information went.
A disaster! Business on the Internet is mostly based on the principle that you control your texts, own the source and your protection is not the law, but just the unprofitableness of manual copying. And suddenly you lose control over information: your domain no longer protects you, your site isn’t visited, your banners not seen. Your text is everywhere and nowhere…
But there’s nothing extraordinary in it. Similar systems have been functioning for a long time already – radio and television.
Where exactly does a TV programme exist? In the great nowhere: on air. And when you turn on your set, you don’t know where the studio or the transmitter is, you just know that it’s time for your favourite programme. But for Internet business it’s still quite a shock that can change the way things work. However, Internet businessmen are possibly the most flexible people today. And hopefully we will see new opportunities for business very soon! | 
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