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AndoYFirstPaper 13 - 16 Jan 2010 - Main.EbenMoglen
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< | ready for review and comments | | | Capitalism, Internet Bubble and Beyond
| | | thank you
-- AndoY - 05 Dec 2009 | |
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- Ando, I think you've made some sense out of some of the phenomena of the last fifteen years. But consider this: The browser called Netscape was a commercialized version of the free software browser called Mosaic, made at the NCSA at University of Illinois. Then, as you say, Netscape (which was always actually called Mozilla, from Mosaic) became again free software Mozilla, which was rewritten into Firefox. There was also the free software browser renderer called KHTML, which became the guts not only of Konqueror but also of Apple's Safari. And consider this: on the server side, the world's first webserver at CERN was free software, as is Apache, the world's most used webserver. So there's a really good case that the Web, which is the most important change in human communication in the last five centuries, wasn't ever really led by capitalism at all: capitalism trailed along behind, as you saw it lagging in Japan.
- But—and this is the crucially important fact about Google—as a matter of computer science no one has figured out how to search a data structure like the web in a decentralized fashion. There is an inherent economy of scale in search unless someone comes up with an extraordinarily important solution to a problem that has been stumping us all. Because the architecture of the web rewards the largest possible search entity, Google has learned how to monetize search by taking advantage of the ability to scale exponentially in the non-zero marginal cost world of a servers-and-storage "cloud." Google's cloud is now the largest one the human race can afford, except for the anarchic one consisting of "all of us," which the free software world knows how to harness for some purposes, but not for searching. Google uses the scale of search to control larger portions of the global advertising business, as consumers shift their purchasing activity into the web.
- That's 21st century capitalism. You have written a very good introduction to an essay in which you should be able to say some entirely creative new things about how 21st century capitalism is going to work.
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| Revision 13 | r13 - 16 Jan 2010 - 22:55:06 - EbenMoglen |
| Revision 12 | r12 - 22 Dec 2009 - 22:00:12 - AndoY |
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