On Demand Media

Future of TV: evolution or revolution?

Over the past week I have attended two conferences at which Patrick Barwise, professor emeritus at my school and a bit of a legend in UK media marketing, has been presenting some recent findings about on-demand TV viewing. Key among these are that:

• Even in households that have PVRs and access to video-on-demand, some 70% of the time is spent viewing live TV, and this figure appears to be stable.
• The main reason for viewing on-demand TV is having missed a program on live TV. The practice of going to an on-demand platform without a specific programme in mind is relatively rare.

From this and much else, Barwise concludes (if I understand him correctly) something like this:

Talk by the digerati of a revolution in television is wildly exaggerated. Television addresses certain key consumer needs that on-demand viewing cannot meet, and the incremental benefits that on-demand can offer over this are small. Therefore, good old linear television is here to stay; the coming change is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Given this, the emphasis on broadband infrastructure in the Government's Digital Britain report is misplaced. Public funds should be directed at content, not pipes.

According to Barwise and others, some of the key consumer needs that TV addresses are:

• The need not to think about something one should be doing – i.e. procrastination (for radio, the need is to be distracted away from something one is doing).
• The need to find a compromise between what different family members want to watch – i.e. a social need. On-demand is mainly about what I want to watch, but that is irrelevant in the living room.

The thinking, if I understand it, is that

• Good old linear TV, plus time-shifted TV via DVRs, go a long way towards addressing these needs; and
• The choosing and navigating involved in on-demand TV may be counterproductive to addressing these needs

All of these observations ring true. But I don't see how the conclusion follows.

Until now, on-demand viewing on the TV set has been constrained by what cable operators care to offer, which is mainly catch-up TV and movies. And web video happens on the PC and is mainly short-form, neither of which works for a passive and shared experience.

But nothing says that internet-delivered TV can't overcome these obstacles. It is perfectly possible to think of a future in which you turn on the TV and, without needing to choose anything, you receive a continuous stream that is tailored to your family. You can interrupt this programming if you want to make a choice, or you can just let it play.

There's no reason to think that something like this won't be developed (with the necessary content rights) for the TV set. This is exactly what last.fm does today, except that as yet it is largely constrained to the PC (although there are exceptions). It is also what TiVo does, but restricted to off-air content.

If this has not yet been fully developed even for music, it is not surprising that for TV it may be several years away. So, granted, internet TV is a speculative proposition. But to write it off in the context of long-term public policy (e.g. the Digital Britain report) feels wrong.

I agree with Barwise's attack on the notion that any technology that "gives people the content they want" is bound to succeed. "What people want" is not a given, but is influenced (if not determined) by marketers and programmers. I don't think that will ever change. However, marketers and programmers are themselves slowly moving to on-demand platforms. With enough eyeballs, "what people want" will be determined within these platforms.

If that happens, everything changes. New content formats become possible, freed from the constraints of linear TV. New players may rise to the fore. Thousands of new voices may appear on TV. The long tail may become fat. It is by no means a given, but if this happens it is not evolution, it is revolution.

 

Content as packaged consumer goods

At the (excellent) Media Futures conference yesterday, I heard John Giles comment that until now media firms have been stuck with a view of their products (content) as "packaged consumer goods". As an example, he mentioned the case of games publishers moving to an online, hosted model so that games are now becoming "places that people go to", like websites, rather than things they can download and own (or steal).

This resonates with an earlier post of mine on newspapers and rings true on so many levels. In the internet era, consumer-facing media firms should not see themselves as purveyors of content but as service providers. Content is only a prop, a tool that plays a crucial but incomplete role in delivering the services that people need. Companies that succeed will be those that can deliver better services. The key is to understand what services people need.

The service the iPod offers is not to store your entire music collection in a portable way. What it offers is to let you play any song from your collection with minimal fuss, wherever you have your iPod with you. And with iTunes, it also lets you play any song you want at all (after paying £0.79).

Today I found myself reading Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Solution. Christensen sees products as things that consumers 'hire' to do specific 'jobs' (i.e. services), and he argues that successful disruptive products are those offer to do 'jobs' that are not being done well enough by existing competitors. To understand what these jobs are, says Christensen, you need to look at the broader practical context in which the job is relevant.

Consider again the iPod. It excels at the job of letting you play whatever song you want. But that's not the only music-related job you may want. Sometimes, what you really want is to entertain your guests with music of a certain style, or to have background music while you work that is to your liking but not always the same.

The iPod is rubbish at these services. Having to think about what song to play next is the last thing you want when you are in the middle of a conversation or writing something. To get a background music experience, you need to compile a playlist on your computer, sync your iPod, plug it to your stereo, and only then you are good to go. And even then, once you've listened to the same playlist a few times it becomes boring. It's no wonder that old-fashioned radio has proven so resilient. Last.fm does a better job in a sense, but because (for most people) it is PC-bound, most social contexts are ruled out.

This suggests that in the future piracy may be less of a problem than the media industry fears today. People consume content-related services, not content. They are interested in content only when nobody offers to do the job at hand for them and they are forced to do provide their own services (e.g. building a playlist). As innovative companies begin to address these needs, content will be less of a consumer product. It will be the concern only of the companies that provide the final services, and these companies have to play by the rules and pay content owners.

Don't charge for content. Charge for content experiences

Having a chat today with my friend Kevin Anderson about the newspapers-charging-for-online-content thing, I thought of a simple way of summarizing what I've been saying in the last few posts:

Don't charge for content. Charge for content experiences.

News content is like gasoline: people don't pay for the thing itself; they pay for what they do with it. On the web, what people do with content – what they want it for – is to carry on with their web surfing session, to follow a link they found somewhere else, and continue hopping from site to site. Or maybe they want to just "read the day's news" in the morning, the main headlines then a couple of articles and then the sport, as they've always done.

Only rarely do people actively seek a specific article that they heard about. And when they do, if the need is strong enough, they will find ways to get to it without paying: they can get a friend to email them the article, or maybe they can find a blog that copied it without permission. Yes, newspapers may stand to gain a little by making this kind of piracy harder. They may make a few micro-dimes here and there. But only a few. Most of the time, people's needs are about the flow, not the content. Content is the brick, not the house; the gasoline, not the driving.

Yes, you could say the same about pretty much any product. This is the kind of thing that marketers have in mind when they talk about the need to focus on customer needs and not product features. What is new is that web technology affords new ways of asserting exactly what experiences users are having, to an extent not possible before in the media world. You can tell what site (and exactly what article) they were visiting before they got to you; how long they've been with you; how often they visit you; where in the world they are; whether they are at work or at home; etc.

So the trick, I think, is to do two things:

• First, take these experiences, not the content, as the core product. As a first pass, you could ask which experiences you can charge for, and how much. My hunch is that these 'products' are complementary and not substitutive of each other. The same article could be free (ad-supported) if it's accessed via a deep link on a blog, and paid-for (e.g. micropayments) if accessed via a search engine. The fact that the first experience is free is unlikely to undermine the revenues from the second experience
• Then, to maximize revenues apply segmentation and price-discrimination to consumers of those experiences. Charge different people different amounts (including free) for the same experience – e.g. depending on their country, their city, how often (and how) they use your site, etc.

All of this calls for quite a bit of marketing thinking and quite a bit of technology, but it's doable.

 

 

What’s the problem with aggregators?

So what is newspapers' problem with aggregators? This is not a rhetorical question. I genuinely want to know.

On Tuesday this week, a group of UK newspaper editors went to Parliament to complain about their inability to negotiate with Google (News?), as a group, for the right to link to their stories. And today Paidcontent reports that the UK's Newspaper Licensing Association "says it will from September extend its licenses to cover web links" – i.e. it will (try to) charge people for the right to link its content.

We all know the arguments against this sort of thing – most famously articulated by Jeff Jarvis. Links bring traffic and traffic means ad money. What's not to like?

But what is the opposite argument? I've heard lots of things, but I'm not sure they amount to a case. This is what I've gathered from reading on the web and talking to newspaper people over the last month or two. I would really appreciate any corrections, additions, comments etc.

1. Aggregators (Google News) and curators (Huffington Post, Drudge) compete with newspapers' own front pages. This means that
   1. Newspapers' front pages get fewer hits and less money
   2. Newspapers don't get to promote other articles – which leads to fewer hits and less money
   3. Newspapers lose their agenda-setting powers
   4. Newspapers lose their direct relationship with their readers – because aggregators' audiences don't look for newspapers' brands, and may not ever care who published the articles they read
2. Readers who arrive from aggregators or search engines read fewer articles (usually one)
3. Front pages ads have higher CPMs
4. Readers who don't care about the front page are less likely to subscribe, because of the brand/relationship problem

All of these issues are about aggregators stealing audiences from newspapers' front pages. But how much of an overlap is there between aggregators' audiences and those readers who might conceivably have visited the newspaper's front page if the aggregator didn't exist? An example: the US edition of Google News featuring an article from the Scotsman's on Susan Boyle. Very few US readers would have gone to the Scotsman just to check if it had something interesting.

Everybody seems to agree that for most news sites the proportion of readers arriving via the front page is decreasing; but is the actual number decreasing too? For what types of paper? For which market segments?

Finally - to the extent that aggregators are stealing audiences from newspapers' front pages, you could say that they are "bad news" for them. Maybe. But whether or not this is the case has very little to do with how large Google is. Google's large share of the aggregator market may (perhaps) give it bargaining power when newspapers ask for money. But newspapers would still have the problems (1-4) above even if Google had a small share of the aggregator market. Whether newspapers, without colluding, could impose a linking fee on an industry of small aggregators looks very much like an open question from here.

Towards a strategy for the newspaper problem

If you've been reading my previous posts you'll know that I've been thinking about newspapers' monetisation problem for a while. So far I've been mainly sharing some rather philosophical thoughts on the problem, but the point of all that is to serve as background for a more practical and positive strategy that I'm trying to put together.

These are the building blocks:

• One is what economists call price discrimination. It's no good to say "I will charge X for my content, and those who value it enough will pay and the rest won't get so see it". What you want to do is charge each reader as much as s/he is likely to pay. If someone is unlikely to pay at all, then it's better to let that person read the content for free, because then at least you get the ad revenue. The trick is to do this in such a way that those who might have been willing to pay don't get the stuff for free. Albert Sun recently wrote a post with the basic ideas.
• Marketers' approach to price discrimination is to do segmentation: identify distinct groups of readers who share similar needs, see what they are interested in, and see if you can find a way of charging them a different price according to their willingness to pay. Typical example: business travellers vs leisure travellers. Most business travellers buy return flights with outbound and return legs in the same week, while leisure travellers usually spend a Saturday night away. So you charge less for flights involving a Saturday night stay – you charge as much as leisure travellers are willing to pay, which is less than business travellers would. Note that the product you are selling here is the same, and it costs you the same to deliver it to either segment. But you would make less money if you chose a single price for all customers.
• The key is how you do the segmentation, and here the web offers a myriad of possibilities that are not available in other media. The FT started along these lines by identifying users who visit the site more than 30 times per month and only charging them. Others have gone about it by identifying 'premium' content that would appeal to a select audience and making the rest free.
• But you can be much more granular than that. For each visitor you can tell if s/he came via your front page or via a direct deep link; whether they live in your core city or country; whether they came from search, social networks, news aggregators or blogs (and which blogs); how often they visit you; whether they are reading current news or old archive content; whether they are on a PC or on the move; whether they are at work or at home (sometimes); etc.
• The challenge is to combine these parameters judiciously and ask how much leverage you have with each segment – and not just ask what content or activities should be paid-for. For example, you might conclude that a medium-frequency user who never visits the front page is unlikely to pay a subscription if he is abroad (because most of the site might be irrelevant to him), while local users may be likelier prospects. Don't ask any segment for more than it is willing to pay, and be willing to give any of them your content for free (with ads) if that's all you can get from it – provided this doesn't mean giving it for free to those who could pay.
• Finally, you need to move away from thinking of your content as the beginning and end of your readers' needs. Increasingly, your content – i.e. articles – are just stepping stones in sequences of pages connected by hyperlinks. It is these sequences – or flows – that are at the centre of people's needs, and they are often orchestrated by people who have no affiliation with you: news aggregators, social contacts, blogs, etc. These mediators, and their brands, are standing between you and consumers. But don't fight them; work with them. Treat them as channels (in the marketing sense), market to them, and devise win-win strategies that work for you and them. This need not mean just exchanging money – e.g. it could mean exchanging demographics.

Enough for now. Hopefully you can see where this is going. I would be very interested to hear from people working along similar lines.

Notable links 12/06/09

An occasional series of posts with links to key stories you may have missed. For day-to-day links, get my links feed.

 

1. Net neutrality rears its head in the UK (for an introduction, see my primer on the subject):

• The Financial Times reports BT as saying that iPlayer and Youtube "can't expect to continue to get a free ride".

  When BBC reporter Rory Cellan-Jones called BT to clarify, a spokesman "made it clear that this was a new stance, and BT was happy for the world to know about it". He notes that an email he received from BT "pointed out that Lord Carter's Digital Britain review next week will call for broadband for all at high speeds and low prices - and said making that happen would involve content owners paying their fair share". He reflects that amid all the horse-trading around the report, "something is going to have to give - and net neutrality may have to be chucked overboard".

• Google is concerned that the BBC's project Canvas could endanger net neutrality if ISPs give it preferential treatment over other internet content. As far as I know, this is the first time that Google has made a public statement on net neutrality in Europe. Of course, in the US it has been active for a long time.

2. What happened in Chicago... didn't stay in Chicago. Top newspaper execs met at the Chicago O'Hare Hilton to talk about solving the 'online problem' – with antitrust counsel in the room. The fine people at the Nieman Journalism Lab have spoken to some of those present and put the pieces together. There were (at least) three pitches:

• Alan Mutter pitched a system (working name: ViewPass) that "would consist of a simple, one-time registration system that would remember users as they moved among participating websites. It would build a profile of individual users from demographic information supplied by them" and "support payments for individual articles, subscriptions and bundles of content." The system would gather data "on each individual consumer, because the data would enable publishers to sell their advertising inventory at premium rates to advertisers seeking to target their messages to the most likely consumers".
• Steve Brill pitched a variant of the above, supported by a complex strategy involving consumer segmentation and price discrimination to maximise revenues. It would all be facilitated by a system made by Journalism Online.
• Under Jim Pitkow's scheme, the Fair Syndication Consortium would use a system developed by Attributor (where Pitkow is CEO) to identify websites that steal newspapers' content. Instead of sending cease-and-desist letters, content owners would just receive, automatically, a cut of pirate sites' ad revenue. Presumably this would require Google's active involvement (for AdSense etc).

According to the people interviewed, some major newspapers have already signed up to these initiatives and we should be seeing the first fruits in a few months' time.

Marketing musings on the newspaper problem

Following on from my recent critique of the newspaper paid-content debate, I've been trying to think more positively about solutions to the problem. I'll post about that sometime soon. For now here are just a few musings, not necessarily in the right order or coherent. Read at your own peril.

Idea #1: News content brands are not consumer brands

An example: if your work involves doing strategy around new media, you probably start your day by skimming all the articles that paidcontent.org and a few other sites have published in the last day. What you are looking for here is not content (although content is part of it), but rather an overview of what you should know about. If an entry is relevant to you, you follow the link and often land in a newspaper site. This could be a major brand like the WSJ, the Guardian, etc, or a newspaper you had never heard about, in Australia, thus just happened to have an interview with a key executive.

The crucial thing to note here is that the newspaper's name – its brand – is largely irrelevant to you. You followed the link because Paidcontent told you should read the article. The fact that you ended up reading the Guardian's version of a story rather than the Times' is a result of Paidcontent's choice, not yours. The newspaper's brand had no effect on your actions, but it may have had on Paidcontent's.

Note two more things: first, the main service that the Paidcontent people offer is not their writing (or anyone else's), but rather awareness of content across the web that you need to know about (and this is a service more than a product). Second, for paidcontent.org you could substitute your Twitter feed, your email inbox, your Facebook page, Google News, the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post, Martin Sabe's blog, whatever. The point is that you start by visiting a place that will tell you what you should read across the web.

Idea # 2: Aggregators are consumer brands

Note how this view contrasts with the notion of "content discovery" that you often hear. Paidcontent's role is not just to alert you to a newspaper article that you may or may not have found interesting even if Paidcontent had not existed. To a large extent, the article is interesting because Paidcontent and its peers (or your friends, or the Drudge Report) linked to it. Paidcontent has that power not just by virtue of its good editorial judgement, but also, and crucially, because its readers know who its other readers are – namely, their peers. Paidcontent helps decide what you peer group is reading today – and, by implication, what you should read if you want to be in the loop.

(All of this just says that aggregators are articulators of social identity, much like fashion brands: they reflect and are targeted at specific communities.)

Aggregators are consumer brands in a second sense too: unlike the content they link to, they are actually chosen by their readers. Some compete for the same readers (e.g. techcrunch vs valleywag vs gigaom), and they all invite repeated, loyal custom.

You don't discover news content. You discover aggregators. And if you like them you come back, or subscribe.

Idea # 3: The web, like print, is a push medium. It's just that the pushers have changed

In marketing lingo, in the example above Paidcontent was a channel, and newspapers' content was distributed in a push, not a pull way. But the pusher was not the newspaper; it was Paidcontent.

Granted, if instead of Paidcontent the pusher is your Facebook friends then things change a little in that the pushers are not businesses but other consumers. But still,

• What you read was pushed to you by someone
• That someone had it pushed to him/her by a business, or by someone who in turn had it pushed to him/her by a business
• In this chain, the first business that pushed the article was the newspaper's own front page

True, the old brands are no longer in control of our attention, and now we (the readers) have a lot more say in deciding what content we read. But between us and the old brands now sit the aggregators, who are malleable. "If it doesn't spread, it's dead" said Henry Jenkins. True. But there are entire industries involved in the spreading.

Idea #4: The main structural change that the web has brought to the news business is not the digital distribution of content, but the separation of aggregation and content

Scenarios like the one above would not have been possible before the internet, and would have been rare as recently as four years ago. But that is changing quickly.

Today it is possible to run a successful aggregation business (like the Drudge Report) without having much of a content business. This lowering of barriers-to-entry has lead to an explosion of niche curators whose products are far more targeted and comprehensive than any integrated business could dream of.

The reason that traditional businesses cannot compete is not that they would struggle to produce enough targeted aggregations to satisfy small niches – with enough resources they could do that. It is because firms in the traditional, integrated aggregation-plus-content business have strong incentives not to link to other websites (I've written about this conundrum before). But to satisfy a web-savvy niche audience you just have to send people to all sorts of sites across the web. This is not just because you can't hope to cover all relevant events with your own content, but your readers audiences demand to be taken to the 'original' articles, clips, etc. Put differently,

Idea #5: Readers don't expect aggregators to report on world events; they expect them to report on web events

By linking to a newspaper article, Paidcontent need not have implied any sense of endorsement or recommendation of it: the PC blurb might be inviting you to read the article to see its questionable reporting, which you should be aware of. Paidcontent's promise – what it asks you to trust it on – is to keep you up to about with what is being said. If what is being said turns out to be unreliable that has nothing to do with the promise.

 

Newspapers are in the breakfast business

The recent anxiety about business models for news has got me thinking about some of this blog's old subjects. Let me start with three recent quotes:

The medium does not matter. [...] It doesn't matter if they want to print the Wall Street Journal on salami and people want to eat it. [...] Whatever way people want it is fine: it's the quality and what you're getting that matters
– Kara Swisher

Instead of focusing on the paper part, which may go away, we need to focus on the news part
– Phil Bronstein

I mean, we've always believed in the value of content, and also that for a publisher the most important relationship is with the reader rather than the advertiser. So I think we've always felt it's important to have a direct, paying relationship with our audience
– John Ridding

There are two key assumptions implicit in these views:

• Consumers will pay for what they want, if it is adequately priced, unless they can get it for free
• Consumers want content

The first assumption is the basis of economics – and, you'll be pleased to hear, I won't dispute it. But the second is more problematic.

Consider this quote, from Mark Potts (my emphasis):

But maybe we're all looking at this through the wrong end of the telescope—or rather, the microscope. Maybe there is something in the news business that people might want to pay for. It's just not what some of the pay-proponents think it is. Maybe—maybe—the thing you can charge for is the package the news comes in, not the specific news items themselves. [...]

What people do buy are packages of news, often supported by other, non-news content. Journalists don't always like to think about this, but the reasons for subscribing to a newspaper often are as much about the comics, the crosswords and the ads as they are about the news itself. That's what people plunk down their quarters for: the package, not the story. News collected in a convenient, easy-to-use form that adds value.

This feels right. People will pay for what they want, and they certainly want to read the news. But perhaps the thing that they want – the object of their desire – is not the news content, but something else. I'm not quite sure of what this is, but I have a vague hunch. Bear with me.

The retreat into content

Back some ten years ago, news executives began to see that one day the internet would change their business forever. Clearly, printed news and scheduled TV would eventually be disrupted by the web and on-demand viewing, but nobody could quite tell how the new technologies and consumer habits would shape up.

Their reaction was to embrace multi-platform strategies. "We are not in the newspaper/television/magazine business", they said, "but rather in the news content business." So they invested millions in new technologies, newsrooms and skills that would let them create content to be consumed "whenever and wherever" people wanted.

This thinking was in the spirit of a long and honourable tradition in marketing, one that was famously articulated by Theodore Levitt in his 1960 Harvard Business Review paper "Marketing Myopia". In it he chastised many defunct industries for not having understood what business they were really in and focusing too much on their products instead of the consumer needs these were supposed to address. For example (my emphasis),

The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That grew. The railroads are in trouble today not because that need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, and even telephones) but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves. They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry incorrectly was that they were railroad oriented instead of transportation oriented; they were product oriented instead of customer oriented.

The news industry failed to follow Levitt's prescription all the way. It did the right thing in seeing beyond the physical products (newspapers) that it was producing. But instead of finding new ways of satisfying the underlying consumer needs, it concentrated on the disembodied news 'content' that would be involved in that satisfaction, whichever form it took. It never stopped being product oriented; it just replaced a physical product (newspapers) by an intangible one (news content).

To use an analogy, imagine that you are in the construction industry and one day you realise that in the near future consumers won't need the kinds of two-floor houses that you've been building for generations. The experts tell you that people will probably live in something like hotels or student-like dorms, or maybe in large communal spaces – they don't know, but they do know that houses are finished. So you say "fine, but however people choose to live they will still need buildings, and buildings will always need bricks. So I'll rebrand myself as a brick-maker".

This has two problems. First, bricks are undifferentiated – they are commodities. And second, they are not chosen by consumers – they are chosen by the people who manage to sell to consumers and build dwellings for them. Your once-powerful consumer brand now has to work in a business-to-business context – where it has no equity – and your old brand equity among consumers is gone. Even worse, the brick-making industry has been there for centuries, and it has some strong specialised players that won't welcome new competition.

At least some of the blame for this state of affairs must go to the armies of consultants and techno-enthusiasts who proclaimed that from now on "the consumer is in control", and there is no longer any point in trying to control how or when content is to be consumed. "Just look at the kids", they would say. "They are using RSS feeds, email, Youtube, Myspace etc in their own terms. They dictate how news is consumed. Stand in the way and your content will be pirated, your brand will be abandoned, or both. Consumers really want their content, they want it now, and they have the means to get it on their terms. Surrender or be killed."

Content companies responded to this by surrendering control over aggregation. They started publishing their content is disaggregated form, allowing anybody – consumers, other media companies or even machines – to re-aggregate it in new ways. Newspaper websites started publishing RSS feeds of all their news, hoping to increase their reach through people who would re-publish these in Facebook, blogs, news aggregators, what have you. TV companies started slicing their news bulletins into individual packages that were uploaded to Youtube, from where people could embed them on their own blogs. "Go where your audience is" was the motto. Eventually most TV programs ended up being published under a common brand – Hulu, where the kids are – thus creating

the uberbrand of media, and the networks [...] simply relegated themselves to being content producers. In essence, the networks have quit. What happened to the value of a network brand?
– Kevin Wasong

The new house builders

The best proof that disaggregated content was not the only option is that we are finally beginning to see new industries that are beginning to address consumers' real needs around news. I am referring, of course, to aggregators—editorially-run sites like the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report, thousands of professional and semi-professional blogs, and automatic aggregators like Google News—whose value proposition is that they send you to wherever you need to go across the web to read the day's key stories, form the horse's mouth.

To translate the brick analogy to the news business, the old houses are the newspapers, the incumbent brick-makers are the newswires (who seem to be doing well), and the new dwellings are the blogs, aggregators and curators where people find links to newspaper articles. The masses who find these links are not newspapers' customers, they are the aggregators' customers; to them, content is a commodity. Another quote:

A consumer is now as likely to discover newspaper content on Google, visit our sites, then flit away before even discovering that it was the Daily Mirror or the Telegraph that created the content in the first place. [...] Or worse, they may visit an aggregator like Google News, browse a digital deli of expensive-to-produce news from around the world, and then click on an ad served up to them by Google. For which we get no return. By the absurd relentless chasing of unique user figures we are flag-waving our way out of business.
– Sly Bailey

What is particularly painful to newspapers about this is that curators and aggregators are taking exactly the same place in consumers' minds that newspapers' brands used to own. This is no coincidence, since curators are addressing the same need that newspapers used to cater for – a good overview of the world in the morning when you wake up – but better. They do a better job at this not least because, increasingly, "an overview of the world" means "an overview of the web". Of course content is still needed – it is the bricks in the house – but it is not among content items that consumers make their choices. They choose curators, and the curators choose the content.

Memo to newspapers: it is not that people want your content for free. Properly speaking, many of your readers don't really want it at all. What they want – what satisfies their news habit – is aggregation. It is for that that they used to pay you, back when the only way of aggregating content was to own it and print it all in a newspaper. Today you are trying to get aggregators to pay you for the right to aggregate your content – like house-builders paying for their bricks. You may or may not succeed in this. But even if you do, your brands will continue to wither, your products will continue to become commoditised, and your margins will remain low, until you provide something that is the object of consumers' choices. Only then will they once again care to remember your name in the morning, when they think of breakfast – and only then will you be able to command a premium.

Doing this means aggregation. And that is a problem. For reasons I've outlined in an earlier post, there are strong economic forces preventing newspapers from entering the aggregation business. If a newspaper's website doesn't aggregate other people's content it just can't compete. But if it doesn't drive reach to its own content its transition to the web must inevitably mean producing less content – and laying off journalists. But this they can't do, because they need that content for their print versions. Catch 22.

Poor newspapers. Yes, they made some mistakes. But maybe they just didn't have an option.

The barbarians have arrived

In his wonderful essay about the internet (which, inexplicably, hasn't been translated into English yet, so this is my translation), Italian novelist Alessandro Baricco sets out to understand the meaning of a world in which people no longer read newspapers from cover to cover, no longer see films from beginning to end, but surf in a sea of links, jumping from one disaggregated snippet to the next. For him this is no less than a

Copernican revolution in knowledge according to which the value of an idea, of a piece of information, of a datum, is related not principally to its intrinsic characteristics but to its history. It is as if brains had started thinking in a different way: for [these readers], an idea is not a circumscribed object, but a trajectory, a sequence of steps, a composition of distinct materials. [...] Today there is a large part of mankind for which, every day, the knowledge that matters is that which can get into a sequence with all other knowledge.

For Baricco, the change is not just about technology and the media. It is also a mutation in society. New individuals are being born – the barbarians, or mutants – for whom the very experience of content is fundamentally different from what we've known until now:

Experience, for the barbarians, is something that looks like towing, like a sequence, like a trajectory: it supposes a movement that links different points in the space of the real: it is the intensity of that spark.

For centuries it wasn't like this. Experience, in its highest and most redeeming sense, was related to an ability to get close to things, one by one, and to develop an intimacy with them that could open the most hidden of chambers. [...]

It seems that for the mutants, by contrast, the spark of experience jumps in the quick movement that it traces between different things. It is as if now nothing can be experienced except through longer sequences, made up of different "somethings". [...]

As a general rule, the barbarians [...] don't move towards a goal, because the goal is the movement. Their trajectories are born from chance and die from tiredness: they don't seek experience, they are experience.

If Baricco is right, newspapers are history. Their problem is not just about business models or distribution technologies. (Packaging a newspaper, self-contained, in a Kindle won't help: what the barbarians want is not self-contained.) The very nature of content is changing beyond recognition, and any business with it as its foundation will be shaken to its core.

 

Postscript: for more positive thoughts on what can be done, see this

Confusing net neutrality

I've just read Cory Doctorow's impassioned new Guardian piece advocating net neutrality. I have a lot of respect for Cory's work at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but on this I think he is muddling the issues.

Under net neutrality Cory is conflating

• The principle that ISPs should not discriminate against websites on commercial (e.g. anticompetitive) or political grounds,
• The debate about internet censorship by governments, and
• The idea that ISPs should not be allowed to charge their subscribers according to how much they use the internet (metered broadband)

The problem with this kind of position is that it paints net neutrality as a take-it-or-leave-it package, and groups the proponents of each of these causes together in a cyber-libertarian, woolly-lefty category that is an easy target for opponents of any of the three. This makes for an ill-informed and overheated debate.

My point is not that Cory's second and third causes are less important, or that they are less defensible. It is just that their merits and demerits depend on different things:

• In the first case, the arguments are mainly about the importance of the internet economy and consumer rights, versus telcos' legitimate interests and their need for a business case if they are to invest in infrastructure
• In the second, the arguments are about freedom of expression versus (in the more defensible cases) governments' need to enforce laws concerning copyright, hate speech and child abuse
• In the third, the arguments are about encouraging people to use the internet versus ISPs' freedom to define their pricing strategies

Yes there are some overlaps: freedom of expression is part of the first two debates. But as I've argued in my primer on net neutrality, I think the debate on net neutrality should focus on the first group of issues as much as possible. These are far too important for their debate to get stuck on grounds that are largely irrelevant to them. (For an example of similar muddling from the opposite camp, see this).

(And no, I don't want to take a militant position on any of these three debates – not because I'm afraid to reveal my colours, but because my colours are not militant.)

Broadband policy primer part I: net neutrality

First of a three-part series on broadband policy. The introduction is available here.

Along with piracy and investment in superfast networks, net neutrality is at the centre of the debate about broadband public policy. More and more policymakers, media executives and concerned citizens are having to come to terms with what is by any standards a very complex area full of technical and economic jargon. Unfortunately, there are precious few accessible balanced and professional introductions out there.

This post is an attempt to provide just that. I've tried to make it as accessible as possible without sacrificing the important subtleties. The first section gives the big picture quickly; the nuances come later. Stop reading when the level of detail is more than what you need. Links to further reading are at the end.

Net neutrality in a nutshell

Net neutrality means different things to different people, but this definition will do here:

Net neutrality means that your Internet Service Provider (ISP) should have no say in deciding which legal websites you can and cannot visit

This means that your ISP should not play favourites between websites, and should leave you to decide freely where to go. If your ISP has a commercial interest in you visiting certain websites over others (perhaps because it made a deal with them, or is owned by the same people), it should not use its control of the 'pipes' to privilege its preferred sites. For reasons I will explain, many people believe that net neutrality is 'at risk' and should be protected by law.

Clearly, net neutrality is a principle about consumer rights. But it is also about competitive strategy: it limits ISPs' actions by telling them not to use their control over the 'pipes' and their subscribers

1. as a way of favouring certain websites, or

    

2. as a way of forcing content providers (website owners) to the negotiating table, threatening to block them unless a 'carriage fee' is paid

While you could argue that (a) is just about preventing anticompetitive practices, (b) is more unusual in that it essentially forces ISPs to 'carry' all content providers 'for free', relying only on subscribers' fees for revenue.

However, complaints by ISPs that content providers get a 'free ride' should be put in perspective. In the cable TV industry, where most carriage decisions are matters of negotiation between content providers and cable companies, it is usually the pipes people who pay the content people for the right to carry their content. 'Fairness' here is a very blurry concept.

Today, ISPs are generally not required to observe net neutrality, and yet things are much as if they were: ISPs let consumers access all content providers, and content providers don't pay ISPs. This has led many people to think that net neutrality is a natural outcome of market forces and that hence there is no need for legislation to protect it.

However, the claim that the status quo is just the result of market mechanisms is not quite right. US regulators have taken a pro-net-neutrality stance in certain disputes in the past. And everything is changing: some of those regulatory interventions are now the subject of court proceedings whose outcome is uncertain, and changes in technology and consumer behaviour suggest that while net neutrality may have made commercial sense for ISPs in the past, in the future it may not (more on this below). Lack of clarity about all this has led some people to call for net neutrality to be explicitly enshrined in legislation.

Two caveats. First, nobody is seriously considering blocking access to ordinary websites. This is about video-intensive websites, and is really all about setting precedents for a future in which most TV viewing may happen over the internet. Second, some of the remarks above apply only to fixed (landline) ISPs. Mobile operators have historically not observed net neutrality, although this seems to be changing rapidly.

Other versions

Note that, as I'm using the concept here, net neutrality is not opposed to an ISP prioritising emergency Skype calls or slowing down certain kinds of traffic (e.g. peer-to-peer downloads or mass emails) if that is a sensible way of managing their network (e.g. controlling costs, avoiding network congestion or preventing spam), provided this is done fairly and transparently, and is not done on anti-competitive grounds. This is similar to the definition of net neutrality adopted by Google in its public policy blog.

However, this is at odds with certain other definitions of net neutrality you may have found out there. According to them, ISPs should treat all traffic (or 'information packets') equally. More specifically, while

• the definition here only says that ISPs should not discriminate between different content providers (i.e. on the basis of the content's source),
• other definitions add that ISPs should not discriminate on the basis of application being used (i.e. the specific internet technology through which the content is being transmitted, such as peer-to-peer downloads vs streamed video vs internet voice calling). A variant of this notion that is often used by engineers is the end-to-end principle, which holds that the internet's networks should treat all information flowing through them equally – at a technical, not just a commercial level (see the world of ends website for advocacy of this position).

Although the second kind of definition can sometimes amount to the first, in principle the two are different animals: the first is about competitive behaviour, while the second is about specifying exactly what service ISPs should provide. Now, the first definition has a higher chance of flying with policymakers than the second, because it involves less regulatory micromanagement.

In what follows I'll use the first definition only – not because I'm advocating pro-net neutrality legislation, but because otherwise the debate is less interesting and the arguments get confused.

Why does net neutrality matter?

Net neutrality matters for at least three reasons:

• First, there is the political dimension: many people worry that if ISPs have discretion over which websites to carry, the future will see a very different internet to the one we have today. Websites from big media corporations would be able to make deals with ISPs to secure carriage, while smaller, unknown and challenging voices might get "squeezed out" (Obama). The internet's promise of a more plural democracy would be thwarted. (Of course, this view is contested).
• Second, net neutrality is a battlefield in the fight over consumers' wallets. For ISPs, it means they can't get bigger a slice of the money that companies like Google, Amazon, Myspace et al are receiving. To a large extent, they are condemned to acting as boring, low-margin utilities (more on this below). As the NY Times once said in a related context, "this is in good part a business negotiation being conducted in a policy arena."
• Third, net neutrality matters for national economic policy. If you want to create an environment where lots of new Googles can spring up from garages, you don't want the Pages and Brins of tomorrow to have to negotiate with every ISP for the right to reach their users. But if your vision is to have lots of film studios (the content owners) making lots of content, lots of ISPs delivering this content via superfast networks, and consumers accessing (and paying for) this content, then you can leave that job to ISPs and studios, and you don't need the website industry (today's content providers). Of course the answer will probably lie somewhere in the middle – and you can guess who is pushing for which view.

Three related debates

Net neutrality is related to, but different from, these three other controversies:

• Piracy, and calls for ISPs to crack down on it via measures known as "graduated response", "three strikes" and the "Hadopi" law (in France). Until now, ISPs in both the US and Europe have been largely exempt from legal liability for their subscribers' activities (this is called "safe harbour" in the US and "mere conduit" in Europe). If ISPs are made liable for ensuring that their users don't engage in piracy (not the only option being discussed), they might just choose to block all content downloads whose legal status they are unsure of. This could force content providers to enter into arrangements with ISPs so that legality can be ascertained. Whether this would lead to net neutrality being undermined is unclear, but in any case the resulting ecosystem would be very different from today's internet.
• Metered broadband – i.e. ISPs charging their subscribers according to how much they use the internet. In April 2009 Time Warner Cable backed off from attempts to introduce metered broadband after politicians got involved. Metered broadband is commonplace in Europe.

  Metered broadband is related to net neutrality in that a cable company could potentially make internet downloads so expensive that consumers find it cheaper to use its own video-on-demand services than view a film from, say, Hulu or iTunes. But barring anticompetitive cases like these, metered broadband and net neutrality are unrelated. If ISPs simply make broadband expensive but not for anticompetitive reasons this may irritate consumers and/or video website owners, it may delay the advent of internet-delivered TV, and may even be an abuse of monopoly power – but it is not in itself against net neutrality.

• Open networks, or unbundling. This is the regulatory process of forcing those who own the 'last mile' networks connecting consumers' homes to share their pipes with other ISPs. This is mandated in Europe but not in the US, although it is a requirement for the new broadband stimulus funds.

  Unbundling regulations are designed to strengthen competition between ISPs. In some people's view, strong competition between ISPs is enough to guarantee net neutrality without further regulation—but among economists the jury is still out on this (see, e.g., this paper). Essentially, the question boils down to what is the greater loss: allowing internet video to eat away pay-TV's revenues (while also incurring bandwidth costs), or risking users' frustration by not allowing them to surf the internet freely. While this remains unanswered, so does the question of whether or not any new rules are required if net neutrality is to be preserved.

Why now?

Leaving the possibility of sanctions aside, there are good reasons to believe that whatever commercial rationale ISPs may have had in the past not to block websites may not apply in the future:

• As the internet becomes a viable medium for the distribution of films and TV content, two things begin to happen:
  • The internet begins to compete with pay-TV (cable TV, satellite TV and ISP-run IPTV). In Europe, ISPs are increasingly also (and mainly) in the pay-TV business; and in the US cable operators are the main broadband providers. The result is that on both sides of the Atlantic, broadband is beginning to compete with ISP's TV businesses.
  • The cost of carrying this content begins to increase, which makes ISPs keen to find new sources of revenue. Now, any economist reading this might object at this point: if ISPs have always been retail-only businesses, always passing all of their costs to consumers, what prevents them from passing on the costs of video distribution as well? Part of the answer is that some ISPs pay more for bandwidth than others. If you have a lot of competition between them, those with higher bandwidth costs suffer, since they can't reflect these costs in higher retail prices without being undercut by their competitors.

  As the internet begins to move to the TV set and the living room, these conflicts are set to intensify. This move is already happening. The Apple TV lets you buy, rent and instantly watch premium movies in high definition without your ISP even knowing what you are doing. In the US you can also get movies from Amazon delivered straight to your Tivo, or to a variety of high-end TV sets; and you can download movies from Netflix to LG televisions and the Xbox games console.

• Until recently, monitoring and selectively blocking people's internet activities was beyond ISPs' technical capabilities. But in the last few years a new set of technologies (called Deep Packet Inspection, or DPI) has changed that.

Is this about laws and regulations?

To this day, net neutrality has not been explicitly protected by legislation in either the US or Europe. And yet – with the exception of some mobile operators – ISPs do not block access to legal websites on commercial grounds, and website owners don't pay ISPs. This has led some people to claim that net neutrality just 'happens' naturally as a result of market forces, and that hence there is no need for governments to intervene.

This is a strong argument – 'if it ain't broke don't fix it'. But it has a pitfall: although they have not passed laws, governments have played an important role in net neutrality in the past:

• The internet was not created by private companies but by governments over two decades – with net neutrality built-in. When it was eventually privatised in the mid-90's this was under a gradual and carefully managed process which ensured that the original modus operandi was maintained.
• Over the last decade the US Federal Communications Commission has intervened several times to ensure that some degree of net neutrality is respected – see this and this. In 2005 it introduced its now-famous four "internet freedoms" principles:
  • Consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice.
  • Consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement.
  • Consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network.
  • Consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers

  The FCC's authority to enforce these principles is currently being legally challenged by US cableco Comcast.

• Legal experts are unsure as to whether net neutrality is already implied by existing competition law and telecoms regulations. While this is so, and lacking legal precedents, any ISP contemplating blocking a website would need to consider the possibility of lengthy lawsuits.

None of this is not to say that ISPs would discriminate if they are told they can, but it is clear that until now the uncertainty around (and risk of) possible regulatory or legal challenges may well have played an important role in ISPs' decision not to block websites.

Net neutrality is tangled up with a number of other policy issues:

• As part of its concessions for its merger with AT&T, SBC agreed in 2006 that the new AT&T would respect a high-level version of net neutrality (the FCC principles above) for two years. That period ended in December 2008.
• Governments around the world are keen to encourage investment in superfast broadband infrastructure. But imposing net neutrality regulations may weaken ISP's business case for investment. See this. I will write about investments in a separate post.
• Piracy and the content industries' (mainly film studios and music labels) lobbying efforts to stop it: one of the options they have proposed is that governments should require ISPs to prevent people from downloading pirated content. See above. I will discuss piracy in a separate post.
• Obama: net neutrality featured prominently in President Obama's campaign pledges, and of one the key people behind his technology policy, Julius Genachowski, has been appointed to chair the Federal Communications Commission.
• The EU's 'telecoms package' which, among other things, may set the ground rules on net neutrality and internet anti-piracy enforcement across the EU. After years of debate and lobbying, the package got derailed at the last minute on May 6^th 2009 because of controversy around some proposed anti-piracy measures (not because of net neutrality). The package will be discussed again late in 2009, but it is not clear whether net neutrality will be revisited then; as it stands, the proposed package does not explicitly protect net neutrality.
• The UK Government's Digital Britain report – a preamble to the next UK Communications Act – emphasised the need to fight piracy and to invest in broadband infrastructure, while stating that "the Government has yet to see a case for legislation in favour of net neutrality". This made some people angry.

Who is involved?

At the corporate level, net neutrality's main supporters are those who stand most to benefit from it: large internet companies like Amazon, Google and Ebay (owners of Skype); the Open Internet Coalition lists many of these. The main opponents are those with most to lose: telcos and ISPs, some of which have joined forces behind the Hands Off The Internet group. This NY Times article discusses the corporate lobbying effort in Europe. In the UK, BT has recently called publicly for video websites to contribute towards distribution costs. This quote from AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre has become a bit of a cliché but is still mandatory:

How do you think [Google, MSN, Vonage and others] going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

Politically, in the US the divide is generally along partisan lines, with Republicans generally siding with telcos and opposing pro-neutrality legislation, and Democrats favouring it (this Wikipedia article lists various failed attempts to legislate net neutrality in the US). In Europe the debate has not been very political yet, but if the recent (and related) debate about internet piracy is anything to go by, Europe is likely to see a similar left/right divide.

As to advocacy groups, the Free Press, Public Knowledge and Electronic Freedom Foundation groups have all been vocal supporters of net neutrality in the US, and the Save The Internet Coalition lists civil liberties groups and liberal intellectuals as its members. In Europe, La Quadrature du Net, Blackout Europe and Monica Horten's IPTEGRITY blog offer pro-net neutrality commentary. Opposing groups in the US include the Progress and Freedom Foundation, NetCompetition.org (members include AT&T, Comcast, Qwest, Sprint and Verizon) and the CATO institute.

As to people the list could be endless, but here are a few names. Net neutrality's main supporters include law professors Larry Lessig (see this testimony), Susan Crawford and Tim Wu (who coined the term), economist Nicholas Economides, mathematician Andrew Odlyzko, inventor of the web Tim Berners Lee, and "father of the internet" Vint Cerf. Key opponents of neutrality regulations include Adam Thierer Bret Swanson at the PFF, Timothy B. Lee, Scott Cleland from netcompetition.org, and various renowned economists who have been at least sceptical about the idea. Other experts worth following are Stefano Quintarelli (Italy), Chris Marsden (UK/EU) and Rob Frieden (US).

This page lists lots of statements grouped by side, plus papers and much more.

The flip side

Most people – even among those who oppose net neutrality regulations – agree that net neutrality as we have it today is a good thing. The problem is that any rules mandating net neutrality would risk 'unintended consequences'. Here are some:

• The net-neutrality concept may not be future-proof. It may have served us well until now, but will it work in ten or twenty years' time, when we use the internet for all our live TV? Perhaps the free market would be better equipped to come up with the right model than any policymaker. You could argue either way, but the question is not clear-cut (for techies: how do you roll out IP multicast in a non-discriminatory way?)
• It is hard to implement. Even if you agree that ISPs should not discriminate on commercial grounds, how do you decide what is discrimination and what is just good housekeeping? You could quickly end up mandating a 'technological' version of net neutrality such as the end-to-end principle – which is unlikely to fly, on grounds of regulatory micro-management.
• It is difficult to mandate net neutrality, even in a general commercial sense, without to some extent implicitly mandating a business model for ISPs – regulatory micromanagement again. More on this below.
• Net neutrality regulations may discourage firms from investing in new infrastructure – if it means that investors are stuck with a low-margin business model.

While some of these concerns may be addressable, there is no silver bullet: introducing net neutrality regulations would unavoidably involve a trade-off between ends. If you believe that preserving the internet as we know it is essential for the economy's future, and you believe that this cannot happen without new rules, then you may have no option but to favour legislation. But however much you try, you may be unable to avoid limiting some industries' prospects– much like when the Glass Steagall act limited what activities banks could be involved in. In that case there was a compelling rationale. Is there one here?

ISPs' perspective

If ISPs are not allowed to discriminate between content providers (i.e. website owners), they have little chance of ever receiving money from them– because content providers can reach their users without paying ISPs. And if ISPs can only get their money from consumers they are stuck with a retail business model. They are also stuck with an undifferentiated product to sell: access to all of the internet, exactly the same internet that the next ISP offers. This is a commodity business, and the main way of competing (if there are competitors) is by reducing costs and lowering prices. And because there are economies of scale, the result is consolidation and eventually an industry with a few big players – as is happening in the UK today. With effective competition, margins are likely to remain tight; and if competition disappears, regulators may step in and force margins to remain low.

What is an ISP to do? There seem to be four main ways out of this:

• Treating broadband as an add-on to other, more interesting retail services (mainly television and telephony).

  As I argued above, as the internet begins to compete more directly with television, concerns about the (anti) competitive aspects of net neutrality are bound to arise. If net neutrality regulations are introduced this is likely to hurt ISPs' revenues.

• Offering content providers better-than-normal service so that they can reach their end-users with higher quality – i.e. a system 'tiered' around 'quality of service' or 'QoS'.

  This approach is not devoid of controversy, as it may create anticompetitive incentives. The concern is that once enough content providers pay for premium carriage, ISPs may be tempted to pressure those who 'opt out' to 'opt in' by giving them 'worse than normal' service (this post by Rob Frieden explains the argument better). And if – for this or any other reason – one day you can't launch a competitive web site without paying ISPs, net neutrality will have disappeared in spirit if not in letter.

  Not all proponents of net neutrality are against paid fast lanes. Larry Lessig has recently written in favour of them, provided they are offered to all content providers on the same terms.

• Offering content providers ways of reaching their end-users at lower total cost – for example, by offering to bypass the Content Delivery Networks that often sit between content providers and ISPs.

  This is a nascent development. I have not come across strong arguments in favour or against this from a net neutrality perspective (but see this post by Rob Frieden on a related issue).

• Charging content providers for access to ISPs' relationship with users – e.g. by handling micro-payments for content, or providing (anonymous) information about end-users' demographics and/or browsing habits, so that advertisements can be better targeted.

  This strategy is the subject of much excitement among ISPs – largely thanks to the labours of the clever people at STL and their Telco 2.0 initiative. It is also controversial, as it sometimes involves issues around privacy.

If network neutrality becomes law, ISPs' future could lie in the last two strategies.

Conclusion: is the debate irrelevant?

At the heart of the debate about net neutrality there are three questions:

• Is net neutrality desirable?
• If it is, is there a risk that without new regulations neutrality will disappear?
• If neutrality is desirable and at risk without new regulation, how far are governments willing to go in its pursuit? What are the downsides of introducing regulation?

The first question is mainly a political one. The second is one for the economists. And the third is one for policymakers once the second has been answered.

In the US, political views on the first question seem to be relatively clear – but far from consensual. But the answer to the second question is far from clear, at least in the published literature. And while this is so, whether the first and third questions are of more than academic interest is unclear.

For interested parties this means that everything depends on the answer to the second question. Which means nothing but good news for economists: years of lucrative consulting opportunities await them.

Where can I learn more?

The Wikipedia pages on "network neutrality" and "network neutrality in the US" have good overviews with lots of links to more in-depth documents. This page lists lots of resources, grouped by side. This briefing at law.com gives a well-rounded overview of the issues and history from a (US) legal perspective, and this report by Oxera Economics gives a good and brief overview from an economic perspective. The rather academic blogs by Rob Frieden (in the US) and Chris Marsden (in Europe) offer ongoing sophisticated commentary.

 

Updates:

08/06/09: Added links to netcompetition.org, Scott Clelan, Google Public Policy statement

11/06/08: Added various clarifications, links to BT statements, mention of QoS