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.
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