Welcome to Netopia, where technology meets society.

What is money? It used to be tied to resources, like gold – the Mayans used cocoa beans. In recent time, the value of money is guaranteed by central banks. But increasingly, digital currencies enter the financial systems. It started with game currencies like World of Warcraft-gold tradable for harder money. Lately, a number of peer-to-peer currencies have appeared, most famously Bitcoin.

The rate of one Bitcoin was 13 dollars in the beginning of 2013 and recently peaked at over 1000 dollars, before dropping 20% following a ban from People’s bank of China on Bitcoin-transactions. Still, mining Bitcoin (this is done by cracking cryptography with computers) is a lucrative enterprise and third party manufacturers sell Bitcoin mining machines. There is a growing market of Bitcoin services: wallets, trading platforms, even cash machines. In August, Germany’s Ministry of Financed announced Bitcoin is a legitimate financial instrument.

Skeptics criticize Bitcoins and virtual currencies on grounds like money-laundering and tax evasion. The real challenge is that such currencies challenges the nation state and democratic governments’ reach. How do we tackle the next financial crisis if a currency exists outside the central bank system? So far, governments have been split over virtual currencies, some invest in supporting technology or acknowledge it as legitimate payment. Others ban it. Netopia has a two-column special on Bitcoin by German journalist Dr Ralf Grötker (Part 1, Part 2).

It was inspiring to find that NTDTV’s coverage of Netopia’s 3d-printing seminar aired to a potential audience of over 100 million viewers. Watch the video!

This post was also distributed as Netopia’s newsletter

As search algorithms and website content adjusts to internet users historical behavior, the filter bubble phenomenon becomes a reality. If you have made a lot of searches on, say, sailing, search engines will put sailing-related results higher in the list and show more sailing-related ads. Various websites have background programs collecting information on your surf habits and selling it to third parties, so don’t be surprised if you get more rental offers on sailing boats after lurking on the Ahoy, Captain-forum. If you read general news sites and click on stories relating to sail racing, those stories will be more prominent next time. The filter bubble enhances your previous behavior and potentially makes other information more difficult to access. To some extent, these background algorithms make your life easier, allowing you to faster find what you’re looking for. The price you pay is being funneled into topics the cloud thinks you will appreciate,  plus the fact that information about your preferences is sold on marketplaces like Bluekai. But what about the things that you don’t really want to acknowledge as part of your online habits? What about gossip on the private lives of celebrities? What about dating sites? What about pr0n? Turns out adult sites increasingly monitor users to sell ads and information about your preferences. Financial Times quotes a report that found 869 trackers on adult websites. Netopia does not pass any judgment on your surfing habits,  but it’s probably a good idea to clear that cache just in case.

FT story: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f7c54d1a-5cee-11e3-a558-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz2mbW4ELsl

Technology shapes society, at least this is what tech pundits will lead you to believe. But which technologies? Financial Times interviews Ha-Joon Chang, economy professor at Cambridge, who claims household technologies like the washing machine and piped gas has done much more or society that the internet. They allow women to join the labour market, argues Chang, have fewer children and later. This upset the previous power balance and resulted in universal suffrage, among other things. Netopia says great, but still techno-centric. Reminds me of a talk by another UK professor (at Oxford, as fate would have it!): Netopia-favourite Viktor Mayer-Schönberger. He may be most familiar for his recent book Big Data, but his previous work Delete looked into the right to be forgotten, the importance of teaching machines to forget. I attended a seminar where he introduced his thinking that Guttenberg may have invented the printing press, but it was the content that made it popular. “What content?” you ask. The Bible, says Mayer-Schönberger, pointing to Martin Luther as the one who real made the print book popular. Is it technology that drives society? Or can technology function as a vehicle for what the people want, whether it be access to scripture or women’s lib?

Financial Times story: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/27a2027e-5698-11e3-8cca-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2mFzFTc9v

Algorithmisation is when human jobs are replaced by machines. It used to be robots doing manufacturing jobs, but with algorithmisation also white-collar jobs will (supposedly) be done by the machines. Doctors and lawyers are examples of professions that are essentially flow charts and thus easily algorithmised, or so say the proponents (I know, accountability, but for argument’s sake). Thus, educating surgeons and lawyers is a waste of time and money.

Teachers, too, can be replaced by machines. University educations are going online at a rapid scale. Distance courses are of course old hat, but Massively Open Online Courses (“MOOC”) are all the rage in the academic world. It’s a brilliant proposition, more students get degrees with less effort from the universities. Too bad it seems most of the MOOCs teach skills that will soon be algorithmised. And MOOC-students drop out a lot more than their on-campus mates.

I spent some years in university and sure had some great experiences from courses. But my most important lessons we’re learned outside the classroom: in the student union, editing the campus paper, throwing parties and rock festivals, lobbying the university board et cetera. Probably, that’s why I dropped out without a degree. On the other hand, who cares? My job will be algorithmised before long anyway.

Cybersecurity is a topic thclickat most often ends up putting the responsibility on the individual user to protect his or her data. That is a useless solution, many internet users have a very limited understanding of what’s going on behind the scenes and those who do still are at an information disadvantage to cyber-criminals, hackers, spammers, government surveillance, profit maximising intermediaries, service providers collecting personal data etc. Public institutions would be a better answer, except their reach is often limited to one country and the internet of course is global.  And these days it seems we cannot really trust the public institutions too much in terms of looking after our privacy. Making the intermediaries liable is Netopia’s best suggestion so far, they control the technology and traffic after all – plus they shape traffic all the time to optimise their networks and revenue. But that has downsides too, who decides what should be blocked? What about over-filtering? What if different users have different priorities?

“It’s going to be messy” says Rebecca MacKinnon. She is one of the people on the planet who has done the deepest thinking on these issues. She says it’s messy, as in there will not be one single fix, like a download patch. Better to see human rights online as democracy: a never-ending process of strong wills and opposing interests. Instead of looking for one solution, we must try to find many suggests MacKinnon and points to some current initiatives in various forms. You have read Netopia’s interview with Rebecca MacKinnon (one click away from this blog post), now watch her speech at an internet conference yesterday. It’s the best thirty minutes you will ever spend on human rights online.

Google is once again on a collision course with content producers, this time the news publishers. Google’s new Newsstand app could be a way for the search giant to find a mutual interest with the media industry, both parties wanting to maximise sales. But at the same time the European Publishers Council criticises Google for abusing its dominant position in terms of third party content. EPC Executive Director Angela Mills Wade points to the absurdity that Google will promote its own services over the competition in its search results, leaving media companies to buy ads from their competitor as the only way out.

That is doubly ironic, as ad-revenue already shifted from content media to search media when Google started posting snippets of news stories (without prior consent from the content owners, as Mills Wade also points out). Google’s standard answer to such criticism is “fine, don’t use our service”. From media producer perspective, that is a useless answer, Google’s dominant position on search means hardly anyone can afford to opt-out. And for the consumers, the users, the consumer power is in reality very restricted. Sure, there are other search engines, but www.google.com is the world’s most visited website so the individual user’s influence is microscopic.

Should Google be held to a higher standard just because it’s successful? Yes, without a shadow of a doubt. Is that not punishing Google for its success? No, it’s perfectly normal in competition regulation. In fact, regular news media, the same businesses that Google competes with for content, audience and adverts, follow strict policies of press ethics (details vary between countries). One of the fundamental is to never let the advertising or business interests interfere with the editorial content. Google would be well-advised to apply that principle to its own services. That would not be evil at all. Not one bit.

Full disclosure: European Publishers Council is one of Netopia’s supporters

I wrote about TEDx Brussels the other week and bashed it a little for not inviting dialogue and criticism. I still enjoy the TED videos, there is a lot to take away from them, but it turns out that there is another problem. British writer Frank Swain revealed this week that the TED organisation – a not for profit – does not pay its speakers. In fact, it expressedly prohibits the independent TEDx-organisers to pay their speakers. Even if they wanted to, they can’t – it would be a breach of contract. Bear in mind that tickets to these events are pricey, the TEDx in Brussels was more than €100 and the core TED-events much more.

Of course, you could use the old visibility-argument – TED provides a great platform for speakers who want to get their message out. A lot of conferences don’t pay their speakers. On the other hand, this falls into an all-too-familiar pattern of Silicon Valley-philosophy where the content is always free and those who distribute it make the big bucks. Google is another example, making huge profits on selling ads against other people’s content in their search and other services. Sure, you could argue that they bring traffic to other websites, but the pattern remains: Google curates the content  (through algorithms for the most part), sells ads against it and effectively takes revenue from for example traditional media who used to make ad profits from the same content that Google now exploits.

In his 2011 book “Free Ride” (Doubleday), US author Robert Levine – formerly editor at Wired magazine and editor-in-chief of Billboard –makes a convincing case that digital technology shifts revenue from producers of media content to new intermediaries. The methods are different – broadband carriers make money from movie file-sharing (by selling more expensive plans), hardware manufacturers like Tivo sell on the promise of cutting out TV ads, aggregators like Huffington Post build their business on content from other media, and so on. Swain reveals that this pattern is not limited to digital distribution, adding TED talks to the list of free-riders.

Our economy increasingly relies on production of intangibles. That means content must be valued more, not less, going forward. It’s the opposite of information wanting to be free.

Vint Cerf is nick-named “father of the internet”, as he managed the US defense research program “DARPA” that did the first research in the 1960’s on the communication technology that became the internet. Cerf is the “Chief Internet Evangelist” at Google. The other day, Cerf spoke at a US Federal Trade Commission event on The Internet of Things, saying that “privacy may actually be an anomaly” (according to this report in The Verge), comparing with the lack of privacy in a smaller village and suggesting that privacy is an idea that came with technology and that may now be going away.

It’s funny he would say that, because I read something like this:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

… oh, wait! That’s Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So it may be that privacy is not something that technology invented after all, but something we are entitled to from birth. Funny how Google wants to mess with this. In this day and age of NSA, Prism, Xkeyscore, GCHQ etc it would make more sense for internet services to make a case that they protect privacy as best they can.

Also, a small community like Vint Cerf’s childhood village is completely different from cloud services, there is a social contract that everybody knows (almost) everything about one another – it goes two-ways. Internet surveillance is the cloud looking at the people, without the people looking back.

Euractiv – the EU-insider publication – has published my opinion piece, based on Netopia’s report on 3d-printing technology and the market and policy disruption that is the potential result of widespread dissemination.  I argue that it is important for the European Commission to take a closer look at these implications, sooner rather than later. Distributed manufacturing challenges many structures of society: gun control is the most spectacular example, but also consumer protection (who is liable if someone is hurt by a 3d-printed object?) and intellectual property rights as the technology as a consumer product could bring similar challenges as the entertainment industry has struggled with in the past decade to manufacturing. Toy piracy, anyone? The way that the cost of development and marketing has been covered by mark-up on the end product is how the equation used to be resolved both for entertainment and consumer goods. In the former case, digital technology broke this link, making it possible for consumers to (illegally in most cases) acquire the content and leaving the producer with the cost. Now, personal 3d-printing could put manufacturing in the same spot. This is often called market disruption. But as the traditional division of intellectual property law into patents, designs, trademarks, copyright and business secrets is challenged by this development, it is fair to talk also about legal disruption or policy disruption. This ought to be on the Commission’s radar, plus other governments of course. But there is one more reason: if distributed manufacturing catches on, it will be increasingly difficult for states to collect sales tax, tariffs, fees and other taxes relating to consumer goods. How to deal with that?

Regrettably, the Commission has a rather poor track record of considering policy implications of technology. When the E-commerce directive was put together in the late Nineties, it assumed regulation concerned dial-up internet connections. However, ADSL technology already existed at the time and only months after the directive, consumer broadband was picked-up on a large scale, forever changing the landscape for e-commerce. Regulation of this field has lagged behind since. With personal 3d-printing, there is an opportunity to avoid repeating this pattern.