Won't somebody please think of the buggy whip manufactures.

History is filled with example of technologies and products that have been rendered obsolete by the advancement of society and industry. Regardless of whether or not we want that advancement, it will happen, the only real choice we have is how we embrace that advancement. Will you cry foul that Henry Ford is destroying your buggy whip business, or will you switch you production line from whips to tyres?

While there is a certain purity to the capitalist ideal of your product living or dying at the hands of consumer choice, there is now a new option available to those who see their profits diminish. Legislation! Why leave product success to the whim of consumer demand when you can get the government to legislate your survival.

Article from Ars Technica

Radio, RIAA: mandatory FM radio in cell phones is the future

Music labels and radio broadcasters can't agree on much, including whether radio should be forced to turn over hundreds of millions of dollars a year to pay for the music it plays. But the two sides can agree on this: Congress should mandate that FM radio receivers be built into cell phones, PDAs, and other portable electronics.

The essence of this story is that two industry associations, the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) and musicFirst (a lobbying group of which the RIAA is a member) are involved in ‘discussions’ about performance rights for music played on the Radio. The two groups reached an agreement on the annual payment of rights fees that was dependant on them getting a new law in place that mandated the inclusion of FM radios in all portable devices. Time for a quick go on the spin machine, and out pops the following justification;

“this proposed legislation will give us improved consumer choice and better access to the population in the event of an emergency.”

There is a large whiff of hypocrisy about a move like this. Radio companies were happy to use the public airwaves with as little interference from government as possible while their business model was working. Never mind that Radio became a race to the lowest common denominator that offered little real choice to the consumer. As long as the audience listened and the advertisers paid up there was no real need to offer any actual choice. I mean, where were the consumers going to go?

And then the Internet happened, and as with so many businesses the broadcasters and record labels stuck their heads in the sand and loudly repeated the manta of the doomed “the Internet can’t do what we do, we bring all the value, we have all the customers, eventually the Internet will have to come to us”. And in a world with no innovation that plan may well have worked. But when technology results in a massive drop in the cost of production and allows you to market to tens of people rather than tens of thousands, then the ball game has changed. Now your business model is expensive and it turns out your audience chose your product not because it met their needs but because there was no real choice in the market.

Lets ignore the fact that as the world moves to digital radio broadcasting the National Association of Broadcasters is lobbying for laws requiring the use of outdated analogue receiver technology in new devices, but instead focus on the fact that Radio can be relevant in the Internet age. I don’t listen to the CD player or Radio in my car (unless I’m trying to work out why I'm stationary on the motorway). The stereo in my car is simply an interface for my MP3 player and what I actually listen to is podcasts from the TWiT Network, CNET and the BBC. TWiT is owned and run by a former US radio host, CNET is owned by CBS, and the BBC, well the BBC is the BBC. What I actually listen to is Radio shows that don’t use Radio waves as their broadcast medium, perhaps we should talk about distribution rather than broadcast.

The real irony here is that as Capitalism is showing us the holes in their business models, the Radio and Record companies are effectively arguing for socialism, they want the State to prop up their business models. As with so many things in the modern world, corporations want capitalism and free markets when their model’s generate profits, but government assistance when the housing market collapses or the advertising revenue dries up. How long before the newspaper publishers follow suit and propose a law that requires all tablets devices be sold with a newspaper subscription or the buggy whip manufactures want congress to mandate the inclusion of a whip with every new car?

The music, movie, TV and publishing industries have all been affected by the Internet and at some stage have all tried to prevent the rise of iTunes, Netflix, Amazon and any number of similar offerings. Now Radio is rather belatedly trying to stop the rise of Pandora, last.fm and rdio.com. And as for the suggestion that this proposal will improve communication in the event of an emergency, if that was really a concern we would see the proposal specifying AM and not FM receivers.

While the inclusion of an FM receiver will have little effect on my decision to buy my next MP3 player or mobile phone, what concerns me is that for the second time in a week we are seeing parties with clear commercial interests getting together to propose legislation that is anti-consumer.

Google and Verizon’s proposal to abandon net neutrality on wireless networks is born out of commercial greed. The Internet is well on the way towards becoming a public utility, in effect it is becoming the infrastructure we use to provide a range of services that we could only dream of twenty years ago. But the big money isn’t made by running the infrastructure. Electricity, Gas and Water companies don’t make money by hooking you up to the infrastructure they built, they make their money by changing you for the services delivered over those networks. AT&T, Verizon, BT, Vodafone and other large network providers don't want the infrastructure only model, they want the Cable TV model where they charge for value added services as well as the infrastructure. To ensure maximum revenue over their networks they need to be able to prioritise their traffic to add that extra value and getting rid of net neutrality is the first step on the road.

The issue for end users is that the development of new services like amazon, iTunes, Skype, Netflix, iPlayer, flickr, webmail, most of Google’s offerings and numerous other products was made possible by the universal and unrestricted infrastructure that the Internet provided. Most of the services I listed would not be permitted over a Cable or Satellite TV network because they shift the revenue from the network provider to the service provider. Were the Government to allow a gentleman's agreement to create a split Internet which offers all services over wired connections but only selected vendor specific services over wireless networks to become law, we would see the destruction of the fundamental and key underpinnings of the Internet that allowed so many services to be developed. Wireless access to the Internet is not just the future of the Internet for us, for some counties it is the only way to access the Internet. To this day there is very little wired network infrastructure in developing countries, large parts of Africa completely skipped the roll out of wired telephone networks and jumped straight to wireless technology and we can expect to see the Internet rolled out in the same way.

Had the network providers been allowed to successfully argue against net neutrality as we moved from dial-up to broadband connections, on the basis that broadband was a limited resource, we would not have seen the development of the services we have today, and it was those new services that drove demand for Internet access and the increase in Internet speeds to the level we have today.

There is no wired Internet, there is no wireless Internet, there is just the Internet, and that must be the case going forward.