Dark Sky sends me a push notification with a custom sound whenever it’s about to rain. I’ve become so accustomed to it that I no longer need to even take it out of my pocket when I receive an alert. The custom sound is enough.

Moves sends me a push notification every morning, telling me how many steps I took on the prior day. I don’t really need to open the app to learn more. A quick glance at the notification tells me what I need to know, and I am free to continue on with whatever I’m doing.

Moves and Dark Sky have no idea that they are providing value to me, since I typically do not take any action on the notification that is visible to the developer or even the OS.

The business impact is that companies are evaluated and funded on the basis of metrics like Daily Active Use, Monthly Active Use, Impressions, Visits. Notifications happen prior to all of these metrics.

The product impact is that if the goal is to deliver value in the notification itself, then these apps have no way of knowing whether or not their notifications are successful.

My hunch is that, for these two reasons, push notifications are an under-explored interface. Imagine an entire suite of apps with which you interact without ever opening. Imagine if app developers could send more data (images, videos) through push notifications, or even receive simple responses (“Yes” / “No”) from users without requiring users to launch the application itself.

Our phones and the apps within them are with us at all times — they are starting to feel more and more like extensions of the brain, augmenting its inputs with sensors that don’t come pre-installed in humans.

I’d love to see some forward progress in notification interfaces from the major mobile operating system. That’s the type of change that could unleash a massive wave of innovation in app development.

As a result of that hype, if you sit down with an MBA interested in technology — with due apologies to MBAs for using them as the ultimate barometric gauge of hype — they will tell you that they are learning how to code. The typical evidence provided at this point in the conversation is an account at Codecademy (and all credit to the awesome team at Codecademy for this being the case).

Here’s how it goes: Before you even get started you’ve decided that you don’t want to be an engineer. You convince yourself that you provide enough value as “the business gal/guy,” and that you just need to know enough to call bullshit on the engineers. You, after all, know how to raise capital. You sign up for Codecademy. You spend 3 months deciding between Python and Ruby, because you heard Django was more powerful or something but Rails had better community support or something. You in fact have no idea what that means. You maybe do a tutorial or two. Oh wait, I should be learning Node.js. It’s the future. Then… hey what’s that shiny thing over there?

I’m allowing myself to move into snark:overdrive because I’m being self-deprecating. Yes, I, like many other business dudes and dudettes before me, have fallen into the abyss of half-assery.

Here’s how you manage to crawl out of it. Stop trying to learn how to code. Stop it right this instant. Doesn’t that feel nice? You didn’t really like it anyway, did you? Because it’s not really that fun. Syntax errors, terminal commands, servers, consoles, frameworks, libraries, gems, classes, models, views, controllers, fml.

You know what is fun? Making things. Turning a spark of creative insight into a thing that you can show people — a thing that people can use and from which they can derive some iota of pleasure or utility. Start with a simple website. Basic HTML and CSS. No product is too small. In fact, the opposite is true. If you don’t know how to build the first version of your product in a weekend — a usable working version, don’t try to build it. Programming is a means to an end, not an end in itself. You should be trying to do as little of it as possible to make the thing that you want.

Use tutorials like this one for Rails and this one for Python to introduce you to new concepts (and read this post while you’re at it), but as soon as it starts to feel like work, stop what you’re doing and use that newly-gleaned knowledge to build something cool.

Here are some other tools that I recommend:
Google

As you build, you will actually begin to find that programming can in fact be fun! You’ll struggle for hours to solve a problem and literally clap out loud when you find a solution. Then when you realize that that single solution enables a whole set of user-facing features, you’ll pee yourself a little with joy (or because you’re so engrossed that you just couldn’t bring yourself to go to the bathroom. Go to the bathroom guys, that’s gross). The moment I discovered caching? zomg. The moment I discovered, while building an application, what MVC actually meant? Fuggetaboutit.

Here are some things I built in the last few months:

VinylStore.me
A personalized vinyl store based on your data from Rdio and Last.fm

TumblrMonkey
See what your friends are liking on Tumblr

LastGreatThing
We asked 20 people in 20 days about the last great thing they saw on the Internet (made w/ @jvanslem).

Twordsie
A word cloud generator for your most frequently tweeted words (made w/ @alexmr).

Name10ThingsThatArentSkrilex
What the name says…

Kittygif
No description needed.

Fuckitship.it
i.e. the alternative title for this post.

This isn’t rocket science. The only thing getting in the way is your commitment to programming as an end in itself, and your ambitions to build the next great social network for pets or nothing at all. Start small, make things, and then when you’re done, make some more things.

There is an inherent tension in social software between content discovery and the quality of conversation around that content. Group conversations get worse as groups grow, and groups grow as group discovery improves — if it’s easier to find something, more people will find it. Therefore, the easier time I have finding good conversations, the less likely those conversations are to be any good (e.g. Reddit front page vs. Subreddits). Paradoxes should be named, so let me know if you have any good ideas.

Let’s look at Twitter through this lens. Twitter began as a space for conversation — a messaging platform. It exhibited characteristics of a “many-to-many” network. Anyone could publish, anyone could follow anyone else, and discovery in this context meant discovering people to follow, not content to consume.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen Twitter evolve its focus towards the discovery of content (e.g. hiding @mentions from user streams, the #NASCAR page, the Summify acquisition, the new Twitter email, the Discover tab). Today, it looks more like a broadcast medium than a distributed social network. Large groups of users (consumers, really) follow a small number of very large brands. Some of those brands are people (Bieber) and some of those brands are publishers (cnnbrk). Lots of talking, very little listening.

Why is it in Twitter’s interest focus their users around a relatively small number of mega-publishers?

First, Twitter needs to reach late adopters with a product that late adopters can understand. It’s much easier to onboard people into “a real-time feed of news links from publishers and celebrities that you’ve heard of” than to it is to explain “a distributed messaging platform where you follow friends, some people you don’t know, some celebrities, and some brands… where you make lunch plans, share what you had for breakfast, and post your favorite links of the day… where sometimes it’s a chat room and sometimes it’s the nightly news.”  Try explaining Twitter to your parents and see what works better. On a unique active user basis, evolving into a more traditional broadcast medium will be a boon for Twitter.

Second, brands (you know, the $$$) don’t know how to join small group conversations. They do, however, know how to shout at large groups of passive media consumers. If Twitter looks more like a broadcast product, then brands will have an easier time fitting Twitter Ads into their campaigns (and budgets).

Like any piece of social software, as Twitter evolves from a space for conversation into a space for discovery, prioritizing features that support a one-to-many model at the expense of the many-to-many model, we will see its value as a conversational platform erode.

For lack of a better term, you might call this the “broadcast-ification” of the major social media platforms. I’m picking on Twitter, but it’s happening in different ways across the industry (see LinkedIn today, Facebook’s asymmetric “Subscribe” feature). These platforms are all evolving towards a more traditional broadcast media model, because it’s more palatable to late adopters and because that’s the environment in which brands know how to communicate and, more importantly, spend.

So 2013 will bring two things: more ad revenue for the major social media platforms, and a massive opportunity for upstarts like Branch, Reddit, Digg (hopefully), and a company or two that doesn’t exist yet, to create spaces where small groups can engage in high quality conversations.

Yawn. Yawn. Yawn.

I’m so tired of these awful headlines.

“Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”

“Does Facebook Turn People Into Narcissists?”

“Is technology x making us negative human characteristic y?”

Must we play into the fear and self-doubt of those who feel lost in today’s primary medium of interaction? Must we rely on a false nostalgia to defend against the scary new and unknown? My god, were you guys even paying attention during Midnight in Paris???

But worry not, ye demagogues of Internet-phobia, you’re in good company.

Here’s Plato writing about writing in 400 B.C.:

For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.

And German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, on the printing press in 1680:

I even fear that after uselessly exhausting curiosity without obtaining from our investigations any considerable gain for our happiness, people may be disgusted with the sciences, and that a fatal despair may cause them to fall back into barbarism. To which result that horrible mass of books which keeps on growing might contribute very much. For in the end the disorder will become nearly insurmountable; the indefinite multitude of authors will shortly expose them all to the danger of general oblivion; the hope of glory animating many people at work in studies will suddenly cease: it will be perhaps as disgraceful to be an author as it was formerly honorable.

That’s right, the invention of the printing press, and the accompanying reduction in the cost of publishing, will result in the “barbarism” of the human race; science itself will suffer from the expansion of our ability to print and distribute knowledge.

Here’s James Gleick explaining early reactions to the telegraph in his book, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood:

Some worried that the telegraph would be the death of newspapers, heretofore “the rapid and indispensable carrier of commercial, political and other intelligence,” as an American journalist put it:

“For this purpose the newspapers will become emphatically useless. Anticipated at every point by the lightning wings of the Telegraph, they can only deal in local “items” or abstract speculations. Their power to create sensations, even in election campaigns, will be greatly lessened—as the infallible Telegraph will contradict their falsehoods as fast as they can publish them.

…Intelligence, thus hastily gathered and transmitted, has also its drawbacks, and is not so trustworthy as the news which starts later and travels slower.”

It’s time to move beyond these headlines. Let’s meme them out of existence. Anyone writing one of these articles should be required to read Charles Bridenbaugh’s 1962 address in the American Historical Association’s journal:

There are, however, numerous inescapable ironies about the dilemmas created by inventions of the new age. With more and more scholars employing all the tools and techniques, using all the data processing machines, and also those frightening projected scanning devices, which we are told will read documents and books for us, there is still no machine for digesting the sources. No longer is there, or will there be, the time in which to ponder at length the meaning of the old reliables among the sources.

Notwithstanding the incessant chatter about communication that we hear daily, it has not improved; actually it has become more difficult.

The transistor radio has everywhere created a new urbe in rus, bringing the Huntley-Brinkley news and the Madison Avenue claptrap to the summit of Moosilauke and the High Sierras. Shades of John Muir and his lovely, lonely summers!

At best, these articles conclude with “well, we don’t really want to (or cannot) go back to the old ways of doing things, since we all agree that this technology is here to stay. But we’re going to continue missing what we used to have and being upset about what we have less of now, so that when our kids come home from College for vacation we can decry the decay of all that is proper and good in this world.”

I won’t argue that technological progress produces only positive change. Significant societal changes come with many externalities, and some are more positive than others; but I refuse to believe that an innovation that reduces the costs of creating, distributing, and consuming information is a net negative for society.

If nothing else, let’s please do away with these link-baity, AARP-approved, reefer madness headlines. (And let’s not pretend that people actually read these absurdly long articles. That’s the whole problem, right?) A thoughtful conversation can and should take place about the impact of technology on society, but that conversation should avoid at all costs any pandering to nostalgia and fear.

And now a dose of reality from Clay Shirky, who summarizes better than I ever could:

The change we are in the middle of isn’t minor and it isn’t optional, but nor are its contours set in stone. We are a long way from discovering and perfecting the net’s native forms, what Barthes called the ‘genius’ particular to a medium.
…
When society is changing, we want to know whether the change is good or bad, but that kind of judgment becomes meaningless with transformations this large.

And to those of you who will continue writing these headlines, stoking the fires of nostalgia, feeding the egos of participants in industries that are threatened by new opportunities for interaction, I invite you to heed Clay’s warning:

Our new freedoms are not without their problems; it’s not a revolution if nobody loses.

I was sitting at home in front of my computer in the months leading up to my freshman year in College. My friend Will instant messaged me with a startling proposition: “Check out this website where you can see pictures of the incoming freshman girls in your class!” For an 18 year old dude, this is the equivalent of Internet gold. I’ve never handed over my email address so willingly.

Throughout the first couple of years of college, my typical usage was:

1) Go to party
2) Meet people at parties
3) Friend people on Facebook

My network grew to about 400 “friends.” I poked, I posted, I updated. This network made sense according to the patterns of use to which I had become accustomed. By default, my photos and status updates were only shared with people from my school (with the same .edu domain).

And then something happened…

Well first, I grew up. Cheesey, I know, but people change. My priorities changed. My interests changed. My behavior changed. The friends that I spent time with changed.

Meanwhile, Facebook changed. Its focus evolved from private profiles to the Newsfeed. Tagged photos were front and center. My little cousins joined. My parents joined. My aunt joined.

And they were all playing games.

Suddenly, the content emerging from this social application was less college and parties and more cows and pigs.

But wait! Facebook! You told me to add people that I meet at parties. You didn’t tell me to add my parents and their friends and trade cows with my Aunt! You didn’t tell me to share my academic achievements! I thought I was supposed to be sharing party pictures!

So should I un-friend that girl I met at a party five years ago but haven’t spoken to since? Oh wait, you make that nearly impossible. Plus, how then will I know that she needs my help to kill a rival Mafia?!

For you, my network can only grow in one direction: bigger. We don’t meet fewer people as we get older. We meet more people! And if we know more people, our “Friends” list should grow accordingly. We don’t forget people do we? If we’ve met them, they belong in our Facebook network.

You seem to think that Facebook is the only network I’ll ever need; that instead of adding and removing people as your features and my real world networks evolve, I should just move them into smaller groups and manage a massive number of impossible-to-understand privacy settings. Because for you, my identity and how I interact with the people that make up my life are as straightforward and comprehendable as the blue in my profile.

How people build their networks in social applications is informed by the features and functionality present when they join. When I join an application whose primary function is to share my location, I’ll be sure to only connect to those people with whom I’m comfortable sharing my location. When I join a photo sharing application, I’ll likely connect to only those people with whom I’m interested in sharing photos.

On the flip side, how people use social applications is as much determined by the network of participants as it is by the features and functionality.

So our use of social applications relies on two inseparable and codependent characteristics: features suggest the network, and the network suggests a use. As features evolve, so too does the network that is relevant to the application. And as we evolve, so too does the network that is relevant to us with regards to those features.

Today, my Facebook network is really really good at one thing: Birthdays.

It was my Birthday a couple of weeks ago. From my 527 friends, I received 52 birthday wishes on Facebook. That’s 10% of my friends — more activity in one day than I saw in an entire year prior. Who are these strangers posting on my wall? I haven’t spoken to some of them in 5 years. What a wonderful treat to hear from them on my birthday.

It’s important for every company to have an ambitious goal, and for a company that insists on owning every relationship in some kind of one-dimensional version of my life, birthdays fit the bill. Congratulations Facebook, you’ve built THE KILLER BIRTHDAY APP. They own the birthday market, which, as far as I can tell, has a massive addressable audience (numbering in the billions).

I guess that just means that I’ll get my photos, location, and news elsewhere, in applications where my networks more appropriately map to the type of sharing that those content types suggest. In the meantime, I’d make one addition to the “Risk Factors” section of their S-1:

“To the extent that Birthdays go out of fashion, Facebook, as an end-user application, will cease to serve any function to anyone. It will be nothing more than a wonderful rolodex on top of which many more useful applications will be built.”

(Thanks to Alex for his help editing this post.)

This year, I was lucky enough to have Findings to organize all of my Kindle highlights. Where available, I’ll include the link so you can skim through my favorite moments from each book.

Biographies

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson

Benjamin Franklin is a legitimate page-turner that reads more like a novel than a history. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, likely as a result of Isaacson’s access to in-person interviews, reads more like a play-by-play report. Given the difference in available documentation (hundreds of letters vs. eye-witness accounts), it’s no surprise that the biographies turned out in very different styles. That said, both books are excellent and must-reads.

Histories

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

The Information: a History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

The Master Switch was probably the most impactful book of 2011 for me. It provides a rich and easy-to-understand context for the most important issues in Internet policy today. If you’re interested in participating in the debates around Network Neutrality and the recent legislative efforts to curb online piracy, this is a must read. (After reading The Master Switch, I was inspired to write “It’s Time for a Social Network Neutrality.”)

The Information is a fascinating review of the emergence of the concept of information — tracing it from the origins of language, to the innovation of writing and its impact on the way humans process logic, to the birth of computer science in the 19th century, all the way into genetic theory in the 21st. The book is home to my favorite sentence of the year: “The universe computes its own destiny.” It’s is a bit of a slog, and includes some challenging math, but if you’re at all interested in the history of computer science, it’s worthy of a read.

Network Theory

Lots of people are writing about group and network theory — attempting to explain a new behavioral economics that makes sense of the kinds of creative activity we see on the web. These books tend to blur the lines between economics, law, sociology, and psychology.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky

Read The Wealth of Networks first. It is an incredible primer on Internet law, economics, and sociology. It’s a challenging read, but a fascinating one. You’ll learn about Network Neutrality, patent law, collaborative creation, power law dynamics, and much, much more.

Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody is a much easier read, and helps provide an updated context for many of the ideas presented in The Wealth of Networks. (It was written a few years later, and a few years matters in Internet time). Cognitive Surplus builds on these ideas to propose a more general theory of media in the post-Internet landscape, one characterized by the consumer’s desire and now expectation to produce.

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal

What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers

How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar’s Number and Other Revolutionary Quirks by Robin Dunbar

Read the introduction and first couple of chapters of Reality is Broken. Skip the others.

Startup Thinking

The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

From the perspective of my career, The Four Steps to the Epiphany is probably the most important book that I read this year. Most experienced entrepreneurs will look at Customer Development and say “oh, yea, that’s just called ‘how you start a company’,” but for the first-timer, it provides a non-obvious (until you try it) framework for thinking about product development.

The Lean Startup marries Steve Blank’s Customer Development with agile product development methodologies. It also skews B2C where Blank skews B2B. It’s a quick read and worth your time.

Alongside both of these books, I recommend checking out some of Blank and Ries lecture videos available online.

Who: The A Method for Hiring by Randy Street and Geoff Smart

Who picks up where “Topgrading” left off. It’s a useful framework for thinking about hiring / people management for your company. Most tactics aren’t immediate applicable until you reach a certain scale, but the general concepts and interview tips are helpful.

Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson

Venture Deals is a very tactical book, but a must-read for anyone who plans on fundraising anytime soon. It takes you line-by-line through typical seed stage and series A term sheets, and arms you with just enough legal know-how to ask the right questions at the right times.

Lean Thinking by James Womack and Daniel Jones

Lean Thinking walks through the history and theory behind Japanese lean manufacturing processes. This theory informs much of what you’ll read in The Lean Startup and Four Steps, so I found it helpful. A bit of a boring read, but worth making your way through the introduction.

Fiction

Song of Ice and Fire: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin

It was a big year for the Song of Ice and Fire series. About 50% of my friends are making their way through it now. If you like dragons and magic (which, since you’re reading this post, you probably do (nerd)), then you’ll love this series.

Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen

Great book. I read it ahead of the movie release (which wasn’t so great). Buy it for the beach.

——

My philosophy on buying books is that if a book has a small chance of making me just the slightest bit smarter, it’s worth buying. Getting a tiny bit smarter for $9.99 is probably the best ROI I’ll ever see.

For 2012, I have a handful of books in my backlog:

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest by Yochai Benkler
Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff
The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
Snow Crash and The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
Song of Ice and Fire: A Feast for Crows, A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin

…but I’m looking for more! Let me know in the comments if you have additional recommendations.

The short story is that they are giving their users finer control over their sharing and how others tag them in photos and updates, and building the concept of friend lists more fully into the experience. One other interesting change, which made its way into the blog post as little more than a “by the way,” is that Facebook has removed the places feature from its mobile applications.

In response to these changes, Matthew Ingram over at GigaOm wrote a great piece asking, “Are Facebook and Google Splintering the Social Web?” His analysis focused on the much-talked-about Circles feature from Google, along with the similar changes from Facebook, and questioned whether or not people would actually use these features.

Are people really going to spend the time it takes to create groups or lists or Circles and then choose from a pull-down menu every time they want to share a piece of content? I don’t think so (even Mark Zuckerberg once said that people hate lists). And my fear is that people will share less as a result, or will turn away from these networks in confusion, or because the settings are too cumbersome.

I’m less concerned than Ingram is on this point, but to answer the question in his title: Yes, the social web is splintering, but it is not Facebook or Google doing the splintering – it’s Instagram, it’s Foursquare, it’s any network that is purpose-built for a specific behavior, a specific community, and a unique set of privacy expectations.

Facebook and Google are merely responding to the “splintering” that they are seeing outside of their walls. My friend Nina Khosla wrote a great post that neatly elucidates why this might be happening:

“Therein lies the paradox of the social network that no one wants to admit: as the size of the network increases, our ability to be social decreases.” – The Social Network Paradox

Size is one reason why these communities might be losing value in the eyes of users, but I think something else is at work.

Last year, when Facebook’s Places feature was released on mobile phones, I wrote that they would ultimately “lose location” to Foursquare, since on Foursquare we had the opportunity to rebuild our networks with location-sharing in mind.

Speaking more generally, I believe that social networks built with a purpose in mind have two distinct advantages over larger catch-all networks like Facebook:

1) Functionality: it’s easier to do one thing well than to do many things well (just ask Yahoo)

2) Social context: every type of sharing has a unique privacy expectation associated with it, and unique social context in which that sharing makes the most sense

Users have shown that they prefer the switching costs of rebuilding their networks elsewhere to the costs of managing their existing networks in order to make them more suitable for the kinds of sharing they want to do. In other words, users would rather build a network from scratch, with a particular use case in mind, than mold an existing network to make it fit one additional use case.

The bottom line: Users are going elsewhere to share their location. Users are going elsewhere to share their photos. Facebook will continue to do a few things well (birthday messages?), but they will more and more find themselves unable to compete with these smaller “splinter networks.”

Yes, the social web is splintering, and we should celebrate.

The network neutrality / common carriage debate is one of the most important debates of our time. At stake is the freedom to innovate, the freedom to listen, and the freedom to speak. To date, arguments for or against common carriage have focused largely on the relationship between Internet service providers and content creators, but a new threat is emerging.

Companies like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have unlocked new ways for people to connect, curate, and consume. They have changed and continue to change how we interact with the web – how content is distributed, discovered, and delivered. But with the emergence of this new social layer comes a threat that rivals that posed by the great information monopolies of the 20th century – AT&T, the Radio Trust and the Motion Picture Patents Company, companies known for price gouging, anti-competitive behavior, and the stifling of innovation.

I recently finished Tim Wu’s “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empire.“ For anyone interested in network neutrality, this book is an incredible primer. Beyond presenting a thoughtful analysis and historical review of the information industry, Wu provides a compelling read – one might even call it a page-turner! If you haven’t yet, go buy it, and read it.

Network Neutrality

If you’re familiar with the basics of network neutrality, feel free to jump to my main argument below. If not, let’s start with a definition for common carriage.

At the heart of common carriage is the idea that certain businesses are either so intimately connected, even essential, to the public good, or so inherently powerful—imagine the water or electric utilities—that they must be compelled to conduct their affairs in a nondiscriminatory way.

As a simple example, if a man operates the only ferry over to town, that simple boatman is in a position of great power over other sectors of the economy, even the sovereign authorities. If, for example, he decided to charge one butcher more than another to carry his goods, this operator could bankrupt the one who didn’t enjoy his favor. The boatman is thus deemed to bear responsibilities beyond those of most ordinary businesses.

Wu, Tim (2010). The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (p. 58).

Reflecting on Wu’s review of information monopolies, one can extract two primary tendencies manifest in countless examples throughout history. First, like all institutions they follow a law of self-preservation. If the ferry owner senses a threat to his monopoly in an innovation outside of his control, he will do everything in his power to acquire or squash it.

• The Motion Picture Patents Company consolidating control over film production and distribution by ransoming access to patent licenses and buying up independent theaters, ultimately leading to the independents’ flight to Hollywood.
• RCA buying up nascent radio networks to create a single national content creator and distributor.

The tenuous relationship between distribution channels and that which is being distributed is summarized neatly by Wu:

You cannot serve two masters, and the objectives of creating information are often at odds with those of disseminating it.

Ibid., p. 306.

Social Network Neutrality

Before joining Brad and company in opposition, I spent some time going through the text of the Act. Regardless of your position on Copyright, one cannot ignore the extent to which certain language in PIPA significantly expands the scope of responsibility for infringement. Even if this expansion of scope helps Copyright holders re-capture a greater proportion of the economic value that is rightfully theirs, it will do so only with serious collateral damage.

I thought it might be helpful to share some of the more egregious clauses (bolding is mine):

(7) the term ‘Internet site dedicated to infringing activities’ means an Internet site that–

(A) has no significant use other than engaging in, enabling, or facilitating the–

(i) reproduction, distribution, or public performance of copyrighted works, in complete or substantially complete form, in a manner that constitutes copyright infringement under section 501 of title 17, United States Code;
(ii) violation of section 1201 of title 17, United States Code; or
(iii) sale, distribution, or promotion of goods, services, or materials bearing a counterfeit mark, as that term is defined in section 34(d) of the Lanham Act; or

(B) is designed, operated, or marketed by its operator or persons operating in concert with the operator, and facts or circumstances suggest is used, primarily as a means for engaging in, enabling, or facilitating the activities described under clauses (i), (ii), or (iii) of subparagraph (A);

I wanted to call out the text above in bold, as this is the type of language that puts at risk the protective measures included in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. In their letter to the Senate, Brad and his colleagues explain:

But the suffering doesn’t end with the accused. Payment providers, advertising services, and “location tools” (defined broadly as “including a directory, index, reference, pointer, or hypertext link”) – in other words, countless internet services – would be required to shut down all payment capabilities, advertisements, and hyperlinks to the “offending” site:

(B) FINANCIAL TRANSACTION PROVIDERS- A financial transaction provider shall take reasonable measures, as expeditiously as reasonable, designed to prevent, prohibit, or suspend its service from completing payment transactions involving customers located within the United States and the Internet site associated with the domain name set forth in the order.
(C) INTERNET ADVERTISING SERVICES- An Internet advertising service that contracts with the Internet site associated with the domain name set forth in the order to provide advertising to or for that site, or which knowingly serves advertising to or for such site, shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures, as expeditiously as reasonable, designed to–

(i) prevent its service from providing advertisements to the Internet site associated with such domain name; or
(ii) cease making available advertisements for that site, or paid or sponsored search results, links or other placements that provide access to the domain name.

(D) INFORMATION LOCATION TOOLS- An service provider of an information location tool shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures, as expeditiously as possible, to–

(i) remove or disable access to the Internet site associated with the domain name set forth in the order; or
(ii) not serve a hypertext link to such Internet site.

The Protect IP Act promises to unleash a torrent of law suits, which, successful or not, will stunt innovation.

If you value the free web, if you recognize it as a tremendous force for growth in a country slowing slipping behind, if the Internet is your Religion, TAKE ACTION.