Paul Smalera

Will Big Media and Big Tech companies ever stop punishing their biggest fans?

Like many people, I woke up yesterday and reached for my iPad for my morning hit of news, entertainment and information, so I could start my day. (And like many, I’m embarrassed to admit it.) Padding to the front door to get a newspaper still sounds more respectable, but my iPad gives me a far more current, rich and satisfying media experience than a still-warm printed Times could ever produce.

Except, lately, it doesn’t. Yesterday morning, I saw the exciting news that Bill Simmons, ESPN’s most popular, profane and controversial writer, had secured an interview with President Obama. Simmons published his interview in podcast, text and video form on Grantland, a longform sports journalism website he founded last year under the ESPN umbrella. I clicked over to the story from my Twitter feed and saw three YouTube excerpts of Simmons with Obama. And that’s all I saw. When I hit play on the videos, I discovered ESPN had set them to be “unavailable” on mobile devices.

Moving on, I tried to read a New York Post headline that also found its way into my Twitter feed. But when I tapped in, the Post webpage that loaded was not the story I wanted to read. Instead it was a notice, which I took as an admonition, that to read New York Post content on an iPad, I would have to download the app, which retails for $1.99.

I want to make it clear that I’m not against paying for content. But what I’ve just described aren’t paywalls, where publications warn users that they won’t be able to consume content for free.

The situations I’m describing are blanket denials of content because of a choice I made about which device to use. With these tactics, media companies aren’t creating content paywalls, they’re creating content ghettos. Big Media, set my content free! Stop messing with the user experience to deny readers their content simply because you can detect what platform they’re on. And stop punishing users who are investing in the latest devices to consume your output. In other words, grant my hyper-advanced iOS device or my friend’s fancy new Android phone just as much access to the Web as my mother’s four-year-old Windows XP PC. Which one of us do you think wants to watch Simmons talk crossover dribbles with the Commander-in-Chief?

Why is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp -- which, remember, created The Daily, an iPad-only newspaper -- punishing Post readers who use iPads and who expect their Web browser on that device to be no different than the browser on their computer, as Apple so painstakingly designed Mobile Safari to be? Why have ESPN and Disney, parents to Grantland, decided to use a setting in YouTube to deny themselves video traffic to their biggest story ever -- an interview with a sitting president of the United States?

A spokesperson told me the mobile block on the videos was inadvertent and that the company is “aggressive” about getting its content onto as many screens as possible. Unfortunately for ESPN, someone did set the block, denying itself mobile video traffic during the first 24 hours. The spokesperson had to admit, however, that sometimes rights restrictions, like those in their deals with sports leagues, limit where and when they can show highlights, games, etc. (Interestingly, in 2008 ESPN denied Simmons the opportunity to interview candidate Obama, so by at least one measure -- getting an interview at all -- things have actually improved.)

Time Warner is the company that perhaps best exhibits the split personality of the content industry. Time Warner, and much of the rest of the media, wants to make a splash in the digital world with one toe while protecting its profit streams with every other usable extremity. Its CEO, Jeff Bewkes, has long been promoting a “Content Everywhere” initiative, which allows paying cable-television subscribers access to shows via all their digital devices. Yet the company’s Time Inc. division has recently started posting online-only excerpts of its Time and Fortune magazine articles, directing readers to subscribe in print or via iPad. I’m sure this cannibalizing of print content sounds like a grand idea in an executive suite, especially one full of TV execs, but it’s extraordinarily frustrating online.

Time Inc. wants to turn back the clock on giving away its print content for free, but runs excerpts of its stories online to try to reap the attendant traffic, SEO and link rewards. Between decades of magazines at the dentist’s office and years of free content online, print readers are simply accustomed to the advertising-supported free or near-free model.

Yesterday Fortune released an excerpt of “Inside Facebook,” a feature from its latest issue. You can read teases of it in media outlets like the Huffington Post and others. At Fortune, online readers won’t get the full article for at least several months, if ever, unless they pony up $1.99 to buy the Kindle version or pay to read it via the magazine’s iPad app. Unfortunately for Fortune, the Internet is all-seeing. Online discussion about this article on the hottest company in tech appears to be stifled at best, probably because readers who would link to and discuss the juiciest parts can’t; they’re just not online, making this exercise the worst of both worlds. It’s easy to predict that social-media shares will eventually suffer as users find they can’t easily read stories or consume video on mobile devices.

(Having executed previous attempts at this strategy for Fortune, including with the article-turned-ebook-turned-book “Inside Apple,” I can confirm that the profit on a successful Kindle edition is, at least for Fortune, minuscule at best, due to a variety of factors including Amazon’s commission structure and the relative interest in a given article. Meanwhile, an article that does not find a paying audience online actually creates a significant loss in time, effort, pageviews and overhead.)

As a heavy Internet user and media consumer, I can’t help but think back to the recent Net neutrality battle that pitted ISPs, which wanted the power to throttle their networks, against content providers, which stoked fears in the tech world and the halls of the FCC that the Internet would go from Autobahn to limited-access toll road and that only those sites that could afford to pay more would be able to guarantee speed and availability to their users, stratifying the open network.

As it turns out, the recent anti-usability, nonsensical ways in which Big Media and Big Tech have restricted access to content has proved that both sides have been against Net neutrality all along. After all, Disney’s ESPN (however inadvertently) used a feature provided in Google’s YouTube to block its interview with the president from appearing online. It seems that what the industry has really been after -- and perhaps has finally won -- is the power to be non-neutral on its own terms.

Lately Internet users in the U.S. have been worried about censorship, copyright legalities and data privacy. Between Twitter’s new censorship policy, the global protests over SOPA/PIPA and ACTA and the outrage over Apple’s iOS allowing apps like Path to access the address book without prior approval, these fears have certainly seemed warranted. But we should also remember that Internet users around the world face far more insidious limitations and intrusions on their Internet usage — practices, in fact, that would horrify the average American.

Sadly, most of the rest of the world has come to accept censorship as a necessary evil. Although I recently argued that Twitter’s censorship policy at least had the benefit of transparency, it’s still an unfortunate cost of doing global business for a company born and bred with the freedoms of the United States, and founded by tech pioneers whose opportunities and creativity stem directly from our Constitution. Yet by the standards of dictatorial regimes, Internet users in countries like China, Syria and Iran should consider themselves lucky if Twitter’s relatively modest censorship program actually keeps those countries’ governments from shutting down the service. As we are seeing around the world, chances are, unfortunately, it won’t.

Consider the freedoms — or lack thereof — Internet users have in Iran. Since this past week, some 30 million Iranian users have been without Internet service thanks to that country’s blocking of the SSL protocol, right at the time of its parliamentary elections. SSL is what turns “http” — the basic way we access the Web — into “https”, which Gmail, your bank, your credit card company and thousands of other services use to secure data. SSL provides data encryption so that only each end point — your browser and the Web server you’re logging into — can decrypt and access the data contained therein.

By blocking SSL, Iran has crippled Tor, a program that enables Internet users to anonymize not just their content but their physical location as well. Tor is a very common workaround for users in totalitarian regimes to access Twitter, Gmail, Facebook and other services. It’s hard to come up with an apt analogy for Iran’s unprecedented blockage — it’s not just that the letters you send are read by the Post Office and photocopied for their records, it’s that the Post Roads themselves have been closed off, so you can’t even send a letter in the first place. That’s the net effect of blocking SSL in Iran.

The hacking group Anonymous has brought down all kinds of websites in protest, mostly over copyright, in the U.S. and Europe. I don’t advocate their targeting any country’s servers for retribution, but where is the outrage or public demonstration or media attention over the denials of Iranians’ basic freedoms to communicate, via the Internet?

Unfortunately, it’s still too easy for Internet companies and even the Internet’s founding fathers to dismiss the importance of the tools they created in fostering free and open public dialogue, especially in places like Iran. Recently, legendary engineer and Google Vice-President Vint Cerf published a New York Times op-ed entitled “Internet Access is Not a Human Right,” where he wrote: “Internet access is always just a tool for obtaining something else more important.” How wrong he is. Cerf’s line of thinking eviscerates the Internet — the wonder of the modern world he helped build. Cerf argues that humans have the right to “lead healthy, meaningful lives,” including having “freedom from torture or freedom of conscience.” Yet, we live in the 21st century: It’s hard to see how, among people whose economies are developed enough to afford them communication devices, Cerf would excuse governments that curtail their citizens’ freedom and right to use the ultimate communications tool — the global network of the Internet. In fact, in underdeveloped parts of the world, the cost to have a cell phone that connects to the Web can be quite affordable.

I’m not arguing semantics here — if our society excludes the Internet from the fundamental rights of human communication, we also excuse totalitarian regimes like Iran’s from any repercussions when it comes to blocking that avenue of human contact. It’s a dangerous compromise to make in a world that only gets more digital with each passing day. And it also conveniently excuses the free world from having to do much of anything about it. We wouldn’t forgive Iran if it threw 30 million citizens into solitary confinement — so why would we ignore it when the Iranian government effectively cuts the entire population off from the outside world, to stifle their voices during a critical electoral cycle?

The U.S. and the free world have often engaged in global humanitarian missions in cases of genocide, famine and natural disaster. At what point will the deprivation of freedom of communication warrant such an intervention? The U.S. is already on guard itself against hacking attempts from Russia and China — intrusions by both rogue and government-sponsored actors — so how long will we tolerate countries’ depriving their citizens of Internet access?

It’s a tricky question, with no easy answer. However, contemplating it may prepare us for the possibility that the world’s first cyber-war could be fought not to cut off a country’s Internet hookup, but to restore it. After all, the Obama administration’s State Department petitioned Twitter to stay online during one recent Iranian uprising and has used the service to communicate with citizens there during another. Iran has now essentially shut down Twitter with its SSL blocking. Will the U.S. respond? If we do, we will set a precedent that calls into question the rights of any government to silence its citizens on a global communications network, putting us into thorny conflicts with China and other 21st century frenemies. But if we don’t, we are condoning the silencing of dissent and turning our backs on a century-long pledge to foster democracy wherever it might flourish — even if it’s online.

Photo: Technicians monitor data flow in the control room of an internet service provider in Tehran. Picture taken February 15, 2011. REUTERS/Caren Firouz

Think right now about your home bookshelf. If yours looks like mine, it contains odds and ends, comic books you’ve saved for years, books mailed to you or bought on a street corner, your own collection of dog-eared titles, some old yearbooks. Now think about the privacy of your own home and the few legal ways in which that privacy can be violated: an emergency response, a crime, a public health crisis. Imagine if once a year you had to open your door to a copyright agent who could scan your library for content that you have not paid for, add up your violations, and send you a bill. Imagine if the agent came by once a week, or even once a day. Imagine that the agent found a picture of the nerdy kid from high school in your yearbook and explained that that kid copyrighted his likeness, so you’ll have to either pay up or destroy his high school photo.

This is the world that content companies want to create. Legislation they have proposed in the U.S. and around the world — SOPA, PIPA and ACTA — would open the Internet’s house to any agent.

Artists and big companies often warn us of the opposite of this problem — the idea that the Internet is a lawless space where content is pirated, stolen and shared recklessly, costing them billions of dollars in lost revenue and shrinking the incentives for artists to produce new works. After all, if they can’t be paid fairly for them, why bother?

But not being able to monetize media doesn’t mean you have to obsessively limit it. As the content companies see it, the bookshelf described above is the data stream heading into your house, and they, specifically those who create music and video, are demanding that governments consent, more or less, to let them tap the wires. SOPA and PIPA are currently on hold, but ACTA, whose provisions are almost as enveloping, is taking root all over Europe, though not without protests.

Amazingly, governments around the world, including the Obama administration, resisted making ACTA’s text public. American politicians said the provisions the U.S. was agreeing to enforce were “national security secrets.” Ironic, then, that the Internet should be open for inspection, but the inspectors’ marching orders shouldn’t.

When the text was eventually leaked, reportedly by EU officials, the measures didn’t quite allow copyright agents to search your house, but they weren’t too far off. One particularly draconian provision allows for border searches of iPods and other electronic devices — not for terrorism prevention, but for theft of intellectual property. I suppose this means that if you were planning on partying to Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album or Girl Talk’s All Day on your Cancun vacation, you had better burn it to a CD and stuff it into your underwear, lest the Border Patrol decide to take your Genius Mode for a whirl.

According to a recent study on SOPA, 52 percent of Americans support penalties of some sort for illegal downloading, but only 36 percent support the provisions for enforcing copyright protection that SOPA allowed. If there were clearer proof that Americans, and indeed people around the world, could be convinced to pay for content if the system were fair, friendly and flexible, Apple or Amazon would have already created it. Which, actually, maybe they have.

Among the serious issues lawmakers and content providers should tackle is fair use. The copyright enforcement systems proposed in recent laws nearly make it a crime even to listen to music that hasn’t been paid for. One thing the music business must do is stop squeezing startups that become successful. As Spotify has accelerated its growth, its royalty payments to the recording industry have, by one measure, eclipsed those of terrestrial radio. If Neil Young is right and piracy is the new radio, music labels should be hoisting the Jolly Roger, not tearing it down.

If the music industry would focus its attention on creating a clearinghouse that allowed for affordable music sharing and discovery through digital tools, it could still save itself. The book publishing industry, which had to wait for the invention of e-ink to get serious about digital, is arguably further along. It at least has begun supporting limited “lending” of books and has even enabled social bookmarking and other similar features. At the same time, the book industry has won some battles against Amazon, regaining its right to set the price of its content in Amazon’s Kindle store.

During a recent panel discussion on copyright, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian talked about the need for the content industry’s scarcity-based pricing model to be superseded by something more attuned to our digital times — something that makes sense not just for businesses but for artists and consumers too. The problem is, the models the industry has proposed far too often resemble the type of intrusive interrogations by state agents one would expect to find in a totalitarian state rather than an open society.

Content creators and artists openly worry about the power of the Internet to rob them of compensation — which, for many, is their incentive to keep creating. What they ought to worry about are the incentives their proposed laws are creating — incentives not only for artists but also for consumers and distribution networks — to abandon altogether their high-walled, authoritarian compensation and copyright enforcement models. Where one castle crumbles, a thousand wildflowers may bloom.

PHOTO: Protesters opposed to anti-piracy legislation gather to demonstrate against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) being considered by Congress, at City Hall in San Francisco, January 18, 2012. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

Twitter’s announcement this week that it was going to enable country-specific censorship of posts is arousing fury around the Internet. Commentators, activists, protesters and netizens have said it’s “very bad news” and claim to be “#outraged”. Bianca Jagger, for one, asked how to go about boycotting Twitter, on Twitter, according to the New York Times. (Step one might be… well, never mind.) The critics have settled on #TwitterBlackout: all day on Saturday the 28th, they promised to not tweet, as a show of protest and solidarity with those who might be censored.

Here’s the thing: Like Twitter itself, it’s time for the Internet, and its chirping classes, to grow up. Twitter’s policy and its transparency pledge with the censorship watchdog Chilling Effects is the most thoughtful, honest and realistic policy to come out of a technology company in a long time. Even an unsympathetic reading of the new censorship policy bears that out.

To understand why, let’s unpack the policy a bit: First, Twitter has strongly implied it will not remove content under this policy. If that doesn’t sound like a crucial distinction from outright censorship, it is. Taking the new policy with existing ones, the only time Twitter says it will ever remove a tweet altogether is in response to a DMCA request. The DMCA may have its own flaws, but it is a form of censorship that lives separately from the process Twitter has outlined in this recent announcement. Where the DMCA process demands a deletion of copyright-infringing content, Twitter’s censorship policy promises no such takedown: it promises instead only to withhold censored content from the country where the content has been censored. Nothing else.

To be sure, that’s censorship of a kind, but compared to the industry censorship even Americans have long lived with — take the Motion Picture Association of America, which still censors films based on dubious standards of taste and morality — it’s positively enlightened. And it never permanently destroys or pre-empts content, the way the MPAA does.

Further, for a country to censor content, it has to make a “valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity” to Twitter, which will then decide what to do with the request. Twitter will also make an effort to notify users whose content is censored about what happened and why, and even give them a method to challenge the request. According to Twitter’s post, a record of the action will also be filed to the Chilling Effects website. The end result of a successful request is that the tweet or user in question is replaced by a gray box that notifies other readers inside the censoring country that the Tweet has been censored:

They’re gray boxes of shame alright, but not for the user, or for Twitter. It’s instead a bright signal to a country’s online citizens that their government is limiting their free speech. While the Egypt uprisings were powerful and in some part powered by Twitter, I can easily imagine a world where a censored tweet becomes the ultimate protest symbol; one that unfortunately deprives the protesters of content, but sends the message to protesters that their worst fears are right, and they ought not give up their fight.

The press organization Reporters Without Borders has sent a letter of protest to Twitter chairman Jack Dorsey, which is surprising considering the power of the gift that Dorsey has just given them. While some reporters get themselves on the ground to report from say, Syria, nothing can stop others in the U.S. or any other country from following the tweets of Syrian protesters, even if the Syrian government requests and is granted censorship of tweets within that country.

That’s the second important note: Twitter has made no mention of disabling users’ ability to tweet or of deleting a user because their tweets have been censored. Syria or some other country may choose to take down its communications grid or try to block access to Twitter, but short of such an action, it can’t stop tweets from reaching the outside world under this policy. In fact Twitter has strengthened its case to remain online in countries where free speech is threatened, possibly providing protesters with a valuable tool that would otherwise have been preemptively shut down.

If a government does engage in a cat-and-mouse game of blocking access, remember that nowhere else is the playing field more level between authorities and insurgents than online. Workarounds for Twitter blocks already exist, such as proxy servers that spoof the identity of users and their country of origin, and alternative access points (APIs) to reach the Twitter service.

Finally, reputation matters. Twitter has engendered much goodwill in the tech and international communities by its sterling behavior in both worlds. This is the company that put off a server upgrade to keep the tweets flowing from the Iran uprising in 2009, at the request of the U.S. State Department. It’s a company that’s managed to play by the rules while also leveling the playing field of communication as no other service has since Alexander Bell’s telephone. There’s nothing about this announcement that smacks of any change in policy or attitude; rather it seems like an honest attempt to abide by country-specific rules of law, while also exposing the power of those laws to citizens in countries where freedoms have been abridged. (Forbes as an example, mentions it is illegal to insult a French bureaucrat. One can imagine the uprising in France if the government tried to censor a Tweet insulting Sarkozy or one of his ministers, which would presumably lead to a rapid re-writing of that law.)

As long as no country can ever make a claim to censor a tweet on a worldwide basis, that tweet will exist somewhere on Twitter’s servers, and someone will be able to see it. By laying down clear rules for country-specific censorship, Twitter has implicitly stated that no government, company or individual has the power to eradicate a tweet it doesn’t like from the face the Earth. Twitter has laid down the rules by which it will hold countries accountable, and by which it will hold itself accountable, at least when it comes to censorship.

They are so fair as to be without precedent, and if they are violated, the world presumably will be able to see the hypocrisy in an instant. That’s a maturity that many — governments, corporations, and yes, sniping tweeters — have rarely shown when it comes to censorship or privacy policies. (Hello, SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, DMCA, Facebook and the rest!)

Besides, if Twitter were as evil as its critics would have us believe, would we be able to see the results of the ongoing #TwitterBlackout? If we are living in a world where corporations have more power than government, I’ll take that level of transparency from a new media company, every day.

Felix Salmon Paul Smalera, you're the king of all media!

Paul Smalera Well yes, I suppose I am.

Felix Salmon First you post a piece about how Slate should spin itself off to some VCs

And now we've gone and done a video too!

So, I threw lots of very sensible objections at you

Paul Smalera Indeed you did.

Felix Salmon And at the end of the whole thing, I assume that you inwardly conceded that I was right

You're really just trolling, right? You're not actually serious.

Paul Smalera Ha! You assume incorrectly!

This is no Swiftian Modest Proposal, Felix.

I really do think Slate needs to tap into the cash, talent and ambitions of the tech economy in order to have a shot at making it another 15 years.

Felix Salmon And you honestly think that someone out there thinks that they can make VC-type returns by investing in Slate?

Paul Smalera I think if the Washington Post co. can spin Slate off with the right leader at the helm, the angel investors of Silicon Valley and Alley can be convinced there are less bad options than Slate out there for their money.

Arrington should do it!

He's got $20 million in the CrunchFund and no editorial control over a media platform.

Felix Salmon Perfect!

I can just imagine David Plotz working for Mike Arrington. A match made in heaven!

Paul Smalera Ok, maybe I'm being a little Swiftian with that one.

Felix Salmon It's creative destruction, baby