Terry Heaton has posted another in his terrific series of essays. He sets it up:
As media companies struggle with disruptive innovations eating away at the foundation of their business model, they’re throwing everything but the kitchen sink at trying to sustain the unsustainable. One solution would be to transfer the world or worlds in which they now compete to the Web as a whole, instead of trying to compete for attention in a world of unlimited reach and range. ¶ I flew over Philadelphia on Tuesday, a city — like others — that has all of its sports arenas in the same location. Each shares the parking space, and freeway access can sustain the traffic required for such big crowds, all of which makes it very convenient for sports fans. There are many examples of this in “real” life, so why can’t we see that this might also be smart online? ¶ Why? Because it would mean competitors cooperating to create the location. ¶ Ain’t gonna happen? Never say never.
And, within the essay:
... What makes the Web so different is that it is an entirely open network, although the deep pockets of the status quo are lobbying everyone with breath to change that by creating tiers of service. The argument in Congress is that we're running out of bandwidth, which means a TON of money to beef up the Internet, and the people spending that money should be entitled to profit from the build-out. While that's certainly true, the reality is that this disguises what is essentially an attempt by the incumbents to restore some form of command and control mechanism (tiered pricing) to the open network. This means that those with money will be the only ones able to advance the spectrum, and this is exactly the old profit model wearing new clothes. But I digress. ¶ On the Web, all of these individual companies are merely pixels on the overall page, blips in a spectrum of equal blips. There's no doubt that mass marketing muscle in the worlds within which the incumbents currently play gives them an advantage over the other blips, but it doesn't influence the essential infrastructure. This is why innovations from other blips can explode across the entire Web and why we're seeing new models being developed everywhere. ...
Link: Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog. --Dennis
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