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Regulation

 

Ceding ownership is a hard thing to do. People are territorial. They like what is theirs and they don't willingly give it up, in most cases. Whether it's income given up for taxes, or an ex-spouse married anew, or words written that get pilfered by someone else - those things that belong to us matter to us and we want control over them.

For quite some time, media companies have "owned" the channels by which we observe the world. Of course, blogging and YouTube and podcasting have reclaimed for the average citizen that ground most holy: attention. Media companies can't control what gets our attention these days. And it's driving them nuts.

Other channels will soon open up. Think of those places where distribution is tightly maintained. Like the financial industry. Deeply regulated, a corporate entity can't give a penny to someone without the government wanting to perform an anal exam. Sure, some companies get by with some shenanigans, but it's rare. Regulations actually do protect the consumer. But they can't for much longer...

In this global society connected by the Internet, where 10 years ago I bought music in a store, there are no music stores any longer. 10 years... think about that. That is nothing, really.

And so now that people buy their music online, and the media companies want to retain control of the content. More regulation. Lawsuits. Sites like Napster and Kazaa get entangled in legal trouble. But then comes an outfit who wants to dismiss the legalities and they want to buy their own island to forego international laws. They want to be their own country.

Yeah, I know. It sounds far-fetched. It probably won't work. But you know, it's simply a metaphor: control is pointless. Jeff Jarvis says it well:

And we should look at this from a distributed perspective: The lesson of Yahoo and Google is that owning something is less desirable than enabling a network you don’t own.
What an interesting thought: relax the control and enable the network...

It was once the case that space travel was the stuff of NASA, the agency that epitomized government with a can-do attitude. Then comes Burt Rattan and NASA looks like a bloated pig inefficiently producing unwieldy and dangerous solutions. The nerve of us common folk...

What happens when a highly regulated industry is subjugated by a little startup that skirts law and distributes the network to everyone? What's not attractive about enabling people?

The resort, which is only temporary, for the big companies and the government is then to up the regulation. But it won't work. Even if such legislation is passed here in the US, it's only a matter of time before some country elsewhere, existing or new, safehouses such enterprise.

Any industry that has digitized products or services that can be run digitally is at risk. How long is 10 years? Is it long before you bank online in another country, free from US regulation?

How long before our graduates here consider jobs in Taiwan with just as much consideration as they do a job in Topeka?

The smart business will get ahead of the regulation now, by steering the law necessary to compete in the future and by tryintg to reduce it as much as possible. Will Congress and the president listen? They hardly understand the web today...

The financial sector hasn't been hit by this yet. But when it does hit, no one will be prepared. I expect that it will change everything. 10 years isn't a very long time...

Which will be the financial company to enable the network?

 


by Brett Rogers, 1/24/2007 8:39:08 AM
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