On Sat, 20 Jan 2007, Roland Dobbins wrote:
On Jan 20, 2007, at 11:55 AM, Randy Bush wrote:
the question to me is whether isps and end user borders (universities, large enterprises, ...) will learn to embrace this as opposed to fighting it; i.e. find a business model that embraces delivering what the customer wants as opposed to winging and warring against it.
I believe that it will end up becoming the norm, as it's a form of cost-shifting from content providers to NSPs and end-users - but for it to really take off, the tension between content-providers and their customers (i.e., crippling DRM) needs to be resolved.
There have been some experiments in U.S. universities over the last couple of years in which private music-sharing services have been run by the universities themselves, and the students pay a fee for access to said music. I haven't seen any studies which provide a clue as to whether or not these experiments have been successful (for some value of 'successful'); my suspicion is that crippling DRM combined with a lack of variety may have been 'features' of these systems, which is not a good test.
OTOH, emusic.com seem to be going great guns with non-DRMed .mp3s and a subscription model; perhaps (an official) P2P distribution might be a logical next step for a service of this type. I think it would be a very interesting experiment.
Won't really happen as long as they stick to a business model which is over a hundred years old. I would strongly suggest people with interest in this area watch Lawrence Lessig's lecture from CCC: http://dewy.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/CCC/23C3/video/23C3-1760-en-on_free.m4v But I would like to stay on-track and discuss how we can help ISPs change from their end, considering both operational and business needs. Do you believe making such a case study public will help? Do you believe it is the ISP itself which should become the content provider rather than a bandwidth service? Gadi.