-hc / "Incommunicado" Amsterdam Workshop, Jun'05 / draft

FORMATTING THE MESSAGE
======================

Roberto Verzola introduced the "intermediary", the role of
ICT owners as rentiers - the cyberlords - of the globalised planet. I'd like
to expand this analytical concept along another, so-to-say "inner"
dimension: namely, how this works even inside the ICT realms.

Certainly, the ITC business has a same economical role even in the very
environment which profits most from it, and where the cyberlords indeed
have their castles, the "industrialised" countries of the OECD. And
certainly, the nominal share of their rent is grossly underestimated in
the usual calculations of GNI and the like (OECD counts the GNI share
of ICT at an average of around 7 per cent only: but the sampling of
this data is simply ridiculous[1]).

For everyone of you working with the stuff it's quite obvious how far ICT
has invaded everyday "economically active" life (and beyond); and those
who have to do an institute's or organisation's yearly accounts - or even
the tax declaration if you're an "independent" - it's clearly visible
how more and more of its growing share of "costs" goes not so much to
hardware but ever more to licenses and "services" of all sorts which feed
the cyber rentiers. Some time ago I did a small survey among a number
of NGO offices in Brussels which revealed that their ICT costs
had clearly passed costs for their core "business" of lobbying, all
phsical mobility and costs for face-to-face meetings.
But there is more to it.

All communication is "social" - which is an apparently trivial
observation.  However, look at it the other way 'round: if there were
means to make this intermediary function of communication tributary to
rent payments this could be an enormous source of extra profits - and
this the more so the nearer you can set the point of taxation to a
lowest possible level of so-to-say "human hardware".

In terms of the mechanics of communication this would be the very
cognitive activity, a person's capacity to recognise an external
stimulus as a meaningful sign - to identify from the noise those
phonems and sounds which make up spoken language and music, and to
recognise among the pixels on a monitor screen the letters and signs
which make up written text and meaningful visual impressions: Thus,
if you allow to communicate the letter "a" only if the originator of a
message using this letter "a" has paid a toll due for using it in a
specific form or "format", in order to be allowed to communicate it; and
corresponding side, if you make the letter "a" visible only after the
receiver of the message likewise has paid an access toll.

Thus the real thing would be to get at the most abstract, and at the same
time, the most basic[4] layer - which is writing; and more elementary:
the very form -- or format of typeset -- of letters and signs which
constitute the symbols of written content.

But how do you make people subject to pay tribute(s) ?

In the olden days, forcing people to pay a levy was straigthforward
waylay: to visit a cousin in the neighbouring village was to meet the
risk of getting robbed on the way through the woods or at the toll gates
of the local baron.

In the digitalised environment, the club of the robber, or the
axe of the bailiff, is the proprietary format.

  [Besides: No debate intended here on the relative importance of audio
   vs. visual cognition; it seems clear though, that "written" language
   is dominant - even on the most technical level, where all sorts of
   contents indeed is "coded" in written form.

   Face to face talk has natural limits though.[3]

   But think what's involved in a gathering like this here: use of
   the microphone/headphone involves probably well over a thousand patent
   licenses which had to be served, and if there's just one of INTEL's
   microprocessors involved in controlling the sound here, this would make
   it a good hundred thousand.[2]
   Or another example: The explosion of GSM/cellphone use, and there again,
   of "SMS" - but all that is still dispenseable, still not low-level enough
   to be unavoidable. ]

But there had been some obstacles yet to exploit this taxation at an indeed
basic level of communication.

In the early days of - more or less "personal" - computers it was the
hardware manufacturers who had the say, and they had a strong position
vis-a-vis the copyright holders of software.  Neither was turnover
important: the once-off payment for the copyright for use of just one
typeset did not weigh through in the total cost of BIOS chips, for
instance, which then gave the one and only type used for reproduction
on screen.  "Line printers" had a rather restricted set of fonts; and
printer manufacturers finally lost the battle over the fixed fonts and
had to adapt to the software-driven reproduction of pixel-dots.

Today we are almost there.  The LARGEST part - and this is a very
circumstantial attribute, in order to avoid a libel suit - of all
practically useable typeset for letters and signs by now is privatised
"intellectual" property of two firms, Adobe and Microsoft.[4]

However, what was still missing up to now, was a watertight system for
the control of use.

Sure, vendors of other composing software had to steer clear of suits and
did duely pay their license fees if they wanted to deliver the most
popular fonts within their program packages.

   [And BTW, it's these B2B relations which are subject of those "IPR"
   negotiated presently at the level ov WIPO and WTO-TRIPS.]

The widely open field to escape from the rent levy was the ease and
near-zero cost of the digital copy.  Thus each and every software package
sold through so-called "legal" channels nevertheless was in itself the
source of uncontrollable numbers of copies which had not gone through the
toll gate.

Stories about the "fight against software piracy" abound; I need not add
any.  What is less recognised, however, is the link between this type of
artificial "illegality" with the "security" issue.  Perhaps there's time
to go more into the technical details of this but it seems important to
point already here to the instrumental role of "Angst" and fear
for insecurity which was decisive to drive through the building of the
control structure for digital copyright.

Work on that had been under way for some years, with finally the
unfolding of the TCPA - the "Trusted Computing Platform
Association"(1998) - and its centralisation into the TCG, the "Trusted
Cumputing Group" (since 2003) with the restricted membership of only the
most powerful cyberlords.  By now we _have_ the TPM - the "Trusted
Platform Module" -, the chip or chipsection welded into every mainboard
sold; and, even more important perhaps, into "embedded" processing gear
like hendhelds, cellphones and all sorts of special purpose instruments.

What is less known is that Microsofts's "Windows XP" operational system
at the outset was intended to use "Trusted Computing", only that neither
the hardware was ready nor the clients were ready to accept it - Intel
provoked an outcry with its CPU-identification number which became part
of the Pentiums-3 architecture in the mid-'90ies, and M$uck experienced a
major flop with its attempt to tweak the Internet into a "Microsoft
Internet"; the present Mickey-".Net" is only a feeble resemblance of
the originl project.

And finally here comes the club for cyberrobbes and barons:

From the end of this year on, the next M$ OS named "Longhorn" must be
installed on "all" PCs - M$ has announced to stop support for its present
"Windows", even the "XP", after 2006.

The new operational software will, together with the TPM chip, simply
control _all_ input and output and check it against its "legality".
According to the official announcement of "Longhorn" in April, this
copyright watch is in the first instance designed to check all video and
audio signals of "high" resolution and "high" quality which are produced
following the most recent copyright protocols of the "content industry"
and thus have built-in control features.

So this is precisely that "Digital Rights Management" or "DRM" which had
been pursued with the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act" in the USoA
since the pre-Bush era and with a series of recent "modernisations" of
patent, copyright and broadcast laws in Europe. With the difference
that this is not a rule on paper but hardwired technical solution in
the machine and its software.

Two things are quite clear from these first official M$oft
announcements:

Firstly, "external", "imported" source materials which lack
any "Digital Rights Management" specification will be either reproduced
in artificially decreased quality, or not at all, with some of the
interfaces to external devices.  For instance, the most traditional and
simple video and audio wired "line" connections will not be functioning
any more, if peripherals there do not have the least of the presently
required anti-"copy protection".

Secondly, it is quite clear from the drawings that this "protected
environment" for audio and video input and output does check the "rights"
of just every "application" you want to run on future "Windows" machines.
That is, just every software and program used must have some sort of
"certificate" of origin so that the "protected" system allows it to run
and to work with "protected" content.

So much for even your handicrafted font which has not been, and cannot be
"legalised" with the "Trusted Platform Module" in your machine.

The TPM finally will help to fight spam and evil hackers too, it is
said.  Email and just any packages arriving from the internet will be
checked against their "legitimate", unique identification signature of
the originating machine.

And yes, so-called "older" PCs will not work so well with it, you have
to buy new.[5] While some newer peripherals like TFT-monitors and DVD
burners will only work with "Trusted Computing" activated, or not at
all.[6]


What DRM implies:
=================

A short recourse to basics again - the PC is fundamentally a stand-alone
production unit (with the additional benefits it can draw from the Net.)
Certainly, there was the precursor of the "dumb terminal", connected to
the "mainframe" - but remember that for years, the primary means of
exchange between units, between PCs was some media: at first the exchange
of tape, then of various diskette formats, but in any case physical media
exchange between separate, stand-alone units.  The marriage with
telecommunication, let alone networking, was not at all perceived in
the begining.

On the other hand, the origins of the internet clearly stem from the
other end of the spectre, i.e.  interconnected mainframes; and the
affinity of large telecom switchboards with the scaled-up switchboard
architecture of computer "mainframes" was almost a matter of nature.
There, input/output functionality and "human interfaces" were considered
as marginally important.  (Just remember those telex tapes and
punched cards which served for input, and those monsters of
IBM printing machines with the jumping bars of a full length of
alphabetic letters which hammered on the paper from endless zigzag folded
forms.)

This dialectic relationship between the two lines of development for
today's networking should be kept in mind -- and, I think, should be
maintained, seen the present push towards re-centralisation on a much
more abstract level: The individual, stand-alone and by now even mobile
unit has been tweaked and seduced to become the vehicle for penetration
of a pre-determined and lopsided type of communication, in an ever
stonger push for centralisation of networking - imagine he hyped web
"portals" as the mainframes of the cyberlords.

At the same time, the capacity of the stand-alone unit as a production
tool all by itself, so to say, of being its own mainframe, is the very
means of resistance against that centralised control.

Anyway, in the course of events the traditional means of producing
"communication" - and even more so, of traditional "mass communication"
by broadcast, printed newspapers and the like - have been profoundly
changed: Physical reproduction of "content" (!AND, by the way, its share
of the cost of production!) becomes completely de-centralised - "content"
has not only to be re-produced but indeed it is re-constituted at the
receiving site.

(A.) HENCE, there is the demand, from the originator, for "control" over
form and content of the original "product". This is doubtlessly a
legitimate argument, from the point of view of a creator, but it has far
reaching implications given the economic realities in the given
conditions of networking -- it reinforces the push towards a
"presentation" culture in communication(s), and demands total control
over the reconstitution and (re-)presentation.

The intervening condition is that anything produced must be of economical
value - or profit -, that is, at a price which has to be realised by
successfully selling it.  The inning (collection) of the price is the
salient point here - there must be a tight control that the buyer/taker
doesn't run with the product without paying.

The only way to exercise this control is through the form, _not_ through
the "content": the idea of the letter "a" is too abstract, and too
variable, to ever get a grip upon.  Thus its holdfast form, the copyrighted
"format" of its presentation is the hook to catch that profit.

This is the "qualitative" angle to a tendentially totalitarian control of
"formatting".

   [Qualification: it's not the author/originator who is "totalitarian";
    that one is simply "unique" in the choice of expression, and this
    is not a matter of pluralist decision or not. The element of total
    control comes with the procedure of (net-)distribution and (digital)
    re-construction of "copies".]

(B./1.) And then there is the "quantitative" angle to it:

Quick recourse again to technical history.  The stand-alone, "individual"
nature of the PC was the real "revolutionary" step in that whole
computing history.

"Revolutionary" in that it created the material means for "anarchy" -
hitherto, the treatment of masses of information was the priviledge of
administrative hierarchies, the army of bureaucrats of the powers that be
(in business as well as in government, but likewise in the social
hierarchy of academia); now it was at the reach of just "any" citizen.

   [Maybe we can have it about the intial "prices" and the process
   of "innovation" at another occasion - in this context here, it may be
   sufficient to point to the difference between real and false technical
   "innovations": Criteria for false ones would be to restrict, instead
   of to enlarge, the "use value" of things. A typical example for false
   innovation would be the new version of M$ Void which cannot be
   accessed by the previous one.][7]

So this creates another problem for the "control" of whatever use of
programs and data: the sheer number of individual units/users to control.

The successful way is not necessarily through the basic Operational
System but through the installation of a yet more abstract set of "rules"
(or "layers" or "protocols") which have to be served by OSs as well as
all application programs; so programmers as well as hardware
manufacturers would do best to comply with these and support them.

That's exactly what M$-"Longhorn" does - but so does even Linux: work
is in progress which will warrant the compliance of the very Linux
"kernel" with the prescribed checks through using the TPM control chip.
Thus, the even major "alternative" platform will precisely reinforce the
scope of use of restrictive "rights".

   Just to mention: Already now the list of devices with "hardwired"
   copyright check compliance is impressive. To name but a few:
   DVD drives;
   FireWire encryption/decoding ("Digital Transmission Content Protection");
   USB memory sticks ("Magic Gateway");
   Serial ATA HD interface;
   audio SPDIF interface;
   TFT displays (DVI interface);
   TV analogue interface (even blocks copies from VHS video);
   USB - for exchange media of all sorts (already implemented in:)
   DVD-Videorecorders.[8]


(B./2.) Along a quantitative dimension, the expansion of Internet use
created another "challenge" for centralised controls. The new quality of
the Net (and the Web) was its very constituency of "peer-to-peer" units
connected.

   This is all too easily forgotten in the noisy row about the Napsters
   and the like. Almost as eagerly _made_ forgotten ist the role of the
   EU, and specificly the EU Commission, in privatizing the WEB: The
   WWW development was done, and was in its entirety publicly financed
   through the European reserch institution CERN; and CERN is not even
   a common instance restricted to EU members. Nevertheless, it was the
   EU Commission - and there specificly, its German member Bangemann -
   which pushed end steered for establishing a proivate "industry"
   consortium and thus enclosed the W3C from the public commons.

   And even if the W3C tries to do its best to maintain WWW standards
   public, it cannot by structure and construction avoid inroads of
   if most important corporate members, allowing most importantly the
   expansion of the use of proprietary formats. Nor could it avoid the
   very structural change of the peer-to-peer Net of exchange to a
   commercially and server-push dominated "presentation" WEB; where
   exchange and "interactivity"has degenerated into mousclicks.

   Tim Berners-Lee, co-inventor of the WWW and still the W3C director,
   has some quite bitter words about this.

Yet there are still some strong remains of the "public" nature of the
WEB, with the TCP/IP (protocl), the command languages HTTP and CGI, and
the mark-up language HTML as the public standard for page presentation.

One can share the widely hold skepticism against the ITU, the
international standards setting body, and specificly the costs and
exclusivity of that inter-governmental club.
   [Steve Cisler raised some very pertinant points in that respect !]
However, the maintaining of HTTP/CGI as the crucial standard for
interoperability on the Net is doubtlessly a merit of that bureaucracy.

I am a little less frightened than Lawrence Lessig about the hardware
menace of the TPM chip; its use and some of the implications of its use
can be avoided perhaps, for so long as the basic public standards for
interoperability are left in force.

But I am much more frightened by the eager stupidity with which all sorts
of "public" actors and instances embraced proprietary formatting and
thus already have created the precondition of DRM use.

Just any visit at the websites of public instances shows the symptoms of
the condition - .PDF, .DOC, FLASHes all over the place, like the barbed
wires of the privatised coast line at the Cote d'Azure.
(And not to speak of the plethora of proprietary pixel and sound
formats.)

   A short extempore here: There is indeed a public, ISO standard named
   "PDF/X", which came about in 2001 and 2002 after endless squabbles -
   Adobe is member of the pertinent standards committee but reportedly
   has been one major reason why standardisation is far behind of the
   present paxis in the printing business; there, the recent version
   of the Adobe Acrobat tools is the business condition, and a number
   of its features are incompatible with the ISO standard for PDF.

   And do not think that Adobe's so-called "free"[9] "Acrobat Reader" could
   access all the features of the original Adobe PDF file format. Sure,
   Adobe does publish most of the file specification (which in itself is
   apparently good business: you would not get the more than 1000 pages
   for nothing.) But no-one can and does restrict the firm to use own,
   undocumented properties [sic], or to change them ad lib.[9]

   No great wonder that none of the other available tools to treat PDF
   files can indeed offer the full feature set.

And the problem is not confined to the files and their format as such,
but extends to the "embadded" components in particular, like the fonts
to use. Note that seemingly standards conformant things, like
HTML-formatted eMail attachments, are soaked with proprietary elements,
perfectly ready to be subjected to "Digital Restricted Managment".

   Some examples[10] taken from eMails of the organisers of this very
   conference can show that even attentive people can all too easily
   fall victim to the built-in traps. In these three seemingly harmless,
   standards compliant "attachments", each time at least one, in case of
   the Apple-Mail produced, Microsoft-proprietary, "rich text format" a
   fully five proprietary typesets are required for reproduction of the
   originals. All these are to be subject to "legality" checks by DRM;
   and, most important, to the license payment asked for their use.

   In addition, even these much cut-down quotes give some hint to the
   enormous waste involved with this sort of "ICT" - the colour
   prescription in the last of the three is visibly telling.

   One side efect but one of some weight and of relevance here, is the
   redistribution of profit from this scandalous wasteful abuse of resources
   into the pockets of "Northern" cyberlords in the context of globalised
   North-South (tele)communication: I think it can be shown that this
   alone by far surpasses the most "optimistic" marks of "official
   development aid" set for the so-called "Millennium Development Goals".

I cannot but mention my sad impression about the role of NGDOs, of
"non-governmental development organisations", in this context.

Despite of their expertise in the fields they work in, despite of many of
their well reflected and often thoroughly critical positions towards
"Northern" exploitation of the "South", almost all their daily practice
in their core activity - which is "communication" -, reproduces some of
the worst forms of rent extraction for the cyberlords.

Just one example from a Brussels based network active with solidarity
work and support for Sahel peasant farmers: Their own, excellent
equipment was paid for with grants from the EU and the Belgian
government - and their correspondent "partner" NGOs in Timbuktu and other
places of the Sahel region have been forced ever since to lay out three
quarters of their budget, or even more, for investment, maintenance and
upgrading of the Apple made communication gear, just in order to share
the wisdom of the Brussels experts.

Or I could invite you to have a look at the website of the umbrella
organisation of all the EU's Development NGOs, national "platforms" and
transnational "networks" all combined, <http://www.concordeurope.org>
Just to dial-in to their homepage from a hotel in Dar-es-Salaam or
Abidjan could well produce a bill of 10 to 30 Dollars or EUROs.  And you
wouldn't be nowhere yet without the very latest versions of proprietary
software from Adobe and Microsoft on your laptop: because you would have
no chance to "share" the quite excellent output presentation of Europe's
development promotion elite.

Now you would go - and I mean: go, walk, because there's no transport and
you just spent the money for a taxi on the telco bill -, you go thus to
your friends around the corner some 8 to 10 kilometers away at the
university campus.  Where the (luckily donated) Pentium-I with its
black-and-white monitor sits dead in the corner of the institute, as the
electricity had just gone again, and its robust old needle printer would
have needed a new ribbon anyway.  Then please explain to them the
importance of a four-colour print-out, including high-resolution photo
illustrations, of the latest policy statement from the EU's most
prestigious lobby of their development interests.

[But back to realities here in the "North":]

Thus, with the field well prepared, the critical mass has been achieved
to close the trap: With "Digital Rights Management" installed on the
majority of computers, each and every use of a "proprietary value" can
be checked and tracked.

Arguably it will be just a matter of time _and_ of the "securisation" of
NET traffic - especially for micropayments - that this check-up of the
"legality" of used copyrighted material (for which there is the license
rent to be paid already for its installment) will be extended to a
pay-per-use mode, and with this will increase enormously the rent cashed
in by the cyberlords.


(C.) The "security" issue is indeed the final argument used to justify
"trusted" net-connected computing.  The TCG reasons quite formally
that their chip would allow the unambiguous identification of the
"trusted" machine.

And M$'s "Longhorn", it has to be added, claims unambiguous
identification of a "legitimate" user to that machine; besides of
passwords for "secure start-up" of a Longhorn mad cow, M$ envisages
number of additional identity checks, biometrical gadgets like finger
prints or iris or voice recognition, as well as "smart card" readers.

The weirdness of this reasoning is that a "secure" network does and did
exist long before the public internet - the teller machines, or cash
automats, rightly are connected through perfectly separately wired
networks, and there's no need whatsoever to double this already existing
infrastructure.

The transposition of this "secured" concept of "trusted"[11] machines
and their network into the public realm of the internet sure has other,
and undeclared reasons. The implementation of DRM is is definitely one
of them, and the most important.

But I think there's more to it.

By attacking the very "nature" of the "public" net, and by attempting
its enclosure, it aims at the vulnerable heel of Free/Open Software,
namely, its very dependence on this (inter)NET: while FOSS development
had depended on the Net as an "alternative" means of distribution, it
has neglected the development of an alternative "plan B" for the case
of the Net being highjacked by its adversary.[12]

So what is needed ?

To my dismay, I did not see much of an approach in the first phase of
the WSIS to freeward the very basics of standards for free,
non-proprietary interoperability of the Net. Great declarations for
"freedom of expression" and "fundamental rights" of such seem quite
useless if they are subject to pre-paid licence fees for the use of
the copyrighted file formats and typesets these declarations are
printed with.

Secondly, there seems no alternative to the ITU as the international
regulatory body - and you may like or dislike its bureaucracy, and
besides of its subversion by the business-lobby[13] -, if you want to
pass binding, suable safeguards for the least public standards.
The few rules "governing" the basic technical functionality of the Net
had been precisely that.

Thirdly, there is definitely a point to demand more "public"
participation - i.e., beyond state bureaucrats and business-lobby - in
ITU's procedures; and more opening of access to information of its work.

***