Europas telecombolag vill skattebelägga internet

Kopplat till ryktet om att ITU vill ta över kontrollen över internet

The EU Telco Plan To Have The UN ‘Tax & Track’ Internet Usage Goes Against Fundamental Internet Principles | Techdirt

And now the plan is to basically pretend that the internet is just like the phone system, so they can extend this “calling party pays” plan to one where the “sending party” pays. The reasoning here is more or less twofold: (1) lots of these countries still have (either fully or partially) nationally owned telcos (or at least telco monopolies), whose business models have been completely undercut by the internet. Since these firms have been monopolists from the very beginning, they’ve never been very good at innovating or adapting to the times. The idea of shifting what had been a key money maker — collecting tolls for international phone calls — and then applying it to the internet sounds really attractive to lazy national telco folks who would love a system that just starts printing money for them. (2) While they don’t like to admit it, plenty of other countries remain quite jealous of the of large massively successful internet companies which are mostly based in the US. By placing a “sending party pays” tax, it’s a way for European (and other) countries to more or less put up toll booths on the internet for these companies, forcing Google, Facebook, Twitter and others to “pay” to reach people in their countries. Oh, and on top of that, it’s a chance for them to make plans to drop net neutrality and the basic end-to-end principle that defines the internet.

Enkelt sagt: många gamla statliga teleoperatörer har blivit omsprungna av internet och nu vill man ge dem konstgjord andning på konsumenternas och internets grundprincipers bekostnad!

Sammanfattning av ACTA-avtalet

Vad är ACTA?

ACTA står för Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement

Varför är ACTA dåligt?

Läckor

Avtalet läckte ut under de hemliga förhandligarna

EFFs analys av det officiellt släppta avtalet

Den 22 april 2010 pblicerade EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) en analys av det då officiellt släppta avtalet.

Vad händer nu?

Europaparlamentet planerar att rösta om ACTA i juni eller juli, ingen vet exakt när.

Motståndarna planerar flera protestaktioner, bland annat kommer det ske demonstrationer på många håll den 9:e juni.

Länkar att läsa vidare:

Ingen bryr sig om hur mycket det kostade att få fram din bok!

De bryr sig om värdet av kopian de har köpt.

En riktigt bra text om prissättning av varor:
Nobody Cares About The Fixed Costs Of Your Book, Movie, Whatever | Techdirt

The consumer doesn’t care how much it cost you to make the original.

Nor should they. They only care about the value to them of the single copy they get. And this makes sense for a variety of reasons, both economically and psychologically. This is the point that economists have been making for ages, trying to get people to understand the difference between fixed costs and marginal costs. Fixed costs don’t impact pricing. Maginal costs (the cost to produce the copy) do. That’s not to say that the fixed costs aren’t important — they are — but they don’t factor into the pricing decision, they factor into the investment decision. That is, you don’t take on a project if you don’t think you can create a business model that will give a total return on investment over the fixed and marginal costs. But the pricing on the individual item is entirely about the marginal costs. And this is actually a good thing. If you did pricing based on the average cost, including fixed costs, you actually lose the incentive to be more efficient and lower your fixed costs, since you get to just bake them into the price. But the public doesn’t care about how much you spent. As far as they’re concerned, you may have spent stupidly and inefficiently. They only care about the marginal benefit they get from the copy.

mer att läsa:

Veckans video II: TED – Rob Reid: The $8 billion iPod

Rob Reid: The $8 billion iPod

TED

En tredje industriell revolution?

Den tredje industriella revolutionen | Framtidskommissionen

Är världen på väg in i en tredje industriell revolution? Enligt ett av de senaste numren av The Economist är svaret ja. Den första industriella revolutionen inträffade under 1800-talet och innebar att hantverket som dominerande produktionsmetod ersattes av mekaniserade fabriker. Den andra industriella revolutionen inträffade under 1900-talets början och innebar övergången till massproduktion. Nu står vi i början av den tredje industriella revolutionen, där digitaliseringen av produktionen får fullt genomslag och där det blir möjligt att på kommersiell basis producera produkter individuellt anpassade till kundernas och deras behov.

Frågan är om det är relevant? Jag tror att det är viktigare att mer och mer av sammhällsekonomin flyttat över till kunskapsbaserade branscher. Man kan kan säkert hävda att vi är inne i en sjätte, sjunde eller åttånde jordbruksrevolution men det påverkar inte samhället så mycket. Produktionen av individanassade varor är snarare en produkt av övergången till informationsåldern/nätverkssamhället än ett industrisamhället utvecklar sig…

Läs mer:

Piratkopieringens kostnad?

Det är inte så lätt som vissa vill få dig att förstå:

Hulu, Pricing Strategies, and the Costs of Piracy | Cato @ Liberty

To illustrate, let’s imagine television show that initially streams online for free with advertising, garnering a million viewers per episode and earning $1 per viewer in ad revenues, for a total of $1 million. A small number who really dislike ads, or have connections too slow for streaming, let’s say 5,000, download pirate copies anyway—but the vast majority watch legally. After building an audience and generating some good word of mouth, the accountants suggest that it might be more profitable to stop the free streaming and instead sell ad-free episodes for $4, in hopes that enough dedicated fans will pony up to compensate for the predictable drop in viewership once the program is no longer free to watch. The paying audience does indeed drop to 255,000, which still leaves the company slightly better off for the switch, but 100,000 viewers decide to keep up with the show (at least initially) by downloading pirated copies. A subsequent price hike to $10, however, turns out to be a money loser. Now the show has only 80,000 paying viewers, while 150,000 are engaged in piracy.

Undoubtedly that piracy is costing the show’s producers something: If piracy were impossible, some unknown fraction of those who download illegally would be willing to pay the asking price. But just crudely using the actual market price at each stage—even if modified by some constant “displacement rate” to acknowledge that not every illicit download represents a lost sale at that price—yields some perverse results. As the pricing strategy for the show changes, the “cost” of piracy rises from $5,000 to $400,000 (even as revenue rises) to $1.5 million (while revenues drop by $20,000). Obviously, something is wrong here.

It’s no great mystery what: The problem is that the rate of piracy, the price of a digital good, and the “displacement rate” (the percentage of the pirates who’d buy at that price in a world of perfect copyright enforcement) are not independent variables. And, of course, the interdependency runs both ways: Pricing decisions are influenced by the knowledge that we don’t live in a world of perfect enforcement, and you can tell plausible stories according to which this might keep prices higher or lower than they’d be under perfect enforcement, depending on your assumptions about the conditions under which a particular audience will substitute the pirate for the legal good.

Ranking States by Their Dependence on Manufacturing

En grafisk genomgång på vilka stater som är mycket beroende av tillverkningsjobb och som på grund av detta säkert kommer att få en högre arebetslöshet över tiden.

Data Spotlight: Ranking States by Their Dependence on Manufacturing | Newgeography.com