Publius Project » Guidance

Money for Provision and Clicks for Free

cnolan — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:51:16 +0000

When I was kindly invited to write a short essay on Advertising and Internet for the Publius Project, Google’s encyclopedia and potential Wikipedia killer, Knol, was not launched, yet. So, I did not have to balance between the reputation to be one of the first European scholar to contribute to the Berkman Center’s new forum and the money from ads incrusted on my post on Knol.Google.com. A hard choice for any economist like me! Anyway, the recent initiative of the firm from Mountain View provides me with a good case to illustrate a few patterns on ads and Internet.

Online advertising will have a profound impact on the future of the Internet

Online advertising has boomed and become the fastest growing segment of advertising. In terms of dollars spent, it grew at
40% annually between 2003 and 2007. In the future, advertisers are expected to spend $54 billion on online advertising in 2011, that is, the double of last year. One reason for this huge growth is that advertising can be better targeted online than through radio, TV or newspapers. As is well known, the Internet is a very effective invisible mechanism to collect information on consumers and track their behavior. Targeting and profiling raise serious privacy concerns but also provide some benefits. Firstly, it provides more relevant information to users. Do not forget that 40% of searches are commercially motivated. Secondly, it reduces inefficiencies raised when you put ads under the eyes of people who are not interested in them (e.g., a TV spot on shampoo for bald people). My point here is not to assess whether for society those benefits offset the harms on privacy. (Honestly, I do not know) I just want to point out that there are strong forces that, like it or not, make money water-shedding in online advertising.

As those dollars move online, all Internet giants see a chance to strengthen their position in online advertising business. Google, outbidding Microsoft, bought DoubleClick, a software company specialized in serving ad displays online for $ 3.1 billion. Microsoft took over aQuantitative, involved, inter alia, in ad networking business and (like DoubleClick) in ad-serving technology for $6 billion. Yahoo! bought RightMedia, the leading ad exchange, and BlueLithium, a behavioral targeting network, for $680 million. AOL made also a series of acquisitions for an undisclosed amount. In a nutshell, the Internet giants want all to become intermediaries between the advertisers and the websites.

No doubt, such a large change will impact the future of the economy and the industrial organization of the Internet. The example of Knol and Wikipedia provides a concrete illustration:

Unlike Wikipedia, Knol offers contributors the opportunity to make money. If they accept ad displays or text ads intertwined with the piece of knowledge they wrote, they get a share of the revenues Google will receive from the advertisers. The more popular their entry in the Google encyclopedia, the more revenues they’ll get. Some users of Wikipedia – those who value ads – and certain contributors of Wikipedia– those who are attracted by money – might shift to Google’s encyclopedia. Today, nobody knows the extent of these defections, if any, and therefore nobody is able to forecast what will happen. The predictions are even diverging between insiders. For the former Wikimedia foundation chair, Florence Devouard, Knol is the strongest threat Wikipedia has ever been confronted with whereas the honorary Chairman of the foundation, Jimmy Wales, has welcomed the entry of Google in declaring that “The more good free content, the better for the world”.

In the worst case scenario, Knol will eliminate Wikipedia. Less users for the latter means less donors, less donors means less money to operate and to renew the network of servers, insufficient network capacity leads to lowering the quality for users, and the degradation of quality results in reducing the number of users. Less users may lower the attractiveness of Wikipedia to contributors, and in turn the decrease in number and in quality of contributors adversely impacts on the number of users.

By contrast, we can imagine that Google will not catch up and Wikipedia will be stimulated. [Today, Knol provides less than 150.000 entries, especially in the field of health and medicine, against 2.5 millions for Wikipedia.] Competition in online encyclopedia industry like elsewhere could boost people and organizations. Google’s entry into this space can result in better quality of Wikipedia content, speedier access for its readers and an easier process for its contributors.. The important point here is that whatever the scenario, there will be an impact on Wikipedia: the introduction of online advertising changes the future of the Internet.

Free provision of content will decline

The Internet is a unique experience of both free access and free provision. Wikipedia is an iconic illustration of these two free-of-charge sides. There is a myriad of others, such as websites delivering online academic contents or blogs without ads. For economists, the magic does not lie with free access but with free provision. We are familiar with what we call two-sided markets, where you can deliver one product for free (e.g., radio programs to households, payment card to individuals) because you sell another product to other clients (e.g., audience to advertisers, payment facilities to shopkeepers). The economic puzzle is why people decide to incur costs (at least the costs of their time and their efforts) without a financial counterpart. Hence, the tons of economic papers on the motivations of Open Source Software developers. Fun, altruism, ideological convictions, reputation, learning, personal marketing are part of the story.

Motivations are often complementary. Consequently, more money flowing into online advertising means a decreasing share of content that is provided completely for free. For instance, some contributors to collaborative networks or certain bloggers will consider the money from ads as the cherry on the cake. They will use it as ‘argent de poche’. Others will invest more time to improve the quality of their writings. Some other individuals might decide to enter into content provision expecting the ads will remunerate their time.

The issue is to what extent this second trend will affect the content on the Internet. A major concern is online advertising may reduce diversity and free speech. It is especially shared by those who view non-financial and financial motivations as opposed and as leading to different outcomes. In our example, contributors who want to maximize their ad revenues would rather write an entry dealing with what to do in Singapore rather than with the reign of Ramses VIII (1129-1126 BC). It is likely there will be more entries on Knol on tourist cities than on Pharaon dynasties. Interestingly, some registered Knol authors chose not to accept ads on their posts. Unfortunately, Google did not disclose the percentage that those advertising-adverse contributors represent. If it is significant, it would be possible in the future to demonstrate whether topics addressed in contributions with ads are different from those without ads. A good experiment to test how advertising influences content.

In France, there is currently an interesting debate on whether the complete elimination of advertising on public TV channels will result in more cultural (and less trash) programs. The example of BBC One, the UK channel, shows that this expectation might be misleading. The impact of advertising on free speech is also controversial. On the one hand, non-politically correct statements may be refrained and self-censured to avoid the risk of a decrease in ads revenue. On the other hand, as a complementary incentive, money through ads may increase expression of opinions. According to Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, “We […] found that online advertising promotes freer, more robust, and more diverse speech. […] Without [it, bloggers] would not be able to dedicate as much time and attention to their publications as they do today.”

No doubt free provision will decline— but we will only get a clearer picture in a few years of the subsequent impact on online content.

Antitrust control and litigation will expand

Web-based industries are young and innovative, two features that are generally associated with strong competition. However, because of scale economies and network effects, leading Internet firms enjoy high market shares. Google, for instance, with more than 650 million unique visitors per month worldwide (including 150 millions in the US), enjoys about 70% share of the search traffic (53% for the US only). Such levels of marketshare inevitably attract the scrutiny of antitrust enforcement agencies, either through investigations or through complaints by rivals and consumers. Moreover, the official green light is required for a merger.

The current consolidation in the web-businesses gives antitrust agencies more data and facts regarding how the competition process is going in several markets. At first glance, online advertising markets seems immune, as the number of both online content providers and advertisers is huge and therefore concentration is low. However, both rely on a small number of firms to make the process work (e.g., selecting and serving the ads on the websites, measuring the impact). The creation of a dominant gateway connecting advertisers and online contents producers has been one of the main concerns raised by Microsoft to try to prohibit the acquisition of DoubleClick by Google. Neither the US, nor the EU antitrust authorities retained the argument. Both gave a full clearance to the merger.

Of course, a high market share is not anti competitive per se. It is generally the outcome of successful business strategies that lead to better products and services to consumers. Even when high market shares enable the extraction of monopoly profits, companies need not be hindered by antitrust law, as such high profits can incentivize firms to innovate. Moreover, as is well known, competition in several web-businesses takes the form of a race where the winner takes all and then is challenged and displaced with time. The antitrust concerns mainly arise when the winner undertakes anti competitive practices to maintain or strengthen its dominant position.

Imagine, for instance, if Google modifies the algorithms of its search engine to facilitate the high ranking of Knol entries on the page results– less users will be directed to Wikipedia and more to Google’s encyclopedia. Today, about 40% of the consultations of Wikipedia come via queries treated by Google search engine. This figure demonstrates how Wikipedia would be if Knol pages were systematically ranked above its own. It is likely that, should Google attempt to o leverage its leadership on the search market to get market share and ads revenues on online encyclopedia publishing, it would infringe antitrust law. Note that the more Google activities spill over into the content business, the more the suspicion that its search engine is biased will arise. Google currently serves ads to users primarily via search results pages; it is obviously attractive to try to continue to serve ads to them when they arrive at the desired website. However, Google is only allowed to succeed its expansion in publishing and media by merit, that is, because its contents would be better for users, not because it drove them to click on its pages in trafficking PageRank. As far as the Publius Project is concerned, do not worry: Google would never deliver a more terrific content even if contributors get some dollars from ads!

François Lévêque is professor at the Ecole des Mines, Paris and a Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Law at UC Berkeley. His research, teaching and consulting interests are in the areas of antitrust, intellectual property rights and network regulation. He blogs here.

Is the lack of web link and search engine accountability the elephant in the room of online reputation?

cnolan — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 19:12:07 +0000

Essay by Chris Dellarocas.
Continue the conversation on online reputation with Judith Donath

The majority of debate on online reputation and free speech has focused on questions that relate to content authorship and hosting (see for example, this book and related discussion here, here and here). There has been far less discussion about the responsibilities of those who link to harmful content as well as about the accountability of search engines, whose page ranking algorithms – themselves based on counting links – largely determine the extent of such content’s impact. In this essay I argue that page ranking algorithms and people’s linking decisions are at least as important components of online reputation formation as content itself and deserve to be made more visible and, perhaps, more accountable.

Links constitute the true currency of reputation on the web. Even the most malicious online content will remain largely unnoticed unless others choose to link to it. Links are all the more important since search engines, that ultimate arbiter of online relevance, use a page’s link counts as the primary determinant of that page’s ranking within a set of search results.

Linking to a piece of content constitutes a judgment on the part of the linker that this information is worth noticing. By the same token, a search engine’s choice to employ a link-based page ranking algorithm constitutes a judgment that link counts are a fair method of determining web content’s merit of being read.

Although linking is as deliberate and consequential an action as authoring, our social norms and legal structures have paid much less attention to it. Many web users who would never dream of posting certain types of content have far fewer qualms about linking to them. In cases of slander only the original creator of content bears legal responsibility. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 provides almost blanket immunity to the people who helped make this content visible by linking to it. Similarly, no responsibility is borne by the search engines, whose algorithms chose to list the content near the top of search results and greatly contributed to its negative impact.

Viewed from this perspective, the current lack of accountability with respect to linking and page ranking constitutes an important shortcoming of our fledgling reputation economy. On the one hand it encourages irresponsible and sometimes malicious behavior. On the other hand it misses a great opportunity to turn the millions of web users into more intelligent and responsible information gatekeepers.

Let me be upfront in that I am not advocating more litigation. I believe that a lot can be accomplished through education and implementation of the right incentives into the technical architecture of the web.

The first step is education. Most people do not fully realize the implications and responsibilities that come from their choice to link to a piece of online content. Even fewer people fully grasp the way in which web links, stripped out of their original context and aggregated en masse, affect the decisions of page ranking algorithms. For example, a blogger who links to a racist article from inside a posting in which she strongly condemns it, is at the same time boosting that article’s PageRank, improving its visibility on search engines and exacerbating its negative impact. Fully grasping the consequences of an individual’s linking decisions is the first step towards using this powerful staple of our networked society with responsibility.

The second step is implementing incentives for responsible linking and page-ranking into the architecture of the web. For example, one can envision a set of mechanisms that keep track of the linking actions of websites (and, to the extent possible, individuals), and, on the basis of such actions, assign to them a publicly visible score that roughly translates to their “quality of judgment”. Linking to content that proves to be beneficial increases the score; linking to content that proves to be harmful decreases it.

In a reputation economy, a person’s quality of judgment is as valuable and important a trait as a person’s reputation on any other dimension. In small communities people who spread false rumors quickly acquire a reputation for bad judgment and become ostracized or irrelevant. On the other hand, people who exhibit good judgment grow in esteem and are welcome everywhere. We need to build a similar set of checks and balances for the web.

Search engines must be subject to similar scrutiny. Their choices of page ranking algorithms are deliberate and, therefore, accountable. Plus they have very real consequences. It is my hope that public measurement of a search engine’s “quality of judgment” will induce the creation of more responsible algorithms. At the minimum, it will alert users that these all-powerful gatekeepers of reality are not infallible.

Implementing these ideas will not be easy. There are several difficult challenges for which there are no easy answers. Here are just a few: Who gets to decide what content is beneficial and what is harmful? In limited cases (for example, content that has been proven to be libelous in court) making such judgments with a fair degree of objectivity is feasible; in the majority of cases, however, such decisions will be subjective. How should one take into consideration the context of a link? For example, when a blogger lambasting a libelous posting ends up boosting its visibility on search engines, is this an instance of poor judgment on behalf of the blogger or a failure of page ranking algorithms to properly take the context of the link into consideration? Who should bear the responsibility (or get the credit) for anonymous links posted as comments on eponymous blogs?

Despite their difficulty, these are challenges that we cannot ignore. In our networked society, linking and page ranking carry just as much weight as authoring. All three need to be exercised with caution and responsibility. Similarly, any discussion of free speech and online reputation must focus on all three.

Chris Dellarocas is an Associate Professor of Information Systems and Director of the Center for Complexity in Business at the Robert H. Smith School of Business of the University of Maryland. His research examines the implications of consumer-generated content and social web technologies on business and society. His work on online reputation formation has received international recognition and has been quoted in, among other places, CNN Headline News, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Washington Post and the Financial Times. He is an inventor with 3 patents and board member of several Web 2.0 companies.

Is reputation obsolete?

cnolan — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:45:59 +0000

Essay by Judith Donath.
Continue the conversation on online reputation with Chris Dellarocas.

In the past, most conversations were ephemeral: spoken words quickly slipped into the past, resurrected only if a listener later repeated them from memory. Today, many discussions and transactions live on indefinitely. Online conversations are often permanently archived and events in the face-to-face world are frequently recorded. We photograph each other at events both significant and mundane, and upload the images to public media-feeds. Records of our travel times, purchases, health conditions, phone calls, and more exist in vast corporate and government databases. Today, I often no longer have to rely on someone else’s account of your past behavior: I can see for myself.

In a world in which all action is recorded, is there still need for reputation information? If I can see the events of the past for myself, is getting other people’s potentially biased and self-serving opinions about it worth anything? Or, has reputation become obsolete?

In some cases, the answer is yes.

For example, when buying something on eBay, if a seller’s reputation is poor I’ll go elsewhere. However, some ratings are falsely low because of retaliation, or inaccurately high due to fear of retaliation. The reported opinions of others are therefore dubious.* What I really want to know are the facts about the seller’s past transactions: Were the items sent on time? Were they in good condition? The ideal would be if UPS had a service where they photographed an item to be shipped, wrapped it themselves, and posted the photo and shipping info; I could then look up a verified record of the seller’s actions (though items whose condition is not readily apparent from a photo – a laptop, for instance – would need a more extensive evaluation). In other words, I’m more interested in history here than in reputation.

Yet even when the facts of an event are clear,interpretations of them can be important. A politician’s publicly broadcast speech is subsequently argued over by journalists, bloggers, and taxicab drivers; different communities interpret the same words and gestures in vastly different ways. In academia, the committee members evaluating a professor for promotion can read his C.V. and publications, but they also rely heavily on letters from colleagues assessing the significance of the candidate’s work.

Reputation is central to community formation and cooperation (Emler 2001; Gluckman 1963; Hardin 2003). Through discussion about others’ actions, people establish and learn about the community’s standards. Reputation is the core of rewards and sanctioning – it amplifies the benefits of behaving well and the costs of misbehavior. If I work with someone who turns out to be lazy and dishonest, by telling my friends about it, they are spared from a similar bad experience. Having access to reputation information is a big benefit of community membership: insiders know who to trust and how to act toward each other, while strangers do not get the benefit of other’s past experiences. Our ability to share reputation information makes society possible (Dunbar 1996).

In light of this, it would seem that the answer to the question “Is reputation obsolete?” is “No”.

Yet reputation is subject to manipulation, for various reasons. People use it to influence opinion to advance their own causes, to maliciously harm someone, or to curry favor by providing entertaining or seemingly confidential material. We need to understand what circumstances make reputation reliable.

Reputation information exchanged within close-knit communities is more reliable, and members learn when assessments are biased. A colleague recently mentioned that she would never trust another recommendation letter from Professor X again – she’d seen too many in which he claimed that different students were “the top scholar I’ve known”. In overzealously promoting the careers of his students, Professor X acquired a poor reputation for inflated praising. Most letter writers temper the desire to over-enthusiastically praise in order to remain credible in the eyes of their peers, realizing that this close-knit community assesses the assessors. Without community ties, reputation is generally less useful. On public rating sites such as eBay, where no community binds the rater and the reader of ratings, there is no check on reliability and the ratings function primarily as a social exchange between the rater and subject (David & Pinch 2006).

So, is reputation obsolete in an increasingly archival world? The answer, it appears, is “sometimes”. When the immediate facts are primary, we should make use of the vast amount of archived material available. But when situations are ambiguous, when there are conflicting versions of events or codes of behavior, and when developing a shared culture is important (Merry 1997), reputation and the communicative, community-building process of creating it is far from obsolete.

Online, new factors affect the balance between reputation and history. One big issue is “portable identity”: if I spend countless hours on a site being a gracious and well-informed companion, shouldn’t I be able to take that personal history and reputation with me to another site? Many would argue yes, that “you own your own words”. (More controversial is the question of whether you *must* take your history with you: people prefer to port only positive pasts.) But porting reputation is a different matter. Your reputation is information about you, but it is not by you. If you own your own words, then your reputation is owned not by you, but by the people who talk about you. Furthermore, it is a subjective judgment made it a specific context that may not translate well into another. History is portable in ways that reputation is not.

An online site can encourage reliance on history by making search easy and by providing visualizations of patterns within its archive. Or it can encourage the use of reputation by providing both public and private communication channels, as well as feedback about the value of the reputation information people have provided. In technologically mediated societies, evaluating the relative merits of history and reputation is especially important, for the habits of such communities are shaped by deliberate design.

*People do use these ratings and they affect price (Resnick et al. 2006) but this is in the absence of better information.

Judith Donath is a Berkman Faculty Fellow and the director of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. Her work focuses on the social side of computing, synthesizing knowledge from fields such as graphic design, urban studies and cognitive science to build innovative interfaces for online communities and virtual identities. She is known internationally for pioneering research in social visualization, interface design, and computer mediated interaction.

References

David, Shay and Trevor John Pinch. 2006. Six Degrees of Reputation: The Use and Abuse of Online Review and Recommendation Systems. First Monday 11, no. 3.

Dunbar, Robin I. M. 1996. Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Emler, Nicholas. 2001. Gossiping. In The New Handbook of Language and Social Psychology, ed. W. P. Robinson and H. Giles:317–338. New York Wiley.

Gluckman, Max. 1963. Gossip and Scandal (Papers in Honor of Melville J. Herskovits). Current Anthropology 4, no. 3: 307-316.

Hardin, Russell. 2003. Gaming trust. In Trust and reciprocity: Interdisciplinary lessons from experimental research, ed. Elinor Ostrom and James Walker:80-101. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Merry, Sally Engle. 1997. Rethinking gossip and scandal. In Reputation: Studies in the Voluntary Elicitation of Good Conduct, ed. Daniel B. Klein:47-74. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Resnick, P., R. Zeckhauser, J. Swanson, and K. Lockwood. 2006. The value of reputation on eBay: A controlled experiment. Experimental Economics 9, no. 2: 79-101.

The Looming Destruction of the Global Communications Environment

mariel — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:49:05 +0000

Essay by Ron Deibert

Ask most citizens worldwide to identify the most pressing issue facing humanity as a whole and they will likely respond with global warming. However, there is another environmental catastrophe looming: the degradation of the global communications environment. The parallels between the two issues are striking: in both cases an invaluable commons is threatened with collapse unless citizens take urgent action to achieve environmental rescue. The two issues are also intimately connected: solutions to global warming necessitate an unfettered worldwide communications network through which citizens can exchange information and ideas. To protect the planet, we need to protect the Net.

Just as evidence of threats to the global natural environment can be found in seemingly unrelated local events – deforestation here, a loss of wetlands there – so too can threats to the global communications environment. In Belarus, for example, access to opposition websites was disrupted during 2005 presidential elections, and then restored immediately afterwards with no explanation. In response to images and videos of demonstrations being uploaded to blogs and news sites, the Burmese government shut off the Internet entirely, except during the period of curfew when Internet users could be more effectively tracked. In Cambodia, the government quietly disabled the use of text messaging over cellular networks leading up to national elections. In Pakistan, inept attempts to block access to streaming videos containing imagery satirizing the Prophet Muhammed resulted in the collateral filtering for several hours of the entire Youtube service, not just for Pakistanis, but also for most of the entire Internet population around the world.

Further degradation comes from the troublesome encroachments of military and intelligence agencies into the global communications commons. Around the world, states’ armed forces are developing sophisticated doctrines for cyberwar that include everything from computer network attacks to psychological operations. The U.S. Pentagon’s recently launched strategic command for cyberspace, operating under the Air Force, is perhaps the most formidable, ominously talking about “fighting and winning wars” on the Internet. Although details are classified, what this may mean in practice can be fathomed by the recent distributed electronic assault on Estonia, which poisoned the country’s 911, banking, and telephone systems for a period of time after that government decided to move a Soviet era statue. Evidence gathered about the assault suggests that although it was likely a spontaneous uprising of hackers sympathetic to Russian concerns, the event appears to have been at least partially “seeded” by the Russian state, whose actions spiraled out of control like a cyclone in cyberspace.

Meanwhile, states’ intelligence agencies are increasingly extracting precious information flows through the installation of permanent eavesdropping equipment at key Internet chokepoints, such as Internet exchanges, Internet service providers, or at major international peering facilities. When combined with the deep packet shaping activities undertaken by ISPs to limit use of peer-to-peer networks for alleged copyright violations, these incursions eat away at the constitutive principles of the Internet’s “neutral” architecture. As a consequence, once seamless global flows of information are now being damned up, distorted, and diverted into heavily filtered cesspools where surveillance saps creativity and induces a stifling climate of self-censorship.

These and hundreds of other examples from the OpenNet Initiative’s latest research are but a few pieces of evidence of what has become an alarming trend: motivated by short-term security and cultural concerns, dozens of governments and corporations are carving up, colonizing, and militarizing the once seamless Internet environment.

Like any other commons, the global communications environment is a finite public good whose maintenance as a valuable resource depends on sustained contributions of individuals worldwide. And yet citizens are having their legitimate contributions stifled by fickle governments and greedy corporations who are threatened by freedom of speech and access to information.

Fortunately, there are many ways to begin to rescue the global communications environment:

• We need to encourage the research and development of tools (like the censorship-evading software psiphon, or the anonymity network Tor) that support the Internet’s distributed and open architecture.

• We need to promote the Internet’s original culture of sharing, as represented by Creative Commons and the free and open source software movement, as an epistemic bulwark against the possessive and exclusionary instincts of the profiteering motive.

• We need to revise and encourage the original notion of “hacking” as a positive experimental ethic, encouraging citizens – especially youth– not to accept technologies shrink-wrapped and locked down but to open them up and explore them as media of both freedom and control.

• We need to put pressure on governments that censor and the companies who assist them, promoting laws, norms, and principles from the domestic to the international spheres that restrain their shortsighted motives and hold them accountable for their actions.

• And we need to raise global awareness that if we, citizens of the Earth, are ever to solve our many shared problems successfully, we need an unfettered worldwide communications environment with which to do so.

Ron Deibert is associate professor of political science and director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto. He is a co-founder and principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative and psiphon projects. This essay is a modified and extended version of an earlier essay that appeared on OpenDemocracy.Net

Framing the Net

cnolan — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:42:18 +0000

essay by Doc Searls

We’re always talking about something else. Regardless of the subject at hand, we have other subjects in mind that help us say what we mean. According to cognitive science, all of our thought and speech is metaphorical. That is, we understand everything in terms of something else.

For example, time is not money, but it is like money, so we speak about time in terms of money. That’s why we “save,” “waste,” “spend,” “lose,” “throw away” and “invest” time. Another example is life. When we say birth is “arrival,” death is “departure,” careers are “paths” and choices are “crossroads,” we think and speak about life in terms of travel. In fact, it is almost impossible to avoid raiding the vocabularies of money and travel when talking about time and life.

The embodied nature of our conceptual systems — our frames — is profound. Why do we say happy is “up” and sad is “down”? Why do we compare knowledge with “light” and ignorance with “dark”? The answer is that we are diurnal animals that walk upright. If bats could talk, they might say good is dark and bad is light.

Of course, one subject might have many metaphors, and it is easy to mix them. In Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson point out that ideas are framed in all the following ways: fashion (”old hat,” “in style,” “in vogue”), money (”wealth,” “two cents worth, “treasure trove”), resources (”mined a vein,” “pool,” “ran out of”), products (”produced,” “turning out,” “generated”), plants (”came to fruition,” “in flower,” “budding”), and people (”gave birth to,” “brainchild,” “died off”).

Yet none of those frames is as essential to ideas as what Michael Reddy calls the conduit metaphor. When we say we need to “get an idea across,” or “that sentence carries little meaning,” we are saying that ideas are objects, expressions are containers, and communications is sending.

Which brings us to the Internet.

Given the primacy of the conduit metaphor, it only makes sense that we speak of the the Internet as a “medium” through which “content” can be “uploaded,” “downloaded” and “delivered” to “consumer” through “pipes.” Dig deeper and we find transport language in TCP/IP (for Transmission Control Protocol/Internetworking Protocol), in “packets,” in the “transport layer,” in the File Transport Protocol (FTP) and in all the mail protocols.

Not surprisingly, those we call “carriers” frame the Net in terms of transport and property. They do that because they own “pipes” and sell use of them. In a 2005 Business Week interview, Ed Whiteacre, then the CEO of SBC (now AT&T) said of Google and other companies, “Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using.”

Another common frame for the Net — and especially the Web — is real estate. That’s why we say we have “sites” with “domains” and “locations” that we “architect,” “design,” “build” and “construct” for “visitors” and “traffic.” We talk about going “on” the Net, and call it a “world,” a “sphere,” a “place,” a “space” and an “environment” with an “ecology.”

A third frame is publishing. This grows from Tim Berners-Lee’s founding concept of the Web as an assortment of documents, connected by hypertext. Today we have “pages” that we “write,” “author,” “edit,” “put up,” “post” and “syndicate.” When Dave Winer, one of blogging’s inventors, improved its technology and practices with RSS — Really Simple Syndication — the Web became even more of a publishing platform.

Yet the Net is not a physical thing. It has no first costs. Its core protocols are barely encumbered by the concept of ownership. In fact, those who developed those protocols mostly operated on virtues which the open source community today characterizes as NEA:

1. Nobody owns it
2. Everybody can use it
3. Anybody can improve it

In the first two respects, the Net is like the periodic table. In the third respect the Net resembles only the free and open goods that grow in its own environment. Steve Larsen, CEO of the code source engine Krugle, estimates that the number of open source code bases now exceeds half a million.

Craig Burton characterizes the end-to-end architecture of the Net as a giant hollow sphere: the only geometric shape in which all “ends” are visible to all other ends. I’ve been calling this “the giant zero,” because one of the Net’s founding ideals is reducing toward zero the functional distance between any two people, or any two devices. Also the cost.

Unlike phone and cable systems, the Net was never meant to be understood, much less charged out, as minutes or channels. Those are mechanisms for organizing scarcity. The Net was built to support abundance. The closer it gets to zero in the middle, the more what it supports approaches the infinite.

The Net’s use value so far exceeds its sale value that it’s silly to subordinate the former to the frame of the latter. Yet that’s what the carriers do with pricing and provisioning policies that prevent far more business than they enable. This is a legacy of what Bob Frankston calls The Regulatorium.

“As we establish the principle of neutrality,” Bob writes, “we challenge the fundamental concept that the carriers own the transport for their own use in delivering services. We now create the services ourselves and it must be our infrastructure — not the carriers’ private asset.”

I’m not sure how we should frame that. But I am sure that we need to.

Doc Searls is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and Senior Editor of Linux Journal. He is also co-author (with fellow Berkman Fellow David Weinberger and others) of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and one of the world’s best-known and widely read bloggers. His work as a journalist, speaker and advocate of the Internet led to a Google-O’Reilly Open Source Award for Best Communicator in 2005. He blogs here.