The Federal Trade Commission’s running an anti-trust suit against Google on the principle that its practices are anti-competitive. Okay, that’s all well and good, except Google only has 66% of the market and there’s nothing forcing anybody to use Google. Every browser – including Google Chrome – has built-in access to competing search engines. My own browser, Firefox, has Google, Yahoo and Bing as part of the standard toolbar.

But that’s not where I’m concerned. The issue to me is the language:

For example, if Google were to program its system so that a consumer’s search for “washing machines” is more likely to produce as its top result a link to Google-related shopping sites, that could be interpreted as putting its competitors at a disadvantage.

The rest of the article throws out platitudes how “technology is transforming our society” but that’s really the heart of what the feds care about. That bothers me. It bothers me because there’s a fundamental disconnect between how they see the internet and how lowly peons like me see the internet.

To me, the internet is a font of information. To them, the internet is a playground of consumerism. They don’t care about the fact that Google’s been collecting data on users such that the Chinese government had to call shenanigans. They don’t care that Google has more access to personal information than a federal agent with a court order, with no effective oversight. They care that Google might favor this consumer product over that consumer product.

To that I ask, who the fuck cares? There are more important things to bust Google on. Like how it’s almost impossible for the feds to bust Google’s data aggregation issues because most federal agencies use Google Apps. Our priorities are ridiculously skewed. But then, I suspect they’re not gigging Google on this because they want to do the same thing.

What Fourth Amendment?

The Entertainment Software Association, which is the video gaming industry’s version of the Record Industry Association of America, is similarly finding itself, with its support of the Stop Online Piracy Act, on the wrong side of business.

So what’s SOPA? In short, it’s an internet censor machine: Any streaming of any protected creative work – for promotion, for reviewing, for satire or parody – is a felony, and any site that is suspected of doing so or merely ‘harboring’ users (as part of its business model, like Facebook, or even on ancillary user forums) can be shut down pre-emptively – by DNS filtering enforced through ISPs – until it can prove its innocence. What this means is that file-sharing sites like Pirate Bay will move webhosting offshore and periodicals and content hosting sites like the Escapist and Flickr will suffer as collateral damage. It means that the advertising dollars that the internet relies on may dry up due to the Sword of Damocles looming over so many legitimate websites and many internet-based companies will be forced to drop employees – if they don’t just shutter altogether.

Suffice it to say, this is like stopping burglary by demolishing homes. Through the proceedings, congressmen admitted ignorance of the very things they were debating, and dismissed actual experts on the field, but this isn’t surprising because it’s at heart the last gasp of economic dinosaurs watching their model destroyed by a new dynamic. They’re lashing out at piracy in the most draconian ways possible when their original business model’s simply outdated, like the RIAA and MPAA did before them. In fact, they’re lashing out at it similarly to how the RIAA did, and with similar incompetency – which is to say, like current DRM, the bill will affect everybody except pirates, as previous attempts to block the Pirate Bay through the proposed measures have proved laughably easy to bypass.

Further, their arguments are, like the RIAA, for people they don’t actually represent: They claim that it will hurt artists overall, but artists aren’t hurting, their publishers are. Another way of saying that is if the artists are hurting, it’s by the publishers – publishers like Electronic Arts, Sony and Nintendo – just like musicians were being summarily screwed by Sony and Universal (…hey, I just mentioned Sony twice). Indeed, your average programmer for a game nowadays is likely to be laid off directly after release, no matter how successful the game proves to be, the games industry is one of the most exploitative industries today, and one of the ironies of the new internet business model is that the much greater ease and ability for self-publication in all fields of art and entertainment actually empowers artists.

In effect, it’s as if we learned nothing when the RIAA and MPAA fought this fight a decade ago: Piracy is just people fixing what is a fundamentally broken system by themselves, and piracy can be solved by giving people what they want: If piracy really destroyed movies and music, Hulu, Netflix, iTunes and Rhapsody wouldn’t be printing money right now. E. D. Kain of Forbes says this much, and Forbes had an interview with Gabe Newell of Valve doing the same for computer gaming with Steam. That said, despite Forbes’ generally progressive views, I’d like to go one further than Kain:

The entertainment industry is held aloft by piracy.

It always was. You think people become movie buffs, music fans or video gamers out of the blue? No. They ingest lots and lots of examples of the medium before that happens. Nobody buys collector’s editions without first becoming collectors, and starting such is prohibitively expensive. Drug dealers know the golden rule: The first hit is free. Every year in the gaming industry hold record profits, despite rampant, widespread piracy, because the people who swapped disks and cracked copies and exploited shareware twenty years ago got bit by the bug and are hooked for life. (Indeed, the median age of the PC gamer is 37, a number which rises by one year every year. That would place the average gamer in the current sales boom as somebody who was a teenager just when file-sharing took off. Funny that.)

As such, when senators like Roy Blunt (R-MO) argue that “business have lost $135 billion in revenue annually as a result of these rogue sites,” not only are they using the same specious “counting chickens before they’re hatched” arguments that the RIAA and MPAA did before, but are ignoring that the only reason people are aware of these products in the first place is due to that same apparatus, and fans wouldn’t exist to be exploited as customers were it not for such ‘rogue sites.’

The gaming industry will shrink overall if it’s allowed to shoot itself (and the whole internet) in the foot with its support for the bill. The irony is that, again, the gaming industry is having yearly record profits – despite the economic downturn – and is growing faster than any other entertainment industry today, so kill that goose, why don’t you.

One of the themes I found so intriguing in the Ghost in the Shell IP – the movies, the mangas, the TV series – was the idea of the re-emergence of a public censure (to say nothing of domestic terrorism) as heralded by the social zeitgeist of the internet. It was messy in that universe – ideas have a habit of morphing beyond anyone’s control – and it’s messy here.

I’m reminded of it thanks to the recent destruction of Ocean Marketing Public Relations Manager Paul Christoforo’s career. He, in a particularly unprofessional fit of pique, got into a heated exchange with a customer of a company his was contracted to represent, and got burned for it.

But let’s set the stage: The company, N-Control, which sells game controllers, got several times its expected holiday demand and could not fulfill orders in time. Its in-house marketing and public relations threw up their hands and it put Ocean Marketing to the task. Christoforo got put handling customer complaints, where one particularly irate customer and he escalated their argument to the point of name-dropping and threats. Said customer forwarded the exchange to the tips inbox of Kotaku, a gaming webzine, and directly to Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade, a gaming webcomic, and the whole thing blew up.

Within twenty four hours, Christoforo lost his job, his marketing company went belly up, his police record and personal life was exposed to the world, and the company he was representing was put in jeopardy, struggling with collateral damage when its flagship product got Amazon bombed.

In effect, by broadcasting the e-mail exchange, the customer – who is still anonymous beyond the moniker “Dave” – unleashed an online riot against the PR rep. The broadcasters themselves – Luke Plunkett of Kotaku and Mike Krahulik, the kindling to the Reddit/IGN wildfire – could fire their salvos with impunity, calling ignorance and denying culpability to the work of thousands of anonymous internet denizens who trawled the net for Christoforo’s Twitter account, scoured his Facebook pictures, hijacked his old Twitter account, looked up his Youtube videos, created parody videos of him, searched his work history, posted his police records, called his home and brought his family into the ordeal.

Suffice it to say, the internet has grown up. It’s now the preferred tool of public censure, and with the utter lack of privacy thanks to the humungous paper trail sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn offer, we live in the biggest small town in the world. Of course, stuff like this has happened before – 4Chan’s /b/ community loves reliving escapades of ‘Anonymous,’ its distributed wars against whomever – but it’s surprising the speed at which it manifests and does its damage, and that presents a huge problem.

Public censure is a nice way of saying “lynch mob,” and while Christoforo may not have been right for the job he was put in, lynch mobs don’t understand concepts like ‘proportionate response.’ Further, neither Kotaku nor Penny Arcade are willing to take responsibility for their efforts in fanning the flames. Owen Good of Kotaku gave a politician’s non-apology today, but Krahulik remains unrepentant: He practically crowed his accomplishments at destroying the man, citing outright malice, and in a just world he should be held legally responsible for that sort of grotesque harassment.

At this juncture, however, he likely won’t, which means that this monster has no boundaries. We have a system that nobody can corral, and that is a scary notion.

Part of Section 9 of Electronic Arts’ Terms of Service – the End-User License Agreement that everybody signs after buying (or, rather, in the software world, leasing the rights to use) a product and before installing it:

EA may also terminate access to EA Services for violation of this Terms of Service (in its sole discretion) … You may lose your user name and persona as a result of termination. If you have more than one (1) Account, EA may terminate all of your Accounts and all related Entitlements. In response to a violation of these Terms of Service or any other agreement applicable to EA Services accessed by you, EA may issue you a warning, suspend your Account, selectively remove, revoke or garnish Entitlements at an Account and/or device level , immediately terminate any and all Accounts that you have established and/or temporarily or permanently ban your device and/or machine from accessing all EA Services or certain EA Services. You acknowledge that in such an instance EA is not required to provide you notice before taking action to suspend or terminate your Account, temporarily or permanently banning your device from some or all EA Services or selectively removing, revoking or garnishing Entitlements associated with your Account. If EA terminates your Account, you may not participate in an EA Service again without EA’s express permission. EA reserves the right to refuse to keep Accounts for, and provide EA Services to, any individual. You may not allow individuals whose Accounts have been terminated by EA to use your Account.

If your Account, or a particular subscription for an EA Service associated with your Account, is terminated, suspended and/or if any Entitlements are selectively removed, revoked or garnished from your Account and/or if your device is temporarily or permanently banned from accessing some or all EA Services, no refund will be granted, no Entitlements will be credited to you or converted to cash or other forms of reimbursement, and you will have no further access to your Account or Entitlements associated with your Account or the particular EA Service.

Part of Section 11 of EA’s ToS:

You may violate the Terms of Service if, as determined by EA in its sole discretion, you:

[long list of actions]

Specific EA Services may also post additional rules that apply to your conduct on those services.

In short: “You agree that we can cut our services to you with no prior notice or compensation if it should break rules that we can invent after the fact, as interpreted by us only.”

In shorter: “You agree that fuck you.”

This has come to light of late mainly because Electronic Arts’ forums are tied to the same account as their games – with their new digital download service named ‘Origin’ – which means that any disputes over forum conduct has ended up in the permanent suspension of more than a few people’s game accounts. In one case, a gamer used the word “badass” on one of EA’s forums and, being banned due to a word filter, found he was banned from every game he purchased from EA as well.

Now, the funny aspect of this, if you can call it that, is that Terms of Services and End-User License Agreements are largely untested, legally, and as such their status as binding contracts are currently dubious. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that Section 20 of the ToS, which categorically denies customers the right to trial by jury and class-action lawsuits as well as severely limits the window of time in which they’re allowed to dispute anything at all, would be all that defensible if actually challenged.

Indeed, consumer rights legislation requires that, if a service is paid for, it remains available, and if it stops being available, a refund is offered. However, on the internet, the rules (seemingly in outsize response to piracy) have become fantastically draconian and currently exist largely because nobody’s taken the time to fight them yet. They’ve attempted to redefine products as services (for instance, a piece of software that you purchase for use offline is not a “product,” but a “service” that you lease the rights to use – a service that can be revoked), and now they’re attempting to redefine the parameters of services themselves.

Clearly this is just reality being a few years ahead of legislation, but it’s an incredibly sour note in the rather hostile relationship between corporations and consumers of late. At least, in the internet, nobody has yet and nobody likely will able to put a lid on piracy, so the consumers, for the moment, still have the upper hand.

Technically, we're 6%, but who's counting?

The self-conscious sneering of my generation is surprisingly hypocritical. I got into an argument recently when an acquaintance posed the point that the #OWS protestors had nothing on starving African children, and that our squabbles were a First World Problem. Hell, this tack even came complete with one of those pithy cartoons, as seen right.

The thing is, the irony that this exchange took place on Facebook was not lost on me. As it stands, reminding ourselves that the world exists – and indeed, letting that reminder stand in for actual action – seems to be a favorite past time of folks my age. Like all things, there’s a website devoted to just that sort of ironic tut-tutting, not to mention a song by MC Frontalot, itself an ironic ‘nerdcore’ band.

(Y’know, white guys acting like Black musicians used to be called hipsters, but I suppose now that hipsterdom has grown a life of its own, ‘nerdcore’ needed to be coined, but I digress…)

But, really, who are we fooling? If we do anything at all – beyond, of course, sharing that photo (and that photo’s been shared some 400 times on Facebook at the time of this posting, with a commensurate number of people cooing at its wit) – it’s a token effort done more to assuage our consciences than to bridge the divide between the developed and developing worlds. Nobody is about to give up their wealth and live frugally, no matter how many people thousands of miles away are starving.

But more importantly, how do the problems of the developing world equate with ours? Should we simply stop fighting about inequity here until all problems abroad are solved? Yes, if I have a bachelor’s and live in the United States, then no matter my personal debt and current employment status, I have one up on most of the world. I’m fully aware of that. But that doesn’t pay my rent, nor does it stop the fact that a lot of this nation’s wealth is mostly hoovered up by a tiny minority of plutocrats.

I’m thankful I have the comfort and luxury of being able to sit here in my heated apartment and type out this post on my computer. I’m aware of my situation. I’m aware that there are people poorer than those protesting downtown, even inside this country. But how does that negate their message?

I’ve rather considered myself a fervent traditionalist, for somebody who was born into the computer age, despite the glow of electronic devices pretty much dominating my time: I work IT. I’m a consummate forum troll. I’m rarely more than two hours away from a computer if I’m awake.

But I only just now got a cell phone, eschew the 3G network, maintain a personal library of more than two thousand books – as in the physical objects, not the digital feeds – and hate Web 2.0 with every fiber of my being. I’m friends with people who prefer personal contact and live performances to networking and recordings, and who keep LPs not just for the fidelity but for the social protocol as well.

The reason for this is as simple as it is distressing: I feel that we’re replacing a medium with new one that does not offer everything the former one did. We’re losing something. And not just the displaced jobs – else I’d be a neo-luddite – but something far more intrinsic; fundamental: We’re losing intellectualism.

I mean, sure, there’s already a lot written out there about how, with the decline of newspapers being able to afford foreign offices and investigative reporters, we’re deluged in a wave of amateurs, but that was always the case with the internet. This is a blog. This isn’t my first blog. I know the score. But perhaps I’m a skylarking idealist whose hope that the original precepts of the internet – a frank and open exchange of ideas – would be born out.

I remember in college lauding the internet for being what is essentially a printing press in every living room. The flip side to that is, when printing presses came out, what kept the presses running were not peer-reviewed periodicals and papers of record, but handbills and tawdry literature: The equivalent of “Obama is a Secret Radical Muslim” and Dan Brown potboilers.

How the concept of journalistic integrity came out of this cauldron, I don’t know, but we appear to be, with this shift in dynamics, losing it. It was inevitable, to be sure: What was the wild west of the electronic frontier would be tamed and, eventually, monetized, but short of that right now what we get is not exactly WalMart and not exactly anarchy but instead Abu Dhabi: Two or three big players with their own spurious agendas and a lotta unpaid laborers.

And in the fray we’re reading less (yet owning more “books”), not paying attention to what we read, and care not for the truth but the domination of the message. What matters is not what happened but who’s shouting loudest – in school we denigrate the Soviet Union for their reliance on propaganda to opiate the masses, but our current system of dueling propaganda isn’t exactly better.

Fox excuses itself by saying the NYTimes is a liberal rag and thus we need “balance.” Democrats lament that Republicans are pulling the debate to the right by catering to their extreme, and then turn around and suggest the solution to that is to do the same, reversed. The news is only too happy to “report” on both, which is to say they’ll take quotes ad verbatim and play on the salacious and scandalous attention rather than the veracity of the claims.

What matters is not whether a statistic quoted is correct, but how soon that statistic will become a meme before it is corrected. The Islamic Cultural Center on Park Place lost the media battle the moment Sarah Palin called it a “Ground Zero Mosque,” which it is of course neither, and only in the op ed pages do columnists report on the “error.”

Stephen Colbert reported on the “truthiness” of the current cultural zeitgeist: Nobody reads into anything, so everybody is duped by any ruse that plays to their pre- and mis-conceptions. I think the internet must take its fair share of blame, here. Rather than being the great egalitarian library – the forum (in the original sense of the term) of a new age – it’s instead done the exact opposite: Reinforced ignorance, hyperbolized public sentiment, and self-served prophecy.

We’re looking at ourselves through a funhouse mirror and calling it the world. We’ve become lumpen-sophists, in the ugliest form of the word. Perhaps we should take a step back and figure out what parts of this new electronic age really work and what clearly do not.