Media giants face down geeks for control of internet

Multinationals get ready to target same micro-market audiences as anonymous file-sharing 'Darknet' networks with niche content.

The battle for who controls the future of content on the internet is played out, superficially, between the new media giants - Microsoft, Google, Apple - and the old - the BBC, Time Warner, the music and movie majors.

We have a revamped MSN and the runaway success of iTunes. Movie trailers have found their home on the internet. Content suddenly seems legitimate after the copyright battles of the past five years.

The real battle though is still between those who continue to believe that the internet belongs to its users and those who are accustomed to building global businesses around the information people consume.

That battle now focuses on Darknets.

A term coined by a group of Microsoft employees, Darknets will define the direction of the internet and the success or failure of the content giants competing for our attention there.

Darknets exist at the edge of the internet, comprising anonymous small groups sharing files and content, often relying on their own interpretation of copyright law, one that they believe is democratic and in tune with the original purpose of the internet.

Not only has this group not gone away, its practices, beliefs and technologies continue to exert influence over the strategies of the global giants.

Darknets began as file-sharing networks like Napster but after a number of high-profile legal challenges to Napster-like initiatives, and to illegal downloading in general, you could say the light went out. Quasi-legal and illicit content sharing now, often, takes place in the dark.

Nonetheless, the willingness of individuals and small groups to create, mix and share content offered a tantalising glimpse of a future internet.

"The major players all buy into the long-tail theory of content," explains Michiel Pelt, a research manager at telecommunications supplier Alcatel in Antwerp, Belgium. "Most content companies do," he adds, "and are looking for ways to create business out of user content."

The "long-tail" theory of content says that the days of global audiences for film, television, game or other media content, are over. In their place, people are seeking out and spending their time with content that appeals to audiences of 10, 20 or 100 people.

The long-tail theory is a new one that underlies the corporate strategies of major players not just in content industry but also in the market for network technologies that allow content distribution on a massive scale.

Alcatel is one such company and is currently working with Microsoft as well as with telcos around Europe on micro-market content initiatives.

"We're working with Telekom Austria," says Alcatel marketing expert Nora Maene as an example "to help communities develop their own video production, just to see how much people want to take this initiative."

Alcatel is using the experience to develop technologies that will vastly increase the capacity of telecommunications networks to allow users to interact with audio-visual content.

The stakes are high. New internet protocol technologies will allow every telco to roll out its own national managed internet, carrying a thousand new channels of audio-visual material over broadband networks, the majority of which will be dependent on users contributing content.

At the same time, however, big business continues to wage a legal battle against the domestic content user that abuses copyright.

The paradox is that the content majors want to capitalise on the pent-up creativity of the average person, but at the same time teach them to conduct themselves in a manner that the corporate groups approve of.

The problem is that the micro-audiences the content majors are avidly seeking are currently to be found in Darknets, the small anonymous groups that swap content and share files away from the gaze of government and big corporations.

Looking to the future of digital media, companies have one eye on Darknets as an example of what users want to do, and another on what has now been termed the Lightnet.

The Lightnet is that part of the internet where users create, mix, interact with and share their own and professional content, and still pay due respect to the content rights of creative organisations.

Companies in the content business are hoping there will be sufficient numbers who want to create their own micro-markets, pretty much as started to happen with file-sharing, but that this generation of users will behave.

Pelt argues that Darknets are in fact a part of the internet reserved for geeks. They will always exist, and they will influence the course of events, but will not be central to mainstream developments.

"Well, Bill Gates was a geek," says Dublin-born Ian Clarke, currently in Los Angeles promoting his own content-sharing initiatives. Clarke is the inspiration behind Freenet, the technology that promises an anonymous internet where users can do as they please with anybody's content.

"The internet was built by geeks," Clarke continues. "I would not want to be quick to dismiss them. The technologies that enable them now enabled the internet and did not come out of Microsoft."

Here is the contradiction though that lies behind today's fast-growing internet and internet protocol TV developments. The media and software giants building out the new content world are inspired in part by the furtive world of file sharing that they adamantly oppose.

The way forward into a higher capacity internet and into different kinds of internets (such as competing national IP networks), however, is to foster the same underlying creativity that gave us Napster and now Freenet.

As Johnny Cash admirably put it: "Because you're mine, I walk the line".

There is a very thin line between preserving the status quo and opening the floodgates.