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Free the IM 90 million The latest word on the AOL - Time Warner deal is that it might hang on the issue of Instant Messaging (IM). Here's how CNNfn puts it:
Wrong. Instant messaging isn't an arena. It's a service, like email. It happens that 90% of the IM clients in the world are AOLs, but it also happens that 100% of them can only communicate through AOL's servers. Therein lies the rub. Just about everything we know about IM has been learned on AOL clients — either AOL's own Instant Messenger (AIM) or ICQ (which AOL also owns). Both are controlled by private servers. They are not a public, nobody-owns-it service like the Web, the Net and email. IM inevitably will become part of the vast commons we call the Internet — a space nobody owns, everybody can use and anybody can improve. There is nothing in the current arguments over IM that represents this fact (I won't trivialize it by calling it a point of view). The commercial rivals of AOL that formed IMUnified cannot represent the essentially noncommerical nature of a fundamental service such as IM (or email or web service, for that matter). Today the explaining job belongs to Jabber, which is open source IM, based on XML. Jabber is to IM what Apache is to Web service and Sendmail is to email. (Disclaimer: I'm on the Jabber.com advisory board.) We cannot understand any of these services — or their successes — in strictly commercial terms. I won't explain Jabber here. Jabber.org and Jabber.com do the job well enough. Let me just add that AOL has done nothing significant to improve IM over the past several years. And why should they? they "own" the market, right? Yet the range of what can be done with IM is flat-out enormous. It's time for the FCC and other bodies concerned about IM's future to start reading those sites. AOL does not have this thing locked up, any more than they have the Net locked up. Sometimes the best hack is no hack at all Don Marti has publicly declined to eat the Secure Digital Music Initiative's bait to the hacker community. A sample:
So, if you're going to say "Hackers couldn't break our system even thought we offered a $10,000 prize," you'll be wrong. Hackers should not, and will not, offer free consulting services to an organization that is using technical means to destroy the customary balance of the interests of copyright holders and music listeners. This thing won't get solved until everybody involved cooperatively reconceives the music business around concepts of sharing rather than distribution. Simple — and complicated — as that.
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