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Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

Do you believe the tech industry is so different with its walled gardens, proprietary software, and closed protocols built off of decades of publicly funded research and infrastructure? Why?

Is it contradictory to support an industry which does that while supporting this? Would you be for the liberation of Google's property?

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It's categorically different. The arrow is in the opposite direction. The tech industry's private siloed stacks are built on top of that public infrastructure and are an elaboration of it. Whereas the publishing industry's walled gardens are the foundation upon which public research is built.

It's the same.

Publishers are the "gateway" to science, and they have cornered that market, using publicly funded science.

Google is the "gateway" to search, built largely using publicly funded science. Facebook is the gateway to online social interaction, and is again built largely using publicly funded science. Et cetera.

The content in Google and much of it in Facebook is discoverable via those services, but exist outside of it.

Publishers are not mere discovery services - they are gatekeepers, not portals.

"built using publicly funded..." Is not the relevant direction. You'll come to absurd conclusions. A building in San Francisco is literally built using publicly funded safety science, and materials science, etc. Should we then force it to be free to access?

A building is not information, in the sense that you cannot freely copy it.

Well, things are a bit different in the US where your universities are privately funded but in many countries the publishing industry publishes research from researchers employed by state funded institutions and sells the research back to libraries in state funded institutions. So, really they're being doubly financed by the state.

There are moments in what google do where it's explicitly in the public domain. QUIC is now in IETF process. Substantial parts of IPv6 are done in IETF. Google public DNS is in IETF. I believe Google docs and sheets uses open doc standards.

There are moments which are not. I think their smarts behind ad placement logic and the ML derived stuff may be trade secret not patent. I believe their use of patents acquired through Motorola was defensive not offensive but I disliked that move.

Google exploit first mover advantage and category killer scale as much as IPR. If they used IPR as much as apple do, to defend the indefensible (slide to open for goodness sake) I'd repudiate that.

I don't entirely like Google. In this space is see them as a lesser evil than say SCO or Oracle

I think the argument is that the science building the underlying infrastructure is public and free to share. And that is a fundamental part of the reason for it reaching the size/scale that it is right now.

Publicly funded research should without reservation be free and available to all (if that's what the author chooses). I say that as someone who hopes to publish within the next 18 months. Not sure it's going to be any good, but it will be free.

The big publishers are public parasites that make money off the work of other people and through controlling information and progress. The quicker they go into the dustbin of history the better. My issue is less with the argument and more with the general sentiment.

I don't understand how we can get outraged that companies like Elsevier operate this way when it is fundamentally the same closed model that is so prevalent in tech. I don't imagine as an industry we are so self-unaware, contradictory, or (to use a less nice word) hypocritical, but the sentiment doesn't match with the actions of this industry. where does the disconnect come from?

We celebrate piracy in this thread, but if these same tactics were turned on almost any company represented on HN, it would not be seen as a virtue.

>fundamentally the same closed model prevalent in tech

They're totally different. If tech were like academic publishing, software would be developed in publicly-subsidized studios and then given, for free, to for-profit distributors. These distributors would play no significant part in the development of the software, but would happily charge the public an arm and a leg for any usage of it.

Yes. I don't buy "information wants to be free" but I do believe "the internet worked better than the others because it was open spec and free" (in no sense without cost)

That's true. ITU-T standards (eg for ATM and OSI protocols) used to be really expensive. Buy one 8 page document for 50$, realize that this is mostly a collection of references to other documents, keep buying until you have all the information. This takes a lot of time, as the documents aren't available online. Or you go to a university library with a notebook ("making a copy is strictly forbidden"). It was a system that shut out small companies.

Or you implement IETF RfCs. There's an FTP server with all standards documents. If you have just email but no Internet yet (think uucp mail or bbs), there's a service where you can request documents to be sent to you.

Nobody ever gives the full version of that quote:

"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."

Brand wasn't a naive utopian; he acutely understood the conflicts that the internet would bring about.

To save others from panicked searching, Stewart Brand still is not a naive utopian; he has not died.

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