2009-10-31

Slow information

(Originally written as a comment at http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/10/slow-capital.html)

I am a slowblogger. I tend to know about a news later, and tend to make my opinion about it much later after the stormy initial debates have gone, when the topic has been outdated. Even at AVC.com, I find myself leaving comments days after.

But why do fast blogging/twitting dominate?

One reason is that the world is becoming more complex and moving faster, and the average shelf life of information has to become shorter. There are more and more new information, and a piece of information gets outdated after even newer information arrives. This is natural.

So, this explains all why we don't see much slow information (generation, distribution, discussion)? Probably not. There are topics that deserve longer thinking and discussing. I think the other reason must be that we made it easier and cooler for fast information.

Blogging has made information faster. With Twitter, even blogging looks slow now. Average shelf life probably being 1-2 hours vs. 1-2 days. All the marketing and journalism encourage you to join the wave. So we get rapid progress in the fast side of the information, which is good. But the other side, the slow, is left undeveloped. The fast information is likely be more popular as the world, which is the ultimate source of information speeds up, but not this much.

The ebook is showing some hope, but it has not fully utilized the advantage of the Internet. It is just substituting the tree paper with the electrononic paper, an old model using new technology. I am not saying old models are bad, but there must be other new possibilities.

More than any other areas, we need innovation for slow information.

Net Neutrality issues

(Originally written as a comment at http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/10/net-neutrality.html)

I am interested to see where this goes in the US, as Koreans tend to benchmark the US when it comes to regulation. They demonize the US ("The age of wall-street capitalism is over!") when they don't like it, and praise they like it ("Hey, even the US did it.").

There may be other issues, but it comes down to two questions to me.
1. Should the ISPs be allowed to charge differently based on network usage?
2. Should the ISPs be allowed to block certain dada (or applications)?

I think the answer to #1 is easy. Yes. The freedom to pricing is probably the most important freedom after freedom to entry (that is, to start a businss that you like). When you cannot determine how much you want to charge for your product, you are not much different from a bureaucratic government service. Plus, price regulation will distort the resource allocation. For example, it will benefit heavy loaders, whether their contents are popular or not.

#2 is a bit more tricky. My sense is that when consumers don't have alternatives than the an ISP, the regulation of not allowing blockage may be justified. But when consumers have alternatives, it should be left as a businss decision. Theoretically, there could be different ISP business models purely based on such discrimination. One hypothetical model I can think of is a child-friendly ISP, of which value proposition could be "No more worries. We block porn contents." For parents who are not techy, this could be a very good solution.

If the competitive situation differs by regions, perhaps #2 decisions could be delegated to states or below? Just an opinion.