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Frank Pasquale

R.I.P., Muxtape: A Tragic Tale of Transaction Costs

A few months ago I wrote about the wonderful site Muxtape here. It was not long for this world. I’ll append below a summary of its story from its founder, Justin Ouellette; to whet your interest, here’s an interesting paragraph on fair use indeterminacy:

I talked to a lot of very smart lawyers and other people whose opinions on the matter I respected, trying to gain a consensus for Muxtape’s legality. The only consensus seemed to be that there was no consensus. I had two dozen slightly different opinions that ran the gamut from “Muxtape is 100% legal and you’re on solid ground,” to “Muxtape is a cesspool of piracy and I hope you’re ready for a hundred million dollar lawsuit and a stint at Riker’s.”

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The Google Imaginary

As the DOJ lawyers up for a potential fight with Google (possibly the last entity they consider themselves capable of suing), we’re going to be hearing a lot about “competition on the internet” in coming months. As I’ve said before, I think that’s a will-o-the-wisp, an ignis fatuus that does more to distract us than to help us understand what’s really at stake in Google’s growing domination of the web. Having already commended the work of Felix Stalder, I’ll now turn to Geert Lovink to offer us some sense of the cultural and political consequences of Google’s dominance–consequences elided by the economic focus of contemporary antitrust inquiries.

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Dominant Intermediaries’ Future: Monopoly + Responsibility

After giving testimony at a Congressional hearing on Competition on the Internet, I began to wonder–has anyone done an intellectual history tracing the origins of worries about the power of search engines and other intermediaries? Helen Nissenbaum and Lucas Introna published an extraordinarily prescient paper on “why the politics of search engines matters” at the turn of the millennium. Alejandro Diaz’s 2005 thesis Through the Google Goggles is remarkably sapient. Siva Vaidhyanathan authored a terrific cultural critique of Google Library in the Chronicle of Higher Education well before many others worried about it, and his book The Googlization of Everything is eagerly anticipated. At first their voices were only joined by a few in the academy. But now worries about intermediary power are starting to gain some critical mass, as the following items demonstrate:

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