I link therefore I am - and other myths of the Link Economy

Jeff Jarvis quoting his column in the Grauniad on Buzzmachine, about News International stopping blogs linking to its pages:

Linking is more than merely a function and feature of the internet. Linking is a right. The link enables fair comment. It powers the link economy that will sustain media. It is a tool for accountability. It is the keystone to free speech online.

A number of major assertions there, which if unpicked present a different picture to that assumed:

- Linking is a right: No, in reality nothing is a "right" unless it can be enforced. To enforce something requires effort, which needs resources. A right that is un-resourced is more likely to go away. The Link Economy is unresourced.

- The Link enables Fair Comment: No, you can still do fair comment without direct linking. For example, I don't have to link this post to Jeff's - I can just tell everyone on Twitter who follows me, and they can tell their friends etc etc. You could argue that those Twitter followers are also links, but they ain't a right - and Twitter allows linking as part of a business model (which, like the Link Economy, is still not making money directly) not as a Liberty International sponsored humanitarian project.

- It powers the link economy that will sustain media - Links power an Ecosystem, but that doesn't mean its a viable Economy. The whole reason that News International et al are putting up paywalls is that the Link Economy does not sustain their media costs, in fact their experience is that it drains it of cash and hands it to other people's media - mainly the search engines. The Link Economy does not sustain this blog either for example, despite it having the circulation of a fairly large "dead tree" technical magazine and lots of lovely people who link to it. What sustains this blog is the Real Economy, which subsidises my time to write it with cold, hard cash earned elsewhere. The only people making money out of the Link Economy are either writing about it and selling good old fashioned (non linkable) paper books, or purloining and aggregating other people's content without paying much (if anything) for it and then setting up low cost display Ads against it. And Google has the search Ad game just about sewn up.

- It is a tool for accountability - How so? If you write it, and I can't link to it, but I rail about it anyway (like here) to my followers, how are you less accountable? Google will tell you what I've done, Link Economy or no. Now, my post may be more popular if there are lots of links to it, so more people may read it but as I noted above, I have other channels.

- It is the key to Free Speech Online - well, no. Being able to argue about the Link Economy on this blog without any censorship or interference is the key to free speech online, regardless of whether I link or not. And I can write this blog because I can pay for a web hoster and my time with real cash etc etc

Where Jeff is right is when he tells you what links really are - a distribution mechanism:

linking is distribution; it is a benefit. That’s why I argue News Corp is a fool not to welcome, encourage and exploit links to its content. Links do not stop people from reading it; links bring readers to it.

The thing is, a distribution mechanism is not necessarily an "Economy". News International and most Newspapers have welcomed, encouraged and exploited links to their content over the last few years, but found out that not enough money flowed down those channels to make it worthwhile carrying on with. In other words, having a distribution mechanism is all very well, but if it costs more than it earns it is unaffordable. Hence the paywalls going up. They have nearly all - after several years experience - calculated that a small % of people with real money is worth more than a virtual fortune in link-whuffie volumes.

In summary then, linking is an Ecosystem. Its nice to have, but its not necessary for free speech etc etc so long as other alternatives exist, and the"Link Economy" is totally lousy at making money for everyone, except link aggregators (ie Google) and those who can sell a non copyable good via it.

Of course, no Noo Media polemic is complete without a call to the Cluetrain manifesto:

We in the media tend to view the internet in our own image. But the internet is not a medium. Instead, as Cluetrain Manifesto author Doc Searls argues, it is a place. Think of it as a public park. You may not be selectively kept out because of your association with a race, religion … or aggregator. “Linking,” says Bartlett, “is a common public amenity.”

Actually, a public park is a very good analogy here. Link Economics is like someone looking at a park and saying "gee, we can use all this space for free - isn't that cool - lets build a New Economy from this". But what you don't see is that a public park is funded by taxing the the local companies and people, for free enjoyment of the park by them as a common good. If we were to really run the Link Economy as a public park, we would tax all the users of the park to pay for its services.

But everyone except the dyed-in-the-Kool-Aid idealists really know The Link Economy is largely bankrupt, which is why they are paying lip service (to get said idealists to proselytise their services) but the real game is getting the data about your behaviour and money. So next link along the chain is that Privacy is Dead:

I fear that what is really in danger here is the doctrine of openness* on which journalism and an informed society depend. Pertinent are the arguments around Google’s Streetview, which takes pictures of buildings and the people who happen to be in front of them. Some object that these photos violate their privacy. But they are in public. What they do there is public.

I understand that people caught on Streetview might not want us to see them strolling into a drug den or brothel.

Jeff defines open-ness roughly as the public's right to access. And I totally agree with that, for public things. Like public services, public buildings, public people etc etc.

But Public Open-ness and personal privacy are two very different things. Privacy is my control of what I reveal about myself. I object to Google Streetview because I don't want every Tom, Dick or Harry peering through my front windows. People are obfuscating one issue to force entry into the other, because linking to and mining your data is where the money is. And as danah boyd noted yesterday, those Social Mediarati with real power and money embrace privacy, while removing it from the hoi polloi who use their services. If privacy is good enough for Larry, Sergei, Eric, Zuck et al but not good enough for me, then guess who the sucker is?.

But of course this is anathema and we must castigate the unbelievers - like silly old Rupert, who is just not drinking his Kool-Aid:

As Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed response to Rupert Murdoch on the value of search and aggregation, it’s up to the recipient of the link to take advantage of the relationship it creates – and Google creates 4bn such opportunities for publishers a year.

Actually, Google gets in-between those 4bn transactions a year, serves a low budget Ad, and sucks nearly all the value out of the transaction before the MediaCo even sees it. If Eric was right, Rupert would see money flowing in to his coffers, not out. But of course boring old Rupert just doesn't get it:

In the end, this fight is over control. News Corp is desperately trying to maintain its control over access to and packaging and pricing of information that now flows freely from many sources. Thanks to the internet, it is losing it – in more than one sense.

Actually, its not about Control. Its about Making Money. And if other "New Media" had worked out where Rupert was truly wrong we'd see a host of organisations rushing ahead. What the Link Economy buys you, by and large, is the Huffington Post model - a system that makes enough money to afford a few full timers and a large string of freelancers - "free" here referring to what they are being paid, more or less.

Thus, an open and public-spirited suggestion for Newspaper Editors, Media Strategists etc who are genuinely trying to turn around media company fortunes. Its just a bloody distribution channel, and its a low value one for low value media at the moment, unless you can be an aggregator of very large amounts of low value transactions.

(This is not to say that News International will win, as the major issue is getting paid for valuable content creation - its just that the Link Economy is not the path to media richness for those sort of companies as it stands)

So the next time someone pops up burbling on about how "the Link Economy" will save you if only you could embrace it, its best to de-link from them before any serious damage is done