The Creative Contribution will carry its own direct benefits. These benefits will be maximized, however, if attracting attention in the non-market sphere can also lead to increased commercial revenues, when desired. In this section, we outline a number of policy measures that could contribute to a better synergy between both domains.
More open markets for cultural goods and services
The markets for cultural goods and services are presently characterized by an ex-treme degree of concentration. The large media publishing and the new Internet providers have a strong control over the distribution of works and the provision of services. We presented an overview of the degree of media concentration in the Oligopoly box on page 61.
Some of these concentrated distribution channels, in particular in digital distri-bution, are more open to offering a large set of titles for sale. However, there are worrying signs that this theoretical openness does not lead to a more diverse market because of a combination of heavy promotion over a short period, DRM that are de facto imposed by publishers on authors, and access mechanisms on platforms which disfavor intermediate popularity titles. Some of these problems will be solved with the recognition of the right to non-market sharing, but a basic competition policy could help limit others, whether by anti-trust, dominant posi-tion abuse or preventive competiposi-tion policy, such as an open standards policy.
Fair trade requirements for commercial offers
One of the positive effects of information technology and the Internet has been the emergence of fair trade offers in the content markets. In particular, some providers guarantee that a significant share of the revenues will actually go to the artists. These offers are presently confined to niches, as they are the object of an unfair competition from classical offers, who should rightly be re-branded “un-fair trade” in contents.
Minimal requirements of fairness (to authors and other contributors), taking in account the different structure of costs for digital media, are a real policy option:
they can be attained through voluntary self-regulation under the vigilant eye of the
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public, but also through incentive or normative policy. Contract law could be im-portant, for instance forbidding the common practice of deducting promotion actions from the accounts of authors and other contributors.
Strong and effective requirements for network neutrality
In the past two years, network neutrality, that is the equitable transmission of bits on all types of networks, regardless of their origin, contents, or the application and protocol used, has become the hottest policy issue in the digital environ-ment.1Governments have taken various positions. The Federal Communications Commission voiced a strong commitment to network neutrality in the US, but it has yet to be translated into effective measures, and it faces significant opposition from cable networks and mobile communications operators. European govern-ments, under intense lobbying by telecommunication companies intent on verti-cal integration with premium content publishers,2tend to tolerate discriminatory practices, with weak and ineffective guarantees of consumer information. The Google/Verizon agreement, analyzed by (Zittrain 2010), and the fuzziness of some of its clauses, show that even a company like Google, whose success is built on network neutrality in the general Internet, is prepared to accept network dis-crimination to promote its own side interests.
If demanding and effective standards of network neutrality are not adopted, new forms of gatekeepers will replace the old ones and maintain artificial scarcity despite the abundant capacity of networking. They will produce networks with which they will“canalize” the Internet, to make it function like stores with lim-ited shelves, or media with a limlim-ited editorial space. The rest of the traffic will still be there, but it will be discriminated against in terms of quality of service or even in terms of accessibility. The potential of the Internet for a diverse culture will have been lost, or at least damaged. Network neutrality may seem an abstract concept, but the lack of it will be felt in very concrete ways.
Encouraging sharing-compatible commercial services
The idea here is not to promote a specific form of business, but to maximize the compatibility between non-commercial sharing and commercial offers. It has a bearing on the detailed definition of the scope of the Creative Contribution. For instance, news media could offer their daily contents only to subscribers, but permit free sharing of archives. Journalists, or their employer (depending on laws and contracts) could then benefit from Creative Contribution rewards for this sharing. This can be seen as a reward to the service rendered to the cultural com-mons within the frame of a private for-profit organization.
Keeping advertising pollution under control
Advertising is a debated issue in the Internet world. Initially, advertising offered means to obtain revenues from delivering a limited value to many users, which is
a typical situation on the Internet. However, advertising is highly polluting. Even schemes such as AdSense, which have been designed to avoid the need to con-centrate attention on a limited set of contents (that plagues classical advertising-funded media), have a polluting effect. A blog writer using AdSense will write for two public instead of one: readers and advertisers.
One must draw lessons from those media that managed, at least for a period, to provide access to information of a reasonable quality whilst being partially financed through advertising, in particular newspapers. This fragile balance did not materialize spontaneously: it was the product of regulations (on signaling advertising), of ethical codes (of independence of the editorial contents, or bans on product placement), of internal and external counter-powers. On the Internet, technical innovations can also play a part, with ad-blocking software. All of these attempts to resist pollution by advertising are under threat, but they can be regen-erated if authors and consumers start refusing this degradation of media quality.
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10 Usage measurement for equitable rewards
We are close to our intended goal of making a reasonably complete and self-con-sistent proposal. We have one final question to tackle: can we really measure the non-market use of works precisely and reliably enough to set the basis for re-wards? Strongly divergent opinions have been expressed on this topic in the past.
Some managers of collecting societies, who were hostile to a flat-rate-based lega-lization of file sharing, initially claimed that it was impossible to measure usage, and that the system would be prone to an enormous amount of fraud.1Then, as such a system started looking increasingly likely to be implemented, others said that there was no problem at all, provided they were the ones to do it.2Finally, yet others declared that it was intrinsically unfair, since the methods would neces-sarily use statistics, while their present measures for other sources of revenues use detailed counting of every use.3This objection is ironic, since they measure only an extremely limited fraction of the use of works, compared to what we are trying to address.
These disparate arguments further motivate us to evaluate the precision which can be achieved in practice. We start by describing the structure of a possible measurement system, then detail some of its aspects and describe what it can achieve in realistic conditions. Appendix C details the underlying model support-ing our claims.