Fergus Cassidy

The Klingons

THOSE vultures I saw last week circling over Eircom, disappeared all of a sudden but have now been spotted on a nearby offshore island. The weather's probably nicer there. Taking back almost half of their original investment, and placing the telephone company in deeper debt, will turn out to be an even nice little earner courtesy of Her Majesty's tax laws.

And speaking of royalty, it's time that one of Liz's ancestors be resurrected and his powers acknowledged. These days even patron saints don't seem to be immune from the dreaded P45, so the world is badly in need of some fresh ones.

So let's hear it for the former King of England, Sweyn Canute. With a name like that he could even be an England soccer manager, but I digress. He should immediately be made Saint Canute - the patron saint of Holding Back the Future. The man proved his worthiness when he tried to hold back the sea tide almost a thousand years ago. And it looks at though plenty of businesses have already been praying to him for guidance and help.

Canute seems to have provided great succour for the world's telephone companies. Our own included. Anything they can do to block innovation and prevent threats to their existing business models, they'll do it. They are the true conservatives. Leave things as they are, no matter what.

And they aren't the only ones getting Canute's blessing and intercession on their behalf. Big players have big prayers. The global credit card money transfer system is certainly one huge player. Now with the emergence of the internet and particularly the web, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the credit card companies would be leading the innovation in online payments. Not a bit of it. Canute has seen to that.

Since the heyday of ecommerce much effort has gone into trying to devise a method where people can pay a very small amount of money for various types of digital content. Known as micropayments, the efforts to come up with something workable have so far had little or no impact.

The best effort to date involves buying a minimum (say $10) worth of 'tokens', which are then deducted as a purchase is made. Not every vendor had installed the software necessary but shelling out $10 for something considered a one-off was the real killer.

Nobody has given up completely on the micropayments idea, and one US company called BitPass launched its test version last month. The brainchild of two Stanford University doctoral candidates, the idea is based around the traditional debit card. What's new about their idea is that they claim that it makes the process much simpler for both customer and retailer. Sites can set up in less than 30 minutes with no set up costs. Buyers need only give an email address and a BitPass password.

If it works it's an improvement, but not much of one really. And that's very good news for the credit card companies and their solid business model. They charge per transaction, estimated to be at least 25c in the US. So that puts the kibosh on micropayments.

And wait for the same crap as we heard from the telephone companies when things begin to change. Mark my words, the first utterings of the credit card companies when responding to the lack of micropayment facilities will be 'there's no demand'. Eventually they'll halve the transaction fee but also halve the credit time allowed or some other give with one hand, take with the other scheme. If there's a way, they'll find it.

Never mind the millions of writers, artists, musicians, coders, teachers and many others who might be able to make some reasonable living if they could charge very small amounts of money to larger amounts of people.

One of those, a musician, in a recent comment to The New York Times on how micropayments would benefit him, said "it seems like a wonderful opportunity for someone like me who doesn't seem to have, at least according to people in the business, great commercial appeal".

And that leads inexorably to another beneficiary of the example of King Canute. Sometimes it's a toss-up to decide who shows the most belligerence and ostrich-like behaviour in the face of change - the telcos or the entertainment industry.

The latter have gone postal, so to speak, and are jumping up and down on anything and anyone who gets in the way of their profits. The latest trick being to flood the US district courts with hundreds of subpoenas for alleged copyright infringement by individuals. The objective is not so much to drag those people before the courts, but to clog up the court system so much that action has to be taken on a national level.

They've been so successful in putting the frighteners on that the consumer electronics manufacturers are capitulating to their demands. In particular the makers of digital recording systems have winced at the prospect of taking on Hollywood. One of those manufacturers, ReplayTV, has launched its latest model without two key features previously available. Out goes the ability to completely skip commercials and, of course, the ability to send recorded material over the net.

That ability to bypass commercials landed ReplayTV's previous owners in a world of trouble when they were sued by a group of movie and television studios. But their new owners are keen to please. Jim Hollingsworth, a ReplayTV executive said: "The question became, how do we make sure that consumers get to do things with their personal video recorder without abusing the rights of the copyright holders".

In reference to dropping of the two features in the new model he said: "We did this on our own. There was no coercion. We will take features out because we want to be a positive force in the industry". Ah shucks.

The threats are implicit. A senior Turner executive ranted last year that skipping commercials was akin to stealing. In case there's any doubt on the industry's views try this one from another US executive: "Like any kind of antisocial behaviour, every system tolerates some amount of it. But when it starts to overwhelm the business activity, there won't be any more business activity. That's when we have to take action".

Antisocial behaviour?!?!? Give me a break. Holding up a country's ability to modernise its telecommunications systems is antisocial. Holding back creative people's ability to eke out a living by selling at tiny amounts is antisocial. And dictating what people may watch or not watch on television is also antisocial.

Father Time and the internet is going to catch up with these corporations and their rigid business models. The more they feel threatened, the more they'll scream and shout. But who'll give a damn?

Only King Canute I'm afraid.