philippe::niquille | regular niche market thoughts

I’m sort of live-blogging (never done this before..) from this lecture at the University of St.Gallen. The two professors (Urs Gasser & John Palfrey) will discuss current topics concerning law and economics on todays internet.

some excerpts ..

• Urs: 
  • “The internet is like a cake. You have the biscuit (physical layer), chocolate (logical) and cream (content)”
  • Four different modalities of regulation exist:
    • self-regulation of markets
    • law (regulation e.g. IPR)
    • social norms
    • code (such as country specific google search results)
  • I get hunders of messages a day, spam doesn’t annoy me that much, although there is student spam..
  • interoperability results in more competition and therefore more innovation; interoperability becomes key when talking about national innovation policy; however disruptive innovations theoretically have greater impact without regard to interoperability
  • cyberspace solved classic market failure of information asymmetry, but how should limited processing capacity cope with large amounts of information and how can information quality be assured (also from a regulatory perspective)
• John:
  • “ISP’s are a wonderfull place for regulation”, meaning it is the best spot for law-enforcement from an architecture point of view.
  • Talking about Spam: Why not change the paradigm of the web (the accountable web). Instead of accepting everything by design one could actually reject everything by default and rely on what trusted “friends” accept.
  • Bill Gates wasn’t able to solve the spam problem (although he was confident to have it solved by 2006) -> Gasser: he should have said one wouldn’t care so much anymore.
  • “Spam is not just about putting the Spam Kingpin to Jail”
• Eric (Student):
  • We get Robocalls (spam) in India on our cells