Now, exactly what is AOL? We all know what it was, the mass-market internet-with-training-wheels for the turn of the century. The system so easy to use that if you had fifteen bucks a month and a computer, you could get online. More importantly, you could get your mother online and not have to walk her through such complexities as having a connection, a browser, and an e-mail client, each with its own desktop icon. (Yes, I can sneer, I set my mother up with an actual Windows NT system and taught her to use it.) In 2003, AOL crested at 26.7 million subscribers, now they’re down to 3.85 million. They claim display advertising sales is their real strength, but their ad revenue fell 26% last year, when pretty much any site that actually sold ads held steady or made decent gains. (Overall industry results? Up 17% per eMarketer.)

Even AOL’s peak wasn’t really a peak, it was the slow-growing backwater of new users that wasn’t yet ready for the real internet, so isolated from the primary market that it kept growing three years after the dot.bomb implosion. That year AOL Time Warner recognized a $99 billion loss based on writing off the absurd goodwill acquired in buying AOL. Then AOL’s paid-subscription walled-garden business model cratered. Imagine Ford after the peak years of the Model T, if they hadn’t actually made other cars. (Actually, Ford wasn’t ready for the drop either, but they had Henry Ford while AOL had Steve Case. Enough said.)

Huffington, who had the sense to get almost the entire deal in cash, now has the chance to carry on with building her content-based empire. She’ll be able to pick through the bits and pieces of the current AOL, supporting the strong properties and letting the weak sisters wither away. And when the last pieces of the old AOL have no more value at all, she’ll be the one in charge when the remants are swept out. There may even be one last piece that is still called “AOL”, allowing us to see the headline I proposed.

Yes, things went all wrong in Iran, with the revolution promptly coopted by a coterie of vicious old men addled with religious fundamentalism. (I don’t care what religion it is, fundamentalism addles its adherents.) But I don’t believe that such a stance is inherent in an Islamic people breaking free from despotism. Egyptian parents know they want decent jobs, decent infrastructure, decent services, and decent education. While there are those in Islam that want nothing more than to build mind-narrowing madrassas, and every religion does need to train priests and theologians, the public knows full well that the education needed is in communications, engineering, medicine, law, and a host of other fields that allow graduates to be productive in a modern world. Government needs to keep the peace and deliver the mail. Even the Muslim Brotherhood understands this.

If I Were King, I’d take Mubarak aside and point out the obvious: Having failed to build the secure modern society that Egypt deserves, it’s time for him to walk away and let someone else pick up the challenge. I’m sure that safe transportation for Mubarek and his family is available from numerous nations. And he should make the call to turn the internet connections back on before he starts packing.

If I Were King, I’d meet with the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and make the point that although set back by three decades of oppression, Egypt needs to continue as a mature member of the international community, that the Brotherhood needs religious freedom and a voice in society proportionate to their numbers, but not religious law.

If I Were King, I’d encourage the leaders of the protesters to continue their “hug a soldier” campaign to build relationships with the military, but also to immediately attempt to get control of the looting and other criminal activity that is taking advantage of the absence of the existing police force. (Whether there is any possible rehabilitation for Mubarak’s current security forces is another matter.)

If I Were King, I’d take Dr ElBaradei aside and suggest he look into the concept of regency. As regent for two years, forswearing a permanent role in government, he could use his reputation to start the process of building a new state based on the values of the Egyptian people. He’s obviously smart enough to do more in two years than Maliki has done in Iraq.

And to all, I wish you well. A chance like this comes rarely to any society, don’t screw it up.

What I am convinced of is that there exists a huge problem in Monsanto’s approach to their Roundup-Ready GM seed, specifically the way they have defended their intellectual property. Anyone who uses any of their GM seeds is bound by contract to not save any of the crop to use as seed for the following year. While this seems fundamentally unsound, farmers have traditionally processed a portion of each year’s crop to plant the following year. In every farming community, at least one supplier has operated a seed cleaning operation to process those seeds, presumably treating them with any necessary fungicide and ensuring they were properly dried. It’s a fundamental part of historical farming, the essence of sustainability.

Monsanto is entitled to make a complete replacement of their seed a condition of their sales contracts, and farmers are entitled to sign those contracts. However, Monsanto goes well beyond this. When their crops are grown, pollen blows off those fields into the fields of farmers that have not chosen to grow GM crops, and the resulting seed inevitably contains some that contains the glyphosphate-tolerant gene. Monsanto sends agents out, takes samples, and sues farmers who attempt to plant the seeds they have grown themselves if the gene is found. They have forced hundreds of suppliers to discontinue seed cleaning operations.

Some provision should have been made so that organic-certified farmers would be protected from the encroachment, as selling their crops as “organic” becomes impossible once genes from the GM crop has contaminated it. This is regrettable, one hopes that the farmers themselves will decide to not plant the expensive Monsanto product in enough areas that untainted seed continues to be available. Monsanto should be responsible for the additional expenses needed by farmers who choose to continue with the traditional product.

The very idea of patenting a gene still causes me some difficulty, but it’s currently the law and I don’t resist it. However, the law is running exactly the wrong direction on enforcing this. If I Were King, farmers who innocently ended up with the Monsanto gene in their seed would absolutely have the right to plant it the following spring. I would be tempted to consider Monsanto’s suits against such farmers to be frivolous and malicious and order that the farmers be granted at least three times their legal expenses and lost time spent in defending themselves.

If a service provider enters the marketplace and offers to carry data using some set of resources, this has to be seen as a good thing. Not all providers will offer the same service. Wireless services will allow mobility, metro fiber carriers can allow staggering volume. No one should expect every technology or every provider to offer the same level of service. But what is absolutely essential is that each of them offer that service without regard to the actual content the end user chooses to send or request.

The concept of “reasonable network management”, which some vendors would like to think allows them to cut off any service they don’t like, is only reasonable if it means preventing some users from hogging so much bandwidth that other users suffer as a result. The concept of “paid prioritization” can never be considered reasonable.

I don’t use any mobile network access, but it’s obviously going to be important to millions of people in the years ahead. Far too important to be hamstrung by the very services that we expect to provide it. Far too important for the FCC to wash its hands of its responsibilities.

Kevin Hofman, the owner of OnSmash.com, learned of this through an early-morning phone call from one of his technicians, on Thanksgiving Day no less. According to Hofman, the “pirated” music on his site was “leaked” to him. That is to say, he didn’t go out and grab it surreptitiously, or rip commercial CDs to post on the site, this was content that the promoters of various artists wanted to have out there where fans could hear it.

Hofman asserts that he’s in thick with the hip-hop artists, invited to far more parties and concerts than he has time to attend, talking to the performers regularly on the phone. That he’s part of the music infrastructure. I absolutely believe this, from my limited contacts with the industry I know it’s exactly how the game is played. Perhaps the same principal, although much more healthy, than the cash payola of the ’50s and ’60s.

So two questions and one answer: First, if Hofman is part of the marketing engine for this sector of the music business, why was he targeted? Easy, the RIAA targeted him because he isn’t playing by their rules. Nobody, artist or fan, should give a rat’s ass what the RIAA cares about, but they have high-paid lobbyists on call as Washington City. Yes, there’s still a role for money to influence the music business.

Second, why did Hofman find out his domain had been seized from a tech? Why wasn’t he served with papers? How did it happen that anyone other than a federal judge sitting in open court made this ruling?

If I Were King, there are people at ICE that would be wondering whatever happened to their paychecks and pensions today.

It’s a battle they can’t win. Although criminal undertakings are facilitated by secure communications, the same can be said of many personal and commercial communication. If they press too hard, and the same goes for India and the Arab nations that have been leaning on Research In Motion over the secure Blackberry messaging system, they’re going to see the whole process end up out of reach. How might this come to pass? Simple: open source software solutions. The heart of secure communication is encryption, and governments have never been all that good at it. In recent years, the most secure encryption methodologies have all come from the OSS community and, in reaction to the Clinton-era attempts to block secure encryption in the US, this is almost all done outside the US. One of the few OSS projects that American programmers can’t work on is OpenBSD, developed primarily in Canada, because the lead developers fear that anything developed in the US might be compromised by government action. Security for most online transactions come from the OpenSSL Project, none of the core participants are from the US.

What would an OSS approach look like? It would look just like a standard e-mail client, only it would offer end-to-end encryption. In order to tap it, the FBI would have to have a warrant to monitor the sender or the receiver, a process about as obvious as thrusting a microphone in the faces of two people talking quietly in a dark corner of a bar. In other words, they couldn’t do it until their investigation was over. Further, the program could be made such that without the owners active cooperation, there was no readable information on the computer. Would using such a program identify a person as a terrorist? Not at in a world where business and technology secrets are sought after by those who don’t have the talent or patience to develop their own technology.

When this nation was founded, the police could get a warrant to search your premises or to arrest your person, in either case you knew of the warrant when it was invoked and it was issued by a judge as a matter of public record. The FBI feels put upon to be spending $20 million a year to “help” communication vendors comply with CALEA. They shouldn’t, they’re getting information that they have no business hearing or seeing.

If I Were King, communication would not be a matter for law enforcement, only criminal acts in the physical world would be.

Microsoft has always had generous programs to provide free or inexpensive licenses to NGOs and education. Now the company has broken new ground. According to the official Microsoft blog, because some NGOs don’t know about the available programs, as of the 23rd of last month and extending through 2011, all Microsoft software used by most NGOs in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam is immediately and retroactively licensed. That is, even if an organization pirated all their software, that software is now legal, for at least the next year, and MS is encouraging those NGOs to apply for permanent licenses on the same terms. Further, Microsoft is taking the initiative to notify officials in the affected countries.

If I Were King, I would enjoy no exemption from eating crow from time to time. Although I have never actually said that Microsoft was always evil, it would be understandable if some reached the conclusion that I felt that way. Well, I’m happy to say that they got this one right, in spades, with style. I’d tip my crown to Redmond if I had one.

He moaned about how little time he had, and I told him that’s why he had me. So he handed me a menu. Today I got a site up for him. It doesn’t look like it will probably end up looking like, we haven’t shot any pictures yet, but the menu is there. There’s some slightly sassy temp text you’ll need to look fast to see. (As far as I can tell, he hasn’t looked at the site yet, he’ll probably make me clean the odd stuff up tomorrow.)

The food is damned good, at least what we’ve eaten. We tend to alternate between the barbecue chicken and Mediterranean pizzas when Larkin and I are both eating, but I’ve had the Supreme and thought it was very tasty. I haven’t had any of the sandwiches yet, but after typing the descriptions in I’m definitely ready to try a couple of them. The Mediterranean salad is also great. I’m not saying this because he’s a client now, he’s a client now because we thought the food was good.

Chris is into the Flintstones, so the flag on the site is set in that font, and it’s also why it isn’t Madison Pizza, but Madistone Pizza. Given half a chance he’d change the street signs from Scott Road to Bedrock Lane.

There is some weakness in the article in that, as far as we can divine from the text, the “sides” aren’t balanced. Against the change are postal employees wanting to preserve current work schedules, credit card issuers and insurance companies not wanting to miss a single opportunity to send you a bill, and health care networks hoping to reduce costs by mailing prescriptions. On the other side, nameless businesses that have kept some national organizations from coming down solidly against the change with no reasons given and Netflix preferring the cut to even the smallest of rate increases. Come on, shouldn’t the writer have done a little more to flesh this out? And aren’t we all pretty used to the occasional rate increases for what is, in daily use, an excellent service?

The article quotes Andy Rendich of Netflix (Chief Service and DVD Fulfillment Officer) in support: “Big rate increases will absolutely squash business and will absolutely slow growth for a company like Netflix.” The article did make fairly clear the interests of those opposed to the cut, but let Netflix completely off the hook. A journalist has some obligation to make the issues clear: Had I been writing this piece, I would have called bullshit. (In a most dignified and regal way, of course.) Netflix’s motivation is the same as a landlord campaigning for a switch to thirteen months from twelve in the year. Their costs are absolutely tied to the number of days their shipping facilities are open, their income is absolutely tied to the passage of months. On average, this cut will reduce every operating expense the company incurs by at least 15%: wages, DVD purchases, and postage. It won’t have any affect on executive salaries or rent, but everything else is driven by the number of mail days. Are they ready to lower their subscription rates by 15%? I doubt it.

There has been a case of landlord’s benefiting from a reduction in the length of a month, but it was a one-time gain in every country when it switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. Netflix would make out like bandits every month. Until their subscribers woke up and noticed they were getting screwed.

In terms of public relations, perhaps Netflix should be all in favor of this change, being careful never to let a soul know about it. In actuality, Netflix is a major part of keeping the postal service afloat, along with eBay, as most correspondence moves to e-mail. The six-days-per-week delivery of DVDs is their primary competitive advantage over their competition. If they think that moving from physical delivery of DVDs to streaming the same content over the internet is to their advantage, I wish they’d share what they’re smoking. Their only advantage in the online-delivery arena is their pool of dedicated subscribers. Crap on those subscribers, which their support of dropping Saturday delivery does, and their days are numbered.

The Times should have done a better job of laying this out, Netflix should have been more intelligent about revealing their motivations, and Netflix really needs to think about where their interest lies. The Empress Larkin and I are satisfied Netflix patrons (standard two DVD plan), but we’re not likely to ignore changes that run counter to the royal viewing needs.