Chris Gulker: They've put friction back into the 'frictionless economy'

"In 1995... I used the term friction-free capitalism to describe how the internet was helping to create Adam Smith's ideal marketplace, in which buyers and sellers can easily find one another without taking much time or spending much money". So said one Bill Gates.

Well, friction is back.

Big companies, rich people, dictators. These are all guys who have historically enjoyed an advantage they didn't particularly have to work for. Or, more precisely, they didn't have to work for once they'd achieved the position of big, rich or dictator.

I'll give you it probably took a lot of work to get that way: big companies would have had to squish hundreds of smaller competitors; rich people may have had to back-stab thousands of their peers on the way up and dictators would likely have had to rob, rape and murder millions.

But once on their respective pedestals, they have an advantage. They have the advantage because of friction. Friction can be a lot of things, but basically it means you and I and all the rest of the little guys have to drag a rock up a steep hill. Our big/rich/dictatorial peers, by virtue of starting from atop their pedestals, don't have to drag the rock quite so far.

So, usually, they win. And they keep winning. And they keep getting bigger, richer and more out of the reach of the peasants. It's just easier to get things done when you have lots of money and power. From their standpoint, friction is a good thing.

Early in my career, a boss of mine confirmed that this is how the world works. The boss, William Randolph Hearst III, was then publisher of The San Francisco Examiner. Don't get me wrong, Will Hearst is a bright and engaging guy. But he's also worth something north of $400m, last I heard, and he's a realist.

Will had asked me, in 1994, to look into starting a website for the Examiner. We had a couple discussions, and Will, while a peer age-wise, was way ahead of me thinking through the business ramifications of the then-nascent Web.

Will explained that because he could afford presses, trucks and labour contracts, talented people like writers and photographers had to come to him for jobs. And since there were more people than jobs, the economics tended to work in his favour. But in the internet world "you could go out and start gulker.com", thus disintermediating the Hearst Corporation. So I did, and www.gulker.com is still there, telling my story to any who care to surf through.

And while I didn't exactly manage to put a dent in Hearst's revenues, some other online enterprises did manage to worry their competition. Most bookshops aren't too wild about Amazon, for example.

Big record companies began to have fits about Napster. Movie companies went ape over a few lines of DVD-cracking code called DeCSS. Microsoft, which initially ignored the Net, started to take umbrage at the antics of, first, Netscape, and then AOL, and then the Open Source software movement.

These were guys who, having long been in the driver's seat, began to see their advantage slip away in the "frictionless" confines of the Net. Competitors big and small could put up a web page just as big as theirs, and it might be a whole lot more interesting.

So these guys wanted their friction back. But how do you put friction back into a friction-free medium?

One good way, it seems, is to get the lawyers on it. Lawyers, I'd argue, are probably gifted with the highest friction quotient of any of the known elements in the universe. They can stop, slow, stall, immobilise or wear down just about anything.

The US Congress was lobbied into turning copyright into a weapon with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The lawyers were unleashed. So Napster got sued. Kid hackers were hauled into court. Microsoft threatened Slashdot, the "News for Nerds" site on the grounds that they couldn't cite Microsoft copyrighted materials in their criticism.

So Napster cop copyright.net was born, to harass folks who weren't following the time-honoured, friction-filled paths. One entertainment group even armed its lawyers with automated programs that simultaneously generated a threatening letter to the frictionless offender and a cut-'em-off-or-we'll-sue-you-into-submission letter to their internet service providers.

In short, corporations of many stripes have decided to wage what amounts to economic terrorism against any who dare to go the friction-free way. Classic tactics: if you can't win the battle, move to a new battleground where you can.

And tort allows you to step around inconvenient concepts, such as freedom of speech, and inconvenient institutions, such as democratically elected governments. Lawsuits take money away from rent and feeding little mouths – threatening livelihoods like a slow terrorist's bomb.

Microsoft has even begun to bash Open Source as un-American and threatening in public forums. And since Open Sourcers could be threatened with suits if they didn't tiptoe around Microsoft lawyers when answering, it looked like Microsoft had finally managed to find a way to squash Open Source the same way it was used to using its economic muscle to squash conventional competitors.

No matter that Microsoft's software, including Windows itself, uses Open Source software that is borrowed from the FreeBSD operating system, according to The Wall Street Journal.

We shouldn't benefit, but Microsoft should. That's not hypocritical: that's just the way friction is supposed to work.

cg@gulker.com