Joost minds the baby: what happens to state control when technology passes them by?

Viacom - network parent of MTV, Comedy Central and Paramount Pictures - has agreed on a distribution deal with fledgling Internet television service, Joost.

Started by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, creators of Kazaa and Skype, Joost promises “infinite choice, and TV that is truly interactive.”  The revenue sharing model is attractive to media producers, and gives them the opportunity to reach an international audience directly.

Many South Africans are already users of Skype and significantly reduce their cost of Telkom, the exorbitant state telecommunications monopoly, calls.  Joost threatens to bypass the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) and their monopolistic and one-sided news service.

The gradual introduction of technologies threatens the thing that centralised, monopolised states demand:  their control of access to information and freedom of communication.

Wireless broadband communication allows for a wide range of new technologies.  Satellite-based communications are already used in lieu of local telephone exchanges across Africa.  As the price for these services comes down it gets easier and easier to use the new online services.

Joost will soon strike deals with news services like CNN and the BBC.  It makes sense for the producers since they want to sell stories – their product can be as easily disintermediated as music was when it shifted from CDs to MP3s.

A probable future will contain computers and cell phones linked together in a meshed distributed broadband network able to make calls anywhere in the world or receive any information from a range of sources.

The end of monopolisation follows.

The pity, for governments, is that by refusing to engage with the process – by indulging in maintaining their monopolies – they are left calamitously behind.  The most productive members of an entire nation can move on without physically going anywhere.  

Governments, so used to using their own monopolies to carry their message and – as the ANC has recently done with the BBC – bludgeoning their message across whether anyone wants it or not, will find that no-one is there to listen anymore.

Ignorant of conversation and the equality of dialogue they may become marginalised from the discussions their own people are having.

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