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Jun 12 2006

A war is brewing that shows just how complicated internet rights can be. Recently, Jason Calacanis started a vocal thread on his personal weblog against Greenlight Wireless and their Skweezer Web Service. Basically Skweezer is a proxy service that compresses and formats web pages for viewing on a mobile device like a PDA or Cellphone. So who is Jason Calacanis and what's his beef with Skweezer? Mr. Calacanis is one of the founders of Weblogs Inc., a company that firmly believes that blogging can be a profitable enterprise. For the most part bloggers are the Average Joe with a voice. Companies like Weblogs Inc. and it's major competitor Gawker Media have taken bloggers under their wings and provided them with hosting, sometimes a small salary, and in the case of Weblogs Inc., a split of advertising revenue. In the world of weblogs, advertising is the best (and usually the only) source of revenues.

Before we go any further, let me take a moment to explain exactly what Skweezer is. As anyone who has tried to surf a webpage on a PDA can tell you, it's painfully slow waiting for images to load and the amount of scrolling involved can be agonizing. Skweezer is not a web browser but is a proxy service. Once a user is on Skweezer.net, they type in the address of the site they want to visit and Skweezer strips out things like images, javascript, and frames so that you're basically pulling text only. Previously Skweezer was a paid service that has recently become a free service.

So what's Mr. Calacanis's problem with Skweezer? On TheJasonCalacanisWeblog.com, Mr.Calacanis refers to Greenlight wireless as "slime" and claims that the Skweezer service hurts bloggers by stripping their ads and replacing them with Skweezer advertising. He also claims that Skweezer is republishing that information on Skeezer.net, which he claims violates fair-use. He has requested that Greenlight Wireless stop Skweezing his content and has appealed to other bloggers to do the same. You can read the full text of Mr. Calacanis's comment here. Mr. Calacanis did not reply to our request for an interview.

So what is Greenlight Wireless's response? Barnabas Kendall, the CTO of Greenlight Wireless has rebuttaled--at length--Mr. Calacanis's concerns point by point on Greenlight's own blog. I have quoted parts of the text with permission from Greenlight Wireless. As far as the claim that Greenlight is republishing content, Mr. Kendall responds: "At this point, I think a more technical discussion of what exactly Skweezer does would be helpful in understanding what's at stake. This helps to lay the groundwork for our argument that Skweezer does not republish content, but is simply a reformatting service. When a Skweezer user requests a URL to be skweezed, our requester gets the page content in its entirety. The requester tries to mimic the original device browser by passing though headers such as cookies, referrer, and user agent information. Aside from the IP address, the goal is that the request would be indistinguishable from the original request." he continues by saying "First, the Skweezer service does not interfere with a publisher's visibility of their audience, except for IP address. Publishers will serve the same HTML content traffic (and slightly less image traffic), hit for hit, which they would otherwise serve to these mobile browsers, except that these mobile browsers can actually view and experience the content. Also, nowhere does Skweezer explicitly remove advertising, unlike a pop-up blocker. Images are removed in accordance with view mode and size constraints; many advertising images remain intact."

So what about the claims that Skweezer strips advertising and replaces it with it's own? Mr. Kendall says: "The fact that text ads do not show is a by-product of JavaScript being removed, not some malicious intent to steal content. How is this different than someone browsing a site with images and JavaScript turned off? What about people with ad blocking software? How about the people who never click ads based on principle? Are they thieves? Should you block them from stealing your text? A fanatic may argue yes, they are costing you money. Finally, by not storing or caching the content at all after the page has finished loading, Skweezer functions more as a conduit or proxy and less as a destination or alternate server. Someone who visits Skweezer and thinks all the content is from Skweezer itself is delusional. Clearly, people visit their favorite sites through Skweezer, using us to read what they are unable to otherwise. For example, I cannot read French, so I use Babblefish to read Wanadoo France. I win because I can read it, and Wanadoo wins because they have a user they wouldn't have otherwise."