The New York Times has (finally) unveiled details of its metered-access digital subscription system to predictably mixed reviews.

As I've said, it's not a paywall, and using that word steers you toward misunderstandings. Think of it as rate-limiting. Light usage is free; heavy usage brings a request for payment.

A paywall, by contrast, is a dumb, blunt instrument that separates content from the general public, prevents sampling, inhibits linkage and sharing, and usually is the product of an unhealthy arrogance.

There is potential in metered access without damaging the advertising revenue stream or cutting a site off from the Web.

Earlier this week Alan Mutter wrote about the Augusta Chronicle, reporting that "page views rose a nifty 5% in the three months since the Georgia newspaper installed a metered system."

No one knows how this will play out over time, but the early numbers from Augusta and other sites where this technique is being piloted should not be surprising. They're performing as designed.

There is actual science behind all of this -- not just a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but extensive modeling based on detailed frequency-of-use accounting of real website traffic.

The configurations and threshholds that you're seeing are specifically intended to leave the vast majority of visitors untouched, while focusing on the much smaller audience that already sees high value in the website and has demonstrated that through heavy, frequent usage.

The upside is worth thinking about. Gordon Crovitz was quoted by BusinessInsider.com: "We estimate the N.Y. Times should be able to generate $100 million in new revenues with this approach." That's based on a mathematical model that includes some key assumptions. The only way to discover whether those assumptions are valid is to test them in the real world.

It is possible, of course, to beat the New York Times meter, or for that matter any meter, and it's not even as hard as Cory Doctorow suggested. (Think "incognito mode.") It's also easy to read a newspaper while standing at a newsstand, or to take two copies from the dispenser in front of IHOP while paying for only one.

But so what? It's not supposed to be a bank vault, people. It's a polite request for payment. I am fairly certain that if you flush your cookies and your HTML5 local storage and disable Flash, the New York Times Website Payment Police will not track you down.

This is a matter of large numbers and is not about you.

It's also worth noting that this may not work, and that there are risks, and that the external economics could change at any time.

By targeting its heavy users, a news site also targets its best, highest-quality set of eyeballs from an advertising perspective. Advertising campaigns require repeat exposure to a message in order to be effective. Driving away repeat users would immediately undermine the site's value proposition even if gross traffic levels remained fairly strong.

And the external economy could shift. I'm fairly certain we wouldn't even be having discussions about charging for content if the economy were booming and advertisers were beating down the doors.

Earlier this week, Google's Chrome browser project announced it was dropping support for H.264 video, and immediately there was an uproar as if Google had desecrated a sacred object and posted the video on YouTube.

Most people actually have no idea what this means. A lot of people have drawn conclusions that I think are fundamentally wrong. All of this is very important to the evolution of Web media, and I'm going to try to make some sense of it.

Let's start with the word "open."

The Web has never been the best technology for conveying and displaying information on computer screens, but it has always been the most open. That openness enabled "the rest of us" to go off and create pages, sites, applications and innovations.

Nobody had to buy a license from Tim Berners-Lee to use HTML or transmit information using HTTP. Nobody had to pay Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn to use TCP/IP. Nobody had to license Javascript from Brendan Eich or pay Håkon Wium Lie to use CSS in web pages. Their contributions were free and open, and the entire world benefited.

The Internet became popular because it's owned by no one, and open to all. All of us can be creators and publishers.

If you're the guy holding a government-enforced monopoly on an idea or a method of doing something that's important to the rest of us, then of course you're happy. You might even think you're entitled to ownership and that the rest of us should pay to enforce your property rights.

But if you're the rest of us, well, open is way better. And the Web is built not on patent law and payment of royalties, but on open, freely usable, standard ways of doing things that are part of our human commonwealth.

When the makers of various tools reach formal agreement on how they can interoperate, those agreements are called standards.

Making standards is a messy, contentious process.

Sometimes they prescribe things that haven't been implemented yet. CSS2 has a lot of that.

Sometimes they chase implementations. HTML5 tries to do that, following a pattern called "pave the cowpaths." Overall, this works pretty well, messy or not.

The trouble we're about to examine arises from a case where the cowpath is not yet defined, and a bunch of bulls are having a big argument over where it should lead. At least one of the paths is known to be dangerous. None of the bulls trust each other.

Sure, we've had video on the Web for years, so why the fuss?

None of it has been defined as a Web standard. There was no way to be sure of having the right extra tools installed on your computer -- maybe RealPlayer, maybe Quicktime, maybe some goofy format-of-the-year from Microsoft or from some company you've never heard of.

While there was no video standard, there was a standard for telling a Web browser to embed an external program in a page.

Well, that's not quite right. There actually were three competing methods for doing it, a real mess, depending on which browser and platform you were targeting, but there were ways to write HTML that would at least work everywhere -- if the external program was available. Each browser maker developed its own "plug-in" architecture that made it possible for third parties to add external programs.

Those external programs might be a video player, a "virtual reality" viewer, an interactive game, a viewer for an advertisement with moving images, a Java image editor -- any number of things, so long as the browser could figure out what to do.

The trouble was, there were no actual standards. If you were a content creator, you couldn't depend on any particular technology being available.

Eventually, Adobe "won" this battle of non-standards by making its Flash-based video player technology available, free, on Windows, Macintosh, and several versions of Linux, so it could be used by a Web browser as a plug-in.

But it wasn't a standard, isn't a standard, and -- this is important to understand -- it is not built into any Web browsers. Not IE, not Safari, not Chrome, not Opera. In every case, it's an external plug-in.

Because this non-standard was at least ubiquitous, Flash video helped a couple of former PayPal employees create a company in February 2005 that was worth $1.65 billion by the end of 2006. That company was YouTube, and it made Internet video commonplace. It changed everything.

Then Apple launched the iPad, and it chose not to support Flash. All hell broke loose.

Apple's reasons aren't relevant to this discussion. The simple fact is that since Flash wasn't specified as a Web standard, Apple could, with a straight face, claim to be supporting openness by excluding the one tool that nearly everybody was using.

Apple started talking a lot about HTML5, something most people hadn't heard of. HTML5 is good. HTML5 is open. It's full of benefits for everybody.

HTML5 also is unfinished. The committee writing the HTML5 standard has agreed that a video standard would be nice, and that a <video> tag that works pretty much like an image tag would be the right way to do it, but it has declined to specify what kind of video. And that's the problem.

At one point, a free and open technology called Theora was in the spec, but that's been removed. So now we know how to write the tag, but we don't know what to render.

For years we've had an <img src="blahblahblah"> tag in various versions of the HTML standard, and yet there is no required standard for what kind of image files are supported. So why isn't image handling a train wreck?

Well, actually it was, for awhile.

Let's go back to 1994. The Web was a new thing. Early browsers like Mosaic and Viola and Cello were letting you mix images with text. What format should be used? There was a handy image format called GIF that had been developed by CompuServe. It compressed flat colors well and made tiny files, which was important in a world of slow dialup modems, so it became popular.

Then in 1995, Unisys surfaced with a previously unknown patent on the data compression technique that was used in GIF. Big trouble ensued.

That patent led to the creation of the competing, patent-free PNG format. There was some chaos around this issue for a couple of years until the Unisys patent expired. Now both formats are widely supported, along with JPEG.

There are lots of other formats that could be used. But if you're developing Web pages, you stick to these because they're the ones people use -- standards or no. (The HTML4 spec mentions them, but only as examples.)

So let's return to the present and the future of video. We'd all like to see a simple HTML5 video tag that just works, and Web browsers that can play the video without having to fire up some external program.

So the browser makers -- Microsoft (IE), Apple (Safari), Mozilla (Firefox) and Google (Chrome) are all incorporating support for the video tag.

But which formats to support?

The world of video formats is incredibly complicated. There are competing methods of encoding/decoding, compressing, coordinating images with sound (which itself can be represented in many ways), wrapping all of it in a container and then feeding it across the network.

As you might expect when there are potential fortunes to be made, there are lawyers involved. Lots of them.

In some countries, software -- methods of doing things with a computer -- can be patented. A patent isn't a copyright, which covers a specific creative expression or design. A patent covers all possible implementations.

The United States is one of those countries. There are many who believe software patents are hindering innovation, and the reason patents exist at all is to promote innovation. But software patents are a fact of life.

At the moment, there are three proposed ways of delivering video that have gained some level of support among the people who create browsers.

One is called H.264 and has the backing of Apple and Microsoft. It's already in Safari, on the Mac and on IOS. It will be in Internet Explorer 9, which is still being developed. Until the recent announcement from Google, it was included in Chrome's feature set as well.

H.264 has a problem. It's clearly covered by a big pile of patents.

This is a big problem. At least until a court says otherwise, if you make a tool that encodes video in H.264 format, you need a license. If you make a tool that decodes video in H.264, you need a license. But it's worse than that: If you encode your own video into H.264 and distribute it, you also need a license.

The cartel that controls the H.264 patents and collects royalties can fix this, but it has not done so.

It has said it will not charge royalties to content creators (that's you and me) for "Internet Video" content "that is free to end users." Originally the term of that license expired in 2015; the group recently extended the offer.

But be very careful. If you charge for your website, or if you include your video in an iPad app that is sold, or if the vague phrase "during the entire life of this License" turns out to be something different than you thought, you could find yourself in deep trouble.

This is also a big problem for anybody making free software, such as Firefox, and is why Firefox will never support H.264.

And as for Apple -- let's just keep in mind that Safari would not exist if it weren't for Linux and the KDE project, which created the open-source HTML toolkit that eventually turned into Webkit and Safari. (And Chrome, for that matter.) Free tool licenses matter, too.

So, is there an alternative? Yes and no.

Ogg Theora is a competing format that has the support of Mozilla (Firefox), Google (Chrome) and Opera browsers. It's not supported by Safari and Internet Explorer.

Theora is widely considered technically inferior to H.264, even by some of its supporters. Google is supporting it in the browser, but won't use it for YouTube.

Like H.264, it is covered by patents. The company behind them has assigned them to a foundation and they're licensed freely, in perpetuity, for all uses, commercial and noncommercial. So it's open and unencumbered. However, the team on the other side of the fence has been spreading a story that "A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other 'open source' codecs now."

The third alternative is WebM, developed by Google using patented technologies from a company it acquired. It's technically competitive with H.264 and its patents are licensed royalty-free to everyone. It's supported by Firefox 4, still in development, Opera, and many others.

There are two arguments against using WebM. I think both of them are wrong, but here they are:

WebM could violate somebody else's streaming patents and Google isn't indemnifying users. I'm not persuaded. Writing this sentence could violate somebody's patent; the USPTO hands out patents for idiotic things like swinging from side to side on a swingset, or cutting the crusts off bread. Submarine patents and patent trolls are a fact of life.

Google "controls" WebM. I don't see what "control" there is -- the specification is frozen, but the open code can be improved, subject to the creativity and persuasiveness of contributors and developers. Open tech has to start somewhere.

This isn't about trusting Google more than Microsoft and Apple. I understand a certain amount of paranoia about Google. It's spooky that they know my physical location when I'm using a wired Internet connection (but they screw up the address of the restaurant around the corner). Their data sponge soaks up everything.

And I understand completely that they're operating in their self-interest. It's not just a matter of saving money on patent licensing. It's a matter of minimizing the power held by their biggest competitors.

But in this case, Google's self-interest is also in the interest of the rest of us who create and consume content on the open Web.

I can't predict how this will end. Maybe WebM gets us there. Maybe MPEG-LA grants perpetual, genuinely free licenses for all of these usages. I really don't care.

My hope is simply to see free and open standards across the Web, including the toolkits we use to generate the Web, and consume the Web, and without regard to whether we're private citizens, small businesses or large corporations, artists or programmers or kids in high school. Open is open.

"OK open systems beat great closed systems every time." I've cited that quote (from Scott Kurnit, circa 1994-95) often, and we're now looking at yet another example: Android and the Web are winning the mobile space. Your stats may be telling you something different. They're probably wrong.

We've launched robust mobile news sites for most of our newspapers, properly integrated with our non-mobile sites, fully supporting social link-sharing and commenting. We also have some apps from a couple of different vendors. In terms of usage, the mobile sites are slaying the apps.

But until a couple of days ago, I thought Android was still trailing the iPhone. A closer look at the actual devices being used in our December stats revealed that we were being fooled in two ways:

• iPad traffic was showing up as mobile, and lumped in with the iPhone and iPod Touch. The iPad arguably is an unpocketable portable device and has more in common with a laptop than a phone. About 40 percent of what I had assumed to be iPhone traffic turned out to be not mobile traffic at all.
• Quite a bit of Android traffic was showing up as "Linux" and not "Android" in our Omniture reports. Android actually is Linux, but Linux as a category includes non-Android devices like the Amazon Kindle, the Nokia N900, a couple of older Motorola phones that have proprietary Java interfaces, and WebOS (Palm/HP).

I moved the "lost" Android numbers to the proper category. I subtracted the non-mobile iOS numbers. The picture shifted radically. In our most Android-heavy market, Android phones were actually 20 percentage points ahead of the iPhone in terms of Web traffic to our news site.

Nationally, Comscore has confirmed that Android has passed iOS in the three-month period ending in November.

The reason we should care about these things is not for the purpose of cheerleading any particular technology, but for understanding where we should focus our energies in developing mobile services. Open systems win. That's where you want to be.

If information is your product, open Web technologies are likely to be better tools for mobile services than bespoke applications anyway.

You might think an app can have slight user-interface advantages. One of my favorites is ITA Software's "OnTheFly" app, which is free for both Android and iPhone and does the best airline search I've seen anywhere. ITA's Web interface pales by comparison.

But on close examination, I think this is an implementation difference not really determined by any limits in the Web technology. As more developers get familiar with all of the capabilities of HTML5, and as more development frameworks and toolkits are evolved, you're going to see a shift away from bespoke apps.

Heavy bets on HTML5-based applications are being placed by the teams developing HP's WebOS, Blackberry, and of course Google's ChromeOS, all of which will support installable, offline-capable applications developed with Web technologies.

We all tend to forget that Steve Jobs sang the open-technology song early in the life of the iPhone. It was over a year before Apple even offered a development toolkit for creating apps. The app store didn't exist. It's common for newcomers to sing praises of open standards, then shift to closed approaches when they gain a powerful position. The investment markets often reward this, and you can see it valuations of closed-system companies like Apple and Facebook.

But those of us on the outside don't benefit from that. If you're running a media company and you're tempted to cheer for a side in this battle, the smart move is to cheer for openness.

In the wake of Clay Shirky's prediction of "widespread disruption" of syndication it's tempting to pronounce the Associated Press dead.

I've been known to go in that direction myself. But now I want to point out some reasons supporting an alternate view that the AP is positioning itself to ride out the storm. It's not a pleasant ride. The AP employees don't like it. It's not clear what's on the other side of the storm. But in many ways the AP is better off than some other journalism organizations.

The first, and most obvious, is that the AP has shed most of its revenue dependency on its member newspapers. AP's annual report doesn't specify where the revenue comes from, but most estimates say about eight out of 10 dollars in AP's revenue budget come from non-newspaper sources. Those sources include global broadcasting, commercial online customers such as Yahoo, and some you wouldn't at first imagine, such as news on the Nintendo Wii.

This revenue diversification is partially a strategic move and partially just a side effect of decisions made years ago by the newspaper companies that hold seats on the AP's board. Go forth and sell so that we may keep our assessments down, the AP was told. It did, and now it's largely self-supporting.

"Ah, but where will they get the content if the newspapers drop the AP?" you might say.

That view is flawed. The Associated Press isn't an aggregator/distributor of other people's work. Many newspaper editors desperately cling to the notion that AP gets its news from newspapers, but it's a myth. The only place you see a significant member-generated component is the state wires. They're not available to commercial clients. They're also not generating high-readership content; anybody who's done any market research knows that state news is a dead zone. The AP report is heavily dominated by staff-written Washington-based political and New York financial coverage.

This is not new. One of my early newspaper jobs in the 1970s was editing the all-wire front page of a midwestern daily newspaper. The AP was primarily staff-written then, and is primarily staff-written now. It's a creator of original content.

So you have the AP quietly shifting its mission. Once it was a network for the sharing of news among members. Then it became an independent creator of journalism distributed through its members. Now it is a creator of journalism heavily distributed through non-members, and even through its own products. The latter is a tiny part of the picture (does anybody actually use AP's mobile app?) but it's there.

This leaves us with a problem: It's changed its customer set, but it's still marketing its work largely through third parties. Shirky says that business is dead. Is he right?

Shirky didn't actually say "death of." Others did. What Shirky said was "disruption," which isn't the same thing. The new does not replace the old.

The Internet may be everywhere, but it isn't everything. We buy from Amazon.com, but we still shop at Wal-Mart. News breaks on the Internet, but people all over the world still watch broadcast and cable television, listen to radio, and read printed newspapers, magazines and books. There's still a significant market for content that gets sold to and distributed by third parties. In this market the AP has to compete with others, such as Reuters and Bloomberg. But when was it not so? The AP's future may be a difficult one, but it's not going to vanish in 2011.