In January, Netflix expanded to 190 countries. Rather tellingly, Chief Executive Reed Hastings noted: “It will take a while to bring the catalogs together.” That’s something of an understatement. In some countries, even Netflix’s own series are absent from Netflix, due to earlier deals being cut with local cable providers. Elsewhere, to say libraries have slim pickings is putting it mildly.

For many users, this never made any odds. Prior to Netflix showing up, people used it anyway by way of VPN software. This spoofs your location, enabling you to browse and play media ‘geolocked’ to a specific country, for example the Netflix US catalogue if you’re living in the UK. When Netflix expanded, people carried on as if nothing had happened, presumably after looking at their local catalogues and wondering if tumbleweeds were about to bob across the screen.

At one point, Netflix didn’t seem to care about VPNs. Although they were technically against the company’s terms, it was perhaps pragmatic to turn a blind eye. Netflix was still getting paid, and by extension so were the companies who owned the series people were watching. Only media executives don’t see things this way. Instead, they consider people using VPNs the new ‘home tapers’, killing the industry through stopping movie and television companies making local deals. In other words, a single Netflix catalogue is bad for business, when you can in some countries carve off the good bits and sell them to a dozen individual networks, each of which charges for access.

Of late, the most common thing I’m seeing regarding Netflix is people quitting the service, on account of no longer being able to access content they were enjoying. Their alternative, almost without exception: returning to torrenting. I wonder whether movie and television execs will ever wake up to the reality of modern media distribution. Having a service available worldwide is irrelevant if the content doesn’t go with it. And if you restrict the content, people will simply stop paying.

It was recently reported that Napster co-founder Sean Parker was working on a new way to get blockbuster movies into your home on release day. According to Variety, his plan is called Screening Room, and would give you the chance to rent any movie on the day of release, albeit for a vastly inflated charge over a standard movie rental.

In the abstract, this is a fantastic idea, and one I’ve long argued in favour of. For various reasons, many people cannot easily get to a cinema. Some are housebound due to disabilities. Others have babies and young children, making escapes to the cinema some kind of long-forgotten memory.

I belong to the second group, and these days get increasingly annoyed at spoilers being repeatedly fired into my face the second a movie is released, on account of knowing I won’t get the chance to see it for months. The question is what I’d be willing to pay and do in order to avoid waiting months for a home rental release.

Unfortunately, not what Screening Room’s planning. As I noted, it seems smart in the abstract, but the details are tone-deaf. First, you’ll need yet another box to sit under the telly. Secondly, the price of $50 (which would probably be £40 in the UK) is excessive and presumably making the assumption it replaces four ‘lost’ tickets. More bizarrely, a sweetener comes in the form of two free local cinema tickets for any movie rented, despite the fact many people using this system would not be able to get to the cinema in the first place. Odd.

The whole notion of movie windowing seems ridiculous these days, and some indies at least have realised that they can make money by getting movies on to iTunes and the like simultaneously with limited runs in cinemas. I’d happily pay the price of a shiny disc (15-to–20 quid) for a rental of a blockbuster within a fortnight of cinema release, but it seems the industry still isn’t keen on budging nearly enough to make that a reality.

I recently wrote about the transient nature of modern tech writing, but something I didn’t touch on was the impact of social media. I really like Twitter. It can be an excellent way to follow publications and people whose opinions you care about. However, it is by design essentially ephemeral. Twitter is supposed to be an ongoing stream of ‘what’s now’, rather than a repository for ‘what was then’.

Of late, I’ve noticed a tendency for people to nonetheless use Twitter as a kind of microblogging service. You’ll see thoughts split across a dozen tweets, to which you might often think: Why didn’t you just write a blog post? I’ve been guilty of doing the same myself; meanwhile, this blog’s been very sporadic in terms of updates of late. Surely, any expanded thoughts would therefore be better off here.

So I’m trying something new, getting back to writing more regularly here again, but with shorter, sharper articles. I’m not sure what themes (if any) will emerge, nor even what kind of voice. But I hope any of you who are still checking in now and again will enjoy at least some of what is posted over the coming weeks and months.

Tech journalist Charles Arthur recently tweeted a link to the article Time to prosecute Apple for monopolisation. The piece essentially argues that the FTC should ” bring a monopolization case against Apple”. This, apparently, because Apple is “using its power in anticompetitive ways”, methods which are “far beyond even what Microsoft was lambasted for doing to Netscape and other emerging competitors in the now-ancient 1990s”.

This is an argument I read surprisingly often. The problem is false equivalency. Perhaps people have short memories, but Microsoft got hit in the 1990s not only because of some decidedly dodgy tactics, but because it practically owned the desktop and mobile (in the sense of notebooks) computing spaces. Apple was the main competition at the time, but its slice of the pie was tiny, and so Microsoft could strong-arm much of the industry into doing what it wanted and annihilate competition whenever it felt the need.

It would be ridiculous to argue Apple doesn’t have clout and influence. When the company enters a new market, it’s wise for the competition to respond rapidly. But to argue Apple is in any area operating a monopoly is absurd. In smartphones, even the most favourable figures have Apple with about a fifth of the market. In music sales and streaming, Apple has a big presence, but we’re not in the high-90s per cent. And although it’s accurate that Apple essentially forces all apps for iOS to go through the App Store, that’s not a monopoly position, because you can buy smartphones with other operating systems.

My first professional writing commission was for Cre@te Online, a magazine for web designers. I’d for months been feeding pithy quotes to an editor, but got made redundant from the web bit of a marketing department during a boom-and-bust cycle.

The editor sweetly immediately offered me the back page (which was typically a fun op-ed), before presumably coming to his senses and hastily asking: “You can write, can’t you?” Fortunately, I’d been penning a monthly column for a now-defunct Mac website, and so had at least a little proof I wasn’t going to file something incomprehensible, in all-caps. And in crayon.

When the issue with my column arrived, I was thrilled to see my words in print, and this kickstarted a big change in my life that has lasted to the present day. Now, the vast majority of my income comes from smashing words into shape. But the difference today is the shape is rather more malleable.

Once, I made a point of owning a copy of everything I wrote. It felt important to me to have in my hands the words I’d created. But eventually stacks of magazines built to the point there was a good chance someone would one day remark: “Yes, it’s all very sad. They found him under a pile of Internet Advisors and MacUsers.”

I switched to only keeping covers and the pages I’d written, but sooner or later even gave that up. The reasons were twofold. First, magazines were getting too expensive and I was writing for a wider range. I had no hope of getting hold of everything, and publishers became increasingly reluctant to send contributors free copies of magazines. Secondly, I more often ended up writing for the internet.

I estimate that over half of my current writing is online-first. Many pieces are written, edited, and rewritten. They become ‘word Lego’ building blocks editors use for other features. Website copy is recycled for magazines, and magazine work finds itself online. It’s sometimes hard to know what you wrote; there’s little record of changes and no sense of permanence.

In a sense, I quite like this modern fluid nature of words. That something written for a time (such as a review, or round-up of products) can be updated is like an injection of new life — a temporary reprieve before the inevitable obsolescence that eventually comes to the vast majority of writing, tech-oriented or otherwise. But a part of me does miss that set-in-stone quality of finely crafted words, and the knowledge that they would remain in that configuration forever.