David Isenberg posted about our Worldchanging interview. David did a great job articulating the net neutrality issue...
To simplify, I have proposed - and continue to propose - that the carriers should simply be prohibited from having any financial interest in what they're carrying. Then we could
let the carriers manage their networks without fear that they'd discriminate against traffic that competed with their interests because they would have no competing interests.
This solution, which is called Structural Separation, would guarantee and assure that any network management was for the sole purpose of congestion control, because that would be the carrier's only interest. Any bias in favor of one kind of packet or against another would be, by definition, entirely innocent. As such it could be easily remedied.
Structural Separation would make Network Neutrality simple. Enforcement of the proposition that carriers could have no financial interest in what is carried would be via audit. There would be no big fat complex rule book. There would be no government intervention in processes the government is not competent to govern. The carriers would behave, and the network would be de jure neutral. Simple.
But the political process to get from "here" to "there" would be as complex as the carriers could make it.
Worlst Telco Moments
Tim Karr posts a top ten list of 2007's worst telco moments. Big telcos are trying their best to control and monetize the Interet. They have friends in high places.
In September, departing Attorney General Alberto Gonzales filed a brief with the Federal Communications Commission, urging the agency to oppose Net Neutrality. The DOJ stated that broadband companies like AT&T should be able to erect toll booths and filter traffic -- upending the even playing field that has made the Web an unrivaled engine of democratic discourse and new ideas.
The DOJ move once again proved the point: Powerful corporate and government gatekeepers are working together to dismantle Internet freedoms and impose their will upon the Web. By moving against Net Neutrality, Gonzales was merely pulling last-minute favors for friends in high places. Soon thereafter, Free Press submitted a FOIA request to shed light on the DOJ's recent hit job against Net Neutrality and uncover whether industry lobbyists or White House politics had a hand in this unusual action. We're still waiting for a response.
Telecom and the Internet: Why?
Bob Frankston has a good point: "Putting so much effort into issues like Network Neutrality and Broadband deployment diverts us from recognizing that the Internet has nothing to do with telecom except insofar as we let telecom control our connectivity." [Link]
...our home networking keeps improving because we have no reason limit it. Perhaps this is the biggest misconception driving policy – the assumption we need to incent people to do better. In reality as long as we don’t discourage it there are too many ways to make improvements – it’s more about removing impediments (that’s the point of antitrust). Home networks are still clunky but if you remember back just ten years ago things have improved a lot.
Google (click click)
Google just acquired Doubleclick, one of the oldest Internet advertising companies. This "expands Google’s business far beyond algorithm-driven ad auctions into a relationship-based business with Web publishers and advertisers," according to The New York Times. Cornering the market, as they say.
Pirate Bay wants to buy Sealand!The folks who run the bittorrent catalog Pirate Bay have decided to buy Sealand, a man-made offshore installation, and build a new nation. They're taking donations online. [Link] Hopefully they're familiar with The Mouse that Roared.
This might be my year-end summaryI know I should be writing a year-end summary, even though I'm put off by all the top ten lists and summaries of others. It's just what people expect. A good start might be a poem in the New Yorker that came today, Blue Song by Tennessee Williams. I never met Tennessee Williams but I knew his sister in law Joyce, Dakin's Wife, who was born in my hometown and hung out with my parents. She was very pleasant... it was hard to imagine her in a Tennessee Williams play. Here's the poem:
I am tired.
I am tired of speech and of action.
If you should meet me upon the
street do not question me for
I can tell you only my name
and the name of the town I was
born in – but that is enough.
It does not matter whether tomorrow
arrives anymore. If there is
only this night and after it is
morning it will not matter now.
I am tired. I am tired of speech
and of action. In the heart of me
you will find a tiny handful of
dust. Take it and blow it out
upon the wind. Let the wind have
it and it will find its way home.
I suppose by including that poem here, I signal that I'm depressed. I suppose it's normal when you get older to start losing your enthusiasm, to wonder what it's all about, to feel a little tired and a little depressed. That's really okay.
The poem has a literary feel to it and reminds me how I once thought that I would be a successful writer. I never dreamed that I would spend so much time writing and giving it away, as I do here at Weblogsky. Then again, I was pretty innocent about life's financial demands back then. This was before I understood business and thought people could just do things.
That's a long digression – I should get to my summary. I thought at various times that I would be a writer or a film director or an attorney; each phase was driven by high hopes. Ultimately I've become an Internet professional, which means I have a career no one could envision when I was in college. I was an English major and I wanted to write – somehow I think that ideally suited me to become an Internet pro. I was fond of publishing, wanted to learn all about it. I worked for years with typographers learning about their craft, and the process of printing books. That was good preparation for web publishing, though I have to admit the web is a bit of a letdown, design-wise, after you've studied how to make books. The web doesn't let you much control over the appearance of your publication.
My year end summary is about the web. 2006 was a transitional year, it seems to me. The Internet and the web seemed to sink into the fabric of our reality more than once before, but this year it really seemed to become Important. This was the year of convergence. All media is data now, and it can be transported from one device to another with relatively little effort. The web is replacing everything. It replaces television, radio, records, newspapers, magazines, books... all those things are still around, but they've leaked onto the web, and the web is where they really exist, despite the legacy of paper and analog media devices.
Every year I give advice and help to the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Conference, part of the larger set of conferences that include music and film. Interactive was like the bastard child, small and sort of ignored by the others, until 2006. Last March it was a different conference, larger, more professional, more of a scene. More THE scene, I should say, because music and film are leaking or converging, becoming part of the interactive world. I think that was a key story in 2006, and I'm surprised that others aren't mentioning it, though Time Magazine did try to kill it with an acknowledgement ("label it, and you dispense with it.")
Another big 2006 story: people finally accepted that global warming is a very real phenomenon. Some people didn't, but most people did begin to see the problem and want to do something about it. Green thinking is more common. I think much of this can be traced to the work Bruce Sterling started in 2000 with the Viridian Design Movement. He had the right instinct: at the time environmentalism was not a compelling interest, it was boring, and too much of it was doom and gloom. Realizing that global warming was seriouis enough that it had to get into our heads and stay there, he proposed a design movement, because design movements really can transform consciousness. I helped a little by building and maintaining the Viridian Design web site, so I was in a position to gauge the movement's effect. You could see Viridian thinking grow and spread, so that people who had no idea who Bruce Sterling was and had never heard the word Viridian were influenced by it, if indirectly. We waited too long to do much about it, we're probably really screwed, but at least we're a little more conscious about it.
2006 was, in fact, a year that I tried to be more conscious of a lot of things. It was the year I realized I had grown up – you don't realize it til your life is 2/3 over. It was a year I started reading more and listening to more music, listening closely. It was the year I could finally acknowledge that I'm not a nice person (but no one else is, either, not really). It was the year that Tom Ferguson and Larry Lockard died, and each death in its own way forced me to confront something profoundly wrong in the way I'd been living. Confront and admit it, though I don't know that I changed anything. It's still good to be aware.
It was the year I realized how totally committed to the Internet I've become. I just live and breathe it. I'm not even sure why anymore, it just fits. I get how it works, and I spend my time helping other people leverage its power. I stayed with it even when there was no money in it; that's how I know I love this work. Like a good musician or mechanic, I've got it in my bones now, I have muscle memory about the Internet. I walk around in it and I don't get lost. 2006 is the year I realized I'd made my choice, though it's a choice I made fifteen years ago. I realized that the future is all present now, and this is what I'm doing.
Was Tennessee Williams really depressed when he wrote that poem? Or was he just doing what he did best?
ID WorkshopInternet Identity Workshop 2006b was December 4-6. [Link] I haven't read much on it yet, but wanted to point to the schedule, which has links to notes on various sessions. This was an unconference, documented on the fly by parti;cipants. Other links:
- Phil Windley's coverage
- Blog entries tagged iiw2006
- Blog entries tagged iiw2006b
I think the "Thrill of the Hack" (TOTH) is a key factor in the success of technologies like RSS, tagging, and XMPP and I see it making OpenID successful even as I write this blog. I don't think I'm overstating the value TOTH to say that the web wouldn't have happened without TOTH.
But TOTH doesn't just happen by itself. Its enabled by "busy developer guides", robust open source development efforts, community support, hangouts for developers and curious users, and friendly easy-to-understand IPR policies (see sec 10.2.3). All of these things take deliberate effort, and yet in isolation may not seem to have any direct value for those investing time and effort. However, I think the evidence is clear that one of the best ways to enable a new open network technology is to enable TOTH and open source development around that technology.
Gabe goes on to express his concern that "the INames community has failed to enable TOTH."
Much of the effort on inames has focused on communicating how inames are usable to end users. But we haven't enabled developers to make INames (and even XRI, which doesn't necessarily rely on the global root directories) ubiquitous and we haven't enabled developers to go beyond what we've envisioned and come up with the really killer apps.
The distributed identity framework is still clearly a work in progress.
Austin identity note: Tom Brown has edited the recording of his OpenID talk at a recent Bootstrap Web meeting.
Gravy: here's a piece I wrote years ago about how we should all have ownership of our data... a viable identity framework could be a solution to the data sharing problem.
Gone, daddyGodaddy.com seems to've dissoved into a sea of ideograms.
Moyers on net neutralityBill Moyers has written a good explanation of net neutrality. [Link]
So why "neutrality?" Because since the Internet's inception, everyone, every site, regardless of the data load, has been given equal-i.e., neutral-treatment by providers, their content transmitted at equal speed. Net neutrality advocates argue that changing this system will give unfair advantage to deep-pocketed content providers, while start-ups, small businesses, and nonprofits who can't pay the piper will be unduly punished. The telecom proponents of the tiered system insist that they need these new fees (in addition to those paid by their users) to recoup the costs of updating their networks to handle all the new data-heavy content. Many also object to the additional government regulation and involvement that would be necessary to enforce net neutrality.Should networks be public utilities?
Neutrality supporters worry that without regulation, there's no guarantee that some traffic would move over the net at all. In other words, neutrality supporters say that only with regulation would internet users be guaranteed access to whatever they want to read, listen to, or watch online, and that without regulation, large telecom companies could block or censor things they don't like without consequence.
Somebody told me once that I shouldn't mention "Internet access as public good" in debates about municipal networks because that creates a frenzy of resistance in the minds of the duopolistic telcos/cablecos and the legislators they've lobbied so successfully over the years. I can understand the resurrected Ma Bell's concern: they understand that their real value is in their networks; bad news if upstart municipalites start building their own. And this concern isn't new: when Austin, Texas tried to build it's own fibre-to-the-home network in the 1980s, telcos lobbied the Texas legislature for a law that would end the project.
In a world where network access has significant implications for economic development, public safety, education etc., there's a growing sense among smaller rural towns and cities that they'll be left even further behind than they already are if they don't have robust networks, and they're generally underserved by private providers who realize rural networks will be expensive to build and not particularly profitable.
Which brings us to Powell, Wyoming, which is building its own fiber-optic network "capable of delivering ultrafast Internet, cable TV and telephone service to virtually every household and business...."
The rise of community-backed projects has sparked debate about whether it's proper for government to compete with private enterprise, and whether broadband technology is a luxury or a virtual necessity that cities should provide, the way they do water or garbage service.
''Is it a commodity where you pay for what you use and leave it to the private sector? Or is it a utility, as important to today's lifestyle as water and electricity?'' said John Anderson, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has studied and written about the debate.
''A lot of communities feel it's in their interest to step in and offer it,'' he said.
The local telco (Qwest Communications) and cable provider (Bresnan Communications) oppose the project, of course. But more cities want to do this because they're not getting what they need from incumbent providers. And they're not going to wait around. [Link]
Kessler: No one to root for in the net neutrality debate...The more I dig into the net neutrality debate, the more I get the impression that nobody knows what the *&%$# they're talking about, and that applies to my friends on the – I almost said on the consumers' side of the debate, but how can I use the c-word when I've also been preaching the end of the consumer with Web 2.xyz, where everybody is both/neither consumer and/nor producer. But you know what I mean: there are megacorporate telcos trying to save their skins by adopting a model that's new to them, but old news to the cable television industry, which has been piping (slightly pixellated) programming over digital networks for some time now. And there are grassroots tech.activists who want to keep the Internet safe for "the rest of us," so that bloggers will have the bandwidth to share their rants and youtubers will have bandwidth to share their funniest home videos.
I was feeling out of place in all this, because I know the incumbent telcos are going to get it wrong. Their day is over, and they should take a graceful exit, embrace extinction, stop fighting for life and profit. (But they won't, human nature being what it is; they'll fight, and they won't fight fair. They won't compete on a level playing field; they'll leverage their dominance and their legislative connections to win as much as they can as long as the can.
Is legislation the answer? I hear a lot of people say that "we've lost" because we didn't get legislation to ensure something called net neutrality, but I'm not sure such a thing exists, or that it's inherently a good thing. I think we all agree that we don't want the Internet to become another form of cable television; that we want a symmetrical high speed Internet, meaning you can upload as fast as you can download. All kinds of innovation will emerge from a network like that, but existing models will probably suffer. Multimedia content will be ported all over the place, shared and also sold, but the suits that have traditionally taken most of the profits will be selling their homes and working at Walmart. I'm pretty sure they'll fight to prevent that. But I digress – I was saying we can all agree that we want the Internet to be free and open, with low barriers to entry and umpty-tons of bandwidth to spare. But "neutrality" might be stifling in its own way, and legislation is probably not the best way to "save the Internet," if we can help it. And maybe we can't, considering the power of the telco monopoly-that-wouldn't-die, but I hate to see all focus on legislation and no thinking outside that box.
Telco truthinessTimothy Karr notes that telco front "Hands Off the Internet" uses what looks like an amateur animated cartoon to argue against "government regulation of the Internet," i.e. regulations to prevent tiered service and preserve net neutrality. [Link]
Sinister vs safe web
Here's a horror story of sorts: Claire Miller, a Manhattan publishing exec, started getting "steady onslaught of unsolicited and lusty phone calls, e-mail messages and even late-night visits from strange men – typically seeking delivery on dark promises made to them online by someone, somewhere, using her name." According to Tom Zeller in the New York Times, Miller is the victim of cyberstalking, which is recently a crime. In the Times story, Parry Aftab of WiredSafety.org describes cyberstalking as "the hidden horror of the Internet." At first glance, WiredSafety.org appears to be the best kind of approach to online safety: it's chock full of information about potential online safety issues and ways to prevent and respond. There's a companion site at WiredCops.org, "a network of law enforcement officers, who specialize in cybercrime investigation, training other law enforcement officers and who assist cybercrime victims online." There's also WiredKids.org and an Internet Super Heroes site, all related to WiredSafety. What's cool about these programs is that they bring the community together to deal with bad behavior online, avoiding heavy-handed regulatory measures and restrictions.
Note about network neutralityI just posted a response to comments about the net neutrality issue following my recent post at WorldChanging.com. I'm repeating what I posted here because I think it's an important point:
The real issue here is about vision: what is the Internet for? Many of us have begun to see it as a kind of public utility equally available to all - abundantly available. Some would like to see it primarily as a conduit for content that is relatively scarce, therefore expensive. We now have an enforced, artificial scarcity of broadband service, which is why it tends to be expensive. In other countries, people are paying the equivalent of twenty bucks for service that's ten times fatter/faster.
Network operators here, especially incumbent telcos who are losing voice service to VOIP technology, want to remain profitable and to maximize their profits. If they find the most obvious way to do so is to control and constrain the Internet, they'll do it - not because they're evil people, but because their charge is to maximize profit. The two ways suggested to keep them in check are market forces and legislation. The reason legislation seems necessary is that the telcos, formerly part of a monopoly, still think like a monopoly, and use effective and expensive lobbying to stifle competiton.