isen.blog

Small fish, but New Zealand is a beautiful and delightfully manageable pond.

NZ Herald Story: Isenberg's Internet Nightmare, Why NZ Broadband Sucks

And here's a video of Ernie Newman and Sarah Putt, my gracious, inimitable TUANZ hosts!

Here's the text of a talk that I presented in Wellington NZ yesterday at the the TUANZ annual NZ Telecom Day conference.

Like other Americans before me, on whose shoulders I stand, I have a dream.

I have a dream that the Internet becomes so capable that I am with you as intimately as I am right now -- but without leaving my home in Cos Cob Connecticut. For starters, today's best attemot to do telepresence -- which, in my opinion is Cisco's high-end telepresence system -- this means about 20 megabits per second, guaranteed, in each direction.

I have a dream that the Internet is so capacious that Kiwis no longer feel like they're dangling at the end of a 12,000 kilometer long cable. That ADSL loses its "A" and becomes truly symmetrical -- upload speeds of 128 and 256kbit should be New Zealand's national shame. (and I'm American, so when I say "national shame" I know what I am talking about).

(I actually did the arithmetic: when you divide the one terabit of Southern Cross by 4 million kiwis, you get 250 kilobits per second per person.)

I have a dream that DSL loses its DSL too, because, DSL is all about copper. , and let's face it, fiber, the all-optical network, is the end game.

I have a dream that the Internet becomes so omnipresent and useful that we will think of the people in Accra or Caracas as "us" not "them" much as we think of the people of Auckland and Christchurch.

I have a dream that a cornucopia of new and wonderful applications, some of which we can't even imagine today, will make our lives even more satisfying and productive tomorrow.

I have a dream that one day the climate change problem, which today threatens to turn our Earth into an orbiting cinder, will be a thing of the past thanks, in part, to the Internet and trillions of smart vehicles, heaters, refrigerators, air conditioners connected to the Internet so as to mediate real-time auctions for energy, urban access and carbon credits.

I have a dream that the two billion human beings who live on less than dollar a day today will use the fiber optic cables that connect them to the rest of the world to connect them to food and water and medical care, to connect to transparent, democratic governance, to connect to customers, suppliers, markets and innovative ideas.

I have a dream that one of these two billion is already so smart as to be another Einstein, that another is so compassionate as to be another Gandhi, that another is so diplomatic as to be another Mandella . . . and that someday soon we will discover them on Technorati, leave comments on their blog, and subscribe to their flickr photo stream and their twitter tweets.

But I also have a nightmare . . .

In my nightmare, the telephone company has convinced us that it needs to know the nature of every Internet transaction, so it can -- quote-unquote -- manage -- what it calls "my pipes".

This might happen in any of several ways. Maybe it says it needs to stop terrorism, or protect the children, or serve blind and deaf people, or protect authors and performers from theft of their work. Or maybe there's a genuine emergency -- a pandemic or a nuclear attack or a 9.0 quake that wipes out San Francisco and LA at once, and causes the network we have to overload.

In my nightmare, whatever the excuse -- or the precipitating real-world event -- once the telephone company gains the ability to know which apps are generating which packets, it begins charging more for applications we value more.

In my nightmare, this becomes a form of blackmail, because if you tell, say, a bank, that there's a secure transaction service, and it doesn't use it, and there's a security breach anywhere for any reason, under US law, the bank becomes liable because by not choosing the so-called "secure service," it demonstrated that it did not take *all* the precautions that were available.

In my nightmare, once the telephone company has some applications that generate more revenues because they're subject to management -- and others that don't -- the former get all the newest, shiniest, fastest network upgrades, while the latter languish in what soon becomes Yesterday's Network.

In my nightmare, new innovations that need the newest fastest network, but don't yet have a revenue stream, are consigned to second class service. Or they're subject to lengthy engineering studies and other barriers that keep them off the market. In other words, in my nightmare, all but the most mundane innovation dies

In my nightmare, the telephone company and its henchmen log every Internet transaction that reveals what I buy, what I search for, where I am, what I'm doing, what I want to do tomorrow, what I can afford, what my medical condition is, who my heros are, and who I aspire to be. Then commercial entities use these aggregated clues to assess the surplus value of that transaction to me and charge accordingly.

In my nightmare, the post-Google search company is NOT guided by a pole star that says, "Don't be evil." The temptation to steer by a star of profit or power will be irresistible.

In my nightmare, I discover that the ruling party is monitoring my aggregated Internet activity to find out if I like its war, if I agree with its energy policy, if I've detected that its cronies are on the take, and if I accept its version of the truth.

(You Kiwis need not be smug because you've got a good ruling party. The Internet is global. Any ruling party that wants to reach out and abridge your rights threatens us all.)

In my nightmare, I break into a cold sweat because they've discovered exactly when I'll be at the record store or the supermarket or the airport. A car pulls up, and there's a man holding each of my elbows . . . "come with us, sir, just a few routine questions" . . . I step into the car, I feel a prick in my arm and the world goes dark . . . and I wake up in an orange jumpsuit in a windowless room that is completely disconnected from the Internet, from geography, from information, from law, from time, from my wife, from everything that makes me human. I break into a cold sweat, I try to scream, I struggle to wake up . . .

Then my wife is shaking me, asking "Darling are you having that Internet nightmare again?

So? Which will it be, the dream or the nightmare?
We have a choice. That the choice is now.

Now let's talk about our reality.

In our **reality**, the Internet came into being as a network of networks. It exists because we needed a network that would just deliver the bits. It arrived because DECnet wouldn't talk to HP, and Starlan would not understand ATM features like "constant bitrate", and call waiting/callerID were just a pain in the ass when we dialed an on-line service. Network specific features, even features that added value to a specific network, lost their value when networks were Inter-networked. Intelligence in the middle of the network became impossible -- the entire value creation process migrated to the edge.

So today, we have an Internet protocol that makes specific features of any proprietary subnet irrelevant. Today, the Internet delivers the bits wrapped in stone-simple Internet packets. Today, the Internet is a stupid network.

It is this property that makes the Internet the huge success -- and the daily necessity -- that it is today. It is not digitization -- else other digital networks like ATM and X.25 and GPRS would be as prevalent. It it the fact that anybody can connect into the cloud, and reach anybody or any service or any content without barriers. It is this fact -- intelligence at the edge -- that let one individual in a physics lab in Switzerland create The Web. It is this fact that let a Pez dispenser collector create eBay. It is this fact that let a couple of Stanford undergrads create Google.

I know you know all this. But it is important to re-iterate it, because the telephone companies are now proposing to change the very essence of the open Internet.

It was the open nature of the Internet -- and value creation at the edge -- that made it possible for three programmers in Estonia to invent Skype, which now threatens to disrupt the trillion-dollar-a-year global telecommunications industry.

By accident, this trillion-dollar global industry is the same industry that supplies our Internet connections. No wonder they want to radically alter the very nature of how our Internet works.

And now, suddenly, they have the technology to do it. Suddenly they have deep packet inspection that works at up to OC-48, and probably faster. Suddenly they have IMS, which would re-establish an application's dependence on underlying network services, and IP-Sphere, which would put machinery into the network to coordinate inter-carrier services. Suddenly, all around the world, telephone companies and their equipment suppliers are furiously creating machinery to put the value creation process back into the middle of the network.

They can do this because what was once an Inter Network of heterogeneous, diverse networks has become "The Internet." Beware of homogeneity. Beware of optimization. Beware of telephone companies bearing new, centralized capabilities that would manage scarce capacity.

Here's another fact that they don't want us to know: Capacity is not scarce. We have the technology -- the affordable technology -- to never be bandwidth-limited again. New Zealand has to abandon its talk about the copper loop.

Let me illustrate:

This cable has 864 fibers.

Each fiber can carry up to 160 different wavelengths, each wavelength can carry 10 Gigabits.
The technology to do this has been in the marketplace for at least five years.
This 1.6 terabit signal can go from Russell to Dunedin, (and perhaps, if you'll allow an ignorant extrapolation, even from Auckland to Sydney) without active regeneration.

How big is a gigabit? One gigabit can carry the entire conventional telephony load of a city of 100,000 people. In other words, four wavelengths on one fiber could carry New Zealand's entire conventional telephone traffic. No wonder the telephone companies are worried.

Here's another way to see this cable. If all 6.5 billion people on earth had a telephone, and if they were all off-hook, generating 64 kilobits a second, and all those conversations were routed to this cable, there would be 100 fibers still dark.

Now imagine this running down your street. Imagine that each house could have two or three fibers, more bandwidth than a telco in each house.

So I've done a back-of-the-envelope study of what it would cost for New Zealand to lose its scarcity and retain its open network.

A friend of mine is building rural fiber build for a consortium of 20 towns in rural Vermont. The largest town is 10,000 people. He figures his business case on about 12 homes per mile of road and a 50% take rate. He figures it will cost about $6000 per home. If he pays this off over 20 years, debt service is about $500 a year. OP-EX is another 5 or 6 hundred. So for 1200 a year, or $100 a month, the most rural Vermont farmer can get the full triple play -- TV, Telephone Service and screaming, uncapped 100 Megabit Symmetrical Internet service. This includes initial build, initial startup (where take rate is temporarily way below 50%), truck rolls for installation and early maintenance, TV programs, telephone interconnection, the works.

In town, it costs a lot less. I visited Lafayette LA two weeks ago. Lafayette is a city of 110,000, or about 40,000 households. They're building a municipal fiber network to every house in the city, rich and poor, black and white, for about 300 million, or about $2000 a house at a 50% take-rate. If you factor in OPEX and everything else, their cost will be about $50 a month. They plan to charge $70, for TV, telephone and 100 Mbit/s Internet.

So if you take New Zealand's 1.3 million homes, let's say that 30% are rural. That's 400,000 homes at $6000 == $2.4 Billion. The other 70%, 900,000 homes at $2000 == 1.8 Billion.

So for about $4.2 Billion, you can fiber up every house in the entire country.

But with 4 million Kiwis uploading at 100 megabits a second, Southern Cross, at 256 kbit/s per Kiwi, won't do. I guesstimate that Southern Cross cost around $1 Billion, and the technology is probably a decade old. So I'd guess that for another $2 Billion, you could get 1000 times the capacity.

There's no reason New Zealand can't build this network in five years. Japan did it. Amsterdam did it. Stockholm did it a decade ago.

Originally, when Sarah Putt asked me for a title, I told her it would be "Four Paths to Kiwi Internet Leadership."

I was going to discuss various scenarios for functional separation and local loop unbundling. But in my studies -- and in my conversations over the last day -- I've become convinced that the current policy initiatives are like "lite" cigarettes for smokers who want to quit. Objectively, smokers who switch to "lites" aren't actually improving their health, but they are admitting they have a problem, and changing their behavior. So perhaps the current policy initiatives are a way of opening the door.

Meanwhile, I've got a better guess at what the "Four Paths to Kiwi Internet Leadership" actually are --
Open Fiber,
Open Fiber,
Open Fiber,
Open Fiber.

One more thing. You should ban two words from polite conversation about future telecoms policy. Kilobit. And Copper.

Thank you!

Technorati Tags: Economics, MunicipalNetworks, MunicipalUtilities, NetworkNeutrality, NewZealand, fiberoptics, puppy, StructuralSeparation, Stupid Network, Unbundling

[Source]

Harold Feld wrote to me yesterday to let me know about an initiative he's working on.

Harold works for the Media Access Project in Washington DC. Media Access Project is organizing a much-needed initiative to bring more policy discussions to Silicon Valley. The two California events coming up look like they're going to be very worthwhile.

The first -- entitled The Future of Content and Control -- will be on May 12 at eBay HQ. It features folks from Microsoft, Skydeck and AT&T, as well as friends like Mike Godwin (now at Wikipedia) and Harold Feld (my MAP contact).

The second -- Open Access and the New Net Neutrality -- will be on June 12.

There will be a third event in this series on June 25, but it will be held in Washington DC.

For more info, see Media Access Project's events page. Or contact Brooke Rae-Hunter at MAP -- 202-454-5686 or brooke@mediaaccess.org.

Technorati Tags: Censorship, Conferences, HaroldFeld, NetworkNeutrality

Nobody's reporting this obvious juxtaposition:

Pastor John Hagee: "America is under the curse of God"
John McCain: "I'm glad to have [Hagee's endorsement]."

Pastor Jerimiah Wright: "God damn America."
Barack Obama: “I’m outraged . . . and saddened . . . I find these comments appalling."

McCain embraces his minister's outrageous comments.
Obama is outraged by his minister's outrageous comments.

Is the corporate establishment press pimping the right story?

Technorati Tags: Politics, Press

It is one thing to do basket-of-apples gedanken experiments but the real world is just a weeeeee bit more complicated. Some of my friends deny the peak oil hypothesis, aka Hubbert's Peak, even though the scientific underpinnings are clear, the confirming evidence gathers and the disconfirming evidence is nowhere in sight.

In today's New York Times, in an article entitled Oil Price Rise Fails to Open Tap, the words "peak" and "oil" are not found together, but the article is chock full of confirming evidence for peak oil, to wit:

A central reason that oil supplies are not rising much is that major producers outside the OPEC cartel, like Russia, Mexico and Norway, are showing troubling signs of sluggishness. Unlike OPEC, whose explicit goal is to regulate the supply of oil to keep prices up, these countries are the free traders of the oil market, with every incentive to produce flat-out at a time of high prices.

But for a variety of reasons, including sharply higher drilling costs and a rise of nationalistic policies that restrict foreign investment, these countries are failing to increase their output. They seem stuck at about 50 million barrels of oil a day, or 60 percent of the world’s oil supplies, with few prospects for growth.

“According to normal economic theory, and the history of oil, rising prices have two major effects,” said Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the International Energy Agency in Paris. “They reduce demand and they induce oil supplies. Not this time.”

and

At the same time, oil consumption keeps expanding. Global consumption is forecast to increase by 1.2 million barrels a day this year, to 87.2 million barrels a day, with much of the growth in demand coming from China, India and the Middle East, according to the International Energy Agency, a group that advises industrialized countries.

(expanding consumption is one leg of the peak oil hypothesis) and

“What is disturbing here is that things seem to get worse, not better,” said David Greely, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. “These high prices are not attracting meaningful new supplies.”

The outlook for oil supplies “signals a period of unprecedented scarcity,” Jeff Rubin, an analyst at CIBC World Markets, said last week. Oil prices might exceed $200 a barrel by 2012, he said, a level that would very likely mean $7-a-gallon gasoline in the United States.

Some regions are simply running out of reserves. Norway’s production has slumped by 25 percent since its peak in 2001, and in Britain, output has dropped 43 percent in eight years. Production from the giant Prudhoe Bay field in Alaska has dropped by 65 percent from its peak two decades ago.

and

“It’s a crunch,” said J. Robinson West, chairman of PFC Energy, an energy consulting firm in Washington. “The world is not running out of oil, but rather it’s running out of oil production capacity.”

(a decline in global production is the other leg of the peak oil hypothesis) and

Mexico, the second-biggest exporter to the United States, seems increasingly helpless to find new supplies to offset the collapse of its largest oil field, Cantarell. . . . Russian energy officials warned recently that the days of stunning growth that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union were over . . . Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, is completing a $50 billion plan to increase capacity to 12.5 million barrels a day, but it signaled recently that it would not go beyond that. That means Saudi Arabia could fall short of the 15 million barrels a day that most experts had expected it to produce in the long run . . . OPEC will need to pump 60 million barrels a day by 2030, up from around 36 million barrels a day today, to meet the projected growth in demand. Analysts say that without Iran and Iraq — where nearly 30 years of wars and sanctions have crippled oil production — reaching that level will be impossible.

but . . .

Not everyone is pessimistic about energy supplies. A study by the National Petroleum Council, an industry group that provides advice to the secretary of energy, concluded that the world still had plenty of petroleum resources that could be tapped.

I sure hope that the "experts" at the National Petroleum Council tell the oil producing nations where all this untapped oil is in a hurry . . .

Technorati Tags: Economics, HubbertsPeak, JunkEconomics, Oil

By permission of my friend Abell Smith, perpetrator of Fighting Words Comics.

Technorati Tags: NetworkNeutrality, Press, savetheinternet, toons

Rafael Noboa tells it like it is for a soldier coming home from Iraq . . .

You’re on that plane, and you’ve got your kit with you. You spend 18-20 hours on that plane, and all you can think is, I’m coming home. I’m coming home. I’m coming the fuck home. I’m coming home!

Then you start thinking about the kind of welcome that you’re going to get, and the things that you’re going to do. You’re going to get your party on, you’re going to buy this, you’re going to buy that (because there’s nothing to really spend your money on in Iraq, so you have a decent amount saved up, if you’re smart).

You think about the food you’re going to eat — I’m gonna eat some Chinese, some Mexican, man, I want some Taco Bell now! — you think about the beer you’re going to drink.

snip

You get off the plane, you hurry through your inprocessing at the station, and then, just like that, you’re free on a four-day pass. . . . You shower. You eat. Then, you go out.

And…and…and nothing. You head to the mall, for lack of something better to do, and you see the people milling around — and it’s like nothing ever changed. If you didn’t tell them, they wouldn’t know you’re a soldier, they wouldn’t know we’re at war, and they wouldn’t know that you just got back.

Don’t get me wrong — they’re not ungrateful. They’ll thank you, they’ll congratulate you…and then, they’ll go on their lives and you’ll go on with yours.

Except for this: the whole time you were in Ar Ramadi or Balad or Tuz Khurmatu, your platoon leader and your company commander and various VIPs were telling you that you were the only thing standing between America and the massed hordes of Osama bin Laden. We were fighting them in some godforsaken shithole in Ad Dawr because the other option was kicking their ass in Aurora or Hilliard or Prestonsburg.

snip

But none of this matters to the folks out at Nordstrom’s or JCPenney’s or Bed, Bath & Beyond. They’re just regular folks, they just want to do their thing.

You turn on the news…nothing. The very thing that was at the center of your life for a whole year…you might see it get 90 seconds in the regular news. And when I say a whole year — I mean it: I lived my life day to day. I was grateful to see the dawn — the end of my tour snuck up on my ass like a thief in the night. There’s really no way to describe the centrality of existence to someone who hasn’t been there.

Read the whole piece here. No wonder so many returning soldiers have post-traumatic psychological disorders . . .

Technorati Tags: Iraq, stories, War

"We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010."

Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, quoted here.

Technorati Tags: AT&T, Internet, QuoteOfNote, Stupidity

In 2005, Ken Di Pietro laid out the business case for rural fiber. By his conservative, reasonable assumptions, a fiber deployment to a town of 1000 homes, with a conventional triple play bundle of voice, TV and Internet connectivity for $70/mo, would pull down about $18 per user per month in profit. Today, two Moore Intervals later, the numbers only look better. If the architecture were wireless from the side of the house, it'd be even better. If we figured out how to offer Skype-like phone service and Vuze-like TV that was acceptable to Ma and Pa America, it'd be a . . . pardon the much-misused expression . . . a slam dunk.

Worth a look at Ken's numbers. Comments? Objections?

Technorati Tags: FTTH

"What Milton Friedman said was that government should not interfere. It didn’t work. We now are looking at one of the greatest real estate busts of all time. The free market is not geared to take care of the casualties, because there’s no profit motive. There’s no market incentive to deal with the unemployed or those who have lost their homes."

Allen Sinai, quoted in the New York Times, A Fresh Look at the Apostle of Free Markets, 14 April 2008.

Technorati Tags: Deregulation, Economics

[From The Falmouth Enterprise, Tuesday, April 8, 2008, p 2 & 3. No byline, but a comment on isen.blog's first Shang story by Enterprise sailboat race reporter Janet Chalmers says she wrote it. Nice job, Janet.]

[UPDATE April 10: Janet Chalmers sent me her "as written" obituary, which contains some charming descriptive language that the editors of the Enterprise cut. One paragraph in particular stands out; I've included it in square brackets below the published one -- search for Chalmers' Original. The Enterprise edits, in my opinion, make the obit significantly less interesting, and certainly reduce the way it conveys Shang's essence.]

Charles Goodwin III

Charles Goodwin III, a lifelong summer resident of Quissett and Woods Hole, died of pancreatic cancer on April 1 at his home in Baltimore, Maryland. He was 84.

Mr. Goodwin was the husband for 39 years of Charlotte Moseley Ober-Lord Goodwin.

The son of F. Lawrence Goodwin and Frances K. Goodwin, Mr. Goodwin was born December 21, 1923, in Baltimore and raised in that city’s Guilford section. He was a Gilman School graduate and earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Brown University in 1947 and a master of education from Harvard University in 1959.

A retired private school educator, he taught fifth grade at Gilman School in Baltimore from 1947 to 1957, and in 1959 was named headmaster of the Meadowbrook School in Weston. In 1969, Mr. Goodwin returned to Baltimore, where he taught fifth grade at Boys’ Latin School until retiring in 1971.

Mr. Goodwin served on a number of boards. He was a member and honorary member of the Corporation of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a commodore of the Quissett Yacht Club, a member of the Elkridge Club, Men’s Hamilton ST Club, and the Bachelor’s Cotillion.

Called Shang by his many friends, he got his nickname as a child when he asked his brother to call him Shanghai for Shanghai Charlie, a character in a radio program.

David S. Isenberg, a Woods Hole friend of Mr. Goodwin, described him perfectly in his blog on April 3, writing, “Shang was geeky and quirky, and kind of frail in a robust way, but unfailingly happy. He knew everything about flags. Everything. Not just American flags, but every kind of flag and crest and burgee and seal and pennant. Provenance, etiquette, symbology, you-name-it. He carried the Stars and Stripes at the head of the rag-tag July 4th parade in Quissett every year until last year when his pancreatic cancer had begun to weaken him.”

Mr. Goodwin grew up sailing his family’s Herreshoff 12 1/2-footer Spindrift when he spent summers in Quissett. Though he and his wife built a home on Penzance Point, Mr. Goodwin was a fixture at Quissett Harbor. In his years as commodore, he was always on the Harbor House dock to congratulate the winner when the Herrshoff racers returned to their moorings. He donated a flagpole in front of the Quissett Harbor House on which the Quissett Yacht Club burgee and the American flag fly daily during the summer. Mr. Goodwin flew the flags of all the yacht club officers during club meetings and he sponsored a contest for the creation of a Watersports flag, which has flown on Watersports day every year since.

Mr. Goodwin had a vast collection of flags. On his own flagpole he would fly a different flag every day, each marking a significant event somewhere in the world.

Mr. Goodwin was a generous supporter of many causes, often as an anonymous donor.

He was known for his wit and his great sense of humor. Intelligent and a gifted conversationalist, Mr. Goodwin could speak on any topic. Mr. Goodwin loved a party and loved dancing.

[Chalmers Original Paragraph: Mr. Goodwin was known for his wit and his great sense of humor. One thing that made him special was the fact that people felt good when they spent time with him. Intelligent and a gifted conversationalist. Mr. Goodwin could speak on any topic; old friends and strangers alike left his company feeling that this man really cared about who they were. Many lives were likely altered when Mr. Goodwin connected the dots and one friend or acquaintance was introduced to another in a mutually beneficial way. Mr. Goodwin loved a party and could dance with the best of them; leaving this life on April Fools Day was his last “wink” to his friends and family.]

A memorial service was held yesterday at 4 PM at St. Mary’s Seminary and University School of Theology and Ecumenical in Baltimore. In addition to his wife, he leaves two stepsons, Mason F. Lord Jr. of Sherman, Connecticut, and Hambleton D. Lord of Wellesley; two stepdaughters, Charlotte Lord of Reading and Rebekah L. Gardiner of Weston; a sister, Emily G. Kemp of Omaha, Nebraska; and eight step-grandchildren: Mason F. III, Alexander McK. and James E.C. Lord of Sherman, Connecticut, Helen S., Olivia M. and Julia H. Lord of Wellesley, and Charlotte P. and Samuel T. Gardiner of Weston.

Mr. Goodwin’s brother, F. Lawrence Goodwin Jr., died in 2007.

Contributions in Mr. Goodwin’s memory may be sent to Gilman School, 5407 Roland Ave., Baltimore, MD 21210, or to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA 02543.

Technorati Tags: FalmouthEnterprise, Press, RIP, Sailing, WoodsHole

There are LOTS of spinoffs from F2C this year -- press articles, chat logs, live-blog records, presentations on line, etc. You can find my collection of pointers here.

If you have, or know about, other items that should be included, please tell me.

Soon come: photos. Longer come: streams and/or movies.

Technorati Tags: F2C, F2C2008

Damian Kulash of the band OK Go, in Op-Ed in today's New York Times:

. . . When the network operators pull these stunts [violations of neutrality -- David I], there is generally widespread outrage. But outright censorship and obstruction of access are only one part of the issue, and they represent the lesser threat, in the long run. What we should worry about more is not what’s kept from us today, but what will be built (or not built) in the years to come.

We hate when things are taken from us (so we rage at censorship), but we also love to get new things. And the providers are chomping at the bit to offer them to us: new high-bandwidth treats like superfast high-definition video and quick movie downloads. They can make it sound great: newer, bigger, faster, better! But the new fast lanes they propose will be theirs to control and exploit and sell access to, without the level playing field that common carriage built into today’s network.

They won’t be blocking anything per se — we’ll never know what we’re not getting — they’ll just be leapfrogging today’s technology with a new, higher-bandwidth network where they get to be the gatekeepers and toll collectors. The superlative new video on offer will be available from (surprise, surprise) them, or companies who’ve paid them for the privilege of access to their customers . . .

Exactly. Outright censorship is way too visible for them to get away with. Creeping proactive censorship built into a new infrastructure is a MUCH harder story to tell. And a MUCH bigger danger.

And they're building it. And at first it will look exactly like legitimate network management.

Technorati Tags: Censorship, Music, NetworkNeutrality

At VON last week, Ken Camp and Cheryl Breuker did a session together that had a surprise ending for Cheryl. Ken proposed. Cheryl accepted. The ring went on the finger. All was streamed, twittered, etc., etc., Here's Cheryl's account of it.

Very cute. Congratulations Ken and Cheryl!!!

Technorati Tags: Conferences

My friend Steve Crandall blogs at tinglinde that F2C: Freedom to Connect, ". . . is simply the best conference out there on the overlap of networks, society and technology."

Who denies that non-financial signals are meaningful? I am so proud when critical, discerning friends like my work.

Technorati Tags: Conferences, F2C, F2C2008, SteveCrandall

Shang Goodwin died on April 1. I think it's a cruel April Fools joke, because as long as I'm alive, he will be too.

[I took this photo of him about two years ago. It is licensed under the same CC license as most of the rest of this blog.]

UPDATE 4/9/08 . . . this article keeps changing as I find new pictures to add. Also some of the comments from others who Shang touched are beautiful . . .

Shang's secret -- not a secret, a finely-honed skill -- Shang's craft was listening. He would ask you a question and listen with his whole brain to the answer. Then he'd ask you a deeper question. Sometimes they were very personal questions; if somebody else had asked, it'd be impolite. But Shang had such genuine curiosity that it was OK when he asked.

One day, two of Shang's other friends, John B and Carol B, and I were sitting in a restaurant on a slow night, and we consciously Shanged our waitress. We were emulating Shang, asking ourselves at every step, what would Shang ask? We tried to dig deeper, and we asked follow on questions, and we remembered the answers, and we actually learned all about her. She told us her story, right down to, "Are you going to have kids? How many do you want?" She told us, if a bit hesitatingly. We weren't as good as Shang was at it.

It is astonishingly rare to be so purely curious about somebody you're not dating or working with or have some kind of ulterior motive on. I have not Shanged anybody since then. But I don't know why. There's a cultural MYOB ethic, for sure. But, just as surely, people want to tell their story, and mostly, people's stories are fascinating -- if you get the real story. Why don't we ask more? Why don't we want to know who the people around us really are?

[This pic is of Shang and Carol Reinisch on the Quissett Yacht Club race committee boat, by permission of Carol. Please ask her about re-use.]

Shang did that with everybody he knew. And not just once. If you saw him two weeks later, or the next summer, he'd remember, and he'd ask you very specifically how it went, or what happened. And he'd listen. And he'd keep asking with disarming openness until he understood. And got the story.

Once he got my story out of me, well, it was impossible not to like him. And Shang was as open himself as he was curious. He told me all about his summers in Woods Hole and Quissett 70 or 80-some years ago. He used to wear braces and corrective shoes. One day when he was a kid, his older brother tricked him into climbing onto "the gaslight" -- a buoy in the mouth of Great Harbor that's still there -- and then the brother sailed away. Another time, his brother asked him to do a favor, and in return, he (born Charles) demanded that his brother call him Shanghai, after the hero of a book he was reading. He was never Charles again.

Shang was geeky and quirky, and kind of frail in a robust way, but unfailingly happy. He knew everything about flags. Everything. Not just American flags, but every kind of flag and crest and burgee and seal and pennant. Provenance, etiquette, symbology, you-name-it. He carried the Stars and Stripes at the head of the rag-tag July 4th parade in Quissett every year until last year, when his pancreatic cancer had begun to weaken him.

A couple of years ago, in the middle of the summer, Shang told me that he and his wife would be in New York on November 3 and would like to take me and my wife out to dinner. Sure enough, on November 3, 2006, we went to a very nice French restaurant. Shang relished every bite. He and Charlotte were charming company. Paula and I had huge fun.

One day at breakfast late last summer, at the bakery in Woods Hole with about eight other friends sitting around the table, Shang turned to me, without any context, in a low voice but in a matter-of-fact way, told me, "I'm not coming back. This cancer is all through me." Nobody else heard. I didn't know what to do. The circumstance dictated a matter of fact answer, and I tried. I caught my breath. I wanted to stand up and scream, "NO FUCKING WAY SHANG." I wound up suppressing everything. Shang turned back to the conversation as if it were just another breakfast on just another summer day. And so did I.

[I took this photo (same CC license as this blog) a few years ago at breakfast. It illustrates Shang's participatory sense of humor.]

I saw Shang one more time. Last fall I told him and Charlotte I was going to a meeting in Washington, and could I stop by and visit him in Baltimore. Of course I could. I took the train down, took a taxi to Shang and Charlotte's house.

Shang was home from the hospital between chemo treatments and in GREAT spirits. He was wearing a beautiful green shirt, a loud bow tie, and Bermuda shorts with a urine bag and catheter peaking out from one leg of the shorts -- the outfit looked very stylish on him.

He was just as "all there" as ever, and we talked about everybody in Woods Hole and what we were all doing. He has a realistic view of his own condition. He said he wanted to, "beat the bell curve." The chemo actually did seem to be shrinking the tumors.

He described his doctors at Johns Hopkins in detail. He thought they were the best. My guess is he had discovered his doctors' hobbies, what kind of music and art they liked, their wives' names and what they did, their kids and how old they were and what they liked to do. And when they decided to become a doctor, why they decided to become a doctor, what their parents did and whether they were doctors, how they experienced medical school, etc., etc., etc.

At that point, he was hoping he would get to Woods Hole one more time, but I don't think he ever made it back. I left him sitting on the couch with a giant toothy smile plastered all over his face. And that huge, loud bow tie. That's how I want to remember him. Charlotte drove me back to the train station. On the way she said she couldn't imagine a better patient. He was unfailingly happy.

I just Googled for Shang's obit, but it's not there yet. It will be. Meanwhile, just this, from the Baltimore Sun via a Woods Hole friend:

GOODWIN , Charles On April 1, 2008, CHARLES GOODWIN; beloved husband of Charlotte Ober Goodwin. Survived by four step-children, Acha Lord, Mason F. Lord, Jr., Hambleton D. Lord and Rebekah L. Gardiner. Also survived by four granddaughters, four grandsons and one sister Emily G. Kemp of Nebraska. A Memorial Mass will be held at St. Mary's Seminary, 5400 Roland Avenue on Monday, April 7, at 4 p.m. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be sent to Gilman School, 5407 Roland Avenue, Balto, MD 21210 or to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA 02543. Arrangements by family owned Henry w. Jenkins & Sons Funeral Home.

Goodbye Shang. I'll never ever forget you.

Technorati Tags: Friends, RIP, WoodsHole

Here are my opening remarks at F2C: Freedom to Connect yesterday:
-----------

Welcome to F2C: Freedom to Connect

I am honored to be among so many remarkable people. We have to be remarkable people, because we have a hell of a job to do. The Internet has been given to us. It is a miraculous gift, and a boon to our lives . . . at least in part because it accidentally matured outside the purview of profit and loss. Now the money has arrived. If you want to see what happens when the money arrives, look at Nigeria or Venezuela or Russia or Iraq.

I challenge you to expand the discussion over the next two days. Our planet is in danger of becoming hostile to life. I'm not talking about the flooding of Miami and New York and Bangladesh. I mean that because of the carbon we humans put in the air, Earth could become Venus, a place where life can't live. So I believe -- and I put this forward as a hypothesis -- I believe that we can use the Internet to conserve more atmospheric carbon than its infrastructure generates. Furthermore, I believe we can use the Internet for global participation that transcends tribalism and nationalism to end war . . . for discussion!

We're a remarkable group. We've come from Japan and New Zealand and the Netherlands, from England and Canada and California. We're from 23 states, and two provinces.

We're innovators and activists, academics, investors, lobbyists, lawyers, regulators, reporters, builders of networks and a man of the cloth. Among us is a Son who brought his Father to Freedom to Connect, and a Mother who brought her Daughter. This is good -- saving the Internet *should* be a family affair.

Some of us are here because they don't think the Internet needs saving . . . or if it does, it needs saving from people like me, who are dissatisfied with what the telcos and the cablecos and the Bush-Martin FCC have been doing. I welcome them, because too often we only talk with our friends. I honor Richard and Scott and John and Brett for having the courage to be here. I have no illusions that anybodys minds will change, but I look forward to their contributions to the discussion, and perhaps to some degree of mutual understanding.

The story we will tell in the next two days is not widely told.
It is a story of telephone companies and cable companies, and the disruptive power of the Internet.

It is a story many of us wrote. Some of us wrote it in networks strung across neighborhoods and nations. Some of us wrote it in blogs. Some of us wrote it in C code. Some of us wrote it in The Federal Register. Some of us wrote it in a checkbook. Some of us wrote it in wrinkles on our faces and hands.

It is a story we will not find in the mainstream media, because it would be the story of their own Internet-wrought disruption . . . or even destruction.

It is a story of A Telephone Company that I loved, and hated, and worked for, and tried to save, called AT&T. That AT&T doesn't exist anymore. AT&T created the digital switch, but failed to understand that when digital switching matured, it would make AT&T's business obsolete.

It is the story of a Goliath composed of a thousand Davids. I am one of them. AT&T shaped me. It made me who I am today. Like Barack Obama, I'm of mixed heritage . . . half BellHead, half NetHead.

AT&T had other Davids too, who not only invented the digital switch, but also the transistor, stereo recording, photovoltaics, Information Theory, digital signal processing, C, Unix, DSL and the Cable Modem.

It is also a story of managers who didn't understand technology so they sent consultants to Bell Labs rather risk displaying their ignorance in a personal visit.

It is the story of a corporate culture so deeply rooted
that its assumptions were not only un-questioned
-- they were unquestionable.

It is a story of a system that couldn't possibly be merit-based, because managers had to rise through eighteen layers of management in a 20-some-year career. It is the story of an AT&T CEO that said the Internet was a toy. It is the story of an executive who drove AT&T's computer business into failure, then he presided over AT&T's NCR's failure, and then he was promoted again. It is the story of a failed credit card business, a failed cable business, millions of dollars of failed Silicon Valley partnerships, and a cell phone division that would have failed over and over if it had not been tied to such a large mother ship.

It is a story of a telephone company called Qwest, that built a transcontinental fiber-optic network of unprecedented capacity, and then sold twelve fibers to create competition so capable that the competitor almost put Qwest out of business.

It is a story of hundreds of facilities based competitors that were created with the stroke of a President's pen in 1996, and then -- just a few years later -- these same companies were put out of business by a million tiny pen strokes by the Courts and the FCC .

It is a story of a nation that passed a law mandating competition as a substitute for regulation, and then competition was destroyed.

It is the story of the rise of a neo-conservative economics that correctly notices the market-signalling power of money, but mistakenly denies that non-financial signals are meaningful. By this mistake, the Neo-Econs reject an 800 year old principle of common law that when you offer public services, you have public duties.

It is a story of people struggling to be free. When every major record label abandons DRM, this is a victory! When when one third of iPhones are unlocked, this is a victory. When Verizon Wireless says it will accept any device, this is a victory. When Comcast abandons network management by packet forgery, this is a victory. The Neo-Econs say these are responses to market forces, but they're WRONG. These are victories -- our victories!

The struggle to keep the Internet free is just like the struggle to have our vote count, just like the struggle to control the size of our family, just like the struggle to work a 40 hour week, and just like the struggle to end stupid wars. We win, AND can't stop fighting. Nobody's going to say, "Hey have some more rights." If we want a free Internet, we have to take it!

The story we will tell in the next two days is the story of the future of the Internet.
It is an unfinished story. We are writing it. But we do not know how it will end.

But let me show you some technology that illustrates what is possibile.
*** SHOW FIBER CABLES***

This cable has 864 fibers.

Each fiber carry 160 different wavelengths, each wavelength can carry 10 Gigabits.
The technology to do this has been in the marketplace for at least five years.
This 1.6 terabit signal can go from Washington DC to Chicago without active regeneration.

How big is a gigabit? One gigabit can carry the entire conventional telephony load of a city of 100,000 people. So one fiber can carry 1600 Gbits, or 160 million people -- two or three fibers would carry the conventional telephony of the entire United States.

Here's another way to see this cable. If all 6.5 billion people on earth had a telephone, and if they were all off-hook, generating 64 kilobits a second, and all those conversations were routd to this cable, there would be 100 fibers still dark.

Now imagine this running down your street. Imagine that each house could have two or three fibers, more bandwidth than a telco in each house.

In other words, the problem is completely mis-framed. Comcast and Verizon -- and even Net Neutrality Advocates -- are are talking how to manage scarcity. We should be talking about how to achieve abundance.

But -- and there is a big but here -- All of this transmission capacity takes energy. And this is a problem. Global computing and communictions uses as much energy as the airline industry. We Netheads have a social duty to reduce the energy our infrastructure uses. I believe that we can go much further -- I think we can use the Internet to manage energy, to cut traffic congestion, to reduce travel, to actually conserve more energy than we use. We'll devote almost all of Tuesday afternoon to discussing this hypothesis . . .

How will the Internet story end?

Will a few of the smartest telephone companies, such as BT and Verizon who have the wisdom and foresight and courage to sponsor Freedom to Connect, evolve to be the abundant Internet access providers of tomorrow?

Or will the biggest telcos corporatize and homogenize the Internet in the image of Clear Channel?
Will they lock it down so that personal expression and innovation are driven into an isolated ghetto accessible to only a small minority, where people must devote their lives, like monks, to gain its benefits? Will an oppressive government make the Internet so invasive that nobody creative goes there anymore?

Or will new entities, maybe cities or non-profits,
but maybe new, Benkler-style forms of organization made possible by the Internet itself,
arise to build and operate the infrastructure we must have.

Or will other countries, such as Japan and the Netherlands, or maybe China or Brazil, show the way, assuming the United States is capable of seeing what they put in front of our collective face?

Welcome to Freedom to Connect. I can't wait to see how the story of the Future of the Internet evolves over the next two days!!!

But before we begin, I would like to thank our courageous and foresighted sponsors:
Google
BT
Verizon
Magic Jack
The Sunlight Foundation

Also, thanks to our organizational partners
OneWebDay
NATOA
The New America Foundation
The Mozilla Foundation

Thanks to our tech support sponsors:
Atlantech Online
37 Signals
The Berkman Center for Internet and Society

Technorati Tags: AT&T, BellLabs, Comcast, Conferences, DavidIsenberg, End-to-End, F2C, F2C2008, Freedom, GlobalWarming, HowardLevy, Infrastructure, Innovation, IntelligentNetwork, JunkEconomics, MainStreamMedia, Nethead, NetworkNeutrality, Organizational Culture, Press, Rant, savetheinternet, ScenarioPlanning, SusanCrawford, Sustainability, YochaiBenkler

I can't believe I have not blogged for a week! There's so much to blog about too, but I've been busy as a one-armed paper-hanger making F2C: Freedom to Connect happen!

Here, for bookmark purposes, are a few items off the top of my head:

The Verizon Open Development Forum, which I attended, was substantially different than I thought it would be, a lot more Henry Chesbrough than Tim Wu. This is not necessarily good, but not necessarily evil either.

The 700 MHz auctions ended, winners announced, same-old same-old.

Comcast recanted! It is trying to manage its network in non-app-specific ways. Yay? Or yeah, right?

Pulvermedia, my one-time partner in F2C, is rumored to be near demise.

There was a great story in the WashPost about Ben Scott, the spark plug of Free Press's Network Neutrality engine.

I'm certainly forgetting several other bloggables . . . Meanwhile, on the F2C Front:

New speakers include Obama Tech Consultant Alec Ross, Vermont FTTH guru Tim Nulty and PublicKnowledge co-founder Gigi Sohn.

Last minute cancellations include, Jonas Birgersson, Tom Evslin and Andrew Rasiej. I'm disappointed . . . I understand that real life sometimes intervenes, but each F2C speaker seems to me a bit like a family member -- it hurts when I lose 'em.

F2C has a new logo -- see the upper left of this post! It works nicely on this year's t-shirts!

F2C will be webcast and there will be a chat-in feature. You can join us even if you can't be there. See http://freedom-to-connect.net for details

See you at F2C on Monday!

Technorati Tags: Comcast, F2C, F2C2008, FreePress, NetworkNeutrality, PublicKnowledge, Verizon

"The auction . . . failed to produce a much-needed competitor to the phone and cable giants. Since Verizon -- winner of the C Block -- is already a dominant provider of DSL, the prospect of a genuine third pipe competitor in the wireless world is now slim to none."

Ben Scott, policy director, Free Press, quoted here.

Technorati Tags: Competition, FreePress, BenScott, QuoteOfNote, Verizon

[This article, originally written on January 15, appears in VON Magazine, March/April 2008, p. 48 -- David I]

Ten Internet Talking Points for the Next U.S. President
by David S. Isenberg

By the time you read this the race for U.S. President will be more defined than it is as I write it. But Internet policy issues will not change as fast. Here are ten talking points on Internet policy for the next president, no matter who he or she is, no matter what party.

1. Critical Infrastructure: Today's Internet is every bit as important as roads, electricity and clean water for commerce and economic growth. If all sectors of the United States economy are to grow as they did in the 1990s, we must have a world class Internet infrastructure, beginning with fiber to every home, supplemented with spectrum governed according to today's technology, not the technology of 1927.

2. Direct Democracy: Today's Internet is a platform for vigorous discussion of issues that once were available only via broadcast networks and newspapers. Because today's Internet is key not only to an informed electorate, but also to unprecedented citizen participation, it holds the potential to revitalize U.S. democracy and, in so doing, to restore the moral regard the United States once commanded among nations.

3. Freedom: Today's Internet holds a threat of surveillance, suppression and "total information awareness." We must be vigilant to ensure that the Internet supports the freedoms guaranteed by our Bill of Rights rather than undermines them.

4. Innovation: The Internet's succeeds at nurturing new ideas because it carries information without regard for the origin, destination, form, content or meaning of the information it carries. This keeps barriers to innovation low, so new ventures like Google, Amazon and eBay can be discovered and grow. Companies that provide Internet access and transport must preserve this essential property; they must not impede or privilege packets based on what is in those packets, where they came from or where they're going.

5. Leadership: The United States invented the Internet. But today the U.S. is somewhere between 15th and 25th most wired nation, down from #3 in 2000. President Bush pledged to bring universal, affordable broadband to all Americans by 2007, yet today many Americans don't have broadband, or can't afford it. Competition has shrunk to three giantcompanies, AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, and a handful of smaller ones. This is not acceptable; we need real competition or policy that enforces public duty when market power is great.

6. National Broadband Policy: The United States is the only developed nation today without a national broadband policy that ensures state-of-the-art Internet access for all citizens in their homes, places of business, schools, hospitals, libraries and on the go. Other nations have shown the way; we must learn from them.

7. Patents and Copyrights: The Internet changes how Intellectual Property is used. The rights of information owners must be protected, but not at the expense of the public's rights to know and the people's rights to create culture. The United States needs intellectual property law reform to harmonize it with today's technological advances.

8. Malware: Spam, viruses and spyware are growing problems, but they need not be! It should be a crime to install software on a computer without the informed consent of its owner. The polluters of the Internet must be tracked down and brought to justice. Technology exists to do this but there have been only a few prosecutions. Existing law should be enforced so the threat of jail is real.

9. Internet Crime: The Internet is a place where fraud, child abuse and exploitation, and other already-criminal activities occur. Criminals perpetrating these crimes should not get a free pass just because their crimes occur in cyberspace. They should be prosecuted. Our police and prosecutors should have sufficient technology expertise to track and prosecute criminals in cyberspace.

10. Rebuild Network Research: Bell Labs used to be a national treasure, spinning off such ideas as the laser, the transistor, and the digital signal processor, which are the heart of today's Internet technology. Now that Bell Labs has shrunk to be a mere development arm of Alcatel- Lucent, the United States must rebuild its network research capabilities. We should invest ten billion dollars over ten years in a National Institute of Network Research modeled on the National Institutes of Health so the U.S. can reclaim its role as the leader in Internet technology.

What's the difference between Wall Street and the Ninth Ward of New Orleans?

The best punch line will be chosen for special recognition. Winner(s) -- selected by isen in his sole discretion -- get free admission to F2C: Freedom to Connect, March 31 & April 1. Maybe even a prize on stage.

Technorati Tags: F2C, F2C2008

"We've got strong financial institutions . . . Our markets are the envy of the world. They're resilient, they're...innovative, they're flexible. I think we move very quickly to address situations in this country, and, as I said, our financial institutions are strong."

US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on Sunday, 3/16, quoted here.

I'm writing this post for myself, as a control-shift-meta-hyper-bookmark.

Aaron Swartz recently invited his blog readers to tell him about . . .

books which a) try to explain a whole subject with b) clarity and even joy while making c) no strong assumptions of prior knowledge and d) not dumbing the subject down. It's an extremely rare combination

One commenter noted that Metafilter has actually done this already.

Link to Aaron's posting (and contributions from his readers).

Link to Metafilter's rather awesome list.

Technorati Tags: AaronSwartz, Ultimate

Cisco CEO John Chambers: Broadband. We need to put the rhetoric on the back burner and need to focus on making broadband a priority in the United States. We need a national broadband plan. We need to change the current FCC broadband measurement of 200Kpbs to 100 or even 500 times faster. The U.S. is falling behind on broadband and without leadership and focus we will continue to do so.

John McCain: I agree with John.

[Source] Thanks to Jim Baller & Casey Lide for the pointer [.pdf].

Technorati Tags: Cisco, JimBaller, JohnChambers, NationalBroadbandStrategy, Politics, JohnMcCain, USLosingLead

Steve Lohr has written a great article about how the Internet is doing, but Steve's editors got the headline wrong. The headline screams,

Video Road Hogs Stir Fear of Internet Traffic Jam

and the article opens quoting Jonah Johna Till Johnson, author of a badly spun recent study, and citing "Industry Groups" singing "a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet."

But the story should have bean headlined,

Internet Experts Debunk "Road Hog" Fears

At the core of the article, sanity prevails.

Others [that is, those other than Jonah Johna Till Johnson and "industry groups"] are less worried — at least in the short term. Andrew M. Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota, estimates that digital traffic on the global network is growing about 50 percent a year, in line with a recent analysis by Cisco Systems, the big network equipment maker.

*snip*

“The long-term issue is where innovation happens,” Professor Odlyzko said. “Where will the next Google, YouTube, eBay or Amazon come from?”

Reporter Lohr goes on to explain that country-to-country differences are shaped by . . .

. . . local patterns of corporate investment and government subsidy. Frederick J. Baker, a research fellow at Cisco, was attending a professional conference last month in Taiwan where Internet access is more than twice as fast and costs far less than his premium “high speed” service in California.

The article ends with a quote from Bob Metcalfe, who famously predicted the Internet's catastrophic collapse under the weight of too much traffic way back in 1996. Today Metcalfe says,

"The Internet has proven to be wonderfully resilient,” said Mr. Metcalfe, who is now a venture capitalist. “But the Internet is vulnerable today. It’s not that it will collapse, but that opportunities will be lost.”

That's the real threat, opportunities lost. But that's an abstract fear that's demonstrably hard for the American Public -- maybe even for New York Times editors -- to grasp. How about,

Internet Experts Fear Lost Opportunities

UPDATE: Thanks to anonymous commenter for catching the misspelling of Johna Till Johnson's name. Duh. I know her, and how to spell her name. Blush.

Technorati Tags: AndrewOdlyzko, Infrastructure, NationalBroadbandStrategy, NetworkNeutrality, NewYorkTimes, Press, USLosingLead, video

Richard Martin missed my measured analytic approach in my Ecomm talk today in his article today in Information Week, where he wrote:

The issue of "network neutrality" . . . was the subject of an outraged diatribe from David Isenberg, former research scientist at AT&T (NYSE: T) Laboratories and the author of an influential 1997 paper called "The Rise of the Stupid Network." Isenberg pointed out that political developments quashed the "Competitive Local Exchange Carriers in the early 2000s and that the national Internet service business is in many ways an oligopoly, with the network providers now "trying to move up the stack" to control the applications that run over their networks.

"We need to have a neutral network," said Isenberg to applause from the audience, "where the owners of the physical infrastructure can't exercise discriminatory practices against applications they don't participate in and shut out the competition.

Remarking that the eComm audience represents "several hundred apps," Isenberg concluded, "If you guys care about your jobs you should care about the politics in Washington D.C., because the phone companies will shut you down or buy you out and you won't exist."

California is too far from Washington. I wanted the innovators in the audience to wake up and smell the coffee burning.

Technorati Tags: NetworkNeutrality

They've got the Quantico Circuit and Room 641A, so keep it zipped [.pdf].

Technorati Tags: AT&T, Democracy, FourthAmendment, Stupidity, Verizon, Wiretap

The House and Senate should resist the bullying tactics of the Bush White House and ensure that we have our day in court to vindicate our rights and reveal any illegality engaged in by the telecoms. We need to know about the Bush White House's secret program.

Studs Terkel and three other authors, "Why we sued the phone company," Chicago Tribune, March 2, 2008. [link]

More on "the bullying tactics of the Bush White House" here. (worth reading!)

Technorati Tags: AT&T, Bushco, Constitution

Another affidavit [.pdf] has surfaced that gives further credence to tales of spying without a warrant by our nation's telephone companies, in this case Verizon Wireless, according to a story in Wired's Threat Level Blog.

Babek Pasdar, CEO of communications security firm Bat Blue, and a "Certified Ethical Hacker," testified that the Verizon Wireless East Coast Data Center had a circuit called "The Quantico Circuit" that was excepted from his firewall and fraud detection work. Quantico, Virginia, is headquarters for the FBI's electronic surveillance operations.

When Pasdar asked where the Quantico Circuit went, one of the other consultants on the job (named "C1" in the affidavit)smiled, "a very telling smile [that indicated] we were discussing something unusual," but did not answer the question. Later in the conversation, when Pasdar suggested that everything should be at least logged, another consultant, "C2," showed "body language [that] showed that he was very uncomfortable discussing the matter."

Then, by surprise, the Verizon Wireless Director of Security showed up. Pasdar testifies,

The tentative, uncertain DS I had known was transformed into a man wagging his finger in my face and telling me to "forget about the circuit" and move on with the migration, and if I couldn't do that then he would get somebody who would.

I politely and in a low-key manner informed the DS that my intention was to deliver security in line with industry-acceptable use scenarios, and although I am not intimately familiar with their security policy, it was reasonable to think that having a third party with completely open access to their network core was against organizational policy.

DS did not want to hear any of it and re-doubled his emphatic message to move on. This was serious stuff. He had let me know in no uncertain terms that I was treading above my pay grade.

When DS left, I asked C1, "Is this what I think it is?"

"What do you think?" he replied again, smiling.

I shifted the focus. "Forgetting about who it is, don't you think it is unusual for some third party to have completely open access to your systems like this? You guys are even firewalling your internal offices, and they are part of your own company."

C1 said, "Dude, that's what they want."

I didn't bother asking who "they" were this time. "They" now had a surrogate face -- DS.

Pasdar then testifies that the Quantico Circuit,

. . . was tied to the organization's core network. It had access to the billing system, text messaging, fraud detection, web site, and pretty much all the systems in the data center without apparent restrictions.

Pasdar concludes that not only is it possible for a third party to gain sensitive information using such a circuit, but also -- and this was missed by the Wired Threat Level -- to exert control over the network. Boy, I'd like to see some scenarios for what's possible . . .

A letter [.pdf] from Representatives Dingell, Markey and Stupak, dated March 6, also misses the possibility that the Quantico Circuit could be used to control the Verizon Wireless network. The letter renews the call to not pass a retroactive telco amnesty law until Congress gets the facts it has requested from the Bush Administration, and asserts that the Bush Administration has prohibited the telcos from talking to Congress.

Negotiations on FISA and retroactive telco immunity seem to have gone behind closed doors. Will the Democrats capitulate, as Glenn Greenwald reports? Or won't they?

Technorati Tags: Bushco, Cellco, Constitution, Verizon, Wiretap

Finally, a majority of US Senators and Congressmen are sufficiently repulsed by US torture tactics to pass an intelligence authorization bill limiting all US government agencies to interrogation tactics approved by the Army Field Manual [news story].

Bush vetoed this bill.

If you're not repulsed by torture committed in the name of each US citizen (yes, they're doing this in my name and yours) then please watch this video showing new photos of the Abu Ghraib horror. The video is disgusting, yes, but it shows things (a) that our tax dollars pay for every day, and (b) that our president continues to assert are right.

Bush's veto does not only asserts that the practices shown in the video are right, it also asserts that protecting them is more important than supporting all other US intelligence activities..

Gentle reader, please for just one moment suspend your active impulse to deny the impact of torture on a human being. Just for one moment imagine that you are stripped of your dignity and autonomy like one of the people in the video. Just for one moment imagine your life is under control of a person who likes it when you hurt, has fun making you so scared you lose control of your sphincters, and doesn't care if you die. Imagine that this has gone on for weeks . . . or years. Imagine you have no recourse and no hope of getting out alive.

Repulsed yet?

Torture. Is. Wrong. Too bad our president, and a significant minority in Congress, do not grasp this fact.

Technorati Tags: Bushco, Iraq, Torture