isen.blog

"They think copyright means 'mean people'."

Debbie Cwalina, Girl Scout, explaining how Girl Scouts see ASCAP, since the Scouts can't afford to license ASCAP songs at summer camp.

UPDATE: <blush> A comment by Bob, below, points out that this story is datelined 1996. I missed this little fact completely. Wonder how the Girl Scouts and ASCAP are getting along these days. </blush>

[source] [h/t Hamish MacEwan]

Technorati Tags: Copyright, QuoteOfNote

The two most powerful telecom officials in the land, FCC Chair Julius Genachowski and NTIA Head Larry Strickling, were approved today on the Senate floor. It's been a long time since January 20. I know that both men have a lot of shoveling before they (metaphorically) find their desks, but finally the shoveling can begin!

Technorati Tags: FCC, JuliusGenachowski, NTIA, LarryStrickling

The Wall Street Journal's dubious story about Iran's use of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) for spying, censorship and disinformation appears in a highly charged atmosphere. The US Republican right wing wants the US to talk tougher to Iran, to bomb-bomb-bomb, invade, or commit "regime change."

More questions than mine [my original post here] have surfaced about the WSJ's story from a graduate student in Australia and from Wired's Threat Level Blog. Meanwhile, Free Press, the major driving force behind the Net Neutrality movement, seems to have swallowed the WSJ story hook, line and sinker accepted the major claims of the story.

Cui bono, these claims about Iran's use of DPI? Suppose the Right could co-opt US techno-leftists with claims about issues they care about, such as Net Neutrality and Internet spying, would it not further their Iran agenda? I'm not saying they ARE doing that, but suppose they were, would not the WSJ be a convenient channel for doing so?

Christopher Parsons, a doctoral student at the University of Victoria, wrote to Lauren Weinstein, who posted to Dave Farber's IP list,

I have some serious doubts that the WSJ is accurate in their depiction of
DPI. I'm doing my doctoral studies on DPI as it relates to privacy, and
neither I nor the network engineers that I have communicated with (who are
using DPI appliances) are aware of ANY DPI appliance that is actually
capable of doing what the WSJ is claiming is going on. I've written about
this, informally, here.

If you follow the link above, Parsons writes, in part,

. . . Iran is either using DPI in incredibly complex and sophisticated ways that push the technology to its limits, or the WSJ is blowing smoke.

. . . DPI could, potentially, in an ideal world do what the WSJ is suggesting, but networking environments where admins are trying to regulate gigabytes of traffic each second are hardly these ideal environments for mass surveillance and content regulation using DPI appliances. Hopefully the pressure gets Nokia-Siemens or other network manufacturer to fess up about what they sold, but I’m not holding my breath.

Whereas my doubts are largely about the article's primary source, Parsons also casts doubt on one of two named secondary sources, Bradley Anstis, director of technical strategy with Marshal8e6, when he says,

I truly wonder just how accurate the story from the WSJ is on the technical capabilities of the DPI devices that are deployed, and am also incredibly interested to know what the tests are to see if DPI is being used. I’m not saying that such tests don’t exist, but I’m not certain what, exactly, you’d be looking for. A network engineer would have a better grasp, but I haven’t found any product that Marshal8e6 offers that would give them particular insight into this. Now, if we were talking about spam or phishing I wouldn’t doubt their competencies. I also have to note that the data Marshal8e6 fed to the WSJ isn’t available on their website anywhere that I could find it.

Threat Level Blog's Kim Zetter, in reporting on the WSJ story, says,

Although the Journal has published questionable “spying” stories in the past, we’re willing to go with them on this one.

Zetter fails to say WHY Threat Level is "willing to go with them on this one."

Zettner also blogs Consumers Boycott Nokia, Siemens for Selling to Iran. This article is completely, totally unsourced, and seems to be the only primary information on this supposed boycott. If anybody knows anybody who is organizing this boycott, or participating in it, or a Web site for it, or any other free-standing evidence that does not originate with Zettner's story, please leave a comment or let me know!

Josh Silver, Executive Director of Free Press, an organization whose general aims I strongly support, has fallen for the dubious WSJ story. In an interview on Democracy Now, Silver says,

[The WSJ story has] been disputed by the European company, but the validity of the report seems solid.

Silver fails to say why the validity of the report seems solid. He fails to note that not only did "the European Company" (Nokia-Siemens) dispute the report, but also the primary source for the story, Ben Roome, a Nokia-Siemens spokesman, denies that he said what is attributed to him.

Just before the Iran election hit the fan, Free Press released a report on the use of DPI that outlines many REAL DANGERS that DPI poses, and the bulk of Silver's interview turns on these dangers. To Silver's credit, he does state that the WSJ story on Iran "has not been completely proven." But it is too bad that Free Press can't make their points about the dangers of Internet monitoring from higher, more solid ground.

Reminder: I'm not saying that Iran isn't using DPI. I'm not saying there's no Nokia-Siemens boycott. I am saying that I'm waiting for solid evidence. Got evidence? Please let me know.

Technorati Tags: Censorship, DeepPacketInspection, FreePress, Iran, IranElection, NetworkManagement, NetworkNeutrality, Press, Wiretap, WSJ

At EComm 2009, in Silicon Valley, at least one speaker from Washington DC failed utterly to understand the techno-libertarian Bay Area mindset. This person, a friend, was all Obama-Genichowski-Net-Neutrality-Democrats as if the audience were a bunch of liberal beltway thinktank staffers who, incidentally, happened to know how to wire breadboards and write code. The talk got resistance, pushback and hostile questions from the audience. The response to that pushback was ineffective, perhaps even damaging to open Internet initiatives.

When policy people go to Silicon Valley, they need to explain why politics is relevant to Silicon Valley jobs and companies. I just re-stumbled across a clip of my own talk from the previous EComm. I didn't make that mistake; the talk got across. Here's a substantial clip from it:

Technorati Tags: FCC, LeeDryburgh, NetworkNeutrality, Politics, EComm

I'm looking forward to Personal Democracy Forum, June 29 and 30, in New York. PDF producers Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry do an amazing job of bringing the smartest, most relevant speakers to PDF's amazing Time Warner Center venue for a two day political brain-feast. The PDF motto, "technology is changing politics," is truer today than ever before; if you doubt it, simply look at how the aftermath of the Iran election is playing on Twitter.

I'm especially looking forward to hearing from White House CIO Vivek Kundra, VRML inventor and visionary Mark Pesce, and must-read NYT Columnist Frank Rich, and also, if it is anything like last year's PDF, to the several surprises that are bound to occur.

See you there!

Technorati Tags: AndrewRasiej, PDF2009, Politics, MicahSifry

The main source for a story in the Wall Street Journal today about Internet monitoring and spying in Iran denies he provided key evidence for the story's main claim. In addition, one of the story's co-reporters has a history of writing stories that his sources disavow.

The WSJ story, headlined Iran's Web Spying Aided By Western Technology, says

Interviews with technology experts in Iran and outside the country say Iranian efforts at monitoring Internet information go well beyond blocking access to Web sites or severing Internet connections.

Instead, in confronting the political turmoil that has consumed the country this past week, the Iranian government appears to be engaging in a practice often called deep packet inspection, which enables authorities to not only block communication but to monitor it to gather information about individuals, as well as alter it for disinformation purposes, according to these experts.

The monitoring capability was provided, at least in part, by a joint venture of Siemens AG, the German conglomerate, and Nokia Corp., the Finnish cellphone company, in the second half of 2008, Ben Roome, a spokesman for the joint venture, confirmed.

The "monitoring center," installed within the government's telecom monopoly, was part of a larger contract with Iran that included mobile-phone networking technology, Mr. Roome said.

Now Roome is all over Twitter denying that he said what the WSJ reports. He points to his blog, which says,

Nokia Siemens Networks has not provided any deep packet inspection, web censorship or Internet filtering capability to Iran.

He says Nokia Siemens only provides

Lawful Intercept . . . with the capability to conduct voice monitoring of local calls on its fixed and mobile network.

Chris Rhoads, the reporter who co-wrote today's story, also co-wrote a story that painted what I said to support something I didn't mean. Two other sources for that story, Larry Lessig and Rick Whitt, also felt the same way! So even though the claim that the Iranian government is using the Internet for spying and censorship is consistent with my beliefs, I have to take spokesman Roome's claim, that Rhoads' reporting goes beyond what he said, seriously! [Here's that WSJ Story and my blog post on that story.]

Today's WSJ story raises a second question. First it quotes Roome saying,

"If you sell networks, you also, intrinsically, sell the capability to intercept any communication that runs over them."

But then the story reports (and Roome confirms) that Nokia Siemens

exited the business that included the monitoring equipment, what it called "intelligence solutions," at the end of March, by selling it to Perusa Partners Fund 1 LP, a Munich-based investment firm, Mr. Roome said. He said the company determined it was no longer part of its core business.

So are "intelligence solutions" intrinsic to networks or not?

I would like to think that Iran's government is raising a danger flag about using deep packet inspection and other forms of Internet monitoring for anti-democratic political suppression. But if you strip away the claims attributed to Roome, which he denies, you're left with one anonymous Iranian engineer saying,

We didn't know they could do this much . . . Now we know they have powerful things that allow them to do very complex tracking on the network.

and Bradley Anstis, director of technical strategy with Marshal8e6 Inc., an Internet security company in Orange, California, saying (according to the article) that, [Anstis] "and other experts interviewed have examined Internet traffic flows in and out of Iran that show characteristics of content inspection, among other measures." The article quotes Anstis directly making general claims like

[Iran is] now drilling into what the population is trying to say,

and

This looks like a step beyond what any other country is doing, including China.

But how would we know? The main source has denied that he said what the story reported, the other two experts are generality-rich and specifics-poor, and one co-reporter has a history of writing stories that his sources disavow.

We can see evidence that Iran is involved in wholesale Internet shutdowns. But where is the evidence that it is doing spying via packet (or header) inspection? My mind is more than open, it is *ready* to see it. Nevertheless, today's WSJ story isn't anything more than suggestive; it certainly doesn't stand on its own.

Technorati Tags: Censorship, DeepPacketInspection, Iran, IranElection, NetworkManagement, NetworkNeutrality, Press, Wiretap, WSJ

Technorati Tags: NetworkNeutrality

From Department of Defense Antiterrorism and Force Protection Annual Refresher Training Course (for all personnel):

Which of the following is an example of low-level terrorism activity?
Select the correct answer and then click Check Your Answer.
O Attacking the Pentagon
O IEDs
O Hate crimes against racial groups
O Protests

***

The "correct" answer is Protests.

[source]

Technorati Tags: FirstAmendment, War

When I went to check my mail this morning, a Verizon truck was parked in front of my house. It was leaking hydraulic fluid, and three of the four Verizon employees with it were looking as the fourth spread absorbent pads. I asked one of the lookers what happened. He said, "We've been asking for a new f^&%ing truck for years."

Four hours later there are three Verizon vehicles, three fire trucks, a police car, two Environmental Clean-up Services of Vermont vehicles, and a crew of dozens. One guy is vacuuming up kitty litter soaked in hydraulic fluid. Two cops are directing traffic.

You'd think a capex-heavy company like Verizon would replace its fleet once in a while! Or at least do the preventative maintenance.

I shudder to think what this is costing. My guess is that this morning's mess is worth about half a Verizon truck. Maybe Verizon won't pay for the fire trucks and police cars and firemen and police men and women . . . but I, most assuredly, will.

Technorati Tags: Capex, Prevention, Stupidity, Verizon

@Katrinskaya writes:

Rumours (and photos) of actual real, filled-in, stamped ballots found dumped out of Tehran in thousands. #iranelection #gr88 (RT @lotfan)

and:

RT @LilyMazahery I'm getting reports that telephone communications in various parts of Tehran have now been cut off too.

and:

Guardian on today's rallies: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2009/jun/17/iran-uprising #gr88 #iranelection

[update] and:

Blogs w/ good/great updates: @dailydish- http://bit.ly/HpSSc, Guardian http://bit.ly/sPKgJ, Nico Pitney, Huffpost http://bit.ly/3x210o #gr88

Clearly the best source of news on the Iran Election Fiasco is Twitter, thanks to diligent aggregators like @Katrinskaya

Technorati Tags: Elections, KatrinVerclas, Press, Twee2blog, Twitter, Voting

The other David Isenberg (the military analyst, currently at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo) has written a good review of a scary piece of non-fiction. The book is _Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century_ by Peter Singer.

Remote-controlled and autonomous vehicles are already playing major roles. Today there are 22 different kinds of ground systems in use in Iraq alone, not to mention airborne drones like the Predator, which is responsible for controversial attacks in Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan, and,

"it's bigger brother, Global Hawk, which can stay in the [air] for up to 35 hours and reach an altitude of 65,000 feet."

How about,

". . . the Spartan Scout, a 30 foot robotic speedboat, packing a .50-caliber machine gun."

Those are deployed today. Tomorrow is even scarier. Isenberg writes,

So what happens when other countries which are even more advanced in electronics and robotics, like Japan, start investing in military robotics?

As Singer notes the US is not the only player in this. And, as an early adopter, the US may well be surpassed by other countries which piggyback off US developments.

[Countries? What about small groups hacking roombas, quad-copters, etc.? We gonna outlaw model airplanes? -- DSI]

Because so much of robotic development is based on open source information [download source code for one project here -- DSI] their increased use may well hasten the global redistribution of power; not exactly the result that those hoping the use of military robots will allow continued US military hegemony.

And how does the US military field enough scientifically and technologically adept personnel, when it has trouble attracting sufficient high school graduates, which was the case until the recent recession eased its recruiting problems.

He says that author Singer believes that Murphy's Law,

"Anything that can go wrong, will - at the worst possible moment,"

also applies to robots.

In other words,

. . . to quote the tag line from one sci-fi movie classic (The Fly, 1986) . . . "Be afraid . . . Be very afraid."

But, Isenberg says we must face what we fear if we are to deal with it. He quotes Singer:

"We embrace war but don't like to look to its future, including now one of the most fundamental changes ever in war."

Technorati Tags: Robotics, War

It's official. A team of market analysts from Oppenheimer are saying (.pdf) what I've been saying since 1997, that the apps are separating from the network, and this is driving a wave of "explosive innovation." The team, which includes my friend Tim Horan, says

". . . the latest smartphones (Pre, Bold, iPhone) show that wireless applications can be separated from the underlying network. Indeed, apps must be provided separately to allow the explosive innovation required to grow as well as take advantage of global economies of scale. Applications and hardware are global, with future expense elasticity being driven primarily by their adoption in markets such as China and India, rather than the U.S. This could potentially cannibalize voice and text messaging with applications for which the service providers receive little revenues (e.g., instant messaging, Skype, Fring, Truphone and Nimbuzz are all VoIP applications now available wirelessly). The obvious conflict this creates between the service providers and the application/hardware providers will be the most important dynamic the industry will face.

The carriers need to face the fact that just because something is unthinkable doesn't mean it's not going to happen. Today mobile phones. Tomorrow cable TV.

The Oppenheimer team thinks the winners will be backhaul providers, towercos and data centers -- in other words, infrastructure providers. The losers; anybody that depends on integration of infrastructure and app.

I had it right in 1997, but my timing was off. If you believe the Oppenheimer team, the time for wireless dis-integration is now.

Technorati Tags: ClayShirky, Infrastructure, TimHoran, Stupid Network, WirelessNetworks

From Is the Tipping Point Toast? (p.4) by Clive Thompson, in Fast Company:

Working with two colleagues, [Duncan] Watts designed an online music-downloading service. They filled it with 48 songs by new, unknown, and unsigned bands. Then they recruited roughly 14,000 people to log in. Some were asked to rank the songs based on their own personal preference, without regard to what other people thought. They were picking songs purely on each song's merit. But the other participants were put into eight groups that had "social influence": Each could see how other members of the group were ranking the songs.

Watts predicted that word of mouth would take over. And sure enough, that's what happened. In the merit group, the songs were ranked mostly equitably, with a small handful of songs drifting slightly lower or higher in popularity. But in the social worlds, as participants reacted to one another's opinions, huge waves took shape. A small, elite bunch of songs became enormously popular, rising above the pack, while another cluster fell into relative obscurity.

Hat tip to @kevinmarks

Technorati Tags: Hollywood, intellectualproperty, Twee2blog

An article in New Scientist has a misleading title and lede. The headline says, " Train can be worse for climate than plane."

The article's lede continues the deception, saying,

True or false: taking the commuter train across Boston results in lower greenhouse gas emissions than travelling the same distance in a jumbo jet. Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is false.

The whole premise is false. Nobody ever takes a six mile trip on a jumbo jet. It's as meaningless as saying the average human has one testicle.

The New Scientist article is attempting to report an academic study by Mikhail V. Chester and Arpad Horvath, entitled, "Environmental assessment of passenger transportation should include infrastructure and supply chains," Environ. Res. Lett. 4 (2009) [link.pdf]. It's a pretty good attempt to look at more than just fuel use in determining how various means of transportation use energy and pollute.

The study compares the per-person-kilometer energy footprints of busses that are full with busses that are empty, but it fails to compare full and empty airplanes. It breaks out airplanes by size but not by another, more important variable, short-haul versus long haul trip. It fails to even attempt to account for the trips that *never would occur* if there were no airplanes, or if they were slower, etc. And it fails to relate that every plane trip begins and ends with a car, bus or train trip to and from the airport.

The study, and the New Scientist mis-reporting of it, it impels this rant against the apparently irresistible urge to conclude more -- and different -- than the data indicate.

Technorati Tags: Energy, Environment, Global, GlobalClimateDisruption, Press, Rant, Science, statistics, Sustainability, Travel

Ed Whitacre tapped for GM Chair.

UPDATE: Alex Goldman on Ed W at GM [link].

Technorati Tags: irony

The FCC Web site is a mucking fess. It's a wonder that ANYBODY can find -- or do --ANYTHING! Here's hoping the Obama Administration's transparency initiatives include a complete tear-it-out-to-the-studs re-do of our communications commission's communication platform.

I needed to call the FCC Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) Help Desk to figure out how to file the Its the Internet Stupid Comment. Fortunately, I figured out I needed to call the ECFS Help Desk before it closes at 4:30 East Coast Time. Then I needed a tutorial from a friend to figure out how to download and view the 495 comments filed to date.

If you want to view the comments filed so far, just go to this easy-to-remember URL: http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/websql/prod/ecfs/comsrch_v2.hts?ws_mode=retrieve_list&id_proceeding=09-51

Go to the bottom of the page and click on Enter New Search Criteria. Do this even if you don't have any old search criteria.

On the Search for Filed Comments page that comes up, enter the docket number. In the case of FCC GN Docket No. 09-51 you enter only this: 09-51. You've just gotta know this.

Then, if you're looking for our comment, you may enter David S. or you may enter Isenberg under "Filed on behalf of." But if you enter David Isenberg, it will return Zero Documents.

Want to find it based on key words, or a text string search? Heh. How does it feel to want, sucka? It's so 1998.

Now try to download it. Just click on the blue-fonted hyperlinked word COMMENT, and open the downloaded document, right? WRONG.

What gets downloaded is a file named -- in every case -- retrieve.cgi. Doesn't matter if it's filed by Free Press, Brett Glass or AT&T; everybody's comment is named retrieve.cgi. If you want to download ten in a row, you're S-out-of-luck. You've got to rename each file, one at a time, to have a meaningful name and a .pdf extension. With a .pdf extension, you can click-to-open the comment in Acrobat, Preview or some other .pdf reader.

Welcome to the "public" comment system at the FCC! No wonder telecom policy is an inside game around here.

Technorati Tags: FCC, ItsTheInternetStupid, Open, Organizational Culture

Tucows’ CEO Elliot Noss explains the "It's the Internet Stupid" initiative to focus the upcoming National Broadband Plan on “faster, more affordable, more ubiquitous, more reliable connections to the Internet.”

As a signatory to the initiative, Noss believes it’s essential not to confuse “broadband” with access to the Internet. It needs to be spelled out explicitly to make sure that the plan meets the needs of ordinary citizens.

[link to source, a tucows news item]

Technorati Tags: BB4US.net, Broadband, ElliotNoss, Internet, ItsTheInternetStupid, National Broadband Plan, USBroadbandCoalition

isen.com, LLC: Internet Experts Tell FCC: It's the Internet Stupid!
FCC's National Broadband Plan Should Put Internet First

FOR: ISEN.COM, LLC

JUN 8, 2009 - 18:02 ET

COS COB, CT--(Marketwire - June 8, 2009) - A group of 41 computer scientists, network engineers, Internet business owners, legal scholars, best-selling authors and other Internet experts are telling the FCC to put the Internet at the center of its National Broadband Plan. "This is our country's big chance to make up lost ground," said spokesperson David Isenberg, Principal Prosultant(SM) of isen.com, LLC, "but a faster connection won't matter if we're not connecting to a free and open Internet." In essence, the experts are telling the FCC, "It's the Internet, Stupid." They've published their statement at http://ItsTheInternetStupid.com/.

The group points out that most of the benefits that Congress wants the National Broadband Plan to deliver -- such as job creation, civic participation, energy efficiency and health care delivery -- come from one specific use of broadband connectivity: accessing the Internet. (Broadband is also used in cable TV, cell phone and corporate networks.) The group is concerned that a focus on broadband that does not emphasize Internet connections could lead to an infrastructure that does not yield the very benefits the Broadband Plan aims to deliver.

The group includes Vint Cerf, who, with Bob Kahn, designed the TCP and IP protocols in 1973. It also includes David P. Reed, a co-inventor of one of the Internet's most important principles, Steve Crocker, who designed the process that improves and expands the definition of the Internet, and Scott Bradner, a lifelong leader of the Internet Society, the Internet Engineering Task Force and other Internet technical groups. It also includes Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow, who founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Robin Chase, who was recently named by Time Magazine as one of 100 most influential people of 2009, and Lawrence Lessig, a leader in Internet law and culture.

The group includes Michael R. Nelson, who worked as lead Senate staffer on the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991, which helped transform the Internet from an academic experiment to the useful utility it is today. It includes Tim O'Reilly, of O'Reilly Media, producer of many widely-respected technical books and conferences. It includes authors of formative books about the Internet such as Howard Rheingold, Clay Shirky, Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Jeff Jarvis, insider newsletter publishers Dave Burstein and Gordon Cook, and some two dozen other Internet experts of many stripes. The group was organized over the weekend by David S. Isenberg, Robin Chase and David Weinberger to address concerns about fundamental assumptions of the FCC's first document on a National Broadband Plan.

"The telephone and cable companies, who are saying 'broadband, broadband, broadband,' have money, power, lobbyists and a cash-cow business that is threatened by the Internet," says Isenberg. "The best way to get our message out is by organizing a large group of distinguished Internet experts."

The FCC was directed to produce a National Broadband Plan as a provision of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). The ARRA tells the FCC to deliver a National Broadband Plan to Congress by February 17, 2010. The "It's the Internet, Stupid," experts and over 50 other signers are submitting their statement to the FCC in a first round of public comments that ends today.

About David S. Isenberg: Isenberg was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories until he quit in 1998 to found isen.com, LLC, a decidedly independent telecom analysis firm. He blogs at isen.com/blog and produces F2C: Freedom to Connect, a technology policy conference held in Washington, DC, every March.

About Robin Chase: Chase is currently CEO of GoLoco, a ride-sharing and social network, is also founder and former CEO of ZipCar, the world's most successful car-sharing network. Chase was named as one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people of 2009. She was an invited speaker at the prestigious TED conference in 2008.

About David Weinberger: Weinberger is co-author of the best-selling "Cluetrain Manifesto" and author of two other books that are seminal Internet works, "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," and "Everything is Miscellaneous." He is a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

About isen.com, LLC: isen.com, LLC is an independent telecom analysis firm based in Cos Cob, CT.

Prosultant is a service mark of isen.com, LLC

FOR MORE INFORMATION: Contact David S. Isenberg 203-661-4798 Email Contact isen@isen.com

Technorati Tags: AaronSwartz, AndrewRasiej, ARRA, ARRA Stimulus Act, BB4US.net, Broadband, Content-Conduit, DavidBurstein, DavidPReed, DavidWeinberger, Democracy, DocSearls, EFF, FCC, GordonCook, GreatDepression2.0, HaroldFeld, Infrastructure, Innovation, Internet, ItsTheInternetStupid, LawrenceLessig, NetworkNeutrality, ParadoxoftheBestNetwork, PublicGoods, NationalBroadbandPlan, RobinChase, savetheinternet, ScottBradner, USBroadbandCoalition, VintCerf

Comments are due tomorrow on the FCC's Notice of Inquiry [PDF document with full FCC Notice here] on a National Broadband Plan, which was mandated by Congress as part of the Recovery Act of 2009.

This proceeding is likely be at least as important to U.S. telecommunications policy as the Telecom Act of 1996 was. It could be more powerful if we do it right.

We think the broadband connections that count are connections to the Internet! If we put "broadband" first, we risk twisting and diminishing the Internet to fit somebody's political definition of broadband. But if we put the Internet first, then it's far more likely that broadband will be defined and implemented to serve the Internet we know and love.

In other words, Broadband, schmaudband, fraudband! It's the Internet, stupid.

Please join John Perry Barlow, Scott Bradner, Dave Burstein, Robin Chase, Judi Clark, Gordon Cook, Steve Crocker, Susan Estrada, Harold Feld, Tom Freeburg, Dewayne Hendricks, Jeff Jarvis, Mitch Kapor, Larry Lessig, Sascha Meinrath, Jerry Michalski, Elliott Noss, Leslie Nulty, Tim Nulty, Tim O’Reilly, Andrew Rasiej, David P. Reed, Howard Rheingold, Roy Russell, Doc Searls, Micah L. Sifry, Dana Spiegel, Aaron Swartz, Katrin Verclas, David Weinberger, Stanton Williams, Brian Worobey, Esme Vos Yu and me by signing our comment at ItsTheInternetStupid.com.

Technorati Tags: AaronSwartz, AndrewRasiej, ARRA, ARRA Stimulus Act, BB4US.net, Broadband, Content-Conduit, DavidBurstein, DavidPReed, DavidWeinberger, Democracy, DocSearls, EFF, FCC, GordonCook, GreatDepression2.0, HaroldFeld, Infrastructure, Innovation, Internet, ItsTheInternetStupid, LawrenceLessig, NationalBroadbandPlan, NetworkNeutrality, ParadoxoftheBestNetwork, PublicGoods, RobinChase, savetheinternet, ScottBradner, USBroadbandCoalition

NYT [link]:

Nearly 20 percent of the graduating class have signed “The M.B.A. Oath,” a voluntary student-led pledge that the goal of a business manager is to “serve the greater good.” It promises that Harvard M.B.A.’s will act responsibly, ethically and refrain from advancing their “own narrow ambitions” at the expense of others.

The oath says, in part:

As a manager, my purpose is to serve the greater good by bringing people and resources together to create value that no single individual can create alone. Therefore I will seek a course that enhances the value my enterprise can create for society over the long term.

Two questions:

1) What's wrong with the other 80%?
2) Student led, where's the teachers?

Technorati Tags: Corruption, PublicGoods

"All that is necessary is to ban anticompetitive practices and incent or require the existing fiber owners to open their networks to the areas through which their fiber passes. (This should have been a condition of granting them use of the public right of way, but at the time no one imagined that they wouldn't do the obvious thing and seize the opportunity to serve those areas.)"

Brett Glass, in a CircleID comment on my Crawford likes Aussie utility network blog posting. Good idea Brett, but probably not quite all that is necessary.

Technorati Tags: Competition, fiberoptics, PublicGoods, CommonCarriage, QuoteOfNote, Unbundling, USLosingLead, Utility

From The Homeless Stay Wired, by Phred Dvorak, WSJ, 5/30/09

Like most San Franciscans, Charles Pitts is wired. Mr. Pitts, who is 37 years old, has accounts on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. He runs an Internet forum on Yahoo, reads news online and keeps in touch with friends via email. The tough part is managing this digital lifestyle from his residence under a highway bridge.

"You don't need a TV. You don't need a radio. You don't even need a newspaper," says Mr. Pitts, an aspiring poet in a purple cap and yellow fleece jacket, who says he has been homeless for two years. "But you need the Internet."

*snip*

Aspiring computer programmer Paul Weston, 29, says his Macintosh PowerBook has been a "lifeboat" since he was laid off from his job as a hotel clerk in December and moved to a shelter. Sitting in a Whole Foods store with free wireless access, Mr. Weston searches for work and writes a computer program he hopes to sell eventually. He has emailed city officials to press for better shelter conditions.

*snip*

Robert Livingston, 49, has carried his Asus netbook everywhere since losing his apartment in December. A meticulous man who spends some of his $59 monthly welfare check on haircuts, Mr. Livingston says he quit a security-guard job late last year, then couldn't find another when the economy tanked.

*snip*

For Skip Schreiber, 64, an amateur philosopher with wispy white hair who lives in a van, power is the biggest challenge to staying wired. Mr. Schreiber tended heating and ventilation systems before work-related stress and depression sidelined him around 15 years ago, he says. For his 60th birthday, he dipped into his monthly disability check to buy a laptop, connected it to his car battery, and taught himself to use it. "I liked the concept of the Internet," says Mr. Schreiber, "this unlimited source of opinion and thought."

*snip*

Michael Ross creates his own electricity, with a gas generator perched outside his yellow-and-blue tent. For a year, Mr. Ross has stood guard at a parking lot for construction equipment, under a deal with the owner. Mr. Ross figures he has been homeless for about 15 years, surviving on his Army pension. Inside the tent, the taciturn 50-year-old has an HP laptop with a 17-inch screen and 320 gigabytes of data storage, as well as four extra hard drives that can hold another 1,000 gigabytes . . .

*snip*

Technorati Tags: Economics, GreatDepression2.0, Internet, Poverty

Technorati Tags: RIP

President Obama made a remarkably strong re-affirmation of network neutrality today, saying,

“Let me also be clear about what we will not do . . . Our pursuit of cyber security will not -- I repeat, will not include -- monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic. We will preserve and protect the personal privacy and civil liberties that we cherish as Americans. Indeed, I remain firmly committed to Net Neutrality so we can keep the Internet as it should be -- open and free.”

[source] via Tim Karr in Free Press Blog [link].

Excellent. But when do we get proof positive that the optical splitter in Room 641A at AT&T's Folsom Street facility and the Quantico Circuit at Verizon Wireless in northern Virginia -- and the other domestic spying facilities that we haven't discovered yet -- have been taken off line? [ref]

Technorati Tags: BarackObama, Constitution, NetworkNeutrality, Privacy, QuoteOfNote, Wiretap

Dennis Fazio has posted a comment over at CircleID, which reprinted my blog post entitled Crawford likes Aussie utility network, taking me to task for saying that an Aussie-style network would cost way less than the $500 billion we get when we naively multiply the cost of that network by the difference factor of the two national populations. He is right for flagging this prone-to-misinterpretation number.

Fazio bases his alternate estimate on Verizon's cost per house passed of $800 per house times 111 million households in the U.S. That's $88.8 billion. Since that doesn't include the cost of hooking up a house or the new gear in the central office, I say it is low. It probably doesn't include passing homes in Vermont or Maine or other hard-to-recable states, which Verizon has been dumping left and right.

In another blog post not too long ago, I tried to pencil out the cost of fiber a bit more carefully and came up with $290 billion. Is that right? Who knows. But $500 B is clearly way high and $88.8 B is clearly way low.

Technorati Tags: fiberoptics, FTTH, OpenAccess

My friend Benoit Felten (with co-author Wally Swain), has written a Yankee Group report entitled "Open Access Makes Economic Sense." It begins:

Analysis of a series of high-level generic next-generation access business models suggests that on the basis of the current generation of services, the revenue-generating opportunity will not offset the costs in a reasonable amount of time for the vertically integrated service provider deploying it. Opening the network to competitive or new service providers is one of the solutions to solve that conundrum.

The business model for fiber to the home (FTTH) is a tough one to make fly. Despite the increasing pressure (competitive and political) for wireline copper operators to upgrade their networks to FTTH, the economics of the business model scare both the telcos themselves and their shareholders or financiers. This report examines the greenfield deployment business model in depth and looks at how it might be optimized.

Technorati Tags: BenoitFelten, FTTH, NetworkNeutrality, Open, OpenAccess

Re-nonymize, or renonymize, V,. To discover, using data from an "anonymized" data set (a data set from which the explicit identifying data has been removed) which specific individuals generated the data. Usage: ". . . companies claim they're releasing an anonymous dataset, only to discover later that it's not so difficult to re-nomynize it." [source]

Technorati Tags: Privacy, WordoftheDay

Douglas Galbi writes,

More than half the libraries existing in the U.S. in 1919 had received construction grant money from Andrew Carnegie. Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish-born U.S. industrialist who acquired massive wealth. He believed in self-improvement through hard work, and he considered public libraries to serve this purpose by making knowledge available to everyone. Hence Carnegie set up a grant program for the construction of public libraries.

The total value of Carnegie's grants to U.S. libraries was about equal to that of the current U.S. broadband stimulus package. Carnegie donated more than $40 million between 1886 and 1919 to construct 1,679 new libraries in the U.S. (about $56 million for libraries world-wide). As a share of GDP, Carnegie's total donation to U.S. libraries is about equal to the current $7.2 billion U.S. broadband stimulus package.

Galbi says that commercial book rental libraries were very active at the time, but there's no evidence that this potential conflict ever became a problem.

Technorati Tags: ARRA, ARRA Stimulus Act, PublicGoods, Sustainability

All your election R belong to us! Democracy by AT&T RT @freepress: RT @TimKarr: NYTimes: http://twurl.nl/zxefcj #AmericanIdol

UPDATE 5/28/09: Did AT&T throw the election? We'll never know because the results won't be made public. As for the charge that it provided power-texting equipment and instructions to supporters of one candidate but not the other, AT&T claims just a few bad apples, saying,

"a few local AT&T employees, caught up in the enthusiasm of rooting for their hometown contestant, they brought a small number of demo phones with them and provided texting tutorials to those who were interested . . ."

Sounds almost like what AT&T said when it censored anti-Bush portions of a Pearl Jam concert, just a few bad apples, in that case, "a mistake by a webcast vendor."

As long as AT&T has a role that joins delivery of content and control of content, such mistakes will be made. By AT&T.

We need structural separation now. The delivery of our data is too important to be left to entities with motive, means and opportunity to mess with it in transit.

Technorati Tags: AT&T, NetworkNeutrality, StructuralSeparation, Twee2blog

Susan Crawford, special assistant to the president for science, technology and innovation policy and a member of the National Economic Council, is reported to be favorabll inclined towards a U.S. network much like Australia's recently announced $33B broadband plan.

Of course, the U.S. is some 15 times bigger than Australia, and that'd make the price tag closer to $500B by straight multiplication. But the U.S. would get a fiber network done right. It'd be as fast as technology would allow; note that affordable symmetrical residential Gbit service is already available in Sweden and Japan. It'd be upgradable approximately forever. It'd be un-bundlable, so anybody could offer services on it and no entity would need to maintain a monopoly. And, says Crawford, ". . . [such] a wholesale network can deliver massive social and economic benefits."

What's not to like? Incumbent mouthpiece Scott Cleland says that it'd unfair if the government competes against his clients. Former FCC Chair Reed Hundt doesn't think it's a "practical solution."

I think Susan Crawford has the right idea. Technology exists now to deliver hundreds of times more than we're getting. The only thing the U.S. lacks is the will to do it. The U.S. used to think big. That's what made it a great country. It could do it again. The only losers would be the very same companies that are keeping us in the past in the name of the late, great free market.

Technorati Tags: Competition, fiberoptics, Utility, USLosingLead

This is wonderful!

The Networked Future of Farms

. . . a Bay Area startup has launched a service to make it easier and cheaper for restaurants to buy food from small, local farms. With a suite of mobile apps for use in restaurants and on farms, FarmsReach wants to create an online food marketplace that would directly connect farms with restaurants.

“The food supply industry is ripe for ‘disintermediation’ because of the internet,” said Alistair Croll, a startup consultant working with FarmsReach. In other words, middlemen beware: Food could undergo a transition like the one that swept through classified ads, air travel and dozens of other industries.

*snip*

The current distribution of edibles works the way it does, though, because it’s brutally effective at reliably delivering low-cost food all over the country. Sysco, the dominant $13 billion American food distributor, works and restaurants know that . . . "Chefs order from Sysco because they know, no matter what, they’ll get their orders or there is an account rep they can strangle.” . . . [today] restaurants have two basic options. Call up a dozen local farms to order the ingredients for their salads or use Sysco’s online system and have everything show up, come hell or high water. Perhaps unsurprisingly, only the pickiest chefs at the fancier restaurants choose the local farm route.

FarmsReach wants to make ordering from local, small farms as easy and reliable as ordering from Sysco.

*snip*

If the Internet stopped developing now, disruptive innovations like this would probably echo down through history for a few dozen more years. But do we have that long?

Previous versions of the, "End of Moore's Law" story have been superseded by technology breakthroughs. But this most recent one, by Saul Hansell, in the NYT Bits Blog, might have legs.

Eli Harari, the CEO of SanDisk says he anticipates about two more doublings, with doublings occurring about every year. “We can’t get below one [electron per memory cell]," he says.

Harari continues, “If I want 40 electrons, plus or minus two electrons, I can do that when the device is new. But seven years out, it will start to smear.”

He anticipates maybe two more doublings. So what it it's four? Or eight? "We can't get below one [electron]," is a fairly hard limit.

"When Manhattan ran out of space, they built skyscrapers," says Harari. What's a skyscraper in the world of bits? Hansell, entrained by the real estate analogy, imagines multi-layer chips. That's OK if you're only thinking chips.

In the wider digital economy, three things trade off with each other: storage, data compression and transmission. Data compression is the least general of these alternatives; it is costly, energy-intensive and/or inappropriately lossy. So, if Hansell's article is even close to right, I think we'll see new emphasis on the value of ubiquitous, inexpensive network connections.

Technorati Tags: DisruptiveTechnology, Economics, NewYorkTimes, MooresLaw

"After the most lethal and devastating terrorist attack ever, seven and a half years without a repeat is not a record to be rebuked and scorned, much less criminalized."

Former VP Dick Cheney, May 21, 2009 [source]

[Photo source.]

American Airlines twitter handle is AAirwaves. AAirwaves tweeted all day today about the American Airlines shareholder meeting. But it doesn't do customer service, it doesn't tweet about airline delays, weather, fare deals, etc. At American I'm Platinum, been a card carrying AAperson since 1982, but AAirwaves tweets me like chopped liver, saying "AA.Com does that, but not on twitter." Gosh, thanks for the news, I'm on AA.com every week.

As you can see from this post, @AlaskaAir actually tweets4customers.

Technorati Tags: CustomerService, WealthofNetworks

RT @chrismessina: Not only did @AlaskaAir respond to my tweet, but also helped me check in to my flight *VIA Twitter*! OMG! Customer service 2.0 FTW!

UPDATE: @AlaskaAir tweets: Check-in via Twitter isn't available as a svc. We reach out to people that are having technical issues.

My comment, at least AlaskaAir tweets4customers.

Technorati Tags: CustomerService, Twee2blog

The Hollywood panel reported in this story, 5/15/09, has a couple of gemstone quotes to mark our nodal times.

“I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet. Period.”
Michael Lynton, Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO

and

“It’s just giving everyone a bathroom wall to write exactly what they think.”
Anne Hathaway, actress.

Technorati Tags: CluetrainManifesto, Internet, Press, Hollywood, QuoteOfNote

"If Comcast decided to get in front of the 435 members of the House, they could do that in a week. I don't think I could do it in a year."

Ben Scott, Policy Director, Free Press. via @jenhoward80, DSL Reports and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Technorati Tags: BenScott, Democracy, FreePress, QuoteOfNote

In the last weeks I've become a major twit, er, tweeter.

If you can't express yourself in less than 500 words are you a woofer?

How about: Dress up in costume, knock on door, "Twitter tweet?"

Now the CIO of Seattle @billschrier tweets news of the First Ever Perkins Madrona-Ventures Twittercon where experts with weeks of deep experience . . .

. . . from local companies such as Avelle, Alaska Airlines, Smartsheet.com, Nordstrom and Expedia offered advice and feedback on how to utilize Twitter . . . [and discussed] "Where's the ROI?"

I'm already getting tspam. Name tsquatting is rampant. Twademark conflicts are common.

It's the march of the monetizers. How long will Twitter be a friendly open place where you can twitter a rhythm with your tribe? Six months?

I hope it'll evolve faster than monetizers can march.

Technorati Tags: Open, Twitter

UPDATE 5/18: Art Brodsky and Kos weigh in.

Yesterday's Washington Post OpEd, Laws That Could Save Journalism is an explicit call for protectionism for the Old Journalism, aka MSM. It whines that, "the playing field has become so uneven."

It's worth noting that even the conservatives aren't saying, "Let the market take it's course," anymore. So now that we've agreed that some regulation is desirable, the next question is, "What kind?"

If a nation wants to remain at the forefront of new technology, its government should regulate to nurture new, young innovations so that established behemoths don't strangle them in their crib. If progress is to occur, a government doesn't regulate to protect big, old, powerful entities from young, new ones. If government is to treat corporations like persons, the least it could do would be to treat mature ones like adults that can take care of themselves!

The Internet's innovations are just beginning. A pro-progress government doesn't say, "We've seen enough of this new stuff," unless it is in the pocket of the old, threatened industry. This is Tim Karr's main point in his HuffPo takedown of the "Save Journalism" OpEd. It's authors are old-media sock puppets.

But there's a bigger point, one that Clay Shirky makes in his March, 2009 essay, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. This essay points out that newspapers saw the Internet coming miles away. They devised a number of plausible strategies to deal with it. They only missed one of the major plausible scenarios, to wit:

The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.) . . .

This seems to be the scenario that's playing out. In scenario planning, it's worth taking each, "We'll always have . . . " assumption apart before the scenario exercise is complete.

The "death of telcos" was the scenario that AT&T missed while I was working there. Discussing the possibility that AT&T might wither and die was seen as impolite in the extreme. My Rise of the Stupid Network was rejected and I was treated accordingly. Shirky says:

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception . . . Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

The WaPo OpEd falls short of a useful contribution because its authors didn't read Shirky's piece. Or, if they did, they didn't acknowledge it. Perhaps the OpEd's authors (or the WaPo OpEd editor, who could have asked for appropriate revisions) wasn't aware of it, because it was published only in the blogosphere. They're newspaper folks. They didn't know about Shirky's essay cause it wasn't published in their version of reality. More'n likely, there's the rub.

Technorati Tags: AgeofHeretics, blogging, ClayShirky, Internet, Press, WashingtonPost

A friend is visiting Portland, Oregon this morning, and I wanted to point him at Gwenn Seemel's great portrait work. I've blogged about her before, but I wanted to find something that'd really capture his imagination, and I found this remarkable post from her blog. The picture to the left is an excerpt from that post.

[A little note on culture and so-called piracy. I don't have the artist's permission to reproduce her work, but I don't think she'll mind. After all, she wrote to thank me for my previous post on her, and said not a word about my reproduction of her work. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I'm virtually certain "fair use" covers my use of her work on several grounds. However, if she were to express any discomfort, I'd take down the wonderful work to your left -- immediately, not because of any law, but because of my respect for this great painter.]

Technorati Tags: art, GwennSeemel

A recent Washington Post story, headlined DHS to Bolster Protection of Civilian Computer Networks, explains that the Department of Homeland Security, working with the National Security Agency (these two agency titles sound alarmingly similar), are plotting to defend my network and yours

. . . despite concern over the impact on Americans' privacy and the legal authority for the military and intelligence agency to conduct domestic surveillance activities.

I get it. The DHS and NSA on our side, so it's all OK.

Technorati Tags: FourthAmendment, FUD, Wiretap

Here's two of the musical highlights for me from F2C. The first is Benoit Felten's hot harmonica rendition of Django Reinhardt's Swing Mineur with the John Jorgenson Quintet. The second is Terry Huval, the inspiration for the Lafayette LA FTTH project, giving us a taste of Cajun culture.

Technorati Tags: BenoitFelten, F2C, F2C2009, LafayetteLA, Music, puppy, TerryHuval

Yesterday I couldn't post the fact that Blogger was unable to publish about 15 comments on my "ain't worth squat" story, because Blogger was down just about all day yesterday. FTP from my computer to my site worked, but FTP from Blogger to my blog was hosed for more hours than I have fingers.

It is finally fixed. The comments are there. Blogger posted this story. But there's no official indication as to why it broke or what needed fixing. Did Blogger get to the root cause? Or do we have a duct tape and hose clamp situation that could go fubar again?

After all, this is the second time it has failed in two weeks.

A lot of people on the "Something is Broken" page within Blogger Support were a bit irritated.

It's good that Twitter has an independent feed. If this happens again, I suggest we use #bloggerfail.

Technorati Tags: Blogger, FTP, isen.blog, Organizational Culture, Twitter, Redundancy

" . . . it’s important to understand that just as denials that climate change is happening are junk science, predictions of economic disaster if we try to do anything about climate change are junk economics."

Paul Krugman in his New York Times column today on the economic costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Technorati Tags: ClimateChange, Economics, GlobalClimateDisruption, PaulKrugman, Science

I know a little bit about complex pattern recognition, and it's not easy or straightforward. So my jaw dropped a bit when I read David Pogue's footnotes on his review of the Panasonic Lumix GH-1 camera. What got me was this:

The Lumix doesn't just recognize that something *is* a face; it actually tries to determine *whose* face it is. That way, it can give priority of focus and exposure to your own friends and family, even plucking them out of a crowd.

What the marketing materials don't say is that you first have to register each person you want it to recognize. The camera displays a little on-screen template, basically a box with two eyeholes; you're supposed to take a snapshot of the person, facing front and positioned to match the template. You can even name the person, using an onscreen keyboard; if you register more than one person, you can rank them by priority. (Dealing with the hurt feelings if someone catches you ranking them low is left to you.)

Coming soon, self-tagging photos, a speech-to-text dictation machine, caller ID by voice, nav-by-video cars, et cetera. Sheesh, the future is more evenly distributed every day.

Technorati Tags: DavidPogue, Photography

I am very proud of my friend Robin Chase's recognition by Time Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2009!

The story on Robin, written by one Craig Newmark, says, in part,

For years, Robin Chase, a co-founder of Zipcar, has run such a business, in which people share a community-based pool of vehicles. Customers use Zipcar, which rents cars by the day or hour (when public transportation won't quite do the job) and makes smart use of technology like GPS to connect people with autos and trucks that are parked near them.

The Zipcar operation recognizes that people are fundamentally trustworthy. If you trust your customer community, they'll respond by operating in a trustworthy manner, self-policing your operation. Zipcar's success fuels the whole Internet-based sharing culture, and Robin, 50, also uses social media to get car-sharing fans to work together in communities. This implicitly pushes the sharing culture to even more people.

One of the things this tells me is that the rumors of MainStream Media's death are somewhat exaggerated. Way to go Robin! Way to go, Time.

Technorati Tags: Press, RobinChase

Broadband without Internet ain't worth squat
by David S. Isenberg
keynote address delivered at
Broadband Properties Summit 4/28/09

We communications professionals risk forgetting why the
networks we build and run are valuable. We forget what we're
connecting to what. We get so close to the ducts and splices
and boxes and protocols that we lose the big picture.

Somewhere in the back of our mind, we know that we're
building something big and new and fundamental. We know, at
some level, there's more than business and economics at
stake.

This talk is a 30,000-foot view of why our work is important.
I'm going to argue that the Internet is the main value
creator here - not our ability to digitize everything, not
high speed networking, not massive storage - the Internet.
With this perspective, maybe you'll you go back to work with
a slight attitude adjustment, and maybe one or two concrete
things to do.

In the big picture, We're building interconnectedness. We're
connecting every person on this planet with every other
person. We're creating new ways to share experience. We're
building new ways for buyers to find sellers, for
manufacturers to find raw materials, for innovators to rub up
against new ideas. We're creating a new means to distribute
our small planet's limited resources.

Let's take a step back from the ducts and splices and boxes
and protocols. Let's go on an armchair voyage in the opposite
direction -- to a strange land . . . to right here, right
now, but without the Internet.

In this world we have all the technology of today, but no
Internet Protocol, that is, there's no packet protocol that
all proprietary networks can understand.

In this alternate reality, every form of information can be
digitized, BUT there's not necessarily a connection between
all this information and all the users and services that
might discover it and use it to their advantage.

This was the world envisioned by the movie, The President's
Analyst, where The Phone Company secretly ran the world. It's
from 1967, the same year that Larry Roberts published the
original ArpaNet spec.



Roll Clip

In a world without the Internet, it's not clear that we'd
actually have a thought transducer in our brain. But if we
did, I'd bet we couldn't program it ourselves. I'd bet we
couldn't shut it off. I'd bet we couldn't decide who could
receive its signal and who could not.

What WOULD we have?

We would have super-clear telephony. We'd have cable TV with
lots and lots of channels. We'd have lower op-ex and higher
def. We'd probably have some kind of telephone-to-TV
integration so we could order from Dominos while we watched
Gunsmoke. Our cell phones would make really, really good
phone calls . . . and we'd have another half-dozen bungled
attempts to convince us that picturephones were the next
great leap forward.

Surprisingly, we might not have email. The first generation
of Internet Researchers only discovered human-to-human email
in 1972 - the subsequent growth of "People-to-People"
applications was a big surprise to them. Now, without email,
there there'd be no reason to invent the Blackberry or the
iPhone. Without the Internet, it would be a voice, voice,
voice, voice world.

This voice, voice, voice would be expensive. Without the
Internet - specifically without Voice over IP -- we'd still
be paying fifteen cents a minute for long distance, because
VocalTec would not have commercialized VOIP, Vonage and Skype
wouldn't exist, and even the major telcos would not have used
VOIP to destroy the international settlement system.

Data service? Think ISDN. Actually, think about a dozen
different so-called Integrated Services Networks, each with
its own access and login, with no good way for one to connect
to another. Metcalfe's Law would suggest there'd be orders of
magnitude less traffic overall.

Would we have Search? Perhaps. Imagine what Encyclopedia
Britannica On Line would look like in a non-Wikipedia world .
. . at a buck a lookup.

Digital photography? Perhaps . . . but medium would be paper
and the biggest company would be Kodak.

What about Amazon? EBay? YouTube? Weather.com? Google Maps?
Travelocity? Yahoo Finance? iTunes? Twitter? Facebook?
CraigsList? Blogging? On-Line Banking?

We wouldn't even have Web sites. Sure we could probably buy
some kind of proprietary on-line presence, but it would be so
expensive that only GE, GM and GQ could afford it, and so
inaccessible they probably wouldn't want to pay.

Web 2.0 - the ability of a single computer to reach across
the Internet in a dozen different directions at once to build
an customized web page on the fly - would be worse than
unavailable, it would be unthinkable.

But it's not all bad. Without the Internet, we would still
get our news from newspapers, the corner bookstore would
still be down on the corner, the Post Office would be
thriving, your friendly travel agent would still be booking
your trips, Dan Rather would still be on TV, perverts would
still get their sick pix in inconvenient plain brown
wrappers, and the NSA would not know the books I bought at
Amazon or who I email with.

Tough. We lost a lot of skilled leather-smiths when they
invented the horseless carriage. We'll find ways to deal with
the Internet's changes too.

Without the Internet, the minor improvements in telephony and
TV certainly would not drive the buildout of a whole new
infrastructure. The best way to do telephony would still be
twisted pair. The best way to do Cable TV would be coax.

Now I'm a huge Fiber to the Home enthusiast! But I'm also
part of the Reality Based Community. So let's face it, even
WITH the Internet, including Verizon's amazingly ambitious
FIOS buildout, the business case for fiber is so weak that 97
percent of US homes still aren't on fiber. We are still in
"Law of Small Numbers" territory. The Internet is the only
thing standing between our limited success and abject
failure.

Notice, I have not yet, until now, used the word BROADBAND.

But before I talk about broadband, I want to talk about
Synechdoche. Synecdoche is when you say, "The Clock" but you
mean Time. Synecdoche is when you say, "Eyeballs," but you
mean The Customer's Attention. Synecdoche is when you say,
Dallas, but you mean, "The Mavericks."

Most of the time Broadband is synecdoche. When we say,
"Broadband," most of the time we mean, "High Speed
Connections to the Internet."

I repeat, Most of the time when we say Broadband we mean High
Speed Connections to the Internet. Broadband is synecdoche.

Without the Internet, "Broadband" is just another incremental
improvement. It makes telephony and TV better. It makes the
Internet better too. But the key driver of all the killer
apps we know and love is the Internet, not Broadband. And, of
course, the Internet is enabled by lots of technologies -
computers, storage, software, audio compression, video
display technology, AND high-speed wired and wireless
networking.

Now, Broadband is a very important enabler. The United States
has slower, more expensive connections to the Internet than
much of the developed world. And that's embarrassing to me as
a US citizen.

Imagine if a quirk of US policy caused us to have dimmer
displays. That would be a quick fix, unless the display
terminal industry demanded that we disable the Internet in
other ways before it gave us brighter displays. Or insisted
"all your screens are belong to us."

High-speed transmission does not, by itself, turn the wheel
of creative destruction so central to the capitalist process.
The Internet does that. Broadband, by itself, does not fuel
the rise of new companies and the destruction of old ones.
The Internet does that. Broadband by itself is not
disruptive; the Internet is.

The Internet derives its disruptive quality from a very
special property: IT IS PUBLIC. The core of the Internet is a
body of simple, public agreements, called RFCs, that specify
the structure of the Internet Protocol packet. These public
agreements don't need to be ratified or officially approved -
they just need to be widely adopted and used.

The Internet's component technologies - routing, storage,
transmission, etc. - can be improved in private. But the
Internet Protocol itself is hurt by private changes, because
its very strength is its public-ness.

Because it is public, device makers, application makers,
content providers and network providers can make stuff that
works together. The result is completely unprecedented;
instead of a special-purpose network - with telephone wires
on telephone poles that connect telephones to telephone
switches, or a cable network that connects TVs to content -
we have the Internet, a network that connects any application
- love letters, music lessons, credit card payments, doctor's
appointments, fantasy games - to any network - wired,
wireless, twisted pair, coax, fiber, wi-fi, 3G, smoke
signals, carrier pigeon, you name it. Automatically, no extra
services needed. It just works.

This allows several emergent miracles.

First, the Internet grows naturally at its edges, without a
master plan. Anybody can connect their own network, as long
as the connection follows the public spec. Anybody with their
own network can improve it -- in private if they wish, as
long as they follow the public agreement that is the
Internet, the result grows the Internet.

Another miracle: The Internet let's us innovate without
asking anybody's permission. Got an idea? Put it on the
Internet, send it to your friends. Maybe they'll send it to
their friends.

Another miracle: It's a market-discovery machine. Text
messaging wasn't new in 1972. What surprised the Internet
Researchers was email's popularity. Today a band that plays
Parisian cafe music can discover its audience in Japan and
Louisiana and Rio.

It's worth summarizing. The miracles of the Internet -
any-app over any infrastructure,
growth without central planning,
innovation without permission,
and market discovery.
If the Internet Protocol lost its public nature, we'd risk
shutting these miracles off.

One of the public agreements about the Internet Protocol lays
out a process for changing the agreements. If somebody
changes their part of the Internet in private, they put the
Internet's miracles at risk. Comcast tried to do that by
blocking BitTorrent. Fortunately, we persuaded Comcast to
stop. If it had continued, it would have put a whole family
of Internet applications at risk, not only for Comcast
Internet customers, but also for everybody who interacts with
Comcast's customers.

The whole fight over Network Neutrality is about preserving
what's valuable about the Internet - its public-ness.

The Internet threatens the telephone business and the cable
TV business. So of course there's a huge propaganda battle
around the Internet.

The propaganda says Network Neutrality is about treating
every packet exactly the same, but the Internet has never
done that. The propaganda says that Network Neutrality is
about regulating the Internet, but we know that the Internet
exists thanks to the government's ArpaNet, and subsequent
wise government regulation.

Look who's calling for regulation anyway! The only reason
telcos and cablecos exist is that there's a whole body of
franchises and tariffs and licenses and FCCs and PUCs keeping
them in business.

Cut through the propaganda. Network Neutrality is about
preserving the public definition of the Internet Protocol,
the structure of the Internet packet, and the way it is
processed. If there are reasons to change the Internet
Protocol, we can do it in public - that's part of the
Internet too.

It's the Internet, smart people. Your property already has
telephone and TV. So does everybody else's. Broadband without
the Internet isn't worth squat. You're building those fast
connections to The Internet.

So please remember that the essence of the Internet is a body
of public agreements. Anti-Network Neutrality attacks on the
public nature of the Internet are attacks on the value of the
infrastructure improvements you've made to your property. So
you can't be neutral on Network Neutrality. Take a stand.

If you install advanced technology that makes your property
more valuable, you deserve your just rewards. But the
potential of the Internet is much, much bigger than your
property.

Like other great Americans on whose shoulders I stand, I have
a dream. In my dream the Internet becomes so capable that I
am able to be with you as intimately as I am right now
without leaving my home in Connecticut.

In my dream the Internet becomes so good that we think of the
people in Accra or Baghdad or Caracas much as we think of the
people of Albuquerque, Boston and Chicago, as "us" not
"them.".

In my dream, the climate change problem will be solved thanks
to trillions of smart vehicles, heaters and air conditioners
connected to the Internet to mediate real-time auctions for
energy, carbon credits, and transportation facilities.

In my dream, we discover that one of the two billion who live
on less than dollar a day is so smart as to be another
Einstein, that another is so compassionate as to be another
Gandhi, that another is so charismatic as to be another
Mandella . . . and we will can comment on their blog,
subscribe to their flickr stream and follow their twitter
tweets.

But I also have a nightmare . . .

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

Maybe it says it needs to stop terrorism, or protect the
children, or pay copyright holders. Maybe there's a genuine
emergency -- a pandemic or a nuclear attack or a 9.0
earthquake.

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, 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

So it's up to you. When you make high-speed networks part of
your real estate, if you insist that these connect to the
REAL Internet, the un-mediated, un-filtered publicly defined
Internet, you're part of a global miracle that's much bigger
than your property. Please ask yourself what's valuable in
the long run, and act accordingly.

Technorati Tags: Cableco, fiberoptics, NetworkNeutrality, privatization, Telco

Answer: when your network is undersized.

Most of us have heard about the iPhone debacle at SXSW Interactive in March, when there were so many iPhone users in Austin that AT&T's network was overwhelmed. Users of iPhones were frustrated, angry and unable to find the good parties.

I'm in Lafayette, Louisiana, at Festival International de Louisiane. It's a music festival, so the iPhone density isn't even close to SXSW. Nevertheless, last night my friends John St. Julien and Geoff Daily were sitting to my left and right. The music was loud. Texting was the way to go. Yet, both had to try numerous times to send messages on their iPhones. The failure message said, "Network unavailable."

[Eventually after multiple attempts, both John and Geoff were able to send their messages.]

Yogi Berra said it best, "so crowded nobody goes there anymore." The iPhone is an amazing advance. But if enough customers use it normally on AT&T's network, it is tantamount to a Denial of Service (DOS) attack.

AT&T, to its credit, is planning a massive cap-ex program for its wireless network. But it should have thought of that sooner. I wonder if AT&T's wireline division is learning anything. Or Time Warner Cable's broadband guys.

Normal use, and lots of it, should be the kind of problem a vendor WANTS to have. It shouldn't hose your service. It shouldn't give your PR face a black eye. It shouldn't require all kinds of post-hoc fixes.

Understanding how one's business is growing and planning accordingly is, in most businesses, an imperative. C'mon folks, WTF? (This stands for, "Where's the fiber?)

Technorati Tags: Cableco, Caps on Service, Cellco, DenialOfService, fiberoptics, FIOS, FirstMile, GeoffDaily, LafayetteLA, SustainingTechnology, TimeWarner

Technorati Tags: Bushco, Obama, Torture

I was in Portland, Oregon some months ago for a NATOA meeting. I wandered the streets, marvelling at how Portland had changed so much faster than I did in the years between my Corvallis, Oregon, High School days and today. I stumbled across a show of Gwenn Seemel's portraits. I was floored, gasping for air. Gwenn just sent me a notice of her newest show in Eugene. The picture on the left is a sample, but check out her other work here.

Her corpus of portraits is here. Maybe it's just me, and what do I know, but I think she's one of the giant artists of our time.

[Uh-oh. See update below.]

In response to customer feedback, Time Warner Cable has discontinued its trials of tiered Internet service. [Corporate Announcement here.] It was quite a stuff-storm, but to TWC's credit, they put their finger up, felt the howling gale, and changed course right away.

This is in marked contrast to their larger competitor, Comcast, which did stuff at the application level that was supposed to be about simple traffic metering, did it in secret, lied about it, packed an FCC hearing with paid seat-warmers, lied about that, for months and months, until the FCC told them to cut it out. And did they? I still don't trust them.

TWC, at least, approached the traffic problem head-on, by trying to discourage excess traffic with direct, obvious price signals. At the time, I wrote, Time Warner Cable does the right thing. Unfortunately, they did the right thing the wrong way [my blog post on that] -- their price tiers were very aggressive, it gave the impression they were trying to specifically discourage "over-the-top" Internet video, and it gave the impression they were milking their infrastructure.

If I were TWC, I'd re-start from the assumption that Internet traffic is growing, and today's bandwidth hog just might be tomorrow's median Internet user. I'd announce a much less aggressive -- and limited and temporary -- tiered pricing plan. Simultaneously, I'd announce a capital improvement plan aimed squarely at expanding the TWC distribution infrastructure. Then I'd only implement tiering where my infrastructure was under threat, and I'd implement it in conjunction with a capital improvement program in the same area.

It might not be as lucrative as the tiered pricing system that TWC envisioned, but it would position TWC as a major Internet player in the future. Taking the high road and the long view worked for Verizon. TWC now has a chance to show it is not only responsive, but also visionary.

Disclosure: I have had business dealings with TWC in the past, and perhaps I'll have more in the future, but I have no current business relationship. Nobody at TWC has asked me for my opinion recently, either. In any case, I'm more valuable to TWC if I speak my mind; they know where to hire yes-people if they want them.

UPDATE (4/21 4:56PM): Whoops, apparently they have :-(.

Technorati Tags: Caps on Service, Comcast, Competition, Tiers of Service, TimeWarner, Verizon

Once you get past the mis-lede of today's Washington Post story on Somali Piracy, you find this:

Piracy began as a violent reaction to rampant illegal fishing by commercial fishing companies, mostly from European and Asian countries, according to U.N. officials, who say the fishermen often operate with fake licenses.

A Somali man who gave his name only as Ali said he became a pirate in 2004 after several confrontations with commercial fishing vessels operating in Somali waters.
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"We used to put our nets at night in the sea and go back in the morning to see our catch, but we'd just see a big ship taking our nets out of the water," said Ali, 25, now a shopkeeper in Nairobi.

When he and his colleagues steered their boat close to the vessel, he said, the crew sprayed them with hot water, and one of them fired bullets. Ali said his friend was injured, their boat was sunk and they had to swim to shore. The next time they went out to sea, he said, they were hauling AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
"Our plan was to attack the illegal fishing boats," he said. "We took ransoms to cover our wounded people . . . in all, we took 16 ships."

It confirms what I've been blogging here and here.

Technorati Tags: Energy, Environment, Framing, Global, Poverty, Press, privatization