Archive for September, 2005

On Friday, Thomas Friedman sent in another column from Singapore.  The column begins with the words “Singapore is a country that takes the Internet seriously,” and ends with “…American parents had better understand that the people who are eating their kids' lunch in math are not resting on their laurels.” 

In between, Friedman writes about math and science education in Singapore, and specifically an online math teaching program called HeyMath whose “library of animated online lessons, interactive activities and assessment modules” helps both teachers and students.

Friedman's The World Is Flat also focused on how the internet is changing the world, and had the same implicit message as his recent column from Singapore:  America is falling farther and farther behind, in part because it doesn't take the internet seriously.

How would we take the internet seriously?  We'd understand that the nondiscriminatory, layered model of internet communications has made enormous economic growth possible, and we'd do anything we could to stop bills like Barton-Dingell from becoming law.  We'd celebrate the power and innovation unleashed by the internet rather than (or at least in addition to) condemning the spam and spyware that travel online.  And we'd subsidize builders of broadband networks in exchange for agreements not to engage in higher-level packet meddling.

The internet takes us very seriously.  It reflects the best (and, sometimes, worst) of humanity, and it keeps creating better and more interesting metainformation about society.  Surely this should be a two-way street.

[Thanks to GreaterDemocracy blog]

How would Barton-Dingell work for mesh broadband networks? 

Clive Thompson has a nice piece in tomorrow's Times Magazine about wifi meshes, and how they might be awfully helpful in emergencies.  They might be awfully helpful for basic connectivity too.

The basic idea behind a mesh network is that cheap small devices are smart enough to automatically detect access points and other cheap small devices.  Together, these cheap small devices can form an ad hoc wireless network, using unlicensed spectrum.  “Devices” and “routing” become synonymous, because your network is self-configured.  Any open wireless point can serve as a beginning for a mesh network. 

We can assume that local bandwidth will continue to grow, and that open places will exist for wireless access.  Mesh networks capable of dynamically updating and “healing” themselves — while providing high-speed internet access for free — are inevitable. 

Under Barton-Dingell, a node in a mesh network (anyone participating in that network) would be categorized as a ”BITS Provider”:

1.  A “provider” is anyone who offers to provide BITS.

2.  “BITS” are packet-switched services that are offered to the public (as mesh networks certainly are), “with or without a fee.”  So free networks fit into this.

3.  A BITS has to be able to provide to “subscribers” the ability to send and receive packetized information.  Yup.

4.  A “subscriber” is ”any person who consumes goods or services” even if the services are free.  Yup. 

So the first step is that in order to be legal, the mesh network would have to apply to be a BITS.  (Who applies on behalf of a headless, ad hoc, ever-changing cooperative arrangement?  It's anyone's guess.)

And here's the kicker:  The FCC could say You Can't Be A BITS.  The headless, ad-hoc mesh could fail to provide information that the Commission thinks it needs (no limitations in the bill as to what that information is).  Or — even more likely — the Commission could simply determine that the the “BITS provider’s offering of BITS would harm consumers.”  End of story. 

Even if the mesh somehow got through this process (which it wouldn't), being a BITS is hard work.  Many of the old Title II common carrier obligations have been moved over to BITS.  The FCC will be mandating all kinds of consumer protection requirements (and what are the “terms of service” for a mesh?), access to the disabled, privacy terms — a thick regulatory web.

A mesh, if it could talk, would say, “I'm going over to the darknet.  They'll never approve of me.”  If Barton-Dingell is the law of the land, ad hoc won't be permitted.

Every day I look forward to reading a bit more of The Singularity Is Near.

Today's excerpt:

We will continue to have human bodies, but they will become morphable projections of our intelligence.  In other words, . . . we will be able to create and re-create different bodies at will.  However achieved, will such fundamental shifts enable us to live forever?  The answer depends on what we mean by “living” and “dying.”  Consider what we do today with our personal computer files.  When we change from an older computer to a newer one, we don't throw all our files away. . . . . Ultimately software-based humans will be vastly extended beyond the limitations of humans as we know them today.  They will live out on the Web. . . .

Kurzweil doesn't believe that death is inevitable or desirable.  Chew on that for a while.  Maybe we believe that death is a good idea because the only way of existence we've known always ends in death — it's the ultimate is-ism argument. 

I'm just beginning to digest Barton-Dingell [warning, large PDF].  My initial reaction is that although there are some positive signs in the bill — elements of non-discrimination and encouragement of municipal broadband — the bill's vision of the internet is made up of cleanly-categorized services provided by large registered entities whose activities are closely watched by the FCC.

The bill uses the acronyms BIT and BITS to mean “broadband Internet transmission” and “broadband Internet transmission service” (very clever — no one ever gets to refer to bits again in a simple technical sense).  A “broadband Internet transmission service” is defined, in turn, as “a packet-switched service that is offered to the public . .  with or without a fee” and is “transmitted in a packet-based protocol” and “provides to subscribers the ability to send and receive packetized information.”

At first I thought that a BITS was any online application.  The definition includes all the machines and functionalities and everything else connected to a BITS (“any features, functions, and capabilities, as well as any associated packetized facilities, network equipment, and electronics, used to transmit or route packetized information”).  But that can't be right — they must really mean providers of broadband access to the internet. 

What happens to BITS under the bill?

Well, the first step is to register.  All service providers have to sign up with the FCC and with all the states.  Then they're subject to interconnection and nondiscrimination obligations (but only with respect to “lawful” services), with exceptions for special service plans, video services, protection of their networks, and the need to provide quality of service guarantees (many many bodies buried there).

Same approach for VoIP services.  This time, Skype is clearly covered — the bill defines VoIP to include free services that allow calls to be made to the PSTN (or to be received).  Oddly, VoIP doesn't include cable services.  Again, the first step is to register and then be subject to a multitude of obligations.  It's striking that one of those obligations is to exchange traffic with other VoIP providers. Plus required number portability.  More sniping at Skype.  Lots of E911 requirements, and a quick hard look at universal service before it is applied to VOIP.

Same approach for broadband video services.  No matter what size they are, no matter what they're up to, they'll need to register.  A bunch of former cable obligations will be applied to broadband video (including closed captioning).

The bill includes a laundry list of FTC-like consumer protection rulemakings that the FCC will go through, including this doozy:

(a) NATIONAL STANDARDS REQUIRED.—The Commission shall by rule establish national consumer protection standards with respect to BITS, VOIP services, and broadband video services, individually or collectively. Such standards shall—

10) prohibit the use of any equipment used for the provision of BITS, VOIP services, and broadband video services for obscene or indecent communication made—

(A) with the intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass another person; or

(B) knowing that that the recipient is under 18 years of age

Sure, we've been litigating over this for years, but now the FCC will be in charge of rules about using computers to annoy people with legal indecent materials.

Plus many provisions about privacy and advertising.

At first blush, this bill is about guaranteeing sources of revenue for network providers.  They'll have control over video packages and VOIP services.  All independent VOIP providers will go out of business, crushed by universal service, disability access, and E911 requirements.  Independent video offerings won't survive, because there's no requirement of nondiscrimination with respect to them.  And the FCC will become the internet consumer protection agency.

Lots of work to do.

Yesterday's Public Advocate election in NYC should be remembered.  It's important because of what didn't happen.  Andrew Raseij ran on a platform of “wireless for all.”  Tom Friedman raved, the blogosphere went into paroxysms of joy.  One of us!  Someone with a clue was running for office!  Someone who knew all about tagging and Technorati and Flickr was going for mainstream appeal!

In the end, Raseij got only 5% of the vote.

How do we react to this unbelievable event? If we have an ounce of humility left, we realize that the clueful are out of touch.  People don't care (enough) about progressive wireless-based platforms.  People riding on the subway just want to get home and aren't thinking about the collective conversation.  The most transformative of transformations, the electronic excitement of our age, has not touched the hearts and minds of the voting public.

This is bad news for our collective online future.  If no one cares about openness, about connectedness, about interaction, it can all be quietly taken away. 

We have some choices to make.  We could keep going to conferences (boy, are there a lot of conferences).  We could keep recognizing the coolest of the cool A-list blogcasters, and we could really get into the people's video.  We could moan about how Skype doesn't have open APIs.

Or — we could start working on true grassroots appreciation of the open internet and all it makes possible.  That's what I want to do. I supported Raseij and his campaign, and I bet his team has learned a lot about electioneering.

This election should be remembered.  The blogosphere couldn't sweep a new Public Advocate into office (trust me, it's a pretty obscure position), and we're not making progress on the Hill or at the FCC.  It's time to make a big public deal out of access to the open internet. 

National Journal's Insider Update reports today that Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo!, and others are working on inserting “net neutrality” provisions into any updated Telecommunications Act.

The principles preliminarily adopted by the FCC in August didn't give us much reason to hope that incumbent telcos and cablecos would ever allow true “net neutrality” to be written into law.  True net neutrality would simply say:  don't discriminate against any application; allow any device to attach to your network; disclose upload/download speeds and the scope of the “internet” to which you're providing access; don't evade any of the foregoing principles through your EULA.  No caveats, no hedging, no surprises.

(By the way, where are the many orders and final principles promised us on that hectic early August day?  Is it possible that the Commission is worrying about its legal arguments?)

The key problem, as the National Journal article points out, is that in order to require “net neutrality” you have to make explicit rules about bit carriage by private networks.  From the telcos' perspective, “net neutrality” is “You can't put the kind of radio you want in the car you're building.  You have to allow any kind of radio to be put into that car.”

Sen. Sununu, reportedly the most clued-in Senator we have, is dubitante. He's been convinced that people won't use networks that discriminate.  I'm not so sure that's true, only because the choices of access providers are so few and consumers' expectations are so easily dampened.  It's hard to vote with your feet when there's nowhere to go.

It's a hard problem.  Asking for statutory “net neutrality” means that we'll end up with language in some queasy middle of the issue.  It puts the Commission in the position of arbiter of non-discrimination.  And it doesn't fit with the overall deregulatory, pro-competition stance of the current Congress.  On a meta level, the compromises required to squeeze “net neutrality” into words won't fit the idea of the original open internet.

Not having statutory “net neutrality” puts all higher-level net functions at the mercy of network providers who have every incentive to monetize every transaction that uses their infrastructure.

Can't we be bolder?  Can't we change the facts on the ground? Why are we stuck with only these variables?  Why can't we treat internet access like a subsidized utility?  If that's a bad idea, could discussing it lead to better ideas?

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As I walked by my polling place this evening, a guy tried to hand me a leaflet.  I waved him off (politely), saying I'd already voted.  He said:  “You could use it as a coaster or something.”  He'd had a long day.  I assured him that I had voted for the leafletted person — we cheered — I went on.

In the new world, says the Prophet of Boom, what's a library?  What's a classroom?  What's a newspaper? 

Jeff Jarvis is carrying out plans to join the new CUNY school of journalism.  He's ideally suited to help us figure out what a newspaper is in this new age, and to help train the young journalists who will make these new newspapers come alive.  And he's going to webcast his classes!  Congratulations to Jeff on his eminently sensible move.  We're all lucky that he left BigMedia. 

It's a big question that Jeff is going to be working on.  I love The Times.  The day after John Roberts was nominated they published an enormous, careful, detailed story about his background.  Just amazing.  Their coverage of the Discovery launch (including the run-up to it) was great.  More stories than I can believe are coming out every day about the Katrina aftermath.  It's a truly great institution.  But how can it survive this new era of fractured, personalized, man-on-the-street news-blogging?  Even if it succeeds in changing itself to meet its changed electronic context, will other, smaller newspapers be able to make the transition? 

Jeff is lining up to help train people to do good journalistic work in this new age, and I honor him for it.  He says he wants to work on the ”future of media.”  I wonder how many of his students will end up working for themselves. 

Every day I read news stories and blog posts about fights over VoIP and plans to create intelligent networks that will trap and trace our every communication.  Every day I write about how dreadful it would be if we couldn't use the open internet in the way we wanted to use it.

I need to confess that this set of issues has taken on new meaning for me:  I can't use GoogleTalk at work, and every other email I send doesn't go through.  Why, why? 

I suspect the university just heard about VoIP and decided to block it as a Dangerous Thing.  And I think that they've decided that anyone not authenticated to their mail server must be a Dangerous Spammer.

Sure, GoogleTalk doesn't have any features — yet.  But it will someday, and I want to be there.  I'm frustrated that I can't experiment with it and build bristling buddy lists.  Sorry — “friends lists.”  I'm also getting very tired of re-sending email messages, hoping to sneak through the walls.

Oh, and the university locked the door of the coffee-machine room today too. 

Maybe I should stay home from now on. My place can't be described as palatial, but the wireless connection always works, I can send email messages all day long, and no one keeps me from using new applications.  And I can drink coffee. 

The real enemies of the net are not just yearnings for control on the part of BigNetworks, but also smug, squelching, and self-satisfied attitudes on both sides of the divide.

If you talk to an engineer and say “I'm worried about the regulatory trend in Washington,” he'll say, “Where?  We'll just route around whatever they do.  They're irrelevant.  We've got some slick new open source telephony things coming out.  They'll never be able to stop us.”  And that's the end of the conversation.

If you talk to a regulatory maximalist and say “I'm worried about cutting ourselves off from the development of new kinds of interactions and services that will be very useful to mankind,” he'll say, “What?  The internet isn't working very well.  We've got spam and spyware and terrorists — right and left.  It clearly has to be fixed for your safety. Why should the internet be any different from any other form of communications?”  And that's the end of the conversation.

Neither side is considering the amplifying, complex, non-linear events that follow from either too much randomness or too much rigidity.  From the regulatory maximalist point of view, we've got a completely random situation that requires amelioration; from the free-to-be technician's point of view, rigidity is simply impossible.  Neither side is right. 

The smugness is striking.  We need to inject some humility and some hard facts into the discussion (to the extent there is a discusssion — which is another problem).  We need to solve the problems of law enforcement and emergency services and funding universal service without crippling the open internet.  This takes work.

There is a middle ground.  It's not (quite) impossible to imagine a better way forward.

In the Television Without Frontiers setting, Yahoo! filed some very thoughtful comments.  They noted that taking broadcast regulations from a 1980s context (characterized by spectrum scarcity and absence of user control) and applying them wholesale to internet audiovisual content would make no sense.  Broadcast TV is not the same as IP TV, and even IP TV will take on myriad forms in the coming years:

[I]n a very short time, IP TV will bear no resemblance to today’s broadcast world. . . . It will be a world of on-demand, streamed, live, pre-recorded and citizen-created services mixed into a melange of interactive information, education and entertainment. At the centre will be the consumer (not the broadcaster),  controlling his/her choice of content, the timing, format and so on, and also having the ability to restrict access to certain content for themselves and other family members. Already, Internet users have access to a host of filtering, parental control and other tools enabling them to decide what is appropriate viewing for them and their families. It is not unreasonable to expect similar market-driven solutions to be provided for IP TV.

That's not smug.  That's reasonable and forward-looking.  We need to get many more filings like Yahoo!'s in front of policymakers around the world.   

Two places where more light needs to shine:

1.  The ITU “next generation network” standards process.  ITU hosts a resource page here.  It looks as if telcos from around the world want to take the billing/tracing standards used by mobile carriers and graft them onto the internet.  This would allow them to know exactly what everyone is doing on their networks, and to charge for it. 

Standards aren't neutral.  The original internet standards had a definite bias towards openness, non-discrimination, and simplicity.  The ITU project is aimed at making the internet into (essentially) a circuit-switched operation, in which central control is far easier.  This is appealing to many powerful entities around the world, including law enforcement authorities. There are constant NGN-oriented meetings, and steady progress is being made.  Unless we pay attention — actively — the original internet standards won't always be with us. 

What can you do?  You can ask the techies you know to translate for you, and to help persuade internet advocacy organizations that are friendly to the original standards to get actively involved in the ITU process.

2.  TV Without Frontiers.  Just as the ITU wants to take mobile rules and stick them on the internet, the European Commission wants to take rules about broadcast TV (protection of minors, for example) and apply them to internet content.  This is a hopelessly pernicious idea.

What can you do?  If you work for a large company that has something to do with internet content, you can take a moment to flip through a few comments, understand why this is a bad move (I'll do this in summary tomorrow — about to get on a train here), and publicize the substantial retrograde inversion that this step represents.