Clue: have a densely-populated downtown
Forbes has this story about the U.S. cities that are the most wired.
Atlanta!
Atlanta, like many major U.S. cities, is planning a citywide wireless network, aiming to bring free or affordable Internet access to all residents and small businesses, with trial stages in early 2007.
Hello to Atlanta, with its tightly-packed downtown. Don't have Culver City access — that's your challenge. Southern hospitality means (or should mean) an open, non-discriminatory, unfiltered network.
Utah internet censorship law struck down
Congratulations to CDT (and particularly to John Morris) who, with the ACLU, bookstores, independent artists, and ISPs challenged the constitutionality of Utah House Bill 260 — and won. (June 2005 post about the complaint is here.)
House Bill 260, like the Pennsylvania statute challenged in the Pappert case, would have mandated that ISPs block sites deemed “harmful to minors” by the State AG. And that AG could have acted without any judicial review, just deciding on his own that particular sites were “harmful.” The ISPs, in turn, would probably have blocked those sites by blacklisting IP addresses — which would have blocked an enormous amount of perfectly lawful content (because sites are routinely co-hosted).
It's nice to have some good news once in a while.
CALEA: Five reasons why not
It's time to be actively concerned about a proposed DOJ draft amendment to CALEA — posted here by EFF. (Here's a post I did about this a short while ago.) Remember the outrage about the Hollings bill? Well, this is worse.
Quick review: back in 1994, the FBI had evidence that it had had trouble carrying out wiretap orders 183 times. So the FBI asked that telecommunications providers be required to design their equipment so as to be easily tappable — to make digital telephony as tappable as analog phones. At first, the FBI wanted all communications (including internet communications) to be subject to these design mandates — but that attempt was flatly rejected by Congress. We ended up with the current Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act of 1994.
CALEA requires telecommunications providers (not online services) to be able to get “call-identifying information” to law enforcement in a standard format. (Half a billion dollars was tagged to help these telecom providers redesign their systems to make this possible.) Call-identifying information doesn't include location information — it's pieces of information that could have been obtained in the old trap and trace/pen register days of traditional telephony, like the numbers dialed and the length of the call.
Although there is zero evidence that law enforcement has had problems carrying out wiretap orders since 1994, and indeed DOJ has only carried out a dozen or so interceptions of computer communications a year since 2003, DOJ has never liked the deal it got from Congress back in 1994. They want the internet. And so they've written a telephony-style bill and are trying to slap it on top of all online applications.
The draft bill is astounding. Here are five reasons why:
1. It covers all online communications services you can think of — instant messaging, gaming, peer to peer service providers, calendars, VoIP, search, and anything the FCC decides should be covered. In some narrow instances email may be excluded. But if the FCC decides email should be included, it'll be included. As I've said before, this would have enormous impacts on innovation if passed. Every single service would have to be redesigned to meet the compliance requirements of CALEA.
2. It forces all of these services to have a point of presence (servers) in the U.S. This is a very big deal. This means that any entity that allows people here in the U.S. to communicate has to have servers here. Remember ICQ? They started in Israel. They didn't have servers here. This means that no startup in any other country can help us communicate without being subject to the design desires of U.S. law enforcement. What?
This point of presence requirement is now found in China — they, too, want to make it easy for law enforcement to listen in and then arrest people.
3. It broadens the definition of “call identifying information” to include items that are content, and that will require deep packet inspection by ISPs. Example: “user authentication and logon information.” That's content — it's like the moment when you're on the phone and you tell someone your mother's last name. In order to get that information, you'd have to open up the communication and look inside. Example: ”post cut through digits.” That's content — it's like the moment when you're on the phone and you press number commands to make your voicemail system do something. (And, boy, what a telephony-style concept in the internet age.)
4. It says that law enforcement's interception needs trump every other interest, including (implicitly) getting communications to their destinations in a timely way. Think about it — if law enforcement wants real-time interception of VoIP calls and other online transactions, what do you think will happen to those communications? Right — they'll be slowed. And privacy concerns will go out the window.
5. It puts the cost of all of this squarely on the shoulders of online services. Sure, the big guys will be able to comply. But no garage startup is going to be able to handle these demands. Every tiny business needs 24/7 responsiveness to law enforcement (required in the bill)? Every tiny business copes with ever-changing law enforcement or FCC requirements? Every tiny application developer that helps its customers communicate in any way (every mesh network) has to comply with CALEA? Every dial-up system? Every private network that FCC decides should be covered?
Those are just the five big screaming headlines of what's wrong with this draft bill. I'm sure others can list more.
Value in networks
Reading more telecommunications scholarship today, I'm struck by how analog the discussion is. Broadband networks are analogized to department stores, bridges used by railroads, road systems — it's as if interactivity never happened, and we're all just part of a global production chain. We consume, they provide, the only question is who gets to charge for what. Whoof.
Well, so if broadband access is a department store (sure, I'll play on your field) is it all Macy's?
Effectively, yes. We have very few choices here in the U.S.
According to the FCC's July report [pdf]: about half of us have two choices of broadband provider (DSL and cable); a third only have one choice; and about 13% have no broadband service from either DSL or cable. Satellite, wireless, and the much-hoped-for BPL (broadband over power line) make up about .5% of residential broadband access.
Verizon is confident enough about the situation for its subscribers that it wrote to me (and millions of other people) saying it intended to charge a new fee. I wrote back saying “inappropriate and unlawful” but they weren't taking messages.
Starting August 26, 2006, Verizon Online will begin charging a Supplier Surcharge for all new DSL customers, existing customers with a DSL monthly or bundle package, and existing DSL annual plan customers at the time their current annual plan expires. This surcharge is not a government imposed fee or a tax; however, it is intended to help offset costs we incur from our network supplier in providing Verizon Online DSL service. The Supplier Surcharge will initially be set at $1.20 a month for Verizon Online DSL customers with service up to 768Kbps and $2.70 per month for customers with DSL service at higher speeds.
I don't think we've got a very competitive marketplace if this company can impose another fee on a commodity service. Prices should be going down, not up.
In the Netherlands they're paying 7 euros for 30Mbps symmetrical service.
Content and sociability
I'm very grateful to Gordon Cook and his friends for many useful pointers. A recent one went to a 2001 paper by Andrew Odlyzko called “Content is Not King.”
Odlyzko's central point is that content (broadcast, centralized) has generally been less important than point-to-point communication — most of the money is in communicating, not being entertained. Indeed, the contribution of “content” to the economy is not that large.
Each old form of technology has its strong adherents who see new things as simply modifications of the old. When I was writing about the early history of telephony last summer I learned that the first telephony guys were actually telegraph guys. They took telephony very seriously as a form of telegraphy — crucial information-forwarding — and were actually distressed when social use of the telephone became widespread. And many of the first networked-computer guys were actually researching/timesharing guys, who were baffled when use of email became the killer application (and fewer people than anticipated were actually using the networks for research purposes).
Now, we've got online guys who see the internet as a platform for useful applications — as a place where people will mostly watch delivered content — and the tussle is over who gets to control the platform and whether companies should be able to introduce new applications without asking permission. (Many of my beloved academic colleagues are in this camp.)
But it seems to me that just as content isn't king, applications aren't (really) kings either. Applications are convenient vessels for human semantic communication. We're glad there are applications around to help us communicate, but we'll be just as glad when there are even more common/free/open source interfaces that let us get down to the business of socializing effectively online.
Pattern recognition, looking for metainformational depth — all of this is just socializing in different words. Whatever layer-interference gets in the way of this human activity should be examined carefully, particularly if the layer-interference is made possible by leverage over crucial bottlenecks. I have a feeling we'll pay more to socialize online than to watch movies.
What's alive?
A Berkeley professor recommended that I read “Self-Producing Systems: Implications and Applications of Autopoiesis” by John Mingers.
Basically, an autopoietic system is a “dynamic network of interacting processes of production” that is contained within a boundary and also produces that boundary — where the boundary is “maintained by the preferential interactions of its components.” So you're looking for something that produces its own components and whose components in turn create its own boundaries. This concept helps us understand life.
If all autopoietic systems are the same as “living” systems, then we'd have to say that online communities/societies are ”alive.” They have components that are engaged in dynamic, interacting processes; they have boundaries that those components create (membership, activities); their boundaries are maintained by the preferences of their members. A community, offline or online, creates itself.
Or you could say that some autopoietic systems are alive (like cells) and some (like computer networks) are not. Or, finally, you could say that only physical living systems are autopoietic — which seems wrong. It seems to me that the first choice (all autopoietic systems are “alive”) is the strongest.
Autopoietic systems aren't closed — indeed, they can't be, because they need energy flows (like new members) to do the work of creating themselves. Wikipedia is an autopoietic system, arguably. And it has a great entry on autopoiesis.
Yes, this is a little far-flung — a “right to life” for online self-created systems. But instead of always prioritizing the economics of infrastructure companies, we might want to look at the value (the liveliness) of what's going on online.
Email amnesty
I was in DC earlier today, and I noticed that I wasn't able to send or receive email using Outlook. I figured it was just Starbucks/TMobile bossiness. But no.
No blogging tonight because I'm trying to quickly clean up my mailbox before it stops working altogether. The problem? Nearly two gigabytes of mail — sent mail, deleted mail, hoarded mail, yet-to-be-responded-to mail, mail I like to look back at, forgotten mail, funny mail.
It turns out (I didn't know this) that no Outlook “profile” can handle more than two gigabytes. So that particular identity of mine had become nonresponsive. The guy on the phone said that the profile might have been corrupted and urged me to leave all the mail behind. With much ceremony, he walked me through creating a new profile — a new me — and then we said goodbye.
I'm hoping I can disobey his command because I don't think I can manage without this electronic memory. I also don't want to rely on webmail because I can't always be online, and I don't like either the Google or Yahoo! interfaces for longterm use (although I use both frequently for list mail and other special-purpose mail).
It's been a sobering experience, this evening of mail. My new “me” received a bunch of mail that may never be answered — so forgive me.
Not so long ago
Americans have no memory. That's why it's possible for someone to be doing a remake of ”Working Girl,” which came out minutes ago. (At least on my timescale.)
Well, for more than thirty years before Working Girl was first released, AT&T controlled all aspects of telephony in the U.S. Long distance, local, all the equipment, and all the good research too. (We're not faulting them for the research — in fact, we miss it.) They were an arrogant and clever company — the largest in the world — and when some aspect of their business came under some form of control that made it difficult for them to act in anticompetitive ways in that area, why, they just looked for another place to be anticompetitive in.
AT&T used their monopoly over local service (the telephony last mile) to make it impossible for competition to emerge in long distance or the manufacture of equipment.
It was all so complicated that the FCC was completely overpowered — at the antitrust trial before Judge Greene, DOJ called a bunch of former FCC-ers to testify that they couldn't supervise the Bell System. This wasn't market failure, this was regulatory failure. Complete inability to cope.
So Judge Greene drove them through discovery and trial with a firm hand, and after 11 months DOJ and AT&T came up with a consent decree. It separated the local telephone part from everything else (putting local service into the hands of seven operating companies made up of 22 former operating companies). It specifically said that those operating companies couldn't get into offering content, or manufacturing equipment, or operating long distance service — because they couldn't be trusted not to discriminate in favor of their own stuff. After the decree and the complicated process of splitting up the company, long distance prices plummeted, a vibrant market for equipment emerged, and the internet arrived.
Here's Judge Green on the content restriction:
The Regional Companies argue at some length that they have no incentive to discriminate against competitors in the information service market because to do so would diminish use of the network and hence cause a reduction in their revenues. But in any market where the Regional Companies are in competition with independent information service providers, their economic interest lies in manipulating the system toward use of their own services, rather than in encouraging maximum use of the network by their information service competitors.
Sound familiar?
So where are we now? The seven operating companies crept back into long distance service, got rid of the consent decree (and Judge Greene's firm hand) in the 1996 Act, manipulated/litigated their way out of allowing competitive local service to emerge, and now …. they're mostly reconsolidated. We really have two phone companies in the US: Verizon and AT&T.
And they don't really have competitors for broadband access — just gentle telco/cableco giants. Maybe colluding gentle giants — the gentlest of all.
Finally, another bit of history: the FCC was against structural line-of-business limits on the Baby Bells from the beginning. Is the Commission now more capable of enforcing any rules against these guys than they were before the first “Working Girl”?
Short notes
So I've decided to read about the AT&T divestiture — and, boy, does Ma Bell's pre-breakup rhetoric sound familiar. Paraphrasing:
Everything is so much more efficient because AT&T is vertically integrated. In fact, it would be dangerous to move away from vertical integration — dangerous to universal service, to the price of local telephone service, and to consumers generally. And, by the way, it would endanger our networks to allow foreign attachments…
Anyway, so here we are, lovely end of summer day in New York. With a crash of suits, the students have returned. The building doesn't seem to be quite ready for them — a couple of floors are still under construction. But, heck, classes don't start for four more days. Dear students, welcome back.
Big and welcome news from Brussels today, as Viviane Reding follows through on her determination to force Deutsche Telekom to open up to competition. I wrote about this a while ago (here). Yes, a broad, persuasive, before-the-fact (”ex ante”) rule mandating that the IP bitstream of DT be made available for connection. So:
Access to the broadband networks of Deutsche Telekom should be granted immediately and without further delay irrespectively of the underlying technology of the network. Any exclusion from the access obligation would jeopardise the working of competition in the market.
and the Commission explains that:
Bitstream access allows competitors to have access to the established operators' infrastructure in order to offer broadband services (for example high-speed internet, telephony) directly to end customers (households and business customers). This is of crucial importance for competition on the end user market.
The Commission also points out that lots of other perfectly respectable countries have mandated this kind of infrastructure access by competitors:
The vast majority of EU member states has mandated bitstream access some time ago. Bitstream access thus is today a reality on the broadband markets of Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain. Sweden and the UK, with bitstream access in preparation also in the Czech Republic, while other countries (such as the Netherlands) are profiting from strong infrastructure-based competition.
Back to school, back to bitstream, back to remembering the AT&T divestiture.
Traffic flowing nicely
From the OECD, a useful paper about interconnection online. It turns out (surprise!) that inter-networking is working fine without intervention. There are zillion networks out there, and as long as the local telecommunications environment is sufficiently open (all the way to opening up incumbent facilities to competitors), these networks are finding ways to connect on their own:
The greatest cost barriers to any country connecting to global networks are not traffic exchange relationships, in competitive environments, but monopolists charging high prices in the absence of such competition.
Also — where there's facilities-based competition, broadband prices can plummet and services to rural areas can be profitable. Global Broadband Battles makes the same point: Reform to telecommunications regulation (opening up facilities to competitors) is the key to stimulating growth in access.
Thanks to Milton Mueller for the pointer to the OECD paper.