The Great Quadrangle
Back in March 2004, the FCC issued a remarkable piece of paper — an “IP-Enabled Services” notice of proposed rulemaking. Someone sidled up to me and said, “it's all over! This is Computer Four! The FCC is in charge!”
In a nutshell, the March 2004 notice suggested that the FCC believed it had jurisdiction over “IP-enabled services” (that is, anything using the Internet Protocol) under its “ancillary” powers in Title I of the 1996 Act. (Translation: even though the statute giving the FCC its power doesn't say anything about the internet, the FCC believes that it has authority to make rules about “services” that use IP. It gets this authority, it believes, from a little line in the first, general Title of the Act that gives it “necessary and proper” internal housekeeping rulemaking authority. So we're into a standardless, undefined area — all the other Titles are quite specific. So far no one is stopping the FCC and the Supreme Court BrandX opinion defers to the FCC's interpretation of its authority. But I digress).
This was a dramatic statement. The Domain Name System depends on IP. All web sites depend on IP. Email. You name it. The FCC said it was thinking about what “social policies” to apply to these “services.”
Since then, we've seen several moves to apply particular “social policies” to, in particular, “interconnected VoIP” services and highspeed internet access providers. The FCC has said that it can broaden what “interconnected VoIP” means, but for the moment it means voice applications that are capable of connecting to the traditional phone system (even if they don't actually connect). It's a sort of “fruit of the poisoned tree” move — as soon as some part of an application or suite of applications is capable of connecting, the whole thing/company has to be compliant.
The first three “social policies” have been E911, CALEA, and Universal Service funding. Each is a story of its own. (The CALEA story had a another milestone moment a couple of weeks ago when law enforcement filed a petition for an expedited rulemaking essentially saying that the wireless packet data they get is inadequate under CALEA — they want more precise data. This has potential design implications for any nascent service.)
I've heard that today the Commission adopted a fourth “social policy” for “interconnected VoIP”: accessibility compliance under Sec. 255. We'll see what the requirements are — right now there's nothing on the FCC site.
Dopplr
So Twitter is too much and LinkedIn seems increasingly
impersonal. But Dopplr — just right, at least for
now. I like the little thumbnails of people, I like that I
can see who's in the town I'm in, and I like the simplicity.
Not a lot of bells, whistles, and meta-bettah-information - at least
for now. It's like…a calling card system for people who
move around a lot.
Perhaps you are
unfamiliar with the practice of calling and leaving cards. I
know about it only from my (now late) grandmother and from a 1920s
etiquette book that I bought at a garage sale once. Basically, the idea was that people established At Home afternoons when they were available for calls. But you would only call on people you already knew. And the first time around, you would do no more than leave your card - then the recipient would decide whether to return or acknowledge your call. Complicated - sometimes the cards would have corners turned up to signal particular messages.
So you start in Dopplr by being invited (just ask, lots of invitations floating around). Then you ask other people if they want to be fellow travellers of yours. Then they can see your trips, but they can decide in turn if they want to allow you to see theirs. Just like the card system — polite, signals sent and received, levels of acquaintance decided on — but faster and spanning the globe.
The visit that follows the signal - that's the interesting part across which a discreet veil will be drawn.