Archive for June, 2007

Today was a very full day on all fronts — ICANN, OneWebDay, digging through everything recently filed in the 700 MHz proceeding (this week's favorite filing is here, from Google), and…viola.

I have a feeling you read that last word as voilà. You probably thought that I had fallen once again into the conceit, the blogging cliché, that any three disparate items can be tied together in a breathless post. 

Here she goes yet again, you sighed, rummaging through your feed reader, looking helplessly for something interesting to read. She's saying XY about ICANN and flogging OneWebDay, saying that it all relates somehow to spectrum policy. 

No, I'm spending a lot of time with the viola (the VYE-ola, as many lawyers call it) and with my new friends Tim and Alexa getting ready for an elaborate way-out-of-town concert on Sunday.  I can't put it together with technology, it doesn't fit.  Here are blogs of real musicians:  here, here, here, and here.

I have a friend who tours worldwide as an in-demand opera singer.  He asked me whether he should start a blog – he said everyone seems to have one.  I replied, too quickly, “Yes, you definitely should, it will give you a voice.”  He gave me an odd look.  He thought he had a voice.

–Update:  four more music blogs recommended by a reader
1.  Alex Ross, New Yorker critic
2. Steve Smith, Time Out New York critic
3. Opera Chic, Milan-based opera gossip
4. Helen Radice, harpist

Let's see if this works.  Watch this video, and try translating its captions into another language.  (You'll have to register with dotSUB to do this.)

dotSUB's tool is very easy to use, and suddenly makes it possible to make a piece of video understandable around the world.  It's a wiki for translation.

Thanks to Michael Smolens for introducing me to dotSUB and for arranging for the transcription of the OneWebDay video!  I'm looking forward to seeing how we can encourage people to upload their own videos about how the web has changed their lives – and then encourage other people to translate them.  It's a great OneWebDay project.

Today's Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the 700 MHz auction, in a nutshell:

The auction is broadly seen as critical to our shared communications future, but there's very little agreement about how all the pieces fit together.  My prediction:  some delay in the promulgation of the auction rules.  There's too much at stake and too little shared territory.  Sen. Rockefeller noted that the consequences of the auction are enormous, but the public doesn't understand the issue and committee attendance is sparse.

1.  Public safety.  Although many agree that a national broadband network controlled by public safety would be a good idea, not everyone does.  The NYC witness, Paul Cosgrave, says that NY has already built its own network, and he doesn't want to be forced to adopt nationwide standards and choose particular spectrum.  He doesn't think one size fits all.  On the other hand, he agrees with the notion that a national network won't happen without a substantial assist from private industry, and he concedes that cooperation among public safety actors isn't currently optimal.  McCarley, from Texas, thinks that a public-private partnership makes sense as long as the network is built to public safety specifications and controlled by a strong public safety (unitary) actor.

2.  Frontline.  Sen. Stevens, it's fair to say, is irritated by the very idea of auction rules that would condition award on agreement to the Frontline plan.  His “dialogue” with Barksdale was surprisingly uninformed – Frontline has clearly said that compliance with CALEA and E911 is part of its plan, and no one thinks that an auction using the Frontline-proposed rules for just 10MHz of the spectrum will result in less competition on any metric.  There will be bidders other than Frontline. Barksdale was emphatic and authentic – a busy, experienced guy who seems to be doing this because he actually cares about the subject.

Stevens would rather have NO auction rules and give $5 billion to
public safety to start building their own network. Barksdale shot back
that $5 billion wouldn't be nearly enough.

Sen. Dorgan took his time understanding the Frontline proposal, and seems to appreciate that it's complicated and clever.  I didn't get the sense that he would embrace the plan right now. 

The Frontline plan was framed by a few speakers, particularly Lynch from Verizon, as supporting “net neutrality” (told you this would happen).  Verizon's view is that the Frontline plan won't help innovation or consumers.  Lynch points out that public safety doesn't like open access, “and as an operator I don't like these rules either.  They'll reduce interest in spectrum, and won't allow us to manage our networks” to prevent spam, viruses, and monopolization of the network by hogging-devices.  Verizon likes band plan 3 (in the weeds – I'll describe someday).

3.  Entrepreneurial energy.  The only real entrepreneur who spoke was Amol Sarva of Txtbl, who is pointing out that wireless carriers are constraining innovation along many vectors.  He wants open access rules applied to 10 MHz, and dynamic auctioning rules applied as well.  He suggests that America lead the way in innovation.

Bottom line:  many pieces to play with, and not a lot of time.  According to the statute, the auction has to start in late January 2008, and players need several months to get ready.  A nationwide new-energy wireless broadband network faces many obstacles at this point.

Network operators, the gatekeepers of the internet, will often say something like this:

Sure, we'll leave the 'public internet' alone.  We just want to be able to apply differentiated prices to our private network – we're investing a lot in installing fiber, and we need to be able to recoup our investment.

Lots of people understand this argument. Maybe the “public internet” will be a little slower, but it will still be there.  Won't it?

Think about it.  If somehow there's a line drawn by an operator between the machines it uses for the “public” part and the “private” part, what incentive will a provider have to maintain the “public” machines? 

There's a cautionary tale out there about how one telephone company, Verizon, seems to treat its old-fashioned copper wires.  A lot of people depend on copper to make phone calls.  The Communication Workers of America are claiming that Verizon has essentially abandoned longterm maintenance on its copper phone lines in Virginia.  They're flooded with complaints that Verizon is directing its resources towards installing (unregulated) fiber optic lines instead of fixing the old copper connections.

Verizon, for its part, steadfastly denies the CWA claims.

Sen. Claire McCaskill's remarks at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on universal service this morning were memorable. 

Universal service is broadly believed to be a swampy mess.  Billions are collected from all of us to pay carriers for services that may be (1) the wrong services (i.e., not highspeed internet connections) provided (2) inefficiently to (3) the wrong people by (4) bloated and canny telephone companies. Let's paraphrase:

Universal service needs fundamental reform.  You [Commr. Tate, chair of the Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service] keep telling us that if we want to see reform we have to ask the next panel about it.  [The next panel of witnesses was peopled by employees of rural, wireless, and wireline telephone companies.] 

But that's an acknowledgement that the cart is driving the horse here.  The next panel is filled with people who make money with universal service support.  You're essentially saying that “the FCC is incapable of moving forward on reform unless everyone tells us it's okay.” 

We thought you, the FCC, had statutory authority to act!  You don't have to wait for all the people making money here to join hands and agree! 

Commr. Tate responded that, well, the Joint Board did take a step – it made a recommendation.  The Senators seemed not to be persuaded.

Here's what I (the blogger, not Commr. Tate) understand the recommendation to be.  It's not comprehensive reform. On May 1, the Board recommended that swiftly-growing “high cost” support given to competitive carriers (for serving areas that are expensive to serve) be subject to an interim cap.  From what I can tell, this cap won't be applied to the incumbent local phone companies.  So it will constrain what wireless providers in rural areas will be able to do.  And the incumbents will be able to continue along their merry way.

It's all very hard to believe, and the Senators seemed both frustrated and well-informed. 

Back to Sen. McCaskill (paraphrase):

It doesn't matter what the Joint Board says.  You at the FCC have the authority to fix this.  But the people who have figured out how to access this money are driving the train, not sound public policy.
 
Look, this really is a fetid, arcane area in the dark basement of FCC regulation.  Universal service is complex and graft-ridden and tied to political patronage.  People say we can fix the collection mechanism by tying it to phone numbers – VoIP and otherwise – and fix the distribution mechanism by making everything a reverse auction. But there are miles and miles between this solution and where we're standing (or sinking).  Meanwhile, an amazing technological age is passing people by, because USF doesn't fund highspeed internet access. 

Luckily, the numbers are staggering (it's almost beyond count – they'll have to switch to the latter-day McDonald's formulation of billions and billions spent because it's getting hard to tell how many), so people should stay interested in this one for a while. 

Commr. Tate seemed a little taken aback.  She said, “I’ve never seen this much attention focused on
this issue.”  Let's hope the focus continues.

I heard a talk last week by Walter Isaacson that was a tour de force.  He spoke without notes – granted, the subject of Einstein is part of Isaacson's life right now, but still it seemed so graceful and communicative on his part to be looking at us instead of an index card. 

I'd like to give a talk (also without notes) that persuaded everyone listening that they are part of a story that is just as creative and visual as Einstein's mind.  Something profound is going on in the world of communication that can't be finitely explained in advance.  Talking about email and VoIP and blogs is just skimming the surface.  We're inside a phase change in communication that is hard to see – there are small avalanches of changes in the form of email and blogs, but the bigger change is more fundamental.  There's a push into novelty, into the “adjacent possible,” that is speeding along, catalyzed by global digital communications.

But starting this way, with handwaving and appeals to profundity, won't be memorable.  I'll need to tell stories.  What stories put across the thought experiment of a global brain?  Why would anyone want to be told they're a neuron?  (“No, not moron, neuron.”)  Maybe the global brain solves a universal problem, in a way that brings makes people see things differently.  Anecdotes, web pages, videos – but is that like looking down at an index card? 

The couch potato is dead, and we're in the midst of a history of surprises. 

Isaacson had it easy, in a way; he's talking about a life that has ended, and he can look back and tell stories about how it went.  I'd like to convince people listening to my talk that we have absolutely no idea how things are going to go with the internet, and that that's as it should be.  Mind-blowing diversity is actually good, because out of sufficiently dense diversity life emerges.  Whoof – hard to visualize.

I like graduation ceremonies.  It's a ancient ritual with a now-common tune:  Pomp and Circumstance.  The poor people playing the tune have to play it over and over and over as the class files in.  But it's a great tune and I hope they don't mind.

Last Friday I went to my niece's high school graduation in Los Angeles, and today was Cardozo's graduation in Avery Fisher Hall.  It's too bad that the energy of commencement speeches can't be harnessed somehow, made to do work, because both of these events featured fine speeches.  Both speakers (Jim Newton, LA Times editorial page editor; Sen. Chris Dodd in NYC) spoke plainly about the need for leadership right now in America; both spoke about the honor of a fine education; and both exhorted their listeners to avoid apathy and generally fix things.  Both had personal stories about activism that had inspired them, and both hoped to inspire us.  Both were authentic and persuasive.

But then their speeches ended, and there weren't any levers to pull or actions to take.  Both speakers waited politely until it felt like the right time to leave, and then left, whispering thanks to their decanal hosts.  These events just end.  The faculty and graduates file out to greet their families. 

I'm not saying these rituals are empty – far from it.  But if only we could bottle it:  “Essence of Commencement.”

===sorry I inadvertently deleted a trackback from this fine blog. it's the spam that clouds my vision.

In the 700 MHz auction filings (my current obsession), Frontline draws [warning, large pdf of reply comments] a sharp distinction between its suggested “open access” rules for a fraction of this part of the airwaves, on the one hand, and “network neutrality,” on the other.

This is in response to (apparently) poisonous language from Verizon (and others), saying that “Frontline is a stalking horse for net neutrality and other unprecedented and unjustified mandates.”

Frontline's argument is that its suggested “open access” rules aren't “network neutrality” because (1) NN would operate retrospectively, affecting entities who have already invested in particular network setups, (2) NN would be broad, affecting all internet access.  “Open access,” by contrast, isn't either – it would operate only prospectively, because any applicants for this part of the airwaves would know about this license condition, and it would apply to only this little bit (10 MHz) of the auctioned spectrum, not all highspeed internet access.  So far, so clear.

So what is open access, in Frontline's view?  It doesn't necessarily mean that any particular device could simply hop onto the network, as far as I can tell.  All devices (and perhaps all users) would have to be authenticated and authorized for particular uses of the network. 

Why?  To ensure compliance with law enforcement needs like CALEA and E911.  There's an appendix to the Frontline set of comments I've linked to above that makes that clear.  I'm not saying this is a problem – not at all – but it is interesting.  It appears that Frontline anticipates that, ultimately, a single national actor will have the ability to isolate and provide to law enforcement the packet stream coming from a particular device.

“[A]ssuming a single entity were in operational control of a given open-access network [like the one proposed as a license condition for these 10 MHz], all packets in a given stream could be easily captured [for law enforcement purposes].  This would not, however, necessarily be the case in an uncoordinated network, such as the Internet.”

The advantage of this approach from an innovation point of view is clear:  it means that rather than design devices and applications and other parts of the ecosystem to match law enforcement's needs, you simply provide law enforcement with a stream of packets (after they've presented an appropriate warrant) and let them figure out what's going on.  But the downside is that there will be a single entity who will be in operational control of the entire nationwide network, and will be uniquely in the position to authenticate and authorize devices.

The proposed rules drafted by Frontline provide:

So here's the question:  what specifications will the new licensee state?  Does it matter?  Maybe not.  After all, right now it's very tricky to get incumbent wireless carriers to approve a particular handset.  Maybe it's better to have everything filed with the FCC and public, rather than secret and private.

But it's pretty clear that Frontline does anticipate a lot of authentication and authorization in the future.

Vastation — this word sticks with me although I hardly ever use it.  I found myself using it tonight.

Henry James Sr. had a “vastation” that changed his life.  Wikipedia quotes James describing it as

a perfectly insane and abject terror, without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damned shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life.

More on this part of James's life:

James's “vastation” initiated a spiritual crisis that lasted two years, and was finally resolved through the thorough exploration of the work of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), the Swedish scientist, religious visionary and teacher, and mystic, who held that “We are part of one another; the crime of one is the crime of all; the virtue of one is the virtue of all.”

I didn't personally experience a vastation today, and I certainly hope you didn't either. Vastations can be avoided through human contact — James was sitting alone, staring into the fire, when he had his.

==Lots of human contact last night, at the warmest chamber music concert I can remember.  Apparently the air conditioning in the Baryshnikov Arts Center has been a problem from the beginning.  It was like attending a very serious event in a rain forest — everyone was dripping, but steadfastly paying attention.  Soprano Lucy Shelton (miraculous) doing George Crumb's Walt Whitman cycle, “Apparition,” and Brahms's Piano Quintet with the Brentano Quartet.  It got hotter and hotter; the string players kept having to re-tune, and ladies in the crowd fanned themselves with their programs; motions seemed slow and gluey.  All credit to the audience for staying in their seats.  The key:  it was a free concert complete with complimentary glasses of wine and little round tables for seating.  Vastation is impossible in such a setting, however warm the room.

There's an arcane communications issue out there that involves Time Warner and a two-lane highway mandated by a communications gatekeeper — but has nothing to do with the internet.

Stumped?

This story is about what it costs to mail a magazine using the U.S. Postal Service.  There's only one mail service, so the USPS is a gatekeeper of sorts when it comes to postal mail. 

For years and years, newspapers and other publications were charged especially low postal rates — dissemination of knowledge and all that.  These rates have gone steadily up, but periodicals were able to plan for the higher rates.  Indeed, this year most people expected that periodical mailing rates would increase by about twelve percent across the board, for everyone.  (That's what the Postal Service itself suggested back in May 2006.)

But then Time Warner submitted an elaborate plan (described here) that in effect created two classes of service:  one for the large conglomerate publishers that could afford to do things like pre-sort their mail and drop it off at convenient centralized locations, and the other for all the little publications that couldn't afford those sorts of moves.

The group that accepted the TW plan is called the Postal Regulatory Commission.  It makes recommendations to the Postal Service Board of Governors.  (Isn't this interesting? I had no idea.)  The Board of Governors has in turn accepted the PRC recommendation.

I heard today that the plan was so complicated that no one could figure out how much its implementation would cost small publications.  But it appears as if it will create rate hikes of 20 percent and up (way up) for the littler guys.

The little guys just simply could not afford to lobby the way TW did.  TW put enormous energy behind its plan, and got it through.  It will save TW money because they will be able to take advantage of discounts for the pre-sorting etc. that they do.  The littler guys now will be making editorial content decisions based on distance — historically, they had faced a flat fee no matter how far within the US the content traveled.  That's no longer the case.

That's the story.  It's apparently a done deal.  The smaller magazines don't have the funds to reverse the decision.  They've been out-lobbied for access to what should be a resource managed in the public interest: the US Mail.