Archive for November, 2007

The Hill Country, Electricity, and Lyndon Johnson

By On November 13, 2007 In Uncategorized With 2 Comments Permanent Link to The Hill Country, Electricity, and Lyndon JohnsonPermalink

After I gave a short talk last week about the relationship between high-speed internet access and economic growth (to a violently skeptical crowd – one person asked, “Why do we care whether someone 100 miles outside Texarkana has access to the Internet?”), someone came by my office and suggested that I take a look at Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson.

Caro describes just how hard it was to get through life in West Texas Hill Country without electricity.  Wash day and ironing were unbelievably grueling.  Tired arms, tired backs, big fires in hot weather, endless trips to haul the water; the irons (made of iron, heated on a wood stove) burned hands and left blister on top of blister.  No entertainment – no radio, no light to read by.  A bare and difficult life.

Johnson managed to get money from the Rural Electrification Administration to bring 1800 miles of power lines into Hill Country.  It took an awfully long time for power to actually reach houses.   Here’s the end of the story (or the beginning):

[I]t had been so long since the wiring was installed…that they couldn’t remember whether the switches were in the ON or OFF position.

But then one evening in November, 1939, the Smiths were returning from Johnson City..and as they neared their farmhouse, something was different. 

“Oh my God,” her mother said.  “The house is on fire!”

But as they got closer, they saw the light wasn’t fire.  “No, Mama, ” Evelyn said.  “The lights are on.”

They were on all over the Hill Country.  And all over the Hill Country …. people began to name their kids for Lyndon Johnson.

A Europe-wide FCC?

By On November 12, 2007 In communications policy, fcc With 2 Comments Permanent Link to A Europe-wide FCC?Permalink

According to this AP story, the European Commission is going to suggest that a pan-European body should have the power to decouple large telecommunications transport companies from control over internet access. They’re calling this a “functional separation” plan, under which telecommunications platforms would be opened to competitive providers under pressure from national regulators (who themselves would be under pressure from this new body).

It’s an interesting move. There’s evidently a good deal of frustration at the Commission with national regulators – viewed as complacent and captured by the regulated entities.

Knowing that they’re a central focus of this effort, the German regulators have already fired back. They claim the decentralized system is working just fine. Indeed, all the national regulators are quite happy with their roles, and have rejected the idea of a European regulatory authority for the telecommunications market.

Viviane Reding, the EU telecommunications commissioner, knows why she’s doing this:

“I want to revolutionise the European telecom market. And that’s why we need a European supervisory authority”, Ms Reding told weekly Der Spiegel in comments quoted by German papers.

And she likes the idea of a European FCC:

In an interview with the same paper, Ms Reding said she wanted the EU telecommunications market to function like that of the United States. “In the US, you have got one market, one network from east to west, from San Francisco to New York,” she stated. “Here in Europe you have 27 scattered markets with 27 regulators with rules which sometimes oppose each other.”

Hmm. Competition among rulesets is usually a good idea. Here, though, the problem is the complacent national regulators, not their diversity in rules. At any rate, it will be interesting to watch this development unfold.

Immunity

By On November 9, 2007 In Uncategorized With 1 Comment Permanent Link to ImmunityPermalink

at&t switch

[source: EFF]

In early 2006, a class of people represented by EFF asked a federal court in San Francisco to tell AT&T to stop providing the U.S. government with all of the domestic and international online communications of millions of people.

The drawing above shows what was going on. It’s simple. AT&T was copying all of the communications coming across its network and sending that copy to a secret, secure room controlled by the NSA. AT&T technicians installed a splitter that sent one complete version of these transmissions to the government and another complete version along its way to its intended destination. From the secret NSA room, the communications – email, voice, web browsing, everything – were probably processed and transferred to other government offices for evaluation.

(If you’re curious about the details, read this statement by Scott Marcus.)

This is and was illegal, unconstitutional, and unthinkable. It’s hard to come up with words to describe just how abusive this practice is.

This week, a retired AT&T technician named Mark Klein came to Washington to explain what the fiber optic splitter did, and to remind everyone that the illegal actions of AT&T didn’t just scoop up targeted international communications. This was domestic warrantless wiretapping that was exhaustive and unselective – everything was vacuumed up.

I was gripped by this video of Klein. He’s a retiree now, and he’s bravely and patiently doing the best he can to keep his former employer under pressure for its wrongful acts.

The current question is whether the telephone companies should be assured of immunity from suit. FISA is being rewritten, and there’s some sentiment in favor of treating the phone companies like patriotic citizens who did their duty when they were asked. (That the practice was illegal was not a good enough reason not to do it.) On the other hand, there’s a good deal of evidence that the telephone companies were happy to help out, and that benefits from their involvement included new federal contracts and other indicia of their close relationship to our government.

The smug, complacent answer is, so often: Well, of course they cooperated. What do you expect? That’s the way the world works.

I hope that isn’t the way the world works, I hope EFF’s lawsuit can continue, and I am glad that Mr. Klein went to Washington.

Musicophilia

By On November 8, 2007 In music With 1 Comment Permanent Link to MusicophiliaPermalink

That’s the name of a worthwhile new book by Oliver Sacks. Do you hear music in your mind, even when you don’t choose to? I do, all the time, and so does Dr. Sacks. He’s wondering why:

I see my room, my furniture every day, but they do not re-present themselves as ‘pictures in the mind.’ Nor do I hear imaginary dog barks or traffic noises in the background of my mind, or smell aromas of imaginary meals cooking, even through I am exposed to such perceptions every day. I do have fragments of poetry and sudden phrases darting into my mind, but with nothing like the richness and range of my spontaneous musical imagery. Perhaps it is not just the nervous system, but music itself that has something very peculiar about it — its beat, its melodic contours, so different from those of speech, and its peculiarly direct connection to the emotions…..[Aliens landing on Earth would be] stupefied [if] they realized that, even in the absence of external sources, most of us are incessantly playing music in our heads.

Making the wireless world more web-friendly

By On November 6, 2007 In communications policy, fcc, google With 1 Comment Permanent Link to Making the wireless world more web-friendlyPermalink

Your wireless carrier (in the U.S., probably AT&T or Verizon Wireless) has a lot of control over the handset you can use and the applications that can run on that device. In fact, wireless carriers routinely ask for (and get) an enormous slice of the revenue from applications that work on their networks, and they force handset manufacturers to jump through all kinds of hoops in order to be allowed to sell devices that can connect to these networks. (You can’t, usually, buy devices except through the wireless carrier itself.)

There has been a great deal of consolidation in the wireless carrier market: twelve wireless carriers that were independent as of 1999 have combined (through merger, spinoff, or joint venture) into four large wireless carriers: AT&T, VZ, (and, far behind in terms of size) T-Mobile and Sprint. AT&T and VZ together control more than half the market and the lion’s share of new subscribers. The competitive picture isn’t great — AT&T and VZ actually charge more per minute than other, smaller carriers (like Sprint).

Until the FCC’s 1968 seminal Carterfone decision, which allowed non-AT&T equipment to be connected to the telephone network, consumers were not free to buy and use devices of their own choice for ordinary telephone communications. Carterfone led to the broad use of the modem and the fax machine, and arguably the birth of the commercial internet. But this open attachment regime has not to date applied to the wireless world, as either a legal or practical matter. The wireless carriers are in complete control.

This has had bad effects on the ecosystem of the wireless world. It’s essentially a closed system, for both applications and devices. We’ve gotten used to locked phones that cannot be switched between service providers and two year contracts with heavy penalties for early termination. Here’s the Washington Post from this past summer:

Currently, the major U.S. wireless carriers, including AT&T and Verizon Wireless, largely decide which Web sites, music-download services and search engines their customers can access on their cellphones. This is accomplished by wireless companies determining which cellphones will receive their services: AT&T, for example, is the only carrier available to users of Apple’s iPhone.

This isn’t a great situation for consumers or innovators.

Google’s paired announcements yesterday were aimed at addressing this situation in a way that will – ultimately – be very good for Google.

First, they said they were releasing a software “stack” – an open software platform called Android – that would be available under an open-source license. The idea is that anyone could adopt that platform (which includes an operating system, middleware, a user-friendly interface, and some applications) and use it on their phones or in their networks. They’ll be releasing tools for developers to use in writing for that stack, which will (they hope) spur the creation of impossibly cool applications that everyone will have to have. They’ll have big developer conferences someday for Android, just like Microsoft does, creating buzz, t-shirts, and a general sense of well-being and connectedness.

Second, they announced a large consortium of companies that will help in further developing Android and pushing it out into the world – the Open Handset Alliance. It’s significant that this group includes T-Mobile and Sprint, the smaller guys in the U.S. It’s also significant that some large handset manufacturers (but not Nokia, why?) and chipset creators are involved too. This will give these guys courage to fight the depredations of the current breaking-kneecaps wireless carrier situation in the U.S. I bet the handset manufacturers are feeling some relief. There’s strength in numbers. This is like unionizing to challenge The Man.

Yes, Om Malik is right, this is a big PR move. But the goal is to raise things up a level, to make this platform so ubiquitous and crammed with so many great applications (including Google ad-serving thingies) that the incumbents won’t be able to avoid it. Now, nothing guarantees that this platform will stay open. In fact, VZ could adopt it and close it to applications it viewed to be competing with its core services – like Skype. But the hope is that this kind of modular approach will become the norm in the wireless world.

In fact, the goal is greater than that – the goal is to make the wireless world much more like the PC world, where there is no necessary connection between transport and content and anyone can introduce the new cool thing.

This clearly helps Google. Of course it does. Why would they do it otherwise? There will be new landscapes to plaster with ads, new ways to make money out of disorder. We won’t be able to find a thing or a person we need without Google’s help.

But this initiative also leaves room for new Googles to show up in the wireless ecosystem, and to take advantage of new kinds of cheap, portable devices that are much better than what we’ve got now.

Maybe I’ll finally be able to afford a cool phone.

Monetizing disorder

By On November 5, 2007 In communications policy, fcc, icann With 7 Comments Permanent Link to Monetizing disorderPermalink

Remember Sitefinder? I still have my notes from a session four years ago that was led by Steve Crocker. VeriSign (the registry operator for .com and .net) introduced a change in the way .com/.net operated. A misstyped domain would return the address of a host that was one of VeriSign’s own instead of an error message. There was considerable pushback from the community. VeriSign quickly suspended the service.

The generic name for what VeriSign was doing was a “wildcard.” Before SiteFinder was implemented, if you typed the name of a nonexistent .com domain (say, scrrawford.com hadn’t been registered), you’d receive back a “name not found” answer. After SiteFinder, if you typed a nonexistent domain you’d receive back a referral to a server controlled by VeriSign. VeriSign claimed that they weren’t retaining or collecting any data in connection with this service, and pointed out that other registries (mostly country code top level domains) also used wildcards. (Internet Explorer does something similar. If you misstype a domain, you’ll get a page of suggestions. There’s money to be made from confusion.)

What was the point of SiteFinder? To send confused users to a potentially “useful” page — a page that would have (eventually) been populated with links to advertisements and other relevant materials. In the end, had the service stayed in place, VeriSign would have been able to monetize this confusion – making money from the pay-per-click advertisers that populated the potentially “useful” page.

Why was there uproar? Because not all domain record requests are made in connection with hunting for web pages – spam filtering email services got hung up on the wildcard service. There’s a commonly-used spam filtering rule that rejects messages with envelope sender addresses that do not resolve, and other protocol (non-web) requests didn’t react well to the redirection. Sitefinder didn’t break the internet, but it did cause a number of small problems for applications that rely on domain name queries. The DNS infrastructure is very sensitive to change, and SiteFinder was viewed as a “system expectation violation.” The plumbing was getting uppity, and that wasn’t appreciated.

In recent years, the market has filled with “parked” pages. If you misstype a domain name, chances are you’ll go to a page that someone has registered and has populated with a bunch of (somewhat) relevant links. Again, the aim is advertising revenue.

Over the last few days, Verizon has reportedly been doing something similar to its DSL and FiOS subscribers. According to ConsumerAffairs.com:

“When users misstype a web site address, they get redirected to Verizon’s own search engine page — even if they don’t have Verizon’s search page set as their default.”

One more time, the goal here is to make money from confusion. Verizon doesn’t want to be treated like plumbing – they’re anxious to make money from their users’ navigation failures. In order to get away from the Verizon default page, you’ll need to reset your DNS settings. Not something that the average user wants to cope with.

You can imagine this as a layered fight over confusion. First the DNS registry itself – VeriSign – tried to make money from misstyped domains. Then DNS registrants – the people who build parked pages – tried to get in on the value chain. Meanwhile, edge applications (like the browser) were doing the same thing. Now the ISP is inserting itself, trying to override the parked page and browser efforts.

Is this a violation of net neutrality? It certainly is a “system expectation violation.” We don’t expect ISPs to be filtering our web browsing requests and inserting themselves into the conversation. There’s some concern that the ISP could be doing more than presenting a response page, as we’ve seen from the Comcast flap. Although in a larger sense it’s just what all the other players in the chain want to do – make money from disorder – we want to avoid having the plumbing, the transport, do this without a user’s acquiescence.

I have a feeling that Verizon’s actions here will cause as much upset as VeriSign’s.

(Say “Verizon/VeriSign” quickly a few times.)

ICANN Friday

By On November 2, 2007 In Uncategorized With No Comments Permanent Link to ICANN FridayPermalink

The board meeting is about to end, with individual tributes from each board member to departing chair Vint Cerf.

Joi Ito (who I will miss enormously), has a good portrait of Vint here.

ICANN Thursday

By On November 1, 2007 In icann With No Comments Permanent Link to ICANN ThursdayPermalink

Today – the public forum. Not enough time for public comments. Many many reports.

This afternoon – endless board huddling. All discussions are over before dinner, which doesn’t always happen.

One more meeting, and then a break for the evening.

Tomorrow: back to telecom policy again.

ICANN Wednesday

By On November 1, 2007 In icann With No Comments Permanent Link to ICANN WednesdayPermalink

This morning, the GNSO Council voted neither to adopt OPOC nor to sunset the current whois clauses (all jargon unpacked in yesterday’s post). AP story here, WIRED story here. The report that the board gets about this result should be useful in making clear exactly what the obstacles were to changing the status quo.

This afternoon was taken up with board committee meetings, a meeting about the accountability/transparency of ICANN, and meetings about the strategic plan.

Tomorrow – more meetings. The public forum in the morning – webcast – and then the board huddles all afternoon and evening.

At some point, someday, this blog will do more than report meetings, but for right now that’s all I can manage.

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