Planning for the future
I’m a Comcast internet access customer, and I don’t have a television here in Ann Arbor. There, I’ve said it. I remember thinking when other people used to say they didn’t have televisions that they were just being sanctimonious cranks. I swear I’m not being a sanctimonious crank.
With a good internet connection, and a big/friendly enough monitor, you don’t need to subscribe to cable content any more. I was thoroughly content watching the convention this week on C-SPAN. But I was watching C-SPAN.org - and I was also following the Twitter feeds of thousands of people. Plus I was watching the comments on DailyKos. It was the most convivial, richest way to watch a major speech that I have ever experienced.
Having cut all of those cords (no landline phone either), I’m worried about a future in which Comcast gets to say that I’ve used “too much” bandwidth and have to be cut off. That future is coming on October 1, when Comcast will implement a 250 GB monthly cap. (Hat tip: Karl Bode.)
Comcast sees a future in which people use the internet to send a few emails or look at a few web pages. They don’t want people watching HD content from other sources online, because that doesn’t fit their business model. So rather than increase capacity, they’d rather lower expectations. 250GB/month is about 50-60 HD movies a month, but we’re not necessarily going to be watching movies. Maybe we’ll be doing constant HD video sessions with other freelancers, or interacting with big groups all over the world in real-time. Who knows what we’ll be doing - it’s all in the future.
But rather than build towards a user-powered future, Comcast wants to shape that future — in advance — in its own image. The company is not offering additional bandwidth packages to people who want more. They just want to be able to shut service off at a particular point - a point of bandwidth use that most people aren’t using right now, so that they won’t be unhappy. By the time we all want to be doing everything online, Comcast users (the company hopes) won’t expect anything better.
Here’s a comment that makes the competitive picture clear:
Q. How does this factor in with users of your Digital Voice service? On average how much bandwidth does that service take up?
Bill G. [Comcast]: Digital voice has no affect [sic] on this, the 250 gig cap is allotted for just downloads
So Comcast’s own services won’t be limited, just downloads of other peoples’ services and material. And don’t get us started on those asymmetric uploads.
Comcast’s cap is being widely discussed, which is a good sign. Building in an assumption of scarcity rather than building out better access - that’s strange.
What business doesn’t want to build capacity to serve the future? I’ll tell you — listen, now — a business that’s confident it can plan for the future it wants. A business whose plans don’t include serving as a neutral transport platform for other peoples’ material. A business that is focused on maintaining scarcity.
More Denver
Another evening of watching DailyKos comments, tweets, and c-span.org. There’s a certain flatness that everyone seems to be picking up on - a repetitive fluffiness - nothing like Senator Kennedy or Michelle Obama last night. One of my favorite tweets:
I’m getting the feeling john McCain is more of the same. Similarly I spontaneously feel Obama is change we need
They’re introducing speakers quickly, but the hum of conversation in the hall isn’t cut - nothing memorable for long minutes at a time - but here’s a good line from Gov. Deval Patrick:
Democrats don’t deserve to win just because republicans deserve to lose.
Judging from the online chatter, people are easily distracted and drifting, waiting for Hillary Clinton to speak.
Crowd stirs as Bill Clinton is in the house at #dnc08!
Convention
Nancy Scola of TechPresident took me (and anyone else) on a quick video tour of the Big Tent. The Google smoothies, the clean wood of the temporary stairs, the serious rows of people typing - I’ve seen it. It looks comfortable, well-thought-out, and like any well-run conference. More security, maybe, and more sense of purpose, but otherwise a familiar sense of deep comfort and interesting people to talk to.
The convention’s opening night in 1968 - August 25, Chicago - as described in Nixonland, by Rick Perlstein. Just one paragraph:
The convention floor accommodated 6,511 delegates, but was designed to hold 4,850. The air hung heavy with summer sweat, cigarette smoke, the smell of the nearby stockyards. The gavel rang, Aretha Franklin belted out a rock-and-roll version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the first of many brawls broke out: the compromise on the Georgia delegation voted by the Credentials Committee wouldn’t go into effect until Wenesday, and liberals jumped on their seats and started shouting at Georgia, “Throw them out! Throw them out!” Senator Daniel Inouye delivered his keynote speech, addressed to the hippies infesting Chicago’s parks. “What trees do they plant?” The ringers carrying WE LOVE MAYOR DALEY signs were exuberant. . . . Concessionaires were instructed not to put ice cubes in the drinks lest people throw them. Word arrived of that night’s riot in Lincoln Park, how the Yippies built a massive barricade of picnic tables, trash baskets, and anything else they could get their hands on. In the park, a cop car stealthily glided up at 12:20am, turned its lights on . . and every window was smashed, and a kid grabbed the driver by the neck and almost pulled him out the door. Then , the retaliation: wave after wave of tear gas, assaults with shotgun and rifle buts. . . The liberal Chicago Daily News called it “the most vicious behavior on the part of the police” in twenty-five years.
Okay, 2008 Denver bloggers - what’s your material? The Freedom Cage is muted, according to the Guardian.
Is it all hope and uplift? Maybe so. C-SPAN has online coverage, and the woman singing Aretha is .. great.
==update after Sen. Kennedy’s appearance: okay, that’s drama. Life, death, commitment - definite drama.
Denver
A mass exhalation across listservs and social network sites today, as people announce they’re leaving for Denver. For a little while this afternoon I wished I was going too. I’ve never been to a convention and it would be fun to see the spectacle.
Or would it? One of my Facebook contacts wrote that he’s very glad he won’t be anywhere near Denver next week.
Maybe it’s just too exhausting. The Sunlight Foundation is doing a great job with Party Time, keeping track of the more than 400 parties that will be happening at the two conventions. Here’s the Denver list. Thirty-one pages of parties.
Sunlight is determined to show us how lobbyists are managing to pull off these parties despite extensive new ethics requirements, and I’m looking forward to the on-the-ground party blogging.
Go, Sunlight. Have a toothpick-structured sandwich on me.
Comcast
Yesterday’s FCC decision to require Comcast to stop interfering with popular peer-to-peer applications being used by subscribers to its highspeed Internet access service was historic. Millions of Americans were surprised by Comcast’s discriminatory activities, and the FCC accurately sensed that it was time to respond. Just three years ago, such an action by the FCC would have been unthinkable. Now the Commission looks both brave and in step with the times.
Three years ago, the CEO of AT&T said, “There seems to be a mentality [on the part of online companies] that they can put more and more through our pipes for free. . . . We’re the ones who built the network. You cannot make that sort of investment if you can’t make a return on the capital. They’re more than welcome to use our networks, but if they do, they’re going to have to pay. It’s not free.” A Verizon executive said a month later that Google was “enjoying a free lunch that should, by any rational account, be the lunch of the facilities providers.”
The uproar that followed these comments has been sustained, mighty, and popular. We Americans assumed that basic communications transport services should be nondiscriminatory, and the hands-off approach of the FCC of three years ago seemed to violate some essential social contract. The uproar stopped some bad pro-incumbent legislation in its tracks.
Meanwhile, evidence of actual network operator discrimination mounted. A Pearl Jam online concert was censored by the network access provider. A text-messaging campaign by NARAL was categorized as “unsavory” by the cellphone company. Comcast denied absolutely that it was interfering with P2P transmissions, and then later when confronted with investigative evidence admitted that it had indeed been doing so.
Following two public hearings and tens of thousands of public comments, the FCC got the message. Now the Commission, led by Chairman Kevin Martin, has censured Comcast, and it’s clear to the world that discriminating against particular online communications isn’t something that a network access
provider should be doing. That’s a good change in the wind.
Other countries have taken a hard look at their communications policies, and have understood that communications and economic growth are tightly intertwined. The cost to the U.S. economy of adopting a taming, constraining approach to complex online communications by making them simple and predictable may be great. We are at risk of encouraging the development of a sclerotic, dumbed-down, cable television version of the Internet for U.S. users.
The network access providers have exactly this kind of plan in mind. They’d like to be able to charge what the market will bear for each Internet transmission, watching carefully what people are doing and choosing how to treat particular traffic. The FCC’s action last Friday, while a noble and necessary first step, won’t make that kind of behavior illegal. We need structural change to the law that will allow Americans’ instincts about the importance of basic nondiscriminatory transport to shape legal reality.
It looks as if public concerns about private discrimination have once again mounted towards the place that drove this country to adopt the original paradigm of regulation in the telecommunications field: administrative oversight of an industry providing nondiscriminatory services. That paradigm disappeared in a rush of deregulatory fervor over the last twenty years or so, leaving all general-purpose communications services private and free to discriminate. Traditional phone services (which aren’t allowed to discriminate) are disappearing, as people drop their home phone subscriptions and companies rip out regulated copper wires.
Over the same period of time, there has been tremendous consolidation in the network access provider market. Most Americans have very few choices when it comes to buying highspeed Internet access.
The battle over nondiscriminatory Internet access is far from over. But the outcome of this initial skirmish is the right one for our shared future.
Harold Feld on Comcast order
Harold Feld’s post is here.
It’s been a big day of OneWebDay for me, so I am a little under water, informationally-speaking. More tomorrow.
Mashups of various kinds
With OneWebDay about a month from now, I’m hearing from a lot of different people. Here are three sites I didn’t know about until this week:
Spot.us - helping communities support journalists doing reporting. “Spot Us is a nonprofit that allows an individual or group to take control of news by sharing the cost (crowdfunding) to commission freelance journalists.”
TuneRooms - online music collaboration. “Record your music to MP3 (using GarageBand, Pro Tools, or your favorite app). Upload your music to the Tune Rooms mixer and collaborate with friends, or with musicians you’ve never met before.”
Computers For Youth - “As a nation, we are failing to provide low-income children the support they need during the critical middle school years. As a result, test scores are dropping sharply between the fifth and sixth grades. School-based efforts to address this challenge have fallen short. Children spend only 13% of their waking hours in the classroom. CFY offers an innovative solution with proven results. We improve student achievement by enhancing the educational resources available in children’s homes, by improving parent-child interaction around learning, and by helping teachers make powerful links between the classroom and the home.”
And, of course, YearbookYourself, which Eszter Hargittai used to great effect recently.
Great.
Another entry: Bricabox
==
one more note for today: congratulations to Jim Dempsey of CDT.
Two possibly related developments
A filing about the first Android device, scheduled for release in November.
A new group lobbying for freer use of the white spaces, sponsored by Google: FreeTheAirwaves.
One of America’s most valuable natural resources is our “white spaces” — the radio airwaves, or spectrum, that have long carried analog TV signals. Three-fourths of the white spaces are completely unused today, and — especially once TV is broadcast in digital only starting in 2009 — could be used to kick-start a revolution in wireless technology, including universal wireless online access and numerous new products and services that can’t even be imagined today.
This fall, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will decide whether to make this spectrum available for anyone to use. At Google, we think more open access to the white spaces is essential, not only for companies like ours, but for society in general. But this outcome is far from certain, so we’ve joined a broad coalition of public interest groups and industry peers who are working to convince the FCC to free the airwaves and unleash the next generation of Internet innovation. We hope you’ll add your voice to the debate by signing our petition and helping spread the word about this campaign.
HT: Stephen Schulze
[Plug: I wrote a paper called The Radio and the Internet about the 700 MHz auction and the promise of the white spaces.]
The only vision is backward-looking
So I’ve spent more time with the McCain tech plan today.
At a time when this country is suffering economically and looking for fundamental change, it looks as if Sen. McCain is in the back office having lunch with a bunch of accountants.
The heavy emphasis in the policy on tax cuts seems designed to appeal to people who equate lower taxes with progress. Haven’t we already had years of that kind of approach?
Where’s the vision? There’s no protection for *new* businesses from the depredations of the increasingly-powerful carriers who control internet access in this country. The policy is all about deal-making with the major forces the Senator is used to - “rewarding companies that offer high-speed Internet access services to low income customers by allowing these companies to offset their tax liability for the cost of this service,” “encourage private investment to facilitate the build-out of infrastructure.”
We tried this deal-making for years, and it’s been a disaster. We need leadership to get ourselves out of this mess, and as far as I can tell John McCain isn’t offering that.
There’s almost too much to say about the back-of-the-handedness of this policy, so I’ll stop here. This isn’t vision. It’s more like a wistful memoir about times gone by.
The McCain tech plan
Disclosure: I am not affiliated with either candidate. If you’re commenting here, please let us know whether you’re working for a campaign.
The McCain tech plan is out. A few things leap out.
First, here’s the fact: We don’t have a functioning “free market” in online access. John McCain thinks we do. That kind of magical thinking takes real practice.
Instead, we’ve got four or so enormous companies that control most of the country’s access, and they’re probably delighted that McCain is promising not to regulate them.
The “net neutrality” movement is not about “regulating the internet.” That’s twisted.
You can think of the internet as a conversation being had by more than a billion people walking along a sidewalk. Big sidewalk. Net neutrality would require that the sidewalk keep out of the conversation - not limit it, shape it, charge it based on how interesting it is, or butt in. Right now, our sidewalks are in the business of deciding what kinds of conversations can happen, and they’re no longer required by law to just lie down and act like sidewalks. That’s a problem. We’d like the sidewalks, those basic transport elements, to be separate from the conversation.
Just as the power companies can’t dictate what kinds of purposes people use electricity for, the providers of basic general-purpose communications transport shouldn’t be able to dictate how we communicate.
We used to have thousands of independent ISPs in this country. If that was still the case, we’d have the market McCain seems to believe in - the ISPs would be competing, and some of those ISPs would choose to be non-discriminatory. We don’t have that any more, because the sidewalk (back to that image) has been freed to rise up and become a set of channels, stepping-stones, and other traffic-shaping capacities that affect the conversation - it’s “vertically integrated.” And all of the ISPs have been killed off or absorbed into a few large companies.
Not having basic, general purpose transport in place (to which lots of independent ISPs can connect) means no predictability for businesses or their investors. It also means we’re empowering a few large gatekeepers to decide which companies will be effective. That kind of private control over communications is something we’ve always cared about avoiding - until very recently.
Restoring basic, general-purpose, nondiscriminatory transport is not “regulating the Internet.” It’s making the Internet - the conversation, remember, not the sidewalk - possible.
We can’t deal with all the sidewalk shenanigans on a case-by-case basis. That just helps people who are good at hiring lawyers and delaying. Instead, we need a rule and a separation of function, in my view. You’re either a sidewalk or you’re not.
Second, the tax credit idea, under which McCain suggests there should be a credit of 10 percent of wages for each research & development employee, seems to be sort of a handout without real substance. Don’t we want to encourage new investment and new jobs? Why reward just the status quo? I’m all for research, but this doesn’t seem very visionary.