Heath Row's Media Diet

Administrivia: Shedding My Skin

2008-04-19T11:51:00.003-04:00

Since I started blogging in 2001, I've used the same default Blogger template. I've decided that it's high time I freshen things up a bit, simplify the layout, and chill out on how many links, widgets, and other add ons I include in the design. So welcome to the cleaner new look of Media Diet! (Changing the template also tidies up how comments and archives are displayed and accessed, but that wasn't the real reason I changed up. Really!)

Let me know what you think: likes, dislikes. And I'll try to work some of the additional links and resources back in as time goes on. But I'll try not to go crazy like I think I did before.

Momentarily Delayed

2008-04-13T21:29:00.005-04:00

The following poem of mine was recently published in the spring 2008 edition of Beatlick News. The fourth line is indented some, but I don't know how to do that in HTML yet.

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Not I, said the girl with the mad-banged hair
as she stooped to retrieve
one half of the book
from the floor of the subway car.
The spine had cracked, the cover torn
and pages sat on the gum-marked tile
like a first-night deb
refusing to speak
a word of Ed Albee's lines

Haiku in Transit

2008-04-08T01:29:00.001-04:00

Rainy Friday morn
The airport could be madder
Grey dilution, peace

Media for Action

2008-04-01T16:48:00.001-04:00

Clay Shirky recently wrote a book called Here Comes Everybody. It's good.

I just finished a book called Here Comes Everybody. The thesis of the book is that group action just got a lot easier. We're living through the biggest expansion in expressive capability in history. The first was the printing press and moveable type. The second was the telephone and telegraph. The third was recordable media. And fourth, the rise of broadcast. There's a curious symmetry in those expansions. The ones that created large groups didn't create two-way communication. And the one that created two-way communication didn't create large groups. This one does both.

The first new communication pattern put into place by the Internet is many to many. What have we done with that? LOLCats and Facebook profiles. But then there's freedom. I'm going to tell three stories I've seen unfold that I think show that the tools don't set the conditions for use. The tools can be used for silly frothy things as well as serious things.

In 2006, HSBC, the bank, recruited a bunch of college students and said we're not going to charge you if you have an overdraft. Then they changed their mind and said we're going to charge you a few hundred dollars. We'll give you 30 days to change your bank accounts. They knew they had the advantage over those college students. Switching costs are high. And they had the advantage of coordination because if the students had all been on campus, there could have been some insurrection. But they were all hiking or on summer break. But they didn't count on Facebook. A guy started a group on Facebook. People posted really detailed notes on how to change bank accounts. HSBC lost the informational advantage. Then the online protests began. Then the real protests began � but that protest never happened because HSBC finally caved. HSBC didn't back down because its customers were unhappy, they backed down because their customers were unhappy and coordinated.

This is an example of people assembling around a very lightweight system we didn't have access to before. We now have the ability to bring organizational solvency up against organizations. The other thing to note is that there wasn't anything terribly complicated in the technology itself. That's not because the tool launched but because there were enough people online. If only 10% of the people had been online, you wouldn't have gotten one tenth of the leverage.

This stuff doesn't get socially interesting until it gets technologically boring. The most important social tool in the next year � the source of the most freakouts � is going to be email. If your mom is goin gto be involved in any of these coordinating effects, it's going to be via email. She's not going to use Twitter.

Second story: Flash mobs. Remember flash mobs? The flagpole sitting of 2003? They were pushed by Bill from New York. Turned out that Bill from New York was Bill Wasik from Harper's Magazine. His whole idea of flash mobs was a critique of the brain-dead behavior of hipsters out to shock the bourgeois. Then the idea spread to Belarus. And in the photos of the people eating ice cream in October Square, there are black-clad police officers dragging off the people. The problem wasn't the ice cream. The problem was the group. You can't have a group in October Square.

When I saw the difference between what Bill was doing as a critique of hipster culture and what these kids were doing in Belarus, I realized something. In high-freedom environments, any new coordinating capability can be used for silly things. In environments in which there's any degree of political control or suppression, use of any new coordinating capability can be essentially political.

Twitter makes it possible to not always have two-way communication. You can outsource some of that to the group. In high-freedom environments, that can seem trivial. But in less-free environments, it can be more critical.

The third story I wish was in the book. There was a group in Palermo that, in 2004, ran around stickering. The stickers said that anyone who pays money to the mob for protection was undermining society. They got a lot of media coverage, but then they decided it wasn�t enough. So they built a Web site to organize the shop keepers. That means something very important to the mafia. They also put up a search engine. If you want to only go to businesses that don't pay money to the mafia, you can find them on that Web site. They provided a coordinating layer to a problem that everyone understood but couldn't act on.

William James the philsopher would say that we have brains to figure out what to do next. The same thing is happening to media. We now have media for action. You can get access to media that doesn't just say something but also helps you do something. In Belarus, the LiveJournal page helped lead to action, the protests in October Square. They didn't just bring ice cream. They brought their cameras. Because they wanted it to also lead to more media. They wanted those pictures online.

This is starting to be manifested in ways that aren't just about the early adopters and the techies. It's starting to spill over to other areas of society. And I'm optimistic about that. But here's the big asterisk. The danger here, it seems to me, is a regulatory one. Imagine you live in a society that wanted three things: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and a category of speech acts that they didn't want with no prior restraint. You can say anything you want except the stuff you can't say, and we won't do any policing in advance. We all live in a world like that, or we have until recently. Like a trellis, the law grows up around the structure of the society we're in.

Media used to be something only made by professionals. That didn't just create an engineering bottleneck, but it created a class of professionals with a vested interest in defending that model. It's an iterative game of prisoner's dilemma. The people who own the newspapers or television stations have been in collusion with the politicians. They might have something explosive about a leader, but they might not publish it because that they want to publish their newspaper again tomorrow.

I teach at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. The average age of my students has remained relatively stable, but my average age has grown at the alarming rate of one per year. I've had to start teaching about the '80s and '90s as ancient history. I can see them register it but not feel it. Prior to the mid-'90s, if you had something to say in public, you couldn't. You had to get someone's permission.

So what does the regulator look for? A new class of professionals to exercise self-censorship. We're playing an iterative game with you. Watch what goes out over your pipes. We may exert the same force we used to exert on the other professionals. The removal of the Wikileaks domain. GoDaddy's removal of the RapeMyCop domain. Domain names are in that stack.

We have to find a group that self-censors. That brings back the threat of that kind of regulation. It used to be that freedom of speech and freedom of the press were different. It used to be that freedom of speech and the freedom to assemble were different. We now have a medium that allows all three freedoms to occur together.

The biggest threat right now is to prevent the TSE style of we're going to sue you until you're like the bus commuters you used to be model. We all have to watch out for that to preseve those freedoms.

The Usefulness of Data Bits in Addressing Climate Change

2008-04-01T15:40:00.001-04:00

Robin Chase founded ZipCar and blogs.

I'm talking on the same topic but with a different bent. It's more specific and less specific simultaneously. When I think about this, I tend to think about history. This is Anne Frank's hiding place. Would I have had the courage to do what they did? This is another picture more recently. This is Elizabeth Eckford, who's desegregating the Little Rock, Arkansas, high school. She's 17. She's one of five people. Look at those angry white faces. Would I have been a heroic person?

The question is, what kind of person am I? And what kind of person are you? We have the chance to determine who we are. It's because of climate change. There are those among you who are believers. There are those of you who are not. I'm not a climatologist. I'm just channeling the two best climatologists in the U.S.

What's a catastrophic effect? It's a 50% drop in species. It's a 25% drop in wheat despite doubling population. John Holdren is director of the Woods Hole Institute. In September he had a presentation to the UN. If US CO2 emissions peak in 2015, we have a 50% chance of averting catastrophic climate change. If we continue the status quo for 10 years, we have 0% chance. What are we working with?

We're working with the next 2-3 years. We're all like little ostriches. We hear about 2015, 2020, and we put our heads in the sand. Cap and trade will do nothing in 2-3 years. We have to work with behavior, marketing that affects behavior, and a carbon tax, which really affects behavior.

This 2-3 year timeframe is upon us. We need to do all of these things to get the effects, but we need to keep track of the fact that we need to get emissions down in the next 2-3 years.

The power use of technology is the 2% piece that was talked about. We can address this by machine and chip design, reducing the number of devices, cloud computing, and deistributed data centers selling heat byproducts. I'm a strong believer in low-cost, ubiquitous data bits as a tool for behavor change. We can have efficient use of resources, customization, group intelligence, and quick access to expert intelligence.

My realm is transportation. We think about cars. 20% of our CO2 emissions is our personal cars. Filling them with motor fuel is another 9%. A lot of people talk about lightbulbs. That drives me out of my mind. The largest part of what you control at home is your electricity bill. Residential electricity produces 17% of CO2 in the US.

I run a company called ZipCar. 25-50 people are car-satisfied with one vehicle. 10-20 cars are off the road for each ZipCar. The quality of life improves for all. The parking paradigm changes. Because we pay for your car by the hour, the lump and sunk charges change dramatically. People choose to use their car correctly relative to their other transportation options. We have 80,000 people driving 5,000 cars. From an environmental perspective, people drive about 90% less than if they owned their own car.

And it's 100% technology enabled. The 80,000 people have each bought a fraction of a car. As a person, I have 5,000 cars at my beck and call across the geographies. We've been able to make this expensive asset more efficiently used.

My more recent company is GoLoco. We're trying to do with ride sharing what we did with car sharing. It's your car, your friends, your trips, your money creating your own transportation network. It�s the long tail of transportation. We combine social networking and alerts from your friends traveling places, as well as the money management online without anyone having to worry about it. GoLoco can solve the transformation ills of people who aren't anywhere near transit statins.

I also like the shared bike network in Velib, France. And this is another favorite: the Interstate Wireless Mesh System. We're testing congestion pricing, which is a trial for road pricing, in which you'd pay by the mile as well as by your type of car. How will we build out this infrastructure? I'm trying to get our government to open excess capacity to abutters.

I'm a two-trick donkey, and I'm sharing these tricks with you because I think we can get this stuff done. We can improve the efficiency of expensive resources that were previously privately held. And people create the infrastructure using Web 2.0, infrastructure, and financing 2.0. We don't have to have someone spending billions and billions of dollars. Each of us can take just a small bite.

As congestion pricing is to pricing, so too can we do with our use of electricity. Don't turn on your dishwasher in August at noon when everyone's running their air conditioners. Do it at midnight. We can all be superheroes.

The Carbon-Negative Internet: Kathy Brown

2008-04-01T13:29:00.004-04:00

David Isenberg: We who run the Internet have a responsibility. We're responsible for about 2% of the carbon emissions put into the atmosphere. The airline industry is responsible for about 2%. We can not only use the Internet to reduce the total emissions by at least 2%, we can do a lot better than that. That's why this panel is called the Carbon-Negative Internet.

This is too important an issue to have factionalism. It's not about Bell heads versus Net heads any more when we're talking about the survival of life on the planet.

***

Kathy Brown works as Verizon's SVP for public policy development and corporate responsibility.

I don't even know what a Bell head is. I came to Verizon about five years ago. Before that, I spent my time at the Department of Commerce and the FCC working on the information superhighway. We did a lot of thinking about how we use the Internet to solve real problems, like hooking kids around the country up to the Net.

Before I came to Washington, I lived and worked in New York. My work there was all about energy. What we were struggling with then was how to conserve energy. As we go now into the new century, the issue now is our carbon footprint. My daughter sent me a photo of the Antarctic ice mass breaking in two to remind me what kind of car to buy.

How can we think about bringing down our energy usage so we're more efficient? It's amazing to me that ICT isn't part of the energy policy I'm hearing. We're not going to reach the kinds of efficiencies I think we can reach without high-speed broadband networks in our homes.

Back in the '90s, we talked about the productivity gains we could make with the Internet. We were able to produce amazing productivity with respect to almost anything. This technology, the Internet, and what was attached to it at the edges has caused us to rethink how we do things. The growth of broadband is a significant and fundamental change. I want to think about a way to frame this discussion so energy efficiency isn't something we wring our hands about. How can we bring it front and center?

2% of global carbon emissions have to do with our industry. We're all in a huge coalition right now. I want to concentrate on the other 98%. The notion that we can affect that 98% by a better use of broadband technologies and the Internet isn't something I hear a lot about. As we discuss efficiency in our homes, it's not up front in the discussion. We talk a lot about the various things we can do � fluorescent light bulbs, turning your thermostat down � but there's more we can do.

We sponsored a study looking at the major issues confronting our country and customers over the next 10 years. The American Consumer Institute found that the use of broadband networks can decrease our dependence on oil up to 11% over the next 10 years. That's worth thinking about.

Let's take the logical things first, the things we talk about all the time, like telecommuting and teleconferencing. We've talked about this forever, but we've basically walked away from it. Cisco's high-resolution telepresence product is amazing. I use it. It's a big screen. It's over high-speed lines. We use it to not get on an airplane. You overcome the human problem with videoconferencing. We're putting into the market right now a 20 up and 20 down product so you can have a virtual presence right in your office.

We see 1,751 pounds of emissions not dispersed because of telecommuting. Every time I don't go to India, the amount of jet fuel I'm saving allows me to use my telepresence technology twice a week for one year.

What about the e-conservation idea? Downloading music and books saves time and energy. Let's take CDs. It's plastic. It's a disc. There's a plastic jewel box. There's a wrapper. You have to go to the store to get and then you go home. What about books? The Kindle let's you just download it. No paper is consumed. Driving 20 miles to the store uses one gallon of gas. Shipping 100 products uses one tenth of a gallon because you aggregate them.

But there's so much more that we can do. Like Thomas Friedman says, you can't make a product greener without making it smarter. What does smart green growth really mean? There are a lot of small things that we can do. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, has installed FIOS as part of their smart green homes. The idea is for the whole community to bring down its usage.

What's Verizon doing beyond thinking these things? We're rated highest on our environmental practices. From lifecycle management and paperless billing to video conferencing with EDS and a huge experiment with fuel cell technology. It's an approach a telecommunications company is taking to figure out how to use this technology to deal with the issues we're all facing. The deployment of ubiquitous broadband must be part of the energy solution.

The State of the Internet

2008-04-01T11:21:00.002-04:00

John Horrigan serves as associate director of research for the Pew Internet & American Life Project. What follows is a rough transcript of his remarks. Corrections welcome.

When David asked us to talk here, the topic was the State of the Internet, which seems heavy with gravitas. Because I research the users of the Internet, I think I'll focus on the users. We do a lot of random phone dialing interviews, and I thought I'd share some of the insights we've learned about Internet usage patterns.

There's a large variety of Internet users. Our data shows that the distribution is very interesting. For lots of American adults, the Internet is just peripheral to their lives. Given that not everyone is an ardent user of ICT, even with broadband deployment and getting infrastructure right, we're still not going to hit adoption nirvana. I want to talk about those frictions.

Let me share some of the things we've learned about the people online over the last few years. We've focused on the many-to-many Internet. More than 20 million Americans were active in online communities even with dial up. They were willing to clear the substantial slowness of dial up.

2004 was the first time we picked up on more people having broadband at home than dial-up users. As broadband began to gain a foothold, we saw not just many-to-many communication but many-to-many participation. E-healthcare is a great example of that. People share a lot of information online to participate in their healthcare with their doctors.

We see 54% of Americans with broadband at home. The always-on information appliance is now in line with the always-present information appliance. 42% of people with wireless devices use their handheld device to do something other than make a phone call. We're seeing people really get engaged. It's not unlike the dial-up hurdle in 2000. People are often dealing with slow connection speeds.

In 2006 we did a typology of different Internet users, looking at their assets and attitudes. Some are just peripheral users. Some people have a hard time trouble shooting their devices. They might have trouble getting broadband to function correctly in their home. These people tell us they just don't find the Internet that useful to their lives. They don't see a lot of content that's relevant to them. Usability and content are two important barriers.

In terms of Carlota Perez's book about technological transformation, we're currently in the installation phase. As we start to see institutions adapt to the information revolution, we need to keep in mind the users. Their rate of adaptation might be different than that of institutions. Think about the user experience and the frictions that people encounter while using technology.

There's a derath of information available about broadband technology and its quality. I'm going to turn the podium over to Drew so he can tell us just where this technology is.

Drew Clark is founder and executive director of Broadband Census and an active blogger to boot. Usual disclaimers apply.

We invite people to share information about their broadband. We've partnered with the Pew Internet project to bolster the research they're doing on broadband adoption. The site invites people to enter in their ZIP code. The government won't release information about who provides broadband service in a given area. In my ZIP code, the FCC says there are 15 providers in McLean, Virginia. Our census covers three. You can rate the service, and you can take our speed test.

There are other provider who are doing some piece of this. There are plenty of speed tests. That's really positive. There's not enough information abou the availability and quality of broadband. As soon as we can compare our broadband to our neighbor's broadband, we can make better decisions. Think of it like the real estate market. You can learn a lot about a neighborhood, but in broadband, there's not a lot of power on the consumer side.

We use the NDT network diagnostic tester used by Internet2 to do the speed test. More broadly, though, what we're trying to do is build a pool of data that's useful to a lot of constitutencies. Our speed test tends to underestimate, so there's always something to refine. We always welcome feedback, input, and your engagement.

The last thing I would want to say is to encourage you to get involved. There are three things I encourage you to do. Take the speed test yourself. Grab a button for your blog. And we're working to get these committees together.

Our Rights Online: Danny O'Brien

2008-04-01T10:03:00.004-04:00

Danny O'Brien currently serves as the EFF's international outreach coordinator. He also founded the excellent newsletter NTK, which is understandably on a hiatus of sorts. Here's much of what he said. If you have any amendments or corrections, let me know.

I'm running on incredible constraints this morning. David told me to be funny and to talk about international human rights. If you've seen the Amnesty Internation Big Book of Jokes, you know that's not easy. Another thing David likes is salacious personal histories. Here's mine: How I First Got on the Internet.

I was a humanities student in the UK in 1989. The Internet hadn't really reached the UK at that point. It belonged to the technological priesthood. We have one of them in our computer room. I was just a humanities student typing up my essays, but there was some disgruntlement that this priest held the keys to the Internet. He used these PCs just as they were terminals. Someone wrote a keylogger that recorded his brief incantations to see what he did. And a few people got to see the Internet. There wasn't a whole lot there. Tim Berners-Lee was just starting to write the Web. It was basically a telnet proxy.

It was like seeing the stars in the sky for the very first time. You saw how simple it was. You saw how much power you coud wield because of those simple terminals. If you could just pull at that wire that connected that small set of terminals, reconnect, and connect again, you could build a bigger and faster network. We wanted it very badly.

My job at the EFF is that I'm the international outreach coordinator. Bonjour! There's a lack of understanding of how the Internet spread to and transformed other countries. Many of the values we pick out here enabled that. The construction of the Internet was able to ignite and contain the explosion of interest and demand.

How the Internet reached the UK was basically a model for how the Open Rights Group started. It was a group of people coming together. They put up money. There you have it. You have a network. Within 10 years, Demon, which was the corporation, was a multimillion dollar organization. The Internet beat the proprietary, commercial setups.

There's also a moral value to these attributes. We were both lucky to come up with this idea and to catch this window of opportunity. Once it had spread past a certain critical mass, people being able to add their own nodes to the network made it a done deal.

I feel the same way about human rights. We're extremely lucky. The UN Bill of Rights has signatories all over the world because it has the same attributes as the Internet. Once you have this idea in your head, you compare everything else to it. There's very little disagreement about what human rights are. There's a lot of debate about when we get to break them.

The Brazilian constitution has their equivalent to the First Amendment. It says expression of thought is free but anonymity is forbidden. So it's moot for us to debate that because it goes against what's in their constitution. There are limitations to the argument. There are variations. The growth of the Internet has been mapped out in different places differently. Its not easy, when we do these comparisons, to work out which will work out and which won't.

The arrangement of the economics of the network means that a lot of our own ISPs won't roll out their own DSL offerings but just rebrand BT's DSL offering. The problem that arose was that when the BBC offered their YouTube-like service, BT was charging them per gigabyte, which was eroding their profits. We have a strange situation.

We tend to step in when there's a state intervention that's not in the interest of the network or the citizens themselves. The EFF spends a lot of time in organizations like the EU, venues in which people come together to do proactive regulation. Our biggest problem right now is that in the attempt to pre-emptively harmonize, the spirit of innovation declines and disappears.

Were we lucky to get the Internet, or were we lucky that the Internet wasn't stopped? The more we allow innovation internationally, the more we'll see the network grow and thrive. Closed networks simply aren't as good as open networks. I just went to Beijing. It's very interesting to be behind the great firewall of China. The Internet just doesn't work very well.

Our Rights Online: Suw Charman

2008-04-01T09:58:00.003-04:00

Suw Charman is cofounder of the Open Rights Group, as well as a social software expert and blogger. This is a rough report on her remarks at Freedom to Connect. If you have any amendments or corrections, let me know.

The Open Rights Group in the UK is a bit like the EFF only with fewer lawyers. We are a community of people who have opinions on issues like privacy, identity, and copyright � areas in which civil liberties and consumer rights are affected by digital technologies. In less than three years, the Open Rights Group has convinced the treasury that an extension of copyright on musical recordings, which is currently 50 years, would be a bad idea. We provided our community with a voice by putting the consultation document online and soliciting comments. The document that came out was very good.

We're one of the first groups to observe e-voting. We wrote a report on the findings, which was quite alarming. Not just how the e-voting worked but how people interacted with the technology. For example, in Scotland, they almost didn't realize that the results printed out on two pages.

ORG started nearly three years ago, in 2005. It started at a conference called Open Tech. There was one panel called Where Is the British EFF? Talking about whether we, in fact, needed something like the EFF in the UK. Toward the end of the question and answer session, someone stood up and said, well, I'll pledge 5 pounds a month, who else will? Almost everyone else rose their hand.

There was a real will for this to happen. There wasn't just one person standing up and saying someone shoul ddo something, there was a group of people who came together to do something. The key thing that got us together was the reaction of the blogs and the greater community. We had people nagging us about giving us money before we even had a bank account. We didn't even have a name, but we'd started a campaign on data retention. Even though we were a fledgling organization, the demands to get our act together got us going.

In the old days, when you wanted to start a movement, you had to get a photocopier. Now, you organize people online. That community has really been key to ORG. They comment on our consultation documents online. That helps us in two ways. Firstly, it helps us get a sense of how the community thinks. We've got an advisory council, but we also have a large group of people who deal with these issues all the time. The MPs respond really well to this. They know we're not an organization putting forth one particular view because we're an industry. They know we represent their constituents.

But it's not just about facilitating conversation between us and government. It's about connecting activists. And finally, we don't want to be a wagging finger organization pointing out what's wrong in government. Oh, you're being naughty. We also want to be positive. It's been really instructive to me how people will come together to discuss and tackle these issues. We can make the best of what's happening.

Our Rights Online: Bruce Schneier

2008-04-01T09:49:00.003-04:00

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist and blogger. This is a partial transcript of his remarks. If you have any amendments or correction, let me know.

I have approximately five points to make. Before, I want to talk about something that was said during the introduction, that the Internet was founded on trust. People are good and not bad. Practically everything about our species is founded on the fact that people are good and not bad. All of society requires that all of us are good most of the time. There has been a dishonest minority. There has been a minority of bad actors. It's not on the Internet that we're surprised that they existed. It's that we didn't realize they existed before. The Internet is just people communicating.

What the Internet does is different. When I read Clay Shirky's writings, I do it from the security guy perspective. How does culture and community foster security? Because they do. The ability of this group to form as a community is a form of societal security. It allows good ideas to propagate. It allows change to happen. It serves as a back stop to bad, repressive politics. The Internet fostering communication and community fights against oppressive politics.

We are building the Internet. It's still very new. We don't know how it will shake out. We're still understanding the social ramifications of this new way of communicating. This is a very disruptive technology. You see that in the political battles.

Connection fosters community, and that is a security device. It protects us. It's something valuable. That's the first poiint.

The second point is that there's social value in privacy, in anonymity. This is not a nice to have. Privacy is fundamental to human dignity. Privacy is not about having something to hide. It's not ill intent. It's not criminal activity. Privacy is necessary for democracy � the secret ballot. Anonymity is required. All speech cannot be named in a democracy. As a regime becomes more oppressive, anonymity becomes more important.

Too much we're caught up in the battle of security vs. privacy. That's a false dichotomy. That's my two and a half point. When someone says security and privacy say door lock, tall fence. Most of the ID card checks are complete nonsense. The real dichotomy is liberty vs. control. That�s the dichotomy.

That leads to my third point. What's key here is the power imbalance, the power balance between the disparate bodies. If there is an oppressive government, these technologies can help them be more oppressive. If there is a free people, they can use them to be more free. This is where I think a lot of people who say everything will be public and it'll be OK are missing a very important point. Power imbalance matters. When a police man stops you on the street and asks to see your ID, your being able to see their ID doesn't do a lot. They have a lot more power. The power imbalance is magnified through forced openness.

What privacy does is it increases the power of the citizens with respect to the police. We live in a world where all interrogation rooms have cameras and are recorded. That increases the power of the citizens. This is true of lots of technologies. That's why you see the media companies using the technologie sthat will eventually make their businesses obsolete. They can use the tech to increase their power.

Point four: All technologies can be used for good and evil. Yes, the bad guys can use the Internet to communicate, to plan, to organize. That's been true about the telephone. That's been true about the automobile. Bad guys go to restaurants and eat lunch. There are more good guys than bad guys. Having restaurants is a good idea even though they feed criminals because they feed even more non-criminals. It is not the technology.

Sometimes the imbalance is there, and we try to ban a technology. The good uses of landmines don't seem to outweigh the bad uses of landmines, so we ban them. The quintessential argument here is guns. We're not going to do the argument, but do the beneficial uses of guns outweigh the negative uses? When you ban a technology, yeah, you take it away from the bad guys sort of, but you definitely take it away from the good guys. Let's say you put a speed governor in ordinary automobiles so people can't drive faster than 55 and use them as getaway cars. The bad guys may or may not be able to circumvent that technology, but we definitely can't drive faster than 55.

Sometimes that's worth it. Take landmines. You might argue about it. Take handguns. That's fundamentally what you're debating. You're trying to decide the right social policy.

The fifth point, and my last one, is that technologies make change. Those changes are resisted by those who have a vested interest in maintaining the old ways of doing things. Every time there's a disruptive technology, it changes the nature of business.

What's sort of new is that these are happening relatively quickly when before they used to happen every couple of decades. There are some very powerful interests that don't like that. Their business model is built on the old way of doing things. There are lots of places where the Internet makes it different.

When you have a long-run bet, you might want to bet on the natural flow of the technology. Trying to make the Internet behave as a system of scarce resources is kind of like making water not wet. There's a lot of interests in making water not wet � the entire copy protection industry. They're trying to make the natural ease of copying and make it not true. That could be a long and difficult run. That's where we are now.

That's the battle we're in. Whether it's the freedom to connect, upload, download, make copies, save copies, view copies, in the natural world of information these are properties like water is wet. That's not going to work long term. You can't remove what the bad guys do by removing the technology. Cheap copies of a movie will appear on the streets of Taiwan regardless of what happens. But our abilities will be limited very easily.

Whose rights win out in the end? Us, or Sony? They have rights, too. The rights that win in the end are the rights that foster community, democracy, and liberty. They're the rights that flow naturally from people using technology to do what they do. You can tell a law makes sense when there are millions of law breakers. But when your grandmother is a lawbreaker because she makes a copy of a movie for her grandson without really thinking about it, you've got a problem.

We've got to make it intuitive. Take drunk driving laws. What do you mean, I can't drive my own car? Smoking laws are a more recent example. The rights that win are the rights that foster community. We're going to live in a world with free information exchange. We're living in the decades where we have the turbulence. Big business doesn't abandon their business models easily, and they shouldn't.

Administrivia: Removing Snapshots

2008-04-01T08:39:00.002-04:00

This morning I removed the script for Snap Preview because I noticed that it'd begun to insert links to phrases that I didn't link off of. I didn't mind the page previews, but I don't want other people to be determining links off Media Diet.

The Wireless Third Pipe, Net Neutrality, and Everything

2008-03-31T16:25:00.003-04:00

Brett Glass runs a wireless ISP in Laramie, Wyoming. He's presenting a "lightning round" to flesh out the open wireless session. You can access his presentation online.

Suw Charman offers a better report on this session in Corante's Strange Attractor.

Open Wireless: Rich Miner

2008-03-31T15:57:00.004-04:00

Rich Miner serves as group manager of open platforms (Android) for Google.

I'm group manager of mobile products. We announced an open handset alliance, roughly 34 partners working with Google to build Android, a Linux-based mobile platform. We also announced a software platform that allows third-party developers to build applications. It was a huge shout by Google about openness in the mobile landscape.

I'll talk a little about the handset space. Most of us carry mobile phones. Today, they have roughly the equivalent of the power that a desktop computer had in 2002. If we look at our mobile phones today, they fall far short of what we could do in 2002 online. There's a huge gap between the capabilities of the hardware and what the industry is offering in terms of software. There's a stifling of innovation because the ecosystem is a closed one.

The platforms we use to operate mobile handsets are closed. Symbian is cleared as an open platform because it has an API. But if you're trying to develop applications, openness by publishing APIs isn't as open as you'd like it to be. It doesn't allow you to choose what applications ship with that handset. It doesn't allow you to find a bug and fix it.

There are other kinds of control and lack of openness. If you're a developer, you can't just go to a consumer and let the consumer download your app to their handset. There are huge hurdles you have to get through. Your destiny is controlled by an operating carrier who's going to make an arbitrary decision.

It's the same with content. On the Web, it's all based on best in quality or the moment, right place right time. In the mobile industry, there are barriers, huge walls. If you look at the number of PCs shipped every year, 200 million PCs, there are about a billion mobile phones shipped every year. If Google wants to make the world's information easily accessible, mobile phones are strategically very important.

The process to develop our mobile apps, the process of distributing those apps, the model's a bit broken. For the last three years, we've made a pretty big investment on the mobile platform Android. We hope it results in significantly more innovation. That's why we built the SDK.

There are a lot of initiatives looking at open source in the mobile industry, but not one of them was looking at allowing you to build a complete phone. We're building a platform that we're open sourcing and giving away. We hope the manufacturers and carriers build a lot of phones on it.

We want to break down the closed mobile platforms and open up the world to a more open handset experience. We're working with carriers to understand the benefits of openness and want openness. The world we envision is more openness on the handset side and then breaking down the walls of innovation.

I've mentioned that it�s open. I've mentioned it's Linux. To just say you're going to take Linux and build a mobile phone probably isn't the right way to do it. It's not the best consumer desktop experience. You need to put a bunch of dedicated software layers on top of Linux to make it a consumer product. When you stack up the architecture diagram, you'll see Linux at the bottom and then a bunch of software that Google or somebody else � like Packet Video � has written. It's a rich stack.

Another thing we thought about was the choice of licensing. We don't want to discourage innovation or limit Sony. We're using the Apache 2.0 software license, which is a very good license when you want to encourage people to make derivative products but don't want to open source everything. Once we ship the first handset, we'll open source the platform. At that point anybody will be able to license the software stack and add their own value.

The pitch to the carriers � and carriers look at Google as competitive � is that we can help make them lots of money but also that they can take this platform and build as tightly branded handset as they'd like. They don't have to build open phones.

This message of openness is starting to resonate throughout the industry. Google feels comforted by that fact. It'll be uncomfortable for carriers if they deliver very closed phones. In general, smart phones should be smart. They should be open. That's our goal.

Suw Charman offers a better report on this session in Corante's Strange Attractor.

Music to My Ears

2008-03-31T15:30:00.003-04:00

One of my favorite things about Isen's events is the musical entertainers he enlists. This year (like last year, when I wasn't here), the musician in residence is Howard Levy, whom I first encountered on Bela Fleck and the Flecktones's 1990 eponymous album. Levy's been alternating between the harmonica and keyboard, and he's joined by guitarist Chris Siebold, who's also sung a couple of numbers. Good stuff.

Open Fiber: John St. Julien

2008-03-31T15:08:00.004-04:00

John St. Julien: The name of this session is open fiber. I'm of two minds about this open thing. One side of me, the geek and the wonk think it's about open systems and that it'll all work itself out. The other part of me is the historian and activist. These two guys don't get along, so I've segregated them. You get the historian and activist.

What is this open fiber thing? We're not citizens of the Net, we're clients. We're little better than serfs. A key element of any feudal system is that the lord of the manor controls access to the land. Think about your terms of service with AT&T and Cox. This is roughly your condition. They can kick you off for next to no reason. They don't have to follow their own rules consistently. They give themselves an amazing level of structural arrogance. That's what's driving us toward some kind of geekish and wonkish solution. But I don't think that's what we want. We want to be full citizens.

In medeival times, they did the Enlightenment, and then they did a revolution. They overthrew the old order. As soon as they realized there was something better, they went after it. We don't believe that that's possible. Tim is the perfect case of the counter-example. Of course it's possible. We can own our own network.

Lafayette, Louisiana, is a place in which we've done just that. This is a very hopeful thing, more hopeful than wiring up all of Vermont because Lafayette is one of the most conservative cities in one of the most conservative states. It's an oil town. It thinks Houston takes second stage in purity. But it's really something they want to do. How could it happen in Lafayette?

Back in the day, there was a bunch of malcontents that convinced a group of economic leaders it'd be a good idea to put in fiber just for government. There was all sorts of opposition to that. It was from the lords of the manor, who acted like it was outrageous. They did it anyway, and there was basic resentment that built up from that. Then they said this is crazy; we should provide retail service to every home in the city.

The malcontents lost that, but people heard the argument. People remembered the argument, but they forgot who said it. We got a new mayor who was really naive. He asked the incumbents if they would do this for him. They said no in such insulting terms that they offended him. So he went to the mat. The malcontents immediately jumped in and got on board. They got a big grassroots movement.

The assumption was that there'd be a group of old-money guys who'd run the thing. They'd do expensive polls, a big TV campaign. Their opposition faded. They weren't there. More power was handed to the grassroots operation. We won two to one, a clear, stunning victory.

Did we get what we wanted from it? We just wanted to be treated with some respect. We're going to get a network that's basically one huge intranet. Average speed citizen to citizen will be 100 Mbps. They'll offer it for 20% less than the incumbents were offering it. We'll have our own stable, static IPs to work out of. We'll have a wireless network hanging out that. Because we have fiber running down every street, it won't have to be meshed. You can do what you want with that much wifi.

We're also exploring a different kind of digital divide issue. What the current plan is is to use every cable box to provide wireless Internet as well. What you end up with is a whole swath of people having access who never had access before.

The question isn't so much the technical issues when we talk about openness but whether you want to own it in the long run. If you don't own it, you don't get the right to make those choices.

Open Fiber: Tim Nulty

2008-03-31T15:01:00.001-04:00

Tim Nulty: I have a career in telecommunications in which I have steadily sunk in the system. I retired in Vermont, and I was inveigled to help Burlington bring back a ubiquitous fiber to the home network. The initial financing for the real network was signed in December 2004. We broke ground in 2005. We signed up our first customer in 2006. And in 2007 we went cash flow positive for operations. Covering our debt and being profitable will happen in about 2009. That's stunning for a very capital-intensive telecommunications operation.

The foundation of that was (a) be universal, design to cover everybody, (b) it's open access; I don't mean we don't offer services � if you don't do that, you'll go broke � offering retail services means we make money, but open access for us means we have an almost infinite resource, and (c) be financially self-sufficient. In much of Europe, the foundation is in some form taxpayer. That's fine. That's great. Good idea. In the United States, that won't happen. In some states, including Vermont, it's illegal to build it with taxpayer funds. (d) Be future proof. Forget DSL, cable modem, and all that nonsense. We all know that won't last 10 years. You need to build something to last a long time.

I resigned from Burlington telecom in November because we were getting so many calls from all over saying, that's great, but can we do it? I want to see if we can take this model into two places that were substantially different than Burlington. Can you bring it to genuinely rural America? None of these towns is big enough to do it on its own. The biggest town is 11,000 people. Can you do it with an assembly of 35 towns? Can you organize that? It's really more of an organizational question.

We do expect to do this. We've had votes in all the towns in March. They were about 95% in favor. The worst was in the capital, Montpelier, where we had about 80%. We're doing a presubscription now, and some of the towns are 47% presubscribed.

The bottom line is that this vision can work in a practical way in the United States in really rural areas. The network we built is one generation more modern than than the FIOS system. We're just a little more modern than Verizon.

Open Fiber: Adam Peake

2008-03-31T14:59:00.003-04:00

Adam Peake: What is the Japanese broadband miracle? 28 million is about 55% of households. That's a good number of people. We have it. In the United States, you don't. In Japan, this can be traced back to the language of the 1996 act. A good number of you came over to tell us what a good broadband policy would be. We've really been involved in watching the Internet grow.

In the early 2000s you had an incumbent who decided that IP networks were good and something they should embrace. That�s important. We talk about speeds. Here I have a brochure for a housing development in Japan. It's overlooking the fish market. And they advertise that the mansion building has 1 Gbps to the basement. You don't have 1 Gbps to your home, but you have access to that technology.

Randy Bush is one of the people who's driven the Internet around the world for the last 20 years. He's got fiber to his home, it's 100 Mbps, and he can tweak it so he gets maybe 80 Mbps out of it. Don't be misled by that. You won't get it. But you will get extremely fast service, and extremely affordable service.

Fiber, fast DSL will be about $35 a month. You can get 100 Mbps with telephone and the Internet for under $70. That's quite good.

The open access model can work if the conditions are right. We've adopted many of the ideas from the 1996 act. What are the conditions that allowed Japan to get where it is today?

The first difference is that we don't have a major cable television industry. It's all about telephony and opening up the incumbents' networks. The legal system is also not litigious. That means the NTT didn't spend its time going to court and fighting this. They accepted it, and that's how Japanese business works. They also had a regulator who stood by it. The goals were set at the national level.

We're moving to an information society. It's more than broadband. How do you use this in society? We have 100 million mobile subscribers. 85 million of those are 3G. 87 million of those have an Internet contract. 40 million have contactless payment cards in them already. 20 million of them are digital televisions. Very sophisticated set of uses. The end result is a ubiquitous networked society.

Japan doesn't really have a particularly good broadcasting industry. It's somewhat moribund. The programs aren't particularly good. They don't even have a popular sport. Think about the United Kingdom, where BT says there are no commercial opportunities for the them to bring fiber to the home. That's because they have BskyB, subscription satellite television to the home.

I hope that gives some idea of the background of where Japan is. It's important to think about what the problems are and what the future might bring. There are two issues, really. One is the Japanese view of network neutrality. It's important all around the world. In November 2007, the ministry responsible for communications accepted an amendment that was similar to the four principles of network neutrality, but they made them rules that should be followed.

IP networks should be easy to access and easy to use. They should be accessible to any terminal and support end-to-end communication. Users should be provided with equality of access at a reasonable price. Those are the principles. And they're meaningful principles people will adopt and follow.

Next, we have a more problematic situation. That's one of packet shaping and network congestion. One of the impacts of accessible broadband is that it pumps out a lot of bandwidth. This is a worry. Some companies have begun packet shaping on peer-to-peer traffic particularly.

There's a particular problem on an application called Winny, the national peer-to-peer application. It's extremely easy to share your whole hard disk. And prone to viruses. Winny is basically a pig, and there's no way anybody's going to defend it.

Open Fiber: Dirk van der Woude

2008-03-31T14:57:00.001-04:00

Dirk van der Woude: I'm not an American, so I didn't learn how to present in public in kindergarten, so I need PowerPoint. I'll start to tell you more about why this meeting is important for the Netherlands, as well as American telecommunications and connectivity. You see, approved by Brussels.

I see people, children, walking around very proud. This is a campaign map of New Guinea in 1944. They came to a territory in which people were living in the stone age. The child you see is now, but her grandfather was born in 1920. In two generations, you can go from being in the stone age to being in the modern world. Yes, we can.

This is Europe. All of France is occupied except for this small, small village in Normandy. It's still fighting. This is how Amsterdam has felt for some time. All of the Durch old-fashioned incumbent telecoms are now owned by English and American corporations. Just a few percentage points are still owned by the Dutch. This is what it feels like to be a colony. Some people say we never should have given away the copper network, but we did.

In 2005, we started with a fiber network. What's the average citizen's perspective? Are we at the end of the last mile, or the first mile? We didn't want to be locked in.

In 1926, people started to think about highways. The highway was built. They started far before Hitler. The market had the vision, but it didn't have the long-term money. To head back to Amsterdam, you know we have canals. They bring in the tourists, and Americans complain about things being expensive. We have some paintings, and that's good essence. We have a harbor. It used to be the largest in Europe. We didn't take care of it, but it's still a lot of jobs in Amsterdam. We also have Schilpol Airport. And we have another harbor that's No. 1 in the world, the Amsterdam fiber exchange.

Because of that development, we started to think about whether today's networks are going to cut it. Or should we have another network? What we learned in Amsterdam is that you have to invest in infrastructure if you want to keep up with technological development.

It's not so much the backbone that's going to be the problem, it's the first mile. What's the state of the first mile at the moment? .2Mpbs per second is still counted as broadband. What to do about that? Do we want fraudband? The real world will have shared bandwidth.

Let's talk about fiber to the home in Europe. There's a great example in France. They decided to do the fiber thing, and it's 60 million Euros in subsidy. The most important thing is what happened in Germany. They were very slow, but suddenly, fiber started. In Cologne, two fiber networks were deployed in parallel. Now it's in Hamburg and Munich, where they've done 60-70% of Munich. In Germany, when they start something, they end it. This will be a big, big thing in Europe.

And in Amsterdam, we believe that a city with a great future is not a city without fiber to the home. We got the approval. We have three programs in Amsterdam. The fiber to the home program has 40,000 address. I can't say what we're doing for the other 400,000 homes. We also have fiber to the theater. The last theaters in Amsterdam are now provided with 1Gb/s. And 70% of all the children under 18 have parents and grandparents who weren't born in the Netherlands. So we're connecting the schools. We want them to connect to the theaters. And we want them to connect to the museums.

This is the network. We have a passive infrastructure that's 33% municipal shares and 20% municipal Euros. The wholesale operators sell capacity at 100% market terms. And the service providers are also market. The problem is that in the Netherlands, none of the ISPs are independent any more.

From a business perspective, the passive layer has a high CapEx but a low OpEx. The active layer has an average CapEx and a low OpEx. What do you get? One size fits all. 99% availability. I now myself have a 30 Mbps connection for which I pay 50 Euros. There are four Internet connections. One is for the Internet, and the other three are for whatever you want. Everything ends up in a utility cabinet in the home.

What are you going to do with it? Having ubiquitous broadband and this grid will also be good for wireless connectivity. It'll be green as well. Why do we do it? Economic growth. This network is going to bring in more economic profit than it's going to cost you.

In France, they had 18th century wifi � semaphore. 140 miles, 15 stations, 36 characters in 32 minutes, all records broken, a resounding success. There was this guy who said, can I have a portable one? That was Napoleon. He could. In 1845, someone said we should invest in a copper network. And that was that.

Open Fiber: Introduction and Jim Baller

2008-03-31T14:34:00.005-04:00

This session was a series of presentations moderated by Jim Baller, who advocates for a United States national broadband strategy.

There were a number of participants. Dirk van der Woude works as program manager of Amsterdam's world-leading fiber to the home offer. John St. Julien is a grassroots champion of Lafayette, Louisiana's, fiber to the home network. Adam Peake serves as executive research fellow for GLOCOM, the Center for Global Communications of the International University of Japan. And Tim Nulty was formerly chief economist for the House and Senate commerce committees, and is a fiber to the home activist. Any errors are my own, and I welcome amendments and corrections.

Jim Baller: Let me begin by observing what these folks have in common. Each one has a hand in some of the most advanced efforts in the world in terms of fiber connectivity. Lafayette, Louisiana, decided it wanted to be one of the most progressive fiber cities in a state that was not. John will tell you about that project. Tim Nulty has an incredible background that I can't begin to summarize. Tom started a fiber project in Burlington, Vermont. His philsophy was do it conservatively step by step and those steps resulted in a coalition of 20-25 towns that want to do it as a group. Next over, we have Adam Peake, who has a catbird seat in Tokyo where he is with the International University of Japan. He's here to tell us how the Japanese have achieved their miraculous assent to being one of the leading countries in the world in communications. And a special hero of mine, Dirk van der Woude from the city of Amsterdam.

The other remarks will follow in a series of posts.

Politics, Democracy, and the Internet

2008-03-31T11:13:00.005-04:00

This is a rough transcript of a panel discussion of sorts moderated by Micah Sifry, cofounder of the Personal Democracy Forum. Alec Ross is a tech policy advisor to Barack Obama's campaign. Matt Stoller is a political Net-roots activist and blogger for OpenLeft. And Donna Edwards is a candidate for Congress from Maryland. Any errors are my own. Amendments and corrections are welcome.

Micah Sifry: This is my third time here, speaking, and it's a thrill. David was the first person to invite me to a tech conference when I first got into this. I'm going to take a couple of minutes to introduce the session. Our topic is politics, democracy, and the Internet.

We are living in amazing times. We're still in a transition, but the old one-to-many system is being joined by a peer-to-peer, many-to-many, people-intensive system. It's not pretty, but these are exciting times for those of us who've been frustrated by how gridlocked our political system is.

I hope we spend most of our time looking at how we can change governance. That's the easy topic. The fun one is what happens when Net-centric thinking and policy enters the halls of power. We're going to start with Alec Ross, who's here in his capacity as an advisor to the Barack Obama campaign. He's going to talk a little bit about Obama's thinking about transparency. This does not imply an endorsement of any candidate, but the Obama campaign has some of the most interesting tech policy statements.

We're then going to segue to Matt Stoller and Donna Edwards. If the Obama tech policy is all about what we can do to change the executive branch, they'll dig into what we need to do to fix Congress.

I do a lot of work with the Sunlight Foundation. They're soft launching a new project today, PublicMarkup.org. We've drafted a detailed bill for transparency at all levels of government. You can read the draft bill, as well as comment and improve it. We're still lining up sponsors, so if you're interested in getting more involved, please talk to us. Why can more legislation be posted on the Web so people can get more involved?

Alec Ross: Before I talk about some of the specifics of Senator Obama's proposals in terms of transparency, it's important to consider the attitude and mindset of the candidate and the campaign.

The fact that Obama hasn't been in Washington for decades means that he feels more of a connection to people outside of the Beltway rather than within. The solutions to problems come from outside of Washington. What's become clear is not technology for technology's sake but how technology can play a unique role in connecting people to the process.

Obama's fluent in technology, but he's not a coder. When he started his campaign, he didn't have an organization or apparatus. He had to figure out how to organize his campaign very quickly. How he did it was using technology. It was a huge leap of faith.

Win or lose, one of the stories that will be told about this campaign will be about how he got power by giving up power. He used his Web site not as a way to raise money but to organize the campaign. Thousands of offline events have been held because of whats happening online.

The principles of using technology for openness have made themselves manifest in the campaign. He's brought a lot of people who aren't involved in the process into the process.

The specifics are where Obama's been most bold. Online, you'll see pretty deep proposals. Let's take all government data and make it accessible in machine-readable data. This is data you own and pay government agencies to figure out. If that content lives in the Department of Energy, let's put it on the Web so you can find out what the relative environmental safety in your community. Citizens with information can make decisions that are in their own self-interest.

[...]

When Barack Obama becomes president, people better be ready to get to work. We've shared some very specific ideas about implementing government transparency. We need to make sure congressmen are aware of those issues.

Sifry: Of those proposals, where do you expect the most resistance?

Ross: There are two. Making communications public. That basically means people getting their mail read. That will face some opposition. The other one is taking government data and making them machine readable so they're accessible. That can be done technologically, but people will ask whether we should spend tons of money to do so.

Our federal government does not have a chief technology officer. You get ridiculour siloing. Let's take clean technology. That would involve half a dozen government agencies. There's no coordinating body. There's a lack of coherence from the federal government.

Part of what the chief technology officer's role is to bring a level of organization to the federal government that doesn't currently exist. That requires a strong hand.

Matt Stoller: Can we open up government? Yes, we can, and yes, it's already happening. Politicians are getting more feedback than they've ever gotten before.

Congress is us. We elect these people to Congress. If we're so angry at these people, how do we take responsibility for that? We haven't connected the organs of the Internet to the organs of power. I want to share two stories about that. One is a success, and one is a failure.

I worked for John Corzine in New Jersey. I encountered one blog that was hyperlocal, why is the train so slow? There was an issue about why a local pool was so expensive, and one person said it was because there were too many lifeguards. People were debating that, and then the lifeguards got involved. It's really hard to be a lifeguard! That really changed the conversation. That's a success because it changed how people talk and relate to each other.

I was also involved in Legislation 2.0, which was hosted by a number of blogs, including my own. We had people discussing broadband policy. There were some really exciting people who came, but it went nowhere. It looked like we were really going to have a dialogue, but it didn't do anything. It didn't turn into new power for Senator Durbin. Somehow we failed to connect it to real political power.

How do you take social context and connect it to real political power? How do we create the bridging pieces? That's what I want to figure out.

Donna Edwards has a long career in public advocacy. She pairs toughness and sympathy. When she got elected to be the nominee for Maryland's fourth district, it was the first time the power of the Internet has been able to seat someone into an electoral position. At least we were one piece of that.

Donna Edwards: If I'm one of the most remarkable people Matt knows, he needs to expand his universe. I apologize for being late this morning. I might have to run in two more elections before I can run in the November election. I'm thinking about the Internet because we're going to have to toll up how we reach people online.

Sometimes, people don't even know an election is taking place. We were able to engineer a conversation about the race that was able to elevate it from the mire of all the other discussions.

Years ago, I was a systems engineer for Lockheed working on the space program. My job was developing and tested software and hardware. A lot has changed over time, but not a lot of communities have been able to be involved in that change.

Where I live, I have dial-up Internet service. Oh my god. Last night I was at home and I needed to do some work on the Internet. I couldn't get on, it was slow, and I just quit. The reason I have dial up is because Verizon says they provide broadband service. That's sort of true unless you live 200 yards away from where the service is routed. That's where my home is.

There are children who don't have access to a computer at home. Many of our most vulnerability communities lack the ability to jump into the technology age the way they should. That's shameful. Looking around this room, you don't look like some of those communities.

From a campaign perspective, what that means is that we can use the Internet to generate energy and communicate a vision for the future. At the same time, folks come up to me and say, please, can you just bring us a piece of paper? We can't get onto the Internet. That seems extraordinary.

We have to operate in two worlds, one in the 20th century and one in the 21st century. In terms of public policy, we're not at a time when we can hope that the technology service providers will just do right. We have to legislate and mandate that kind of stuff. Some of us will have access, and some won't because it's not efficient for those companies to reach out to those vulnerable communities.

How do we develop technology policy that works for our most vulnerable communities? Matt forced me sometimes to blog about the campaign. I was being interviewed by the Washington Post, and an editor asked me if I couldn't answer my questions more quickly. "You don't have to think about it so much." I thought thinking about my answers was a good thing.

We want to have the ability for legislators to have contact with a wide range of people, but I'm not sure I want to put all of that into email. I don't know if that's the best way to judge whether someone's engaged in effective policy making.

The importance of having the Internet and open access to the Internet is that I don't want anyone else deciding what's good for me. Let me add it. We have way too many gatekeepers. Our communities and the vibrancy of the Internet require us to limit and put a kibosh on the gatekeepers. We're pretty smart people.

Technology can work to build all of our communities. It can be useful for us without getting in the way. I'll be blogging when I'm in Congress, too.

Connect with Freedom to Connect

2008-03-31T10:25:00.005-04:00

If you use Quicktime, you can watch the event streaming live. You can also join the backchannel chat via Campfire. (To sign up for a Campfire account, use this link.

Paying Per Packet? Don't Be Selfish

2008-03-31T10:01:00.001-04:00

Brad Templeton serves as chairman of the Electronic Freedom Foundation and is a blogger. What follows is a near-realtime transcript of his remarks. If you have any additions or amendments, let me know.

I am the chairman of the EFF. It's not saving the Internet that's hard, it's audio visual. We got into a battle in this town against the president of the United States, suing AT&T for letting everyone wiretap. I want to talk about the history of regulation in data communications. I'm also involved in BitTorrent Corp., but I'm not speaking officially on behalf of that today.

Most of the people here are in favor of an open network. The Net was created as a peer-to-peer environment. This allowed people to come up with the concept of the end-to-end or stupid network. It's a great thing, and hopefully we have a choir here.

But the real invention of the Internet wasn't a technological invention. Believe it or not, the thing that made the Internet great was it's pricing model. It was an economic invention. It's pricing model didn't involve money. I pay for my line in the middle, you pay for your line to the middle, and we don't care about what happens in the middle. We don't sweat the small stuff. That still involves paying for things but enabled a whole bunch of applications.

Paying per packet means that every application on the network had to be justifiable. Network providers are run by bean counters. One of the earliest Web sites was a video camera trained on a fish tank. That would have been shut down by the network. But some of the best applications aren't financially justifiable. Paying per packet also leads to a network of timid users. The cost of books shouldn't matter to us. But how many of you see a book that's $1 more than it should be? Paying money on an incremental basis has a psychological cost.

There's a bit of a monster hiding in the pricing model. Everybody oversells their Internet capacity now. They really want to sell you shared access to a pipe they don't intend you to use. They sell you oversaturated pipes. They advertise unlimited use. Is that a business? Whose bandwidth is it? Do they sell the bandwidth to the customer, or don't they? There's a dissonance.

Meanwhile, the upstream component goes unused most of the time. That got exploited by peer-to-peer publishing tools. Peer-to-peer file distribution is the best technology for publishing a file cheaper. It's no surprise that people who want to do copyright infringement pick the best technology to do it. It's used for both honest distribution and otherwise.

There's always going to be some application that's a bandwidth hog. There's always going to be one that uses more bandwidth versus less bandwidth. We don't want to beat down the winner. Right now, peer-to-peer is the villain, but if you get rid of that, there will be another one.

I'm going to go in the opposite direction when it comes up with coming up with a law for Net neutrality. I'm going to make a rather bold statement that's not entirely true. All the telecom regulations have actually caused more harm than good. They all turn sour in the long run. They do some good in the early days, but before long, they go bad.

Simply having paperwork and asking raises an effective barrier. Even if it seems like you're not asking for too much. Solving Net neutrality is like putting out a fire with corn-based ethanol, which is itself the result of activity by the corn lobby. We've got the telcos in a briar patch. Br'er telco is more nimble in the briar patch than br'er fox. We're br'er fox.

It subsidizes phone service for poor people. Long ago, maybe that helped. Years ago, a friend and I decided we'd drop a phone booth in the middle of the Black Rock Desert. You can actually bring wireless to the rural user cheaper than you can put in an urban landline. Two guys could do that. If you need to subsidize something, just subsidize it.

E911 is another example. If you want help in an emergency, you don't want to say that something that looks like a phone is the means to it. $1/use/month kills� Let's look at CALEA. Why didn't we learn more from 80211?

If I were put in charge, I would replace the FCC with three words, "Don't be selfish." Don't interfere with others. Don't be overly sensitive to interference.

The one regulation I would say is somewhat successful is the one we're suing AT&T over. Back in the '70s, there was a president that Congress decided wan't trustable. He did wiretaps. So they made a law that said phone companies couldn't allow wiretaps on all traffic without warrants. We sued them under that law. So the president got the Senate to pass a law. The House hasn't passed it. Thank you, House.

Technology changes so quickly in telecommunications, that any policy should automatically sunset. The time they change from good to harm is remarkably short. Be careful what policies you have. Review all policies every few years. It's the monopoly, stupid! There's no need for a natural monopoly. We've created these monopolies and allowed people to use them. We need to get in there and use the dark fiber.

There's plenty of bandwidth. If we really open this up, I'd like to see people able to go into small electronics stores to install small networks in their neighborhoods by just burying the fiber in their yards. Make a technology mass market, and lo and behold, it's $20 at Fry's in just a few years. This technology is possible.

People say the Internet can't scale for video. That's totally wrong. IP multicasting can work if we want it. Peer-to-peer also scales up. It can provide the ability to distribute vast amounts of data. What's popular only goes over the line one or two times, and then it's in the local cloud. A lot of people who built these networks made the assumption that everybody would be a consumer.

Comcast did a deal with BitTorrent on Thursday or Friday. What Comcast did was sort of sly. They didn't do that much interference with BitTorrent. They put detectors on the network to see what people had finished downloading. Then you become a seed, and other people can access it. If you were seeding, and if you were seeding people who weren't on Comcast, that's when they went in and decided they wanted to stop you. The thing that got them in trouble was putting in synthetic packets that would say that the person on the other end had hung up.

The network rose up about that. There was regulatory threat. Comcast realized that, crap, we can't even do this. They've agreed now that they're going to be protocol agnostic. They're going to balance bandwidth. They'll put more upstream in the network. They'll do new research so there's more local caching. And they're going to be more transparent about what they do.

The best lessons in the network come from the edge, both in technology and network neutrality.

The Music of Countervailing Stories

2008-03-31T09:50:00.007-04:00

Susan Crawford is founder of OneWebDay, an ICANN board member, and a blogger. This is a partial transcript of her remarks. If you have any amendments, let me know.

Life is short. We might as well tackle some big questions while we're here. What makes a life significant? Life contains an inner ideal. There's some aspect that's intellectual and conscious. These ideals need to be joined to will. They have to be accompanied by action.

My father's life is drawing to a close. The ideal for him is to sit and listen to music. The ideal is pure human expression in music. As his body gives up on him and his brain decays, the music remains.

We spend a lot of time talking about network operators. The logic of it is constrained and controlled by companies we call network operators. There's inadequate competition. We're paying a lot for slow speeds. These companies aren't monopolies. This is an oligopoly. There are a few sellers acting with consideration for the industry as a whole. The prices themselves don't signal the ebb and flow of user desires. It's not a monopoly, but it's not competition. It's something in the middle.

Instead of ruinous price competition, there are lots and lots of ads showing us the differences among these operators. Oligopolists have power similar to monopolists, but there are few actors. What's the solution to this? Is it anti-trust? That would undermine the very fabric of the American economy. We have a lot of oligopolists. They're not working together to keep prices high. They're acting in deference and knowledge of how the entire industry is doing.

We get stuck on the idea of competition. We need to think differently. This is where music and John Kenneth Galbraith comes in. Galbraith suggests that in a oligopolist economy, restraints come from the retail level or consumers or users. You have oligopoly and then countervailing power. Let's look at the retailers. We've got an integrated market.

We need to find a way to make the user power aggregated, present, visible, organized in a way that would make restraints on the oligopoly real. If there were adequate power coming from users, we could draw them together. We can be as smart as we want to be, but without votes, we're nowhere. The Net neutrality movement isn't always connected to people who vote.

The source of countervailing power needs to be user stories, not gadgets or technology. The story of being enabled to further your life purpose can be connected to this policy debate. We need to simplify the message and make it as human as possible � as musical as possible.

John Kenneth Galbraith, our friend with the theory of countervailing power, always went to a new year's party. He always led the singing of Auld Lang Syne.

If I die tomorrow, I want to make sure I've talked to you about my efforts to bring these stories together via OneWebDay. The purpose of OneWebDay, which is Sept. 22, is to globalize a constituency that cares about the future of the Internet. It's a way for us to all tell stories and teach about our connection to this network. This constituency will provide the countervailing force.

I ask you today to do something to make the Web real for the community around you. That's my message. We need a countervailing force. Competition isn't going to do it.

Suw Charman also offers a transcript via Corante's Strange Attractor.

Welcome to Freedom to Connect 2008

2008-03-31T09:15:00.004-04:00

I'm going to take a stab at confblogging this year's Freedom to Connect. Here's host David Isenberg's opening remarks (he emailed me his talk, so these notes are practically exact):

I am honored to be among so many remarkable people. We have to be remarkable people, because we have a hell of a job to do. The Internet has been given to us. It is a miraculous gift, and a boon to our lives . . . at least in part because it accidentally matured outside the purview of profit and loss. Now the money has arrived. If you want to see what happens when the money arrives, look at Nigeria or Venezuela or Russia or Iraq.

I challenge you to expand the discussion over the next two days. Our planet is in danger of becoming hostile to life. I'm not talking about the flooding of Miami and New York and Bangladesh. I mean that because of the carbon we humans put in the air, Earth could become Venus, a place where life can't live. So I believe -- and I put this forward as a hypothesis -- I believe that we can use the Internet to conserve more atmospheric carbon than its infrastructure generates. Furthermore, I believe we can use the Internet for global participation that transcends tribalism and nationalism to end war . . . for discussion!

We're a remarkable group. We've come from Japan and New Zealand and the Netherlands, from England and Canada and California. We're from 23 states, and two provinces.

We're innovators and activists, academics, investors, lobbyists, lawyers, regulators, reporters, builders of networks and a man of the cloth. Among us is a Son who brought his Father to Freedom to Connect, and a Mother who brought her Daughter. This is good -- saving the Internet *should* be a family affair.

Some of us are here because they don't think the Internet needs saving . . . or if it does, it needs saving from people like me, who are dissatisfied with what the telcos and the cablecos and the Bush-Martin FCC have been doing. I welcome them, because too often we only talk with our friends. I honor Richard and Scott and John and Brett for having the courage to be here. I have no illusions that anybodys minds will change, but I look forward to their contributions to the discussion, and perhaps to some degree of mutual understanding.

The story we will tell in the next two days is not widely told.
It is a story of telephone companies and cable companies, and the disruptive power of the Internet.

It is a story many of us wrote. Some of us wrote it in networks strung across neighborhoods and nations. Some of us wrote it in blogs. Some of us wrote it in C code. Some of us wrote it in The Federal Register. Some of us wrote it in a checkbook. Some of us wrote it in wrinkles on our faces and hands.

It is a story we will not find in the mainstream media, because it would be the story of their own Internet-wrought disruption . . . or even destruction.

It is a story of A Telephone Company that I loved, and hated, and worked for, and tried to save, called AT&T. That AT&T doesn't exist anymore. AT&T created the digital switch, but failed to understand that when digital switching matured, it would make AT&T's business obsolete.

It is the story of a Goliath composed of a thousand Davids. I am one of them. AT&T shaped me. It made me who I am today. Like Barack Obama, I'm of mixed heritage . . . half BellHead, half NetHead.

AT&T had other Davids too, who not only invented the digital switch, but also the transistor, stereo recording, photovoltaics, Information Theory, digital signal processing, C, Unix, DSL and the Cable Modem.

It is also a story of managers who didn't understand technology so they sent consultants to Bell Labs rather risk displaying their ignorance in a personal visit.

It is the story of a corporate culture so deeply rooted
that its assumptions were not only un-questioned
-- they were unquestionable.

It is a story of a system that couldn't possibly be merit-based, because managers had to rise through eighteen layers of management in a 20-some-year career. It is the story of an AT&T CEO that said the Internet was a toy. It is the story of an executive who drove AT&T's computer business into failure, then he presided over AT&T's NCR's failure, and then he was promoted again. It is the story of a failed credit card business, a failed cable business, millions of dollars of failed Silicon Valley partnerships, and a cell phone division that would have failed over and over if it had not been tied to such a large mother ship.

It is a story of a telephone company called Qwest, that built a transcontinental fiber-optic network of unprecedented capacity, and then sold twelve fibers to create competition so capable that the competitor almost put Qwest out of business.

It is a story of hundreds of facilities based competitors that were created with the stroke of a President's pen in 1996, and then -- just a few years later -- these same companies were put out of business by a million tiny pen strokes by the Courts and the FCC .

It is a story of a nation that passed a law mandating competition as a substitute for regulation, and then competition was destroyed.

It is the story of the rise of a neo-conservative economics that correctly notices the market-signalling power of money, but mistakenly denies that non-financial signals are meaningful. By this mistake, the Neo-Econs reject an 800 year old principle of common law that when you offer public services, you have public duties.

It is a story of people struggling to be free. When every major record label abandons DRM, this is a victory! When when one third of iPhones are unlocked, this is a victory. When Verizon Wireless says it will accept any device, this is a victory. When Comcast abandons network management by packet forgery, this is a victory. The Neo-Econs say these are responses to market forces, but they're WRONG. These are victories -- our victories!

The struggle to keep the Internet free is just like the struggle to have our vote count, just like the struggle to control the size of our family, just like the struggle to work a 40 hour week, and just like the struggle to end stupid wars. We win, AND can't stop fighting. Nobody's going to say, "Hey have some more rights." If we want a free Internet, we have to take it!

The story we will tell in the next two days is the story of the future of the Internet.
It is an unfinished story. We are writing it. But we do not know how it will end.

But let me show you some technology that illustrates what is possibile.
*** SHOW FIBER CABLES***

This cable has 864 fibers.

Each fiber carry 160 different wavelengths, each wavelength can carry 10 Gigabits.
The technology to do this has been in the marketplace for at least five years.
This 1.6 terabit signal can go from Washington DC to Chicago without active regeneration.

How big is a gigabit? One gigabit can carry the entire conventional telephony load of a city of 100,000 people. So one fiber can carry 1600 Gbits, or 160 million people -- two or three fibers would carry the conventional telephony of the entire United States.

Here's another way to see this cable. If all 6.5 billion people on earth had a telephone, and if they were all off-hook, generating 64 kilobits a second, and all those conversations were routd to this cable, there would be 100 fibers still dark.

Now imagine this running down your street. Imagine that each house could have two or three fibers, more bandwidth than a telco in each house.

In other words, the problem is completely mis-framed. Comcast and Verizon -- and even Net Neutrality Advocates -- are are talking how to manage scarcity. We should be talking about how to achieve abundance.

But -- and there is a big but here -- All of this transmission capacity takes energy. And this is a problem. Global computing and communictions uses as much energy as the airline industry. We Netheads have a social duty to reduce the energy our infrastructure uses. I believe that we can go much further -- I think we can use the Internet to manage energy, to cut traffic congestion, to reduce travel, to actually conserve more energy than we use. We'll devote almost all of Tuesday afternoon to discussing this hypothesis . . .

How will the Internet story end?

Will a few of the smartest telephone companies, such as BT and Verizon who have the wisdom and foresight and courage to sponsor Freedom to Connect, evolve to be the abundant Internet access providers of tomorrow?

Or will the biggest telcos corporatize and homogenize the Internet in the image of Clear Channel?
Will they lock it down so that personal expression and innovation are driven into an isolated ghetto accessible to only a small minority, where people must devote their lives, like monks, to gain its benefits? Will an oppressive government make the Internet so invasive that nobody creative goes there anymore?

Or will new entities, maybe cities or non-profits,
but maybe new forms of organization made possible by the Internet itself,
arise to build and operate the infrastructure we must have.

Or will other countries, such as Japan and the Netherlands, or maybe China or Brazil, show the way, assuming the United States is capable of seeing what they put in front of our collective face?

Welcome to Freedom to Connect. I can't wait to see how the story of the Future of the Internet evolves over the next two days!

Not all of my confblogging today will benefit from the speakers' notes. If anyone has any corrections as the day progresses, let me know.

Learning Kicks A$$

2008-03-15T15:26:00.003-04:00

But what I love most about SXSW is this.

You have an idea. You meet someone. You share said idea. And magic happens.

I described an idea I had to John from Metanotes, and he made it happen. The result: Everything I Know About X, I Learned from Y.

We're going to find a proper place to host this (right now, it's a gift), and we'll see what happens.

For now: What have you learned... from whom?