Friday, May 19, 2006
Loosed links
Metamagenic has a Libertarian take on Saving the Net.
Darren Barefoot: As it turns out, the two defunct networks apparently only had 12.5 hours of programming worth saving.
Adam Fields: Musings on Consumer Content Experience (or sometimes, maybe you need a brand). Who wants to help me come up with a brand for my spool-fed bacon-wrapped CPU cooling scheme? You have to refresh the bacon every once in a while, but on the plus side, it’s tasty. Got some terrific hang time with Adam in New York, by the way. I don't know anybody else who can go as equally deep on code, food and business.
Does anybody ever think to thank Dave Winer for RSS? Thanks, Dave.
and,
Producerism and the live Web aren't about "allowing" your customers to do things. It's about recognizing that you don't have the power to stop them from doing what they want. It's about recognizing that the world has changed so fundamentally that your very survival is now tied up with engaging everyone in your "value constellation" in authentic relationships (you do know what authentic relationships are like, don't you?)...not capturing their eyeballs, but making it important to them that they continue to be in a relationship with you; that their lives would be diminished if you weren't there.
Eric Schwartzman: I felt like I was a revolutionary talking to a Russian aristocrat in a Chekhov play.
Robert Berkman: I do not look forward to a world of increasing focus on the provision of analytical tools targeted at my personal online behavior.
A key goal of the telcos internationally is to find a way to "upgrade" the internet from a network optimized on innovation (layer independence, unauthenticated use allowed, open interconnection) to one optimized for billing (IMS, NGN).
Also,
I think common carriage means offering service on a nondiscriminatory basis, neutral as to use and user. If the innkeeper's customer has red hair, he shouldn't charge him more than his blond customers. These are just bits we're talking about. Making them into "service type" decides the question up front -- they're not services until the carrier decides to call them that. And it also seems to me that if the second customer speaks more quickly than the first customer (because he's done the equivalent of hiring Akamai or some other private middleman to help him out), the innkeeper also shouldn't discriminate.
And,
I have a different vision. I hope, someday, we'll treat broadband access like the utility it is. That would mean separating transport from other activities, and separating access from backbone and backhaul transport. That doesn't require a great deal of discretion to repose in any particular actor.
Preston Gralla says Cisco hates Net Neutrality. No surprise there.
(AP Technology Writer) Peter Svensson: Will video break the Internet? Which might as well have been written by a carrier's PR office.
At the heart of the debate is a key question: How much would it really cost the Internet carriers to provide a couple of hours of prime-time TV over their networks every day? Really?
At the heart of the debate is what the Interenet is. As I said in Saving the Net, if we define it as pipes, we lose (at least in Congress, which is not the free marketplace, where we have a much better chance). And we're doing exactly that.
Same goes for describing the Net's contributors (that's all of us who produce anything on the Net) as "consumers" whose only need from the Net is "access". Which is exactly what former FCC Chairman Michael Powell's "Four Freedoms" does.
Grant Gross reports on new Net Neutrality bills just introduced in Congress.
Tom Abate in the San Francisco Chronicle:
A group of performing artists led by alternative musician Moby and Michael Stipe of REM has joined the grassroots effort to derail a House bill that would let telephone companies and other broadband carriers set up toll roads on the Internet.
Thursday's Washington news conference by the Save the Internet coalition is the latest round in the so-called network neutrality debate that pits Internet companies and activist groups, led by Google and MoveOn.org, against telephone companies and network equipment vendors such as AT&T and Cisco.
From the PR Newswire: Net Neutrality's End Would Give a Modest Boost to Telco Broadband Revenues, New Report Finds. This is what you get when, as with the last item, you imagine that the only parties standing to make or lose money on the Net are the carriers and their partners (e.g. Cisco). How much business, right now, is prevented by the asymmetrical (big downstream, slow upstream) and crippled (blocked ports 80 and 25, no IP addresses) services to homes and businesses provided by the carriers. You can't miss what you can't imagine. By the way, the best warning against asymmetry was issued by John Perry Barlow in Death From Above, more than eleven years ago. It's a killer piece. Please read it.
Also, don't think the paragraph above is an argument to regulate the carriers. Quite the opposite, in fact. Asymmetrical service isn't a failure of regulation; it's a failure of imagination. I say de-regulate the bastards. Break up the regulatorium. See how these zoo animals thrive in the free and open jungle some of us call the marketplace, and others of us call the commons. On the Net, they're the same thing. Let these guys walk their talk.
On the other hand, Ethan Zuckerman says,
As I think back on it, the vast majority of the policy work I did in Africa was, on one level or another, net neutrality work. As Voice over IP became increasingly important in African nations, I was concerned that phone companies would claim authority over any electronic voice traffic, forcing one of the most interesting developments in telephony into illegality to protect their lucrative monopolies… which is precisely what happened in most countries. Some countries are now discovering they have to undo these decisions and make VOIP possible now, because it’s such a powerful technology and economic force, letting people communicate with families overseas because technical innovation and invention has lowered the price of voice transmission.
It would be a shame to see the US make the same mistake many developing nations made almost a decade ago.
Here's Wikipedia on Net Neutrality. And here's who's writing it.
Whirled Tour
Rick Segal and Shel Israel are teaming up to do a whirlwind tour of the world. Rick is out to make investments far from the madding crowds of Silicon Valley and other customary locales. Shel is out to write a book about the whole experience.
Says Rick,
I’ve got nothing against Silicon Valley start ups or Venture Capitalist who feed there. Heck, I look to most of those VC guys for advice and guidance on many things. But when you look at the connected world we live in today, look at all the problems looking for solutions, and look at all the smart people each of are getting exposed to because of blogging, email, forums, etc, you have to ask the obvious question; aren’t there other great places with smart people doing world changing stuff that could use support, exposure, etc? I’m proud to be from my birth country (U.S.A) but there just has to be more out there.
Says Shel,
I've been looking at startups for over 25 years and will help Rick make any investment decisions that may come up along our way. He has written four books and will collaborate to some degree with me on what the story and stories are as we find them. By virtue of this adventure, Rick will be a major character in this new book or so I would assume.
Shel also points out that I was along for the early planning of this thing:
or a while it looked like we would be blessed by Doc Searls coming along with us, but Doc can't spare the time and he as other things to do and places to go. Doc wanted to call this the "Flat World Tour," which in many ways, would be a very apt title. Thomas Friedman's book did a great job of showing how technology is making this a smaller, faster, more closely connected world. Friedman focused on what big companies are doing in China, in India in supply chains and in global employee collaboration. Rick and I are much more interested in the small companies, or in people who have not yet formed companies; on collaborations between people who are making geography irrelevant. For me, I have a particular interest in companies that may prevail because they are empowering communities of people, rather than attempting to command and control them.
Rick adds,
I’ll be posting the schedule of places shortly but the block of time is August 11th — September 3rd. If you can recommend some places to visit, schools doing cool stuff, people we should talk to, places we should see and/or you want to get a group together and talk about start ups, blogging, venture capital, etc, we’d love to hang out with you and will try to fit in everything we can.
So let Rick and Shel know where you think they should be going, and who you think they should be talking to. The time frame for the tour is August 11th to September 3rd.
The cell sell
Alan Karl responds to what I said the other day about cell phone choices. Says he,
I jumped in head first and bought a Symbian-based Sony Ericsson Smartphone - the P900. After I beat the crap out of that phone I moved to its successor the P910i. This phone offered unmatched international capability meaning I could use it on GSM networks in Central and South America, Asia and Europe. Sure, I'd pay out the nose for access. Or, I could simply by GSM chips as I traveled. But because these phones are rather pricey, the carrier doesn't offer it. However you can buy it directly from SonyEriicsson or any number of independent resellers. Here in the USA the GSM phone offered adequate GPRS capability and with the 910i push-email. Combine that with compatibility to read PDF, MS Office and other ubiquitous files I had no reason to go back to the lame Palm OS I abandoned with my Verizon Kyocera Palm-based Smartphone in 2002. Good bye. There's no reason to be carrying a Windows CE device nor an antiquated OS like Palm. The Symbian OS is open source and the Sony Ericsson syncs seamlessly with Mac OS X 10.4.x. What more could I ask. Or could Doc for that matter?
First, I didn't know Symbian was open sourced. Indeed, it is.
As for GPRS, if it's the same as I have now on my Sony-Ericsson T-637, I'm not interested, because it's slow as dial-up, if not slower.
As for carriers, I'm with Cingular now, and have been since that company ate AT&T Wireless, which was my former carrier. For living in Santa Barbara and driving often to San Francisco, the only choices are Cingular and Verizon, because they're the only companies with acceptable coverage.
Verizon has EVDO. Everybody I know with an EVDO card in their laptop says it's hot stuff and loves it. I can get one of those from Verizon, but not from Cingular.
A guy at the Cingular store says their competitor to EVDO is EDGE, and that it's at least as good as EVDO, plus it works on GSM (vs. CDMA for EVDO), so it will be good for Europe (where I'm going in a little more than a week).
But I'm also told at the Cingular store that only one phone they sell (a Sony Ericsson, I think) both offers EDGE and works with a Mac laptop. (As for Linux, he said "forget it".) Of course, he could be fulla shit. Both my Mac and my Linux laptops have built-in bluetoth, by the way.
Anyway, I'm still defaulted to keeping the T-637 running for as long as possible. It provided Net access (slowly, a bit expensively) over GPRS in Copenhagen a year ago, and I'm ready to settle for that again.
Back track
I'm back in Santa Barbara after most-of a week in New York. Yesterday was a travel day (all of yesterday's blogging was between flights at LAX, for what that's worth), at the end of which I spoke to SBMUG, which was a lot of fun.
I'm not exactly back home, because we don't have one at the moment. There's a house we're renting temporarily while our new house gets done. That house is being renovated as well. Painters and other workers are coming and going all day, so it isn't the best work environment.
That's why I'm full-time at the office I share with another visiting scholar here at UCSB. Getting that office in shape (it's still full of boxes imported from my old office at our last home) is just one in a long pile of necessities I need to plow through in the eight days between now and when I leave for København (Samtalerne, Reboot).
I've said before that I can keep more balls on the floor than anyone I know. But I feel a need to repeat it now to help explain why many among the dozens of phone messages and hundreds of emails (not to mention verbal commitments) will continue to await a response. But I will do my best.