Tom Peters’ Interview

From the Land of Self-Promotion comes this bulletin: Tom Peters’ site is featuring an interview with me.

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The Death and Resurrection of CBDTPA

J. Thomas Vincent has sent me an email in response to my reporting on scuttlebutt that Sen. Hollings’ CBDTPA bill won’t pass during this session:

…I’ll go so far as to say that is the conventional wisdom around DC. Leahy doesn’t like it and as long as he is unhappy it’s dead because the bill hits his jurisdiction. I do completely agree though that the pressure needs to be kept up, for while this year and perhaps not even the next Congress will CBDTPA pass. After ‘04 regardless of what party wins that will be the session where the battle will really get ugly. That’s why the organization efforts online need to get up and running now, to have a coherent message to politicians well before that cycle. (Not to mention efforts like GeekPAC)

So, we shouldn’t drink so much champagne that we fall asleep while the issue rises from the dead. It ain’t going away so soon.

(GeekPAC is an advocacy group started by Doc Searls and Jeff Gerhardt of The Linux Show.)

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My Italian Adventure

Perhaps you heard me on Italian TV yesterday, although I doubt it. The producer of the show said that it’s the “Nightline” of Italian TV, on RAI, the national network. When he called at 6:30AM, he said that they were doing a show on the ceremonies marking the removal of the debris that was once the World Trade Center and they wanted someone to comment on the role the Internet played on 9/11. This is something I’d talked about on U.S. National Public Radio. “Sure,” I said.

“I’ll ask you about how the Internet allowed the world to tell itself its stories,” the producer said.

“Excellent,” I replied with the confidence of someone about to make a fool of himself.

So, a few minutes before air time, the phone rang and the translator introduced herself. “The first question,” she said, “will begin with the host saying that the events of 9/11 have changed the world and affected each of us. In such a time, we think about what it means to live in a world together. We’re talking with David Weinberger, an American philosopher and writer” - Danger! Danger! - “Tell me, Dr. Weinberger, about your reaction to the ceremony and what we learn from 9/11. What are our feelings?”

“I didn’t see the ceremony. I’m an Internet guy. You don’t want to ask me that question,” I replied. Worse, from the question, it seemed I was the first guest. Why would they put the Internet guy on first to provide a general, non-Net comment about 9/11? Thank goodness I had had a chance to warn them off that question!

Seconds later, the interpreter asked me the first on-air question. Except for taking out the part about the ceremony, it was exactly the same. With dead air looming, I tried to come up with an answer to “What do we learn from 9/11? What are our feelings?”

I felt the weight of my country’s honor descend on me. Speaking for all Americans, nay, for all sentient creatures in the universe, I babbled about being sad. And then I forgot that I was required by international treaty to close by saying something uplifting about courage and instead blurted out: “And fear. For all of our economic wealth and all of our science, there is no protection.”

Undoubtedly sensing that he had a guest who too thick even to get the platitudes right, the host asked a question about the role of the Internet in the new world. “Connections,” I said, wiping frothy spittle from my lips, “The children are connected. Connections. Hope. Children. Links. The connectedness of connection. For the children. Connectannectannectannecta…” The show switched to a commercial, an act of desperation since I think RAI doesn’t run commercials.

Look for my upcoming appearance on the Bulgarian version of 60 Minutes explaining the meaning of life, what Angelina Jolie sees in Billy Bob Thornton and exactly how Nancy Reagan feels about her Ronnie. For I am: The Internet Guy

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See you on Friday

I’m on the road, speaking to a Customer Support conference in Arizona, and won’t be blogging today. (Hint: The real purpose of this placeholder message is to see if Blogger is working yet. If you’re reading this, then it is. Yes, it is! Thanks, Ev.)

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Forgiveness Again

AKMA is continuing his thoughts on forgiveness, beautiful in their clarity and in the warmth of the heart pumping the oxygen to his remarkable brain.

I hesitate to react in “print” for a couple of reasons (i.e., I am not going to let those reasons stop me). First, my reaction has to do with the way AKMA’s piece sounds the differences between Judaism and Christianity, yet as a non-observant Jew I lack the standing to reply for My People. Second, I love what AKMA is writing and don’t want to sound quarrelsome. I want to point out differences, not argue that one way is better than the other; there are lots of ways to G-d and I would be truly delighted to live in a community that lived up to AKMA’s vision of forgiveness.

Nevertheless, I’m fascinated by the way AKMA’s explanation doesn’t quite capture my sense of forgiveness. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s somewhere in this passage:

David’s right to note a divergence here between “Jewish” and “Christian” sensibilities, but it goes deeper than that too. Many Christians feel a strong attraction to an ethic that emphasizes putting beliefs into action, walking the walk, whereas another large body of Christians recoil in horror from what they regard as works-righteousness, the notion that you can earn God’s favor by doing the right stuff.

AKMA is reacting to my asking where restitution fits into the scheme. Both alternatives he raises make an assumption that I don’t share. The reason to make restitution - which, as AKMA rightly points out does not mean handing someone a wad of cash - isn’t necessarily to put beliefs into actions or to earn God’s favor. In my understanding, it’s neither belief- nor G-d-focused. You make restitution because doing something wrong fractures the world and you need to try to make it whole. You’re not salving your conscience and you’re not currying favor. You are repairing the damage you did as best you can. The holiest Jews aren’t those with the purest beliefs and purest relationship to G-d. They aren’t saints. They are the righteous ones who do well to humans and G-d. The reason to be righteous in the world is not to put beliefs into action or to make G-d like you but because, well, that’s what’s right and it’s what we have been commanded to do.

Back to the caveats: this isn’t an argument. A world filled with holy Christians, holy Jews, holy Muslims, holy Buddhists, holy Hindus and holy the Rest would be a damn fine place to live, a whole lot better than where we are now. After all, who wouldn’t rejoice at having AKMA and Margaret move in next door?

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Tinseltown Antics

Kevin Marks passes along a clever Flash on the Electronic Frontier Foundation site that parodies the Mickey Mouse Glee Club while propagandizing against Sen. Hollings’ evil CBDTPA bill.

I was relieved to hear from someone who spoke with the confidence of the insider (but not necessarily with the insider’s knowledge) that the CBDTPA is “DOA” because the Judiciary Committee feels slighted by Hollings. I have no idea if that’s true and it in no way should stop you from protesting loudly and often against this profoundly stupid and dangerous bill.

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AKMA on Forgiveness

AKMA has burst onto the Daypop Top 40 with his blog entry on Forgiveness. And deservedly so. Although I don’t hold grudges (generally … you know who you are, you dirty bastards), it took an embarrassing number of years for me to get over the idea that forgiveness was an irrational will-to-forget and to see that it was the way we humans, imperfect by nature, can manage to live together. When AKMA writes that forgiveness “may be the only way to take an offense with adequate seriousness,” I have one of those Getting It moments. “Forgiving wrongs requires us to take them utterly seriously as injuries to one another and to the relationships of which we form a part…” Beautiful.

One thing struck me as peculiar, though. AKMA writes:

Forgiving entails recognizing a wrong, looking at it clearly and honestly, assessing responsibility for it, and resolving not to permit that wrong to determine our lives from thence forward.

Elsewhere AKMA says that forgivness must include “a degree of resolution to avoid repeating my offense, and my effort to live out a life characterized by the manifest embrace of a better way forward.” The one thing missing from AKMA’s article is the idea of restitution. My religion, Judaism, as I understand it (i.e., not at all) puts particular stress on making whole what one has ruptured through one’s bad behavior. Yes, you resolve not to do it again, and yes, you don’t let that behavior rend the fabric of the relationship. But you also run out to the store immediately and buy Margaret some more damn pepper.

Now, obviously AKMA doesn’t need me to tell him that. He was probably camping on the doorstep of the Quickie Mart to be first on line for pepper. Is restitution too obvious an idea to have surfaced in AKMA’s essay? Or does the difference in emphasis indicate a deeper difference in our religions? I’m inclined toward the former since I feel an odd social responsibility to mark the differences between Judaism and Christianity so that the hyphen in “Judeo-Christian” catches in the throat. For example, Judaism tends to be less of a religion of beliefs and faith than Christianity is…

Gentlemen, start your generalizations!

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Quite an amazing blogthread developing on forgiveness! AKMA followed up his post with another wallop, this on what forgiveness does to time: “forgiveness involves a transition from a problematic past to a more hopeful future…” which, he notes, means constructing (or finding) a narrative. And this should lead us to reflect on the way in which all social relationships are about time often in the form of narratives: “You are my friend for life” includes you in a particular narrative whereas “You’re just a social acquaintance” tells a different story.

Also in the blogthread is the eloquent Steve Yost, a guy I’ve known in the real world for a couple of years, and although I have the highest regard for him as a person of integrity and as a software master, his blog is showing me something even more that I hadn’t met in him in the real world. Halley and Marek have also jumped in, but we’ve grown to expect Excellence in Blogging from them already…

Nah, I’m not going to let them off the hook that easily. Halley tries to get comfortable in forgiveness’ embrace when writing about her recently passed father. I must say that her writing over the past couple of days has really been outstanding. See for yourself. And Marek confronts himself and his feelings for his father and how that refracts all of his world — just like the rest of us, Marek, just like the rest of us — with the confusion that marks honesty about what’s most difficult. What he writes is so personal that I don’t feel like I have right to say anything except: See for yourself.

Thank you, Steve, Halley and Marek. And thank you, AKMA. Isn’t this what teaching is about? Creating occasions for learning?

(Forgive my pompousness. It’s how my emotions come out in public.)

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The Virtue of Indoors

I lied in yesterday’s blog. I said that I was worshipping nature from indoors. The indoors part was true. The worshipping wasn’t.

I like nature ok. Some of my favorite fruits come from nature. Also there are times when a fresh breeze will redirect the bus fumes away from my house towards my neighbor’s. Thank you. On the other hand, nature is the source of: carcinogenic sun rays, humidity, filling-freezing cold, mosquitos, fatal lightning attacks, tornadoes, droughts, chiggers, the microscopic bugs that infest every mattress, rabies, slime, eggplants, temperatures in excess of 75, quicksand, banana peels, Mothra, night-long darkness, asteroids, tape worms, monkeys’ red butts, rain, poison ivy, dog crap, needlessly pointy gravel, earthquakes and a fish floating belly up with its eyes eaten out. That’s just plain disgusting. I could go on and on. (The situation is actually much worse than I’m letting on because children may be reading this.)

And that’s why we invented the indoors. In fact, I’m writing this from indoors right now! Let me try to describe it. I’m able to adjust the temperature to one that is comfortable for our species, and the indoors automatically keeps itself at that temperature no matter what type of hissy fit Nature throws. And through the miracle of glass, a sort of hardened air — I’m not making this up! — we are able to see what is going on outside while the animals that would prey on us are kept away. This beats climbing a tree and looking down because some of the nastier animals can fly. And I’ve had doors installed so that only I and my family can enter our sanctuary without having to ask permission first. Plus I can organize my things exactly as I want and can be confident that when I return, they won’t have blown away, gotten wet, or have been gnawed by beasts.

It’s really quite remarkable and difficult to describe to those who haven’t experienced it. Try to find the next time Dean Kamen is giving a talk since I’m pretty sure he invented it.

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A title for a book I have no intention of writing but that pretty much sums me up

“Worshipping Nature from Indoors”

[We're in the Berkshires for Memorial Day, an important American holiday where we take the time to recall something or other.]

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MiscLinks

Marek recommends ResultsUSA, a site that works on ending world hunger.

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The ever-vigilant Chip recommends Eric Alterman’s big-J-ish blog. Alterman writes for The Nation as well as for just about any other journal that hasn’t completely hocked its soul.

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Gary Unblinking Stock sends us back to our favorite comic strip, mnftiu, to discover that there’s going to be a “Get Your War On” book. All of the proceeds will go to landmine relief efforts in Afghanistan.

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Cherchez la French

David Isenberg has found an interesting French search site. It shows the results graphically, connecting the nodes to display, well, I have no idea what it’s displaying. But other people on the mailing list to which he sent the link seem to think that it’s quite helpful to those who didn’t sell their graphical lobes to artistically challenged millionaires in the early 70s. It’s called Kartoo.net and if it works for you, then I delight in your success.

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Another 2.5 Tools

Ading to the list of simple tools for managing URLS and comments about URLs come two suggestions.

Phililp Webre recommends askSAM. But I’m a formerly happy user of surfsaver. It saves the entire page, not just the urls, which would be ok except that it does so in a proprietary format (or at least it used to) so that when it broke and askSAM couldn’t fix it, I lost all my data. I also got stuck in upgrade hell with them: couldn’t install the new, couldn’t get the old back…

Jonathan Peterson recommends Compass which looks pretty durn neat:

I love compass (), it can import/export opera, Netscape, IE bookmarks, you can do drag-n-drop and hotkey bookmarks, it autograbs meta tag info, but allows you to stick in your own comments as well. It works pretty well out of the box, but has a lot of customization features while still being pretty small and quick. I’ve got over 1500 bookmarks, in dozens of categories and subcats. One of the most powerful features is an HTML/XML export, which isn’t well documented, but lets you do stuff like: http://way.nu/bookmarks/, which I know I wouldn’t deal with otherwise.

The author is very responsive, I made a feature suggestion that he implemented with 2 months and I’ve managed to lose my serial number twice and he’s emailed it back to me.

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James Sisk points us to a tool that he knows isn’t quite right but that looks interesting anyway. Hunter/Gatherer. In the words of the site: “Hunter Gatherer lets users select information of interest from within Web pages, and have those components collected automatically into a new web page.” It seems to be a research project and it is definitely not yet available.

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Link Reference Tools

A few days ago, I asked people for suggestions for a simple tool that would let me save URLs and comments into folders. I heard from a few of you:

The ever-alert Chip recommends Treepad, a tool I had forgotten I’d downloaded a while ago. It’s small (470K zipped), it’s pretty friendly (the manual could use some work), and they have a workable version that’s free, as well as a more fully-featured versions you can pay for.

Gil Gilliam writes:

Have you looked at Zoot from www.zootsoftware.com ? It may be more than you want, but then again, you don’t have to use all of its features.

I had previous downloaded Zoot but it is a full featured “information processor” whereas I’m just looking for a place to stick some URLs.

Buzz Bruggeman at ActiveWords (and today the subject of an encomium by Doc) suggests:

Using ActiveWords simply name your URL’s according to a naming logic. For example all of the blogs’s I got to, I name “weblog”, then when I want to see them, I simply type, “weblog” trigger and see the list. Same for news, sports, research, travel, fun, etc. Real simple, real easy, and while only limited space for comments, they are only a word away, and also searchable inside ActiveWords.

ActiveWords has many things going for it, but it’s got too much if you just want to stick URLs into folders.

Doria Thodla (a name just dying to be anagrammed) of imorph recommends a service on her site:

It does not do all the stuff you want, but will let you put up a tool bar button, capture any URL you want, add a description, a set of keywords and will monitor the page for changes.

It is a service on our website (free for up to 10 pages)…

Please check it out at www.infominder.com

Kevin Marks comes in with a surprise suggestion: use the blogger bookmarklet tool. It doesn’t do exactly what I want, but it wins for Most Creative Suggestion.

So, for now it’s either Treepad or my home-brewed app. Thanks for the help, y’all!

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Epeus Takes Up the Telco Story

Kevin Marks thinks he’s disagreeing with my attempt to boil down the telecomm story. In particular, he thinks he’s disagreeing with “The Paradox of the Best Network,” the longer version David Isenberg and I wrote. But he’s not. I like a lot what Kevin says.

The supposed point of disagreement is that Kevin thinks Isenberg and I imply that “you can’t make money with a well-designed network.” Says Kevin: “It was a good soundbite, but wrong on a deeper level” because you can make good, steady money selling a commodity.

No argument! In fact, the heart of what we were saying is summed up in Roxann Googin’s phrase: “The best network [the "stupid" network that does nothing but move bits] is the hardest one to make money running.” Not impossible. Just hard. This is why the telco’s want to be in the added-value network business, not in the we-move-bits business.

So, Kevin and I are in agreement. And we also agree that Larry Lessig’s “The Future of Ideas” is really important; Kevin includes an extended quote from an article by Lessig in The American Prospect.

Sorry, Kevin, wish I could disagree…

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Doom III

Not that I would waste my time playing violent games that glorify destruction and demean the human spirit while elevating a set of typically patriarchal values, but, damn, Doom III is looking good!

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The Telecommunications Story

At my session at Connectivity 2002 yesterday (see my previous days’ blogs as well as Halley’s astute coverage including her pilloring of my presentation … and Dan Bricklin has just blogged his take on the conference), I asked the group to come up with ways of explaining to an intelligent layperson (well, a senator) what the technological argument is for fighting the incumbent telecommunication companies. The idea was to boil it down to the simplest possible story from the technological point of view. What’s the picture technologists should paint for the rest of us?

I’m nowhere near as up on this area as just about anyone you’ll meet, but it’s good to know that ignorance doesn’t deter me from making large-scale pronouncements. So, here’s what I would say:

Let’s just agree that the Internet is the best way our species has ever come up with for spreading free speech and free markets on a global scale. Screwing this up would be an epochal mistake. And, we want to make sure that we Americans don’t lock ourselves out of this arena, repeating the mistakes we made in, say, the auto industry. So, what do we do?

The Internet has succeeded because it Keeps It Simple, Stupid: it just moves bits around. And we want to keep it as a simple bit conveyer belt. That way, any bright new ideas someone has for products and services that can be done with bits — a little thing we like to call “innovation” — can count on the Net for getting bits from A to B with incredible efficiency.

But there’s a danger. The old types of networks have assumed that it’s always good to be tuned for particular applications — for example, a network specifically for telephone calls. But tuning a network for one type of application means that it’s “de-tuned” for others, and the strength of the Internet has been precisely that it just moves bits without caring what type of applications are sending the bits. To keep the Internet open for innovation we have to keep it the simplest possible “de-tuned” bit conveyer belt.

The temptation to tune the network is inevitable if control of it is given to a group that has one particular type of service to provide. That’s why it’s vital that we keep the provision of the network separate from the provision of applications that use the network. This has to be enforced at the technical level but also at the application, business and regulatory levels.

Yes, this doesn’t cover other vital issues such as free speech and the need to remove municipal regulations that hinder smaller competitors, but the aim is to keep this simple.

Comments, criticisms, suggestions, humiliating exposures of the fact that I am merely a poseur? Most important: Other ways of telling the story?

PS: I helped David Isenberg draft a similar sort of story at NetParadox. And at that site you’ll find links to “The Rise of the Stupid Network” and David Reed’s work on the End-to-End network that are behind this simple, stupid re-telling.

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Thank you, Marybeth Peters

Marek, referring to an article by Doc in Linux Journal, suggests we send our thanks to Marybeth Peters, Register of Copyrights, for rejecting the CARP recommendation that would have killed Internet Radio. I called the Copyright Office and got her contact info:

Email: mpet@loc.gov
Fax: 202 707 8366

Marybeth, our love is on its way!

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Halley Blogs The Conference

If you want to see the benefit of not doing realtime blogging at a conference, compare Halley’s coverage of Connectivity 2002 with mine. She’s actually reflecting, summarizing, and picking out the parts worth making fun of (e.g., my presentation). I’m just typing.

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David Isenberg’s Underwear

On Tuesday at the Connectivity 2002 Conference, David Isenberg opened his talk by waving his underwear around and listing the metaphorical similarities between jockey shorts and telecommunications. So, on Wednesday morning during my session, I waved David Isenberg’s underwear around as the prize for coming up with the best way of explaining the telco mess in the fewest words. Yes, I was blatantly trading on the laughs Isenberg earned.

It was only on the way home that I realized that about 20% of the audience on Wednesday hadn’t been there on Tuesday and thus must have their own theories about why I would give Isenberg’s underwear away as a prize.

It reminds me of the time my sister-in-law Sue, a serious and seriously published novelist, was teaching an English course to college freshman. They were reluctant to speak up, so over the course of weeks, Sue used every technique she could think of to get them to open up. Finally, one woman - call her Mary - actually contested something Sue said, and Sue replied: “Mary, you ignorant slut!” There was a shocked silence for, of course, the students were too young to understand that this was a reference to an old Saturday Night Live skit. They sat there wondering why their professor was calling them sluts.

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Connectivity 2002 - Wednesday Afternoon

Keith, Joe and Lee

Panel: Open Communications Infrastructure: Cutting the Knot. Lee McKnight is talking, Prof. at Tufts. He says, there should be no regulatory distinctions local and national communications, wireline or wireless, narrowband or broadband, broadcast or switched. He’s presenting what he he thinks the new regulatory framework should be.

Keith Weiner, CEO of DiamondWare. He’s here to ruffle our feathers. Keith begins by stating the prevailing theory with which he’ll disagree: In theory we need to reign in the profit-hungry corporations, level the playing field and intervene to manage competition. People here would like to see hundreds of little companies competiting and would like to see the incumbents destroyed. But (now he’s stating his own views) there is no such thing as public interest because (on Ayn Randian grounds) there is no such thing as the public. But under the theory of “public interest,” the Bells are the ones who are delivering because they provide a universal service without tax money. (Fred from the audience says that the Bells don’t do rural delivery and it is subsidized by a tax.) Keith is trying to show equivocation on the word “power” that leads us to think that we need regulation to protect us. Microsoft doesn’t have the same sort of power as the Mafia; you can always go to a competitor. His point (as I understand it in response to a question from me) is that all regulation is bad and is only needed because of prior flaws in the system that prevent markets from being truly open and free; he would roll back the regulation and then attack the more fundamental problems (e.g., courts that favor incumbents with money). … Many ruffled feathers later, Keith wraps up: In a regulated environment, the richest gang wins, so fight against regulation.

[Must type louder to annoy Halley.]

Now Joe Plokin from Bway.net (a NYC ISP) and www.teletruth.org is up. He says we’re not looking at deregulation but demonopolilzation. TeleTruth is a consumer protection and advocacy group within telecommunications.

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David Brustein looking more like Fidel
in the photo than he does in person.

Dave Burstein is leading a panel on “The Realities of the Local Access Bandwidth Bottleneck.” He’s reminding us of what’s at stake: our ability to decide what we want to put on the Net at prices we can afford, e.g., a broadcast of a church service. What is it that we want, he asks? The audience answers: Connectivity to be treated like a utility; as many people connected as quickly as possible (that was me).

How do we get there? In politics, you find allies and phrase the issues in their terms. Here are some potential allies:

• Commissioner Kevin Martin at the FCC is a rigid conservative but he loves what the Net can do and doesn’t want parts of the country left out. He wants a better, faster Internet.
• John Chambers and Andy Grove want to sell lots of equipment to do these great things on the Internet. Their TechNet initiative wants to deliver lots of bandwidth.

We can’t get there through a market full of small companies. .. [Damn, I have to duck out for a few minutes...] David is now suggesting various ways of getting cable to just about everyone, including a 30% investment tax credit to the Bells along with requirements that they open it up to other vendors. [Another phone call. I missed the ending. Too bad. It was interesting.]

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Connectivity 2002 - Wednesday Morning

Back at the Connectivity 2002 conference. Bob Frankston is giving the morning’s introduction, boiling it all down. Here’s his slide:

Connectivity: The Concept

Separate transport from content
- Pack connectivity like the Internet
- Functions defined at the end point
Current situtation
- Inherent conflict of interest
- Egregious restrictions on free speech

Bob is pushing on his “More is More” (More’s Law) that says that you want to be in a situation where if you want more of something, you can buy more. This makes for a healthy market. But the current situation isn’t like that: if you buy more set-top boxes, you don’t get more channels or more choice. But it should be true for connectivity: if you buy more streams, you get more capacity. This puts connectivity into the market where market forces can work its magic. Currently, broadband, on the other hand, is a set capacity with no ability to buy more. That’s why Bob said yesterday that he considers broadband to be a distraction; we shouldn’t be worrying about delivering broadband but about building a market where capacity is subject to market forces.

We just broke slightly (as the projector reboots) to let newcomers introduce themselves. David Burstein from Vortex - a big time telecomm forum - just brought us greetings from Doc Searls and news that we may have allies in quarters such as Cisco that would benefit greatly from a rapid growth in connectivity.

Frankston: “The thing about companies is that it’s not against the law to kill them.” His slide says that we are not saying they should die, “only” that they should reinvent themselves.

Audience: How does this work in rural areas? And what about the expense of rights of way?

Me: Doesn’t the logic of “More’s Law” lead to paying by bit, which we agree would be a bad thing?
Frankston: No, that’d just be a bad business model. [So, More's Law actually says that we should be able to buy more in increments that maximize the market. After all, we can buy "more" now by moving within the upload/download increments in cable, and moving from dial-up to cable to T1, etc.]
Frankston: Rights of way is part of the “nefarious conspiracy” to keep this so expensive that only the incumbents can win. And we should open up the problem of rural access through innovation.

Halley Suitt takes a moment from blogging the conference…

Frankston: Content does have rights. And privileges. [I'm glad to see the conversation get down to the battle for the words that count.]

Bob is continuing to outline why breaking the hold of the “content providers” will open new business possibilities, e.g., aggregating content in flexible ways, etc. etc. I don’t need convincing on this point. But I’m also worried that we’re not seeing these new models already emerging. Some depend on greater access, but some - bands selling their own music over the Internet - could work now and yet haven’t caught on.

Frankston: “But it’s not all about entertainment. Some people have come to think that the purpose of the roof is to keep the rain off the television.”

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Bob DeRosa

Bob DeRosa, VP Mktg of American Fiber Systems, is up now. They design and develop metropolitan dark-fiber networks - fiber that can be used for whatever purposes the customer wants. (Thanks to David Isenberg for the explanation.) He’s explaining his competitive market: lots of groups (ILECs, CLECs, CATV, Gig-E players, utilities and more) are hooking wires up to your house. The “hidden competition” is the city itself: rights of ways, franchises and fees, permits, regulations and restoration demands. There’s some wiggle room, but “given the regulatory environment, competitors of any stripe are at a major disadvantage when competing against incumbents…”

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I’m up supposedly up next leading a panel on “What the Fuck Do We Do about It?” Because this topic has come up pretty consistently in other panels, I instead, I want to have the entire group try to come up with the story by which we can explain the technological reasons for keeping the Net open. Divide into small groups, report back to the total group … the entire yechy, touchy-feely, marketing-offsite-meeting thing.

…Ok, I’m finished. We broke into groups and reported back. I can’t say that there were any tremendous breakthroughs, but it was - I hope - useful at least to begin talking with one another about this.

Here’s what the groups came up with: 1. Transport and connectivity are different 2. Infinite growth of imagine makes for infinite growth of potential… Split between:” everyone can be an ISP vs. This is a natural monopology which we hate but we’re going to get our net from the post office We were split between do we really need broadband and Broadband or Death. We’d send a politican back to look at national infrastructure projects, e.g., highway system. It’s not so much the post office as we need the network.) We sought a way to tie the self-itnerest of the legislator to the desire to achieve access to bb broadband. But what type of access? By facilitating universal access of any strength, you can induce the legislator to see it in his self-interest because the demographic can include new voters, by opening up access you open up particeipation in the electoral process. A number of the goals the Telecomm Act advanced have not been met (e.g., education). We wwant to promote 100mb/sec broadband. Platform neutrality. Might be wireless in rural, fiber to the home. Maybe through taxx breaks. It will serve the economy globally and locally. Do we attack the IP rights of the entertainment industry, which becomes an issue when you have the higher connection speeds? If we start talking about the RBOCs, we won’t get anywhere. So we have to frame this to meet the legislator’s self-interest by getting appropriations into the home district. We talk about the private road and the public road. The Internet is one of the greatest highway systems in the world but it’s being turned into a private road that serves private interests. Our country is rapidly losing employment to offshore competitors. How are enterpreneurs and people in disenfranchisede areas going to compete if they have worse access than, say, Korea and have to pay high prices? We’re shutting down the competition and our ability to be entrepreneurial in the global society. We need to create an “innovation platform.” The next great boom, like the Net’s first great stimulus of creativity, will come from the breakthrough of an innovation platform.

Kevin Werbach

Kevin Werbach is speaking. He’s not only the editor of Esther Dyson’s “Release 1.0,” he’s also an ex-FCC person. (He has a paper on this topic here. Regulators are well-intentioned, he says. They want broadband access nationally. They just lack the right way of talking about the issues. The “regulatorium” (Frankston’s term) exists for reasons. The FCC is under tremendous constraints: when you’re inside the FCC, all you see are the limits on what you can do.

Michael Powell has been spending his time marshalling his forces. He’s started at lesast five seprate broadband-related proceedings. He’s trying to push through his agenda but not much has happened.

What’s missing is the right information. They rely on what they’re told and mainly what they’re told comes from the established players. There’s a woeful lack of engineers and economists for independent internal analysis…but this is beginning to change. This is the best thing Powell is trying to do. Before, the FCC had lawyers but no engineers.

But the real problem is that the FCC doesn’t have the right paradigm. Its communications policy is based on the 1934 Communications Act. Today we have horizontal categories: teleecomm, broadcast, cable, Internet. But connectivity doesn’t fit into this model because it isn’t a service, it’s a platform for delivering many different services, e.g., Voice Over IP. But the FCC has to stick it into one existing bin or another. So, the most important questions simply don’t compute.

Is there a better alternative? Sure: Look at how the network actually works (today, not in 1934). There are vertical layers, not horizontal categories: not separate networks for voice, for pictures, etc. This is old news for techies (OSI stack, etc.) but it’s news to the law. Reconfigure the law to recognize perhaps four layers: content, apps/services, logical, physical. [This is very close to Lessig's argument, which is certainly an argument in its favor.] This would let you put constraints on physical networks that would lead to greater openness higher in the stack. Not all-or-nothing regulations. (There are always going to be regulations.)

So, how do we get there? It’d be nice if we had a creative and committed FCC, but even then the courts would be a problem. So, we need new legislation. It’ll take time and money. We should start writing the Telecom Act of 2010. We need to recognize that the time frame is longer than 6 months. But we also need short-term tactical actions. Kevin helped draft the Stevens Report issued four years ago to explain why Internet telephony shouldn’t be regulated, so the FCC does occasionally do the right thing. But we need more input from the public and tech industry by informal meetings with the staff and by formal filings. The FCC keeps asking “Where’s the other side? Where’s this big tech industry?”

[Chris Herot just passed me a pointer to Dan Gillmor's excellent article on David Reed's excellent article on spectrum.]

Realtime Blogging

I blogged the TED conference a couple of months ago by taking notes (pen and paper, how primitive!) during the sessions and then spending a couple of hours each morning writing up entries before breakfast. I’m blogging the Connectivity 2002 conference in real time because there’s a wireless net here. The result is not only that I’m distracted from what’s going on, but you’re getting something much more like a spotty, inadequate transcript than a reflection on what’s important about the conference. You’re getting notes. I personally think the reflective model is more useful. But, because this conference is in my home town, the blogging time would have to come out of time spent with my family. And last night was the excellent two-hour season finale of “Buffy.”

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Connectivity 2002 - Tuesday Afternoon

David Isenberg showing off
the latest in “fiber to the lap.”

David Isenberg, author of “The Rise of The Stupid Network” has begun his presentation. He’s explained how the telephone network arose as a “smart network” optimized for the services the telephone companies want to sell. The Internet is stupid in that it don’t know how to do nuthin’ but move them bits ’round. And, when you internetwork these networks, the control shifts from the network owner(s) to the end users; no longer can a network provider add features unilaterally, so the innovation has to come at the edges. That’s why the Internet disrupted the telecommunications industry.

[Eric Norlin has blogged about this blogging of the Connectivity conference. He thinks the question of digital IDs is underneath the spam and privacy issues discussed this morning.]

David is saying that the new end-to-end model puts the end-user in control and lets into the mix. Microsoft “gets this in spades”: Windows Messenger under XP lets two users open a voice channel or video channel integrated with the IM window. “SIP will change everything.”

Isenberg’s put up a 2×2 chart. X axis = kilobits to gigabites. Y axis = intelligent network to stupid network. Lower left is telephony, lower right is television, upper left are email and web browsing and internet telephony and games [this is the fun quadrant] and the upper right has “SIX BILLION CHANNELS” open to innovation. “The real important apps haven’t been discovered yet.”

[Kevin Marks has just blogged about this conference also. He proposes a 3-pronged attack on spam.]

Key point: The stupid network decouples connectivity from app building and it’s a mistake to try to be in both businesses. So, what’s the business model for connectivity? Not the phone company which likes vertical apps. Not the cable companies because they’re stuck on the old video paradigm and resist the new distributed model. So what’s left? Municipalities, utilities, customers, and/or something new … which David connects to David Reed’s “We Don’t Know,” fast becoming the conference’s mantra and theme.

Question from the audience: Should we come up with the apps first to drive the infrastructure? Reply from the audience: We did already and called it “Napster.” Isenberg: We have 100 megabits on our desktops but we use only a fraction of that usually, but we’d scream if someone tried to take our bandwidth away; bandwidth comes first.

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ISP panel

The ISPs. Chaired by Sue Ashdown of the American ISP Association. Panelists: Ira Kleiner, CEO of ProSpeed Networks. Colin King, co-founder of ProSpeed. Victoria White, CEO of Eclectechs in North Hampton.

Sue: “We’re beginning to see the death of the Internet service provider” because of the consolidation and now because ISPs need to obtain supply. [Artificial scarcity rears its ugly head again.] The actual title of this panel is “What happens if the ISPs don’t get what they want,” but Ashdown opens by asking when have ISPs ever gotten what they want? Now even the Patriot’s Act adds risk to the ISPs because they can’t afford attorneys to fight FBI requests for information about users.

The telephone companies have kept the ISPs out of the market by setting the price for lines to the house so high that the ISPs margins’ shrink pass the point of reason. And the telephone companies through “errors of omission” make it harder for customers to accept ISPs. As a result, the Bells have 86% of the DSL market.

Ira is about to talk. His company - a CLEC (Competitive Local Exchange Carrier) - delivers connectivity to underserved markets in NH and MA. [I have to duck out. See a man about a dog. And, unlike Doc, I'm not going to blog while balancing my laptop on the urinal.] Sue is now saying that she recommends against ISPs becoming CLECs because it brings them under so many regulations.

White began by building web sites; her company did 300 in about five years. “Sometimes running an ISP is like being in an MRI where you hear the field gradients, like someone shooting at you,” but you don’t know where it’s coming from or where the next one will come. They serve a lot of seniors and since they don’t require a credit card to sign up, people come into the office to pay the bill, to pay the dog, etc.

What’s the value of small ISPs? Ashdown says it’s in the ability to serve smaller and niche markets.

The guy from Bway.com, a NYC ISP, says that the only way for smaller ISPs to survive is by adding value rather than by competing on price.

Audience: What do the local congresspeople say when you lobby them? Colin: They don’t understand the technology. (Exceptions made for Markey and Hollings.)

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Jeff Chester

Jeff Chester, Exec. Dir. of the Center for Digital Democracy, says that the advertising and entertainment industry’s vision of the new media is the old media. Their vision is to marry the branding power of TV with the interactivity of the Net, resulting in an “advertiser’s nirvana.”

He told about a meeting in the Chamber of Commerce early in the Clinton admionistration where, with the advertising lobby present, Clinton and Gore talked excitedly about the Information Highway. “You’re not really going to let people getheir content over the Internet,” said the advertisers, “That’ll kill our industry.” Jeff knew then that the government would work to restrict the Net to the benefit of those who own the content and sell the advertisements.

[BTW, blogger.com just ate some more paragraphs; it does a 404 when I hit the Post button and can't get back the new content. Argh.]

[During the break, Jock Gill, former tech advisor to the Clinton White House and a fighter for What's Right, said that we're losing the battle because we can't tell the story without dropping into deep techno-caves. We need a simple way to say what we mean. I may use this idea to structure the session I'm supposed to be leading tomorrow on What the !#$^% Do We Do About It?]

Jeff says that the cable companies have been successful in warding off any attempt to stop their near-explicit goal of controlling the network. He points us to a few sites that including his site: www.democraticmedia.org. “You have a handful of companies gobbling up control of old and new media. If all of the FCC rules go through, one company will be able to own the newspaper, several TV stations, several radios, the cable system, and de facto that town’s major ISP…all tied to a very very meaningless vision of just attracting eyeballs, engaging in what they call t-commerce, developing the branding…”

Jeff: “Go to FCC.gov and go to the Media Bureau and go to Media Mergers and go to the AOL/time Warner public interest statement. You’d think that the biggest media merger in American history…there will only be two benefits. #1 Just by the fact that we’re merging, more people will want more broadand. We’ll make a whole new generation of commercially sticky features.” No one in Congress is speaking out, only Hollings is speaking in the Senate.

Jeff would be happy simply with non-discriminatory access (opening the wires to the competitive market) but, he says, we won’t get that unless we form a movement. Now. “We’re not saying big companies can’t make lots of money. We’re saying they can’t monopolize the network. It should be win-win.”

Isenberg: We need to tell the story, as Jock Gill says. Here’s one way: “The US to be the best auto maker. Not any more. We used to be the best steel maker. Not any more. Do we want to lose the Internet business? We’re on the right track to do just that.”

Jeff: We lost the battle in DC. Now we need to take it local. Show our local reps that it’s win-win for business.

FLASH: Copyright office rejects CARP!! [By the way, I was able to blog this before Isenberg could get the chair's attention to announce it at the conference. [... which proves what?]]

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Connectivity 2002 - Tuesday Morning

The most visible initial fact about Connectivity 2002 is that there aren’t a lot of people here. The room is set up for about 150 people but there are only 30 of us here. [At 10am we're up to about 50.] On the other hand, we just went around the room introducing ourselves and it seems like a really good group.

Bob Frankston is the conference chair and he’s giving his presentation as we wait for The Dave Farber to show up.

I’m now swapping notes — actually scribbles on 3D paper — with Halley Suitt, about what is and isn’t blogworthy. So, 10 minutes in and I’m already three levels of abstraction beyond where I am. Ack.

Bob Frankston’s explaining his version of Moore’s Law, More’s Law, which says if you want more, you can buy more. That’s what drives Moore’s Law. This argues against subsidizing the delivery of broadband because that destroys the dynamic of building more as the market needs it: if the cable company runs out of bandwidth, it builds more because people will pay more. [Yeah, but subsidizing may kickstart a market and, more important, can get over the inequities of a purely market-driven infrastructure.]

Bob Frankston

Bob’s second slide:

RAGE!
You are hostages!
You can’t choose what to watch
You pay the trolls for “phone calls”
You can’t be seen or heard
They must kill the Internet!

You are at the end of the last mile!

Bob, in response to a question, says that the incumbent business model pretends there’s a scarcity of bandwidth so that it can maintain control over access and over prices. But the users are the “unindicted co-conspirators” who go along with this.

Carl Ford, formerly from GTE but now with pulver.com, is standing in the aisle disputing the conspiracy theory. [Chris Herot IM'ed me with this info. He's reading this blog as it develops. Thanks, Chris!]

Carl Ford protests!
Bob would like to see a decoupling of the network from the services built on it. He thinks the telco’s should actually want to be broken up, if only they were smart enough. The people here from the telco industry are shaking their heads at the idea that it’s stupidity that keeps them from seeing the wisdom of decoupling. If this conference can actually get to the common ground here — for surely it is anything but stupidity that drives this mess — it’ll be truly useful.

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Dave Reed (right) - Icon … and Icon-Abuser

David Reed, of End-to-End fame, has announced that his point is that it’s time for us to admit that we don’t know what the business model is. The end-to-end argument says that the network itself should be “stupid” in Isenberg’s phrase in that it ought to do nothing but move bits, and the applications that make sense of those bits ought to be on the edges of the network. The alternative is to build special functionality into the network itself, but every time you do that, you actually make it harder to come up with innovative uses of the network. But that means that the network becomes commoditized which the telcos desperately don’t want to have happen. [This is my summary. Don't blame Reed.]

Damn! Blogger just hiccoughed and ate two paragraphs of recapping of Reed’s economic model and why Bluetooth failed. Basically, Reed argues that the value in the network comes from the options at the edges where you make bets on innovation that may work. “Optimizing” the network itself for this or that app closes down other options. Reed pointed to Bluetooth and Universal Plug and Play as ways not to do this. Bluetooth came up with app-specific protocols rather than being a “stupid” protocol. Universal PnP tried to anticipate every conceivable app/decide that might come its way, an impossibility.

Reed is saying that pervasive computing will be wireless, so let’s look at it. All the wireless devices will have to be capable of highly flexible connectivity. The situtation is urgent already. It’s not so much about bandwidth…
[Damn. I have to go make a phone call that can't be rescheduled...]

[Ok, I'm back. Which is as unnecessary as "If you lived here you'd be home now."] Reed is saying that end users can afford gigabit broadband (currently $2,500-$3,500 and dropping, much less than remodeling a kitchen) as opposed to looking for a business to make that sort of investment. And now we’re all clapping for David… Sorry I missed the center. I am a huge admirer of David’s.

David Reed

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Privacy and Spam panel. The connection between privacy and spam is, says the panel chair, Ray Everett-Church (ePrivacyGroup), is that many people assume t