I am an admirer of Marco’s. His new project is trying to explain what’s important and real about the Internet. Its page is here,. It’s in Italian, but I am confident in recommending it without having read it. (I’m still on the road, and only have 3 minutes left on the free hotel wifi before its 15 mins are up.)

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Spending an interesting day in Milan in conversation about whether Web-based social networking sites/services are going to continue to shape our expections about SNSes (and sociality), or whether the ubiquity of mobiles will wag this dog. The social roles of SNS on the two platforms are so different. One creates my presence, the other announces my temporality.

(Hint: Don’t try blogging on ytour blackberry on a bus.)

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Tim Spalding, founder of the estimable LibraryThing, is calling on us all to create an open shelves classification project to replace Dewey and his pals. LibraryThing is a brilliant implementation of a what a library built on a social network of readers can be, so I’m excited about Tim’s new idea.

[Tags: library taxonomies tim_spalding librarything everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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I am not as unhappy with the FISA bill as many of my friends are. But this bill needs to be challenged in court. For one thing — as others have pointed out — that the president told you to do something illegal doesn’t excuse you from it, if only because presidents don’t have the power to order you to do anything.

EFF is asking for donations for a court challenge. EFF’s budget is a dry cough in a thin hanky compared to the economic forces it’s fighting. Is it worth a few dollars to you to get this bill tested?

Tags: wiretapping fisa eff

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I received two Chase Quicken Visa credit cards yesterday. Neither were numbers I currently hold. So, I called their support line.

They told me that my current Citi credit cards had been bought by Chase, and would expire as of June 29, even though they’re marked as continuing into 2010.

The support guy couldn’t answer the most basic questions, including which new card number mapped to which old card number. So, I got Citi on the line while I escalated the Chase call. With one support person in each ear, I discovered that my two Citi cards were not being transferred, but an old Citi Quicken card was. And what about that second Quicken account for which I had received a new card? The Chase person explained that this was a card for an account that I had closed two years ago.

Why did they send me a card for a closed account? The Chase person said it was done automatically. So, presumably, thousands of cards have gone out with no indication that they’re for closed accounts. Was it a simple mistake, is Chase hoping that we’ll call the 800 number listed on the sticker on the front, thus re-activating accounts we’d closed?

I have now canceled my every single Chase Quicken account. (I don’t even use Quicken any more.) And I’ve asked for an acknowledgment in writing that I have done so. [Tags: cluetrain chase_bank credit_cards ]

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The Berkman Center has posted a video (also available as an mp3) of me and Persephone Miel interviewing Willms Buhse and Tina Kulow. Willms is one of the editors of a German anthology, Enterprise 2.0: Die Kunst, loszulassen. (Disclosure: I contributed a chapter.) We talk about how Enterprise 2.0 is being received in Germany, given the inevitable cultural differences.

Unfortunately, because I insist on dressing like a 12 yr old going to summer camp, my polo shirt creates a hypnotic moire pattern, so please shield the eyes of your household pets.

[Tags: enterprise_2.0 willms_buhse tina_kulow persephone_miel germany business web_2.0 ]

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I think this public service announcement makes it pretty obvious which drugs are good and which are bad. Ones shot in black and white are bad, while brightly colored ones are good. [source] [Tags: propaganda everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Tilestack (in beta) runs Hypercard stacks and lets you create new ones.

I happened to have been at Apple’s press launch of Hypercard lo these many years ago, and built a couple of stacks, including one to introduce Interleaf’s gigantic (at the time) text-and-graphics system. Hypercard was a miracle of generativity: Drag and drop, link things up, learn how inheritance works, and, boom, you’ve got a clickable, words and pictures organism. Is there anything more exciting than discovering a new power to create?

(The Internet is Hypercard times gazillion. It’d be nice to keep it that way.)

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But plurk is more like Twitter than like a cheese log. For one thing, both plurk and twitter only allow 140-character posts. (Why that number? It’s not even a power of 2.) Plurk also enables some threading.

So, at the moment, I’m plurking. And twittering. And occasionally FaceBooking. And blogging. And overall successfully social networking myself around the work I’m supposed to be doing. [Tags: plurk twitter social_networks blogging ]

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Mark Bauerlein has a terrific piece in The Chronicle of Higher Ed that compares the flat style of Wikipedia to that of other encyclopedias. It suffers from taking a single example — the entry on Moby-Dick — but it rings true. At least for some of Wikipedia.

Mark is undoubtedly right that Wikipedia’s stylistic flatness is due in part to the fact that professional writers often write better than amateurs and crowds do. But, it also seems likely to result from Wikipedia’s commitment to neutrality. Perhaps in the process of constructing this article together, the color was driven out as non-neutral.

Of course, we can find out by checking the article’s history. But, there is a complicating factor: The section of the Wikipedia entry Mark cites is the first paragraph of the article. It attempts to characterize the novel as a whole, whereas the passages from the other encyclopedias seem to be introducing Ahab in particular. So, for an apples-to-apples comparison, here is the Ahab section in the current Wikipedia entry:

Ahab is the tyrannical captain of the Pequod who is driven by a monomaniacal desire to kill Moby-Dick, the whale that maimed him on his last whaling voyage. A Quaker, he seeks revenge in defiance of his religion’s well-known pacifism. Ahab’s name comes directly from the Bible (see 1 Kings 18-22).

Little information is provided about Ahab’s life prior to meeting Moby-Dick, although it is known that he was orphaned at a young age. When discussing the purpose of his quest with Starbuck it is revealed that he first began whaling at eighteen and has continued in the trade for forty years, having spent less than three on land. He also mentions his “girl-wife” whom he married late in life, and their young son, but does not give their names.

In Ishmael’s first encounter with Ahab’s name, he responds “When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not lick his blood?” (Moby-Dick, Chapter 16).[10]

Ahab ultimately dooms the crew of the Pequod (excluding Ishmael) to death by his obsession with Moby-Dick. During the final chase, Ahab hurls his final harpoon while yelling his now-famous revenge line:

. . . to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.

The harpoon becomes lodged into Moby-Dick’s flesh and Ahab, caught in his own harpoon’s rope and unable to free himself, is dragged into the cold oblivion of the sea with the injured whale. The whale eventually destroys the longboats and crew, and sinks the Pequod.

Ahab has the qualities of a tragic hero — a great heart and a fatal flaw — and his deeply philosophical ruminations are expressed in language that is not only deliberately lofty and Shakespearian, but also so heavily iambic as often to read like the Bard’s own pentameters.

It’s not clear to me that this writing is substantially worse than the positive examples Mark quotes. It could stand some line editing, but it’s not particularly bland.

Nevertheless, Mark may well be right that overall, Wikipedia is written more flatly than commercial encyclopedias. That would not be a surprising effect of the quest for neutrality. For example, the Moby-Dick article started in September, 2001, with just a few lines. On July 14, 2004, the plot and symbolism sections were still entirely blank. By October 5, 2007, the following passage is in the symbolism section:

The Pequod’s quest to hunt down Moby-Dick itself is also widely viewed as allegorical. To Ahab, killing the whale becomes the ultimate goal in his life, and this observation can also be expanded allegorically so that the whale represents everyone’s goals. Furthermore, his vengeance against the whale is analogous to man’s struggle against fate. The only escape from Ahab’s vision is seen through the Pequod’s occasional encounters with other ships, called gams. Readers could consider what exactly Ahab will do if he, in fact, succeeds in his quest: having accomplished his ultimate goal, what else is there left for him to do? Similarly, Melville may be implying that people in general need something to reach for in life, or that such a goal can destroy one if allowed to overtake all other concerns. Some such things are hinted at early on in the book, when the main character, Ishmael, is sharing a cold bed with his newfound friend, Queequeg:

This writing is indeed pedestrian. For example, the hedge phrases, “widely viewed as” and “can also be expanded” vitiate it. To which I have three replies:

1. These flatfooted reminders that interpretations are not universally shared are in fact salubrious for readers and other students. 2. The article was revised hundreds of times after this. 3. Yes, Wikipedia’s style often isn’t as muscular or punchy as that of commercial encyclopedias aimed at family usage. Sometimes — perhaps even often, although with 2 million articles, it’s hard to be certain — its style could be improved. And should be. But there is also a useful and scholarly humility in a reference work that is written plainly. [Tags: wikipedia mark_bauerlein rhetoric moby_dick everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Gene Koo sets up the problem: We are wired to react morally to the people we see, but we have trouble extending that to people at a distance. Yet, we have to broaden our moral embrace if we are to make it through another century. So, Gene wonders whether games might help:

Computer games offer at least two possible responses to our collective human predicament. First, they can open players’ eyes to the moral implications of systems by experimenting with them and witnessing the results. Games might offer moments of reflection and of epiphany, connecting personal morality with systemic awareness. A player might see how tweaking health care policies affects a family’s lives, or how environmental regulation could shape the destiny of a polar bear. Games might lead people to begin to see a soul within the machine.

And perhaps systems might begin to learn lessons from game design. Why must the computer systems that exercise more and more control over our daily lives be morally inert? If computer games — mere software — can lead players to weep, perhaps the mechanization of our world needn’t be soulless…

Gene’s not saying that games will save us. He’s suggesting that morally designed games might help.

So, before you point to all the games that seem to abrade our conscience — Grand Theft Auto, just about every first person shooter ever made, even PacMan if you look at it from the point of view of the dots — you might want to note that The Sims has sold 100 million copies.

[Tags: games morality gene_koo ]

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The NY Times has an interesting article about Uwe Boll, whom many consider to be the worst director working. I’ve only seen BloodRayne, which is laughably cliched and wildly incompetent. The top half of the graduating class of Emerson College (whose commencement is today … good luck, kids!) has to be better at the basic story-telling techniques than Boll is.

Still, it’s hard to call Boll the worst director in the world when this guy is still making movies. Have you seen Alexander?

[Tags: movies uwe_boll oliver_stone ]

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Charlie Nesson begins by saying that the morning had a negative cast to it. It was about fear. But he was uplifted when Yochai and Jimbo got to what Wikipedia is and could be. [Live blogging. Full of errors and omissions. Posted unedited and unspellchecked.]

He asks the general counsel of Viacom what he does in the course of a day. Mike: Viacom is an entertainment company, but it’s diverse, from cable TV to Internet. It has 140 channels around the world (ComedyCentral, MTV, etc.), video games His day consists of planning, managing, and dealing with surprises.

Charlie asks Esther Dyson what she does during the day. “I’m a court jester.” She swims every morning. She’s retired. So she does what she likes, including sitting on boards, giving advice, writing, giving talks, working with “do-good” groups trying to foster democracy in emerging markets.

Reed Hundt, former FCC chairman, says he’s on 7 boards, kibbitzes on politics.

Charlie says that he speaks for Eon, Dean of Cyberspace, and she has some questions. Wikipedia is the instantiation of the building of the knowledge commons. Why didn’t it come out of a university?

Esther: It came from neither the university nor government because they have rules and process. They don’t welcome strangers. Wikipedia is just a rule set. And, btw, you should check out barcode wikipedia. The topics are products with barcodes. [Ah, the power of unique identifiers!]

Charlie says to Mike of Viacom that Harvard is in a sense a public media company. We sit on a huge archive of material, most of which is copyrighted. The permission system is mired in transaction costs. So, we can’t use our treasure unless we pay a huge amount in time and money to free it up. So, it sits there. You too site on a huge pile ofassets. You’re looking at the system from the other side.

Mike: The system that creates those books depends on an economic incentive.

Charlie: Suppose we had the network infrastructure but no copyright. If we had to make a new system, can we agree that we would not choose the existing system?

Mike: Yes. We would have created something with many different features. You should be allowed to decide how to make your works available. But disrupting those expectations undermines people’s willingness to make works.

Charlie: The Net is a true inflection point. It changes defaults. It starts you from an open space, and you create private spaces within it. That means that the answer to Mike’s argument should be: Yes, except things have changed. We should be in a hurry to change.

Mike: There are tons of examples of those changes. E.g., the record companies have given YouTube site licenses.

Esther: If you’re really going to start over, there’s a principle that if someone creates something, they ought to control its distribution. But there are lots of business models and varieties of contracts.

Reed: Here are some facts that might be true. Over the past 20 yrs, if you look at all content, the price of the hardware in that network has continuously declined. The price of sw has stayed flat. So, the predominant value of the Net is now software. That inhibits the take-up rate in poorer economies. Linux is a response to that.

Esther: The price of the sw isn’t the inhibitor. They’re happy to use stolen sw.

Mike: There are a lot of new, efficient licenses that have developed, including blanket licenses designed to reduce the transaction costs. And we’ve developed ways to get our content out everywhere. And getting clearances are a pain in the butt for Viacom, too.

Charlie asks if we should worry about what JZ has pointed to, the locking down of devices.

Reed says that what happened to the music industry will happen to “elite universities.” You can tell by the fact that universities don’t spend a lot on IT that they don’t know how to accomplish their mission in the new world. E.g., bring Western knowledge to China.

Charlie says that the open access movement wants to bring all knowledge to everyone everywhere.

Esther: Education is about more than making info available.

Charlie: We should be able to make education that is interesting to people around the world. But can you do that with Verizon in charge of the connection and the cellphones?

Reed: In most countries, it’s a state-owned company and has nothing to do with education. We now know that within 15 yrs virtually everyone will have a Net connection, and most will be a wireless connection. Universities need to get ahead of this parade or they won’t be a significant part of how people learn.

Esther: In India, she saw the multimouse, so you can stick a single usb device into a port, and it connects to 8 mice, each with its own cursor. Eight students at a time. That’s MSFT investing in emerging markets. She tells a story about S. Africa to make the point that we shouldn’t be looking for government solutions. We need open markets.

Q: (David Marglin) How do we welcome strangers? How do we beat our swords into plowshares?
Charlie: Harvard has gone open access. That’s news. Other universities notice. Elsevier notices.

Q: You’ve addressed how you broadcast your ideas. But that’s easy. Paris Hilton does that. Harder: How do you listen to all the people who have ideas? How about if Harvard could listen to all those people. And how about getting the science dept to talk with the art dept?

Q: If there were no copyright, we’d have a digital library of Alexandria. Copyright is about providing incentives, not about lowering transaction costs, etc.

Mike: The library wouldn’t exist if people didn’t have incentives. It’d be great if al content had metadata so rights could be cleared automatically, lowering transaction costs. [So there we have the two visions: A system of perfect control to lower transaction costs, and a commons. Me, I want the commons. [Tags: berkman berkmanat10 ]

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Dean Kagan has just announced that the Berkman Center, which had been part of Harvard Law, is now an interdisciplinary center, part of Harvard University overall.

This is not only quite an honor. It also will embed the Center even more directly in the full range of Harvard’s discourse.

[Tags: berkman berkmanat10 ]

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The Berkman Center’s Publius Project is now live. There you’ll find essays on the Internet’s “constitutional moments,” even though most of those moments do not involve a written constitution … which makes the topic all the more interesting. (My contribution, on tacit governance, is here.)

[Tags: publius governance ]

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Flyp, an online mag, is in beta but it’s already gorgeous.

[Tags: flyp ]

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BoingBoing points to some wonderful comments by Vint Cerf in an interview in Esquire, including:

The closer you look at something, the more complex it seems to be.

So true. And also quite different from one of the founding ideas of Western culture. For the ancient Greeks, beneath the apparent complexity there had to be a simple order, or else knowledge wasn’t possible.

You have to wonder about the role our current technology has played in our moving from the Greeks to Vint. (1) We are far better able to externalize ideas now, so that we can know more than we could when memory was confined to what fit in our skulls and could be written down by hand. (2) Our technology now lets us put things together far more complexly than the physical world does; reality is designed to keep things apart (to be something is to not be something else, said Aristotle), while the Web is designed to link things together. (3) Our technology connects us in socially complex ways, enabling us to understand things together.

And it’s not just that things become more complex the closer you look. They also become more interesting. Everything is interesting if looked at closely enough. I take that as one of the lessons of the Net. [Tags: vint_cerf philosophy ]

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Amazingly, the course I’ve been co-teaching with John Palfrey, called The Web Difference, ends on Tuesday. The question the course poses is, unsurprisingly: Is the Web very different from what came before, a little different, or not different? More important, in what ways? The class has looked at a number of different domains and dimensions. (A now outdated version of the syllabus is here.)

John and I haven’t talked about what to do on the last day, but I’m tempted to raise the question of the Web’s difference by asking the class how epochal they think the Web is. Is it different enough and important enough to call this the Age of the Web? (For purposes of this discussion, I’m not distinguishing between the Web and the Internet. If you’d rather substitute “Internet,” I won’t argue. And, yes, I do know the difference.)

Since that’s still pretty vague, suppose we were to ask whether the Web is as big a deal — in terms of defining an epoch — as genetic manipulation. TV. The telephone. Anesthetics. CB radio. The printing press. Paperback books. Bronze. Steam engines. Commercial aviation. Electric keyboards. The computer. Ball point pens. Johnny Depp.

Personally, I think it’s roughly on the order of the printing press. But I also believe that Wikipedia is our Gutenberg Bible… no, not in terms of credibility or spiritual depth, but as the artifact that shows the importance of the new technology. I suspect and hope many of the students in our class thoroughly disagree… [Tags: webdiff ]

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I will understand if you don’t think this is funny, but I do:

TF2 Karaoke: My Heart Will Go On from FLOOR MASTER on Vimeo.

It comes via Bradsucks. It’s a karaoke version of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” as performed by some guys playing Team Fortress 2. [Tags: karaoke team_fortress ]

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Thanks to my relentless ego-surfing, um, I mean my participating in the ongoing conversation that is the Web, I came across a rough draft of a course paper by Devin Dadigan about the racism and sexism implicit in playing cards, — which, apparently are ordered the way they have been since the 14th century. Kings beat queens, and, the black queen is an especially disastrous card in several games.

At first I thought Devin’s hypothesis about race was problematic, because I thought clubs are sometimes taken as the highest suit, even though Devin says that black cards represent labor and slaves. (That link seems incontestable in America where “spade” has been a demeaning — and occasionally hip — term for African-Americans.) Wikipedia, however, says that when suits are ranked, clubs sometimes come first because the ranking is done alphabetically. Ah, the hidden power of alphabetization! Why, it even cures racism!

Fascinating fact: According to the paper, the ascent of the ace as the highest card “was hastened in the late 18th century by the French Revolution, where games began being played ‘ace high’ as a symbol of lower classes rising in power above the royalty.”

[Tags: cards games history devin_dadigan ]

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As the 2004 Dean campaign crashed, Steven Johnson wrote one of the more provocative and insightful analyses of why it failed despite all the enthusiasm behind it. In the piece, Steve refines the notion of “emergence” he had popularized in his terrific book of the same name: There’s emergence that clusters and emergence that copes. Clustering is exemplified by slime mold, which creates a crowd without any top-down control. Coping is exemplified by termite nests which result from a bottom-up regulatory regime which is able to adapt. The Dean campaign, under this analysis, clustered people and money but was unable to cope when things started to go badly.

Steve ends the piece this way:

I suspect that such a system may well be fundamentally incompatible with the necessary structure of a national political campaign, at least for the foreseeable future. Emergent systems that excel at coping do so out of truly local information; they take their random walks through their neighborhoods and record patterns in what they find. National campaigns, on the other hand, work at a macro scale, and they are necessarily wedded to the broadcast amplifications of the national media. Whatever local disturbances or opportunities they discover are quickly uploaded to the world of network TV and satellite feeds, where they undergo all sorts of distortions. And national campaigns, by definition, have to have leaders, at least in the form of the politicians themselves…

Is there an emergent politics capable of a more subtle form of self-regulation? If there is, I think it will first take shape, not as a political campaign, but as a more local, day-to-day affair: more polis than politics.

Was Steve right? (Just to be clear: I’m not asking about Steve, of whom I am a giggling fanboy, but about the state of politics.) [Tags: politics steven_johnson emergence everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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The Media Re:Public group at Berkmanhas announced a breakthrough technology that promises to take the “conference” out of “un-conference.”

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On the flight to LA this morning, while I was standing in the attendant’s cranny, waiting for the bathroom to free up, I noticed a sign on a bit of the JetBlue plane that jutted in at about knee level. The sign said:

DO NOT SIT HERE
NO SENTARSE AQUI

But, the attendant had left a piece of paper there which accidentally obscured half the sign, so that it read:

SIT HERE
ARSE AQUI

(This would be funnier if I’d had a camera with me. Or maybe not.)

[Tags: humor funny_signs ]

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If anyone would like to help me figure out why my MacBook crashes seemingly randomly, here are some crash reports: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9.

My MacBook is 9 months old. Apps were crashing under Panther. I did a total clean reinstall of Leopard. It seemed to be ok for a couple of weeks, and then the apps began crashing again. I took it in to a highly recommended local Apple shop. They kept it for a week, ran thorough diagnostics, replicated some of the crashes, and replaced the motherboard. Again, for a couple of weeks it seemed to work. Now things crash intermittently but fairly frequently. Usually, the crashes only crash the app, but Keynote has crashed all the way back to a cold boot a couple of times; I don’t have crash reports for the cold boots.

Help? Any ideas?[Tags: mac os_x tech ]

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Comcast has sort of admitted that it stacked the audience at yesterday’s FCC hearing with paid seat-warmers. More here and here.

Since over a hundred people were turned away, this papering of the house is not just a bad joke. Although it also is a bad joke.

[Tags: net_neutrality comcast ]

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Martin: Comcast didn’t just not publicize its policy of blocking BitTorrent. They actually denied it, right?
Ammori: Yup. We want to know what you’re blocking. And we think there are many better ways to manage traffic

Martin: Why would they lie about this?
Woo: They shouldn’t block any lawful application, much less do so secretly or lie about it. And while we know the carriers have made an investment, we also want to encourage app developers to invest. Who’s going to invest in an app if you fear it could be blocked, and not even transparently?

Martin: Consumers are being asked to buy more and more bandwidth but they’re not being told the limitations. Wu: When you buy a piece of candy you know more about what's in it. [Verizon guy is chuckling] No one in this debate should be against providing more information, unless they have pernicious motives.
Yoo: Yes, transparency should even be the fifth principle. Also, some apps need a different network. Telemedicine can’t take a backseat to anything else. So, network management ought to allow discrimination.
Benkler: Disclosure is an important first step but it only works when there’s market discipline and consumers can switch. But we only have 1.5-2 services, on average. That’s not a lot of competition. You can extract rents from traffic that’s competing with services you, as a last-mile provider, also provide.
Verizon: We believe in transparency. Consumers don’t want the 30-page document so we’re trying to make it more understandable, while still providing the whole thing for those who want it. But every ay we block spam. You don’t want so much disclosure that it prevents us from providing network security.
Martin: Letting consumers know what they’re purchasing seems primary. Were any of the users exceeding the bandwidth that they’d purchased from Comcast?
Ammori: Know. In fact, VOIP providers side with us.
Wu: It’s odd that providers would complain about people using their produce. Users of Vuze want more bandwidth. The oil companies love it when users buy an SUV. There’s something odd about this debate.
Martin: Cable companies argue that consumers get a better deal by bundling channels rather than allowing them to pick their own channels, as I like. It’s odd that when consumers buy extra speed, you block them for using it. Inconsistent?
Comcast: No. First, we sell an “up to” amount of service, as part of shared network, and you’re not allowed to use it in a way that would degrade it for others. Our new disclosure is the best ever.
Martin: Is that the type of application developers need?
Ammori: No, we need to know what they mean by “high periods” and what “delay” means.
Benkler: We need a standard for disclosure.

Copps: I’m nervous. We have a transition to DTV by 2009. Now I’m hearing that by 2010 use may exceed capacity. This is all testimony to need for a national broadband policy. Mr. Ammori, what is the price we’re paiong for not having this kind of national strategy?
Ammori: Other countries have more capacity. The carriers profit from scarcity. We have Third World networks and we’re debating whether we can even manage current traffic. A lot of these problems would go away with genuine competition. We should manage traffic in ways that don’t block content.
Copps: How do other countries do network management?
Benkler: NN as a policy need only arose after we abandoned unbundling. Other countries have competition. You have to share costs and components when the network is high-cost. [E.g., open it up. Let 1,000 ISPs bloom.] We only have to set standards because we don’t have competition.
Wu: Asian countries tend to look at broadband as an infrastructure issue, like highways. There are obviously negative examples as well: China blocking content.
Yoo: Korea got there through gov’t subsidies. Japan overcharges for voice telecommunication. Wireless is likely to make the markets competitive.
Copps: You’re rolling out fiber, Comcast. How will this change network mgt?
Comcast: My engineers tell me that all networks in the world are maxed. We will never solve this problem purely by building capacity. [Yoo nods] We will always have to net mgt.
Verizon: As we put in fiber, the demand grows. Capacity helps and facilitates a “rich and robust Internet experience for consumers” [= sit down and watch your IP TV kiddies].

Adelstein: Japan has 100Mb to the home and they’re not having the NN discussion. Does Verizon use the RST packet for P2P? [Comcast forges a packet that breaks the BitTorrent connection]
Verizon: No. At this time we don’t have a need for it. We don’t have a shared network.
Benkler: If we accept duopoly, which is a weakly competitive market, then without market discipline we need regulatory discipline.
Adelstein: What are non-discriminatory ways to manage traffic?
Ammori: The providers promised not to discriminate.
Comcast: Comcast does not block any web site, app, or proocol. We manage based on objective assessment: during limited times, in limited geographic areas where the congestion is, only uploads, only when a seeding request comes, we only delay and not block, and when we delay a p2p upload until the congestion alleviates. With BitTorrent, a delay merely causes the system to move to a different, uncongested, node. The delay is imperceptible.
Ammori: You can believe Comcast or Vuze about whether they’re being affected. Comcast has lied about this from the beginning. The RST packets don’t just delay; they deny connection. Further, studies show that introducing minor delays hurts user adoption.
Comcast: My understanding that the delay doesn’t block or degrade. The AP experiment did not use BitTorrent the way it’s supposed to be used.
Wu: Comcast cannot deny that AP tried to use an Internet app in a particular way and were blocked. Comcast says that’s because they weren’t using the app the way it should be used. But Comcast shouldn’t be telling us how we may or may not use an app
Comcast: That’s not what I said. They weren;t using BitTorren the way BitTorrent says it should be used.
Benkler: The effect of delays is to say you may not use your computer to support this collaborative network function. Comcast offloads it to another network. But that’s how TCP works. It handles congestion in a non-discriminatory method. Comcast is telling you that you can’t do what other are doing. Delay is blocking in this case.

Deborah Taylor Tate, a commissioner who arrived late because of a plane delay, says we agree on more than we disagree about. We all want to deploy broadband everywhere. And we do have a role in global principles. We all agree that there can be reasonable network management.
Rep. Bosley (a state rep): The disclosures don’t tell me when I’m going to be cut off or delayed. There’s no competition in many parts of the US. We’ve spent $70B in this industry to speed up capacity. That’s not enough and it hasn’t been spen equitably. For that we need a national plan and transparency. We still have dial up in many parts of my area. Our electric system is non-discriminatory and transparent.
Tate: Are there other complaints, beyond the one that’s bee filed?
Ammori: Yes, but this is the key test case. There may be other interference we don’t know about . We don’t know how long Comcast was doing this.
Comcast: Generally, the customer reaction has been positive, not negative. There’s an appreciation of all that we do to maximize the Internet experience by blocking spam and viruses, etc.
Verizon: We haven’t had complaints about net mgt. The focus of our complaints is people want to know when we’re coming and can we deliver more.
Tate: I’m deepl concerned about child online safety, and piracy.
Ammori: We might discriminate among packets, but not by policy or application. We’re not looking for a detailed policy, just a statement that you will not discriminate based on policy or application. Don’t block access to lawful content. With the policy, we’ll figure it out. E.g., BitTorrent has a way to avoid congestion.
Tate: But disclosure would be enough.
Ammori: No, not without competition. You know you’re being blocked and have no option.
Benkler: Your analogy to common carriage is apt. Take minimal rules like Wu’s — no discrimination against lawful apps. Think of Carterphone — a general rule, and a procedure that allows a carrier to notify, say, BitTorrent that it’s generating too much traffic. That would be a model. A model.
Yoo: The shift in Carterphone came in monopoly. We have a duopoly. Duopoly is more competitive. Regulation is expensive. We can have a non-discrimination system, but it will be expensive. Typically, 500 subscribers share a node in a cable system. You could provision it with enough, but that’d be expensive. The more expensive it becomes, the harder it is for carriers to build out to rural areas. That’s the genius of the public safety provision of the 700MHz auction.
Tate: What’s the status of the industry-led p2p protocols?
Verizon: Early in the process.
Wu: It’s good to think about this in terms of common carriage. There are forms of discrimination that are reasonable. Many good ones go on already. FiOS devotes an entire wavelength to TV content. That’s fine discrimination. able does the same thing with their TV service. But we’re worried about the forms of anti-competitive discrimination. The FCC has already said this in their statement that it’s dangerous to have the carriers pick and choose among lawful applications. We’re not saying that all discrimination is bad. We’re saying anti-competitive discrimination is bad.

McDowell begins by noting that he has to pee. Do you think it’s ok to sell more bandwidth than you deliver?
Comcast: P2P during periods of congestion creates degradation for other customers which violates our terms of us. We don’t sell x amount of bandwidth. We sell it subject to not using our service in ways that degrade it for others. [Not the question.]
McDowell: If my neighborhood loves BitTorrent in the evening and it slows down.
Comcast: You’ve exceed according to the terms of service.
McDowell: Wu’s distinction between anti-competitive and non-anti-comp discrimination is important. Would it be less concerning if Comcast didn’t also sell TV?
Ammori: Less concerning. But even when discrimination is not anti-competitive, it still does serious harm. if they blocked BitTorrent even if they weren’t a TV company, it would still harm users and innovation.
Wu: Even if Comcast didn’t have a TV service, we’d still need NN. So many industries depend on these carriers, the carriers start to attract public duties.
McDowell: What would be the practical effect if you were required to carry all p2p at all hours, without discrimination?
Comcast: In the short run, it could be a significant degraded experience for many more customers, as opposed to the very small effect on a small group of people. And the BitTorrent users may be delayed anyway, but by net congestion not by our net management tool.
McDowell: Would more capacity solve it?
Comcast: No. We will always need network management.
McDowell: If that’s the case, would BitTorrent DNA help to rectify it? [DNA is the BT tool for balancing load, or some such]
Ammori: It might be a short-term project, but the carriers would adjust their networks.
McDowell: Does the protocol designer have an obligation to inform customers that it won’t work as well on particular types of networks?
Ammori: Not an obligation. But they should work together, if there’s a non-discriminatory principle.
Benkler: When you have full transparency, people can solve the problems on the edges.
McDowell: Should apps be required to disclose that it doesn’t work as well on some nets?
Benkler: No. Apps operate in an open market.
McDowell: Is NN an issue in Korea? Yes, it is. Only a network operator can provide things like VOIP. Is that what you want?
Wu: No. It’s cautionary as well as a role model. Great on access. Lots of censoring. The US can do better.
Woo: Japan and Europe do a lot of network mgt. They’re more candid about it.
McDowell: How can enhance the supply or demand side of the roll out?
Yoo: Lower the break-even number of subscribers to enable a last-mile provider to make a go of it. Let them use bandwidth more efficiently, including net mgt but not only that.
Wu: Letting consumers buy more of the last mile.

Martin: Can cable companies move some of their TV capacity to Net capacity?
Wu: Yes.
Martin: Doesn’t that creative a negative incentive to allow Vuze, etc.?
Wu: Yes. There’s obvious motive to suppress the next form of TV.
Martin: Does the FCC have the authority to enforce NN principles? Or do you think with Markey that it needs legislation?
Verizon: Yes you do.
Comcast: Not if you say they’re unenforceable.
Martin: Re-ask…
Comcast: You don’t have the authority to impose a forfeiture fine.
[Tags: fccboston08 net_neutrality ]

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