According to a post by Carl Brooks at SearchCloudComputing, Verizon is making a major push to be the provider of health information exchange services:

The Verizon Health Information Exchange can be used by doctors and healthcare providers to store, manage and transfer patient information, including medical records, test results, medical images and more, all hosted on Verizon’s infrastructure.

The project is nothing if not ambitious. Verizon says it is ready to roll nationwide and can absorb as many electronic medical records (EMR) as are currently out there; there may eventually be one for every person in the United States. It may even offer personal health records (PHR) to its telco customers.

This sort of service seems valuable. In fact, it’s so valuable that it makes me nervous that it would be in the hands of a telecommunications provider. For example, MedVirginia says that “its entire base of patient records will be stored with Verizon and delivered via the cloud.” Are we sure that this vital service should be a company that also sells access to the cloud? Will there be temptations for Verizon to use its ownership of the medical records infrastructure (“store, manage and transfer patient information”) to leverage its position as an access provider, or vice versa? Will medical images in Verizon’s vault arrive faster for Verizon’s ISP customers? Is that what we really want? Wouldn’t it be better for us all to have this service in the hands of someone who has zero interest in how we access that information? And I’m putting all of these as questions because I have vague suspicions but nothing more.

Maybe I’m just especially nervous because today is the last day to leave a comment for the FCC about Net neutrality.
The

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Susan Crawford says, “We are in the course of a titanic battle for the future of the Internet in the United States. The technology community is radically underrepresented in this battle.”

Telephone providers and cable providers have each been merging, increasing monopoly holds on regions.The government has a key role in providing a level playing field for innovators. If you’re worried about personalization at the app level (as per Eli Pariser yesterday), you should be very worried about it at the network level.

“The Net would not exist absent government regulation.” E.g., the telcos were required to allow modems to attach to telephone lines. When cable modems arrived, government regulators were confused. Thinking that competition was right around the corner, the FCC completely deregulated highspeed Net access in 2002 (and 2205,6,7). They took away the “regulated” level but reserved the right to reregulate it (via “ancillary jurisdiction”). The courts have found that labeling a service as deregulated but then regulating it (as in the Comcast case) makes no sense. So, the FCC is proposing to re-regulate, but free of the heavy-handed elements: No rate regulation, etc. But, carriers would be required not to discriminate among bits [= Net neutrality]. This is the FCC’s “Third Wave.” The carriers claim that this is the “nuclear option.”

The FCC needs to regulate to fulfill its mandate to enable Net access to all people. E.g., they need to gather data. And they want to make sure that it’s open for innovation. Also, to keep privacy of packets. It’s great that AT&T is part of this conversation at PDF. But AT&T has spent $6M this quarter for lobbying against any form of regulation. There have also been personal attacks, she says. Comcast spent $29M in the first quarter, she adds.

By 2012, the FCC says, most Americans will have only one choice of provider. [June 5: Susan's slide actually said that by 2012, 75 to 85 percent of Americans will have one choice of wired provider for 50 to 100Mbps speeds; sorry for the gross gloss. This comes from the National Broadband Plan.] Verizon has backed off on its plans for FIOS. So there will not be another competitor to cable. We should therefore be concerned about Comcast’s plans to merge with NBC, giving it an edge against other major video providers, but also against the growth of online video. Comcast could put content behind an authentication wall, so to see it you’d have to be a cable subscriber. The tech community should watch this merger carefully.

The content providers believe in “vertical integration,” so we’ll see many more mergers.

She says 100 yrs ago, Americans hated Standard Oil which was able to control regional production of oil. Small business people and farmers were enraged by them. Standard Oil required railroads to ship their stuff cheaper, and if the RR’s shipped competitors’ stuff, SO got paid. They also carried out espionage about competitive shipments. Like the electric grid, like the Net, the future of highspeed access depends upon government creation of a level playing field. The tech community should be working together to make sure we retain the ability to innovate.

[I interviewed Susan about the FCC's Third Way on a Radio Berkman podcast] [Note: On June 5, I made some very minor edits, cleaning up typos and unclear referents, etc., in addition to the insertion noted above.]

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Christian Sandvig explains spectrum and spectrum policy in this Radio Berkman interview.

Christian — who is both brilliant and a wonderfully generous colleague — textifies the main points here.

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Harold Feld explains the FCC “third way” reclassification decision. He goes into a moderate amount of detail, but this is perhaps the takeaway:

…I call this a “legal reset.” Basically, Genachowski is saying “Back in 2002, when we moved cable modem service (and later other forms of broadband access) into the Title I/information services/ancillary authority box, we thought we would still have authority to protect consumers and do other necessary policy things. The Comcast court told us we were wrong. So now we’re going to move broadband access service into the Title II/telecom service box. But nothing substantive/policy changes. We’re just doing what the DC Circuit told us to do by articulating a different theory of authority.”

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The FCC has said it’s going to announce on Thursday a “third way” to regulate the broadband access providers to make sure that they leave the Net open and neutral. The first two ways are (1) to give up on protecting the Internet, or (2) to reclassify the Net as a communications network that counts as a common carrier (i.e., it has to let all bits go through equally, regardless of the app, origin, content, etc.).

The Washington Post headline of the AP story unfortunately reads “FCC to impose some new regulations on broadband,” thus reversing the actual meaning, which is expressed in the lead sentence: “Federal regulators plan to impose additional rules on broadband providers.” Big, big difference.

Anyway, this is a happier day than two days ago. For how happy, we’ll have to wait until Thursday’s announcement…

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The Washington Post reports that FCC Chair Jules Genachowski is intending to give up on regulating the access providers – Comcast and the gang — leaving Internet users unprotected and at their mercy.

The Post implies that the Genachowski thinks of this as leaving “broadband services deregulated.” The problem is that that will also leave broadband unprotected. We need to regulate the providers of access so that they don’t get to regulate what we’re allowed to do on our Internet.

This is Chairman Genachowski’s chance to make a difference. That he would abandon the Net to access providers who have already shown that they don’t care about an open, free, innovative Internet is just about unthinkable. Unfortunately, as of today we have to add the “just about.” Let’s hope it’s just a trial balloon.

(Marvin Ammori has a worst-case scenario list of what unregulated access providers could do to the Net … except that almost all of the items are things they’ve already tried to pull.)

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Marvin Ammori, Susan Crawford, and Tim Wu — all professors of law — have sent a letter to Julius Genachowski, Chair of the FCC, “to support the proposition that the Federal Communications Commission has the legal authority to classify the transmission portion of high-speed Internet access–but not “the Internet”– as a telecommunications service.” This would enable the FCC to hem in the restrictions on Net access that access providers are so intent on imposing on users.

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I was less depressed than I would have expected about yesterday’s ruling that the FCC does not have the authority to tell Comcast to let us do what we want with our Internet. In part, that’s because I was expecting to lose. In part it’s because this battle is far, far from over. There’s the possibility of an appeal (although the 3:0 decision seems pretty definite), Congressional action, or reclassifying the Internet. The third is the most interesting, although it has its own risks.

I am not a lawyer and I do not understand these things well, but this ruling could spur the FCC to make a simple change in how it classifies the Internet — it’s all about the classifications, people! — which would truly change the game.

So, pardon me (or better, correct me) as I get this wrong, but it all comes down to the various classifications that began with the 1934 Communications Act and were amended in the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The 1996 Act institutes a difference between “information services” (like the Net at the time) and “telecommunication services” like the telephone system. Information services include “the offering of a capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications,” i.e. the Internet. Telecommunication services transmit “information, without a change in its form or content,” i.e., the telephone system. Telecommunication services are considered “common carriers,” and are classified under Title II. Common carriers are not allowed to unjustly or unreasonably discriminate in their services, which is why you can use George Carlin’s seven dirty words in any !@$#%-ing telephone call you want. (I found David Johnson’s post on this helpful, but don’t blame him for my misunderstandings. Stephen Schultze also does an excellent and thorough job on these topics in a Radio Berkman podcast — highly recommended. Also, see Susan Crawford’s concise explanation of yesterday’s decision.)

In 2002, the Bush FCC decided that if you get Internet access via a cable company, those services should not count as coming under Title II; cable companies are information providers, not telecommunication companies. The courts agreed in the 2005 Brand X decision, which meant the cable companies no longer had to provide wholesale access to ISPs the way telephone companies did under the obligation of common carriers to provide access to all without discrimination. That’s why around that time your choice as a user went from lots of small, competitive ISPs to one or two Big Name cable ISPs.

These classifications are troublesome — everything is miscellaneous, people! — because the Net is eating the other communications media; the Net now carries a good percentage of telecommunications traffic and doesn’t always run via the sorts of telecommunications the Congress envisioned in 1996. So, assuming that the FCC wants to regulate the Internet — and “regulate” here means to keep it free of the de facto regulation by those who provide access to it — it could reclassify broadband as the transmission of information (telecommunications, Title II) rather than as an information service that transforms information. This would make broadband a type of common carrier, preventing providers from discriminating against content they don’t like or discriminate in favor of their own content. There is, of course, dispute about whether the FCC has the authority to reclassify it this way (putting it under Title I, AKA “ancillary powers”), so “the FCC could” actually means “the FCC could and face legal challenges.”

Erik Cecil is among those who have posted very interesting comments on these issues. Erik maintains that, despite the pundits, it would be easy for FCC to reclassify broadband services under Title II as a type of telecommunications. He says the FCC already has a set of regulations about broadband (including requiring wiretapability under CALEA, and 911 VOIP access), and thus is already treating it as a Title II telecommunications service that moves bits without changing them. Public Knowledge, which has been active in pushing for Net Neutrality, also has posted about this.

My own, uninformed point of view? Classification for its own sake is a mug’s game, especially when we’re using categories such as “common carriage” that go back to the age of railroads. So, I don’t much care how broadband services are classified except insofar as it gets us to the social end that I want: maximal access to a maximally open and non-discriminatory Internet.

CEO of Verizon, Ivan Seidenberg, says “we will throttle”:

… the very, very high users, the ones who camp on the network all day long every day doing things that — who knows what they’re doing — those are the –

MURRAY: It’s video, right? I mean, it’s video.

SEIDENBERG: But those are the people we will throttle and we will find them and we will charge them something else.

Anyone want to print up some “Internet Camper” t-shirts

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The next FCC workshop is on “Consumers, Transparency and the Open Internet.” It’s is in DC on Tuesday. It should be interesting…

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As part of FCC’s Open Internet tour, I got invited into one of the many group meetings the FCC has been holding, along with Nicholas Reville of Miro and Cara Lisa Powers of PressPassTV.org.

Nicholas talked about how difficult it would be for Miro to attract video producers if they had to worry that carriers might block or slow their traffic. Why not instead go to one of the Big Brands that can afford to pay the tariff? Miro — an innovative, public-spirited non-profit — would be unable to compete.

Cara compared the crappy local news coverage of a spraying of bullets in Dorchester with the responsible and careful job done by high school students, and pointed out that videos like those (enabled by PressPassTV) compete with the TV news offered by triple-play access providers. (Comcast is going to own NBC, after all.) The community is better served if she is able to compete on equal footing.

* * *

Since I didn’t have anything concrete and helpful to say, I took my five minutes to say the following (roughly):

The Net as a medium is not for anything in particular — not for making calls, sending videos, etc. It also works at every scale, from one to one to many to many. This makes it highly unusual as a medium. In fact, we generally don’t treat it as a medium but as a world, rich with connections, persistent, and social. Because everything we encounter in this world is something that we as humans made (albeit sometimes indirectly), it feels like it’s ours. Obviously it’s not ours in the property sense. Rather, it’s ours in the way that our government is ours and our culture is ours. There aren’t too many other things that are ours in that way.

If we allow others to make decisions about what the Net is for — preferring some content and services to others — the Net won’t feel like it’s ours, and we’ll lose some of the enthusiasm (= love) that drives our participation, innovation, and collaborative efforts.

So, if we’re going to talk about the value of the open Internet, we have to ask what the opposite of “open” is. No one is proposing a closed Internet. When it comes to the Internet, the opposite of “open” is “theirs.”

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Even as the FCC is holding hearings about the value of an open Internet, Secretary Hillary Clinton is preparing a “major policy address on Internet Freedom” to be delivered on Jan. 21.

Maybe her statement will provide some framing the FCC could use — it’d be awkward if our international Internet policy were more progressive than our domestic policy…not to mention Google’s international policy.

I’m excited about this. I think and hope it will set a stake in the ground, if only an aspirational one. (Plus, I’m going to be in the audience for the address!)

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Harold Feld presents a coherent, incisive perspective on why Comcast is afraid of winning too big in its court case that argues the FCC does not have the jurisdiction to enforce Net Neutrality rules. This question is especially important since Comcast looks like it is indeed going to win its case.

Plus Harold has a most excellent Buffy reference.

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Brett Glass is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk. Brett runs a Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) in Laramie, Wyoming. “Lessons from Laramie: Broadband Innovation on the Wireless Frontier” [his slides]

Brett begins with a photo of him on a 50′ tower on top of a 6-story building, which is what you have to do to be a WISP in Wyoming. He’s going to talk about what it’s like to be a WISP. “My entire life brought me to this,” although he didn’t know it as the time. He had worked at TI designing chips, and got a masters at Stanford. He was a computer journalist for many years: more than 2,000 published articles. He moved to Laramie because he likes it there. But the only way to get the Internet was at the University of Wyoming which had a couple of T1 lines, or Compuserv at 2400 baud. So, he founded LARIAT as a user group that turned into a non-profit cooperative ISP that bought its own T1 (for $6K/month). He got early circuitry to build wireless connections for the other users. But the members eventually just wanted to be customers, not coop members. So, Brett and his wife took LARIAT private in 2003. He has 18 yrs of experience deploying high speed wireless Internet. It’s growing by about the size of Manhattan island every year.

“Our cost to deploy is less than $100 per sq mile” at DSL speeds. But FCC regulations prevent him from beating cable speeds. The latencies are lower than DSL and much lower than satellite. The big choke point is that he can only get to the backbone through the telephone company, which charges them 10x as much as the telephone company charges to bring it to the rest of the world. They can’t get licensed spectrum because it’s too expensive, and unlicensed has too much noise in it; every baby monitor and wireless mic can disrupt their signal if they’re close enough to the access point.

Fiber is $25/foot. Brett can cover 40 sq. miles for less than $3000 in capital. “Nobody has this sort of cost per sq mile except perhaps the satellite guys.” “We turned out to have invented a really really good way to cover rural areas, and it’s pretty good in urban areas.” He’ll do things like go to the guy with the “trophy house” on top of the hill and offer free wifi so long as they can also transmit from that site.

The primary constraints on his ability to provide coverage and to innovate are political, not technological. “Fiber is nothing but wireless inside an expensive tube. The physics are the same. You just put it in a tube to exclude interference.”

He bid on 700mz auction, and even a tiny sliver to cover a tiny bit of WY went for $3M. There’s no way, he says, the telco that bought it is going to make a profit by using it; they bought it to exclude other players. “The incumbent has so much to lose that they’re willing to bid many times what the independent operator can.” Brett would like “lightly licensed spectrum”: Not polluted by consumer devices. I.e., a wireless broadband band. “It seems perfectly reasonable but national policy doesn’t have anything like that.” He says that white spaces coming available aren’t right for this.

Q: Doesn’t the 1996 Telecommunications Act provide for competition?
A: Short answer: We watched the courts remove the provisions.

Q: The newly-free analog TV bands?
A: This is beachfront property spectrum. Down the frequency it’s easier to penetrate walls. But the FCC did the wrong thing: They allowed consumer devices on the band, which means they can go through the walls and interfere with your neighbors. But there were powerful lobbies. People didn’t think about the science. Only the politics. It should have been reserved for transmitting from towers to get through walls.

“I had a customer I served on the same band you use for your wireless PC. This customer his service was failing on bright sunny days. We came over to his house when he was having trouble. Nothing was blocking his antenna. But on the patio his daughter was sunbathing in a bikini, with a cordless phone positioned right in front of the antenna. Both were on 2.4gH. We got her a phone on a different phone and that solved the problem.”

And, he says, we need to look at regulating only when there are real problems to be solved. E.g., getting inexpensive backhaul to the Internet. But all the focus in DC is on addressing problems that don’t exist, e.g., Net Neutrality. “No one is engaging in the practices they’re talking about outlawing. But no one is addressing the problems that actually exist.” [paraphrasing throughout!]

He shows a graph of Shannon’s law: To get a lot of bandwidth to someone, you need the frequencies to be uncluttered. Get too far down “Shannon’s knee” and the ability to get broadband falls off, but above the knee, returns diminish as noise goes down. This is an argument for cognitive radios [unassigned frequencies negotiated in real time by transmitters and receivers], which Brett’s been working on for years, but doesn’t have spectrum to implement.

Policy recommendations:

Devote more nonexclusively licensed spetrum to wireless broadband, with mandatory “etiquette” to enable cognitive radio. E.g.,. use the 700 MHz “D” Block. Take back the “virtually unused MDS “A” band for local wireless.

Q: Use it or lose it licensing, like liquor licenses?
A: You do that when you want to restrict something, keeping them to a zero-sum number.

Next thing to do: Increase power limits on when the devices are doing broadband in rural areas, not when they’re a baby monitor, etc.

Increase the geographic granularity of spectrum licenses so “little guys” can bid on them. Right now, the FCC offers narrow slices of frequency for large geographic areas; the FCC ought to do the opposite.

We should have a doctrine of “adverse possession” for spectrum. Right now, we have a feudal system when it comes to spectrum. New doctrine would be one like homesteading: If you use the spectrum, you have a claim on it. This is to get past the current policy of hoarding.

Do not write regulations that assume only content proviers are innovators or that only ISPs can be gatekeepers. We should be more worried about Google. “I have lots of competition in many of the areas I operate.” There are 3 WISPs in Laramie. “You don’t have to worry about me being a gatekeeper. But if you can’t get something listed on Google, you’re basically off the Internet.” “It’s easy to hate the big guys. But not all of us are big guys.”

Finally, “fiux the broken middle mile (special access) market.” There’s no competition there. “ISPs have never filtered any content” except maybe with a couple of exceptions, including filtering VoIP but that was taken off the table. Some of the regulations would outlaw some of the most popular service plans Brett’s company offers. He offers basic service for $30/month [rate plan]; for that you’re not allowed to operate a server, because a lot of the bandwidth Brett buys is asymmetric. People can buy a business class connection that does allow more bandwidth.

Q: Who are you buying access from?
A: The local exchange carrier, the only game in town. The only other way is to tap into the Level 3 backbone that runs along the highway. Level 3 doesn’t want to open up service to Laramie, except for hundreds of thousands of dollars + a guarantee of $15,000/month right from the start, which is way beyond that LARIAT makes. And microwave spectrum is too crowded to enable to get to the backbone in Cheyenne. The government should consider telling the carriers that unless they drop their wholesale prices below their retail prices, there could be some federal price caps.

Q: Is Level 3 quoting you that fee because they have sweetheart fees with the incumbents?
A: I can’t speculate. But others have told me that Level 3 only wants to sell to densely populated areas, even though we’ll pay them more per megabit.

Q: You can’t run p2p apps on your network, right?
A: Yes, because they’re servers.

Q: Title 1 Section 1 of Comms Act says that all radio frequencies ought to be used for emergency use. Section 303G [?] requires the FCC to make the best use of the spectrum. Have you considered a First Amendment suit against the FCC to challenge its right to regulate spectrum since there is no longer a scarcity?
A: I don’t have the money to sue the federal government. Interesting idea.

Q: What do you think of LRE, etc.? Or are you happy with 802.11?
A: 802.11 is not ideal for outdoor use. It’s designed for when all the transmitters can hear one another. But it’s good in that environment anyway. Wimax at it’s best is maybe 10% better, and sometimes worse. We tweak 802.11 to make it work better.

Q: Spread spectrum?
A: 802.11 is sometimes spread spectrum [Techie answer. Couldn't follow.]

Q: [me] Your $30/month plan provides a guaranteed minimal connection rate? What is it?
A: We started as a coop, so we had to provide transparency. We have always offered a committed information rate: You can receive and send a particular amount of info. The plus is that if someone is really a bandwidth hog, I can tell them that this is what they’re buying for that price. For $30, you only get 256kbps. Might double during off-peak. We guarantee this by buying enough. We monitor that someone can’t cut into someone else’s guaranteed amount. And we prevent people from doing bursts; everyone gets a VPN tunnel that controls how much bandwidth is allocated to each tunnel to make sure it gets its share and can’t hog. The New America Foundations nutrition label for bandwidth isn’t a bad idea, although it can be hard to figure out what you should be measuring.

Q: Muniwifi?
A: There’s no such things as a free lunch. Very expensive to run a high quality broadband network. You can’t just give it away. People expect to be able to stream and do latency-sensitive things. The amount of taxes you’d have to pay is about what you’d have to pay to a private provider. And they expect it to be ubiquitous, but 2.4gH won’t go through many walls.

Q: Would you consider doing this in developing countries?
A: There’s an advantage. They’re often not deploying telephone infrastructures. You could locate net service with the cellphone towers.
Q: LTE?
A: It’s just a buzzword for whatever we develop next. Long Term Evolution is the cellphone companies’ word for whatever they build next. Watch out for the hype. No one can violate Shannon’s law.

Q: Do WISPs need to be small? Could they get big enough to get over your scale problems?
A: There are some roll-ups. Some achieve economies of scale. But they don’t come to our area because they couldn’t get the backhaul. And you’d really need a good person in each city, and this knowledge is not easy to come by. And it’s hard to get investors; they walk away when there’s a hint that we might get regulated. I’d love to do it, though.

Q: In Cambridge we have a single ISP…
A: There are some WISPs in Cambridge. WispDirectory.com. There are 4,000 in the US. They hide because they’re worried about being squashed by the big guys.

Q: Why aren’t the other WISPs lining up behind you, supporting your ideas?
A: WISPs are very independent people who climb up on rooftops.

Q: Are there common areas where you can work with people on “the other side”?
A: Depends what you mean by other side. I’ve worked with CTIA. But WISPs are small, homespun businesses. “We’d like to see ourselves enabled, rather than hobbled.”

[Posted without re-reading. All possible errors and stupidities are mine, not Brett's.]

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Paul Brigner, Executive Director of Internet and Technology Policy at Verizon, says what he would tell the Broadband Strategy Initiative: Build on our this country’s current success providing access to the Internet. Do no harm (= beware of Net Neutrality). And question the research that shows that America has fallen behind other countries in the ubiquity, price, and speed of broadband.

More at Broadband Strategy Week.

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Esme Vos founded MuniWireless.com. Here she talks about the benefits of competition among access providers, and what we’ve learned from countries that have enforced a structural separation between those companies that provide access to the Internet and those that provide content and services over the Internet. (7:40 minutes)

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The FCC has put up a site — openinternet.gov — where anyone (after registering with a valid email address) can post an idea, or vote existing ideas up or down. I love the idea of the feds opening discussions up, although, I am not convinced that this particular implementation achieves its presumed aims. But, what the heck! Try-fail-try is the right rhythm for the Net.

The site defaults to listing the ideas reverse chronologically, which adds some serendipity, or you can choose to view them listed in order of popularity, which encourages piling on. You can also browse by category/tag.

Anyone who registers can post a comment. The comments are unthreaded, discouraging much development of ideas but also discouraging flaming. You can report a comment as being “abusive,” but otherwise cannot rate them.

At the moment, the most popular posting is from Tim Karr, who, according to his biography at SaveTheInternet.com, a site sponsored by FreePress.net, “oversees all Free Press campaigns and online outreach efforts, including SavetheInternet.com.” Tim — who I know a bit and like — is an activist. He has the most popular post at the FCC’s site presumably because FreePress.net sent out a mailing urging supporters to vote it up.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s how politics is played in this country. If an anti-NN group sponsored by, say, AT&T wanted to play the same game, it’s perfectly entitled to. It’s not hard to imagine a well-funded group swamping FreePress’s shoestring efforts and getting orders of magnitudes more people to thumbs-up an anti-NN comment.

Which is to say that an open discussion board like the one the FCC has posted can serve either of two purposes. It can be a place where people come for rational discussions across political positions, or it can serve as an informal poll of citizens’ sentiments about an issue. But combining the two means that neither works very well. It becomes simply an opportunity for gaming the system.

It seems to me that sites such as these cannot serve as a poll that has any value at all. Besides, we have lots of other ways of gauging public opinion, including scientific polling and elections. If, on the other hand, the FCC wants to sponsor a forum for useful discussion or to generate new ideas, it could modify the current implementation. For example — and these are just ideas that may turn out to be gigantic belly flops — comments could be divided into two tracks, pro and con, with most-popular listings for each. Readers could be allowed to vote up but not down. Comments could be threaded. The comments could be rated. Postings could have buttons for “agree/disagree” and “interesting,” so that the site could highlight articles that people disagree with but find interesting.

All of these techniques could be gamed because everything can be gamed. Some discussion boards do work, though. I don’t know what the magic keys are, but I’m pretty confident that a political discussion board that includes an overall popularity contest will so encourage gaming that its results will necessarily be unreliable. At the very least, the popularity contest should be confined to determining the best arguments for each side.

But I don’t want to close on a negative note, for the FCC is to be congratulated on its efforts to open its processes up not only to lobbyists and geeks who know how to walk and talk like an FCC commenter, but to the general public. And it’s doing so in the proper Webby way of taking small steps and not being afraid to fail in public. That takes guts.

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I have only so far read the 5-page executive summary of Richard Bennett’s argument against Net neutrality, but this looks like a piece to be reckoned with by all in the Net neutrality debate.

Here, for flavor and substance, are two key paragraphs from the summary:

The legitimate concerns of network neutrality take place at the network edge, where the network interacts with the user; what goes on inside the network is largely beside the point, and has typically been misstated by network neutrality advocates in any case. The Internet is not a “level playing field” in which each packet gets equal treatment; the design of the Internet, the facilities that users purchase, and the location of servers all cause varying degrees of inequality. The Internet also discriminates by design for and against various uses; structural discrimination can only be mitigated by active management within the network.

It’s more productive to make a diligent effort to understand the Internet’s dynamics, its structure, the challenges it faces, and the tradeoffs that circumscribe the work of network engineers before trying to constrain the Internet’s ever-changing nature. If we do this, we can avoid creating a program of regulation that’s more likely to retard genuine innovation than to nurture it.

I look forward to learning from the discussion this look at the history of the architecture of the Net is going to engender…

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At last, that brave band of oppressed companies who have been granted near-monopolies to deliver over-priced, under-performing broadband to the entire USA (exempting the parts they don’t find particularly profitable) have managed to scrape together an organization to give voice to their position. BroadbandForAmerica.com is finally going to air their views about why de-regulated near monopolies are the best and only way to bring affordable, open Internet to everyone in the country — views that until now have gone unheard, except from their hundreds and hundreds of lobbyists. Why, the industry could barely put together a mere $765,000 to send to John McCain’s campaign!

The site itself seems innocuous. Their history of the Internet nods in some appropriate directions, including to Al Gore and to students who have innovated on the Net. (It oddly leaves out Tim Berners-Lee.) Of course, it’s actually a paean to private industry that cleverly equates the role of creative individuals who have contributed mightily for free and the incumbent infrastructure providers whose financial incentives lead them to prefer to tilt the field against cash-starved start-ups. The closest the organization comes to stating its actual intent is in the wording of the print ad they’re running. Hmm. On the open medium of the Internet the organization hides its purpose, but in the controlled medium of print, they come close to stating it. How unexpected!

So, welcome to the Web, BroadbandForAmerica. Now — after your long list of rules of discussion, followed by a forum that is only soliciting happy stories — how about engaging in some honest, forthright discussion?

[Later that day:] Here’s a New Yorker interview with Julius Genachowski about Net Neutrality.

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Dylan Tweney has published a piece in Wired, where he’s an editor, warning that the FCC’s proposed Net neutrality rule may spell the end of the “unlimited Internet.”

I think he’s quite wrong. And whoever wrote the headline, really botched it. Dylan’s argument is that bandwidth isn’t unlimited, so the access providers need to manage traffic. If the premise of the piece is that bandwidth isn’t unlimited, then there isn’t any “unlimited Internet” to end. And if he means that the era of getting as much Internet as you can eat is over, well, it never existed. I pay my access provider for an always-on connection with a cap on how many bits per second that is far lower than what I could actually eat if allowed.

And access providers can manage traffic without doing so on the basis of the content of the bits. In fact, they already do manage traffic by selling different tiers of service; Net neutrality has no problem with that.

The comments on the piece get at the problems with it. (And, btw, despite what some of the commenters allege, I’ve known Dylan for years and he’s personally honest and very smart. We just disagree.)

(Pardon my plugging again my piece at Npr.org. My editor insists.)

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[MINUTES LATER: Npr.org just posted a different piece of mine about Net neutrality. It says that we wouldn't need a NN rule if we got our infrastructure right.]

I know there are lots of arguments about Net neutrality. I understand that there’s vagueness to the term, that there are times when we may want access providers to discriminate among bits, that it’s possible there will be unintended consequences. But, I want to say two basic things.

First, beyond its practical effects, there’s a symbolic importance to Net neutrality. A Net neutrality principle states firmly that the Internet is ours. It does not belong to, and should not be controlled by, those who provide access to it. Now, that doesn’t mean access providers have no rights. But they should be gatekeepers only in the sense that they keep the gates open as wide as possible. There may be technical issues that require some discrimination but the fundamental and guiding principle enunciated by Net neutrality is, as Tim Bray says: Fat pipe, always on, out of our way.

Second, a bunch of my co-religionists (so to speak) track the Obama administration’s actions on broadband and the Internet, and are seemingly in a state of constant agitation. The administration is not going far enough, is still too beholden, have hired some people from the other camp, is in bed with this lobbyist or that. I sincerely am very happy that these watchdogs are doggedly watching the Obamists. Thank you! But, on the eve of One Web Day, and on the day that the chair of the FCC has enunciated a Net neutrality principle, I want to say to them: Rejoice! Hold the Obama administration’s feet to the fire, but roast a marshmallow or two as well. You’ve earned it.

So, thank you, my friends, for your tirelessness. Thank you for saving the Internet. But also delight in having an administration that has brought in some amazing people, has opened up the processes in ways unthinkable just a few months ago, and is fundamentally with us and of us on these issues.

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A Pew Internet report says that while 56% of Americans have accessed the Internet wirelessly, there’s a stark racial divide in the devices we use. About half of the African-American and English-speaking Hispanic population accesses the Net through cellphones and other handheld devices, but only 28% of white Americans have ever done so.

Three bullet points quoted from the report:

* 48% of Africans Americans have at one time used their mobile device to access the internet for information, emailing, or instant-messaging, half again the national average of 32%.

* 29% of African Americans use the internet on their handheld on an average day, also about half again the national average of 19%.

* Compared with 2007, when 12% of African Americans used the internet on their mobile on the average day, use of the mobile internet is up by 141%.

We can read this in many different ways:

• Mobiles are helping to end the digital racial divide

• Mobiles are extending the digital racial divide by providing second-class Net access to African Americans

• For a far greater percentage of African Americans than white Americans, the Net is less generative and participatory

• We’d better make sure that the carriers become device independent and Net neutral

[Tags: digital_divide mobiles pew race ]

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I went to a fascinating breakout at Reboot at which two government guys came to talk about national policy. The government guys were culturally of the Reboot crowd (or so it seemed to me), and one of them came to his position straight out of a tech start-up. But the group of thirty people in the small, converted men’s room (!) met their openness with pent-up hostility. I was surprised at the anger. The gov’t guys ought to listen (which is what they were doing at this meeting), should not expect ideas for free, need to maybe do nothing, need to get the country over the digital divide, should give grants to small businesses, should stay clear of small businesses, don’t be afraid to lose control, build communities, participate in communities, stay out of communities… My untutored sense was that the Web community felt frustrated that this initiative was so late at getting started. As an American, I was actually impressed with the government folks’ openness and webbiness.

Afterwards, I talked with my friend Morten Kamper. He wasn’t at the session, but he said that there was concern that the government’s broadband committee is comprised of the telcos without sufficient citizen or webizen participation, and that Net neutrality is indeed an issue, as the telcos assume they can prefer some of their bits to others.

BTW, I asked the room if there was reluctance on the part of the government to be transparent, and, if so, where’s the Danish version of the Sunlight Foundation. The general answer I got was: There’s no official reluctance, but it’s going too slowly. And Ton Zijlstra said that in the Netherlands, the official policy is to be transparent but there are cultural resistances.

I also asked, at the beginning, if it was clear that the “broadband policy” they were talking about was actually committed to delivering an open, unfiltered, non-discriminatory Internet. The answer was “Yes,” with an implied, “Why would you even have to ask?” (And the answer to that implied question is: Because it’s not clear in America.)

[Tags: denmark e-gov e-government egov reboot reboot11 rb11 ]

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David Isenberg questions the veracity of the Wall Street Journal’s report about Iran using Nokia equipment to do deep packet inspection. Interesting on its own and also as yet another example of smart bloggers raising journalism’s bar.

[Tags: iran david_isenberg citizen_media journalism media ]

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Here’s a comment aimed at the FCC that reminds the FCC that (a) broadband and the Internet are not really synonymous, (b) the value of broadband is that it gives access to the Internet, so, (c) when designing a national broadband package, we should make sure that it supports the value of the Internet.

[Tags: internet broadband net_neutrality fcc ]

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I frequently write in HTML, but find footnotes (endnotes, actually) a pain. I don’t like having to interrupt my flow to jump to the end of the document to plunk in a footnote, and I hate having to decide on a number not knowing if I might decide to insert a footnote ahead of the one I just inserted. So, primarily because I enjoy writing utilities for myself, I spent far more hours writing a tool that will make it easier for me than the tool itself will save.

Footnoter lets you embed footnotes in the middle of an HTM document. [[For example, this might be a footnote]] It looks for the designated delimiters, pulls the footnote out, puts it at the end, and leaves a hyperlinked number in its stead. It defaults to the quick-and-dirty HTML that uses <sup> to superscript the number, but the Advanced section lets you instead insert CSS classes for the marker in the text, the marker that precedes the footnote, and for the footnote itself.

Some warnings if you decide to try it out. First, It’s fragile. I’ve barely tested it. I’m sure there will be lots of ways it can be broken. (Nested footnotes won’t work.) Second, you would be a damned fool to paste its results over your only copy of the document you’ve been working on. Third, I am a baboonish, flatfooted writer of programs. What I write is the oppoosite of elegant: I prefer the long way of doing it and of writing it, since I can barely follow what I’m doing. Besides, the programs I write are so small and confined that efficiency doesn’t really matter.

If you care to try Footnoter out, with fear in your limbs and forgiveness in your heart, it’s here.

[Tags: footnotes utilities ]

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According to Tim Poulus, citing DSL Reports, Verizon is acting as a wholesaler, allowing DSL Extreme to sell Internet access over Verizon’s FIOS fiber lines. So, if FIOS comes to your premises, you’ll be able to buy your Net access from DSL Extreme (under the name “Fiber Extreme) instead of from Verizon, and it will cost you less than getting access via Verizon: 50Mbps for $99 instead of $150. Verizon will continue to offer a bundle of Net, TV, and telephone at a bundled price. DSL Extreme does not mention Verizon or FIOS in its press release, which is impressive in its own way.

There are subtleties, and perhaps grossnesses, of this deal that I don’t understand. (For example, Tim writes: “This is a WBA (wholesale broadband access) deal, not unbundling (ODF access, which is not really an option on PON networks anyway)…”) But it sounds like a welcome development, since open competition (which this is not (?) because Verizon is picking one particular company to allow onto its fiber) would commoditize access, driving prices down. And it might tend toward neutral, open networks for the same reason that Web browsers want to show you every page you care to point at: Browsers — and networks — that don’t show you every page look broken.

[Tags: net_neutrality verizon fcc broadband ]

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David Isenberg has posted a transcript of his keynote at the Broadband Properties Summit that reminds us that the value of the Net comes not merely from its technical architecture but from the fact that that protocols that define that architecture are public. From the middle of the talk:

The Internet derives its disruptive quality from a very special property: IT IS PUBLIC. The core of the Internet is a body of simple, public agreements, called RFCs, that specify the structure of the Internet Protocol packet. These public agreements don’t need to be ratified or officially approved – they just need to be widely adopted and used.

The Internet’s component technologies – routing, storage, transmission, etc. – can be improved in private. But the Internet Protocol itself is hurt by private changes, because its very strength is its public-ness.

Because it is public, device makers, application makers, content providers and network providers can make stuff that works together. The result is completely unprecedented; instead of a special-purpose network – with telephone wires on telephone poles that connect telephones to telephone switches, or a cable network that connects TVs to content – we have the Internet, a network that connects any application – love letters, music lessons, credit card payments, doctor’s appointments, fantasy games – to any network – wired, wireless, twisted pair, coax, fiber, wi-fi, 3G, smoke signals, carrier pigeon, you name it. Automatically, no extra services needed. It just works.

This allows several emergent miracles…

[Tags: broadband net_neutrality david_isenberg ]

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Stephen Conroy, Australia’s Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, today gives a talk ([Tags: broadband telecommunications australia ftth fttp net_neutrality ]‘>transcript here) to the National Press Club in which he outlines the case for treating broadband access as a service as fundamental as electricity. Australia is implementing a national rollout, providing wholesale access to competitive access retailers. They want 90% of the country connected. “Our rollout will start at 100Mbps, but once fibre is distributed, future hardware upgrades can boost speeds even further to 1000Mbps and beyond.” (No mention of Net neutrality or the openness of access; a truly competitive market would help ameliorate some of the need for that.)

Conroy ends his talk with a summary:

Broadband, like electricity in the century past, has the potential to drive innovation, productivity, efficiency and employment across the economy.

It will, over time, influence every activity and process throughout our daily lives.

Broadband will transform health care.

Broadband will revolutionise education.

Broadband will underpin our future carbon constrained economy.

vBroadband will secure our infrastructure investments.

The National Broadband Network will support applications and services in these and other sectors that today we cannot begin to imagine.

And for the first time they will be delivered over a genuinely competitive platform.

It is our responsibility and obligation to ensure that these opportunities are available to future generations of Australians.

[Tags: broadband telecommunications australia ftth fttp net_neutrality ]

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At Freedom to Connect, I was unable to blog Benoit Felten’s excellent and very popular talk because there was too much in it, and there were some terms I didn’t understand. But I did like the following quotation from Ad Scheepbouwer, CEO of the Dutch telecom, KPN:

In hindsight, KPN made a mistake back in 1996. We were not too enthusiastic to be forced to allow competitors on our old wireline network. That turned out not to be very wise. If you allow all your competitors on your network, all services will run on your network, and that results in the lowest cost possible per service. Which in turn attracts more customers for those services, so your network grows much faster. An open network is not charity from us, in the long run it simply works best for everybody.

Benoit went on to talk about whether the US situation is sufficiently like that of the Netherlands to warrant learning a lesson from KPN. You can see a version of his talk here: 1 2 3 4.

[Tags: benoit_felten broadband net_neutrality fcc ]

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The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has published a set of solicited essays on the wisdom of using software that looks at the content of the data being sent over the Net, AKA deep packet inspection or DPI. The essays are from notables such as Susan Crawford , and Berkman’s Chris Soghoian and Max Weinstein. The essays overall condemn DPI as a general practice, on privacy and free speech grounds.

The page itself reads like something that comes not out of government but out of e-government.

[Later that day:] By the way, the Privacy Commissioner is the only federal government org in Canada with an outward facing blog. I can’t tell if that should be filed under Irony or Appropriate.[Tags: dpi canada e-gov egovernment net_neutrality ]

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Tim Karr, campaign director of Free Press, moderates a small panel: Nathaniel James ( Media and Democracy Coalition) and Ellen Miller (Sunlight Foundation).

Tim: We’re in a period of turmoil, torn between “two distinct value systems”: Mass media and social media. Now is the crucial time for making the right policies. We’re seeing a perfect alignment of three movements: media reform, free culture, and open government. The principles of the unity of these three movements: Openness (neutral, nondiscriminatory net), transparency, innovation (through copyright reform), privacy, access.

Ellen: As Andrew Rasiej says, technology is not a slice of the pie, it’s the entire pan. (Ellen talks about the origins and current projects of the magnificent Sunlight Foundation.)

Nathaniel mentions that he’s very involved in One Web Day. But his talk is about fighting for the freedom to connect. He says the process of providing access needs to include a diverse swath of the country. The Internet policy process ought to be as participatory as Internet culture itself. “Are we building programs that allow empowerment and peer to peer education?”

Q: Politically, what’s it look like with the new administration and Congress?
Tim: We’re more hopeful. “The more the public gets involved in the sausage-making, the more visionary and courageous our politicians become”
Nathaniel: The Dems and Reps are equally opportunity offenders in this area.
Ellen: When it comes to the new admin, “it’s a delight to be pushing on an open door.”

Q: [googin] We’re seeing an increase in bottom up business, not just in media.

[Tags: f2c egov egovernment transparency f2c09 ]

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I’m at Freedom to Connect, David Isenberg’s annual conference on building open, fast, dumb networks. If you go to the F2C site, there should be instructions about how to live stream the proceedings. The twitter hashtag is #f2c09. The room’s backchannel is here.

[Tags: f2c f2c09 telcom wifi broadband net_neutrality ]

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“Unbundling” means that the companies that run the Internet wires to our homes and businesses also act as wholesalers to others who want to be our ISPs. Benoit Felten of the Yankee Group gave a talk recently arguing that this can be very profitable for all involved. (It also creates competition, which generally is good for us users.)

Scott Cleland disagrees with Benoit.

[Tags: broadband benoit_felten scott_cleland net_neutrality ]

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David Isenberg, exercising his freedom to disconnect, has posted photos from his trip to Antarctica here, here, and here.

Meanwhile, there’s still time to sign up for David’s Freedom to Connect conference, March 30-31, in Silver Spring MD (a subway ride from DC). It’s a terrific get-together and learning-fest for those who think that pervasive access to an open Internet is important and do-able. It attracts a whole bunch of the do-ers. I try not to miss it.

[Tags: antarctica david_isenberg isen freedom_to_connect net_neutrality broadband ]

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Yochai Benkler, who wrote the seminal book on the new collaborative economics (and of course posted it for free), and is also a Harvard Law professor and holder of the Berkman Chair at the Berkman Center (and is also one of the sweetest people ever) … I got lost in my benkleration, so let’s just start again …

Yochai Benkler has posted at Talking Points Memo his analysis of the Senate and House versions of the stimulus package for broadband. (Thanks for the link to David Isenberg, who provides his own, usual insightful analysis.)

[Tags: yochai_benkler berkman broadband stimulus net_neutrality david_isenberg ]

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Steve Schultze explains how the FCC got into the business of regulating the Internet in this Radio Berkman interview. I’m the interviewer, so I’m biased, but I think Steve does a great job talking us through this, so that Title I vs. Title II, etc., is clear at last.

[Tags: berkman stephen_schultze steve_schultze fcc telecommunications internet net_neutrality ]

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Harold Feld is very happy that the stimulus package includes “only” $6 billion for broadband to underserved areas. He puts it this way:

There’s an old Jewish joke about how a Frenchman, a Pole, and Jew saved Napoleon’s life. Napoleon asks what they want as a reward. The Frenchman says his family were aristocrats before the revolution and he wants his family lands restored. “Granted,” says the Emperor. The Pole says he wants Poland liberated and her pre-partition borders restored. “Granted,” says Napoleon. The Jew says: “I want a real nice piece of herring.”

Napoleon stares, turns in disgust to one of his attendants, and says “get this man a nice piece of herring from the kitchen and then get him out of my sight.”

The Frenchman and the Pole turn to the Jew and laugh “You could have asked for anything! You idiot, that’s the Emperor of France! And you asked for a nice piece of herring!”

“Ha,” answered the Jew. “You think you’re so smart? I’m actually gonna get my herring.”

That’s about how I feel about the broadband stimulus package. Sure, I’d love to have had the feds build fiber out to every home. But I always knew that wouldn’t happen. Worse, I figured that any HUGE pot of money would invariably end up chock full of goodies for incumbents with zippo oversight. ….

But a reasonable set of grant proposals, properly targeted, can do a boatload of good. Consider Mark Cooper’s community hotspot approach, for example, or the work of ongoing projects such as the Mountain Area Information Network in rural North Carolina or the Lawndale Community Wireless Network in Chicago or any of thousands of projects in hundreds of communities working to bridge the gap between connectivity and digital exclusion…

[Tags: harold_feld broadband stimulus herring jewish_jokes ]

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Ken Camp follows up on his follow up to his provocative post that says that Telco 2.0 is not a winning idea. He compares telcos to five attributes of social media companies:

Five words that do not describe telecommunications or the telecom industry – Participation, Openness, Conversation, Community and Connectedness. The industry, the whole construct of that framework is to control four of those by ensuring there is no community in the first place. To embrace community is not to become Telco 2.0, but to create something entirely new.

Ken worked in the industry for twenty years, btw.

[Tags: telcos telecommunications fcc policy social_networks social_media ]

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Ed Felten offers a brief and useful taxonomy of Net neutrality. The discussion in the comments is helpful, too. So are David Isenberg’s additional thoughts.

Before the anti-NN folks pounce on the admitted ambiguity of the term, I have two comments.

First, free speech is even harder to pin down and apply, but it’s still a principle worth supporting. (Preemptive defense: No, I’m not saying free speech and NN are equally important. I’m making a point about the logic of the argument.)

Second, as far as I’m concerned, the core of NN, and underneath all three of Ed’s flavors, is the idea that the network should be equally open to all ideas. Or, put differently, those who provide access to the Net should not be allowed to favor some bits over others. Put thirdly, no one should be allowed to decide for others what the Net is for.

None of these formulations are easy to apply. Even doing a first-in-first-out prioritization favors some bits over others. But, this is exactly the same sort of argument one has about free speech: “Oh yeah, Mr. Free Speecher. So you think spies ought to be able to blab state secrets, and there shouldn’t be laws against perjury…?” NN is the right principle. How it’s applied is a matter of justice and politics.

[Tags: net_neutrality ed_felten david_isenberg ]

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In this week’s Radio Berkman podcast, I interview Stephen Schultze about the FCC’s auctioning off spectrum to a national provider who would be required to use 25% of it for free, nationwide wifi. There’s only one catch: That wifi would have to only connect to sites and services that are safe for minors (defined as people between 5 and 18).

After we had recorded this interview last week, the FCC postponed voting on the proposal, and since it’s the baby of the outgoing Chair, it’s probably postponed forever. Still, the idea raises some really interesting issues. Steve and I focus on the free speech considerations, although the opposition from other spectrum-holders certainly could not have encouraged the FCC.

[Tags: berkman fcc wifi wi-fi spectrum free_speech censorship kevin_martin podcast stephen_schultze ]

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