On Feb. 19, 2020, Elliot Noss testified before the Canadian Radio and Television Commission about how to knock Canada off the very top of the list of the world’s most expensive mobile connections. It’s very much worth a read [pdf] or view.

Elliot is the president and CEO of Tucows, and the found of Hover and Ting. These companies are profitable, but they are also driven by Elliot’s commitment to supporting an open Internet … where openness includes open affordable. Ting, for example, provides excellent wireless service at prices that should make the Big Boys blush in shame — although they’d first have to look up “shame” in the dictionary — while also providing what may be the best customer service in the world. Not exaggerating. Hover is also a very excellent Web registrar.

Yes, Elliot is a friend of mine. But one of the reasons I’m so attached to him is that he is so thoroughly decent. He is what my tribe calls a Mensch.

In his testimony, he’s trying to get the Canadian government to support Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MNVOs), as opposed to only supporting “facilities-based providers” that, by definition, “serve a subscriber using its own network facilities and spectrum…” [pdf] The facilities-based providers own the wire or cable going to your house, and they compete on the basis of their coverage. An MNVO (such as Ting) rents access to the physical infrastructure and provides services to customers, competing on factors like price, service, and quality … which is what we customers want. (Yes, Canada supporting MNVOs would open up business opportunities for Elliot personally, but that is not his primary driver.)

Here’s a taste of Elliot’s remarks:

Telecommunication services are infrastructure, just like water, electricity and roads. Think of telephone service provided over copper networks. From their onset they were regulated infrastructure with rate of return economics. When we introduced mobile phone service provided
over the public resource of spectrum it was for making phone calls and was considered a luxury. Today it is primarily for using small computers, that we still anachronistically call “phones”, to consume data. And it is for everyone. Lower income Canadians need access to mobile data just
like other Canadians. Not for “occasional use”. Not at lower data rates. In fact lower income Canadians are the most likely Canadians to NOT have a fixed Internet connection at home.

Telecom is infrastructure. Which leads me to my most heretical point. If telecom is infrastructure, and it is, then the desire for facilities-based competition is misplaced. We do not require facilities-based competition with any other infrastructure. In fact it would seem absurd if we were
talking about it in connection with water or electricity.

I am an Elliot Noss fanboy, and proud of it.

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Well, here are two things I never heard of before. First:

Through this intriguing Register report I learned about the DNSSEC root-signing ceremony. It happens quarterly in alternating fashion on the east and west coasts of the US. The carefully scripted ceremony, lasting over two hours, is meant to anchor the web of trust in the DNS, the Internet’s domain name system. To this end it is streamed live and archived for posterity.

So writes Keith Dawson (twitter) in a post on the A Recovering Physicist blog.

Then he notes the resemblance to the second thing:

Reading about this modern ceremony, performed quarterly for 10 years now, immediately put me in mind of a similar ritual, the Trial of the Pyx, staged in London for 738 years, for a substantially similar purpose: anchoring trust in the English currency.

I’d bet against either of these on a “Bluff the Listener” game on Wait Wait Don’t Tell me. But they’re both real.

Here’s some information about the DNSSEC ceremony, taken from the post Keith links to:

The root DNS zone contains information about how to query the top-level domain (TLD) name servers (.com, .edu, .org, etc). It enables Internet users to access domain names in all TLDs, even brand new ones like .software and .bank, making it an integral part of the global Internet.

In How DNSSEC Works, we explained how trust in DNSSEC is derived from the parent zone’s DS resource record. However, the root DNS zone has no parent, so how can we trust the integrity and authenticity of its information?

The article ably describes the trust systems involved, which include trusted institutions and individuals, redundancy, and encryption. And ceremony.

Trust won’t anchor itself.

(Actually that’s quite contestable.)

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Lee Rainie, of Pew Research, is giving a talk at a small pre-conference event I’m at. I’m a Lee Rainie and Pew Lifetime Fan. [DISCLAIMERS: These are just some points Lee made. I undoubtedly left out important qualifiers. I’m sure I got things wrong, too. If I were on a connection that got more than 0.4mbps (thanks, Verizon /s) , I’d find the report to link to.]

He reports that 23% of people say they have forwarded fake news, although most in order to warn other people about it. 26% of American adults and 46% between 18 and 29 years old have had fake news about them posted. The major harm reported was reputational.

He says that 41% of American adults have been harassed; the list of types of harassment is broad. About a fifth of Americans have been harassed in severe ways: stalked, sexually harassed, physical threatened, etc. Two thirds have seen someone else be harassed.

The study analyzed the Facebook posts of all the members of Congress. The angrier the contents were, the more often they’re shared, liked, or commented on. Online discussions are reported to be far less likely to be respectful, civil, etc. Seventy one percent of Facebook users did not know what data about them FB is sharing about them, as listed on the FB privacy managaement page.

A majority of Americans favor free speech even if it allows bad ideas to proliferate. [ I wonder how’d they answer if you gave them examples, or if you differentiated free speech from unmoderated speech on private platforms such as Facebook.]

Two thirds of Americans expect that robots and computers will do much of the work currently done by humans within 50 yrs. But we think it’ll mainly be other people who are put out of work; people think they personally will not be replaced. Seventy two percent are worried about a future in which robots do so much. But 63% of experts (a hand-crafted, non-representative list, Lee points out) think AI will make life better. These experts worry first of all about the loss of human agency. They also worry about data abuse, job loss, dependence lock-in (i.e., losing skills as robots take over those tasks), and mayhem (e.g., robots going nuts on the battlefield).

Q: In Europe, the fear of jobdisplacement is the opposite. People worry about their own job being displaced.

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From Jane Wakefield at the BBC:

Its 11th International Classification of Diseases (ICD) will include the condition “gaming disorder”.

The draft document describes it as a pattern of persistent or recurrent gaming behaviour so severe that it takes “precedence over other life interests”.

Oy. IMO, this will go down in history as a ludicrous example of the hysteria we’re living through, which I take as strong evidence of the depth of the changes the Internet is bringing. It’ll be the example of cultural hysteria mentioned after the anti-comic-book hysteria of the 1950s.

That’s not to deny that some people suffer from the symptoms listed. But we don’t have a disease called “fingernail addiction” because some people chew their nails compulsively. Or TV addiction. These obsessive behaviors are (in my non-expert opinion) expressions of other issues, not caused by the object of the obsession. Or else games are a peculiarly finicky addictive substance. If only heroin were so selective!

Pardon me, but I left my character in Tom Clancy’s Wildlands
sitting on the edge of an airfield, awaiting her 37th attempt to steal that frigging airplane.

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A list I am on is counseling that a particular writer not to be taken in by a tour of a data center or network operations center. These tours are typically given by PR guides and can leave the impression that the Internet is a set of writes owned by a corporation.

I certainly agree with both concerns. But, having been a Rube on a Tour more than once, I think technologists who are deep into protocol issues may underestimate how shocking it is to most people that the Internet is also a physical thing. Yes, I understand that the Internet is a set of protocols, etc., and I understand that that is usually what we need to communicate to people in order to counter the truly pernicious belief that Comcast et al. own the Internet. But the Internet is also, as instantiated, a set of coiled wires and massive industrial installations. Seeing the blinking lights on a bank of routers and being told by the PR Tour Guide that those signify packets going somewhere is, well, thrilling.

Every Internet user understands that there is a physical side of the Net. But seeing it in person is awesome and inspiring. That’s why Shuli Hallak‘s photos in Invisible Networks are so impressive.

It is tremendously important both conceptually and politically to understand that the Net is fundamentally not a thing and is not owned by anyone. But seeing in person the magnitude of the effort and the magnificence of the hardware engineering also teaches an important lesson: the Internet is not magic. At least not entirely.

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Jaap van Till has posted an aggregation of thoughts and links to remind us of what it seems we have so much trouble remembering: The Internet is not a thing but an agreement.

An internet, network of networks, is a voluntary agreement among network operators to exchange traffic for their mutual benefit. (The Internet is a prototype internet.) That’s all — it’s an agreement.

That’s from an earlier post by Jaap, which along the way links out to the World of Ends post that Doc Searls and I wrote in 2003 that aimed at explaining the Internet to legislators.

I sense that we are due for a shift in tides, maybe over the next two years, in which the point that needs making is not that the Internet is dangerous and sucks, but that it it is dangerous and sucks and is the greatest invention in the history of our species. Cf. Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss.)

This pendulum swing can’t come soon enough.

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I’m at the Web 1.0 conference, at the MIT Media Lab, organized by Amber Case [@caseorganic]. It’s a celebration of sites that can be built by a single person, she explains.

The subtitle of Amber’s opening talk is “Where did my data go?” She talks about hosting sites that folded and took all the home pages with them. After AOL Hometown got angry comments about this, it AOL Hometown “solved” the problem by turning off comments“solved” the problem by turning off comments. Other bad things can happen to sites you build on other people’s sites. They can change your UI. And things other than Web sites can be shut down — including household items in the Internet of Things.

She shows the Maslow Hierarchy for Social Network Supermarkets from Chris Messina. So, what happened to owning your identity? At early Web conferences, you’d write your domain name on your ID tag. Your domain was your identity. RSS and Atom allowed for distributed reading. But then in the early 2000s social networks took over.

We started writing on third party platforms such as Medium and Wikia, but their terms of service make it difficult to own and transfer one’s own content.

The people who could have created the tools that would let us share our blogs went to work for the social networking sites. In 2010 there was a Federated Web movement that resulted in a movement towards this. E.g., it came up with Publish on your own Site and Syndicate Elsewhere (POSSE
).

Why do we need an independent Web? To avoid losing our content, so businesses can’t to fold and take it with it, for a friendlier UX, and for freedom. “Independent Websites can help provide the future of the Web.”

If we don’t do this, the Web gets serious, she says: People go to a tiny handful of sites. They’re not building as many quirky, niche, weird Web sites. “”We need a weird Web””“We need a weird Web because it allows us to play at the edges and to meet others.” But if you know how to build and archive your own things, you have a home for your data, for self-expression, and with links out to the rest of the Web.

Make static websites, she urges…possibly with the conference sponsor, Neocities.

QA

Bob Frankston: How can you own a domain name?

Amber: You can’t, not really.

Bob: And that’s a big, big problem.

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The Emerson Engagement Lab (of which I am a fan) is having me in for a talk that is apparently open to the public on Monday at 2pm. I’m talking to Paul Mihailidis‘ course in Emerson’s Greene Theater about whether and how we’ve managed to let the Internet become just yet another mass medium or possible the Worst. Mass Medium. Ever. I’ll be talking about why my aging cohort had such high hopes for the Net, how well the Argument from Architecture has held up, and why I am not quite as depressed as most of my friends.

This is an odd talk in part because I’m not using slides or notes. That changes things. For the better? Well, there are reasons why people use slides and why people like me, who only have three remaining neurons devoted to memory, use notes.

Has anyone seen my keys?

Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to talking with Penn State’s Center for Humanities and Information this afternoon. I’m giving a talk about our changing ideas about how the future works, but I believe there will be lots of time for conversation.

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Just in case you’ve confused the Internet with the entities that bring us access to the Internet or with the machines that instantiate the Internet, here’s an actual goddamn definition:

RESOLUTION:

“The Federal Networking Council (FNC) agrees that the following language reflects our definition of the term “Internet”.

“Internet” refers to the global information system that —

(i) is logically linked together by a globally unique address space based on the Internet Protocol (IP) or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons;

(ii) is able to support communications using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons, and/or other IP-compatible protocols; and

(iii) provides, uses or makes accessible, either publicly or privately, high level services layered on the communications and related infrastructure described herein.”

This is from a 1995 report by The Federal Networking Council, which is too old even for the Wayback Machine. According to Wikipdia, the FNC was “was chartered by the US National Science and Technology Council’s Committee on Computing, Information and Communications (CCIC) to act as a forum for networking collaborations among US federal agencies…” It was dissolved in 1997. But its words are still good.

More than good. The definition quote above comes recommended by a coupla guys who know something about the topic: Robert E. Kahn and Vinton G. Cerf. In their classic article, What is the Internet?, they refer to it as follows:

The authors believe the best definition currently in existence is that approved by the Federal Networking Council in 1995, http://www.fnc.gov and which is reproduced in the footnote below [xv] for ready reference.

Keep it ready for reference the next time an access provider complains about regulations as if the access providers are or own the Internet. The Internet is bigger than that. And deeper. And ours.

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