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| Monday, February 27, 2006 |
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Blogging for stock. And vice versa. 
| | That's the model for what Noel Guinane calls BC, for Backside Capital. The formaula: No Cash/Advice In, Beer + Equity Out. It's aimed at start-ups who are so small that even a "living wage" is outside their budget, for themselves and everyone else too. |
Our space
| | Read the whole thing, which concludes, |
| | My generation draws the Internet as a cloud that connects everyone; the younger generation experiences it as oxygen that supports their digital lives. The old generation sees this as a poisonous gas that has leaked out of their pipes, and they want to seal it up again. This is why we need to fight for our spontaneous orders. |
| | Ultimately, I believe the our more open way will succeed through it's very creative, positive-sum nature, but that does not mean we should complacently stand by. |
| | Susan Crawford talks about "framing", which is cognitive linguistic lingo for what we talk about everything in terms of. Framing is how we think and speak about everything in terms of something else. Can't help it. |
| | Sometimes the frames are obvious. For example, when we speak of "saving", "wasting", "losing" or "setting aside" time, we are framing time in terms of money. When we say birth is "arrival" and death is "departure", we are saying life is a journey and framing life in terms of travel. When we say we say we "owe" favors or criminals must "pay" for their crimes, we are framing morality (and justice) in terms of accounting. |
| | What should we — all of us, in all generations — frame the Net in terms of? Susan says, |
| | It all depends what you think "the Internet" is. I think "the Internet" is a combination of standards and interactions/relationships. I'm with the founding fathers on this one, but I think their view can sometimes be a little narrow. These online interactions/relationships are persistent in a way no other network (and no mere "language") has made possible. It's a new informational construct that can be separated from the substrate used to store/forward its elements. And so, because I'm neither a carrier nor a founding father, I'm worried about the future of "the Internet." Our internet. |
| | The problem here is that an "informational construct" is not a frame. It's an abstraction of a frame. |
| | Frames aren't abstract. They're the concrete bedrock beneath the soil of abstraction. Time is money. Life is a journey. Justice is accounting. |
| | This is the question I raised in Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes. This piece, which may be the most important I've ever written (at least that's how I feel about it right now), has been cited by many as a rallying cry for a fight with carriers and copyright extremists (both of which see the Net as a transport system for "content" and nothing more). But Saving the Net is about more than that. It's a call to frame the Net as a place: |
| | To start we acknowledge the necessity of the transport metaphor; but also its insufficiency. |
| | Of course, at its base level the Net is a system of pipes and packets. But it's not only packets, or "content" or anything for that matter). Understanding the Net only in transport terms is like understanding civilization in terms of electrical service or human beings only in terms of atoms and molecules. We miss the larger context. |
| | That context is best understood as a place. When we speak of the Net as a "place" or a "space" or a "world" or a "commons" or a "market" with "locations" and "addresses" and "sites" that we "build", we are framing the Net as a place. |
| | Most significantly, the Net is a marketplace. In fact, the Net is the largest, most open, most free and most productive marketplace the world has ever known. The fact that it's not physical doesn't make it one bit less real. In fact, the virtuality of the Net is what makes it stretch to worldwide dimensions while remaining local to every desktop, every point-of-sale device, every ATM machine. It is in this world-wide marketplace that free people, free enterprise, free cultures and free societies are just beginning to flourish. It is here that democratic governance is finally connected, efficiently, to the governed. |
| | It is on and not just through — prepositions are key here — the Net that governments will not only derive their just powers from the consent of the governed but benefit directly from citizen involvement as well. |
| | As a place, the Net has always been independent of the carriage on which it relies, which is one reason it also encourages and rewards independence. The independence of the Net and its inhabitants is precisely what accounts for countless new businesses and improved old ones. |
| | If fact, this is also what Susan is saying: |
| | If you're someone who goes online and is neither a carrier or a founding father, you may have expectations that "the Internet" will continue to be a free and ordered place whose value comes from interactions -- not from the access valves used to get there. |
| | The boldface on "place" is mine. |
| | Framing the Net as a place is not a generational choice. It's what all of us do already anyway when we talk about going on the Net, or describe it as, say, an environment. |
| | But we do have a mixed metaphor problem, in that this environment, this world, this place, is also delivered, and relies on transport protocols. |
| | Yet clearly the Net is not a form of carriage, even though it might appear that way to the carriers and the copyright extremists. The Net has an existence that encompasses carriage and content but is not reducible to either — just as human beings have an existence that encompasses the circulatory system and its constituents but is not reducible to either. |
| | There are higher principles involved. Life is larger than the systems that sustain it. The principle we call net neutrality is as essential to Internet life as consciousness is to human life. When we subordinate Net neutrality to the systems that sustain it, we reduce it to those systems. The Net becomes a cable system, a phone system, a content delivery system. And nothing more. In human terms, this is called brain death. |
| | By framing the Net as a neutral place, we assure that it will continue to serve as what it has already been for more than ten years : a public marketplace where private enterprise of all forms can not only grow and thrive, but can do both better than it ever has anywhere, ever, before. |
| | This is the case we need to make to lawmakers as well as to private stakeholders. Right now we are seeing carriers make the specious argument that they are private interests threatened by government interference (especially around the issue of municipal wi-fi). In fact they are the business equivalents of zoo animals: creatures that have lived for so long in the "regulatory habitat" that they can barely conceive of a free and open marketplace — beyond fearing its threat to them. |
| | What we need from lawmakers is recognition that the Net is a place where naked conversations by armies of Davids comprise the rising tide of liberty and enterprise that will lift all boats, including industries so clueless that the only new business their captains can imagine is shaking down Google and Yahoo for "premium" services. |
| | We need citizens, businesses and lawmakers all to utter a loud "Feh!" in the general direction of that idiocy. |
| | The Net is a place. Protecting it is good for everybody. The important debate is around how we do that. |
| | Bonus links: OneWebDay and the sign for it. Also Mitch Ratcliffe's Network Neutrality: the PR blitz is underway. Mitch reports that the carriers are framing tiered Net service in terms of infrastructure build-out cost recovery. Also how certain think tanks and other helpful sources are dragooned by the carriers to give them (and their own brand of protectionist legislation) a free-market paint job. |
| | The market failures in telecoms all derive from the high fixed-capital costs of conventional wirelines. These have two major effects: (1) incentives to provide service in rural areas are weak, because the amount of time required to amortize large fixed costs makes for poor discounted ROI; and (2) in higher-density areas, the last mile of wire is a natural monopoly/oligopoly. |
| | New technologies are directly attacking this problem. Wi-Fi, wireless mesh networks, IP over powerlines, and cheap fenceline cable dramatically lower the fixed capital costs of last-mile service. The main things holding these technologies back are regulatory barriers (including, notably, not enough spectrum allocated to WiFi and UWB). |
| | The right answer: deregulate everything, free the new technologies to go head-to-head against the wired last mile, and let the market sort it all out. |
| | Note that "the market" here is not just the nasty old telcos and cablecos, but inventive businesses and individuals in growing numbers. This is the libertarian position, and one I find especially compelling — even if it isn't the way to bet, politically. |
| | Really, why not let the phone and cable guys fight it out in the open markeplace -- where market-native and Net-native parties will step up and serve a zillion Davids while the old farts fight over a few Goliaths? |
| | Second choice: pass legislation establishing the Net's neutrality, and nothing more. |
| | As Kevin Marks adds, We need to keep trying out metaphors of openness and freedom, invisible hands and co-operation, until we find one that fits. |
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