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Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Flying abroadband 
| | I'm on an SAS flight from Washington D.C. to Copenhagen, connected by wi-fi and Boeing's Connexion system to the Net. |
| | It took awhile to get up on the thing. The sign-up and sign-in sytem is on the arduous side. Then the signal went away for half an hour. Then it said the service was "temporarily unavailable". Not what I wanted for $29.95. |
| | I just tested the speed. 512Kbps down and 38Kbps up. Could be worse. |
Saving vs. Shaving the Net
| | I'm heading off to the Samtalerne and Reboot8 conferences in Copenhagen. Gonna be a long trip: I leave at 6am PDST and arrive at 7:30am local time in Denmark. |
| | The subject is hot on a mail list I participate in. One participant (a guy I like and respect a lot) wrote that we need to teach people what the Net really is. |
| | I agree. But it isn't easy. Many of us have tried, with little success. |
| | So here's what I wrote back: |
| | We've been trying for 11+ years to explain what the Net is. And it hasn't worked. Yet. |
| | The carriers don't understand us, except to the degree that they perceive our views -- and our lobbying -- as threats. |
| | The "consumers" don't understand either, generally. |
| | One woman I know says "I don't like the Web because I don't like mass media in general." Really. |
| | One man I know, when I tried to tell him the thinking behind Net Neutrality, said "I don't see how it's any different for the phone company than it is for a country. If you don't like what's flying over your territory, you have the right to shoot it down." Really. |
| | Try this (any of us): The next time you talk to a group of citizens not from our tech circle, ask "What is the Internet?" You'll be amazed and discouraged by their answers. |
| | For that matter, try the same thing with techies. The answers will still be all over the map. |
| | But ask anybody to define any utility or public infrastructure -- road system, phone system, cable system, railroad system, electrical system, sewage system, water system, air traffic control system -- and you'll get pretty much the same answers from everybody. |
| | They can define those things, and not the Net, because the Net is not a system. It's ... something else. |
| | Yet it's easy to *describe* as a system, because big public systems are easy to understand. And regulate. |
| | Which is why, with Net Neutrality lobbying, we've gone into the hive and whacked at the queen. And the king too. (One being telcos, the other being cablecos.) They hate each other royally, and covet rights to milk each others' larvae; but we've united them over this one. Net Neutrality is their common enemy. No surprise that they're even taking their fight to the airwaves (or the cablewaves). This is a political battle now, and they know how to fight it. To put it unkindly, we don't. Even if we have the money (which we do, if you count Google and Microsoft and Dell and Apple and Intel), we don't have the cunning or the courage or the steel-cold resolve to win this thing -- both in the hearts of citizens and in the halls of Congress and the state houses. |
| | Imagine if Apple gave its ad agency the job of telling the truth about the Carriers vs. the Internet. Think about the successes of iPods and Apple stores. They'd kick ass, wouldn't they? |
| | But do you think Apple would risk pissing off its Hollywood friends, who hate the Net even more than the carriers do? nfw. |
| | Yet there is cause for optimism. Countless citizens hate the phone and cable companies, and have hated them for the duration. With good reason. Even if people don't know all the gory details, they know enough. And they've had plenty of personal experience. |
| | If we want to play hardball against the carriers, we need to join these citizen journalists, and expose what they're doing at the state level. |
| | To do that, we should take our campaign to the local and regional newspapers, which don't like the cable and phone companies, either. Or the TV stations. This wouldn't be hard. Just gather your facts, call your local muckracking reporters, and turn them loose. |
| | If we don't want to play hardball, we need a whole 'nuther strategy. One that starts with defining the Net in terms other than carrier-owned pipes. (Which is the default right now -- even for many of us on the pro-Neutrality side of things.) |
| | My vote is to go for complete work-arounds in counties and municipalities, while trying to contain the damage in Congress and the state houses. |
| | It's more blunt than I might have written here, which is interesting to me. But I was in a hurry, as I am now. |
| | One last thought before I fly away. |
| | If Saving the Net is about "consumer access" to "content", we lose. If it's about preserving and growing a place nobody owns, everybody can use, and anybody can improve — literally the best marketplace that the world has ever known.... one that, if they understood it, would warm the hearts of every pro-market, pro-business Republican — we stand a chance. |
| | Can we get Apple, Dell, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Sun and the rest of our corporate friends to help us with this? Lobbying in Congress isn't enough. If Sascha is right, the carriers just moved the battle to the tubes. Our side needs to do the same. |
| | Or so it seems to me on 2 hours sleep. Wondering what the rest of ya'll think. |
| | Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet, Dave says. Okay, I'll leave you with that. |
| | [Later, in Denver...] A thought: Our advertising message, and our muckraking message, shouldn't be about Net Neutrality. Yes, there is a lot to like about that dog, and its advocates are right about the smear campaign against it, but it won't hunt. |
| | We need to sell the Net as a public marketplace, and not a private one: a marketplace that supports everybody and everything — including all the small and medium-sized businesses that can't happen as long as the carriers can't imagine they're doing anything more than freight forwarding that needs to get more specialized and billable. |
| | I'll think more about this beteen here and Dulles. Maybe I can make it a little clearer. |
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