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Thursday, March 15, 2007
A little help for carriers wanting to get past the scarcity game 
| | The first item tells us there is big value in services that run on the Net. The second item tells us there is leverage in abundant storage on which back-end busienss services can be hosted. |
| | So here's an idea for telcos and cablecos: leapfrog Amazon, Google and Microsoft by putting Big Storage as close to customers as possible, and then work partnering deals with local outsourced IT companies to provide back-end services to local individual and business customers. |
| | While it's true that the Net yearns to make everything zero distance from everything else, there are physical advantages to proximity. There is value in reducing latencies. There is value in providing local backup, local server capacity and local business services that require four, five and six nines of uptime and reliability. |
Whatever it is, it ain't neutral
| | To average Internet users, the battle over network neutrality must seem quite confusing, if not downright opaque. They must wonder: What's all the fuss about? After all, to this point, the Internet has been an unqualified success, adopted faster and used more creatively than almost any other technology in human history. |
| | In just a decade or so, the Internet has gone from use by a relative handful of technically savvy people to an essential part of the daily lives of hundreds of millions. Why impose additional regulations now? |
| | Indeed, that question should be at the heart of the debate. |
| | The supporters of net neutrality regulation believe that more rules are necessary. In their view, without greater regulation, service providers might parcel out bandwidth or services, creating a bifurcated world in which the wealthy enjoy first-class Internet access, while everyone else is left with slow connections and degraded content. |
| | That scenario, however, is a false paradigm. Such an all-or-nothing world doesn't exist today, nor will it exist in the future. Without additional regulation, service providers are likely to continue doing what they are doing. They will continue to offer a variety of broadband service plans at a variety of price points to suit every type of consumer. |
| | Depending on their requirements and preferences, some consumers will choose to pay more for premium service. Others will decide that they don't need such high service levels, so they will pay less. Inevitably, the market will adjust, just as it has in the past, to this varied population and its preference for a highly diverse mix of services, quality, bandwidth and price. This is the hallmark of a competitive market. |
| | While I agree with him that more rules may not be necessary, I disagree with the framing of his argument. The Net is not just a service, users don't just consume it, the market is hardly competitive, and many choices are overpriced or just not there. |
| | First, the Net is a vast set of connections on which countless services can be deployed. Telephony and television are just two. Because telephone and cable companies offer Internet connections as a secondary "service" on top of their primary businesses, customers tend to think of the Net in the same terms — something extra you get from our phoen or cable company. This is wrong. In terms of what-runs-on-what, the Internet will in the long run become a base-level utility, and we will come to regard telephony and television as two among many categories of data supported by that utility, just as we now regard Fedex delivery as a service that runs on roads, but does not control them. |
| | Second, the end-to-end nature of the Net puts everybody on it in a position to both produce and consume. It is not just about consumption. It is at least as much about production. In the U.S., telephone and cable companies have deployed Net services in asymmetrical and crippled forms from the beginning. While this crippling is easily rationalized (typical usage is asymmetrical, and turning off outbound mail and web service ports discourages spamming), it also serves to discourage countless small and home businesses. Worse, "business-grade service" (symmetrical with no port blockages) is so expensive in most cases that it is essentially prohibited. |
| | Third, most customers in the U.S. face a choice of one or two Internet carriers: their local phone and cable companies. Other providers can only sell services that run on those carriers. (Since the Brand X decision in 2005, phone and cable companies can keep any of these other providers off their lines if they want to.) In many areas (such as mine), only one company provides "high speed" Net access. There is no choice, and there is no competition. |
| | While the carriers talk a free market game, some of them are working behind the scenes to reduce choice for customers, and to restrict to themselves the exclusive right to carry the Internet into homes and businesses. It's not pretty. |
| | I'd love it if carriers would "continue to offer a variety of broadband service plans at a variety of price points to suit every type of consumer". But they don't. |
| | Neutrality may be an important Net virtue, but arguing for it distracts from three things that deserve more attention: 1) what the carriers are doing wrong; 2) what the carriers could be doing right (for their sake and everybody else's); and 3) the need to open the market to more and better offerings at the local level. |
At the 1000th inning it's still a tie
| | Many decades ago, Mad Magazine invented a game called "26-man squammish", or something like that. Every player had a different uniform, and fielded different equipment. One would have a catcher's mitt, another a lacrosse stick, another a football. It was meant to be silly, of course. But it's what came to mind when I saw the inaugural post in a blog devoted to launching a Blog Hall of Fame. |
| | To me, blogging is 60-million-player squammish, and we'll never finish our first game. Or at least I hope we don't. |
| | Seriously, Michael Schaefer asks, |
| | Is there a need to permanently recognize the efforts of those (like Dave Winer, David Sifry, Evan Williams, Meg Hourihan, Paul Bausch, Mena Trott, Ben Trott, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Rebecca Blood, Jay Rosen, Dan Gillmor, Rebbecca MacKinnon, Scott W. Johnson, Scott Watermasysk, Glenn Reynolds, Jim Romenesko, Doc Searls, Lawrence Lessig, Rebecca McKinnon, Charles Johnson, David Weinberger, Adam Curry, Shel Israel, Wil Wheaton, Xeni Jardin, and Markos Zuniga to name only a few) who have helped create, nurture and advance one of the greatest milestones of free thought and free speech in out collective history? |
| | ... and adds what do you think? |
| | I think everybody who does good and original work deserves credit and recognition. But a Hall of Fame? Blogging is orthogonal to fame. Halls of Fame are exclusive, and blogging is inclusive. |
| | Blogging may not be a pefect system; but can you name a better way for anybody to raise points and spread ideas? |
| | Blogging at its best is conversational. It's a public, persistent, syndicatable and searchable form of talking. Would we have a Hall of Fame for talkers? |
| | Also, as soon as you come up with a system for ranking bloggers (such as Technorati's), you'll get a chorus of people who accuse those with high rank of systematically exluding those in the "long tail" from "membership" in club that doesn't exist. Count on it. |
| | Here's a perfect way to illustrate how screwed up this can become: make the Hall of Fame a wiki. Open it, like blogging, to everybody. Watch what happens. |
| | You get the Wikipedia problem. Which is that growing, changing and popular subjects do not lend themselves to treatment as history. |
| | The entry on blogging, for example, has lots of interesting information; but it is open to dispute on many points and unavoidably incomplete. And it has become exclusive. Editing of this article by unregistered or newly registered users is currently disabled, it says. Also, many of the people listed in Michael's paragraph, starting with the highly deserving Dave Winer, aren't mentioned. |
| | So, while I appreciate Michael's interest in doing a Good Thing here, I don't think a Hall of Fame is a good idea. |
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