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Thursday, March 15, 2007
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 Thursday, March 15, 2007
started 3/15/2007; 9:51:16 AM - last post 3/16/2007; 8:56:28 AM
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Doc Searls - Thursday, March 15, 2007 
3/15/2007; 9:51:16 AM (reads: 6603, responses: 6)
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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. |
discuss
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mattblass - RE: it ain't neutral
3/15/2007; 5:35:09 PM (reads: 1283, responses: 4)
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I agree with your three points on what we should be focusing on in the net neutrality debate, but I think the first point (what are the carriers doing wrong) is exactly why we're talking specifically about net neutrality. They're trying to lock people out and make the internet into a walled garden. They want to be able to charge Google more money so that I can get it faster (or slower if Google doesn't pay) no matter if I pay for myself a slow connection or a fast connection. They want to keep generic VoIP solutions off their networks by blocking traffic coming from certain providers (probably because they want to provide their own solution and charge money for that). They only want to offer me a faster connection to a site if it's under their section of the network as they might be able to define their network by sites that pay for such access.
As you are, I'm all for tiered service speeds, so I can have my 1 terabit connection, and my parents can have their much slower connection for their emails. However, when I email my parents a link to a site that I think they can use (perhaps your blog), I expect them to have the same access even though they're using a different provider because they're connecting to the same net that I'm connecting to. To me, that's what net neutrality is about. Access less than speed ([edit addition]: although on the net, access can be as much about speed as access itself), but even in that case, if I pay for a faster connection and they pay for a slower connection, they don't inherently have a faster connection to that site because my provider throttles my connection to that site, or their provider throttles their connection up regards of what they're already paying. I think we're talking about net neutrality now because the telcos and others are forcing us to, but the words net neutrality could have stronger representation in certain circles.
discuss
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Doc Searls - RE: it ain't neutral
3/15/2007; 8:14:37 PM (reads: 1423, responses: 0)
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Actually, it was Ed Whiteacre of SBC (now AT&T) who said they wanted to be able to charge Google more, even though Google pays plenty -- "market rates", no doubt -- for the heavy load they place on whatever backbones they connect to. Privately, the carriers say that they really don't plan to create slow and fast backbone lanes, because it would be too big a pain in the butt. However they do say that the threat of Net Neutrality restricts investment. I think that's pure FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt), and a self-fulfilling prophesy. Wall Street is certainly good right now at punishing the most aggressive deployer of fiber (Verizon) while rewarding AT&T, which has backed off on fiber plans.
And fiber is what we need most, before we unwire everything with wireless everywhere.
Did I say I was for tiered service speeds? In my ideal world, which is achievable, we would all have more capacity than we could use. That's why fiber is so important. And why there is no good analogy for what happens when you deploy fiber to as many locations as possible.
But as the carriers know, you can play scarcity games with the Net, but the Net itself doesn't play scarcity games. At least not like the carriers do. Because the Net is just a way to connect anything with anything. What matters most is connection, not capacity.
Still, we're used to thinking in terms of capacity, and capacity is a red herring. Twelve years ago Dave Winer said "Remember the mantra -- repeat after me -- market share is a head trip, market share is a head trip, market share is a head trip, market share is a head trip, market share is a head trip, market share is a head trip. Market share is a head trip. Uh huh." Same goes for "broadband", "capacity" and "speed". Those aren't what count most. Wht counts most is connectivity. What counts second is abundance -- including ubiquity. Port blockages and tiered plans may make sense in a carrier-defined world, but there are better ways to define the world, to deploy the Net and to leverage the abundance of customer relationships that the carriers still have. In the long run they will find better ways to make money than by playing the same scarcity game that Ma Bell invented more than a century ago.
Still, we can no more imagine those non-scarcity businesses than we could imagine the Internet back when the only way we could communicate and collaborate was through AOL, Compuserve, The Well and Prodigy. Nothing wrong with any of those; but they weren't the Net.
Net Neutrality is a huge distraction and energy-suck. There is huge fear, distrust and non-communication between the forces of Neutrality and the carriers fighting it. We are having political arguments in places where technical ones have barely started, much less finished.
Anyway, I just posted this. See what you think.
discuss
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Doc Searls - RE: it ain't neutral
3/15/2007; 8:14:57 PM (reads: 1890, responses: 2)
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Actually, it was Ed Whiteacre of SBC (now AT&T) who said they wanted to be able to charge Google more, even though Google pays plenty -- "market rates", no doubt -- for the heavy load they place on whatever backbones they connect to. Privately, the carriers say that they really don't plan to create slow and fast backbone lanes, because it would be too big a pain in the butt. However they do say that the threat of Net Neutrality restricts investment. I think that's pure FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt), and a self-fulfilling prophesy. Wall Street is certainly good right now at punishing the most aggressive deployer of fiber (Verizon) while rewarding AT&T, which has backed off on fiber plans.
And fiber is what we need most, before we unwire everything with wireless everywhere.
Did I say I was for tiered service speeds? In my ideal world, which is achievable, we would all have more capacity than we could use. That's why fiber is so important. And why there is no good analogy for what happens when you deploy fiber to as many locations as possible.
But as the carriers know, you can play scarcity games with the Net, but the Net itself doesn't play scarcity games. At least not like the carriers do. Because the Net is just a way to connect anything with anything. What matters most is connection, not capacity.
Still, we're used to thinking in terms of capacity, and capacity is a red herring. Twelve years ago Dave Winer said "Remember the mantra -- repeat after me -- market share is a head trip, market share is a head trip, market share is a head trip, market share is a head trip, market share is a head trip, market share is a head trip. Market share is a head trip. Uh huh." Same goes for "broadband", "capacity" and "speed". Those aren't what count most. Wht counts most is connectivity. What counts second is abundance -- including ubiquity. Port blockages and tiered plans may make sense in a carrier-defined world, but there are better ways to define the world, to deploy the Net and to leverage the abundance of customer relationships that the carriers still have. In the long run they will find better ways to make money than by playing the same scarcity game that Ma Bell invented more than a century ago.
Still, we can no more imagine those non-scarcity businesses than we could imagine the Internet back when the only way we could communicate and collaborate was through AOL, Compuserve, The Well and Prodigy. Nothing wrong with any of those; but they weren't the Net.
Net Neutrality is a huge distraction and energy-suck. There is huge fear, distrust and non-communication between the forces of Neutrality and the carriers fighting it. We are having political arguments in places where technical ones have barely started, much less finished.
Anyway, I just posted this. See what you think.
discuss
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mattblass - RE: it ain't neutral
3/15/2007; 11:23:45 PM (reads: 2060, responses: 0)
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Connection is most important, but capacity is partly what drives connection. As certain areas have abundant or excess capacity, your business can no longer be one of only providing more capacity as people won't pay for it, or at least as much as they used to. At that point capacity is just a commodity that's only differentiated by price (which might be 0 or free), so you either supply capacity to new or under serviced markets, which increases the number of connections, or you turn the capacity business into a cash cow and open new revenue streams on top if that, and other companies finish the job of servicing capacity needs. That's why I like your post on carrier S3s, but not as a counter argument for net neutrality.
Ideally, other services like S3s or something else is where telcos and cablecos should be looking, but currently, they see their perfect world in light of the trifecta (TV, phone, and lastly internet). They see themselves fundamentally as capacity providers, and changing that mindset is ultimately what matters. They must see capacity as a secondary product to something they've connected to that capacity like an S3 service. It's like Google's business as an advertiser where search (and YouTube) is secondary to the actual product, but they still have to compete in the search business (which they give away for free) as it drives their advertising business (which not ever search user clicks). In contrary to what you thought, that's the comparison or analogy we have.
I don't think we should give up or switch away from the net neutrality fight in hopes of steering the carriers into new business models, though. For one, new competition is being driven away (sharing line laws), and two, current companies don't appear interested in servicing the rest of the market (and regulators like the FCC have flawed measurements that say the market is fully served). New revenue streams are the carrots we show carriers, but if that doesn't work, then the public has the stick of net neutrality, written in law possibly, to follow through.
I see this like Fair Use and the content industry. Fair Use is a good and valuable principle that's partly been written into law, but after decades of being out of sight and mind, corporations have, or are rewriting what that means in the minds of the public and also in the minds of politicians (and in turn the law). There's a struggle that won't naturally be fixed by the market as failures in the market make it appear more profitable to harm consumers and lock everything up.
Interesting link: Study by University of Florida links net neutrality to increased investment in architecture: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070311-study-net-neutrality-law-would-spur-service-improvements.html
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Jonathan Peterson - RE: it ain't neutral
3/16/2007; 7:21:32 AM (reads: 1888, responses: 0)
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When I was at BellSouth we did a bunch of product concept development predicated on sticking lots of cheap, linux raid storage devices in the wire center right beside the dslam to keep bandwidth off the last mile. Caching based on popularity is easy as is the calculation of local storage cost vs. data transfer costs.
Add on products like personal websites, desktop backup, video/music products are all no-brainers. How much would it have been worth to youtube to make bandwidth fees for all BellSouth customers? Or to make video quality for BellSouth broadcast quality?
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Jonathan Peterson - Re: Thursday, March 15, 2007
3/16/2007; 8:56:28 AM (reads: 1203, responses: 0)
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Honey? It's the telephone hall of fame. Apparently you've been nominated for inclusion...
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