Writings and Musings

Today's telecommunications industry exists in defiance of all we've learned about "information" in the last 100 years.

In 1897 the British Copyright office warned us about the danger of creating scarcity by taking our abundance and converting it to private property. In 1949 Claude Shannon gave us a science of "Information" that helped us understand the distinction between bits and what we do with them.

The generativity of today's Internet demonstrates the power of the idea.

But we continue to act as if the Internet were a railroad with finite capacity and we must pay others to do our networking for us -- even if that creates a fundamental conflict of interest. We are forced to become dependent upon broadband. The Internet grew rapidly in the US because we could use the phone network as a transport without paying a premium to stay online. Riding the broadband railroad puts an end to that and leaves us firmly dependent upon companies that exist only in the fictional world of the Regulatorium.

The basic problem is that service-based regulator system forces the carriers to take advantage of their control to finance their infrastructure. This is true whether we have a traditional phone company or a municipal system (a "muni-bell").

A lot more -- we can demand the ability to create our own solutions instead of petitioning a service provider.

It's another lesson in the difference between the world of telecom and its services and the world of the Internet with us, the users, in control.

What struck me most about the workshop is the lack of a crisp insight. There was a lot of talk about how complex the issues are and lots of fascination with the details of the current Internet. But there was a stunning failure to see though the complexity.

We can argue all we want about neutrality or we can recognize that bits are inherently neutral and reframe policy in terms of basic connectivity. Basic connectivity means we can create our own solutions rather than being required to buy services from a provider. We would not need to petition the FCC nor the FTC for neutrality.

But transport is simple infrastructure.

The cellular companies are so confident that they are willing to make my case for me. They are warning each other about the danger of abundance and lay out their strategy for assuring scarcity.

The idea of a Wi-Fi camera that automatically send your data to a web set where you view the pictures sounds wonderful. But there's something very wrong -- you don't really own those pictures. You have to pay and they will deign to mail you a CD if you want and can wait. And the price increases with use!

Something is very wrong -- once more we have an old business that is used to exerting control and getting revenue for each transaction. Just like the carriers, just like Tellywood.

We are still confusing fast broadband with the Internet and simply replacing the television isn't that exciting but we'll get past that.

Universal connectivity is far more important than speed just as universal service was an important idea (even with a bad implementation) in the early days of telephony. We need to shift our emphasis to connectivity.

The billions spent on redundant infrastructure is more than sufficient to provide 24x7 connectivity to everyone with or without a wire.

The issues are coming to a head. The Regulatorium is becoming more obviously dysfunction and as ideas like municipal Wi-Fi become accepted the carriers are going to find their "story" is no longer accepted.

The result is a network that is not sufficiently dynamic and subject to the whims of those who administer the network. The P2P community (Skype is an example) works around these restrictions. Such approaches will become the norm as we make it easy to develop ad-hoc communities that do not depend on "The Internet" but can use any paths available.

Understanding evolution is really about how systems change. Biological evolution is just a special case. By teaching evolution is an arbitrary fact in biology class we trade insight for memorization.

We cannot afford a retreat into comforting non-explanations. It leads us to make public policy blunders that leave us all poorer.

One might justify the policy if it preserves jobs and meets other needs but the tele/com industry is costing us jobs and frustrating the creation of new industries that can create new jobs and value.

Connectivity is another utility like garbage collection, electricity, public roads etc. The value comes from the availability of connectivity but policies that require capturing the value of each service don’t permit innovation because nascent services typically don't seem valuable at first.

Telephony, in this case cellular telephony, is just an application. What is really important is the connectivity afforded by their devices and the ability to use technology as our agent.

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The majority in Congress doesn't reflect a majority of the people -- it's more of an artifact of an all-or-nothing electoral process.

Not only is it difficult to do things for ourselves -- we must pay a high price and be thankful for the little we are allowed to do.

The real problem is that all it takes to steal an "identity" is persons name phone number and social security number and maybe a tidbit or two. And once you lose your "identity" why is it so hard to reestablish relationships?

Of course this is not you identity, just the persona that the is used by banks and others in lieu of the real "you".

As long we treat biological evolution as apart from evolution in other systems we will find ourselves asking people to memorize it as an arbitrary "fact" rather than understand it in context.

The same processes apply marketplaces, social systems and the Internet.

Have we reached a time where one point of view has a decisive majority? Most worrisome is that this is not a benign majority but one that is threatened by others' ideas.