Because Bob Pepper is sick, Kevin is asking the FCC people in the audience to form a panel. They gamely do.

Amy Wohl asks what they think about Reed Hundt’s idea of moving money from over-the-air digital tuners to a project that provides broadband to everyone. The panelists are being evasive and then negative. “I don’t know that people need that much bandwidth today,” one says. I ask how much bandwidth people need. He points to a report that said we need to look at how much we need for today’s apps and for tomorrow’s. We have enough for today’s, he says.

Cory asks why they’ve taken on the role of legislators and ignored 750,000 messages opposing the media conglomeration decision. FCC person says that the FCC is appointed by elected officials and that now it’s easier than ever to communicate with the FCC. [Accessible but not responsive.] Cory says that Congress is sending the FCC issues that they don’t want to touch. Thus, the FCC needs to respond like representatives. FCC replies that it’s very hard for an administrative agency to be contacted by the public that expects to have an impact on the complex issues that are before the agency. Traditional legislative lobbying tactics are being addressed to a policy agency set up to dive into a nuclear toxic waste area. It’s a “data point” that 750,000 Americans feels one way, but at the end of the day it’s more important to work with someone with expertise working out a compromise.

What about the broadcast flag? FCC says the broadcast industry doesn’t want to move into the digital age because they don’t want their stuff copied. The rule is pending. The transition to digital TV is an area of high interest to Chairman Powell.

Kenn Coukier asks about open spectrum. What is the process for going forward to make a decision about spectrum? Kevin explains that the FCC has a task force but Bush just announced his own. The FCC report covered issues around commercial and public safety. It covered interference protection, access protection. They came up with bold suggestions that they are implementing. The report suggests opening up some spectrum and creating underlays. They also suggested an easement by which software-defined radios could sense and use unused bandwidth. Now they’re in the implementation phase. More studies are going on about cognitive radio, interference temperature…The president’s commission parallels this.

An audience member asks how changes in the industry and market are handled when they cross organizational boundaries. How can you make the regulatory landscape more consistent across wireless, wireline, etc.? The FCC guy says that the question is right and it’s really hard. “The regulation is in terms of the service seen by the end user, not by the technology.” The Europeans have implemented a truly tech-neutral policy.

The FCC guy now tells us that they don’t hear enough from the likes of us to help understand what’s possible now. (My shouting out, “So, let’s set up a meeting” didn’t go over real well.) We don’t hear nearly enough from ISPs, etc. I’m a populist, he says, and wants to get the broadest public input. We need to be listening to those 750,000 voices. Another guy says that the FCC can be cloistered so it’s important for them to conferences like this. Another one says, helpfully, that they can tell us how we can get ourselves invited in while following the government regs.

Cory, in the Joi Ito IRC, says that it’s a bad thing that an expert commission is getting thrown issues too hot for the legislative branch to handle.

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Paddy Holahan of NewBay thinks that camera phones will change everything. As the data from voice declines, the telcos are looking for data apps to fill the pipes and the coffers.

Raju Gulabani of Telesym focuses on delivering voice over wifi.

Louis Holder of Vonage says that they offer phone service over a broadband connection. [Unfortunately, it’s not available in Boston, unless you’re willing to get a new phone number. I checked a couple of months ago.] They have about 33,000 customers. You get unlimited calling for $40/month, including long distance. Now they’re adding services.

David Isenberg of David Isenberg asks which we would choose if forced, telephone or email. Most of us in the audience would give up our email instead of our phone. In fact, these days we set up long phone calls through IM or email. The era of voice is over. SIP will do for communications what HTML did for documents. And don’t forget to keep the network Stupid!

Raju agrees that voice is undergoing a transition and that the idea of charging more for distance is going away. But we’re going to have more phones and more talk than ever before. But don’t underestimate the power of a disruptive business model.

The audience argues about whether voice is dead, or exactly how dead it is. More minutes. Fewer lines to homes. David clarifies: The era of voice-only is dead.

Arnold Kling asks if the last mile has to be wireless. General agreement on the panel.

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Joi Ito’s IRC channel is encouraging the writing of limericks. Here’s another:

There once was a conference with voice
where the dominant speakers were the boice.

They nattered and boasted
and insulted and roasted
and turned sociability into noice.

This does not refer to the conference I’m at.

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Michael O’Connor Clarke has had a poem burst fully formed from his forehead. Make sure you get to the punchline.

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There’s a list of people blogging the SuperNova conference here.

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[I missed the beginning due to an interesting hallway conversation with an FCC guy.]

Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge was finishing up when I came in. She was asking why the FCC keeps holding back policy to protect the 10% of Americans who don’t have cable. Bruce Mehlman of the US Dept. of Commerce says that the broadcast flag is a reasonable solution to the problem of copyright violation. And he likes technology that keeps digital recorders from working in theaters.

Blair Levin of Legg Mason likes all that stuff too because Wall Street would like it.

Bruce says that the tech community needs to speak in one voice. He also refers to the 750,000 messages to the FCC as “spam.” [Why should we have one voice?]

Q&A

Arnold Kling says that he’d rather subsidize content producers directly than pay an indirect tax that will affect behavior.

Cory tells Bruce that he’s proud of file sharers because we’ve made accessible the 80% of creative works that are no longer published but have been locked away by copyright. Where in history have we had a successful regime in criminalizing a sixth of the population for a federal crime that you say should be investigated by the FBI. Bruce replies that authors expect and deserve to be paid for their labors. Cory says that DRM won’t put a nickel into the pockets of an artist because 90% of people with contracts make less than $600. Compulsory licenses like the one we did for Internet radio puts money into the hands of artists.

Someone follows up: Why should I respect the rights of copyright holders when they don’t respect our rights by asking that copyright be expanded into perpetuity. Bruce replies that this is the law that Congress passed. Compulsory licenses are worth discussing. It’s good to protect IP; the question is (Bruce says) whether the protections undo the point of protecting IP in the first place. [By gum he’s got it!] If there were a reasonable marketplace, Bruce says, file sharing wouldn’t be an issue.

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Simon is Chief Technology Evangelist at Sun. He’s talking about why social software is taking off now since it consists mainly of technology. Answer: the audience has changed, not the technology. It’s taken ten years for “The network is the computer”® to become the pervasive reality. It’s not enough to be massively connected. It’s also go to be based on shared, open, royalty-free and loosely standards.

We shouldn’t worry about the network’s center or edges. Instead, worry about whether there will be a digital ID scheme that anyone will use. [This is addressed to the presentation I just gave.]

Sun believes that innovation happens elsewhere because you most smart people don’t work for you. Open Source is beta for commercial software. [See correction below.] Ultimately, what matters about OS is that the license and freeness enables a community to come together to define the software for users. We should look past “free” and look into the community-based software model. There’s a big change there in how we develop software and how we own things.

A Sun experiment called MadHatter is going to see if community-based development can build enterprise-class software.

Weblogs have come into existence without working out formats and standards ahead of time. Echo is the beta test for the development of standards in a massively connected world. Now we can get everyone in the room at the same time.

Simon doesn’t worry much about digital ID. When Scott said “You have no privacy. Get over it.” he meant that we’ve given up so much privacy in the real world, why are we worrying about this next step on the Web. But we should worry about the unintended consequences of digital ID.

Q (Dan Gillmor): What are the unitended consequences of weblogging?

A: I know everything bad Dave Winer has ever said about anyone.

Q (Donald Weightman): How are blogs different from bulletin boards, etc.?

A: Only because they’re still developing.

Q (Geoff Cohen): What’s the John the Baptist out there, announcing the next big thing?

A: We haven’t begun to see what will happen when mobility and computing are blended together.

In the comments section, Simon corrects my paraphrasing:

I think actually I said that open source is the late beta test (release candidate?) of a methodology for software development in a massively connected world, and that necho is an early alpha test for standards development in a massively connected world…

Thanks, Simon.

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I just gave a talk on why digital ID makes me nervous. It wasn’t an argument against it, just an attempt to figure out why my stomach gets upset every time someone talks about it.

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Two companies in the identity space and two on security. Kevin Werbach Himself is moderating.

Jim Kollegger, CEO of BBX Technologies. Security is getting dicier. BBX locks down servers, rolls back to the previous version, and puts the invading executable up against a wall with a blindfold around its eyes and its pants down at its knees. [This is my way of putting it.]

Marc Hedlund of Sana Security. There are security companies that are doing exceptionally well because the threats are so real. His company uses biological models to improve security. [My personal favorite: Playing dead. But that’s just because I have a thing about being sniffed by wild animals.]

Joe Hildebrand, chief architect of Jabber. “When you talk about knowledge workers, all you have is your reputation.” But reputation is extremely complex, what with people moving around and all. The edges of the network matter. You have to make decisions out there. But reaching them can be a challenge.

Nikolaj Nyholm of Ascio Technologies. He begins by apologizing on behalf of the identity industry for working on the wrong problems. He’s unhappy with federated ID systems because they create a layer on top of the Stupid Network. It’d be like asking mail servers to federate. Instead, I need an identifier and a way to authenticate that identifier.

Q (Amy Wohl): We have multiple identities. And we need to solve the problem of needing separate passwords for every account.

A: (Joe) We need to disambiguate “identity.” All we need is identifying information for the different types of transactions.

A: (Nikolaj) We need to authenticate that you have possession of a particular identifier, just as you type in a PIN when you use your ATM card, enabling your bank to authenticate that it’s you using your card. That’s missing on the net.

Q: What will drive people to want this stuff?

A (Kevin): Spam.

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Dennis McGinn is a retired vice admiral in the US Navy.

He says we built a Coalition Wide Area Network in the PAcific Rim. It was built with commercial, off the shelf software. Best of all, the Navy moved to rapid prototyping, supplying 60-70% of needs fast, enabling “self-organizing information exchangers” to coordinate themselves. “It broke the old mold of centralized planning and centralized execution.” There was little training provided. “Pretty messy.” But it worked. It was flexible and agile in a world that is chaotic. “If the war’s gonna start in a chatroom, please make sure I’m in that chat room.”

Random points:

In the Network-Centric Innovation Center, people were charged with using existing technology but innovating in organization and tactics.

The military is facing the same problems as the corporate world: Security of information. Need bandwidth on demand.

Common Relevant Operational Picture: People need the same picture/database. For example, if there’s an underwater reef, it should show up in the maps everyone in the fleet uses.

“It’s all about standards. But not about standardization.”

In the Iraqi War, casualties were proportionally lower than ever before, but the proportion of friendly fire casualties was higher, clearly something that better info could help.

Q: COTS won’t do it. Need GOTS (government-generic off the shelf) products because COTS isn’t secure enough.

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