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July 30, 2007
Elizabeth Edwards talked about Net Neutality, among many other things, at Blogher.
Jeez, do we need her in the White House!
Jennifer Pozner’s post
Video
John Edwards on the 700mH auction
JE YouTube on Net Neutrality
Me on E.E. and the Net
[Tags: elizabeth_edwards fcc net_neutrality john_edwards politics blogher ]
Susan Crawford has an excellent analysis of Google’s teaming up with Sprint. In sum, Sprint is pushing for WiMax, and Google seems to be hedging its bets on the 700mH spectrum auction which it is very likely about to lose. Susan considers why Google isn’t pushing for the same degree of openness with Sprint as it is for the Internet 700. [Tags: susan_crawford google sprint wimax fcc ]
July 24, 2007
In 2008, Cliff Richard’s first hit, “Move It!,” will come out of copyright because the British government just refused to extend the term of copyright for sound recordings from 50 years to 70 years after the artist dies.
Richard’s is up in arms about this. Instead, lets help Cliff Richard celebrate the ultimate success of his work: Fifty years later, it’s touched enough people that it matters that it’s moving into the public domain.
Congratulations, Cliff! You should be very proud that you have the opportunity to see something you made become something all culture now can rely on! [Tags: copyright copyleft cliff_richard ]
According to New Scientist, Apple’s patented a DRM system that would prevent you from charging your device with anything except a licensed charger. The charger would be locked to your device. Yes, that’d keep a thief from charging your stolen laptop, but it would also keep you from plugging your gasping laptop into a friend’s power supply, and would give Apple yet more control over the aftermarket for its products. Because if there’s one thing users are demanding, it’s that Apple have yet more control over its products. (See Dan Lockton’s post. Thanks to Hanan for the link.) [Tags: drm apple]
July 7, 2007
In response to my posting about the desirability of structurally separating businesses that connect us to the Internet from businesses that provide content and services over the Internet, Esme Vos, of MuniWireless.com, in an email reports some good news from Europe:
Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Telecommunications, has already said that the Commission will seek structural separation in the next EU round of telecom regulations. In addition, the Commission sued the German government for allowing Deutsche Telekom to exclude competitors from its new fiber optic networks. The German government believes DT deserves a regulatory “holiday” to allow it to recoup its investments in fiber.
[Tags: structural+separation delamination esme+vos ]
July 6, 2007
I’ve posted a long-ish call for structurally separating the businesses that provide us with connectivity and those that provide us with services and content that uses that connectivity. It’s called “Delaminate Now!.”
It’s based on David Isenberg’s Making Network Neutrality Sustainable, which argues that the only way to get an enforceable Network Neutrality policy is to restructure the industry itself. I also highly recommend Susan Crawford’s Moving Slowly in the Fast Lane. [Tags: telecom david+isenberg susan+crawford net+neutrality ]
June 27, 2007
When talking with Brad Templeton at Supernova, he put perfectly the misgivings about even the best of the digital ID systems that I’ve been trying to express for years. In The Paradox of Identity Management, Brad says, “If you make something easy to do, it will be done more often.” Thus:
The easier it is to give somebody ID information, the more often it will be done. And the easier it is to give ID information, the more palatable it is to ask for, or demand it.
Because it’s easier, more merchants will ask it of us. We will thus give away more and more personal information.
Brad goes on to connect this with fears about how this technology might be (= will be) used by tyrannies.
I continue to believe that we are best off addressing the identity problems locally, at the edges, rather than by putting in place a new layer or infrastructure. Let sites continue to design their own solutions to their own problems. If the credit card companies need stronger authentication, then let them handle it. If you want single sign-in, then get yourself a password manager like RoboForm. There are just too many unintended consequences of monkeying with something as basic as identity. And we should be especially concerned that the demand for identity management is coming mainly top down, not bottom up.
Doc responds to Brad. Doc hopes that VRM (vendor relationship management) can overcome the “market power asymmetries” that are at the heart of Brad’s (and my) concerns. Doc writes:
In a VRM system, IDM (identity management) provides (perhaps even defaults) to the choice not to provide data the customer would rather keep private, including names, addresses and every other piece of information not required to do business at hand. And let’s face it, in many (if not most) retail transactions there is no reason to give the vendor anything more than our money.
First, I’m surprised that defaulting to keeping info private merits only a “perhaps even.” I think this may have been a slip o’ the pen on Doc’s part.
Even so, Doc is ignoring the existing asymmetry. If Amazon is your favorite place to buy books, if Amazon requires more info than you think you want to give, you may be willing to pay the price. If it asks for personal info in order to “improve your shopping experience,” you may give it even if you don’t see its relevance. And if every bookstore on the Web decides it wants to ask for more info than it did before, you will start to take that as the norm. I believe that’s a predictable result — as per Brad’s paradox — of making it easy to give out personal information.
In fact, it seems to be a requirement for VRM to succeed. As Doc concludes: “VRM cannot succeed unless it overcomes Brad’s Paradox. If it makes that jump, it will bring IDM systems along for the ride.” But, since VRM is all about letting vendors know more about your preferences and intentions, it really doesn’t overcome the paradox. It depends on making it easier to give out personal info so that it can be done more often.
Doc makes the case for the benefits of keeping vendors well-informed. It would mean, for example, that we aren’t subjected to pointless, annoying ads for stuff we wouldn’t want anyway. And I may well be willing to trade my biography for that. (Of course, I would also want to be able to control how much sharing a merchant does of the information I’ve entrusted with it.)
I am more concerned about the effect of Brad’s paradox on social and political forums where anonymity is currently, and thankfully, the default.
Here‘s the much less elegant and clear way I put it just about a year ago when arguing for keeping anonymity as the default:
[Tags: anonymity digital_id brad_templeton doc_searls vrm digital_rights ]My fear is that we are in the process of building a new platform for identity in order to address some specific problems. We will create a system that, like packaged software, has defaults built in. The most important defaults in this case will not be the ones explicitly built into the system by the software designers. The most important defaults will be set by the contingencies of an economic marketplace that does not particularly value anonymity, privacy, dissent, social role playing, the exploration of what one is ashamed of, and the pure delight of wearing masks in public. Economics will drive the social norms away from the social values emerging. That is my fear.
…
I have confidence that the people designing these systems are going to create the right software defaults. The people I know firsthand in this are privacy fanatics and insistent that individuals be in control of their data. This is a huge and welcome shift from where digital ID was headed just a few years ago. We all ought to sigh in relief that these folks are on the job.
But, once these systems are in place, vendors of every sort will of course require strong ID from us. If I want to buy from, say, Amazon, they are likely to require me to register with some ID system and authenticate myself to them…far more strongly and securely than I do when I pay with a credit card in my local bookstore. Of course, I don’t have to shop at Amazon. But why won’t B&N make the same demand? And Powells? And then will come the blogs that demand I join an ID system in order to leave a comment. How long before I say, “Oh, to hell with it,” and give in? And then I’ve flipped my default. Rather than being relatively anonymous, I will assume I’m relatively identified.
Harold Feld, who knows more about this in his little finger than 100 of the smartest little fingers you care to pile up, thinks AT&T’s “tepid expression of possible interest in a Frontline ‘E Block’ license” is big news, “on par with support from Senator John Kerry and Presidential candidate John Edwards.” Says Harold:
That looks pretty tame, until one considers the speaker and the context. In spectrum lobbying terms, this is roughly the equivalent of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad saying that, under the right circumstances, he would accept an invitation to visit Israel and meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Frontline is bidding for some of the 700mH spectrum so it can act as a wholesaler, opening up the band to whatever businesses want to participate. This is a gazillion times preferable to selling it all to the incumbents who will continue to freeze out competitors and thus freeze out all innovations that are not theirs and that do not support their particular business model. AT&T now says it’d consider bidding for a spread of spectrum even if it were required to act as a wholesaler and open it up to all comers.
Harold speculates that AT&T sees this as a way of getting the national coverage it wants. It would rather have coverage at the price of openness than cede it to cable.
David Isenberg has created a transcript of the snippet available of John Kneuer — Bush policy guy — at Supernova. The bit David had available started immediately after I asked him the first question. Since he posted it, the entire video has gone up on the Supernova site.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post has run a scary op-ed opposing open access from two guys who have taken money from the the telecom trade association. I know two industry insiders who are going to be receiving some very expensive single malt whiskey from some powerful friends! [Tags: 700mh telecom net_neutrality john_kneuer supernova2007 supernova harold_feld at&t david_isenberg wapo]
June 26, 2007
Mark Gibbs recounts yet another experience in which the presence of DRM would have deterred any normal, sane person from buying digital content. (Fortunately, Mark is either not normal or not sane, so he persevered.) [Tags: mark_gibbs drm cmopyright copyleft ]
June 21, 2007
John M.R. Kneuer Acting Assistant Secretary Communications and Information gives a talk. He begins by talking about the value of the 700mH spectrum. It’s becoming available as “leapfrog” technologies are becoming available, he says. “What we really have is an opportunity for a game-changing opportunity against the first movers and incumbents.” [I think I garbled that, but so did he.]
“Net neutrality sounds very open, but it rapidly comes down to the government setting rate terms and rules for access.” “I firmly believe that market forces are going to provide an open network much much better than what we would get” through regulation. He refers to our current “great success.”
I ask the first question. I say something like: The great success has us at #19 in broadband access because there is no open market. I wonder what great innovation is going to come from the incumbents. We have proof that it doesn’t work because we’ve been trying it for about a decade [depending on how you count]. He says we’re asking for the government to set rates. I ask if anyone in this audience is asking for that.
Doc points out that wifi has succeeded because the spectrum was left open, not auctioned.
David Isenberg says that wifi wasn’t auctioned, and isn’t owned by a carrier, yet most people in this room agree that wifi is the most innovative sector in the entire spectrum. Kneuer agrees. David says there’s no business model, no carrier, and no market.
Kneuer: Wifi is local access to get to an underlying access. It doesn’t lend itself to building out broad networks.
David I: Same for last mile for fiber, DSL…these aren’t networks either. So they should be treated the same way…
K: They are nodes of a DSL network, etc. If I want to build out a 5mH wifi cloud, you won’t be able to scale it. Wifi’s authoriziation was for local area networks. It does not lend itself to the competing interests that need to be resolved in an efficient way. When you have lots of people trying to enter a commercial space and the gov’t is the bottleneck, the best way to handle it is in a transparent way by letting people bid for it.
KC Claffy from CAIDA kicks butt explaining how much bogus information there is — stats supporting the interests of the incumbents, based on bad research, without review or transparency. Fantastic presentation, but too fast for me to blog.
Now a panel on “Does the Internet need an upgrade?”
The first guy (I can’t tell who is who) says the Internet is us. The applications we’re using and the way we’re using them is radically changing. E.g., video vs. text. What we’re using it for now is different from what we originally designed it. And it will continue to change. The Net does need to expand and grow, but it’s up to each of us to determine how we’re going to effect that upgrade because we are the Internet.
Next guy says that when the End-to-End principle was created, every end point was trusted. Now we violate it all the time. So, we do need to look at the architecture, he says, if only to raise our collective consciousness. How do we get the balance right.
Van Jacobson from Cisco says the network has done pretty well. He says we’ve made only three architectural changes, yet it’s scaled incredibly. That’s because we’ve kept the network simple and moved the innovation to the edge. We solve the problems on the edges. We can do secure email by using encrypted messages. SSL, on the other hand, signs the envelope, not the message, which doesn’t guarantee very much,
David Isenberg agrees with 95% of what Van has said, but challenges his analogy. David says that all four panelists respect the end-to-end principle. The Internet grows, enables innovation, runs on any system, because of end-to-end. David wants to know why Van thinks security violates end-to-end.
Van says that SSL puts someone in the middle securing the envelopes, which violates end-to-end.
Van describes an attack where the man in the middle was fraudulent.
Isenberg: What’s the cost of fixing these genuine security issues? Everyone in this room knows there are security issues, but we still use the Internet. There are 40,000 traffic fatalities per year, but we treat it as a network externality. We still get into our little packets and get on our end-to-end highways…
Van: Vint Cerf said the middle can be arbitrarily untrustworthy, but we’ll fix it up on the ends. If the ends reject packets that aren’t answers to questions they asked, then the senders will learn to put enough in to let the recipients trust the packets. But that’s not our security model. Our security model is “Let’s make the center more secure.” That won’t work.
Isenberg: The incumbents would certainly say that the Net needs an upgrade because their business models are disrupted by the Internet. We need to beware their calls.
Q: Van, what about PKI?
A: It’s a disaster. It makes high-value targets.
Q: How do you keep the Net moving as people stream, etc.?
A: (Van) I started a company called PacketDesign a while ago that looked at the sort of data KC wants to see. We looked at the router downstream of the NBC Olympics coverage. It had 5,000 copies of the same data because the computer doesn’t know what’s in the packets. If we had a different model that saw the content propagating…As far as avoiding stutter goes, if you take every phone in the world and call up everyone in the world, it’d take 3TB, while a single fiber can carry 30TB. There’s room. There’s no incremental cost in adding more bandwidth. The incumbents act as if bandwidth is expensive as it was in the previous century.
[Tags: supernova2007 supernova07 commerce end-to-end net_neutrality ]
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