The Internet Distinction

(Original video on Marc’s blog)

Marc Fennell of Hungry Beast gets a lot right here.  This video features Barbara van Schewick, Douglas Rushkoff and John Perry Barlow. The key to it is where he starts: with Barbara van Schewick explaining “Network Neutrality’s” origin in the Internet’s design as a general purpose platform for end user innovation. A proper discussion of the nature of the issue can be laid out if we start there — because that characteristic is what’s at stake in all the discussions of such concerns as “next generation networks,” “quality of service,” “specialized services” or “reasonable network management.”

(from Internet Society-New York)

INET NY announced for June 14 2011

Vint Cerf, Tim Berners Lee, Larry Strickling to speak

The Internet Society (ISOC) will present an INET Regional Conference on June 14 2011 at the Sentry Center in NYC. The theme is “It’s Your Call. What Kind of Internet Do You Want?“ The distinguished lineup of speakers will include ‘Father of the Internet’ Vint Cerf, World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information at the U.S. Department of Commerce Lawrence Strickling.

What: INET New York
When: Tuesday June 14, 2011: 9am-5.30pm EDT
Where: Sentry Center, 730 Third Avenue, NY NY 10017
Who: ISOC Members $25, Others $50
Register: http://isoc.org/nyinet
Agenda: http://bit.ly/inetnyagenda
Hashtag: #inetny
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=145503388852445
Site: http://www.isoc.org/nyinet

With almost two billion people online, the Internet is a catalyst for boundless creativity and growth. But the decisions we make in the coming months and years will determine whether it remains a global platform for innovation and expression for people everywhere. Join us on June 14 as we set the agenda for the future of an open Internet. We’ll identify and examine the critical decisions that will shape the future of the Internet:

• Who will help define the Internet’s evolution?
• What role should government and private industry play?
• How do we provide greater bandwidth and access?
• What does online privacy mean in the age of Facebook and Wikileaks?

This is a unique opportunity to network with the thought leaders and policy makers who are designing the global networks of tomorrow and help develop the policies that will drive future Internet innovation.

(Original at Wired)

[. . .]

It took him six weeks of short-burst sleuthing to reach his conclusion. In a detailed post on DSL Reports — a site for broadband enthusiasts — under his online name, funchords, [Robb] Topolski laid out a case against his Internet service provider. Comcast appeared to be blocking file-sharing applications by creating fake data packets that interfered with trading sessions. The packets were cleverly disguised to look as if they were coming from the user, not the ISP. It was as if, in the middle of a phone call to a friend, Comcast got on the line and in the caller’s own voice told the friend he was hanging up, while the caller simultaneously heard the same message in the friend’s voice.

[. . .]

By the end of 2007, 22 cents of every dollar spent on broadband in the US went directly to Comcast. And that figure looks like it’s only going to increase; the number of ways to connect to the Internet reliably and at high speed is shrinking, not growing. “There’s this magical thinking, both in the tech community and the regulatory community, that competition will solve all problems,” says Craig Moffett, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. “Well, get over it. The evidence says we’re not going from two pipes to three but from two pipes to one.”

[. . .]

[Brian] Roberts truly believed Comcast was ready for tech stardom as the Facebook or Google of 2008. Instead, he got Topolskied. On October 19, 2007, the AP story broke with the headline “Comcast Actively Hinders Subscribers’ File-Sharing Traffic, AP Testing Shows.” Bloggers called for protests and boycotts; the Electronic Frontier Foundation said Comcast was using tricks formerly used by “malicious hackers.” A coalition of Internet law scholars and consumer groups petitioned the FCC to step in. Instead of basking in glory, Roberts found himself at the center of the fight over network neutrality—the attempt to keep ISPs from discriminating between different kinds of traffic and, say, favoring their own video or VoIP services over another company’s.

[. . .]

The Topolski affair, as far as Roberts is concerned, is all based on a misunderstanding. Every company “manages” its network by restricting and opening access to maintain speeds. [. . .] “You’ve always had Ma Bell managing its network for things like how you handle voice traffic on Mother’s Day. You get a busy signal occasionally.”

[. . .]

In August, the FCC issued a 67-page report that read as if Comcast was the worst company the FCC had ever regulated. Comcast lied about its actions, schemed to prevent oversight, confused customers, and put the future of Net-based innovation at risk. The commissioners doubted Comcast’s contention that blocking BitTorrent helped its network. [. . .] The final verdict was devastating: “In laymen’s terms, Comcast opens its customers’ mail because it wants to deliver mail not based on the address or type of stamp on the envelope but on the type of letter contained therein,” the FCC wrote. “This practice is not ‘minimally intrusive’ but invasive and outright discriminatory.”

The FCC didn’t levy a fine. In fact, it’s still not even clear whether the commission has the regulatory right to punish such behavior.

[. . .]

(Original at Bob’s site)

In 1949 a Bell Laboratory researcher, Claude Shannon, published a paper on a new science of “Information”.

With this understanding we can revisit connectivity by thinking in terms of relationships and communications between end points. The message itself doesn’t even exist along the path – yet the defining assumption of telecom is that the message itself is being transported as valuable cargo.

Bell Labs had sponsored the research with the goal of improving phone networks but was not prepared to embrace the full implications of the new science which made explicit the distinction between information in the information sense and information encoded in numbers or bits.

Today’s telecommunications business dates back to the days of the telegram when each message was treated as precious freight to be carried over the carriers wires just like a railroad would carry a box of cargo.

Cross-country telegraphy worked because we had just dots and dashes. If the signal becomes a bit fuzzy we could fix it by (re)generating fresh dots and dashes. As anyone who played the game in which you whisper a message from person to person knows it’s hard to preserve the voice message over a distance.

The solution was to turn voice into distinct ones and zeros just like the dots and dashes which could be preserved over any distance.

We can treat an Internet data packet just like any message and pay a carrier to deliver the message to the destination just like Pheidippides did at Marathon or like the telegraph companies did in the 19th century.

That is what we do and it misses the point of the Internet.

With the Internet we only need to exchange enough bits for the purpose. If we agree on a coding system I can send you “1B, 3b, 2o” then you can put them together to spell Bob. It doesn’t matter what order you get the letters in and if you are missing one I can resend it. You don’t even need all of them if you know Bob is the only name in your list that has two B’s.

Exchanging bits doesn’t even require a network. We can use any means available. Charging for carrying the bits is like trying to put a toll on a city street – there are simply too many other paths and it doesn’t make any sense to limit our paths so that toll-collectors could make a profit.

In 1897 the British Copyright office issued a report warning us of the dangers of creating scarcity by taking our abundance and dividing it up as property.

Yet this is just what we do by translating “Internet” into “Telecom” and using a property model wherein owners use their control to be the sole providers of services and transport.

People who create their own solutions are competition and those who add capacity are seen as thieves!

We may have a thousand wires running past our homes but we can only use one of them and must subscribe to a provider. We’ve taken the essential unlimited capacity for exchanging bits without wires and created exclusive properties in the guise of spectrum allocation.

Claude Shannon gave us an understanding to liberate us from the constrictions of telecom’s “pipes”. The Internet has given us a hint of what is possible once we can exchange bits instead of paying to send messages.

Yet today’s policies miss the point even as the telecommunications model is failing. The reason we need a “broadband” policy is that funding infrastructure by selling services fails when we can do it ourselves and bits are not consumables with a limited supply.

But then why should we expect common infrastructure to be a profit center any more than garbage collection should be a profit center?

The message from the market is simple. Instead of depending on service providers we should own our own facilities.

Home networks are not really networks – they are just wires and radios we use to exchange bits. We can get the same rapid improvements in price/performance by being able to invest in our communities rather than being beholden to providers.

Our home networks have been founts of innovation. We need to own the facilities that connect our homes to each other.

On the surface the Internet seems to be just another telecommunications service. In Information vs. Telecom I provide the deeper understanding necessary for challenging our accepted paradigms.

(Original at Bob’s site)

• Overview
• Information and Telecommunications
  • Information
  • Applied Information
  • Tele-communications
• The Telecommunications Regulatorium
  • The business of messages
  • The Federal Communications Commission
  • Ma Bell
  • The Intelligent Network
  • Divestiture
• Understanding the Concepts
  • New Paradigms
  • Learning
  • Key Concepts
  • Language and Meaning and Ambiguity
  • Misattribution
  • Names and Identifiers
  • Active Information
• A Fresh Start
  • Relationships
  • Exchanging Bits
  • Opportunity
  • Achieving Infrastructure
• Looking Ahead
• Related Essays

Overview

In 1897 the British Copyright Commission issued a report. One of the observations is as salient today as it was then:

A limitation of supply by artificial causes, creates scarcity in order to create property. To limit that which is in its nature unlimited, and thereby to confer an exchangeable value on that which, without such interference, would be the gratuitous possession of mankind, is to create an artificial monopoly which has no warrant in the nature of things, which serves to produce scarcity where there ought to be abundance, and to confine to the few gifts which were intended for all.

There is no limited supply of letters of the alphabet or the bits we use to encode information. Yet we have created scarcity by adopting a property model in the form of spectrum allocation and by confining our ability to communicate to narrow pipes as if the very thoughts we communicate are freight to be tariffed by a government commission.

The telecommunications industry is based on this idea that there is a business in transporting meaning be it using the runners in ancient Greece, the telegraph of Napoleon’s era or today’s telecommunications providers with their scarce supply of “minutes”.

The big idea behind the Internet is that we can decouple the exchange of meaning, that is, what we communicate, from the representation or alphabet of bits, ones and zeros.

Thomas Kuhn has written about paradigm shifts – how changes in our understanding of the familiar change the world. We saw this happen in the 16th century. Copernicus looked at the same skies that mankind had observed for millennia but instead of seeing a solar system in which planetary motion was described in complex epicycles he saw planets orbiting around the sun. Nothing changed but our understanding and it is that understanding which gave Newton and others the insights that give us today’s world. Copernicus’ insight and Newton’s Calculus gave us the tools for a dispassionate understanding of the solar system.

As Gleick explains in his book, Information, Claude Shannon’s Information Science has given us a vital tool for understanding how we exchange information. The idea of measuring information in bits seems simple and sensible but understanding how the ideas apply to the real world turns out to be fraught with pitfalls.

James Gleick is a great writer who can translate arcane technical stories into exciting tales for a relatively wide audience. And his story of the rise of the concept of “Information” is exciting in itself.

We can use the science of information and our pragmatic experience with today’s Internet to formulate a policy that relies on markets rather than regulators. We can exchange bits over a common infrastructure just as we use common roads and sidewalks. Just as the road system emerges out of our local streets our networks emerge from our local efforts at networking.

Without the burden of the overhead of maintaining an infrastructure for each service we are free to innovate, taking advantage of the opportunities afforded by this new commons.

Let’s not forget that the United States was founded on the idea of creating opportunity bolstered by the guarantee of freedom of speech. We must not cede our future to the misguided idea that we may run out of words.

[. . .]