Hi Jim,
I'm not quite sure what the main theme of discussion here is at this point, given the interplay of several related topics that have crossed the transom during the past several days. Although, most of the discussion has had to do with connecting source and sink elements together in the delivery of content, and, increasingly, the return path, as well. Or, in short, connectivity in support of communication.
It's sometimes useful to think of connectivity in the abstract, devoid of commercial considerations and regulatory entanglements. It’s the ham operator in me that goes back to my pre-teen years. The precepts of communications handled on a personal level, which I learned back in the late fifties and earlier sixties, have stuck with me to this day. Getting back to doing some break-away thinking on this subject - which may require more than a cursory read to fully grasp - consider what Bob Frankston wrote on the Dave Farber Interesting People list several months ago:
---Begin Frankston:
interesting-people.org
The reason we don’t have facilities competition is that there really isn’t a separate business in facilities competition any more than there is a business in competitive electric distribution. Mandated pole access is a good idea but I expect it will quickly lead to viewing the bit paths as simple infrastructure.
The reason we don’t ask for competitive electric distribution is that we don’t buy light, we buy electricity. At first people did buy light and you still [see] some buildings labeled “Municipal Light Company” or something like that.
As long as we frame the debate in terms of services and fund the infrastructure by selling services we have a problem. You can’t fund the transport if users create services themselves and you can’t sell bits at a price that covers the cost of the infrastructure unless you limit the supply because the bits have no value until they are turned into a service outside the network.
As I note in frankston.com the value of the term “network neutrality” is in giving voice to the sense that the carriers are not playing fair if they do something like block VoIP or try to get a cut of the users’ value. I do worry about being too specific since what is important is the marketplace dynamic not the particular implementation of the current Internet. We don’t even have to require global addresses because, as Skype has shown, we can program around such things.
If we look back at what happened when we were able to own our own phones and then later the phone wires in our homes we can see that people do indeed pay for infrastructure when they understand the value. There is no reason that doesn’t extend to community infrastructure be it roads, sewers or bit paths.
Even better when the cost is reduced because we have a shared infrastructure rather than having each service provider have to build a separate infrastructure and then watch all the value disappear as others use the transport but create new services outside the network. The carriers should indeed be angry but the solution is not to prevent competition – the carriers should be asking themselves why they have to pay for the infrastructure. They should be the first advocate community ownership.
Of course the carriers see control of the infrastructure as giving them an advantage in the marketplace but the FTC should be asking hard questions about such tie-ins. The carriers may also believe that they need control because they still think in terms of scarcity and can’t imagine that a community would deploy enough capacity even as they leave many gigabits of copper fallow by carrying only an occasional phone call per pair.
The carriers’ plight is deeper as new services aren’t using their infrastructure anyway – the studios (AKA, TV broadcasters) are already assuming a download and peer model for distribution since only a small amount of their content needs streaming anyway.
Once we have the idea of infrastructure—the community owning the connectivity—and we fund the infrastructure transparently as infrastructure we go far far beyond network neutrality. We no longer have to contain the bits within billing paths and there is no reason not to leak it out to provide ubiquitous and extensible wireless coverage. This is where things get exciting because that’s a real tipping point – once we get past the fear of abundance (as the carriers explicitly decry in frankston.com we have no barriers against ubiquitous wireless coverage and, even better, anyone can extend coverage even to subbasements or caves or wherever. You can then have you medical alert bracelet call home instead of waiting for someone to read it and then find a phone.
This [is] why I don’t like the whole focus on broadband and am not convinced Korea is the right model. I [used] to think minitel in France was a great idea but in the end it kept them off the Internet. I think of broadband as being like a railroad when we really want to be able to walk and drive where we please. It’s easy to get speed but coverage is more important.
We can argue about the technical details of how infrastructure works but it would be hard to do worse than today’s misaligned incentives.
For entertainment purposes you can read about viewing sidewalks in terms of services. Of course no one would charge for sidewalks – after all it’s just concrete and dirt and maybe some hops, skips and jumps when we go groundless for a short distance.
---end Frankston
Another view, this time from Doc Searls, who, among many other things, is an author (The Cluetrain Manifesto) and an editor of Linux Journal:
---begin Searls:
4. The Net is pure infrastructure.
As with the land and oceans of the terraformed Earth, the Net's primary role
is supportive. It's something that makes everything else possible.
This is a hard concept for people to get their head around, when they're
used to looking at the Net as an extra charge on their cable TV or phone
bills. But in the long run video and telephone are just breeds of data.
They may be services that carry charges. But once the Net's light-based
infrastructure is built out, it's as naturally costless as the crusts and
oceans of the Earth.
This, of course, is the place where many arguments come up. Who's going to
pay for building this out in the first place? How do you pay down the debt?
Do you want to write off billions of dollars in sunk capital expenses? Don't
the carriers have the right to charge for using their "pipes", which are
their property? How can you think this infrastructure is going to get built
out, or improved over time, if there's no profit to be made by the
businesses doing the science and the work?
The problem with all those arguments is that they ignore the nature of what
the Net is, once it's built out. Those arguments also presume that the main
(or only) benefits of incumbency for carriers come from charging for use of
the "pipes". In fact, there are countless advantages for incumbents as
alpha inhabitants of this new Earth's surface. There are services to create
and sell. There are millions of existing customer relationships. There is
physical real estate and office space out the wazoo. There are endless
support services to be sold to persons and companies that build businesses
on top of the Net's infrastructure. Why not get into those games as well?
Why not look toward those games as motivation for building out the raw
infrastructure?
Because phone companies come from telephony and cable companies come from
cable TV. They can't help protecting and leveraging their existing
businesses. And fighting those who appear to threaten those businesses.
But at some point they'll stop doing that, and start taking advantage of
this:
5. The Giant Zero is built to support an infinitude of business.
When the non-physical distance between everything in the world becomes zero,
there's no limit to what you can do with that fact. This should be good
news for anybody with imagination and entrepreneurial spirit. (Not to
mention an equally endless variety of non-business possibilities.)
Especially for businesses that already have advantages in their
marketplaces. As phone and cable companies certainly do. They need to stop
thinking of their corner of the Net as their private silo, and start
thinking about the zillions of businesses that become possible, faster, with
their help. And how they can make money in a wide-open and much bigger
marketplace.
---end Searls
Like yourself, and apparently like Searls and Frankston, too, I also sometimes find myself using metaphor and historical analogues for the purpose of reinforcing, or refuting, arguments, as the case may be. And why not. It's fun tying pieces of the larger timeline puzzle together in ways that demonstrate the fractal nature of human behavior and expectations, as represented by the repetition of similar patterns throughout history, while making use of readily identifiable constructs for all who partake in the discussion. It makes eminent sense.
Using what we know (or think we know) about the past as prologue sometimes requires exercising a level of prudence. Tying the past to the present with the hope of being able to project the future is often useful, in other words, as a "get in and out" mechanism in order to make a point, lest the original topic becomes so mired in anecdote and historical critique over concepts that predate present-day capabilities, thus forming the foundation for future arguments that would otherwise be considered irrelevant, that the original topic either becomes lost in the shuffle or subordinated to anachronisms.
Last year, discussion in another forum that I frequent became so immersed in analogs that the main topic was relegated to only secondary import, when it was remembered at all.
FAC |
