1.  It's unfortunate that yesterday's drama had to come in the context of a merger clearance.  I tend to agree that mergers aren't the right moments to apply laundry lists of conditions that may or may not serve public interests.  I'm confident that the Democratic commissioners and the consumer advocates were negotiating in good faith, but it all smacks of a private deal -- a back-room deal, done to ensure completion by some company's internal deadline.  (Kudos to the person who can figure out why year-end 2006 was so important.) 

That's not the way national policy should be made.  And here I'm going to point to my service on the ICANN Board, where all of my colleagues on the board operate in good faith and with the best of intentions.  But we often trip ourselves up on this front.  In my personal view, it's not right to have one-off merger clearances (or one-off registry contracts) that are made behind closed doors dictate policy.  Doing it that way puts everyone on shaky ground.  It's always a better idea to work towards rules of (1) general applicability (2) that are decided in advance by (3) some process that (4) brings the issues to the attention of everyone who might be interested.  Nothing's perfect; legislation itself is always a "deal" as well.  But whatever we can do to reduce the deal-like atmosphere is good.

In the net neutrality context, all this means is that we should take the momentum generated by this merger discussion and use it to drive towards generally-applicable, clear-as-possible legislation.

2. SBC/AT&T have been arguing for years that any "IP platform service" (they'd now call it IPTV) should be removed from regulation.  Back in February 2004, SBC filed a petition asking that the FCC forbear from subjecting these "platforms" to traditional telephony regulation.  That petition was eventually denied on the grounds that it wasn't clear whether such regulation would be applied to such "platforms."

What was an "IP platform" to SBC at that point?  SBC wasn't entirely clear -- they said "IP platform services" were "those services that enable any customer to send or receive communications in IP format over an IP platform, and the IP platforms on which those services are provided." But the FCC noted that SBC intended its petition to cover its new fiber networks:  In "ex parte filings SBC suggested that, at least with regard to the facilities portion of the relief
requested, its petition is intended to cover newly constructed fiber-to-the-node and fiber-to-the-home IP networks that SBC plans to roll out later this year."

The argument hasn't stopped -- just a few months ago, SBC/AT&T filed a letter with the FCC saying that its "U-verse" wasn't a cable service (and so not subject to local franchising rules) because it was interactive.  AT&T also let the FCC know that the Connecticut PUC had made the same determination.

What's U-verse?  It's the "IP Platform" under a different name.  It used to be called Project Lightspeed, and here's how SBC/AT&T described it to the Connecticut regulator:  "The Project Lightspeed network will integrate IP-video with voice, data and other applications (all ultimately to be IP-based) in a manner that is not possible over existing broadband or cable networks. Because the various applications will amount to data packets traveling over the same broadband pipe, the services will interoperate and communicate in a way that makes each service more useful than it would be standing alone." 

It's SBC/AT&T's fiber network:

With AT&T U-verse, it’s all coming together. The AT&T U-verse portfolio integrates digital video, AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet U-verse Enabled, and in the future, voice over IP services. AT&T U-verse TV – AT&T’s premier, 100 percent IP video offering – features leading content, quality high-definition programming, and enhanced capabilities unlike anything on the market. (emphasis in original)

The point of all this quoting is that SBC/AT&T have been working steadily for years to have their fiber optic "IP Platform" (however named) treated differently than traditional telephone or cable services. They see this platform as an integrated whole -- a "portfolio" of services.  They see it as different from their now-traditional DSL offering. That's why the exclusion of "IPTV" from the neutrality language in yesterday's merger document is troubling.  IPTV, to AT&T, likely means "U-verse," and U-verse includes internet access ("U-verse Enabled") as well as everything else.  At the least, the reference to IPTV is deeply ambiguous.

As part of the AT&T/BellSouth merger that is expected to be approved today, AT&T is now pledging to keep its "wireline broadband Internet access service" neutral.

AT&T joins the trickster pantheon with this move.  (Other well known recent tricksters include Br'er Rabbit and Bugs Bunny.)

"Wireline broadband Internet access service" means traditional copper-wire digital subscriber line access provided by phone companies like AT&T.  It's not very fast, but it's much faster than dial-up, and AT&T and Verizon sell it to a lot of people. 

But cable internet access is more popular in this country, and although the phone companies are closing the gap they'd like to compete more effectively with the cable industry.

Hence AT&T's big push to announce a "massive access network upgrade, dubbed Project Lightspeed, back in 2004." (Light Reading story here.)  The idea was that AT&T would put in fiber optic lines that would allow data to travel much more quickly to households across the country.

AT&T renamed the service "U-verse" in 2005, and has promised to roll it out to 15 to 20 markets before the end of 2006.  It's hurriedly doing this in San Jose -- press release from a week ago is here.  When you read the press release, you see that U-verse includes (is "bundled with," in the now-standard term) high speed internet access.  But it's not plain old internet access -- it's not naked or neutral or commoditized.  It's "AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet U-verse Enabled."

That's AT&T's new high-speed internet access -- AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet U-verse Enabled.  It'll have speeds of up to 6 Mbps for downloading (not very fast -- Singapore, Japan, and Korea and lots of other places have 100 Mbps and more available).  It'll use all kinds of "middleware" from Alcatel and Microsoft and other companies to prioritize and privilege particular packets.  It cannot be purchased separately -- "purchase of AT&T U-verse TV required."

If some nascent Google/YouTube application -- some now-garage-bound online thingie we can't even imagine yet -- wants to reach AT&T U-verse subscribers at these high speeds, it'll have to strike a deal.  It'll have to ask for permission.

This means that naked, neutral, non-prioritized internet access (for AT&T customers, anyway) stays at 2001 speeds.  AT&T has no incentive to upgrade its existing DSL facilities -- it wants to move everyone to this new U-verse.

As AT&T says, "the new U-verse enabled AT&T Yahoo!(R) High Speed internet builds on AT&T's position as the nation's leading provider of broadband DSL."  It's not the same as the "wireline broadband Internet access service" that AT&T is willing to keep neutral.

I applaud the consumer advocates who got AT&T to promise neutrality as to DSL -- but I think they may have missed a major battleground. 

AT&T is effectively saying, "We'll keep existing 'broadband' access neutral.  But when it comes to our new super-duper 'AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet U-verse Enabled,' well, that's not up for negotiation.  We need to make money there. 'Enabled' and 'broadband' are not the same thing."

I understand that the fix is in and the merger will go through.  It would be great if someone, somewhere, realized that neutral high speed internet access would be good as a matter of economic and social policy in this country.  But getting there will take leadership that we don't now have.

[Update -- I've been reminded that it's a BIG DEAL to get AT&T to make any concesssions, and I certainly agree with that. The precedential value of this merger deal on neutrality is important. I hope that the next step will be general-application legislation that is clearer as to what exactly has to be neutral -- and I hope that legislation will include all transport to the internet in the sweep of a clear neutrality mandate.]

I spent much of today reading about electromagnetic radiation.  Imagine those rays bouncing through and around us all. 

Some of those rays are visible, so we can see colors.  Some are x-rays and gamma rays.  And some frequencies are allocated by the FCC.

Yesterday's Harold Feld post is a doozy -- all about a spectrum giveaway being sought from the FCC in the name of public safety.  Lots of details here.

Earlier today, I was at a midtown restaurant that caters to business and media tycoons.  In the lounge area, one man had drawn his two small children (probably 3 and 6) to the Bloomberg terminals in the corner.  They sat on his lap, staring at the screens.

"See?" he said, "There's the price of oil."

To his credit, or theirs, the children remained fascinated with the rows of colored numbers for some time.

If you were working in Hong Kong today, you weren't able to access Bloomberg terminals.  According to the Wall Street Journal, traders were getting their stock prices from local data providers instead.  Today's earthquake off the coast of Taiwan caused breaks in as many as eight undersea data cables.

Prediction:  the stated need to invest in more undersea data cables (the vulnerabilities of which were revealed by today's incident) will be used as yet another argument against network neutrality in this country and others.

Whatever the incentives were that caused groups of companies to get together and invest in the cables that wrap around the world, they already existed before this earthquake took place -- indeed, Verizon recently announced that it would be joining up with five big Chinese telecom companies to build a cable system between China and the U.S., at a cost of $500 million.

We clearly need these cables.  But investing in them appears to require calculations that are separate from whatever last-mile vertical integration receipts the telcos expect.  Nonetheless, I think we'll be hearing more about this issue.

Nice end-of-year summary by news.com here -- particularly useful for links to stories about various bills that didn't pass. 

I'm working on a comparison between the arrival of cable (regulatory response: "we must protect broadcast!") and the advent of the internet (regulatory response: "we must protect telephone companies without appearing to!"), and it's quite entertaining.

In other news, Joi Ito is on a diet.  He seems pretty excited about it and I'm rooting for him.

C-SPAN re-aired the Second Circuit argument in Fox v. FCC this evening.  Riveting. 

Judges Rosemary Pooler and Pierre Leval had sharp questions for the FCC:  why aren't you concerned about violence? if a parent doesn't want to protect their kids, why are you stepping in to do so? (answer: because Congress and the Supreme Court have said we should).  how is anyone supposed to know in advance whether their broadcast will be indecent -- can you get a no-action letter (answer: no, but we've given lots of examples of non-indecent speech in our orders).

It's an important case. It looks as if the judges are really questioning why the FCC does what it does. Carter Phillips was very emphatic in arguing that the FCC had made a 180-degree turn away from its enforcement policies of the last 25 years by suddenly focusing on fleeting, gratuitous expletives, and implied that political pressure had caused the switch.  He's confident that the FCC's move can't possibly survive strict scrutiny, and he's urging the court to declare the entire scheme unconstitutional. 

The absence of safe harbors or any real guidelines seems particularly troubling -- the chilling effect on speech of not knowing whether someone will come after you with a fine has to be substantial.  And the fact that broadcast is treated differently from everything else -- also silly.  Plus the fact that there is no evidence that children are actually harmed by fleeting expletives.

And, of course, the argument (which included plenty of fleeting expletives) wasn't itself indecent -- it's news.  Eric Miller, the FCC lawyer, said as much during the hearing.  So awards programs (the Billboard Awards) aren't protected, but the Daily Show is? Very tricky stuff, this speech censorship business.

[nice Harold Feld summary here]

Not too many days ago, I went to a staged reading of A Christmas Carol.  It was thoroughly rewarding -- Scrooge was tremblingly grateful to be delivered from his obsessive thrift, and Bob Cratchitt and Scrooge's nephew were kind enough to acknowledge the change in Scrooge's habits.  I went out into the streets suffused with well-being.

I had read Andy Oram's essay ("The Ghosts of Internet Time") before, but he sent it around again today and I was delighted to see it.  So here it is.

So for more than 24 hours there I wasn't able to be online.  It felt very peaceful.  I stopped checking to see if there was yet another message about the economics of internet infrastructure.  I didn't read a single blog entry.  And I didn't haunt the front page of the New York Times or the Washington Post.

I sat in my office with a nice big cup of coffee and read a book about telecommunications law.  It's a lot easier to do that when there isn't a laptop around.

Now, of course, the laptop is with me again and I'm back in the swamp.  There are two full in-boxes to page through in a dispirited sort of way.  The problem is that everything's interesting and I can't possibly absorb it all.  It's overwhelming, every single day.

It's refreshing, under these conditions, to focus on a simple and heartwarming story from the world of mass media. 

NBC broadcast [requires registration, sorry] a funny song on Saturday night as part of Saturday Night Live.  I'm confident that more than 90% of the people who saw the broadcast received the show via their cable provider.  But because it was a broadcast, using the sacred spectrum, NBC bleeped out a possibly offensive word.  Many times.  Then NBC took a deep breath and posted the funny song on YouTube without the bleeping.  The claim is that the video is funnier with the bleeps included, but the unbleeped song is getting a lot more attention because it's online.

So what does this parable tell us?  A low-ranking network is trying to make sure it gets some attention, is that all this is? 

Maybe there's more here.  The anachronistic bleep may be the heart of this story.  It can't possibly make sense for the FCC to continue making vague threats about license renewal (and assessing not-vague fines) associated with the appearance of broadcast impropriety, when all the kids we're supposedly protecting have access to innumerable other sources of impropriety using other forms of electromagnetic transmission. 

In fact, I'll go out on a limb here and say that it's embarrassing for the FCC to continue along this indecency path.  Surely the agency has better things to do. Tinkering with the timing and content of broadcasts seems increasingly beside the point. Not that there's a need (I have to say quickly) to tinker with any other form of communication either. The best software is between the ears.

My obsession for the last few months:  Economic growth is tied to new ideas; new ideas are more likely to emerge online than anywhere else; so universal highspeed internet access should be a key government policy.  And those private providers have every reason to skew things towards their own benefit rather than the larger social good.

Today there's a report from Australia saying -- according to MuniWireless -- that there's an association between highspeed internet access and economic growth.  The report costs a good deal to access, which is unfortunate.  But here's a nice summary:

This year’s report presents a compelling case for the roll-out of broadband in all regions and that it is the key driver of economic growth.

The Report found:

· the failure to address inferior Internet access quality could cost regions up to $2.7 billion in foregone gross regional products and up to 30,000 jobs in 2006;

· regions with poor access to telecommunications technology are less productive;

· firms that use the Internet can increase their sales 3.4% faster than other firms; and

· high speed broadband provides the best opportunity for Australia’s industries to access global supply chains.

The Report says that the connection of rural communities to broadband is happening ‘relatively slowly’, despite Government programs.

So -- maybe someday we'll have access to the whole report.  But for the meantime it's an interesting summarized data point.

Also good news today in Commr. McDowell's strong (and well-reasoned) statement that he wouldn't be un-recusing himself. 

Yikes.  I've been tagged by David Weinberger, who says that he's sorry but that I have to now have to write five things most people don't know about me.  And then I have to tag five other bloggers.

Here are the five things:

1.  I hate Brussels sprouts and will do almost anything to avoid being near them.

2.  In eighth grade, I used to say "Cat!" urgently to my dog Cory so that he would drag me along the street on my skateboard.  He was absolutely convinced that there was a cat right ahead of us, just out of reach, and he'd run for a long time.  I was a pretty good skateboarder.

3.  I enter the New Yorker cartoon caption contest almost every week and I never win.

4.  I read the obituaries section of the newspaper first.

5.  I was a music major in college and got credit for violin lessons, which allowed me to have a great GPA, which made it possible for me to ... go to law school.

I tag Nina Camic, Tonya Brito, Ann Althouse, Beth Noveck, and Harold Feld.

[tags: blogtag]

I've recently seen the first two installments of The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard's much-discussed trilogy. 

From a recent Ben Brantley review:

How could Americans, with their notoriously short attention spans, be expected to thrill to long conversations about the relative merits of German philosophers, conducted by historical figures (Michael Bakunin, Alexander Herzen, Vissarion Belinsky) who are hardly household names? (This is a play full of throwaway lines like, “We were discussing transcendental idealism over oysters, and one thing led to another.”)

Well, the plays are dazzlingly energetic and beautifully done, full of quick sketches of characters traveling through their lives in the mid-19th century while dreaming of a changed Russia.  I went off and read two Isaiah Berlin essays because Berlin is a hero of Stoppard's and his essays prompted (to some extent) Stoppard's writing of these plays.  What comes through, in the essays and the plays, is a deep appreciation for the unpredictability and dynamic nature of what happens next.  No single truths, no simple beliefs end up succeeding. 

For most of the second installment, Shipwreck, everyone is living far from Russia.  A critic, Vissarion Belinsky, can't wait to get back home -- because in Moscow, unlike in Paris, literature means so much.  Political speech and discussion of ideas is suppressed in Russia.  In Paris, everything is noise, nothing rises to be heard.  But Belinsky dies of consumption when he returns to Russia.

Although the Times recommends a long reading list, you can understand what's going on without much background.  The plays are visually arresting, immensely talky, full of portent, and mostly sad.  The characters often dwell on Russia's backwardness, something Belinsky says is relieved only by the Russian novelists springing up.  People stumble through their time together, doing their best to muddle along, forgetting what effects high-mindedness can have on their friends and relations.  Michael Bakunin, in particular, keeps crying for action and revolution, and puts himself in the middle of tussles all over Europe. Turgenev stands stock-still and talks about the stunning visual moments that he constantly notices in his life -- he should notice, he's a novelist.

These are big, turbulent, beautifully-lit plays.  They're more like a wash of sound than a tightly-knit paragraph.  I'm looking forward to the third one, and then to reading them (and reading up on them).

The National Center on Education and the Economy report that I wrote about yesterday is focused on one thing:  how to shape education policy to produce more people who can think creatively.

Thomas Friedman wrote about the issue earlier this week:

We should have the same goal from a communications policy point of view:  What's the set of policies that will facilitate creative thinking, generate new ideas, and help us keep our rate of economic growth increasing?

The answer is to focus on diversity.  But before you groan and think of forced educational programming or affirmative action programs of various kinds, let me explain:  my suggestion isn't that we go back to FCC's old role of using scarcity to require particular kinds of programming. (Red Lion: "because of the scarcity of [electromagnetic] frequencies, the Government is permitted to put restraints on licensees in favor of others whose views should be expressed on this unique medium.") That kind of diversity means "the fostering of programming that reflects minority viewpoints or appeals to minority tastes."

Rather, the new growth theory form of diversity is much simpler.  The internet, which will someday soon be cable/telephone/television all in one, is characterized by abundance, not scarcity.  Although we don't have competition in this country for highspeed internet access, we have a fiercely competitive internet above the access layer.  All the FCC has to do is support this fiercely competitive, idea-generating, diverse internet, and we'll all be better off.

The leap forward in technological change represented by the internet provides us with a tremendous opportunity to foster the kind of radical change in communications policy that the education community is already working on.  We should make sure that highspeed internet access is universal and unfettered -- uncontrolled and unmonetized by the regional duopolies that control access in this country at the moment.

If we can consider changing the format of high school education, as Friedman and the NCEE are urging us to do, we can certainly consider changing the way we approach communications.  If we don't, as they suggest, we'll continue our steady descent as a country.

Here's an opportunity for leadership, change, and increasing returns:

A report [warning, large pdf executive summary] has been released by a panel called the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, organized by the National Center on Education and the Economy (funded by foundations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, Hewlett Foundation).  As reported by both Time Magazine and the New York Times, the New Commission states bluntly that leadership in the new world order of digitized global industries requires a "deep vein of creativity" that, in turn, requires substantial education ("comfort with ideas and abstractions") that we're not providing in this country.

So our standard of living is going to fall.  Inevitably. 

To address this problem, the report (based on two years of work, many major economic and labor studies, lots of international comparisons) makes several recommendations about how education should work in the US.  Students should take board examinations in subject areas at the end of the 10th grade, which will serve to direct some students to community college and some to additional high school work towards eventual college admission.  And we should persuade the best students eventually to become teachers, by paying them more in the early years of their teaching careers and providing them with better benefits.  We should test students for the skills that will help workers in this new world, like creativity, self-discipline, the ability to work well with a team. We should change the way schools are managed, by privatizing them and making them accountable for their funding to the state rather than the local area -- and allowing parents to send their children to any school whose reported results they liked. We should provide high-quality early childhood education, provide continuing education to adults, and generally make learning a lifelong (and competitively provided) experience.

Paul Romer is quoted in the Times coverage saying that this change-the-world effort "was driven by improvements in technology, much as advances in the early 20th century led to universal high school." 

Investing in the educational changes suggested by the report could substantially increase our productivity as a nation -- many increasing returns.  And technology -- particularly an open internet -- could help a great deal.

So Commr. McDowell is rumored to be walking the halls of Congress taking political temperatures about what he should do in connection with the AT&T/BellSouth merger.

McDowell used to work for Comptel, where he would have opposed such a merger, but Chairman Martin thinks (and has persuaded the FCC GC) that federal ethical guidelines that would require McDowell not to vote on the merger can be waived -- because there's a 2-2 tie among the remaining four Commissioners.

I can't imagine being McDowell's shoes -- being forced by political pressure to vote on something that an applicable set of ethical guidelines says you shouldn't vote on.  Excruciating.  No matter what he does, he looks awful to some large group of anxious and persuasive people with whom he frequently interacts. 

So here's the out.  If he can't stay recused, he can look to empirical evidence as to whether the merger will improve the public welfare -- and that evidence suggests that the merger is not in the public interest.  Blogged here by David Isenberg, it's a study by Sumit Majumdar of UT-Dallas:

We find that the approval of the mergers in the past have clearly led to welfare losses for the American consumer. The approval of the ATT&T and SBC merger will lead to further substantial negative economic consequences for hundreds of millions of American consumers. Approval of the merger is not in the public interest. The local exchange sector has been re-consolidated and re-monopolized a generation after the divestiture of the original AT&T in 1984. Today’s lack of productive efficiency and technological progressiveness, particularly with respect to the deployment of broadband and network digitalization, of the merged US comjpanies means that the welfare of the US consumer has been significantly compromised in perpetuity.  To ensure that no forther compromises are engendered, and overall compromises exacerbated, the AT&T and SBC merger should not be approved by the FCC.

Today started with me spending hours trying to re-establish my identity with a host of private and public organizations.  Thanks to all - you've been great.  And I'm back.

So apart from noting a fun evening debating the implementation of Beth Noveck's spirited, worthwhile, and frankly awe-inspiring Community Patent proposal (details here), I don't have much to report.

But I do have a movie idea.  Ready?  Prior Heart.

It's the story of a fun-loving but eccentric patent examiner who runs across an invention that allows him to travel back in time -- sitting right there in his cubicle, he's transported to Mount Vernon (? -- has to be near the USPTO) in the time of Washington.  And he finds himself falling in love with the great man's niece, and suddenly in a position both to aid the General in a time of great peril (the patent examiner knows what to do because he's an amateur historian familiar with the intricacies of the renovation of the Mansion) (or something like that) AND to help the niece discover just how lovable she is.   But then, of course, at a tremendously inconvenient time he can't help having the memory of Crystal City float into his mind (those awful buildings), which jars him back into the present.  Poof!  But the niece turns out to be in the present too, as a lobbyist working on patent reform, and he looks into her eyes and remembers her.  But she doesn't remember him and she's mad about some narrow patent issue.  What to do?

Surely we need some entertainment vehicle that brings the drama of the Patent Office closer to home.

Okay, your turn.  Try these titles:  Novel and Nonobvious.  or...Examined Lives.

The GAO issued a report recently that seems relevant to the AT&T/BellSouth merger -- particularly in connection with business lines.

The report says that "in areas where FCC granted full pricing flexibility due to the presumed presence of competitive alternatives, list prices and average revenues tend to be higher than or the same as list prices and average revenues in areas still under some FCC price regulation."  The GAO's report suggests that there isn't meaningful competition for commercial telecommunications business in the United States. "In the 16 major metropolitan areas we examined, available data suggest that facilities-based competitive alternatives for dedicated access are not widely available," the study discloses. "Data on the presence of competitors in commercial buildings suggest that competitors are serving, on average, less than 6 percent of the buildings with demand for dedicated access in these areas."

Here's more from Lasar's Letter on the GAO report, which was picked up by FreePress, which was picked up by the Benton Foundation -- if only the Commission was picking all of this up as well.

Back in NYC, finally, after a long and remarkably low-energy board meeting on Friday.  We have a new Vice Chair, Roberto Gaetano, and a shared commitment to make the transition to a new Chair by the end of next year -- this is Vint Cerf's last year as an ICANN board member.

The big events were the renewals of .biz/.org/.info and a gesture towards progress on internationalized domain names.  As I said publicly in several settings, I'd like to see the LSE report on the GNSO taken seriously and adopted wholesale -- this would lower barriers to participation and generally make the GNSO's job much more coherent.  Along those lines, the contracts and the bylaws need to be brought into connection with eachother -- from my point of view, the GNSO's key task is the creation of consensus policies that can be mandatory for registries and registrars.

I'd also like to see meetings improve, become more open, and produce results that can be acted on and interacted with remotely.  It would be good to have much more cross-cutting structured dialogue, rather than panels or serial comments.  I'm not pushing for just two meetings a year, because it seems that we need them for a host of purposes that aren't limited to policy-making -- things like outreach, regional participation, and workshops on various subjects.  I'd like to try the Idea Tournament that Jordyn Buchanan has proposed.

The board is changing, and our discussions are frank and robust.  I'd like to see these discussions reflected in the minutes of these meetings, and I've been assured that this will be happening soon.

Right now, I have a much more mundane concern:  the display on my ThinkPad T41 no longer works reliably.  Maybe it was the travel, maybe it has indigestion, maybe it simply has had enough data and is ready to take a break.  Breaks all around.  I'll be offline for a while.

Ooookay.  Another big day (but you knew that).  We had the second part of the public forum this morning -- my big issues were the GNSO LSE review and transparency stuff (tired, sorry).  Then the board went into its conclave between 2pm and 10pm, then we met for a chat in the bar, then, finally, we were done.

Tomorrow I have to report on the meeting about meetings, the meta-meeting, so here's what I'll say:

Positive remarks:  People have lots of positive things to say about ICANN meetings.  The scribes come in for universal acclaim.  The healthy culture of debate is appreciated -- the idea that you can get to a mike pretty easily to speak your mind.  Hallway/networking very fruitful.  ICANN's meeting coordinators do a good job. 

Communications:  Translation is a key issue, and it would be good to have key documents available in major languages (we're working on that).  Some concern about doing business/legal document only in one language.  Lots of interest in agendas available in advance, and cross-cutting meetings focused on a single issue.  Each ICANN meeting should leave a footprint of some kind, by attracting local people who join in policymaking and stick with it.  Perhaps we need to set goals re how many participants we're seeking to attract from each region.   Need to get basic information out before the meetings.  Need to make it easier for newcomers to understand what's going on so they can get involved.  Maybe we should have a daily service that provides an overview of key discussions during ICANN meetings. 

Some of the most interesting meetings are small in size, but they're not publicly visible.  It may be everybody's responsibility to take notes about those smaller meetings and get them posted online. 

We're not getting remote conversations into these meetings -- everything's a one-way broadcast.  It would be great to project the IRC channels in the meeting room.  In general, we need better online tools (and asynchronous, virtual meetings).

We should encourage people to set up satellite meetings-around-the-meeting -- before and after.

We really need to speak more slowly to one another.

And, of course, we need to know why we're communicating!  What are these meetings for?  We have a narrow technical mission...We certainly need a better web site.

Meeting protocol.  Should we charge a small fee?  It would create a barrier, but it would help us cover costs.  How about voluntary fees?  How would we allocate fees?  Are we overdoing security, requiring badges and security?  (This may pose a big problem for local hosts.)  We should make it obvious which meetings are "closed" and which are "open," and move towards as much openness as possible.  We should make meetings comfortable and open for attendees -- better signage, better guidance, better context (what's the history of topic X?) etc.  Maybe we need to revive the Salzburg Seminar idea of funding participation at meetings through scholarships.

Meeting structure.  We have a good opening tutorial for newcomers, but then it's not clear what they should do next.  Our intake processes aren't good.  We need more joint cross-constituency discussions.  The room setup is awful for the public forums.  We shouldn't read reports (we're getting better at this).   More dialogue!   The nominating committee should be part of the first public forum at the beginning of the week.  The board gets over-scheduled, but these meetings shouldn't focus on talking up to the board.  The board meeting on Friday is too staged (we're going to loosen up tomorrow).  Maybe there should be a public meeting AFTER the private board prep meeting, for feedback on what we've decided on.

Number of meetings/location of meetings.  Who would get sponsors for non-local-hosted meetings?  Maybe ICANN should be renting the A/V equipment for all meetings.  We need to collect data about how many people come, and where they come from.  We need to find out whether holding these meetings actually benefits the local community.  Maybe we'd have more participation if our meeting locations were more predictable.  Maybe we need to consider having one of the three meetings in a "hub" location.  Visa issues are a major concern.  We're not sure whether two or three meetings is the right number, but we are sure that more dialogue is what should be happening at these meetings.

That's it -- scattershot but well-intentioned.  The Board will have to take all of this in and decide what to do for 2008.

Today was another long one - tomorrow will be too.  Lots of concrete suggestions in the meeting about meetings this afternoon, including ideas about cross-group meetings, importance of speaking slowly (I'm an offender), importance of figuring out WHY we have these meetings.  You might think it's all about policy development, and I often do, but there are other things going on here -- outreach, networking, appearance-creation -- that are also relevant.

A great question:  what are newcomers supposed to do AFTER they've gone to the newcomers' roundtable discussion?  It's a hard place to find a point of entry -- the learning curve takes about a year. And if you're interested as a vendor of IDN-related software, there's no constituency for you....  The transcript for the meeting about meetings should be available soon, and I'll link to it.

This morning was the GNSO public forum (mostly about contractual conditions and about the LSE review); tomorrow morning is the Board's public forum (many many things on the agenda).  Then the Board disappears for the afternoon and evening to deliberate.  By Friday afternoon another ICANN meeting will have ended.  Then I'll be able to get back to linking and blogging about things other than my schedule. 

Okay, there's no other way to describe today:  this was an incredibly long day.  This was "constituency day," when the Board traipses from meeting to meeting.  We had many many meetings today, including breakfast and lunch meetings. I'm sure the ICANN staff was working for many more hours than this.

I did get to leave the building for dinner, which was a total delight.  Hair-raising cab rides.  The guy did not stop at red lights. 

Speaking only for myself, the big issues I'd like us to make progress on at this meeting are the London School of Economics report on the Generic Names Supporting Organization, internationalized domain names, and new generic top level domain names.  And meetings.  I'll be at a meeting about meetings tomorrow, and I hope people will show up to talk about how we can improve ICANN meetings and communications generally.

But for now, I have nothing to say on any topic.

Well, what happens at ICANN meetings is that you don't get to go outside.  This morning we had the opening ceremony -- note to self, Brazilian anthem is really something --

Here's the Wikipedia entry on the anthem.  How about this:  "Brazilian law stipulates that only one stanza must be played in instrumental renditions of the anthem, but both must be sung in vocal performances."  We heard both stanzas.  It was just great.

There was an opening report from Paul Twomey -- file isn't online yet -- and then two panels, one about the President's Strategy Committee recommendations (here), and one with IGF updates.  (Useful IHT article here.)

This afternoon two good public discussions -- on new gTLDs, and on Whois. 

Consensus policy processes can work.  And we need to adopt policies that foster competition among registries.  On the other hand, to the extent there isn't a consensus in favor of a particular mandatory global policy to be imposed on registries and registrars, having competing "local" rules should be fine.  It's not a failure not to have consensus.  It just means that there's a diverse world out there.

So we're here in Sao Paulo.  Last night was the first official Board event -- a nice dinner.  Today we met in committees during the morning and then as a Board for the afternoon.  It was a pretty good afternoon meeting, devoted mostly to listing (but not ranking) priorities for 2007 and talking about what is coming up this week.  Plus internal Board machinations -- who's leading, who's on what committee.  We have three new Board members (two really new, one Board liaison becoming a Board member).

Tonight there was a dinner with the GNSO council and staff, with semi-assigned seating (two Board members per table, different constituency reps, a staff member) and topics set for conversation.  It was quite useful as a format, I thought.

The topics tonight were:  the LSE GNSO evaluation (process for considering it); the new gLTD process; and the nominating committee.

So that was Day 1.  Kieren McCarthy put together a great remote site for people to use here.   

Here's yet another reason why the U.S. should make sure it gets its highspeed internet access policy right:  the rest of the world is watching. 

The same forces that are combining to control the internet in the U.S. -- law enforcement, incumbent network providers, the content industry -- have the same incentives in other countries.  It's very convenient for them, politically, to point to what the U.S. is doing.  So, say you're in India and policy now requires open access be provided to competitive ISPs.  You can point to the U.S., if you're an incumbent Indian telephone company, and say "see, in the U.S. they're not doing this.  Why should we?"

If we go backwards, if we give up on the idea of the neutral internet which has prompted such explosive economic growth and transformed lives all over the world, we'll be leading the rest of the world backwards as well.  Why would we do that?

For whatever reason, people around the world still watch what the U.S. does in the communications realm.  We need to be conscious that we still have the remains of a leadership position in the world.  We really need to get this right. 

This was a very interesting presentation from Ken Calvert of the University of Kentucky.  Rough notes:

He's a systems guy, an engineer.  His first question in response to "what would you do with a gigabit per second" is "what do you mean?"  Would this be shared v. dedicated? wired v. wireless? local area v. last-hop vs. internet wide? will there be another bottleneck elsewhere? can I do whatever I want, or are there acceptable use constraints (no servers)? is it symmetric?

He focuses on technology limitations.  What limitations exist inside and outside the home that might be bottlenecks on 1gig?  The serial ATA interface is okay -- 1-3 gigabit.  The latest digital display is fast enough.  Memory bandwidth is high enough too - 10 gig/second.  The home lan is 1 gigabit ethernet.  So we can do this inside the home.

The big problem is the last mile.  Right now, we only have about 1-10% of what we need to have a gig a second.  In the core of the network, there are no bottlenecks.  Same for wireless -- WiMax and WiBro are also 1-10% of 1 gig/second.

So let's assume we have 1g last mile/symmetric, and a gig in the home.  Memory bandwidth may be a constraint for high-throughput applications requiring significant software processing.  They need 3.5 times bandwidth because of redundancy.  But that's not really a big issue because we have big caches in our systems -- big enough to hold all the data. 

Protocol bottlenecks?  Not really.  Right now TCP is 70%, Bittorrent the rest.  TCP's congestion control is wasteful of bandwidth on startup by sending very few packets per roundtrip.  So we could trade bandwidth for latency.  He suggests we could,  instead of waiting a round trip time to learn which of several possible events occurred, send all possible reactions plus policy for choosing.  So -- send all the options, get response back for one that actually happened.  Trade bandwidth for latency.

There may also be local distribution bottlenecks -- most homes aren't wired for gigabit speeds.  Gateway/router -- that'll show up. But people will need upgrades.  Content -- interactive immersive environments, 3D conferencing.

But he sees an interesting trend in display interfaces.  VESA is the org that standardizes display into PC -- DVI.  DVI is sophisticated, assumes that display has a fair amount of intelligence.  But the interface is continuing to happen at a higher level
Eg, DisplayPort allows us to hook PCs up to same display.  Now there's net2display -- has IP interface to display.  You don't need a PC.  It's just a smart display.  The services/applications can be anywhere in the network, and the apps could be far away.  So you walk up to it with your computing device, and the human-size display will do the work for you.

Visionary part:  assume a ubiquitously available, local area gigabit wireless channel (bluetooth 1gbps).  The vision: separate computing devices from input/output devices via an open, networked interface.  This will allow the separation of computing from  input-output devices.  This frees up PC and portable computer from having to have an integrated display.  He doesn't think you can do real work through a phone interface, but a phone-size package will hold a good machine if you take away display and keyboard!  Display is separable.  You'll have protocols for dynamically discovering and establishing secure associations with such networked human interface devices.  Then each can evolve independently.  He calls this "belt-top computing."

You'll have a permanent personal mobile computer, internal storage, single input/output channel, wireless interfaces, peripherals connected via network, human sized interface devices.

Eli Noam speaks first.  Rough, paraphrased notes.

He has 100Mbps at home for $40/month from Columbia.  (Not the typical situation.)  One can see we will get to gigabit range access fairly soon.  We're still talking about investments and incentives for these networks, national comparisons -- but we're looking forward as well.

Historically, for thousands of years, information traveled only as fast as humans could.  People tried to find ways to speed things up (shows drum network).  Semaphore network under Napoleon went 100mph - but only when the weather was good, and only during the day, and only for a few people. It was a quantum leap to the telepgraph, telephone, cable, and he's interested in relating capacity and penetration and price in the US over the period since 1850.

Noam points out that content adjusts to transmission capacity and cost, and we're now moving to multichannel TV and beyond.  This is a historical moment -- it's as if we've moved from the bicycle to a car but now it's time to go to airplanes.

What will capacity be used for?  Every time we have more capacity we doubt we'll be able to use it.  Gives example of Sweden:  in the early 1950s, they had two national radio channels, it was suggested that that was a bit boring, can't we have a third one -- but a report came back that the "national cultural capacity would not support a third radio channel."

Long tail phenomenon -- easier to have specialized programs that appeal to narrower range of people -- that's one thing we're seeing.  But also more sensory additions -- to beyond reality.  Noam thinks we'll see very expensively produced content, hyper-reality.  He also says there will also be community production, user-generated content, interactivity.  He notes that there is a "return channel" for ultrabroadband.  (For me, this is an understatement! This interactivity is the key, not a side-note.)  He's seeing high-end and low-end content flourishing, and worries about the middle.  He points to telework, virtual communities, immersive marketing