Towards Neutral Ground on Net Neutrality, Simon Wilkie, Jonathan Aronson, Francois Bar. But Wilkie wants to talk about what's going on at Annenberg (USC).

He notes that on Feb. 10 the USC Annenberg Center hosted a closed conference on Net Neutrality. Included content providers, network operators, equipment manufacturers, academics, Wall Street analysts, public interest. They developed a broadly supported list of principles. Paper explains that process and proposal.

Long and extensive dialogue. Emerged with a "split consensus." Almost a consensus, with a few holdouts. More agreement than disagreement.

Annenberg Principles (see annenberg.edu). This is the first in a series of processes Annenberg wants to have/host.

First point of consensus: Net Neutrality is a horrible term. Too value laden and politicized. Need better terms. Ambiguity re what broadband meant. Speed, QoS? fixed and/or wireless. We're going to take 1.25Mbps to the home as the standard.

NN components: End to end principle -- any end user can access any other content provider or end user, attach any non interfering CPE, point of interconnection.

Nondiscrimination: two types -- customer level (based on speed, access, quality and quantity of service); transport level (in terms of interconnection, many types).

Four categories for transport level discrim:

DS1 -- "neutral" eg a posted tariff; any firm can attain a priority level by paying posted price.

DS2 -- "non-neutral" exclusive deal eg a preferred or affiliated content provider receives access to end users on exclusive terms

F1 foreclosure Type 1: network operator forecloses access to its subscribers from certain other content providers sites/users

F2 foreclosure Type2: network operator offers affiliated exclusive content only to its own subs.

In the discussion, even consumer advocates thought tiering okay -- charging more for higher capacity fine. Neutral transport price discrimination D1 may be efficiency enhancing. But discrimination of D2 and F1 is likely harmful. Discrimination F2 is ambiguous -- take a "wait and see" approach.

Modified end to end principle: we looked at what's available to consumers now. If there are deviations now, consumers shouldn't lose those if they are useful. Speeds of 1.25Mbps ubiquitous today. Allows delivery of VHS quality video. So let's modify the principle. They should have this 1.25 available in the marketplace. But be able to pay more for more.

Economic theory behind this: costs a lot to build a network. Vertical integration can be good. We've got mix and match components, so we can have multiple equilibria. Equilibrium does not imply efficiency. So bottom line is that we need better information on the market parameters.

Sunk costs: investments in network upgrades are sunk. Low marginal costs of moving bits. Competition in 'dumb' pipes' drives prices to marginal cost. Fixed costs not recouped -- therefore people won't invest. There's a need for some type of price discrimination.

Internet is really a two sided market. Needs an intermediary to make the market. Multiple sources of revenue for network providers increases incentive to invest. There's a hold up problem: if intermediary can extract rents then that discourages innovation at the edge (content providers and end users).

So - what to do? Market reality is a duopoly likely for the short term. Some potential entrants -- aws, sprint, clearwire, power line. But long legacy of entrant failures. Notes that incremental value of adding a MVPD customer is around $2000. Can't justify the investment, so has to be another revenue sources.

Case study 1 -- videotext market. Look at minitel v. Bildschrimtext (DT). Nascent information services. Technology developed in UK in 1970s. Minitel deployed by France Telecom in 1982. Bildschrimtext deployed by DT. Minitel still functioning, Bildschrimtext is dead. Minitel was open to any information providers. Neutral but not open. Non discriminatory access (like DS1). Created private information services as "kiosks". Huge initial success. Limited by use of only FT services. eclipsed by Internet. DT was closed -- controlled content, limited both innovationa and usage. Killed off in 2001. [pretty gross case study!]

Market falure - case study 2 Australian cable TV market, similar cultrue to US, similar suburban population. Duopoly policy. No program access rules. Each franchise gained exclusive access to movie studio libraries. Take rate about 20% compared with 85% in US. Implies significant welfare losses.

These are real issues. We're concerned about high prices because of lack of competition and we're also concerned about low quality.

Principles:

Both operators and customers should win.

Any regulation should be national and uniform and with a light touch.

There should be basic access to broadband -- meaningful, neutral internet connectivity. 1.25Mbps. Beyond this, all bets are off. Baseline should be reviewed every four years.

Customers should receive clear, understandable terms and conditions of service re preferred deals/content discrimination. FTC should enforce.

Sascha Meinrath and Victor Pickard paper on The New Network Neutrality is next.  Rough paraphrase of Victor's talk follows.

We're not just here to promote pro NN.  We're trying to begin a conversation that assumes importance of current argument but tries to think about next steps in order to be proactive.  People are paying attention, broad bipartisan coalitions are here -- we need a springboard, and we're trying to work on one.  NN is a battle worth fighting, but it's short-term.  NN isn't alone as an issue -- we still are way down in BB penetration.  And lots of undemocratic trends.  So we're broadening parameters to include a number of democratizing proposals.

A number of factors -- reframing of debate, complexity, shifting allegiances -- have separated democratic principles that should be considered together.  We need new historicism.  Need to look at last century and common carriage.

Paul Starr, Robert McChesney etc. show incumbents exploiting market advantages -- to hurt universal service and innovation.

So we'd like to go beyond econ and tech to normative principles about the role of the internet in society.  Need a renegotiated social contract with telecom providers.  We have ten principles/policy points.

[Sascha takes over]

So we think status quo is lame and we're opening up even more - that explodes the notion of what neutral network is.  We talk about historical precedents.  What we've done wrong we know -- so let's not do it again!  We look at common carriage.  While BrandX going on, we were saying NN was the big battle for 2006 -- and we were right -- but it was hard to get traction.  And now we think NN is just the first step.

So ensuring that network operators must lease their lines to other operators, explicitly allowing municipalities to be players, is critical.  We can't allow that kind of behavior.  AT&T breakup etc. sets same conditions that we faced in 1908.  AT&T destroyed many local carriers.  Open architecture and open source development is important -- a way to take control is to prevent access to hardware that might be perceived as open.  We noticed that 80% of wireless hardware owned by one company....

In the wireless realm in particular, we're moving away from open protocols and standards.  This has enormous implications for interconnectivity.  End to end architecture fits into that.  Maintaining an architecture that can allow for interconnectivity is important.  Vital to notice that conspiracy theories are often right! see NSA and CALEA.

He notes that Royal Post allowed for de facto "deep packet inspection," and our post was founded in reaction to that.  If you allow people to inspect packets, and require a mandate that that be done, you'll make legitimate packet inspection much more difficult.

We know that Windows Vista has DRM.  We know that allowing discrimination here will allow blocking of VoIP.  

We must remove notion that it's okay to remove the net bias of creating circumstances - conflation - of paying for premium services v. discrimination against those who do not pay for premium service.  These are two different things.  We need required minimums.

Interoperability is important. Systems need to talk to one another, and not be proprietary.  Too many actors are creating path-dependency.

Business-model neutrality.  Sascha is concerned about discriminating against municipalities.

Internationalization.  Also important to avoid American-centric management (notes ICANN).

Asks for feedback.

Craig McTaggart (of TELUS) paper is Was the Internet Ever Neutral?  Here's a rough paraphrase of his presentation.  All mistakes mine.

He asserts that the internet of today has many forms of discrimination and preferential arrangements -- caching, peering, filtering, and traffic management.  Points to Christian Sandvig saying that Lessig view is a myth.

Since the time that the public has been able to access the internet, it's been evolving in response to consumer demands, and we shouldn't stop now.  Internet's user population has changed dramatically since Arpanet etc. days.  It wasn't designed to support realtime bandwidth intensive applications.  In McTaggart's view (points to Ohm paper re myth of superuser), a lot of literature assumes that internet users are sophisticated, run their own routers.  But that's not true.  But those superusers have far too much importance in the policy discussion.  That's a problem for the mass market view.

Commercial ISPs have always served customer needs.  Meeting those needs may require changes to the internet's architecture.

Third: a neutral internet won't best serve consumer interests.  Mainstream users today have interests that are more important than historical architectural issues.  NN authors don't know better than users, and they keep patronizing users, who can act for themselves.  Consumers won't accept changes to the way their internet works.  But they'll love differentiated offerings.  So a non-neutral internet may better satisfy user demand. But we don't really know yet.

So -- while law professors are extolling virtues of the original architecture, tech community is long past this, and knows that architecture needs to change significantly.  End to end is a sacred cow.  Points to newarch, funded by DARPA, including Dave Clarke.  See "developing a next generation internet architecture" and GENI.  They want to create new core functionality, etc.

He says that NN proponents have an "end of history" way about them.

Noam asks for policy prescriptions.

Peha:  You're vulnerable to regulatory action if, when you have market power, you (eg) charge more for VOIP than for video.

Bauer:  I don't have an explicit welfare component to my paper.  My suggestion is that it would be a bigger mistake to adopt specific network neutrality rules and then decide we don't need them.  Congress should enable the FCC to adopt rules if needed. And don't prohibit municipalities to invest in broadband.

Lehr:  All versions of NN rules I've seen are bad.  We need general legislation (if we can craft it) that shows intent of what we're trying to do, and then have agency (without full discretion) enforce it.  Ex post alone is inadequate.  Trying to make the problem go away will help -- reform spectrum, don't block creative efforts by end-users.  Trying to design a framework for future is important.

Nachbar:  I'm in favor of bad legislation (joke!).  This NN problem is different because usually we don't mandate design in access fights.  That's the primary risk that we face here.  With a product like this, design is everything.  You can discriminate much more easily here than you could have with railroads.  So I'm more concerned about forms of discrimination here that are possible.  I think a strong non-discrimination norm enforced by standards would be a good idea.  And ex post is better.

Question:  old problems, new players, Noam has said.  Why don't we see differences in pricing here?

Lehr: We do need to see more price discimination.  We have a coordination problem here. 

Peha:  We have a choice from a tech perspective.  We can discriminate based on packet inspection etc. or you could throw capacity at the problem.  We did that in the 1990s.  Maybe we'll do that in the future.

Question:  What about consumer switching? won't people just migrate ISPs if there are discrimination issues? (from Martin from BT)

Lehr:  If you have competition, sure.  But switching costs can still be there.

Question:  What about just paying by bits or by service?

Peha:  That's technically possible, sure.  If the question is how to set the price, that's a hard problem.  That's what we're trying to figure out.

Question:  Assumption here is that pipe people can tax content providers. Cable systems show us that they have to pay more each year to content providers.  Why do you assume this is different?

Question:  In Netherlands, program providers PAY cable for access to the network.

Question:  What about looking toward the future -- barriers to entry for future entrants that won't have capital?

Question:  Market power is a necessary but not sufficient element for regulation.  What's the market definition?  And for content providers, they have a national market? shouldn't we look at national market from broadband access? (this from Yoo).

Question:  Innovation from IP is the most important -- not at platform level, which is like ISDN.

Question: Do we also look at market power for content providers? Also -- it's clear we don't like Telus-like discrimination.  And we don't like Madison River.  Both of those were acted on very quickly.  Largest driver for network infrastructure will require deep discrimination. (from Morgan person)

Panelists respond: 

Nachbar:  Market power is not at the root of a lot of things we regulate.  We could have competing police forces -- but we don't.  We've traditionally been more concerned about concentration in content.  Have to worry about nature of the product here.

Lehr:  Comcast owns a lot of content -- making a separation is hard.  Market power is one reason to justify, but not necessary for regulation.

Peva:  There is a terminating monopoly here, and I think that's the driving issue.  Existing antitrust rules well-designed for eBay, but not well-designed for last mile network provider. I'm not sure Telus would be in trouble in the US.  Biggest problem we have is duopoly for broadband access -- which is local.

Noam:  One day Google will ask for discriminatory pricing.

Interesting paper here from Jon Peha.  He's listing all the ways in which network discrimination can be helpful and harmful, and suggesting that both sides of the debate need to be addressed in any NN rules.  Very worth listening to.

Co-authored paper here from Bill Lehr, Marvin Sirbu, Jon Peha, and Sharon Gillett.  End users have tools too -- they shouldn't be viewed as passive in response to carrier discrimination.  But the arms race has costs that shouldn't be ignored.  And the issue remains complex and unresolved (good for those writing about NN).  Lehr asserts that the welfare implications of NN are ambiguous. 

I'm not so sure about that, because society needs diversity (requires it) in order to create greater wealth (monetary and otherwise).  Diversity above the network layer will be better for all of us. 

Thomas Nachbar is talking now about pre-New Deal public works cases.  Looking at lines of argument (eg, apartments in DC during WWI, political exigencies).  Necessity is a great justification (eg railroad).  But we often have things that we don't provide open access to - like food, and medicine, even though necessary.  If hold yourself out as providing a common resource, held to that (but that's mostly about civil rights).  How about market power?

Well, Nachbar points out that those who hold market power tend to be politically unpopular.  These cases are really rhetorical.  This isn't a traditional justification for open access regulation.  Wagons didn't have market power! 

Nachbar points out that all open access provisions have to do with networks.  There isn't an open access regime for bottled water.  Roads have always been subject to these requirements.  Always a special treatment of them.  How does recognizing this role help us be principled?

Nachbar gently suggests that we should look beyond market power as justification for open access.

ICANN today issued a press release and a series of documents about its relationship with the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Speaking only for myself, and not on behalf of ICANN, I want to make three points:

1.  ICANN is no longer bound by the specific set of milestones that were in its prior MoU with DOC.  With this freedom comes great responsibility.  Without detailed government oversight, and without market competition for policymaking for domain names, ICANN (and the ICANN Board) has a great obligation to be accountable to its community. 

2.  We have a very long way to go in creating adequate accountability and transparency mechanisms for policymaking for gTLDs, as a recent London School of Economics report demonstrated.  And this is only one aspect of ICANN's operations that needs improvement -- we still haven't figured out a rational way to involve individuals and we still don't have a rational process for adding new gTLDs.  ICANN has to continue to change for the better, and we have a lot of mileage to cover in this respect.

3.  The Preliminary Report of the recent Board meeting (here) reflects that the Board adopted the new agreement with the DoC.  It does not record the statements that were made by Board members, including me, at the time of that meeting -- these must be coming later in the minutes, which will need to be approved by the Board.  I was deeply concerned about the agreement's apparent wholesale ratification of the DOC's desire to retain the current WHOIS policy. It would be completely inappropriate to bind ourselves contractually to that policy in advance in order to satisfy the USG, particularly when members of the ICANN community have devoted tens of thousands of hours to discussing possible changes to that policy.

To me, personally, it doesn't make sense to require public display of private information as a condition of registering a domain name.

I have been assured, again and again, that ICANN's own current PDP processes are not undermined by this agreement, and that should a changed WHOIS policy be adopted by the Board it can be enforced without the DOC's agreement.  That was certainly the understanding I had in agreeing to adoption of this new agreement with the Department of Commerce.

All comments more than welcome. 

So we know from Technorati that there are about 75,000 new blogs a day. There are about 1.2 million posts a day, or about 50,000 blog updates an hour.

But are the writers writing about what the readers want to read about?  Maybe not.

1. Cicarelli
2. Pinky
3. Facebook
4. Chavez
5. Onewebday

[Yes, it really is great that people were looking for posts about Onewebday, right after wanting to know about Facebook and who that Chavez guy was]. 

But the bloggers were writing about

Bush
1. youtube
2. Islam
3. Microsoft
4. Politica

So it appears to the post-writer that the bloggers are not necessarily writing about what the readers want to read about.  Maybe blogging is still an elite sport.  Maybe the use of tags hasn't become sufficiently widespread.

This will certainly change over time.  Meanwhile, it's good news for onewebday that there's a large group of people out there interested in finding out more.

I really like Dave Burstein's newsletter.  It sounds like him.  Even when it's just saying that "Verizon has extraordinary things coming":

He says "GPON can go 250 down, 125 up" and because Verizon's fiber bandwidth is allocated dynamically users needing speeds of hundreds of megabits will have them.

(What's GPON?  It's a Gigabit Passive Optical Network, so no optical repeaters. I can hear Dave's enthusiasm.)

Dave says they will have reached 18 million homes by 2010.

And Dave also says that Verizon will make all online video content (not just its own) available through its set-top box. 

Thanks, Dave!  This means that Verizon is quickly making fiber networks available to people across the country (taking out of service the copper lines to which common carriage obligations applied).  The set-top box news is very interesting, and we'll see what happens there.

In other news, no vote this week on the Stevens bill.  But he's threatening to bring it up again after the elections.

Someone called me today asking whether I had any stories about weird informational things happening online.  He was focused on new strange advertising/promotional/lobbying efforts popping up.

I immediately pointed him to the avatars having their picture taken for OneWebDay.  And I told him about odd commentators on blogs that discuss net neutrality -- people who seem to be paid to look for pro-neutrality posts so that they can slap them down in the comments.  We discussed online astroturfing generally.  We talked about infiltration of chat rooms.

But if you have stories of the weird that seem to fit in with this theme, send a note or leave a comment.

After the events of last week, I thought a break was a good idea.  I was supposed to go away on a short vacation, but cancelled that (that's what led me to ponder the Hugh McLeod material from yesterday).  That's the second vacation in a row that I've cancelled.

But over the weekend I did in fact stay away from the computer.  I went to see two independent films that turned out to have surprisingly parallel plot lines:  young woman in terrible situation, oppressed by society, is rescued by a series of unlikely events that culminate in a parting shot of her in a car driven (in some sense) by a helpful man.  But there's another woman left behind in the terrible situation who is stuck with it, and turns to face her fate (and certain death).  No food in either movie (starvation very possible).  No freedom. 

The first one was Water, and the second one was House of Sand.  Very elemental.  Too much water in the first one, and too much sand in the second.

So canceling yet another vacation isn't such a big deal.  The Brazilian neighborhood in House of Sand is the very opposite of my neighborhood here in NY (see the movie -- it's a stunningly inhospitable place).  I'm not a widow in 1930s India.  Actually, everything is going surprisingly well.  Very cheering.

That's the title of a post today by Hugh McLeod.

McLeod's the guy who brought us these great drawings:

In McLeod's post today he renounces the schism between Work and Life.  He's working all the time, but it's meaningful.  Taking time off for recharging makes sense to him, but the idea of having a "real life" that is different from work (and having work become just the thing that finances your lifestyle) doesn't compute for McLeod.

It's not time to start thinking about OneWebDay2 yet.  I do think OneWebDay2 will be more substantive, more widespread, and noisier than OneWebDay1.  But we'll get going on that later.

We had to start somewhere, and it was a more than respectable start.  I'm so grateful for the interest of so many people.  I had an awful lot of help in making sure that visible things would happen around the world.  And there are many many pictures, videos, and blogposts out there that weren't there before, and many people who thought about the web's impact on human lives yesterday that had never had that perspective before.

The idea behind OneWebDay1 was to assist the process of consciously building a worldwide view that the web is, by and large, helpful to people.  I got asked many times (by non-techies) during the last 18 months why we should celebrate the impact of a medium that has such a negative impact on life -- isn't it a cesspool for crime?  isn't it destructive of social interaction?  isn't it destructive of the fabric of society as a whole?

I hope that people who are interested in OneWebDay are interested in combatting that view and in recognizing the overwhelming potential of the internet to assist humans, to augment our lives, and to enrich our interactions.  The internet is under pressure around the world from a variety of directions, and OneWebDay is designed to create counter-pressure from the people who interact online.

I learned that there are many people around the globe who appreciate this message.  It's a big world out there, and it will take a while for this celebration to be as multilingual and multicultural as it should be.  And it will take fundraising, marketing, and serious corporate attention to make this celebration have the impact it should.  I'm in this for the long haul. 

Hello, blog. I'm distracted getting ready for OneWebDay on Friday.  It looks like we'll get great coverage in Korea, and we're in touch with Sir Tim Berners-Lee about being part of the London festivities, and I heard from people in China who can help get the word out.  It's all very exciting.

In the meantime, I understand there was a hearing about ICANN today -- I couldn't watch, but if anyone has impressions/notes of what happened please post in the comments here or send an email.

Dear blog, I assure you that I am thinking of you, but I am just distracted and delighted to be in touch with people across the globe about Friday the 22nd.

I went down to The Battery today at lunchtime to check on the wireless signal and the ambiance.  The wireless wasn't working, but I've been assured that it will be working on Friday for the big event.  We'll test again tomorrow.

I was standing there with wireless guy Marshall Brown, in the blazing sunlight, both of us peering at our laptop screens cradled in our elbows.  We were sort of an odd sight for the tourists going by to get on the boat for the Statue of Liberty tour.

And then the Statue of Liberty spoke to me. 

It was actually a woman wearing a SofL outfit -- pasty greeny cloaky outfit -- who had taken off her mask and crown and wanted to know what we were doing.  (There are three human SofLs hanging around on tall chairs near where people get in line for the ferry.)  I said that we were getting ready for an Earth Day for the web on Friday and testing for wireless.  I said that Craig Newmark would be there. 

"Is he famous?" the statue asked.

I said he was, I said he had started craigslist.

"Oh," the statue said, "of course!"

Then the statue asked: "Maybe he can put all three of us up for sale on Friday!" 

We agreed that she could make some money that way.

State of Play Academy, New York Law School's new virtual world law teaching academy, beta launched last week. Building on the experience of the annual State of Play conference that brings together technologists, lawyers, social scientists and other professionals to discuss virtual worlds, State of Play Academy will continue that interdisciplinary conversation online and throughout the year.

Their aim is to: 1) democratize law teaching by making it available to an open audience; and 2) understand how teaching and learning can most effectively be done within a three-dimensional, immersive and social online environment.

They're having 45-minute 'test' classes each Tuesday and Thursday at 5:30PM PST/8:30PM EST, and you are urged to join.

It's happening in There. You can download There for free.  To be voice-enabled, you'll need to pay a one-time fee to There and have a microphone.  If you need help getting set up, write to State of Play Academy Dean Lauren Gelman at gelman AT stanford DOT edu. 

I'd be there in There if it wasn't for this, and I'll be in There when that "this" is over.

Thanks to Beth Noveck.

The London School of Economics review [warning: large pdf] of the GNSO was released today by ICANN.

ICANN's comment about the review said that the "report will be used to inform ICANN's effort to develop detailed proposals for improving the GNSO's structures and processes. ICANN's Board will work with the GNSO and the ICANN community to consider this report, along with previous reviews and public input, in a collaborative process to strengthen this key policy-making body."

The review is refreshing.  But first, a pause:

Do you know what the GNSO is or what it does?  Do ICANN's processes seem difficult to understand? 

I bet (unless you've been going to ICANN meetings) you don't know much about this.  And the focus of the report on the impenetrability of ICANN's work is refreshing and very useful. 

It's as if the LSE team went on a trip into a tangled terrain full of oral history and oddly-shaped reports.  The civil and learned voice of the review expresses amazement at what they found in this strange land.  39,000 hours of work on whois, for example. Wildly varying approaches to intake, representativeness, and scope of work.

They're also amazed at what they didn't find.  Coherence? Standardization? Metrics? Accessible information? Outside expertise? Listing of who's involved? Rational web sites?

I hope that everyone who's interested will participate in the processes that are coming up that will consider this review.  My first, personal, take on this is that there is much to applaud in the report -- particularly the recommendations that outsiders be heavily involved in task forces and the relationship of new "members" in the process be with ICANN first and a broad constituency second.  Both of these recommendations will help professionalize ICANN enormously.

There is also much to applaud in the current GNSO.  The Council Chair is terrific, many people work very hard as volunteers on policy issues, there is a real effort to do good work, and none of this is easy.  But change is surely needed.

As an undergraduate music major a long time ago, I really hated Schenkerian analysis.  It was heavily taught when I was in school.  I was probably learning from the masters, but I resented it.

My memory of it is that we were told (implicitly, at least) that a piece was "really" about a simple harmonic gesture.  Say, 3 to 2 to 1 (the tonic).  Movements, symphonies, could be understood as "really" three or four key moves over a long period of time.  These moves could be prolonged, but they would always be revealed by the diligent Schenkerian.  (I undoubtedly have this completely wrong, but stay with me for a few more more paragraphs.)

From Wikipedia:

"The primary means of describing the structure of a musical passage for the Schenkerian analyst is to show hierarchical relationships among the pitches of the passage. This can be done through making reductions of the music and through a specialized symbolic form of musical notation that Schenker devised to demonstrate various prolongational techniques.

The musical reductions of Schenkerian analysis are usually arrhythmic. This reflects Schenker's belief that the deep, long-range structure of a piece of music has no particular rhythm."

Can you imagine?  Say you're 18 or 19 and you're told that that great Tchaikovsky movement (when I was a teenager I loved Tchaikovsky) is "really only" a slow move from 3 to 5.  That's it, that's all that's going on, and if you were just a little more sophisticated you'd hear the key things and ignore the rest.

This is a problem with how people talk about "the internet" too. 

For the telecom-trained, it's "really only" three sets of connections -- from user to ISP, ISP to backbone, content provider to backbone.

For the originalist engineer, it's "really only" the protocol used to interconnect machines and networks.  Once spoken, that language (knowing the protocol) says it all to the engineer.  To this group, the internet is "really only" its logical architecture.

I'm not persuaded.  The internet (for me, the human semantic communications part of it) is a serenade cooked up on the fly, a swirl of meaning.  It's not "really only" the pipes, it's not "just like" a railroad or a broadcast network, and it's not "really" a content delivery system.  There are big bossy applications out there online, but they're primitives.  It's irreducible, this layer of communication, it's not a machine. 

But because our minds live only through metaphors, we keep talking about transport and highways and trucks.  I don't think we're well served by reducing things this time around. 

VON is very big.  In fact, it's an epic conference.  I did my bit on net neutrality.  I have to say I thought the BellSouth panelist, Jon Banks, was very good indeed. 

But he kept saying, and Scott Cleland kept saying, that competition in the market for residential broadband access was very strong.  Prices are lower!  Service is better!

That's just not true.  If competition is such a potent force, why was Verizon able to invent a new service charge to take the place of its Universal Service charge -- and only back down in the face of FCC intervention and general uproar?  Why are cable prices flat or going up?  Why are DSL subscribers getting less bandwidth per dollar than last year?  Why do 40% of zip codes in the US have a choice of only one broadband provider?

I'm not saying the network neutrality question is easy.  But the broadband access market isn't competitive.  I'm waiting until some state AG starts investigating whether cable and DSL providers are colluding.  Go, state AG!

After our (quite polite and subdued) debate, I went out and wandered around the epic conference floor.  I couldn't stay long, and it was just too big to take in quickly, and I couldn't find the lunch.  I know that Jeff Jarvis gave a great speech the day before, but I had to miss that too. 

Next time I go to Fall VON I'll take the month off to soak it all in.

So Tech Daily (subscription only) is reporting that Sen. Stevens thinks his bill is being held up by net neutrality issues.

(On the other hand, I've also heard that anti-net-neutrality forces are planning a vote on Sept. 25, feeling confident that they will have the 60 votes to end debate and pass the bill.)

Sen. Stevens apparently expressed frustration about the net neutrality issue in a hearing today about Chairman Martin's re-confirmation for a second term:

The lack of stricter neutrality safeguards, however, has splintered the Senate and the communications industry. The issue "may well lead to its total defeat this year after 19 months of work on that bill," Stevens, R-Alaska, said of his measure, which his committee narrowly approved in June but which has not reached the floor.

This may be a feint, a gesture, or it may be real.  Can't tell.  It may signal that a large online company is about to make a deal to help the legislation through, to be the hero of all those hard-working telecom companies who have slaved away over this bill for so long.

Can't tell.

This fifth anniversary of 9/11 is a beautiful day.  I saw two businessmen I know on the street outside the school, and we all said "beautiful day in New York today." 

Five years ago I was in Montevideo, Uruguay, when the attacks happened, and I remember being very glad that I was with the people that I was with when it happened.  We stayed in Montevideo, watching television and sending email, for a long time.  When I finally got back to my office in D.C., nothing was going on -- everyone was stunned.

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On Wednesday of this week I'll be on a panel with Scott Cleland at Fall VON talking about net neutrality.  I have already received a bunch of helpful email messages.  If you'd like to send one too, please do. 

If you have relevant information about the state of broadband access competition in the U.S. that is more recent (or better) than the July 2006 FCC report, please let me know.

Alan Bennett's play The History Boys (which you must see) is about many things, including, on its surface, teaching a group of boys how to write clever exam answers that will win them scholarships to Oxford or Cambridge.

The teacher that encourages them to write sideways, to "flee the crowd, follow Orwell, be perverse," is named Irwin.  Irwin ends up as a lobbyist/consultant for Members of Parliament.  Here's how Irwin counsels his clients to present a bill that will "abolish trial by jury" and "abolish the presumption of innocence" in many cases:

[I]nsist that the bill does not diminish the liberty of the subject but amplifies it; that the true liberty of the subject consists in the freedom to walk the streets unmolested etc., etc., secure in the knowledge that if a crime is committed it will be promptly and sufficiently punished and that far from circumscribing the liberty of the subject this will enlarge it.

When I heard this speech in the theater it seemed acute and painfully appropriate.  We get this all the time from public life, these bemusedly tolerant speeches twisting paradoxes.  The (metaphorical) room fills with mist and everyone nods. Irwin again: 

'The loss of liberty is the price we pay for freedom' type thing. 

Today I heard a 19-year-old developer say that when he talks to his friends they all assume that cable and DSL broadband access will be irrelevant.  He mentioned the $100 laptop and mesh networking, and said that his developer buddies are confident that no one will use traditional networks in a few years.  Instead, we'll just pop open our machines, find someone to connect to, and we'll be done.  So he and his developer friends are writing applications to suit that world.

That's a great vision, and it very well may come true.  But there are some counter-indications.  If cities manage to create healthy municipal networks, then why would people living there go through the pain of developing adequate meshes?  If all network access points have to be CALEA-compliant, then won't we be in a Prohibition-era-style time of law enforcement hunting out meshes and squashing them?  (Maybe that'll just help their growth.)  Will we learn how to participate in mesh networks in time to adopt them in large numbers before they become illegal?

Anyway, it was a fine moment.  "Why are you guys spending so much time talking about wires and cable?", he was saying.  "We don't even think about that stuff."

Doc Searls, noting the Facebook flap, says that having social networks hosted by silos is a problem.  He's calling for a "real commons" online.

But, wait.  Doc's thinking that we should have public spaces online, that you should know when you're there, and that you should act differently when you are.  Borders are interesting -- borders make for differences, which make things alive.  Without a difference between an inside and an outside, you've got equilibrium. 

So to have a public space online, we'd need some borders between that and the private space.  I can imagine an open source metaverse, where the people from WoW can come by if they want to and get on a soapbox.  Worlds collide!

I'm not convinced that a "silo" is a problem to the extent that "silo" means "borders."  Borders are very useful.  There may even be rules associated with the envelope of a public online space (no sleeping there overnight?).  

All in all, it's a good time to be dreaming about the future of the graphical, networked screen.  We've been stuck with text for far too long. 

There's a Board call on the 7th that has a discussion of org/info/biz on the agenda.  I hope I'll be able to be on the call -- I'll be at a conference that doesn't have great cell reception.

I am most concerned about the possibility of differential pricing for renewals.  I personally think the contracts should require that no renewal at time T cost more than the lowest fee  the registry is charging for individual (ie, not part of a bulk sales deal of any kind) new registrations at time T.  It doesn't make sense to allow a registry to hold up a registrant at renewal.  Switching costs are high.

The approval of these contracts isn't on the agenda, and I don't anticipate that they'll be approved on this call.

Given that the .com contract still hasn't been approved, it doesn't seem appropriate to assume that it will be approved unchanged.

Happy to hear from anyone about this, of course.

Yesterday a letter to The Times from Prof. Mark Gerstein caught my attention:

One cannot help but wonder whether the way that Dr. Perelman sequestered himself from the minutiae of academic life and from e-mail and correspondence altogether is a principal reason he has been able to think so deeply about a problem.

Grigory Perelman (New Yorker article by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber here) stayed away from everyone for seven years.  Then he emerged with a key theorem but refused to receive the leading mathematics prize for it (and also refused to joust for credit with others).

Consider Paul Erdos.  His life was a long collaboration with innumerable mathematicians:

In a never-ending search for good mathematical problems and fresh mathematical talent, Erdös crisscrossed four continents at a frenzied pace, moving from one university or research center to the next. His modus operandi was to show up on the doorstep of a fellow mathematician, declare, "My brain is open," work with his host for a day or two, until he was bored or his host was run down, and then move on to another home.

Erdos was the polychronic mathematician, happiest when he was working with six colleagues at a time, constantly finding and attacking new problems.

Convinced that guilds in WoW are harbingers of effective group work online (and remembering Joi Ito's astonishing video of his guild on a raid), I went off looking for what people were saying about their WoW experiences.  I found this remarkable thread on Terranova:  "WoW-nnui."  Lots of thoughtful comments about why some WoW players have had enough, and well worth reading.

Gerstein and Perelman wouldn't have liked being in a guild in the first place.  They're usefully off on their own, avoiding academic committees and thinking carefully. 

But there are other kinds of minds -- minds like Paul Erdos's, although his was really one of a kind -- who would stay with the guild experience for a long time.  Under certain conditions.  It's telling that some of the talented commentators on Terranova have had their fill.  

Some minds want more meaningful things to do in a guild than just scrabble around leveling up their character.  They'd probably like problems to solve and predictions to make and development plans to carry out.  Paychecks to earn.  It wouldn't have to be all earnest work -- there could still be a 20lb catfish around every once in a while -- but it would have to be more than what they're getting in current game settings, and for payoffs more closely tied to their investments of time and experience.  (Some of the comments about just how long it takes to get things done, and how boring the tasks are, are painful.)

Surely all of this is just around the corner.

I've been saying here that what communications policy should do is create conditions that increase the value of communications for society.

One key way to do that is to make it possible for communications to continue to be more and more complex.  Complex doesn't mean complicated.  A system that has greater complexity is one that takes more information to describe.  The most ordered system would be the least complex, because it wouldn't take much information to describe what's going on.

More complex communications would offer more choices of social entities to join online (a WoW guild, a Second Life business, perhaps a group blog with a well-defined boundary).  Having these choices is valuable in and of itself.  In order to cope with all the information around us, we'll want flexible social entities to work with that fit our local needs -- it takes a complex organism to deal with a complex environment.  (Think "law of requisite variety.")

The global economy has become more and more complex with the passage of time, giving all of us more and more diverse choices of what to do and how to do it.  This increasing complexity has been joined with (and perhaps has caused) increasing value.  

Similarly, increasingly socially complex communications are valuable to us as humans.  We're always looking for patterns and ways of working through the world. So facilitating the most complex communications -- creating conditions that allow the widest variety of social groupings to emerge to battle for our attention -- should be the primary goal of communications policy.

This means that the network neutrality battle is about much more than "innovation" or encouraging (or discouraging) "free speech."  It's about creating the greatest possible social value by encouraging the online evolution of complex communication.   

It's not a sound bite.  I wish it were.  I'll try to find a quick way to say it -- something that involves restaurants and Chowhound and food delivery and New York (and maybe bings) -- some pungent anecdote that brings complexity to life.

It rained all day, but thanks to chowhound I found a new favorite place:  The new bing restaurant on W. 3rd, east of 6th.  Unbelievable.  I want to go back tomorrow.  Make sure you get there when they're just taking a tray out of the oven, and ask for an assortment of whatever they have.  It's all delicious.

More blog substance tomorrow -- not just bings, although these bings were spectacular.  I like the name.  Bing.

This month begins the fourth year of this blog.  It's been wonderful having a voice. 

Speaking of voices, for the last year or so I've been working on a celebration of the internet called OneWebDay.  Today there were two milestones for OneWebDay -- I recorded my very first PSA podcast (thanks, Howard!).  Howard was a DJ for a long time, and you can hear his fine radio voice at the end.  But the first voice is mine.

The second milestone was getting in touch with volunteers in London, Sofia, Tokyo, Washington, D.C., and Ottawa about helping them set up Meetup.com pages for whatever OneWebDay activities they end up holding.  (Thanks, Meetup!)  This is the first year of OneWebDay, so it may be one volunteer and one puppy (and a laptop) getting together, but it's a start, and it was good to have five capital cities to write to.  Lots of other cities in several countries are doing things too -- in fact, I can't really tell what's going to happen.

I'm just planting a seed with this OneWebDay idea.  The idea behind it is to create an Earth Day for the internet.  It's a day to celebrate how important the web is to each of us and remind ourselves not to take it for granted.  (Because the web is made of people, it's up to us to take care of it.)  It's a big tent, OneWebDay.  I am still hoping to find someone who will create a way for millions of people each to upload a picture that becomes a pixel in an enormous online collage, but that may have to wait for year two. The day will have a character of its own that has nothing to do with me (I've seen a blog posting talking about "the Canadian organizers of OneWebDay," and someone once asked me whether I was with "the OneWebDay organization") and will be different in each place where it happens.

It's great to have a voice -- we each have one, online.