Back in March 2004, the FCC issued a remarkable piece of paper -- an "IP-Enabled Services" notice of proposed rulemaking.  Someone sidled up to me and said, "it's all over!  This is Computer Four! The FCC is in charge!"

In a nutshell, the March 2004 notice suggested that the FCC believed it had jurisdiction over "IP-enabled services" (that is, anything using the Internet Protocol) under its "ancillary" powers in Title I of the 1996 Act.  (Translation:  even though the statute giving the FCC its power doesn't say anything about the internet, the FCC believes that it has authority to make rules about "services" that use IP.  It gets this authority, it believes, from a little line in the first, general Title of the Act that gives it "necessary and proper" internal housekeeping rulemaking authority.  So we're into a standardless, undefined area -- all the other Titles are quite specific.  So far no one is stopping the FCC and the Supreme Court BrandX opinion defers to the FCC's interpretation of its authority.  But I digress).

This was a dramatic statement.  The Domain Name System depends on IP.  All web sites depend on IP.  Email.  You name it.  The FCC said it was thinking about what "social policies" to apply to these "services."

Since then, we've seen several moves to apply particular "social policies" to, in particular, "interconnected VoIP" services and highspeed internet access providers.  The FCC has said that it can broaden what "interconnected VoIP" means, but for the moment it means voice applications that are capable of connecting to the traditional phone system (even if they don't actually connect).  It's a sort of "fruit of the poisoned tree" move -- as soon as some part of an application or suite of applications is capable of connecting, the whole thing/company has to be compliant.

The first three "social policies" have been E911, CALEA, and Universal Service funding.  Each is a story of its own.  (The CALEA story had a another milestone moment a couple of weeks ago when law enforcement filed a petition for an expedited rulemaking essentially saying that the wireless packet data they get is inadequate under CALEA -- they want more precise data.  This has potential design implications for any nascent service.) 

I've heard that today the Commission adopted a fourth "social policy" for "interconnected VoIP":  accessibility compliance under Sec. 255.  We'll see what the requirements are -- right now there's nothing on the FCC site.

So Twitter is too much and LinkedIn seems increasingly impersonal.  But Dopplr -- just right, at least for now.  I like the little thumbnails of people, I like that I can see who's in the town I'm in, and I like the simplicity.  Not a lot of bells, whistles, and meta-bettah-information - at least for now.  It's like...a calling card system for people who move around a lot. 

Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the practice of calling and leaving cards.  I know about it only from my (now late) grandmother and from a 1920s etiquette book that I bought at a garage sale once.  Basically, the idea was that people established At Home afternoons when they were available for calls.  But you would only call on people you already knew.  And the first time around, you would do no more than leave your card - then the recipient would decide whether to return or acknowledge your call.  Complicated - sometimes the cards would have corners turned up to signal particular messages.

So you start in Dopplr by being invited (just ask, lots of invitations floating around).  Then you ask other people if they want to be fellow travellers of yours.  Then they can see your trips, but they can decide in turn if they want to allow you to see theirs.  Just like the card system -- polite, signals sent and received, levels of acquaintance decided on -- but faster and spanning the globe. 

The visit that follows the signal - that's the interesting part across which a discreet veil will be drawn.

Many many comments filed here.  And the Commission is asking for comments in response to Google's question:  "Do the Commission’s existing rules governing commercial spectrum in the 700 MHz Band already allow licensees to utilize 'dynamic auction mechanisms,' such as real-time auctions and per-device registration fees"?

It's a big story, and I'll be blogging about it - lots of drama.

But my favorite story today (still catching up with email and news) was about lunch delivery in Mumbai:

The precision and efficiency of the dabbawallas have been likened to the Internet, where packets identified by unique markers are ferried to their destination by means of a complex network.

“There is a service called FedEx that is similar to ours — but they don’t deliver lunch,” said one dabbawalla, Dhondu Kondaji Chowdhury.

I've been in yet another meeting for the last couple of days, and that's IT.  Back on the blog on May 29.

So this afternoon my charge is to lay out all the NN issues to a bar association that doesn't have a telecom subcommittee.  Writing it all down took a while this morning.  It's a hard story to make simple.

Cringely says that "In the end the ISPs [network providers] are going to win this [network neutrality] battle, you know. The only thing that will keep them from doing that is competition, something it is difficult to see coming along anytime soon, rather like [a] lemonade-powered sports car."  He points out that cable systems can easily prioritize things if they see congestion, and that traffic shaping has the same effect as discrimination. (Not that we have any real data about shaping inside these private networks.)

So will we see competition?  I'm going to say that the spectrum auction later this year is raising hopes of that.  (Good Wired story here.)

Meanwhile, the 9th Circuit casts asparagus on sites that encourage people to fill out forms -- Section 230 immunity is at stake. (Eric Goldman roundup.)  It's an odd case.  I wonder whether the big online companies will appeal.  I hope they will.  This is potentially a bipartisan issue that the current Court might treat fairly.

I'm not planning to turn this blog into a travelogue, and the truth is that my journeys aren't as exciting as, say, Joi's or Nina's. 

But the people I've met in Cincinnati have been very kind, and I'm staying at a great old steamship of a hotel:


Tomorrow we astonish the Ohio State Bar Association with a passionate yet well-informed debate about net neutrality.  We're up against "How To Use Casemaker," so the competition is tough.  ("Your Source for Online Legal Research.")

I'll try to give the briefest, most persuasive answer I can to the question "Why is Net Neutrality Important?" Plus I've been called on to give the neutral professorial background segment.  It's a two hour debate.  By the end of it both teams should be able easily to switch sides.  I'm pretty sure it will be available online eventually.

Long days of reading about spectrum policy, and, in particular, the big auction of "beachfront" spectrum coming up later this year. 

Why can't some of this spectrum be left unlicensed?  Yes, we've seen great growth and ingenuity spurred on by having unlicensed spectrum being made available.  But Congress has said that the "commercial use" part of this spectrum has to be assigned through competitive bidding, and that means auctions and licenses.  The Commission believes that competitive bidding and auctions will "ensure[] that spectrum licenses are assigned to those who place the highest value on the resource and will be suited to put the licenses to their most efficient use."  Even though we have no idea, really, whether licensing is more efficient or more valuable to society than letting this spectrum be used by unlicensed devices.

How will this auction affect whether DSL/cable providers are subject to competition from wireless broadband providers?  Unclear.  The Frontline proposal is remarkably audacious.  Create a new nationwide block license.  Extend the license for 15 years, not just ten.  Require whoever bids for it to pay cash up front (billions) in order to win.  Require whoever bids for it to have a business plan that will involve building (at no cost to the public) a free public safety highspeed network.   Use of the new nationwide license will be preemptible by public safety emergency needs.  It's a pretty elaborate plan that might result in making available a new wholesale source of highspeed access with some watery neutrality.  But is it a giveaway to a former government employee -- will the rules be written so that only Frontline can win?  Does it make sense?  I have a lot to learn about this.

In the meantime, I've had two days of San Francisco light and fog, all for spectrum reading.

I'm locked away in a conference room at the Googleplex.  There was a tour before we started -- it was essentially mostly about food.  Free food.  Bagels, blood oranges, organic snacks, endless food.  A great deal of playfulness - perhaps Google has hired playfulness consultants.

So this week will end on a brief blogging note.  Rest assured that I am getting plenty to eat.

Have you visited the Internet Archive lately?  It's officially (as of this month) a library.  Coming soon: a tool that will make it really easy to upload videos and mark them with tags.  Now, you've heard of this already -- there are several commercial applications that do this.  But the Internet Archive is dedicated to archiving and preserving web content:

The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet - a new medium with major historical significance - and other "born-digital" materials from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, we are working to preserve a record for generations to come.

I visited the Internet Archive building in San Francisco today.  It looks as if the Internet Archive and OneWebDay will be collaborating, and I couldn't be happier about that.

One project that needs doing, and needs leadership and prodding:  interviews with people about their early web involvement and memories.  The Archive has a nice Computers and Technology video area, but a much more substantial project would be to have citizen journalists out there recording interviews and making the raw footage available to everyone via the Archive.  This may be a OneWebDay project in the making -- if you'd like to volunteer to work on this, the barriers to entry are vanishingly low.

The last in the series. "What is broadband good for?"

For

“For” can be understood as both a utilitarian word (“for what purpose is X used?”) and a pointer to a beneficiary (“for whom the bell tolls”).  Here is a moment at which I think  “for” could bravely choose one of these purposes. 

“For” in its utilitarian sense is tied to “what,” providing a kind of bookend service-oriented function within our little phrase.  What’s it good for?  What content-delivery supply-chain usefulness is broadband providing?  We are devoted to coming full circle, as human beings.  Repetition is the way we know things are reaching an end, and we long for resolution of difficult moments.  If we take this approach, “for” is just another instance of choosing online services and billing for them, rounding out “what” and “broadband” with a comfortably related “for.”  I think this use of “for” is selling “for” short. 

Of course, “for” is short.  But let us press on.

“For” could instead be used here in a higher-minded, more optimistic, more socially-responsible way.  Why wouldn’t we want to push “for” higher up the great chain of meaning?  Who are we to hold “for” back?

So here is my brief conclusion.  Internet access is “for” our collective economic and social future.  We are the beneficiaries, as are the generations who will follow us.  We can’t predict it, we can’t control it, but we can try to make it as interesting and complex as possible.  It’s “for” us.

==

Comcast CEO Shows Off Super Quick Modem.

DOCSIS 3.0, from Wikipedia.

"I wonder if Comcast will still have their blistering fast 376kbps upload speed when they increase the download speed."  Comment on Engadget entry.

Last week, the Susan Crawford blog featured a slow, close reading of the question/phrase "What is Broadband Good For."  We only got through "broadband" - that's the geologic pace of this blog.

Twice in the last week I've been presented with a lunch menu at a fancy midtown club that has the following entry as one of the choices for red wines by the glass.  I am not making this up (as Dave Barry would say):

Chateau Routas, Internet, 2004.

So, if the internet can bring forth a great glass of wine, surely it's good for other things as well.

Good

Communications policy suffers from a certain perspective-blindness.  Our tangles with line-drawing between “information services” and “telecommunications services” are embarrassing, because for anyone other than a communications lawyer these distinctions make no sense.  From a user’s perspective, cable modem access to the internet is transport. Just like a DSL connection to the internet is transport.  Users don’t care about the materials that are involved in transporting their communications. 

“Good” suffers from this same potential perspective-blindness.  Good for whom?  Who decides what’s good?  Good compared to what alternative state of the world?  The use of “good” is as weighted in its policy implications as “broadband,” and carries with it a large number of questions. Even without a clear goal, the regulatory actions we take affect outcomes and create controversies about which economic and social benefits should be preferred or can be attained.  We are stumbling forward, tinkering blindly with the greatest value-creation system we have ever seen.

Our national internet access policy suffers from a lack of a principled theory of “the good.”  Other countries are doing better at this.  In many Northern European countries, and in Asia, they’ve decided what’s “good” about internet access.  They understand that choices made by government to stimulate the production of new ideas can have an significant effect on economic growth, and they have explicitly linked communications infrastructure and internet access to economic policy:  better infrastructure leads to more new ideas, new ideas lead to a more flexible labor market, more flexible labor market and the ability of new businesses to operate at scale lead to economic growth.  Other countries are making these explicit, national, public choices to support national internet infrastructure in a variety of ways. 

We need a theory of "the good."  Mine is that "more, faster, open internet access is better for everyone."  Whether spectrum should be "licensed" at all is a fiercely-contested question.  We can’t predict what business sectors will flourish and which will die as a result of this policy, and that’s as it should be.  No one is guaranteed a return on their investment in this life.  We need a national social policy for internet access that takes the country as a whole and tries to do better for all of us, rather than for the few companies that currently control internet access.

[Disclosure:  I'm connected to David Weinberger through a web of mutual interests and conference-attendance.  I read his blog.  David is a member of the OneWebDay board.]

This is a book that was written to be blogged about.  (Other blog entries are here.)  I'm confident its author, David Weinberger, often thought to himself "So why am I writing a book if the world I’m writing about exists online?"  So let me rush to assure him that I am glad he wrote this book.  We still need books, which give us sustained single voices talking to us and can be conveniently carried around so as to be read on quiet trains or in quiet rooms.  It may be an old-fashioned medium, a book, but this one is written humbly and with no great claims to authoritative “last word” status.  And it’s good.

This lovely book was written to be taken apart – in a good way.  It asks us to reflect on how the great worlds of knowledge and authority have been changed beyond recognition by the advent of the internet.

In my view, which is only one of the thousands of views about this book (and that’s the way it should be), I think this book was written to bridge gaps between the people that are baffled by the web and the people that aren’t.  The people that aren’t may find instant anachronisms – mentioning X new business when X is already merged into Y, how slow! and why on earth didn’t he write about Z? – but the people that are baffled (even a little baffled) will need to sit back in their collective chairs and consider.  

Weinberger has written (or, at least, I think he has written – he may differ) about the distinction between information and knowledge, and between knowledge and authority.  And he’s letting us know that online groups of various kinds, consciously and unconsciously, without necessarily having any direction, are rewriting these distinctions and restating how they work.  Finally, he’s telling us that this is a great and joyous development.

Many wiser minds than mine have written about these distinctions.  Now, these distinctions fall apart at their margins, like the differences between atoms and bits.  You could say that a map is “information” and the best route between Boston and New York is “knowledge” – but as Weinberger makes clear, the map itself represents a judgment about what’s important to its particular audience.  But leaving that alone, we could say that we know the difference between information and knowledge.  We could bluntly say that information is unprocessed – a train schedule, a laundry list.  Some mind or machine processes that information in some way, by pointing to it or using it somehow, and metainformation (compressed, useful, expressive, having quality) emerges.  Metainformation, in turn, can be processed by human minds in ways that causes knowledge to emerge.  No sharp lines here, just sharpening and turning and pattern-revealing.  At some point, who knows when, knowledge can emerge as authoritative, relied on by others, agreed-to.  (My cousin Benjamin Reeve has written about “metainformational depth” and the quality that attaches to metainformation.)

What’s amazing about the online world, what makes Weinberger need to write this book, is that it enables everyone to participate in these emergent processes.  We could look at the amount of information available online and just shudder.  (My mother does this when she’s thinking about arranging for a stay in a hotel across the country.  Hi, Mom!)  Or we could say bravely that the ability to tag and disaggregate and reaggregate splinters of digital information in ways that we find sympathetic is an extraordinarily powerful skill that we are just beginning to learn.  It’s not so much that everything is miscellaneous but that nothing need be.  Shards of information are forever being gathered online, creating individual “knowledge” that is revelatory.  Weinberger finds music in the spaces between the notes, in the intersections and gaps and collections that make up online group-created knowledge.

In The Machine Stops, a short story by E.M. Forster that I keep pointing to across the years, the main character takes a journey across the physical world to visit her son.  They have been joined only by electronic communications for a long time.  She is unaccustomed to movement, and trembles when she climbs aboard the almost-empty airship – people have stopped traveling.  She thinks that only the machine, a very centrally-run machine, can give her new ideas, and she has begun to worship it.  When the airship is above the Greek islands she draws the shade closed, afraid of the sun, and says to herself, “No ideas here.”

Weinberger turns this vision inside out.  The internet is not the machine that Forster was afraid of.  Instead, because anyone can publish and link and annotate, and no one is in charge, the internet can reveal the wealth of ideas and interactions that we could only approximate in the past by musing about ancient Greece.  It isn’t visible, this emergent miscellany-knowledge, you can’t see the boundaries of the islands, but it’s amazing nonetheless.  We needn’t worship the machine, because there isn’t really “a machine” – just a sea of all-of-us in which meaning is constantly emerging.  Here’s a lovely moment towards the end of Weinberger’s new book:


So thanks to David Weinberger for writing this book. Small Pieces Loosely Joined (also written by Weinberger) was a very important book for me because it made me think about the web as a cultural construct rather than a curiousity.  I’m glad he wrote this one, and I treasure its expression of emergent discovery.

We still have some key words left in "what is broadband good for" -- both the "good" and the "for" are ahead of us.  But it's time for a break.

I've been taking breaks offline on weekends recently, and I recommend it.   I find it's really hard to make any sustained progress in writing or reading if I'm wondering who's sending me the next email.  (Not that my email traffic is that great - there's a lot of listmail and a lot of news.)  In fact, I can't write these days unless I intentionally isolate myself from online access. 

What's up with that?  I keep writing about how great it is, how productivity-enhancing and empowering and all-around helpful the internet is, but I can't write anything longer than a few paragraphs when I'm online.  I bet many people who check by this blog have the same problem. 

There are some architectural fixes for this.  There's a physical switch on the machine that prevents it from picking up wifi signals.  There's a chair in my office, a big, comfortable chair, that isn't anywhere near either a wireless signal or an ethernet connection.  There are libraries and benches that don't have access.  I need these architectural limitations.  It's a challenge to settle my mind down and concentrate.

And increasingly I need a day or two off each week to take a breath and reflect, both offline and online.  I'm a mix of the very old-fashioned and the very-electronically driven.  I spend hours working on playing an instrument whose sounds can be synthesized perfectly by Ray Kurzweil's machines.  So tomorrow and Sunday I'll take a break, and I'll be back here on Monday.

Before we continue the What is Broadband Good For serialization, a big cheer for Rick Whitt!  And thanks to Gordon Cook and his list for pointing to the article.  Another big cheer for David Weinberger and his new book, Everything is Miscellaneous, reviewed here beautifully by Cory Doctorow.  Small Pieces Loosely Joined is one of my favorite books of all time, and Everything is Miscellaneous will join that short list.

Broadband

We have reached the middle word, the heart of the matter.  I remember seeing Yehudi Menuhin run a master class about the Bach Chaconne once, with a white linen Indian overshirt over his tuxedo pants.  He played the piece for the students, and suddenly stopped to bow deeply.  He said that he bowed at that point because it was the exact middle of this great piece, and he wanted to show respect.

“Broadband” is both central to this essay and a loaded word.  It is used to draw a distinction between slow and fast speeds, and it implies speed – but this word does much more work than that.  To talk about “broadband” means that you either (1) understand “the internet” to be, essentially, the connections we use to access it or (2) that you’re not thinking about “the internet” at all but rather about some speeded, managed “service” that happens to use the Internet Protocol.

What is the internet?  Again, this is a mindset question.  To the engineers, the internet is a logical architecture, an agreement to chunk data into packets and send them on their individually-routed ways to their individually-numbered destinations.  To netheads, the internet is both the logical architecture (the standards) and the relationships that that architecture makes possible; these relationships, pulled together by interest and accident and characterized by shifting boundaries and unpredictable dynamics, are what is so attractive about the internet.. To the telecommunications companies, the internet is the collection of three physical transport links (last mile, middle mile, backbone) and nothing more.  To equate “the internet” with “broadband” is to give all prominence to the importance of last-mile speed, and to fall into the traditional telecommunications way of seeing the world.  This equation of “internet” with “broadband” subtly ends all discussion and focuses us only on the incentives the telecommunications companies say they need to build out these last miles.

It may be, however, that this use of the word “broadband” isn’t about “the internet” at all, but instead about a very special purpose use of IP:  the managed last mile.  (Bob Frankston often talks about this.) IP was of course designed to handle “video” in the same way that it manages “voice” and “data,” as undifferentiated packets with no guarantees.  The idea was that the ends of the network would take care of the guaranteeing.  This works rather well.  It leaves a lot of room for reinvention and new opportunities to be new. 

The managed last mile, by contrast, is potentially indistinguishable from a cable system with a cellphone overlay, optimized on billing and bundling.  I realize that Verizon and AT&T have different plans for our “broadband” future, but this use of “broadband” is what may be meant by AT&T’s “Your World Delivered” and Verizon’s “Our People.  Our Network” slogans.  It’s our network, we manage it, and we’re going to deliver content to you.  You’ll be passive, you won’t need to upload, we’ll take care of all of this for you and you’ll be happy. 

If I can convey only one idea in this short study of this short phrase, it is this:  the use of “broadband” as the portmanteau term for online communications has significant connotations.   The train left the station carrying this word long ago; the OECD studies “broadband” penetration, not “highspeed internet access” penetration, the President calls for “broadband” by 2007, and the Progress and Freedom Foundation identifies “many signs that the U.S. broadband market is showing healthy growth” – including the new “mobile wireless broadband” platforms.  If there is anything that isn’t highspeed internet access, it’s mobile wireless as it is now in this country. 

Even though the word “broadband” is in wide use, we should try to be candid about what it means, and careful to make sure that its differences from “the internet” are understood.  At the least, we should understand how the intentional use of “broadband” affects central communications policy debates.

We're moving on from yesterday's "What" to today's "Is."  But we will also have to think about Obama/MySpace, and there's a tie-in ahead.

What is broadband good for?

Is

After a few earnest paragraphs [see yesterday's very serious "What" discussion], it is always a good idea to take a break.  “That depends on the meaning of ‘is,’” we can all say at this point.  This is also a good tie-in to the Casanova theme with which I shamelessly tried to grab your attention at the beginning. 

There is something serious to say about “is,” though.  To think that what we are doing online now is somehow predictive of what we will be doing is another example of the human wish to categorize and clump.  It implies that we can measure and assess online activity in some helpful way now that should drive telecommunications policy for the future. 

With just ten years of experience with a user-friendly graphics-rendering browser behind us, and just ten years of the commercial internet under our belts, it seems naive to think that we have any idea what will happen next.  Many online eruptions are entirely unanticipated.  Who knew that classified ads would be destroyed, that we would all stop using phone books, that online presence-detection would become a nuanced, informational thing, that tens of millions of people would start publishing details about their lives online, and that IBM would be trying to make a business model out of Second Life?  Maybe all of you did.  If so, congratulations.  It’s safe to say, though, that a few other people didn’t.

=====and speaking of online eruptions, many thanks to Micah Sifry for carefully reporting on the Obama/MySpace volunteer story.  What a story!  Here's more from Micah.

Who would have thought that campaigns would feel the need to take over MySpace sub-areas?  I agree with Micah that the Obama campaign fumbled this one.  Anthony worked on this fan site for 2.5 years and the work got to be overwhelming.  He was asked to name his price and he did.  But the campaign decided that control was the better way to go. 

"Is" is changing daily, and our candidates aren't quite as dynamic as they should be - in all senses of that word.  I hope they get there.

What is Broadband Good For, someone asked me. 

In “Casanova in Bolzano,” a novel by Sandor Marai, an aging but powerful nobleman comes to pay a call on Casanova.  The nobleman has intercepted a letter written by his young and beautiful wife to the famous womanizer, and has come to convey a warning to Casanova.  But before he delivers the warning, he does a close reading of the letter for Casanova’s benefit.  The nobleman says:


The letter is very brief.  There are four words.  “I must see you.”  The nobleman takes his time with his interpretation.  “Next comes ‘must.’  Not ‘I would like to,’ not ‘I desire to,’ not ‘I want to.’  Immediately, in the second word of the text, she declares something with the unalterable force of holy writ.”

This slow exegesis is compelling and sinister, and while it is going on you imagine Casanova’s clever mind trying to map out a way to avoid the painful plans of the nobleman. 

I realize that communications policy is not always viewed as a dramatic subject.  But when I was asked to write a brief response to the question “What is broadband good for” it seemed to me that to take the words as simply a banal phrase would not do them justice.  Each word has a weight and import of its own.  The intentional choice of each of these words is, in fact, significant.  And it is much more fun to approach the task this way.  So, each day this week I will take on a separate word.  Let's start with

What

There is an implication hidden in “what.”  It implies a kind of “service”-oriented thinking.  “What” is something you can point to, draw lines around, and understand as a single or aggregated coherent thing/activity in the world.  When people want to hear about the activities their aging relative has undertaken during the past day, they say “what did you do today.”  They expect that the output will be a list of events, each with a distinct starting point and ending point.  Each item on this list will have a boundary and will fall within a category that already exists in the listening (even if slightly bored) mind of the other.  There will be errands (to, from, the shop visited, the item bought), conversations (who with, the plan made, the information exchanged), entertainments (music heard, videos seen), and, if the aging relative is employed, a series of work-related events (meetings, who attended, more conversations, outputs).

This “service” mindset for what people do or will do online has a long and distinguished pedigree.  This is the mindset that sees each communications modality as a categorizable, separate entry on a list.  New forms of these modalities occasionally arise, but they can easily be related back to the old form.  The use of “what” is a prompt for output-categories like “IPTV” and “VoIP” and “email”: a new form of broadcast television, a new form of telephony, a new form of terrestrial mail.  Each item on this list of “whats” has a clear boundary (“Verizon plans to roll out FiOS TV services in January”) and a start date.  Before January, there was no FiOS TV from Verizon, after January there will be.  The entire “IP-enabled services” rulemaking initiated by the Commission in 2004 has this “what” orientation.  The FCC stated that there that it was dealing with “services and applications relying on the Internet Protocol family,” and trying to decide how those “services and applications” should be regulated.

“What” “services and applications” will people use online?  To ask the question in this way assumes that we will be able to perceive boundaries around categories of online activity, that what we do will be recognizable to us and others as a new form of what we used to do, and that we will be able to talk calmly and intelligently about the substitutability of these services for regulatory purposes.  It assumes that the internet is a content-delivery supply chain – much like a railroad – that is a souped-up version of earlier communications modalities.

This focus on the application-layer, service-oriented view – celebrating the advent of Wikipedia, YouTube, eBay, Second Life, blogging software, and other new substitutes for the delivery-chain applications of the pre-internet era – provides an impoverished (or at least incomplete) perspective on communications. The landscape of the internet can usefully be perceived differently:  Human online communications are best captured intellectually as a complex adaptive system that can generate economic growth. New forms of persistent social interaction (often crossing application boundaries) are quickly evolving in direct reaction to collective human attention, and these communications are creating opportunities for the development of new ideas and new ways of making a living.  This has never happened before at the same rate, with the same directness, or with similarly persistent results. 

The use of “what” is meaningful.  It is intended to elicit a list of activities, a letter (now, an email) home from camp reciting events and activities.  To resist the use of “what” is quite a challenge – humans look for patterns and lists in everything they do. 

But the only answer to “what” in this context is “everything.”  Communications online will not necessarily fall into easily-categorizable chunks, even though they may seem to now.  We will hear that something like ten social-network sites account for about 40% of internet traffic. That tells us only that humans are social, not that these sites are “services” that replicate earlier “services” or will remain a definable category.  We are dealing with a transformative system, not a supply chain.  Communications policy should be about optimizing communications.

======================

The latest is that WSJ representatives can't/won't talk about the Vonage ad.  [from GigaOM]