Author Archives: John S. Quarterman

Communications Monopoly

Adm. Elizabeth A. Hight Here’s what happens when you have a communications monopoly:
The Defense Department isn’t trying to “muzzle” troops by banning YouTube and MySpace on their networks, a top military information technology officer tells DANGER ROOM. Rear Admiral Elizabeth Hight, Deputy Commander of Joint Task Force-Global Network Operations, says that the decision to block access to social networking, video-sharing, and other “recreational” sites is purely at attempt to “preserve military bandwidth for operational missions.”

Computer_center_400x Not that the 11 blocked sites are clogging networks all that much today, she adds. But YouTube, MySpace, and the like “could present a potential problem,” at some point in the future. So the military wanted to “get ahead of the problem before it became a problem.”

— Military Defends MySpace Ban (Updated Yet Again), Noah Schachtman, DangerRoom, 18 May 2007

How much bandwidth is it using? We don’t know; the Admiral won’t say.

Now if the U.S. military’s real reason is to keep the troops from posting information that could get some of them killed, I could understand that. But if so, why are they trotting out this lame excuse? And for that matter, why is the U.S. commander in Iraq saying military blogs are providing good accurate descriptions of the situation on the ground? Continue reading →

Reemphasizing Innovation

Pointing out the tiny little problem with globalization, namely that with fast global data networks many jobs from doctors and lawyers to clerks become offshoreable, an economist tries to look ahead:
What else is to be done? Trade protection won’t work. You can’t block electrons from crossing national borders. Because U.S. labor cannot compete on price, we must reemphasize the things that have kept us on top of the economic food chain for so long: technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, adaptability and the like. That means more science and engineering, more spending on R&D, keeping our capital markets big and vibrant, and not letting ourselves get locked into “sunset” industries.

— Alan Blinder: Free Trade’s Great, but Offshoring Rattles Me, Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal, 5 May 2007 quoting Free Trade’s Great, but Offshoring Rattles Me, By Alan S. Blinder Washington Post, Sunday, May 6, 2007; B04

If this is the case, then it would seem that promoting innovation by promoting a fast, open, and participatory Internet would be important for the U.S., and also important to the rest of the rest of the world that wants the U.S. to remain a major market.

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Student Loan Regulatorium

This is a kind of thing that can happen when the regulators aren’t really interested in regulating:
When Jon Oberg, a Department of Education researcher, warned in 2003 that student lending companies were improperly collecting hundreds of millions in federal subsidies and suggested how to correct the problem, his supervisor told him to work on something else.

Jon Oberg, a former Department of Education researcher, warned that student loan companies were abusing a subsidy program and collecting millions in federal payments to which they were not entitled.

The department “does not have an intramural program of research on postsecondary education finance,” the supervisor, Grover Whitehurst, a political appointee, wrote in a November 2003 e-mail message to Mr. Oberg, a civil servant who was soon to retire. “In the 18 months you have remaining, I will expect your time and talents to be directed primarily to our business of conceptualizing, competing and monitoring research grants.”

For three more years, the vast overpayments continued.

— Whistle-Blower on Student Aid Is Vindicated, By Sam Dillon, The New York Times, May 7, 2007

It wasn’t so much turning a blind eye, as claiming there was no eye.

Could this happen in the U.S. telecom/ISP regulatorium?

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Chief Parsons

Gen. Custer
Chief Parsons
Chief Sitting Bull
This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while. Time-Warner CEO Richard Parsons says:
“The Googles of the world, they are the Custer of the modern world. We are the Sioux Nation. They will lose this war if they go to war. The notion that the new kids on the block have taken over is a false notion.”

— The Fighting Sioux, by Gunnar Peterson, 1 Raindrop, 11 May 2007

Which is amusing enough. Time-Warner thinks the cablecos and telcos are the original natives of the Internet? I beg to differ. Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, etc. are much more in the spirit of the original creators of the Internet technology and of the people who originally commercialized and privatized the Internet. Continue reading →

Speed Is Trivial

Sometimes Bob Frankston makes me shake my head in wonder:
Speed is trivial — the dial up modem completely trounced the entire Interactive TV industry thanks to the web which gave people a reason to find their own solutions without waiting for a service provider to deign to provision a path. As long as you don’t over-defined the solution you’ll get speed — it’s hard not to.

— Re: We’re Stuck In The Slow Lane Of The Information Trollway — it’s all about the billing relationship, Bob Frankston, Interesting People, Sat, 12 May 2007 20:13:50 -0400

Yes, back in the 1990s, video on demand and interactive TV were the big plans of the cablecos and telcos. They tried it. Users didn’t buy it. Instead, participants bought modems and the web boomed. Continue reading →

Fire Participation

Now here’s an interesting use of the web:
InciWeb is an interagency wildland fire incident information management system. The system was developed with two primary missions: The first was to provide a standardized reporting tool for the Public Affairs community during the course of wildland fire incidents. The second was to provide the public a single source of information related to active wildland fire information.

A number of supporting systems automate the delivery of incident information to remote sources. This ensures that the information on active wildland fire is consistent, and the delivery is timely.

— About InciWeb, Accessed 13 May 2007

The small map is for the Bugaboo fire that started near Waycross Georgia and burned more than 300,000 acres through the Okefenokee swamp into Florida, as of 12 May 2007, with two interstates closed (I-10 and I-75). Sure you can read about it on CNN and other mass media; when they realized much of Florida was closed, they picked up on the story. Continue reading →

Content-Delivery Supply-Chain Usefulness

Susan Crawford hits the broadband nail on the head:
What content-delivery supply-chain usefulness is broadband providing?

—For, by Susan Crawford, Susan Crawford blog, 9 May 2007

That’s the question you get if you’re in a corporate strategy meeting trying to decide where this broadband thing fits in with your core competences. That plus they’ll be thinking purely in terms of broadband, because that’s their product, not the Internet. There’s nothing wrong with that, except when there are only a couple of first-mile ISPs deciding the answer for all their users. And the answer in such cases tends to be “video on demand” or “IPTV” or “our search engine”. Corporations are designed to maximize their own profits, not to think in terms of a supply chain that delivers participation, innovation, and prosperity for the general welfare. Continue reading →

Internet Neutrality

Derek Woodgate makes a very basic point that what we really need is Internet neutrality, not “non-internet services carried over broadband networks”. After all, the whole point of having an internet instead of the original ARPANET was to have a network of networks, run by many different parties. Derek is a futurist, and he understands the technical underpinnings of the Internet, and he understands their importance in “[P]reserving the internet as an open platform for speech and innovation without gatekeepers or centralized control”.

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National Embarrassment

A newspaper notes the national embarrassment of the U.S. slipping from 12th to 15th place in broadband per capita among big rich countries:
Worse, much of U.S. “broadband” service is only a smidgen faster than a dial-up modem. Japan leads the world in cutting-edge fiber connections, offering speeds of up to 100 Mbps to 7.9 million home subscribers in 2006. In the United States, only a paltry 700,000 have fiber connections. Moreover, the Japanese pay $35 a month for their ultrafast speed, which is enough to stream full-screen, high-definition video. Most Americans pay the same price for one-twentieth the speed.

— Editorial: We’re stuck in the slow lane of the information highway, Valley and U.S. must push harder for a faster Internet, Mercury News Editorial, San Jose Mercury News, Article Launched: 05/07/2007 01:32:59 AM PDT

I was beginning to wonder if anybody else noticed that part about Japan. Continue reading →

Nickle and Dime Time

Verizon gets you for long distance you don’t use:
Now some phone companies are adding a new line item to monthly bills: a charge for not making long-distance calls.

The category of customers affected by the new fee is the shrinking subset of people who have no-frills home-phone service and don’t pay for a long-distance-calling plan.

Verizon last month introduced the $2 fee. It is charged to customers who could dial out for long distance, but don’t subscribe to a long-distance service and don’t make long-distance calls.

— Phone companies levy new fee for not making calls, John Murawski, Raleigh News & Observer, Thursday, May 3, 2007

Continue reading →