Category Archives: Innovation

Fair Trade: Fixing Antitrust for the Internet

zoe_lofgren.jpg So suppose for the moment that net neutrality is an antitrust issue. Does this bill fix antitrust law enough to deal with it?
Federal lawmakers have introduced yet another network neutrality bill, but this time with a focus on fair trade issues.

This week, U.S. Rep. John Conyers, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, has introduced legislation that addresses the issue by labeling it an antitrust matter. Conyers’ H.R. 5994 would ban discriminatory network management practices by amending the Clayton Act.

The bill, labeled the Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act, would require carriers to promote competition and allow people to use any device they want to on the carriers’ networks. The bill makes exceptions for emergencies, criminal investigations, parental controls, marketing, and improvements to quality of service.

Under the Detroit Democrat’s proposed legislation, ISPs could give preference to certain types of data, but they must give the preference regardless of the data source. It would ban ISPs from discriminating based on content, applications, or services.

— Lawmakers Eye Net Neutrality As Anti-Trust Issue, The Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act would require carriers to promot e competition and allow people to use any device they want to on the carriers’ networks. By K.C. Jones, InformationWeek, May 9, 2008 05:42 PM

And does this fix the problems Google and Ebay complain about?

Meanwhile, a cosponsor sums it up:

U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., has co-sponsored the legislation.

“Recent events have shown that net neutrality is more than a hypothetical concern. We need a meaningful remedy to prevent those who control the infrastructure of the Internet from controlling the content on the Internet,” Lofgren said. “This legislation will help guarantee that the innovative spirit of the Internet is not trampled.”

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Internet Freedom Policy Act

markey-photo.jpg Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Chip Pickering (R-MS) have introduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008, which will amend Title I of the Communications Act of 1934 to say Internet freedom, commerce, innovation, participation, and speech are the policy of the United States. It’s interesting what this bill does not say. It doesn’t specify any regulations, so that those who oppose net neutrality don’t have a leg to stand on when they say net neutrality is all about regulation. It doesn’t say “net neutrality”: it says “freedom”, “marketplace”, “innovation”, and other positive benefits. (I think I’ll take a cue from Commissioner Copps and start referring to Internet freedom.) It doesn’t say “consumers” except a few times, including once where that word is immediately qualified by
(i) access, use, send, receive, or offer lawful content, applications, or services over broadband networks, including the Internet;
Let’s see, if “consumers” can send their own content, applications, and service, they’re not really consumers in the traditional sense, now are they?

This is all very nice, in that Markey and Pickering apparently get it about what Internet freedom is about. However, why does this bill have no teeth, unlike Markey’s bill of last year or the Snowe-Durgan bill before that? Continue reading →

Users Revolt: Net Neutrality Wins

NodeMagazine.jpg This is the path to net neutrality:
“See-bare-espace… it is everting.”

—Odile Richards, Spook Country by William Gibson, 2007

Long version:
Top Ten Predictions for 2008

1. The Users Revolt. As advertisers focus in on social networking sites, users revolt against this trend, and power shifts in the worlds of Social Networking from owner to user, on issues ranging from Second Life rules and Facebook privacy to Cellphone Billing. Users will gain new leverage.

— My Top Ten Predictions for 2008, Mark Anderson, Strategic News Service Blog, 22 December 2007

He picks up on some of many signs of users’ discontent, such as Facebook’s Beacon fiasco: Continue reading →

Consolidation Flood: What Will Really Stifle Internet Innovation

monopolist.jpg Advocates of the “exabyte flood” political campaign against net neutrality claim they are for innovation and that the coming flood of Internet usage will stifle innovation unless they get their way.

What will really stifle innovation on the Internet is this:

The Federal Communications Commission, at the urging of Chair Kevin Martin, voted 3-2 on Tuesday to relax longstanding rules that block corporations from owning a broadcast TV station and a newspaper in the same city.

— Uproar Over FCC Vote on Media-Ownership Rules, By Frederick Lane, Top Tech News, December 19, 2007 10:14AM

No, not specifically newspaper and television consolidation. Further consolidation of media and information distribution in the hands of a tiny number of companies. This December the FCC lets newspapers and TV stations consolidate. Last December it let SBC buy Bellsouth. Internet access is already in the hands of a tiny number of companies (typically at most two in any given area) that are increasingly moving to control the information they carry on behalf of a small number of companies including themselves and movie and music content producers.

The exaflood politics isn’t really about how much infrastructure the duopoly has to build out. It’s about maintaining the duopoly and extending its control of information, to the duopoly’s short-term profit and the long-term detriment of of us all, including the duopoly.

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Clogged: Internet Demise Predicted, Again

nur03006.jpg I predict this prediction will be misused by the duopoly to lobby for more favoratism for the duopoly:
User demand for the Internet could outpace network capacity by 2010, according to a study released today by Nemertes Research. The study found that corporate and consumer Internet usage could surpass the Internet access infrastructure, specifically in North America, but also worldwide, within the next three to five years.

…

As Internet capabilities continue to expand and users strive to be constantly connected, usage of the Internet via the mobile phone, set-top boxes and gaming devices has exponentially increased thus limiting bandwidth capacity. This is due in large part to voice and bandwidth-intensive applications, including streaming and interactive video, peer-to-peer file transfer and music downloads and file sharing. According to ComScore, nearly 75% of U.S. Internet users watched an average of 158 minutes of online video in one month alone and viewed more than 8.3 billion video streams.

— Internet could clog networks by 2010, study says, By Sarah Reedy, TelephoneOnline, Nov 19, 2007 1:03 PM

If I had a nickle for every time imminent demise of the Internet has been predicted. This has been going on since before the Internet even existed, and the results have been different than in this prediction. Continue reading →

Normative net neutrality: Milton Mueller on free association and free trade

milton-mueller-1.jpg Free as in free speech, free association, and free trade: Milton Mueller drafts an Internet governance paper using net neutrality as its central principle.
… as a normative guide to policy, network neutrality transcends domestic politics. The network neutrality debate addresses the right of Internet users to access content, services and applications on the Internet without interference from network operators or overbearing governments. It also encompasses the right of network operators to be reasonably free of liability for transmitting content and applications deemed illegal or undesirable by third parties. Those aspects of net neutrality are relevant in a growing number of countries and situations, as both public and private actors attempt to subject the Internet to more control. Because Internet connectivity does not conform to national borders, net neutrality is really a globally applicable principle that can guide Internet governance.

— Net Neutrality as Global Principle for Internet Governance, Milton Mueller, Internet Governance Forum, 5 November, 2007

Basically, instead of getting mired in discussions of bandwidth or technical methods of stifling, throttling, or censorship, let’s get back to deriving net neutrality from general political and economic principles, which turns out to make net neutrality a convenient lens by which to view those principles and to apply them to the Internet. Continue reading →

Mosh by Nokia: A Telco Invents Something!

20070614-mosh.jpg I’m always complaining about the telephone companies, so this item is refreshing:
When George Linardos was ordered to clear his diary to help dream up new business for Nokia (NOK1V.HE: Quote, Profile , Research), he imagined six weeks brainstorming on the terrace of a five-star hotel in the Caribbean.

What he got was a pot of porridge every morning at a Spartan hotel hours from Finnish capital Helsinki, with forests and snow all around.

Seeing the same half a dozen faces for 45 days and craving greater social interaction, Linardos and his team came up with a site aimed at making informal networking easier, especially for people without access to a PC.

The result, Mosh (http://mosh.nokia.com/), a social networking site that is accessible from mobile phones, is the latest piece in the puzzle for Nokia as it tries to build an Internet stronghold to balance a maturing cellphone business.

— Nokia’s Mosh marries mobile with social networking, by Tarmo Virki, Reuters, 23 October 2007

Not only invented something, but something the inventor personally wants to use! This is the way Unix got invented, and Linux, by that other Finn, Linus Torvalds. I don’t know how successful Mosh will be, but that’s not the point, no more than how well a talking dog talks. And it’s also beside the point that the invention simply crosses two existing ideas: mobile phones and social networking web sites. Many inventions are like that. A telephone company invented something!

Of course, it wasn’t a U.S. telephone company.

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SCO, Unix, and Net Neutrality

unix-live-free-lg.jpg What does this have to do with net neutrality?
The Lindon-based SCO Group Inc. says it is planning to lay off 16 of its 123 employees and has asked a federal bankruptcy court to keep their identities secret because it fears they could be harassed.

SCO also is facing an effort to push ahead with a trial in federal court in Utah that could determine that SCO owes Novell as much as $35 million in licensing fees because of a ruling in a dispute over ownership of the Unix software program.

SCO filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 14, the result of a long court battle with Novell and IBM over ownership and use of the Unix computer operating system program. SCO claimed it, and not Novell, owned the copyright to Unix and that IBM had used parts of that code in developing the Linux operating system, whose code is open to the public and can be used or altered by individuals or companies for their own uses.

— Stricken SCO to lay off 16 workers, Lindon-based firm asks court to keep ex-employees ID secret, By Tom Harvey, The Salt Lake Tribune Article Last Updated: 10/15/2007 11:45:43 PM MDT

Unix was actually invented by a couple of researchers at AT&T Bell Labs, in an attic, in their spare time. AT&T never knew what to do with Unix, and eventually shuffled it off to Western Electric, whence it finally percolated over to SCO (I’ve probably omitted a few owners in between).

Meanwhile, Microsoft made billions out of an operating system (and clever legal ploys such as boot loader contracts). And Unix and its offshoots such as Linux underly everything from Apple’s OS-X to mobile phones to Google.

This seems to me the archetypical example of why we shouldn’t expect telephone companies to innovate, no matter how much of a monopoly they have. If we want innovation, we want net neutrality and competition.

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Os Invasores: Brazilian Malware Education Videos

img-video02.png At the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) meeting in Pittsburgh, one common theme was that people still fall for scams like phishing, and have little comprehension of the various forms of malware that phishing uses.

The Brazilian Computer Emergency Reponse Team, CERT.br, has one possible solution: animated videos from antispam.br. So far they’ve got a pair. Navegar e Preciso explains how the Internet works, and goes as far as firewalls. Os Invasores explains viruses, trojan horses, worms, bots, and spyware (keylogger and screenlogger). Both videos are in Portuguese, but it’s pretty easy to follow what’s going on. Spanish translations are already in progress, and other languages will probably follow.

A virus looks like a little purple crab with yellow eyese and welding torch. A worm has google eyes and a long cable-connector tail. A bot looks a bit like a worm, but with shady Doonesbury eyes, a mechanical-looking tail, and in the foreground in hand with a toy remote control. I wonder how long before somebody makes mass market toys out of these characters?

Unfortunately, I couldn’t watch these videos in Pittsburgh, because the hotel Internet “high speed” connection was so slow. Ironic, isn’t it? The most innovative approach to user education I’ve seen lately comes from Brazil, and back in the U.S. of A. there’s difficulty finding fast enough bandwidth to watch it. At the moment I’m elsewhere on a cable connection, which works, although the larger version of Os Invasores (22.4Mb) takes several minutes to get here.

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NYTimes Sets Itself Free

times_select.gif Two years ago the New York Times made its best marketing estimate of how to derive income from the web, and put many of its back stories beyond a paywall called TimeSelect, at $49.95/year or $7.95/month. Times change:
In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

The Times said the project had met expectations, drawing 227,000 paying subscribers — out of 787,000 over all — and generating about $10 million a year in revenue.

“But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com.

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.

— Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site, By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA, New York Times, September 18, 2007

This is why it’s a bad idea to let the telcos and cablecos determine what we can see or do on the web. Nobody can predict what will work best, especially for deriving revenue.

Hm, this would also mean that the duopoly’s insistence on TV as the future of Internet revenue could be just as wrong for them as it is for the rest of us.

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PS: Seen on BoingBoing.