Apparently people have trouble imagining what
a telco-packaged non-neutral Internet
would look like.
Think of cable TV.
Look at AT&T’s Blue Room.
Or look at
this graphic,
which apparently was originally drawn in May 2006.
Hey, this version doesn’t include Amazon or Craig’s List. So sorry; guess they didn’t pay for access.
-jsq
PS: Seen on BoingBoing.
Google may be getting into international infrastructure as well as domestic:
Google is planning a multi-terabit undersea communications cable across the Pacific Ocean for launch in 2009, Communications Day has learned.Coyly refusing to confirm nor deny, Google has nonetheless left bread crumbs along trail of its ambition: Continue readingThe Unity cable has been under development for several months, with a group of carriers and Google meeting for high-level talks on the plan in Sydney last week.
Google would not strictly confirm or deny the existence of the Unity plan today, with spokesman Barry Schnitt telling our North American correspondent Patrick Neighly that “Additional infrastructure for the Internet is good for users and there are a number of proposals to add a Pacific submarine cable. We’re not commenting on any of these plans.”
However, Communications Day understands that Unity would see Google join with other carriers to build a new multi-terabit cable. Google would get access to a fibre pair at build cost handing it a tremendous cost advantage over rivals such as MSN and Yahoo, and also potentially enabling it to peer with Asia ISPs behind their international gateways – considerably improving the affordability of Internet services across Asia Pacific.
Google plans new undersea “Unity” cable across Pacific by Grahame Lynch, CommsDay ASEAN, September 21st, 2007
Steven Levitt points out there are other ways to measure the
effects of a military action than listening to politicians or generals,
and the Internet can promote the production of such measures,
and the analysis of them by multiple parties.
On several measures, M.I.T. professor
Michael Greenstone
finds results of the U.S. “surge” in Iraq to be mixed.
Then he brings in another measure:
The most interesting part of Greenstone’s paper is his analysis of the pricing of Iraqi government debt. The Iraq government has issued bonds in the past. These entitle the owner of the bond to a stream of payments over a set period of time, but only if the government does not default on the loan. If Iraq completely implodes, it is highly unlikely that these bonds will be paid off. How much someone would pay for the rights to that stream of payments depends on their estimate of the probability that Iraq will implode.This kind of analysis seldom gets written for traditional channels because (2) there’s no academic incentive for it and (3) the only money in it is usually from special interests. Here’s the main point:The bond data, unlike the other sources he examines, tell a clear story: the financial markets say the surge is not working. Since the surge started, the market’s estimate of the likelihood of default by the Iraqi government has increased by 40 percent.
— Is the Surge Working? Ask the Data, Not the Politicians, By Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics, September 15, 2007, 11:55 am
1. This paper shows how good economic analysis can contribute in a fundamental way to public policy. Anyone who reads Greenstone’s article will recognize that it is careful and thorough. It is even-handed and apolitical. It combines state-of-the-art data analysis techniques with economic logic (e.g., using market prices to draw conclusions about how things are going).If the Internet helps focus many eyes on bugs and make them shallow, why can’t it do the same with political and military actions?…
4. The internet can potentially solve both problems (2) and (3) above, leading to an increased supply of good, timely analysis. If people like Greenstone can immediately get their findings into the public debate through the internet, it gives a real purpose (not just an academic one) to doing the work. In addition, there are now online peer-reviewed academic journals that have greatly sped the time from submission to publication, potentially increasing the academic payoff to someone like Greenstone. With many respected economists now blogging, there is also a vehicle for these folks to weigh in on the quality of policy-related economic writings — like I am doing in this blog post.
Right now it can. Without net neutrality it wouldn’t be able to.
-jsq
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.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.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
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.
-jsq
PS: Seen on BoingBoing.
Well, even though
the FCC only provided half-measures
to open up the 700Mhz market,
Verizon thinks that’s too much and is suing the FCC
because it partly unlocked cellphones:
Verizon Wireless seeks judicial review on the grounds that the Report and Order exceeds the Commission’s authority under the Communications Act of 1934, as amended, 47 U.S.C. §§ 151, eg. seq., violates the United States Constitution, violates the Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. § 701 et. seq., and is arbitrary capricious, unsupported by substantial evidence and otherwise contrary to law.Curious how the burden of proof always seems to be on anybody but the telcos and cablecos. I mean, didn’t the FCC get the memo that it was only supposed to do anything if somebody proved market failure?— Verizon Wireless v. FCC, Case No. 07-1359, U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit, 10 Sep 2007
-jsq
PS: Seen on SavetheInternet.com
&mdash:
Net Neutrality: This is serious
by timbl (Tim Berners-Lee),
DiG,
Wed, 2006-06-21 16:35
What is net neutrality?
—
Markey renews calls for FCC investigation into wiretapping,
By Jeffrey Silva,
RCCWireless News,
September 12, 2007 – 2:13 pm EDT
Oh, wait:
It would be good if the FCC were to represent the public interest,
rather than just the telco and cableco and the administration’s interest.
-jsq
PS: Seen on Fergie’s tech blog.
This is a bad idea. Bad for audiences, for citizens, and for
democracy. Dispersed media ownership, ideally local ownership, serves
democratic values, while conglomerate ownership and media mergers, which
would be the result of reduced ownership restrictions, do the opposite.
Equality — one person one vote — provides the proper standard for
the distribution of power and voice in a democracy. Maximum dispersal
of media ownership can enable more people to identify a media entity as
in some sense speaking for and to them.
Dispersed ownership also reduces the danger of inordinate, potentially
demagogic power in the public sphere. As the FCC once recognized,
many owners creates more independent decision makers who can devote
journalistic resources to investigative reports. Finally, dispersal
reduces — without eliminating — potential conflicts of interests
between journalism and an owner’s economic interests.
In contrast, media mergers put papers and broadcasters into the hands of
executives whose career advancement depends on maximizing profits. Mergers
require owners to squeeze out more profits to pay off debt created by the
high bid made to secure the purchase. As too many recent examples show,
the most consistent method to reduce expenses is to fire journalists.
—
Dispersed media ownership serves democratic values
By C. Edwin Baker,
Los Angeles Times,
10 September 2007
…
The Federal Communications Commission has just been advised by the US
department of justice, under heavy lobbying from the operators who stand
to gain from higher data charges, that a neutral net might “prevent,
rather than promote” investment and innovation. This is twaddle. An
open-access net has produced one of the greatest surges of innovation
ever recorded and has given an opportunity for people all over the world
to communicate with each other and share knowledge on equal terms. Long
may it continue to be so.
—
In praise of… a freely available internet,
Leader,
The Guardian,
Tuesday September 11, 2007
The Guardian brings up a related point:
-jsq
The ITU defines “NGN” as a network that provides
quality-of-service-enabled transport technologies. The idea is that
packet transport will be “enriched with Multi Protocol Label Switching
(MPLS) to ensure Quality of Service (QoS).”
Translation, as far as I can tell: packet transport becomes the same
as circuit-switched transport. Prioritization is controlled; it’s a
network optimized on billing.
—
Tying things together,
by Susan Crawford,
Susan Crawford blog,
Mon 10 Sep 2007 08:05 PM ED
-jsq
When I invented the Web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission.
One sentence sums it up:
When I invented the Web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission.
That’s Internet freedom.
That’s why we need net neutrality.
If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and
you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can
communicate at that level.
Where you and I are any pair of participants on the Internet.
Continue reading
FCC Investigating Wiretapping?
Now this would be a good thing if it happened:
House telecom subcommittee Chairman Edward Markey (D-Mass.) repeated his
call for the Federal Communications Commission to investigate widespread
allegations of telecom privacy law violations by intelligence agencies
that received cooperation from telecom carriers in anti-terrorist
surveillance efforts.
That would be about as likely as Gonzales starting such an investigation.
After Markey wrote Martin in March to ask him to launch an investigation
into whether telecom privacy laws have been broken, the FCC chairman
wrote Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to verify that the agency
could not conduct such a probe because it would violate federal laws
governing disclosure of state secrets. Gonzales, who recently announced
his resignation, has yet to respond to Martin.
Markey points at a number of events since his first request,
such as that
it’s not a secret anymore that the government has been using telcos to wiretap.
Dispersed Media Ownership
Here’s a point that somebody needed to spell out:
The Federal Communications Commission is considering whether to reduce
restrictions on broadcast-station ownership, an action that would permit
greater media and press concentration.
There’s more. It’s all good.
And it’s by a law professor who has written a book on the subject,
so he appears to have researched it.
Continue reading
Twaddle v. a Wonder of the World
It’s good to see a newspaper not mince words:
A free-for-all web (after normal monthly broadband charges have been
paid) is one of the wonders of the world and a binding force for all
communities.
It has only become an issue because the US Congress is scrutinising the
question of “net neutrality”, though why the US authorities – rather than
an international body – should deem themselves to have jurisdiction over
the internet is not clear.
The usual answer to that is that
a properly constituted international body would do even worse.
Although nowadays, it seems the otherwise unlateralist U.S. government
is toeing the (pseudo-)capitalist international party line.
Back to the ITU Future
I should have expected the International Telecommunications Union (ITU)
to be involved in this:
Another document came out last week that ties this all together.
It’s from the ITU, and it’s called
“Trends in Telecommunication Reform
2007: The Road to Next-Generation Networks (NGN).”
This takes us back to the bad old days when national telephone companies
sold you data service by the byte, through their preferred protocol, X.25.
The advantage of circuit switching was supposed to be fully provisioned
copper wires or other resources all the way through between two parties.
The disadvantages were that you sometimes couldn’t get a connection
and the high price, which got even higher between countries.
It seems the telcos have settled on MPLS as their modern equivalent of X.25.