From September 2005 to June 2006 a team of thirteen scholars at the The University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for Communication explored how new and maturing networking technologies are transforming the way in which we interact with content, media sources, other individuals and groups, and the world that surrounds us.
This site documents the process and the results.
categories
.
The Last Mile and the Threat to the Net
In Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes, at Linuxworld.com Doc Searl comments on the threats the Internet faces from broadband carriers. In this lengthy piece, Searl suggests that the combination of mergers among broadband carriers and the continued hatred of the Internet by the same entities poses tremendous danger to the future of networked publics. Searl's position is something that I've mentioned before in my response to Chris Anderson's talk on the Long Tail. For in the rapidly elongating Long Tail of microcontent and—as Mimi Ito underscored for us—the even more quickly proliferating cultural sphere of amateur cultural production, we are perversely reversing the undoing of big media that marked the last forty years. If my concern in that post was with what might happen to, say, Indy labels if artists can just go directly to iTunes, or what power entities like Google or even Flickr begin to have over us, Doc Searl reminds us that the much-vaunted free access that we have to the Internet is an illusion, not reality. In an earlier article for Cabinet Magazine, I explored the highly-centralized structure of the Internet itself and, in particular, the peering arrangements and physical structures created by the Tier 1 carriers. This article turns our attention to the last mile.
Broadband carriers have been going through a recent fit of mergers enough to make old John D. Rockefeller proud. Moreover, a recent comment by SBC CEO Edward Whitacre, on the acquisition of AT&T made many of us think that SBC's adoption of the AT&T name wasn't just an accident:
How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google (GOOG ), MSN, Vonage, and others?
How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! (YHOO ) or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!
Searl concludes that once the mergers settle out
The new carrier-based Net will work in the same asymmetrical few-to-many, top-down pyramidal way made familiar by TV, radio, newspapers, books, magazines and other Industrial Age media now being sucked into Information Age pipes. Movement still will go from producers to consumers, just like it always did. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Literally.
But do we have to listen to whatever it is that AT&T, the reincarnation, wants us to? Isn't the Internet fundamentally two way? Not in the carriers' view, Searl points out. Wonder why broadband upload speeds are so much slower than download speeds? It's no accident, Searl says.
We need to stress how the pipe-centric view of the world is responsible for the crippled and asymmetrical "consumer" service the carriers call "broadband". By restricting upstream use of the Net and biasing service to downstream "content delivery", the carriers have effectively outlawed personal and small business enterprise on the Net. This is one area where the carriers have been persistently clueless and hostile to the Net since the beginning, and we need to call them on it. (Required reading: John Perry Barlow's Death From Above, written in March 1995.)
Searl's piece is a call to action and he concludes by declaring that we need to find ways to bypass the last mile ISPs pipes and to take the fight to Congress.
The Searl piece has already generated a bit of discussion. At Smartmobs, Samuel Rose suggests that all that dark fiber out there may allow a mesh network to bypass the ISP's pipes, but how that gets us past the problem of the last mile is unclear. At the if:book blog, Ben Vershbow suggests that we may be in for a replay of radio—which could have been two-way—but became one way. Radio, or Muzak? Radio has its possibilities for mild dissent. Back in my grad school days, horrified by Ithaca, New York's lousy college radio (it wasn't college, more like proto-Britney Spears) and disgusted by NPR's rah-rah coverage of the first Gulf War, I bought myself a shortwave radio and listened to John Peel on the BBC and dance music on Radio Sierra Leone while monitoring world newscasts for some hint of what was really going on. The model that the carriers are creating is much more total, a complete experience, all packaged for you to whatever micro-niche they identify you as belonging to, along the lines of Muzak. Watch for this under the guise of opt-out parental monitoring. As it is, my ISP, which I chose as an alternative to SBC and which is generally quite progressive, blocks port 25 and won't let me opt-out, effectively cutting me off from an email address that I've used forever. What's next, will I get this message when I go to Flickr?
.
.
Vonage Accuses Carriers of Trying to Sink It By Resisting e911
Slashdot carries this article and discussion on Vonage's claim that it is unable to comply with an FCC deadline that VoIP carriers provide e911 service because last mile providers are unwilling to work with them. Read here.
bring back the CB
Interesting stuff. Or not. I can't quite decide. Is the internet a fad? Is amateur cultural production a fad? Is this the CB radio of the 21st century? For those of you old enough to remember, CB radio was imho a very good example/model of amateur cultural production on a broad/public scale. I was quite active (KKP 3039, excalibur), and it was a true 2-way medium. And broadcast medium. And annoying medium. All at the same time. The main distinguishing characteristic is that it was only synchronous...there was no persistance other than your memory of when someone was a jerk and stepped on your conversation.
But alas, CB died a rather quick death after it became over-run with people who didn't understand the cultural norms, and the early adopters got frustrated and moved "up" to shortwave, or on to other things. Hmm...could this be the fate of blogs? Podcasts?
I don't think this will be the case. I just got a friend of mine blogging and she is hooked. And already has readers. Yes, they are mostly friends and acquaintances, but at this point that is enough. And may be enough to sustain her for quite some time. I provide a free blog for her on my domain. And I pay my hard earned cash every month (albeit not much) to an ISP to host my domain. Now unless the big telecom/cable bozos decide to price independent ISPs out of business, I don't see how this will change. They've got to sell that bandwidth to someone...they cannot fill it all themselves. That has been show time and again. They just cannot generate enough content. The masses generate the content. And the masses consume the content. And as the masses remix the content, it becomes more interesting. The early adopters will always resist the borg, and given the disruptive capabilities of digital technology, odds are pretty good that they will be able to get around whatever the borg throws up. And on the plus side, big business now runs via the net, so it can't just "go away".
interesting times indeed...
Of CBs, Moos, Wires and such
But has CB really ever left? It's still the medium of choice for long-haul truckers. If we used it as an analogy, then we might imagine the Internet one day reverting back to computer scientists and university researchers. Already large parts of the Internet have died. Take Gopher, MUDs and MOOs, (anybody remember PMC-Moo?) or Usenet, for example. The latter used to be the center of my Internet experience, but now it's merely peripheral as the various tech support forums and academic forums that I used to inhabit have been replaced by stronger ones elsewhere. On the other hand, for some inexplicable reason (perhaps the lack of forums at the Encyclopedia Astronautica, discussions about the history of outer space exploration (sci.space.history) still have their strongest base on Usenet and I explore them every evening as a ritual, prior to going to sleep. I guess it's the thought of being gently lulled by the sounds of a Soyuz capsule's pipes shuttling water around makes me sleepy.
Anyway, media will come and go, and some have more natural audiences that they will revert too. I agree that big telecoms are blind to their own madness, but they can still do a lot: impose massive port blocking (90% of users will never notice if http, pop, and ISP provide SMTP are the only things available to them), clamp down on any peer-to-peer distribution, knock down samizdat servers left and right. All this under guise of whatever panic they foist upon us: terrorism, porn, piracy, or whatever they can think of.
Moreover, if you and I may find ways to route around this such as some kind of mesh WiFi system, I'm far from convinced these will be competitive. Regardless of what I hear, my own experience with WiFi in a small apartment building with ten wireless access points and tons of cell phones is unpleasant. I have to constantly channel hop to avoid the neighbors interference. Latency is bad enough two hops from my base station, I don't want to think about a city wide network like this. Beyond the annoyances of running a wireless network in day-to-day life, I wonder about the next step in bandwidth, which is going to be DVD or HDTV sized video in real-time streaming. That's clearly what the network providers want to pipe to us and make no mistake, they do have a lot of content. It may be the same old thing, CNN, HBO, MTV, ESPN, and so on, but there will be more of it, it'll be on-demand, and people will swoon for it. Will our rebel meshnet handle that? Not for along time to come, I predict.
Against conventional wisdom, I'm going to declare the next half decade will be marked by the return of the wire. Since the 18th century, wired and wireless have been in a dialectic. The moment one wins (remember satellites? or microwaves?), the other comes rushing back in (music broadcasts over cable had a real chance of knocking out radio until superheterodyne circuits and vacuum tubes showed up and the Great Depression made subscription models far less attractive than one time purchases). But big telecom has figured that out too and, I fear, is sharpening its knives...
Post new comment