There’s
been a lot of press in the last year or so about port blocking, open
access, Net Freedoms, and so on. I won’t provide the links, you go find
‘em. Every forum, mailing list, conference, and discussion panel seems
to have a lot of heated opinion about it. 
Although I couldn’t attend
the VON sessions, there was heated debate there between the “Freeloader!” and the “Freedom fighter!” factions.
But why should I, emotively, care at all?
Stop for a moment. Why do you, personally, care about this issue?
Telecom isn’t the only industry with distribution bottlenecks,
significant market power, and cross-subsidy between the stages of
production. Just look at how baked beans are positioned in supermarket
shelves. Manufacturers in the UK pay the supermarkets to buy prime
positions. Yet telecom incites such great passion in intelligent
people. Baked beans don’t. What’s going on?
I think I’ve finally worked out why. It’s David Isenberg’s elephant in the corner — what he ambiguously calls Freedom to Connect.
Most of these arguments attempt to build a logical economic thesis
about why we do or don’t have the correct balance between price
discrimination, competition and common carriage. But it increasingly
misses the point. We sense there’s a deeper, more troubling, aspect to
getting cut off from part of the conversation.
Whilst nebulous and fluffy, it’s all about democracy. The rest is post hoc
rationalization of our more fundamental beliefs about how a 21st
century society needs to be wired up to work. And my thesis is that we
are underestimating the importance of this political (as opposed to
economic) side of the debate.
The sense of indignation you feel inside you when you hear about
port blocking is because you sense the loss that those customer are
enduring. You and I have come to realize that if you don’t have access,
you aren’t able to fully participate in society any more in some
non-trivial way. You can still do the old analogue things, have a
protest at the street corner. But the crowds have moved online. Nobody
can hear you.
Not only that, but when someone else gets the chop, you’ve lost a member of the demos from your democracy. Your conversation is impaired by others no longer being able to participate.
Why don’t we feel so upset about the closed, walled gardens of
wireless networks? There are several reasons, I believe. Firstly, the
very nature of the medium lends itself to competition (through multiple
overlapping networks), which ensures some degree of openness. The low
cost of wireless telephony is also in itself a great democratising
force. Going from zero phones to one closed one is a great step
forward. Participation is everything. We also have lower expectations
based on the natural capacity limits the technology has had until
recently. Our tolerance of “co-operative bottlenecks” has been greater
in order to share the resource better.
On the other hand, when someone’s Net connections to their home come
under pressure of restriction, we react differently. I think this is
partly a psychological issue of how we view these spaces differently.
We are defensive of our homes. Somewhat tenuously, the family still is
the organising unit of society. We aspire for every household to have
at least some form of unfettered access to all forms of information
discourse. That’s why it hurts when we fall short.
Which brings me to my real point. This conversational chatty
democracy stuff all sounds fine. But that’s hardly going to energize
society into fits of fiber laying and open access regulation. Where’s
the beef? Well, here’s my outrageous suggestion:
The ability to access Internet content and services is the new Right to Bear Arms.
Wow. I’ve said it. So what does it mean? The founders of the United
States of America in their wisdom saw the seizure of excessive power by
government as a central risk. To counteract this, they ensured the
general populace would always be sufficiently armed. This gives any
putative dictator or tyrant pause for thought before exercising the
machinery of government violence for undemocratic ends. The price is a
certain undercurrent of everyday violence, but the experiment has by
and large succeeded. The USA is one of the
longest-standing constitutional democracies, and has withstood
extraordinary change in demographics and fortune during that period.
We’re moving from a society where physical force was the prime means
of coercion to one where ideas have ascendancy. Physical force doesn’t
scale well as a means of subjugation. It’s one thing to take a man’s
posessions; quite another to persuade him to make your dinner every
night for nothing. The hardest part of the civil rights movement wasn’t
undoing the yoke of the white man, but persuading the everyday black
man that it was his inalienable right to have that yoke removed. Once
that was achieved, the outcome was largely a foregone conclusion.
Building tyranny is harder when the populace is armed with good
information. It’s not impossible; indeed, a tyranny of the majority is
still a major risk. But when I can have a cheap encrypted Skype
conversation with Iranians, Syrians, and Mexicans, something
qualitative has changed. For example, when I visited Syria a few years
ago, we went to Hama. This town was largely razed in 1982
(with the loss of tens of thousands of lives) when its own army shelled
the city to put down an Islamic uprising against the Baathist
government. I pass no comment on the politics of it, but merely note
that this is a little-known episode of history. You certainly don’t see
it mentioned on the official tourist website. Can you imagine keeping such news under wraps in the era of video cameraphones, satellite Internet and Skype?
Consider a populace that wants to rise up against its political
masters. We’re already at the point where the government response isn’t
to take away the populace’s arms, but to take away its means of
communication. Militias don’t congregate in the woods and more, they
start their own Yahoo! group and MoveOn and Meetup from there.
There’s no point in demanding universal access if you don’t have the
economic means to deliver. Much of the debate is about means, not ends.
But those ends deserve greater exposure and reflection. If we are
serious about transformation of society through information technology
it means sweeping away many of the special protections the telecom
industry has managed to accrue, enforcement of competition law, and
greater collective effort to deploy connectivity and open up wireless
and fixed rights of way.
There’s more at stake here than cheap phone calls and unlimited TV
channels. Cheap airlines have done more for European cohesion and
understanding than decades of political exhortation. Cheap, ubiquitous
and unfiltered communications are becoming a prerequisite of a
pluralist participative democracy. Societies that fail to encourage the
free flow of information will suffer because ingrained interest groups
will ensure the rules are set up to perpetuate their privileges. When
you can’t make a Skype call, you’re losing something more than money.
You might believe that your political system is a stable one
delivering endless contended freedom and openness. But your average
American feels a lot more secure in that knowledge with a rifle in the
basement. I’d want the same feeling of security, just with symmetric
gigabit fibre so I can host my own subversive content if necessary.
Next time someone is vigorously defending the existence of filters
on the Net, dig deeper. Don’t ask them for the logic of their argument.
Rather, try to find out why it excites them so much. Perhaps they
aren’t aware of what animates their own passions.
Don't get me wrong...
I don’t want anyone to think I’m about to become a crypto-socialist, so a quick clarification. The correlation between “network freedom” and the right to bear arms is only a partial one.
Taking up arms is something that can be done unilaterally. A network
is by its definition a collective effort, even if an emergent rather
than centrally co-ordinated one. So it cannot be purely a personal
“freedom”.
The right to bear arms is equally re-stated as a right not to have
your arms taken away from you. It doesn’t mean anyone has to provide
you with a gun. Network access is a positive outcome of economic
activity over which there are rivalrous claims to finite resources,
like network engineers. But you don’t (yet) own the network, so there’s
no corresponding right not to be deprived of the use of your
possessions. Bearing arms is really a negative freedom (something bad
that won’t be done to you), whereas Net access is a positive freedom.
Freedom doesn’t do free lunches.
As I have said before,
price discrimination in competitive markets is your friend. Filtering
can be used for price discrimination. Filtering is a symptom of how
well the system is performing. In a mature telecommunications sector,
such as wireline, it is a symptom of ill-health. In a nascent one, such
as cellular access in the developing world, being only able to access
closed phone and SMS service is a vital part
of the pricing regime that makes the network possible. The existence of
network filtering is an output, not an input; a symptom, not a cause.
You do not automatically make your society freer and healthier by
outlawing all network filtering. Indeed, you might achieve the exact
opposite result.
Guns don’t come with enforceable end user license agreements that
say “For shooting small furry animals only”. But we do distinguish
between bunny-hunting guns and machine guns. We discriminate based on
lethality. We don’t expect unlimited freedom to bear arms. A farmer
wanting to blow some cute crop-nibblers to kingdom come is given carte
blanche to blast away. Walk into a bank carring the same hardware, and
expect trouble. We might likewise expect some boundaries to our
communications freedom.
So I would caution people from taking the analogy too literally. The
right to bear arms is also a means to an end — a populace willing and
able to resist attempts to capture the machinery of state to perpetuate
undemocratic activity. Unfettered and affordable network access is
correspondingly essential to the operation of a free and dynamic
post-industrial society.
So I’ll say it again, differently. Rules against network filtering
are one way of dealing with significant market power in a vertically
integrated part of the market where someone has significant market
power in the access layer. It isn’t necessarily the best way of doing
it, but it’s one way. In all other cases, it’s likely to be harmful.
You should use the existence of such activities as a yardstick for the
development and maturity of the industry. Expect new technologies and
markets to be full of filtering, which slowly recedes over time as
competition heats up. Meanwhile, municipal networks and other
co-operative of user-owned connectivity systems should aim for more
opennness that simple economics suggests, because the benefits are
hidden in the political layer.
I alluded to the special privileges and protections that exist in
telecom. I guess I ought to enumerate a few to back up such a claim in
what is becoming sometimes a suicidally competitive environment.
The US is the easiest example of how barriers to entry are built via
co-option of the regulatory infrastructure, but examples about all
over. Tariff sheets and their attendant cost of lawyers to issue,
public utility comissions stuffed with friendly faces, exclusionary
numbering schemes, sweetheart deals on rights of way, spectrum auctions
that have singularly failed to recover the maximum public benefit,
suspicious tax rebates, opaque pricing schemes that fail to come under
scrutiny, faux taxes; the list goes on and on. Mostly it’s just a
matter of not having to comply with normal competition and
cross-subsidy rules and establishing your own parallel (and captive)
regulatory environment, plus special deals on costs on inputs and
prices of outputs. Check out the usual places for more data.
UPDATE: Susan Crawford has some thoughts along similar lines, with the money quote being:
I’m trying to create a normative map that will help
reveal the assumptions at the heart of the network providers’
arguments. The key issue should be: is access to the internet a public
goods problem, for which incentives are necessary to ensure buildout
and maintenance? or — Is access to the internet a monopoly problem, for
which you have to find ways to ensure frictionless competition?
Right now, we can’t tell what the right answer is.
My hunch is that we’ve not found ways for the invisible hand to
operate that also allows collective action by users, groups of users,
communities and regional government. It’s an “economics technology”
problem, not a “technology technology” problem.
David Weinberger documents
Tim Wu’s similar analysis of how the world is divinding into “openists”
and “deregulationists”, where a confused cross-purposes of terminology,
worldviews and methods collide.
via Martin Geddes' Telepocalypse.
Hi, I'm Phil Wolff, Editor of Skype Journal. 
This gent put his 277 Skype contacts to use today as he changed his "real name" to "1968 DB5 - Bid: £30k - 4 hrs left" for a while. 
.
