Unlocking fiscal from technical architecture
The first new idea I've seen in a long time on the stale network neutrality debate came from following a comment to this post (whose conclusion doesn't match the quotation -- if big enterprises want to waste shareholder capital on me, please bring it on!). Anyhow, here's the deal:
The false dichotomy of net neutrality, and the Tariff Rebate Passthrough solution
...and the nutshell version from the previous comment:
The idea is Tariff Rebate Passthrough -- i.e., the ISP can charge by byte for QOS (but only by byte) and the information service provider (Google) can rebate the costs directly to the consumer (but only to the consumer). This works because it meets the need to pay for differentiated QOS, without letting the telecom companies' control over that payment become actual control over content. I.e., all the good parts of net neutrality are preserved, but there's no need to give something costly away for free.
Now, I'm not sure how practical it is (any large change to a large system causes large pain), but it sure stimulates the grey cells. What it does acknowledge is that you need to look at the interests of the various actors and see how they align under different models. The one that lines them up best, wins -- just as capitalism harnesses greed to do good.
I have a bone with the original academic papers on the end-to-end principle of the Internet. (This basically says "a dumb pipe is good because it preserves option value and only the edges have the context to know how and when to add value to the bits".) The argument was presented against a technical framing. Really, it a question of economics. If fat, dumb pipes can be deployed and scaled at a lower cost than an equivalent hybrid or centralised architecture, then that ecosystem will grow faster. The honest truth is that we don't know if the Stupid Network is a local anomaly in history (although a damned big and important one) or a permanent fixture of the landscape. It could be a by-product of the relative technical and cost constraints of CPU power, storage, transmission and battery power. Not to say the limits of the speed of light, quantum physics and human-imposed legal and social constraints. (No nuclear-powered mobile handsets, please.)
The timing whole P2P/broadband/filesharing phenomenon can in some ways be traced back to an upswing in the rate of progress of hard drive capacity. Without that we'd have had the technolgy to build the pipes, but not to create the demand.
It is possible to conceive of radically different distributed computing architectures. They'll come about not because of some religious war between technologists, but because of cost and demand curves changing position.
The study of choices in the allocation of scarce resources resources has a name -- "economics". By publishing in the proceedings of the ACM, they picked the wrong type of journal. It's good to see the economics coming back into the neutrality debate and the political ranting take a back seat for once.
Unlock Geddes' choices via Telepocalypse.
Comments
Hi Martin !
First of all : taxes and rebates are all but a wise solution for two reasons :
1. they will generate overhead because you need at least some infrastructure to manage these transactions.
2. the overhead will increase with cheaters. There will be coalitions etc.. and this will induce another overhead = the control structure.
Second point is : how do you find the right price for this ? After years of having been milked by Telco Operators behaving more or less like cartels (no defamation here : at least in France the 3 mobile operators were already condemened by justice for illegal secret agreement on prices) we will end up with the same kind of issues with your system. And then will come more State to attenuate the excessive strength of ISPs position.
The main issue behind all this is that the relationship between individual customers and service providers is biased from the very begining : the access to information about the reality of the market is clearly in favor of the corporation (It is not an ideological problem.. but simply a resources' one).
Since your grey celles are working well, and fast (I really like to read your posts, even if I do not agree with all of them) I am really looking forward to read the original idea you will have to solve this ;-)
Posted by: Phil | October 30, 2006 11:35 PM
The study of choices in the allocation of scarce resources resources has a name -- "economics".
If there's one thing that the computing age should have taught us it's that scarcity is temporary. Although I'll grant that we make up for that by adding complexity every time we switch from scarcity to abundance. What's really irritating about the Net Neutrality debate is that it's framed as a response to scarcity when the scarcity is being artificially created. Switch from scarcity to abundance and the problem disappears. Or in the terms above, QOS becomes irrelevant if the pipes are big and fast enough.
We should be push, push, pushing for faster broadband at the same price, because comms storage and switching hardware are all dropping in price and increasing in capacity every day.
AnyRoadUp the USA problem is a government mandated and controlled Duopoly. And the solution is a government mandated and controlled marketplace. But clearly that's not going to happen.
Posted by: julian.bond | October 31, 2006 12:26 AM
Has anybody seen any software that will unlock a Motorola mobile phone without cables?
Seen some software called 'Mototools 6' at motounlock.co.uk that will unlock without cables.
Anybody used this software, does it work???
Sorry if posting in wrong section, new to this. Thanks in advance for any help.
Posted by: jonnybob | March 7, 2007 01:49 AM