Network Neutrality: Did you see this?
An advantage of having a parallel personal blog to your day job blog is you can put your cards on the table and not have to pretend to offer some neutral event moderator position. So this, for the record, is 100% personal opinion.
David Isenberg's next Freedom to Connect conference is coming up. I've managed to make his spring events for the past 3 years, but I'm away so much at the moment it just isn't fair to abandon my wife with two overdemanding offspring for yet another week. So I'm going to have to give it a miss this time, which is sad. Because although I and David probably have quite divergent political beliefs, we're on common ground when it comes to "What is 'the network' for?".
It's for people to speak to each other, freely and openly, about anything, in any medium and manner we can imagine.
Anyone going to F2C looking to find someone to make their next deal with, or to discover some hot new technology or investment trend, is likely to be disappointed. It's really about people who are passionate about human communications and the industries that enable those transmissions. How can you tell if you care enough to be there? Easy, you'll burn the frequent flyer miles and sleep in a doorway if your boss refuses to fund the trip. And you'll get out of it exactly as much as the effort you put in to meet interesting people and learn something new.
Rather like the pharmaceuticals business, the American telecoms market goes a long way to building the supplier scale and revenues that makes the rest of the world's communications affordable. It matters to outsiders. It's also been a crypto-cartel; an OPEC of packets, not barrels. On one hand, it is unlike OPEC, as it's a result of a game theory equilibrium position for RBOCs to maintain non-compete, rather than any explicit collusion. On the other, it is like the energy industry, where centralisation spawns of more "edge-centric" alternative technologies. For the US telecom industry, this is the creation of alternative ownership models, with lots of muni network activity. (Come to the Digital Town sessions of the next Telco 2.0 event where I'll be covering some of this with a Euro-centric focus.)
In other words, the subjet matter, matters. To everyone.
Not that you need to agree with either the diagnosis of the problems nor the remedy. I'm on the record as being deeply anti-regulation with respect to network neutrality. It's an ineffective (indeed counter-productive) palliative. I'm also only a tepid enthusiast for muni net experiments -- I like voluntary collective action and free markets, and dislike taxation and coercion.
Yet the idea any self-starting kid could grow up in a home and not have access to broadband scares me. (I'm probably a socialist for kids and an anarcho-libertarian for adults. Give 'em free and large healthcare and education vouchers for 18 years, then tell them to get lost if they can't make the best of it.)
There are already clear and serious abuses of free speech, such as Verizon's FiOS terms that forbid criticism of Verizon, or the Great Firewall of China (which affects you too, my dearest reader, should you ever wish to be heard by a billion Chinese). "Freedom to connect" isn't a hypothetical concern.
Which kind of leads me to my confessional. Most of the arguments around networks centre on economics -- the cost of this access technology, the subsidy to that service. That's fine to a point, but economic systems exist in symbiosis with political ones. Politics and technology are an explosive combination. Giving everyone a printing press is important, to the extent that truth becomes harder to suppress, and feedback to actions eliminated. I'm awfully tempted to slip in a Monty Python quote here:
Dennis: Come and see the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
King Arthur: Bloody peasant!
Dennis: Oh, what a giveaway! Did you hear that? Did you hear that, eh? That's what I'm on about! Did you see him repressing me? You saw him, Didn't you?
What I want isn't just YouTube arbitraging my uplink bandwidth. I want every repressed peasant, every Rodney King video, to be given free reign. Would so many of the crimes of the 20th century have been comissioned so easily with a populace armed with videophones? Would Rwanda have happened if every village onslaught had been uploaded to the Net in real time?
On a lesser scale, I want the unsanitised truth: show me a fox hunt, a drug user shooting up, a mugging on the Tube. Show me the real world, not one approved by the unseen censor. My evening news bulletin isn't a showbiz spin-off. It's a sequence of "me TV" snippets from pro to complete amateur centred around my life, my interests and my neighbourhood.
My dream: no media too large to attach to a message of "Did you see this?" and send to all your friends -- directly. It's about a post-democratic society. We don't elect a "great them" to oversee a "little us". We're all permanently networked into a web of action and reaction. No viewers, readers, listeners; no audience share, market share; only participants and mindshare.
It won't all be pretty. New digital narcotics like online games will no doubt leave a trail of addiction, frustration and broken lives, just as previous audiovisual distractions have done. Technology can't re-wire human nature. Suffering and atrocity will continue as usual, just not over on channel 20.
In my Telco 2.0 day job we're taking the view of the operators and vendors looking to progress their business models. (One unkind wag said "turning dinosaurs into mammals", but I'll let you be the judge of that.) You have to be part of the system to influence it. There is no revolution to join.
Freedom to Connect is unique in that it's not beholden to anyone's commercial interest, and comes nearest to being the forum for discussing the public interest.
Telecom's changing. Danish, Irish, French and Dutch regulators over here are getting out the sharp electric carving knife from on top of the cupboard to hack up more of their infrastructure. The developing world is abuzz with wireless connectivity. Spectrum restrictions that impose a small number of gatekeepers to the form of online speech are being loosened. New "Capitalism 2.0" means of network production are being created.
Freedom to connect. Did you see it coming? Did you see it? Did you?
Martin draws parallels at Telepocalypse.
