I attempted to reply to this column by Doc Searls, Linux for Suits - The World Live Web, but the reply appears to have disappeared into the net ether, so I’ll try to restate it here. Searls outlines his conception of a “live web” in the article’s concluding paragraphs. To me, this idea sounds very much like Wiliam Gibson’s vision of a “consensual hallucination” (which is not necessarily a pejorative term — any human constructed social framework could be called a ‘hallucination’ of sorts), for which he coined the term “cyberspace.” I also wish(ed) to point to the concrete need for a juridical construction of a civil society in cyberspace, which I think parallels Searls’ calls for what he terms “identity,” as well as the “right” to “network neutral” access to the internet. I tend to frame these issues, following after Gibson’s realization that the franchise of civil society will move largely into cyberspace, in juridical and civil terms first, and technological terms only incidentally.

First, Searls’ concept of a live web, then my discussion of Gibson’s idea.

Searls:

Is it possible that “live” will join “free” and “open” in our pantheon of adjectives? Possibly. Whether or not it does, I’d like to thank my son Allen for being the first to utter “World Live Web”, providing me with a perspective I never knew I lacked, until I heard it.

His original vision of the World Live Web was a literal one: a Web where anybody could contact anybody else and ask or answer a question in real time. When he first encountered the Web, as a researcher, he saw it as something fundamentally deficient at supporting the most human forms of interaction: the kind where one person increased the knowledge of another directly.

We’ve moved a long way in the live direction since Allen first introduced me to the concept. VoIP alone is a huge live category. Mobile Web progress will all happen along its live branch.

Where it goes exactly is anybody’s guess. All we can say for sure is it’s headed toward the sky.

My discussion (that I attempted to post in reply to Searls’ column):

The “World Live Web” sounds like the conception that William Gibson had of the then germinal internet. He foresaw that it would become a space into which the entire politico/socio franchise of society would move. In Neuromancer, Gibson coined a term for this new “place:” cyberspace.

And quite unlike the many Pollyanna-esque visions of the web that have followed, Gibson’s was dystopian. In the tradition of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, the net can serve as the a tool of “universal surveillance,” to use Michel Foucault’s description of the “dark side of the enlightenment.” It needn’t necessarily be so, but that is up to us, the hopefully vigilant citzenry.

To wit, patents must not be overly broad, and must not apply to ideas (as Thomas Jefferson argued), copyright must guarantee the right of individuals to benefit from their ingenuity within reason (and for a reasonable length of time, not a corporate lifetime, but rather a human person’s lifetime). Citizens must have a right to access civil spaces to express political opinion — whethor those spaces be cyber’d, shopping mall’d, or public square’d. Yes, that means that Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, or whomever, cannot block port 25 or forbid the use of servers. Access to the internet will be instrumental to civil liberty in the future, as were postal service and free libraries in the past

Does anybody know if Earthlink’s service is to be of the typical consumer flavor? That is, will the terms of service permit Earthlink to block ports such as 25 and 80 (or whatever their whim dictates)? Also, will Earthlink define the service as an “information service” rather than as mere provision of bandwidth, as a common carrier would? Will hosts connected via this network experience true network neutrality by being permitted to send packets without restriction to other hosts?

[Note: I had posted this question earlier in response to an sfist.com article.]

The San Francisco Chronicle has run an article entitled “Free wireless a high-wire act: MetroFi needs to draw enough ads to make service add profits.”

I’m profoundly skeptical of anything that regards the real-estate between my head as “free,” as advertisers do, and so MetroFi’s so-called “free” wireless service immediately raised my suspicions, given that it subjects users to a barrage of ads in a one inch strip atop browsers. After a little bit of digging, I turned up an excellent post on dslreports‘ site, “MetroFi is a badly broken Internet experience.”

The reviewer reports:

MetroFi executives describe their service as the same as normal broadband “as long as users can accommodate a one inch ad bar atop each WEB page.” That doesn’t tell the story at all.

The big problem is that MetroFi advertising scheme all but completely “breaks” your browser’s ability to bookmark pages, and it “breaks” other aspects of the browser as well.

I have always followed the rule that one need know only the funding behind propositions and candidates to know what to vote against: the side with the laughably small funding probably best represents the interests of the vast majority of the populus. The oligarchs, as always, have their shills. Telco (telephone company) funding of front groups opposed to internet network neutrality, as reported by Common Cause, should, therefore, come as no surprise (Wikipedia network neutrality introduction).

The Common Cause site provides a revealing look at each of the front groups. For example, there is a description of the deceptive advertising of HOTI (Hands Off the Internet), a group that includes BellSouth, Cingular, and AT&T:

With its pithy name, viral web cartoons, high profile spokesman (former White House press secretary Mike McCurry) and barrage of print and television advertising, HOTI has been effectively injecting the telephone industry’s arguments on net neutrality into the public debate in recent months.

And they manage to do it while hiding their relationship with their corporate backers. K Street Confidential columnist Jeffrey Birnbaum wrote in The Washington Post that “no one can determine who is supporting Hands Off the Internet by looking at its ads alone. To find out, one must dig into its Web site.”[1]

Not surprisingly, the Common Cause report continues, HOTI poses as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and fundamentally misrepresents the issue at hand:

HOTI ads “are the epitome of doublespeak,” according to Birnbaum.[4] For example, one print ad attempts to frame the Hands Off the Internet message in pro-consumer terms. “Net neutrality means consumers will be stuck paying more for their Internet access to cover the big online companies’ share,” the ad claims.[5] But every major consumer group supports net neutrality, and opposes HOTI’s plan to give telephone and cable companies gatekeeper status over the Internet.[6]

HOTI’s web-based advertising campaigns look and feel like something a consumer or grassroots group might publish. Their catchy, flash animation web videos try to persuade citizens that the government and Google are trying to control the Internet through net neutrality. The benefits that would accrue to the telephone and cable industry if telecom legislation passes without net neutrality language are never discussed, of course.

Learn more: visit Save the Internet’s FAQ.

An excellent column by Robert Cringely proposes bypassing the telcos altogether in the last mile, thereby mooting the question of “Network Neutrality” (the proposal is in the context of a discussion of Microsoft’s future).

Cringley outlines the problem:

To Bob Frankston’s way of thinking this all comes down to who owns the infrastructure. The phone and cable companies own the wire outside our homes but we own the wire inside. (It didn’t used to be that way, you know. There was a time when the phone company owned the wire in our walls even though we paid for its purchase and installation.) The Internet has been a huge success to date specifically because nobody much controls the electrons. This is as opposed to services like broadcasting where some perceived scarcity of spectrum allowed governments to determine who could give or sell us entertainment and information. The ISPs (by which I mean telcos and cable companies) would very much like to go back to that sort of system, where they, not you, are the provider and determinant of what bits are good bits and what bits are bad.

No thanks.

Cringely describes Frankston’s solution to the Telco’s anti-capitalist, anti-entrepreneurial, and anti-social tendencies:

This would be a real marketplace not a fake one. Today’s system is a fake because it depends on capturing the value of the application — communications — in the transport and that would no longer be possible because with the Internet the value is created OUTSIDE the network.

“One example of the collateral damage caused by today’s approach is the utter lack of simple wireless connectivity. Another is that we have redundant capital-intensive bit paths whose only purpose is to contain bits within billing paths,” Frankston explains. “In practice, the telcos are about nothing at all other than creating billable events. Isn’t it strange that as the costs of connectivity were going down your phone bill was increasing — at least until VoIP forced the issue.”

“We have an alternative model in the road system: The roads themselves are funded as infrastructure because the value is from having the road system as a whole, not the roads in isolation. You don’t put a meter on each driveway. Tolls, fuel taxes, fees on trucks, etc. are ways of generating money but they are indirect. Local builders add capacity; communities add capacity and large entities create interstate roads. They don’t create artificial scarcity just to increase toll revenues — at least not so blatantly.”

“I refer to today’s carrier networks as trollways because the model is inverted — the purpose of the road is to pass as many trollbooths as possible. We keep the backbone unlit to assure artificial scarcity. Worse, by trying to force us within their service model we lose the opportunity to create new value and can only choose among the services that fill their coffers — it’s hard to come up with a more effective way to minimize the value of the networks.”

A model in which the infrastructure is paid for as infrastructure — privately, locally, nationally, and internationally can create a true marketplace in which the incentives are aligned. Instead of having the strange phenomenon of carriers spending billions and then arguing that they deserve to be paid, we’d have them bidding on contracts to install and/or maintain connectivity to a marketplace that is buying capacity and making it available so value can be created without having to be captured within the network and thus taken out of the economy.

So why not do it? Well the telcos and cable companies would hate it. Who made them gods?

Thanks to Doc Searls for the link.

I posted on the issue of net neutrality in a classroom forum (for my Network Administration class at CCSF):

Doc Searls of Linux Journal wrote a column, “Saving theNet: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes,”about this issue recently.

Searls is a strong advocate of the point of view that the main reasonfor the internet’s extreme malleability and explosive growth has beenthe abstraction of applications from the underlying networkinfrastructure. To use his term, the internet is a “stupid” network: thenetwork says nothing about what applications (the networks “endpoints”)can or should be. In contrast is the PSTN, of Ma Bell fame — thepenultimate example of a circuit switched “smart” network. Searlsargues that the telcos, owners of the PSTN, yearn to exert the kind ofcontrol over the internet that they have over the PSTN, and that theyare moving to reestablish their hegemony by arguing before the USCongress in favor of doing so.

What would this mean in a pratical sense for you and I? It would meanmuch less diversity on the application side, and little or no control,or ability to develop our own solutions. Think cell phones, where it isvirtually impossible — if not illegal — to control the software on thebox. Reverse engineering the software, even if only to build beneficialnew applications, is a violation of an agreement that you entered intoin order to get phone service. This closed, proprietary software worldis a fundamentally different development (and user) environment from theworld of tcp/ip, where standards are published and vetted openly in theform of RFCs.

This is a complicated issue, but it would behoove us not tounderestimate its implications. The outcome of the fight for control ofintellectual “property” in the form of patents and copyright onsoftware, in conjunction with the struggle for control of networkinfrastructure, may very well determine whether the “useful arts”continue to flourish in the U.S., or, conversely, as we’re alreadywitnessing in both the software and telecom world, the US slips intorelative obsolesence.

Whenever I’m trying to explain the difference between the web, the internet, and earlier media forms, I begin with this analogy: the first TV news shows looked like radio sounds. Announcers stood stiffly in front of a camera and sonorously read the news. Of course, it didn’t work, because TV abhors stillness. Even if it’s just Ken Burns moving the camera across a tintype from the U.S. civil war, you’ll notice that everything on TV moves now. It’s such a basic insight, but people didn’t automatically grasp it. I also believe that this process, as with the adoption of any technology, is fundamentally collective in nature: we learn, and adapt, as a group.

Similarly, the best ways to use the internet and the web are forming as we watch. An excellent example? The incomprehension with which traditional print news organizations greet the web. Dan Gillmor discusses the phenomenon of the “costwall” at traditional print news outlets’ web sites. Gillmor points to how traditional news organizations can adapt and even benefit from the ‘net, by turning fishwrap, as Cory Doctorow so aptly terms it, into an asset that is both communally and commercially valuable.

I think examining the unfolding of earlier adoptions of technology can be revealing, and here I usually refer to Benedict Anderson’s excellent book, Imagined Communities. His principal subject is nationalism, but along the way he examines the influence of the printing press on the spread of capitalism, vernacular languages, and nationalist ideologies. We can expect similar upheaval, given that the foundations of capital and property are threatened by the internet and the web.

The means of reciprocity usually get rearranged in such times, as was the case after the advent of radio. Eben Moglen’s 23 February 2004 Harvard address, as posted on Groklaw, is a lucid introduction to the unfolding of this story this time around.