NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Isenberg: "Broadband" - Internet = Not Diddly Squat
> http://isen.com/blog/2009/04/broadband-without-internet-ain-worth.html "The Internet derives its disruptive quality from a very special property: IT IS PUBLIC. The core of the Internet is a body of simple, public agreements, called RFCs, that specify the structure of the Internet Protocol packet. These public agreements don't need to be ratified or officially approved - they just need to be widely adopted and used. "The Internet's component technologies - routing, storage, transmission, etc. - can be improved in private. But the Internet Protocol itself is hurt by private changes, because its very strength is its public-ness." --- > http://isen.com/blog/2009/04/broadband-without-internet-ain-worth.html Thursday, April 30, 2009 Broadband without Internet ain't worth squat by David S. Isenberg Keynote address delivered at Broadband Properties Summit (http://www.bbpmag.com/2009s/9fullagenda.php#gs71) 4/28/09 We communications professionals risk forgetting why the networks we build and run are valuable. We forget what we're connecting to what. We get so close to the ducts and splices and boxes and protocols that we lose the big picture. Somewhere in the back of our mind, we know that we're building something big and new and fundamental. We know, at some level, there's more than business and economics at stake. This talk is a 30,000-foot view of why our work is important. I'm going to argue that the Internet is the main value creator here - not our ability to digitize everything, not high speed networking, not massive storage - the Internet. With this perspective, maybe you'll you go back to work with a slight attitude adjustment, and maybe one or two concrete things to do. In the big picture, We're building interconnectedness. We're connecting every person on this planet with every other person. We're creating new ways to share experience. We're building new ways for buyers to find sellers, for manufacturers to find raw materials, for innovators to rub up against new ideas. We're creating a new means to distribute our small planet's limited resources. Let's take a step back from the ducts and splices and boxes and protocols. Let's go on an armchair voyage in the opposite direction -- to a strange land . . . to right here, right now, but without the Internet. In this world we have all the technology of today, but no Internet Protocol, that is, there's no packet protocol that all proprietary networks can understand. In this alternate reality, every form of information can be digitized, BUT there's not necessarily a connection between all this information and all the users and services that might discover it and use it to their advantage. This was the world envisioned by the movie, The President's Analyst, where The Phone Company secretly ran the world. It's from 1967, the same year that Larry Roberts published the original ArpaNet spec. Roll Clip (http://www.youtube.com/v/uUa3np4CKC4) In a world without the Internet, it's not clear that we'd actually have a thought transducer in our brain. But if we did, I'd bet we couldn't program it ourselves. I'd bet we couldn't shut it off. I'd bet we couldn't decide who could receive its signal and who could not. What WOULD we have? We would have super-clear telephony. We'd have cable TV with lots and lots of channels. We'd have lower op-ex and higher def. We'd probably have some kind of telephone-to-TV integration so we could order from Dominos while we watched Gunsmoke. Our cell phones would make really, really good phone calls . . . and we'd have another half-dozen bungled attempts to convince us that picturephones were the next great leap forward. Surprisingly, we might not have email. The first generation of Internet Researchers only discovered human-to-human email in 1972 - the subsequent growth of "People-to-People" applications was a big surprise to them. Now, without email, there there'd be no reason to invent the Blackberry or the iPhone. Without the Internet, it would be a voice, voice, voice, voice world. This voice, voice, voice would be expensive. Without the Internet - specifically without Voice over IP -- we'd still be paying fifteen cents a minute for long distance, because VocalTec would not have commercialized VOIP, Vonage and Skype wouldn't exist, and even the major telcos would not have used VOIP to destroy the international settlement system. Data service? Think ISDN. Actually, think about a dozen different so-called Integrated Services Networks, each with its own access and login, with no good way for one to connect to another. Metcalfe's Law would suggest there'd be orders of magnitude less traffic overall. Would we have Search? Perhaps. Imagine what Encyclopedia Britannica On Line would look like in a non-Wikipedia world . . . at a buck a lookup. Digital photography? Perhaps . . . but medium would be paper and the biggest company would be Kodak. What about Amazon? EBay? YouTube? Weather.com? Google Maps? Travelocity? Yahoo Finance? iTunes? Twitter? Facebook? CraigsList? Blogging? On-Line Banking? We wouldn't even have Web sites. Sure we could probably buy some kind of proprietary on-line presence, but it would be so expensive that only GE, GM and GQ could afford it, and so inaccessible they probably wouldn't want to pay. Web 2.0 - the ability of a single computer to reach across the Internet in a dozen different directions at once to build an customized web page on the fly - would be worse than unavailable, it would be unthinkable. But it's not all bad. Without the Internet, we would still get our news from newspapers, the corner bookstore would still be down on the corner, the Post Office would be thriving, your friendly travel agent would still be booking your trips, Dan Rather would still be on TV, perverts would still get their sick pix in inconvenient plain brown wrappers, and the NSA would not know the books I bought at Amazon or who I email with. Tough. We lost a lot of skilled leather-smiths when they invented the horseless carriage. We'll find ways to deal with the Internet's changes too. Without the Internet, the minor improvements in telephony and TV certainly would not drive the buildout of a whole new infrastructure. The best way to do telephony would still be twisted pair. The best way to do Cable TV would be coax. Now I'm a huge Fiber to the Home enthusiast! But I'm also part of the Reality Based Community. So let's face it, even WITH the Internet, including Verizon's amazingly ambitious FIOS buildout, the business case for fiber is so weak that 97 percent of US homes still aren't on fiber. We are still in "Law of Small Numbers" territory. The Internet is the only thing standing between our limited success and abject failure. Notice, I have not yet, until now, used the word BROADBAND. But before I talk about broadband, I want to talk about Synechdoche. Synecdoche is when you say, "The Clock" but you mean Time. Synecdoche is when you say, "Eyeballs," but you mean The Customer's Attention. Synecdoche is when you say, Dallas, but you mean, "The Mavericks." Most of the time Broadband is synecdoche. When we say, "Broadband," most of the time we mean, "High Speed Connections to the Internet." I repeat, Most of the time when we say Broadband we mean High Speed Connections to the Internet. Broadband is synecdoche. Without the Internet, "Broadband" is just another incremental improvement. It makes telephony and TV better. It makes the Internet better too. But the key driver of all the killer apps we know and love is the Internet, not Broadband. And, of course, the Internet is enabled by lots of technologies - computers, storage, software, audio compression, video display technology, AND high-speed wired and wireless networking. Now, Broadband is a very important enabler. The United States has slower, more expensive connections to the Internet than much of the developed world. And that's embarrassing to me as a US citizen. Imagine if a quirk of US policy caused us to have dimmer displays. That would be a quick fix, unless the display terminal industry demanded that we disable the Internet in other ways before it gave us brighter displays. Or insisted "all your screens are belong to us." High-speed transmission does not, by itself, turn the wheel of creative destruction so central to the capitalist process. The Internet does that. Broadband, by itself, does not fuel the rise of new companies and the destruction of old ones. The Internet does that. Broadband by itself is not disruptive; the Internet is. The Internet derives its disruptive quality from a very special property: IT IS PUBLIC. The core of the Internet is a body of simple, public agreements, called RFCs, that specify the structure of the Internet Protocol packet. These public agreements don't need to be ratified or officially approved - they just need to be widely adopted and used. The Internet's component technologies - routing, storage, transmission, etc. - can be improved in private. But the Internet Protocol itself is hurt by private changes, because its very strength is its public-ness. Because it is public, device makers, application makers, content providers and network providers can make stuff that works together. The result is completely unprecedented; instead of a special-purpose network - with telephone wires on telephone poles that connect telephones to telephone switches, or a cable network that connects TVs to content - we have the Internet, a network that connects any application - love letters, music lessons, credit card payments, doctor's appointments, fantasy games - to any network - wired, wireless, twisted pair, coax, fiber, wi-fi, 3G, smoke signals, carrier pigeon, you name it. Automatically, no extra services needed. It just works. This allows several emergent miracles. First, the Internet grows naturally at its edges, without a master plan. Anybody can connect their own network, as long as the connection follows the public spec. Anybody with their own network can improve it -- in private if they wish, as long as they follow the public agreement that is the Internet, the result grows the Internet. Another miracle: The Internet let's us innovate without asking anybody's permission. Got an idea? Put it on the Internet, send it to your friends. Maybe they'll send it to their friends. Another miracle: It's a market-discovery machine. Text messaging wasn't new in 1972. What surprised the Internet Researchers was email's popularity. Today a band that plays Parisian cafe music can discover its audience in Japan and Louisiana and Rio. It's worth summarizing. The miracles of the Internet - any-app over any infrastructure, growth without central planning, innovation without permission, and market discovery. If the Internet Protocol lost its public nature, we'd risk shutting these miracles off. One of the public agreements about the Internet Protocol lays out a process for changing the agreements. If somebody changes their part of the Internet in private, they put the Internet's miracles at risk. Comcast tried to do that by blocking BitTorrent. Fortunately, we persuaded Comcast to stop. If it had continued, it would have put a whole family of Internet applications at risk, not only for Comcast Internet customers, but also for everybody who interacts with Comcast's customers. The whole fight over Network Neutrality is about preserving what's valuable about the Internet - its public-ness. The Internet threatens the telephone business and the cable TV business. So of course there's a huge propaganda battle around the Internet. The propaganda says Network Neutrality is about treating every packet exactly the same, but the Internet has never done that. The propaganda says that Network Neutrality is about regulating the Internet, but we know that the Internet exists thanks to the government's ArpaNet, and subsequent wise government regulation. Look who's calling for regulation anyway! The only reason telcos and cablecos exist is that there's a whole body of franchises and tariffs and licenses and FCCs and PUCs keeping them in business. Cut through the propaganda. Network Neutrality is about preserving the public definition of the Internet Protocol, the structure of the Internet packet, and the way it is processed. If there are reasons to change the Internet Protocol, we can do it in public - that's part of the Internet too. It's the Internet, smart people. Your property already has telephone and TV. So does everybody else's. Broadband without the Internet isn't worth squat. You're building those fast connections to The Internet. So please remember that the essence of the Internet is a body of public agreements. Anti-Network Neutrality attacks on the public nature of the Internet are attacks on the value of the infrastructure improvements you've made to your property. So you can't be neutral on Network Neutrality. Take a stand. If you install advanced technology that makes your property more valuable, you deserve your just rewards. But the potential of the Internet is much, much bigger than your property. Like other great Americans on whose shoulders I stand, I have a dream. In my dream the Internet becomes so capable that I am able to be with you as intimately as I am right now without leaving my home in Connecticut. In my dream the Internet becomes so good that we think of the people in Accra or Baghdad or Caracas much as we think of the people of Albuquerque, Boston and Chicago, as "us" not "them.". In my dream, the climate change problem will be solved thanks to trillions of smart vehicles, heaters and air conditioners connected to the Internet to mediate real-time auctions for energy, carbon credits, and transportation facilities. In my dream, we discover that one of the two billion who live on less than dollar a day is so smart as to be another Einstein, that another is so compassionate as to be another Gandhi, that another is so charismatic as to be another Mandella . . . and we will can comment on their blog, subscribe to their flickr stream and follow their twitter tweets. But I also have a nightmare . . . In my nightmare, the telephone company has convinced us that it needs to monitor every Internet transaction, so it can -- quote-unquote -- manage -- what it calls "my pipes". Maybe it says it needs to stop terrorism, or protect the children, or pay copyright holders. Maybe there's a genuine emergency -- a pandemic or a nuclear attack or a 9.0 earthquake. In my nightmare, whatever the excuse -- or the precipitating real-world event -- once the telephone company gains the ability to know which apps are generating which packets, it begins charging more for applications we value more. In my nightmare, once the telephone company has some applications that generate more revenues because they're subject to management -- and others that don't -- the former get all the newest, shiniest, fastest network upgrades, while the latter languish in what soon becomes Yesterday's Network. In my nightmare, new innovations that need the newest fastest network, but don't yet have a revenue stream, are consigned to second-class service. Or they're subject to lengthy engineering studies and other barriers that keep them off the market. In other words, in my nightmare, all but the most mundane innovation dies So it's up to you. When you make high-speed networks part of your real estate, if you insist that these connect to the REAL Internet, the un-mediated, un-filtered publicly defined Internet, you're part of a global miracle that's much bigger than your property. Please ask yourself what's valuable in the long run, and act accordingly. Technorati Tags: Cableco, fiberoptics, NetworkNeutrality, privatization, Telco PermaLink // posted by isen @ 9:48 AM // emailthis