NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] The Un-Internet and the war on general purpose computing
This is also related to the war on general computation (http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4848.en.html) that Cory Doctorow has spoken of and battle over SOPA. Part of the problem is that we do have a tendency to focus merely on risks (http://rmf.vc/RisksRisks). In trying to explain to people why we need connectivity rather than telecommunications I've come to realize that a big part of the problem is the difficulty of seeing past discontinuities. Our tools for assessing risk tend to project from the present rather -- what else can they do? If you think about the Innovator's Dilemma the real message in the book is not that the featured disk drive company succeeded but that it was entirely unlikely -- but the number of pages devoted to success were out of proportion to the scope of the book. But then we don't want to read discouraging news and tend to focus on success as if it were fated. We tend to underestimate our ability to find success in chaos because we measure success in terms of what we want rather than having a wider definition of success based on tolerating a wide variety of possibilities. Though, often, you require a new generation of thinking to accept the new kind of success. It's hard to defend creating opportunity because that new constituency doesn't exist in the present (AKA, the near-past) and because the current measures of success are indeed threatened by creative destruction. Trying to explain to a local member of Congress why the DMCA was problematic. I couldn't get past his "how will the artists get paid" (even though few artists actually get paid and those that do typically are in the business of art). The worries are exacerbated by the nature of digital systems -- not only do we have the discontinuities of paradigm shifts, digital systems in general tend to not respond according to our analog intuition. What opportunities we've had have tended to be accidental as in separating the software from the hardware business thanks to an accidental legacy of a 1950's antitrust suit. IP's separation of application from transport was in response to a pragmatic problem in extending LANs to the wider world. It's not clear if the CYCLADES datagram idea would have gotten widespread adoption without that need. Sometimes a good idea just gets through on its own because the incumbents do not have sufficient clout to prevent it as in the case of container shipping. And when we do try to engineer change we can get it very wrong as in the ATT Divesture that didn't address the fundamental shift from services to bits -- we didn't have the experience or understanding at the time. One of the biggest accidental wins was the ability of search engines to discover so much "content" due to what I think of as a design flaw in today's Internet which violates the end-to-end argument by depending on central address assignments and naming (IP address and the DNS). We're also fortunate that HTML could be processed by spiders and other tools - unlike Flash sites. While HTML5 has many benefits I worry that my bank will be able to prevent me from scraping my own data from their website. We've also had minimal success even where information sharing seems to be an accepted good as with micro-formats. Calendar and contact information lacks basic mechanisms like GUIDs (Globally Unique IDs) and instead rely on various hacks. Those with the resources to implement these protocols tend to want to control the value chain rather than share. Despite the lessons of the Internet, government research still focus on the network rather than empowering markets and applications as I wrote in http://rmf.vc/IPGENI. What happens when we do have distributed connectivity without a center? What will happen to search engines when discoverability is not the default. We already see some hints of it to the extent that those who want to be discovered are gaming the system and greatly reducing the value of searching for the information that we most care about. I don't have simple answers but, for now, we need an understanding of opportunity and an appreciation for the limits on assessing risk and value across discontinuities. We need approaches that embrace reasonable risk rather than try to avoid it and ones that aren't just concerned about near-term ROI. We can't simply focus on innovation in the absence of creating opportunity. -----Original Message----- From: nnsquad-bounces+nnsquad=bobf.frankston.com@nnsquad.org [mailto:nnsquad-bounces+nnsquad=bobf.frankston.com@nnsquad.org] On Behalf Of Lauren Weinstein Sent: Sunday, January 01, 2012 14:35 To: nnsquad@nnsquad.org Subject: [ NNSquad ] "The Un-Internet" "The Un-Internet" http://j.mp/uuL20r (Scripting) "This time around, Apple has been the leader in the push to control users. They say they're protecting users, and to some extent that is true. I can download software onto my iPad feeling fairly sure that it's not going to harm the computer. I wouldn't mind what Apple was doing if that's all they did, keep the nasty bits off my computer. But of course, that's not all they do. Nor could it be all they do. Once they took the power to decide what software could be distributed on their platform, it was inevitable that speech would be restricted too. I think of the iPad platform as Disneyfied. You wouldn't see anything there that you wouldn't see in a Disney theme park or in a Pixar movie." - - - --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org Founder: - Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org - Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance: http://www.gctip.org - PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com Google+: http://vortex.com/g+lauren Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com _______________________________________________ nnsquad mailing list http://lists.nnsquad.org/mailman/listinfo/nnsquad _______________________________________________ nnsquad mailing list http://lists.nnsquad.org/mailman/listinfo/nnsquad