If we've learned anything at all about from the history of Internet-as-utility, it's that this strained analogy only applies in cases where there is no existing infrastructure, and probably ends best when a publicly-financed project is sold (or at least leased) to a private company for upgrades and management. We should be suspicious of projects aimed at providing Wi-Fi mesh because they're slow as molasses on a winter's day.
I don't see any examples of long-term success in the publicly-owned and operated networking space. And I also don't see any examples of publicly-owned and operated Internet service providers doing any of the heavy lifting in the maintenance of the Internet protocols, a never-ending process that's vital to the continuing growth of the Internet.
Sherman:
Pursuing a public utility model while also desiring competition are fundamentally contradictory goals. Utilities are designed not to compete. Do you, or does anyone you know, have a choice of providers for water, sewage or electricity?
My second question would be: is there anyone in the technology world who sees public utilities as a model for innovation? A 1.5 megabit connection (T1) was an unimaginable luxury when I started in tech in the mid-90's. It was for well-funded companies only. Today, it is a low-end consumer connection and costs around 80% less. Has your sewage service followed a similar trajectory?
A public utility is designed to be "good enough" and little more. There is no need, and little room, for differentiation or progress. Your electricity service is essentially unchanged from 20 years ago, and will look the same 10 years from now. Broadband, on the other hand, requires constant innovation if we are to move forward -- and it has been delivering it, even if we desire more.
A few months ago, I penned a mega book review about the growing divide between "Internet optimists and pessimists." I noted that the Internet optimists -- people like Chris Anderson, Clay Shirky, Yochai Benkler, Kevin Kelly, and others -- believe that the Internet is generally improving our culture, economy, and society for the better. They believe the Net has empowered and liberated the masses, sparked unparalleled human creativity and communication, provided greater personalization and customization of media content, and created greater diversity of thought and a more deliberative democracy. By contrast, the Internet pessimists -- including Nick Carr, Andrew Keen, Lee Siegel, and others -- argue that the Internet is destroying popular culture and professional media, calling "truth" and "authority" into question by over-glamorizing amateurism and user-generated content, and that increased personalization is damaging deliberative democracy by leading to homogenization, close-mindedness, and an online echo-chamber. Needless to say, it's a very heated debate!
I am currently working on a greatly expanded version of my "Net optimists vs. pessimists" essay for a magazine in which I will draw out more of these distinctions and weigh the arguments made by those in both camps. I plan on concluding that article by arguing that the optimists generally have the better of the argument, but that the pessimists make some fair points about the downsides of the Net's radically disintermediating role on culture and economy.
So, this got me thinking that I needed to come up with some sort of a label for my middle-of-the-road position as well as a statement of my personal beliefs. As far as labels go, I guess I would call myself a "pragmatic optimist" since I generally side with the optimists in most of these debates, but not without some occasional reservations. Specifically, I don't always subscribe to the Pollyanna-ish, rose-colored view of the world that some optimists seem to adopt. But the outright Chicken Little-like Ludditism of some Internet pessimists is even more over-the-top at times. Anyway, what follows is my "Pragmatic (Internet) Optimist's Creed" which better explains my views. (Again, read my old essay first for some context about the relevant battle lines in this intellectual war).
A Wide Diversity of Consumer Attitudes about Online Privacy
Debates about online privacy often seem to assume relatively homogeneous privacy preferences among Internet users. But the reality is that users vary widely, with many people demonstrating that they just don't care who sees what they do, post or say online. Attitudes vary from application to application, of course, but that's precisely the point: While many reflexively talk about the "importance of privacy" as if a monolith of users held a single opinion, no clear consensus exists for all users, all applications and all situations.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, this picture makes the point brilliantly--showing:
locations where [Flickr] users are more likely to post their photos as "public," which is the default setting, in green. Places where Flickr users are more likely to put privacy controls on their photos show up in red.
Of course, geography is just one dimension across which users may vary in their attitudes about privacy, but the map makes the basic point about variation very well. Seeing what users actually do in real life says a lot more about their preferences than merely polling them about what they think they care about in the abstract--as my colleagues TLF Solveig Singleton and Jim Harper argued brilliantly in their 2001 paper With A Grain of Salt: What Consumer Privacy Surveys Don't Tell Us (SSRN).
Coincident with the news of a few days ago that Microsoft is embracing the Web even for its longtime PC-centric OS and apps, The Economist has a big special report on "cloud computing," including articles on:
PC-centric Microsoft has been moving toward the Net slowly for years. There's MSN search, the Live interactive gaming platform, Web-delivered software updates, and video chat, among other Net-centric applications. But PC software still dominates the company. Today the company finally and fully embraced the cloud. Following Google, Amazon, IBM, Salesforce.com, and others, Microsoft says it has spent $3 billion on its new cloud platform and that its plans are more ambitious than its rivals.
Next year Microsoft will open a 100-megawatt data center (these facilities are measured in power usage now, not in numbers of servers) in Chicago, bigger than anything Google has running.
It's a big shift for Microsoft, technically and culturally. Since most of its competitors were born on the Web, cloud computing isn't so much a shift for them as a natural evolution.
"We're going to create a new operating system for the next 20 to 50 years," [Microsoft chief software architect Ray] Ozzie says. "We don't get an opportunity to rewrite it very often, so we're really making key architectural decisions now for a long time."
PFF has just launched the new Center for Internet Freedom. CIF offers an alternative to the proliferation of advocacy groups calling for government intervention online by offering timely analyses and critiques of proposals that diminish the vital role of free markets, free speech and property rights. We aim to drive the Internet policy debate in new directions by emphasizing a layered approach of technological innovation, user education, user self-help, industry self-regulation, and the enforcement of existing laws consistent with the First Amendment. Such an approach is a less restrictive--and generally more effective--alternative to increased regulation.
Here are some of the issues I'll be working on as CIF's Director in conjunction with my esteemed colleagues Adam Thierer, Adam Marcus, and adjunct fellows:
Defending online advertising as the lifeblood of online content & services, especially in the "Long Tail";
Emphasizing market solutions to problems of privacy protection, especially regarding the use of cookies and packet inspection data;
Protecting online speech and expression both in the U.S. and abroad;
Defending Section 230 immunity for Internet intermediaries;
Opposing online taxation and legal barriers to e-commerce and digital payments, especially at the state and local levels; and
Ensuring that Internet governance remains transparent and accountable without hampering the evolution of the Internet.
TiburonTV, a Web video channel out of Berlin, posted a speech I gave last month in Vienna. It was my first visit to the home of those giants of economics and innovation like Mises, Hayek, Schumpeter, Drucker, and Popper. Below is the hour-long talk on Web innovation where I detail some of the most important technologies and coolest rich-media applications that are driving Internet traffic growth. Here's a PDF of the presentation.
exaflood - Bret Swanson - presentation @ talk the future from Tiburon-TV's german stuff on Vimeo.
Online Advertising & User Privacy: Principles to Guide the Debate
By Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer
Progress Snapshot 4.19 (PDF)
Over the last year, a debate has raged in Washington over "targeted online advertising," an ominous-sounding shorthand for the customization of Internet ads to match the interests of users. Not only are these ads more relevant and therefore less annoying to Internet users, they are more cost-effective to advertisers and more profitable to websites that sell ad space. While such "smarter" online advertising scares some--prompting comparisons to a corporate "Big Brother" spying on Internet users--it is also expected to fuel the rapid growth of Internet advertising revenues from $21.7 billion last year to $50.3 billion in 2011--an annual growth rate of more than 24%. Since this growing revenue stream ultimately funds the free content and services that Internet users increasingly take for granted, policymakers should think very carefully about what's really best for consumers before rushing to regulate an industry that has thrived for over a decade under a layered approach that combines technological "self-help" by privacy-wary consumers, consumer education, industry self-regulation, existing state privacy tort laws, and FTC enforcement of corporate privacy policies.
In an upcoming PFF Special Report, we will address the many technical, economic, and legal aspects of this complicated policy issue--especially the possibility that regulation may unintentionally thwart market responses to the growing phenomenon of users blocking online ads. We will also issue a three-part challenge to those who call for regulation of online advertising practices:
1. What is the harm or market failure that requires government intervention?
2. Prove that there is no less restrictive alternative to regulation.
3. Explain how the benefits of regulation outweigh its costs.
Nuts and Bolts: Everything You Wanted To Know About Cookies But Were Afraid To Ask
This is the first in a series of articles that will focus
directly on technology instead of technology policy. With an average
age of
57, most members of Congress were at least 30 when the IBM PC
was introduced
in 1981.
So it is not suprising that lawmakers have difficulty with cutting-edge
technology. The goal of this series is to provide a solid technical
foundation
for the policy debates that new technologies often trigger. No prior
knowledge
of the technologies involved is assumed, but no insult to the
reader's
intelligence is intended.
This article focuses on cookies--not the cookies you eat, but
the cookies associated with browsing the World Wide Web. There has been
public concern
over the privacy
implications of cookies since they were first developed. But to
understand them
, you must know a bit of history.
another review of Zittrain's "Future of the Internet"
Sorry if it seems like I am beating a dead horse here, but the folks at the City Journal asked me a pen a review of Jonathan Zittrain's new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Faithful readers here will no doubt remember that I have already penned a review of the book and several follow-up essays. (Part 1, 2, 3, 4). I swear I am not picking on Jonathan, but his book is probably the most important technology policy book of the year--Nick Carr's Big Switch would be a close second--and deserves attention. Specifically, I think it deserves attention because I believe that Jonathan's provocative thesis is wildly out of touch with reality. As I state in the City Journal review of his book:
[C]ontrary to what Zittrain would have us believe, reports of the Internet's death have been greatly exaggerated. [...] Not only is the Net not dying, but there are signs that digital generativity and online openness are thriving as never before. [...]
Essentially, Zittrain creates a false choice regarding the digital future we face. He doesn't seem to believe that a hybrid future is possible or desirable. In reality, however, we can have a world full of some tethered appliances or even semi-closed networks that also includes generative gadgets and open networks. After all, millions of us love our iPhones and TiVos, but we also take full advantage of the countless other open networks and devices at our disposal. [...]
