The Real Political Struggle of the Internet

The reason the Internet's political struggles aren't understood is that they are hard to explain.

Fortunately Bob Frankston can explain it. In his latest on SATN, about Skype, he defines it as a struggle between the center and the edge.

The Internet as it is, and should be, is about applications controlled in your PC or the server you choose to connect with. You are the edge.

The Internet, as the Bells want it, is about applications controlled at the center, inside the network.  AT&T is the center.

Here is how this applies to Skype:

It's an example of how communities can stay connected independent on the accidental properties of the Internet and the gatekeepers. Because the relationships are maintained at the edge mobility is fundamental. You don't need the network to do meshing when the applications maintain their own relationships. Meshing then becomes a low level technique for pooling routers rather than a way to make applications mobile.

In other words, what is politically right is also better technically.

Over the last 10 years the Internet has developed at its edges. Individual users and entrepreneurs have created services, on their own computers, and open connectivity so there is a level playing field.

The result is enormous social mobility, among people and companies, with wealth based on traffic and usage.

What the Bells want to do is define everything in the center, charge both sides of every transaction, and keep all the wealth for themselves. This is stupid in terms of technology, stupid in terms of business productivity, and politically smart only for those who want central control of everything.

Unfortunately, in the excess time we live in, where the followers of Reaganism are desperate to hang on to power, and convinced that anyone who disagrees is illegitimate, guilty of treason, there is enormous power being brought to bear on behalf of the center. This is matched by the Bells' lobbying power and market power, earned mainly through lobbying, which has given them control of most folks' IP access, and most of the Internet backbone.

It is vital, for the future of all kinds of competition -- social, political, economic, even religious -- that some politician understand and articulate, in words of one syllable, what is at stake here. What is at stake is the future of the American economy.

At stake in the politics of the Internet is nothing less than the direction we take as a society.

We can remain like Canada, or we can become like Mexico.