Dana Blankenhorn

Resolutions, Not Predictions

I much prefer New Year's Resolutions to New Year's Predictions.

I can try to control myself. The future is unknowable. You can see the patterns of the past, you can see how things should knit together, but you can't know, and you shouldn't try to predict specifics.

But let's get the chore out of the way with some generalizations.

If history is any guide, 2007 is going to be a bad year. By my reckoning we're a year removed from a Generational Crisis election, one that will define our politics for the rest of my life, and most of the lives of my children. Such years are always filled with terrifying events which make the nature of the next crisis crystal clear to everyone.

Things like the Summer of Love. The KreditAnstalt collapse. The Gold Bond. John Brown's raid. Each of these events crystallized the coming crisis. They helped define the abyss, and the choices which people at that time had to make. And it was the climb-down from these crises that defined the politics of the next generation. Listen carefully when a right-winger is cornered by events, forced to dig deep into the id of his ideology. A hippie is going to fall out of that tree.

I can't tell you what that event might be. It is likely to be an environmental catastrophe that will make Katrina look like a small thunderstorm. Or it could be something else. Whatever it is, it will generate enormous fear, one that will be met with paralysis by all our leaders -- political, economic, cultural, media. The Washington "cocktail party" will end, to be re-formed only after the crisis has been addressed by the people, and only after a new set of political myths and values have replaced the Nixon Thesis. (You know which ones I like.)

So on to my own New Year's Resolutions, which I hope you will enjoy and (perhaps) share:

This Week's Clue: The Internet Thesis

This is the first week where my weekly A-Clue essay comes via the blog rather than in newsletter form. You can call this the January 1, 2007 issue, Vol. XI, No. 1. Enjoy

---

The AT&T acquisition of BellSouth, not the execution of Saddam Hussein, should be the real end of an era.

Ever since the Bush Administration took power, in 2001, we have seen continuing consolidation in the Internet access space. Users have fewer choices, and so too site managers. We pay more for less bandwidth than any other industrialized nation, which means that soon, we may not be one.

There is no sound reason for this. The cost of providing Internet connectivity has actually gone down continuously over this period. We've gone from 802.11b WiFi, at 10 MBPS, to 802.11n, at 100 Mbps. DWDM means a fiber placed into the ground today has many times the data capacity of fiber put in service six years ago. Internet access has never been easier to install. And the Internet can now handle all the connection services we need. Video, telephone, money, thoughts  -- any good that can be reduced to bits can now be processed cheaply.

The only costs of telephony today are bureaucratic.

Yet throughout this decade, as the Bells have spent billions gobbling one another up, America's competitive position has fallen. At last count we were down to 19th in terms of our access to Internet resources, and we're continuing to fall fast.

The Answer to the AT&T Monopoly

Back at Freedom2Connect I wrote about James Salter at Atlantic Engineering, who was advocating municipal fiber networks as the solution to the Bell monopoly.

But I admit my heart was not in it. 

Like most others at the event I was more interested in the idea of municipal WiFi as a solution. I was more interested in people like Ron Sege, because he proposed a quick way around the bottleneck by using WiFi and WiMax to reach competitive longhaul fiber.

I was wrong.

TechDirt has, since that spring conference, published a number of examples where municipal fiber actually delivered on its promises.  DSL Reports has also covered a number of small towns where competitive fiber brought in new jobs. Google, which everyone knows is not hard up for money, actually chose to site a new facility in The Dallas, east of Portland, specifically because of a municipal fiber project.

What are the keys to success?

The War Against AT&T Will Go On

It's over. It's done.

The AT&T-BellSouth merger is a done deal.

To get the deal done, AT&T offered some concessions on network neutrality. But some smart people, including Dave Burstein, consider this language a dodge.

Essentially AT&T agreed to apply network neutrality to its main network for at least 30 months, but did not extend that promise to its IP TV network. The key to AT&T has always been getting into TV, and a promise to take on all TV comers would violate the principles companies like Comcast long established, which is that they control the vertical, the horizontal, and the channel offerings, so they collect from the operators and the free market doesn't work.

Dave believes AT&T will simply move everything to its IPTV network, essentially defining everything as IPTV, and then start trying to charge Web sites blackmail for access to its backbone, not to mention "its" customers (which Ed Whitacre insists it owns).

Well, maybe.

The Bowl Economy

For those who've missed me, we traveled to New Orleans for Rice's first bowl game since 1961, then on to San Antonio to visit relatives who are without Internet access.

So I took a brief vacation.

Let us start the return with good memories.  Given that many of us considered it a once-in-a-lifetime event (the last Rice bowl appearance was in 1961) about 7,000 Owls descended on New Orleans for something called the R&L Carriers New Orleans Bowl.

The Rice crowd was so passionate that when we arrived on the afternoon of the game they were completely sold out of Rice shirts, sweats, hats, scarves, and anything else referencing the event. (We eventually cadged some bowl t-shirts from a street vendor, after the game.)

But while 7,000 was a big impressive number to School President David Leebron, it didn't look like all that much in the 70,000 seat Superdome. Only the bottom two tiers of seats were sold at all, and the crowd on the middle dome tier was sparse. Even on the ground level the end zones were empty.

This Week's Clue: Final Five: The Internet Future

For the final essay in the e-mail version of A-Clue.Com, which is being sent to over 1,000 subscribers, I talked a little about the Internet's future, and its importance.

Enjoy.

---

Something that sets my teeth on edge is any reference to what the Internet is doing" or where the Internet is going.

The Internet isn't doing anything, and isn't going anywhere. It is a protocol, a way to connect computers together. It's a voluntary technical agreement.

When they make this reference, people are usually talking about HTTP, the HyperText Transfer Protocol first unveiled by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. They may be talking about the Internet address space, or its naming conventions, or some technology like AJAX that makes the Internet more efficient. Or they may be talking about some other new technology, like video over IP, that runs on the Internet Protocol.

That would make sense.

When it gets crazy is when they start talking about social networking, or blogging, or TV clips, as what the Internet is doing. (Time Magazine just did that in naming no one in particular as its Person of the Year.) These are just services that ride on the IP backbone. They're not the Internet. The people who use the Internet, who feed it material and download that information, they are doing something. The Internet? Not so much.

 

The Next Ted Turner?

Ted Turner was a brilliant man, a great entrepreneur, and a philanthropist, who was hosed by AOL to the point where he had to renege on some of his greatest philanthropic achievements. That's why he lives as a virtual recluse, a Citizen Kane of the 21st Century.

Oh, don't feel too sorry for Ted. He's doing OK. His ranches are profitable. But imagine what he could have done if he really had that $10 billion he thought he had after the 2000 Time-AOL merger was announced. It's quite a comedown. Which is why you don't see him much in public these days. He is usually portrayed as a flake.

I worry that the same thing may now happen to another multi-billionaire, Bill Gates.

We Don't Need a Carbon Tax

There is a lot of talk right now of imposing a carbon tax to limit global warming.

Europe is taking the lead, creating an emission control scheme airlines will have to join by 2011.  But there is increased talk of such a tax here.

There is a better solution. It's practical and, more important, it could win political support. It lacks that dreaded "t" word that sets voters' teeth on edge.

Price floors.

America's Somalia

The states I call Pottersville and West Pottersville are dieing, destroyed by a toxic mix of racism, greed, and one terrible storm.

Democrats were dismayed this year when idiot New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and corrupt Rep. William Jefferson were both re-elected, after making explicit tribal calls to their supporters. Jefferson's was the most blatant, essentially painting black opponent Karen Carter as the "white" candidate, changing his positions on social issues into those of cruelty against "the other," and basically acting more like a Somali warlord than a U.S. Congressman.

Meanwhile, in Mississippi, Republicans are cruising  for many of the same reasons. Most Mississippians are white, and this trumps everything else, in a state that is 35% black. But where the racial roles are reversed, as in the state capitol of Jackson, the governing is actually worse.

Motivation

One thing we know the Internet and Open Source make possible is success defined by something other than the bottom line.

The Open Source movement itself has long been led by people who could have been rich but chose not to be. People like Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds do manage to avoid the poor house, but they're quite satisfied with their modest lives, which are completely out-of-scale with the good they do in the world.

Many bloggers are the same way. Some just want to be heard. Others want a little influence. Some just want to help.

These are valid motivations, but the leaders of the Proprietary World -- the "smart guys" in New York, or the "kewl kids" in Washington or the "media darlings" in Los Angeles -- they just can't conceive of this being a valid stance.

Which brings us to Craig Newmark and Craigslist.

Newmark and his "partner," Jim Buckmaster, just aren't motivated by the idea of getting rich.  This gives them an enormous advantage in the Internet market.  They're not thinking of how to hose the users, but how to serve them. They're not using the funds Craigslist throws off to fund lavish lifestyles -- they plunge it all back into the business. And they really aren't interested in maximizing revenue at all.

This led to a "culture clash" of major proportions when Buckmaster spoke to a media conference sponsored by UBS recently.