Dana Blankenhorn

Scott Cleland's Game: Turn Google Into AT&T

Scott Cleland is a Bell troll.

He is what he has always been, an apologist and paid advocate for the Bell companies and their causes. He hides his source of funds, and reporters new to every beat keep buying the act. It's crazy. Crazy like a Fox.

This week he's a concern troll, having issued a "book" (the same way Regnery publishes "books") that is nothing but a long hit piece against Google. USA Today gave him an admiring interview without once asking him where his money comes from, which is like treating Glenn Beck as an unbiased journalist.

Cleland's theme is that you can't trust Google, that Google always lies, that Google is not out to serve anyone but its own shareholders, and that it deserves the strict government scrutiny given his clients, the Bells.

The aim is simple. To hobble Google with lawyers and layers of bureaucracy, hordes of people who spend their days focused inward, taking big salaries to prevent innovators from innovating.

Free the WiFi

There are two reasons to share things via open source. So they won't become worthless, and so they can become more valuable.

The Sega game machine is an example of the former principle.  Had Sega been able to donate the code when they killed the product, it could have had an after-life. As it was, owners now have bricks.

WiFi is an example of the latter principle.  The Electronic Frontier Foundation now says it wants the WiFi protocol “opened,”  allowing free sharing of unused bandwidth.

Peter Eckersley calls fears of privacy and security that have made people lock their WiFi routers a “tragedy of the commons” and suggests the launch of an Open Wireless Movement to fight back.

I wrote something very similar two years ago, from Chengdu, where I was able to post stories only because of open wireless connections in a Chinese condo project. My hosts let us use a great apartment, but it had no computer, no Internet. Without the open connections of nearby units, which admittedly were on intermittently and didn't provide a ton of bandwidth, I would have been gone from the Web all that week. As it was, I delivered some of the most popular things I ever did write at ZDNet.

OpenStack Becomes Telecom Lifeline

The announcement that AT&T is building itself an open source cloud stack based on OpenStack should be no surprise to regular readers here.

As I noted Friday in writing about CenturyLink (the former Qwest, the former US West), telcos see OpenStack as their best move against Amazon, Google, and the obsolescence that comes with being a 19th century technology platform.

This is great news for OpenStack, bringing with it a bunch of really committed programmers, backed by heavy corporate sponsors. But it's also a challenge to Rackspace, the main sponsor.

That's because telcos remain Clueless, and always will be. Like newspaper owners, telco executives think they control monopolies, even when they don't.

So there will be two temptations among the "CenturyLink," "AT&T" and (let's call it) "Verizon" programming teams moving toward OpenStack:

1. The temptation to tweak the software in order to maintain customer control.
2. The temptation to fork the software and run off with the code.

These sound like the same temptation, but they're not. If you tweak the software you're keeping up with the latest releases. If you fork it, you're creating a new branch of the software tree entirely.

What Should Microsoft Do Now?

For some reason – maybe it's the fact that Microsoft now sells at the P/E of a medium-sized bank – the company is getting all sorts of advice.

Some of the dumbest advice comes from ReadWriteWeb, which thinks Microsoft Needs to Open Source Something Big But What?

Wrong question. Open source is not some magic elixir. It's a specific tool with a specific purpose. When you want collaboration you offer up the code. In the mid-2000s, this meant code you just wanted to shove over the side. More recently it's been important projects you needed others to commit to in order for them to succeed.

Why Android Won't Be Stopped

My friend Florian Mueller at FOSSPatents has been writing furiously about Android of late, becoming a one-man Groklaw on the subject.

His main thesis?Android has so many patent and copyright suits being filed against it that it can't survive, and that it could drag Google down with it.

My initial response on this was that the effort was self-defeating, that it was attempt to end competition through the force of law, and competition doesn't work that way. I even trotted out my picture of Samuel Slater, whose mill (a mile from where my mom grew up) in Pawtucket R.I.  was a deliberate copy of a protected British design. Slater had to smuggle himself into the country in order to steal that intellectual property.

The simpler answer to Florian's point is not a look back at our own history but a single word – China.

It's an important point which a friend reminded me of recently. Android let Chinese OEMs create their own software ecosystem. They're not going to give it up.

After the Carrier Death Spiral, Google

A “carrier death spiral” is what some are calling AT&T's acquisition of T-Mobile. (Others disagree.)

The merger raises the spectre of a renewed monopoly (as though the former SBC hadn't moved decisively in that direction years ago). The deal will take a year to clear although AT&T officials insist they have the stroke with the bureaucracy to get it done.

And they do. That's the problem.

I can't tell you how many trillions of dollars American consumers have paid over the last decades, over and above their real value, for wired and wireless bits, thanks to monopolistic practices we foresaw in the mid-1990s, tried to deal with, and then saw politics unravel.

The whole idea of the government, from the beginning, was to separate the infrastructure from the service. Thanks to a compliant Bush Administration, and Clinton appointees who were outmaneuvered, the Bell operating companies overthrew that deal. This led to the merger mania which now sees us with only three “choices” – AT&T, Verizon and Comcast – for most people just two of the three, and for others just one.

The Market is Bigger than the Law

To hear Florian Mueller tell it  Google is doomed.

In addition to its other legal troubles involving Android, it may have grossly violated the General Public License (GPL), taking copyrighted work willy-nilly from open source and turning it into the semi-proprietary Dalvik.

Well, since it's St. Patrick's Day, we'll quote a little Finian's Rainbow.  Things are desperate, but not serious.

What a Real Cyberwar Looks Like

Ever since the Web was spun people have been buzzing about the idea of "cyberwar."

I have been among them. Over the last 15 years I have tracked online battles over East Timor, over Lebanon and Israel, over China and Chechnya. Every major conflict comes with a cyber-component these days.

But most are cyber in nature. Oh noes, you can't get to a particular site. Or maybe your connection goes away for a while. Pinpricks.

Real cyberwar doesn't just take place in cyberspace. Real cyberwar takes place in meat space, and is a concentrated effort by government to enforce local law on a global scale.

When Chinese or Iranian bloggers are arrested and put in jail to rot, that's cyberwar. When it becomes a crime to pass on valuable information, or to have it on a server, that's cyberwar.

Cyberwar has come to America.

Fox Jr.

One neat trick the Right perfected over the last generation has been the manipulation of the media.

A founding principle of the Nixon Thesis is  "the liberal media." Any criticism, on anything from any quarter gets this immediate response from the conservative grassroots. "You're part of the liberal media," followed by a prompt dismissal of the critic.

It's a great dodge, this victim game. It means you never need answer a critic. They're biased. They're the enemy. And you can spread this word among your acolytes, so they too are inoculated.

Once inoculated in this way people become sheep. Nothing that contradicts you can ever get to them.

To this has been added the control and ownership of the media. The best know conservative media baron is Rupert Murdoch, who now has immense sway over the politics of Australia, Britain and the U.S. through his ownership of newspapers, magazines, TV and cable, and Web sites. A better example might be Silvio Berlusconi, who used his control of Italy's media to make himself ruler of all Italy.

To these conservatives the equation is pretty simple. Own the media and you control the people. Grab them by the clickers and their hearts and minds will follow. Politics is not a contest of ideas. It is a contest of wills, and money. With enough of both you can make people believe anything you want.

Liberals have never really gotten their heads around this. It's one thing to deal with a media that is owned by people who vote conservative. It's another thing entirely to face a conservative media, a media where no voices other than conservatives ones get a hearing, where no facts other than those conservatives approve of can be known.

Murdoch is not alone. Pat Robertson controls a large hunk of the media. Sun Myung Moon controls another hunk. There have long been regional conservative barons in various parts of the country -- Freedom Newspapers in California, Morris Communications in Georgia. The dominance of these companies within their markets mean liberal causes, liberal politicians, and liberal organizations start off with an immense disadvantage.

But at least these organizations pretend to exist in the market.

Valuing Clicks

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 39 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Let's go back to Internet Commerce a moment or two. That's what A-Clue.Com was created to cover in 1997.

A click's value is easy to state but very hard to calculate.

It's worth what you can get for it.

The corollary is also true.

It costs what it costs.

In absolute terms this means a page view is worth the advertising (or commerce revenue) you can generate from it, less the cost of getting the page view and serving the page.

V= A - C

These values vary tremendously by site, and ignorance of the underlying equation leads to ferocious misunderstanding wherever e-commerce is discussed.