Dana Blankenhorn

It's 1938 Over Here

I often decry the call of "Munich" on foreign policy. It's not 1938. Our foreign enemies are not Hitler. They don't have his kind of power, and don't pose his kind of threat.

But domestically, it has been 1938 in this country for a long time, and most Democrats have been Neville Chamberlain before it.

They constantly assume goodwill toward democracy, and to the basic rights of a free society, which Bush, Cheney, and their whole crowd do not share. The Administration uses this assumption of goodwill against them in ways large and small, in their ruthless campaign for absolute power -- not just political power, but personal power, financial power, and judicial power.

It's only the DFHs of the Netroots, the ones called "extreme" by the mainstream press, who are playing Churchill here. They seem easy to dismiss. In the short run, they are. If these people had realized earlier this year they were, in fact, the majority, as they claimed they were, they wouldn't be in this mess.

But let me leave the financial scandals, the power grabs, the planetary destruction and the sick foreign policy for a moment. Let's talk about this in terms of something I know well, the Internet.

The Last Big Endorsement

The fall has been a series of non-endorsements, sort of like the college football season:

• The Netroots primary delivered no endorsement. Edwards leads, but his lead over Barack Obama is so small as to be meaningless.
• Al Gore never made an endorsement. His embrace of Wall Street and Silicon Valley has been so complete he's practically a Republican.

There is one very important endorsement that still might happen, and which could prove decisive.

  The Google Endorsement.

I'm not talking here of some appearance by Eric Schmidt, who has hosted the company's talks with candidates at the company offices. (Ron Paul's interview drew the most interest.) I'm talking about an endorsement by founders Larry Page and/or Sergey Brin.

Such an endorsement would be powerful far beyond the money involved. Because it would be based on Internet Values.

This Week's Clue: Liberate Moore's Law

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 48 of This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since March, 1997. It would be the issue of December 3.

Enjoy.

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When this newsletter launched in 1997 it was called A Clue...to Internet Commerce.

As Internet Commerce became commerce, and as the process of doing business online became standardized, I began looking at other areas to cover and settled upon Moore's Law.

At the start of this decade Moore's Law was racing along on every front, and it seemed there was no way to stop it. So I wrote in my 2002 book. (That's it to the right. The beard is whiter now, but I still have the suit and it fits.)
 

I was wrong. There was a force that could stop many elements of Moore's Law in their tracks.

Politics.

All the People, All the Time

You of course know that famous Abraham Lincoln quote:

"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."

To this we must add the George W. Bush corollary:

"If you fool half of the people once in a while that's good enough."

Bush didn't really give us that second quote. That's just the lesson his Administration taught us. And it's a lesson the Right has been systematically teaching for decades now. It's the dark heart of the Nixon Thesis.

Reporters are actually easy to fool. If it's a thick report with a cover page we'll generally repeat what's on the cover page. Easier still, if the boss says "do it this way" that's how it's done. Or they'll find someone else.

The policy debates of this entire last generation were turned into kabuki dances this way. Corporate-funded think tanks replaced independent universities informing Congress. The whole game is so institutionalized now no one even remarks upon it. In fact one of the main goals of the Netroots is to get "our own" think tanks, which will say what we want to hear.

The result is everything becomes Astroturf, and no one really knows anything. The think tanks do as they're told, the policy makers do as the think tanks tell them, and the people funding it all may just be acting on rank prejudice -- or self-interest.

It's the last which is most dangerous to the medium you're now reading, because this process has been adopted by major corporations, and by no corporation so much as the new AT&T.

Google and Microsoft Need Each Other

Google and Microsoft are fierce competitors. Everyone knows that.

Google is out to eat Microsoft's lunch, steal its Office revenue by putting applications online. Microsoft is out to eat Google's lunch, putting Office online, and continuing to grow its own search business.

But these two companies need one another right now. Badly. They need to ally. Now.

The reason for that is power. Political power. Microsoft, Google, Apple and every other tech company is being locked-out of the wireless market by AT&T and Verizon. Those two companies are working hard to extend the same control they exert on wireless to the Internet.

If they win the "net neutrality" fight, the Bell monopolists, who also control most of the Internet backbone,  will do just that. Already, AT&T and Verizon are hoarding bandwidth which Google, Microsoft, Apple and the rest could use to make a ton of money -- far more money than AT&T or Verizon could ever make with it. They're defining huge swaths of their bandwidth as off-limits, defining it as "services" -- video services and phone services which could easily ride on the Internet instead, and would give people dirt-cheap voice service and infinite video choices.

AT&T and Verizon are standing there with a bandwidth hose and kinking it, just like you'd kink a garden hose, so only a trickle of bandwidth comes out to the market. Then they're charging all of us out the wazoo for that trickle, because we need it, because we don't have any choice. It's digital water -- AT&T and Verizon have a monopoly on digital water.

AT&T has already posted new "terms of service" which forbid business customers from even criticizing the company. It's reminiscent of the worst Microsoft abuses from back in the day, but everyone can choose another operating system, a Mac or Linux. Most businesses can't choose another phone company -- they're captives.

The Biggest Lie in Technology

It's a lie that makes my blood boil every time I read it. (This cartoon, by Thomas Nast, is over 110 years old.)

The lie is that the U.S. telecommunications market is competitive, even hyper-competitive.

That lie was told again this week, by the Walt Disney Internet Group, when it announced its MVNO, a re-sale agreement with Sprint, would be closing. (The idiot in charge was engaging in some serious ass-covering.)

This followed similar announcements by Amp'D Mobile and by ESPN, another Disney unit. The only successful MVNO in the U.S. is Virgin Mobile, which is trying to go public in order to pay down its bills.

The plain fact is that the U.S. communications market, wired and wireless, phone, cable and Internet, is an oligopoly with very few participants, and that U.S. consumers have either few or no choices.

The End of E-Mail (As We Know It)

It's time to admit that e-mail, defined strictly by a client like Outlook Express, is dead.

Over the last several months I have been losing increasing amounts of e-mail sent to my POP3 e-mail box, whose address is based on my old Web site domain.

When this e-mail comes from business associates, from companies I'm writing about, I can make a call and get it re-sent. Sometimes I have to watch it fly away from my Mailwasher screen because I neglected to whitelist it, and that's embarrassing. Sometimes I never see it at all.

Recently I had a personal e-mail, sent from someone I knew, fall through the cracks. The story involves other people so I can't detail it. But the result nearly cost our family dearly. It still threatens us. The person in question was not a friend, they did not re-send, the e-mail was not expected, and the failure of that e-mail to arrive caused enormous misunderstandings, a short time later, whose repercussions may be felt for years.

People assume when they send an e-mail that it will get through. When it doesn't, they may believe the loss was deliberate. That's the way we are. We hit send and expect results.

This Week's Clue: The Resilient Network

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 36  of This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since March, 1997. It would be the issue of September 10.

Enjoy.

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The Internet is naturally resilient.

When a direct path to a bit's destination is blocked, it automatically goes around the blockage. This is a critical design feature. It may be the most under-appreciated aspect of the whole network.

Dave Isenberg calls this the "stupid network" because it's controlled at the edge, not the center. This makes censorship difficult. But it does more than that. It makes the whole network efficient, even more efficient as it grows.

Unlike the traditional telephone network design which preceded it, where whole cities might become dependent on a single switch, a single point of failure, the stupid network scales. It becomes more resilient as it grows, not less resilient.

The same principle has been applied to politics in this decade.

This Week's Clue: Winning The War Against Oil

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 33  of This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since March, 1997. It would be the issue of August 20.

Enjoy.

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There is only one way to win the War Against Oil.

Unleash Moore's Law.

The benefits of Moore's Law have been imprisoned for five years now, due to deliberate government policies aimed at protecting monopolies.

You can argue about the why all day. The facts are crystal clear.

• Spectrum has been sold to Bell companies that hoard it, and charge for each action you take using it.
• The phone network is a set of local monopolies, most controlled by two companies. There is no competition.
• The Internet backbone has become the same way, as the duopolists have purchased MCI and the old AT&T.
• Cable is also a series of local monopolies, led by Comcast.

BPL Still Going Nowhere

I have been covering Internet over power lines for 10 years.

It has always been a pipe dream, and always will be.

The reason is that, when you load a power line with Internet-speed traffic, you create enormous interference with licensed radio frequencies. Especially ham radio frequencies. So any time a BPL provider gets close enough to development for an announcement, the hams rise up en masse and push them down again. (BPL stands for Broadband over PowerLine.)

So it will be in Dallas, I predict, where Current claims to have a re-sale deal with DirecTv which (they claim) will give the latter a "triple play" offering of telephony, Internet and TV, competing with cable and the Bells. TXU won the right to do this through a contract with TXU.