Dana Blankenhorn

The Unstoppable Power of Communication

The most powerful force in the world is communication.

This medium brings more of it within reach of more people than any medium has before. (Pictured, the capital of Rwanda.)

When George W. Bush was in Africa this week reporters were astounded by the number of people there who supported Barack Obama, who seemed to know all about him.

And why not? Africa is filled with Internet cafes. Africans don't have to listen hopefully for a word from the BBC anymore. They can pick up The New York Times.

Recently I mentioned the idea that Obama should go to Kenya and try to sort out the growing crisis there. Turns out he's been there, via radio. He made a statement and took questions at the end of last month. This has not yet had an impact, as the struggle has morphed into a tribe-on-tribe war over land. But he was there, and could be again, at any time.

It's not just politics where this medium is making enormous change. It's in every facet of life. The turnaround in Rwanda is being driven as much by information as anything else. The use of sympathy to reach markets, and the opening of an online stock exchange,  is enabling capital to reach all of East Africa. Trouble in Kenya can now quickly move capital to Rwanda and vice versa. Rapid capital flows can create a gigantic incentive to make peace.

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.

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.

Return the Spectrum Commons

Some day, when Republicans are truly politically dead, not just wounded as they are now, we need to return to the idea of the Commons. (The picture of Bruce Kushnick to the left is getting a bit old -- send us a new one, Bruce!)

Not Communism, asshole. The Commons. Parks, forests, content, seas, air,  software...and most important, spectrum.

Right now, in Washington, so-called regulators and so-called competitors are doing their little spectrum dance again.

The headline on this Washington Post story is deliberately misleading -- it reads FCC Majority Backs Open-Access Plan for Airwaves. In fact that's just not true at all.

The plan of FCC chair Kevin Martin and two Democratic commissioners is to auction off all the spectrum being abandoned in 2009 by TV stations, and to  require but one-third of it built out so that all devices can use it. Martin resists even the idea of mandated wholesaling, which Google says is a pre-condition for its entry into the bidding.

The Corruption of Technology

Of all the corruptions during this decade, it's the Bush Administration corruption of technology that hit me the hardest.

When I use the word corruption, I am describing a deliberate policy of politicizing the development of technology, tearing at the process of change in order to put control into as few hands as possible, so as to control those hands.

This has been the pattern everywhere. The Bush Administration much prefers monopoly, or oligopoly, to real competition. Once such a goal is achieved, the few at the top can easily be manipulated, bribed, cajoled, or threatened into absolute support of the leadership.

I take the subject of technology personally, and have real-world experience with it. For nearly two decades, prior to this Administration, I watched technology change play itself out in successive waves.  No lead was safe. Those who were Clueless, or became so, went under practically before I could proclaim the word upon them. It was Darwinian, it was brutally competitive. It was also wonderful, and highly profitable. The raw capitalism of the 80s and 90s brought the U.S. economy to the very pinnacle of success, producing nearly a third of the world's products and services by the end of the last decade.

Now those days are gone. What we have instead is nothing less than state-directed corporate welfare. Moore's Law has been overturned by the War On Terror.

Routing Around The Bells

The evils of the Bell monopoly continue to get worse-and-worse.

Yet I remain optimistic. But first, let me vent a little.

So-called "broadband" users are still paying the same price for the same speeds as a decade ago, while the costs of actually moving the bits have fallen by more than a thousand-fold. Koreans consider our "broadband" a joke. And our wireless situation is no better. Every new auction is dominated by the same frequency hoarders, so we still pay $100 or more a month for what's essentially narrow-band wireless service. And nothing has been added to the unlicensed 802.11 spectrum, nor is it likely to be.

With the Bells facing a Congress which has other, more pressing business, and little appetite for more subsidies, it's getting what it wants from the states, where officials are incredibly ignorant. No one seems to understand that the AT&T push into "cable" is just an excuse not to liberate any bandwidth for true broadband Internet service.  Everything gets defined as a "service," with  an added monthly fee whether you use it or not, and nothing gets better, as it should under Moore's Law.

I'm facing nothing but crap from my cellular provider, Sprint. They only sell, they never service. They hid a $10/month "data" charge on my camera phone, they sold me a phone their other stores knew was a piece of crap (Motorola, you can go Chapter 7 now) and I'm paying $160/month for services I was told would cost $90/month, when their junk fees are added in. Trying to change anything in a store is impossible -- you have to go on-hold for an hour to talk with anyone. And this is the only national carrier alternative to the AT&T-Verizon duopoly -- it makes me want to spit.

Yet I remain optimistic. Here's why.

Destroying Net Neutrality, Piece by Piece

Net neutrality, a cause I support wholeheartedly, is already (in many ways) a myth.

It's a myth because, since the Web was spun, we have encouraged third parties to act as censors of the resource, with no controls and no accountability. Programs like NetNanny claim they're just filtering out porn, but there's really no way to tell what they're filtering, save by trial and error. (And since NetNanny is now part of ContentWatch, which uses what it calls "dynamic filtering," there is no way to produce a list.)

Here is an example. It's a block against the DailyKos political community, put in by Motorola's Netopia unit, on a wireless hotspot it is managing. I happen to know this company, and centralized censorware has been a part of its 802.11 business from the beginning. Its original business model was to sell censoring as an upgrade, called parental controls, on wireless routers it would install on behalf of phone companies.

No Longer Number One In Tech

The U.S. has lost its place as the leading technology nation.

That's the news from an annual survey of technology policy known as the World Economic Forum's "networked readiness index," which previously had the U.S. on top.

Now we're 7th. Denmark, Sweden, Singapore, Finland, Switzerland and the Netherlands all scored ahead of the U.S. in the annual survey.

Ironically these countries, and others, have spent the decade copying the tech policies the U.S. had in the 1990s. They have broken up telecomm monopolies, pushed competition for all forms of bit traffic, and encouraged rapid write-offs of all investments.

The committee producing the report was headed by Chilean economist Augusto Lopez-Claros (left, above). This is ironic because throughout the 1990s Republicans held up Chile's forced privatization under Pinochet as a model for Latin American development. In this decade, Chile's performance has not been as good.

This Week's Clue: Promises Gone Missing

The following should be called Vo. 11, No. V of a-clue.com, my free weekly e-mail newsletter. Enjoy.

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Where does e-commerce stand, 13 years after the Web was spun? (Picture from SercomGroup.)

I date the beginning from 1994 because that's when I first started covering the field, at the old Interactive Age Daily.

The promise was e-commerce could cut costs by eliminating middlemen, and expand choices by making one-off merchandise profitable.

In some ways this has been achieved. Middlemen have been eliminated. E-commerce has marched like a locust swarm through the travel market, the video market, the music market, the book market. But the savings have mainly been pocketed by new, larger merchants based far away (Amazon) or re-captured by the sellers who treated the Web as the middleman (Southwest Air).

The Long Tail does a better job than I have in detailing how choices are expanded through the Web.  Sites like eBay are great for one-off goods, bringing the maximum number of buyers in, killing another traditional market (auction houses) in the process.

But in terms of technology we could be much, much further along than we are. Internet-based systems let you manage demand from the point of supply and it has been traditional merchants, like Wal-Mart, not online merchants, who have taken advantage. As a result rather than promoting diversity and local provisioning Internet technology has actually promoted the opposite, sameness and foreign provisioning. So far.

What are the two key factors slowing Internet commerce in 2007? It comes down to two words.

This Week's Clue: Final Five: Always On

I am folding A-Clue.Com into this blog as of January. To celebrate the end of 10 years in e-mail publishing I am posting 5 essays covering the letter's main topics.

This week I talk about The World of Always On, an idea I considered "the next big boom" after finishing work on my Moore's Law book, but one that has yet to come to pass. Enjoy.

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By all rights we should be in the middle stage of a tech revolution as important as the commercial Internet itself.

I am talking here about what I call The World of Always On. (To the right is the current state of the art in active heart monitors.)

The vision is simple. Extend applications into the air by using 802.11 WiFi routers as application platforms. Use sensors and motes to collect data on our bodies, our homes, and our property, creating new valuable applications that live in the air. Use Internet standards to let you control these applications from anywhere.

I first began exploring this idea in 2003, after the dot-boom went dot-bust. Having explained (for myself if no one else) how progress was inevitable with Moore's Law, I sought out the new direction it would take.

I was struck by two things. First, how small powerful chips were getting, with line widths reaching the nano-level. Second by the need for people to "age in place," and the monitoring requirements of that.

I posited a true "killer app," a heart monitor linked to an 802.11 router. Perhaps, I speculated, it might have a bluetooth link to a cellphone, so the whole thing could live wherever the user went? At the same time, I noticed, Intel was doing fascinating work with Alzheimer's patients, creating multi-chip systems that could identify when a patient was acting confused, and when they were not, lowering the load on care-givers.