Dana Blankenhorn

Dyson Fears

Readers here may recall I had a colloquy last week with Esther Dyson (right) over the AOL-Goodmail deal. She pointed me to a statement from the CEO of Goodmail, and defended the company's actions so-far.

Frankly, I take her words seriously. I am an Esther Dyson fan.

Esther is the daughter of the physicist Freeman Dyson, the sister of the scientific historian George Dyson and the granddaughter of the famed English musician, also named George Dyson.  I could find no relationship between her and James Dyson, the vacuum cleaner inventor.

When I saw my first ad for that vacuum cleaner, in fact, I was certain that James Dyson said it was the first vacuum cleaner that "doesn't use suction." In fact, he said that the Dyson vacuum doesn't lose suction.

Misunderstandings are easy.

Esther feels Goodmail has been misunderstood. As she later wrote:

Goodmail has its own long-term success to consider.  It's not resting its business case on technicalities, but rather on satisfied customers long-term.  You many not believe that, and indeed, they do have to prove it over time.

For my part, I do believe it, and I certainly follow the principle of  innocent until/unless proven guilty. (Emphasis mine.)

Dyson's role as founding chair of ICANN illustrates this point well, and identifies what I consider a common character flaw among liberals. She never saw the possibility of evil in the domain name game until it was, frankly, too late. She did not see Stratton Sclavos, for instance, as evil until he had completely outmanuevered her and rendered ICANN useless. And even afterwards she refused to give these machinations the kind of condemnation they deserved, at a time when such condemnation might have been helpful.

The Boy in the Bubble

In all the liberal frou-frouing and tut-tutting over Ben Domenech (the Redstate founder briefly hired by the Washington Post, let go when it turned out he didn't have an original thought in his head) one important number was generally ignored.

24.

This is not just the name of a Fox TV show. It is Domenech's age. This means he was born in 1981. Af the end of 1981. Reagan had already been shot. His earliest memories are probably of Iran-Contra. Everything else is history to him.

Another point not remarked upon often-enough is that he was home schooled. His parents were determined that nothing disagreeable -- meaning nothing outside their own heads -- would enter him. He was force-fed propaganda 24/7, and only allowed to read and watch those things which supported those assumptions.

His brief adventure at William & Mary was just that, brief. He did not graduate. Instead, he went right into the bubble of the Bush-osphere, in which up is not up until we say so, in which down is not down until we say so. Obedience to the will of the leader is all that matters in the Bush-osphere, and anyone who dares disagree -- no matter his past conservative credentials -- becomes apostate.

Is this story beginning to sound at all familiar?

Where We're Heading

When I launched Mooreslore for Corante in 2002, I was purely interested in technology. I think Hylton Jolliffe thought he was getting a nice little blog about hardware, with lots of comparisons of GHz and Gbytes. (The picture is from Tom Tomorrow's blog. Why I'm picturing George Bush here will become clear. But hang with me.)

But I have always been a futurist at heart. When I started in this business, in Houston in 1978, I obsessed about the coming oil industry crash. That happened practically the day I left, June 1, 1981,  and the town remained mired in depression for most of the succeeding decade.

I launched myself as a freelance under the name "Have Modem, Will Travel" in 1983, and was rewarded two years later with a post at Newsbytes, where I eventually settled in as telecomm editor, and occassional editorialist.

The Interactive Age Daily, which I launched after Newsbytes, was the first daily Internet coverage to launch alongside a magazine. Unfortunately the magazine closed less than a year later, and so did the next one I joined for CMP, NetGuide. By 1997 I was out of work.

My response was to do what I'd done in Houston, get on top of the coming boom and play Cassandra. I had covered Internet Commerce extensively at NetGuide, was even photographed in a suit and fedora, holding a sheaf of dollar bills. But I knew most of what I was seeing was phony, and said so.

This did not help me when the crash happened. You can date it. My 45th birthday, January 12, 2000. That was when AOL decided to merge into Time-Warner -- that at least was the date of my next newsletter. I called it the Worst Deal Ever.

And it was.

I have learned that it does not help to be right. It doesn't get you past the hard times, not really. And people resent you while they're enjoying yourself, if you're sitting over to the side muttering, "this can't last." They think you're a party-pooper.

My obsession became broadband, especially wireless, and the possibility that Wireless ISPs might compete with the Bells. I even spoke at an Agere kick-off conference in December of that year on all the ways broadband might be delivered, using Agere chips of course.

By 2002 I was looking for something for that broadband to do, and I started writing about what I called the World of Always On. What I meant was that wireless broadband should become an application platform, as the PC and Internet had become application platforms. Sensors would measure the condition of your home, the air, your body, would tell you where your stuff was, and the network would then tell you how everything was. This is just beginning to happen, but with frustrating slowness.

So I began looking at why progress was so slow. Early this year Gordon Cook invited me into a group he was putting together about the phone-cable duopoly, celebrating the arrival of Bruce Kushnick's great e-book "The 200 Billion Scandal."  This blog was launched for that book.

What I learned over the next few months was it was all politics. The Bells had hot-wired the political system for their own benefit. And as I looked around I saw other giant companies which had done the same thing.

The Lou Dobbs Election

James Walcott interrupts his usual snark today for a thought-provoking piece on the U.S. economy, and the nation's short-term political direction. (I like the snark, by the way.)

After quoting at length from a Stephen Roach memo to Morgan Stanley investors worrying that the Chinese and Arabs who now hold our notes are getting sick of our attitude, he neatly summarizes the public mood in the person of CNN anchor Lou Dobbs.

Walcott notes that Dobbs probably did more than anyone to turn the Dubai Ports deal around, and then notes some of his other bugbears -- immigration, pensions, deficits, the middle class squeeze.

Much of Dobbs' work in this area is good, but sometimes, as on the issue of China, he goes off into a jingoism "like something out of the National Review circa 1958." (There's a present in that link.)

Goodmail Defends Itself

Through the good offices of Esther Dyson, I received the following today from Richard Gingras, chairman and CEO of Goodmail. After the break, some comment:

CertifiedEmail will only have value if recipients believe it has value: that CE is an indication of the authenticity of a message from an accredited sender who respects the recipient's willingness to receive or deny the sender's messages.

CertifiedEmail's Authorized Use Policies (available on our website) dictate that the messages must be permissioned-based email to existing customers or members of the sending entity. There is a feedback loop that allows Goodmail to collect complaints from recipients and maintain a reputation profile on the sender's mailing practices (that they respect permissions and unsubscribe senders promptly). High complaint levels would lead to revocation of privileges. Since a cryptographic token is added to each message it allows us to track message volume and track complaint levels very accurately. Poor mailing practices such as sending to non-permissioned lists would be quickly visible.

Also note that CertifiedEmail senders must be qualified:

1. we accredit theentity to be sure that we have a legal path of accountability (we usevarious vetting processes to double-check physical addresses, how long they've been in business, etc, etc.);
2. we evaluate prior sending histories (prior complaint levels on AOL and Yahoo! for example) to be comfortable they follow proper sending practicies. Those are the only criteria but both are extremely important to the integrity of CertifiedEmail. We do not take all comers.

Our role is that of a trust intermediary. We take that very seriously. We must. If we don't we won't be around for long.

What is the Internet?

David Reed asked this question on a mailing list recently and it sort-of brought me up short:

What is the Internet?

His point was that the Internet is not the transport. In other words, no matter what Comcast or Verizon or AT&T do, they do not and cannot "own" the Internet. No one can.

The more I thought about it, the deeper the answer got. The Internet is not the servers or services connected to it. The Internet is not even (really) the people who use it, who provide content or download that content. And it is not the content, either.

The Internet is a larger, greater, more important result. It is Version 1.0 of a Global Mind. That is the result of connecting all these servers, all this knowledge, all these opinions, or making it available to anyone whose network can access a TCP/IP link that, eventually, can reach a DNS address.

When you think about the Internet in this way, a sort of What the Bleep model, your priorities for it shift just a little bit. Maybe more than a little bit.

Real Dynamics of the Chip Business

There are many myths about the chip business, which give Americans much comfort.

• It's an American lake.
• It's all about the microprocessors

In fact, as iSuppli notes, only half the top 10 semiconductor firms last year were American.  Microprocessors represent only a small part of the business these days.

Here's another myth. Intel is in trouble.

Again, false. According tot he same report AMD actually lost ground last year to Intel.

True Heart of the Spam Problem

The true heart of the spam problem is American businesses insisting they should have the right to spam.

NOTE: Pictured here is the delicious pork shoulder and ham product from the good people at  Hormel called Spam, not the nasty form of mass unsolicited e-mail named for the Monty Python sketch.

It's a definition problem. The 2003 CAN-SPAM Act is aptly named, because it defines as "not-spam" most of the spam corporations want to send.

Here it is, direct from the FTC's own Web site:

Here's a rundown of the   law's main provisions:

• It bans false or misleading   header information. Your email's                "From," "To," and routing information – including the originating domain name and email   address – must be accurate and identify the person who initiated the email.


• It prohibits deceptive subject  lines. The subject line cannot                     mislead the recipient about the contents  or subject matter of the message.


• It requires that your email  give recipients an opt-out method.       You must provide a return email address  or another Internet-based response mechanism  that allows a recipient to ask you not to send future email messages to that  email address, and you must honor the  requests. You may create a "menu" of choices to allow a recipient to opt  out of certain types of messages, but  you must include the option to end any       commercial messages from the sender.

Here in the real world we know that if you try to "opt-out" of real spam you are, in fact, "opting-in" to everyone's. This reality is deliberately ignored in the law. It's perfectly legal under CAN-SPAM for a corporation to send mass e-mails, so long as it follows these rules. The same provision ignores the problem of "spoofing," in which crooks pretend to be real companies in order to steal your money or identity. We're supposed to "trust" the "real" companies that have "valid" opt-outs -- why?

It is against this backdrop that we have the AOL Goodmail controversy. Many who have looked at the program, including Esther Dyson, whom I consider the "godmother" of the early commercial Internet, have said it is perfectly fine. When I expressed skepticism over Goodmail on the Dave Farber list recently, she wrote me:

Goodmail is completely dependent on an opt-in model, and has its own auditing system to ensure that its  sender-customers behave.

On what are you basing your assertions?

The short answer, Ms. Dyson, is U.S. law.

We Have Met The Enemy...

Lately I have found myself in arguments with two friends who refuse to look at politics because, in their own words, "they're all crooks."

This is not uncommon. It is not uncommon in America. It is not uncommon elsewhere. Voter participation in elections is going down throughout the Western world. The exceptions are in new, emerging democracies, where people denied the right to be heard tend to take to the process with real enthusiasm.

There are three  reasons for this:

1. Corporate control of the money, the message, and the process of politics.
2. Politicians who are dishonest, stupid, and get re-elected anyway.
3. A popular culture that reinforces the idea that "they're all crooks."

The plain fact is, not only aren't all politicians not crooks, but most aren't. Anyone who puts themselves forward, as a candidate for public office, is taking a giant leap of faith, and not all of them are cynics. Most believe in something (at least at first). It could be something big, or it could be something small. They may just believe in themselves. But they do believe in something.

As to the specific issues I have noted, all of them can be addressed:

1. Explicitly fight through the political system against corporate control.
2. Shine the light on dishonest politicians and get rid of them.
3. Don't believe the media. Run yourself.

Periods of political crisis, such as the one we are entering now, are often marked by increased participation, by new forces of belief, and by a reduction in cynicism about leaders and their motives.

The Potemkin Monopoly

The sudden success of Verizon yesterday, which had its business services disconnected from FCC regulation at a stroke, has many of my fellow analysts crying very hard. (That's the old MGM backlot, circa 1976, from seeing-stars.com.)

This is not a surprise. People who have studied and lived with regulation for years, who see it as the only protection against a vast legalized monopoly, are rightly despondent that just such a monopoly has been granted.

But has it? Perhaps something I wrote earlier today deserves repeating. This order isn't really about raising prices. It's about cutting them.

Most large companies and organizations long-ago left the Bells and developed their own networks. The networks are fast, they're Internet-based, they're written-off over a very short time horizon. They are considered differentiators by their owners -- my network is better, faster, cheaper, than your network and that's why I win.

Verizon badly wants to get into this business. But as long as it was tightly regulated it had no chance. Now that the regulation is gone, it can compete more directly with IBM, with EDS, and with internal corporate efforts. It can do special deals, cut prices to the bone, and keep that information secret from the public.