Dana Blankenhorn

FUD the Free Web

It shocks me how many tech writers and self-proclaimed liberals have joined the recent attack on the Free Web.

That’s what Facebook is. That’s what Google is.

They’re the free web.

They don’t charge you for using them. They’re free. Access isn’t free, and neither is most of the information the Web provides. Most of the news today is hidden behind paywalls, available to subscribers only.

But Google and Facebook are free.

The attackers say that on these services “you are the product.” They like to say that because they can afford the cost of subscribing to all the things which interest them.

Google and Facebook have built over $1.3 trillion in market cap, and almost $200 billion per year in annual revenue, with an advertising business model. They won the market and invested their money in building what we today call the cloud. Unlike the phone companies and everyone else, they invested ahead of their growth. Facebook put $1 billion/quarter into its server farms before it had the revenue to back it up. These are risk-takers. They’re what capitalism is all about. They’re Amurica.

World War III, The Internet War

World War III is an Internet war. It has been ongoing for over a decade.

When the conflict was between countries like Pakistan and Ireland, or Ukraine and Russia, we could afford to ignore it.

Then it came to our own shores. November 8, 2016 was this war’s Pearl Harbor.

Yet we still haven’t reacted, because once the enemy is in the tent the media thinks going after them is friendly fire.

There’s nothing friendly about it.

Sure, there are efforts underway at Google and Facebook to boost “real news” and dissuade “fake news.” Yes, there are efforts underway in Congress to control online political spending. Yes, there is the Mueller probe.

But these are nothing. We still see the Internet War as something we can stop with higher firewalls, or bigger budgets.

We can’t.

Monopoly, Market Advantage, and Mouthpieces

The long-running scam on which this blog was originally based was the AT&T monopoly.

Since the 1984 Bell break-up, AT&T has been recreating itself, like the brooms of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence in Fantasia. What were originally 7 regional Bell companies merged into 2 regional Bells, then those two bought the long-distance operators with big market share in the Internet core. AT&T is descended from Southwestern Bell, one of the original 7, and changed names when it bought the long-distance operation.

AT&T has spent most of its corporate life grifting off government. It won huge subsidies to create “universal service” over a century ago, and it eventually won the end of price regulation on the service. It continued its grifting on the Internet. A “universal service fund,” derided as a “Gore Tax” by opponents, was a subsidy, crafted mainly for AT&T, aimed at delivering broadband service to rural areas and urban ghettoes.

The Core and the Edge

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 12 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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The IN in the word Internet stands for interactive. (Right, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, whose 1989 paper set the terms for today's World Wide Web.)

The assumption of its designers was that the Internet would be a two-way network, that as many bits would flow in one direction as the other. Peering, the original financial agreement underlying today's Internet, is based on this assumption.

The Internet, in other words, was not designed to be TV. It was not designed to be a passive medium, as something you watch, or read, or listen to. We already had such media. The Internet was designed to be something you interacted with.

That's not how things are working out in our time. The Internet is becoming TV, is becoming something you watch, or read, or listen to. The bits are mostly flowing in one direction, from the core to the edge of the network. Most of the technical standards underlying consumer Internet traffic, like DSL and DOCSIS, are designed to let bits flow faster downstream than upstream, on the assumption that more bits would do that.

Google is Not at War

I have always been annoyed by the lazy "great game" tech analysis of reporters who would rather be covering politics than business.

An example is found in a recent TechCrunch piece on Google. Headlined "Google's Six-Front War," it focuses on the areas of business where Google is now concentrating its energy under co-founder (and now CEO) Larry Page.

VC Ben Horowitz started this nonsensical meme, calling Page a "war time CEO" in contrast to the "peace time" leadership of predecessor Eric Schmidt.

There are two things that are true here. First, Page is paring down the company's development focus. Second, he's focusing the company's energy on areas where it is in direct competition with other big companies. Microsoft in browsers, Apple in mobile, Facebook in social networking, etc.

This is natural. This is good. Page is wasting fewer development hours, he's aiming to monetize his infrastructure advantages in various ways, he's working to compete.

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.

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.

One Word for Broadband Stimulus

Congress is looking at putting anywhere from $6-9 billion into broadband as part of the stimulus bill.

Not what advocates like Free Press want. (They were looking at more like $44 billion.) But a lot more than I was thinking of, namely, zero.

This is not to say I hate broadband. I love me some broadband, the broader the better. I just happen to think that competition is a better tool for getting it than any subsidy.

Which leads to  one word, the one word by which I will measure whether this is money down a rathole or something significant.

Internet.