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.
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.
"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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What was most startling to me was the naked corporatism with which this was defended. It reminded me that, before the next election, we need to find some First Principles, based on Internet values, to guide future regulatory activities.
The goal of spectrum regulation is to maximize use of the resource.
The goal of spectrum regulation is not to maximize any license holder's financial return.
The goal of spectrum regulation is not to maximize the government's financial return.
These principles were, as I expected, systematically ignored. They were willfully flouted. Government officials actually said that, if open access were allowed, it might cut the value of spectrum now held by Verizon and AT&T, that it might cut the price the government could expect at its future auctions.
Well, duh! And what is wrong with that? Whose government is it? Is it Verizon's government? Is it AT&T's government? Is the government just in business to make a profit for itself?
Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 30 of
This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since
March, 1997. It would be the issue of July 30.
Enjoy.
Robert Cringely is, rightfully, a legend in tech reporting. But there are times when he just makes me cringe.
In it he is describing the same situation I described here a few days ago, Google's effort to increase the spectrum commons in the coming re-allocation of TV spectrum.
But his conclusion? Stop. Don't tick off Verizon and AT&T. They will crush you.
Look who Google is up against -- all the largest Internet service
providers in the U.S. Google will not win this even if they win the
auction, because the telcos and cable companies are far more skilled
and cunning when it comes to lobbying and controlling politicians than
Google can ever hope to be. The telcos have spent more than a century
at this game and Google hasn't even been in it for a decade. And
Google's pockets are no deeper than those of the other potential
bidders.
Cringely, STFU. There are two key reasons why you are absolutely, totally, 100% wrong on this one:
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.
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.
When this newsletter launched in 1997 it was called A Clue...to Internet Commerce. 
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