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More Challenges to the Lessig-Zittrain-Wu Thesis

by on February 27, 2011 · 3 comments

Writing over at Forbes, Bret Swanson notes that the progression of information technology history isn’t going so well for those Net pessimists who, not so long ago, predicted that the sky was set to fall on consumers and that digital innovation was dying. Specifically, Swanson addresses the theories set forth by cyberlaw professors Lessig, Zittrain, and Wu (among others), whose theories about “perfect control,” the death of “generativity,” and the rise of the “master switch,” I have addressed here many time before.  [See this compendium of TLF essays discussing “Problems with the Lessig-Zittrain-Wu Thesis.”] Swanson summarizes what went wrong with their gloomy Chicken Little theories and their predictions of the coming cyber end-times:

As the cloud wars roar, the cyber lawyers simmer. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. The technology law triad of Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain and Columbia’s Tim Wu had a vision. They saw an arts and crafts commune of cyber-togetherness. Homemade Web pages with flashing sirens and tacky text were more authentic. “Generativity” was Zittrain’s watchword, a vague aesthetic whose only definition came from its opposition to the ominous “perfect control” imposed by corporations dictating “code” and throwing the “master switch.” In their straw world of “open” heros and “closed” monsters, AOL’s “walled garden” of the 1990s was the first sign of trouble. Microsoft was an obvious villain. The broadband service providers were  of course dangerous gatekeepers, the iPhone was too sleek and integrated, and now even Facebook threatens their ideal of uncurated chaos. These were just a few of the many companies that were supposed to kill the Internet. The triad’s perfect world would be mostly broke organic farmers and struggling artists. Instead, we got Apple’s beautifully beveled apps and Google’s intergalactic ubiquity. Worst of all, the Web started making money.

Swanson goes on to argue that, despite all the hang-wringing we’re heard from this triumvirate and their many, many disciples in the academic and regulatory activist world, things just keep getting more innovative, more generative, and yes, even more “open.”  Continue reading →

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George Ou & Bret Swanson on Berkman Broadband Report

by on October 21, 2009 · 15 comments

Last night here on the TLF, Bret Swanson raised a number of objections with this FCC-commissioned report about international broadband comparisons, which was conducted by some folks at Harvard University’s Berkman Center. Meanwhile, over at the Digital Society blog, George Ou also offers a hard-nosed look at the Berkman broadband report and concludes “The underlying data cited by Berkman study is simply too flawed to be of any use.”  I recommend everyone check out both essays.  It will be interesting to hear how the Berkman folks respond.  Some of these international broadband comparisons are really fishy.  [Here’s a podcast we did on that issue two years ago.]

One quick point… Like Bret, I also found it shocking that–even though the report reads like an ode to forced access regulation–the Berkman folks didn’t spend much time discussing the result of America’s previous open-access regime. “The gaping, jaw-dropping irony of the report,” Bret argues, “was its failure even to mention the chief outcome of America’s previous open-access regime: the telecom/tech crash of 2000-02. We tried this before. And it didn’t work!”  Indeed, America’s regulatory experiment with forced access regulation involved a lot of well intentioned laws and regulation, and too many acronyms to count–CLECs, TELRIC, UNE-P, etc– but it did not result in serious, facilities-based competition.  Instead it offered us the fiction of competition through network-sharing, or what Peter Huber once referred to as building “networks out of paper.” The results were disastrous for investment during that period since regulatory uncertainly led to a lot of stunted innovation.

In sum, sharing is not competing.  You can socialize and commoditize old pipes for awhile and get decent results in the short-term, but you’ll sacrifice long-run investment and innovation if you do.  [For more background, see my recent essay on “The Fiction of Forced Access ‘Competition’ Revisited” and this old Cato piece on “UNE-P and the Future of Telecom “Competition” as well as Jeff Eisenach’s PFF white paper, “Broadband Policy: Does the U.S. Have It Right After All?”]

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TPW 38: The Google Kerfuffle — Edge Caching & Net Neutrality

by on December 19, 2008 · 5 comments

In several of our previous podcasts (see episodes 34, 35,and 37), we’ve discussed what we’ve called the “Comcast Kerfuffle,” which was the controversy surrounding the steps Comcast took to manage BitTorrent traffic on its networks. Critics called it a violation of Net neutrality principles while Comcast and others called it sensible network management.

This week we saw a new kerfuffle of sorts develop over the revelation in a Monday front-page Wall Street Journal story that Google had approached major cable and phone companies and supposedly proposed to create a fast lane for its own content. What exactly is it that Google is proposing, and does it mean – as the Wall Street Journal and some others have suggested – that Google is somehow going back on their support for Net neutrality principles and regulation? More importantly, what does it all mean for the future of the Internet, network management, and consumers. That’s what we discussed on the TLF’s latest “Tech Policy Weekly” podcast.

Today’s 30-minute discussion featured two of our regular contributors at the TLF, who both wrote about this issue multiple times this week. Cord Blomquist of the Competitive Enterprise Institute wrote about the issue here and here, and Bret Swanson of the Progress & Freedom Foundation wrote about it here and here.  To help us wade through some of the more technical networking issues in play, we were also joined on the podcast by Richard Bennett, a computer scientist and network engineer guru who blogs at Broadband Politics as well as Circle ID and he also pens occasional columns for The Register.  Also appearing on the show was Adam Marcus, Research Fellow & Senior Technologist at PFF, who wrote a “nuts and bolts” essay full of excellent technical background on edge caching and net neutrality.

You can download the MP3 file here, or use the online player below to start listening to the show right now.

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Bandwidth, Storewidth, and Net Neutrality

by on December 16, 2008 · 14 comments

Very happy to see the discussion over The Wall Street Journal‘s Google/net neutrality story. Always good to see holes poked and the truth set free.

But let’s not allow the eruptions, backlashes, recriminations, and “debunkings” — This topic has been debunked. End of story. Over. Sit down! — obscure the still-fundamental issues. This is a terrific starting point for debate, not an end.

Content delivery networks (CDNs) and caching have always been a part of my analysis of the net neutrality debate. Here was testimony that George Gilder and I prepared for a Senate Commerce Committee hearing almost five years ago, in April 2004, where we predicted that a somewhat obscure new MCI “network layers” proposal, as it was then called, would be the next big communications policy issue. (At about the same time, my now-colleague Adam Thierer was also identifying this as an emerging issue/threat.)

Gilder and I tried to make the point that this “layers” — or network neutrality — proposal would, even if attractive in theory, be very difficult to define or implement. Networks are a dynamic realm of ever-shifting bottlenecks, where bandwidth, storage, caching, and peering, in the core, edge, and access, in the data center, on end-user devices, from the heavens and under the seas, constantly require new architectures, upgrades, and investments, thus triggering further cascades of hardware, software, and protocol changes elsewhere in this growing global web. It seemed to us at the time, ill-defined as it was, that this new policy proposal was probably a weapon for one group of Internet companies, with one type of business model, to bludgeon another set of Internet companies with a different business model. 

We wrote extensively about storage, caching, and content delivery networks in the pages of the Gilder Technology Report, first laying out the big conceptual issues in a 1999 article, “The Antediluvian Paradigm.” [Correction: “The Post-Diluvian Paradigm”] Gilder coined a word for this nexus of storage and bandwidth: Storewidth. Gilder and I even hosted a conference, also dubbed “Storewidth,” dedicated to these storage, memory, and content delivery network technologies. See, for instance, this press release for the 2001 conference with all the big players in the field, including Akamai, EMC, Network Appliance, Mirror Image, and one Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of . . . Novell. In 2002, Google’s Larry Page spoke, as did Jay Adelson, founder of the big data-center-network-peering company Equinix, Yahoo!, and many of the big network and content companies. Continue reading →

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Net Neutrality forever! Wait, never mind…

by on December 15, 2008 · 9 comments

Big news in these parts.

The celebrated openness of the Internet — network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic — is quietly losing powerful defenders. Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers.

TLFers and commenters: Go.

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Technology: 2008 vs. 1992

by on December 13, 2008 · 23 comments

See my comparison of the state of technology in 2008 versus 1992, during the last Democratic presidential transition.

In mid-2008, the four-gigabyte (or 4,096 megabytes) flash memory chip in an iPod Nano cost $25. Late in 2008, four-gigabyte flash cards and USB drives are selling for $14.99. But back in 1992, four gigabytes of flash memory would have cost $500,000. This means a hypothetical iPod Nano circa 1992 would have set back the teenage Nirvana or Boyz II Men fan around $3 million. Apart from research scientists and a few early adopters of Compuserve and AOL, the Internet essentially didn’t exist in 1992. Monthly Internet traffic was four terabytes. All the data traversing the global net in 1992 totaled 48 terabytes. Today, YouTube alone streams 48 terabytes of data every 21 seconds. . . . The dramatic centralization of money, power, information and influence now under way seriously threatens the entrepreneurial revelations and technological revolutions that drive long-term growth. If we quasi-nationalize the energy, finance, auto and health care markets, and possibly bar dynamic new business models on the Internet, as with possible network neutrality regulation, we will close off many of the most promising paths to needed efficiencies and, more important, new wealth.

See the whole article at Forbes.com: “How Techno-Creativity Will Save Us.”

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Straw Men Can’t Swim

by on December 5, 2008 · 6 comments

The venerable Economist magazine has made a hash of my research on the growth of the Internet, which examines the rich media technologies now flooding onto the Web and projects Internet traffic over the coming decade. This “exaflood” of new applications and services represents a bounty of new entertainment, education, and business applications that can drive productivity and economic growth across all our industries and the world economy.

But somehow,  The Economist was convinced that my research represents some “gloomy prophesy,” that I am “doom-mongering” about an Internet “overload” that could “crash” the Internet. Where does The Economist find any evidence for these silly charges?

In a series of reports, articles (here and here), and presentations around the globe — and in a long, detailed, nuanced, very pleasant interview with The Economist, in which I thought the reporter grasped the key points — I have consistently said the exaflood is an opportunity, an embarrassment of riches.

Continue reading →

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“Techno-Nationalism”: Debating the “where” of innovation

by on December 1, 2008 · 20 comments

About 10 days ago I gave a presentation to a D.C. business group on “Innovation: The End? Or a New Beginning?” We got into a discussion of high-end immigration and were in general agreement that we should grant easy green cards to all STEM PhDs educated in the U.S., among other enticements to smart immigrants. One commenter then suggested this was a kind of a zero-sum race between the U.S., China, and India for the world’s human capital.

I replied, however, that the technological, economic, and political advance of China and India is a good thing. Innovation anywhere in the world benefits us, too, if we are open to the global economy. For hundreds of years, North America attracted much or most of the world’s financial and human capital because (1) though imperfect, we were an attractive realm of freedom and (2) much of the rest of the world was so inhospitable to innovation, entrepreneurship, education, and was generally politically intolerant. This massive tilt in our direction is now over. Other parts of the world present more opportunities for entrepreneurship and education, and we’re not going to get all the smart people, no matter how open our immigration laws. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to get the smartest people. Just that there’s going to be lots of innovation and new enterprise in new non-U.S. places, and that overall that’s a good thing.

So I was intrigued when an Economist article on this very topic hit my radar yesterday. Turns out Amar Bhidé of Columbia Business School has written a whole book on the subject: The Venturesome Economy. Continue reading →

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Obama’s Entrepreneurial Lesson

by on November 7, 2008 · 7 comments

See my take on the election and the prospects for capitalism in today’s Wall Street Journal:

If Barack Obama ran for president by calling for a heavier hand of government, he also won by running one of the most entrepreneurial campaigns in history. Will he now grasp the lesson his campaign offers as he crafts policies aimed at reigniting the national economy? Amid a recession, two wars, and a global financial crisis, will he come to see that unleashing the entrepreneur is the best way to raise the revenue he needs for his lofty priorities?

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Of Curves and Chaos

by on September 30, 2008 · 8 comments

Apologies for the non-technology post, but since the only topics of conversation these days are Wall Street, credit default swaps, and Putin’s flights over Alaska, I thought I’d post my review of Dave Smick’s new book The World is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy…the Mortgage Crisis Was Only the Beginning.

                                                                                                            <div style="100%"><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/6320801/Not-So-Flat-After-All-Forbescom-092908-by-Bret-Swanson">"Not So Flat After All" - Forbes.com - 09.29.08 - by Bret Swanson</a> - <a href="http://www.scribd.com/upload">Upload a Document to Scribd</a></div>

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