Good for them. Democrats in the Senate have rejected a Republican-backed cloture vote that would have forced an up-or-down vote on a Senate wiretapping bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecom companies. Encouragingly, only 48 senators voted for cloture, suggesting that the vote on the final bill might be close.
It remains to be seen if the Democrats have the spine to go on the defensive. If I’m reading things right, the president has threatened to veto any effort to temporarily expand the powers of the Protect America Act. In the president’s own parlance, he appears to be putting politics before the safety of Americans. So will the Democratic leadership fight fire with fire and tell the American public that the president is endangering American lives for the benefit of big telecom companies? I sure hope so, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
I missed them when I was writing my previous post about IPv6, but Ars has done quite a bit of coverage of the IPv6 transition over the last year. Here is an overview of IPv6 done in the usual exhaustive Ars style. And here is a recent story on the federal government’s rush to make IPv6 available on its networks by July… but not actually start using it.
I think the takeaway lesson here is that all manner of large institutions are preparing for the IPv6 transition, but so far nobody seems to be actually pulling the trigger. It’s fairly easy for Microsoft to add an IPv6 stack to Windows XP. It’s much harder for an ISP to stop using IPv4 and start using IPv6. And until a significant number of people have already done so, there will be very few compelling advantages to doing so, because most network traffic will still get routed through a 6to4 tunnel to the old-fashioned IPv4 network. I would love to be proven wrong, because IPv6 has some nifty features (you can read all about them in the article above) but there’s precious little evidence of actual movement in that direction.
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Like Mike, I find this distinction illuminating:
I like to call this the “purpose-driven voluntary sector,” as distinct from (a) the profit-driven voluntary sector, i.e. the private sector, and (b) the purpose-driven coercive sector, i.e., the public sector. Its role is reminiscent of the religious orders in the Middle Ages, groups like the Franciscans and the Dominicans, or the Templars and Hospitallers who fought in the Holy Land. It includes universities, NGOs, churches, the blogosphere, Wikipedia, and so on. Its aims and its loyalties transcend both the self-interest of individuals and the interests of national states. It is a major driver of innovation and progress. It is growing in influence and power.
As Mike notes, there’s also a profit-driven coercive sector centered on K Street.
Libertarianism, properly understood, is concerned with the “voluntary” part, not the “profit” part. When Bill Gates and John Mackey encourage businesses to broaden their focus to encompass motivators other than profit, they’re properly understood not as free-market apostates but as thinkers who are helping to broaden the focus of a free-market movement that is sometimes too myopically focused on the profit-driven segment of the voluntary sector. For-profit companies are crucial to a free society, of course, but so are those parts of civil society that aren’t focused on turning a profit, and the “profit-driven” versus “purpose-driven” distinction is a nice way of highlighting this basic symmetry.
Over at Techdirt, I question whether the long-predicted IPv6 transition will ever actually occur:
A few weeks ago, David Siegel of Global Crossing looked at some high-profile websites and found that none of them have made the switch to IPv6, the supposed replacement for today’s 32-bit Internet addressing scheme. The IPv6 protocols have been finalized for a decade, and major operating systems have supported it for several years, so one would expect Internet-savvy companies like Google and Microsoft to have started running IPv6 versions of their sites. But it appears that so far, nothing of the sort has happened. Indeed, progress toward an IPv6-based Internet appears to be at a virtual standstill. The situation becomes less mysterious when one realizes that the primary rationale for the switch to IPv6 — the exhaustion of the IP address space — is basically bogus. It’s true that if Internet governance authorities continue handing out IP addresses, they’ll eventually run out. But the best solution to this isn’t necessarily a massively disruptive transition to a totally new addressing scheme. It may very well be a lot cheaper to continue working within the constraints of the existing address space. Technologies like NAT allow many users to share a single IP address. And Internet governance bodies can facilitate the creation of a robust market for unused IP addresses, so that those who need additional IP addresses can easily purchase them from someone who has more than they need. For example, Apple, Ford, General Electric, and several other Fortune 500 companies currently control blocks of 16 million IP addresses each. These companies should be given a straightforward way to auction off the unused portions of their blocks for the use of other Internet firms. There would be plenty of IP addresses to go around if firms had a financial incentive to give up unused addresses.
I got a lot of pushback from Techdirt readers, but I’m still not convinced. They pointed out lots of reasons that IPv6 is better than IPv4, which I’m sure it is. But path dependence is a real phenomenon. And none of the reasons they offered (easier routing, not needing NAT, better security) strike me as compelling enough that the median ISP will find it worth the trouble to make the switch. I think everyone may wait for everyone else to go first, and as a result, the transition will never actually happen.
Over at Ars, I’ve got a new post about Bill Gates’s call for “creative capitalism.” I took the opportunity to highlight one of the most interesting recent discussions in libertarian philosophy:
Gates’s arguments are strikingly similar to those of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, a self-described free-market libertarian who has long emphasized that successful businesses must do more than merely maximize profits. In a 2005 debate with economist Milton Friedman and T.J. Rodgers of Cypress Semiconductors, Mackey rejected the the traditional free-market view that a business’s only obligation is to maximize shareholder profits. To the contrary, Mackey argued, businesses have obligations to customers, employees, shareholders, and the broader communities where they reside.
As supporters of capitalism, both Gates and Mackey embrace the arguments for free trade and free markets in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. But both like to cite Adam Smith’s earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which is focused on man’s desire to help his fellow man. They argue that this desire to help others can be at least as powerful a motivator as the drive to increase profits.
I also suggest that Gates take a second look at free software as an excellent example of “creative capitalism” in action. Read the whole thing here.
Those mean old Republicans:
Reid castigated the Republicans for not allowing debate and discussion on amendments that would have required reports on the goverment’s secret wiretapping program, re-affirmed that spying could only happen by following wiretap law, and strengthened bans on the government finding loopholes to target Americans for surveillance without getting warrants first.
“We offered an extension of the current law for a month, several months, a year, 18 months,” Reid said. “But the Republican leadership don’t want to extend the program.”
“It is really not fair we be asked to accept hthis without being able to vote on a single amendment,” Reid complained.
Poor guy. It sure would be nice if the Democrats were in the majority so Reid had some control over the legislative calendar.
Before World War II, party lines were the dominant form of phone service, especially in rural areas. People could pick up their telephones and listen in on their neighbors’ conversations.
Until the 1950s, local telephone numbers consisted of an exchange and a 5-digit phone number. A New Yorker might be listed in the phone book as “CHelsea 4-5034”, and someone wanting to call him would dial (once dial service was available—until the 30s phone calls had to be manually connected by a switchboard operator) CH4-5034 (this is apparently where the letters on the phone come from). When the phone company began running out of memorable exchange names and tried to replace it with “all-number calling,” it sparked an intense outcry among urban users, who considered all-numeric calling to be de-humanizing. Under intense pressure, AT&T backed down and allowed existing exchange-name-based phone numbers to stay in the phone books in some urban areas until the 1980s.
Update: So apparently everyone except me already knew all of these things. One person helpfully informed me that “that post makes you sound about 12 years old.” Well, when I’m 80 I’m sure my grandkids will be fascinated to read this post and learn about how things were back in the good old days.
The story of the telephone industry’s first quarter-century is the story of the Bell patents. Alexander Graham Bell famously filed his telephone patent hours before Elisha Gray filed a competing telephone patent, forming the foundation of what became the AT&T telephone monopoly. The way Brooks tells it—and he gives no hint of having an axe to grind against either AT&T or the patent system—the American Bell company mostly sat back and collected licensing revenues for the 17-year term of its early patents, charging high fees and doing relatively little to improve its technology or aggressively build out its services. What it did do, however, is prosecute hundreds of patent infringement suits against rivals. The book doesn’t go into enough detail to judge how many of those were independent inventions and how many were mere copycats, but it’s clear that at least a handful—including Gray’s—were independent inventions.
The Bell Company is not, in other words, an effective poster child for the patent system. The company’s reaction to the coming of competition in 1894 is interesting:
All through this welter of litigation, and right up to the turn of the century, American Bell chose to compete with the rising independents chiefly in the courts rather than by trying to provide better and cheaper telephone service. But there were now thousands of telephone patents in force other than Berliner’s [a patent that American Bell had unsuccessfully tried to use to perpetuate its monopoly beyond 1894], and in 1897 American Bell for the first time began to lose cases when wwithin a few weeks two other important Bell-held patents—on the switch hook and the automatic switch—were struck down in Chicago. The tide was turning.
Not surprisingly, competition was good for consumers…
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Telephone is just full of fascinating passages:
Western Union had its own corporate troubles; the financial predator Jay Gould was seeking to devour it as he had devoured the Erie a decade earlier. Beginning in the middle 1870s, Gould had launched a characteristically intricate scheme to conquer Western Union by first bringing it to its knees. While attacking Western Union’s stock price in a series of bear raids in which, according to a contemporary observer, he used “every trick and art of Stock Exchange manipulation,” he quietly established a rival telegraph network of his own, the Atlantic and Pacific Company. As a result, Western Union’s business declined by two million dollars in one year. When the combination of stock manipulation and competition had forced Western Union’s price down to rock bottom, Gould secretly bought up its stock, and at last, in 1881, emerged in control of Western Union and of the national telegraph business. During 1877-79, when Western Union was striving to take over the telephone business from Bell, Gould’s Byzantine maneuver was in full cry. Western Union, at that time, was controlled by another notorious financier not noted for gentleness or sensitivity, William H. Vanderbilt. In sum, Western Union was in the thick of battle between jungle titans. If Vanderbilt had been victorious over Bell as Gould eventually was over Vanderbilt, the telephone business would have fallen into the hands of the most sinister and devious of all the beasts in the post-Civil War financial jungle, and one hesitates to think what its subsequent development might have been.
What I find remarkable about this is passage is that it’s almost complete bereft of substance. I learned from this that Gould bought up Western Union stock and obtained a controlling interest in the company. And I know he did some things in the stock exchange the author doesn’t approve of. And I learn that the author really, really dislikes Gould, for reasons that aren’t clear.
It is, again, hard to imagine a modern writer writing like this. We still have bitter power struggles in corporate boardrooms. But it’s hard to imagine a serious journalist or historian writing about “the financial predator Larry Ellison, the most sinister and devious of all the beasts of the Silicon Valley financial jungle.” I suppose that might make business stories more entertaining (and come to think of it, Ellison might enjoy the resulting notoriety), but it would certainly be an abdication of the historian’s obligation to strive for objectivity.
I’m reading Telephone: The First Hundred Years, written in 1975, and I found this passage striking:
The century of invention was at zenith. Robert Fulton’s first commercially successful steamboat dated from 1807, Mcihael Farady’s dynamo from 1831, Samuel F. B. Morse’s telegraph from 1835, the steam-driven electric generator from 1858; in 1875 Thomas A. Edison’s phonograph was three years ahead, his incandescent lamp four years, the skyscraper about a decade, the automobile and the airplane a generation or less. Behind them all was a persuasive idea; as Alfred North Whitehead would write, “The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the method of invention.” Moreover, the economic rewards of invention under the U.S. patent system were great and well advertised; Bell and others like him knew well enough that the inventor and original backer of the telegraph had become millionaires, and his passion for secrecy about his experiments, along wit his early and intimate association with the Patent Office through Hubbard, suggest how well he realized he might be onto something commercially big. And he was urged on by both his philosophical background and the current social climate in America. The Scottish Calvinism of the nineteenth century made a primary virtue of material success achieved through hard work, and as an example Bell had his countryman Andrew Carnegie, twelve years his senior, who had come to the United States from Scotland in 1848 and by 1875 was already a millionaire in the process of consolidating the largest steel company in the world. As to the social climate, 1875 was the heyday in America of laissez-faire venture capitalism, when men had a kind of savage fury for fame and fortune that the more jaded twentieth century can scarcely conceive of.
I think that last sentence is fascinating, not so much for what it says about the 19th century as for what it says about the late 20th century. I find it hard to imagine someone writing that sentence today. We certainly don’t consider the pursuit of fame and fortune through invention passé these days.
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