Tim’s thoughtful analysis of the slow adoption of the IPv6 protocol turned my mind to a long-standing topic of interest: the illusory value of elegance in technology. A corollary: In technology, as in life, revolutions are rightly rare and usually only visible in hindsight.
The IPv6 transition is a good example of the difference between policy and implementation. This transition raises all sorts of broad policy issues, given its potential costs and the potential for disruption. For certain kinds of network applications, carefully tuned to use existing Internet infrastructure, the transition will be difficult and costly. In some cases, things may just stop working. At the least, those who work on Internet applications and infrastructure will have to learn all the minute details of the new system and its implementation, a surprisingly deep pool of knowledge, while their IPv4 experience fades into irrelevance. These are no small things.
When naive engineers (and those who think like them) drive policy, their recommendations are often to scrap existing systems and start anew with something that’s more elegant that eliminates “cruft” and the like. It’s a fun engineering task to go back to first principles and start over with what we know now that we may not have known when creating earlier standards. It is a rewarding intellectual exercise.
But “muddling through,” as in other domains, is often the best choice in tech policy.
Continue reading →
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.
Continue reading →
Last week on the Google Public Policy Blog, Peter Greenberger of Google’s Elections and Issue Advocacy Team posted Google’s new guidelines for political advertising on the site. Most of the guidelines seem fairly straightforward and sensible to me since they relate to general principles of fairness and transparency. But sandwiched in between those principles is the following guideline:
No attacks on an individual’s personal life. Stating disagreement with or campaigning against a candidate for public office, a political party, or public administration is generally permissible. However, political ads must not include accusations or attacks relating to an individual’s personal life, nor can they advocate against a protected group. So, “Crime rates are up under Police Commissioner Gordon” is okay, but “Police Commissioner Gordon had an affair” is not.
I understand what Google is trying to do here in terms of making the Net a more civil place to engage in deliberative democracy without all the mud-slinging and name-calling. In one sense, I applaud them for that. On the other hand, the world is not a perfect place and candidates are not perfect people. And, candidates for office are not just like any other citizen in our society. They are people who will be given power over other people. Power over our lives, our liberties and fate of the nation.
Continue reading →
Roy Mark, a reporter with eWeek, was kind enough to call me last week to get some comments for a story he was putting together about the upcoming State of the Union Address and where technology policy fits in.. or rather, doesn’t. “When President Bush delivers his final State of the Union speech Jan. 28, don’t expect to hear much, if any, discussion of technology,” Roy argues in his piece. “In his previous seven addresses to the nation–adding up to almost 34,000 words–the president has never uttered the words “Internet,” “broadband” or “digital.” Wireless? Not a word. Spectrum? Not a single mention. Network neutrality? Forget it.”
Here’s a few sections from Roy’s article that include my comments agreeing with his thesis:
None of this is surprising to Adam Thierer, director of the Center for Digital Media Freedom and a senior fellow at Washington’s Progress & Freedom Foundation. When it comes to tech issues, “This has been an administration that has been largely missing in action,” Thierer told eWEEK. “It obsesses more about analog-era issues, steel over silicon, even as the service and technology sectors are the driving factors in the new economy.”
[…]
Continue reading →
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.
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 scene is Central Europe. It’s 1990-something. After a bicycle tour of the Czech Republic’s Bohemian countryside, Jim Harper and his girlfriend have traveled into Hungary and a town called Eger, two hours by train northeast of the capitol.
In a small valley not far out of town, there are dozens of underground wine cellars where vintners store and sell the local wine, Egri Bikaver, also known as “Bull’s Blood.” As the evening winds on and the cellars close, visitors concentrate themselves more and more tightly into the remaining open cellars. The wine and proximity make for good conversation and new friendships.
Late on, this particular evening, as our table edged toward overstaying, one of our group stood up and sang his country’s national anthem. He was Estonian.
It was a very long song. I’d like to say otherwise, but his singing wasn’t all that good. And he was quite overly serious about it. With the song going on so long, and the wine having its full effects, the scene edged toward the comical.
Since that evening, the Bull’s Blood wine and our Estonian friend have provided the touches of mirth and memory that interesting travel will. The Estonian singer has been the subject of some affectionate joking, I’ll admit.
That’s a little bit regrettable, because I now know that there’s more to the story. Watch the trailer here.
Tim… You should quit reading that crap by John Brooks and read the authoritative history of the issue, you know, the one I wrote for the Cato Journal 14 years ago!…
“Unnatural Monopoly: Critics Moments in the Development of the Bell System Monopoly,” Cato Journal, Vol. 14, No. 2, Fall 1994.
(P.S… I still have all the files I used to prepare that article, so if you need anything that appears in my bibliography, let me know. Most of it is not available online. What are you working on, anyway?)
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.