saschameinrath.com

I've been wanting to write about this for quite some time. Many of us are familiar with network effects within telecommunications. Fundamentally, the notion is that as the number of participants in a network increases, the value of that network increases superlinearly. Though many different theories exist about how best to value these networks, the general idea is that the more people on a network, the more benefits accrue to everyone on the network:

The flip side of this is that as the number of participants on a network approaches 100% of the population, the disadvantage faced by those still excluded from access also grows superlinearly. Rahul Tongia and Ernest Wilson's research Turning Metcalfe on His Head: The Multiple Costs of Network Exclusion brings this issue into sharp focus:

For those of us working on digital inclusion strategies, it's a sobering reminder that we cannot cease our efforts until everyone has access to broadband services. And also that the last constituencies left unconnected will be the ones who face the greatest disadvantages.

A bunch of folks have asked me about the recent keynote I gave at the 2009 eComm Conference in San Francisco. Below is a transcript -- definitely take a look at the conference website -- Lee Dryburgh has done a fantastic job of making information available quite widely.

***

Sascha: I'm going to do a couple of things differently. I don't have a PowerPoint presentation, number one. I planned to only speak for about half of my time, and then to turn it over to you all for a conversation. Since I think a lot of what I have to say is both provocative, but only half of the story.

Because I don't have a PowerPoint presentation, you should feel free to return to your gadgetry overlords, if you wish. But I think what I have to say and the times we are living through are so interesting, that I hope you will stay engaged with me.

The question I want to put forth, today, is one that was asked by David Bollier, in his book, Viral Spiral. He asked simply, "Who will set forth a compelling alternative to centralized media and build it?" And one of the most vexing conversations I've had, over the years, is one that begins with "What do you do," and ends with a lot of head nodding, but I fear, very little understanding of my answer.

The reason for this is that fundamentally, I'm a policy hacker. I advocate working on behalf of the public interest, and educating the congressional staff, FCC commissioners, administration officials, the media, and allied organizations on issues related to telecommunications, broadband, and open technology. In essence, what this means is that I translate from the geek into the wonk. I hope to affect meaningful changes, at the highest level, to a fundamentally flawed status quo.

What's interesting is that even though I work in D.C., my background is in radical media activism. I helped to build the Indy Media movement, which normalized this notion of journalism from the streets, which is now quite prevalent in our society. I've helped to build radio stations and community wireless networks, and organized rallies and un-conferences, much like Lee has done. I founded concert venues and foundations, and I've protested injustices and have been beat to shit by police, simply for exercising my right to assemble. I've been honored on the one hand, and blacklisted for the same work, for the same community-organizing work, by my university. My involvement in one of the more preeminent progress think tanks, the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., has arisen as much from a series of fortunate and serendipitous events as to any plan A of a trajectory of where I wanted to go.

My background, contrary to popular conception, has nothing to do with computer science or engineering, but is rather in a field called socio-ecological psychology, which is a mouthful. It's a field that explores the transactions between and amongst people and their settings. My own focus area started in the mid 1990's. It was focused on a school climate, in particular, the racial climate in public schools.

In conducting research in central Illinois, I quickly came to realize that while institutionalized racism was rampant, our local media simply refused to address the issue. Thus, these racial inequities that we were uncovering in our academic work had been swept under this rug, for generations. There was, in fact, a Midwestern mystique at play, in [0:03:35.8 unclear], to borrow from Howard Zinn, and it permeated our local community. For those of us who wished to expose these fundamental injustices, we were, at its heart, subjected to ridicule, scorn, and in my case, death threats.

What I came to realize was that documenting the problem, unto itself, was simply not enough. Somehow, we needed to bring pressure to bear and fill in the shortcomings of my academic research. What we needed was a local media, one that would cover these issues that no one wanted to talk about, or I should say the dominant constituencies in our community did not want to talk about, and could contest the inequalities that were eating away at our community.

My involvement in Indy Media, radical media activism, was both personally a reaction to the physical threats of violence that were left on my answering machine and on my doorstep, as well as this more holistic intervention to help rally a community to address local injustices.

I believe, as Doc Searls mentioned yesterday, that our language creates our knowledge framework. How we describe our experiences within the world affects our epistemology and warps, for both better and for worse, our understanding and comprehension of our communities and of one another. Indy Media and media activists everywhere, from the commie-pinko left, all the way to the completely reactionary wacko right, have been waging a war to establish platforms for telling their stories and narratives, for years now, in the United States. The goal of all of this work has been to impact mainstream culture and to shift the very foundations of civil discourse.

Unfortunately, media creation and the documentation and telling of our stories without the information dissemination component are entirely impotent. When Malcolm Matson asked the question, "Who will control local connectivity," he exposed the fundamental question facing civil society at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Because what I learned quite quickly is that even when we created media, and documented local injustices, we had no means in our local community to disseminate this vital information to the rest of our local community. In essence, we were locked out of a public discourse. We were locked out, systematically disenfranchised from the media.

The solution that we came up with, and the reason why I ended up in Washington, D.C., consulting with power brokers and forward thinking decision makers was that we needed to not only create alternative media dissemination systems, but we needed to implement fundamental changes to civil society, before it collapsed under the weight of its own ignorance and inequity.

As a historian by training, having taken a sabbatical from psychology to pursue a second PhD in communications, I cannot help but understand contemporary telecommunications' political battles through the lens of their historical antecedents.

Before we can project into the future of communications, we must first understand the parallels to our past. They are myriad. When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about democracy in America, this entirely new breed of how to build, run, and maintain a country, a nation state, he was writing about an engaged body politic, a knowledgeable citizenry that swapped information through the most advanced packet switching network that the world had ever seen, the United States Postal Service.

The post office staff, at one point, made up almost 75% of all federal employees. The post office was, in effect, the federal government of the United States of America. Democracy in America, the very foundation of our modern civil society, was predicated upon massive government intervention and subsidization of our cutting edge communications and information dissemination network.

Newspapers, for their part, were provided free transit through the postal system, so vital were they considered to the health of our fledgling democracy. The history of previous telecommunications revolutions is rife with extraordinary examples and cautionary tales. If we take a moment to look backward, I hope that we might be able to find our way forward, a bit more clearly. Disruptive technologies have been recaptured, commoditized in unexpected ways, and have had their democratic and participatory potential systematically decimated over and over and over again.

The telegraph, which was so vital to bringing forth an age of instant communication, was also the bearer of unprecedented speculation, and the advent of mass commoditization of information inequalities. The cotton buyer who had daily weather information of what was happening on the ground in the Deep South ran rings around their competitors who lacked access to this information. The telegraph was also one of the most vital tactical resources for annihilating enemies, as the South experienced with devastating effectiveness during the Civil War. The telegraph, through Western Union, and its manipulation of the news, was also our first experience with the telecommunications conglomerate that became so powerful, as to endanger the very foundations of our democratic society.

The telephone, several years later, provided even a more instructive cautionary tale of the danger of conglomerization. Paul Starr, in his book, The Creation of Media, documents the rise of the Home Rule telephony movement, during the first decade of the twentieth century. How many have heard of the Home Rule telephony movement, just a smattering of folks, and I think this is indicative of why it is so important to pay attention to our past.

While the remainder of the twentieth century was owned by Ma Bell, or at least much of it, the first decade saw this flourishing of independent providers, cooperatives, affiliations, coalitions, etc, much as the first decade of the twenty-first century saw the rise of ISPs.

AT&T systematically destroyed this movement, a movement that accounted for some 40% of all telephones in the United States, at its height, 40%. AT&T did this by refusing to interconnect these independents, in essence leveraging their ownership over their long distance lines, the telephony backhaul, to curtail and control edge network development and implementation.

If the telephone demonstrates the viability of instant communications for the masses, the roaring 20's were a golden era for communication's technological development. The radio era was a time when the democratic potential of instant communications seemed unstoppable. Following the footsteps of Marconi, the 1920's saw this explosion of innovation from so-called radio amateurs around the globe. Unfortunately, as we all know, even this genie was stuck back into a bottle, through the creation of the Federal Communications Commission, and under the guise of organizing the airways; the public airways were taken away from us, from the people, and reassigned to an elite few.

These decisions of 1927, 1934 and onward, set the groundwork for 75 years of spectrum regulation, frequency allocation, and assignment that we now labor under, today, in a whole other century.

For the sake of time, I'll skip CAT TV, PEG channels, the battle over free-nets, local access, over the air rebroadcasting, and the low power FM radio debacle, only saying that the politics of these battles, time and time again, is uncannily prescient of today's telecommunications debates. Today, the telecom Sevier du jour is the Internet. Whereas most of us are still focused on the import of this resource, I posit that the Internet era is rapidly drawing to a close.

Instead, I believe we are headed into an age of the intranet, an epoch characterized by local connectivity, applications, and services. The Internet is a broadband connectivity generally, instead of being the end-all and be-all of telecommunications, is rapidly becoming just one, albeit I will readily agree a very important service on intranet infrastructures. In fact, we are lucky enough to be living through a critical juncture in telecommunications history, a critical juncture characterized by this trifecta of circumstances that have combined to create a perfect storm of disruptive potential.

First, digital technologies and their attendant innovations have transformed media production and information dissemination. They have done so at a far greater pace than our society is capable of assimilating into its regulations, its legislation, and in fact, into our everyday lives.

Second, these new technologies have driven and are being driven by an enormous demand from constituencies throughout our society. This aggregation of demand for more [libertoric], participatory media has created untold pressure for telecommunications reform, has strained our existing media structures, and has baffled our policy leadership.

Third, we have this new administration, with an unprecedented opportunity; I hope not an unprecedented opportunity for problematic decision making, but an unprecedented opportunity to institute regulation, legislation, and policy reform. In fact, this administration has already hinted that seismic shifts are imminent.

Lest we all drink too deeply from the draught of technological determinism, and declare victory is at hand, another word of caution; there is this massive behind-the-scenes, epic, political battle being waged inside the beltway, right now, between the forces that want to create this more open, distributed, participatory media and telecommunications future and those who favor a centralized, command and control regime, a reinstitution of command and control in all of these new media in telecommunications systems.

The threats we are currently facing in Washington, D.C., are quite daunting. My hope is that with history as our guide, and your active involvement and support, they are entirely surmountable. However, our vigilance is already waning. Too often, we are being lulled into this false sense of our own security. Yet, the re-institutionalization of centralization is all around us, even today.

As Mark Roettgering rightfully pointed out, vertical and horizontal conglomerization of media and telecommunications are at an unprecedented level. Tax and subsidy structures, from e-rates, to the universal service fund and inter-carrier compensation; anticompetitive mandates, for example, state laws preventing municipalities from deploying telecommunications networks, and slap lawsuits against those that legally do so, and the elimination from AUP free access over dumb networks are eroding any semblance we once may have had to a healthy and fair market.

Instead of demanding fundamental changes, too often we have donned chains of silver and declared ourselves free. How else can we fool ourselves into declaring that everything from AT&T and Verizon's networks, to the iPhone and the Android phone to be open? Open, really [laughs], not at all - how is it that we're allowing functionality and fair use to be further and further inhibited by Windows, Mac and mobile device operating systems? Whatever happened to the notion of unbundled services through common carriage? What else is cloud computing, today's big buzzword, if not a modern equivalent for mainframes and dumb terminals, a decades old business model for centralization and control?

More often than not, there is this scrappy fellowship of public interest groups, and a handful of advocates and visionaries. They are all that stand between this more democratic and participatory potential for current communications innovations and the forces fighting for increased command and control. At this critical juncture in telecommunications history, it is both within our power to dramatically alter the future of communications as well as our responsibility as knowledgeable participants, to actively participate in the policy hacking that is so desperately needed to avoid a more dystopian future.

I hope that many of you will join me in taking part in supporting the policy hacking of twenty-first century telecommunications. The next three to five years will decide a trajectory for communications that will be with us and with our society for generations to come. Thank you very much for listening. I very much look forward to your questions.

Audience 1: This morning, Paul Buddy wrote an interesting article on CircleID, about how potentially it's not salvageable. We need to do structural separation and start from scratch. I was just curious what your thoughts are on whether or not this can have a bandage slapped on it, and we keep adding to the existing laws, or do we really need to seriously consider some sort of green field approach?

Sascha: I've seen some of my allies and friends who have written about how we have to destroy the FCC or remove the Internet. There has never been a time - I think somebody was speaking about this yesterday; there has never been a time where you just eliminate the old and start afresh with the new. Certainly, there needs to be continued innovation, evolution, and changes, but the fundamental tenets of the Internet are still sound, today. The ideas behind the Internet, this completely anarchic, chaotic network of networks that is ownerless, the strength being in the interconnections and network effects; that is a really good, solid basis for telecommunications, given today's technologies.

We shouldn't throw that out. On the other hand, we also need to be protective. We need to have interventions to prevent the worst excesses that otherwise will become normative. The reason why you need private industry and government in these spaces is because private industry helps push the envelope and government helps prevent the worst excesses of private industry.

We're living through the failure to do that, to rightfully assess that if you don't have government intervention to set parameters for how these systems operate, you have far more massive government intervention down the road because of our failure to be responsible for preventing these excesses.

Audience 1: You can't keep cramming it into the definition of a service, under the existing telephony common carriage laws. At some point, you realize that it's not waddling and quacking so it's not a duck anymore.

Sascha: Exactly, and this is why I say our legislation regulatory structures are so far behind the times. At the same time, there has been allowed to be this shell game. You go to a telecommunications provider and you're like, "Okay, we're going to regulate you under Title I," and they're like, "I'm not Title I, I'm Title II". A couple of years go by and you say, "Under Title II you have to...," and "We're not Title II, we're an information service". You keep swapping around until it's like what rules and regulations.

There has been a lack of leadership to say, "No, you have to make a decision and stick with it, and you're going to be regulated based on these sets of parameters". You need that because the market needs a surety, but you also need it because otherwise, you end up with no meaningful regulation whatsoever. The disaster is in our falling penetration ratings amongst other industrialized nations, and the increased costs that we each pay for megabits per second of connectivity, through utter decimation of our information economy vis-a-vie other countries around the globe.

Audience 2: Sascha, I just want to say thank you. These are very wise words and every one sits deeply in my aging bosom. [Laughter] I would urge everybody to listen to this because whatever else we heard yesterday, we will hear today. We are talking about what I regard as a seismic battle between the interests and freedoms of us, as humans, to converse and powers and interests that would try to stop that.

I remember when Tony Blair came in. There was the same fresh hope, and so forth, [laughter] and that this was going to be a change. I want to caution you because Barack Obama is indeed a new, fresh face. I have hope, but I remember within a couple of months, I was asked by the then new Minister of Telecommunications, to sit with her, alone, no officials, and she said, "Malcolm, what do I do? What do I do to open up this broadband thing? You have this vision for open access and so forth. What do I need to do?"

I said, "Minister, you are not going to like this, but I want you to promise me that you will do nothing." She said, "Nothing, what do you mean by nothing?" I said, "I want you to make sure that when any vested interest goes and knocks on the door of Tony Blair, and says, 'This man, Matson and this crazy open access initiative he has in this town or that town is ruining our business,' I want you to promise me that Tony Blair will say, 'Go away, I don't want to hear.'" She said, "I can't do that, can I? There are thousands of jobs and so forth".

I just wonder whether the greatest contribution to bringing about this change is that we realize that as history teaches us, that revolutions start at the grass roots. You know that and I know that. If we only have one or two exemplars, which can then inform and enforce the power of the citizenship upon the regulation, I think we will get there more quickly. I don't want to be critical, but I would hate to see you go native as a result of spending too much time with those people in Washington. [Laughter]

Sascha: Thanks Malcolm. I too fear going native. There is a certain psychosis of the mind that I think grips you. It's like Alzheimer's of some wacked out sort. Today, unfortunately, I think we don't have the ability to do nothing any longer. Things have gotten so bad; we are so stuck in the mire.

This is what scares me. I was meeting with Michael Kopps, who is the interim Chairman of the FCC, last week. I was like, "Great, Michael Kopps has been this huge advocate for all sorts of institutional change". He has already reaped some important changes at the FCC, opening things up, and adding more transparency.

What it came down to is we had sort of an agenda of all these different things that he had talked about, supported publically, and was very interested in. We were like, "What's going on with all of these different areas?" He said, "Well, I'm interim Chairman, and my job here is to really stay the course and to make room for the next Chairman," who I believe has just been publically announced, Julius Janikowski.

That's fine, if it's going to be a week or two weeks or a month. But, due to the politics and psychosis in D.C., we could be looking at Michael Kopps being there through the summer. Now, several months could pass, and it could be a transition that already dates back a few months. We could have a half-year period where nothing meaningful or no innovative comes out of the FCC. That's a huge danger.

It's a huge danger because all the other parts of these systems are staying still. No one is taking a breather and it's like, "Time out, nobody do anything". There are huge forces being brought to bear on a lot of the biggest telecommunications battles. People are entrenching themselves and it will be that much more difficult to affect much needed change, down the road.

Audience 3: I also go visit Congress in the U.S. In the last election, we went from one scientist and two engineers in Congress to one scientist and one engineer in Congress. You're a policy person, not an engineer. What can we do to help? How can we help educate? It's good when you get the legislative assistants; they're twenty-two or twenty-three years old, with a degree in biology. They have the portfolio for the congressmen for technology.

A lot of it is that they don't know. When someone comes in and says, "We've been providing emergency services for the past 125 years. You wouldn't want your constituents to not have this ultra reliable, provided by copper, emergency services. And we come in and say, "There are alternatives". How can we help?

Sascha: First of all, you're exactly right. Congress is actually ruled by the twenty-something year old class. Unfortunately, I wish they just had the telecommunications portfolio, but usually they're environment education, Medicare, oh and technology. It's like one guy, or gal and she's like, "I have fifteen minutes for understanding telecommunications in the last 150 years, go" [laughs].

This is the unfortunate reality of Washington, D.C. The most important thing that folks can do is to find allies that are in the muck, on a daily basis, and work with them. I now run the Open Technology Initiative, at my foundation. We're working to reach out and find those folks with on the ground knowledge and build bridges and bring them to D.C., and to learn from all of you. It's one of the reasons I wanted to spend so much time on Q&A. Because these connections are vitally important.

What we don't know, in D.C., is astounding. But, it never stops us from making decisions. The more information flow we can get going between all of you and your allies, friends, and compatriots, and all of us who know how to take that knowledge; translate it when it needs translating; and put it in front of the correct people - D.C. is this labyrinth of complexity of enigmas of riddles - it's impossible to fully comprehend how things work unless you're in there. It starts infecting your brain and all that other stuff. We should talk and communicate. My contact information is all over the place, and I'm one of most easily found people to get in contact with on the Web. Thank you for that question.

Chair: I didn't see any other question there, so I'm going to throw in my own little question there because I have a mic. Combining some of the comments there on revolution starts at the grass root level, and combining what can we all do to help, another thing to be thinking about is how much education you're doing in your own community, with your actual peers.

I just moved into a new house, and my wife is utterly insistent that we pay for a landline, for no other reason than we can call 911 in the event of an emergency. My belief is that if an emergency is so bad, my land line goes down before my cell phone goes down. That's my belief. We have those debates. I've gone out and educated her on things, and hopefully she can tell some other person.

Another quick story; I share an office with another company. They decided they want phone lines at every desk. They called, I'm assuming AT&T, and they pay $500 a month for 8 phones lines. The neighboring office to us hooked up an Asterisk server, got some basic thing; they pay $20 a month and they have as many phones as they want set up in their office.

We told our office mates this. We said, "Hey guys, you're kind of overspending by about $6,000 a year. It's been three months, and they haven't changed their phone service, yet. A lot of the things we could do to inspire the change that's going to help these people at the level, well above us, is getting the word out there and getting a lot more grumpy people annoyed at their phone companies for more than just bad service, but really wanting to have change happen. I'm just planting that seed for you all.

Audience 4: This is less a policy question and more of a conversation I had about seven years ago, with a colleague, Scott Petrack. What I don't understand is why we all have highways that are paid for by our tax dollars, yet there is not ubiquitous access to my home. I'm not talking about computers. You have to buy your own car. The fact that we still have to pay - and I think part of getting over the media control of everything is just the cost of simple connectivity. I think a very important policy that would be wonderful, if Obama took it upon himself, would be - they talk about homes for everybody. How about just basic connectivity so every little kid, who knows where, can contribute? I think that's an important step.

Sascha: That's a great point; it really goes to the heart of what it means to live in a civil society in the twenty-first century. We have highways, parks, landscaping; we have schools and primary education. We have fire service and police, all these sorts of different elements of what it means to live in a society, today.

Communication is a fundamental human right. It's like Article XVIIII of the International Declaration of Human Rights. Everyone has the right to communicate. Yet we, as a society, haven't figured out yet that this is vitally important to the health of our democracy. I think it's finally dawning. We no longer have an FCC Chair. Michael Powell is talking about the Mercedes divide. We no longer think, "Oh, broadband, that's this elite thing, this big diamond bling". We actually need this in our everyday lives.

I wrote an editorial for The Guardian, that talks about this exact issue. I'm sure if you Google my name and Guardian, it will pop right up. It talks about what it really means to live in a civil society, how is it possible that we don't make this a priority in today's day and age. Thank you.

Audience 5: There is a universal service obligation around phone systems. Isn't it time listening [0:04:12.9 unclear] arguments to change this universal service obligation, to say, "Okay, everyone has the right of 100 Mb Internet connection?" Why not go in that way?

Sascha: I agree. I'd love to see it happen. I'm working to help make that happen. Unfortunately, it will only happen once there is enough demand aggregation.

Audience 5: Keep on trying.

Sascha: Come join me.

Audience 6: If I may, especially when you put it that way, AT&T will love you. We will collect taxes so we can pay AT&T to make sure you get a 100 Mb pipe that might have 12 or 13 Mb of through put, but they're going to love it.

Audience 5: I have my doubts that they can fulfill that.

Chair: We just have a little bit of time left, and one more question over here.

Sascha: This was the rationale behind the Universal Service Fund, in its beginning. What people forget is that when we were doing this sort of mega-monopoly of AT&T, and had Universal Service Fund enriching this one company, they also had, by law, a mandate of 7.5% profit cap. That was done because it was understood that without that profit cap, you would have corporate excesses and malfeasance, etc. It at least helped curb the worst components of that. That was the idea. I'm actually less concerned about specific business models and much more interested in the outcomes and on the ground realities. e do have to be cognizant of the interplay between public subsidies and corporate and private enrichment.

Audience 7: In your last 19 seconds, could you outline your top three priorities, in terms of policy?

Sascha: Sure, in terms of policy, I'm looking for opening up the public airwaves, and government spectrum. I'm looking for utilizing open technologies to lower the costs, lower the transaction costs, to disintermediate all these technologies. I'm looking to expand the number of folks working in D.C. on these issues to include people like you. Thank you.

Viral Spiral is the term David Bollier coins to describe the almost magical process by which Internet users can come together to build online commons and tools. From free and open-source software, Creative Commons licenses, Wikipedia, remix music and video mashups to peer production, open science, open education, and open business - the world of digital media has spawned a new "sharing economy" that increasingly competes with entrenched media giants.

Please join us for a discussion with David Bollier, author, Viral Spiral, on how commoners built a digital republic of their own. Bollier argues that during a period when the Bush Administration promoted privatization in all things and brought digital policy innovation to a standstill, free culture was one of the few spaces where idealism and innovation could run free. Free culture has built its own alternative democratic polity - a parallel digital universe that honors such radical ideas as participation, transparency, and accountability.

David Bollier is a journalist, activist, and public policy analyst as well as Editor of Onthecommons.org. He is a former New America fellow and Co-Founder of Public Knowledge. A Senior Fellow at the Norman Lear Center, Bollier is the author of numerous highly praised books, including Brand Name Bullies and Silent Theft.

See map: Google Maps

Participants

Featured Speakers
David Bollier
Author, Viral Spiral
Senior Fellow, Norman Lear Center at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication
Co-Founder of Public Knowledge

Sascha Meinrath

Research Director, Wireless Future Program
Director, Open Technology Initiative
New America Foundation

Moderator
Michael Calabrese
Director, Wireless Future Program
New America Foundation

I just received word from my colleague, Vickram Crishna, over at the Village Telco project that South African athorities have confiscated their wireless equipment. Apparently, digital inclusion work is so threatening to their regulatory agency and telecom incumbent that they're more than willing to use police force to stop the spread of connectivity. Here's what Vickram says:

Tragically, yesterday the South African regulatory agency ICASA confiscated (without warrant or notice) equipment being used by the Mesh Potato project in its Village Telco implementation. The excuse (given verbally on the telephone) was illegal use of wireless equipment, against which the local telco (named Telkom) had filed a complaint on grounds of wireless interference.

It appears from discussions on the Village Telco list (at Googlegroups) that the ISM band in South Africa is still not free-to-use, and also that licensed wireless networks (but not WISPs) must not allow their signals to cross roads (al la Canute?). However, in this case, Village Telco evidently has the requisite WISP license, so one must view the situation with some gloom.

I got an e-mail this morning from Chris Riley over at Free Press saying simply, "You made the list. Congratulations - you deserve it" and with a link to today's lead story in Ars Technica:

Ars Technica's Tech Policy "People to Watch" 2009

It's a great list of folks and I feel quite humbled to be among them. I've been working closely (some for years now) with many of this year's honorees and as a group, we are definitely helping shape the future of telecommunications.

Ars gave me a very nice shout out:

When it came time to further narrow down the pool of influencers, our next bias was in favor of those doing something new, interesting, or otherwise innovative—the sort of people who can not only influence tech policy but would also be fascinating to sit next to at your next dinner party. These are people like Sascha Meinrath of the New America Foundation, a creative advocate of open networks who has done work on white spaces and the new Google M-Lab program; or Vivek Kundra, the hard-charging CTO of Washington, DC, who brings Silicon Valley's innovation commitment to government IT work.

Here's what they wrote about me:

Sascha Meinrath, Research Director, Wireless Future Program, New America Foundation

Before joining New America Foundation in 2007, Sascha Meinrath previously worked as a policy analyst, telecom consultant, and community organizer. The skills he developed in those three different roles undoubtedly have influenced his current work as research director at New America's Wireless Future program where he and Michael Calabrese are striving to reform US telecommunications policy, particularly spectrum access, one challenging step at a time.

In addition to his research on municipal broadband networks and net neutrality, Meinrath is heading up a new Open Technology Initiative (OTI) on behalf of New America, and he helped produce the new network metrics site M-Lab. OTI's charter is to advocate policy and regulatory changes that support open architectures, technologies, and communications networks.

Well if you've been following tech news today, you probably already know -- after month (years, really) of work, the MeasurementLab.net (M-Lab) initiative has now officially launched. Given how many people have been working on this project, I'm amazed it didn't leak. Having just launched, I've been stunned by the immediate outpouring of interest -- not only did it peg our servers, taking a couple of the research tools momentarily offline, but my inbox has been entirely flooded by correspondences.

The news coverage has been pretty phenomenal:

Washington Post, Slashdot, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Associated Press, Wired, ArsTechnica, USA Today, Digg.com, PC Magazine, CBC, CNet News, PC World, Network World, Information Week, eWeek, Techdirt, Techcrunch, Mashable, GigaOm, and a whole host of locales around the globe: Japan, Austria, Poland, Netherlands, Australia, South Africa.

But it's the stories that didn't make the press that intrigue me the most. So here's three quick bits of info that you won't read that's part of the real history and success of the M-Lab project:

1. Derek Slater -- my colleague and co-conspirator on the M-Lab project. Without his organizing skill, dedication, and all-around fantastic leadership, M-Lab wouldn't have gotten off the ground. Derek's kept a low profile on this project, but deserves to be publicly outed as the Wizard of M-Lab who kept everything on the rails. My hat's off to him.

2. kc claffy runs the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), who I consulted with for a couple years before moving to Washington, DC. Her freakishly and frenetically brilliant assessments of how much we don't know made me (and many others) a true believer in the need for maximum network research as soon as humanly possible. When things go awry with the Internet, people are going to be saying, "Didn't kc write a paper predicting this problem about ten or twelve years back?"

3. Awesomely cool researchers! M-Lab's afforded me with an opportunity to work with some remarkably cool folks whose life work is to help ensure that you're able to read this praise of their research. But two dozen folks have come forward to provide the brains behind M-Lab and they've been unbelievably helpful -- cramming to get servers set up, troubleshooting when the inevitable ghosts in the machine pop up, and keeping the back end of M-Lab humming along.

More when I get caught up a bit more...

From the folks at icanhascheezburger.com. This PSA is at least as effective as NAB's. Also, less likely to be forgotten:

I recently had a wide-ranging conversation/interview with Lee Dryburgh, who puts on the the yearly eComm conference (this year's will take place March 3-5 in San Francisco). It's a fun read of what I've been thinking about at the dawn of the Obama administration:

Sascha Meinrath on Spectrum 2.0, Battling the Incumbents and Future Telecom Networks - Emerging Communications Blog

Last Wednesday I had the pleasure of interviewing Sascha Meinrath (who will be one of the keynote speakers) via Skype.

You can download it as a 96kbps MP3 here (32 meg, 46 minutes).

Additionally the full transcript is below. To distinguish between us I've indented Sascha.

Transcript

Good morning, Sascha.  How are you?

I'm doing well.  Good morning to you. 

What time is it where you are?

Where we are, it is now about 10:30.  I've already had my first meetings of the day.  [Laughs]

Okay, well, it's 4:30 p.m. here, and I've got large mug of coffee so I'm all good for you.  So, I'm really excited to be speaking with you.  I see that you're the Research Director for the New America Foundation's Wireless Future Program.  Could you say a few words on what the Wireless Future Program is?

Sure, Wireless Future Program has been engaged, the past seven years, in telecommunications reform.  In particular, it's been particularly focused on spectrum, the public airwaves here, in the United States, and innovation in terms of how it's allocated and used, and who has access to it.  A lot of what we've pushed for are things like opening up spectrum to unlicensed devices and reallocating spectrum for public access, things of that sort.

I also head up what is going to become the Open Technology Initiative, here at New America Foundation, which will be looking at open architecture, open source, open API, kind of the open side of these technologies that are happening.  So everything from cell phones and open networks on cellular networks, to open source software and design.

Okay, the Open Technology Initiative sound pretty interesting, so let me make a note here to circle back on you, a little later, with questions on that.  So, looking here at the New America Foundation's Board of Directors, I see the Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google is the Chairman.

Yes, and he's actually been with New America since before his days at Google.  He's been on our board for a number of years, now.  Recently, this past year, he stepped up and decided that he wanted to put a bit more time and energy behind the Foundation, and has stepped up as Chairman of the Board.  He got a lot of press for it.  What was not really talked about so much is that he's been part of this institution for quite a number of years.

[Laughs]  Okay, I'm just laughing because obviously I picked up the sort of Google sense, the Google significance to it and what it could mean, except you're saying he's been on the board for years, anyway.

A lot of people want to really read in that this means Google in some way has its fingers in the Foundation, and the reality is that's not really true.  He happens to now be chairman of our board, and CEO of Google.  The reality is that there are some areas where some of the work we're doing aligns with what Google wants to do, as well, and we're happy to work together and partner in those areas, but Google doesn't have any official space or place inside this organization.

Okay, thanks a lot for that clarification.  I'm going to jump right into the deep end here, where I really want to go.  You talk about a status quo in communications.  Could I ask you to describe that status quo?

Sure, let me exemplify it straight out of our own historical records here, in the United States, which in terms of licensure and who has access to much needed resources, and it could be rights-of-way access, but I'll focus on the public airwaves part of things.  Starting in the 1920's and into the 1930's, when the Federal Communications Commission, sort of the highest, most important space for telecommunications policy making in the United States, when they decided, back in 1934 and onwards, that we had to divvy-up the airwaves, it was based on the newest, most important, cutting edge, technology of the pre-WWII society.  Unfortunately, that kind of licensure regime has, effectively, continued to be in place, right up through and until today.

When people get licenses, they get a specific license and a specific location and at a specific power, which ends up being incredibly inefficient.  A lot of things have changed since the 1930's.  We have transistors, computers, and digital technology.  That is not really taken into account in terms of shifts in how we allocate the public airwaves.  What this has led to, then, is an artificial scarcity, which keeps certain incumbencies in place.  In fact, we have sort of an oligopoly on a lot of the airwaves, but it also keeps most of the populace out of being able to use the airwaves, for various uses. 

The status quo is very much about maintaining this oligopolistic system of maintaining artificial scarcity, of ensuring that the incumbents still have control over this medium, and that the actual owners of the public airwaves are kept out of this medium.  What it boils down to is that we're really fighting to ensure that new technologies and innovations, things like digital computers and digital technology, are taken into account when we're setting up our spectrum licensure.

Okay, did you see the comments that Lessig made, regarding the FCC, recently?  Are you able to pass any comment on them?

The knee-jerk reaction is often to jettison everything.  I think there is a lot of jettisoning that needs to take place.  We need to shift, dramatically, how we license things.  But, you can't just throw everything out without an alternative for how to take care of incredibly important areas of telecommunications policy.  If we were to jettison the FCC, we would end up being stagnant in ways that are even worse than the current situation.  I still have hope that a new FCC will be more proactive in instituting much needed reforms.  I'm still hopeful that a new staff will be much more aligned with the public interest coalitions that have been working here, in D.C., and pushing for reforms that really meet the needs of the general populace. 

I don't want to throw out the baby and the bath water.  [Laughter]  I really want to look at how we can have meaningful reforms and interventions into a system that is clearly broken.  Lessig was very correct in that.  Still, it has a lot of positive aspects to it. 

Okay, and this status quo, you've described it as inefficient, stagnant, overpriced, command-and-control.  That is fairly - that's not a light viewpoint.  You feel very strongly that a status quo that we have is not acceptable. 

It is completely unacceptable.  I speak as somebody who has served a couple of terms as a member of the board of directors for my local community radio station.  I've set up a low power, FM radio station.  I've fought, for half a decade, to get a license for our local community to have its own radio station. 

These sorts of battles - it's very clear that media diversity has been thrown out of the window.  Local control of the media has been thrown out of the window over the last eight years.  These are reforms that need to be made.  We really need to re-empower the populace to take control over what is ours; the public airwaves are held in trust for us to use, and has been granted to corporations and entities that have made incredibly inefficient use of them. 

Government research - National Science Foundation here in the United States has conducted extensive research on actual spectrum usage.  What we found is that even though the allocations of space - this part for FM radio, that part for AM radio, this part for television broadcast - the allocations show a completely full spectrum.  When you look at the assignments, you find, "CBS gets this station, and WRFU gets that station".  These assignments show there is a lot of empty space, but then when you look at actual use, what's happening on the ground, you find that over ninety percent of the airwaves are vacant, in any specific location in any specific time.

You can imagine a resource that's being used less than ten percent efficiently, and that's what we have, today, with the public airwaves.  I look at that and I look at the scarcity, and I look at the desire to make better use of the public airwaves, by people all across the country, and I think that's egregiously unfair.

So, then, I would like to ask what alternatives do exist?

There are many alternatives.  One of the big ones we're pushing for is called "Opportunistic Spectrum Reuse".  People can think of this in terms of a Wi-Fi device that can scan and find an open channel.  Or, if you remember home telephones, radiotelephones, where you would hit the on button and it might scan a number of channels and choose the one that had the clearest signal.  These technologies have been around for quite some time. 

With the television white space and in the spaces that we used to - if you were flipping through your television, you would have snow on your screen; those spaces can be reutilized for broadband access and for all sorts of different purposes.  We've pushed very hard at the FCC to allow unused television spaces to be used by next generation hardware or software, etc.  This is a fundamental shift in how we license our spectrums, and basically says, "Look, as long as we're using less than ten percent of the space, let's reuse the unallocated space, the underutilized space, on an ad hoc basis, by next generation hardware, so people can do all sorts of new, innovative things with it".  That's a huge change. 

The second one that we've been fighting for, and have lost thus far, is what's called "Interference Temperature," which is that in the same was as a rock concert, people in the audience can whisper, or yell for that matter, and not be disruptive to the concert itself, we want to see very low powered usage on occupied channels.

The idea is if you're sitting next to a 100,000-watt television transmitter and you want to utilize a device to connect your laptop computer to your television, fifteen feet away, you should be allowed to do that in the same space.  Of course, the incumbents have said, "If you allow any of these things, it will destroy radio, or television," or whatever it is that they own or license.  Of course, time and time again, we've found that these claims of disruption have been blown way out of proportion.  The disruptions that have been promised have never come to pass.

Okay, Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks comes to mind.

Absolutely

So, do you have some more optimism, now that Kevin Martin has stepped down [at the FCC] and you have Julius stepping up [as chairman of the FCC]?

Yeah

Yes - more hope?

I have a lot more hope.  You know, I've worked with Julius first on the campaign, and with the transition teams, and he gets a lot of these new ideas, in terms of innovation and shifting our regulations and policies to take advantage of computers, digital technologies and other advancements that have happened in the past half century, frankly.  So I'm very hopeful that a newly constituted FCC, with him at the helm, or with somebody else at the helm, would be fantastically much more receptive to a lot of the ideas that we've been talking about for years, but it's faced a lot of resistance from regulators.

So, you see some traction coming?

Absolutely, it's very clear that they've pulled together an "A" team of thinkers and innovators to contemplate what are the new policies that we're going to be implementing or looking at, in the next few years.  That gives me a lot of hope because when you get the engineers in the same room, and they're talking off the record, there is a lot of eye-to-eye agreement on what needs to happen.  It's only once the PR spin, and what have you, gets thrown into the mix, that you end up with people on opposite sides of the table on these issues.

Okay, so what opportunities do you see?

Gosh, everything from reuse of underutilized spectrum, to rolling back some of the liberalization that has allowed for media conglomerization in unprecedented rates.  What we've seen, over the past five years - the destruction of local media, the "crisis" that's whelming in things like newspapers, here, in the United States is incredibly destructive to the health of our civil society.  That needs to be addressed. 

We need to look at everything, from how we allocate new spectrum, in terms of whether we should continue to pursue this auction system, which guarantees that corporations fight it out - whereas public interest is completely unable to afford even the licenses that are out there, or whether we look at things - everywhere from network neutrality, to how we view network management and how we view universal service fund reform, in terms of telephone versus Internet. 

All of these are issues that are going to be coming to the fore, over the next year or two, all of which are going to have to be addressed by the FCC.  Many of these have been pushed down the road by the current FCC, for the new FCC to have to deal with.

Okay, I know it's may be slightly off topic, but are you able to pass comment on 700 MHz, and your opinion of how that went?

Sure, 700 MHz was a mixed bag, to say the least.  What we have is a number of different allocations within the 700 -800 MHz range that have been auctioned off, some previously, a couple of years back, and then a huge auction that took place from January to March of 2008.  That second auction, the 2008 auction, raised close to twenty billion dollars.  The big winners were groups like Verizon, the same incumbents that have been incumbents [laughs] for quite some time now.

One of the elements that was a huge win was what's called the "Open Platform Conditions," which mandated that if you have the 20 MHz of space that Verizon won, for about 4.8 billion dollars, then you had to open up your network and you had to allow any device to be attached to this wireless network that consumers and users wanted to bring to that network.  Really, what it is, is a precedent to bring back what's called Carterphone.  On the wire line, here in the United States, there was a Supreme Court decision, in 1968, the Carterphone Decision, which mandated that you could attach what's called "foreign attachments" to any network.  What foreign attachments meant was everything from what became answering machines, to modems, which of course, is what allowed for the Internet to exist in the first place.  Without the Carterphone Decision, there would have been no Internet.

Unfortunately, in the wireless realm, we've never had a Carterphone kind of decision applied.  So, the Open Platform Mandate in the 700 MHz harkens back to this history of allowing foreign attachments, allowing devices to be attached to these networks, so long as they do not harm the network.  It is a giant leap forward, in terms of empowering customers and end users to start building next generation systems, technologies, applications, and services - all of that on a wireless medium as opposed to just the wire line medium.

On the other hand, also in the 700 MHz, you had the D Block, which was a block that was supposed to be utilized for public safety, and to create a national telecommunications infrastructure, with interoperable technologies, for public safety use.  That has been a stagnant disaster. 

I wrote an article about this for Government Technology Magazine, where I interviewed CIO's of places like New York, San Francisco, Houston, and major cities, that really desperately need an interoperable public safety network for disaster response.  They have been waiting for years for the FCC to figure out how to do this. 

In many ways, the D Block is an exemplar of how the FCC has had it's hands tied, in terms of having a mandate by Congress to have to auction this off, but also has been unable to really reinvent itself and institute innovative solutions to address the needs of public safety community, in this case, but the general populace, more generally speaking.

Okay, thanks a lot for your views there on 700 Mhz. I've got a very simple, and it could be a naïve question, but what I never understood with allowing this "foreign attachments" is that when I think of GSM, I can take my SIM card and put it in any device.  For the fancier sports cars out there, you have security systems, where you put in a SIM.  If you car is stolen, it rings you or a main center, automatically.  So, with SIM cards, you can put them into anything.  If I roam into the States, I can take any device I want and it attaches.  So, I never quite understood this because I didn't see anything different to what we have, today, except maybe on paper, it says it's okay.

You have to view it in regards of what are you allowed to do on these networks.  You can take your SIM card and move it around to any SIM-compatible, wireless telephone or similar device.  Chances are, that's actually not allowed by your terms of service with the providers, at least not in the United States, and probably internationally, for the most part.  Now, people do it en masse and it's sort of ignored.

Where you really start running into problems is when you say, "I have a data plan on my cell phone.  Why can't I use my cell phone to tether it to my laptop and get free Internet through that?  Why should I have to buy an EVDO card, or some other device for my laptop, when I'm already paying once for a data plan on my cell phone?" 

The reality is that the providers don't want you to share your data plan amongst other devices; they only want you to buy one data plan for your cell phone, one data plan for your laptop, etc.  This is where the Foreign Attachments Mandate is really important, in that you should be able to take your SIM card and not just be able to put it into your car, but to put it into any device that you want, that follows the standards of connectivity on a wireless, telephony network, and have that interoperate with that network.  You should be able to put a computer - you should be able to put - whatever it is, that should be interoperable with the cellular network, and utilize those devices as you, the consumer, the end user sees fit. 

These are places where we see the lock down that's really in place.  You can't really use any service or any application on the cellular telephony networks.  In fact, whereas that one car might use your SIM car, chances are that car's manufacturer has made some specific deal with that cellular network to allow for that usage to take place, is paying some fee or licensure, etc. 

All of this stuff really is incredibly disheartening for innovation and development of next generation applications and services.  It really stagnates that whole market sector.  When I look at all the different devices you could connect to the Internet, the wire line Internet versus the few devices you can actually connect to a cellular telephony network, I think the Carterphone versus non-Carterphone regimes really become clear.

Okay, so thanks for letting me know that.  You have said that we're at a critical juncture.

Absolutely

Do you want to describe that juncture?

Sure, there are three elements to what is creating this critical juncture.  The first is that new digital technologies are really maturing at an incredibly speedy rate, leading to all sorts of innovations and new uses.  The second is that there is an unprecedented consumer demand to make use of resources like the public airwaves, in ways we really haven't seen since the CB radio craze of the 1970's or in the 1920's, the amateur radio craze.  People really want to utilize wireless technologies in ways that are unprecedented.  The third is that we have this shift in regulatory structures and administrations.  The three of those, the regulatory shifts, the consumer demand, and the new technologies are sort of swirling together and creating this "perfect storm" that has the potential, at least, to shift the trajectory of telecommunications, of fundamental communications, for generations to come. 

Over the next year to three years, is really this moment in time that will determine what that trajectory looks like.  After that, things will really be a lot more locked down and will not be nearly as innovative an environment.  So, the battles that are being waged right now are absolutely, fundamentally important to the future of human communications.  The reality is; warts and all, what's decided here in the United States often reverberates internationally, globally. 

Okay, so you speak about fundamentally changing access to communications.  I'm obviously getting a sense of what you mean there, but do you wish to add a little more about what you mean about fundamentally changing access to communications?

Sure, I very much ascribe to the notion that communications is a fundamental human right.  Article Nineteen of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, back in 1948, was very explicit in stating we, as a community of civil societies, understand that if you cannot communicate, one of your fundamental rights has been infringed upon. 

We stand at this moment in human history where it is possible to ensure that everyone has access to communication, where traditional barriers to entry into this communications are rapidly being torn down.  In much the same way as we have, as a society, as a human society determined that we're uninterested in world wars any longer, and we are interested in preventing famine and addressing massive health problems, etc., we need to be focusing on communications in much that same way.  When we are looking at the fundamentals of social and economic justice, on a global scale, we need to realize that from the very beginning it has been the case that communications has really determined the health and vibrancy of democratic society. 

I think that's really nice stuff and it's something I wouldn't mind talking to you a lot longer about associated topics, but if I just jump to TV white spaces - I'm surprised how many people still don't understand what's meant by TV white spaces.  Could you describe what's meant by TV white spaces, and then also say why the fairly recent FCC decision was important?

Sure, television white space, as in snow or what you see on the channels when you're flipping through a TV, where there is no signal, where there is no broadcast, what ends up happening in any city or town that has over-the-air television broadcast is you might have a channel, let's call it channel 3.  Channel 3 may be a broadcaster in that local community.  You cannot then have a station on channel 2 or channel 4.  You need to space between these broadcast channels so they don't overlap on one another, so they don't interfere with one another.

What this leads to is a very inefficient use of the television spectrum.  You might have channel 3 and then channel 5 and then channel 7.  What also ends up happening is your neighboring towns cannot use those same channels that you are using.  You can imagine that if you try to fill a piece of paper with circles, you will find there is a lot of empty space.  In much the same way that that happens, television licensure is the same way. 

They draw a circle and they say, "That's channel 3".  No matter how you stack these channels, you always end up with underutilized space.  You have space between channels within a community.  You have space between channels between communities.  All of this, when you look at it, translates to somewhere between a low of about twenty to thirty percent and a high of over eighty percent of television channels that are unutilized. 

What the Television White Space proceedings was, was look, "Rather than just allowing this space to go unutilized, let's start looking at ways we can use the blank channels for innovation, in terms of broadband service, in terms of emergency communications, in terms of all sorts of new uses of this space".  It's very elegant, in that communities that have been least served by television's broadcasters, all of a sudden have access to the most television white space. 

This has been a battle that's been going on for many years, dating back to 2002, but really picked up in 2004, with the FCC saying, "We're going to make a decision on this".  Of course, it took four years to actually achieve a decision, but the decision ended up being, "Yes, we should reutilize these unused spaces". 

Where as the National Association of Broadcasters, the incumbents, the status quo fought against this, tooth-and-nail.  It was a huge political battle to get this done.  A coalition of community organizations, public interest groups, consumer groups, and high tech firms all came out and said, "We support this, we want to see television white space utilized for new and innovative uses". 

The reason why this is important is because it sets this precedent of saying, "Look, if you're not utilizing part of the public airwaves, we should allow devices to use that same space on an opportunistic basis".  It sets a precedent for saying, "If we have this massively underutilized resource, we, the owners of the public spectrum, - it should be entirely legal for us to make use of what we own".

This, of course, scares the bejeezus out of incumbents that have poured billions of dollars into licensing space, on the assumption that they can then keep other people out of that space.  The benefits to the general populace are so enormous, that even the political power of those incumbents was not enough to prevent this decision at the FCC.

Okay, so again, this gives you hope.

My friends often say that I'm a hopeless optimist, but I'm also sort of a pragmatist and looking at the political realities and what's possible.  What I see is that there is a fundamental shift taking place.  It's a generational shift, it's a technological shift, it's a party shift, and it's a lot of things aligning to make more effective use of these sorts of resources. 

Whether it's looking at broadband stimulus, or whether it's looking at the universal service, whether it's looking at network neutrality and carriage, whether it's looking at spectrum allocation and licensure, there is a huge impetus for making more effective uses of these resources, resources that have been underutilized for years, if not decades.  Tie that then, to the notion of things like the U.S. used to lead the world in terms of use and deployment of Internet and broadband infrastructure.  We have systematically, year after year, since the turn of the millennia, fallen further and further behind a growing number of other countries. 

When we look at that, as a country, as a society, we realize that something needs to be changed, from the midst of a massive, multi-year, market failure, a catastrophic market failure.  The market fundamentalism that has driven telecommunications policy for the past eight years is now beginning to give way to a much more pragmatic, society friendly regime.

And that should be nicely timed with the new FCC chairman appointment. 

That is very much the hope.

So, we'll need to track this now.  At the start, you mentioned the Open Technology Initiative.  I'd like to ask what kind of projects the OTI is working on.

The Open Technology Initiative is working on a number of projects around open source, open architecture, and open API systems.  I work at a think-tank so a lot of what we do is looking at what are the differential assessments of open versus proprietary systems or architectures.  How will these affect people, generally, and to concretize that a bit more?

One of the things we're looking at is the different architectures of wireless telephony systems and the hardware that runs on that.  That might be a comparison between the openness of a BlackBerry versus a Google phone, versus an iPhone versus an Openmoko phone, and the pros and cons of each endeavor.  Or, for example, we might be looking at something that's very big yet has not been looked at here in the United States - our healthcare system and portability of patient records, and interoperability of medical equipment.  We might be looking at things like how can we make more efficient use of the public airwaves, and open those up? 

It's really this intersection of technology and policy.  It's an area where, in D.C., you pretty much can't walk three feet without bumping into a lawyer.  We've realized that legal help is fundamentally important to being effective here, in D.C.  In the same way that's true, we need technologists to help us understand what's coming down the pipes, and what's happening with new technologies and the intersections of these new technologies, with the policies and regulations that we're passing. 

This might be looking at what are ISP's doing, in terms of throttling user services and applications?  A classic example would be Comcast, which is a major cable provider, really blocked BitTorrent, file-sharing protocol.  Comcast claimed they were not, and we needed technologists to step in and document exactly what Comcast was doing.  They eventually capitulated [laughs] and agreed, in fact, "Yes, fine, you caught us.  We are blocking BitTorrent, and we will stop now". 

It might also be that we're looking at various ways in which fair-use rights, in terms of copyright, are being curtailed in next generation operating systems.  Windows 7 is the new one that's coming down the pipes, and may have a lot of digital rights management that doesn't just protect copyright holders, but actually infringes upon our constitutionally, guaranteed fair-use rights as a populace.

These are all areas where, until you really take a deep dive into the technologies themselves, it's very difficult to understand the impacts that these technologies have on regulations and policies that are being put in place.

It might be - well, I won't say might be.  It is off topic, but you mentioned an OS, so the geek in me can't help but ask; are you saying Windows 7 will have something worse than what Mac now has, as well, in a new Mac - HDCP.

Yes, it's unclear exactly what Windows is going to do, but from I've heard, they are aligning themselves closer and closer with the Motion Picture Association of America, the RIAA, other major copyright holders, and these copyright holders have often been so incredibly concerned about things like piracy, and protecting their copyright, that they have had no compunctions about stepping all over our fair-use rights. 

I look at that combine that is developing, where most people that buy a computer are still buying a computer with a Windows operating system, and often don't have any other choice but to buy their computer with a Window operating system.  For me, when I look at Section Eight of the Constitution, which defines copyright, and also defines fair use as an important caveat, the notion that I buy a computer that comes with an operating system that infringes upon my constitutionally protected rights is of deep concern.  As we've seen, Vista had a lot of this in place already.  As we've seen this sort of rollback of our fair-use rights, I think it's fundamentally important to understand the technologies, to understand what these technologies are doing, and to fight against this diminution of these rights that are inherent in the United States.

Okay, so you're not a big fan of the personal computer becoming a glorified DVD player, with a play button, a pause button, and a pay button.  [Laughs]

Exactly, in fact, I'm a huge proponent of empowering end users to find, for themselves, what they view as fair use, and to utilize these as tools for whatever means or needs that they have.  We are allowed, as consumers who buy CD's DVD's, etc., to make copies for our own use.  If you have a technology that prevents you from doing that because of fear that you will share those files or media with other people, the notion that you would infringe upon your rights, in order to protect you from doing something that's illegal; it's like making cars that can only go 25 mph because of the fear that you might speed.  It's a ridiculous way to treat a tool that should be open.  You can kill somebody with a hammer; we don't make hammers illegal because they're a useful tool.  When you take a computer and gut it so it can't be used for anything illegal, you take a computer and make it into a relatively useless tool. 

Again, I love this topic because my favorite book is Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks, and it's certainly interesting times we're living in and what's going to take place over the next two to five or six years, i's going to determine a generation or two down the line.

But, jumping back to wireless - what do you actually think is next in spectrum policy reform?

What do I expect next?

Yeah

I think that there will be a big battle, over network neutrality, in Congress.  I expect that Senator Dorgan is going to drop a new network neutrality bill, probably in early February.  That will be on a lot of peoples' agendas.  I think that at the FCC, we will be, first and foremost, looking at how do we transition into this new regime.  I think a lot of the battles there are going to be much more about educating a new staff that's being brought in.  I think through 2009, I see things like digital rights management growing in import.  I think that is one of these areas that really have not been explored to the extent it needs to be explored.  I think that we will be battling over what it means to have universal broadband access and whether we should, as a country, prioritize that or not.  Obviously, I'm hopeful that we will prioritize it but there are a lot of groups and organizations that really want to ensure that a universal service fund enriches the incumbents without necessarily creating a competitive marketplace.

Okay, you had mentioned, again at the start, opportunistic spectrum access.  How do you think that will change things?

It has the potential to allow consumers to buy equipment that, in effect, makes everyone a broadcaster.  You can imagine a much more vibrant public sphere, in terms of media production and dissemination.  It means an increased flow of communications and information.  It means that the large barrier to entry, in terms of not too many people being able to afford either to buy or build their own radio station or television station, but can webcast, can podcast, can videocast, and can do all these things that are possible with new technologies.  But, they often lack the capacity, in terms of the broadband capacity, to do really innovative stuff such as live broadcasting and all these other media.  That is going to be coming to the fore in the near future.  We will have to address this as a society.  Much the same way that we provide parks, schools, and roads to the general populace, do we also say everyone needs to have access to broadband connectivity, as well?

Okay, I have one final question for you.  I would like to know - it's kind of two questions.  What do you see as the future of telecommunications infrastructure?  What will it look like and how will we get from where we are today, to there?

The future is absolutely going to be a hybrid infrastructure.  You will have fiber connectivity.  You want the fiber because it has capacity and reliability, but it will also be this hybrid with a wireless communication system, which will provide cost efficiencies and mobility.  Together, they will hopefully look like a seamless roaming between these different media - wireline and wireless - seamless roaming across multiple, different systems and networks.  They might go from EVDO to cellular, to Wi-Fi, to a wire line plug-in, depending on what's most effective for your needs.  All of this is predicated upon an open networking system where interoperability is paramount and where users are empowered to jump amongst multiple, different networks.  That's really, where these battles are going to be fought.  The telco incumbents really want to be sure that their users stay on their network and really don't like the notion of freeing up users to jump to whatever is most effective for end users. 

If I were to point to the future of communications, it is in this tension between end-user empowerment, edge-to-edge networking and command-and-control infrastructures that attempt to lock down users and networks and keep you on a specific network. 

Okay, would you ultimately like to see a day come where we have glass between us, or what we might call "super-high broadband" and peer-to-peer?

Yes, absolutely - I would love to see a day come where we are no longer having to worry about whether we have capacity or whether we have a mobility, not just to connect from anywhere, but to connect in the most efficient and effective manner.  Cell phones as an example, there is no reason, if you and I are in the same building, that we should have to be routed through a central tower.  The only reason why that architecture has been put in place is because in the United States, I get charged on the way up that tower and you get charged on the way down from that tower.  The network owner gets to charge twice for that call, even though for you and I, we would have better, faster and cheaper communications if our devices were connected directly to one another. 

I would like to cut out middlemen whenever possible.  I'd like to cut out hierarchies that are unnecessary for effective communications, whenever possible.  I would like to cut out tolling, adding expense for no other reason than you control the network, whenever possible.  Those battles between a distributed, peer-to-peer infrastructure, an opportunistic infrastructure and a command-and-control tolled infrastructure are really where the near future - the next half decade - the battles are all going to be fought.

Well, Sascha, I can say this; I hope you come to the eComm Conference every year.

Absolutely, it sounds like a great event.  I'm very much looking forward to attending.

Okay, so I very much look forward to the keynote that you're giving there and I wholeheartedly say thank you very much for your time and sharing your expertise.

You're very welcome, my pleasure.

Okay, have a great day, and thank you again.

You too - take care.

Bye

Government Technology recently published my latest article on the FCC's plans for a national public safety network. Here's the text:

Emergency communications save lives.

The unfortunate corollary to this maxim: Communication failures kill. More attention is being focused on how to improve communication, not only within an emergency response organization, but also among first responders from different agencies. To remain fully connected, key communications officers have often adopted a "Bat Belt" approach with several communications devices - sometimes a half dozen or more - strapped to their waist. It's a necessity for communicating among the many federal, state and local agencies' wireless networks during an incident.

Today's IT is increasingly sophisticated, and emergency response agencies and hardware platforms are proliferating, which makes interoperable communications ever more urgent. Natural or man-made disasters require close interaction of many organizations, but the sad reality is that too many communications systems aren't interoperable; this can lead to on-the-ground snafus, inefficiency and tragedies - as was exemplified in the disaster response after Hurricane Katrina. Within these contexts, the FCC is working to open new radio frequencies to meet first responders' interoperability needs.

Read more...  read more »

I'm attending the Patents, Copyrights and Knowledge Governance Conference today over at the Carnegie Institute. It's full of hyper-knowledgeable people, though the discussions might be a bit dry to the uninitiated. Gavin Baker is live blogging during the panels.