How NOT to Conduct Customer Relations
the fire was out, but it took down a tree
Around 12:15pm Friday, I got a text message from a neighbour saying the power was out at home. Said neighbour, whose identity I'm not going to reveal was a bit lost and didn't know what to do. From my end, I have a shedload of electronic equipment at the flat. So, I went home after lunch. On reaching home, I noticed the above shot.
Stopping by the office, I was told there had been a transformer malfunction and that PG&E was on it. The utility hadn't given an ETA for restoring the power. So I rang them. They had no bloody idea there was a power failure or anything in my part of San Francisco! It wasn't listed on their outage page and they hadn't a clue anything was wrong. Never mind that a television truck had apparently come to the scene and was rolling live. I caught a shot of the reporter, which I've pasted below. I wonder what her name is? Anyone know?
Final examination: PG&E, for being wholly incompetent, and going above and beyond the level of suck I've come to expect from the likes of a monopoly, you are, hereby, fired!
How to Control the Internet
Capitalism, like it or not, works best when a number of players fight it out for control of a commodity. The rules of said fight are agreed upon and no participant violates them any more than anyone else. On the Internet, the only rule is that participants must be able to communicate with each other. This communication layer is termed TCP/IP. The structure of a general Internat packet is sufficiently broad that it can include practically any sort of information, be it text, images, video, audio. Because of the vast array of types of information that may be transmitted through the Internet, TCP/IP does not say much about how a packet ought to be structured. The argument presented is that those that do say how and where data should flow will control the Internet, whether the endpoints of communications are under their control or not.
Suppose I want to send a picture to my sister. I can't exactly go over and drop it off in Mainz over my lunch hour. So I may post it on a website, using a proprietary API. Let's say I post it on Zooomr and get her to do the same, writing code for her to do it. She's not the prolific programmer, she's merely my sibling. She's not even a programmer. So now, zooomr owns her, so far as hosting her pictures are concerned. If Kris and Thomas decide to change their terms of use, her pictures are still on their servers. This represents data lock-in and is one way of controlling the Internet. They who host the data, control the network
A second way is by controlling the transport API. Open Social is the most recent proof of this strategy. The alliance includes LinkedIn, Bebo, and MySpace, among others, none of which are controlled by Google. However, application vendors that write to the OpenSocial API trust Google. Same with advertisements.Those that control the transport mediums control the network
The most powerful player on the Internet is your local ISP. Why? So long as there's no network neutrality legislation, the ISP retains complete control of the on-ramp to the network. And so, they can charge whatever they want to either customers or content-providers. Comcast can reword its terms of service to say that access to the BBC and Facebook is now priced $10/month over the current baseline tariff. Those who control the onramp to the network control it
From the above three paragraphs, it should be apparent that control is to be found at the transport level or on the edges. If you control the medium by which information is transmitted, you have a great deal of power. Similarly, if you control the first access point, you hold a similar amount of power. Indeed, I suspect edge control is the stickier kind, but you can feel free to disagree in the comments.
