Prolific Programmer on the Internets!

Larry Lessig carries the news that the FCC ruled against Comcast in a 34-page brief. Lessig says it's so good that he feels compelled to write a 5-page "thank you" note. I will read the 34-page letter and post my thoughts on it in a later entry.

I've noticed a lot of noise about how open Verizon is making their network. It's a red herring and here's why.

To have an open network, you need to let any device participate on it. In the US mobile phone space, you have 4 technologies, completely and utterly incompatible with one another: TDMA (old ATTWS), GSM (new ATTWS/Tmobile), iDen (Nextel), and CDMA (Verizon/Sprint). Moreover, you have different frequencies at which each technology is deployed. Handsets are incompatible and will remain so.

I read that, in September, Verizon will join Vodafone in transitioning their networks to 4G using the LTE standard. The LTE seems to be an open standard, with no carrier adopting it. Now that Vodafone has adopted it, it will become a closed-standard as Vodafone is the world's leading mobile operator. We'll see if this actually shakes things up.

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.