Listics

Krim says Powell one of the few public officials who understood what he was making policy on.

Powell wanted to shift licensed spectrum to unlicensed spectrum, but now it’s said that there is less available unlicensed bandwidth.

“Harmonization in the global forums with the ITU is more mind-numbing than anything we do [on-shore].” - MP

Krim refers to Vint Cerf’s concern that the duopoly itself drives these concerns… how do we make a more competitive landscape? MP calls the current competitive environment “internescine food fights.”

MP is an antitrust lawyer and he says “We think magical things happen at three.”  JK says yah-but, we don’t have the magic of three.  The backchannel observes that we’d have three competitors if wireless broadband providers could obtain spectrum.

MP is bullish on America… he likes our country’s model… David Weinberger is sitting right here blogging this better than I can…  I’ll just read over his shoulder.

Brad Wurtz says neither door gets us where we want to go. Where do we want to go?

• Ensure quality and choice for the consumer.
• Enable innovation for online services.
• Achieve equitable return on investment.

Third path: fair use.

• Divide bandwidth equally among active users ensuring quality experience for consumers.
• Allow dynamic flexible premium services for online users and providers.

Fair use means give every user an equal slice of available bandwidth. Online providers get a choice of guaranteed and premium access to customers. Kevin Marks points out the “Cheshire skewered guaranteed service 10 years ago.’

Check out my notes on the Freedom to Connect conference now, at Listics dot com.  Have I mentioned that http://listics.com is Sandhill Trek rel. 3.0 and you should update your links?

Dewayne Hendricks makes an immpassioned plea for wireless projects, for wireless adoption, Michael Calabrese says lets reallocate unused TV spectrum. Cynthia de Lorenzi says that the conflict is around entertainment distribution. Bob Frankston on the backchannel says do away with analog broadcast and do all video over packets (”it’s not 1927 anymore”). Brett Glass says we no longer need frequency at all, and offers this paper.

Ben Scott, Free Press - health of 21st century network… speaks a lot on the hill about network neutrality… the congress people and their staffers want to stay away from these issues…

Brad Templeton of the EFF gave a great rant. Alienated all the telcos of course…

Jeff Chester, Center for Digital Democracy…

Bruce Kushnick, Teletruth… new eBook, The 200 Billion Dollar Broadband Scandal…

Martin is here to skewer network neutrality… says it takes us away from Freedom to Connect. The net was built with certain assumptions and value judgments built in, for example the international addressing model. A blanket neutrality law harms the consumers at the lower end of the scale according to Martin.

Blair Levin, with a swipe at Larry Lessig, introduces Michael Copps… Copps acknowledges that “Web site content is what makes the access so valuable in the first place…” providers with bottleneck control can create balkanized internet… innovation will depend on permission from the providers…

From the IRC backchannel: “Real briefly, the telecommunications industry is lobbying for the right to manage the traffic that flows over their networks as they see fit.”

David Isenberg compares network neutrality to elections… he adds “freedom to connect (network neutrality) to the other freedoms - freedom of speech and whatnot… Brad T. says “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the people to connect.”

Tim Wu’s presentation is hampered by inadequate Macintosh dongelization… when he gets started he brings us to the question: What is a network for? “The value of a network is what it makes possible.”

The telegraph… first network in history and first case of network discrimination… Western Union/Associated Press preferred rates provided that AP never used another network, and WU never allowed another news service to access with the same rates.

The monopoly and the AP relationship had a profound effect on the outcome of the 1976 presidential election… story told in the book “Creation of Media,” by Paul Starr.

Kingsbury commitment…

Blocking and transparency are the key issues that network neutrality legislation must address according to Tim Wu. Tiering is the biggest issue… charging consumers for different levels of bandwidth is fair but no application side tiering should be permitted. Not everyone agrees that consumer tiering is the best way to proceed.

Freedom to Connect, April 3 and 4, Silver Springs, MD