Via Arts and Letters Daily comes a useful reminder on how the intrinsic mobility of cell phones disconnects them from geography, as well as disconnecting the user from their public surroundings.
It’s kind of obvious, but you have to point of to telco-heads that IP addresses don’t begin with a country code. This is a political statement, that the network world is flat and borderless. The consequence is you can’t charge for crossing borders. It’s interesting to see this brief twilight world of mobility, but with the pain of international call charges and roaming fees. The stories we will be able to tell our grandchildren!
If Larry Lessig thinks that code is law, then the choice of namespace is part of the constitution. Anything that touches the user’s identity must also touch your business relationship. I’ve seen things like the choice and structure of user identifiers delegated to technical design fora, with executives totally unaware of the long-term business implications of the decisions being made.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 05:09 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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I realize that there is no country code component in the IP address. What I don't understand is that in IPv6 discussions, people say that Asia will run out of IPv4 addresses sson and that US probably will never run out of it. How can this be in a flat and borderless network?
Posted by: at November 18, 2003 05:56 AMSurely it isn't really flat because of the way public addresses are handed out through different classes of network and subnetting. Neither is it borderless, thanks to the magic of NAT and firewalls.
If blogs like this could be compared to a public allotment garden, I spend much of my life in the private walled gardens of corporations who just put a few flowerboxes of publicity on show for passers by.