There were a number of breakout session readouts, short talks (4-8 minutes each). These are not in the same order as the conference agenda, just grouped for my editing convenience.
Overthrowing the incumbents – Ted Stout
Need to campaign FOR something, not AGAINST. More people in the conversation. It’s all about the phone bill and those strange charges. The real cost to the customer. Local economics. Don’t want to make it partisan (party political) battle.
Need a GAO study, FCC and states can’t do it. Need congress involved. Grassroots ways of doing this. Need innovaton around broadband. Target the key investors around incumbents,
It must be about the customer. Must be ease to transition customer to this new world. All about local and regional votes. Impact on telecom costs, education, regional economics.
Bart Stuck - Why Don’t Venture Capital Funds Invest in Innovation
Looked at 1300 IPOs, 200 acquisitions. Came up with 5 that were truly innovative in technology – Verisign, superconducting, Akamai, Ciena .
Puzzled that so companies got venture funding. Innovative ones had higher valuations per dollar of investment before and after crash. Those that didn’t have a tech advantage
Michael Olson – open source telephony
Most interesting open-source company is doomed. Sleepycat Berekelydb customers – building telecom systems a lot. Reasons: 1 . s/w is cheap and cheap is good. 2. Asterisk PBX is Open Source Software (OSS).
Mostly written by one guy, Mark Spencer. Makes living from digiom (hardware sales). Doesn’t own his own IPR in his s/w because of community development.
Can’t do dual licensing to levy different terms and price discriminate.
Stan Hanks – Columbia Ventures
Going from super glut of fiber. Qwest did well. Caused a gold rush. 1998 Salt Lake City to Dallas $110,000/mile, wholesale price $1500/mile, COGS $763, and it sold out. Same route today is $100 an untouched. It’s the salvage business.
Big CAPEX savings (chapter 7, 11, 18, 22 joke). OPEX is killer, people, real estate, services like power. And more – h/w recertification for 2nd hand h/w, obsolescence, “fitness of purpose”.
Morals – some smokin deals, purchase price of fiber isn’t whole story. Some assets that are impossible to operate profitably. “Buy and hold” until the market perceives a scarcity (demand rises). If Wall St loves something, run the other way.
Tom Mandel, Ken Tyler – stupid software
The hardest thing to grasp is that we in this room are the ones who wish to build railroad tracks along the canal to haul barges. 4 part matrix – lhs demand/supply (top/bottom); bottom anxiety/comfort (l to r). 4 part stupid/intelligent; center/edge. Only people are intelligent, can’t be smart if you can unplug it without it defending itself.
Example of grammar correction in word competing with human intelligence (‘cos it gets it wrong a lot).
Opposite to Noam – can’t run an entire economy EXCEPT on niches. A society is based on niches. It is local, completely. Economy is only a function of creating society (sociability).
A state can declare a town is not an entity [ref FCC ruling], eliminates a niche.
Things that cross from the existing to the new have value; can’t build the new from scratch. Example of eBay.
Steve Crandall – Music at Bell Labs
Music - listen (all of us), play (some), compose (a few). 10000 societies in the world, all but two sing, all use percussion. How to fill the pipes? Music…
Very incremental business solutions so far, but not yet made social. Observations of kids, anthropological. About 7 years of college data, network monitoring, 10k students. Usage of MP3s, approx 71% are listened to less than once, 14% once, 4% four or more times. They are using it for sampling.
Everyone has iTunes player on. Using rendezvous to see each other’s stuff. 7-9pm can see between 80 and 120 libraries of students. Social class is where you rank in the library list. Faculty involved .
Amount of data is approaching its limits. Korea reaching limits of BB capacity, campus trying to limit usage. Can get people past the stage of the hardness of making music. $12bn of music sales. Music from making own music about $10bn and rising rapidly (instruments, classes, etc.). Make your own really bad music a better experience that listening to someone else’s really good music.
NYC – 10m, NJ – 1km to nearest music expert.
Bruce Kushnick - Teletruth
History of Bell companies – AT&T, 1984 divesture. Immediately went from 9% to 14% rate of return (1985). “Need more money”, offer more services like call waiting – pennies to offer, dollars of charge. ISDN on offer.
1995 – “information superhighway” – promises of 6m lines at Pacbell, Amerietch, in 2000 and so on. We can’t build this unless we have money, so used price caps. Froze rates that customers paid. Cut staff, kept differential, wrote networks off faster. Started in NJ – “Opportunity NJ” - $1.5bn paid by customer by 2000 for nothing.
Same in MD, PA, said 50% of state supposed to be wired with 45mbps symmetric in 2004. $21bn write down on copper because being “replaced”. Can’t roll out fiber unless … more money. Convinced FCC to start triennial review. You get to keep any part of the network you upgrade to fiber. Bells get exclusive right, assumes they will build. Have to get rid of line sharing and small ISPs because fiber coming.
Entire telecom crash caused by lack of fiber roll-out. Lucent, JDS had contracts.
Would now need faster computers, better s/w, better last mile by now.
40% of the orders from ISPs didn’t go through because bell companies “lost the order”. Went from 7000 ISPs to 2000. CLECs suffered the same.
Incest of Bells. Siblings marrying. Have to take the networks back. We have paid $121bn since 1991 for networks never received. Currently paying $17bn a year. Answer – go after the phone bills. All those little charges. They are mostly unmarked revenue back to LECs. FCC line charge about to go to nine dollars.
If Bells get control of networks and cablecos. Will try to block VoIP. We in rebel alliance need to work out how to presenve common carrier, and get FTTH not at 100 megabit but gigabit speeds.
Wendy Seltzer of EFF
I had a biobreak so I missed the start of this one - sorry. MG
Upstream providers getting hammered through tertiary copyright infringement
Diebold and threats to get docs off the web. Wanted to carry it all the way through and that their should be punishment for misuse of DMCA takedowns.
Because Internet makes copies of all sorts of activities, all sorts of activities get trawled up in dragnet of copyright law. DMCA says that even distributing tools for circumvention. What becomes fair use becomes circumvention of access controls.
Q: DMCA passed in 1998 shows incredible foresight by companies looking to pass the barn door. What’s the positive thing we can pass that neutralizes that sort of thing? Now we have super-DMCA in 50 states.
One of the steps is to change the whole basis of the debate. Can’t re-introduce fairness into the DMCA. Creative commons project to give middle gorund, some rights reserved. Problem of re-invigorating the commons. Create value where there may be no price mechanism.
Q: The concept of ownership. Spectrum. IP. Ownership going to an extreme. Conversations about of commons fall on dear ears because of different concept of ownership.
We’re always looking for counter-examples, eg Cory Doctorow’s books.
Q: Distribution systems rip-off the artists.
Agree, say they’re trying to stifle independent distribution that lets artists get away from them.
Q: When will be ever see MS use creative commons?
Never!
Q: Economist – Richard Caves – “Creative Industries” – retrospective
Q [DI]: Wendy alluded to Cory’s activities. [Summary of CC and some rights reserved]. Difference between creating profit and wealth.
Q: 2 projetcs; artform, a project for artists. Definition of an API for service providers – fanclub, tickets, t-shirts, etc. Don’t have to be a s/w developer to run an artist biz.
Q: Grassroots mcarthur grants– rethink patronage. No way to tip Cory. $2 tip is the same as the royalty. Big margin. Equivalent of spending $20 on the book. The create the social norms. Unless you’re very famous, tips haven’t worked. Lack of mechanism.
Q: Hardest thing for an act is to get famous. Even if you give away all your product online and then sell out a 2000 seat concert, you’re ahead. Has never been a direct connection between artist and audience once you no longer need physical distribution system. By-product of BitTorrent is popularity. Record companies will offer much bigger royalty once they know you’re a sure bet for physical distribution system.
Need a chance to experiment.
Q: Brewster Kales archive.org – stuff out of copyright, old movies etc. Worth a visit. Talked at library of congress – on web.
Q: Could you say about Eldred suit (Tail vs Ashcroft)
Suing to challenge specifics of most recent copyright extension. Congress can’t add retroactivity portion.
Q: 3 things: many of us connected; would like to donate to artist, EFF, software Two. I’d have an emptional reaction to that. Why don’t we have default habit of spending money on these things. I don’t feel that hump at starbucks. Energy hump. Three. This is much larger than copyright. Cost of producing copyrightable material falling through the floor. A $199 box gives us all sorts of music [Casio keyboard on stage for intros]. We are generating content where ownership is not clear. WiKi/blog/chat in conference. There are legitimate shared interests (doctor/patient example). Don’t have regimed to deal with shared interest.
Cost of figuring out owners of content is more than the value of the revenue stream.
Q: We aren’t prepared to value or price these things.
Q: It’s because the economy has become our society. In asia etc there’s the tradition of the begging bowl and given to the poor. We are very commercial. In 1976 everything came under copyright.
Q: Ask how much a program you just created is worth? Well, it took me 3 weeks, and 30 years.
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