I should be in bed, tomorrow is a long day. We're off to Las Vegas to meet up with the inlaws who are on their road trip. A weekend in Death Valley is in prospect. But I have a burning idea I just have to get out there, right now.
I was re-reading this Fortune article by David Isenberg on how DSL and cable have perverse economics and fiber is the glorious future. My mind started to dream about panglossian fiber sprouting from every wall outlet in every home and office. And then it hit me.
A potato has no value on its own. You have to cook it.
He really does need some sleep, you're thinking. Here's the idea. Consider networking in abstract. Networks enable connections. Faster networks enable more connections. More pervasive networks enable more connections. But a physical connection alone has no value. You have to run a service over it. A connection on its own is a potato. You can't eat it raw.
But not all application-layer connections create value. At any one time only a finite number of services have been invented. Only a modest number of end points create value to you in relation to that service. There are only so many people you want to talk to, trade with, get laid with [maybe this theory isn't so hot after all...] A connection from any other end point may have zero or negative value. (Think: e-mail spam, being stalked on a dating site, hassled on a social networking service to make introductions for remote strangers.) And those value-less connections are essentially without bound in number and frequency. They can easily swamp the positive value of the system.
The paradox of the paradox of the best network is that increased connectivity alone does not guarantee any increase in end-user value. Indeed, it may destroy it. For example, the spread of big-pipe broadband in east Asia has enabled a torrent of spam and denial of service attacks against the thin and brittle pipes into US and European homes. The entirety of the Internet infrastructure in Russia has net negative value to me personally. Three of the banned comment spam IP addresses on this site are Russian. I get hardly any genuine visits from Russia. My parents might be better off if their ISP refused all connection from Chinese hosts! There's nobody in China they feel an urge to converse with. They don't run a telecom website with a global audience. They just want to chat with their family and friends, and shop for a retirement home. And that's it. Reject everything from Xianggang and they're better off.
Just as computer-mediated social networks have poor social scaling attributes, pervasive unmediated data networks may have negative value scaling attributes. Wall to wall fiber isn't good enough. Connectivity isn't value in the eyes of the user. In can only be used as an ingredient to something else. You don't get the best value by eating all the food at the all-you-can-eat buffet.
Now, when you create a network, you do it to span a geography. Your personal influence -- your land, the sites you control, the people you know -- is very limited. At some point you stray outside your domain of control. At that point you need to work with a stranger who can get your lump of data nearer to its physical destination.
Traditionally, you pay a network service provider to do this on your behalf. Alternatives you can envision in the future might include mesh networks, municipal networks, or free community networks. Even if no payment is made, you're still expected to do something in return. It might only be to patronize a city district and buy a coffee. In all cases, there is what our lawyer friends call consideration. Namely,
".. some right, interest, profit or benefit accruing to the one party or some forbearance, detriment, loss or responsibility given, suffered or undertaken by the other."
So there is a chain of reciprocacy of mutual obligation embedded in the Internet. It could be to make money flow in the opposite direction to the packets. But it doesn't have to be cash. It could be an agreement to route some packets in the opposite direction. Supply copious ale when you next meet. Whatever.
The trick to going beyond the fibersphere is to understand and utilize this thin relationship network to help mitigate the negative-value connections. What can those around you state about your identity and connection-worthiness? If the people who are so willing to pass on your packet aren't willing to say anyting about you, why should I take the risk your incoming connection will have negative value to me?
Funninly enough, my degree was in Mathematics and Computation. I spent years studing formal methods of proving the correctness of a program in relation to a propositional calculus specification. But in the end I decided the thing was a waste of time, because the most important variable in the equation -- the human being coming up with the requirements that composed the specification -- wasn't appearing anywhere in the model.
Likewise, end-to-endism is stuck in a world of routing and connectivity. It is blind to value. There is no philosophical system behind it as to how value is created for people. Ubiquitous fiber and wireless ultrabroadband isn't the target end state. We need more. Giving people control of their connectivity isn't helpful if they don't have the information they need about the endpoints of the network to make informed decisions. The solution isn't "identity" or "reputation" or "trust". We probably don't have the vocabulary to describe it properly yet.
I have some ideas on what you can do to make that degenerate social network create value. I'll document them over the next few weeks. It might even help to rescue some knackered old telcos. But in the meantime, the future of telecom is clear. It looks like a spud that you bought from a stranger at the market, and devoured with gusto. But not raw.
Now I'm going to bed. Goodnight.
UPDATE: Or to put it all another way, now I've had some rest, the end-to-end argument optimizes a single connection (by assuming the least possible about the purpose of the connection). However, it doesn't necessarily optimize the value of the system to a user over multiple connections, not does it optimize the total system value over all users. The true goal is one of these latter two (a debate of its own), not a single connection.
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