Why do we insist on ‘all or nothing’?

Where’s the Gmail for phone calls? Something that lets me search my life history of chatter.

PS - Skype chat search is rubbish.

For those without an hour to spare, I’m also on the BBC News site here today.

UPDATE: My eComm keynote on re-thinking the phone company is here. But you’ve got work to do, no time to waste watching videos on the web, no? ;)

“Marts, between the boxes for first name and last name there’s a little box with ‘M’ and ‘I’ above. What does that mean?”

“Middle initial, mum.”

“And then at the end, there’s a box with ‘Sr’ and ‘Jr’. As we’re over 62, shouldn’t we put ‘Senior’ in case there’s a discount?”

Pause.

“No, mum.”

Oh, and the telco angle? Shouldn’t there be an API for the web site to collect this stuff from their ISP, with due permission etc.?

Anyhow, I wonder how many US websites find thousands of people come from the ‘state or region’ of Londonshire?

easy enough mate - stay in bloody England - heh, heh!

There is an API already created - hcards and other microformats.

The google toolbar also used to have a rudimentary equivalent - it would attempt to fill in forms based on the data you gave it including credit card numbers IIRC. (I don't know if google toolbar still does this).

This is an area crying out for a solution, but I'm not sure that the telco is the best provider. the website is not asking for autheticated data - you are just proposing that it provide a service such as the above. It doesn't matter to the website who is registered to the IP address - I could be booking a trip for someone else, or on someone else's connection.

I can see hosted hcard services being an added feature to telcos, but even then they will simply be the default provider among many. Perhaps not a bad position to be in, but by no means game-changing.

Microsoft CardSpace or an Open source Identity protocol like OpenID will eventually eliminate the need for web forms...

You'll just drop and drag your virtual ID card onto the web page login to or form to fill, indicate which data you want to share with the provider (ie hotel) and click submit... you'll never enter a form again....

--JB

Any solution that requires my mother to do more than keep breathing is a non-starter, I'm afraid.

Now, who would disagree that a great improvement in the system would be for someone to be able to host their web site on, say, Amazon Web Services EC2/S3 platform, and set a limit on how much they were willing to pay out of their own pocket to host the site per month. Then, once they’ve hit that limit, the requesting ISP has to pay instead.

So now I can choose to subscribe to a ‘premium-enabled’ ISP, and get to see all that content that’s been Slashdotted, and get a monthly top-up bill for the pleasure.

Can someone who wants a network neutrality law please explain to me how they’re going to word it to avoid preventing such improvements to the Internet. Anyone?

Martin, I laugh at your strawman argument. Who's been buttering your bread lately?

What you are describing can easily be solved through agreements between /endpoints/ in the network, without in any way involving the ISP(s) or invoking network (non)neutrality.

Furthermore you might pick a problem that hasn't already been solved. (Tip: Google coral cache)

Now go away or I will taunt you a second time. :)

Martin,

Interesting idea. Not sure I have any answers; I'm not a pro-regulation guy generally. How would this be different than having my ISP be the bill collector for my porn site membership (for example)? And why must it be the ISP instead of Amazon collecting the "premium" in your example?

Granted the premium would be for popularity, not pretty pictures, but it still seems like more of an accounting issue than a transport or access issue. The ISP wouldn't be restricting access per se, the publisher would.

Frankly I think the NN crowd would be better served lobbying for true competition in the access pipe, then this silliness would all go away by itself.

Oh come on Martin, this example has nothing to do with Net Neutrality. There is no preferential treatment, just reverse payment. Google does something similar with Blogspot. You don't pay them, but they hope you start using adwords or something else.

Have a look at Andrew Odlyzko's paper on net neutrality and preferential treatment on other networks. http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/net.neutrality.pdf It goes into why there were networks in the past (canals and railroads that had differentiation for types of goods, but disallowed discrimination between individual producers of the same good.

You're right regulating this will be hard. But are you really happy with Virgin or BT just saying that itunes will have to pay treble the costs of Amazon MP3 because that is how they see the world?

Fact is that currently there is no shortage of bandwidth. Nowhere in the network there is a shortage of bandwidth except at the end-points. In the UK and the US there may be some problems with regards to backhaul, but those are mostly regulatory. There is absolutely no reason to expect a bandwidth shortage any time soon. If there would be a shortage than telegeography wouldn't report dropping prices in long haul prices.

If there is abundance,if there is no shortage, why would we need differentiation.

Good luck,

Rudolf

Martin I'll concede that there is no obvious way to word a law enshrining strict network neutrality that does not run at least some risk of preventing an ISP from innovating. At least in North America however this is a purely hypothetical risk as the ISP market is an effective duopoly of cable and incumbent telcos neither of whom have ever been known to innovate. If there were robust competition one could perhaps count on market forces to ensure that both neutral and "improved" bandwidth were available assuming enough consumer demand but as no such competition exists regulation is required to prevent the destruction of existing real innovations; regulation that yes could interfere with potential telco/cableco innovations. For example in Canada both Rogers (the largest cableco) and Bell (the largest telco) have begun throttling P2P traffic ostensibly to resolve network "congestion" and improve performance for the average user. If congestion were truely the issue would not by the bit pricing be the solution? One wonders whether their respective television subscriber bases are also part of the calculus. In Bell's case they've even throttled wholesalers who otherwise might offer their customers the "inferior" congested service.

Martin,

I agree with Rolf that this is not a particularly good example of Net Neutrality issues.
However, the differentiation is pricing and service levels is an interesting idea. The proposition could include any combination of payment (reverse, ad-funded, subscriber pays, pre-pay, etc).

But different from what Rudolf seems to suggest, this pricing/proposition innovation has nothing to do with either a shortage or abundance of bandwidth capacity. And different pricing between 'procuders of the same good' is an economic fact, typically based on demand, agreements, service levels etc. Martin, suggests that by introducing different tiers of service levels differentiation in pricing/proposition may occur.

BR

Colin

colin,

I don't disagree with the possibility to introduce this new way of paying for access to content that is not available anymore because of slashdotting.

I do however oppose the idea of Network Schmootrality. As I do think that there is serious reason to belief that not keeping the net neutral will seriously degrade the possibilities for countries and companies to compete in the services and content market.

The main argument for Non-network neutrality is about price differentiation being necessary to pay for the network, which in my opinion is a load of you know what :-)

People aren't paying for youtube videos and slashdotted content.

GameRail just went bust

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/GameRail-Closes-Up-Shop-93738

You know who would pay to have their content privileged? Advertisers. The argument you've made here isn't that strong, but your other one, about the advertising-funded Yahoo! broadband for poor people would.

Who would fund it? Perhaps Merck, to tell you their drugs are safe? http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&q=merck+advertisements

Martin,

Net Neutrality aside, how realistic are these complex reverse payment models in terms of implementation. The idea sounds great, and I could see potentially paying such a premium to get through to overburdened content, but, what is the administrative cost do to the OPEX of the system. Micropayments were supposed to be a savior, but few have them effectively deployed. As a corollary, I look at US healthcare where there are thousands of individual settlement contracts putting a miserable 25% overhead tax on the system. Compare this to Singapore with one payment method and 2% OH.

This may not be the most compelling comparison, however, "technology will wring out the efficiencies" does not pass my sniff test on the complex models.

-Todd

Any time an IVR announces that your call may be recorded, without giving you any choice in the matter, you are also automatically entitled to record the call without asking.

And not only that, you’re allowed to publish it, too.

Sauce for the goose…

You can! or at least you will be able to once fonolo launches :)

http://wirelessnorth.ca/2008/03/19/fonolo-deep-dialing-is-cool/

Absolutely. Having long ago given up using landlines or mobiles to call such numbers but instead using Skype-Out, I automagically record those calls and respond when they say they are recording that, yes, so am I thereby making the contract. If they use it to improve customer service, I'm perfectly happy to join in that endeavor including publishing it if needs be. Goose=sauce :: Tit=tat

How come we never read about the companies that update the prompts for voicemail? They must be making a mint these days since every system I interact with says "Please listen carefully as our selections have recently changed."

While we're on pet peeves, how about on-hold agents that don't search for an available rep until you have listed to the full cycle of advertisements. i.e. "Did you know that you innovative energy company has devised a way for you can check to see if the power is out by going to our website?"

I don’t buy it, even as a signed-up fully-paid network neutrality opponent.

Firstly, the numbers ignore economics. If the C block was encumbered, that would raise the prices of the A and B blocks. So you need to take a much smaller differential as to the cost of the encumbrance.

Look at it this way. Say you’re hungry, as is your friend, and there’s three fruit in the market. A tasty apple, a yummy banana, and a mouldy pear. You and your friend don’t want to eat fungus, so you each bid $1 for an apple and banana respectively in the fruit market.

Now imagine the pear was perfect. Supply goes up, demand remains constant, prices come down. You pay $0.80 for each fruit, for a total of $2.40. You won’t pay $3, because fruit isn’t so scarce any more, so you don’t need to bid so high. So the “loss” from the mould was $0.40, not $1.

The next problem is that it confuses the American taxpayer with the American public. That money not paid by telcos to the treasury can now be invested in networks, and lower prices. Some will go to shareholders, but not all.

OK, so what if there’s some residual, lower number, like $2bn? Well, it can still be a good deal.

We don’t really know what the best way of allocating spectrum is. The ISM bands that WiFi sits in have given us an unexpected bounty of goods. A lot of clever people have done all kinds of analysis on the matter, but I’m sure none would say that it’s a closed issue. That such uncertainty exists means there’s value in hedging it. The taxpayer has bought some option value in having a diversity of spectrum rules. Reasonable people could differ over the value of that option. But it’s not zero. Maybe it’s even more than $2bn. And possibly a lot more than $7bn.

We shall see.

Martin,
Excellent analysis about the costs not 'disapearing'- I cant help but think if 3g spectrum costs were cheaper then data throughputs in countries where carriers got a little carried away (pre-crash) on their bidding.

The carriers now need to recoup these wireless infrastructure costs somehow / somewhere and when you consider how vital to the well being of the economy/indsutry that connectivity is you almost wish for a more 'planned economy model' to delivering internet bandwith.

Anyone have any thoughts on if this is possible to implement for landline broadband.....nationalisation coup of carriers by the US marines maybe :)

Cheers,
Dean Collins
http://www.Cognation.net

I’m still at the “why would I bother?” stage. Yet another noisy digital child needing care and feeding.

Sure, I can see the benefit in decoupling sending and receiving, cf being CC/BCC’d to death on email. It’s much lighter than blogging, more conversational.

But it’s all far too manual. I’m still refusing to ever, ever, ever have to describe my social network by hand.

AltaVista wanted you to put keywords into your web page to work out what it meant. Google just took what people were already doing and joined the dots.

I don’t want my social graph to be portable. I want it to be invisible.

Until someone can take my email, IM, phone, blog, comment data — stuff I already do — and work out who I care about right now, I’d feel a twat to be a twit.

UPDATE: The security model is broken too. Why on earth would I tell them my Gmail ID and login — the same credentials that let you buy stuff in my name using my Google Checkout? Thanks, but no thanks.

Are you sure it needs the password for your gmail id? I thought you just needed to enter the id on it's own for the IM to work.

Sprint is crap at customer care, average at marketing, but good at wholesale (MVNOs, affiliate built-out, Xohm). Verizon is good at customer care, OK at marketing and doesn’t really do much in the way of wholesale.

So why not trade? Sprint offloads the retail customers to Verizon, and in return combines both CDMA networks and becomes a specialist wholesale carrier. Might as well merge with Level3 or GX while you’re at it.

Everyone comes away happy, particularly the investment bankers.

I’m not in favour of network neutrality regulations, and feel that Comcast did a Bad Thing™ that should be punishable under existing consumer protection, contract and tort law.

In his submission, David puts forward several ideas. The first says:

All it takes to be part of the Internet as an Autonomous System is to agree to participate according to the very simple ground rules of the Internet.

Bzzt. There is no social or legal contract to adhere to the IETF’s recommendations. To me this feels like communitarian nonsense (in the nicest possible way, separating the argument from the arguer). I think this confuses what should be (maximising total utility through co-operation) with what is (a prisoner’s dilemma-style game where cheating can be rewarded). This is entirely a private matter between Comcast and those other networks it interconnects with.

Somehow, the dignified manner in which IETF standards are arrived at is supposed to re-inforce this point of view.

These congestion control techniques can only work well if they are standardized across the entire Internet. New techniques are introduced carefully, typically orchestrated in the Internet Engineering Task Force, which is a collection of engineers and researchers who resolve these issues Internet-wide, independent of the vendors and operators, but taking their needs seriously.

No, I’m more than happy for ISPs to experiment with techniques that the IETF thoroughly disapproves of. Central planning, even that of benevolent technocrats, is fraught with danger.

A more convincing argument comes later:

Comcast used these non-standard mechanisms in an unexpected way, potentially disrupting systems and applications that are designed assuming the expected behavior of the Internet.

It’s not what you’d write in a public submission, but Comcast’s actions is a bit like a dog poo in the public park. Not only does it offend those who tread in it, but now everyone else has to expend time and energy looking for poo and telling their kids to keep away from the grass near the entrance. There’s an externality which is imposing costs on application and device designers everywhere. I’m happy for us to have regulations that manage pollution, but that carefully balance the true costs of the pollution against the immediate benefits of production. If in doubt, regulate less. Indeed, in this case, probably not at all, since if a legit P2P application was being messed up, Comcast customers would either churn or be willing to pay less.

And the real reason to be furious at Comcast comes at the end:

When Comcast or any Internet Access Provider claims to offer Internet Access, they implicitly agree to participate according to the standard practices of the Internet as a whole. Otherwise, all they may claim to offer their customers is “selective access to part of the Internet’s capabilities”.

Now, we might disagree what those “standard practices” are, but to me it’s limited to:

• social measures to manage traffic (pick up the phone and tell the customer they’re over their fair use limits), or
• applying traffic shaping to users with clearly defined and transparent policies and a system of individual notification of any special throttling,
• dropping packets until the pain to that user modifies their behavior.

Event if RST injection (i.e. automated lying) is superficially the most efficient way of damping the traffic, users will respond to less technically efficient (but more socially acceptable) incentives. Yes, DOCSIS cable networks have a whacky uplink architecture that makes them very sensitive to lots of TCP/IP sessions being started at once, such as BitTorrent attempts. Just start chucking away 99% of their packets, irrespective of protocol, to reflect the social cost to the other users of uplink congestion. They’ll soon get the message and change when their Web browsing slows to a crawl. At the very least send them an email saying you’re throttling them, and why.

Picking on specific protocols, without telling the user, and then denying it, just isn’t part of the game. Particularly protocols that compete with your own video distribution network. Time for the referee to call a foul, and Comcast to scrape the sh*t off everyone’s shoes.

UPDATE: Before anyone gets too excited that Martin’s gone all neutralist, the offence is one that’s of the poop in the park magnitude, not that of premeditated murder that some more hysterical accounts would have you believe. Antisocial, irresponsible, stupid — but not criminal.

I like the dog poop metaphor, despite its graphic nature, because it seems to me you've hit on the problem: Comcast should be free to choose to do whatever it wants with its own network. However, if they choose a behavior that disrupts higher-level network, they could face sanctions from other networks that peer with them; they could be discriminated against, and, to follow their argument, there should be no recourse for Comcast being discriminated against by peers (or even individual Web sites).

I completely agree that there are no agreements binding the Internet. AS's to agree to certain things with IANA (very limited things, mostly about numbering) to obtain their status. But everything else is a matter of contracts among peers, which can state anything legal and enforceable -- or even unenforceable and illegal, and let the courts sort that out.

The Internet is an anarcho-syndicate, I've always argued. Independent entities agree specifically to certain rules that both avoid pooping in the pool, and allow them to ban those who do poop.

Churn where? To dial-up? That's my alternative to Comcast in my neighborhood (almost, we just got ADSL with Ma Bell, but at 18,000ft from the CO it's nothing to brag about). Think DOCSIS uplink is bad, try the multiple TCP starts on DOrA. Time them right and get some amazing idle mode thrashing. Anyways, I think this is a lot of people venting their frustration over the duopoly status quot. We need some serious LLU competition, and the FCC has a loosing track record on delivering.

I remember reading that increasing capacity would cost less than packet filtering. Is it true? I suspect it is.

All it takes to be part of the Internet as an Autonomous System is to agree to participate according to the very simple ground rules of the Internet.

Bzzt. There is no social or legal contract to adhere to the IETF’s recommendations.

I think you've missed the point. There's no social or legal contract in the same way that there's no social or legal contract in a game of football. But if you want to play football you have to abide by the rules or else other people won't play with you.

This was especially true back when the internet was limited to large institutions and the telcos were only there to provide the pipes. If one institution decided to not play by the rules then other institutions would stop talking to them. The telco wasn't really involved.

I think this is the fundamental cause of all the debate over network neutrality. There's the traditional view of the internet as a network of equal peers and the new view where most people on the internet are individual customers of a service provider (and are therefore not equal peers, though maybe some of them are not be being made aware of this by their service providers).

The thing is, I don't think "participate according to the very simple ground rules of the Internet" really applies in the Comcast case. As long as Comcast are playing by the rules in their external connections then they are being neutral according to the traditional view. This is the same as how way back at Uni, as long the University played by the rules with the internet at large the internet at large could care less what happened inside the university network. The Uni was the equal peer, not me. With Comcast, they are the equal peer, not the consumers of their service.

Reed's an interesting character, but his FCC filing and hearing comments were more street theater than serious technical analysis. Comcast's problem is a small number of users who have effectively monopolized their limited upstream bandwidth, at the expense of the web surfing satisfaction of the other 95%. They deal with this imbalance in bandwidth appetites by adjusting the amount that P2P has as a whole under conditions of higher than normal load.

Comcast screwed up in not disclosing fully what they're doing and why, but as a technical matter their approach is sound enough.

IETF people have a long-standing grudge against middleboxes injected RST packets, as you can see from RFC 3168 (ECN for IP), but it's silly. RSTs are good because packet drop is inadequate, which is why ECN was invented in the first place.

Reed is simply reflecting that and adding a little "Respect My Authorita" as a second-rate Eric Cartman.

You could even combine it with VON the next week, so you can go shopping for IP telco equipment to execute the ideas from eComm.

I’m probably going to get out to San Francisco on Monday 10th March, so bid now for Tuesday meetings!

PS - I can still give you an eComm discount code, although you’ve missed the double early bird discount.

I cannot make it but I do recognize many names. I particularly recommend this guy:

http://ecommmedia.com/2008/capouch-twelvevolt-telephony.php

Wife calls, she’s away with the kids at the in-laws. She was unaware of the Heathrow plane crash, because she had only looked at the BBC News website on Thursday morning, and again this morning. So she’d missed the window during which it was a headline.

Second one. I get the Edinburgh Evening News by RSS into my feed reader. But I hardly ever read it, because there’s about 70 articles a day, and many are ‘national’ news that’s I’ve already read somewhere else, and the volume is way too high.

So, what’s the common thread? There’s the old cliche of putting the “me” back into “media”. This seems to have two distinct parts:

• Personalising the content to me.
• Personalising the presentation to me.

With the former, which is what most personalisation efforts concentrate on, you’re trying to pick the stories that fit the individual’s interest. This is hard, because it requires someone to crawl inside the head of the reader.

With the latter, all I want is “tell me the new news since the last time I checked”. But none of the news services do that. Each time I go back to the BBC News home page, I have to manually scan to see what “new news” there is. Don’t we have computers to take all this donkey work out for us? And how come none of the RSS readers seem to have the ability to summarise a thousand articles into the ten that really matter (with a “more…” button), based on actual reader activity?

Looks like an opportunity for someone…

Oh yeah, the issue looms large. I have a lot of feeds, but how do I know when something important happens, really? absolutely, your "seen items" should have the option of dissapearing if you want, and to only show the new items. Perhaps the friends feeds in google reader is a step towards social information sharing, ie. if your friends choose to share it, you can pay attention based on your opinion of this friend. In the meantime, I think people will text their friends important news, because it takes effort on their part, and that is the needed friction, currently.

It’s a prelude to my keynote at the upcoming EComm conference in San Francisco, 12-14 March 2008, for which Lee is the organiser. There’s an absolutely extraordinary who’s who of speakers lined up, so the only thing missing now is you.

Minor location nit : Ecomm is not in San Francisco, it's in Mountain View .. if Mountain View is San Francisco, E Kilbride is Edinburgh ... the Computer History Museum is just along the street from our office, and from Google.

Think of it this way:

• Standing alone, away from city lights, under a starry sky, is an inspiring experience.
• Standing together, away from city lights, under a starry sky, is an awe inspiring experience.
• Knowing this, a telco will try to sell you a picture of the night sky, preferably with an 18 month contract for “sky support”.

I find the current generation of socnets, that suck you in and juice you for “user-generated content” and contextual advert fodder, somewhat scary. But we’ll grow up and mature, and these online spaces are becoming places that are about more than commerce. Places where human spirit blossoms — works of art are created, conflicts are waged, love is found and lost. Simply a place where we can play and explore and interact, on epic scales which the real-world environment cannot support.

The telco thing? Well, I think now more than ever it’s important for operators to open up their platform, because they have a great suite of under-used assets that outsiders can’t access and exploit. You’ll never be able to sell beauty, passion, or love. But you can do a lot more to act as an enabler and distributor for those who can and do.

Happy New Year, I’m off on hols for a week in rural mid-Wales.

I’m going to be speaking at eComm 2008, which takes place on 12-14 March. Buddy Lee Dryburgh is behind it — and there’s a great backstory.

Miffed at the shelving of O’Reilly’s ETel, he pawned his kids’ XBoxes and soft toys to launch eComm in its place, and thus enable that unique community to continue to have a meeting space. You can go read the official blurb with the carefully crafted sales pitch, but what makes it special to me is:

• The people. There are very few places that the bellheads and netheads get to meet each other, apart from to trade insults. This is a constructive engagement and learning opportunity.
• The focus. Personal communications is where the money has always been. Telcos have been in the social networking business for over a hundred years, even if they don’t seem to know it. Web 2.0, welcome to the party. Content, please stand at the back of the queue and wait until called.
• The talks. Lots of cutting-edge ideas, in rapid fire, without long droning dull sponsor talks.
• The opportunity. Both the telecoms and IT/Web industries are in collision, but are also coming to slowly recognise the value of what the other side does. Without apps your network distribution is worthless; but without distribution, your app has nowhere to go. Every time one side tries to do the other, the outcome is a lot of pain. Or, to put it another way, the phone company still has your money, and the Web people have the ideas, so let’s trade.

If you’d like to join me there, then I’ve got triple good news. The cost of the conference is already low. (You’ve no idea how expensive it is to lay on one of these events until you do it!) Early bird registration is still in effect, for another $300 off. And if you email me, I’ll tell you how to do the special handshake and get another 15% off. You’ve got two weeks to register for the discount…

Boss won’t pay? Burn some frequent flyer miles, and invest in your own career future for once. You need to be there.

Dear Martin,

Just a quick note on another conference, this time based in London, which will be of interest to you. Called Telecoms Cannibalization, it looks at all aspects of convergence and how telecoms providers are trying to change their business models and offset the continued decline in ARPU. It is on the 31st of January & the 1st of February, and there is a half day workshop also available on the Wednesday. Further details are at: www.mobilepricing.com

My take: emergency calling is a property of the LINE and not the SERVICE. It’s the ISP who knows where you are. Pick up your Vonage or Skype phone, move next door to show your neighbours how cool it is, and you shouldn’t have to reregister your address if your host gets a dicky ticker.

In other words, why not make 10.9.1.1 always route to a SIP server which offers IP emergency calling?

I agree that the correct way to equate the PSTN and IP is at "LINE" level. After all emergency calling is required even for "fax" line. This means that VoIP advocates have to start accept that voice is just an application in PSTN as well.

There is a social benefit as well. If this view takes hold, it will be much easier to politically introduce that emergency calling should include some data services as well.