The blunt-force approach of a bandwidth cap does have the advantage of making users think twice about streaming HD movies from Netflix. That is, perhaps not coincidentally, doubly to the advantage of most big ISPs, because they’d rather have you spending money on their video services than paying a third party.
— Shed a Tear: The Age of Broadband Caps Begins Monday | Epicenter | Wired.com
Translated to the digital realm, the diplomatic example captures the notion that citizens have the right to communicate both with one another and, in a cloud environment, with their own remote selves, full stop. No party, public or private, should have the unchecked ability to abridge an individual’s lines of communication over our generic global Internet./via Net Neutrality as Diplomacy | Yale Law and Policy Review. This seems like a good new way to frame the debate. I wouldn’t go with diplomacy though as much as human rights. You are cutting people off from their own data, and parts of themselves. Diplomats are people that we think of as being special, but we all have autonomy and liberty, right?
Google and Verizon have decided on a compromise for net neutrality. Well, not really a compromise, since the plan was drafted in secret, and hardly anyone that it affects was involved, but you know. Compromise sounds better than secret business arrangement. It is not a business arrangement, don’t call it that! It’s just an arrangement between two businesses.
Anyway, it’s very depressing and bewildering to me. Obviously I understand what Verizon gets out the deal. Under this proposal there will be no network protections for wireless access of any kind, which unless you think the future of the internet is shoving the same amount of bits over telephone and cable lines, is probably the most important thing to give protection. As if that isn’t a big enough loophole, there will also be no protections for anything referred to as “additional services”, which is vague. The examples given have been, so far, a lot of bullshit. FiOS TV, healthcare monitoring, 3D (seriously!) have been thrown around. Guess what? Those all work with TCP/IP. What this amounts to is anything new won’t have protections. Anything you can think of that isn’t being done on the web now could be called an “additional service”, why not! Twitter is new right? or does it have to be something that is not in a browser to fool the misinformed that there is some magic happening there? Maybe Apple’s app store, or Amazon’s video rental system, or Roku boxes. Are those “new”? I mean they run over the “public internet” and TCP/IP just fine now, but imagine a fun new world where Verizon could argue these are new functionality and should be excluded from protections.
Google is fundamentally misleading people with this. TCP/IP is a dumb, generative network. They know this of course, the person that helped create it, Vint Cerf works there now. As Doc Searls and David Weinberger said in their essay, “Adding value to the Internet lowers its value”. The value of the internet is that it is a dumb network with all the value at the ends. You can, now, create an app store, or Twitter, or FiOS TV, or healthcare monitoring, without changing the network or involving the carriers. This allows for rapid innovation. Can you imagine if Twitter had to meet with every ISP in the world before rolling out? It might be similar to how it was for them to get SMS support, which is still spotty by country, and occupies a huge amount of time and effort.
There is no reason to pretend that we need to draw some imaginary line in the sand and say that everything over this line is some “new service” which net neutrality would inhibit. Quite the opposite, net neutrality allows rapid innovation. Changing how the internet works and having everyone get into business arrangements with ISPs will slow innovation. Of course, the idea that Verizon cares about innovation is also a ridiculous lie.
What I really don’t get though, is what is in this for Google? People say, Verizon is a huge carrier for Android, but Google doesn’t really make money on Android, and even if they did, why make such huge concessions in the wireless space? It’s not like Verizon has any serious leverage, are they going to stop selling Android phones, and watch everyone switch to AT&T? Google’s whole plan for Android isn’t to make money by most analysts estimation, it’s to commoditize the smart phone OS. That goal is achieved no matter what Verizon does. Android offers the only practical response to the iPhone that Verizon can also fuck up and brand however they want, I really don’t see them abandoning that. Apple will simply not allow any proprietary rebranding or labeling, and will likely just sit it out in US markets until Verizon concedes (and maybe also moves on to LTE while they wait). The only other option is Windows Phone 7, which Microsoft seems to be working with AT&T for, but even so that is a gamble, and Verizon just got burned pretty badly with the Kin. So, seriously, what is Google getting out of this?
A solution to url shortening is going around the web now. The plan is to use rev=”canonical” to show the shortened url for the resource you’re using. I think we might have lost track of the problem. The problem is that twitter limits your posts to 140 characters. Twitter does this because it started mainly as an SMS system, a stupid protocol that the mobile carriers thought up to make money overloading their already existing control channels. I don’t know what the break down in their traffic is, but I think we can safely assume most users don’t use SMS now. I just loaded the public timeline repeatedly to get a sample of 100 tweets, and none used SMS. Twitter counts absolute characters also, so for example a tweet can’t do something like:
Hey, i love google!And get a count of 19, they have to say:
Hey, i love http://google.comAnd get 29. This is because, again they are sending to phones, and most SMS clients are stupid and can’t handle links at all. (which is usually smart since they don’t have much room to work with anyway) To get around this problem, people turned to url shorteners. It took people a while to realize this was a terrible idea. urls should mean something, people like knowing where they are going, it destroys the link structure of the web, it relies on a company to exist and creates a single point of failure, and any number of other terrible things. So the solution is
rev="canonical", where I would say, for this page maybe
I signed up for hunch, and have been playing with it a lot over the past couple weeks. It’s a fun system, very addictive at the beginning, while you are answering the questions about yourself (called “teach hunch about you” or THAY questions).
How it works is pretty interesting. Topics are the big questions, “What laptop should I get?” etc. Under these topics are questions and results. Questions are the filters that lead to results. Things like “Should the monitor be bigger than 17”?” for example. Results are the solutions. There are two types of results, yes/no, and specific things. In the laptop example, a result might be a MacBook Air. Some questions, like “Should I learn to ski?” would have just two results, yes and no.
Results are “trained” which means for each result someone goes through all the questions in the context of that result and says which specific answers apply to it. For example, the topic “What font should I use?” would have a question, “Do you want serif, or sans-serif?”. The result Palatino would be trained in each question. For example, Palatino, would be trained as yes for that question. The training is done mostly by humans, but if the algorithm sees something it thinks correlates, it will train on its own. The ranking of results is based on a combination of the training, and what people like you have rated things. (people-like-you being based on the THAY questions)
It works surprisingly well really. Even without the training, and questions to guide it, it can do a pretty good job basing it’s answers only on people-like-you data. The team is also very responsive to suggestions and things in the forums, and is iterating a lot. It’s fun to see employees so obviously excited about the product they are making.
If I have one criticism, it’s that there isn’t enough to do, and no great ways to tell people what needs to be done. There’s also no good way to compare work and create any feedback loops. I think these things help build a real community. I’m thinking of this a little like Wikipedia, and maybe that isn’t a correct comparison. Maybe they don’t need a community in the same way really. It’s certainly very easy to use, and they have built the tools for people to correct their own results. Maybe that’s enough.
Interesting read from Joi Ito on ICANN after having been a board member for a while.
