brian will . net

The oblique threats to violate network neutrality coming from the telecom industry essentially come down to one thing: no one wants to be a commodity provider because there’s never an opportunity for turning a commodity into a golden goose. With a commodity, the seller pretty much gets back just what they put into it, never much more. This explains the greater part of the enthusiasm during the tech boom: startups and investors desperately searched for a position of control, where hard work, a good idea, and being in the right place at the right time once could mean that you won’t have to do any of those things ever again to still rake in the dough. Everyone wants their piece of a positive feedback loop, and the telecoms’ desire to make the network proprietary is just exhibit 3452327325 of this.

Currently, there’s a great difficulty in convincing the general public of the danger of this. What’s needed is a good analogy (via dburrows at One for the Morning Glory):

Imagine that your power company decides that it wanted to open a line of supermarkets. At the same time, it sends out an announcement that supermarkets (due to their refrigeration requirements) are particularly heavy users of the electrical system, and as a result, the power company will add a 15% surcharge to the power bills of any building that it deems to be a supermarket. Of course, the power company’s own supermarkets are exempt from this fee. When the existing supermarkets complain, the power company says that they’re asking for special treatment and trying to get electricity “for free” and that if they don’t like its terms, they should buy their power from someone else.

This anonymous response in the post’s comments makes a strange case:

What would be more accurate to say is that the power company has to continually add more infrastructure to keep up with the increasing electricity use by everyone (likened to Bandwidth in this case). Normally the power company increases the price of electricity across the board for every customer to pay for this but noticed that some customers are utilizing most of their infrastructure. Therefore, they decided to charge the heaviest users (beneficiaries in this case) rather than charging everyone.

First, the commentor is confusing flat-fee service (what most home users get these days) with metered service: in a flat-fee service, yes, the heavy users are subsidised by the casual users, but not so in a metered service, which is the kind of service under discussion in the neutrality debate. (It occurs to me, then, that another problem in making the case to the general public is that the general public tends to only see things in terms of home-use services.)

Second, the idea that heavy users can’t be reigned in is silly. If a customer is over-taxing your metered utility, you do a few things:

1. Cap their usage.
2. Cut them off.
3. Charge a premium for going over a usage within a time period.
4. If your customer base as a whole is communally taxing the network, you can charge a premium for peak-hour usage. With a bit of programming, you can have the per-hour use fluctuate dynamically along with demand.
5. Expand your capacity so you can sell more and thereby make more money. (Despite what the commenter suggests, the consumer can’t force the provider to provide more capacity.)

In contrast, what the telecoms are threatening to do is to charge a premium for how the utility is used, not for how much of it is used. Of course, in a properly competitive market, the best solution for a provider is to use techniques 1-4 in the short term but focus on expanding capacity for the medium and long term. The telecoms don’t see their business this way. They want to do whatever it takes to capture a market and then sit back and watch their golden goose crap out the golden eggs.

Here’s Lawrence Lessig on net neutrality, yesterday.

Here’s a cute video: Net Neutrality Explained

Too much?

Tomorrow I’ll post an argument about whether or not the claims RMS (Richard “Not Milhous” Stallman) makes regarding freedom have justification, but today I want to talk about some things on which RMS is clearly wrong, and they all relate to terminology:

1. “open source” is a perfectly good term for ethical software: RMS has admitted that “free software” is not a terribly satisfactory designation for ethical software, and in fact, there doesn’t seem to exist a particularly apt term in the English language. (Perhaps “freedom software”?) It’s true that the phrase “open source” was explicitly coined to play down the ethical and anti-monetary connotations of “free software”, but what about the words “open” and “source” are contrary to free software? The phrase is not sufficient to convey the ethical ideals, but it’s very clear by now that “free” is neither adequate nor sufficient to the job either. If Stallman wants to debate the primacy of ethical concerns over practical/technical concerns, I see no reason that can’t be done within the spacious confines of the term “open source”.
2. castigating others for their use of terminology is rarely productive: First off, everyone in the FOSS community has heard Stallman’s claims already, and it’s not for lack of terminology discipline that many disagree with some of his positions. Meanwhile, those in the broader, non-technical audience have probably not heard these arguments; shaking this group’s confidence in its very vocabulary is not going to empower these people to enter a technical discussion. Second, terms like “intellectual property” and “digital rights management” may be somewhat biased, but they’re generally useful and established. If a term is really egregiously biased, fine, offer your alternative and support its use with argument, but by castigating your audience’s use of terms, you make it literally hard for them to agree with you.
3. the operating system should not be called “gnu/linux”: In general, Stallman seems not to know how language works: “Linux” is a proper name, and there’s no good reason why it can’t refer to whatever the hell convention says it does. If “Linux” did just refer to a kernel, then we wouldn’t have need for ever saying “the Linux kernel” to distinguish it from “Linux”, yet we do need to make this distinction. Sure this naming is arguably just an historical accident, and of course the GNU project deserves credit for its work, but names are not about conveying correct origins. Names used to be about origins rather than convenience, and it wasn’t fun, e.g. people had names such as “Roger, son of William, son of James, son of Charles”. What good is freedom if it demands we spend all our time and cognition learning, saying, reading, writing, and typing the “proper” name for things? The only possibly good reason to insist on using the term “gnu/linux” is as a matter of advocacy–RMS suggests it might encourage people to inquire about the peculiar name and thereby learn about software freedom–but this won’t work for reasons mentioned in point #2.

I say all this generally supporting RMS’s ethical position. That position is not going to be advanced by being a dick stickler about terminology.