What’s New with Wu

There is a story in today’s Wall Street Journal about Google’s supposed abandonment of Net Neutrality principles.

As someone who dabbles in journalism now and then, I can see the obvious temptation that shapes this story.  It’s the Google - Heart of Darkness plot — Google, the company that does no evil, turns to the dark side.   It’s a tempting story.  I’ve even written versions of it myself.

On the other hand, you actually have to have the goods to have a story.  You need a Kurtz.  And as much as the story tries, there isn’t one here.

What the WSJ is on about is content caching; something that’s been going on for more than a decade.  If you have billions of users, like Google or even the WSJ, you need lots of cached copies of your content for it to deliver fast.  If you are a personal web-site (like this one) you don’t need caching.    Caching is one of the advantanges money can buy, but no one has ever suggested its an unfair advantage.

Nor is this anything new, even co-location.   AT&T, for example, has been offering services like this since at least 2000.      Its never been part of the principle net neutrality debate.

The emptiest part of the WSJ piece are the insinuations that Obama’s positions are changing.  While I cannot speak on behalf of the Obama team, there is just no evidence to suggest that.  None at all.   Except for a random quote from Rick Whitt saying that the Obama team has been quiet.  Well, more like, they are busy with other stuff — caching policy is priority # 8931 at best.

The Wall Street Journal’s Net Neutrality piece, as far as I can tell, is trying to drum something out of Google caching and a few things Larry (Lessig) has said about most favored nation prioritization.   Not news.

In my chapter on radio, one of the most interesting, though obviously not in a good way, theorists of broadcast radio is Joseph Goebbels, the old Minister of Enlightenment and Propaganda for the German government in the 1930s.
Here are his views on the possibility of objective, neutral broadcasting –

The radio must subordinate itself to the goals which the Government of the National Revolution has set itself. The notion that the work of radio can remain an end in itself cannot be refuted enough.

There is nothing at all that is not tendentious. The discovery of the principle of absolute objectivity is the privilege of German professors - and I do not believe that university professors make history…

In other words, the Nazis believed that everything was necessary partisan; aiming for objectivity or neutrality in any form a dream of university professors.  The rejected idea of a communications network as “an end in itself” is interestingly, both the idea of common carriage and the founding principle of the internet’s design.

In his best quote of all, Goebbels liked to say of broadcasting that it is simply:

the spiritual weapon of the totalitarian state.

I was very pleased with Verizon’s “grand opening” announcement –

I take it at face value that they’ve just decided its a good idea to be more open.

In the paper Wireless Carterfone I highlighted a policy that seem destined to get Verizon in trouble: its practice of deciding who gets to send mass text messages. The policy sets Verizon up for obvious violations of Net Neutrality.

Reality caught up as Verizon is now facing criticism for blocking mass text messages from NARA, Pro-Choice America, who Verizon’s policy blocked as too controversial.

This is a test case for what common carriage and net neutrality are all about. It shows the link between net neutrality and free speech: what we see here is a problem of private discrimination, not public. That’s not a concern for the First Amendment, but it has been a concern met with by rules of common carriage –

Declan McCullough, my friend and sometimes mentor in photography, has a recent story called

 TEN THINGS THAT KILLED NETWORK NEUTRALITY

While I appreciate Declan’s taste for drama, the premise of the story is completely false.  Declan seems to believe that, if there aren’t people marching on the streets, and if the rules aren’t being broken, that “Net Neutrality” is dead.

The truth is that AT&T is currently operating under Net Neutrality rules — and in effect, the whole industry has been abiding by net neutrality rules for the entire last year.

That’s why there’s no protests - the carriers aren’t misbehaving — though recent shut-offs by the cable companies may be a problem.

This example may make it clearer.  Say that, for some reason, everyone began obeying the speed limits.  Declan might say “the speed limits are dead” because no one is enforcing the law.  But the better view is that the rule isn’t being violated.

There are a mix of de facto and de jure net neutrality rules in this country that are currently being obeyed. The reason that there’s no protests is because, in effect, the net neutrality advocates won.

I’ve decided to post the original paper I wrote on Net Neutrality but never published in original form.

It was called A Proposal for Network Neutrality and I wrote it in the summer of 2002.

Later I took parts of it and turned it into another paper called Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination

Some of my ideas have changed since I wrote the 2002 paper, but I thought maybe it might be useful for anyone who is doing research into this area.

I enjoyed this letter from football great Steve Largent, asking me to please wake up and get over the 1970s!  Love this.

Someone Please Wake-Up Tim Wu!
By Steve Largent

In a recent essay published in Forbes, Columbia University professor Tim Wu does his best Rip Van Winkle as he attempts to liken today’s ultra-competitive wireless industry to the bygone phone monopoly of the 1970’s.   In his diatribe, Professor Wu characteristically throws fact to the wind as he attempts to paint the wireless industry as a plodding behemoth that is neither competitive nor innovative.  In Professor Wu’s world, there aren’t 233 million Americans using high-quality and ever-evolving wireless devices to surf the Internet, listen to music, take and send photos, watch live television, text message and email, play video games or make phone calls.  Nor do roughly 95% of the American people live in a county with access to 4 or more wireless carriers.  In Professor Wu’s world, companies aren’t competing, consumers don’t have choices, prices aren’t declining and innovation is at a standstill.   Wake up Tim, the 1970’s are over…and no one wants them back.

I wrote this commentary on a paper by Jonathan Zittrain –
Here is his response.

Tim, Thanks for your thoughtful comments on my piece. I appreciate your call for outright warfare rather than compromise in many instances ­ that the forces arrayed economically against an open internet are not much interested in balance except as it might be found in balance sheets. But I resist your call to reframe my argument in terms of the prevailing debate. As you point out, there are already well-developed arguments in now-familiar patterns about network neutrality.

(more…)

This article on Cellular Carterfone is a humdinger! In Information Week.
Meanwhile, I’ve noticed several well-done criticisms of my wireless paper, along with a few funded attacks. All will be answered in version 2.0 of the Cellular Carterfone paper (also known as Wireless Net Neutrality).