Monthly Archives: June 2006

Net Neutrality: Rules vs. Principles

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I found this post from Tim O’Reilly very helpful in thinking about the Net Neutrality debate.

Tim focusses on a helpful distinction made by Chris Savage — between rules and principles. The gist is:

A lot of confusion in the Net Neutrality debate has do with the hoary distinction in jurisprudence between “rules” and “principles.”

A first approximation for the non-lawyers here: the tax code is full of RULES: Take this number, divide it by that number, place the result on line 17 if it’s greater than $57,206 and on line 19 if it’s less. Etc. RULES are intended to direct or forbid very specific behaviors.

PRINCIPLES, on the other hand, are more general. When driving you are required to use “reasonable care.” If you don’t, then you are negligent and can be held liable, in a tort case, for the damages you cause. And though there are plenty of rules about driving, tort liability is based on the PRINCIPLE of reasonable care, and is assessed on a case-by-case basis.

“Net Neutrality” is a principle, not a rule…

It seems to me that this distinction is useful in all kinds of areas. For example, in relation to IP legislation, an important principle is that monopolies are at best a necessary evil and should be avoided or limited wherever possible. This means that any proposal to extend an IP right (which is, remember, a legislative grant of monopoly rights) should always be viewed with extreme scepticism.

Toll booths on the Net

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Believers in the Internet as a free flowing, end-to-end service were talking about the end of it all today, after a Net neutrality amendment to telecom legislation was voted down in a Senate committee yesterday on an 11-11 tie. We’ve been over this ground before (see “That’s a mighty fine looking stream of data you’ve got there … shame if anything happened to it.”), so this time we’ll let ZDNet’s Mitch Ratcliffe say it: “The Senate Commerce Committee, splitting 11 to 11 and therefore rejecting compromise language, set the stage for a carrier-controlled Internet. If the bill passes the Senate and is signed by the President, you can kiss the Net you know ‘goodbye.’ Farewell, open networks and open standards. Soon every packet will be subject to inspection and surcharges based on what it carries and who sent it or where it is going. The compromise language would have guaranteed that all traffic sent over carrier backbones would be treated equally, regardless of its source or destination. Carriers will be free to target especially profitable traffic for surcharges.” Those who frame this as a fight to keep the government’s sticky fingers out of the “natural” workings of the market were pleased. “For those of you who think this is a bad thing — recall the FCC’s actions after the Super Bowl ‘wardrobe malfunction.’ If you think the U.S. government is going to lay down neutrality rules and then keep a hands off attitude beyond that, you probably also think you’ll find a pony under every large pile of manure,” writes James Robertson. Both sides agree, however, that there is fighting that remains to be done, with Net neutralists taking heart from managing the tie in committee and momentum for a Senate floor fight growing.

txts R going thrU roof

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According to BBC NEWS…

Mobile phone users in the UK sent a record 3.3 billion text messages in May, figures show.

The Big Brother TV show, the FA Cup and Champions League finals all helped boost numbers, according to the Mobile Data Association (MDA).

Person-to-person texts sent across all mobile phone networks averaged 106 million per day last month.

This figure was up 26% on May 2005 and beat the previous UK record of 3.2 billion texts sent in March.

That figure could rise higher this month due to a surge in World Cup-related messages.

[…]

More than 120 million text messages were sent on FA Cup final day, rising to 124 million texts on Champions League final day.

A predicted 36.5 billion texts will be sent by UK mobile phone users this year – up from 32 billion in 2005, according to the MDA.

A 100 megapixel chip!

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Technology Review has the story.

San Juan Capistrano, CA-based Semiconductor Technology Associates (STA) has designed the world’s highest-resolution digital camera chip, capable of holding an image composed of more than 111 million pixels. By comparison, the best consumer cameras take shots of 12 to 16 million pixels, and an average computer monitor offers about one million pixels.

The imaging chip, which is a charge-coupled device (CCD), was designed for use in telescope cameras that map stars and ever-moving objects in the solar system, says Richard Bredthauer, STA’s president. But this large-scale chip — it measures four inches square — could be useful in more fields than just astronomy, he says, including high-resolution microscopic images of proteins, military surveillance applications, and even civilian mapping projects that require detailed aerial photography.

It’s four inches square. Too big for my Hasselblad. Bah!

Larry withdraws his offer to Harvard

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Well, well. According to the New York Times,

Lawrence J. Ellison, chief executive of the Oracle Corporation and one of the world’s wealthiest people, has decided not to donate $115 million to Harvard as he announced he would last year, the company confirmed yesterday.

Harvard had planned to use the donation, which would have been the largest single philanthropic donation the university had ever received, to establish the Ellison Institute for World Health, a research organization devoted to examining the efficiency of global health projects.

Mr. Ellison decided to cancel his plans for the donation after the resignation in February of Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, amid a storm of controversy.

Mr. Summers’s five-year tenure at Harvard was characterized by attempts to change the university’s culture and by a personal style that alienated some professors. He also had missteps, like his remarks suggesting that “intrinsic aptitude” could help explain why fewer women than men reached the highest ranks of science and math in universities.

“Larry Summers was the brainchild of this project,” Bob Wynne, a spokesman for Oracle, said yesterday. “His departure is what caused Larry Ellison to decide against making the donation.”

The Princeton-Microsoft IP Conference

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Ed Felten blogged the conference. Here’s his summary of what Yochai Benkler said:

He has two themes: decentralization of creation, and emergence of a political movement around that creation. Possibility of altering the politics in three ways. First, the changing relationship between creators and users and growth in the number of creators changes how people relate to the rules. Second, we see existence proofs of the possible success of decentralized production: Linux, Skype, Flickr, Wikipedia. Third, a shift away from centralized, mass, broadcast media. He talks about political movements like free culture, Internet freedom, etc. He says these movements are coalescing and allying with each other and with other powers such as companies or nations. He is skeptical of the direct value of public reason/persuasion. He thinks instead that changing social practices will have a bigger impact in the long run.

Footballing dilemmas

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After watching the (excellent) World Cup match between France and Spain (which France won convincingly), I sent a text message to a friend currently holidaying in Santander saying “I guess the Spanish Samaritans will be leaving the phone off the hook tonight”.

Back came the reply: “Difficult night for the Basques — wanting both sides to lose”.

Conditions for creating Silicon Valleys

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Marvellous summary by Tom Coates of Paul Graham’s talk, “How American are start-ups?”, to XTech.

  • Silicon Valley is about an accumulation of people, not geography – get the right 10,000 people and you could recreate it
  • To create an environment which is conducive to start-ups you need two groups of people – rich people who are prepared to invest and lots of nerds
  • Government is not a good replacement for rich people / angel investors as they’re slow, invest inappropriately and don’t have the contacts or experience to support the right activity
  • For rich people and nerds to mix you need a location where lots of rich people who care about technology and lots of nerds want to be – New York has lots of rich people but no nerds, other places lots of nerds but no rich people
  • Places that attract nerds and rich people tend to be cosmopolitan, liberal, happy places like San Francisco where people walk around looking happy and with high levels of students going to high-class universities
  • Other features of good places potentially conducive to this kind of activity are: personality, good transport hubs and connections to the existing Silicon Valley, quietness, good weather, not about excitement.

    • The Cambridge skyline

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    The construction of the so-called ‘Grand Arcade’ proceeds apace. Soon this lovely medieval city will have exactly the same kinds of shopping mall as Gateshead or Dubai. A glimpse of a previous generation of commercial vandalism (in this case the early 1970s redevelopment of Lion Yard) can be seen in the foreground. (Fittingly, that building was the first — rented — location of the Microsoft Research lab.) When I am Supreme Ruler, Lion Yard and Grand Arcade will be bombed flat using precision-guided munitions. (The occupants will be given due warning and time to collect their belongings before fleeing: I am a hard man, but fair.)