Net Neutrality and Mr Vaizey

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This morning’s Observer column.

Here’s a tale of two societies. The South Korean communications commission is planning to boost broadband speeds in that country tenfold by the end of 2012. That means Koreans will get one gigabit per second (Gbps) connections by next year, which is 200 times as fast as the 5Mbps ADSL connection which is common in the UK. Meanwhile, back in the middle ages (aka Whitehall next Wednesday), a ministerial summit on “net neutrality” convened by the culture secretary Ed Vaizey will hear how Britain’s internet service providers (ISPs) plan to throttle still further the measly internet access they provide to the citizens of the UK in order to boost their bottom lines and reduce competition.

Now it has to be said that the principle of net neutrality is not exactly a staple of saloon-bar conversation, so most citizens will assume that next Wednesday’s discussions have nothing to do with them. In this, they are sadly mistaken – as they will discover if Ed Vaizey does indeed agree to let the ISPs violate or erode the principle…

Twitter throwing its weight around? Or shooting itself in the head?

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Good GigaOM post by Matthew Ingram.

The point has become clear by now: anyone who is still under the impression that Twitter is the friendly, touchy-feely company that co-founder Evan Williams used to run — the one that admitted it “screwed up” relations with developers by moving too quickly — is living in a dream world. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo may have been a standup comedian at one point, but he is a businessman now, and Twitter is determined to do whatever it takes to come up with a business model to justify the huge valuations it is getting.

As MG Siegler has pointed out, what Twitter is doing is just business and not personal — but there is a reason that most businesses don’t operate the way the Mob does (other than the fact that killing people is illegal, of course). Acting that way, by routinely kneecapping people or setting their businesses on fire, is a risky proposition. Even if you *can* do it, it’s not clear that you *should* do it, especially if some of your business depends on goodwill (as opposed to fear), as Twitter’s clearly does, and especially if a large part of your success is due to that larger ecosystem.

Another pertinent view by Ryan Paul here.

Libya: the military realities

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Really and useful and informative piece by Paul Rogers in openDemocracy.net. Excerpt:

Libya’s air-force has over 300 combat-aircraft, but most are Soviet-era planes with a limited capability, and many are in storage – though there are also some Mirage F-1 planes that have been upgraded by French technicians. The force's strike-aircraft could have an impact if the conflict moves east towards the rebel stronghold of Benghazi, as equally could the substantial number of transport-aircraft and attack-helicopters. Again, the sudden reversal of alliances is highlighted by the presence in Libya’s transport fleet of fifteen C-130H Hercules planes from the United States, and by the Italian arms company Finmeccanica’s recent refurbishment of CH-47 transport helicopters.

These are the military realities. The larger strategic issue is that the Gaddafi regime will only survive beyond the short term if it regains control of most of Libya’s oil-and-gas industry. These resources are widely scattered; most of the energy fields are in the east and southeast of the country which accounts for around 80% of current production, with the remaining fields south of Tripoli in the west.

But the numerous oilfields, wherever they are located, are much less important than Libya’s coastal processing plants, refineries and export terminals. These are the strategically important centres, and the regime has to retrieve the majority of them without delay.

Zawiya, west of Tripoli towards the border with Tunisia, is one of the main outlets for the western oilfields. The Az-Zawiya oil-refinery west of the city is a key facility that the regime needs in order to maintain its own fuel supplies. This explains why the town has become is a key site of conflict between Gaddafi's forces and his opponents who have been occupying the city (see "The colonel fights back", Economist, 10 March 2011).

In addition to the plants near Tripoli, five terminals that handle oil-and-gas exports from eastern Libya generate the great majority of the country’s export revenues. The easternmost one is the large Marsa El Hariga terminal at Tobruk, on the border with Egypt; to the west are the Zuetina and Marsa El Brega tterminals south of Benghazi, the latter the site of Libya's liquefied natural-gas plant. These three are beyond Gaddafi's reach at present, while the two others – at Ras Lanuf (already the centre of conflict) and Es Sider (beside Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte) are being closely contested by Gaddafi’s forces.

The three sites west of Benghazi – Zuetina, Brega and Ras Lanuf – are likely to be the Gaddafi loyalists’ key objectives in coming days. The central challenge for Gaddafi's military planners is to move ground forces eastwards: a difficult logistical task since any large armoured vehicles, and especially tanks and self-propelled artillery, must be moved by road on large articulated transporters. Libya has relatively few of these and they can be rendered impotent by sabotage of bridges. Smaller vehicles may be able to divert across a dried-up river-bed but tank transporters most definitely can't.

In turn this means that airpower – transport aircraft as well as helicopters and strike-aircraft – will become increasingly important as the civil war develops. Both the direct military implications of this shift, and the possibility of greater numbers of civilians being killed by air-strikes, raises the second crucial issue in the evolving conflict: whether outside intervention will prevent Libya’s air-force from operating.

Hmmm… Sounds as though some kind of limited no-fly effort might be useful.