Useful profile of the co-founder (with Tom Anderson) of MySpace.
Hewlett on Net Neutrality
Good lay person’s guide to the issue in today’s Media Guardian. Thanks to Kevin Cryan for the link.
One dot per second
Editorial fatuity
It grieves me to say it, but my newspaper has an exceedingly silly leader today about England’s exit. It concludes:
The consolation, if there can be any, is in the performance that brought us so close to victory. When the squad come back from Germany, for all their flaws, they deserve to be greeted as heroes. We salute them.
In the old days, one would be left fuming at this fatuous sentiment. But there then follows a long stream of critical comments from readers (and this is at 10am on the morning of publication) taking the editorial apart.
“Are you on the same planet as me?”, inquires Grazman. “We should salute these underperforming, overpaid, useless brats? What are you thinking? The only player with any credit is Owen Hargreaves. The rest should be ashamed of themselves.”
Here’s another:
How on earth do they deserve to be greeted as heroes? They were absolutely rubbish. Limped out of one of the weakest groups in the tournament, just about got past mighty Equador, then fell at the first proper test: a depleted Portugal squad without one of their key players. Utterly embarrassing performance. With one or two exceptions, the entire team should be absolutely ashamed of themselves. Beckham’s time is up, Gerrard & Lampard looked a shadow of their club selves etc etc etc. Absolute rubbish…
There’s a lot more in the same vein, and of course outbreaks of the usual infighting that goes on in Blog comments — e.g. a Scotsman complaining that the Observer, as a UK newspaper, should talk about “England” not “us”, followed by people taking the Scot to task. But what’s interesting about this is that it is happening. Newspapers used to be one-way channels of communication. Journalists rarely knew what their readers thought. No longer.
The First Law of Television
This morning’s Observer column…
The case for net neutrality is abstract, sophisticated and long term. It was therefore a racing certainty that US Senators, who respond to corporate lobbying much as Pavlov’s dogs did to the ringing of a bell at mealtimes, would struggle with it. And so it has proved. On Wednesday, the Senate commerce committee rejected an amendment to a new telecoms bill which would have enforced net neutrality, thereby opening up the prospect of electronic tollbooths.
So has the die been cast? Not quite: the issue may be contested on the floor of the Senate. But at the moment there are lots of dire predictions about the consequences of the committee’s vote…
John Kerry wakes up
Wow! I thought John Kerry was dead. But he lives and breathes! Here’s what he had so say about the Senate Commerce Committee’s decision not to endorse the principle of Net Neutrality.
Yesterday in the Senate Commerce Committee I warned that those of us who believe in net neutrality will block legislation that doesn’t get the job done.
It looks like that’s the fight we’re going to have.
The Commerce Committee voted on net neutrality and it failed on an 11-11 tie. This vote was a gift to cable and telephone companies, and a slap in the face of every Internet user and consumer. It will not stand.
I voted against this lousy bill for two reasons: because net neutrality and internet build-out are crucial to building a more modern and fair Information Society, and both were pushed aside by the Republicans.
Everyone says they don’t want the new world we’re living in to be marked by the digital divide — the term is so cliched it’s turned to mush — but yesterday was a test of who is willing to ask corporate America to do anything to fix it, and the Commerce Committee failed miserably. Why are United States Senators afraid to say that companies should be expected to foster growth by building out their broadband networks to increase access?
Free and open access to the internet is something all Americans should enjoy, regardless of what financial means they’re born into or where they live. It is profoundly disappointing that the Senate is going let a handful of companies hold internet access hostage by legalizing the cherry-picking of cable service providers and new entrants. That is a dynamic that would leave some communities with inferior service, higher cable rates, and even the loss of service. Not to mention inadequate internet service — in the age of the information.
This bill was passed in committee over our objections. Now we need to fight to either fix it or kill it in the full Senate. Senator Wyden has already drawn a line in the sand — putting a “hold” on the bill, which prevents it from going forward for now. But there will be a day of reckoning on this legislation soon, make no mistake about it, and we need you to get engaged — pressure your Senators, follow the issue, demand net neutrality and build-out.
Great stuff! But it’s like Al Gore Mk II. Why do these guys not realise that if they were passionate about causes then they might win elections
[Link]
England’s coming home
Er, surprise, surprise. Rob Smyth (whose live Blog I have enjoyed) signs off.
The pantomime villain Ronaldo wins it with an excellent penalty, to Robinson’s left, and it’s the same, same old story for England. Gerrard and Lampard took awful penalties, but there was big controvery over Jamie Carragher’s miss. Lampard and Gerrard are motionless, broken, it’s horrible and a little poignant. Rio is crying violently; fate has merked him, and it’s harsh because, quietly, he had an excellent tournament. Ultimately, however, England found their level – the quarter-finals – and all the bluster and blame and bull****, particularly over Rooney’s sending off, we will get over the next few days can’t disguise it: that dullard idiot Eriksson has trousered £4m a year to do something that you or I could have done. I’m off to drown sorrows I didn’t realise I’d have at this result. Thanks for your emails – Rob.
Now for the next act in the pantomime — the tabloids which fuelled the preposterous fantasy that England could win the Cup, turn inwards — on Eriksson, the robotic manager; on the players; on the referees; on the Portuguese manager with his absurd Evelyn Waugh moustache; and on anybody else even remotely responsible for the defeat. Except, of course themselves.
Later… I’m not terribly interested in football, and am conscious of the fact that I’m pretty ignorant about it. So when I first saw England play and thought they looked terribly pedestrian I kept my views to myself. After all, what do I know about it? But having watched the France-Brazil game tonight it really does seem extraordinary that large numbers of apparently sensible people believed that the England squad was in the same league as France or Brazil. Now that England is out, I guess we can expect lots of people coming out of the woodwork saying that they had known all along that Eriksson & Co weren’t up to scratch. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. And of course, Eriksson had a contract ensuring that, whatever happened, he would cry all the way to the bank.
The Somme, 90 years on
Today is the 90th anniversary of the battle of the Somme, on the first day of which the British suffered 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 dead — the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army.
Max Hastings has a thoughtful piece about it in the Guardian. It begins:
Captain WP Nevill of the 8th East Surreys was a complete ass. In the line in France, he liked to stand on a firestep of an evening, shouting insults at the Germans. Knowing that his men were about to participate in their first battle and keen to inspire, he had a wizard idea.
On leave in England, he bought footballs for each of his four platoons. One was inscribed: “The Great European Cup. The Final. East Surreys v Bavarians. Kick-off at Zero.” Nevill offered a prize to whoever first put a ball into a German trench when the “big push” came.
Sure enough, when the whistles blew on July 1 1916, and 150,000 English, Scots, Welsh and Scottish soldiers climbed ladders to offer themselves to the German machine-guns, Nevill’s footballers kicked off.
One of the few eye-witnesses to survive described watching a ball arch high into the sky over no-man’s-land, on its way to the German trenches near Montauban. No winner collected Nevill’s prize, however. Within minutes the captain was dead, as were most of his men…
Later… James M emailed:
Every time I read about the Somme and other battles, in which the trials of the British and allies are described; when I visit Duxford or Bletchley or Madingley American Cemetery – my mind is always drawn to how it must have felt to have been on the other side. It’s almost never discussed. Does Germany have Somme-fests every modulo-10 years? So I was pleased to see this.
Net Neutrality: Rules vs. Principles
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
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.