Internet Statistics by Alex Goldman

In February, professor Eben Moglen inspired the creation of the Diaspora open source social networking project when in his speech to the Internet Society at NYU, he said:

Facebook is the Web with “I keep all the logs, how do you feel about that?” It’s a terrarium for what it feels like to live in a panopticon built out of web parts.

And it shouldn’t be allowed. It comes to that. It shouldn’t be allowed. That’s a very poor way to deliver those services. They are grossly overpriced at “spying all the time”. They are not technically innovative. They depend upon an architecture subject to misuse and the business model that supports them is misuse. There isn’t any other business model for them. This is bad.

I’m not suggesting it should be illegal. It should be obsolete. We’re technologists, we should fix it.

Last night, it was the turn of Rob Spectre, community evangelist for Boxee, who dropped by the NYLUG in order to grow the community.

Spectre pointed out that while open source technology is widely deployed throughout the internet from the largest core data centers to the newest cell phones, it is absent from the living. This is due largely to the monolith in the living room, as in, “my god, it’s full of patent lawyers!”

Continue reading ‘Boxee at NYLUG’ »

A widely publicized study by the FCC on users’ perceptions of their broadband speeds (.pdf) found that 80 percent don’t even know what those speeds are supposed to be.

Also, a clear majority believe that the broadband provider should always “deliver the promised speed” — they clearly don’t know that the contract they signed but did not read merely promises a “best effort”.

Only a third of cell phone customers are pleased with the price and speed they get, though a majority are happy with the cell phone as a phone.

It is not clear at this time how or whether the survey will influence FCC policy.

Crumb! I never knew he was so good.

On May 21, 2010, we attended the latest performance of counter)induction. The first piece, “Ikhoor” by Xenakis, a piece for string trio, was greatly enhanced for me by a conversation I recently had with my friend Ken, a violinist. I had said that classical music does not have distortion and he described several methods by which violinists can obtain unusual sounds.

One involves turning the bow on its side, a method that Xenakis used very well in this piece. Another involves lifting the strings and letting them fall against the bridge of the violin, which produces a sound that is very different from plucking.

This was followed by Pascal Dusapin’s Trio Rombach, a piece I did not like.

All of this was a prelude to the meat of the performance.

Continue reading ‘counter)induction’s “the child is father to the man”’ »

Melissa and I attended a Games For Change workshop, a brainstorming session to kick off the 2010 Games For Change Festival here in New York and hosted by the Non Profit Commons in Second Life (NCSL).

Many of those attending had built games for nonprofits (including the World Bank!), and some represented organizations such as IBM that are interested in the idea.

The portion of the discussion that I felt I could contribute was this: what can games do for a non-profit? Nancy Goldstein phrased the issue this way: many remember having to teach organizations the difference between a blog and a press release. Many remember organizations that simply published press releases on blog, a colossal failure and a missed opportunity to engage people. So what can a game do that a press release cannot do?

Continue reading ‘Thoughts on Games For Change’ »

Bruce Kushnick believes that FCC reform is a charade and that the FCC plans to give cash handouts to phone and cable companies by taxing all broadband connections.

This FCC policy would be wrong, especially since an FCC study just concluded that the FCC should be spending money on fixed wireless.

Seens many stories about this. The latest is from the New York Times, covering food trucks in New Jersey.

The FCC plans to force the cellcos to warn users who are about to incur a large bill. Let’s see if this gets past the lobbyists and the courts. Gut check time for the FCC.

While most branches of the Obama adminstration are seeking to describe their policies as bipartisan, the FCC today chose to describe its new internet policy as a Third Way.

The Third Way is a phrase made popular by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. It describes an attempt to navigate a path between socialism and the free market. Given the extent to which the Obama administration’s opponents attack so many things it proposes as “socialism”, it is courageous of the FCC to use this term. (To be fair, the FCC says it’s seeking a middle road between re-regulation of a utility and the unfettered free market.)

The FCC does not want to regulate the internet if the internet is defined as the websites and services that we use when we connect to the internet. The FCC wants to regulate the price that users pay to connect to the internet and to be able to police monopoly power at the access level. To this end, the FCC refuses to abandon the great mistake of 2002 in which the FCC first decided that the internet was comprised of both a telecommunications component and an information service.

The problem with this splitting of the internet atom is that the internet consists of interdependent services.

Continue reading ‘FCC Seeks Third Way for Internet Regulation’ »

Bruce Kushnick recently pointed out to me that the FCC is using data from a period between 1997 and 2002.

The key difference between then and now is that through 2002, the ISPs still had control of the market, but today, the phone and cable companies rule.

Continue reading ‘The ISP Market Has Changed Since 2002 — Does the FCC Recognize This?’ »

The Washington, D.C. district court handed down its decision (.pdf) in the Comcast vs. FCC case on April 6, 2010.

The decision throws into focus the muddle that is current internet law in the United States.

“America needs competition among its high-speed internet providers. Open access has proved to be an effective way to do this elsewhere. Barring that, the FCC’s now-voided rules on net neutrality would have been a poor, but adequate substitute,” wrote The Economist, which is not a radical lefty ragsheet, in its response to the decision. The magazine recommended that Congress clarify the distinction between the internet and telecommunications.

All of this is necessary only because of a mistake the FCC made in 2002.

Continue reading ‘The Consequences of the Comcast vs. FCC Ruling’ »