1. "Peering" is a confusing term
   
   While I agree there are some unfortunate connotations of the word, that are ruthlessly exploited by some, it is globally recognised and dealt with in other countries, New Zealand need not set itself apart from this.
   
   Confusion is best addressed by definition not switching terminology. The chosen alternative, oddly selected by InternetNZ and Telecom, is "Internet Interconnect." "Interconnect" brings its own set of connotations, PT&T PSTN interconnect for example, that are better avoided as they are quite misleading in this context. If Wikipedia is to be believed and "The Internet" is a contraction of "The Internet is a worldwide, publicly accessible network of interconnected computer networks," "Internet Interconnect" expands to "Interconnected Network Interconnection" which is prima facae redundant and illustrates that interconnect is intrinsic to the Internet, not a tack-on the way PSTN "Interconnect" has been with the entry of competitors.
   
   
2. Peering is about "Equals"
   
   Peering not about *being* equals, but *behaving* like equals.
   
   
3. Peering is complex
   
   If we examine the longest operating and largest open peering exchange, WIX, we find 160 odd participants of diverse sizes and skills. If peering was complex, it is unlikely that this number of autonomous networks would participate.
   
   While it is possible to elaborate and complicate even the simplest concepts, look at string compared to macramé, the fundamental of peering, which is the fundamental principle of the Internet is:

   the exchange of traffic between members of different, directly connected, networks.

   As noted here, there are a number of other considerations that some are motivated to mix in, but these don't change the basic meaning.
   
   
4. Peering is about "Circuits"
   
   Historically peering (and most other networking) was implemented with circuits, point to point connections, and for reasons of efficiency and administrative simplicity, there were often pairs of circuits, established by each of the peering networks.
   
   This is before the era of cheap metropolitan switched services like CityLINK's PublicLAN which have allowed multiple connections over a single connection with very high performance at relatively low cost. Plus the circuit model doesn't scale, to provide the connections WIX does to 160 participants would require 25,440 such circuits.
   
   What was once canonical is now historical.
   
   
5. Peering is for Service Providers
   
   Empirically false as demonstrated by this list of registrations for the WIX, note, not all registered autonomous networks currently participate.
   
   The fact that changes in networking technology (the move from circuits to switches), costs of equipment (cheap BGP capable routers) has reduced the cost of entry and meant that customers are now intruding on service provider turf. Like most incumbents, this is regarded with concern.
   
   
6. Peering is about cost saving
   
   Peering has a number of other benefits including performance and resiliency. Peering is often deprecated as less important as transit (global rather than local delivery) costs decline. With recent outages in NZ so topical, the benefit of alternative delivery paths to local services is illustrated.
   
   
7. Peering is about carrying another network's traffic
   
   The argument runs that Network B is carrying Network A's traffic when they peer (and vice versa, but "The Folly Of Peering Ratios" by Bill Norton scotches that debate so I won't address it).
   
   The perspective of this view is completely wrong, Network B is carrying its customer's traffic, which is what it is paid to do. Same for the traffic while it is in Network A, it is traffic their customer has paid to send.
   
   Traffic does not belong to the network, it is the customers'.

An Auckland man was left partially blind because of an infection as a result of wearing a pair of coloured contact lenses for several days.

President of the Cornea and Contact Lens Society Dr Trevor Gray says the industry needs to be more controlled to prevent similar tragedies.

One option is to make all contact lenses prescription only.

While in no way minimising the tragedy of the loss, nor impugning the motivation of Doctor Gray, I think this might not have been the best example to use as a media lever for greater regulation.

The victim borrowed the novelty contact lenses from a friend. How would the legislation proposed by opthamolgists influence that? It wouldn't, it wouldn't have as much effect as the now well publicised risks will have. And I doubt there'll be any water drinking contests run as a result of the "Hold Your Wee For A Wii" in the US.

Even regulation would not prevent further occurrences, many things occur even when there is regulation and information in abundance.

We don't need regulation and experts forced on us, it is probably sufficient to publicise the problem, and its regrettable that the publicity only arises from our media, and/or that we pay attention, when there is a tragedy.

My basic tenet is that decentralisation and collaboration of small pieces loosely joined is a model that exceeds in many ways the hierarchical monolith of centralisation with its architectural tension between the center and the edge.

The fragmentation of the monolith into smaller pieces is a trend which continues and the latest example I have is the widget. Once standardised, this will allow you to assemble any number of functionalities in interesting ways. Standardisation is critical to extracting the full value of this technique, until then it remains a scattering of smaller or larger ponds in which every boat has to be rebuilt to float in another. We need the ocean.

This is the bite-sizing of the web, extending the power RSS gave us, and beefing up the IFRAME capability of HTML (standardised) and turning web top construction into a drag and drop task.

But that's not what I set out to write about. Currently I'm visiting a few new sites that I might want to use further, Geni.com for example. And every time I do, its the registration, profile population and configuration rigmarole all over again.

Then I read this. Could 2007 be the year of social network fatigue?

It sure is for me,

The number of sites I've been to recently that offer me one service I want, then lard themselves up with a whole lot "Web 2.0 Community" functionality that I already get somewhere else.

Building a community can happen external to almost any service, and if you do want a little more by way of profile from me, let me give it to you from another site. Now that other site is not likely to be MySpace, there have been some hints recently that they are contemplating isolation and freezing out some services that make them more desirable, duh! But from a site I control.

Now this must be sounding OpenID-esque, (not without critics) about which I know very little despite guru Doc Searls being heavily involved. I tried Sxipper, I hated it, which probably means I don't understand it well enough, but it was intrusive, gigantic and not much help.

When I go to a new site, if I register, I want to give them a password, a URL, and have them suck my favourite movies, books, etc. etc. into their application (and sync it if I change anything). Then in the small pieces loosely joined widgety world, I can hook together the various parts of my presence without repeating myself to every web site I meet from Amazon to Weebly.

Something at the data/information rather than functionality, operating in an X11-like "I am the server" mode and you are my client. Resonates with Doc's VRM musings well.

One of my gurus, Martin Geddes of Telepocalypse is Chief Analyst at, and led me to, Telco 2.0.

By and large they come up with sensible ideas about the future of telecommunications, though they take that difficult position of straddling the disruptive divide between the incumbent past and the faster moving future. The risk of having one foot in the grip of large, slow moving, comfortable monopoly incumbent from the past, and the other in the future agile novel disruptive world of diversity can easily be imagined.

But a recent post to their blog showed their savvy about the trend, and I was happily reading away, as one does when the content is agreeable, until I struck this line, and I acknowlege I may misunderstand and/or put too much weight on a single phrase, but:

The uncertainty of regulatory intervention ultimately works against the carriers, as it drives away risk capital.

Doesn't "uncertainty" = "risk?" or is this some use of either term with which I was not previously familiar?

Isn't uncertainty precisely where risk capital is supposed to be invested?

This of course is one of the many hypocrisies of our brave infrastructure capitalists, risk rewards for gilt-edged security. Champagne on a beer budget.

They bloviate about the risk, while its arguable there is zero risk in frequencies, copper or fibre. They will all return, not at the monopoly rent level that may be their wish, but how much more sunk could a cost be than copper?

Yes, there have been losses on all those infrastructures, but I would argue it was because of over-enthusiatic investment based on monopoly rent returns on stove-piped services that didn't arrive.

Even fibre's cheap, if you're not a Telco ("How we paid the construction guys 18 pints of beer and they gave us a free metro fibre network in Palmy North")

Not sure of the situation in the UK, but our roads, sewers, water pipes, electricity lines, ie all transport infrastructures are funded by the commons, the services over them from a range of suppliers. Telecommunications at the fibre, frequency or copper, is no different.

You can debate the options, but its done when AT&T do it.

Having proprietary service/carriage integration in this day and age is like banks issuing their own currency.

Popper's falsificationism is intimately connected to the notion of an open society. An open society is one in which no permanent truth is held to exist; this would allow counter ideas to emerge. Karl Popper shared ideas with his friend, the low key economist [Friedrich] Von Hayek who endorsed capitalism as a state in which prices can disseminate information that bureucratic socialism would choke. Both notions of falsificationism and open society are, counterintuitively, connected to those of a rigorous method for handling randomness in my day job as a trader. Clearly an open mind is a necessity when dealing with randomness. Popper believed that any idea of Utopia is necessarily closed owing to the fact that it chokes its own refutations. The simple notion of a good model for society that cannot be left open for falsification is totalitarian. I learned from Popper, in addition to the difference between an open and a closed society, that between an open and closed mind.

NOBODY IS PERFECT

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In the debate about LLU, much has been made of Property.

From the listing above, most of the debate has conflated two meanings of the word, where their separation would clarify what is being discussed and alleviate the fears of those who are concerned about State confiscation.

1.c. Something tangible or intangible to which its owner has legal title

This definition covers both the meanings that need to be seperated, the tangible copper, that LLU does not threaten. LLU would not take away Telecom's ownership of the physical infrastructure. There is no suggestion that access would be "given," it would be charged, at a rate who's fairness depends on your faith in the State to set prices.

5. A special capability or power; a virtue

The power of the local loop is that Telecom retains the monopoly control of it at the physical level, and we are beginning to see an ominous growth in efforts to control the use made of the services that run over this otherwise impartial infrastructure, "deep packet inspection" and limited performance to preclude the paying customer from making uses of the service which impact the operators profitabiility. NB. These efforts are sometimes presented under the aegis of protecting other customers from abuses by a small minority.

LLU is about sharing the virtue, not removing the tangible, and if you think that is confiscatory, remember you don't own the mineral resources under your land in this country, nor do you own the airspace above it. These virtues of your property are shared.

All that being said, I agree with those who argue LLU is too late, and implementation now, with changing network architectures underway, will be too vigorously opposed by the incumbent and their skill at twisting out of legislative and regulatory constraint suggests this is their new core competency. Evidence from Australia and the fate of their CDMA cellular network suggest their network decisions aren't as good as they could be. We await the outcome of the Next Generation Network investment, it does in fact more resemble the old, application specific approach of the PSTN, expanded to a "Triple Play," but limited to only the three plays that the operator believes will help them retain their current margins.

Fortunately, the Internet architecture routes around defects, and the worse the behaviour of incumbents, both local and alien, the more apparent the need for a "Third Way" becomes. Implementations, not further discussion and reports, are what is needed. The momentum of municipal networks, both wired and wireless, driven by standards and the lowering cost of entry, both at the center and edge of networks, is growing, despite efforts by beneficiaries of the current model, legislative and otherwise.

There is a growing appreciation of the difference between the connection, and the services delivered over it. One demands co-operation, the other benefits from competition.

Only networks of the people, by the people, for the people deserve protection by the collective.

Will this harm the incumbents? Possibly, left to their own selfish devices, they haven't proved terribly adept at adapting. And if it did harm them, isn't the Bentham utilitiarian approach to favour the greatest good for the greatest number apt?

Generally I'd observe that the dissemination of content that the Courts attempt to suppress, in the interests of Justice of course, was simply another case of content control being weakened by the Internet's democratisation of distribution.

However the limited distribution on paper at Wellington Railway Station is so retro as to suggest it is more a gesture, a deliberate provocation of the status quo, rather than any serious attempt to inform the public. Otherwise they would use the Internet.

How long the legal system believes it can sustain its control of distribution of information before it moves to a new model of jurisprudence will be as interesting to watch as the struggles of the recording and distribution industries.

Interdiction of information may have always been futile in one way or another. Constable Abbot was no doubt well known to anyone who intended him harm, the folding of the 4th Estate, with one exception, before another police action, is another example of the "great and good" protecting their own patches at the expense of the public knowlege.

Do we need to know? Good question, but a better one to ask would be, Do you trust them? Given the components of the system and their known behaviour, Politicians, Lawyers and Police, it would seem the more transparency in the law, the better.

Doubt comes in at the window when inquiry is denied at the
door.

-- Benjamin Jowet

That the rumoured Google PC will turn out to be a Google branded handset with a Linux OS and Sun et al terminal software with SDR, camera, standard batter/fuelcell form-factor, universal recharger socket, 4" color screen, mesh node (when docked, wired gateway) optional, Tor aware, also Hamachi... Google seeds market with 10⁹/10², 10⁷ in under-developed countries as part of food distribution, teach them to fish in the ocean of knowlege...

I mean why not? Google and Skype have kicked in to FON, which provides a small amount of subsidised hardware. Once you've got access and client, search rockets () and with appropriate pricing and again hardware subsidy, Indian broadband connectivity has rocketed, up a substantial 54 percent from 25 million in 2004, but this is a country where broadband costs as little as 199 rupees (US $4.50)/month.

ObUrl: Google, Sun plan partnership
Walled Gardens reward gardeners, Arpu.

They decided what services, when, and how much. They decided the platform, the speed of rotation, controlled the horizontal and the vertical. Digital, analog, when and who and how often and for what purpose.

Now remains of all those institutions exist, but they, like IBM command less and less clout. Or like railways, or the State or the Church, or Society, or broadcast channels, monopoly carriers or a plethora of once ruling classes.

Nobody knows even a working sub-set of everything, nobody is the boss of you, which means you can enter into any contract, given knowlege not the "reality" that supports their One Right Way.

But there remain those who want to live by their Status, poets, priests and politicians among many others, and maybe they can, but at least we'll know what they're doing.

Progressive societies, the movement from Status to Contract.

The coercive power of the centre is loosened, it must offer benefits, not commands, if it is to survive at all.

ObURL: http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2005/04/the_essential_m.html
Used to be a monopoly could ram it down your throat, any surprise we are not happy?

In ethical discussion, it is sometimes used to summarize a moral economy wherein privilege must be balanced by duty towards those who lack such privilege or who cannot perform such duty. It has been used recently primarily to refer to public responsibilities of the rich, famous and powerful, notably to provide good examples of behavior or to exceed minimal standards of decency.

While there is little about hierarchy I admire, the movement from status to contract being the characteristic of progress, let alone progressive societies, the notion of Noblesse Oblige is something I do agree with.

I'm not from the "rights imply responsibility" school, if rights imply anything, they are not rights, they are rewards for good behaviour. The judgement of "good" is usually left to some external entity that will often judge according to its own self-interest.

Privilege on the other hand is different, this is a state above rights that individuals attain, or are assigned, and consequently I think they do impose an obligation to aid rather than capitalise on the advantage privilege confers.

Privilege arises in all kinds of ways, intelligence, health, wealth, good education, good parents, good looks, skills, strengths, in fact I guess most of us are privileged in one way or another. Some people find the concept that they are privleged so painful that they invoke all kinds of reasons why they should be the beneficiaries of noblesse oblige rather than executors of it.

Others take their privilege and use it to leverage themselves into some kind of moral high ground from where the hoi polloi can be despised for lacking what they are fortunate to possess. And please don't think the "self-made" are excused from this, the privilege of self-discipline is just another example.

There was in my past a self-made man who did nothing but pillory those who had not shown his fortitude. Gah, if they had, if many had, how smug, self-satisfied and righteous could that individual feel?

Climbing to a state of self-satisfaction over the limitations of your fellow human beings does seem an unpleasant way to live, IMVHO.

The subject is a quote from Bob Frankston. Its the reverse of an idea I've had for a while, that if you make things a little bit easier they will occur a lot more often.

This is where I believe the explosion in cultural productivity (and other forms) is arising. Note I'm not claiming that the quality of production is increasing (though for the adept I'm sure that is true), the new entrants reduced barriers permit are also reduced guarantees they can leap as high as the incumbents.

But as Linus Pauling observed, "The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away."

And how are we to identify the good ones, when admittedly the "crud" will grow faster than the good? Collaborative peer to peer filtering via cheap, easy, personal global ("blogal?") publishing?

Description

The "end-to-end argument" was proposed by network architects Jerome Saltzer, David Reed and David Clark in 1981 as a principle for allocating intelligence within a large scale computer network.

It has since become a central principle of the Internet's design. End-to-end [e2e] counsels that "intelligence" in a network should be placed at its ends-in applications-while the network itself should remain as simple as is feasible, given the broad range of applications that the network might support.

ObUrL: http://www.law.stanford.edu/e2e/papers/Saltzer_Clark_Reed_ActiveNetworkinge2e.html
Law? Stanford? E2E? FixedURL:

Reed, Saltzer, Clark, Active Networking and End-to-End Arguments. An update on the thinking in the end-to-end paper, specifically criticizing the "active networking" idea.

http://www.reed.com/Papers/EndtoEnd.html

-- 
Let this be an example for the acquisition of all knowledge,
virtue, and riches. By the fall of drops of water, by
degrees, a pot is filled. 
-- The Hitopadesa

David Weinberger




--
What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
— Salman Rushdie