Robert Anton Wilson died recently, and like many artists, it drew my attention more than had been paid in the past and I stumbled over Celine's Laws.

They're entertaining, but seem to me, particularly the second, to have good applicability.

1. National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity.
2. Accurate communication is possible only in a non-punishing situation.
3. An honest politician is a national calamity.

Celine's Laws

"Telcos are to the economy what railroads were to the 19th century and maybe what airlines were to the 20th ... building this great big capacity for things to be transferred." John O'Sullivan, CEO Optus

It explains a lot.

Particularly looking at railways in NZ where a share-holder driven company rode the infrastructure down to where the State has a $NZ300M bill to bring it back to scratch. An expensive lesson that hopefully teaches a wider lesson about structural seperation and how it is possible for the commons to own an infrastructure and let multiple service providers operate over it.

The other aspect of John's analogy is, "Where's my car?" Private ownership of self-drive automobiles provides a lot more passenger miles than railways.

And finally, last September I was musing that the next paradigm for telecommunications would be the ocean, Optus's CEO thinks the age of rail still exists in telecommunications. Our timetable, our services, no choice... sorry, when I look at the shabby glory of the Wellington Railway Station, I don't think it still holds that significant a place in the whole transport story.

We stand at the threshold of a wireless paradigm shift. New technologies promise to replace scarcity with abundance, dumb terminals with smart radios able to adapt to their surroundings, and government defined licenses with flexible sharing of the airwaves. Early examples suggest that such novel approaches can provide affordable broadband connections to a wide range of users.

These are not just incremental advances. The fundamental assumptions governing radio communication since its inception no longer hold. The static wireless paradigm is giving way to dynamic approaches based on cooperating systems of intelligent devices. It is time for policy-makers to consider how regulation should change in response. The radio revolution is the single greatest communications policy issue of the coming decade, and perhaps the coming century. The economics of entire industries could be transformed. We stand at the threshold of a wireless paradigm shift. New technologies promise to replace scarcity with abundance, dumb terminals with smart radios able to adapt to their surroundings, and governmentdefined licenses with flexible sharing of the airwaves. Early examples suggest that such novel approaches can provide affordable broadband connections to a wide range of users.

ObURL: http://www.newamerica.net/index.cfm?pg=article&pubID=1427
--
Listen or thy tongue will keep thee deaf.
--American Indian Proverb

Municipality

What kinds of network owner would be driven by a different kind of goal: to maximize overall utility to users of its network?

It's no accident that fiber to the home (FTTH) is so slow to catch on. Fiber is the most infinitely and cheaply expandable of all connectivity media. It is not surprising that municipalities operate 32% of the FTTH in the United States. Munis are interested in overall utility, not in profit. Munis want their city to be a better place to live.

In summary, the telco ☎(and the cableco) are victims, not beneficiaries, of the Communications Revolution. Nor are they giving end-user customers what we want. This, then is the market failure!

Fortunately there are alternatives. There are munis. There are (still) CLECs. (Maybe some day some CLEC will get that, "It's operational efficiency, stupid.") There are other utilities. There's condominium network ownership. There are networks owned by single customers. And there are "volunteerist" networks without tragic instabilities.
David Isen ❢

ObURL: http://www.isen.com/blog/archives/2004_02_01_archive.html#107782075016571828
“I think it's the low marginal costs. They're not just low; they're extremely low, and infinitely lowerable for all practical purposes. Carriers can modulate faster, modulate better, add another channel, or add another wavelength. Because of this, if a carrier sells one fiber, or even one "dry" (or sharable) copper pair, they might never sell another.” Of course, even the muni's never sell, they lease.

--
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example. -- Mark Twain

Scott Rosenberg

Glaser [Rob Glaser of Real Networks] talked about a "shortage of narrative storytelling skills" and a "dearth of creative talent" when it comes to users creating longer-form video content.

Technically, perhaps he's right. But so what?

"User-generated content" isn't about creating some sort of big farm team for the pros.

The long-term value of "user-generated content" isn't in the businesses — not necessarily those on this panel — that no doubt will figure out how ways to generate revenue from it.

The value is to individuals, and society, in the sheer number of previously silent voices that will sound, in the previously unheard stories that will be told, to whatever size audience.

We're slowly but steadily increasing the breadth of human experience and expression that is recorded and available to others.

Next to that sort of social good, somehow the implementation details of different business models seem trivial.

ObURL: http://www.socialtext.net/pcforum/index.cgi?users_make_content_their_own -- Complexity seems to demand individual autonomy, doesn't it? -- http://www.monkey.org/~timothy/

This decision is a quintessential instance of a self-fulfilling perception of the world.

One starts with an assumption that there are producers and consumers and that consumers are better off when producers have high incentives to produce.

One then creates a regulatory system that increases the incentives for commercial production but also increases the costs of becoming any kind of producer,³³ forcing producers to try to recoup these high entry costs by selling to wide audiences.

This results in a relatively small number of producers able to fund full-time authoring and pay licensing fees to use existing information, who attempt to recover their investments by capturing wide audiences.

Opposite these producers is a wide, passive audience of consumers constrained to select what they buy from a narrow, relatively homogenous menu of choices intended to guess what a large number of them will select under these conditions.

These producers, in turn, make up the political lobby for continuing the basic structure as it is.

This political economy is responsible for an extensive enclosure movement that has pushed our intellectual property law toward ever-increasing centralization, and has squelched concerns that this galloping propertization is attained at the expense both of innovation and of robust democratic discourse that a well-balanced intellectual property law could serve.³⁴
Yochai Benkler

ObuR:L http://www.law.indiana.edu/fclj/pubs/v52/no3/benkler1.pdf
"More from class: one student has stipulated that perhaps e-mail and IM and the like are not steps forward for communications among human beings. Others say it's neither forward nor backwards; just modernization. And another person says that these technologies are just about the best thing ever invented. Others break out e-mail from text-based IM from video and audio over IM clients and the like." Diversity huh. Who's right? "http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Keep+sowing+your+seed%2C+for+you+never+know+which+will+grow--perhaps+it+all+will.%22"

-- You must allow people to be right, because it consoles them for not being anything else. --Andre' Gide

Shoulders of Giants — A Paper on the Inevitability of Open Source Dominance

Abstract:

This paper posits that the open
source/free software development and distribution paradigm will
eventually become dominant. It aims to show that this will occur as an
inevitable process, slowly at first, then with almost critical-mass
motion. A number of analogies to other areas of human endeavour, such as
Science will be used to underline the power of the concepts behind open
source freeware. Also, that the open source movement shouldn't be viewed
as an attack against any single closed source vendor, but against the
inadequacies of the closed source process. And finally, the hope is for
this message to achieve some sense of resonance with enough readers, to
add just a little more momentum to the accelerating adoption of the open
source paradigm.

OBy: Con
Zymaris


Created: 1998-11-02

Modified: 2004-03-23

Version: 0.7


--

If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the
rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time.
-- Chinese Proverb