Un-ending the Internet
<p>Recently, <cite>The Nation</cite> ran an article,<br />
<a href='http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/chester'>The End of the<br />
Internet</a>, that viewed with alarm some efforts<br />
by telephone companies to hack their governing regulations so they can<br />
price-discriminate. Their plans include tiered pricing so a consumer&#8217;s<br />
monthly rate could be tied to the amount of bandwidth actually used.  They<br />
also want to be able to offer preferred fast access to on-line services<br />
that pay for the privilege &mdash; and the flip side of that could<br />
be shutting down services like peer-to-peer networking that big media<br />
companies dislike.</p>
<p>One of my regular visitors. David McCabe, asked me what a libertarian<br />
would do about this.  A fair question, representative of a large class<br />
of problems about what you do to constrain monopolies already in place<br />
without resorting to more regulation.</p>
<p><span id="more-259"></span></p>
<p>Here&#8217;s the answer I gave him: </p>
<blockquote><p>
Deregulate and let the telcos have their tiered pricing &mdash; as long as<br />
we <em>also</em> deregulate enough radio spectrum that the telcos<br />
(evil monopolist scum that they are) will promptly be hammered flat by<br />
wireless mesh networks.
</p></blockquote>
<p>David replied &#8220;Beautiful.  Blog it.&#8221;  Hence this screed&#8230;</p>
<p>The fundamental problem with the telecoms regime we have is that<br />
the Baby Bells inherited from Mama Bell a monopoly lock on the last<br />
mile (the cables running to end-users&#8217; homes and businesses).  More<br />
backbone capacity would be easy and is in no way a natural monopoly,<br />
especially given the huge overbuild of optical-fiber trunk lines<br />
during the Internet boom of the 1990s.  But the &#8216;last mile&#8217;, as long<br />
as it&#8217;s wire lines, truly is a natural monopoly or oligopoly &mdash;<br />
nobody wants more than one set of telephone poles per street, and<br />
their capacity to carry wires is limited.  That system doesn&#8217;t scale<br />
up.</p>
<p>To a left-wing rag like <cite>The Nation</cite>, the answer is to<br />
huff and puff about more regulation.  But more regulation would do<br />
nothing to attack the telcos&#8217; real power position, which is the<br />
physical constraints on the last mile.  The truly pro-freedom anwer is<br />
to enable the free market to take that power position away from<br />
them.</p>
<p>Wireless mesh networking &mdash; flocks of cheap WiFi nodes that<br />
automatically discover neighboring nodes and act as routers &mdash; is<br />
the technology that can do that.  With the right software, networks of<br />
these can be self-configuring and self-repairing.  It&#8217;s pure<br />
libertarianism cast in silicon, a perfectly decentralist bottom-up<br />
solution that could replace wirelines and the politico-economic<br />
choke-point they imply.</p>
<p>The main thing holding wireless mesh networking back is the small<br />
size of the bandwidth now allotted to it for spread-spectrum frequency<br />
hopping. With enough volume, competition would drive the price of<br />
these creatures to $20 or less per unit &mdash; low enough for<br />
individuals and community organizations to spot them everywhere<br />
there&#8217;s an electrical grid.  Increments of capacity would be cheap,<br />
too; with the right software, your WiFi card could aggregate the<br />
bandwidth for as many nodes as there happen to be in radio range.</p>
<p>(And that software?  Open source, of course.  Mesh networking relies<br />
on open source and open standards. Some of the node designs out there<br />
are open hardware, too. The mesh network would be transparent, top<br />
to bottom.)</p>
<p>Today, many people already leave their WiFi access points open for<br />
their neighbors to use, even though DSL or cable costs real money,<br />
because the incremental cost of being nice is negligible.  At the<br />
equilibrium price level of mesh networking, wireless free Internet<br />
access would be ubiquitous everywhere except deep wilderness areas.</p>
<p>But the wireline backbone wouldn&#8217;t vanish, because mesh networking solves<br />
the bandwidth problem at the expense of piling on latency (cumulative<br />
routing and retransmission delays). Large communications users<br />
would still find it useful to be hooked up to long-haul fiber networks<br />
in order to hold down the amount of latency added by multiple hops over the<br />
mesh.  The whole system would self-equilibrate, seeking the most<br />
efficient mix of free and pay networking.</p>
<p>As usual, the best solution to the problems of regulation and<br />
imperfect markets is not more politics and regulation, but less of it<br />
&mdash; letting the free market work.  Not that I expect <cite>The<br />
Nation</cite> to figure this out soon, or ever; like all leftists,<br />
they will almost certainly remain useful idiots for anyone, tyrant or<br />
telco monopolist, who knows that political &#8216;solutions&#8217; to market<br />
problems always favor the powerful and politically connected over the<br />
little people they are ostensibly designed to help.</p>
