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