Cook’s Collaborative Edge

John Wilson generously volunteered to copy edit my forthcoming issue. I wanted to send something editable and found that i could export my final copy from Mac’s Pages into word. Sent John the word attachment. Asked him to turn corrections on. He asked me whether i could read the document from something called skydrive. I could. He then did a marvelous edit asked me to check the result. SkyDrive did a redirect to a site called Windows Live where my document now resided. The problem was that I had to do a full registration accept a download of MSoft’s web based Office 2010 Suite and sign a EULA giving MSoft authorization to send me updates, special offer and news releases not only for office but also Bling. I refused. John stalwart trooper that he is managed to down load the file on his end and sent it. Word 2004 was unable to open it.

Therefore I called Sara Wedeman to the rescue. This woman is outstanding! In an hour she sent me the file duly openable and swollen from 3.5 to 21 megs But hey at least Johns work was not in vain. Meanwhile John and I tried to figure out what happened. It seems that hotmail has been turned into a honey pot to snare users for Office 2010.

Here is what John found out

I documented the whole process in real time, as it happened, in that set of e-mails to you. That will record my process, and what I *thought* was happening.

1) below describes the process

1) I just went back to your original attachment and went through the process step by step, taking screen-grabs which I will send to you separately.

It confirms what I thought - to wit: that I was signed into my hotmail account within the Windows Live environment (nothing out of order there: I would have activated Windows Live at some point in the past, in response to a hotmail prompt to do so)) Your attachment appeared as an icon in the body of the e-mail: this was the first time I had seen an attachment in this way, as opposed to being in the header of the e-mail as I would have in the case of the attachment being in the header, I clicked on the icon assuming this would launch the document locally on my PC.

What I did not see - remember this was my first experience of seeing an attachment presented to me in this way - was that there were 2 options for viewing the attachment - a) online, and b) download thus by clicking on the main part of the icon I took the view online option, ie this activated the javascript. [Cook’s Edge: well documented in the screen shot slide set below.]

To clarify here: by clicking on the icon of the page with the W for Word, I had activated the view online option- although it was my intention to view it locally, as I assumed that by clicking on that main document icon that I was opening the document locally.
Note that I have noticed recently - within the past week I think - that any image or video links within the body of a hotmail e-mail now appear as graphics at the top of the e-mail. But this is the first time I had come across an attachment in this way.

The above is a step by step guide through the process. I will send an e-mail after this one with screen grabs to fully illustrate this.

Conclusion:

This was activated by me when signed into hotmail & Windows Live, it was the first time I had been presented with an attached word doc in this way. When I clicked on that icon and found myself in SkyDrive, I assumed that I went there because that was YOUR intention. in other words I was quite oblivious to the process I was going through. I had no idea what SkyDrive was.

Earlier John wrote

I clicked on your attachment and, voila… I was in SkyDrive, I was downloading Windows Office 2010 Trial… I was saying to myself “no, surely Gordon would not have sent me to SkyDrive…”

I wasn’t even taking drugs… (never have, for the record)

The only option I seemed to have to view your attachment was to click on the link in the hotmail e-mail…(that java script)

SOLUTION: in future I will only correspond to you via my gmail account

There’s a bizarre TV advert that ran in the UK a few years back, “You’ve been Tangoed” - with this freaky Orange guy smacking people (when they take a sip of Tango)… and this was some kind of Microsoft Windows Live SkyDrive (head-f***) Tangoe’d experience….

John had documented what Microsoft does in a set of 18 screenshots view able on Flickr here. Each one is commented.. A slide show hi res version is here

He adds

The nub of it therefore relates to me being presented, for the first time in hotmail, with an attachment displayed in that way. What I assumed would be the link to download the attachment locally, turned out to be a javascript link to the online viewer, which in turn had an edit online option, which led to SkyDrive, etc, as described. All the while, I thought I was following a process to some online storage and editing option that you had initiated. In other words it runs counter to the normal expectation of downloading locally, to channel one into an online viewer & editor that is then integrated into SkyDrive - ie into the Windows Live cloud services.

Finally John ascertained that attachments viewed in hotmail now require the “Active View” feature.

Note the Active View feature to the right of the screen grab images.
See this Flickr image ms1, with a roll-over note now added to highlight the Active view feature
Here’s the hotmail Active View guide.

Note well the bottom bit, which explains (and confirms for our purpose) that ATTACHMENTS to e-mails require the use of Active view:

IMPORTANT NOTE:
Active Views can only be disabled for third party sources.
Example: Photos from a photo hosting site, online videos and shipping updates.
The attachments that are received as part of the emails at this time require the Active View in order to display, hence you cannot change the way they are displayed.

I have borrowed Harold Feld’s title for his outstanding assessment of the FCC Chair. I will copy the first big chunk here…. but PLEASE follow the link and read the WHOLE thing. SPREAD THE WORD

Genachowski’s Fast Fading Star — And How He Can Still Salvage His Term As Chairman.
By Harold | August 3, 2010

There’s a phrase I hear a lot these days. Sometimes I hear it from angry folks, muttering under their breath. Some say it sheepishly, with a trace of embarrassment to find themselves saying it. Some pass it off as a joke. The phrase?

“I never thought I’d miss Kevin Martin, but . . . .”

No one can doubt that Julius Genachowski has emerged as the absolute opposite of Kevin Martin. Unfortunately, this includes a stunning inability to make decisions, combined with an ability to generate his own political opposition by dithering. This does not simply apply to the current fight over FCC broadband authority. It applies to everything, including what was supposed to be his big signature issue from the National Broadband Plan — getting 500 MHz of spectrum available for broadband. A perusal of the last year of FCC orders and Commission meetings shows a non-stop stream of reports, studies, and proposed rulemakings. The only actual orders involve things so non-controversial and trivial that they hardly constitute tweaks. It does not help that Genachowski manages to give every impression that while he enjoys jetting about to industry conferences and rubbing elbows with the media elite, he does not appear very interested in actually doing the work of Chairman.

As if to underscore this point, the Agenda for the FCC’s August 5 meeting has only two items: Amendments to the FCC’s hearing aid rules and a proposed rulemaking and NOI on wireless backhaul. While certainly useful items, the FCC could easily have handled these on circulation. Meanwhile, critical elements of the Chairman’s agenda, such as auction of the D Block, final rules for the broadcast white spaces, incentive auctions for broadcast television licenses, special access reform — in short, anything that matters enough to get anyone mad if they lose — languishes. David Hatch portrayed this in a recent National Journal article (sorry, sub required), David Hatch described Genachowski as under attack from Congress. But the sad truth is that Genachowski creates his own opposition by his stunning refusal to actually make decisions and lead. This gives opponents time to organize, frustrates and exhausts supporters, and undermines support for Genachowski’s initiatives. (Why put yourself out for someone who isn’t ever going to actually take action?)

As I said at SuperNova 10, I don’t say this to be mean or simply to vent. To the contrary, I believe Genachowski can still act quickly and decisively to achieve important things and rescue his reputation and legacy. Below, I outline three recent examples — broadcast white spaces, D Block, and general broadband authority — where Genachowsi’s failure to seize initiative and show leadership has resulted in generating his own opposition and diluting his support. I then recommend some general steps Genachowski can take to restore his fading star and rescue his agenda. In the end, however, it is up to Genachowski. He can keep trying to be liked, avoiding anything that might piss someone off, and live the rest of his term in a Chairman-bubble carefully insulated from criticism. Or he can grit his teeth, decide on what fights — win or lose — are worth doing, and start doing the hard work of making real decisions.

“And Saul said: ‘I have sinned, I did not obey the word of the Lord, for I feared the people, and therefore I listened to their voice.” — Samuel I 15:24

This is Genachowski’s problem in a nutshell. By people, mind, I don’t mean the public interest community — whom Genachowski chiefly seems to find useful as a foil for industry to underscore his own “centrism.” I mean pretty much every constituency at the FCC. Nothing with substantial impact moves, because you cannot move something with substantial impact without having a winner and a loser and losers complain — loudly.

When Genachowski came in, he had substantial political support from the White House, the tech community, competing local exchange carriers (CLECs) and competitive wireless carriers. Everyone expected quick movement on a wide variety of fronts from wireless handset exclusivity (aka “wireless Carterfone“) to finalizing rules for the broadcast white spaces and, of course, network neutrality/open internet. For their part, AT&T and Verizon lived in terror of what might happen, offering to cut deals to ward off what they feared were the inevitable swings of policy from laissez faire free market Republicans to Democrats more willing to actually, you know, regulate.

Like Obama with health insurance reform, however, Genachowski discovered that incumbents do not simply roll over and die. To the contrary, they put up a Hell of a fight. When Genachowski announced his original “open internet” back in September 2009, he had support from the President, the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, The President of the Senate, and the chairs of the relevant committees. Rather than fold, opponents responded with a massive “shock and awe” campaign similar to the campaign against “Obamacare,” complete with accusations of a “government take over of the Internet.” But whereas Obama eventually decided to press the fight on healthcare in the face of massive criticism, judging it better to win after committing than to take a clear loss by walking away, Genachowski never seems to have recovered from the shock that incumbents would not roll over.

As a result, Genachowski does nothing unless he receives a steady stream of affirmative support from Congress, the White House, and relevant industry stakeholders. He returns to the same well over and over, insisting on ever increasing levels of visible support for every affirmative action. Opponents of any particular policy have come to understand that all they need to do is create some modest noise, or generate some Congressional opposition, to immobilize Genachowski. Meanwhile, supporters exhaust themselves and expend their political capital simple to get proceedings begun. No one knows what it will take to drive even a mildly controversial proceeding to conclusion, because it never happens.

THE D BLOCK AS CASE STUDY

The failure of Genachowski to move on the “D Block” auction represents a classic illustration of why Genachowski keeps finding himself frustrated at every turn.

SNIP

BROADCAST WHITE SPACES CASE STUDY

One can at least understand Genachowski’s hesitancy around D Block as a lamentable failure of nerve. But what can possibly explain the failure to resolve the rules for the broadcast white spaces nearly two years after Kevin Martin’s FCC approved the concept by a 5-0 vote?

SNIP

THE BROADBAND AUTHORITY DEBACLE

There’s not much to say here that hasn’t been said a lot elsewhere and won’t get said again. As an object lesson in how Genachowski appears to have a talent for shooting himself in the foot and pissing off his supporters, it bears mentioning. Genachowski started this road with three votes for whatever policy position he wanted, and statements of support from the President on down. Having boldly declared his intent to pursue a “Third Way” on FCC authority over broadband access after the Comcast case pretty much eliminated FCC “ancillary jurisdiction,” Genachowski then promptly gave every appearance of caving to pressure by having his Chief of Staff preside over a series of meeting between Verizon, AT&T, and NCTA on one side and Google, Skype, and the Open Internet Coalition on the other.

Snip

John Wilson’s item just republished below inspired me to read the Drucker article. It seems that our current troubles started with the methodology adopted by the nations and identified by Schumpeter in 1918 to fight world war one…. financialize and borrow.

A 1983 article by Peter Drucker
shows us that the reasons for the current alliance between Washington and Wall Street were first clearly enunciated in 1918 in the writings of Joseph Schumpeter more than a decade before Keynes spread the same hypothesis — albeit with much more benign conclusions.

The critical idea is focused upon the availability of profit needed to enable the economic innovation necessary for better products and support on going growth in an economy.

Drucker: If you assume that innovation is what keeps a capitalist economic growing, the basic economic policy question becomes:

“How can capital formation and productivity be maintained so that rapid technological change as well as employment can be sustained? What is the minimum profit needed to defray the costs of the future? What is the minimum profit needed, above all, to maintain jobs and to create new ones?”

At the end of World War 1 Schumpeter realized that the war had resulted in the “miniaturization of the economies of all beligerents.” In every country that engaged in the hostilities the government poured in not only troops but mobilized all the liquid wealth of the country not only through taxation but also through borrowing.

Money and credit, rather than goods and services, had become the “real economy,” he wrote in a brilliant essay published in a German economic journal in July 1918. The mechanization of warfare meant operation on such a scale that the government found that it had to combine with the industrialists to centralize and co-opt entire economies on a scale never previously seen in order to get capital needed to achieve an innovation arms race.

Schumpeter “argued that, from now on, money and credit would be the lever of control. What he argued was that neither supply of goods, as the classicists had argued, nor demand for goods, as some of the earlier dissenters had maintained, was going to be controlling anymore. Monetary factors - deficits, money, credit, taxes - were going to be the determinants of economic activity and of the allocation of resources.”

Where Keynes theorized that these changes could mean that the economist could become philosopher king and show governments how to balance conflicting forces to maintain economic stability. Schumpeter however concluded that these changes by revealing the fulcrum on which policy could be so powerfully levered invited tyranny. Drucker concludes: “above all, he saw that it was not going to be economists who would exercise the power, but politicians and generals.”

Also in 1918 Schumpeter published a work he called the Fiscal State. In this work he concluded: that “the modern state, through the mechanisms of taxation and borrowing, has acquired the power to shift income and, through “transfer payments,” to control the distribution of the national product.” Keynes agreed and assumed the government would act with benevolence. But reality showed that once the relationships between government and industry were formed, they were very difficult to dismantle.

However to Schumpeter “this power was an invitation to political irresponsibility, because it eliminated all economic safeguards against inflation. In the past the inability of the state to tax more than a very small proportion of the gross national product, or to borrow more than a very small part of the country’s wealth, had made inflation self-limiting. Now the only safeguard against inflation would be political, that is, self-discipline. And Schumpeter was not very sanguine about the politician’s capacity for self-discipline.”

“But Schumpeter’s real contribution during the thirty-two years between the end of World War I and his death in 1950 was as a political economist.” In 1942 in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy Schumpeter “argued that capitalism would be destroyed by its own success. This would breed what we would now call the new class: bureaucrats, intellectuals, professors, lawyers, journalists, all of them beneficiaries of capitalism’s economic fruits and, in fact, parasitical on them, and yet all of them opposed to the ethos of wealth production, of saving, and of allocating resources to economic productivity.”

Schumpeter warns that “in a democracy, to be popular, government would increasingly shift income from producer to non producer, would increasingly move income from where it would be saved and become capital for tomorrow to where it would be consumed. Government in a democracy would thus be under increasing inflationary pressure. Eventually, he prophesied, inflation would destroy both democracy and capitalism.”

“It is this constant emphasis in Schumpeter on thinking through the long-term consequences of the expedient, the popular, the clever, and the brilliant that makes him a great economist and the appropriate guide for today.” concluded Drucker in 1983.

In 2010 in the USA, given that the two major parties are both joined at the hip in this relationship to private business, a relationship that, as we have seen, is nearly a century old, and given the current ruinous state of affairs, it makes more sense to look at the questionable sustainability of the relationship and at what might replace it. After all the agencies and functions stay the same and the people involved now carry out basically the same functions no matter which party is in power.

What is troubling is that society’s resources have been shifted no longer to business that innovates in a way that improves the lives of ordinary Americans but to subsidies of business legally incorporated in other countries to move jobs abroad in order to be more competitive in the global market that, in order to carry out their fiduciary duty to shareholders who may be citizens of any country. t The innovation going on is innovation that has turned financial capital into a gambling casino that has destroyed wealth for some hundreds of millions around the globe while leaving vast winnings in the hands of a few thousands who either bet right or were the croupiers running the collateralized securities creation machines.

Given this outcome as the capital that the center has used as a social safety net for its citizens is redirected to the arbiters of global financial capital, the people in the towns and cities will be increasingly lest to their own devices. their future will become a function of how we they can work together to rebuild their economy at a local level.

From John Wilson in the UK who has been making excellent contributions to my economics of IP networks discussion group. John’s blog item is here.

[ The following notes explore themes that emerge from recent published issues of The Cook Report on Internet, and related arch-econ private mail-list discussions:]

In consideration of teasing out the themes of recent Cook Report on Internet discussion-list and reports:

Creative Construction?

The main theme that emerges seems to be “The Challenge of Creative Construction for a Broken World”:

* the link to Perez’s “Creative Construction” theme - see below - is a worthy balance to the rather darker < "broken finance, broken regulation, broken everything" > & themes ….

* maybe a follow-up interview / or comment with Perez ??? [ See previous May 2008 Cook Report issue on An Introduction to the World View of Carlota Perez: A Roadmap for Rational Policy Making in the Midst of Technology and Economic Chaos] | For this is surely, the universal global challenge … worthy of Schumpeter’s grand themes of Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Schumpeter and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism,_Socialism_and_Democracy

* There’s been a neo-Schumpeter revival following the global finance collapse - and eg review of David Harvey’s Enigma of Capital and FT search results for Schumpeter [ and check out Peter F Drucker’s Modern Prophets: Schumpeter and Keynes?.

John comments:

Notes

* The “resilient communities” theme … was a response to your post regarding the direction/priorities of the list. And the city-state / nation state theme likewise. And all consistent with your previous June 2010 Power of Pull theme. Your Bauwens P2P theme likewise. I know I am stating the obvious.

* All consistent threads with your COOK REPORT June 2010 Exec Summary (para 2) of the global theme of “In some ways, what the authors describe has overtones of Carlota Perez but goes beyond her work in showing with finer resolution how the productivity enhancements of our new digital infrastructure enable what he calls creative edge that can pull the no longer productive aspects of the core to innovative projects at the edge. Edge based skunk-works transform the core in this new world.”

* ie moving beyond the world of broken global finance, telecoms etc, towards the on-the-ground challenge of building next generation communications IP infrastructure and business models that support sustainable local-regional communities and empowerment. - And thence your forthcoming Portland case study.

* = all of which chimes in with this recent conclusion - and call to action - by Carlota Perez [ Open Economy, March 2009: After Crisis: Creative Construction] : “Ultimately, the length and depth of the global recession (perhaps depression) will depend, not on the financial rescue packages but, to a much greater extent, on whether the wider measures taken are capable of moving the world economy towards a viable investment route with high innovation potential. The technological transformation that occurred during the past few decades has already provided the means for unleashing a sustainable global golden age. The environmental threats offer an explicit directionality for using that creative potential across the globe in a viable manner. The major financial collapse has generated the political conditions to take full advantage of this unparalleled opportunity. It is everybody’s responsibility to make sure this possibility is not missed.”

* ie Perez addresses the “destructive creation” / “creative destruction” dialectic that comes from Schumpeter’s approach to technology-social transformations [ see wikipedia discussion of this themehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction ]

* ie Cook Report - through various recent strands - is addressing a parallel agenda for “Creative Construction” of local/regional, edge-based and assets-based telecoms and community development / empowerment

BT acquired Ribbit two summers ago. Early reports seemed to think it was a Grand Central “killer” and competition to Google Voice. In June of 2010, neither seems much to be the case.

BT has been hard at work reinventing the local phone company for the past 3 years. The incumbent is there to provide communication presumably by voice. Ever since the rise of data and the internet, the role of voice in the telco’s future has been the subject of much speculation. Ascertaining what replaces the sale of “voice” has lead to much debate. Convergence of phone and computer and mobility has kept the old world view alive.

But I would maintain that BT with Ribbit has been hiding the replacement for in plain sight. Ribbit is a platform that can be used to enable communication that is tailored to the purposes of the customer rather than one size fits all. The Ribbit platform gives customers “the tools and functionality to create new ways to communicate-with people, businesses, and software.”

Imagine if, instead of modeling apps SOLELY to the iPhone platform, Apple went the next step took its multi-sided business platform and said: our model is to provide the necessary set of hooks by which developers cans can create applications for any set of hardware devices - adding many more sides to the platform of multi-sided services to connect a customer to its customers.

Is this a model that at last goes WAAAAY BEYOND VOICE?

There we read: Ribbit’s open, cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model allows telecom companies to eliminate the tremendous cost associated with building out a network that would otherwise require 24 – 36 months to build, deploy and market.

Reading this I wondered whether Ribbit was like a Skype on steroids. JP Rangaswami, who spearheaded the acquisition or Ribbit in order to use it in turning BT from a telco into a platform-based services company, replied:

“The theme song for Ribbit is Bring Your Own Network. Ribbit works on any network, on anyone’s network. Of course we have to put the node on to the network, but we don’t have to own the network. So Ribbit APIs are accessible by all.

So it’s not just voice. Video. Text/SMS. IM. Even e-mail (!)

COOK Report here: having burrowed into the very rich Ribbit web site it becomes much more apparent how different Ribbit is.

Presumably the Ribbit platform is what you are offered when you are a BT global services customer. Presumably Ribbit is already installed as a part of the network services that BT offers the customer with the account executive having the ability to make sure the applications folk at the account understand how Ribbit can be used to improve enterprise services? Ones that the enterprise is already offering. Or maybe realizing what the platform can do, the enterprise managers see new applications that, without the presence of the platform, the enterprise could not have afforded to develop on its own?

When JP speaks of white labeling Ribbit, he presumably means that BT will sell Ribbit licenses (ie softswitches) to anyone enterprises and also other phone companies. So what does BT have?

It has a very excellent first mover advantage for BT Global services account managers ….assuming it can train the key people so that they understand the importance of what they have been given.

All this is good, but I don’t see much of anything being said about RIBBIT which seems strange. The Ribbit web site is very rich with a great deal of substance. But to go there you have to know that Ribbit exists. And to be motivated to go there you have to understand something about where it fits in the BT scheme of things. Like why it is different from Voxio or Voxbone or even how as an open developer platform it is different from the iphone apps store

Nevertheless, I find myself wondering whether BT is in a position vaguely analogous to Bill gates and the IBM personal computer in what 1982? Gates I believe acquired CPM, dressed it up as DOS and sold the result to IBM for its PC. It looks to me that Ribbit given adequate understanding and exposure COULD become the integrative device for networks and companies that want to go beyond the old model of siloed, facilities-based, controlled, vertically integrated and monopolized bits as billable events business model. Seems to me that its time for BT to get the longer range vision that ensures that Ribbit gets the support it needs.

JP just wrote a nice blog item found here

“Digital curation seems to be a richer form of curation than its analog equivalent. Here’s what I think it consists of:

Authenticity
Veracity
Access
Relevance
Consume-ability
Produce-ability”

The Ribbit site has an architecture diagram that helps an outsider understand what it is.

If Ribbit essentially is a multi protocol carrier grade Class 5 softswitch, it looks to me to be the digital platform that can do JP’s desired digital curation in spades. I will agree that what we need is user tailorable curation tools. Could it be that Ribbitt gives companies the ability to make and tailor their own creation spaces? Ribbitt presumably is customer tailorable in such a way that it could be used for service needs. I am think of how cool it would have been if Comcast has some decision tree based diagnostic on its web site that when my network performance was deteriorating i could have gone to and described my symptoms to it and ultimately would up with what i needed to do or gotten a link that would get me directly to the right kind of human SERVICE. Isn’t there a huge opportunity in both CRM and VRM operations?

Google brought the right eyeballs to the right advertisers. What about web based systems that apply productive means of saving people’s time in dealing with their customers or vendors. Could folks tailor their own Ribbits to be used as “creation spaces” on the edges of their organizations in the sense of the Power of Pull analysis?

Does BT have in Ribbitt the seeds of the future? It seems to me that very roughly like the web browser, it could become the next big huge thoroughly needed tool - A DIGITAL FILING CABINET FOR THE EXABYTES OF INTERNET CREATED DATA mentioned by ERIC SCHMIDT,

We have a tipping point opportunity here if all levels of management have the needed vision. I have done a good bit of Googling to try to dig up analysis about Ribbit and what makes it different, I have found that when it was bought two years ago, it was seen as a grand central killer and then a competitor to Google voice. Nothing much more recent than last fall when Rangaswami grabbed Kevin Marks and that was seen as getting a Google voice expert. Om Malik got part of the picture here last October but only part.

But think of the new incumbent business model - passing IP packets is commodity business. But offering access to a platform that allows the user or customer to curate their digital existence i think could be a huge opportunity.

In his abstract Bill St Arnaud sums things up: “This evolving Internet is likely to have profound impacts on Internet architectures and business models in the both the academic and commercial worlds. Increasingly traffic will be “local” with connectivity to the nearest cloud, content distribution network and or social network gateway at a local Internet Exchange (IX) point. Network topology and architecture will increasingly be driven by the needs of the applications and content rather than as general purpose infrastructure connecting users and devices.”

I would ask: what is it that the FCC thinks it is dealing with?  How can policy be argued if no one knows what the infrastructure is, where it goes or who owns it because it is all under rigid NDA?

Bill’s paper documents what has been happening better than I have seen it done before. “Internet lines” are transport, Erik Cecil said.

COOK Report: Were it clear that the only thing the incumbents have is the last mile because everyone else has built their own paths to get to the last mile, would this make any difference? I think it would.  Remember ATT whines that it would like to get rid of the last mile. But because they are able to hide their infrastructure in secrecy, they can lie all day long and get away with it. Can this be changed? They whine that they are being deprived of incentives to invest in their networks but they are allowed to escape any direct examination of what those networks actu8ally are. How long will this be tolerated?

May 7 Robert Atkinson: “I’ve not been able to catch up with the threads on the FCC’s plans to reclassify internet access since I’m traveling out of the US where internet access is difficult.  But I finally got a decent connection and found an interesting “Wall Street” reaction (from Raymond James), the gist of which is not a big deal:  “…we do not believe any real impact on these carriers will emerge for years, if at all….” Since the cablecos and telcos will be (are?) arguing that the prospect of regulation will inhibit investment, I thought this investor reaction was revealing.”  

COOK Report: Agreed Bob. Again I’d like to ask investment in what? Backbones?  No. Middle mile networks ?? NO. Fiber to the home? NO.!  Verizon quit that.  ATT and Qwest never started.

Internet lines?   Those are smoke and mirrors.  The only internet line is the last “x” hundred meters from the content that has been shoved as close to the edge as possible.

The investment is largely in lawyers and lobbying and maybe in wireless.

Postscript

Canarie and Bill St Arnaud, beginning at least 15 years, ago built one of the globe’s leading research networks. Canarie started as a national backbone linking Canada’s leading research networks. However, around the time of the dot com bust 2001 the Canadian provinces began to build their own research networks.

Suddenly in January 2010 Bill St Arnaud departs from Canarie after having pretty much pioneered green IT  between 2007 and 2009. As of the summer of 2010, Canarie appears to me to be rudderless doing not much more than providing light paths and web services for Canadian universities as it had been for at least the last five years.

While I have been promoting his architecture paper  http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/2010/02/personal-perspective-on-evolving.html   for quite a while, on May 13 i received this from Bill:

“As I pointed out several months ago in my paper on the Future of R&E networks, traffic patterns are rapidly changing on all Internet networks including R&E networks. Increasingly traffic is becoming more local as these networks start to directly peer with large content, application and cloud providers at major IXs. A good example of this change in traffic pattern is the recent press release issued by the R&E network in the province of Ontario in Canada. They have seen a traffic volumes triple over the last 3 years. The overwhelming volume of the traffic is with over 40 content, cloud and application providers such as Google, Limelight etc. Only about 16% of the traffic goes to the national Internet backbone operated by CANARIE”.

COOK Report: From the Orion press release I surmise that the application content infrastructure Bill writes about in his large Architecture Infrastructure paper has had no trouble using IXs in Ottawa and Toronto to link ORION (the Ontario province research net) to the rest of the world.  Ontario traffic has tripled but only 16% goes via the Canarie backbone elsewhere in Canada.

Can it be that the ascendancy of application content infrastructure providers as described by Bill in this summary are making national research network backbones obsolescent?  If so what does this portend for Internet Two and especially for National Lambda Rail? We have the RONs which may be analogous to Orion.

What we don’t have is any mapping effort worthy of the name.  It’s hard to imagine that there aren’t similarities between  ORION and the  RONs.  Wouldn’t it behoove someone to do some studies on traffic from the ACI infrastructure to the RONS and get people thinking about how little Qwest, Verizon and ATT provide to their customers?

Formulating policy in the dark is a BAD idea.

“The growing dominant role of ACIs in the Internet infrastructure may pose future challenges for regulators to insure that ACIs are able to peer and interconnect to last mile Internet service providers and  that their services are accessible and unconstrained to the ultimate consumer.”
As more and more  Internet Exchanges are deployed closer to consumers, the future Internet regulatory battle ground will be the last mile.

The inadequate investment in last mile infrastructure, particularly in North America, was one of the principle drivers to deploy ACI facilities so that content and application companies could ensure a certain degree of  responsiveness and interactivity with users.  As ACI facilities are increasingly bypassing the backbone ISPs, despite the drop in Internet transit costs, the last redoubt for the cable and telephone companies will be ownership and control of the last mile infrastructure.  But as discussed earlier it is in the last mile where most Internet congestion occurs. Despite the huge investment made by ACIs in building out their infrastructure as close as possible to the end consumer, it may not be sufficient to overcome the limitations to today’s last mile infrastructure particularly with the next generation of high bandwidth applications and as the carriers increasingly rely on traffic management techniques to address the challenges of congestion.

Historically building a last mile infrastructure that was part of a national or global end-to-end network was very challenging and you needed large companies to maintain and build this infrastructure. But with the development of ACIs and the disintermediation of end-to-end network the last mile is a stand alone element which does not require the complexity of previous end-to-end facilities.

Concepts like   “Customer Owned Networks” are thereby easier to imagine and may represent the future direction of how we deploy and manage last mile infrastructure. ]

Editor’s Note: Christopher Mitchell, who is the Director of the Telecommunications as Commons Initiative, Institute for Local Self-Reliance in early May released a comprehensive report on publicly owned broadband networks in the US.  He writes: “It covers the philosophy of such networks, the barriers to building them, and a number of success stories.  It addresses Institutional Networks, a little bit on wireless for mobility, and a number of different approaches to building FTTH networks.  It also offers some lessons learned by the networks that have been operating for a number of years.

But what might be more interesting for some members on the list is that I look at open access networks specifically (focusing on Jackson, TN and UTOPIA) and some of the little incentive problems between the owner and service providers that have produced friction and hurt the feasibility of open access.
The report is available as a free download here.:
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“Finally Bill continues: The concept of RPON [RPON] was a further articulation of this idea to allow consumers to control and manage their peering and multi-home with multiple ACIs at a nearby Internet Exchange point.

The recent announcement by Google to fund a number of last mile fiber to the home pilot projects may be the necessary catalyst to enable these types of innovative last mile solutions.
 

Bill continues: “To understand the impact of ACIs are having on the evolving Internet one only has to look at a recent study by Arbor Networks [ARBOR]. Arbor Networks – in collaboration with University of Michigan and Merit Network - presented the largest study of global Internet traffic since the start of the commercial Internet at recent Internet engineering conference in October 2009.” ??

“The study included analysis of Internet traffic across 110 large and geographically diverse cable operators, international end-to end carrier backbones, regional networks and content providers.  Results from the study show that over the last five years, Internet traffic has migrated away from the traditional Internet core of ten to twelve backbone providers and now flows directly between large content providers and last mile networks (and then to their end-users).  As the study notes these networks “have become so popular they are changing the shape of the Internet itself such that many organizations and ISPs are directly peering with content providers rather than purchasing transit from [backbone] ISPs”.

“As a result the costs of Internet transit have dropped dramatically for all the parties in the Internet eco-system. Major media and content now often deliver their content directly to third party ACIs at major IXs where most traffic is exchanged on a settlement free basis.  Regional ISPs and last mile providers have then been able to reduce the amount of Internet transit they purchase from backbone Internet providers by directly connecting to an ACI at an IX. Backbone ISPs have also benefited in that their costs are also significantly reduced as they can also access the same traffic delivered by ACIs rather than carrying it on their backbones.”??“ACIs have not only reduced Internet transit costs but they have also introduced a greater degree of competition. A content and application provider now has many different ways of delivering their product to end users. Organizations with a few very small applications and with a limited market can still choose to host their own servers and purchase Internet transit from a regional or backbone ISP. Alternatively they can decide to deploy multiple servers at different hosting data centers or move their content or application to any number of third party ACI companies. As we have seen there are a plethora of such companies with a wide range of services and options.”??“ACIs have also significantly reduced the cost of Internet infrastructure by adopting new network architectures that simplify and reduce the complexity of the traditional backbone ISP facilities. Again this benefits not only the ACI but reduces cost of Internet delivery to all members of the Internet eco-system. Because ACIs provide load balancing and redundancy through the wide distribution of servers at various nodes around the world they do not need complex and highly redundant network facilities between these nodes.” [snip]

An Abbreviated Summary of Bill St Arnaud’s Architecture Paper

Bill finds that a global Internet has now grown to such a huge extent that the old pretense that the Internet is truly end-to-end in its structure has out lived any claim to economic usefulness. Sending content or applications from one or more edges across the entire global network to all other possibly interested edges simply doesn’t scale.

He shows why with the spread of exchange points it has become far more cost effective to move content and applications — software as a service for example sales force — to places as close to the end user as possible whereas much data as possible is cached – in other words kept locally.

He speaks in terms of “Application Content Infrastructure (ACIs) [that] are specialized infrastructure providing advanced services to the global Internet community that are delivered locally. This avoids all the attendant problems of packet loss and congestion on the backbone network (and also in the last mile). Invariably ACIs connect to the public Internet at the IXs or at private peering points located in most cities.  Their development was driven by several factors, but primarily it was to enhance the user’s Internet experience, especially when there is significant congestion and packet loss in the last mile networks.”

ACIs seem not widely defined as such yet. Bill appears to be reasonably conflating application infrastructure (middleware, software as a service, cloud computing etc) with content delivery, best understood as web sites and related sources of data the delivery of which can be enhanced by caching at the network’s edge. Akamai pioneered this in 1999. The COOK Report extensively described Akamai in June 2000.

Bill illustrates his ACI concept by pointing out that Facebook runs its own infrastructure where user’s data is stored on servers as geographically as close to the user as possible and sent to all other servers connected to a Facebook ACI infrastructure put together by Facebook. This infrastructure functions in a way similar to a VPN. In this scheme of things Facebook does its thing with little if any data traveling over the public end-to-end Internet.

Bill points out that “Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are extensively used by Fortune 500 companies, governments and other large organizations for internal traffic purposes.” However “some ACI networks are global in scale and rival the carrier public Internet networks in terms of size and complexity.  Good examples of such large scale ACIs include Microsoft MSN’s network, Amazon’s EC2 cloud, Google’s Gmail and YouTube infrastructure as well as Level3’s Content Distribution Service. Many Fortune 500 companies like banks and airlines have also deployed their own ACIs as an adjunct to their own internal networks in order to provide secure and reliable service to their customers.’

He continues: “While an ACI must make extensive investment in router and servers, it doesn’t need to advertise the full routing table. Rather than maintaining their own web servers and email many organizations outsource this to ACI specialists to save on costs.”

“Content and application service providers depend on locations in hosting centers for the distribution, replication and load balancing of content and media to various IXs and other interconnection points throughout the Internet. The quintessential examples of CDNs are Akamai and Limelight.  There are over a dozen companies in this space including players such as CDNetworks, Edgecast, Voxel, Mirror Image, Amazon Cloudfront, BitGravity, CacheFly, Edgecast Networks, etc” [snip]

“While CDN facilities are useful and cost effective for distributing web pages and streaming video they could not address the need for computing intensive applications or storage. “Clouds” were developed to address this need.    Clouds are essentially a global ACI facility of tightly coupled and interconnected computing and storage resources.  An entire separate paper could be written on clouds but generally they are broken down into three major applications areas:

·   Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
·   Platform a Service (PaaS)
·   Software as a Service (SaaS)”

“Infrastructure as a service is cloud ACI where users can configure their own virtual computing infrastructure and deploy their own applications.  The Amazon EC2 cloud is the prototypical example of this type of cloud ACI. Platform as a Service, on the other hand, removes much of the complexity of creating virtual machines and allows users to focus on deploying an application.  The Microsoft Azure  is built along these lines.’”

Application infrastructure and content distribution infrastructure come together at exchange points.

“The key component that ties together hosting companies, CDN facilities and clouds into a collective ACI service is the Internet Exchange (IX) point. They often serve a dual purpose:

(a) This is where media, content and application companies connect to third party ACI facilities for distribution of their product; and
(b) This is where ACI facilities connect with last mile access providers for delivery of the content and applications to the consumer.”
“There are several hundred IXs around the world. A reasonably comprehensive list of these exchange points and the connected ACIs and Internet backbones can be found here”

ACIs improve delivery of online services by distributing them to exchange points nearer the end users. ”Keeping data local and thereby reducing transmission time can significantly enhance a users’ perception of the quality of the responsiveness of an application – even under congestion and packet loss. As long as there is sufficient bandwidth to prevent egregious congestion in the last mile virtually all new innovative content and applications can be delivered over a best effort last mile network if they originate from an ACI.  For example, only a short time ago it seemed unimaginable that one could deliver HD quality movies over the Internet – but this is done routinely today by many services delivered using ACI, such as Hulu, Netflix, and YouTube.”

The research and education community has its own application content infrastructures in terms of things like the Optiputer and LHC network.

Bill references Van Jacobson’s August 2006 talk at Google on a content delivery based architecture for the net.

A 2007 Van Jacobson talk is here
Then there is this very interesting entry can be found with a search for “Van Jacobson Google architecture”.
[Van Jacobson content-centric networking insights at the 4Ward … - 3:04pm Aug 18, 2009 … Van Jacobson content-centric networking insights at the 4Ward … In the large and content-dense talk (around 2,5 hs), Van provided many details of the CCN architecture]

I have read fairly carefully the 96 slide lecture of August 18, 2009 and find it extremely fascinating. What Bill is doing in his talk is describing how content and applications have moved to the edge over the past five years. And what Van seems to be saying is how to construct an overlay for the delivery of content that can run quite smoothly on TCP/IP yet be quite independent of the limitations such as IP before address space shortage that seem to be popping up all around us.

I wish I could say that I understand in any appreciable level of detail precisely what Van is doing — I do not. But I think I do see the general implications. With virtually unlimited storage and memory at our desktops and at the intelligent nodes at the edges of network the Akamaisation of the Internet becomes almost a foregone conclusion. Indeed it seems to me that Google to deliver its material has to be using Van Jacobson-like content centric networking protocols.

Now imagine running into this story on the front page of the New York Times website a couple of hours ago where it explains how an increasing number of geeks have downloaded the unreleased source code for Google’s Chrome operating system, put it on their lap tops or notebooks, added their own enhancements, and are happily using it as an OS to access the Internet.

What I find really intriguing is that very few people seem to comprehend the change since the popping of the Internet bubble in basic Internet architecture where you no longer assume that information is at some specific geographical location and depend on the network to follow the Old 1990 rules of going to that point in getting the information and bringing it across one or more backbones and through one or more Internet exchange points before it delivers it to you.

But the content providers, be they publishers in the old style or websites in the new style, have brought the information to the general vicinity of virtually every MSO head end or telco central office and it is only the duopoly’s last mile that stands in the way of an extraordinarily cost-effective access to the data. And it is Google of course that far more than anyone else has created an environment that invites everyone to live in Google’s Cloud. Net books and the Chrome OS would seem to be the final wrapping on the package. Of course the only inconvenience is the duopoly standing in the way of the average person’s access to the Cloud under such circumstances….. one must imagine,or at least hope, that it will become increasingly possible to jump over the moat.

What intrigues me is how long it will take before more people understand the change in architecture. And of course perhaps it’s the strategic significance of this change that leads everyone involved to be so proprietary about their service and the geographic locations on the surface. The people without any clothing look to me like the telco and MSO incumbents. They have warned us that they have no incentive to invest in their networks but at the same time, because they have fortified their stranglehold over the end-user, the rest of the world has had to build out to the very edges where the duopolists attach their customers. What kind of investment in what networks one must ask?

And because they have relied on their respective monopolies and, as Bill St. Arnaud points out, they have not done the kind of building out that the content and application providers have, they stand there potentially quite naked relying on secrecy, nondisclosure, obfuscation, lobbying and the whole nine yards to maintain the fiction that they control the kingdom when in reality what they control are only the drawbridges separating the people from the castle.
That is what I find so important about what Bill has written and for which you can get plenty of intellectual backup for from Van Jacobson’s content centric networking efforts. A Google control Internet running on Chrome and on a Van Jacobson-like content centric networking overlay of TCP/IP may not be everyone’s favorite Internet but it will be a force to be reckoned with. While it is tempting to think that the sooner the reckoning the better, one also must wonder how comfortable a Google controlled universe with no counter balance would be. A rather chilling spoof maybe viewed here. http://www.vidzshare.net/play.php?vid=16345