Cook’s Collaborative Edge

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

Cloud and Content Providers Versus the Incumbent’s Last Mile

Editor’s Note: It would help if only as a part of our suspicions that the Internet is an economic infrastructure that is important to a viable global economy, we had some idea of what the actual architecture of the Internet is. Hidden behind bulwarks of non-disclosures and corporate obfuscation the Net is now a black box. If you are trying to establish a policy for this major global infrastructure that ensures as infrastructures generally should, that it functions in the public interest rather that in the interests of firms large enough to siphon off most benefits for their shareholders, one should understand how it is structured. In other words – what is its basic architecture?

The past six years of Net Neutrality squabbles have not helped. The FCC by making the Internet a Title One Information Service in 2004 and largely dropping regulatory reporting requirements has deprived us of the ability to see the Internet more clearly than a mysterious blur of “pipes.”

Bill St Arnaud, who for 15 years directed the development of Canada’s research network, has written a very important paper describing the current architecture: A personal perspective on the evolving Internet and Research and Education Networks

Here is an abbreviated abstract: “Over the past few years the Internet has evolved from an “end-to-end” telecommunications service to a distributed computing information and content infrastructure. [snip]. This evolution in the Internet was predicted by Van Jacobson several years ago and now seems readily evident by recent studies such as the Arbor report indicating that the bulk of Internet traffic is carried over this type of infrastructure as opposed to a general purpose routed Internet/optical network. 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”..

from converge Digest vol 17 no. 102

Looking ahead, McAdam said he expects that most consumers will
ultimately have a number of devices that need connectivity —
four, five, six or perhaps as many as 20 devices. Consumers will
want to buy “a bucket of megabytes” to be used any way they want
by any of the devices. Voice becomes irrelevant because Verizon
Wireless expects that by 2012 the voice that it sells on LTE will
all be VoIP. So the game will not be about unlimited megabytes on
a smartphone, but about tiers of service for all these devices.
http://investor.verizon.com/news/20100526/
27-May-10

Verizon faces up to the voice dilemma. “VOICE BECOMES Irrelevant” because it’s VoIP which is just bits. A telco finally faces up to its voice dilemma. And then says in effect we will just continue to sell you and bill you for content that we funnel and control.

What if a telco had the vision to say we will lease you a connection to an internet based multi-sided platform that you can tailor specifically to the needs of your business? Could such a platform tweaked by developers into flavors useful for the largest of enterprises on down to the smallest internet based shops?`

The telco originally offered a technology platform that enabled people to extend and to coordinate their communication needs. The telcos scaled up voice along the 20th century top down bigger is better business model. They would sell more of the same. Period.

Google saw that it could integrate search and advertising to delivers well target ads to people who would find them useful. Google has a huge platform where its connect buyers and sellers more effectively that the old scattershot print or TV based advertising companies could do.

But what if a telco built a platform that could use an integrated range of voice xml, web, wireless, email etc to enable customers to actually use in an integrated way the much broader range range of communication planning coordination and advertising technologies available via the internet? Such a telco could say to its customer we will sell you service enablement technology that will enable you to provide better service at less cost to you for your own customers. And what is more you will be dunned micro payments only when the the platform comes through with customer interactions that can be measured as helping you with your bottom line?

Isn’t there a whole world of service enablement out there waiting to be leveraged? And couldn’t an already vertically integrated telecom platform company like a BT have a more powerful foundation from which to work than the smaller companies already entering this market?

Isn’t there a service, information movement coordination need out there awaiting an enabling protocol or platform like HTTP?

Won’t the successful first mover in this market place change the world as much as tim brenners lee did with the world wide web?

what strategist will be the first to successfully grab the golden ring?

Bill St Arnaud has the following paper available for reading

A personal perspective on the evolving Internet and Research and Education Networks

here is an abbreviated abstract:

Over the past few years the Internet has evolved from an “end-to-end” telecommunications service to a distributed computing information and content infrastructure. [snip].This evolution in the Internet was predicted by Van Jacobson several years ago and now seems readily evident by recent studies such as the Arbor report indicating that the bulk of Internet traffic is carried over this type of infrastructure as opposed to a general purpose routed Internet/optical network. 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.

Then there is this very interesting entry can be found with a Van Jacobson Google architecture search

[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 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 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 duopolies 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 googles 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 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 it seems to me to be 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 built out to the very edges where the duopolists attach their customers.

And because they have relied on their monopoly and, as Bill St. Arnaud points out, have not done the kind of building out that others have, they stand there potentially quite naked relying on secrecy, nondisclosure, obfuscation, lobbying and the whole 9 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 vcn 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 in the sooner the reckoning the better.

We are developing group intelligence, and doing so while drowning in a sea of what seems like too much info,

In such a situation prospering will mean the ability to sort through the patterns.

But how to sort without being hopelessly fragmented?

Does one work serial or parallel? My tendency is serial. Given other on going projects, for me, acquiring new communication technologies is difficult.

I tend to choose a large project and work through it. Finding the ability to blog was very difficult…. and now with twitter I am going “oh my god more fragmentation.”

And yet I sense that this is all a part of some (not well understood by me at least) communication fabric, be it called swarms, netness, holons or what ever.

I wonder do the actions of human minds separate into some not well understood functions?

Hedgehogs and foxes were one useful category. But I am sure that boundaries are blurred between them. And something tells me that there is multi-dimensionality to the idea….

This must be something that comes from looking for patterns through time and in space… not quite the same thing. It seems that one must spend some time as hedgehog in order to understand what one connects as a fox.

I am coming off a period of five solid months of intense activity. Beginning with supercom09 on November 14; next supernova. And beginning on Dec 6 writing about Holland’s knowledge infrastructure… seven days a week through February 3 when the book was finished. A day of rest and picking up Eva Waskell’s biography and publishing same on FebruRY 16th, then leaving for a three week around the world trip February 20. Returning a week ago.

Of course life includes parallelism, breathing, eating sleeping, thinking. Having been through the whirlwind leaves me wondering however about the skills needed for multitasking. Is it computer game playing etc. What? Is prioritizing NO LONGER necessary? How fast can attention switch?

Met Michel Bauwens and John Hawker among many others. How to assimilate them into one’s personal fabric and weave that fabric though something meaningful to a larger portion of humanity?

Leaves me a sense of a very rich five months, very exciting but no time to contemplate and watch the river of life flow by.

Finally contemplating and hoping to find more equilibrium….having found thanks to friends in Holland information on an old flame whom I last saw in 1963 and last communicated with in 1966…. and again thanks to Dutch friends an afternoon at the university of Utrecht Medical Center of a diagnosis of early onset arthritis that first affected me 20 years ago - namely Diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis (DISH) – nothing life threatening but, for the moment, chronic and without real treatment. Still it is comforting to have sense made of what for twenty years and several ill advised operations has been senseless.

All that having been said, I am now trying to dip into twitter without drowning and get some feed back on where to apply my skills. Like blogging 4 years ago. Difficult to make sense of. How to cope? Seems like the ultimate attention fragmenter. I had to turn the sound off on tweet deck. Yet people I respect deeply rave about it.

The questions that still interest me the most are large. Such as how to bring capitalism into some kind of equilibrium where nation state investment in infrastructure is considered desirable. If the only goods are private goods then surely the future is a grim one of chaos and strife.

Following from this I would like to better understand where optical networks and e-science collaborative tools are taking science in particular and broader learning in general.

Finally, even with all these connections there is still a big disconnect and that is the gap between what excites us about all this tech and its applications. How do you build a bridge to the life of the man or woman on the streets who in a Maslovian sense may be far more in need of focusing on a place to sleep and food to eat?

So what then is the best way forward?

How Dutch Pragmatism Nurtures a 21st Century Economy

The Book is out! 184 pages

Available here.

Note that a limited of books, paperback but in full 8.5 by 11 inch full color weight 670 grams each will be available at Cookreport.com after March 15.

Cost will be $40 each plus $10 shipping and handling… or a total of 50 each shipped within North America.

Eva Waskell and the Election Integrity Movement

A Profile in Courage in the form of an extended conversation between

Eva Waskell and Gordon Cook

The entire book of 160 pages may be downloaded here

Foreword: An Abdication of Trust

As the USA basked in post World War II prosperity, it invested in infrastructure primarily in response to the perceived Communist threat. Once the race to the moon was won, the interstate highway system rolled on of its own momentum. While private goods like the auto commanded respect, public goods like railroads or mass transit sank into decay. The same telecommunications dysfunctionality that hurts us now, with 50 separate state public utilities commissions and a 51st regime in the FCC at the national level, affects our highly decentralized election administration. Decidedly unglamorous and continually short-changed in state and local budgets, local election machinery nationwide represented easy picking for businessmen who wanted to let “new fangled” computers count votes.

However, in the new post war prosperity, there were few people who knew enough about the technology to realize the trade off between public officials starved by politicians of the money needed to do their jobs, and the attractiveness of these automatic counting machines. Never mind that no one understood how they functioned. The tragedy revealed by Eva’s Profile in Courage is that with peacetime prosperity, our national and public interest were quickly forgotten in the rush to privatization.

What Happened

Starved of resources, local election officials, who were dedicated and hard-working public servants and who, on average had a high school diploma, were offered computers that would let them do their jobs “on time” with even less money and more efficiency.

As the vendors wined and dined election officials and sold them “state-of-the-art” computer systems, these businessmen were thinking of elections as a private and totally recession-proof niche marketplace where the customers wanted cost savings and faster and faster ballot processing for faster and faster election results. There was no one minding the policy “hen house.” There was no one to think about the consequences of the fact that local public officials with no understanding of computers were now being given an IT department to run, even though the typical local jurisdiction had little to no in-house technical expertise to do this effectively. There most certainly was no computer security expertise at the local level.

Waskell’s concise verdict: “Our public servants gave up their ability to understand, and hence control and effectively manage, the vote counting process.” “Privatization was packaged and sold as modernization, efficiency, cost savings, a way to speed up ballot processing and the release of election results, and cost savings. No one seemed to notice that control of the vote counting had now silently and irrevocably passed from our public servants who could be held accountable to the anonymous and unaccountable employees of a private company.”

When the new voting technology established its beachhead in the 1970s and 80s, the vendors had the luxury, even then, of a non-existent regulatory environment, much like they enjoy today. “It was laissez faire in the extreme. Anyone could develop a voting system and sell it to a county after the system went through a fairly non-rigorous state certification process that never ever included a line-by-line inspection of any vote-counting software because it was a trade secret.”

Roy Saltman at the National Bureau of Standards wrote in 1975, “The elections administration must assume responsibility for all vote-tallying activities. It if does not, or it cannot because it does not have the expertise to do so, it is not fully carrying out its assigned governmental duties. The vendor, on the other hand, ought not to assume any responsibility for vote-tallying.”

“Saltman and his report are frequently cited,” said Waskell. “Yet in my 25 years in this field I have never heard anyone in the election community say anything about Saltman’s most critical recommendation, i.e. the vendor ought never to control the vote counting.”

Roy Saltman - Prophet Ignored

Roy Saltman’s 1975 report said that real standards were needed for voting systems. What did the Federal Election Commission do? According to Saltman, “Once the FEC commenced the development of the standards in 1984, it did not request the assistance of NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology, formerly the National Bureau of Standards), although this agency offered its expertise.” Instead, the FEC climbed in bed with the vendors.

Another problem is that the local election officials totally rely on the vendors’ proprietary election software, especially when it comes to the vote counting. Thus, the vendors are in the driver’s seat. At the same time, the local election officials expect the public, including voters, to give them the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval and to trust them with the vote counting, even though they don’t truly understand and fully control the proprietary software that counts votes. The vast majority of election officials are indeed honest and hard-working, but they still lack the necessary technical knowledge to run the vendors’ software under all circumstances without assistance.

There’s also another critical problem that’s often overlooked, i.e. the influence of the vendors’ 30-year history of lobbying aimed at the Federal Election Commission, an agency that was essentially captured by the vendors, and ended up taking about 12 years to develop minimum VOLUNTARY standards. We have the fact that NIST’s Roy Saltman, who wrote the predictive “bible” on the subject in 1975, was essentially locked out of the process as the FEC betrayed the American public by accepting whatever the vendors wanted. We have the fact that the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED), a group not accountable to the public, created the pretense of a testing and certification system that was secret and screamed “trust me” at every step of the way. And finally, we have the sorry spectacle of Penelope Bonsall, the Director of the five person Office of Election Administration (the National Clearinghouse on Election Administration) within the FEC, continually asserting that it was absolutely proper for local election officials to accept private proprietary trade secret software to count votes. Her rationale? That there are many other governmental functions that rely on proprietary software. After all, payroll and accounting systems were proprietary. Why not vote counting?

Meanwhile, from the citizen side of the fence, think about the impact of the obscenely small amount we have invested in our democracy infrastructure over the years, and ask yourself how this compares with our many other spending priorities. Furthermore, the lack of meaningful and effective public oversight, accountability and transparency is an open invitation to someone who is willing to do whatever it takes to win. While this may sound bizarre to someone who approaches the somewhat arcane subject of election administration for the very first time, by the time you, dear reader, get to the end of the interview, you will see the alarming range of choices and gaping loopholes available to someone who is willing to do whatever it takes to win.

Those choices and loopholes are there because our privatized elections lack transparency. In other words, critical processes are totally opaque as representatives from the vendors, not the local officials, frequently operate the vote-counting computer on election night. The average American is highly cynical. This interview will show both why they should be cynical and why we should also have hope. Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 showed us that while we preach democracy and fair elections to the rest of the world, we are not exactly free from partisan shenanigans during a tight election.

Once you lift the curtain, as this book does, you will see how little there is that genuinely protects the sanctity of the most critical steps of the election process, and why we must start to pay attention to what’s going on. With hundreds of millions of dollars floating around in campaigns today, how easy it would be to quietly buy an insurance policy so that your larger investments in media advertising and so on have not been in vain. How would this work in practice?

It would be easy. Let’s look at what happens after the ballots or their electronic equivalent are delivered to the central counting room on election night. As Eva explains, “There may or may not be a surveillance camera in the computer room. If there is, it’s always in the possession of the local jurisdiction so any potentially incriminating footage can always be erased. Camera or no camera, there certainly is no complete, permanent and publicly inspected record at all of the most critical events that take place in the room on election night. Airplanes have flight recorders so we know what happened in the cockpit in case of a plane crash. There is no equivalent comprehensive record—or anything closely resembling it—of what the computer operator does in the cockpit of elections on election night. None. There is no black box or other device to record audio and, say, all of the keyboard keystrokes. The only black box in the room is the election computer.”

Gordon Cook
February 15, 2010

On December 1 at after10 pm on the first day of supernova,my long time friend Eva Waskell who more than 25 years ago started a journey that morphed into the Election Integrity movement - much more about that real soon now - opened her cell phone and called her longtime friend Ed Healy also known as the Phantom Cab driver.

With less than 10 minutes we were driven back to mid town and in the aftermath i found out from Eva how she miraculously conjured up this amazing “cabbie.” I have had a couple of phone conversations with Ed since returning a want to give his two blogs a huge recommendation.

The first The Phantom Cab Driver Phites Back is a SanFran taxi industry policy blog where Ed brings into public view the machinations of San Francisco Mayor Newsom’s scheme to off set the city’s fiscal policies at the expense of long time cab drivers. Here he gives blow by blow description of the work of Christiane Hayashi who was charged with working out a solution. According to Ed she is very impressive in handling a very difficult situation.

But take a look at Phantom Cab stories. These are truly amazing reminiscenses from Ed’s 25 years of driving. Some will make you laugh, others cry.

For example: Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Star

Star was Liverpool Irish and talked just like the Beatles - whom he idolized. He could sing every word to every Beatle song that I knew as well as every word to just about every rock song that anybody else ever heard of. He could do the entire repertoire of Spooky Tooth for god’s sake.

By 1:15 one Saturday morning, he was already dead - shot by junkie, a former taxi driver, who wouldn’t believe that Star hadn’t tucked away a couple of hundred on a Friday night.

Cook’s Edge: Ed has a book here. People will buy it, I am certain. I told him he reminds me of Eric Hoffer. He didn’t quite accept the comparison but understood why i make it.

He is a WONDERFUL writer. Take a look and you will see what i mean.

It is not often that I see such delightful news. The public interest is protected in California even as it is abused in Washington DC.

Ever since the NTIA mapping program became a topic of discussion on my mail list and Sara Wedeman saw and critiqued the work of Rachelle Cong and her project manager Ann Neville, the question of the way in which NTIA would use some hundreds of millions of dollars of stimulus money to ascertain where service was and where it wasn’t became a major subject of discussion. Sara took a look at what Chong had done in California and reacted with extreme dismay. Several prominent members asked Sara how she would do it. When they saw how Sara would approach it they encouraged her to reach out and offer consulting support which sara did and which unfortunately ended very unhappily. Meanwhile I did an interview with Sara on her methodology which I summarized here. It is discussed here. This link will give you the complete interview in PDF form.

Sara submitted comments to NTIA published here and here. And the explanatory slide deck. And here.

Esme Vos was impressed by Sara’s approach, commenting that “an interesting interview that explains why mapping is important and how it should be done to ensure the final product is useful for policy… offering keen insights into why universal broadband availability is so important.”.

By the end of June Lawrence Strickling had assumed the lead at NTIA, from whence the BTOP grant program is being run. He had also brought in Ann Neville, Rachelle Chong’s mapping project manager, to direct the NTIA’s mapping program. One of the results of that we have seen written up or commented on by Art Brodsky in no less than 14 articles which are all linked to and summarized here. Millions of dollars are going to Connected Nation under the supervision of Mr Strickling and Ms Neville. This despite a very widespread opinion in the public interest community that Connected Nation has been put together by interests loyal to the incumbents and is serving their interests by producing maps that say , in effect, “this area has broadband because ATT says it does”. Oh? Where? Precisely under what terms? “Oh sorry we can tell you that. It is carrier confidential. Thank you for giving us the money borrowed from future generations of tax payers while we give those taxpayers nothing useful in return.”

The Delightful News

PUC member’s bid for second term rejected
Telephony Online
By Michael Rothfeld

The leader of the state Senate on Tuesday [December 8, 2009] rejected a controversial appointee of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger who had been bidding for a second term on the commission that regulates state utilities.

Aides to Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) informed the governor’s office that he would not hold a hearing to confirm Rachelle Chong. Chong, who has been severely criticized by consumer groups, was first appointed in 2006 and had been seeking a term that would have lasted through 2014.

The decision means she will have to leave the commission at the end of the year.

Chong, who functioned informally as the Public Utilities Commission’s main telecommunications regulator, had received support from the state’s two largest phone companies, AT&T and Verizon, which benefited from her successful push to deregulate most land-line services.

They lobbied for her confirmation, and AT&T solicited support letters from nonprofit groups and government organizations, some of which had received funding from the company. Both phone companies also donated to a nonprofit group affiliated with Steinberg.

COOK’s Edge: Chong and Ann Neville’s California mapping study found that ATT and Verizon had done a fine job of bringing broadband to 95% of the population. Darrell Steinberg disagreed and listened to his continuents. Thank goodness his actions ended Ms. Chong’s service to the incumbents.

On the other hand, I am sure Mr. Strickling would have no problem in explaining why he defended the choice of Ms. Neville rather adopting Sara’s approach. In my opinion his explanation would likely be analogous to another homily in why Wall Street counts and Main Street does not. At least in denying Ms. Chong another five years service to the incumbents rather than the people California told Washington that the interests of ordinary citizens come before those of 100 billion dollar a year mega corporations.

Today I wrote on my list: I am increasingly more skeptical that like NTIA the FCC will do ANYTHING that could be interpreted to be in the national interest as opposed to the corporate interest.

Count me with Erik Cecil in the hope that events may render the FCC irrelevant. Sheesh what will it take for us to learn?

Erik Cecil Replied with the best piece I have ever seen him write:

Gordon,

The FCC is already irrelevant * and * it is not going away. This is not unfortunate because we are in transition. Power is leaky and must go to the edges. The institutions of government and of law, however, have only begun to transition from indirectly serving people to directly serving them. This transition, however, is also already well underway.

I suspect that the tectonic nature of this shift has actually surprised the Obama team. I am sure there are those who thought they could contain and direct it. Not so. They opened up extraordinary energy pent up behind decades if not eons of government serving themselves and their cronies far better than serving everyone. No government on this planet can stop it; they are being carried by it.

The deepest truth I can detect of the matter is that the institutions of the last few centuries are no longer relevant. They lack moral authority and have zero public trust. Their actual power is waning, not growing. In order to remain relevant, government must regain its moral and ethical standing. It cannot do this by continuing to act as if the old ways and old methods are relevant.

Obama, therefore, is straddling a chasm whose breadth and depth grows daily. It is the chasm of dissatisfaction with concentrated wealth, inner circles of power, cronyism in any form no matter how polished and refined, and anything that smacks of centralized authority. He gains authority by giving back to the people actual powers to choose and influence, but his advisors and ancient interests backing him are terrified to release their grip on systems that have served them well for eons. This is not class warfare; is it far deeper and far more organic. It is a transition in the nature of civilization.

This dynamic is playing out in communications arenas as well because it is, in part, one of the primary instrumentalities of this transition. The FCC, therefore, faces a particularly intense iteration of this same dynamic. They are struggling mightily to serve their political contributors without sacrificing the integrity of the campaign that put them into power. They actually have an impossible task of simultaneously running a conventional regulatory machine on conventional terms while their very integrity depends upon deconstructing and giving away the tools of the machine they have inherited over the protests of those who wrote the largest checks to the campaign.

Larry Summers is one side of that debate; Susan Crawford is the other. Genochowski’s and Obama’s difficulty is that both Larry and Susan are correct, but Susan’s view is the only one that is sustainable over the long term. Long term thinking, unfortunately, tends to lose out to organizational thinking, the latter of which usually values short and immediate appearances over the birds of consequence who may or may not come home to roost during short term thinking’s watch.

Nevertheless, the FCC and Obama have no choice in this matter. The old ice has melted and power structures everywhere are in motion. At some levels, I sincerely believe they see this, but continue to struggle with how to mediate this apparent chaos.

Here is the good news. We can help. We can enable individuals to have power, intelligence and information in ways they never imagined possible. We can re-create the political process.

But there is a giant challenge: Government WILL NOT do it for us. We must do it for ourselves and for others. This is the lesson of the Internet. When you are given power, you must use it. If you do not use it, others will use it for you. This was the success of the Bush Presidency until the nature of the use became obvious to the majority.

2010 will see the emergence of new forms of legal practice, lobbying, information gathering, information sharing, and of exerting influence. Those who continue to exert influence using conventional methods will increasingly pay higher prices for less. Those who exploit newer approaches will create incredible leverage at extraordinary low cost.

To the extent the FCC has the courage to serve all Americans rather than serve the lowest common political denominator, they will reap historic benefit. To the extent they don’t, they will extinguish what little remains of their moral authority in the eyes of most Americans. In other words, if they are authentic to the core in their embrace of transparency, to the extent they serve up the WHOLE truth and nothing but the WHOLE truth, there is nothing but upside. To the extent they play business as usual, transparency will do what it must and will do so without hesitation and with vigor.

Transition is opportunity. Fighting it is futile. We can only embrace the transition and empower our fellow human beings.

Happy New Year to each and every one of you.