Month: March 2010

What's in my wallet, part two

Six weeks ago or so I wrote a post about an unredeemed, and somewhat magical, pawn ticket that I’ve kept in my wallet for the past sixteen years. You’ve seen those TV advertisements for the “credit card” mafia front called Capital One. “What’s in your wallet?” they ask. Well, I used to have a Capital One so-called “credit card”1 in there , but I canceled the account last year –I’m still paying down the balance– so I have nothing with their name on it in my wallet to remind me that I’m still their bonded serf. In addition to that Magic Pawnbroker ticket I have this my wallet:

Some of the words are water-blurred, so here’s a transcription:


“Life’s challenges are determined by our thoughts and actions. Choose willingly and be proud. ‘I live, I believe, I love, I share, I laugh, I motivate, I fly, I run, I hike, I swim, I surf, I ride, and, most of all, I smile every day’”.

It’s a reproduction of a card that was found in the effects of an extremely close friend of mine, a former professional athlete (snowboarding), who died, much too young, of ALS, nearly two years ago. He indeed lived up to this credo, and, as I said in a eulogy at a memorial service for him in a packed-to-overflowing(non fundie, non-evangelical) church in his adopted home town of Colorado Springs, “he was a happy man until the day he died.”

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Will Minnesota Senate Screw Duluth's Chances of Getting Google Gigabit Project?

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As reported by Christopher Mitchel from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Qwest has scored quite the little victory in its efforts to keep itself the world safe from real competition socialism. A state Senator and a state Rep introduced a bill that would have made it easier to for local governments to build municipal networks. Right now, it takes a local referendum vote with 65% to authorize a locality to build a network that offers commercial telephone service (and therefore any “triple play” broadband access service — or so they read it in MN). A State Senator and State Rep offered a bill to reduce the threshold on the referendum to a simply majority. By the time the relevant jurisdictional committee was finished, the revised bill included one of the favorite incumbent roadblocks to localities: a mandatory “feasibility study” designed to be so onerous and expensive to conduct that few local governments will want to even try.

Meanwhile, the good folks of Duluth are so desperate for real broadband that they made this joke video to get citizens to show support for bringing Google Gigabit Fiber project to town.

Question for the good Senators and Representatives of Minnesota: when you’ve got folks clamoring for real broadband, do you really want to be “protecting” your underperforming incumbent? By “clarifying” that your referendum law applies to any indirect provision of telecom service, and imposing a five year plan on municipalities, you are making it very hard for your local governments to — in the words of Duluth’s mock Public Service Announcement — “suck up even harder” than the competition. While I am hardly privy to Google’s secrets and innermost workings, I am willing to bet real money that when they weigh where to set up their pilot project, they will consider any possible legal landmines. Would you want to set up shop in a city where Qwest or some other provider might sue to block your use of city assets under the amended state law? Even if Google were to ultimately prevail, it would tie up the deployment in litigation. Who wants that, when the number of communities begging for Google to come and work its fiber magic keeps growing?

Mind you, there’s a good argument that even this version of the bill is better than the current law. Dropping the referendum requirement from 65% to a simple majority will do a lot of good even with the feasibility study requirement. But should that really be the choice? Don’t the people of MN deserve the better bill, without throwing (yet another) bone to Qwest to reward its failure to provide what people want and need?

So folks in Duluth, and other communities in MN trying to get Google Fiber, you might want to ask Qwest’s buddies in the legislature to cut y’all some slack and pass the original bill without the study requirement. that would send a signal that MN is serious about bringing broadband to its citizens and would welcome the sort of public/private partnership that Google appears to be offering. Or perhaps the MN legislature is just rooting for the people of Topeka “Google,” KS instead of the folks in Duluth.

Stay tuned . . . .

A Quick Addendum To My AWS-2/AWS-3 Prediction

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Last week, I predicted the FCC would opt to auction the AWs-2/AWS-3 spectrum rather than adopt the M2Z proposal. Yesterday, the FCC issued it’s teaser for recommendations to improve broadband adoption. One of these was “[c]onsider use of spectrum for a free or very low cost wireless broadband service.”

That, of course, was M2Z’s chief selling point. They would provide a free tier for for everyone supported by adds and by the higher-speed, ad free pay tier. So do I want to revise my prediction on whether the FCC will adopt the M2Z or T-Mobile asymmetric auction proposal?

Not at this point. Sure, this tea leaf looks much more favorable to M2Z than it does to T-Mobile. But I note two things. First, the language says “consider” rather than simply “use.” The question of whether to require free service of some kind as a public interest obligation was teed up in the pending AWS-2/AWS-3 proceeding. If they were going to go with M2Z, they wouldn’t say “consider,” they’d say “use spectrum . . . .” Second, there are a number of other ways to use spectrum for free or low cost wireless. These range from expanding the use of unlicensed spectrum to facilitate creation of community wireless networks to mandating “wireless lifeline”-type programs that would require all carriers to offer cheap or free access on a needs basis. It also remains to be seen whether the FCC will actually do anything other than “consider” such an approach, or whether revenue concerns and incumbent resistance will ultimately carry the day.

So while I’m pleased to see the FCC looking at spectrum from a public interest/public welfare perspective, I’m not changing my bet on how the FCC resolves the AWS-2/AWS-3 band fight. The real questions are (a) timetable, and (b) spectrum caps, yes/no? (and no, I haven’t forgotten about Fred Campbell’s standing invite/challenge for me to justify spectrum caps generally, just haven’t gotten time yet). The FCC could conceivably issue an Order with service rules and schedule an auction date. Or it could put out a final set of rules for further notice. My personal bet is thy will move quickly — both to show they are taking action and because OMB would really like to book that revenue. But we’ll have to see.

Heck, I could be entirely wrong in my prediction and they could go with M2Z, or some variant thereof. Stranger things have been known to occur.

Stay tuned . . . .

USTR 301 Comments: Crashing the IP Mafia's Party

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Time for another little instructional video, aka “5 Minutes With Harold Feld.” Here, I talk about the US Trade Representative’s “Special 301” Process. This is where the US Trade Representative (USTR) makes a “naughty list” for countries which, in the words of the statute: “deny adequate and effective protection of intellectual property rights” or “deny fair and equitable market access to United States persons that rely upon intellectual property protection.” (You can find last year’s list here.)

But while Congress intended this to be about protecting U.S. interests from wholesale piracy — you know, the warehouses with the industrial copying machines that crank out 10,000 counterfeit DVDs and hour and such what — the usual suspects have hijacked this to ratchet up intellectual property law in other countries. That includes trying to outlaw in other countries things that are not only legal here, but critical to our electronics industry and online services (not to mention free speech and civic expression). For example, because “space shifting” is a perfectly legal fair use, SlingMedia can sell a product that lets me watch shows I pay for through my broadband connection. Because we don’t hold “providers of interactive services” liable for copyright infringement if they follow the Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice and takedown provisions, Youtube can have an open video service that’s easy to use and easy for people to upload content.

Eliminate these provisions and we don’t just lose access to foreign markets for these goods and services. We potentially expose U.S.-based providers to foreign liability. Needless to say, Hollywood and the music industry are deeply concerned about how mucking around with other countries and pressuring them to change copyright law hurts other businesses — let alone the impact on civil liberties. But while it is not the job of these industries, and their associated trade organizations, to care about others, it is the job of the USTR to care about all U.S. goods and services, not just the entertainment industry.

You can read more about this issue from my Public Knowledge colleague Rashmi Rangnath here, including her exciting day testifying before USTR staff here. Rashmi is too polite to say as bluntly as I will that USTR staff give every sign of having been so thoroughly indoctrinated by the entertainment industry that they don’t even remember what their actual job is anymore. So we will need to whack them up the side of the head with a pretty big Clue Hammer a few times to get this process heading back in the right direction.

Stay tuned . . . .

Acts of the Apostles in convenient ebook format

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For nearly ten years, my book Acts of the Apostles has been available for free download from this site, and lately, from lots of other sites. I figure that it’s been downloaded at least ten thousand times, and perhaps a lot more. There’s really no way to tell at this point.

Recently I’ve been getting a fair number of requests for other (that is, not PDF) formats, such as mobi for the kindle and epub for other devices. After much, much, much too much ado, I’ve finally made different versions available on Smashwords for $4/copy. I’ll be curious to see what kind of sales I get, especially since the PDF is out there for free, and people can convert them if they feel like going through the hassle.

As I wrote in an earlier wetmachine post, I consider format conversion, for example from PDF to mobi, to be making a “derivative work” and therefore prohibited by the Creative Commons license. Not everybody agrees with me about this, and the matter really rests in an indeterminate state until such time as a court of law makes a pronouncement on it.

In the meantime, I don’t think $4 is much to ask for such a great book!

The hassles I went through were largely caused by my mule-headedness and lack of understanding of Microsoft Word. The Smashwords site itself is a relative breeze to use. I do plan to make Cheap Complex Devices also available on Smashwords, and I think the process of converting that book will be a whole lot smoother than the first one was.

Oh. Canada.

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Our weekly engineering meeting has a conference table and a huge projection screen. On this Monday, the Vancouver Olympics had just closed, and our three Canadian engineers were celebrating their climactic hockey victory. Being virtual, it was ridiculously easy(*) to find a flag image on Google, drag it in-world, and throw it up on the projector. No mess, no fuss, and no disturbance of the meeting. It might have been an afterthought, but it was appreciated.

In public social virtual worlds, a lot of attention gets paid to avatars — that’s your primary dimension of expression. But in private business worlds, the whole environment is yours to personalize, and it’s easy to change frequently. The discussion referenced in my previous post spoke of spontaneously creating a whole meeting room reserved and named in honor of a visitor.

* Much easier than the mechanics of adding a picture to this blog. See this video, and especially the last minute.

Genachowski's Secret $15 bn Piggy Bank, or T-mobile Triumphs Over M2Z.

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I’ve been rather pressed for time, hence have not had much chance to blog on the FCC’s recent spectrum policy announcements for D-Block and the broadcast migration offer. Combine these two speeches with Genachowski’s recent statement in an interview that the NBP will finance the $25 billion via existing programs and it is clear that the FCC will adopt the T-Mobile’s “asymmetric auction” proposal for the AWS-2 and AWS-3 band, leaving M2Z high and dry. The only question is whether or not there will be spectrum caps to keep AT&T and Verizon from snarfing the good stuff, but do not expect the NBP to touch something as “controversial” as spectrum caps even by veiled implication the way the DoJ did in its comments.

Mind, this is another example of the “spectrum auctions are the crack cocaine of public policy” problem. The thirst for revenue pushes all other considerations out the window. I’m not convinced the T-Mobile approach is wrong (especially if subject to spectrum caps), and I think the D-Block finesse was extremely clever. But when revenue sits in the driver’s seat, policy invariably takes a wrong turn somewhere along the road. But it is difficult to imagine how Genachowski could resist a $15 bn secret cash cow to fend off accusations that Democrats are once again writing checks against our children’s future blah blah blah.

I unpack all this below. . . .

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R.I.P. Jon Swift — a good man gone

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The funny, kind, decent and fiercely democratic (note the lower-case “d”) blogger Jon Swift has died, much too young. See Tom Watson’s appreciation here. Swift, whose “real world” name was Al Weisel, was a friend to Wetmachine, having twice or thrice blogged about this site as “a great site you’ve never heard of” or similar. I never met the man in person, but in email correspondence he was kind and helpful to me. As a blogger, he was an inspiration.

In honor of Al/Jon Swift, this week is Blogroll Amnesty Day at Wetmachine. If your blog is not spam, porn, or blatantly offensive and you’re willing to put Wetmachine on your blogroll, I’ll put you on ours. Leave details in the comments or send me a note to [my first name] at [this a-here website].