As any TNL.net readers know, there has long been a battle between two groups on the Internet: those who believe that copyright holders should be given preferential treatment and those who believe the internet should be a level-playing ground. I am firmly in the latter camp, even though I produce large amounts of content online.

A few years ago, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (aka DMCA), a law that, while somewhat more aggressive than I’d like it, manages to strike a balance between the interests of both copyright holders and online sites by requiring that a takedown notice be sent to a site if you see infringing content. The site then needs to honor or fight the takedown notice in court. The DMCA turned out to be a decent compromise protecting the interests of most people and things should probably have stopped there.

But the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA for short) goes substantially farther. It looks to assume guilt on the part of the site hosting content and looks to provide a system that would put control of internet domain names in the hands of the government.

Today, when you type TNL.net in your browser, that gets translated into a set of numbers known as an IP address (this is similar to you looking up contacts in your address book instead of having to remember that contact’s phone number). What SOPA calls for is that if a copyright owner finds one piece of infringing content on a site, they could go to the government and ask them to block that address. People would still be able to access the site if they knew the IP address (and most pirates would)  but the regular public would not be able to access the site by typing its name. Sites like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Flickr, and other could immediately disappear from the internet for a single presumed act of copyright sharing.

So I would urge you to contact your congressperson in opposition of SOPA today. Sendwrite has created a helpful online tool to send physical letters to your congressperson. The few minutes you put in will make it possible for the internet to continue existing.

Before you go, imagine two futures: in one, the internet becomes like TV, you don’t get to choose what’s on, when it’s on and where it’s on; in the other, the internet remains as it is today, a place where you can choose what you want to see, when you want to see and where you want to see it. Which future do you want? If it’s the latter, contact your congressperson today.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Stopping SOPA. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

But beyond a statement about the internet infrastructure, this is also about figuring out a solution to avoid losing the internet. So to help it, we need to define a way to build the atomic components that will help it become resilient to any attack, whether they are from repressive dictators or over-reaching corporations.

Fortunately, the internet happens to be at a key point in terms of its evolution, with the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 being upon us. With one major effort to upgrade large part of the infrastructure, it seems that new efforts could help us increase the overall resilience of the net.

A few years ago, I put together some basic requirements for a tool that I would like to see, something I had called a “Personal Relationship Manager.” A few years later, there are several of those so I’m thinking that I can start planting similar ideas into the ground for possible implementations by people who understand protocols much better than I do. The following are imperfect thoughts based on my understanding of core internet protocols and discussions I’ve had around them with several people over the last couple of years.

A lot of this, of course, has substantial precedence. For example, the idea of completely rewiring connectivity is not really a new one. Here’s Doc Searls, about 3 years ago:

Connectivity-as-infrastructure is soft in several senses. One is that you don’t need a big utility company to provide it. Another is that data and its protocols are soft. They have no physical substance, yet they have supportive qualities that are substantive in the extreme. That’s because the Net is a way of connecting. It is not the wires and waves that do the connecting.

.. and there has been a lot of work put into making the internet protocols faster and more reliable but few have taken the radical approach of making the net completely self-reliant.

So without further ado, here are some basic requirements:

• Open
• Light
• Easy to use
• End-less

I will now go into the thinking behind each of these points.

Open

Wikipedia defines a protocol as:

a set of guidelines or rules.

The challenge then becomes who is responsible for setting those guidelines or rules. Ownership of the responsibility for setting the guidelines or rules should be diffused around the community of interest on the internet. In that sense, the particle protocol should be a protocol without a head group. Decisions around what to include and exclude in its core should come from the community as a whole, with no central office, no central committee, no central individual, ultimately responsible for it.

Open is the way of the net, where ideas are given dominance based on their individual value and not based on the value of the individuals that brought them forth.

Because it is headless, open is uncontrollable. One could argue that peer-to-peer networks are the closest thing we have to open networks as every node in the network serves and routes things for every other node and the disappearance of an individual node does not impact the network as a whole for very long.

A corollary to open then seems to be that the network will be peer-to-peer, making it impossible to shutdown the network altogether. Peer to peer networks have been the bane of the music and movie industry for a decade because they cannot be shut down and it seems that if we are to build a network that cannot be shut down, we can learn from that model.

Open also means unencumbered from any pre-existing patent. The particle protocol should be something that is owned by absolutely everyone and by no one in particular. The reason for this is that lack of ownership means that the owners cannot be leaned on by any organization or government. With that point of friction removed, the ability to create backdoors or shut down such a protocol would be more limited and require substantial efforts on the part of the people trying to do the shutting down.

Open also means that the particle protocol should be sitting at the lowest level of the infrastructure stack with little or nothing below it. Once again, this is to ensure its resilience as the closer it is to the foundation, the harder it is to remove.

Last but not least, is that open is not about money.  That is because the core portions of the particle protocol should be free in a monetary sense too. However, beyond the core, innovation should be allowed so anyone can build (and make money) by providing extra components for the particle protocol. However, the people doing so must realize that any changes they decide to make to the core are dictated by the underlying principles regarding the protocol and must be redistributed in the same open fashion.

Light

The particle protocol should have the lightest CPU and memory footprint possible. Some may feel it is too much of a constraint but the particle protocol should be so light that it can run on most devices. For its initial version, I think that the ability to run, without impacting their pre-existing operations, on mobile phones, computers, and devices with as low a footprint as a 400Mhz CPU and 128Mb of RAM (Apple watchers may recognize this as the original specification behind the first iPhone: it is no accident as I believe the particle protocol should run on any smartphone in the future).

Light, in my view, also means unattached, which means that the particle protocol would be wireless by default. Sure, devices could be created to connect some points of the network to some wired network (and this could turn into a whole new sector for the telecom infrastructure industry).

Finally, light also means unencumbered of extras. The problem to be solved here is resilience (ie. it can’t be shutdown). Anything beyond that is extra. So the particle protocol should allow for TCP/IP to run on top of it but things like extra security, guarantee of services, and so on, should not be part of its core. However, I’d like to see some kind of a plug-in approach that could allow that protocol to be extended with such features by anyone who wants to.

Easy to Use

The first dotcom boom taught me an important lesson about technology: if it is not easy to use, people won’t use it. The internet was around for a long time prior to 1995 but it wasn’t until then that people adopted it. Why was that? I think it was due to two factors: first, Microsoft built a TCP/IP stack into their operating system, making internet access a question of configuration and AOL started splattering the world with their disks, making access to the online world just a question of setting up a username and password and handing out your credit card information to them. The rest was automated.

In order for the particle protocol to succeed, it should be easy to install and easy to use. By easy to install, I mean that it should be a question of downloading it and, if needed, clicking on an icon to install it but that would be it. The software would install itself, look for ways to connect to its peers, identify any peers nearby, and automatically connect, becoming another node in the network.

By easy to use, I mean that there ought to be no actual work to use it once installed. The first thing the protocol installer would look for is all the ways in which it can connect to other devices (wired: eg. via a modem or ethernet / wireless: eg. WiFi, Bluetooth, EDGE, 3G, 4G, etc…) and attach itself to all the available modes without disturbing the other software attached to those. There should be, embedded in the protocol itself, a logic as to how it would prioritize its connectivity, based on how many nodes are available in a particular connectivity mode and how reliant other nodes are on its connectivity to more than one connection (eg. tying 3G communication to WiFi links).

By being completely invisible, the protocol would become something that can exist without being acknowledged and can be installed without much notice after installation. So, if you were to take Libya as an example again, hacktivist could work to install the particle protocol on every communication devices the government owns, and protesters would leverage those installation for their own communication.

The only way to stop such a protocol would be to completely shutdown every electronic device available in an area/country. While it is not impossible that some strongmen could go down that route (I’m thinking of places like North Korea, maybe), the impact would be that the only way to shut things down is to shut down your own communications line. While it is theoretically possible, such a shutdown could create a race as to who is bringing their own network back up in order to communicate. If we were to take into account network theory, this is basically creating resilience by ensuring that the information assymetry created by a network shutdown forces ALL the players to rush back to restoring it, thus restoring nodes for all sides at the same time. In a perverse way, it leverages the assymetry to get rid of it.

End-less

Many years ago, my good friends Doc Searls and David Weinberger argued that the internet was a World of Ends. The principles were sound but unfortunately, by creating a view based on ends, they opened the possibility for creating points of controls.

If the internet has ends, it can be closed down.

But what if it didn’t have end-point. What if it had addresses that changed on a more random basis. Then exerting control over one point would not necessarily work. What if the addressing were to change on a time and location basis as well as some other factors based on sudden changes in traffic (spikes or drops) with violent drops in traffic resulting in a complete re-assignement of the addressing space along with a drastic change in how long devices would attach to that space before changing address again.

Without those ends, and by creating a network protocol that would carry traffic while seeing radical changes in its addressing space could create a situation where an attack against a portion of the network would be seen as an attack against the network as a whole and solutions would be handled on a global basis.

So whether that network is shutdown because a political strongman decides to do or an earthquake damages a region, the network as a whole would have some form of self-healing capacity to start rearranging the damaged parts quickly and without any involvement from the users in the affected areas (network management should be the least of people’s problems in a time of crisis).

Beyond the principles: Addressing

Since this would be a relatively new protocol, I would throw some backward compatibility away. As protocol development takes place, I can only assume that it won’t be until 2012 that we would see the first implementations of this. As a result, I would go as far as to venture that the particle protocol should not have to worry about IPv4 addressing and should focus on working with IPv6 instead. The reason behind such an approach is that IPv6 will increasingly be the new standard for addressing beginning in 2012. IPv4 support, as a result, would be great to support legacy systems but this is about fixing problems in the future so let’s support the systems that are future proof.

Beyond the principles: Implementations

Ultimately, protocols live and die by their implementation. The first step towards implementation would be a lightweight version of the particle protocol that could work on linux, android and iOS devices.

Why those first?

First, linux. Linux is available in a variety of forms, including as an embedded OS for devices. In the future, I think we could see the particle protocol as something that would be available over embedded devices (particle boxes) that could be assembled cheaply and connected to power sources and network sources. Such boxes should be relatively inexpensive to produce (in discussion with people, I’ve been using the price of $25 in parts as a stake in the ground) and all schematics should be open-sourced.

However, the challenge with the hardware only solution is that linux is not something the general population uses on a regular basis. So creating a mostly linux-based solution would attract the attention of people who want to disconnect things to those devices and get the to disconnect them.

More difficult to disconnect, however, is an overall telecom infrastructure and here are I am making some technical bets: that iOS and Android will be the major operating systems powering mobile phones in the future. Taking that approach, a version of the particle protocol working on those devices could turn every smartphone with those OSes on them into a network point. I’m sure that this might make some people unhappy (Apple would probably not approve) but I suspect that it could allow for quick deployment of devices in regions needing them.

Any other implementations would be welcome, of course.

Conclusion

Protocols are agreements and this set of concepts is only a proposed set. I’d like to see discusion around the concepts in the technical community but, at the core, the problem is simple: we need an communication network that works based on network effects, making the network much stronger with every node that joins it. Recent events, both geopolitical (Egypt, Libya) and environmental (earthquakes and tsunami in Japan) have shown that our networks are still brittle.

The particle protocol is the beginning of a discussion to strengthen the network at one of its lowest layers and ensure that disruption in one physical location can be healed by its proximity to other locations.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The Particle Protocol. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

I would like to propose some basic principles to launch an effort to increase the resilience of the internet and help it grow beyond the current chokepoints that have been created for it.

The Infrastructure

The internet, in my view, is a combination of low-level infrastructures and protocols that allow us all to connect to each other. It is, above all, a set of agreements between all parties involved as to what is and isn’t acceptable across the board. Some may argue otherwise (Some see the net as the physical infrastructure that connect us; some see the net as only the web; some see it as only companies like Google, Facebook, etc… I don’t. I see it as all encompassing.)

The infrastructure of the internet, however, is one that is still largely held in private hands. I explored the subject at greater length last year but to make a long story short, access to the internet can be controlled in 3 areas: at the source (where the servers allowing for creating and sharing content are located), at the receiving end (where the computer or mobile device is receiving content) or in-between those two points (either using firewalls or shutting down the infrastructure altogether).

Repressive governments tend to work at all those points, often managing to block portions of the network through a variety of means. For example, China has been able to shut down sites located in China, block out sites located outside of China (through what is often referred to as the great firewall of China), and has fairly tight control of the telecom industry (the Red Army holds substantial shareholder stakes in anyone doing business in China, including the telcos), giving it almost full control on the end to end approach.

Activists have been moving sites outside of China and using a variety of tools (most notably, Tor) to bypass the great firewall of China but they will be left powerless if the Chinese government decides to unplug the network infrastructure.

At the end of the day, that infrastructure is currently the weakest point in the internet. The mess of wires and wireless services that sits between your access device and this site (or any other site) is what is making the internet a global network… and it is something that is largely outside the control of anyone but the richest and most powerful people, organizations, and governments. In the US, for example, it is mostly under the control of telephone and cable companies, which themselves are working in conjunction with local, state, and federal regulators.

A substantial part of the reason for that control by large operators is that building out and maintaining that infrastructure has been and still is a relatively expensive effort. Laying down and maintaining the cables and equipment used to distribute captioned pictures of cats or images from the latest revolt is something that has required investments in the billions, if not trillions of dollars globally. In developed countries, that infrastructure rebuilt happened mostly in the 1990s, one of the greatest benefits from the dotcom explosions as investments in the early internet startups helped subsidize one of the greatest buildouts in human history (in the US alone, I would consider the effort to be on par with the great pyramids).

However, we have now learned that wires are frail and the march of technology has fortunately allowed us to move to something that could help potentially move the infrastructure beyond its current state to a brand new world.

From cloud to atmosphere

With web 2.0, the idea of hosting content on remote servers shared by many and administered by few (Amazon, Google, etc..) has been commonly referred to as the cloud… and that analogy has been increasingly used to talk about the internet as an amorphous group, moving beyond the ground-based concepts of land lines and server farms to evoke something greater.

At the same time, devices, whether they are mobile phones, tablets, computers, or others, have increasingly moved away from using cables to connect to the internet, leveraging an alphabet soup of acronyms like EDGE, 3G, 4G, and Wi-Fi to access the internet wirelessly. For the purpose of further discussion, I would like to know refer to wireless internet access as the atmosphere.

Today, that space is still under the control of large entities, due to a combination of outdated intellectual property concepts and foreceful lobbying by established players. However, many before me have argued for opening up the wireless spectrum further. By using the atmosphere nomenclature, I would argue that locking down of the wireless space is a form of pollution that can be routed around.

The atmosphere is everything that surrounds the cloud. It is the space between the devices that are used for creation and consumption of content.

No one should own the atmosphere: It surrounds us and we all contribute to its well-being and decay in an almost equal fashion.

The atmosphere is the infrastructure that makes the cloud possible.

It is a public internet (or a virtual common) where the internet public (or all of us) can interact.

… and the atmosphere needs all of us to work together to ensure that a single party cannot poison it.

A breath of Fresh Air

Today’s internet atmosphere can be seen as largely divided between control in the wireless space and control in the landline space… and where control exists, the potential to cut off the air supply is stronger.

Mobile phones and mobile devices accessing the internet over GSM, 3G, 4G, EDGE, CDMA, WCDMA and other acronym the telecom industry can throw at us are generally controlled by wireless telephone companies. This is why one can seldom take a device from one country to the next without being forced to either switch carrier or be faced with relatively expensive fees for “roaming”.

The alternative for this is usually seen as WiFi, which allows anyone to set up a wireless hotspot as long as the upstream provider (the one the WiFi hotspot is connected to) agrees to it. So while few cable and phone companies have objected to WiFi hotspots being connected by individuals to date, they could easily shut down access to the internet at those end points.

What we now need is an infrastructure that would route around those end points and create a mesh network between different hotspot that are not connected to each other.

Cues From Nature

The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it — John Gilmore

The atmosphere is resilient and tends to self-correct. For example, if a toxic particle shows up in the atmosphere, other components of the atmosphere can deal with it. And while an area of the atmosphere can be damaged at a time, all the other areas can help repair it over time.

So if there is pollution in Bhopal India, the overall atmosphere eventually dissipates that pollution and the system is restored.

All this happens without anyone pulling a trigger, or without any major catalytic event. It’s the work of billions or trillions of particles all working in conjunction with each other to keep things going. It’s a pattern that repeats itself in nature time and again.  Ants work together to repair their farms after it’s been flooded; bees work together to fend off attack by a hungry bear; the whole ecosystem works together to balance out preys and predators. It’s an evolutionary battle we can all take cues from.

And it is one that the internet needs to take its cues from. For the internet to survive in the long run, it needs a healthy atmosphere… and that’s where you come in.

As nature gives us cues about collective action to ensure the well being of all the group, even in the face of a threat against an individual, we must find a way to work collectively to ensure the well being of the net in future.

A global mesh

I believe that markets, by their own nature, can be one of the best route around censorship. My main reason for that belief is that every time a company closes a door in the marketplace, one of its competitors starts looking at keeping that door open as a competitive advantage.

So, in the wireless space, an uneasy peace has been struck between the operators where most of them agree to not shut down most of the internet, because it is in their best economic interest to do so.

As I’ve highlighted earlier, however, there are certain areas where the market does not help. For example, when a border is crossed, a device can lose its access to the net because the operator is not running services in that geographical area and therefore doesn’t care to establishing any kind of peering agreement with other companies in that country. Another extreme end of this is the current situation in several middle eastern countries, where dictators can go to the few operators of networks in their country and tell them to shut down or suffer the consequences.

So the only way around such issue is to distribute the control of the atmosphere as widely as possible: to create millions or billions of particles that allow all systems to breathe easily.

In other words, the way to route around any potential damage to the atmosphere is to create a set of protocols that will allow any device to talk to each other and agree to route traffic from and to each other when needed. In the next entry, I will introduce what I consider some of the basic principles to define such a set of protocols. I do not have all the technical solutions (but I expect that some my readers will be inspired to put the call to action and figure out the technical details) but I can provide a basic framework that people can build on.

Wrap-up

As the true embodiment of Jefferson’s marketplace of exchange of ideas, the Internet has now become a tool to increase democracy, improve lives, and hopefully make earth a better place for all of us. As such, it has also become a threat to established orders, and many are fighting to shut portions of it or all of it down.

Whether it is censorship in China, lockout in Lybia, blocking wikileaks, or denial of service attacks, the atmosphere should be resilient enough to route around and to ensure that internet public still has access to the public internet… and it is incumbent upon us all to figure out how to ensure the internet atmosphere is not polluted by the fumes of censorship.

A special thank you goes out to Doc Searls and Kevin Werbach for helping me tighten up this piece.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Internet Atmosphere. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

What matters

To people living largely in the future, the internet obviously matters but increasingly, matters of governance and politics are starting to pop up on radars. Whether it is the current state of rebellions in the middle east and their aftermath, or discussions around freedom of the press, the first skirmishes of internet and the established political structures are starting to happen.

In 1997, with the landmark ACLU vs. Reno legal win in the United States, those of us who were involved thought we had done most of the work that was needed to avert some bad lawmaking on the internet. Because many of us were relatively young, we had confused success in an early battle with total victory and surrender from the established order. Over the years, though, fighting has continued and the incumbents have slowly been regaining ground and momentum.

Unfortunately, whether it is due to ignorance or arrogance, most of the tech community has been staying out of the many discussions related to government regulations. A small cadre of dedicated activists has tried to work on this or that issue but nothing has been done on a coordinated basis to establish a net-friendly view of the world in Washington DC.

Meanwhile, in countries outside of the US, more progressive governments have established some basic principles of internet governance: for example, Finland made 1Mb broadband Internet access a human right and I’ve heard from several sources that internet access will be written as a right under the new Egyptian constitution.

With that background, you’d assume the US would eventually move in the same direction. However, with little outrage in the online community, a bill to create an internet kill switch in the United States is currently making its way through congress.

Or take the discussions around Wikileaks. Much of the debate last year over the cable release seem to bring politicians and the popular opinion to the view that Wikileaks had broken US laws and done irreparable damage to the US State Department. Now three months later, charges still have not been brought against Wikileaks… and State department officials who looked into the damage done by wikileaks reported back to the US Congress that it had caused little real and lasting damage to American diplomacy. Meanwhile, the revelations highlighted in the Wikileaks documents have been credited as one of the elements that helped launched the recent rebellions across the middle east.

But once again, few geeks came to Wikileaks’ defense initially, and fewer yet are still involved in the freedom of the press discussions launched by the Wikileaks dump. Meanwhile, in an attack on government whistle-blowing, some US congressmen are working to ensure that publications similar to the Wikileaks one (or the Pentagon papers in the past) would become illegal. Once again, few computer geeks are involved.

Those are but a couple of examples of why individuals whose livelihood depend on the Internet need to get involved.

A changing landscape

My first experience with internet policy-making was forged through the Clinton years, when incredible individuals came together to establish basic levels of protection for the then nascent Internet industry. I was fortunate enough to be a fly on the wall for several of those events, hashing out such boring issues as tax classifications for goods and services sold on the internet.

Policy makers in the Clinton administration were, for the most part, relatively friendly. While I thought it was because they were believers in the potential of the internet, a more cynical analysis could highlight than those discussions were happening when the commercial Internet was still a relative novelty and did not seem threatening in any way shape or form to traditional models. Viewed through that lens, to toss a few crumbs to the internet crowd seemed like a no-brainer to governmental institutions, and opposition to such idea was non-existent because the stakes seemed so small to any traditional players that it wasn’t even worth fighting for.

Since then, of course, the internet has moved out of stealth mode, slaying a few established players along the way. Internet issues are no longer considered small potatoes by any industry. In fact, for many, they are the main issues. It is in that new climate that the future of the internet is being fought.

At the same time, the internet itself continues to expand. Only a few years ago, most people accessed the internet via a computer. Nowadays, an increasing portion of the population is starting to access the internet through mobile devices, running IP packet on the network of mobile operators who have looked at portion of their landline business being decimated by decisions they made in the 90s regarding letting the net. Back then, because they could not envision the net as becoming a major economic force, they agreed to giving anyone full access to it at a relatively low cost. The explosion in use put that unmetered access to the test and those players now want to reverse what they see as a costly mistake. Their goal is to throttle wireless access or at least make it more expensive so they can return more profits to their own bottom line.  This also means they could balkanize portion of the internet based on special monetary deals, tipping the balance away from small players and towards the people who can pay the most. This imbalance would have a substantial negative impact on the innovation explosion engendered by inexpensive and unfettered internet access.

Network philosophy and governments

For the most part we, in the internet industry, tend to look at structures made out of networks, where each node in the network has a similar say and amplification only happens as a reward mechanism based on the validity of the content being created. It is something we measure in page-views, referral links, subscribers, and twitter followers. It is a model where a 15 year old kid with good ideas can provide opinions in a similar forum as an retired US congressman and both opinions are treated by the network in the same fashion initially.

The content is there for all to see and to be judged on its own merit. Sure, there is some element of filtering happening as people look to follower counts, or subscribers, or longevity as social proof of value but that social validation changes in a dynamic environment and yesterday’s unknown can become today’s superstar as quickly as today’s superstar can become tomorrow’s has-been.

Our governmental institutions, however, has largely based on a more traditional system of top-down command and control, where vision is created at the top, communicated to the lower rungs, and executed within the frame of what the leadership wants. A government, like any organism, tend to be resistant to change.

Evolution has taught us that it is not the strongest of the species that survive but the most adaptable to change. And changes created by network philosophy will have a direct impact on the current state of government. How well that impact is managed is dependent on how well each side is prepared. If preparations are lopsided to one side or the other, the clash will be extremely violent (think Libya) and the outcome will kill the unprepared side. If the preparations are of relatively equal measure, the clash itself will be relatively painless (think Egypt or Tunisia) but there will still be a lot of things to hash out afterwards.

Incremental AND Revolutionary

So to put things simply: it’s time for geeks to get involved in policy making. Refusing to do so is equivalent to signing a death penalty for the current state of the Internet.

Let me simplify that: You can either get involved or give up on the internet.

Over the next decade, the legal framework and the way government will run for the next century or more will be defined. Your role in defining it will help decide whether we live in as free a society (or even freer) as we do today or whether we end up in a more controlled environment.

In order to facilitate the transition, there is a need for both incremental and revolutionary approaches. The incremental model is one where one works within the established framework (so working with government organizations, for example) to steer it in the direction of change through a series of small, seemingly painless, sets of changes. It is akin to moving everything off by a single degree 180 times to completely reverse course. In that model, the secret is to establish the appropriate partnerships, build the appropriate coalitions between all parties and help everyone understand that change takes time but that each step forward brings us one step closer to the future.

In that model, one can do simple things like supporting pro-internet candidates through donations and volunteering of time, or educating current politicians on certain issues. The incremental model puts the focus on the rules of law and uses the current model to move from status quo to a longer term change over a long period.

Meanwhile, the revolutionary model looks to break down the existing system and, through its attack, forces the system to change itself in order to co-opt the revolutionary elements and get them to stop the attacks. The revolutionary model looks at the edge of changes as the beginning while the incrementalist look at it as the end of the process. Because the revolutionary generally looks much farther, he/she is pulled back from where they want to be and continues to push for more reform on an ongoing basis, always being the early test case and always pushing the dialogue a little further out.

Interestingly enough, both models have the same aims, forward motion and change, and the people from each side tend to be the ones that work together in the post evolutionary state.

So, while I myself am very much in the incrementalist camp, I want to put out a call to everyone out there to choose a side and get involved: If you’re reading this, you care about the internet. And if you care about the internet, you now have to go out and get involved in shaping its future, which will ultimately be defined through new laws over the next decade.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Geeks: Get Involved. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Netflix on channel 1

In a transaction estimated to cost Netflix about US$1 billion over 5 years, the DVD and streaming company partnered up with Epix, a cable and internet streaming channel backed by Paramount, Lionsgate, and MGM studios. Considering the fact that Netflix already has an established streaming relationship with Starz, a company that already has streaming rights to Disney movies, this means that Netflix now has a substantial portion of the recent blockbuster movies tied up for its streaming service (Fast Company reports that the combined box office market share of Epix backers was around 21%).

The deal carefully avoids create any controversies around DVDs to establish supremacy in the online streaming space. Netflix is betting, strategically, that the DVD business that brought it to where it is today is a buggy whip type business in a world that is slowly to moving to the cars-like business of online streaming. Now that the netflix player is embedded in a series of devices that allow for streaming across a large footprint (computers, TV and, soon, mobile devices), the company is building up its content catalog.

What Netflix is doing is basically creating a new “on-demand” channel that can sit next to the other channels on a TV screen. The company is sidestepping “appointment viewing,” which requires people to set a particular time and date to see a particular piece of entertainment, to provide instead the equivalent of an always-ready, always-on-demand format of entertainment viewing (kind of like “there’s a movie for that”). It’s a future AT&T predicted in 1993 (as an interesting aside, that very ad campaign was also one of the first banner ad campaigns on the internet) and the company to bring it to you is Netflix.

Basic Internet Tenets

Regular readers of tnl.net will recognize the trend of everything moving to an IP stack. I’ve long held the view (at least since 2004, according to this entry) that cable channels ought to be delivered a la carte over the internet and Netflix may be the first company to successfully deliver an internet-only on-demand channel.

This model, however is predicated on a few key tenets that have made the internet such a great arena for innovation:

• The internet is a level playing field: Large companies do not have an advantage over smaller ones as everyone gets the same level of access to internet resources, no matter whether they are two guys in a garage or a multinational corporation.
• The internet allows any platforms to connect: There is no discrimination on what type of device can connect to the internet, as long as the device respects rules around addressing (getting a unique identifier on the net) and respects every other devices on the net. As a result, computers are seen no differently than mobile phones, TV set-top boxes, game stations, watches, coke machines, or whatever anyone willing to agree with the basic rule set attaches to the net
• There is only one internet: The minute you agree with the basic tenets of the internet, you take it upon yourself to continue supporting them if you want to be part of the internet commons. You are free to leave the internet and go to another network if you want to but you cannot call that the internet if it’s a different network.

A different view

But not everyone seems to agree. Earlier this week, Google, a company that has greatly benefited from the current tenets of the internet, decided that now that it was a large company, it could throw the internet under the bus by breaking some of those very tenets.

In a joint announcement with Verizon, the company proposed a compromise on net neutrality discussions that starts out with the right concepts and eventually gets off-track to a point where the basic tenets of the internet would no longer be valid.

Before I go into the details of what’s wrong with the proposal, let’s first look at what’s right (although I have to take what they say with a grain of salt since I’ve trusted the company in the past only to see it turn its back on earlier announcements):

A broadband Internet access service provider would be prohibited from preventing users of its broadband service from:

1. sending and receiving lawful content of their choice;
2. running lawful applications and using lawful services of their choice; and
3. connecting their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network or service, facilitate theft of service, or harm other users of the service.

I would have some questions on the definition of “harm” here but, for the most part, these seem to be points that could be agreed upon.

The lines would also carry a non-discrimination principle that are, for the most part OK, except for the following sentence (emphasis is mine):

Prioritization of Internet traffic would be presumed inconsistent with the non-discrimination standard, but the presumption could be rebutted.

I would argue that striking those last 6 words would make the rest of that section OK.

The next section is about transparency and the proposition of providers telling people when they do discriminate or make other modifications seems sound.

However, it starts going downhill from there. Provisions like network management (a tricky area that ends up being the place of most disagreement), additional online services, wireless broadband and case-by-case enforcement give up on the notion of the internet as a simple (or stupid) network.

It is true that network management is necessary to the proper functioning of the internet commons but, as Barbara Van Schewick (via Fred Wilson) points out, there is a simple rule on dealing with net neutrality:

A non-discrimination rule that bans all application-specific discrimination, but allows all application-agnostic discrimination. Discrimination is application-specific if the discrimination is based on the specific application or content (e.g. Skype is treated differently  from Vonage), or based on classes of applications or content (e.g. Internet telephony is treated  differently from e-mail).

The main challenge in Google and Verizon’s proposal is the idea of a differentiated internet. If the first two components of their proposal (consumer protection and non-discrimination) were considered valid, the rest of the policy framework would be invalid. One cannot say in the same sentence that a broadband provider is prevented from allowing users and applications almost unfettered access to the net and then turn around to say that this may not be the case for new applications or parts of the net.

Like it or not, the wireless internet is part of the internet. While there are parts where it can be controlled, internet is still a word that works as singular and has no plural. Anything else (a differentiated network) is not the internet and don’t let people tell you otherwise.

Motivations

So what motivated such proposal? Well, first of all, it appears that there are a number of strategic areas where Google could do well in appeasing the telecom and cable industry:

• The Android OS is a natural fit here as Google is working on ensuring that it will do better than Apple in the mobile space.
• GoogleTV is another arena where the company would benefit from sitting on a “differentiated network” where it could serve content as a premium package. In its fight with Apple (Apple’s business model is still largely predicated on selling hardware, like AppleTV), Google could offer an advertising-sponsored model carried on differentiated pipes.
• Of course, another arena would be wherever there are tools that are potentially threatening Google. For example, pictures from Picasa could be served at a faster rate than pictures from Facebook on that network. Or movies from YouTube could get priority access over movies from Netflix.

So, having established that Google has much in terms of alignment with the telco industry, it is now time to question whether its motives are truly in line with its previous policy of not being evil or whether they are better aligned with pure profitability motives. The decision could allow the internet to grow or the world to return to the pre-internet world of balkanized networks.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The internet at a crossroad. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Distribution Channels: More, more, more

Since the inception of the web, computers have been the best way to access it. Efforts around making the web accessible via mobile phones (WAP, HDML, etc…) or TV (web TV profiles, Microsoft WebTV) largely fell flat due to a combination of lack of bandwidth, lack of processing power on the devices, and costs of production for such device making them unaffordable to the masses.

With the introduction of the iPhone, Apple changed all that (and the subsequent entry of Google, with its Android operating system further validated the space.) For the first time, a new distribution channel for web-based application has become possible on phones.

With the iPad, Apple has struck again, breathing new life in a category (tablet PCs) that was considered dead by most people. And over the next few months, we will see a battle between Apple, Google, Microsoft, LG, and others  as to who will control access to the internet in your living room.

A few years ago, I wrote about what may happen when every signal we receive moved to an IP stack. Those predictions took longer than I expected to become reality but we are now moving to a world where everything is finally going through the Internet. This months, millions of people watched at least one world cup game over the net. As the largest event in the world, this is something that is being experienced by people outside of tech circles. Similarly, the explosion of smart-phones has moved the needle from access to the internet being a geeky thing to such thing becoming the norm.

While I do worry about the app stores (from any of the providers) potentially becoming chock-hold points of access to the internet, I do believe that the explosion of apps that are sitting on the device but getting information from the internet (something I’ve been waiting for a decade to happen) represents a substantial paradigm shift that will reinvigorate internet innovation.

Furthermore, the rise of the cloud and the availability of internet bandwidth at any time and from any place is making the desktop metaphors the computing industry has been used to since the mid-eighties irrelevant and, to some extent, moving the computing world back to where it was prior to the introduction of the PC, with applications running largely on remote servers. This phenomenon has two important impacts: first, it makes it possible for people to rent out applications and infrastructure instead of purchasing them outright, thus lowering costs in the short terms; second, it solidifies control of such applications in the hands of a few large players, making it difficult for new entrants to gain scales in those markets but creating potential acquirers for interesting features.

Tools: HTML5 and CSS3

For almost a decade, web standards were in the doldrums. There were a few pockets of innovation here and there but, for the most part, the internet industry spent the first decade of the 21st century digesting what had been created in the previous decade.

In 2009, HTML and CSS were finally updated, providing a new set of standards that keep up with modern applications. This may seem like an insignificant detail but the lack of new standard impeded the growth of the internet as it led to a browser market that was largely stagnant (with the dominant player of the time, Microsoft, introducing very little innovation in that space) and made it difficult to implement bleeding edge technologies because the browsers couldn’t follow.

The innovation in HTML5 in particular is astounding as HTML moves from being a largely representational language, great for static documents but not so good for interactive applications, and is now becoming a full-fledged programming language, allowing to simplify certain tasks that were, to date, only achievable through the implementation of substantial hacks.

Talent: Maturity in our industry

The internet industry is now over 15 years old. The net result of that is that we, as an industry, have grown substantial amounts of talent that has become increasingly specialized in particular areas. During the last boom, websites were designed with HTML and CSS (and, for the most extreme case, Javascript) but little attention was paid to things like user interaction, machine interaction, APIs, or channel targeting.

With the increased opportunities to target across different platforms and have web applications where the website is only a small part of the overall picture, the level of complexity has arisen and so has the level of sophistication of the experts working on such applications.

The great news is that experts from other fields can now join in and bring some of their expertise, hence enlarging our industry and its overall footprint on the economy.

The other great news is that many people in our industry now have well over a decade of experience, allowing them to have learned from mistakes made in the past and to establish some level of mentorship that didn’t exist in the early days of the industry.

This results in talent being fostered at a more rapid pace and innovation being increased as people can now learn a lot of the basics by following experts (either through blogs, twitter, or other online means or offline approaches like conferences, books, and magazines). Such talent can then turn around, having come up to speed at an accelerated rate, and innovate quickly, sharing their innovation with others at a speed that was not always possible before.

The economy: It sucks and that’s a good thing

From an economic standpoint, the times are also right for a number of reasons.

For starters, the state of the overall economy seems to mirror (or be even worse) than what we were experiencing in the early 1990s.

Let me roll the tape back a little for readers who didn’t experience this: Coming out of college in the early 1990s, the job market was horrible. Even prestigious programs had difficulties placing their students into jobs and the jobs that were offered were low-paying. This created a space for start-ups as there was little to loose financially by going into the internet space: in the worst case scenario, a new graduate may have forgone a chance at getting a job that paid in the low 5 figures for the opportunity to do something interesting and potentially rewarding.

I’d venture that the current unemployment rate is presenting this window again and many people are looking at the risk/reward of a startup in a more favorable light as a result.  I am not saying that all those new startups will succeed (in fact, I suspect that they will fit the normal economic model of a 8 or 9 out of 10 failing) but I am convinced that all this new energy will generate further innovation that can be mined by all.

This explosion of start-up also comes at a good time as the cost of launching a new company has dropped drastically. It used to be that one had to buy servers, memory, bandwidth, etc.. from different providers, creating substantial upfront costs. Today, one can rent that kind of infrastructure in a model that is purely based on the amount of traffic one receives. This means that bad ideas don’t cost quite as much. The net result of this is that, by the time an entrepreneur pitches investors, he or she can have real numbers to highlight the successful growth of his or her company.

Investments

The challenge for investors is that it also means that companies need a lot less in terms of investment (good for founders, not so good for investors as they don’t get as large an equity stake in companies; this also means that exit strategies leave more money to founders). On the flip side, the advantage for investors is that the ideas presented to them can be of higher quality than they were in the past and the startups that do get funding have a reasonable chance at good exits.

Speaking of exits, the investment exits scenario have changed. In the 1990s, the preferred way to return money to investors was to take your company public. The introduction of the Sarbanes-Oxley act in 2002 has made it almost impossible to successfully take a company to the public markets in the United States and many have called for its repeal.

This means that the primary way for an internet company to successfully exit has become through a merger or acquisition. Fortunately, the larger players in the market have been very acquisitive. Today, it is pretty routine to hear that companies have been acquired by Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, or IAC. Players outside the industry have also been taking a little more of an interest, which results in further opportunities for acquisition (for example, companies like Disney and CBS often pick up startups for rich valuation)

Conclusion

All and all, the picture for internet startup creation is great. The last decade presented opportunities but I will go on the record now to say the teens will be a greater era of successful internet companies creation than the beginning of the last decade was.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The best time for start-ups — 5 Reasons. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

As access to the Internet increasingly moves away from the PC and to mobile devices, it appears that the new model of interaction with devices can now provide multiple points of lockdowns when it comes to the Internet.

Let me illustrate:

Access Lines

This is the area people have been most worried about. In this scenario, cable or phone companies can impose certain levels of control over what traffic is and isn’t allowed to access devices that are connected to those lines. For example, a couple years ago, Comcast discriminated against bitorrent traffic without its users. The FCC later ruled such discrimination to be illegal.

The telecom and cable industry usually argue about the necessity of such discrimination as a mean of ensuring that all their users are being serviced properly. Opponents of such approaches, myself included, argue that the internet was created as an open medium and ought to be kept as such.

Device Lockdown

Traditionally, mobile devices have been largely locked down by the carriers, who controlled the experience from end to end, dictating what could and couldn’t go on the phone and how it could be used. In the United States, the lockdown even goes as far as tying mobile phones to particular networks. It is customary for mobile devices to be locked to the mobile provider servicing it (even in the case of GSM, the devices are locked to particular carriers).

For a brief period, Apple seemed to wrestle control away from the operators: with the introduction of the iPhone, Apple created an opportunity to wrestle away control of “the deck”, meaning the set of applications installed on a phone. With the success of its devices, the rest of the industry followed and it is now pretty commonplace for any modern smartphone vendor to have the opportunity to let device users decide what software is installed on their phones.

At least, at first sight. The truth is that, while carriers have lost control of the deck, the control has not been given to the users. Users are given the impression of control as, it is true, they have the ability to install more on their phones than at any other times. But the truth is that their choice is limited at a different gateway point:

The Application Store(s)

Application stores are the newest point of control for access to a lot of Internet functionality. In the case of Apple, that control manifests itself through the method the company applies to deciding what is acceptable or not, when it comes to the app store. The reason I’ve been writing a lot about Apple’s point of control is that, if history serves, what Apple does generally has a wider impact as its competitors seem to follow what it does. As a thought leader, the company thus has a different level of responsibility to its industry (in a way, Apple is in a position not dissimilar to Microsoft in the late 90s (with Windows), Google in the last decade (with its search engine), and probably Facebook in the future (with its social graph)).

On one hand, application store owners may argue that they are filtering content to ensure that their user community get the best experience possible. The argument may hold some water but, unfortunately, it is not dissimilar from the idea cable and telco operators presented when they started to discriminate traffic on their networks. On the other hand, completely open stores more closely resemble the internet, a place where the creation of individuals sits next to that of corporations, and where some pages may offend while others enlighten.

What to do?

In such an environment, the fight to keep censorship off the internet becomes more diffuse and more difficult to manage.

If we are to build (and I still believe that we are in the early days of the internet) a new medium that remains as the most democratic delivery method for all of human’s expression, we need to be fight back when anyone tries to lock the net down. Over a decade ago, the US Supreme Court ensured that the US government could not censor what is on the Internet: it is now OUR responsibility to ensure that other parties are not given that control.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Internet Lockdown. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Filing a comment

The FCC site is not the most intuitive site in the world.

• To file a comment, one must first go the FCC’s electronic filing system.
• Once there, click on “Search for Proceedings” and you will end up on a form.
• All you have to know is the proceeding number. In the case of net neutrality, that number is 09–191
• Enter 09–191 in the box that says “Proceeding Number” and click the “Search for Proceedings” button
• You’re now pretty close. As long as “Status” is Open, you can file a comment.
• Towards the top of the page, you will see a link to “Submit a filing for 09–191″ (you can skip the earlier steps if you want and just click on the link here) or you can look at what comments have been made already.
• Of note, you can’t file the comment via a web form. You need to upload a document with your comment in it. A bit of an extra hassle but well worth it to protect the net.
• Make sure that you filled all the required fields or your comment could get rejected.
• Once you filed your comment, you’ll get a confirmation number and a page where you can check the status of your filing (mine can be seen here)
• That’s it. Remember that the deadline is Thursday, January 14, 2009  so please do keep this in mind.

What I filed

Looking at the recent talks around the concept of net neutrality, I decided that I would just tackle some of the arguments against it, showing them to be based on nothing more than FUD. So I focused my comment on a small section of the findings.

Here’s what I said:

As mentioned in the introductory paragraphs of your proposed rule-making, the internet openness has not only been key to its success but also provided entrepreneurs like myself with the ability to foster economic growth by creating new companies and new jobs.

To create a multi-tier system, as parties opposing further actions by the commission (as highlighted in III, item 65), has the potential of creating certain financial barriers that would prohibit innovation within the internet space. Let us not forget that, while Skype is often used as an example of how successful broadband access can enable new business models, that company (and a number of similar broadband-based offerings) was born outside of the United States at a time when broadband costs were cheaper in Europe than they were in the United States.

While the assertion that certain types of traffic can impose greater burden on a network, this has unfortunately been the case for much innovation. Web traffic created greater burden on the phone network in the early 1990s. Chat services and instant messaging created a greater burden on the networks in the later 1990s. Voice Over IP, online video, music stores like iTunes and online games like World of Warcraft have created a greater burden on the networks. Yet each of those legal applications has provided not only a new set of benefits in the form of new communications channels or new ways to deliver entertainment but also improved the country’s economy by providing some new engines for economic and job growth. It is not impossible that, in the not so distant future, we would come to see the internet as the carrier of data of voice for any application, whether it is high definition 3D TV channels, or high definition video telephony.

Third, the assertion that higher costs are required in order to foster innovation seems to be counter to the actual data available in the marketplace. While it is clear that investing in new infrastructure spend is expensive, much of the costs currently needed to provide broadband access to large portions of the country are already sunk cost as the telecommunication and cable industry overspent in the 1990s on laying down fiber that, to this day, is often still unlit. Investing in new technology to enhance the performance of networks is generally not the domain of those providers who are advocating a less open system as they generally do not research and invent the tools that allow for better network management. Network improvements, in the final economic analysis, generally happen because the providers see a competitive advantage in improving the network, not because of network discrimination.

As a result, most of the arguments made in favor of network discrimination amount to scare tactics that have little basis in historical facts. I dare hope the commission will see through this subterfuge and provide full support for the principles of net neutrality highlighted in your document.

I’m not generally asking much of my audience but, in this case, I will make an exception and ask you to please go and file a comment before Thursday. The future of the internet is in your hands: whether you want to keep the net open is up to you but you have to act now.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Fight for Net Neutrality. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

A bit of history

In order to understand the importance of the current shift, one needs to study a bit of history. Since the dawn of the personal computer era, applications have been written and running largely on the user’s desktop. In the mid-90s, Sun Microsystems co-founder John Gage started claiming that “the network is the computer.” Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, the leading browser company at the time, was claiming that Netscape would “reduce Windows to a set of poorly debugged device drivers.”

However, due to limitation in terms of bandwidth and computer power, this vision didn’t come to be until well into our current decade. Today, individuals still mostly use Windows, even if most use it primarily to launch their web browser.

In more recent times, the availability of always-on, higher speed internet access, has allowed companies like Google to start offering more powerful websites, which took on features of full-fledged software applications. Leveraging technology that first saw the light of day in the 1990s (Flash was born in 1995 and XMLhttp, which powers AJAX applications was created by Microsoft in 1999), those applications started offering compelling competitors to existing products.

One the leader in that revolution has been Google. First with the release of Gmail and then with the release of Google Apps, the company has been working on offering online version of tools like email, word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software. Leveraging its establish power in the advertising space, Google has figured that, by offering document and email management features to its users for free, it could create extra advertising inventory that it could then resell.

So Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Apps were born. Since they were consumer focused products, presenting them as products “in progress”, complete with a beta stamp and an advertising-based model. Jeff Jarvis warrants that such act was not only bourne out of humility but also as a  call to collaborate. This week, however, the company decided to shed the beta logo for most of its applications.

With its direct language to IT manager and its message emerging from the enterprise group, Google is making it clear that this announcement is not targeted at the consumer space. In a sign of growing business maturity (most software company attempt to appeal to the enterprise space as they get older and need to develop more predictable financial groundings), the company is now trying to appeal to the enterprise space, aiming its offerings towards a space that has traditionally been controlled by Microsoft (with its Office Suite) and, to a lesser extent, IBM (with its Lotus division offerings).

Poorly debugged device drivers?

But Google realizes that much of what it does is dependent on the continued goodwill of the different operating system providers and browser suppliers. Were it not for web browsers or operating systems, Google could not exist. Last year, the company started reducing that dependency by introducing its own web browser, named Chrome. Chrome was actually quite interesting in terms of browser development as it was the first browser to treat each window session as a separate application, ensuring that if one web page failed, the other tabs would not. This could be seen as something not completely unlike the way an operating system (or kernel, etc) doles out memory and CPU power to each of the applications it deals with and orchestrate who gets what.

The unstated strategic goal of the Chrome browser is to help reduce the dominance of Internet Explorer in the online space while providing Google with more of a say in terms of where web standards were heading (I’m sure some people will try to debate that point but, if Chrome is not intended as an Internet Explorer competitor, why is the only “official” version of the browser a Windows one, with no such offering on OSX or Linux?)

Chrome is not only an attack on Microsoft’s browser dominance in the web space but also an attempt at ensuring that neither Microsoft NOR Adobe get control of the future of web applications. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt knows how trying to fight Microsoft can distract a company from very real threats by other unexpected contenders: he did come from Sun Microsystems and Novell before joining Google and saw, first-hand, how those two companies saw their focus on unseating Microsoft’s dominance in their respective areas blinded them to the threat that Linux came to be to both of them, ultimately dooming each of the companies’ efforts without Microsoft having to do too much.

So, as a veteran of the OS wars, Schmidt is now being careful in balancing its entry in the space. On one hand, he doesn’t want to offend existing partners like Apple and the open source community. On the other hand, he needs to ensure that his company’s offerings are actually going to appeal to hardware vendors. The OS will ultimately be little more than the minimum required to make the Chrome browser run. That means it will include an IP stack, some basic drivers to interact with the keyboard and screen (or a way for companies to offer those) and a UI that will be a full screen version of the Chrome web browser.

The description of the OS, as stated in the press release, describe it as such:

Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web… without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files… Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates.

Put quite simply, this is a web browser with the basics to make it run online and offline (the offline components probably being based on Google Gears (already built into the Chrome browser) or some HTML 5 offline approach). Users will not really store much on their computer but everything will be sitting on Google’s servers, accessible from anywhere. Operating system upgrades will happen automatically in the background and everything will run in the browser. For those people expecting to run Firefox (or any other application) on this thing, sorry… it won’t happen.

Google’s view is that everything will run online and all data will be stored online. In technical terms, this is called sending information into “the cloud.”

However, there’s the question of how to plug components in there. I suspect that Google will lean heavily on its partners to release any device related drivers through the equivalent of an online application store, similar to the app store on the iphone, where Google controls the experience in terms of what gets installed on the user’s desktop and can recall or upgrade an install if needs be. The idea being that the hardware device does not need much power as most everything is coming from the web.

Developers will not be allowed to develop anything that runs on the machine itself:

For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser

With these few words, Google is taking the same approach as Apple first did when itintroduced the iPhone: don’t look to us to provide you with any SDK, the web is the platform. Build your application using HTML 5 and all will be OK. This basically means that right now, Google either has no intention to provide an SDK or will keep it accessible only to select partners who want to integrate with their OS. They will first provide access to the device makers and then, over time, will create an SDK and an app store that they may even be willing to share with partners by white-labeling that store to sweeten the deal for any partner willing to install the OS.

The reason I suspect this would be part of the strategy is that pricing will not be a heavy deciding factor in whether partners will adopt the new OS and Google desperately needs the new OS to be implemented as widely as possible.

Many have said that cost was a large part of their strategy but I suspect it cannot be: Consumers have already been trained to consider the operating system as a freebie or low cost tool. On the windows side, consumers see the OS as something that comes with their machine, not something they buy separately. This effectively brings the price to 0. Even Mac users, who generally tend to be more willing to pay for products offered by Apple, were grousing at pricing on OSX, forcing the company to take a deeply discounted approach when offering the next version of its operating system for about the price of dinner and a movie. And pricing has proven to be a contrarian indicator in the netbook market, as consumers decided to pay extra for the Windows XP version of devices that also offered the same hardware at a lower price point with Linux.

Interesting timing

Having established that the company is looking to get more control of its end to end experience, one big question is why do it now? Why not do this, for example, at their developer conference, as they did for Google Wave? Why announce something that will not be available in the near term?

My suspicion here is that part of the reason for this vaporwave release is that Microsoft is about to unveil a series of cloud focused initiatives at its WorldWide Partner Conference next week: those offerings will include a major push for their cloud platform, Microsoft Azure, along with announcements regarding the Gazelle project (their own browser as an OS offering), and Office 2010, a substantially revamped version of the popular suite that will move collaboration and synchronization front and center. At its core, the revamped Office suite will not only include the existing components and features of older version but its guts will have been rebuilt with some DNA acquired as part of the acquisition of Ray Ozzie’s Groove Networks and its offerings.

I suspect that Groove and Ozzie have Google shaking in its boots. Much of Google’s strategic message is that it is more collaboration friendly than Office and, by leaving one’s documents on Google’s servers, one doesn’t have to worry so much about revisions and versioning. With Office 2010, Microsoft is fixing these problems and telling corporations that while Google’s message is nice, your proprietary information will be sitting on Google’s server. How about getting the same type of functionality but keep the documents on your own servers. Because most corporate IT department tend to be paranoid when it comes to their corporate data, the Microsoft message will resonate better.

So Google is not starting to position itself in the consumer market, hoping that applications which can run in the consumer world will eventually help tear down the corporate walls (to date, few corporations have adopted Google Apps and, if Microsoft offers a competitive product, I suspect it could remain that way for at least a decade). Having to do something, they have now decided to attack a core tenet of the Microsoft empire: its windows OS division.

The battle lines are now drawing:

• Google is asserting that the world runs solely within a browser and all application logic is in the cloud; Microsoft will assert that substantial amounts of complex tasks require the power of the desktop and the cloud is there primarily as a tool for collaboration and synchronization.
• Google is asserting that desktop PCs are merely thin clients; Microsoft is asserting that desktops are still the center of the computing experience.
• Google is asserting that the net is safe enough a place to leave all your information; Microsoft is asserting its not.
• Google is asserting that developers don’t want to run applications natively on a machine; Microsoft is asserting that the tightest integration happens at the OS level.

Each company is presenting a different vision of the cloud. I can’t say which is right as both offering compelling advantages and substantial flaws but I can highlight one important feature: in the future the software you are running will be connected to the internet most of the time and still be able to work when offline. And in that future, I suspect that the notion of software as a product you buy will probably disappear, with software as a rental model becoming the emerging approach. And I also believe that this is the beginning of the cloud OS wars.

Update: As expected, Microsoft sends out its reply.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The Cloud Wars. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Traditionally, the model or rent vs. own has been one that most consumers and companies have mostly considered when it came to real estate (and traditionally, people have looked at renting real estate as more normal than owning, with the possible exception of the last couple of decades, during which real estate ownership appeared more attractive). But today, that concept seems to be increasingly extending to other arenas.

Netflix

For example, Netflix has build a very solid model around renting movies over the Internet. True enough, many people will mention that rental of media dates back to the early days of the video store and were a substantial component in the rise of companies like Blockbuster (born Blockbuster Video). True also that said companies have been falling on hard times lately. But the substantial difference between what Netflix offers and the traditional rental model is focused on convenience: one could argue that Netflix’s original business model was largely centered around the distribution of physical media (the DVDs themselves) but I would argue that the true success of Netflix will be due largely to its digital distribution model, allowing for instant distribution of movies and TV shows with the click of a few buttons. The instant (and the emphasis here needs to be put on instant) access to a large media collection can easily call into question the concept of owning similar content in a physical form: What is the advantage of having a physical copy of a movie sitting on your shelf, collecting dust most of the time, when the same movie is available at the touch of a remote control button from the Internet?

However, the challenge in such concept is that once someone stops paying Netflix, the access to said collection disappears. An owned movie is paid for upfront and can be watched time and time again by a consumer but a rented one can only be watched as long as one keeps paying the owner renting party.

Apple

With Apple’s recent move to sell music tracks without any digital rights management features on it, one could safely assume that Apple is not in the rental business. Apple’s move was largely a response to Amazon’s own marketing around selling DRM-Free music but it is interesting to note that, while the restrictions on music went away, the same was not true of similar restrictions around music videos, movies, and TV shows. The lock-in that appears here is similar to that which exist with Netflix in that if you decide to end your relationship with Apple, the media you bought will stop working. Under such restricted mode, can one really assume that he/she owns the media he/she purchased?

Similarly, Apple is renting out, in partnership with telecommunication vendors like AT&T, an ingenious device called the iPhone. The reason I would call it a rental model is that use of the device is limited by the partners to people who have paid the initial fee and continue to pay a fee to the telecommunication provider on a regular basis. It is a model that exists for most phone providers, as devices tend to be tied to a specific vendor. Once again, people will highlight that it is possible to get rid of that lock-in with software but I will counter that doing so is a violation of the contract terms of the device, voiding warranty and your agreement with Apple. To claim otherwise would be similar to saying that everyone has access to as much money as they want, as long as they are willing to rob banks. (In the interest of disclosure, I should highlight here that I own an iPhone which is not connected to the “authorized provider”.)

Going a little further, Apple gets to lock-in who can and cannot play on an iPhone, only allowing developers who submit themselves to Apple’s whim and offering what is sometimes only temporary access to the userbase as release of every update to a product still has to go through Apple’s review. In other words, Apple gives developers temporary access to the iPhone user base, an access it can choose to revoke at any time.

The Amazon Kindle

All this conversation bring us to Amazon and a couple of its products, starting with the Kindle, which serves as the incentive for writing this lenghthy post. The Kindle, much like the iPhone is a pretty impressive device, bringing several technologies (always on device, e-ink) out of the labs and into more mainstream consumption. And like the iPhone, it has both fans and detractors. And once again, the Kindle offers an interesting kind of lock-in, allowing you to read titles purchased on the kindle (or through the iPhone kindle software) but allowing you access for only as long as you keep a relationship with Amazon. Where the model moves to rental is around magazines and newspapers: you may purchase subscriptions but, should your Kindle be completely full as a result of your subscription, you may loose access to the back issues you “own”.

But Amazon’s move to a rental model is not just around the kindle device. On the consumer end, Amazon now play in the same spaces as Apple and Netflix, renting out or selling digital versions of movies, TV shows, and music.

Renting at the Enterprise Level

In other example of the evolving trend moving from the consumer to the enterprise space, Amazon is now renting itself, or rather portions of its own operating capacity, to anyone willing to pay a fee. Its infrastructure (storage, computing, and databases ) are all available to organizations who are willing to put their application on top of Amazon’s own servers. Amazon offers similar solutions for payment services, and goes as far as providing space in their warehouses along with complete pick, pack and ship capabilities.

The infrastructure component is part of a trend in which enterprise vendors are now providing data center capabilities on a per data transaction costing model. For many Chief Technical or Chief Information Officer, it changes the basic questions around data center from a “Build vs. Buy” to “Build vs. Buy vs. Rent”.

In the process, it also changes the dynamics of how a business can be built as a substantial portion of a company’s activities can now be outsourced to outside players (I’ll go into more details around the enterprise related issues in my next post)

Is it all bad?

If you read this far, you might assume that, by this point, I’m going to claim that this is all about the over-reach of DRM and that it is all a horrible thing.

I’m not.

What I am trying to highlight here is that the experience around internet driven goods is changing. As connectivity speeds increase, the ability to access any movie/TV show/video/ music clip/ books / magazines / etc is going to have a substantial impact on our relationship to said goods (in a fashion similar to the type of relationship kids now have to music, assuming that music on the Internet ought to be free of restrictions, while at the same time assuming that mobile phone ringtones are something one ought to pay for).

The change in our relationship to media forces us to reassess the value of the physical good. In the case of our household, we have made a leap of faith, assuming that the content of certain DVDs will always be available online from one rental provider or another. The reason for that approach is that the experience of watching such thing on our TV using an internet connected video player is not diminished by the lack of a physical medium. Living in a more constrained space (in Manhattan, space is always at a premium), the physicality of a DVD box is actually an impediment to the experience of the medium. As a result, the internet connectivity, and the rental model, appears to make much more sense than the physical ownership of DVD boxes.

In the same way, the value of a CD collection is in what’s on the CD rather than the plastic container it’s in. Much of the value of the physical container of music has decreased: in the past, LPs were designed and the wraping of the LP was almost has important to the experience as the music itself. However, as CDs reduced the size of the cases, and music production companies spend less time on designing custom boxes, physical CDs became more of a commodity, with the music on them being the only thing that truly distinguished one CD from another.

But what about books, magazines, and newspapers?

To a large extent, I would venture that the relationship we have with magazines or newspapers is different from that of a book. When I first saw the Kindle, I was not attracted to it because I could read books on it but rather because I might be able to subscribe to newspapers or magazines. The clear line falls in the arena of experience: with a few exceptions, magazines and newspapers are read and then discarded. The ephemeral nature of that experience archetype seems to make such relationship a prime candidate for digitization: Once again, the convenience of something like a Kindle seems to trump the experience of having to fold a newspaper in a crowded subway or the guilt associated with recycling large amount of newsprint or magazines on a regular basis: because the intrisic value of newspapers or magazines is as conveyors of temporal information that now appears to be archivable and retrieveable online, the need for ownership of that data appears to be lowered.

Books, on the other hand, are a different issue. Reference books may lend themselves to a good digitizable model (O’Reilly, for example, has had success with its Safari offering, as have encyclopedias like Brittanica and the OED) but fiction books may be in a different class. The book as object may be falling into the same class as those ancient LPs, being designed as a full object rather than just its content and rental of such good (though people will mention that books have been something you can borrow from a library for a long time) may take longer to break through as the advantage of reading such a book on a Kindle is not necessarily higher than that of a physical good. I may be romantic in my thinking, attaching to books not only the content and the packaging but its experience in a greater space, as each book I own has, in itself, a number of memories attached, in the form of sand from a beach where it was read, or wrinkles from being carried on a trip or fold marking and writings from a particular era. In those rare cases, the books serve as containers for more than the stories they held when first presented on a bookshelf or through the online presentation they had: they are containers of a full experience and that, at this point, is not yet something that any digital device (whether it is a kindle or other) has yet been able to reproduce.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Is Ownership Passé?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Televisions: Connected and Flat

It’s been 15 years since the Internet revolution started to take hold and about 3 since video on the Internet has become a more viable option. With the rise of devices connecting portions of the Internet video space to your television (for example, allowing to buy movies or TV shows from the iTunes store or download video streams from Netflix), we’re seeing more ways to connect the Internet to television without requiring a computer. I suspect this trend will only continue and expect this year to mark a turning point with some of the first ethernet-enabled televisions appearing. This type of connection will be available first from Samsung and LG, who have already built such connectivity into their BluRay players so I would expect them to port those capabilities to TV sets shortly.

The other improvements in the TV space will include the introduction of more OLED screens on the high end, providing a third option in the flat screen space ( LCD and Plasma being the other two.)

The economy will pressure many of the companies in the space to drop their margins on televisions and I wouldn’t be surprised if flat screens start dropping under $500 by year end. This will force some of the last CRTs off the market, leaving Plasma as the cheap choice, LCD as the average one, and OLED as the high end one.

BluRay: Losing to Downloads

2009 ought to have been a good year for BluRay. Having killed its main competitor in the next generation physical disk format (HD-DVD), BluRay appeared to have the field open to itself.

But through both blunders on the part of people in the media and consumer electronics space, BluRay has succeeded at painting itself in a corner: having priced disks at a premium, executives have to justify the advantage. The approach they took was that BluRay was a higher video and audio quality experience than regular DVD. But this has represented a major hurdle for them as most consumers are fairly happy with the quality they are getting from their existing DVDs.

The other issue is that the war for a next generation format was not about a physical medium, as they had expected. Sure, Sony and Toshiba tried hard to make it about that, because royalties on selling rights to such formats can go in the billions of dollars over several years, but truth be told, the market bypassed physical as a medium almost half a decade ago.

With the rise of the iPod, people have grown more comfortable with the idea that they could buy a media asset (a song, a TV show, or a movie) electronically without having to deal with the piece of plastic that carries it. The revolution started with music because those files were smaller but, as bandwith availability increases, the amount of time required to download a TV show or movie is dropping. Along with the availability of streaming video, this has changed the level of expectations when it comes to media consumption in such a way that, increasingly, people want access to their media without having to deal with a physical component to carry it (one could argue that the on-demand shows provided first in hotel rooms in the 90s and on most cable boxes in the last few years fall in the same space.)

So downloads are going to be the thing that undoes BluRay. As a result, I expect Sony to start touting downloadable media more heavily than BluRay in its PS3 marketing. I also expect most BluRay players to offer some way to access internet media either through direct partnerships with the providers (Netflix, for example) or through the creation of an open format content providers could leverage.

Mobile Phones: Smart is in but so is Simple

The recent success of the iPhone has gotten every phone providers to focus on developing more smarts for their phones, essentially turning them into multi-use devices. This trend is hardly new (I’ve owned a smartphone since around 2000, starting with the first Treo) but its acceptance by the general public is.

What I expect to happen in the space this year is a continued drop in prices as new contenders enter the space. Palm will make a play at the space with a new net-centric phone and operating system that will come with a under $100 price-tag to follow the recent success of their Centro offering. This will, in turn, force Windows-mobile and Google Android-based phones to come down to the same price range, with some of them even being offered by carriers for free with 2 years contracts. Apple, on the other hand, will keep its $199 price tag and may offer a software upgrade that would turn on video recording on the iPhone. RIMM, with its Blackberry offering, will continue to be the darling of the business world but most of its efforts in the consumer space will be rebuffed.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, we might see the rise of phones that have a single feature: making phone calls. Those phones will be marketed to two different segments of the market: elderly people, who barely use computers and want something that has as little complexity as possible and the first grade set, with some level of parental control being available on the devices.

Computers: Smaller, Cheaper, and More Wireless

Netbooks started making the news last year. Sporting a web-browser and generally less power than traditional computers, PC makers have discovered that there is a large audience for such devices. This is a problem with chip makers like Intel and AMD who have relied on Moore’s Law to get faster and beefier processors out the door at heavier costs to consumer. The problem they are faced with today is that most processors are good enough for what people want to do (ie. read email, go on the web, and maybe edit a few documents). So I expect netbooks to be the only real growth sector for PC makers. This represents quite a challenge as margins on such devices are low and the business model around them is a volume one.

The market is now fragmenting into 4 segments:

• Netbooks, which are probably good enough for most people.
• Powerhouse machines, which are used primarily by computer gamers.
• Office machines, which will demand more security features (eg. Lenovo)
• Luxury machines, which are more in line with the fashion space than the electronics one (eg. Apple MacBooks)

I expect a slowdown in the number of machines sold in the computer games market and a flattening in the office market. This leaves netbooks as the growth area and I would put a question mark on the luxury machine market as I’m not sure it could see more growth if the economic climate continues turning sour.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2009 Predictions: Hardware. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The Music Industry

Take, for example, the music industry. Traditionally, the music industry has been based on aggregating multiple songs on a piece of media. Every few decades, they would benefit from the introduction of a new technology (for example, shifing from LPs to 8-tracks, then to cassette tapes, then to CDs) as people had to basically purchase the same good over and over again when they upgraded their equipment. Then came the concept of a digital track available via download. The music industry is trying to resist that change because the shift from selling pieces of plastic at a premium to buying individual tracks hurts them in two ways:

• first, they now have to ensure that every track they sell has the potential of getting some buyers. Gone are the days of packaging some sub-standard product with some better products in order to average out the difference. Now, every track has to fend for itself.
• Secondly, they can no longer rely on technology as a way to get sell the same track again and again to the same people.

So, of course, they are resisting the change. The issue they have with MP3s and downloadable music does not have to do with people sharing things illegally (as people have been sharing music illegally since the first days of recordable media) but rather because digital music has the potential of making their market a lot more efficient. Now that goods (in this case, songs) are parceled out in their most atomic way, there is no room for them to repackage them into something bigger that may be 10 percent good and 90 percent useless. Their approach to fighting things, of course, is to sue and attempt to create a new closed system through the use of digital rights management (DRM) in order to protect their advantage.

The advertising industry

Another industry getting hurt by the Internet is the advertising business. Traditional advertising business have been based on selling a general audiences to advertisers. The model, however, was based on the concept that some percentage of the audience would buy the product. What was always in question, though, was how much that number was. Then came the Internet with its easy to measure model. Ad banners were measurable but response rates were low. Then came google, with its rich contextual advertising model and its offer to charge advertisers only for the clicks they received. This started to change expectations as to what is now expected of advertising. As a result, advertisers are becoming more demanding of traditional media, requiring more information about the effectiveness of their purchase. Television, newspapers, radio are now considered less effective, because they can’t provide the rich tracking data that the internet does. The net result of this is that advertising is becoming more efficient. Along with that efficiency comes the fact that less dollars will be wasted and therefore less dollars will be spent. Because expectations have changed, advertising is suffering. Their model is evolving and they’re having difficulties adjusting.

The phone industry

The Internet is also starting to hurt the phone industry. The recent announcement by Gizmo that they would offer free calls is just another thing highlighting how the phone company model is broken: traditionally, phone calls have been very cheap to deliver (in an order of magnitude much lower than 1 cent) and phone companies have been charging a very large amount for those offerings. Voice over IP is undermining that, showing people that phone service can be very cheap. In the US, the telcos are trying to fight this by attempting to create a multi-tiered internet where such services would not go through. That model is doomed as mesh networks could undermine their ability to do so. Once again, efficiency is making a product much cheaper. At that point consumers win and the remaining players are making good money but are playing in a marketplace that is much smaller than it used to because inneficiencies have been worked out of the system.

Services

Service providers who do not need to have a foot in meatspace (accountants, lawyers, etc…) have the potential of being affected too. In “The World is Flat”, Friedman argues that this type of work is shifting overseas. He’s right and the long term trend has the potential of shaking up many services industry by providing those services at a much cheaper rate. Once again, the introduction of the internet and globalization is making a market more efficient (hence cheaper costs) but leaving behind a much smaller marketplace.

What to do?

When this stuff happens, the only thing you can do is figure out how to move upstream or change your business model. Large corporations are generally slow at making those types of evolutions but it’s a make or break scenario: adapt or die. The process can be painful: One of the first thing to do is figure out where your fat is and reduce it. This means getting rid of people who do not provide real value. The second part is figuring out which part of your business are highly efficient and invest in innovating with those companies. Ultimately, costs will continue dropping and survival will continue to be about increasing efficiency.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Ruthless Efficiencies. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Apple

Scored well on the introduction of the Apple mini, which represents Apple’s entry into the lower end market. However, no video iPod this year, only a photo one, leaving Apple far, far, away from the movie downloading world.

On the computer end, Apple did not introduce a G5 portable. Wishful thinking on my part, true, and still a wish I hope to see fulfilled in 2005.

Convergence: Music Stores

As expected, Apple has solidified its relationship with AOL, offering the iTunes store under an AOL login. However, the store is not fully integrated within the AOL service.

As predicted, the world of online music is now divided into two camps: AAC and Windows Media. However, the surprising move was from Real Networks, which was the first company beyond Apple to adopt the AAC format.

Convergence: Voice Over IP

As predicted, voice over IP has had tremendous growth in 2004. AT&T’s exit from the consumer market can be seen as a move to reorganize around land-line offerings. Also of significance this year was the introduction of VoIP services from most of the big telco player.

Regulatory discussions are now exploding, with telcos pushing for deregulation as “a way to compete” against the new players in the field. At the same time, the same traditional companies are pushing for regulation of VoIP businesses.

Wireless: Wi-Fi phones

Dead wrong on that one. Maybe next year!

While WiFi continues to progress at high speed, the introduction of phone services using such service is limited.

Business: Revenge of the Internet companies

Google did its IPO as expected and that went very well. Other Internet companies also went public this year but one can hardly talk of coattail effect.

On the bright side for investors, my predictions about the decline in stock prices for the big players did not pan out. However, I still maintain that the stock prices of companies like Ebay, yahoo, and amazon are too high.

Business; Sun in Trouble

As expected, SUN continues to have trouble financially but I have to admit I was wrong in terms of what I expected them to do. They are still in the SPARC business and are still pushing Solaris as their main OS.

Development: Standards at the forefront

This one was an easy one. As sites like ESPN and Wired moved to new standard formats, more and more people and companies are getting interested in more standard compliant code. Not a headline grabber but definitely a strong move.

Society: Social Networks at the core

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Social networks were slowly moving but not really getting more important this year. Their integration with search could, however, yield great potentials.

Politics: Internet comes of age

The Internet did come of age in this election cycle but Howard Dean did not win the democratic candidacy. However he, and other groups, managed to use the Internet to mobilize millions of people. The Republicans, on the other side, used the power of conservative bloggers to attack candidates (for example, the Swiftboat veterans for truth) and then take on the establishment (Dan Rather and Memogate).

Coming Soon: My predictions for 2005!

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2004 predictions: Recap. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Historical perspective

Every time a major change happens in technology, the stock market goes through some ups and downs. The explosion of a new medium or a new technological advance generally helps create a whole slew of new companies. After a few years, a lot of those companies fold and go away. It happened with radio; it happened with television (Time Magazine called the color television “the most resounding industrial flop of 1956″); it happened with early computers (remember MITS? Tandy? Commodore? Heath? Morrow? Any of those companies still around today?)… and yet, each of those created markets that went up, went bust and revolutionized the way business is done and media is consumed.

Doing the numbers

But maybe there was a real failure. Maybe the dotcoms are responsible for the big loss in jobs and the wiping out of the US economy.

Let’s take a closer look at where the money went bad in the 90s. What is the biggest failure of the 90s? Enron. Must have been a big dotcom. The only problem with that is that, taking a look at their website in 1999, their homepage talked about them being an energy trader (thanks to the Internet archive for preserving such jewel). When Enron wiped it, it took 150 billion dollars out of the marketplace. By comparison, if you combine Webvan ($1 billion), HomeRun ($750 million), pets.com ($250 million), etoys ($100 million), boo.com ($100 million), furniture.com ($125 million), you still come up with less than 1/20th of the overall failure of Enron. We could look at Worldcom, a large-scale phone company, the other big loser in the downturn and get similar analysis but since it was not a dotcom itself, what’s the point.

What we now call the dotcom bubble was a case of money going largely to companies that pretended to be dotcoms and, through shady practices, defrauded investors. Under the covers, however, they were NOT dotcoms. While many dotcoms failed during the early 2000s, those failures did not compare in any way to the failure of just two large-scale shady companies.

Internet vs. media

As we all know, the Internet gets around the mainstream media and it’s not something they enjoy. But of course, we know that the media are lilly-white when it comes to the dotcom bubble. All of them warned investors about the financial fundamentals of Internet companies, right? Well, except for continuous 24 hours reports on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN/fn, touting the wonders of the new economy; also except for magazines like Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Business Week, etc… which did the same; except for newspapers like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, etc… that wrote flattering profiles of dotcoms and their owners.

The truth is, the media created much of the dotcom bubble, and then, when things went south (as they were expected to), said that they had never believed in all that stuff… except they seemed to have forgotten to tell people during the go-go 90s that they didn’t believe in the dotcom potentials.

Internet and Politics

So the next question, once we know that the media were responsible for the Internet bubble, is in looking at how they work in politics. Governor Dean, an unknown governor from a small state, uses the Internet for political purpose. His campaign manager moved power to the edge, empowering people in terms of getting involved in the electoral process. Together they raised $40 million dollars from individuals.

The media made it very clear that Dean had no chance of ever winning. Actually, it was so obvious to them that they barely covered him. Time magazine was so sure that he was an also-ran that they never covered him, except for that gushing cover article annointing him front-runner 6 months before the first votes were cast. And Newsweek did not consider him possibly having a chance either, right?

The media did set Dean up for a fall by raising expectations and then, when he failed to meet them, complaining that he did not meet them. This is a familiar game. For example, AOL told reporters that MSN would start with 2 million customers after the introduction of windows 95. It was not a number that microsoft invented, it was one invented by its competitor. The same is true about the introduction of Windows 95: at the time, an analyst said that Microsoft would sell 10 million copies from August to December 1995. When Microsoft failed to meet this, the same analyst put out a report saying that uptake must be slow because Microsoft had failed to meet the 10 million target. In the same way, the media said Dean would come in at number one, and when he failed to do so, said that his campaign was faltering.

I would say the only mistake the Dean campaign made in all of this was to listen to the media and change to fit their expectations. The change, of course, meant divorcing oneself from the Internet crowd and I think that, in the end, the real loser in all of this is, once again, the Internet and its potential for true democratization of the electoral system.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Blowing Bubbles. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

I hope that this will help the group formulate a set of policies relating to technology and make technology in general and the net in particular an issue during the presidential campaign. I suspect that other groups will follow suit. During the last elections, I put together a list of technology issues and where the candidates stood. I was surprised at the time that no news organization had gone through the trouble of compiling such list. I was also surprised by how little data there was at the time. With the announcement from the Dean campaign, it is now becoming clear that the business of technology is gaining the limelight it should have had then.

Reading the statement of Internet principles, it appears the Dean campaign is for open Internet access, and is looking to foster more freedom online. At the current time, it’s very hazy and I hope that more details will emerge in the future as to where this campaign stands on critical issues like cryptography exports, H1B visas, Internet taxations, peer to peer networks, etc…

This announcement is a good first step and shows, once again, why the Dean campaign is closely associated with the Internet. The question now is how they are planning to move forward on this.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Dean Campaign names internet brain trust. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

On a related matter, the blog world is now abuzz with a description of the Internet as an agreement. While the document provides an interesting set of concepts that are sound from a purely technical standpoint (yes, the underlying standards of the Internet are based on an agreement), it does not cover the variety of choices of what is on the Internet. If the goal is to say “hey, the Internet is just an agreement to tie networks together” then World of Ends succeeds. But the contention that this makes a difference does not really matter much in today’s world. What world of ends does NOT address is what is ”

on

the Internet” and therein lies the usefulness of a conversation.

So the problem arises from the fact that we keep coming up with new definitions of the Internet that end up referring or reiterating the initial one. However, we seem to do little to figure out the next step. Companies, government, and individuals co-exist on the Internet. Each of those can be considered an entity. Each of those entities makes statements. Each of those statements is either provable or not. And if it is not provable, each of those statements can be assessed as trusted or not (my basic assumption being that a provable statement can only be trusted if it is true). The question remains as to how we can parse those statements quickly (can machines do a better job than we do individually? can smart mobs do a better job than the individual?) and judge their trust-worthiness.

Chris is right: marketers are not necessarily bad. The question is how do we make the difference between the ones we can trust and the ones we can’t?

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Blog, Internet, and Marketing. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Strong Growth

France had been a leader in terms of establishing an information society but was starting to get trapped by its legacy Minitel tool. The Minitel was introduced in France in the late 70s as essentially a precursor to the web. The service allowed users to read online versions of magazines and newspapers, shop in online catalogs, chat, play games, and have access to every government office. In the early 80s, Minitel penetration became so high that the government-owned phone company decided to drop printing of phone books and move that service to the Minitel.

Fast forward to the late 90s. France is still on the Minitel and the Internet has gotten wide acceptance in the United States. At that point, Internet penetration in France is sluggish as few people see any value in it. As a result, the French government issued an ambitious plan to move France onto the Internet. As is the case for every major government project, little happened for several years.

However, the combination of government support for a new Internet initiative and the rise of global services finally started a revolution in French online services. According to several people I talked to in Paris and in the south of France, the effects of the Internet were not really felt until about a year ago, when a sudden usage explosion started. From 1999 to 2001, the number of Internet users in France tripled and it is expected to double this year to about 30 million. As more and more services are now moving away from the Minitel and onto the Internet (as I was told by an American living in France, the Minitel is now fairly useless as most everything has moved onto the Internet.)

Combined with growth in other European countries, this represents a market of almost 150 million users in Europe.

Broadband

While most Internet users in Europe still use narrowband, a few people are starting to make the move to broadband. However, prohibitive costs for DSL mean that most broadband users in France are accessing the net via cable. A DSL line can cost over 100 euros whereas a cable modem connection can be had for as little as 15 euros, with averages of 30–45 euros per months for a 500Kbps connection. The big advantage of such connections in Europe is that local phone is metered whereas broadband is not. As a result, heavy Internet users are finding that it is less expensive to get a broadband cable connection than it is to use a modem and phone line.

The Euro

For the first time in history, 12 countries have simultaneously gotten rid of their currencies and moved to create a single monetary block: the Euro is here and it has wide implications on global E-commerce.

No more Austrian schillings, Belgian, Luxembourg or French francs, Finnish markka, German Marks, Greek drachma, Irish punts, Italian lira, Dutch guilders, Portuguese escudos, or Spanish pesetas. No more complexity in trying to convert those from one to the other when doing electronic transactions. Now, the Euro is the currency for this whole zone (dubbed the Eurozone) and it represents a very large market, larger, in fact, than the American market in terms of customers.

One the biggest challenges in dealing with the European market was the lack of standardization when it comes to laws, shipping, currency, and language. With the Euro, a large portion of that problem can be taken care of as members of the Eurozone start moving towards developing a similar set of economic policies.

Essentially, the Euro takes away the barrier of multiple currency transactions that held back some users from shopping online and some vendors from launching e-commerce sites.

A couple of years ago, I alerted our readers to the fact that Europe was quietly rising as a new giant in the global E-commerce arena. With the rise of the Euro, this message is becoming more important. Now that a market of almost 150 million people has been created, the US is no longer the only place where E-commerce can work and as such, it is important for people in the US to start looking at technological developments in Europe. In the long run, a number of European companies will probably become some of the larger players in the online space.

Wireless connectivity

While everyone in the U.S. is starting to pay attention to WiFi, the wireless computing revolution has not yet taken hold in Europe. On the one hand, cell phones keep getting smaller and offering more features (Multimedia messaging is started to take hold among European digerati), there seems to be some lag in the adoption of wireless computing offering. A few underground efforts are getting organized, in a fashion similar to that seen in the USA a couple of years ago.

Conclusion

The Internet space in France seems to now follow a curve similar to the one experienced in the United States in the late 1990s. However, the lack of venture capital and the fact that, much like the United States, France is suffering from an economic slowdown, have tampered the explosion. While acceptance for everything Internet is growing, the adoption of networked technology is following a course that is different from that of the US and UK. While there will be strong growth in the Internet field in France over the next year, expect that revolution to be relatively quiet, compared to what was experienced in other countries.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Internet in France 2002: An overview. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Since no single source has been offering a complete rundown of both candidates’ positions on tech issues, I’ve decided to do the research myself and share it with you. You might notice that it is not an exhaustive list. The main reason for this being relatively short is that I only posted information I could get from more than one source. I’ve tried gathering the information directly from the candidates’ websites or their party websites.

If a claim was made and I could not substantiate from more than 2 sources, I decided not to include it, nor did I include claims made by non-accredited news sites (think Drudge Report and the likes).

While I managed to get a fair amount of information from both politicians sites, I was surprised not to find it more easily. One would think that in this day and age, technology would be a big platform issue but it still isn’t. I would urge members of the tech press on this list and in general to start pressing the candidates to see what technology agenda is shaping up. After all, it is something that will affect all of us to some extent during the next few years and it would be nice to have clearly stated positions on such issues as future Internet development, taxation policy, etc… I’d also like to hear what each candidate has to offer in terms of helping net companies get more qualified workers and fill some of the current gap in recruiting. Will we see some government sponsored retraining programs or some government help in terms of getting kids to study computer science? Those are issues of critical importance to the Information Technology community and I would love to hear each candidates’ stance on this. After all, whoever wins this election will lead US policy and, as a result, affect world-wide policy about the Internet. It would be nice to get a better idea as to what that will look like so we can prepare for it.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2000 Tech Politics. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Yes, absolutely free. How much for that domain name in the window? Nada, zilch, nothing.

But for a lot of people, it seemed too good to be true. And for a lot of people, it just didn’t happen. At about 9:01pm, the site started to experience VERY sluggish response times. First, they claimed the NSI registry stopped answering.… Then their nameserver crashed… Then the web server crashed. Then, hopeful registrants around the Internet started talking.. and talking… and talking…

It’s Scalability, Stupid!

In the end, the issue came down to one simple overlooked issue: Yes, you guessed it.

It’s give me an S…
give me a C…
give me an A…
give me an L…
give me another A…
tired yet?
give me a B…
give me an I…
and another L…
and another I…
and a T…
and finally a Y!

What does that spell.… SCALABILITY!

While they were expecting under 500,000 unique visitors, they logged over 2 million attempts to enter the site and in the end under 10000 names were registered.

As a result, RegisterFree went from being the new kid going against Network Solutions to joining the ranks of Victoria’s Secrets and ABC in the annals of sites that failed to scale to demand.

By 12:10am tonight, RegisterFree issued the following statement: Ladies and Gentlemen:
This was truly awesome. We never expected ANYTHING like the AMAZING response we
received to our RegisterFREE Free Hour Promotion. At certain times over the course of the evening, the NSI registry (the universal database which provides domain name availability checks) was unable to process requests for those domain name availability checks. As a result, traffic was significantly slowed at times, and some people were unable to register their domain name. We hope to receive better support from NSI Registry during our next promotion, which will be coming up very shortly. We can safely say that hundreds of thousands of people came to RegisterFREE.com tonight, and thousands were able to register their domain name for free. At this point, we ask all those who were unable to register a domain name to send an email to cs@registerfree.com and let us know, so we can deal with each query personally. Congratulations to all of those customers who did get through and were able to submit their registration request. RegisterFREE.com STRONGLY believes that Domain Name Registration should be 100% free, and we will have this promotion again very soon. Again, thank you for your continued patience and support as we try to make all domain names 100% free. The RegisterFREE team.

Now I can hear many of you scoff at the fact that they couldn’t scale.

Yes, it’s true, they mis-planned but how many of us plan for such traffic surges? And how do you plan for something like that. Do you overbuild and hope that people will come? What is the factor by which you have to multiply your expectations and get an appropriate number. Last summer, drugstore.com went down on its first day, deluged by over 1 million requests. Should we use 1 million as the magic number?

Many large web sites have been designed with little attention paid to scalability and every time one of them fails, we all look bad. Why? Simply because the Internet is considered as unreliable when that happens and THAT scares away potential customers.

Don’t believe me? Try asking my 82-years-old neighbor! When Yahoo! and Ebay were taken down, she was so scared by the negative press that she told me she wouldn’t shop online because hackers would steal her credit card and overcharge it. After explaining to her that she was only liable for $50 maximum and that incidents like this were rare on the Internet, I think I managed to rescue one more customer on the Internet.

But enough negative publicity along the lines of what I expect to see in tomorrow morning’s newspaper (especially considering the great coverage RegisterFree managed to get BEFORE the event) is undermining consumer confidence in the Internet and that is what I worry about.

But Wait! It Gets Better!

More troubling was the fact that they were blaming it onNSI. While I don’t particularly like NSI, I have to say that their whois was working tonight. I spent all evening checking domain names in the NSI whois while I was trying to get into registerfree.com. It worked fine for me, actually working faster than it usually does. I even ended up registering domain names from there. RegisterFree.com pointed out that someone at NSI decided to take the “registry processing systems offline for an indeterminate amount of time” but other registrars were fine. After the promotion ended, RegisterFree was still the subject of some discussion regarding ethical issues. It may be just a technicality but other registrars like Bulk Register and Enom (just to take a couple of names from the ICANN accredited list) are cheaper.

So can registerfree be trusted? I just provide the links. You make the call.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Trouble in RegistrarLand. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Why network computers fail

The Denial Of Service attacks that crippled several websites this week show that our increased dependency on the network is not without its faults. I was talking to a friend of mine who was complaining about not being able to read her email (she’s got a Yahoo! account). Meanwhile, other users were deprived of use of their calendars or address books because they could not access the service. Did this information need to always be online? Not really. While the online element allows portability (being able to get to those applications from anywhere in the world… anywhere, that is, where you can get access to a net connection and a browser) but throws in an extra wrinkle: you have to have access to a network. Any problem with the network and the application fails. Ultimately, network computing fails because it tries to offload too much to the server.

Why non-connected devices fails

Meanwhile, non-connected devices have taught us that they can do certain things really well but could do them better if they were connected. Not every application needs to be connected (most of the time, I don’t need my word processor to be connected) but most seem to be dramatically enhanced by being connected. Games? Most of them are interesting but ultimately, computer games were a fallacy in that they didn’t allow for multiple players. The net connection allows for that. Business applications? New levels of sharing are now possible with business application, allowing teams to be more efficient and to work across long distances.

A new paradigm: Hybrid Computing

However, those applications can stand on their own. What we are witnessing is the rise of a new kind of applications and a new kind of computing: Hybrid Computing.

What is Hybrid Computing?

In order for an application to fall into the hybrid computing category, it has to be able to follow two conditions:

• The device or software program should be able to work on its own, without being connected to the net at all time.
• The device or software package is enhanced through its connection to the net.

Examples of Hybrid devices and software packages

While we all already have heard about the Palm VII wired palmtop, a device that offers the functionality of regular palmtops with a little extra when it comes to connectivity, there are many other pieces of software that have not received the same kind of publicity. For example, imagine being able to get information about the CDs you’re listening to while you’re listening to them. Yes, you can do so on your computer but now, you can also do so with the TuneBase family of CDDB-compliant devices, that hook up to your TV and CD player. While still a little kludgey (one should have all that directly embedded into a single CD player unit, it shows the power of hooking up a CD player to the web. The player can get enhanced information from the web but doesn’t have to in order to work: that makes it a hybrid application.

Lately, I’ve also been playing with a new application from Contact Networks. It’s a simple piece of software that hooks up to your outlook directory and allows you to exchange electronic business cards over the web. If, for example, I update my information in that contact manager, the change is sent to the web. If you have the same application, the next time you synchronize your address book, my contact information will be made current in your contact manager. It’s a great concept if people start using the application. After all, who really has the time to keep track of ALL the contact info lines for everyone they’ve encountered. Once again, this is an application that takes a non-networked concept (address book) and creates an hybrid application around it.

Those hybrid applications harness the power of a local machine and use the net to enhance that power. Either way, they can work on their own or connected. And for years to come, until we make the net truly ubiquitous (have you ever tried using a net connection in the New York Subway, let alone make a cellular phone call?), we will have to live in a world where large areas are off the grid.

Over the next few years, as computing devices become more pervasive, we should start seeing more of those hybrid devices because after all, the Internet is nothing more than another evolutionary step in the computing and communication world.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Hybrid Computing. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.