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.

Then, I picked up the same info from the Apple store offerings for the MacBook today:

So looking at this, the comparison in terms of a price drop, since we’re talking about features, would probably have to be around the 2.4 GHz version since it’s the only version that appears on both pages (the MacBook didn’t have any 2.0 GHz or 2.1 GHz version.)

However, here is the first problem with the statement. The 2.4Ghz MacBook version offered today is $1599 and the 2.4 Ghz MacBook Pro version offered yesterday was $1999. That’s only a $400 price drop.

Using the same advanced “check the Google cache” methodology, I pulled up the technical specification list for the MacBook Pro as it appeared on Apple’s site yesterday. It looked like this:

I then pulled up the similar data from today’s specifications for the MacBook. The idea here is to get a fair assessment, based on Apple’s words yesterday and today, about whether one really gets the same value for less.

So let’s take a quick run down through the features of each devices, since Steve Jobs asked us to keep thinking of today’s MacBook offering as equivalent to yesterday’s MacBook Pro, based on the data provided by Apple itself:

So by the look of it,it’s not an exact match. The screen of the old MacBook Pro is, of course, larger, which accounts for it being heavier and bigger. But other features seem to have disappeared: The 2 firewire ports are gone, as is the ExpressCard slot; So is the antiglare screen (with glossy available as an option instead of a default) and the DVI port. Oh, and the supported screen resolution goes from a top of 1440 by 900 to 1280 by 800.

On the plus side, the multi-touch pad is a glassy button-less one, a new video card is available, as is a larger hard drive (50 more Gb to use) and a speedier motherboard is available. Also, it appears that the battery is now a 45-watt-hour one instead of a 60-watt one so I suspect that there are some power enhancements in this new machine.

Are the two machines similar? No. However, each of them has pluses and minuses and they are only $400 apart which, considering some of the things that have been dropped and added, seems to point to a machine that, assuming depreciation, is probably in line, price-wise, with the earlier one.

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

It’s a very smart move on the part of Apple, which highlighted the change in the way the company is operating by changing its name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. , reflecting the fact that they are no longer just a computer company.There were a few interesting items of interest, though.

For starters, no mention of how the phone will sync up with a computer. Are we to assume that it’s Mac Only or will it synchronize with computers running Windows too? If so, does that mean that a new set of applications will be available to Windows users to sync their address book, calendar and email with systems like Outlook or will the device require to manage those things specifically using Apple applications on Windows?

The other thing that was interesting is the announcement that the phone will run on quad-band GSM and will be using EDGE network. This means that the phone will get decent but not great data service. Perfect for email and light web browsing but not quite fast enough for video streaming. However, the introduction of WiFi in the device, which many other companies have avoided for fear of losing battery capacity, could take care of that.

The other interesting thing is that the operating system on this device is OSX. This seems to point out to two possible issues: First, what does that mean for PortalPlayer, which has traditionally provided Apple with the operating system (embedded on a chip) for the iPod? The second question is what does it mean in general: What Apple has introduced is basically a mac in a small form factor, which could easily compete with the UMPC specifications introduced by Microsoft. It’s pretty clear that Apple has a lot of plans in the future for that device but they didn’t say much about the significance of OSX, providing it almost as an aside (and what does it mean for the next version of OSX, which was not mentioned during this keynote at all, a surprising omission in itself.)

Who loses?

Judging from the reaction on the stock market, it’s pretty obvious to see who loses: Palm (makers of the Treo), RIM (makers of the Blackberry), and Motorola and Nokia will obviously not be thrilled with the entrance of Apple in this market. The exclusive deal with AT&T (ooops, sorry, Cingular) will also have a negative impact on Verizon, Sprint, and T-mobile as Verizon will see a number of users switching to them in order to get their hands on this device (in informal discussion with a number of fellow geeks, the disadvantages of moving to Cingular were far outweighted by the coolness of this device).

Let’s take a quick look at specs and see how the difference devices fare against this new entrant:

So looking at it, this phone is pretty expensive (you pay for the Apple premium) but packs a lot more features than other phones in the same category. It’s got a better camera, more memory and a larger screen as well as WiFi. It’s talk time (for the category) is actually pretty good (only bested by Nokia’s E-62) and it is a little heavier than the competition. For a first entry in the market, I’d say that Apple has a winner on its hands.

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 iPhone is here. 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.

Apple

Apple will come out with a new lower-powered, lower-cost version of the iPod. The idea here is that they want to extend their lead in the digital music space and use the iTunes music store as a leverage for selling more iPods. From there, I suspect they will introduce a new low-end iPod which will follow the existing iPod line and offer less hard drive space at a lower price. In conjunction with this announcement, they will introduce a new line of iPods that offer support for both audio and video. From there, we might see a tentative move into the digital video space, with the possibility of their extending the offering on the iTunes music store to include downloadable music videos. Later on in the year, rumors will go uncofirmed as to whether Apple plans to introduce a downloadable movies service.

Apple will also announce the release of a new class of laptops powered by the G5 chip but offering lower speeds than their desktop counterparts, due to issues relating with chip cooling.

Convergence: Music Stores

As more music store follow Apple’s lead, we will see at least one other site (probably Wal-Mart’s) offering downloadable AAC files and follow Apple’s lead. On the other side, Apple will announce that it is solidifying its relationship with AOL and offering the iTunes music store as a component of AOL.

The recognition that the online music business is a low margin one will force many players to reassess their strategy, with consolidation ensuing in that market and solidifying across two standards: Windows Media Player files and AAC files.

Convergence: Voice over IP

2004 will be a big year for Voice over IP with many companies offering Internet telephony products in both the small and medium business arena and the consumer one. As major telephone companies unroll their offering in that arena, thoughts will go to redefining what a telecommunication company is about and new consolidation and splits will see phone companies reorganizing around two business models, either as utility providers, providing the infrastructure (the hardwired lines that go into a house or office), or as service corporations, providing services that run over those lines (the voice telephone will begin to be thought of as a service instead of a utility).

By year end, there will be a lot of discussion as to what those companies are about and calls to reshape the regulatory dialogue on what a telecommunication infrastructure is about. The other discussion on regulation will go towards figuring out how to deal with pricing models on communication services as the new services will destroy the concept of local and long distance.

Wireless: WiFi phones and integration everywhere

A big surprise will be the rise of mobile phones that use Wireless Internet connectivity (Wi-Fi) and voice over IP to allow users to place calls using the Internet infrastructure.

Data services will become more prominent in mobile phones, led by camera-phones, which will increasingly be used for multimedia messaging, and the introduction of some videophone services. As mobile phone companies see more pressure on their voice services, due to the introduction of WiFi phones and continued pressure relating to number portability, they will look to data services as a new source of income.

Business: Revenge of the Internet companies

Internet business will be in the headlines again as Internet companies show they have built successful business models based on profit instead of promise. As a result, investor confidence in Internet stock will return with an increase on stocks of companies that show they can use technology to lower costs and increase productivity.

In parallel, venture capitalists will start investing in new technology companies. Much of the money that has stayed dormant for the last few years will be invested in new companies that focus on services in the infrastructure, security, and interconnectivity arenas.

Of course, the big initial public offering of the year will be Google, which will generate enough excitement in the investment community to have a coattail effect on other Internet stocks.

On the downside of the investment picture, the stocks of Amazon, Ebay, and Yahoo will loose value as investors realize that their price/earning ratio are out of proportion compared to the rest of the market. Amazon will try stemming the losses in their share price by announcing that they are moving to a new strategy: offering a complete set of hosted services for retailers who want to lower their cost, instead of just being an online retailer on its own.

Business: Sun in trouble

Sun microsystems will see itself in a difficult situation as it finds itself squeezed on the lower end by Linux, which will continue to eat Solaris’ marketshares, and on the higher end by Linux, which will increasingly be seen as the way to go when it comes to large scale applications. Companies like IBM and HP will offer utility computing as a “better approach” for large scale applications, running them on mainframes instead of large numbers of blades.

On the educational end, Sun will lose marketshares to Apple, which will be pushing its G5 and OSX platform as a better alternative.

In a dramatic announcement to save the company, Scott McNealy will announce that Sun will abandon Solaris and move completely to Linux by the end of 2005. The company will also look to sell its SPARC processor business, with either HP or IBM picking it up, and announce that it is moving to a new hardware architecture, based on chips produced by another company.

Development: Standards at the forefront

Many large scale businesses will realize the value of building Internet applications on open standards like XML, XHTML, and CSS. As a result, the redesign of many major corporate sites will support those standards and an increasing amount of time will be devoted to making websites more accessible.

RSS will also experience a major growth curve as more and more people become aware of the power offered by such a subscription model. Much discussion will be paid to defining business models for delivery of RSS with media organizations trying to figure out how to distribute advertising in their RSS feeds. Initially, the Internet community will denounce the introduction of ads in RSS feeds but will come to admit it as a necessary evil later on in the year.

Society: Social Networks at the core

While services like Friendster, Tribe, Ryze, and pluggedin received a lot of coverage in the tech sector last year, many investments in the sector will fail as companies just look at social networking as yet another feature to add to their site. The existing players will either merge or be sold to companies like AOL, Yahoo, or Microsoft, which will add social networking as another component in their online product offerings.

Apple will be the surprise player in this new arena, using OSX as the basis for a new social networking platform that will merge their address book application with mail, calendaring and chat services to provide an end to end solution on user’s desktops and offer added services through their .mac platform.

Politics: Internet comes of age

Much of the US presidential campaign will be using the Internet as a political tool to organize supporters and raise funds. The early lead taken by Vermont Senator and democractic presidential candidate Howard Dean will help him win his party’s nomination. Using the same tools during the general election, Dean will try to ignite the general democratic base in a fight against George Bush. The Republican party will enter the election season with a similar set of tools and much of the campaign will be fought online with some potential scandal arising out of one of the candidate’s site being hacked. As a result of the Internet battle, record numbers of voters will show up at the polls in November.

Of course, TNL.net will continue reporting on all this and show how wrong all those predictions were at the end of year.

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. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

At $30/month, Wi-Fi service can currently be seen as an expensive toy for the mobile worker. But if you consider the possibility to make phone calls for the same price, the price seems low. Compared to most cellular phone programs that offer a few hundred or thousand minutes every month for roughly the same price, the idea of unmetered service could represent a huge growth opportunity for anyone offering a hotspot. However, the issue will then become one of available bandwidth. As more and more hotspots are added, the pervasiveness of Wi-Fi makes the possibility to bypass the phone network more real.

The next step in that evolution would be for the Wi-Fi protocol to include some kind of mechanism to check the strength of signal. If you think of the cellular phone system, you will realize that your cell phone conversation moves from station to station as you are moving. Every second, the cell phone checks where the nearest antenna is and changes access accordingly. This ensures that you get the highest signal possible and allows for the phone to stay connected even as you get further away from the original antenna you used. Wi-Fi does not currently have that checking capability in place but when it does, Wi-Fi phones could become more common.

It is interesting to see this happen as cellular phone companies might find themselves displaced in much the same way they are starting to displace land lines. New technologies keep cropping up that disrupt the way business is done and put more pressure on revenues (because they are, invariably, introduced to users at a cut-rate price in order to gain market shares).

However, the economics of wireless networks rely on a limited use of equipment (for example, as more people sign up for a mobile phone service, the quality of the service drops because more people are trying to use the same equipment). With the rise of Wi-Fi and the introduction of small operators (coffee shops, etc…) it will be interesting to see what will happen. My guess is that we will eventually see all the large mobile phone operators introducing Wi-Fi plans over the next 12–24 months. We will then see the rise of one or two new companies that will hook up smaller operators into a different set of networks. As the cost of providing the service increases (because more bandwidth will be required), the smaller players will shake out of the market. Once that has happened, the winners in that fight will start to increase prices again.

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