I finally got around to reading Doc Searls‘s long essay entitled Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes which is hosted by Linux Journal. You can also find a link to Saving the Net from Searls’s blog which includes links to interesting background reading. Saving the Net is basically a response to a Business week interview with SBC CEO Edward Whitacre. When asked about Google, Vonage and other Internet companies Whitacre says:

How do you think they’re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!

Of course, SBC and other telecommunications companies are already being paid for their pipes. That is what their subscribers pay for, access to the Internet. The Internet includes all of these information resources and services like Google, Vonage etc. What Whitacre fails to understand is that without these companies there would be no demand for his pipes. Google and other Internet companies are driving the growth in high speed subscribers, not the other way around.

There are a couple of other interesting ideas in Saving the Net that I would like to discuss.

In the essay, Searls quotes from one of his earlier works, World of Ends.

Adding value to the Internet Lowers its Value.

Sounds screwy, but it’s true. If you optimize a network for one type of application, you de-optimize it for others. For example, if you let the network give priority to voice or video data on the grounds that they need to arrive faster, you are telling other applications that they will have to wait. And as soon as you do that, you have turned the Net from something simple for everybody into something complicated for just one purpose. It isn’t the Internet anymore.

This idea is very counter intuitive to most people. I think one of my favorite quotes helps to enlighten the idea.

Perfection is reached, not when there is no longer anything to add, but
when there is no longer anything to take away.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

If only more software developers would heed that message.

Another interesting topic which is touched on in Saving the Net is how linguistics can frame an argument. For example, let’s look at the term intellectual property. Every good capitalist has some understanding of how the private property system serves society. As a result, protection of property is understood to be an absolute necessity by most people. So it should be no surprise then that people often feel strongly that intellectual property also deserves the same protection; it is property after all, the name says so. Unfortunately, analogies between intellectual property and physical property are strained at best. A farmer who owns a piece of land does not hold power over all of society because any other farmer can grow the food we need if the first farmer chooses not to. Now contrast the situation of the farmer with a company who holds a patent. For a period of twenty years the patent holding company is the only entity that has the right to use the invention covered by that patent. The power over society that comes with a patent dwarfs the power that any private property owner has. This aspect alone makes analogies between real property and intellectual property flawed. Unfortunately, aspects of intellectual property like the example given above are hardly ever discussed, partly this is because by choosing to use the word property, the parameters of the discussion are already defined.

EFF: Legal Guide for Bloggers

People often ask me why I hate Macromedia Flash so much.

Here is a good explanation.

Google Talk will do server-to-server

http://webdeveloper.mozdev.org/

Very useful Firefox extension. The ability to graphically display CSS information (id, class etc) makes CSS customization a lot quicker.

I’m sure everyone who is interested has already heard about and probably even tried Google Talk. I really like the simple interface they have chosen; it is somewhat similar to my Jabber client of choice, Gossip.

What is most interesting about Google Talk is the use of XMPP/Jabber.

There has been much discussion on why Google Talk cannot speak to the rest of the Jabber world. A couple of common answers to this question are: Google just hasn’t gotten around to implementing the server to server features of Jabber yet and Google is worried about IM spam (spim).

I hadn’t really thought about the spim aspect of the problem until I stumbled on a thread on the jadmin mailing list.

Google Talk federation policy proposal

Automatic registration is a feature of many Jabber servers which allows a user to create a Jabber account on the server. Relating this to the email system, automatic registration would be like email servers all over the Internet allowing you to create an account on the server without any other type of authentication. This would be a spammers heaven.

On first glance, the fact that a lot of Jabber servers allow automatic registration appears to be a real problem for a large scale Jabber/XMPP network. However, I’m not so sure the same spam problems that plague email will necessarily effect the Jabber IM network.

A major problem in the war against email spam is that users expect to be able to receive email from people they have never been in contact with before. Since we expect to receive email from random people who have legitimate reasons to contact us it is very hard to block email from people who do not have legitimate reasons.

IM is used in a very different way from email, it is much more personal. Most people using IM clients do not expect, or want, messages from people they do not already have some relationship with. Part of this is the informal nature of IM and part is privacy based. IM clients give out information such as whether or not you are currently using the computer. Most IM users don’t want this to be general knowledge.

In the Jabber world the list of people you communicate with form your roster. By adding someone to your Jabber roster you are essentially saying “I trust you”. If you trust a particular person with your current status and the ability to interrupt your work at their own discretion you also trust them to not send you spim. If that trust is violated the offending contact can simply be removed from your roster.

Fortunately, the authors of the XMPP IM RFC have already thought about this. XMPP has server side privacy lists. This makes it possible to order your Jabber server to not send any Jabber data to your client if the sender is not on your roster. Of course this excludes requests to be added to your roster.

If blocking all communication with people who are not already on your roster is the default for all Jabber clients, what opportunity does this leave spimmers?