Don’t use the content of my bits to treat my bits differently than anyone else’s bits. That’s the general thrust of network neutrality. Common carriage, that the companies moving my phone call or video call or email shouldn’t know or care about who I’m speaking with or what we’re saying.
Net neutrality came up as Internet service providers struggled to do more than move data. They blocked Skype, throttled movie downloads, filtered out websites. They decided it was their right to choose on behalf of their customers since they owned access points to the Internet.
Skype and other Internet companies that suffer from bad carrier behavior supported net neutrality for a long time. Skype’s chief D.C. advocate, Chris Libertelli, recently shot the FCC a note: “The issue of Network Neutrality protections for Skype users has been pending for too long. Skype supports quick action by the FCC and today’s vote. Moving forward with a solid legal foundation is critical to promoting investment and consumer choice throughout the Internet ecosystem."
I bring this up because Skype soft-launched SkypeKit last month. SkypeKit lets programmers build Skype inside desktop software and in hardware. Like Apple‘s app store, Skype limits what you can build based on the content of your app: no adult content, no gambling.
Skype claims this right because your SkypeKit app will use some of Skype’s resources. Copies of your app will log in to Skype’s servers and move data through them. SkypeKit-based apps use proprietary Skype intellectual property, like Skype-built communication protocols, codecs, and encryption. Their turf, at least in part, so their rules.
Skype reserves the right to compel you to withdraw your published product from the market if they decide, at their own convenience, that your app violates their content sensibilities. Should they have this power?
Just as the power companies can’t dictate what kinds of purposes people use electricity for, the providers of basic general-purpose communications transport shouldn’t be able to dictate how we communicate. – Susan Crawford, August 14, 2008
Professor Crawford wrote that about network neutrality. Her point seems to apply here. Infrastructure shouldn’t dictate the content of solutions built upon it. Public roads what models of car you can drive. Cars where you can go. Application platforms what you can run.
Should Skype, arguably a phone company and offering a telecommunications platform, have the right in law to discriminate based on the content of your conversation? How about other cloud telephony and cloud platform providers, like Voxeo, Google, and Amazon? We know they have the technical power to enforce their view. Should those powers be supported in law and regulation too?
"Common carriage was applied to freight or carriage companies and inland and ocean water carriers. By common law, common carriers were 1) required to serve upon reasonable demand, any and all who sought out their services; 2) held to a high standard of care for the property entrusted to them; and 3) limited to incidental damages for breach of duty." — Eli M. Noam, Beyond Liberalization II: The Impending Doom of Common Carriage, 18 Telecomm. Pol’y 435. Sec. II (1994). via Cybertelecom
Serve everyone.
How is carrying our voice bits different than executing our application bits?
Should Apple be compelled to let all apps run on iOS? Should Amazon be indifferent about the apps that run in its cloud so long as they behave non-destructively within technical guidelines?
Should the Carterphone principle (attach any phone to a network so long as it doesn’t harm the network) apply to all APIs by default? Attach any app or service so long as it doesn’t harm network operations?
Should this apply to all platforms? Apple and Amazon are big, successful, market leaders with their platforms. How about a small CAD company without power in a crowded market? Should we consider the long tail of API providers to be common carriers?
How about platforms that are in early testing, where the hosting company is not ready to make a public commitment to the APIs or to the platform? Skype’s SkypeKit platform is in an early closed beta and its APIs are still in flux. Should we exempt early-stage platforms from discriminating on the content of our software?
If software publishing is protected speech,
By whose authority?
Being privately owned isn’t a free pass. Skype answers to its board of directors, not to the public. Then again, so does AT&T. The public doesn’t get to say that my dating site is "adult" except through public discussion. Why should AT&T at the carrier layer or Skype at the application layer?
What constitutes a public interest worthy of taking some authority away from those hosting a platform? Free speech, consumer choice, freedom to assemble (online), access to work (online and off), access to government services and ePolitics? What regulator would have the authority to impose open access? What laws cover this now?
Lots of questions.
One last one.
Should Apple and Skype, both of whom are dictating content on their network, lose exemption from DMCA Safe Harbor provisions? Does restricting some content make them liable for the content they approve?
No more questions.
Courts around the world told Microsoft they had to play fair in the Windows browser wars. Let’s debate application neutrality for our new platforms.
Skype‘s rate of growth is slowing, says Hudson Barton, who tracks Skype user long term activity. "At this point in ’09, Skype ‘Real Users’ was up 18% YTD. This year it is up 13%." Barton adjusts the number of Skype accounts logged in at each moment for regions and common behavior, like logging in during the day and logging off at night, to estimate the number of people who use Skype.
"It can now be said with some confidence that Skype is having a really bad year if the data is being accurately reported by Skype. With 7 months now gone, it is not possible to catch up to the pace of 2009 (36% growth in "real users"), and in fact the full year may be even slower than 2007 (27% growth) which was the worst since 2003."
"At this point in ’09, the seasonal (summertime) drop-off in Skype usage was 7% from its springtime peak. This year the dip is 14%. So one suspects that the situation is getting worse as we go through the year."
Theories abound.
Theory: Competition. People are substituting Facebook and Twitter and other IM for Skype text chat. So more people aren’t logging into Skype unless asked while others take longer to sign up for Skype accounts. Confidence: 5/5. Counter: Millions more folks are holding conversations in context-rich places like a band’s fan page or where social objects trigger talk. Horizontal tools like Skype and email are becoming backup choices.
Theory: Dependency. Skype growth follows bandwidth and availability. Not much growth in that department this year thanks to the economy. Upgrades are on hold in much of the world. Confidence: 4/5. Counter: None.
Theory: Saturation. Skype is reaching some limits to natural growth. What is the universe of people that can have Skype accounts? 1.8 billion people are on the Internet and Skype issued more than 560 million accounts. The first 31% of low-hanging fruit may have already joined and the cost of customer acquisition may be going up. Confidence: 4/5 Counter: The mobile Internet is growing quickly, and Skype along with it.
Theory: Low Buzz. Skype’s gone quiet with its marketing. Very low level PR this year, so still relying on word of mouth, natural growth, which is slow. No big Oprah-US bump like in 2008. Confidence: 3/5. Counter: Skype is not news to early adopters. Mainstream media runs stories weekly featuring Skyped interviews, stories about celebs using Skype, and profiles of deployed soldiers keeping in touch with family.
Theory: Businesses are slow to adopt. The economy still is still in pain so there is less growth in Skype’s business segment. People are logging in to Skype just for the occasional international voice or domestic video call. Confidence: 1/5. Counter: Companies are using every tool to cut costs and improve effectiveness. Including Skype.
Theory: Unemployment. When employment is down 5%, the people logging in to Skype at work will also go down 5% (assuming no other changes or growth) Confidence: 1/5 Counter: The ratio of weekend to weekday activity is not changed (Barton).
Theory: Mobile Skyping doesn’t show in stats. Skype chews up Android battery life and iPhone bandwidth. So users are logging in for outbound calls only (5 minutes per week?) instead of staying connected (10080 minutes per week). Confidence: 1/5. Counter: Skype’s mobile userbase remains a small portion of the whole.
Theory: Greener behavior means turning off computers to conserve electricity, along with Skype. Confidence: 1/5 Counter: No studies to support this claim.
Skype isn’t commenting on financial and operating measures.
California Democrats, in order to promote vigorous free speech, a vibrant business community, and unfettered access to all information on the Internet, support policies to preserve an open, neutral and interconnected Internet.
…
To promote and support the Internet, Free Speech and Communications California Democrats will:
Support protections against any degradation or blocking of access to any websites or content on the Internet to which access is legal and constitutionally guaranteed;
Ensure that consumers have the right to free email and that any and all communications will be protected from warrantless search and seizure as constitutionally guaranteed;
Encourage build-out of high speed networks to all homes and businesses so that everyone, especially rural and underserved areas, can access content of their choice and upload or download what they want on the Internet as a public utility maintained by union workers;
Establish and secure ownership limits on private sector mass media to encourage and provide more cultural diversity, while protecting the openness, accessibility and integrity of the Internet as a public media resource for all Americans, regardless of income; and
Protect free expression by insulating those who engage in it from criminal or civil liability, if the content of that expression is constitutionally protected. To this end we must also prohibit the enforcement in California of any judgment or other determination by any court or tribunal of any other jurisdiction, if the expressive conduct of the defendant, that is the basis for the judgment in question, would have been protected as a right of free expression, if the lawsuit had been brought in this state.
I could easily see The DataPortability Project offering boilerplate resolutions that should work for local and national platforms, any party. Something like:
To promote and support the Internet, Free Speech and Communications we will:
Protect people’s ability to see, change, share, backup, and remove their data;
Download. From the iTunes app store: "Run Skype in the background with multitasking in iOS4. Receive Skype calls and IM while other apps are running or when your iPhone is locked. You can also continue your call while you switch to another application. Multitasking is available only with iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS." Peter Parkes adds "We’ve also updated the app’s graphics to support iPhone 4’s Retina Display."
Peter also announced a change in pricing policy: "We no longer have plans to charge a supplement to make calls over 3G."
UPDATE: More details about the update from Skype. Release notes with improvements, known issues, and fixed issues are below the fold. Notable changes:
The only way to close Skype now is to delete it from the task bar.
Skype doesn’t turn off other audio for a call.
IM chat continues in the background.
Most graphics upgraded for iPhone 4 Retina Display.
We were welcomed to the first SF Telephony meetup by Gabriel Sidhom, CTO of Orange Labs San Francisco. Gabriel teased us with a thought experiment: "What if the phone wasn’t the first thing that was invented but rather a computer? And email rather than voice telephony? Then how would we do voice?"
Adam Kalsey , akalsey@voxeo.com, @akalsey for Voxeo and Tropo. "We’re an API for the phone system." V built their API support in Java for the JVM. They run your code in their cloud against shims that translate from your programming language to the JVM. http://labs.voxeo.com/moho. @tropo. Call or SMS: 415.894.9965: gtalk,XMPP: tropolocal@tropo.im
Jason Goecke for Voxeo Labs [good to see you, Jason!] about Adhearsion. Telephony application framework that drives Asterisk. Integrates with Rails at the MVC model layer. Used by AlertPay, for example. Recent release: Asterisk 1.6 support, ActiveLDAP support. Next release in August to work with Asterisk 1.8, Ruby 1.9 compatibility, and bundler support. Learn more at AdhearsionConf 2010, August 14-15 in San Francisco: Talks, code-a-thon.
AdhearsionConf 2010 Jay Phillips, the creator of Adhearsion, will be joining us for two days of talks, discussions, hacking and pair programming on all things Adhearsion. We also have other folks on deck that will be sharing their innovative uses of Adhearsion. Free. Sunday, August 15, 2010 (all day)
Venue TBD
San Francisco, CAUSA
Adrian Georgescu of AG Projects, Netherlands, for SIP2SIP. SIP service transparent for the end-points, publicly reachable sip uri user@sip2sip.info. Good for audio, video, fax, IM, file trans, SMS, presence, XCAP (originated by Skype’s Jonathan Rosenberg), NAT traversal. Launched 2008. 40k SIP accounts. Most devices are using more than VoIP. sip2sip uses a self organizing sip infrastructure (SIP Thor), applying p2p architecture to SIP. Talk on Thursday (the next day) about the highly scalable back-end systems. sip2sip is free for end users (without PSTN termination or SMS) and white label for operators with pre/post paid accounting. Easy provisioning for end users through scripts. SOAP/XML interface lets you build your own portal to administer sip accounts. For operators that want to offer Skype-like services to SIP devices. Contact info: ag@ag-projects.com. http://ag-projects.com. http://sip2sip.info. Project wiki.
James Li, Dominic Lee and Adam Odessky of Orange Labs SF showed a television UI for a sip phone app accepting an inbound phone call from an iPad, sharing the television’s audio (CSI Miami) in the call, dialing out from the TV, and a fun demonstration of echo in a four-way conference call.
@ChrisMatthiew of Teleku @teleku. Rails – RESTful Phone web service API. Competes with Tropo, Twilio. Hosted on ec2. Free Ninja hosting runs on free open source stack. paid Samurai Warrior hosting runs on Voxeo hosting. Teleku translates apps from its own PhoneML, a 7-command scripting language, or TwiML (Twilio’s language), or VoiceXML and translates them to VoiceXML. So you can run those apps on Teleku’s restful API. Now OpenVBX, built by Twilio, can run on Teleku with speech recognition, international text-to-speech, Skype, SIP, iNum, multi-channel support. "I applied to Twilio’s developer challenge. I haven’t heard back from them." Demoed an SMS from the Twilio app running on the Teleku API running on the Voxeo platform. Demoed Skyping a phone number answered by an OpenVBX IVR workflow running from Twilio’s software on the teleku platform on the Voxeo platform.
Dan Miller of Opus Research spoke on this summer of recombinant communications (vs. unified). In the long run, everyone wants to be a platform. So everyone will be peers, cooperating with each other. The biggest companies will likely dominate at scale but small firms will continue to innovate faster.
Darren Shreiber of the 2600hz project. +1-415-886-7901. How do you manage a network of Freeswitch instances? The BlueBox Project: Core is in Erlang, API-based. Heavy use of distributed software (db, messaging). "Let it fail" assumption so lots of redundancy; calls continue when servers go down. They monitor and virtualize integration. Completely Open-Source, not just the APIs. Designed to help service providers to spin up boxes faster, distribute boxes easily, cut costs, increase flexibility. modular services.
Orange Labs SF is hiring product managers and software architects. Peter Hallinan at Blindsight is hiring "not your grandpa’s android developer" now. 2600hz is hiring erlang and sip people.
Not news: No women there, aside from two Orange staffers helping with registration and video. For some reason Telephony remains a boys’ club.
As you may have noticed, Skype has blocked fring. We are very sorry for any inconvenience this Skype policy has unfairly caused you.
As loyal fring users, you deserve an explanation: Last week, following the surge in fring video calling traffic, fring service to Skype was temporarily reduced . Unfortunately, Skype and their legal team demanded not to restore your connectivity to Skype via fring.
Needless to say, we are very disappointed that Skype is now trying to muzzle competition, even at the expense of its own users.
While we regret Skype’s decision to block fring, we are committed to continuing to provide you with market-leading innovation, to keep you in touch with your friends, wherever they are.
On fring you can freely use the best mobile over internet communication like video calling, calls and chat anywhere (3G/4G/WiFi) on any advanced Smartphone.
So, if you are frustrated like us with communication barriers, and are just looking for a fun and easy way to stay in touch with your friends on the go, tell them about fring and invite your friends to join fring here.
We appreciate your support and look forward to continuing to provide you with great mobile innovations. Let freedom fring!
This is not a contest of equals. Skype is a heavyweight with more money, more cash flow, more brand and many more lawyers. Any contest would be unequal. Fring acted wisely to back off in the face of bullying.
People are more likely to use existing accounts than to create account new ones. A "Register with Facebook" button, for example, transfers trust to the new site and lowers the effort to explore it. Site operators love the higher conversion rate since more people sign up.
Once you’ve registered using a trusted authority, the new site doesn’t need to worry about your changing passwords or your profile. Your trusted authority, like Google or LinkedIn, knows your latest account information and takes care of authorizing you.
Your identity provider can also share your data with other sites. Different providers choose different data to share.
They commonly share your proper name, email, nickname, bio photo, profile URL, birthday, gender, location and a list of your contacts (your social graph in socialmedia speak).
Skype would be able to share most of those fields and more. Skype’s data model also offers mood message (like a tweet that lasts), primary language, time zone, and availability. Skype also has phone numbers (the ones where you forward SkypeIn call), online numbers (where you call and Skype rings) and Skype names.
Skype is missing a vast opportunity. Being an OpenID and OAuth provider reinforces your brand during more of each customer’s day, in more ways. It provides valuable behavioral data. It helps customers choose their primary trustee for their profile data, their contacts and friends, their media, and their conversation history.
Skype is rolling out their platform products starting with SkypeKit and continuing toward Communications as a Platform. "Sign In With Skype" could be great bait for Skype’s developer program.
Unfortunately, Skype’s identity model is soooo last century.
IDs cannot be transferred.
You cannot have multiple personas for each identity.
You cannot present different profiles to different parts of your social graph (a family face versus a work face).
Pricing and contracts are tied to user accounts, so Skype forces you to break your life into work and non-work, which is not how people communicate today.
Skype never provided any APIs for account creation, change, transfer or deletion, so enterprises cannot automate account provisioning and manage the lifecycle.
Skype manager, a control panel for supervisors, doesn’t offer an API for managing funds.
Skype doesn’t model roles which might be shared among multiple Skype names, so inbound calls go to a pool of users to answer the call.
Some of these defects are structural, requiring serious reengineering. Other fixes would be additive, feasible within a few quarters.
Skype has a chance to build its identity technology, bring it to market, to win hearts and minds. Is it on Skype’s roadmap?
Skype has been flexible on privacy when it comes to major markets. Skype’s China software, distributed through a TOM-Skype joint venture, censors text chats and enables government monitoring. Skype mobile for Verizon Wireless in the US is CALEA compliant, offering contact and call records and live intercepts to American law enforcement and intelligence agencies. India’s government wants similar powers, per an India Times report. The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) will give an ultimatum to RIM, Skype and Google to provide access to conversations within and across India’s borders. A Skype spokesperson told me today they haven’t received a message or directive from the DoT.
When you Skype your guest appearance on Oprah Winfrey‘s talk show, Harpo Productions overnights a "Skype Kit." It’s a briefcase with goodies. Here’s what’s inside:
Foam padding to protect the contents.
A laptop with Skype pre-installed, clickable from the Windows desktop, set to start on Windows launch, and to automatically log in to a Harpo Productions Skype account.
Power brick for the laptop.
Ethernet cable to connect to the laptop to your router or DSL/cable modem.
A one-page color guide to connecting your Harpo skype kit in 8 easy steps.
A RØDE directional condenser microphone (NTG1 or NTG2) with WSVM foam windshield for studio quality audio.
A desk-sized microphone tripod.
A keepsake pen
A prepaid return shipping label.
You’ll want to do a few things on the provider side to keep your kit fresh.
Clean the laptop. You really want to remove flopsweat from the screen, keyboard, and trackpad.
Check for new Skype updates monthly. Newer versions are more stable, improve quality, and use your bandwidth and CPU better.
Replace your webcam annually. The quality goes up, the price goes down. If you buy new kits, you’re better off buying an In Store SolutionsFreetalk Everyman HD webcam. Same price point, but 720p if processor and bandwidth allow.
Other instructions arrive separately: where to set up, lighting and sound concerns, what to wear, makeup and hair tips, reminders for other people to keep quiet and out of the shot, etc.
Oh, and this has nothing to do with yesterday’s SkypeKit announcement.
What steps do you take to prevent someone else from deleting my account?
What steps do you take to prevent me from deleting my account when I might regret it? (a moment of anger, intoxicated confusion, suffering from dreadful lack of coordination
Do you distinguish between account deletion and deactivation?
How long will it take for my account to be invisible to others?
How long before my account is gone forever?
If I delete my account, can others claim my username?
If I delete my account, will I be able to use my email address to create a new account?
What happens if I don’t have access to the email address I used to start the account?
What can delay account closure? (For example, pending financial transactions?)
Where is the procedure for deleting my account? What happens after I make the request?
Completeness
Where is the list of authorized software/services that might log into my account? (So I can turn them off.)
If you let me log into other sites with your credentials ("Sign in with your X account"), what happens to my accounts on the other sites? Where is the list of sites where I use your credentials to login?
When you delete my profile and account, what happens to shared/community content, like my contributions to a wiki page or to a threaded conversation or gifts to another person?
When I delete my account, do you also cancel subscriptions to any related premium services?
Do you make downloading and saving my assets (photos, contacts, history, etc.) part of the account deletion process?
When I delete my account, do you also delete my contributions (like videos on YouTube) or should I delete those before requesting account deletion?
If I have money or credit balances in my account, what happens to that money when I delete my account?
What do you do to help reduce search engine caching of and links to my deleted profile and resources?
What do you do with my answer to "Why do you want to delete your account?"
Skype is offering SkypeKit, a UI-free engine so you can build Skype into desktop and embedded systems. It bundles the libraries, protocols, encryption, codecs, and media you’d find underneath the Skype for Windows user experience. From the newly revamped Skype developer zone:
SkypeKit, you can build Skype conversations right into your own products. Skype is currently making the SDK available to a limited number of beta partners, and there is a waiting list. Starting June 23, you’ll be able to sign up for an invitation.
More from the devzone:
At Skype, we believe that every connected device is, potentially, a communications device. We envision a future in which you’ll see and converse with the people in your life no matter where you are or what you’re doing — sitting in your car, watching TV in your living room, or just checking the time.
That’s why we’re so excited to announce SkypeKit, a collection of software and APIs that allows Internet-connected devices or applications to offer Skype voice and video calls. SkypeKit is designed to work with a wide variety of chip sets, operating systems, and audio/video devices. Think of SkypeKit as a "headless" version of Skype–that is, it runs invisibly with no user display. That way, developers are free to surface and deliver Skype functionality through their own products’ interfaces. Or, as we like to say, SkypeKit lets connected devices get Plugged into Skype!
SkypeKit is currently in beta release with a limited number of beta partners. Developers can register for an invitation to the SkypeKit Beta Program beginning on July 23.
Early versions of SkypeKit powered apps built for Panasonic, Samsung, and LG Internet televisions. The first release will be a runtime for Linux. Future runtimes are planned for x86 Windows and Mac OS X, and others as the community calls for it.
Nearly all of the communication, presence and profile management features are exposed to programmers through SkypeKit’s APIs, although multiparty video calling isn’t in this first release. One of the new capabilities is the ability to use your own audio and video interface. We’ll have more once we get our hands on the documentation.
Simultaneously, Skype is starting a new developer program and developer site. Like Apple’s, it will cost you a membership fee; under $20 per organization. While you can sign-up starting Wednesday, Skype will not automatically grant access during its beta stage. And Skype is censoring apps based on content: "our license terms prohibit using SkypeKit for gambling or adult-themed applications." We’ll review the SkypeKit EULA/ToS when we get it.
Congrats to Jonathan Christensen and the rest of the Skype Platform team for the launch.
They blocked Skype, throttled movie downloads, filtered out websites. They decided it was their right to choose on behalf of their customers since they owned access points to the Internet. 
Adam Kalsey 
Dan Miller 
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