Is a little competition still a good thing?

Both Microsoft and Yahoo are deploying dial-out services in their Messenger clients. How do you compete when it comes to call termination? Four points:

1. Rates (converging to flat and free)
2. Reach (going worldwide)
3. Quality (expectations raised by GIPS audio quality)
4. Everything else

It's the everything else that'll matter. Bundling, niching, creative use of call metadata, convenience, caller ID pass through; they and the rest are secondary to making your softphone start up with Windows and be the conversation tool of choice.

Susan Mernit

"One of the ways Yahoo can compete with Google, IMHO, isn't to try to match then in product sets and feature to feature upgrades but to figure out what they can do differently--and do it amazingly well--and integration of tools across media and life management platforms seems like one smart way to go in this regard."

Q. Did the Microsoft-Yahoo IM interoperability agreement include voice calls?

Planck, Henshall, Shapiro, Udell, Hammersley

14 December - Quantum Physics Day. "-- the anniversary of the day in 1901 that Max Planck created the concept -- and the word -- of "quanta" and launched the revolution that has taken over the world." We've all been waiting for Heisenberg ring tones: they tell you who is calling or when, but not both.

Stuart Henshall Resurfaces (Stowe Boyd)

How Skype might help bring Network Neutrality (Mitch Shapiro via Isen. Can you blame poor Skype call quality on your ISP or other pipe-owners? If so, grounds for a consumer fight for customer choice, competition, and for no-filtering rules. David Isenberg: "We can do our part by expressing our outrage when they're outrageous. Early. And often."

Jon Udell appeals for unification of voice and data channels. (InfoWorld) Amen, Jon.

HorsePigCow restates The Madenning Octet, 8 truths driving today's changing Internet:

1. Information wants to be free
2. Zero distance
3. Mass amateurisation
4. More is much more
5. True names
6. Viral behaviour
7. Everything is personal
8. Ubiquitouos computer

This is what is going to disrupt everything you hold dear in the years to come....work with it or perish...

The Enemy (you know who you are)

1. Copyright
2. Borders
3. Censorship
4. Network blocking
5. Identity cards and databases
6. More network blocking
7. Everything is trackable
8. No privacy

(I would add that anybody unwilling to change or open up or collaborate will perish as well)

From the brilliant Ben Hammersley

Syndication, Structured blogging, and the Adaptive Blogosphere

One of the two new ideas in syndication this year: SSE, making RSS bidirectional so you can post back to an RSS publisher. The other, structured blogging, lets you add forms to blog posts and to news readers. Structured blogging is something I wrote a lot about starting three years ago on my a klog apart blog and as proposals to the first Atom specifications for Semantic Component Blogging leading to an Adaptive Blogosphere where your newsreader learns new form types from feeds, and then trains your blogging tools to support those forms, so your blogging tools become smarter over time and the blogosphere shares more structured data. See also: about my liver's weblog.

The Onion's FCC: All Programming To Be Broadcast In ADHDTV By 2007 and Jason Striegel's How I failed the Turing test should make you laugh and think a bit. (btw, ADHD is an American English medical shorthand for Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder. btw is short for By The Way).

localglobe, a blog by Saul Klein, VP Marketing, Skype, London, is sparse but a nice start. Blog on, Saul!

Phones have always been one of the most powerful and natural social networking tools. danah boyd draws a useful distinction between Attention Networks vs. Social Networks when it comes to relationship capital. Right now eBay via Skype holds much data about where and with whom you spend your time. The Attention Trust advocates that you should have control over how that data is used. In some cases you might even be paid if your attention trail helps advertisers find you. Flipped around, your social network may be able to influence your attention. At Microsoft Research, Too Many E-Mails? SNARF Them Up! by Rob Knies describes social sorting for email, defining relevance by social distance. So emails from close friends get more attention than from mutual friends than from strangers. I can see this for reading newsfeeds. Why not SNARF ratings for inbound calls? SNARF sorts of my buddy list?

I have friends who lost their Skype accounts last week, mostly they created the accounts without sharing their email address with Skype or with a none-of-your-business fake email address. Jirong thinks this must make for a More Secure SkypeNet:

Almost all my friends, like me, got a mesage about resetting their Skype password days ago. I am lucky enough to get through the horrible experience. I was trying to make a business SkypeOut when I saw the reset dialogue. Definitely, I hate it! One of my best friend lost his account which has dozens of contact.

When I calmed myself down, I released besides the goodness I have in Skype's letter, maybe I got a more secured and trustful telephony system. Skype is eBay's baby and Versign is eBay's newer buy. There must be some deal under the table. So my bet is SkypeNet is a Versign Trusted Network! Third-party authentication is very important for Skype to enter the business world. Wondering when they are going to publicize this deal.

Brightcove will serve video from commercial producers. Facebridge will let users distribute their own videos. 2006 will be the year that Skype turns millions of Skypers into podcasters, vloggers, and videographers. Who at Skype is working on vid distribution alliances? The long tail of edge created content will dominate in time but there is still good money in Skype as a TV and movie player for the next few years.

Rich Tehrani has a timely riff on mashing up Service Oriented Architecture with VoIP. Bringing voice into enterprise app development.

Another Niklas-is-cool profile. Muesli for breakfast! Niklas is still hard at work with Skype: “My ambition is to make Skype into the world’s largest online communication company. That’s the driver. Financial gain is secondary.”

Google tests phone-enabling AdWords. Long-established technology, but never deployed at global scale. Dear eBay, Skype could design this in one day, prototype in three days, cut deals for the backend in one week, be serving US customers before Christmas. By eBay calling both parties, they (a) preserve caller/called anonymity, (b) match calls to the auction/sale, (c) improve the sale of lucrative but challenging product categories, and (d) charge sellers a small fee to more-than-cover costs. The faq.

cnskyper's Q-Face plug-in. Delightful creative art for your Skype profile.

Dan Gillmor in FT: Rise up against US oppressors. A defense of Internet application providers like Skype against SBC/AT&T and their congressional henchmen.

A Skype Equivalent Without "Big Brother"? (Slashdot). The meme continues to spread that an American Skype will be compromised worldwide by US police, military, and intelligence.

While Internet phone services are catching on rapidly, quality and reliability are still suspect (BusinessWeek). As prices fall, sound and consistency become competitive differentiators.

BT will offer free mobile phone service (TheBusinessOnline). BT’s new service will combine its existing Openzone wi-fi hotspots with a patchwork of new wi-max networks to compete with mobile operators and Skype.

Thanks to Rick Hultz and Jirong Zhou 周继荣 for the tips.

[Editor: Just to set things up: Network Neutrality is the idea that a communications carrier should play fair by not picking favorites among applications or services running over its network. Sounds good, neh? Count on Martin to go all counterintuitive on us...]

I’m sure this is something that’s been raked over before, but I don’t see a common understanding of what ‘Net Neutrality’ actually is. Despite many of the Internetorati demanding it by law. Whatever.

There appear to be several different camps, which you could paint as “bottom of IP”, “middle” and “top”.

The bottomistas would see enforced Internet Protocol itself as a premature optimisation and violation of the end-to-end principle. Unhappy that you only get IPv4 or IPv6? Still grumpy that you only have IPv4 and not even IPv6? Really miserable that your VoIP packets are staggering under the poisonous load of IPv6 headers? You’re a bottomista.

I suspect there are some fundamentalist bottomistas who would object to your service providers not giving you a choice of Ethernet, ATM or roll-you-own-L2-protocol. We’ll pretend to be out and not answer the door when they knock.

The middlemen draw a distinction between “raw IP” (before the ISP gets ahold of it), and “retail IP”, which is what you and I get to experience. This kind of suggests that the OSI 7-layer model got it horribly wrong, because there’s a fundamental cleave right in the middle of layer 3, where IP sits. Fair comment, but sounds pretty radical to me. Although I’ve never really got layer 6, so maybe they’re onto something.

Then you might be a “top of IP” kind of girl. You can cope with the discrimination creeping higher up the stack to the next layer, where particular TCP and UDP ports and flags are screened off. But you only get queasy if particular commercial service providers or applications are targeted. Blocking off port 25 is OK to you, since it doesn’t discriminate against any particular email service provider.

Sadly, these are all hogwash and bunkum.

Net Neutrality is a dead end, because

as Searls and Weinberger correctly noted, the Net isn’t a thing, it’s an interconnected set of agreements. These are bilateral and freely entered into. And since those agreements weren’t modelled off a viral template such as the GNU General Public License, they are all unique. There’s no contagious clause that insists the Internet becomes a “thing” by virtue of everyone having to agree to freely and neutrally pass packets in an ever growing pool of Neutraldom. So to impose neutrality you’re going to have to interpose yourself into a lot of contracts. (Another reason why “Internet Governance” is an oxymoron when referring to anything beyond IP address allocation and routing, which do require some central agreement and co-ordination.)

There’s no grand “first principle” from which you can derive network neutrality as an economic argument. No public choice, competition, game theory or otherwise construct that leads us there. Indeed, saying that the public would benefit if there was a transfer of wealth from providers to users isn’t good enough. You’re playing with matches in the oil refinery when you start messing with property rights. Yes, those networks are mostly funded by risk capital. The local loop copper of a fixed operator may still be hangovers from monopoly days, but generally those assets were brought into the private sector on clear rules, the stockholders took a punt, and some of the better informed ones who saw the long-term potential of DSL etc. got to reap a windfall. Of course in parallel the telcos have done a superlative job of lobbying for rules that keep competition out, but that’s a different issue.

But wait a moment, it gets worse.

What if I wanted to allow people in the street to access my WiFi? But I only want to offer web and email, so as to make P2P filesharing tricky. As a good public-spirited citizen I put up a splash page so they know exactly what’s going on. Am I allowed to? Or is Net Neutrality only for the mythical mystical “them”?

When in deploying my network do I need to “design-in” neutrality? Concept, build or operation? Should we be outlawing the deployment of PSTN-specific GSM networks because they’re “unfair” to non-PSTN voice applications like Skype? Am I allowed to deploy non-technological measures for neutrality, such as contract terms? Am I allowed to read the packets, but not block them, in order to enforce my contract (repeat - freely entered into by both partners)?

What level of jitter and congestion is perceived as “neutral”? What if I deploy technology like Qualcomm’s 1xRTT, which separately supports voice and data, with PSTN-only voice, but the data is a bit lousy for VoIP? Is that being unfair, or merely a realistic response to the limitations of technology?

Is neutrality a wholesale or a retail problem? What if the access infrastructure owner offers “neutral” IP connectivity, but no retail provider chooses to pass that on directly to the public without layering on some filtering and price discrimination?

Oh, and what’s so special about the Internet? Do other IP-based networks need neutrality principles? Do any networks? Should more network industries be forced to forego “winner takes all” rewards? Google looks awfully dominant at adverts, doesn’t it… I wonder if that ad network needs a bit of “neutrality”?

Incidentally, although I’m against blanket rules enforcing neutrality, I would reserve it as a tool for post hoc competition and antitrust law enforcement. And I think you can make a stand on Network Neutrality on political and free speech grounds, but that requires a very different policy approach (i.e. not one that confiscates the proceeds of private capital investment).

And if the users value a neutral connection so much, perhaps it’s time for them to self-organise a bit, build their own networks, or tender for connectivity together — rather than rolling over and accepting whatever the local telco can cableco provide by default. But that would burst the illusion that government is here to save us from ourselves and we’ve no need to take personal responsibility for our connectivity freedom.

The moment you try to define Network Neutrality, you have to choose a layer, a time, a market, the participants. You have to make non-neutral choices in order to define the boundary of your Neutrasphere. There is no ‘neutral’ space devoid of favouring the interests of particular market players. The contradiction is inherent. There is no way to finesse it away.

Everything’s bass-ackwards. Neutrality is a sign of healthy supply competition and sophisticated ways of demand expression. It’s an output, not an input. Beware demanding net neutrality as a blanket principle, rather than a scalpel to excise particular local anti-competitive acts. Khrushchev declared the corn harvest was great, too — but it didn’t create the incentives for more corn to be sown and for the system to succeed on future iterations. And net neutrality rules are also likely to have the exact opposite effect of that intended.

Net neutrality messes up freedom of contract, freedom of association, and property rights.

I don’t buy it.

via Telepocalypse.net

I received some feedback when I floated my previous post on Katrina earlier today. So being naive I sent the following response which outlines what appears possible to me.

Thank you for the FCC perspective. However if I understand correctly you can’t transfer it to a VoIP provider like Vonage or Skype. Thus the regulations aren't going to help much at all. This group is still tied into the tyranny of the fixed line. People need their numbers where access may be difficult and messages can be left.

I was approaching it from the following point of view…

• Minimal infrastructure. Minimal set up and training.
• Implementation in hours rather than days or months
• Put in the Astrodome an Internet café along with headsets.
• Provide broadband and WiFi
• Enable Skype on those PC’s / phone handsets. Word would spread rapidly.
• Enable account holders to open a Skype account and assign their home number to it (SkypeIn)
• They would be enabled with free voice mail at the same time.
• Using the latest version they could call forward if required to a mobile number (cost two cents per minute) or to another Skype account – buddy for free, thus establishing a more online point of contact.
• It costs nothing to open accounts.
• Presence would enable them to create support groups and networks quickly amongst neighbors.
• Bell South could probably arrange to keep ownership of the numbers if they wish, e.g. loan them to a service.
• There is no need for a switchboard; it does require some bandwidth….

Rather than ponder the outcome, it should be done for humanitarian reasons. The old system doesn't have an emergency response that is acceptable any more.

Feedback I received on my previous post:

1) Let displaced account holders log in and claim their accounts (phone numbers) via the Internet. What's happening at the Astrodome?

I don't know of that happening. However, the FCC did actually, amazingly, do something right this time. They issued an emergency waiver of the number portability regulations. It is now allowable to port a number to a different geographic rate center. Under the actual rules, you can port your number to a different carrier, but its rate center assignment is fixed (modulo FX lines, which are controversial). Under the waiver, NO and other impact-area numbers can ring elsewhere. This will mostly be used by businesses, I suspect, but perhaps some people can get this too, once they settle into new digs.

It is somewhat harder, but not impossible, to point multiple phone numbers at a single phone. This would require, I think, two steps, one to port the number to an operative switch, and a second to Remote Call Forward it to a target number. A given phone can't, alas, have very many numbers on it (a few, actually), and in a place like the Astrodome, it might make sense to have a sort of switchboard set up to answer messages for lots of ported numbers.

Or will they:
1) just keep the bills running
2) not use their imaginations.

I don't know if BellSouth will do so, but the FCC's authorization of porting means that, at least in theory, other carriers can step into the breach.