There’s been a lot of press in the last year or so about port blocking, open access, Net Freedoms, and so on. I won’t provide the links, you go find ‘em. Every forum, mailing list, conference, and discussion panel seems to have a lot of heated opinion about it. Although I couldn’t attend the VON sessions, there was heated debate there between the “Freeloader!” and the “Freedom fighter!” factions.

But why should I, emotively, care at all?

Stop for a moment. Why do you, personally, care about this issue? Telecom isn’t the only industry with distribution bottlenecks, significant market power, and cross-subsidy between the stages of production. Just look at how baked beans are positioned in supermarket shelves. Manufacturers in the UK pay the supermarkets to buy prime positions. Yet telecom incites such great passion in intelligent people. Baked beans don’t. What’s going on?

I think I’ve finally worked out why. It’s David Isenberg’s elephant in the corner — what he ambiguously calls Freedom to Connect. Most of these arguments attempt to build a logical economic thesis about why we do or don’t have the correct balance between price discrimination, competition and common carriage. But it increasingly misses the point. We sense there’s a deeper, more troubling, aspect to getting cut off from part of the conversation.

Whilst nebulous and fluffy, it’s all about democracy. The rest is post hoc rationalization of our more fundamental beliefs about how a 21st century society needs to be wired up to work. And my thesis is that we are underestimating the importance of this political (as opposed to economic) side of the debate.

The sense of indignation you feel inside you when you hear about port blocking is because you sense the loss that those customer are enduring. You and I have come to realize that if you don’t have access, you aren’t able to fully participate in society any more in some non-trivial way. You can still do the old analogue things, have a protest at the street corner. But the crowds have moved online. Nobody can hear you.

Not only that, but when someone else gets the chop, you’ve lost a member of the demos from your democracy. Your conversation is impaired by others no longer being able to participate.

Why don’t we feel so upset about the closed, walled gardens of wireless networks? There are several reasons, I believe. Firstly, the very nature of the medium lends itself to competition (through multiple overlapping networks), which ensures some degree of openness. The low cost of wireless telephony is also in itself a great democratising force. Going from zero phones to one closed one is a great step forward. Participation is everything. We also have lower expectations based on the natural capacity limits the technology has had until recently. Our tolerance of “co-operative bottlenecks” has been greater in order to share the resource better.

On the other hand, when someone’s Net connections to their home come under pressure of restriction, we react differently. I think this is partly a psychological issue of how we view these spaces differently. We are defensive of our homes. Somewhat tenuously, the family still is the organising unit of society. We aspire for every household to have at least some form of unfettered access to all forms of information discourse. That’s why it hurts when we fall short.

Which brings me to my real point. This conversational chatty democracy stuff all sounds fine. But that’s hardly going to energize society into fits of fiber laying and open access regulation. Where’s the beef? Well, here’s my outrageous suggestion:

The ability to access Internet content and services is the new Right to Bear Arms.

Wow. I’ve said it. So what does it mean? The founders of the United States of America in their wisdom saw the seizure of excessive power by government as a central risk. To counteract this, they ensured the general populace would always be sufficiently armed. This gives any putative dictator or tyrant pause for thought before exercising the machinery of government violence for undemocratic ends. The price is a certain undercurrent of everyday violence, but the experiment has by and large succeeded. The USA is one of the longest-standing constitutional democracies, and has withstood extraordinary change in demographics and fortune during that period.

We’re moving from a society where physical force was the prime means of coercion to one where ideas have ascendancy. Physical force doesn’t scale well as a means of subjugation. It’s one thing to take a man’s posessions; quite another to persuade him to make your dinner every night for nothing. The hardest part of the civil rights movement wasn’t undoing the yoke of the white man, but persuading the everyday black man that it was his inalienable right to have that yoke removed. Once that was achieved, the outcome was largely a foregone conclusion.

Building tyranny is harder when the populace is armed with good information. It’s not impossible; indeed, a tyranny of the majority is still a major risk. But when I can have a cheap encrypted Skype conversation with Iranians, Syrians, and Mexicans, something qualitative has changed. For example, when I visited Syria a few years ago, we went to Hama. This town was largely razed in 1982 (with the loss of tens of thousands of lives) when its own army shelled the city to put down an Islamic uprising against the Baathist government. I pass no comment on the politics of it, but merely note that this is a little-known episode of history. You certainly don’t see it mentioned on the official tourist website. Can you imagine keeping such news under wraps in the era of video cameraphones, satellite Internet and Skype?

Consider a populace that wants to rise up against its political masters. We’re already at the point where the government response isn’t to take away the populace’s arms, but to take away its means of communication. Militias don’t congregate in the woods and more, they start their own Yahoo! group and MoveOn and Meetup from there.

There’s no point in demanding universal access if you don’t have the economic means to deliver. Much of the debate is about means, not ends. But those ends deserve greater exposure and reflection. If we are serious about transformation of society through information technology it means sweeping away many of the special protections the telecom industry has managed to accrue, enforcement of competition law, and greater collective effort to deploy connectivity and open up wireless and fixed rights of way.

There’s more at stake here than cheap phone calls and unlimited TV channels. Cheap airlines have done more for European cohesion and understanding than decades of political exhortation. Cheap, ubiquitous and unfiltered communications are becoming a prerequisite of a pluralist participative democracy. Societies that fail to encourage the free flow of information will suffer because ingrained interest groups will ensure the rules are set up to perpetuate their privileges. When you can’t make a Skype call, you’re losing something more than money.

You might believe that your political system is a stable one delivering endless contended freedom and openness. But your average American feels a lot more secure in that knowledge with a rifle in the basement. I’d want the same feeling of security, just with symmetric gigabit fibre so I can host my own subversive content if necessary.

Next time someone is vigorously defending the existence of filters on the Net, dig deeper. Don’t ask them for the logic of their argument. Rather, try to find out why it excites them so much. Perhaps they aren’t aware of what animates their own passions.

Don't get me wrong...

I don’t want anyone to think I’m about to become a crypto-socialist, so a quick clarification. The correlation between “network freedom” and the right to bear arms is only a partial one.

Taking up arms is something that can be done unilaterally. A network is by its definition a collective effort, even if an emergent rather than centrally co-ordinated one. So it cannot be purely a personal “freedom”.

The right to bear arms is equally re-stated as a right not to have your arms taken away from you. It doesn’t mean anyone has to provide you with a gun. Network access is a positive outcome of economic activity over which there are rivalrous claims to finite resources, like network engineers. But you don’t (yet) own the network, so there’s no corresponding right not to be deprived of the use of your possessions. Bearing arms is really a negative freedom (something bad that won’t be done to you), whereas Net access is a positive freedom. Freedom doesn’t do free lunches.

As I have said before, price discrimination in competitive markets is your friend. Filtering can be used for price discrimination. Filtering is a symptom of how well the system is performing. In a mature telecommunications sector, such as wireline, it is a symptom of ill-health. In a nascent one, such as cellular access in the developing world, being only able to access closed phone and SMS service is a vital part of the pricing regime that makes the network possible. The existence of network filtering is an output, not an input; a symptom, not a cause.

You do not automatically make your society freer and healthier by outlawing all network filtering. Indeed, you might achieve the exact opposite result.

Guns don’t come with enforceable end user license agreements that say “For shooting small furry animals only”. But we do distinguish between bunny-hunting guns and machine guns. We discriminate based on lethality. We don’t expect unlimited freedom to bear arms. A farmer wanting to blow some cute crop-nibblers to kingdom come is given carte blanche to blast away. Walk into a bank carring the same hardware, and expect trouble. We might likewise expect some boundaries to our communications freedom.

So I would caution people from taking the analogy too literally. The right to bear arms is also a means to an end — a populace willing and able to resist attempts to capture the machinery of state to perpetuate undemocratic activity. Unfettered and affordable network access is correspondingly essential to the operation of a free and dynamic post-industrial society.

So I’ll say it again, differently. Rules against network filtering are one way of dealing with significant market power in a vertically integrated part of the market where someone has significant market power in the access layer. It isn’t necessarily the best way of doing it, but it’s one way. In all other cases, it’s likely to be harmful. You should use the existence of such activities as a yardstick for the development and maturity of the industry. Expect new technologies and markets to be full of filtering, which slowly recedes over time as competition heats up. Meanwhile, municipal networks and other co-operative of user-owned connectivity systems should aim for more opennness that simple economics suggests, because the benefits are hidden in the political layer.

I alluded to the special privileges and protections that exist in telecom. I guess I ought to enumerate a few to back up such a claim in what is becoming sometimes a suicidally competitive environment.

The US is the easiest example of how barriers to entry are built via co-option of the regulatory infrastructure, but examples about all over. Tariff sheets and their attendant cost of lawyers to issue, public utility comissions stuffed with friendly faces, exclusionary numbering schemes, sweetheart deals on rights of way, spectrum auctions that have singularly failed to recover the maximum public benefit, suspicious tax rebates, opaque pricing schemes that fail to come under scrutiny, faux taxes; the list goes on and on. Mostly it’s just a matter of not having to comply with normal competition and cross-subsidy rules and establishing your own parallel (and captive) regulatory environment, plus special deals on costs on inputs and prices of outputs. Check out the usual places for more data.

UPDATE: Susan Crawford has some thoughts along similar lines, with the money quote being:

I’m trying to create a normative map that will help reveal the assumptions at the heart of the network providers’ arguments. The key issue should be: is access to the internet a public goods problem, for which incentives are necessary to ensure buildout and maintenance? or — Is access to the internet a monopoly problem, for which you have to find ways to ensure frictionless competition?

Right now, we can’t tell what the right answer is.

My hunch is that we’ve not found ways for the invisible hand to operate that also allows collective action by users, groups of users, communities and regional government. It’s an “economics technology” problem, not a “technology technology” problem.

David Weinberger documents Tim Wu’s similar analysis of how the world is divinding into “openists” and “deregulationists”, where a confused cross-purposes of terminology, worldviews and methods collide.

via Martin Geddes' Telepocalypse.