"When you go online,
you can see the world.
Richard Pombo hates that.
So he's selling control over which sites you visit
to strangers,
gatekeepers to the Internet.
People who get to choose for you.
Pombo is selling your freedom for cash.
The freedom to read what you want,
to say what you want,
on the Internet.
Fight for your Freedom of Speech.
Save your Free Internet.
Fire Pombo."

You haven't seen ads like that in this campaign. Not on TV, radio or the web.

Because Net Neutrality never cost anyone an election. And NN advocates aren't peppering the Internet or the airwaves with independent advertising for/against candidates.

Russell Shaw doesn't expect Tuesday's US election to remove Republican control of the Senate, so doesn't expect a shift in Congress's net neutrality stance.

I'll go further.

Even if the Dems win both houses of Congress, it will not matter.

Since nobody will win on a "net neutrality" platform, no political capital will be earned for NN. So NN won't be a priority in the 2008 election. It's not like anyone tied NN to big issues like jobs, the war in Iraq, political corruption, or public morals.

And nobody raised a million dollars to advocate for net neutrality.

Just over a week ago Phil reported that Jordan's telecom regulator had ordered that Skype be blocked. It was a short-lived blockade; the decision has been reversed. According to a report from Middle East North Africa Financial News:

Director of the commission's regulatory department, Al Ansari Al Mashaqbah, confirmed yesterday that the recent decision to block Skype had been reversed.

The official told The Jordan Times that the security issues, cited as the reason for the block, had been resolved.

continue reading.....

While well-known as Canada's capital and, for hockey fans, as home of the NHL's Ottawa Senators, the Ottawa region has transformed itself over the past quarter century into Canada's high tech capital (dare I say Silicon Valley North?). Ottawa is headquarters for Mitel, Corel, and Versatel Networks (amongst others), hosts significant facilities for Nortel, JDS Uniphase (the JDS part), Alcatel (formerly Newbridge Networks) and a major Dell support center, and is a breeding ground for many high tech startups, especially in the telecommunications sector. Under the sponsorship of OCRI,  Ottawa is the site of a new conference - Voice 2.0: beyond telecom - a week from Monday (October 16).

"There is a great need for a venue where practitioners at the forefront of building next-generation communications networks and applications can get a broad perspective on the changes in telecom," said Ross MacLeod, Voice 2.0's conference host. "Voice 2.0 will provide an environment where attendees can share experiences that will speed the adoption of leading technologies and practices in the sector."

As one primer check out Alec Saunders post: Voice 2.0 A Year Later.

Skype Journal will be there and reporting on the activities. Check out the agenda. If you are interested in attending you can register via their website. (Hint: check out Terry Matthews' Brookstreet Hotel. They serve a great Sunday brunch if you arrive a day early and want to work in some pre-conference golf.)

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Organized crime organizations suppress competition in a market. This keeps margins high on vice goods and services. Higher prices means overall crime rates fall, some people just can't afford vices at higher rates. Organized crime trys to avoid "wars" with rivals because they are expensive and bad for business. Big Crime also stifles small time rivals who expand the market by bidding down monopolist pricing.

In theory, police would cooperate with mafiya to keep the streets clean of petty crimes that interfere with the mafiya's business. Total crime falls because monopolists will maximize profits in a smaller market at higher prices. General law and order benefits those holding monopolies on drugs, gambling, prostitution, and other steady businesses.

But there's a greater problem. Monopolies concentrate wealth and power. This leads to corrupt government.

So we write special laws that hurt organized crime. We add penalties for large quantities of drugs. We legalize big gambling to bring it out of the underground economy, producing tax income instead of fueling crime lords. We mandate property forfeiture and allow mobster surveillance. In short, we make it more expensive to do big crime and we level the playing field. You never do away with crime altogether, but you cut the concentrated cash flow that corrupts.

Which brings me to net neutrality.

Our Martin Geddes thinks little of laws and regulations supporting net neutrality.

I've said it many times before, but Network Neutrality is a treatment for the symptoms, not the causes - and it's an ineffective anti-consumer folk remedy at that. Good intentions aren't enough. ... Picking at one tiny part of the anti-competitive edifice isn't the way forward. Better to have power over suppliers through your wallet than via politicians.

I agree. In a perfect world.

But the markets are imperfect, power is already concentrated. We see the corrupting power of the largest lobbyists in Washington D.C. and other centers of political power. We see their astroturfing and other bad acts.

So we must act.

We must effect change.

We must out-innovate and out-market.

We must organize as consumers.

We must organize as citizens. We need to educate this generation's Judge Greens, the judge who broke up Ma Bell and made the mobile revolution possible.

We must lead our society to define unmediated access to the Internet as a human right, a civil right. And to react with anger and purpose to anyone who tries to tamper with that access.    

We must find allies, if not friends, in other industries. Companies that need their bits to go untrammeled. That need an Internet without gatekeepers. Companies that know how to lobby.

Like the mafia, yakuza, or bratva, the concentrated power of the telcos will fight back.

They won't fall to any one measure. So we need a theme that All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
 -- Edmund Burkedrives many measures, new ones over time, each driving the monsters toward acceptable societal norms. Perhaps the theme is liberty and freedom?

I agree with Martin that fighting the telcos with laws is hard. Maybe impossible. And not without risk.

But doing nothing is not an option. The societal consequences of giving absolute control over public assembly, public speech, over our new libraries, encyclopedias and news sources, over our civic participation and education - this is tantamount to creating a new branch of government, one without oversight, without checks, balances or accountability.

Martin, we don't have dozens or hundreds of viable suppliers in the United States. We don't have efficient markets for Internet access. And we have damning evidence of the foul intentions of these monopolists to subvert civic freedoms and rights.

So, instead of waiting for Adam Smith's invisible hand to restore rights seized by phone and cable companies, what do you think should we do? 

P.S. Dr. Magaddino, my old economics professor, challenged me to consider crime, applying supply and demand theory to social evils instead of goods.

Consider this.

I'm a cheapskate, and I'm with Tesco Mobile's prepaid plan. I hardly use my mobile except as a camera and for brief voice notes. Under $10/month expenditure.

Tesco's MVNO only offer Web (ports 80/443 HTTP/HTTPS) access on their GPRS gateway. This is a means of the host operator (in this case, O2) to segment the market and avoid competition from the MVNO for its premium customers.

Now, if you have neutrality rules, you get two unwanted effects:

• Tesco may have to close down their GPRS service, because it discriminates against service providers who happen not to use HTTP as their only protocol. The customer loses if the only type of Internet access allowed is 100% unfiltered.
• Tesco can never expand the service to, for example, allow POP email access whilst disallowing VoIP by inducing jitter and using deep packet inspection. The customer loses again -- in this case the marginal one who may even be willing to pay a little more.

continue reading.....

Declan McCullagh breaks down the FBI's new Net-tapping push. Requiring manufacturers of VoIP systems (including Skype) and IM (like Skype) be as tappable as your plain old telephone system. I suppose it comes down to trust, your world view, and how you balance risks with freedoms.

Law enforcement, for example, keeps pressure on legislatures to widen authority, at the expense of citizen privacy, in the name of being efficient and effective. They form an organized lobby putting safety over liberty. Do you know of lobbies that push back the other way?

Laws makers are aware that the threats are personal. For example, this bit from the official site of Ohio Senator Mike "Coingate" DeWine (R-Ohio):

NOTE: Due to heightened security restrictions in the Senate office buildings and elsewhere on the Capitol complex, mail addressed to members of Congress continues to be significantly delayed. Mail addressed to my office must now be sent off-site for irradiation treatment and other preventative measures to ensure safety.

Those wishing to quickly contact my office are encouraged to correspond by telephone or fax. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Senator DeWine will introduce the FBI's bill. If you're a U.S. citizen, Skype him to say the new CALEA extensions are over-the-top and intrusive. Or that you don't mind being spied on. Here are his public phone numbers. If you click them, you'll dial straight from Skype, free in the US:

• D.C. Office: (202) 224-2315
• Xenia, Ohio: (937) 376-3080
• Cincinnati, Ohio: (513) 763-8260
• Cleveland, Ohio: (216) 522-7272
• Columbus, Ohio: (614) 469-5186
• Marietta, Ohio: (740) 373-2317
• Toledo, Ohio: (419) 259-7536

This is an election year for DeWine. He is running for reelection against blogging Congressman Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). If you think privacy and freedom should be a campaign issue, Skype Brown's campaign office at 440-282-3314 or his congressional offices: Lorain County (440) 245-5350, (440) 365-5877; Summit County (330) 865-8450; and his Washington Office (202) 225-3401.

Does making phone numbers clickable (click once to call) make you more likely to call, just for the convenience?

I guess when the fourth person contacts you for your reaction to the week's network neutrality voting in the US, it's time to say something about it.

For newcomers, my reasoning why Network Neutrality is a last resort at fighting duopoly rent seeking can be found here. I won't repeat it.

Let me re-iterate something I said back in 2004:

Over time, the architecture of the telecom system will resemble the political system around it.

The AT&T (as opposed to at&t) years reflected the military-industrial era. A "commanding height" of the Cold War was the flow of information, and just like the interstate highways. AT&T was as much a creature of the government as rational free-market economics. The break-up of AT&T as well as the 1996 act both chose to cleave the industry across the connectivity grain rather than with it. The current situation was 30 years in the making. As I rather undiplomatically stated, it's a uniquely American mess that can only be solved by a uniquely American solution.

But it's really much deeper than that. From my shallow knowledge of American history, and short exposure to American culure, I've come to the following (probably widely unwelcome and possibly wildy wrong) conclusions. Network Neutrality is just a digital-era manifestation of much longer-running sores within the American political system and psyche.

• The outcome of the Civil War was that everyone lost. No winners, not even a draw. One side lost its soul, and the other its honour. It set the stage for a fundamental change from the United States to the United State.
• The Seventeenth Amendment upset the carefully-crafted balance of power between the public, states, federal government (executive), legislature and judiciary. The US is a four-legged constitutional stool that the public is sat upon. (This may explain why it is one of -- debatably, the -- longest continuously established democracy). But it's now an uncomfortably wobbly stool.
• This set the stage for an immediate assault on personal freedom, which continues today in other forms. Competing jurisdictions would have ensured the migration of ethanolics and psychedelics to happier places.
• The same over-reaching federal state also encroached into a whole bunch of other areas it would best have been kept away from, notably communications policy.
• The rest, as they say, is history.

I can't but help enjoy the irony of the often statist/corporatist/collectivist European Union being a paragon of devolved government, competing regulatory regimes and voluntary cross-border cooperation compared to the centrally planned US communications economy.

If the FCC were tossed onto the scrap heap, and those powers returned to the states, my American friends would find that the Network Neutrality issue would rapidly cease to have any political significance. By making the prizes of Federal Telecom Lotto so big, the temptation to fiddle with the rules of the game has become overwhelming.

Anyone fancy some salty tea?

PS - Next overtly political Telepocalypse post: March 2009. I promise to keep my libertarian ways quiet until then. (Note that does mean I don't fit into US Dem/Rep political stereotypes.)
PPS - I'll probably offend lots of people, but the short version is "Nice country, great people, shame about the government." (For the UK, it's "Nice people, great country, shame about the government", and Italy is "Great people, great country, what government?" Only kidding! Calm down!)
PPPS - Comments are open ;) Set status to "published" and be damned...

UPDATE: Something many readers won't be aware of is the different ways the US and EU constitutions work. As I understand it, the commerce clause of the US constitution means that if it relates to interstate commerce (and practically everything in a networked globalised economy does), then it "goes federal" by default. In Europe, it's different. The subsidiarity principle means everything should (in theory) be done at the lowest possible level of government. Just because something has an international dimension, it doesn't mean that the EU gets full power over it. And even where the EU legislates, it merely sets out the general requirements and objectives, and each nation translates that into local law. Again, scope is retained for competing implementations and jurisdictions. I'm no fan of the eurocracy, but it's illuminating nonetheless to see the practical consequences of different constitutional frameworks.

UPDATE: That means the EU constitution is "edge-based", and the US one doesn't scale. Oops. Hey, just skip a generation and move straight to anarchism: peer-to-peer contracts, and a state whose only function is to enforce them.

Skype on your razr?
incompatible today.
SoonR might do it.

Net neutrality
astroturfed, lobbied and shelved
telcos win again

fcc taxes Vonage
maybe SkypeOut too
Save the Internet!

pick friends well, Yahoo!
AT&T messenger
now with NSA

Supernova word:
people Curate their passions
a new meme rises

Calls in US free
June promo: call the world free.
Skype teases America

Censor carefully:
Global Online Freedom Act.
Do you read Chinese?

Packard-Bell laptop
push keyboard to call
or answer the phone

Phishing in Skypeland
Suckers waiting to be fleeced
Study the handbook

Technorati Tags: politics, activism, netneutrality, askaninja, ninja, rights, ebay, skype, skypejournal, freedom, access

Last week, Skype changed the NorthAm VoIP landscape with free SkypeOut until year end. Skype downloads picked up right away.

This week Vonage speculators caught on about 24 hours too late. Vonage, its bankers and investors took in half a billion dollars. That'll buy them a mix of time, talent, features, and paying customers. We'll see how well they use it. 

StreamCast Networks' little litigation engine ups their lawsuit's ante by going for deep pockets, including eBay's, and naming Skype's founders in the expanded suit. Reading their complaint, they think they're facing the Sopranos. ♥ The ammended complaint (4.6MB, PDF) is full of juicy language like "fraud", "exclusive rights", "secretly siphoned-off", "conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act", "steal", "hatched a scheme", "theft", "secret disabling feature", "sweetheart deals", "hijack the 28 million Morpheus user base", "scheme", "scheme", "conspiracy to restrain trade", "pattern of racketeering", "mail and wire fraud", "are currently being aided and abetted in their efforts to fraudulently tranfer funds and properties by their families, accountants and attorneys". ♥ They say Skype's p2p technology is owned by StreamCast, and that Skype's founders cheated them out of the technology. They also say Skype lied to eBay about owning its technology free and clear, or that eBay (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). To make their case, they must pierce several corporate veils, show they had rights to the technology in the first place, prove the people and companies named messed with their rights. The parties span the globe, from Estonia to Vanuatu, but they may have enough to assert California jurisdiction. ♥ The kicker: StreamCast asked the court to shut down Skype. Right now. Protect your Skype SuperPowers! Should you tell StreamCast's management how you feel about it? Using your free or cheap SkypeOut minutes? Just by clicking on the phone numbers below? Maybe you'd say something like "Hands off my Skype, Mr. StreamCast!"? ♥ Do Skype's users have any legal standing in this?

• Michael Weiss, ceo, (818) 887-8610 x110
• Matt Neco, counsel, (818) 887-8610 x105
• Elizabeth Cowley, vp bizdev, (818) 887-8610 x108

The eBay/Yahoo deal seems healthy. Partner with a symbiote, not a parasite. Don't fuel Google's rising threat with ad dollars. ♥ It's an opportunity. Generalizing for a moment, eBay is great at making markets for goods. Yahoo! is better at making markets for intangibles, like jobs, movies, travel. Both create rich communities, but very different mechanics and cultures. As eBay uses Skype to embrace an intangibles strategy, Yahoo! could be a great partner. ♥ What happens should the Skype and Yahoo! Messenger teams swap spit? The best bits of both products could show up in the other. Might they resolve digital ID spaces and data models for users and conversations? Agree to strong interoperability for chat, voice and video? Standards for distributing in-client adverts? API co-development, blending the Yahoo!, eBay, PayPal and Skype developer communities? Together, they'd be an unbeatable team.

Skype updated Windows and Mac clients, bug fixes and repaired security problems, including a bug that exposed millions of SkypeOut call records to the NSA and other Internet snoops.

Dan Houghton, Skype's answer to Shelley Vision, started blogging about new Skypecasts.

The Skype ecology has been active too. VoIP Voice launched a new Mac phone in the UK. ♥ Actiontec is hiring a director of bizdev for VoIP products. "Actiontec is expanding its presence in the Skype Certified VoIP business! As a leader in this marketplace, Actiontec plans to capitalize on it's first to market advantage in the commercial space, and leverage it's intellectual property and strategic relationships in the VoIP adapter business. This is an exciting opportunity for a highly motivated professional to drive a huge up and coming business segment for Actiontec." If you apply, let us know what you learn. ♥ PhoneGnome to Skype came out, using the Uplink SIP to Skype Adapter.

Sometimes people ask me how I find something to write about just focusing on Skype. It's weeks like this, my friend.

Thursday morning I'll be in Lansing on a panel for the Telecommunications Association of Michigan's Politech conference.

These are mostly lobbyists from the bigger phone companies, reps from the smaller ones, and interested state legislators. What should I say to them?

First, you dare not ignore Skype and its kin. Just to get a sense of scale, here are Michigan's top 16 cities by 2003 population [on the right], collectively 2.5 million. Skype is picking up 200,000 new users per day. If all of that energy were here in Michigan, Skype would penetrate 100% your bigger cities in two weeks. And the whole state of 10 million in 50 days. Dear TAM member, how many new customers did you pick up last year? And how much did you pay for them? Skype has less than 400 employees. 

Skype/eBay is not alone. Microsoft Vista comes to a desktop near you later this year. Watch adoption of their Windows Live Messenger with voice and video. What's Microsoft's installed base in your geography?

Your response may be to respond in kind. Everyone and their brother is licensing or building up their softphones. Others are creating consumer non-PC VoIP solutions through Skype or softphones embedded in home phones. Yet others are following Skype onto mobiles or leapfrogging them. Are you used to competing in a very crowded market?

In a very crowded market, how will customers choose? What are the drivers of consumer choice in the world of Skype, QQ (the largest single-language IM/voice network on Earth), and AOL? What are their goals? The risks they're managing? If you answer cost containment, you're right, of course. But that just gets their attention.

So, this shift is big, it's real, it's happening now, and it's affecting your customers' relationship with you. More to come.

I'm looking forward to blogging the Conversations that develop from the sessions at mesh 2006 tomorrow and Tuesday. With featured Conversation Mentors such as Om Malik, Michael Geist, Steve Rubel and Paul Kedrosky there should evovle some interesing perspectives on how the a Web 2.0 world will evolve.

Mark is getting excited in preparing over the weekend, he says:

I couldn't help but think that we are a long way from a cold winter night a few months ago at the Paddock Tavern when someone raised the idea of putting on a conference. Little did we know what we were getting ourselves into! I'm looking forward to meshing as much as possible so if you see me wondering around, please introduce yourself.

As a media sponsor, Skype Journal will be reporting back daily with a particular focus on how Web 2.0/Voice 2.0 can be integrated into, impact and influence a public beyond the geeksphere.

Lots of developments in preparation for the Toronto mesh Conference:

Mark Evans reports on the selections for 15 Minutes of Fame. They're "giving three people a day 5 minutes each on stage to talk about their ideas, their companies or themselves."

Mark also reports on how they have organized this conference with no budget largely using web-based communications via the blogosphere. (I think he meant to say they have been able to "sell a whole bunch of tickets".)

Matthew Ingram expands on how Web 2.0 is rewriting the rules for the marketing business and how, with appropriate credits to Seth Godin, their success has turned out to be the result of using the web to "create a relationship, a dialogue -- a conversation".

continue reading.....

The Financial Times' Alison Maitland scored an interview with Niklas Zennström that ran yesterday. In it Zennström confirms the TOM-Skype joint venture censors text messages on behalf of the Chinese government. He claims: "One thing that’s certain is that those things are in no way jeopardising the privacy or the security of any of the users."

I posed the following questions to Skype but they have no comment beyond trying to insulate Skype from responsibility. "The Skype offering in China is actively managed by our joint venture in the country; TOM Online. Skype works hard to co-operate with local laws and regulations in all markets where we do business." 

1. Is TOM only filtering chats where at least one of the callers' accounts were signed up by TOM Online?
   
   
2. Will TOM filter chats if both parties are Chinese nationals but outside the PRC, say travelling in the US?
   
   
3. Is TOM only filtering conversations where at least one of the parties are using the custom version of the Skype client written for the joint venture?
   
   
4. Will TOM filter conversations using the TOM client being used by non-PRC nationals who are outside of China?
   
   
5. Does TOM's contract with Skype provide for disclosure to Skype and Skype users when their information is provided to a government official?
   
   
6. Are records of what the filter does kept? If so, by whom? Does Skype have or keep copies of those record?
   
   
7. Does the filtering mechanism use a list of keywords? If so, is the list public? May I have a copy? Who has the list? How often does it change?
   
   
8. Are the keywords only in Simplified Chinese or are they in other languages too?
   
   
9. Is China the only country where Skype and Skype's partner have set up filtering?
   
   
10. Do all Skype chats have the potential for a hidden participant, whether human or a robot?
    
    
11. Are filenames for transfer subject to filtering?
    
    
12. Are people's names among the keywords?
    
    
13. Are the content of files transferred via Skype also subject to filtering?
    
    
14. Does Skype encrypt end-to-end the IMs that are subject to filtering?
    
    
15. In a multiparty, multinational chat, can I as an American citizen have my text to a British subject filtered if someone from Shanghai is in that chat too?
    
    
16. Are audio conversations, where at least one party is in China, being listended to, filtered or recorded?
    
    
17. Are all calls filtered, or only if users meet certain criteria, or are conversations selected for filtering randomly?

Skypes founders are not strangers to prickly questions of international law and corporate ethics. Their background with file sharing firm Kazaa left them very aware of the business and technology strategies available and their legal and social consequences. This is also a context where phone companies completely block Skype.com and Skype conversations. Did the ethics conversation ever took place at Skype when they agreed to the Chinese joint venture? Who was involved and was there a real debate? And did eBay understand this situation before the acquisition?

See also:

• Jan in Malaysia: "The difference between Asia where Internet is seen as venue for free expression in Asia, unlike China. Thank god I live in Malaysia. Malaysia Boleh ! Wawasan 2020."
  
• Metafilter thread. "Oh dear, I had high hopes that Skype would hold out. Still, I guess they are telling us. Can anyone find the list of banned words in the TOM client?"
  
• China Herald: "But on a positive note, unlike Yahoo, Skype does not help to send their users to prison"
  
• 21talks: "And dear readers, the next time you want to give a call to the holy Dalai Lama, just say you’re trying to reach the smiling guy with glasses and a yellow head cap."
• IP Democracy: "Yeah, well, last I checked, the U.S. and Germany don’t lock up their journalists and throw away the key."

Some say phone calls score more impact with elected officials than postcards or emails.

Conference calls impact even more.

Try this procedure:

1. Add your elected officials to your contact list.
   
2. Start a group chat with up to three other people.
   
3. Discuss what you want to say, agree on a short intro and one key bullet point.
   
4. Pick a host for the call.
   
5. Pick which congressional office you want to call.
   
6. Add an elected office to the chat.
   

1. Turn the group chat into a conference call.
   
2. Record the call, if it's legal where you are.
   
3. Say your piece or leave a message.
   
4. Hang up.
   

1. Ask each other: how did it go?
2. Share the feedback (we made the call/didn't get through/left a message, and this is what we/they said) with those who inspired you.
3. Blog it or podcast it, if you are so moved.
   
4. Drop this elected official from your group chat and add another one.
   
5. Repeat with a new elected official.
6. Repeat with a new topic and other friends.
   

Technorati Tags: skype, freedom, contact, congress, campaign,