http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6529&cpage=1#comment-1290942

Quote from: me

Eric, sorry for the off-topic comment, but I don't know if I can reach you by email. I've been anticipating and wondering if you are going to dip your toe into the debate about the rising trend (ah, the serendipity of that link ending in "911") to regulate the internet using for example "net neutrality" as the justification. I don't comment often on your blog any more, but I do read. I am interested to read your logic as always. I suppose I [am] thinking the forces of decentralization will win in the end, but what hell do we have to go through first to get there?

I see my recent writings on this subject made all the same points that Eric made in 2008 as follows.

Eric S. Raymond's (the progenitor of the term "open source" in the infamous essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar") past writings about "net neutrality":

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Net neutrality: whats a libertarian to do?
Posted on 2008-11-13 by Eric Raymond

One of my commenters asked, rather plaintively:

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You mentioned net neutrality. Iâve read about this, and the opposition to it. Iâve read about this, and the opposition to it. As far as I can tell, net neutrality is more supported by liberals/democrats, while the opposition is made up more of conservatives/republicans. But for the life of me I canât figure out which is the the more libertarian position.

Your confusion is entirely reasonable. Ive hung out with network-neutrality activists and tried to give them what I thought was useful advice. Their political fixations didnt permit them to hear me. Heres a summary of the issues and one libertarians take on them.

Heres where it starts: the wire-line telcos want to use their control of the copper and fiber that runs to your house to double-dip, not only charging consumers for bandwidth but also hitting up large content providers (Google, Amazon, etc.) for quality-of-service fees. Theres another question that gets folded into the debate, too: under what circumstances the telcos can legitimately traffic-shape, e.g. by blocking or slowing the protocols used for p2p filesharing.

It is not clear that the regulatory regime under which the telcos operate allows them to do either thing. They havent tried to implement double-dipping yet, and theyre traffic-shaping by stealth and lying about it when they get caught. What they want is a political green light to do both.

Let it be clear from the outset that the telcos are putting their case for being allowed to do these things with breathtaking hypocrisy. They honk about how awful it is that regulation keeps them from setting their own terms, blithely ignoring the fact that their last-mile monopoly is entirely a creature of regulation. In effect, Theodore Vail and the old Bell System bribed the Feds to steal the last mile out from under the publics nose between 1878 and 1920; the wireline telcos have been squatting on that unnatural monopoly ever since as if they actually had some legitimate property right to it.

But the telcos crimes arent merely historical. They have repeatedly bargained for the right to exclude competitors from their networks on the grounds that if the regulators would let them do that, theyd be able to generate enough capital to deploy broadband everywhere. That promise has been repeatedly, egregiously broken. Instead, theyve creamed off that monopoly rent as profit or used it to cross-subsidize competition in businesses with higher rates of return. (Oh, and of course, to bribe legislators and buy regulators.)

Mistake #1 for libertarians to avoid is falling for the telcos were pro-free market bullshit. Theyre anything but; what they really want is a politically sheltered monopoly in which they have captured the regulators and created business conditions that fetter everyone but them.

OK, so if the telcos are such villainous scum, the pro-network-neutrality activists must be the heroes of this story, right?

Unfortunately, no.

Your typical network-neutrality activist is a good-government left-liberal who is instinctively hostile to market-based approaches. These people think, rather, that if they can somehow come up with the right regulatory formula, they can jawbone the government into making the telcos play nice. Theyre ideologically incapable of questioning the assumption that bandwidth is a scarce public good that has to be regulated. They dont get it that complicated regulations favor the incumbent who can afford to darken the sky with lawyers, and they really dont get it about outright regulatory capture, a game at which the telcos are past masters.

Ive spent endless hours trying to point out to these people that their assumptions are fundamentally wrong, and that the only way to break the telco monopoly is to break the scarcity assumptions its based on. That the telecoms regulatorium, far from being what holds the telcos in check, is actually their instrument of control. And that the only battle that actually matters is the one to carve out enough unlicensed spectrum so we can use technologies like ad-hoc networking with UWB to end-run the whole mess until it collapses under its own weight.

They dont get it. They refuse to get it. Ive been on a mailing list for something called the Open Infrastructure Alliance that consisted of three network engineers and a couple dozen organizers; the engineers (even the non-libertarian engineers) all patiently trying to explain why the political attack is a non-starter, and the organizers endlessly rehashing political strategies anyway. Because, well, thats all they know how to do.

In short, the network neutrality crowd is mainly composed of well-meaning fools blinded by their own statism, and consequently serving mainly as useful idiots for the telcos program of ever-more labyrinthine and manipulable regulation. If I were a telco executive, Id be on my knees every night thanking my god(s) for this opposition. Mistake #2 for any libertarian to avoid is backing these clowns.

So, what are libertarians to do?

We can start by remembering a simple truth: The only substantive threat to the telco monopoly is bandwidth that has been removed from the reach of both the telcos and their political catspaws in the regulatorium. Keep your eye on that ball; the telcos know its the important one and will try to distract you from it, while the network neutrality crowd doesnt know it and wastes most of its energy self-defeatingly wrestling with the telcos over how to re-slice the existing pie.

Go active whenever theres a political debate about unlicensed spectrum. More of it is good. Oppose any efforts to make UWB (or any other technology that doesnt cause destructive interference) require a license anywhere on the spectrum. If you are capable, contribute to the development of mesh networking, especially wireless mesh networking.

Oh, and buy an Android phone. As I noted in my immediately previous post, Google is our ally in this.

UPDATE: Ive summarized the history of the Bell Systems theft of the last mile here.

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Why Android matters
Posted on 2008-11-12 by Eric Raymond

...

Im going to start with the relatively far future, like five or even possibly ten years out, because Im pretty sure my projections for it are very similar to Sergei and Larrys and that they are what is actually driving Googles corporate strategy.

Cellphone descendants are going to eat the PC...

...

Now. You are Google. You make your money by selling ads on the most successful search engine in the world. One of your strategic imperatives is therefore this: you cannot allow anyone to operate a technological or regulatory chokepoint between you and people doing searches, otherwise theyll stunt your earnings growth and siphon off your revenues. Thats why you ran a politico-financial hack on the Federal auction of radio spectrum to ensure a certain minimum level of openness. And thats why you are [Google is], very quietly, the single most determined and effective advocate of network neutrality. [note Eric is referring to free market driven "net neutrality" not the political lie "net neutrality" which is actually the way to end "net neutrality"]

Now, combine these two visions and youll understand why Google is doing Android. Their goal is to create the business conditions that will maximize their ad revenue not just two years out but ten years out. Those business conditions are, basically, an Internet that is as friction-free, cheap, and difficult to lock down as the underlying technology can make it.

Under this strategy, Android wins in multiple ways. In the longer term, it gives Google a strong shot at defining the next generation of dominant computing platforms in such a way that nothing but customer demand will be able to control those platforms.

In the shorter term, it outflanks the Baby Bells. As web traffic shifts to Googlephones (and things like them), telco efforts to double-dip carriage charges by extracting quality-of-service fees from Google and other content providers will become both technologically more difficult and politically impossible. By depriving them of the ability to lock in customers to gated and proprietary services, Android will hammer both the wire-line and wireless telcos into being nothing but low-margin bit-haulage providers, exactly where Google wants them. (A leading indicator will be the collapse of the blatant absurdity that is the ring-tones market, doomed when anyone can hook MP3s of their choosing to phone events.)

As bad as this sounds for the telcos, Microsoft gets outflanked and screwed far worse...

...

One of the coolest things about this chain of dominoes is that Google itself doesnt have to win or end up with control of anything for the future to play out as described. Its not even necessary that Android itself be the eventual dominant cellphone platform. All they have to do is force the competitive conditions so that whatever does end up dominating is as open as Android is. Given that one of the largest handset makers is already being forced to open source their stack for other reasons (Nokia figured out that they cant afford to hire enough developers to do all their device ports in-house) this outcome seems certain.

For the open-source community, its all good. The things Google needs to do with Android for selfish business-strategic reasons are exactly what we want, too. This isnt an accident, because were both pulling in the direction of reducing the effects of market friction, transaction costs, and asymmetries of power and information. If Google didnt exist, the open-source community would need to invent it.

Oh. Wait. We did invent them. Where do you suppose Sergei and Larry came from? Why do you suppose theyve been running Summer of Code and hiring a noticeable fraction of the most capable open-source developers on the planet? Well, heres a flare-lit clue: before those two guys [Sergei and Larry Page] were famous, they sent me fan mail once.

Thats why I think those two know exactly what theyre doing. And that, if its true that their business strategy requires them to be open sources ally, I think I can be allowed a guess that they chose their business strategy so that would be true. Dont be evil; theyre not angels, but theyre trying.

And, from where I sit? All I can say is this: Bwahahaha. The sinister master plan for world domination it is working!

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Telecoms regulation considered harmful
Posted on 2006-02-27 by Eric Raymond

Doc Searls asked me to put the argument for total telecoms deregulation into a nutshell, then blog it so he could point at it. Here it is.

Telecoms regulation, to the extent it was ever justified, was justified on the basis of preventing or remedying market failures such as, in particular, lack of market incentives to provide universal coverage.

The market failures in telecoms all derive from the high fixed-capital costs of conventional wirelines. These have two major effects: (1) incentives to provide service in rural areas are weak, because the amount of time required to amortize large fixed costs makes for poor discounted ROI; and (2) in higher-density areas, the last mile of wire is a natural monopoly/oligopoly.

New technologies are directly attacking this problem. Wi-Fi, wireless mesh networks, IP over powerlines, and cheap fenceline cable dramatically lower the fixed capital costs of last-mile service. The main things holding these technologies back are regulatory barriers (including, notably, not enough spectrum allocated to WiFi and UWB).

The right answer: deregulate everything, free the new technologies to go head-to-head against the wired last mile, and let the market sort it all out.

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Un-ending the Internet
Posted on 2006-02-07 by Eric Raymond

Recently, The Nation ran an article,
The End of the
Internet, that viewed with alarm some efforts
by telephone companies to hack their governing regulations so they can
price-discriminate. Their plans include tiered pricing so a consumers
monthly rate could be tied to the amount of bandwidth actually used. They
also want to be able to offer preferred fast access to on-line services
that pay for the privilege and the flip side of that could
be shutting down services like peer-to-peer networking that big media
companies dislike.

One of my regular visitors. David McCabe, asked me what a libertarian
would do about this. A fair question, representative of a large class
of problems about what you do to constrain monopolies already in place
without resorting to more regulation.

Heres the answer I gave him:

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Deregulate and let the telcos have their tiered pricing as long as
   we also deregulate enough radio spectrum that the telcos
   (evil monopolist scum that they are) will promptly be hammered flat by
   wireless mesh networks.

David replied Beautiful. Blog it. Hence this screed

The fundamental problem with the telecoms regime we have is that
the Baby Bells inherited from Mama Bell a monopoly lock on the last
mile (the cables running to end-users homes and businesses). More
backbone capacity would be easy and is in no way a natural monopoly,
especially given the huge overbuild of optical-fiber trunk lines
during the Internet boom of the 1990s. But the last mile, as long
as its wire lines, truly is a natural monopoly or oligopoly
nobody wants more than one set of telephone poles per street, and
their capacity to carry wires is limited. That system doesnt scale
up.

To a left-wing rag like The Nation, the answer is to
huff and puff about more regulation. But more regulation would do
nothing to attack the telcos real power position, which is the
physical constraints on the last mile. The truly pro-freedom anwer is
to enable the free market to take that power position away from
them.

Wireless mesh networking flocks of cheap WiFi nodes that
automatically discover neighboring nodes and act as routers is
the technology that can do that. With the right software, networks of
these can be self-configuring and self-repairing. Its pure
libertarianism cast in silicon, a perfectly decentralist bottom-up
solution that could replace wirelines and the politico-economic
choke-point they imply.

The main thing holding wireless mesh networking back is the small
size of the bandwidth now allotted to it for spread-spectrum frequency
hopping. With enough volume, competition would drive the price of
these creatures to $20 or less per unit low enough for
individuals and community organizations to spot them everywhere
theres an electrical grid. Increments of capacity would be cheap,
too; with the right software, your WiFi card could aggregate the
bandwidth for as many nodes as there happen to be in radio range.

(And that software? Open source, of course. Mesh networking relies
on open source and open standards. Some of the node designs out there
are open hardware, too. The mesh network would be transparent, top
to bottom.)

Today, many people already leave their WiFi access points open for
their neighbors to use, even though DSL or cable costs real money,
because the incremental cost of being nice is negligible. At the
equilibrium price level of mesh networking, wireless free Internet
access would be ubiquitous everywhere except deep wilderness areas.

But the wireline backbone wouldnt vanish, because mesh networking solves
the bandwidth problem at the expense of piling on latency (cumulative
routing and retransmission delays). Large communications users
would still find it useful to be hooked up to long-haul fiber networks
in order to hold down the amount of latency added by multiple hops over the
mesh. The whole system would self-equilibrate, seeking the most
efficient mix of free and pay networking.

As usual, the best solution to the problems of regulation and
imperfect markets is not more politics and regulation, but less of it
letting the free market work. Not that I expect The
Nation to figure this out soon, or ever; like all leftists,
they will almost certainly remain useful idiots for anyone, tyrant or
telco monopolist, who knows that political solutions to market
problems always favor the powerful and politically connected over the
little people they are ostensibly designed to help.

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Why I wont be signing the Declaration of Internet Freedom as it is
Posted on 2012-07-03 by Eric Raymond

Theres been some buzz in the last few days about the Declaration of Internet Freedom penned by some prominent libertarians.

I wish I could sign on to this document. Actually, considering who appears on the list of signatories, I consider the fact that the composers didnt involve me in drafting it to be a surprising mistake that I can only ascribe to a collective fit of absent-mindedness.

But, because neither I nor anyone else from the hacker tribe was involved, it has one very serious flaw.

Humility, yes, Rule of Law yes, Free Expression, yes, Innovation, Competition, Privacymost of this document is good stuff, with exactly the sort of lucidity and bedrock concern for individual freedom that I expect from libertarians.

But it all goes pear-shaped on one sentence: Open systems and networks arent always better for consumers. This is a dreadful failure of vision and reasoning, one that is less forgivable here because libertarians who understand why asymmetries of power and information are in general bad things have very particular reasons to know better than this.

In the long run, open systems and networks are always better for consumers. Because, whatever other flaws they may have, they have one overriding virtue they dont create an asymmetrical power relationship in which the consumer is ever more controlled by the network provider. Statists, who accept and even love asymmetrical power relationships as long as the right sort of people are doing the oppressing, have some excuse within their terms of reference for failing to grasp the nasty second, third, and nth-order consequences of closed-system lock-in. Libertarians have no such excuse.

In the context of this Declaration, this defect is particularly sad because the composers could have avoided it without damage to any one of the other pro-market positions they wanted set forth. I actually agree that, as proposed in their next sentence, closed systems such as iOS should be free to compete against open systems such as Android; as the Declaration says, let technologies evolve and intervene, if at all, only when an abuse of market power clearly harms consumers. The proper libertarian stance in these contests is to tell government to butt out and then vote with your dollars for openness.

I am disappointed in the Declarations failure to get this crucial issue right. I hope there is still the option to amend it; and if not, that my objection and correction will reach as many people as the Declaration itself, and the two together will convey important lessons about what we must do to preserve and extend liberty.