Two weeks ago I attended what I suppose must be the founders meeting of the Maine ISP Association in Hallowell, just outside of Augusta. One of the issues that I mulled over during the drive up was cable. How do Maine ISPs get access to monopoly physical infrastructure, the basic CATV plant of the municipal video franchisee, whether TimeWarner or Adelphia? How do monopoly municipal franchise "cable broadband" ISPs, co-exist with ISPs offering "dsl broadband", both serving the Palesky-benefiting (southern, lakes, and midcoastal) Maine, or ISPs offering location-indifferent or independent telephone service area restricted dial-up access, and looking to enter those rich monopoly cable markets?
A simple rich-and-poor question, where wealth is created by walls and a history of walls, and the poor would like to raze, or at least lower, the walls, now and in the future. Nothing complex at all.
As it turned out, it really was just Maine ISPs, so the Atlanta and Philidelphia metro franchise and cable plant management companies were absent. It was just a DSL ISP, a big dial-up ISP, and a bunch of small dial-up ISPs, and me. Wampumpeag isn't an ISP. ISPs are our customers, as are hosting companies, bloggers, political campaigns, and anybody or anything that acquires a domain name.
Some hard questions: Should "virtual" ISPs be allowed to join? Should TimeWarer/AOL and Adelphia and Earthlink and Verizon and SBC and ... be allowed to join? Are they facilities based? Are they incorporated in or doing 50% of their business in Maine?
We didn't decide anything, and we comprised something less than most of the 40 or so ISPs that serve Maine, but we got closer to agreement on what the by-laws should be.
Now the reason for this self-serving post is this -- the DSL ISP put its key public policy goal on the table -- a word added to Maine's basic law.
Old
It shall be the policy of Maine to offer internet service everywhere, etc.
It shall be the policy of Maine to offer broadband internet service everywhere, etc.
Earlier in the primary cycle I wrote on Lawrence Lessig's blog on the problem Howard Dean's "technology policy" posed. In a nutshell, Dean's policy was broadband-everywhere, wireline and wireless. I won't repeat what I wrote on Lawrence's blog, other than the nutshell of both are suburban delivery systems (race and class), wicked expensive (worldcom bailout), and kept the spam-stupidity-and-cupidity model of the net unchanged. More turds via fatter pipes.
Now the importance of a comment on a blog, even one like Lessig's, is close to zero. It was interesting that one of my technical peers, who is to the far right of Ghengis Khan politically, was on the same page on the feasability of wireless as the rural half of the national broadband service plan and just as sanguine about the economics of the wireline broadband. Still, even two comments, one by (I'll omit my quals), and one by a co-inventor of the wireless technology, amounts to two dry beans when set against the charisma and hunger for change of Dean and the Deaniacs of last Fall.
Where this became more substantial was ironically via the Triballaw list. A sublist was set up, and I ended up spending hours pounding the keyboard on technology issues, starting from my critique of Dean's tech policy and reaching out as if I ran DARPA's ISTO and Commerce's NIST and could put in place the change from mutual assured de-industrialization with China and India to something mutually beneficial.
Other TLers wrote on this and related subjects. A TL contributor at Berkeley put our product in the hands of former Secretary Reiche, who teachs at Berkeley, and who also advises John Kerry on economic issues. Whatever became of our product I've no idea.
I don't expect much. A Maine ISP Association could allow TimeWarner et al, and Juno and the other New Jersy modem pool virtualized business models to join and vote just as if they were facilities-based with 50% of their business in Maine (or New Hampshire or Quebec and the Maritimes), in essense "local". It could also not, and leave TimeWarner and Verizon as "foreign" and above all, monopoly exploiting predatory corporations, and "free" or sub-cost virtual gambits like Juno, to form their own non-Maine ISP association.
Sometime the FCC may hold a locality public hearing in Portland. If they do so, I'll submit comment on the banality of TimeWarner's generic basic cable news-and-entertainment product, and the banality of AOL's generic internet (sort of) access product, relative to the vibrant culture of Maine's low-power radio and low-cap dial-up ISP access products.
Oh. This week I was recruited to participate in a bid to take .net away from Verisign Global Registry Services. This is, at its bottom, a very politicaly activity. The DoC regulates ICANN, sort of. On some issues. If Bush wins in November, in March the ICANN BoD might decide that the monopoly incumbant is the best choice for "competition", rather like the Powell FCC has selected the ILECs over the CLECs on key regulatory issues. If Kerry wins in November, in March the ICANN BoD might decide that the monopoly incumbant is the not the best "competitive" choice, and neither is the monopoly local number portability operator NeuStar, and offer 4.7 million domain name customers to one of the better competing technical and management teams.
Hope springs eternal. I bid .biz (won), .us (won), .org (lost), .cat (Catalonia, not "meow", pending) and some day I'll bid .naa, a pan-tribal sponsored top-level domain. Now I need to go fix a technical problem I caused that has freed the academics, tribal judges and practitioners, law students, and chiefs like my spouse for a brief holiday from Federal Indian and First Nations Law.
Posted by at July 24, 2004 07:19 AM | TrackBack