The Connectivity Infrastructure

Craig
Burton says it's the nature of infrastructure to
commoditize itself and that it's the nature of commodities to
ubiquitize as well. That's why he believes every company playing
the infrastructure game in the computer and networking business
needs an open-source strategy. If you want to drive ubiquity, open
source is hard to beat. Just look at Linux. (He also
points
out that driving shareholder value is an orthogonal
concern.)A couple of days ago
Kevin Marks pointed
to the
natural
division between transport and protocols. But the more
important distinction is between infrastructure (comprised of
transport and protocols) and the stuff that depends on it, such as
applications, "content" and companies in those businesses.Toward that end is one of Kevin's links: Bob Frankston's
Connectivity:
What it is and why it is so important. (Background:
Bob co-invented the
spreadsheet with Dan
Bricklin.)It's a good piece that has many provocative and
important things to say. But one paragraph stands out for me as a
locus of trouble:We can now treat telephony and television as
applications built upon any available connectivity. We are already
used to the idea that we access any Internet service from any
provider."We" are still a minority, to the advantage of AOL, Microsoft
and entertainment industry heavies who want to leverage their
application and content mass against lower layers of the
infrastructure stack.Not that they have it easy. Microsoft has successfully
leveraged its monopoly position in operating systems to sell lots
of mail and Web servers, but the company is still not in a position
to change the underlying protocols on which those mail and Web
services
depend (though they're trying, with .Net). In the case of the
entertainment industry, the only leverage they have is legality.
They've had some success with the DMCA and similar efforts but only
with controlling behavior, not with the evolution of network
infrastructure. And in the case of AOL's instant messaging, there
are no lower layers to be concerned about, which is why it's hard
to conceive of a server-side instant messaging infrastructure, much
less a business to build on it. (All due credit to
Jabber, it ain't here
yet -- but in time it will be).That infrastructure is essentially an underlying condition
that's easily conceived as a place. Bob calls
the condition "connectivity". Larry Lessig
calls
it the Net's "end to end" architecture. Craig Burton has my
favorite description for the place itself: a hollow sphere in which
every point is visible to every other point across an empty space
in the middle -- a vacuum where the virtual distances are zero.
Fittingly, we conceive of the Net in place-like terms. We have
"sites" and "locations" with "addresses" that are "on" the
Net.But here's the problem: what Bob and Larry and Craig talk
about is obvious to us, but not to the
majority of netizens to whom the Net is a remote place one "visits"
by "dialing" there. The place-like nature of the Net is also not
obvious to the telecom and cable backbone companies that still
think of the whole thing as a distribution system -- a concept they
share with the entertainment business (and, regrettably, many
lawmakers).Some broadband providers are no help, either. I was recently
pleased to hear that a low-tech friend finally got DSL; but when I
visited her home I found that the provider was SBC, which uses a
goofy PPPOE client to bypass the PC's networking control panel, and
therefore the Net could only be accessed by, of all things,
"dialing up." Yes, the speed was faster, but the concept of a
remote place one only visits was maintained. The idea that her PC
is as connected to the Net as it is to the electric grid remained
alien to her.Of course, using PPPOE to maintain the dial-up model of the
Net makes sense for SBC, which is still essentially a telephone
company. Here's Bob again:If we turn from the exciting reality of the
Internet back to the other reality of Telecommunications we
experience culture shock.
But for those who live within the complex world of telecom
regulation day in and day out, the idea of going back to first
principles isn't shocking, it's simply inconceivable. It represents
a degree of reengineering that is dismissed as naïve and
politically unrealistic. Once you accept the premises of the
regulatory framework, all of its intricacies seem reasonable and
necessary.But not to every corporate creature that inhabits the
regulatory jungle. The big ISP where I live is
Cox
Communications, which is the opposite of SBC in its
attitude about customer connectivity. Right now Cox is rolling
hundreds of thousands of cable-connected customers over to a new
backbone with new servers that require new surnames for e-mail
addresses and web site URLs. And it is actually
simplifying connectivity by eliminating DHCP
IDs and allowing customers to hook up simply with straight DHCP.
The tech support guys even seem to enjoy hearing that our
connection gets split to seven or more computers through a router,
two Ethernet hubs and two 802.11b wireless base stations. They
suspect I might be expert enough to help other customers. Which I
do.But this week I spent almost four days off the air after Cox
threw the switch to the new system (from Excite@Home, which was
bankrupt and going out of business). Why? Because Cox sent out
fancy conversion kits that failed to explain in plain terms that
the Net was now actually easier to access,
even though everybody who used a Cox e-mail address or had a
Cox-hosted web site would need to make some adjustments. The kit
spent most of its glossy energies on those issues rather than
simple connectivity.Worse, the kits failed to explain was that in many cases the
cable modem would need to be turned off for up to several hours, so
that its semi-volatile memory would forget the old settings while
the customer's account was being "reprovisioned."Worst of all, the kit came with a CD that installs new copies
of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Outlook Express (on PCs and Macs
-- forget about Linux) and explains that e-mail addresses and web
sites can only be changed if the user runs special scripts
initiated by unique codes that come with the kit and can only be
implemented using IE5 on Windows.The net effect was to
confound
every customer, regardless of platform or technical
competence. It also did nothing to improve popular understanding of
what the Net is all about. A major lost opportunity.I still believe that conceiving the Net as a distribution
system will ultimately fail, regardless of how much legal and
market leverage the AOLs, SBCs and RIAAs of the exert to maintain
it. In the long run the concept will simply become
irrelevant.But we can hasten its demise by explaining, as often and as
forcefully as we can, the difference between terminal
distribution-oriented business models and ubiquitous commodity
infrastructures that are good for every kind of business. Or, as
Bob puts it:Once we see that connectivity is the basic
resource and that telephony and television are simply applications
built on connectivity we can seize the opportunity to replace
complex regulation with the power of the marketplace.Doc Searls is Senior Editor
of Linux Journal.

email: doc@ssc.com