Date: Thur, 12 October 2006 00:02:00 -0600
From: SuitWatch 
To: suitwatch@ssc.com
Subject: SuitWatch - October 12




                       SuitWatch -- October 12, 2006


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  The Giant Zero, Part 0.x

   I'm in Copenhagen this week, speaking and hanging out at New Media Days
   http://www.newmediadays.dk/.  My opening keynote at the conference yesterday
   morning was titled "The Internet: Not Just Another Medium".  Although most
   of the talk was new, the core concept is was one I first presented
   http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2006/09/20/doc-searls-on-the-giant-zero-audio/
   at the Berkman Center http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/ three weeks earlier:
   that it helps to think of the Net as a "giant zero".  Now that I've given the
   talk twice, this seems like a good time to make the same case in text.  Here goes.

   1. The Net isn't a medium.  It's a place.

   That place is a giant three-dimensional zero.  The metaphor comes from Craig
   Burton http://www.craigburton.com/, who first observed that a hollow sphere
   is the best geometrical characterization of an end-to-end network comprised of
   peers that are all effectively zero distance from each other.  Here's how Craig
   put it in a 1999 interview for Linux Journal:

     I see the Net as a world we might see as a bubble.  A sphere.  It's
     growing larger and larger, and yet inside, every point in that sphere is
     visible to every other one.  That's the architecture of a sphere.  Nothing
     stands between any two points.  That's its virtue: it's empty in the
     middle.  The distance between any two points is functionally zero, and not
     just because they can see each other, but because nothing interferes with
     operation between any two points.  There's a word I like for what's going
     on here: terraform.  It's the verb for creating a world.  That's what
     we're making here: a new world.  Now the question is, what are we going to
     do to cause planetary existence? How can we terraform this new world in a
     way that works for the world and not just ourselves?

   In early 2003, David Weinberger http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/ and I
   called this conceptual sphere a "World of Ends" , in a posted essay by that
   name at http://worldofends.com.  I still think that's a good way of
   describing it, but I like Giant Zero better for several reasons.

   First, nothing in a zero needs improvement.  It's silly to say, "I'm going
   to get in the middle of this thing and improve it." More importantly, a zero
   needs no mediation.  It puts everybody, including The Media, on the outside.
    This doesn't mean The Media have no advantages, or that they can't help
   terraform the Net's world.  It just means that their business isn't helping
   make the Net more of what it is.

   2. Distance is the main issue.  Not bandwidth.

   And the ideal perceived distance across any two points on the Net is the
   same as the one between your keyboard and your screen.  You tap on the
   keyboard, and the results appear on the screen.  Yes, there are delays
   there.  But they don't matter.  Nor does it make sense for anybody to charge
   a toll along the path between your fingers and your eyes.  The functional
   distance, and the actual cost, are both zero.

   In reality, of course, there are costs and delays in the way the Net
   actually works.  But the ideal toward which we must work is one in which
   those costs and delays round down to zero.

   3. The vacuum in the middle of the Giant Zero is sustained by light.

   We can't help mixing metaphors when we speak of the Net's "backbone" and
   "trunks" of fiber optic cabling.  But we can still sense the nature of the
   Net's zero-ness when we consider the friction involved in light that blinks
   in one end of a fiber optic cable and shines out the other.  Even the most
   conductive wiring has some resistance to electrical current -- enough that
   you can detect that current with instruments.  You can't do that with fiber
   optics.  There is no physical difference between fiber optic cabling that's
   "dark" and cabling that's "lit".  Yes, it costs money trench for cabling, to
   lay the conduit, to pull it through conduit and hang it from poles.  But
   once the cable is installed, all the costs are at the ends.  Unless the
   cabling is physically harmed, it just lays there, costing nothing.  Yet
   supporting endless possibilities for value creation and increase.

   4. The Net is pure infrastructure.

   As with the land and oceans of the terraformed Earth, the Net's primary role
   is supportive.  It's something that makes everything else possible.

   This is a hard concept for people to get their head around, when they're
   used to looking at the Net as an extra charge on their cable TV or phone
   bills.  But in the long run video and telephone are just breeds of data.
   They may be services that carry charges.  But once the Net's light-based
   infrastructure is built out, it's as naturally costless as the crusts and
   oceans of the Earth.

   This, of course, is the place where many arguments come up.  Who's going to
   pay for building this out in the first place? How do you pay down the debt?
   Do you want to write off billions of dollars in sunk capital expenses? Don't
   the carriers have the right to charge for using their "pipes", which are
   their property? How can you think this infrastructure is going to get built
   out, or improved over time, if there's no profit to be made by the
   businesses doing the science and the work?

   The problem with all those arguments is that they ignore the nature of what
   the Net is, once it's built out.  Those arguments also presume that the main
   (or only) benefits of incumbency for carriers come from charging for use of
   the "pipes".  In fact, there are countless advantages for incumbents as
   alpha inhabitants of this new Earth's surface.  There are services to create
   and sell.  There are millions of existing customer relationships.  There is
   physical real estate and office space out the wazoo.  There are endless
   support services to be sold to persons and companies that build businesses
   on top of the Net's infrastructure.  Why not get into those games as well?
   Why not look toward those games as motivation for building out the raw
   infrastructure?

   Because phone companies come from telephony and cable companies come from
   cable TV.  They can't help protecting and leveraging their existing
   businesses.  And fighting those who appear to threaten those businesses.
   But at some point they'll stop doing that, and start taking advantage of
   this:

   5. The Giant Zero is built to support an infinitude of business.

   When the non-physical distance between everything in the world becomes zero,
   there's no limit to what you can do with that fact.  This should be good
   news for anybody with imagination and entrepreneurial spirit.  (Not to
   mention an equally endless variety of non-business possibilities.)
   Especially for businesses that already have advantages in their
   marketplaces.  As phone and cable companies certainly do.  They need to stop
   thinking of their corner of the Net as their private silo, and start
   thinking about the zillions of businesses that become possible, faster, with
   their help.  And how they can make money in a wide-open and much bigger
   marketplace.

   6. The Net is a public utility, like electricity, gas, water, waste
   treatment and roads.

   Of course, there are costs of maintaining and improving the Net as a
   utility.  We just need to appreciate the abundant lack-of-distance the Net
   is made to provide.  By its nature the Net is less scarce -- once it's
   installed -- than other utilities.

   7. We need to understand The Because Effect, and how it explains the real
   value of pure infrastructure.

   The Because Effect happens when you make more money because of something
   than with something.  For example, Google makes more money because of Linux
   than with Linux.  Or because of search than with search.

   With the Net, we have a because/with ratio that yearns toward the infinite.
    The more distance we get out of the Giant Zero, the more supportive it
   becomes.  And the more money we make because of it than with it.

   8. The Live Web is branching off the Static Web.

   If you go to Google Blogsearch, you'll face two buttons.  One allows you to
   "search blogs" and the other to "search the Web".  The former delivers Live
   Web results.  The latter delivers Static Web results from Google's familiar
   basic search engine.

   Why does Google make that distinction? I think it's because there is not
   only a radical difference between the two kinds of search, but also between
   the natures of what they search.

   The Static Web is the familiar one we describe in the static language of
   real estate and construction.  We have sites that we architect, design and
   build.  They have addresses and locations.  We look for traffic to navigate
   its way through our facilities.  This is the Web that Google and Yahoo index
   and search.  It's the one that holds still long enough for the search
   engines' bots to index everything.

   The Live Web is the one that we write and publish and put up and edit and
   syndicate and feed.  It's the one that Google Blogsearch and IceRocket and
   Technorati index when they hear the pings that are the pulses of blogs,
   photo collections, news services, retailers and everybody else who exerts a
   living presence on the Web.  Time-to-index with some of these services is
   under a minute.  Sometimes only seconds pass between a blog post and a
   search result that includes that same blog post.  "Rivers of news"
   http://www.buzzmachine.com/index.php/2006/08/22/the-river-of-news/ are an
   example of how independent developers and users are terraforming the Net's
   giant zero.  Dave Winer created the River of News concept many years ago,
   and gave it fresh relevance to hand-held Web browsers through bbcriver.com
   and nytimesriver.com, which flow fresh news items down simple html pages
   that are especially suitable for viewing on Blackberries, Treos, Nokia 770s
   and cell phones with Web browsers.  In the course of an IM session this
   week, David Sifry created a subject-based river that flows news from New
   Media Days.  The index page is http://myne.ws ('MyNews'), a new service
   allowing anybody to set up rivers form single sources (newspapers,
   magazines, blogs), multiple sources (e.g. favorites) or subjects (fed by
   syndicated keyword and/or tag search results).  While it's still in alpha,
   it's a demonstration of how "live" the Web can get.

   9. On the Live Web, immediacy matters more than mediation.

   Immediacy supports conversation and relationship, as well as transaction.

   10. Works of art, good or bad, are not commodities.  Nobody writes (or
   draws, or shoots, or sculpts) cargo.

   When we talk about "content" all the time, we package out the fecundity of
   creative power, on the part of all the artists who work we de-characterize.

   11. There's a new economy coming together around The Live Web.

   It's the same as the old economy, only networked.

   In the new networked economy, power isn't re-distributed.  It's
   re-originated.

   It originates with those who converse and relate, and not just those who
   transact.

   12. In the Live Web economy, the value chain is replaced by the value
   constellation.  There are only stars here.

   Those stars are independent individuals who can contribute to whatever they
   please, provided they bring value.  This is the mash-up economy, in which
   everybody needs to be open to possibilities in a market ecosystem that
   obsoletes silos.

   There's a lot more to this brain dump, but I'm going to stop right there.
   It's past midnight here in Denmark, and past deadline back home in the U.S.
   Connectivity here has been an ordeal.  But I'm tired of saying "the flaky
   firewall ate my homework".  While there's a window, I want to get this out.

   Sometime in the next several days I'll expand this into a more coherent
   Linux Journal essay.  In the meantime, it still gives us something to talk
   about.

     -- Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal, a Visiting Scholar with
     the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara, and
     a Fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard
     University.
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