Thanks to Daniel for the kind words, here's a few thoughts in response to his comments:
>On Behalf Of DANIEL.DAVIES at flemings.com
> 1. [On Lessig's point that without "open access" regulation, telecoms
> carriers would never have allowed the internet to happen], Raymond says "
> >>The obvious counter to the first argument is that AT&T was itself a
> creature of regulation, and that two public-policy wrongs of this
> kind very
> seldom make a right. <<"
>
> This is not the fantastic knock-down argument that Raymond believes it to
> be. First, he asserts without proving that the breakup of Bell
> was in fact
> a public-policy "wrong" in this sense. He doesn't prove it because he
> can't -- the telecoms system was broken up exactly because it engaged in
> the kind of behaviour that the open-access regulation prevented. A quick
> glance at AOL reveals what the Internet would have been like if there had
> been no open access.
I am not sure Raymond thinks the breakup was a bad thing - since that would imply that the government antitrust decision itself was good public policy - but just that regulation post-breakup must by definition be a bad thing.
Of course, as someone who does think the breakup of AT&T was a bad thing, it is clear that the breakup was an economic boon to AT&T and other services serving high-end customers because of mandated access rules, while the overall digital upgrade of basic infrastructure has lagged decades behind AT&T's plans in the 1970s to replace analog lines with fully digital connections to the home. Ironically, mandatory interconnection developed a host of technologies dependent on analog lines, a problem AT&T did raise early on. As well, since the Baby Bells could have no guarantee of getting back infrastructure investments over a long-term payback, new investments have essentially halted on digital upgrades to the home, with DSL trying to be a hacked solution using the old copper lines.
To me, it is clear that a better system could have been found with AT&T held in place with up-front subsidies for Internet connections, rather than mandatory connections that have overwhelmingly favored the highest-end heavy users of local phone infrastrure at the expense of local phone users who have seen the costs of local phone services soar with no real improvement in the basic analog lines coming to the home. We have failed for two decades to address that basic infrastructure question, instead encouraging a whole second cable infrastructure (largely unable to deliver two-way communication) while hoping for DSL to address the high-speed needs of the future.
The fact is that ISPs like AOL are heavily subsidized parasites on that public infrastructure. Encouraging that may have been good public policy in the immediate aftermath of the AT&T breakup when the Internet was in its infancy, but as AOL scoops up TimeWarner and rivals the GNP of various countries, the rational for such subsidies fails and in fact becomes a pernicious obstable to investments in digital infrastructure to the home.
> Raymond certainly does know that Linux would have been impossible if a
> judge hadn't ruled that Bell Labs couldn't keep Unix as a proprietary
> system, under the self-same AT&T regulation. I wonder why he didn't bring
> that one up?
Because that would imply intelligent government policy, an impossibility for Raymond :)
> 2. Next up, we have the wonderful sentence: "Morally, there is a chasm
> between mutual voluntary cooperation and the involuntary,
> one-size-fits-all
> pseudo-cooperation enforced at the point of government guns. "
>
> Raymond seems to be under the belief that patents and copyrights are
> enforced by someone other than the government, and that intellectual
> property law isn't really regulation. The government doesn't have the
> option of not promoting either kind of software -- failure to act promotes
> proprietary software. It would be nice to hear a few small words
> about the
> Digital Millennium Copyright Act and UCITA's effective ban on reverse
> engineering from such a self-professed "libertarian". Or are laws which
> protect someone's right to make money not really laws?
To be fair, Raymond is no doubt against these as well. He is a pretty consistent libertarian, semi-anarchist in promoting voluntary cooperation as the ideal of open source.
> 4. Raymond continually portrays the government as a monolithic agency,
> acting with machine-like efficiency to carry out its will. He uses
> evidence that it isn't as evidence that it is -- this is the only
> way I can
> interpret his bizarre analysis of the way in which the Appropriate Use
> Policy was subverted. Nathan did not "so regret" the opening up of the
> Internet, and did not endorse the Appropriate Use Policy, so Raymond
> shouldn't try to claim that he did.
Since the whole point of my paper was that government policy is multi-faceted, with a whole complicated set of tools at the government disposal, from funding, procurement, direct regulation, infrastructure deployment and standards intervention, this simplistic response by Raymond is the worst aspect of his viewpoint.
Part of why I am so interested in the Internet is that it reflects so many aspects of government policy, both good and bad, yet most analysts reduce it to fears of imaginary "Net taxes" while ignoring the whole host of regulations and subsidies that permeate the technology and industries.
> Comments on Nathan Newman
>
> Raymond is right about one thing -- need more detail on what is meant by
> "public policy promoting standards". If this means ANSI, it already
> exists, and isn't likely to do enough. If it means having public
> consortia
> drafting standards from scratch, Raymond is (rightly) going to throw the
> example of ADA in your face. I'm not sure what the happy medium is,
> because I clearly haven't given this as much thought as you have.
UNIX was my core example- taking an already existing technology that programmers were using, adding new protcols (such as IP/TCP early on) to improve it for other purposes, then using government purchases to standardize it across the board.
The Internet has often been criticized for the fact that the government encouraged continual incremental improvement on what some considered a standard lacking robustness (HTML has suffered the same criticism). In the abstract, this is reasonable criticism, but the incrementalism has allowed continual internetworking and backward compatibility. So in the case of Internet standards, the government has a rather better record than private industry that early on tried to promote their own "start from scratch" standards which they eventually abandoned in favor of the Internet - Microsoft's initial stand-alone MSN network being the premiere stand-alone debacle but IBM and MCI had some earlier similar dead-ends.
There are bound to be false starts and dead-ends, but the government still has the ability to marshall technical experts across university and other research institutions it funds and can rely upon. The idea that the market can do a better job is refuted by the existence of Microsoft, whose "standards" continually undermine other technologies for proprietary advantage. It is that problem that Raymond and others ignore in promoting corporate dominance of open source development.
-- Nathan Newman