Month: January 2003

Who needs cat blogs when we’ve got Brat blogs?

Virginia Postrel should be blogging again any day now.

Stefan Sharkansky hosted a nice little Frisco Blog Bash last night at Perry’s Bar and Grill. Most of the regulars were there — Peter Pribik, Steve Happy Fun, the Weidners, and Joanne Jacobs, and we met new friends Stefan, William Quick, Mike Silverman, Andrew the Punning Pundit, Brian Tiemann, Wes Dabney, and Michael Bruce. It was great fun, and I think Stefan might have picked-up the bar tab, which is an act of true heroism with this bunch.

And no, Quick and I didn’t have a fistfight; he’s a bright and charming dude in person.

A few days ago I bemoaned the tech press and the poor job it did of reporting on the Great Internet Bubble, closing with an off-hand slap at Dan Gillmor, the lead tech journo at Silicon Valley’s newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News. Gillmor’s Sunday column was a critique of Apple that was reasonably good, but this entry from his blog illustrates exactly what I was talking about:

The cable and telephone companies now poised to dominate [broadband], thanks to a federal government that is pushing the idea of a new oligopoly in Internet connections, will let you download at a relatively high speed. They will not permit the converse.

There are several reasons, beyond the merely technical problems (which could be solved) of an old infrastructure. One is to prohibit unauthorized sharing of copyrighted materials. The other is to ensure that competitive media have no chance of getting established.

It’s all about control. As usual.

That’s right – Gillmor says a conspiracy of government and communications companies has forced broadband into a one-way communications model in order to protect copyrights and a media monopoly. Wow.

This is so breathtakingly stupid, it’s hard to know where to start in taking it apart, but I’m going to try anyway, silly as I am.

In the first place, the companies that provide “broadband” connections to the home don’t have a stake in the media, publishing, or TV business. In Silicon Valley, your choices are AT&T Cable (which I use) and SBC DSL (which I used to use). Neither of these companies has holdings in Hollywood, and in fact, both would benefit financially from the transfer to more stuff over their networks, copyrighted or not. In fact, the only industry that has stood up and opposed the DMCA is telecom – Verizon in particular has had its lobbyists complain to Washington that the Act would be disruptive to its network. So Gillmor has the good guys confused with the bad guys from the start.

Second, while the “technical problems” preventing cable and DSL networks from offering as much upstream bandwidth as downstream bandwidth “could be solved”, they can’t be solved for free. So the issue for these businesses — and they are businesses, not charities — is whether they should spend money on providing something that people don’t want — high-bandwidth web servers in each and every home — or something they do want, inexpensive, high-speed downloads to each and every home.

The implications in terms of time, management, security, and utility of personal web servers dwarf the mere technical issues in the design of the network, even though the latter are far from trivial. Certainly, those of us who wish to publish personal web sites are able to do so for very little cash outlay through hosting companies, so there’s really very little consequence of the “one-way” nature of today’s broadband networks.

Gillmor, like so many other supposedly technical journalists, wades into an important topic with no understanding of the underlying technical or commercial issues and tries to bludgeon it to death with a cudgel of ignorance wielded from his position astride the Digital Rights hobbyhorse.

It doesn’t work.

UPDATE: Gillmor offers an explanation for why he wrote such lameness in the next entry to his blog: Dave Winer made him do it. That makes it all OK, I guess.