Richard Bennett

People, come on. When Steve Jobs says stuff like this:

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

he’s got his eye on your wallet. Google gets a free pass for putting Chinese dissidents in prison because they say “don’t be evil, wink wink.” Jobs sees how well the Good Guy thing works for them and he wants some of that action for Apple.

Watch what they do, not at what they say. Google is wrecking the Internet by piling on more regulation, and Jobs is running a music store, nothing more and nothing less.

Prof. Fast Eddie Felten, the voting machine hacker, nails it:

This is both a clever PR move and a proactive defense against European antitrust scrutiny. Mandatory licensing is a typical antitrust remedy in situations like this, so Apple wants to take licensing off the table as an option. Most of all, Apple wants to deflect the blame for the current situation onto the record companies. Steve Jobs is a genius at this sort of thing, and it looks like he will succeed again.

Pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

Regarding my post on the attacks on Phil Kerpen’s Forbes article on net neutrality, Doc Searls does the right thing:

He’s right.

In an email yesterday, a friend complimented the post Richard corrected. Here’s what I wrote back: Look at it again. I’ve changed it a bit to make the logic work better. But I did it in a hurry. Not sure I didn’t lose something. Well, the problem wasn’t what I lost, but what I didn’t find in the first place, because I didn’t take the time look deep enough.

Blogging isn’t the main thing I do. It’s a side thing. I purposely spend as little time with it as I can, while still doing it. In this respect it isn’t journalism. Yet I’m still “supposed to be a journalist”.

That’s right too.

So there’s a corollary to “live and learn”. The longer you live, the more you re-learn.

That’s a hugely impressive and generous reaction and I admire Doc for being man enough to write it.

On the other side of the table, Mike Maslick and Broadband Karl refuse to cop to rash analysis. That tells me a lot. If there were more people in the world like Doc, we’d come to a happy resolution on hard issues like net neutrality a lot sooner. And you know what? That’s another thing that the Deloitte and Touche Telecom Report says, and the larger point of Doc’s post.

The hugely partisan, emotional debate over net neutrality that’s mostly about name-calling (Telco shill! Google bitch!) and fear-mongering isn’t helping anybody.

Let’s all take a step back, cool off, and look for common ground.

Advocates of network neutrality are busily spreading a colorful story today. It begins with a piece in Forbes by Phil Kerpen of the Heartland Institute about the effects of threatened network neutrality legislation on investment in the Internet’s infrastructure. Kerpen discusses a study of telecom trends by Deloitte & Touche to the effect that the uncertain regulatory climate is bad for investment, and without new infrastructure the Internet will soon be in trouble.

For this, Kerpen is attacked by Paul Kapustka and Om Malik at GigaOm as a lying shill of the telcos:

Since Kerpen doesn’t actually link to the study, we are left to wonder what his conclusions are based on. It looks like DT doesn’t even believe there’s a problem, since another research paper there3 predicts that “unrelenting progress in processing power, network bandwidth and storage capacity” will let electronic games proliferate. What you’re seeing in Kerpen’s missive is another offering from the “telco chorus,” a group of bloviators who are paid either by conservative advocacy operations (like Kerpen’s Americans for Prosperity), or by groups indirectly supported by telco contributions.

Broadband Reports fires up this smokescreen:

Who’s to blame for this proclaimed bandwidth apocalypse? Network neutrality advocates, who are scaring off capacity investment, according to Phil Kerpen of Americans For Prosperity. Deloitte & Touche’s actual capacity prediction can be found here, but they make no mention of network neutrality law fears as the primary reason for the crunch — instead stating companies aren’t increasing capacity “because consumers will be unwilling to pay increased costs.”

Mike Maslick at Techdirt adds his own twist to Broadband Report’s fantasies:

It’s based on a Deloitte & Touche report, claiming that there hasn’t been enough backbone buildout to handle the growth in traffic — and the writer somehow connects this to network neutrality by saying it’s because of fear over network neutrality rules that the buildout isn’t happening. There’s just one problem, as Broadband Reports points out, the D&T report doesn’t mention network neutrality at all, and there’s no evidence to suggest that network neutrality has anything to do with backbone buildout.

The problem with these vicious and personal attacks (beside their evident rudeness) is that they’re completely off-base. The D & T Telecoms Predictions 2007 report has a whole section on network neutrality, ending with this remark:

Those who oppose creating [net neutrality] mandates argue that their business models are being undermined by Internet companies offering bandwidth-hungry services such as video and audio-streaming, heavily networked online games, video-based chat and peer-to-peer downloads. Many ISPs and telecommunications companies would like to start charging content companies, and others, a fee to provide access to their services. There are two primary reasons for this. The first is that ISPs and telecommunications carriers are seeing revenues stagnate. As penetration growth slows, competition drives down prices and rapidly rising Internet use among existing customers erodes margins. The second is that some of the largest Internet companies are enjoying bumper revenue growth and increasing profitability, and carriers would like to use their position in the value chain to participate in this growth.

Internet usage and traffic are both growing rapidly. There is an increasingly urgent need for new revenues that could fund expansion of the infrastructure on which the Internet runs. For example, on several key intercontinental routes, such as that between Asia and Europe, backbone capacity has grown slower than usage (see Figure 1), and may increasingly struggle to keep pace with demand. Similarly, ISPs and carriers may have to invest in higher capacity infrastructure to continue to be able to provide genuine broadband speeds to consumers and business users.

Balancing the two sides of [the network neutrality] debate is likely to remain challenging. Both sides have merit; both have their flaws. Clearly, something has to change in the economics of Internet access such that network operators and ISPs can continue to invest in new infrastructure and maintain service quality, and consumers can continue to enjoy the Internet as they know it today. (page 7, section titled The Network Neutrality Debate Needs Resolution.)

So whether you agree with Kerpen or not, it’s clear that his article is true to the Deloitte and Touche report’s summary of the issues, and the attacks by Kaputska, Malik, Broadband Reports, and Maslick are as wildly off base as they are vicious and personal.

UPDATE: Doc Searls jumps on the bandwagon right behind Broadband Report’s pseudonymous Karl:

As Karl notes at Broadband Reports, Deloitte & Touche’s actual capacity prediction can be found here, but they make no mention of network neutrality law fears as the primary reason for the crunch — instead stating companies aren’t increasing capacity “because consumers will be unwilling to pay increased costs.”

Like Karl, Doc didn’t bother reading the D & T report, he read a summary in a news article and drew wildly wrong conclusions from it. The bottom line here is simple: before calling somebody a liar, check your facts. Karl, Doc Searls, Mike Maslick, Paul Kapustka, and Om Malik couldn’t be bothered with that in this case, and they’re all supposed to be journalists.

UPDATE 2: See this post on the fallout from my criticism of Karl, et. al. Doc Searls posted an impressive retraction.