‘The Nightmare Could Be Reality Unless We Take Individual Responsibility’
Mitch Kapor, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Mitch Kapor left behind a successful career as a corporate executive (as founder of both Lotus Development and ON Corp.) for many reasons, but one of the most compelling was his vision that cyberspace — that odd “no-place” on the network where electronic communication and commerce take place — was turning into this century’s version of the Wild West.
Federal agents were seizing computer equipment without search warrants, corporations were monitoring what employees thought were private electronic communications, and crackers and viruses were polluting what had been for many years a relatively placid environment where researchers and computer junkies had created a new kind of community.
So Kapor and a couple of other like-minded individuals founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990, and it’s probably safe to say that they are much busier than they’d hoped to be. Bringing to light the vast potential, both upside and downside, of a national information infrastructure based on broadband digital networks is turning out to be more than a full-time job.
Most recently, intense public discussion about a national interactive TV network has Kapor waking up at night in a cold sweat. To launch his excellent presentation at Digital World, he described his nightmare.
MITCH’S NIGHTMARE: MORE OF THE SAME IN EVERY WAY
In Kapor’s nightmare, a new national broadband network, probably operated by the cable television operators (but no promises), will deliver “the same crap” that comes over today’s systems — not because there aren’t people with new ideas for interactive programming, but because the network remains closed to innovative people with (perhaps) radical ideas.
Driven by what Kapor called the same “hard head” example, people who have devised thoughtful and fun ways to utilize the new technologies are unable to gain access to the network. Instead, “we end up turning into a generation of interactive, button-pushing couch potatoes,” no better off than we are today.
Quashing competition.>> In Kapor’s nightmare, fair and open competition is effectively quashed at the application (i.e., TV programming) level, since all the “big guys” will have gotten together and built “an open platform of a sort.”
These so-called big guys — a group, Kapor said, not unlike the rumored Cablesoft alliance between Tele-Communications, Inc., Time Warner and Microsoft — would control the fundamental software for the nation’s information infrastructure, thus controlling access to the network, control that would serve to advance the interests of those companies’ stockholders first and foremost. “Open interface subverts the truth of a closed network,” as Kapor succinctly put it.
Diversity and access are key.>> While Kapor admitted that his nightmare was stark, he feels it could too easily become reality unless we begin to take individual responsibility for our actions in developing this network.
He left the audience with three principles and practical suggestions for how we should proceed. The key ideas are diversity on, and access to, the network. “If the new media are going to be the conduits for commerce, entertainment, education and social intercourse, we’d better get it right,” Kapor said, and getting it right includes both technology and public policy.
CITIZENS, NOT USERS, WILL BE CUSTOMERS ON THE NET
The first principle put forth was the need to change the way we all view the users of this network. With people planning to use the network to change the way we all live, users are no longer merely subscribers or consumers — although they are both — but they are citizens. “Them is us, too,” Kapor reminded the audience.
Civic-minded, or power monger? Kapor called “wacky” the phenomenon of very civic-minded people, who have families and live in neighborhoods they care about, who cast off their cloak of civic duty and transform themselves into corporate power and glory mongers when they step into their offices. “We have some individual responsibility for where we put our creative efforts to work — for what kind of world we are creating,” he said.
Publish and subscribe.>> Kapor’s second suggestion was to make sure to “bake in” a diversity of uses and multiculturalism in the national information infrastructure and into any system architecture or policy regime involving the network.
The critical component in realizing this goal is making sure that users — citizens — have access to and at least partial control over what goes over the net. “We cannot put a stranglehold on who has access to the system — who gets to be a producer or provider,” Kapor said. In other words, anyone must be able to subscribe to network services, but similarly anyone must also be able to publish on the network as well.
CULTIVATING THE GARAGE BANDS OF CYBERSPACE
Kapor was first to raise an issue that became the unofficial theme of Digital World: “How are we going to create the garage bands of cyberspace?” In the music business today, all you really need is a cheap synthesizer to be a hit. By the numbers, this doesn’t happen often.
But it is how most new bands start out — and from the ferment of cheap available tools come the artists of each new generation. Cheap electronic components and garage-based hobbyists gave birth to the personal computer industry as well. Interactive service and product producers need to have those same opportunities.
Outcasts and weirdos.>> While some in the audience may have thought Kapor stretched the analogy a bit — claiming historical precedent for supporting “outcasts and weirdos” since the founders of our country were kicked out of England — the need for equal access is a crucial issue.
On a smaller scale, the problem is already evident today in the comparatively high cost of multimedia production systems. Financially successful movies have been produced for less than $10,000, and hit records for even less, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone producing multimedia whose computer system alone cost less than that.
So, are the new networks going to require that any folks who want to put themselves on the wire, so to speak, have a specific brand name of hardware or software system in order to tap in? Will they have to make deals with network owners? Or, as Kapor hoped aloud, “are we going to define the architecture in such a way that there are [TV] set interfaces and anyone could put their cheap-jack hardware on it as long as it matches the interfaces?”
CHANNELIZED VS. SWITCHED: WHO CONTROLS THE CONTENT?
The question of open access led into Kapor’s third and final question: Are we going to have a channelized or switched architecture?
In a channelized architecture — the architecture that today’s TV system is based on — a large pipe is divided up into many smaller pipes, or channels, each dedicated to a particular stream of data.
A switched architecture — the telephone system, for example — enables a point-to-point connection via a series of switches that routes the call/message/information from one location to another.
In a switched system, there is no one place to find a particular service or programming source. In the same way that you make a phone call today, you could go directly to an information source anywhere on the network. Think of the difference between how you access a television program versus how you make a phone call.
A false sense of channel scarcity.>> According to Kapor, a switched architecture reduces the amount of bandwidth needed going to the home. If you have three televisions in your home and each of them is capable of directly accessing a desired service or program, you theoretically need only enough bandwidth for three channels.
Therefore, there are a lot of possibilities open without replacing even the telephone’s twisted-pair copper wire. (This fits with Richard Brown of Ameritech’s idea that fiber should be laid as close to the home as possible, but not necessarily beyond the “curb,” as they say.)
Killing diversity.>> The interactive TV scenarios painted by the cable industry naturally point to a channelized architecture. This is the simplest for cable operators to implement, and it supports applications they know will be profitable, like video on demand and pay-per-view.
Kapor believes that following this path will effectively kill diversity, as the control of those channels will be in the hands of the few, and “a new regime of channel scarcity” will develop.
Based upon Kapor’s experience in the personal computer business (and Comcast president Brian Roberts’ presentation backed him up), these architecture decisions have historically been based strictly on maximizing profit and maintaining the power base of the status quo.
A NEW BEGINNING, OR MORE OF THE STATUS QUO?
The question then remains: Will there be a transition to switched systems, or has the template already been laid for the future?
For Kapor, switched architectures won’t develop if John Malone, the president of Tele-Communications, Inc. (the country’s largest cable operator, enormously powerful both because of its size and its deep investments in content and programming), doesn’t see a spreadsheet that convinces him that there is more money to be made with a switched rather than channelized architecture.
“If the dollars don’t add up, that’s not going to happen. It is just that brutal,” Kapor said. The only remaining option for resolution of the problem is the government, a scenario with which Kapor is equally uncomfortable.
No solutions, only hope.>> Kapor offered no solutions for his nightmare, only a hope that the technology is heading in the right direction. Cheap processing power enables many applications to be delivered over copper wire; there are multiple data highways under development — including the phone system, direct broadcast satellite and cellular data networks — which will encourage competition and bring down the price of delivering digital media over those highways. Therefore, what is most needed (and most difficult to develop) is a sense of individual responsibility to create the future in a way that best serves the citizens of the United States.
Later presentations by Geoff Holmes of Time Warner and Richard Green of CableLabs made it clear that the cable industry’s focus had shifted in recent months, and that its objective will be much more ambitious than originally supposed.
They are now talking about a fully switched, high-bandwidth network that supports channels for existing cable subscribers and services and switched delivery for most on-demand services. (See next story.) Kapor clearly applauds this shift — although he remains skeptical that they will deliver on their promise.
To end his presentation, Kapor made a plea for audience members to join the Washington, DC-based Electronic Frontier Foundation. He has frequently spoken before Congress as an executive of the nonprofit EFF, which is dedicated to developing and implementing public policies about computer and communications networks based on the principles of openness, competitiveness and civil liberties that he espoused from the Digital World dais.
David Baron, Denise Caruso