Paul Kapustka's Blog

Of all the event panels, this one had the highest level of committed, passionate, assertive speakers. The 10-second take? The RBOCs and cable will use all their firepower to try to keep video captive, to make money off it the way they did off voice. While underfunded, the Net Neutral team has in its corner the power of the Network -- Metcalfe's Law -- as well as the entrepreneurial ideas of people who just do things without asking permission.

I won't try to recap the panel -- it didn't really follow any logical path -- but I will try to highlight the best bits. Leadoff batter Tim Wu woke everyone up from lunch-slumber with a bizarre video clip featuring John Malkovich, judo experts, and fashion shows. I have no idea what it is supposed to mean, other than Wu has cool friends, and that the John Malkovichs of the world aren't going to sign exclusive deals with Verizon to air their "content" for a set price.

Wu may be telecom's own John Malkovich -- highly brilliant, perhaps with a bit erratic and eclectic user interface -- but capable of great things at a moment's notice. Wu's power quote in support of Net Neutrality: "How many people do you have to ask to start a business?" In a tiered Net, too many, is the point.

Also on the NN side was Susan Crawford, who certainly doesn't need me to parse her points. In a room full of lawyers, Crawford's appeals that the Internet is more than routers and wires and local loops -- "it's an ecosystem quite separate from the access infrastructure" -- and that "there is a higher public value than deferring to their [RBOCs, mainly] property interests" -- perhaps fell on deaf ears. But in spirit she is closer to Internet pioneer Bob Kahn than any team of lawyers can hope to be, and in the greater technical world -- like the unnamed army that helped TCP/IP become dominant in the first place -- such opinions carry great weight.

On the other side of the debate -- and in case you had any doubts, this is a debate between the dark side and the force -- there was Jon Nuechterlein and Paul Glist, who both had a thing or two to say about the evils of Net Neutrality rules. (Stephan Shelanski was also a discussant, and provided a good commercial description of Starz' Internet distro plan.)

Nuechterlein (can I just call him Jon?) was calm and collected, and wondered that if Net Neutrality "commoditized pipes," why would anyone build them? Gist was entertaining (David I touched on it here) but a tad mean-spirited -- no need to slap at Crawford with an aside that "networks and cool apps don't emerge like beachfront property on the ocean." (This after Crawford had compared the Internet's worth to that of the ocean, available to all, source of food, etc.) Don't take that line unless you are ready to address the monopoly structure under which those networks were built, pal. A point that somehow never seems to emerge on the deregulate-everything side.

Actually, Bob Kahn (winner of the show's Big Brain award, hands down) trumped the whole panel and maybe the whole event with a query during the open Q&A, about whether or not it makes sense for the government to purchase the local loop infrastructure from the current owners, and then set up some kind of "open central offices," where anyone could come in, locate servers, offer services, etc. etc.

"Call it a digital extension cord," Kahn posited. An incredible idea -- one that would pre-empt all the RBOC and cable complaints about the cost of building networks. Fine, let's pay them for their infrastructure, and open it up for business, all open protocols and interconnects.

"If someone wanted a 10 to the Nth megabit service and someone else was willing to provide it, there could be a business," Kahn said later when I asked him to expound. (this is a paraphrase; we were just talking, no note-taking)

The coolest thing about Kahn's idea was that it totally silenced a panel of law professors and lawyers, and hushed a room full of legal experts. Another win for the nerds? Let's hope it's not the last we hear of this idea from venerable Mr. Kahn.

(and here's a lagniappe from Crawford: watch for the launch Tuesday of an open-source video hosting project from a group called participatory culture. Sounds cool! And yet another reason not to have entry barriers on the 'Net.)