Technology Futures

Congress is at it again. Apparently our Federal legislators don't have enough to do, so they have cooked up a new bill that would require every service provider and Web site to maintain access records indefinitely. Sponsored by Colorado Democrat Diana DeGette, the bill is supposedly to fight child pornography. But the bill would give law enforcement officials unlimited rights to snoop everywhere that anyone has ever been online, forever.

This is the most egregious abuse of privacy Congress has yet managed to think up. Lest you think it applies only to the likes of AOL and Verizon, it would apply to anyone that runs a Web site, even the Ladies Garden Club.

In the real world, this would be like requiring local stores (e.g. your local hardware store or quick-stop) to make every customer sign in, record the time and date, and then make the book available to police and Federal officials whenever they wanted it, even fifty years from now.

It is a law enforcement dream come true, but a citizen and business nightmare. One little problem--the amount of data that sites would have to maintain (over years and years, remember) will create a boom in hard drive sales and would become a backup and data retention nightmare. Big sites with lots of traffic (e.g. CNN, ESPN, etc.) throw most of their data away very quickly because it is a storage problem.

Your tax dollars at work. Call or write your Congressional reps and tell them the DeGette bill is an invasion of your privacy and that you don't want businesses turned into police snoops.

While at the Digital Cities conference in Reston, Virginia earlier this week, I was able to get some detailed information about Vasteras, Sweden, where they have implemented the kind of open service provider communitywide broadband I advocate for communities in this country. Vasteras is a medium-sized city of about 80,000 people. In past eighteen months, they have run fiber to 7000 homes, 23,000 apartments, and 2000 businesses.

The system is run as a completely open access network--any qualified service provider may offer services over the network, and they have eighty-six (86) service providers. There are several options for Internet access, starting at a full 3 megabit (symmetric--3 meg up and 3 meg down--not offered by any cable or DSL provider in the U.S.) for $15/month. You can get a full, symmetric 100 megabit service for $45/month (about what most of us pay for 1-2 megabit cable or DSL service).

The open access system uses a single community infrastructure that offers freedom of choice for subscribers (pick from 86 different services), increased competition, and much lower costs because service providers can sell services at lower prices because the cost of the infrastructure is shared across the entire community.

Robert Kjellberg, the Managing Director of the effort, said the system has created many new work at home opportunities, helped improve the delivery of local government services, provided new opportunities for distance learning, and that local schools have been able to make much greater use of the Internet for teaching. He said that every K12 student now has their own online portfolio of school projects.

The take rate for the network has been 50% among homeowners and 50% among businesses, and demand has been very strong. They continue to hook up new customers on a weekly basis.

Service providers have been very enthusiastic, and Telia, one of the incumbent providers, sells Internet access over the network for half the price that they charge for DSL in other communities. Kjellberg emphasized that the city does not sell any services and does not compete with the private sector--all services offered over the network come from private sector providers. The service providers pay a small portion of their revenue to the city, which is used to finance debt, expansion, and operations.

Here are some links to the project. Note that as of this day, a Swedish kronor (SEK) is worth about 13 cents USD, so you can take the Swedish service prices and divide by 7.4 to get the equivalent in US dollars.

• Link to the main page of the community portal.
• Main page where you would go to select service offerings (e.g. Internet access, telephone service, TV service, etc.).
• The page of 17 different Internet access plans for homes and apartments.
• The page of 6 different TV packages delivered over the fiber network.
• The page of 6 different telephone service packages for the home, also delivered over the fiber network (starting at $10/month).

Vasteras has won numerous awards for its network and has attracted worldwide attention because it has world class broadband at affordable prices. How about your community? Instead of just one or two highly restrictive and expensive broadband offerings, would it not be better to have homes and businesses choosing from 17 plans starting at $16/month?

A distinguished group of technology leaders has begun a Save the Internet campaign, which is intended to provide information to legislators on the network neutrality issue.

Many of the incumbent broadband providers want to start charging differential fees for access to their broadband networks. The effect will be to squeeze much of the innovation and opportunity out of the Internet, leaving only deep pocket companies that can afford to pay the tolls--and that is all they really are.

It's as if our entire Interstate Highway System, formerly free, suddenly had tollbooths at every exit. It would not be good for the economy. And a two tier Internet won't be good for the economy or for communities.

Communities need a stake in the ownership of the Internet; nothing less than their economic future is at stake. If the toll access to the Internet is too high in your community (think rural), companies won't relocate to rural areas. And that means no jobs.

There is ample precedent for communities to take on partial ownership of telecom infrastructure; done correctly, private telecom providers can make even more money, but on a level playing field that is managed for the common good.

Having trouble understanding the issues around network neutrality? Here is a short video that explains it very clearly.

Anthony Townsend, an expert on the social impacts of technology, has written an important article about community WiFi projects. Townsend is concerned that community leaders, in the rush to show some progress in broadband, are inking deals that give away too much.

As an example, community wireless systems usually have some kind of sign on portal Web page. Often, this space is used for ad insertion, which is fine because it helps to support the cost of the system and can provide visibility to local merchants. But Townsend feels that a significant portion of the page should be allocated for community use--links to the community Web site, community calendar, notices of community events, and so on. A poorly executed contract may lose that community presence for many years.

Townsend also has a problem, as many others do, with the intrusive location monitoring now being implemented in some community wireless systems. Google's San Francisco system will be able to track a WiFi user around the city, and will use that data (where you are, where you have been) to target ads. It sounds innocuous, but this is essentially a loss of privacy. It could have serious consequences if the data is sold to third parties and/or if available to the government. Townsend thinks, and I agree, that location tracking should be an opt-in choice--the WiFi provider can do that only if you give express permission.

Finally, Townsend thinks that some bandwidth should be available to the community for experimental use, particularly as we see new and innovative uses for Internet-connected devices (e.g. parking meters, cars, etc.). The community should retain some control over the WiFi spectrum, and not just give it away to the first company that offers a "free" WiFi deal. It's worth remembering the old adage, "There is no such thing as a free lunch." Make sure community leaders, when making technology decisions, remember this.