Technology Futures

Princeton, Illinois provides some helpful data on a successful community fiber project. So why did the community decide to install 15 miles of fiber cable? Here's what the head of the municipal project said:

"Our primary goal was economic stability and some hope for economic growth," Baird said, noting that one of the largest companies in town moved out, taking with it more than 300 jobs. "We had some concerns from our customers that they were in the same boat because of a lack of telecom services."

Like a lot of other municipal fiber projects, Princeton has its own electric utility, meaning they already have much of the technical expertise to take on this kind of project. But Princeton did not create another city utility. Instead, they partnered with a local ISP to light up the fiber, and the private company handles billing and service. The ISP pays a fee to obtain access to the network, and the city expects to recoup its $350,000 investment in 18 to 24 months.

This is the right way to do it. The community builds the infrastructure, and provides it on a cost recovery basis to the private sector, which provides the service to customers, creates jobs, and pays taxes. Everybody wins.

Certain parts of the 'net have begun talking about building your own TV. Back when I was a kid, one of my favorite pastimes on rainy days was poring over the Heathkit catalogue. Heath of Benton Harbor, Michigan had a whole catalogue full of electronic kits, ranging from simple transistor radios to things like electronic keyboards and color televisions. I eventually built a shortware receiver, among other home-designed projects.

But with the advent of the microchip, Heath went out of business. Electronic stuff got so cheap no one was interested in putting things together themselves. So why the sudden interest?

We're beginning to see "perfect storms" in several areas. The phone business is becoming a perfect storm. Skype's CEO announced the other day that the company has 29 million users and is adding 155,000 PER DAY. Skype is free for Skype to Skype calls, and they charge a small fee for completing calls to non-Skype users. Skype is using the Google model--mostly free service and offering an optional fee-based service. And we all know what happened to Google.

But Google was not disruptive in the same way that Voice over IP is destroying the phone business because there was no global search business before Google. But the steady increase in broadband users, excellent voice telephony software from companies like Skype, and monopoly pricing from the telecoms has created a perfect storm in telephony that will shortly also swallow the entire cellphone industry, since WiFi carries Skype and other VoIP calls just as easily.

Similarly, the television business is also on very rough seas that will build quickly to a perfect storm. Again, broadband winds have increased the wave height. We're very close to a time when some innovative and brash content developer says, "Heck with the TV industry. We're going to produce a "tv" show and broadcast it over the Internet." The show will be so compelling (I'm guessing a comedy will be first) that millions will download and watch it, even if the picture quality is a little fuzzy. Once we have a single breakout show, the wave height will only get higher and eventually the existing model for television will be swallowed by the monster wave of Internet TV. This storm could start anytime in the next year or so, and TV as we know it will hang for a few years, but with fewer and fewer viewers day by day.

So what does all this have to do with building your own TVs? The Federal government has, using the law of unintended consequences, created a storm that will destroy the entire TV industry. Note that Japan will be more affected than the U.S. The V-chip requirement is looming, and we are only months from the requirement that all new TVs have a V chip. This is causing a current spike in TV sales for one thing, but that's not the real story.

Regulators keep forgetting that the 'net is intelligent. I don't mean the network itself, but rather the people connected by the network--that's the real 'net. And the real 'net is mad as heck. When the 'net gets mad, get out of the way. The 'net doesn't take to the streets, they don't write their congressperson, they don't go on talk shows to complain about how they feel. Instead, they go to work.

Hence, the 'net has decided to build their own TVs, without V chips. That's right, Open Source television. It's not going to be like the days of my youth, soldering together hundreds of electronic components and hoping you did not make a mistake. Hoembrew TVs are going to be mostly software, and you'll download and install a TV program--not a program like "Seinfeld," but a program as in software code. You'll need a cheap card that the cable TV connection plugs into, but it will be a lot less than a new TV. And then, presto, your computer will be a television. A V chip free television.

Regulators and the entertainment industry keep forgetting the basic premise of the Internet. Remember the origins of the Internet--it was a Department of Defense initiative. The DoD wanted a network that could continue working in the face of a massive nuclear attack. American genius designed just such a network, and that's what we use today. And guess what? Over-regulation, excessive fees, and monopolies, to the 'net, look like attacks. The 'net routes around such attacks and keeps on going.

It's a perfect storm.

We are just at the dawn of the computer age. I know that because we are finally seeing computers that are not just, well, computers. The $99 iPod shuffle, barely larger than a stick of gum, is thousands of times more powerful computationally than my first hand-built personal computer from 1977. And we don't think of an iPod as a computer at all, but it is. Cellphones are handheld computers that have been programmed to behave like phones (and cameras, and calendars, etc.).

I started thinking about this when I read about Asterisk, which is an Open Source software project that makes a cheap Linux or Macintosh computer behave like a PBX. PBX is an old phone company acronym for Private Branch Exchange, or a small telephone switch normally owned only by medium and large companies because they have been very expensive.

But now any small business can afford a PBX simply by downloading this free software and installing it. It works with most popular Voice over IP protocols, and interoperates with other common telephone equipment. It's an incredible piece of work that is the result of probably hundreds of people working collaboratively for the common good.

And it must scare the pants off companies like Lucent, Alcatel, and others that still make a lot of money selling telephone switches. The world we knew is crumbling around us, and dazzling new opportunities are emerging.

I've been reading a lot of historical fiction and nonfiction recently. I've slowly been ploughing through Neal Stephenson's three book opus on the late 1600s and early 1700s. I'm just finishing up book two, ,The Confusion. It's a fictional account of those turbulent times when the first global economy began to emerge and innovations like paper money changed the rules of nations and commerce simultaneously. Stephenson is a genius of a writer, rooting his story firmly in the real history of the time, including figures like Isaac Newton and Leibniz, both of whom had a profound effect on that era.

I think it is good to read this because it is reassuring--we've been here before, we've seen massive disruptions of business, commerce, and of nations, and somehow, over time, things have always gotten better. By fits and starts to be sure, but we need not be afraid--we need to be bold.

The blogging community is abuzz with the latest threat to writing and journalism on the Web. There is a move afoot to extend the controversial 2002 Federal campaign laws to bloggers writing about politics. At this point, I don't know enough about the law itself to do much more than merely mention the controversy as an example of how the Law of Unintended Consequences continues to work in the age of the Internet.

It seems to be caught up in the age old (okay, about ten years old) controversy of linking. Some parties say you are campaigning if you simply put a link on your site to the Web site of a candidate running for office.

From a certain angle, I could agree with that. But I always like to look at the practical side. How do you enforce such a thing? Will the Federal Election Commission create "Web Police" who will roam the Web looking for unauthorized links? Will they set up massive, Google-like back room 'bots that try to crawl every site on the Web for a stray link to Joe Fiddleray, who's running for Dogcatcher in Left Elbon, Montana?

I remember reading once that for a law to be a "good" law, it had to be enforceable. I don't think this one is.