What happens when different versions of ‘free’ markets collide

by anselm
Google Fiber and the FCC National Broadband Plan
[Via O'Reilly Radar]

I’ve puzzled over Google’s Fiber project ever since they announced it. It seemed too big, too hubristic (even for a company that’s already big and has earned the right to hubris)–and also not a business Google would want to be in. Providing the “last mile” of Internet service is a high cost/low payoff business that I’m glad I escaped (a friend and I seriously considered starting an ISP back in ’92, until we said “How would we deal with customers?”).

But the FCC’s announcement of their plans to widen broadband Internet access in the US (the “National Broadband Strategy”) puts Google Fiber in a new context. The FCC’s plans are cast in terms of upgrading and expanding the network infrastructure. That’s a familiar debate, and Google is a familiar participant. This is really just an extension of the “network neutrality” debate that has been going on with fits and starts over the past few years.

Google has been outspoken in their support for the idea that network carriers shouldn’t discriminate between different kinds of traffic. The established Internet carriers largely have opposed network neutrality, arguing that they can’t afford to build the kind of high-bandwidth networks that are required for delivering video and other media. While the debate over network neutrality has quieted down recently, the issues are still floating out there, and no less important. Will the networks of the next few decades be able to handle whatever kinds of traffic we want to throw at it?

In the context of network neutrality, and in the context of the FCC’s still unannounced (and certain to be controversial) plans, Google Fiber is the trump card. It’s often been said that the Internet routes around damage. Censorship is one form of damage; non-neutral networks are another. Which network would you choose? One that can’t carry the traffic you want, or one that will? Let’s get concrete: if you want video, would you choose a network that only delivers real-time video from providers who have paid additional bandwidth charges to your carrier? Google’s core business is predicated upon the availability of richer and richer content on the net. If they can ensure that all the traffic that people want can be carried, they win; if they can’t, if the carriers mediate what can and can’t be carried, they lose. But Google Fiber ensures that our future networks will indeed be able to “route around damage”, and makes what the other carriers do irrelevant. Google Fiber essentially tells the carriers “If you don’t build the network we need, we will; you will either move with the times, or you won’t survive.”

Looked at this way, non-network-neutrality requires a weird kind of collusion. Deregulating the carriers by allowing them to charge premium prices for high bandwidth services, only works as long as all the carriers play the same game, and all raise similar barriers against high-bandwidth traffic. As soon as one carrier says “Hey, we have a bigger vision; we’re not going to put limits on what you want to do,” the game is over. You’d be a fool not to use that carrier. You want live high-definition video conferencing? You got it. You want 3D video, requiring astronomical data rates? You want services we haven’t imagined yet? You can get those too. AT&T and Verizon don’t like it? Tough; it’s a free market, and if you offer a non-competitive product, you lose. The problem with the entrenched carriers’ vision is that, if you discriminate against high-bandwidth services, you’ll kill those services off before they can even be invented.

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Goggle’s business model requires that customers get the best online experience as possible. It wants a free and open Internet in order to sell itself. The common carriers want one that they can restrict, making some types of data hard to get and thus increasing the price they can charge.

Normally, the carriers could collude in this sort of thing because of who they are and how much money they have. But Goggle has even more money and the ability to route around them, creating a totally new high speed network if the carriers refuse.

Mike uses a nice analogy –”it’s as if GM and Ford were making plans to upgrade the highway system so they could sell better cars.”

The US used to have the best infrastructure – best roads, phones, networks etc. But most other developed countries have surpassed us. We are now way down the list when it comes to broadband. We will not be out there when new innovations come up because our infrastructure is too old. And the carriers have little incentive to upgrade.

Goggle can provide that incentive. Which is why competition is so useful,even for things that are almost free.

Someday, all textbooks will be on an iPad

by Plutor
Can the iPad make it as an e-textbook reader for students? One analyst says the idea makes sense, calling e-texts a ‘killer app’
[Via MacSurfer's Apple]

Apple’s iPad, which arrives April 3, is already regarded as a high-end, color e-reader and multimedia device. But its potential as an e-textbook reader for students remains debatable.

College students, a prime Apple demographic, might be willing to fork over at least $499 for a Wi-Fi-capable iPad — at least partly because Wi-Fi is so prominent on college campuses. “The iPad hardware would certainly be a great platform” for reading content over a school’s Wi-Fi network, said Van Baker, an analyst at Gartner Inc.

“Textbooks may be the initial killer app” for the iPad, said another Gartner analyst, Allen Weiner.

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Most people writing about this need to realize that the iPad is a totally different media display device than a book. Simply moving books over to an iPad presents no advantage. If that was all that could happen, I’d agree with them.

But that is like saying TV is simply radio with pictures. It misses the point of the medium. It misses the point that it is an entirely different medium.

Textbooks will eventually be found on a tablet-like device, such as the iPad. Not only will they be able to provide media access unavailable in regular textbooks (i.e. video, audio, podcasts all linked to specific sections of the book), they can be updated as needed, as well as providing social media outlets for collaboration.

And while, publishers will not have to worry about the resale market, they had also better make textbooks more affordable or the hacker mentality of college age students will find a way to work around such restraints as DRM.

Without a substantially reduced price, there will be little value for the student over normal textbooks. So, could the publishers add such value?

What happens when a professor’s seminar is also provided in line with the material in the textbook, with necessary links to in-book and Internet information?

What happens when a publisher offers a free iPad for use with its textbooks? The economics of iPads will shortly be so cheap that there could be a real business model for providing the viewing device free with a textbook purchase. Or working with institutions to provide every student with an iPad for similar reasons. Students might be willing to put up with DRM if they get a free iPad.

What happens when every student with a textbook across the country can potentially interact with any other using the same textbook? Could learning become a decentralized event? Could publishers create social media networks that work for their customers?

Well, only those publishers that can actually view students as customers and not as marks to take advantage of.

Part of why I am waiting until its on sale

by mikebaird

Apple delays iPad keyboard dock, power adapter until May
[Via AppleInsider]

Originally scheduled to ship soon after the iPad launch in April, both the keyboard dock and 10W USB power adapter for Apple’s tablet computer now have estimated ship dates sometime in the month of May.

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Not everything may be in place on April 3 and I would not be surprised if there are some other bumps along the way. I plan to wail into an Apple store on April 4 and touch one before I start deciding on just what I really want. But i am leaning to the 64GB Wi-fi model at the moment. I’d rather spend the money on more memory than on 3G. If I have to have 3G, I do have my iPhone.

I wonder if there will be some way to transfer information from an iPhone to an iPad? I know tethering via bluetooth is out but it might be nice to be able to connect and transfer data between the two.

The world’s oldest profession provides modern insights

[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

by Paul Mannix

Brazilian hooker-john hookups used for network analysis
[Via Ars Technica]

Modern communication networks, such as cell phone systems and the Internet, have provided researchers with the opportunity to study human associations and movement on a much greater scale than previously possible. Almost all of the papers that describe this sort of network analysis notes that it could have real world applications, since existing and emerging disease threats can spread through social and transit networks. A paper that will be released later this week by PNAS, however, skips the whole “this may be a useful model” aspect, and goes straight to a network in which diseases actually do spread: prostitutes and their clients.

Although organized prostitution is apparently illegal in Brazil, there are no laws against receiving payment for sex, making it possible for sex workers to freelance. Like everything else these days, that trade has found its way onto the Internet, and some enterprising Brazilians created an ad-supported public forum for individuals on both sides of the transaction. The forum is heavily moderated to keep it strictly on-topic: sellers (aka prostitutes) can advertise their business, and those that partake can rate the experience, as well as provide some information about the precise services rendered (the focus was strictly on heterosexual prostitution in this system).

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Using the data generated by Web 2.0 technologies these researchers have been able to garner a lot of insight into a very large social network that has existed for some time.

This looks like it will be a pretty interesting article – Information dynamics shape the sexual networks of Internet-mediated prostitution. And you can download it for free.

These online forums map very well with the correlated social networks, providing a nice insight into how the networks are set up and how something like diseases might progress through the network.

It is also a network that is highly optimized to move information around – who is the best for doing whatever at whichever price. It is also a very large network, so they were able to identify some other interesting characteristics.

For example, social networks also alter over time. Because they had 6 years worth of data, the researchers could examine how the contacts changed over time. They found that there were still very large connected networks at all times, with a minimum of 71% of the people being connected in the network.

There were over 10,000 buyers and about 6600 sellers. The average number of jumps between buyers was about 5.8 (those 6 degrees of separation) while it was smaller for sellers (about 4.9). Also interestingly, was the high number of what are called four-cycles – a set of connections that end where they start. These are normally described as a mutual friend introducing two people, this creating a triangle. This seems to make sense to me – someone who has found a great prostitute telling his friends, for example.

Another interesting aspect of the network, and one that has implications for disease spread, is that it was slightly disassortative. In a highly assortative network, highly connected members also tend to connect to each other. In a disassortative network, highly connected members tend to connect to less highly connected members.

The data suggest that for this network the most active buyers, those with the most connections to prostitutes, tended to connect to prostitutes that were less active in the network (i.e. fewer connections). And the most popular sex workers tended to connect to buyers that were not actively seeking out other prostitutes.

This actually creates a network where disease is not likely to arise but when it does, it could spread to a larger part of the network.

Another intriguing observation they made is that on a log-log plot, the number of sex workers and buyers increases linearly as the size of the city increases. In many things (such as wealth or information workers), the trend is greater than linear because larger cities provide greater benefits. Linear scaling falls for things that are usually necessities, such as water or power.

Normally, prostitution requires face-to-face interactions, so being in a big city, with its increasing large social networks, makes it easier to find one. And thus harder to find one in a small town. But, the online form removes that need and now small towns can do just as well as large towns, bringing prostitution down to the level of human necessities.

Pretty nice examination of a somewhat specialized human social network, one that could only really be studied because of Web 2.0 technologies.