From Monday’s Freedom2Connect conference in Silver Spring, Maryland. (More as it is copyedited.)
Brad Templeton, chairman Electronic Frontier Foundation
I want to talk about the invention of the Internet.
Was it invented by Al Gore or the inventors of packet switching? I believe it was a business invention, the contract under which we operate. That says I pay for my line to the middle, you pay for your line to the middle, and we don’t sweat the packets. This is the way it was done in universities, selling by the pipe rather than the packet.
There were all sorts of pay per use networks in the 1980s. They were all squashed by this idea of the cost contract. It appeared free. But it wasn’t.
This was a miracle because guys were able to put a fish tank on the Internet, a Web page showing their fish tank. Everyone looked at it. It showed we can do weird things. If we lived in a world of settlement per packet, the guy with the fish tank would have been shut down.
Application billing, per packet billing, requires that any application be financially justifiable. It’s a bean counter created network.
That is what’s attacking today.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I want you to understand why we want to protect that cost contract.
I will do this by becoming my evil twin, and promote things like CALEA and E911.
NOTE: The following is from Brad Templeton’s "Evil Twin." Brad himself is not evil.
This can stop the self-funded start-ups, the free calling networks, all the inventors, they can be stopped. The way to do that is by requiring that you get permission to innovate. It’s amazing. These laws don’t deny permission, they ask for permission. The government banned encryption a decade ago, and it kept crypto out of domestic software.
If you demand the asking of permission you get barriers to entry. This is great because the ILECs have buildings full of lawyers, and compliance people. The new start ups can’t afford it. That way we can retain our monopolies. VoicePulse, a VOIP operator, stopped taking new customers in the U.S. when E911 came out.
We leave network architecture up to the government, and they can be bought. It’s cheaper than standards committees. Competition should be based on how many regulators you have on board.
If the PUC hasn’t worked out cost based pricing you shouldn’t do it.
You can choose any cable company in America just by moving your house.
CALEA tells us is that fake security is the best sale. You just convince people they’re safe, don’t make them safe. So we’ll insert back doors to the tools, and it will keep them from competing.
We can bill that as a wiretapping fee, must like the Universal Service Fee. The customer won’t blame us.
The equipment vendors are putting CALEA into their equipment and selling it around the world. The Greek Prime Minister’s phone was tapped.
We got them to set an 18 month deadline on compliance without knowing what the requirements would be. That screws the little guy.
It’s also important to undestand voice is special. It’s not an application. We need to make sure people have the same voice service today we have had for 100 years.
We’re going to catch 1-2 dumb criminals with $1.5 billion in costs that kill small businesses.
