{"id":259,"date":"2006-02-07T14:18:13","date_gmt":"2006-02-07T19:18:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=259"},"modified":"2006-02-07T14:23:59","modified_gmt":"2006-02-07T19:23:59","slug":"un-ending-the-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=259","title":{"rendered":"Un-ending the Internet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Recently, <cite>The Nation<\/cite> ran an article,<br \/>\n<a href='http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/doc\/20060213\/chester'>The End of the<br \/>\nInternet<\/a>, that viewed with alarm some efforts<br \/>\nby telephone companies to hack their governing regulations so they can<br \/>\nprice-discriminate. Their plans include tiered pricing so a consumer&#8217;s<br \/>\nmonthly rate could be tied to the amount of bandwidth actually used.  They<br \/>\nalso want to be able to offer preferred fast access to on-line services<br \/>\nthat pay for the privilege &mdash; and the flip side of that could<br \/>\nbe shutting down services like peer-to-peer networking that big media<br \/>\ncompanies dislike.<\/p>\n<p>One of my regular visitors. David McCabe, asked me what a libertarian<br \/>\nwould do about this.  A fair question, representative of a large class<br \/>\nof problems about what you do to constrain monopolies already in place<br \/>\nwithout resorting to more regulation.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the answer I gave him: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nDeregulate and let the telcos have their tiered pricing &mdash; as long as<br \/>\nwe <em>also<\/em> deregulate enough radio spectrum that the telcos<br \/>\n(evil monopolist scum that they are) will promptly be hammered flat by<br \/>\nwireless mesh networks.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>David replied &#8220;Beautiful.  Blog it.&#8221;  Hence this screed&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>The fundamental problem with the telecoms regime we have is that<br \/>\nthe Baby Bells inherited from Mama Bell a monopoly lock on the last<br \/>\nmile (the cables running to end-users&#8217; homes and businesses).  More<br \/>\nbackbone capacity would be easy and is in no way a natural monopoly,<br \/>\nespecially given the huge overbuild of optical-fiber trunk lines<br \/>\nduring the Internet boom of the 1990s.  But the &#8216;last mile&#8217;, as long<br \/>\nas it&#8217;s wire lines, truly is a natural monopoly or oligopoly &mdash;<br \/>\nnobody wants more than one set of telephone poles per street, and<br \/>\ntheir capacity to carry wires is limited.  That system doesn&#8217;t scale<br \/>\nup.<\/p>\n<p>To a left-wing rag like <cite>The Nation<\/cite>, the answer is to<br \/>\nhuff and puff about more regulation.  But more regulation would do<br \/>\nnothing to attack the telcos&#8217; real power position, which is the<br \/>\nphysical constraints on the last mile.  The truly pro-freedom anwer is<br \/>\nto enable the free market to take that power position away from<br \/>\nthem.<\/p>\n<p>Wireless mesh networking &mdash; flocks of cheap WiFi nodes that<br \/>\nautomatically discover neighboring nodes and act as routers &mdash; is<br \/>\nthe technology that can do that.  With the right software, networks of<br \/>\nthese can be self-configuring and self-repairing.  It&#8217;s pure<br \/>\nlibertarianism cast in silicon, a perfectly decentralist bottom-up<br \/>\nsolution that could replace wirelines and the politico-economic<br \/>\nchoke-point they imply.<\/p>\n<p>The main thing holding wireless mesh networking back is the small<br \/>\nsize of the bandwidth now allotted to it for spread-spectrum frequency<br \/>\nhopping. With enough volume, competition would drive the price of<br \/>\nthese creatures to $20 or less per unit &mdash; low enough for<br \/>\nindividuals and community organizations to spot them everywhere<br \/>\nthere&#8217;s an electrical grid.  Increments of capacity would be cheap,<br \/>\ntoo; with the right software, your WiFi card could aggregate the<br \/>\nbandwidth for as many nodes as there happen to be in radio range.<\/p>\n<p>(And that software?  Open source, of course.  Mesh networking relies<br \/>\non open source and open standards. Some of the node designs out there<br \/>\nare open hardware, too. The mesh network would be transparent, top<br \/>\nto bottom.)<\/p>\n<p>Today, many people already leave their WiFi access points open for<br \/>\ntheir neighbors to use, even though DSL or cable costs real money,<br \/>\nbecause the incremental cost of being nice is negligible.  At the<br \/>\nequilibrium price level of mesh networking, wireless free Internet<br \/>\naccess would be ubiquitous everywhere except deep wilderness areas.<\/p>\n<p>But the wireline backbone wouldn&#8217;t vanish, because mesh networking solves<br \/>\nthe bandwidth problem at the expense of piling on latency (cumulative<br \/>\nrouting and retransmission delays). Large communications users<br \/>\nwould still find it useful to be hooked up to long-haul fiber networks<br \/>\nin order to hold down the amount of latency added by multiple hops over the<br \/>\nmesh.  The whole system would self-equilibrate, seeking the most<br \/>\nefficient mix of free and pay networking.<\/p>\n<p>As usual, the best solution to the problems of regulation and<br \/>\nimperfect markets is not more politics and regulation, but less of it<br \/>\n&mdash; letting the free market work.  Not that I expect <cite>The<br \/>\nNation<\/cite> to figure this out soon, or ever; like all leftists,<br \/>\nthey will almost certainly remain useful idiots for anyone, tyrant or<br \/>\ntelco monopolist, who knows that political &#8216;solutions&#8217; to market<br \/>\nproblems always favor the powerful and politically connected over the<br \/>\nlittle people they are ostensibly designed to help.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently, The Nation ran an article, The End of the Internet, that viewed with alarm some efforts by telephone companies to hack their governing regulations so they can price-discriminate. Their plans include tiered pricing so a consumer&#8217;s monthly rate could be tied to the amount of bandwidth actually used. They also want to be able&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=259\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Un-ending the Internet<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}