Marie’s Big Move

Marie is a successful freelance journalist, with an equally successful spouse who specializes in home management. They have a couple of school age kids together. No one in the house could be considered an expert on the Internet. They just know the Internet is convenient for communications and entertainment, and they don’t think much about its inner workings. They don’t have any separate phone or cable service — those are all just data, and thus provided on the Internet. Because they live in a small European country with 100% Internet access as part of its constitution, they don’t pay any Internet bills either, except in the form of egalitarian progressive taxes for the national network. They just maintain direct network connections (and other personal ties) with immediate neighbors, using their home router. Those neighbors in turn connect to other adjacent neighbors, and so on. They all share wired connections along their fence lines, and wireless signal antennas on their roofs. They only have to pay to replace these things when they break, or when they want to upgrade to something new,  just like all their other home appliances and infrastructure. Their plumbing happens to require more frequent maintenance than their network does. They have a trusted plumbing repair service, and a trusted network repair service, stored in the family contact list.

In this small country, their national Internet services are all encrypted, and they’re so secure that everyone votes in the democratic elections online, from their home computers. Nobody in this country calls their personal pocket computers “phones” anymore — everyone knows that’s an archaic single-purpose device that doesn’t exist today.

Marie’s news agency has allowed her to work from home, over a secure connection into her editor’s office, so her house location was never a big issue for her employers. Her new work assignment has changed that, so now she must move to the United States, into Washington D.C.  Her new political visual reporting assignment requires her to live close to the U.S. capital, so that she can relay news scene visuals and audio as needed, along with her written accounts. The agency provides a camera with a wireless Internet connection for this purpose. The news agency owns a local office node, and they pay a local Washington D.C. business cooperative quarterly for unlimited uplink access. Marie never has to see or deal with the office’s wireless access bills.

Marie has found her new home in D.C.  Luckily, the home comes with an Internet router pre-installed, that is already connected to her new neighbors. The router is fast enough for her work, the kids’ homework, and home entertainment, so she doesn’t have to buy an upgrade. The previous owners have agreed to reset the router’s trust settings, and to leave the router behind and fully configured, as a condition of sale. They even threw in a 1-year home appliance warranty in with the sale contract, which covers the router, fence-mounted lines, roof-top antennas, and all the other interior lines and home appliances.  Marie and her spouse can thus leave their old router behind in their old house, for the new owners to use. They transfer their old router settings into wallet storage, and then reset the router trust settings  for the new owners, by request. The new owners change the door locks once they move in, because that’s a lot more difficult and time-sensitive than changing the home router trust settings.

During the week of move-in, Marie and her spouse meet some of their new neighbors. The new neighbors are mostly friendly, and provide a lot of helpful advice on local resources, including local online resource addresses. After meeting, Marie decides to assign most of the neighbors a “medium” trust level on the router, except for one grumpy codger who smelled of whiskey. She immediately pulls in resource link addresses from all neighbors with a “moderate” trust level or higher. A few weeks later, the grumpy neighbor saves the family kitten from running out toward the street, so Marie moves his trust level up to medium, and his resource links are copied into the home router. One of his resource links conflicts with the same links by the other neighbors (due to a typo), so it’s thrown out automatically. After several conversations at PTA meetings, a few other neighbors are later updated to a “somewhat trusted” level. The only person Marie ever assigns with “absolute trust” is her spouse. Their trust-network gradually grows as their local connections do. They maintain some trust connections with old friends from their old home.

America is a lot bigger than the European country Marie’s family is coming from. When she tries to get on an international web site that she used to watch monthly, she gets a bandwidth pre-payment warning. She never got these warnings before, because trans-national Internet connections were paid via her taxes. Her previous government also maintained local peer nodes with all the major international online services. The warning page tells her about local Internet Service Cooperatives (ISC’s) she can join, along with ratings by neighbors, ranked in order of neighbor trust levels. She thinks a moment about skipping this step, and just buying an annual “peer subscription” with the international site she was attempting to access directly. The site would pay all the bandwidth costs up to their nodes, in return for her subscription. She thinks the kids might like a cartoon serial on another international site that lacks a local node, and the subscription costs to both sites add up to more than the cooperative membership costs. Finally, she signs up with a local ISC, where her most trusted neighbors are all members.

Upon registering at the ISC, Marie immediately becomes a voting member. She gets to see the results of past votes, and biographies for the entire board of directors. Marie is happy with the cooperative’s past and current network management goals, including their low-income member subsidy policies, so she stays with them past the trial period. Her local cooperative also happens to be part of a strong national non-profit federation of cooperatives, so their trans-national connection maintenance costs are low. She pays a small membership maintenance fee every month. She also gets discounts for local “Internet Driver Club” (IDC) memberships, and chooses a club with equipment repair offices within walking distance. This comes in handy the one time her laptop breaks down. It turns out to be a corrupt memory slot, so the IDC mechanic has it working again within a couple of hours. Marie doesn’t know what memory slots are, but she’s happy that the laptop was fixed so quickly. She trusts that her IDC-approved mechanic couldn’t rip her off, at least not without being caught by the IDC’s Certification Committee. The mechanic would never risk losing IDC Certification.

Epilogue

The United States government eventually figures out that every single citizen is using the Internet, and finally decides to nationalize all national and transnational connections’ maintenance. It passes related bills unanimously, and pays for it all via egalitarian progressive taxation. The U.S. Congress forms a national Department of Communications Transport, entirely separate from MILNET. Smaller meshed networks are maintained as a matter of course by state, county, and city governments as appropriate. International links are maintained and grown on the basis of treaty agreements. Internet Service Cooperatives merge with Internet Driver Clubs, and become comprehensive non-profit Local Information Technology Cooperatives.

In the 21st Century, the Internet is the most important tool we all have for our freedom of speech. So it’s important to answer the question: who really owns the Internet? One answer might be found in the Comcast and NBC merger that is currently being fought out in Congress. This is just the latest example of an Internet provider (in this case the second largest one) seeking to control online media content and access. At the same time, they are also fighting the FCC and Congress against Network Neutrality, regulations that affect every single Internet Service Provider (or ISP for short) nationally. They don’t want regulators to interfere with their ability to pick and choose online media winners. If they get to pick the winners, then all of us will be the losers, especially when it comes to our individual freedom of speech.

Even if you don’t live in a Comcast service area right now, your current telephone and cable owners will follow their example. If you don’t like the media content your cable picks, you will only be able to switch to content that your telephone ISP favors. In the end, you will only have full speed bandwidth to companies that pay your ISP for the privilege.

II. The Problem: Nobody owns their connections right now.

So who really owns our connections to the Internet now? It’s certainly not us! The truth is: we rarely have any choice over our connections to the outside world, except for the choice of where we live. A short list of local broadcasters, one telephone company, and one cable company choose our homes, often before we move into them. If another company decides to come along and buy out a local provider, we don’t have any real control over that either.

In Los Angeles, DWP owns our pipes and our electrical mains, but we expect DWP to work in our best interest, through local voter controls over their activities. The giant telephone and cable incumbents have none of the same local voter responsibilities, except in the form of broad industry regulations.

The only connection to the outside world that we really own is our driveways. They give us access to a grid of local city streets, state highways, and national interstates. A larger array of transportation systems connect us to the entire world. Everyone has an equal vote over shared road issues, and we all must obey the rules of the road.

Right now there are no driveways nor surface streets onto the “Internet Super Highway.” We can’t even connect to our next door neighbors without going all the way to their “Highway” and back, and we always have to pay a toll along the way.

It’s pretty clear by now that nobody is going to build any “Internet surface streets” for us. Forcing all of us out onto their toll roads is way too lucrative. Without surface streets to connect to, any driveways we build are useless. We will have to find some way to make these streets for ourselves, but we certainly don’t have to do it alone. Almost every American is in the same situation right now.

III. Two Potential Near-Term Solutions: Google’s 1Gbps Fiber Experiment, and Internet Service Cooperatives.

1. Google recently released news that they will be deploying a lot of gigabit fiber Internet connections in America this year, as an experiment in high-speed Internet Services. They have welcomed responses from local government and members of the public, using their online “Request For Information” (RFI) forms. They are taking all submissions until March 26th. They will use these responses to help them decide where to install fiber, to find out the best installation methods, and even to help decide payment structure.

Please use Google’s RFI forms if you want to help make sure that they get all the information they need, and to let them know that the North East Los Angeles community is an excellent choice for their experiment. An incremental payment path to fiber line ownership should be encouraged to Google, so that home owners are given the chance to finally own their connections to the world. It is not clear that Google wants to provide ISP services in the long term, so they may welcome a path towards giving more responsibility to home owners.

2. A Non-Profit Utility and Communications Cooperative, as defined by Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(12). These co-operatives exist to bring basic services to under-served communities at cost, or to provide superior services for less cost than for-profit corporations. All Cooperative Utility subscribers must also be equal voting members and, unlike for-profit telephone and cable operations, cooperatives are required to share services and cost savings in a manner that benefits all members equally.

A neighborhood cooperative could create a network of “Internet surface streets,” and help local home owners make their own “driveways” onto that network. Two complimentary technologies that could enable private network development today are: wireless mesh networks, and wired conduits along fence lines. These “Internet surface streets and driveways” would increase home value, and decrease bandwidth costs over time.