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.

Now that we know our own FCC isn’t going to help us out of the broadband mess in America, that their past policies helped to create, we have to figure out a way to help ourselves out. One small helpful aspect of the National Broadband Plan is an admonition to Congress that they support schemes to run high-speed fiber to anchor institutions like schools, hospitals, and libraries nationwide. These institutions can then act like central office hubs for neighborhood networks, sharing their fast connections with the entire community, and gaining maintenance fee help from the connected community. The FCC describes no specific action, but hopefully it will inspire Congress to stop the parliamentary games and electioneering, and actually get something done this year. Barring federal aid, local organizations like NELA-ISC can help these institutions install and maintain these networks, in return for open access to distribute connections to neighboring members.

As it turns out, provisions in the Broadband portion of the 2009 Recovery Act already have some of the same goals. Applications taken by the National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) for round two of the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) are now closed, yet no “Anchor Institution” registrants in the North East Los Angeles region can be found in the BroadbandMatch database.

To be fair, I just found out about these grant resources recently myself — not nearly in time to get any grant application paperwork together. Is it possible that the Recovery Act administrators have not taken any steps to inform our local institutions of their eligibility, at the same time rich incumbents like Qwest are already begging them for more funding? I fear that is exactly what happened. To be honest, the number of applicants to these programs, and to experiments like Google Fiber for Communities, make the odds of being selected seem quite low. With the massive amount of lobbying in Washington D.C., it never feels like small communities like ours will be heard through all the noise.

Regardless of how big the challenge seems right now, we know we have to work together to be heard. I will be talking to the ERNC April 6th, 2010, about local resources and fostering greater cross-institution collaboration. In addition to our excellent Land Use Committee, I will recommend and volunteer myself for the formation of a local Technology Infrastructure Committee. I will be looking for all interested Eagle Rock Stakeholders to join this committee, to share any personal technical expertise with the community at large. Depending on the success of this effort, I may end up encouraging similar committees to be formed in all the Neighborhood Councils within the Northeast Los Angeles region.

On the Internet, sharing is a solved problem. The Tier-1 backbone providers all save time and money for their international bandwidth via “peering agreements” — contracts that say network traffic will be freely exchanged between them without any money traded. The cost of maintaining such an agreement is only the maintenance of each side’s own equipment, and one or more “cross connections” that are shared equally between the contractual parties. Whole buildings have been set up, usually called “carrier neutral hotels,” just to provide space for the equipment and wires required for these connections. They wouldn’t be sharing traffic in this way, nor would they pay the costs of these cross connections and hotel stays, if there were not some huge cost benefits being gained. Free Internet traffic must be very valuable.

So why don’t neighbors and home owners just participate in Internet traffic sharing agreements as well? Is it a technical issue? Not really! Home network scale Internet routing features like Multihoming, Routing Information Protocol, and Border Gateway Protocol routing have been available in low-cost network equipment, sitting on store shelves for years.  Computer scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have even developed routing software called PERM (Practical End-host collaborative Residential Multihoming) that makes it easy to safely share a home wireless network connection with nearby neighbors, on low-cost wireless network equipment. They are giving that software away for free! The biggest thing holding back people from actually using that software isn’t knowledge — it’s incumbent ISP contract limitations and related legal fears. Your Internet provider doesn’t want you to get the same economic advantages that they do from sharing connections. They want you to buy any bandwidth upgrades from them, rather than doubling your burst bandwidth by just sharing connections with a neighbor. The problem isn’t that sharing with neighbors is hard — it’s so easy that incumbents can’t easily charge you extra for it.

II. The opportunity of the Commons.

The table above was derived from one that was created way back in 1977, in part by Dr. Elinor Ostrom, who was a recipient of a 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics. It is a brilliantly simple way to figure out how a resource should be managed, between people with access to any given resource. When looking at this table, it’s fairly obvious that the Internet as a whole should be treated as a Public Good. Due to a phenomenon called the network effect, sharing a network with more people actually increases its value. Technologies like wireless network routers, network cables installed via fence line conduits, and Network Address Translation (NAT) all combine to make it almost impossible to stop close neighbors from sharing network connections. Even if a property is physically inspected for such neighbor-to-neighbor connections, properly encrypted connections make it nearly impossible to prove that such connections are sharing anything other than local data traffic. Restrictions on sharing Internet traffic are unenforceable in such a situation. The cost of inspection would be much higher than any income that could be gained by detecting such sharing.

There is one situation when sharing Internet traffic could diminish connection value — when the traffic in an Internet router is congested. This only happens when the sum of router connections sending traffic exceeds the hardware’s ability to route traffic. This could happen either because the processor isn’t fast enough to handle the traffic, or the destination line’s bandwidth is too small to handle all the traffic. In well managed networks, this congestion happens very rarely, and only in short bursts. In these cases, the cost of excluding sharing participants near the router is actually higher, because each additional router that can handle the same traffic will help ease the congestion. According to the table above, this temporary scenario presents an opportunity to deal with the Internet as a Common-pool Resource (or “Commons” for short).

Older and less powerful routers tend to deal with network data congestion by dropping data packets randomly, which just forces the sender to resend the same data a little later (hopefully when that network route is less congested). Newer and more powerful routers can selectively drop data based on packet type, like dropping a video packet while keeping a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone packet. This kind of selective dropping is usually called a Quality of Service (QoS) feature, because selecting one service over others allows it to have better quality, like less static on a VoIP call. How incumbent Internet Service Providers (ISP) use this service is the primary subject of Network Neutrality. QoS technology can be used to give you better service of your own choosing, but it can also be used by your ISP to make services that they choose seem better, regardless of your own wishes. The biggest fight at the center of the Network Neutrality is over who owns your Internet connection, and with it the right to control QoS settings.

III. Remaining Questions.

Should these kinds of management decisions be left in the hands of incumbent Internet access duopolies of telephone and cable? Should these decisions be left to consumers instead, via elected representatives, and perhaps via democratic organizations like Cooperative Utilities? What do you think?

These kind of studies are always skewed in some way, based on sampling methods, size, question order, use of “push poll” methods, and the way questions are phrased. Even without looking at any of these studies, it’s easy to guess that recent unemployment rate increases have probably created poverty rate increases as well. Both increases mean that better access to online tools for education, job searches, online résumé updates, and job applications are even more important now than ever. Of all these studies, the SSRC study seems to go into the most depth over whether low-income populations understand how (lack of) access to the Internet affects their lives. Interviewees told the SSRC that high speed Internet access is a basic necessity, the same way electricity has become a basic necessity to our modern lifestyle.

The analogy between electricity and Internet access is interesting. It shows that many people understand that the Internet is basic to modern national infrastructure, in the same way our electrical lines and roads are. When any of these basic services are unavailable or too costly, we tend to share some of the blame between the responsible government agencies and local providers. It seems strange then, that so many are so willing to let Internet provider incumbents set the terms of access, without more redress through calls for government action. Too few people seem to remember that the telephone and cable companies had little to do with the initial creation of the Internet, and it was government and public institutions that started the process. Government and public University institutions continue to drive open uses of the Internet further, while incumbent access providers try to hold it back. Maybe giving people a chance to own their own “driveways” onto the Internet would change how people address the Internet’s importance politically.