25 Years after ATTv1 -- it's not good vs evil -- it's Telecom vs the Internet

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Bob Frankston" <Bob19-0501 () bobf frankston com>
Date: February 27, 2009 10:59:23 AM EST
To: <oia () lists bway net>, <dave () farber net>
Cc: "'Lauren Weinstein'" <lauren () vortex com>
Subject: 25 Years after ATTv1 -- it's not good vs evil -- it's Telecom  
vs the Internet

25 years ago ATT was spooked into reconfigure itself into mini-bells  
which have since re-formed but not reformed.

We need to remember that 25 years ago ATT was TPC – The Phone Company.  
Reconfiguring ATT was reconfiguring an industry. There was no real  
distinction between telecom and telcos, AKA carriers including  
cablecos and other service providers.

Today the situation is very different and this confusion matters.

Many people on this list are trying to fix the telcos because they are  
evil. I am not.

It doesn’t matter to me whether they are evil or not because that’s  
moot and undefined. Corporation are supposed to serve their  
shareholders. We can argue philosophically about this issue but it’s  
moot because we are not facing a problem in good vs bad behavior.

We are dealing with a structural problem due to the very definition of  
telecommunications. Today’s companies are only symptoms of this larger  
problem and are defined by the constrains of having to monetize the  
path. And that’s the structural problem.

The power of the Internet comes from our ability to create solutions  
without having to negotiate the use of a particular path and because  
we benefit from having a negligible incremental cost for each  
application. This has worked very well because it has liberated us  
from the needs to negotiate for each element of the path based on each  
owner’s assigned value.

By necessity such valuations must be perverse and fanciful because  
they don’t having any meaning in isolation. This is the structural  
problem.

The need to maintain scarcity in order to maintain value in isolation  
is another face of this structural problem.

The ATT system worked because the TPC owned so much of the  
infrastructure it was able to treat it as a whole and we accepted  
whatever models they used to achieve a net profit. Today we have the  
Internet as an example of the damage done by models which have created  
perverse incentives:
·         They have created a Byzantine system of complex billing  
systems that have sucked hundreds of billions of dollars out of the  
economy in billable events.
·         They have prevented the price/performance improvements seen  
everywhere else in networking and computing.
·         They have denied us the benefits of essentially zero  
marginal cost. These benefits include basic things like medical  
monitoring that could save lives. We can’t assume connectivity public  
services, education.
·         They have forced us to depend on the carriers so we can’t  
create our own solutions even in emergencies leaving us enfeebled.
·         They have given us a funding model which is purposefully  
designed to create scarcity and have made us pay for very expensive  
redundant facilities just to have a physical embodiments of the  
accounting abstractions.

As long as we think it’s about bad companies we will continue to try  
to cajole them into giving us more of the same. And we will still be  
in the thrall of TPC.

The Internet is a very different concept – it’s about creating our own  
solutions and doing our own networking. We can view the entire telecom  
infrastructure is just an enabling technology that must be funded as  
shared infrastructure.

But unlike the TPC days it is not a single thing owned by a single  
company. Here Ted Vail did real harm by demanding total control of it  
all because he said that without him we couldn’t communicate.

We must unwind the TPC and own local infrastructure locally and  
recognize it facilitates creating our own solutions. It’s copper,  
fiber and radios and not services like a phone call.

25 years after ATT we have to recognize that the problem is not a  
company but the idea that we can’t do our own communicating nor our  
own networking.

Divestiture II must address the structural problem and separate the  
facilities from what we do with them. It would return hundreds of  
billions of dollars to the economy while creating the opportunity for  
trillions in new value.

We may have overthrown King ATT but the new King Telecom is the same  
thing all over again.









-------------------------------------------
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com