7/25/2006
Influencing the political process for advancment of technology
When I look at issues like Net Neutrality, a largely fabricated issue, I can’t help but observe (again) the serious disconnect between the two groups I’ll refer to as the Bellheads and the Netheads. The Bellheads are winning by the way. Sure the Netheads creat cool startups and think they’re making lots of money, but their revenues are generally peanuts to the Bellheads.
Need an example? Think about IM in the context of what it reall is…delivering text messages. How much revenue do you think the Netheads make from IM? Combine AIM, MSN and Yahoo all together. How much revenue do you think the wireless carriers make from text messagin? Who wins the revenue war?
That isn’t the only place the Bellheads win. Look to political process. I’ve often wondered about our own ranks. Jeff Pulver. David Isenberg. Tom Evslin. Several others. Leading voices fighting the battle from without rather than stepping into the political fray of politics to redirect the system from within. If we’re going to win some measure of control away from the Bellheads, there is only one way. The political power base needs to shift. Netheads have to become the influencers of policy, something we are clearly not today.
One way to do this is for many of use to run for office. To shift from the things we love to the things we want changed. Most of us are loathe to do so. I know I have no interest in political office. My passion for change isn’t so great that I care to make that change.
I personally have taken a different path. The grow your own Senator approach. My oldest son has intense political interests. He’s also in a different generation than I. The next generation of influencers. The next generation of leaders. The next generation of Senators. He doesn’t often talk of his personal politcal aspirations, but down inside, I know they exist. I do what I can to encourage that personal growth and pursuit of passion. And I try to help him bridge the gap to my generation by promoting new technologies and using technology from with the political process. For change. For new campaigns. For new public services. For good.
Today this appeared in the Daily Kos. Note this is a reference to my son, not to me -
Ken Camp’s The Revolution Has Begun looks at the use of newer technology - text messaging podcasts, etc. - in various campaigns.
I’d encourage the rest of you in my generation to chase your options. You can invest of yourself in making change, or you can foster change in the next generation of politics. Either will bring change. You can also blog about it, talk about it, post about it and whine about it. That will feel good perhaps, but it won’t bring change. Be an agent of change rather than a strident voice raging against the machine to no productive end.
This public service announcement brought to you by one too many cups of coffee after dinner.
Amended 15 minutes after I posted to add this link http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/7/25/233213/844
Technorati Tags: politics, Ken Camp, Net neutrality, be an agent of change
Filed by Ken at 10:16 pm under Politics
I don’t like the distinction between Bellheads and Netheads. I’ve worked with people from the Bell companies who’ve made heavy contributions to the networking standards and protocols that we all use today in and around the Internet. One example is the twisted-pair Ethernet standards, which started with something called StarLAN that initially came from AT&T IS. The bellheads understand networking - how to move data through the tubes efficiently - much better than the netheads, who are mainly concerned with what to put in and what to take out.
The people you mention - Jeff Pulver, David Isenberg, Tom Evslin - are actually quite naive about the operational dynamics of packet processing, forwarding, queue management, error recovery, routing table management, and the other crucial aspects of network operations. They’re marketing people, not engineers.
They approach politics in the same way they approach network engineering, by formulating fanciful simplifications and then trying to influence the process as they would like it to be rather than as it is.
And that’s fortunate for all of us, because the worst nightmare for users of the Internet would be to subject it to the whims of philistine regulators.
Network engineering is a tough subject that requires a great deal of study to crack. Political lobbying isn’t nearly as hard, but it takes a lot of time to perfect, as politics is largely based on trust. Developing relationships takes a long time and a long attention span, and that’s a good thing as it weeds out most of the people who shouldn’t be involved in it.
Richard, Thanks for taking time to comment. Your thougths make me realize how rushed my own post was, and how I missed tha mark of what I’d hoped to say,
First to Netheads and Bellheads. I agree the terms both carry negative connotations. But they’re well understood. I could have said circuit-switchers and packet-switchers, but that’s less valid. I could have said “telecommuncations industry” (even using legacy) and ISPs, but that’s not really valid and overlooks all the CLECs crushed by the telcos. I picked those terms because they create a specific perception, although you’re right, I could have done better.
Interesting also because I don’t know which I am 17 years with AT&T living through divestiture firsthand. Really odd because I built and managed the largest StarLAN anyone had ever seen on the planet for a time. Yes, 1 Mbps coaxial. Back in the day. I’ve been a system architect for voice and dat netwotrks, packet and circuit. I full appreciate Erlang-B traffic measures, the busy hour and the nuance of voice systems, but I’ve designed global packet networks too. In a sense I am neither Bellhead or Nethead, or some hybrid of the two in some fashion.
I agree that today the people I mentioned, Jeff Pulver, David Isenberg and Tom Evslin are as much mouthpieces and marketers of a cause as anything else. Although David did work in a technical role in Bell Labs years ago. I use them as examples of voices crying out for change. And I feel they sometimes cry out too much rather than bring about change by engaging in the process. That was my real point.
Technologist who view the big picture and see through the sham of net neutrality and such, need to be encouraged to act as influencers in the politics of the telecommunications environment more. The telcos of old know how to influence politics to their benefit. They do it every day. The “other side,” (are they the progressives of technologoy with the major telcos being the fundamentalists?), seems too often to try and influence change by talking louder. We, the “Netheads” for lack of a better term, doa lousy job of teaching courting, and leading the political power base where we want them to be. It seems to easy to stand on the sidelines of politics and shriek “you just don’t get it” in their direction. Easier than engaging and changing how they think.
Ok,it’s still early here and I haven’t quite worked ou tmy thoughts. Need more coffee and have a meeting to run to. I want to think on this some more. One of these days I’ll articulate my thoughts more clearly.
Thanks again for taking the time to comment and give me something to noodle around with. I really appreciate it.
The StarLAN I worked with used telephone wire, I wasn’t aware of a coax variation. There was a big debate over wiring in the committee, and we desired to focus on twisted pair exclusively.
I think most of the networking debates today are over the people who see the Internet as a black box or “magic cloud” that simply exists to support web sites, and those who see it as a network that can be engineered in principle to support any type of application. Isenberg and Farber aren’t really addressing the same questions.
I wouldn’t say the webheads - my term for netheads - have been ineffectual in influencing legislation. They’ve managed to hold up the Stevens bill with a completely ridiculous set of objections and forestalled any reasonable consideration of the aspects of the bill that really do deserve more scrutiny. They’re affecting the system, but not in a good way.
Thanks Richard. Again, you make strong points that I don’t disagree with at all. I’ve pointed out to Doc Searls and David Weinberger more than once that several of ther arguments through the Cluetrain Manifesto, World of Ends, and Small Pieces Loosely joined are disinformation fueled by their own misconceptions. I chided them every now and then for not being more diligent at getting those right. I think when you publish something like that in the tech sector, no matter what role you’re putting yourself in, you owe it to yourself and the readers to get the basics right.
That said, in my blogging over the last six years of so, I’ve certainly fired off from the hip posts and comments that I realized later weren’t comprensive enough to be accurate. Part of that is the danger of the medium.
I hate the magic cloud analogy. I think it’s an insult to the intelligence of most adults to think they’re incapable of understanding at a high level, how routing works, how DNS works, and the framework of the net. You don’t have to understand the nuance of BGP route flapping or A records and CNAMES to have a basic grasp. It annoys me when people just gloss that over. And I often feel the worst offenders gloss it over because they don’t understand it themselves and are off on a tangent fueled by misperception.
I agree the webheads, on the whole, have had an effect. Having an impact can be a double-edged sword. We get the bad with the good and hope the good outweighs the debacles. I use Pulver and Isenberg as examples for two reasons. Pulver spends a lot of time prodding and poking at the FCC. I think he’d be more effective leveraging a strong senator by his side to effect some of the changes he seeks. And David Isenberg sometimes sounds like a repeating message. I know him personally and I like him a lot, but sometimes I feel he needs to step back, take a breath, and try a different insertion point.
Thanks again for engaging and making me think more about this. It makes my head hurt, but I met deadline for a book chapter to an editor today, so now I’m free to ponder a bit.