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The state of the art in emergent network design goes something like this: step 1, treat everyone you talk to over the Internet identically. Whether the other person is your best friend or the one millionth anonymous stranger from a university network half-way around the world, you offer your resources to them and request services from them just the same. step 2, design a wonderful, infinitely scalable, efficient, elegant emergent network on top of this substrate. step 3, observe that if all of the players aren't perfectly well-behaved and altruistic, your wonderful design doesn't work, and start trying to figure out how to salvage your beautiful design from being destroyed by the ugly fact of malicious and/or selfish agents.

Now, solutions proposed by people in step 3 include very clever game-theoretic tricks and cryptography, the addition of ubiquitous micropayments (as pioneered by Mojo Nation), the addition of sophisticated redundancy so that as long as the malicious/selfish nodes are not a sufficiently large subset their misbehavior is drowned out by the majority, the addition of reputations so that only people who have already done given something of value are allowed to take something of value, and more.

But it seems to me that the first thing we should do is go back and reconsider step 1: the part where you forget everything you know about your friends and family and treat messages received over the Internet from strangers half-way around the world the same as messages received over the Internet from your best friend. I think that the emergent network designer should focus on the human context, both because the human context is where our ultimate goals and values are defined, and also because the human context is the best source of a uniquely valuable network resource: trust.

(Raph Levien and Mark Miller are both thinking along these lines, although they're thinking of dramatically different designs.)
Zooko

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Step 1 is the basis for old economy (or Enlightenment or mercantile/industrial economy), where agents are theoretically undifferentiated in capabilities -- physical or knowledge -- such as voting, investing, insurance, etc. This abstraction has been pushed so far that the disconnects between the theoretical model and the practical reality lead to rending of the social fabric.

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According to Metcalfe's Law, the value of an internet connection rises with the number of users on the network. However, the phone companies do not get to raise their prices in return for that increase in value. This is a matter of considerable frustration to them.

The economic logic of the market suggests that capital should be invested by whoever captures the value of the investment. The telephone companies are using that argument to suggest that they should either be given monopoly pricing power over the last mile, or that they should be allowed to vertically integrate content with conduit. Either strategy would allow them to raise prices by locking out the competition, thus restoring their coercive power over the customer and helping them extract new revenues from their internet subscribers.

However, a second possibility has appeared. If the economics of internet connectivity lets the user rather than the network operator capture the residual value of the network, the economics likewise suggest that the user should be the builder and owner of the network infrastructure.

The creation of the fax network was the first time this happened, but it won't be the last. WiFi hubs and VoIP adapters allow the users to build out the edges of the network without needing to ask the phone companies for either help or permission. Thanks to the move from analog to digital networks, the telephone companies' most significant competition is now their customers, because if the customer can buy a simple device that makes wireless connectivity or IP phone calls possible, then anything the phone companies offer by way of competition is nothing more than the latest version of ZapMail.
Shirky

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There is a certain lack of clarity here about which part of the network he's talking about. The phone companies have two roles -- wholesaler and retailer. The "fax network" is a retail component at the edge of the network. So to is the WiFi/VoIP. What is left undiscussed in Clay's article is who or what is going to maintain the wholesale pipe, and more importantly, what is the economic model for all this?

This is the argument of the telcos for restricting access to their lines: the retail services subsidize the wholesale infrastructure. Eliminate the retail services as a source of income, and the wholesale prices do not support the wholesale infrastructure.

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With the new 802.11g wireless standard, they have an opportunity to make something more radical than the iPod, and just as fun to use. I'd like to see a small, cheap box, maybe the size of the iPod, with video and audio outs, 802.11g, and infrared for remote control. No hard drive, just enough RAM and CPU power to stream high-quality audio and video. You hook it up to to your stereo or TV, and serve music and video over the wi-fi connection from your Mac. The whole box should cost like $200, and you should be able to run 3-4 of them at the same time in your house. So you keep all your music on your Mac; you plug your cable into your Mac, and then you just serve up whatever entertainment you want to any TV or stereo in the house. They can make it Mac-only for the first six months, as they did with the iPod, and then release Windows software after the Mac faithful have had their fun. Why isn't this feasible? And who wouldn't want one of these? (Or three of them?)
stevenberlinjohnson

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The edge of the IP network is a smart device that branches out to single-function appliances. The end-to-end is to the smart device, not to the appliance. The appliance is essentially a remote I/O device.

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The generic name for this technology is RFID, which stands for radio frequency identification. RFID tags are miniscule microchips, which already have shrunk to half the size of a grain of sand. They listen for a radio query and respond by transmitting their unique ID code. Most RFID tags have no batteries: They use the power from the initial radio signal to transmit their response.

....

That raises the disquieting possibility of being tracked though our personal possessions. Imagine: The Gap links your sweater's RFID tag with the credit card you used to buy it and recognizes you by name when you return. Grocery stores flash ads on wall-sized screens based on your spending patterns, just like in "Minority Report." Police gain a trendy method of constant, cradle-to-grave surveillance.

....

First, consumers should be notified--a notice on a checkout receipt would work--when RFID tags are present in what they're buying. Second, RFID tags should be disabled by default at the checkout counter. Third, RFID tags should be placed on the product's packaging instead of on the product when possible. Fourth, RFID tags should be readily visible and easily removable.
Declan McCullagh

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Genetically modified salmon and similar food animals could in theory wreak permanent ecological damage, but no federal agency appears to have clear-cut legal authority to regulate or ban them on environmental grounds, according to a report issued yesterday by a biotechnology research group.

The new, man-made animals might, in the worst case, escape into the wild, propagate, and damage or wipe out other species by out-competing them for food or living space, said the report, by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, a Washington think tank that has taken a centrist position on the use of genetic engineering. But despite the risks, the Pew report said, the federal government's legal authority to restrict or ban the animals remains highly uncertain.

The finding appears to confirm fears long expressed by environmental activists that federal law on the issue was so vague that the Food and Drug Administration and other agencies would be hamstrung as they attempted to evaluate gene-altered animals meant as food.

The general view is that the FDA has power to require food-safety studies in these cases. But a scientific consensus has already emerged that the biggest risk posed by these animals is to the environment, since they might readily find their way into the wild. And the Pew report raises doubt that the FDA could restrict or stop a gene-altered animal solely on the ground that it would upset the ecological balance.
Washington Post

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In 1998 Congress was the scene of a battle over public domain, the public right of common, free and unrestricted use of artistic works whose copyright has expired. Corporations like Disney, organizations like the Motion Picture Association of America, and dead artists' families wanted to extend copyright. Advocates of public domain wanted to leave copyright protection as it was, which would have allowed many early 20th-century works, including corporate creations like Mickey Mouse, to slip into the public domain. The copyright owners won, and yesterday they won again when the Supreme Court, by a vote of 7 to 2, decided that Congress was within its constitutional rights when it extended copyright. The court's decision may make constitutional sense, but it does not serve the public well.

Under that 1998 act, copyright now extends for the life of an artist plus 70 years. Copyrights owned by corporations run for 95 years. Since the Constitution grants Congress the right to authorize copyright for "limited times," even the opponents of an extended term were not hopeful that the Supreme Court would rule otherwise. This decision almost certainly prepares the way for more bad copyright extension laws in the future. Congress has lengthened copyright 11 times in the past 40 years.

Artists naturally deserve to hold a property interest in their work, and so do the corporate owners of copyright. But the public has an equally strong interest in seeing copyright lapse after a time, returning works to the public domain — the great democratic seedbed of artistic creation — where they can be used without paying royalties.

In effect, the Supreme Court's decision makes it likely that we are seeing the beginning of the end of public domain and the birth of copyright perpetuity. Public domain has been a grand experiment, one that should not be allowed to die. The ability to draw freely on the entire creative output of humanity is one of the reasons we live in a time of such fruitful creative ferment.
NY Times Editorial

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Is this supposition true: that before there was a copyright, everything was in the public domain as we know it today. Because copying was so labor intensive, the owner of an artifact -- say a book -- was also "owned" the ideas.

Also of note, as usual, is the Japanese approach to copying. The student was expected to copy the master's work, and could only be said to have learned the lessons when the copy was indistinguishable from the master. Along the lines that the shinto temples are claimed to be a thousand years old, yet no material is more than a hundred years old.

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"Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The Growth of an American Surveillance Society" January 15, 2003
aclu.org

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Paper on the expansion of pervasive surveillance and data collection.

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Noology, or what is currently termed cognitive science, is ideally the science treating all the possible forms and laws of intelligence. It is essentially concerned with modeling human and other minds and with fashioning a valid, fundamental, and universal theory of mind and cognitive phenomena. It is to be distinguished from psychology, the science of all actual and possible psyches and psychological phenomena, and the laws and behavioral manifestations thereof.
INTRODUCTION TO IDEONOMY

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The great breakthrough on the GPS horizon lies in thinking of those geographic coordinates as a real-world URL. In other words, think of those digits not simply as a description of a point in space but as a place to store information. Today you can create a Web address and publish pages and pages of anything you want there.

With GPS-based hypertext, you could leave a virtual note hanging near the street, addressed to your 30 closest friends. The next time they happened to stumble through the area, the text would pop up on their PDA screens: "Hey, come check this out..."

But software such as GeoNotes or WorldBoard suggests a further twist: The street finds new uses for the street itself. Simply strolling down the sidewalk can become a hypertextual exploration, a journey into a new information space layered over the real one. Suddenly the surrounding air is full of information—some of it created for you by your closest friends, some of it created by total strangers. The streets are alive with data.
discover.com

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The intuitive notion that "you are who you call" is proving true for AT&T, as Labs-Research uses its Community of Interest (COI) methodology to help AT&T Consumer Services (ACS) identify consumers who fail to pay their bills and are shut off, and then try to sign up for new service.
AT&T Research

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