Doc Searls recently published an article, Saving the Net, on the Linux Journal. Below is a critical review of the article. What Doc is trying to do: weave together disparate issues into a consistent network. Main issues are the Internet, end-to-end design, markets, and copyrights. These are important issues. However, Doc fails to present a cohesive argument and workable call to arms.

Quoted text from the article is margin left. My comments are bulleted.

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But first, a commercial message from the people who brought us the Net:

"The Pentagon is setting up a stock-market style system in which investors would bet on terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the Middle East. Defense officials hope to gain intelligence and useful predictions while investors who guessed right would win profits. ...

"...(called) the Policy Analysis Market (it) would be a joint program of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, and two private companies: Net Exchange, a market technologies company, and the Economist Intelligence Unit, the business information arm of the publisher of The Economist magazine.

"DARPA has received strong criticism from Congress for its Terrorism Information Awareness program, a computerized surveillance program that has raised privacy concerns. Wyden said the Policy Analysis Market is under retired Adm. John Poindexter, the head of the Terrorism Information Awareness program and, in the 1980s, a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal." -- AP/Yahoo.com

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End-to-End
from Lessig: "The Internet that is to be the savior is a dying breed. The end-to-end architecture that gave us its power will, in effect, be inverted. And so the games networks play to benefit their own will bleed to this space too."

• The Internet as savior?
• networks have consciousness to self-direct?

In the words of David Eisenberg the Internet's innards purposefully were kept "stupid". All the intelligence properly belonged to the ends. As a pure end-to-end system, the Net also was made to be symmetrical. It wasn't supposed to be like TV, with fat content flowing in only one direction.

• The innards are "stupid" with respect to the content, applications, and addressing. The innards are not "stupid" with respect to performance and availability.
• The Net is not a pure end-to-end system. The authors of the seminal 1984 paper, in describing the end-to-end method of system design, acknowledged then, and again in 1998, that end-to-end is just one tool to be used for the proper design of a communications system. Further, they acknowledge that while a design can properly be deemed as end-to-end, the implementation of that design may not be an end-to-end artifact. Dial up connections to the Internet, for one.
• The Net has the possibility of symmetry, but in practice it is not required.

Linux
Take away Linux and the Net, and both technology and the economy would be a whole lot worse. Both the Net and Linux were created, grew and flourished almost entirely outside the regulatory sphere. They are, in a literal sense, what free markets have done with their freedoms.

• Why would the economy be a whole lot worse? Its a fact that the other side of the expansion of communication is the further concentration of resources by companies, such as Wal Mart, which can now further enforce a restrictive supplier network more broadly.
• Microsoft grew and flourished outside of the regulatory sphere.
• Note on regulation: it is not just government that regulates. Monopolies can also regulate the flow of innovation, improvements, and competition.
• What the heck does he mean by free markets in this context? "Free markets" does not equal "open source", yet that's what Searls seems to imply.

The Internet
The Internet has been blessedly free of regulation for most of its short life. But the companies that provide most Internet services -- telcos and cable companies -- are highly regulated. They are creatures that live in a regulatory environment that bears little resemblance to a real marketplace.

• OK, so what is a "real" marketplace? It seems to be some mythological place divorced from the nitty-gritty of the business world. Adam Smith's market of many small producers loosely joined, where the fragile invisible hand can only operate in the absence of monopoly, is no match for the aggressive consolidation that is the touchstone of industrial production.
• Does Searls really believe this, that there are two economies, the regulated one and the unregulated one? It is all one economy. And as with all human social constructs, there are proper forces of control and concentration. Unregulated economies end up as oligarchies. See Power Laws 101.

DRM
...see control extended beyond the Net, into the devices that connect to the Net, including PCs, which have also been blessedly free from regulation. Intellectual property protections have been built into consumer electronics devices for a long time. These guys see no reason why PCs, as a breed of consumer electronic device, shouldn't be subject to the same restrictions, in the form of digital rights management (DRM),...Once those cripples ... are in place, you can count on Dell, HP and Gateway PCs and laptops that are much less ready to run Linux.

• If I were them, I would see no reason why not either. Searl makes no argument as to why a PC is different than any other consumer electronic device.
• The OS should be transparent to the PC, in the same way that the network should be transparent to the flow of data over the Internet. If MS can modify its OS to accommodate a DRM CPU, why can't Linus and crew? It's just software.

Conservatives
Two oddly allied mentalities provide intellectual air cover for these threats to the marketplace. One is the extreme comfort certain industries feel inside their regulatory environments. The other is the high regard political conservatives hold for successful enterprises.

• Pick one: either the FCC is right to deregulate and allow any company to own as many broadcast outlets as they can possibly manage in the "marketplace" or the media conglomerates need to be restrained because the effects of the Power Law is contrary to what is decided as good social policy.
• The Power Law has two tails. There is the obvious tail that everyone looks at, where a few have a concentration of resources. There is the other tail, where the many have not a lot of resources. Republicans tend to favor the one tail, and Democrats tend to favor the other. During the Bubble, there was the delusion that everyone could have lots of resources. Now we have to get back to reality.

Capacity
The carrying capacity of satellites and cable systems also limit the number of available channels.

• The illusion of the Internet is that it is unlimited. However, we are running out of IPv4 addresses, and the pipes are getting congested. There is a limit, somewhere.
• There is a trade-off between throughput and channels. Traditional broadcasting has very high throughput (broadcast quality) and has limited channels. Internet broadcasting has low throughput (jerky at 320x240) with seemingly limitless channels. It seems almost that there is a constant determinant relating the two.

Marketplace
There's also a problem with conceiving broadcast service -- especially the commercial variety -- as a "marketplace." Its customers and consumers are different populations. The customers of commercial broadcasting are advertisers, not viewers and listeners. ... The "content" it distributes is merely bait; the goods sold are the ears and eyeballs of "consumers".

• Let's take his argument about customers and consumers at face value. Why is this not a marketplace? There is commerce between the broadcasters and the advertisers. That the viewers are seen as so many rubes to be manipulated is simply to define one of the main resources of this particular industry.
• So what's the point that Doc's trying to make? That all the people working in the broadcasting industry are nothing more than cynical jerks who have no social consciousness and no creativity?

The notable exceptions are "premium" channels like HBO and public broadcasting.The reason why programming on both is relatively higher in quality is a simple one: there's little or no split in their markets between customers and consumers.

• Again, sounds like a tradeoff between audience and quality. The economics of broadcasting and advertising on one hand and "quality" on the other are inversely related.
• To call public broadcasting a marketplace is just plain weird. It is government subsidized with heavy corporate sponsorship. It is the opposite of an open market

All of which is why this talk about the "media marketplace" is highly screwed up. Relaxing broadcast ownership rules, in the absence of making larger chunks of available spectrum for everybody, is hardly deregulation. It is a highly selective change in existing regulation that opens opportunities only to the most successful players in a completely closed marketplace.

• I'm getting really confused by now. My understanding is that the technology in place today requires spectrum slicing, and that the FCC, particularly in major metropolitan areas, has allowed spectrum allocation so that broadcasters are beginning to step on each other. This, then, is the limit to growth. Maybe with spread spectrum or whatever these limits will change, but that is a different issue.
• Even if more chunks were made available, there is only so much. There is a limited environment. And that's one of the failings of traditional market analysis -- it assumes an unlimited environment within which to expand. Perhaps it is time to drop market analysis all together and just describe what's there, based on proven social, cultural, political, and economic behavior and performance.

Business model
The Net's problem, for the telco and cable industries' perspective, is it was born without a business model. ... They want the Net to be more like television, and to a significant degree, they've succeeded. Most DSL and cable broadband customers take it for granted that downstream speeds are faster than upstream speeds...

• Doc seems to want both sides. He wants a market, but he doesn't want a business model. The providers are trying to provide the business model. That's how markets work. They are constrained by cost of providing service. If you want symmetrical bandwidth with a fixed IP address and the freedom to host a server, you can get it very easily -- you pay two to three times what you pay for "residential" service. That seems fair.
• When the providers want to restrict what kinds of devices go on the network, that's a different matter, but that's not the argument Doc is making.

And why not? These companies "own" the Net, don't they? Well, no, they don't. They only "provide" it--critical difference.

• Not really. They are businesses. They care about the ability to make as much profit as possible. And they certainly own the lines that make up the infrastructure.

Copyrights
We met the problem head-on and lost, with Eldred v. Ashcroft, a case that challenged the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.

• I am highly sympathetic to the arguments against the Extension Act. I just don't buy the argument that this ruling is about the fate of the Net. Or more precisely, there is a meta-issue that encompasses both issues. Being unclear about this is bad politics and will lead to more failures.
• Ironically, if copyright terms were shorter, then the content companies would be even more vociferous in their cries for constraining the digital environment. With a long term, they can lose some money now, but they can make it up in the future. With a short term, they can only make money now.
• The context of the meta-issue is the digital environment, of which the Net, while being a significant part, is just a part. The issue is one of access.

Galvanization
I think we need a galvanizing issue. I suggest Saving the Net. To do that, we need to treat the Net as two things:
1. a public domain, and therefore
2. a natural habitat for markets

• Doc has completely lost me on this one. I know that he is trying to tie everything up into a neat package, but this just doesn't work for me.
• The public domain is a term that is bounded to the term copyright. If a copyright has expired or there is no copyright, then the content in question is in the public domain and can be copied by anyone. Further, if the content is in the public domain, it can not be subsequently copyrighted. From this focus, Doc's call to arms makes little to no sense, for, at a minimum, the issues of access to the communication system and issues of freedom of both verbal and technical expression transcend the issues involved with the legal status of a piece of content.
• Markets are all about private property. I can't sell you something that I don't own, be it a thing or a service. The public domain, then, is an anathema to markets. If I can't own something, then I can't sell it. When I take public domain content and make it into a book, I sell you that book because I own the artifact. I have created a new piece of property, even though the content may not be owned by anyone.
• There is a fundamental contradiction. It is my position that the way through the contradiction is not to extinguish the public domain, but to take a critical look at what we mean by markets. Markets used to have a generative power. In recent years, the term has become so diluted as to be meaningless. Doc's use of the term in this article has at least three different definitions. This only leads to confusion and weakness, something that we can't afford these days.