Sascha: I'm going to do a couple of things differently. I don't have a PowerPoint presentation, number one. I planned to only speak for about half of my time, and then to turn it over to you all for a conversation. Since I think a lot of what I have to say is both provocative, but only half of the story.
Because I don't have a PowerPoint presentation, you should feel free to return to your gadgetry overlords, if you wish. But I think what I have to say and the times we are living through are so interesting, that I hope you will stay engaged with me.
The question I want to put forth, today, is one that was asked by David Bollier, in his book, Viral Spiral. He asked simply, "Who will set forth a compelling alternative to centralized media and build it?" And one of the most vexing conversations I've had, over the years, is one that begins with "What do you do," and ends with a lot of head nodding, but I fear, very little understanding of my answer.
The reason for this is that fundamentally, I'm a policy hacker. I advocate working on behalf of the public interest, and educating the congressional staff, FCC commissioners, administration officials, the media, and allied organizations on issues related to telecommunications, broadband, and open technology. In essence, what this means is that I translate from the geek into the wonk. I hope to affect meaningful changes, at the highest level, to a fundamentally flawed status quo.
What's interesting is that even though I work in D.C., my background is in radical media activism. I helped to build the Indy Media movement, which normalized this notion of journalism from the streets, which is now quite prevalent in our society. I've helped to build radio stations and community wireless networks, and organized rallies and un-conferences, much like Lee has done. I founded concert venues and foundations, and I've protested injustices and have been beat to shit by police, simply for exercising my right to assemble. I've been honored on the one hand, and blacklisted for the same work, for the same community-organizing work, by my university. My involvement in one of the more preeminent progress think tanks, the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., has arisen as much from a series of fortunate and serendipitous events as to any plan A of a trajectory of where I wanted to go.
My background, contrary to popular conception, has nothing to do with computer science or engineering, but is rather in a field called socio-ecological psychology, which is a mouthful. It's a field that explores the transactions between and amongst people and their settings. My own focus area started in the mid 1990's. It was focused on a school climate, in particular, the racial climate in public schools.
In conducting research in central Illinois, I quickly came to realize that while institutionalized racism was rampant, our local media simply refused to address the issue. Thus, these racial inequities that we were uncovering in our academic work had been swept under this rug, for generations. There was, in fact, a Midwestern mystique at play, to borrow from Howard
Zinn, and it permeated our local community. For those of us who wished to expose these fundamental injustices, we were, at its heart, subjected to ridicule, scorn, and in my case, death threats.
What I came to realize was that documenting the problem, unto itself, was simply not enough. Somehow, we needed to bring pressure to bear and fill in the shortcomings of my academic research. What we needed was a local media, one that would cover these issues that no one wanted to talk about, or I should say the dominant constituencies in our community did not want to talk about, and could contest the inequalities that were eating away at our community.
My involvement in Indy Media, radical media activism, was both personally a reaction to the physical threats of violence that were left on my answering machine and on my doorstep, as well as this more holistic intervention to help rally a community to address local injustices.
I believe, as Doc Searls mentioned yesterday, that our language creates our knowledge framework. How we describe our experiences within the world affects our epistemology and warps, for both better and for worse, our understanding and comprehension of our communities and of one another. Indy Media and media activists everywhere, from the commie-pinko left, all the way to the completely reactionary wacko right, have been waging a war to establish platforms for telling their stories and narratives, for years now, in the United States. The goal of all of this work has been to impact mainstream culture and to shift the very foundations of civil discourse.
Unfortunately, media creation and the documentation and telling of our stories without the information dissemination component are entirely impotent. When Malcolm Matson asked the question, "Who will control local connectivity," he exposed the fundamental question facing civil society at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Because what I learned quite quickly is that even when we created media, and documented local injustices, we had no means in our local community to disseminate this vital information to the rest of our local community. In essence, we were locked out of a public discourse. We were locked out, systematically disenfranchised from the media.
The solution that we came up with, and the reason why I ended up in Washington, D.C., consulting with power brokers and forward thinking decision makers was that we needed to not only create alternative media dissemination systems, but we needed to implement fundamental changes to civil society, before it collapsed under the weight of its own ignorance and inequity.
As a historian by training, having taken a sabbatical from psychology to pursue a second PhD in communications, I cannot help but understand contemporary telecommunications' political battles through the lens of their historical antecedents.
Before we can project into the future of communications, we must first understand the parallels to our past. They are myriad. When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about democracy in America, this entirely new breed of how to build, run, and maintain a country, a nation state, he was writing about an engaged body politic, a knowledgeable citizenry that swapped information through the most advanced packet switching network that the world had ever seen, the United States Postal Service.
The post office staff, at one point, made up almost 75% of all federal employees. The post office was, in effect, the federal government of the United States of America. Democracy in America, the very foundation of our modern civil society, was predicated upon massive government intervention and subsidization of our cutting edge communications and information dissemination network.
Newspapers, for their part, were provided free transit through the postal system, so vital were they considered to the health of our fledgling democracy. The history of previous telecommunications revolutions is rife with extraordinary examples and cautionary tales. If we take a moment to look backward, I hope that we might be able to find our way forward, a bit more clearly. Disruptive technologies have been recaptured, commoditized in unexpected ways, and have had their democratic and participatory potential systematically decimated over and over and over again.
The telegraph, which was so vital to bringing forth an age of instant communication, was also the bearer of unprecedented speculation, and the advent of mass commoditization of information inequalities. The cotton buyer who had daily weather information of what was happening on the ground in the Deep South ran rings around their competitors who lacked access to this information. The telegraph was also one of the most vital tactical resources for annihilating enemies, as the South experienced with devastating effectiveness during the Civil War. The telegraph, through Western Union, and its manipulation of the news, was also our first experience with the telecommunications conglomerate that became so powerful, as to endanger the very foundations of our democratic society.
The telephone, several years later, provided even a more instructive cautionary tale of the danger of conglomerization. Paul Starr, in his book, The Creation of Media, documents the rise of the Home Rule telephony movement, during the first decade of the twentieth century. How many have heard of the Home Rule telephony movement, just a smattering of folks, and I think this is indicative of why it is so important to pay attention to our past.
While the remainder of the twentieth century was owned by Ma Bell, or at least much of it, the first decade saw this flourishing of independent providers, cooperatives, affiliations, coalitions, etc, much as the first decade of the twenty-first century saw the rise of ISPs.
AT&T systematically destroyed this movement, a movement that accounted for some 40% of all telephones in the United States, at its height, 40%. AT&T did this by refusing to interconnect these independents, in essence leveraging their ownership over their long distance lines, the telephony backhaul, to curtail and control edge network development and implementation.
If the telephone demonstrates the viability of instant communications for the masses, the roaring 20's were a golden era for communication's technological development. The radio era was a time when the democratic potential of instant communications seemed unstoppable. Following the footsteps of Marconi, the 1920's saw this explosion of innovation from so-called radio amateurs around the globe. Unfortunately, as we all know, even this genie was stuck back into a bottle, through the creation of the Federal Communications Commission, and under the guise of organizing the airways; the public airways were taken away from us, from the people, and reassigned to an elite few.
These decisions of 1927, 1934 and onward, set the groundwork for 75 years of spectrum regulation, frequency allocation, and assignment that we now labor under, today, in a whole other century.
For the sake of time, I'll skip CAT TV, PEG channels, the battle over free-nets, local access, over the air rebroadcasting, and the low power FM radio debacle, only saying that the politics of these battles, time and time again, is uncannily prescient of today's telecommunications debates. Today, the telecom Sevier du jour is the Internet. Whereas most of us are still focused on the import of this resource, I posit that the Internet era is rapidly drawing to a close.
Instead, I believe we are headed into an age of the intranet, an epoch characterized by local connectivity, applications, and services. The Internet is a broadband connectivity generally, instead of being the end-all and be-all of telecommunications, is rapidly becoming just one, albeit I will readily agree a very important service on intranet infrastructures. In fact, we are lucky enough to be living through a critical juncture in telecommunications history, a critical juncture characterized by this trifecta of circumstances that have combined to create a perfect storm of disruptive potential.
First, digital technologies and their attendant innovations have transformed media production and information dissemination. They have done so at a far greater pace than our society is capable of assimilating into its regulations, its legislation, and in fact, into our everyday lives.
Second, these new technologies have driven and are being driven by an enormous demand from constituencies throughout our society. This aggregation of demand for more [libertoric], participatory media has created untold pressure for telecommunications reform, has strained our existing media structures, and has baffled our policy leadership.
Third, we have this new administration, with an unprecedented opportunity; I hope not an unprecedented opportunity for problematic decision making, but an unprecedented opportunity to institute regulation, legislation, and policy reform. In fact, this administration has already hinted that seismic shifts are imminent.
Lest we all drink too deeply from the draught of technological determinism, and declare victory is at hand, another word of caution; there is this massive behind-the-scenes, epic, political battle being waged inside the beltway, right now, between the forces that want to create this more open, distributed, participatory media and telecommunications future and those who favor a centralized, command and control regime, a reinstitution of command and control in all of these new media in telecommunications systems.
The threats we are currently facing in Washington, D.C., are quite daunting. My hope is that with history as our guide, and your active involvement and support, they are entirely surmountable. However, our vigilance is already waning. Too often, we are being lulled into this false sense of our own security. Yet, the re-institutionalization of centralization is all around us, even today.
As Mark Roettgering rightfully pointed out, vertical and horizontal conglomerization of media and telecommunications are at an unprecedented level. Tax and subsidy structures, from e-rates, to the universal service fund and inter-carrier compensation; anticompetitive mandates, for example, state laws preventing municipalities from deploying telecommunications networks, and slap lawsuits against those that legally do so, and the elimination from AUP free access over dumb networks are eroding any semblance we once may have had to a healthy and fair market.
Instead of demanding fundamental changes, too often we have donned chains of silver and declared ourselves free. How else can we fool ourselves into declaring that everything from AT&T and Verizon's networks, to the iPhone and the Android phone to be open? Open, really [laughs], not at all - how is it that we're allowing functionality and fair use to be further and further inhibited by Windows, Mac and mobile device operating systems? Whatever happened to the notion of unbundled services through common carriage? What else is cloud computing, today's big buzzword, if not a modern equivalent for mainframes and dumb terminals, a decades old business model for centralization and control?
More often than not, there is this scrappy fellowship of public interest groups, and a handful of advocates and visionaries. They are all that stand between this more democratic and participatory potential for current communications innovations and the forces fighting for increased command and control. At this critical juncture in telecommunications history, it is both within our power to dramatically alter the future of communications as well as our responsibility as knowledgeable participants, to actively participate in the policy hacking that is so desperately needed to avoid a more dystopian future.
I hope that many of you will join me in taking part in supporting the policy hacking of twenty-first century telecommunications. The next three to five years will decide a trajectory for communications that will be with us and with our society for generations to come. Thank you very much for listening. I very much look forward to your questions.
Audience 1: This morning, Paul Buddy wrote an interesting article on CircleID, about how potentially it's not salvageable. We need to do structural separation and start from scratch. I was just curious what your thoughts are on whether or not this can have a bandage slapped on it, and we keep adding to the existing laws, or do we really need to seriously consider some sort of green field approach?
Sascha: I've seen some of my allies and friends who have written about how we have to destroy the FCC or remove the Internet. There has never been a time - I think somebody was speaking about this yesterday; there has never been a time where you just eliminate the old and start afresh with the new. Certainly, there needs to be continued innovation, evolution, and changes, but the fundamental tenets of the Internet are still sound, today. The ideas behind the Internet, this completely anarchic, chaotic network of networks that is ownerless, the strength being in the interconnections and network effects; that is a really good, solid basis for telecommunications, given today's technologies.
We shouldn't throw that out. On the other hand, we also need to be protective. We need to have interventions to prevent the worst excesses that otherwise will become normative. The reason why you need private industry and government in these spaces is because private industry helps push the envelope and government helps prevent the worst excesses of private industry.
We're living through the failure to do that, to rightfully assess that if you don't have government intervention to set parameters for how these systems operate, you have far more massive government intervention down the road because of our failure to be responsible for preventing these excesses.
Audience 1: You can't keep cramming it into the definition of a service, under the existing telephony common carriage laws. At some point, you realize that it's not waddling and quacking so it's not a duck anymore.
Sascha: Exactly, and this is why I say our legislation regulatory structures are so far behind the times. At the same time, there has been allowed to be this shell game. You go to a telecommunications provider and you're like, "Okay, we're going to regulate you under Title I," and they're like, "I'm not Title I, I'm Title II". A couple of years go by and you say, "Under Title II you have to...," and "We're not Title II, we're an information service". You keep swapping around until it's like what rules and regulations.
There has been a lack of leadership to say, "No, you have to make a decision and stick with it, and you're going to be regulated based on these sets of parameters". You need that because the market needs a surety, but you also need it because otherwise, you end up with no meaningful regulation whatsoever. The disaster is in our falling penetration ratings amongst other industrialized nations, and the increased costs that we each pay for megabits per second of connectivity, through utter decimation of our information economy vis-a-vie other countries around the globe.
Audience 2: Sascha, I just want to say thank you. These are very wise words and every one sits deeply in my aging bosom. [Laughter] I would urge everybody to listen to this because whatever else we heard yesterday, we will hear today. We are talking about what I regard as a seismic battle between the interests and freedoms of us, as humans, to converse and powers and interests that would try to stop that.
I remember when Tony Blair came in. There was the same fresh hope, and so forth, [laughter] and that this was going to be a change. I want to caution you because Barack Obama is indeed a new, fresh face. I have hope, but I remember within a couple of months, I was asked by the then new Minister of Telecommunications, to sit with her, alone, no officials, and she said, "Malcolm, what do I do? What do I do to open up this broadband thing? You have this vision for open access and so forth. What do I need to do?"
I said, "Minister, you are not going to like this, but I want you to promise me that you will do nothing." She said, "Nothing, what do you mean by nothing?" I said, "I want you to make sure that when any vested interest goes and knocks on the door of Tony Blair, and says, 'This man, Matson and this crazy open access initiative he has in this town or that town is ruining our business,' I want you to promise me that Tony Blair will say, 'Go away, I don't want to hear.'" She said, "I can't do that, can I? There are thousands of jobs and so forth".
I just wonder whether the greatest contribution to bringing about this change is that we realize that as history teaches us, that revolutions start at the grass roots. You know that and I know that. If we only have one or two exemplars, which can then inform and enforce the power of the citizenship upon the regulation, I think we will get there more quickly. I don't want to be critical, but I would hate to see you go native as a result of spending too much time with those people in Washington. [Laughter]
Sascha: Thanks Malcolm. I too fear going native. There is a certain psychosis of the mind that I think grips you. It's like Alzheimer's of some wacked out sort. Today, unfortunately, I think we don't have the ability to do nothing any longer. Things have gotten so bad; we are so stuck in the mire.
This is what scares me. I was meeting with Michael Kopps, who is the interim Chairman of the FCC, last week. I was like, "Great, Michael Kopps has been this huge advocate for all sorts of institutional change". He has already reaped some important changes at the FCC, opening things up, and adding more transparency.
What it came down to is we had sort of an agenda of all these different things that he had talked about, supported publically, and was very interested in. We were like, "What's going on with all of these different areas?" He said, "Well, I'm interim Chairman, and my job here is to really stay the course and to make room for the next Chairman," who I believe has just been publically announced, Julius Janikowski.
That's fine, if it's going to be a week or two weeks or a month. But, due to the politics and psychosis in D.C., we could be looking at Michael Kopps being there through the summer. Now, several months could pass, and it could be a transition that already dates back a few months. We could have a half-year period where nothing meaningful or no innovative comes out of the FCC. That's a huge danger.
It's a huge danger because all the other parts of these systems are staying still. No one is taking a breather and it's like, "Time out, nobody do anything". There are huge forces being brought to bear on a lot of the biggest telecommunications battles. People are entrenching themselves and it will be that much more difficult to affect much needed change, down the road.
Audience 3: I also go visit Congress in the U.S. In the last election, we went from one scientist and two engineers in Congress to one scientist and one engineer in Congress. You're a policy person, not an engineer. What can we do to help? How can we help educate? It's good when you get the legislative assistants; they're twenty-two or twenty-three years old, with a degree in biology. They have the portfolio for the congressmen for technology.
A lot of it is that they don't know. When someone comes in and says, "We've been providing emergency services for the past 125 years. You wouldn't want your constituents to not have this ultra reliable, provided by copper, emergency services. And we come in and say, "There are alternatives". How can we help?
Sascha: First of all, you're exactly right. Congress is actually ruled by the twenty-something year old class. Unfortunately, I wish they just had the telecommunications portfolio, but usually they're environment education, Medicare, oh and technology. It's like one guy, or gal and she's like, "I have fifteen minutes for understanding telecommunications in the last 150 years, go" [laughs].
This is the unfortunate reality of Washington, D.C. The most important thing that folks can do is to find allies that are in the muck, on a daily basis, and work with them. I now run the Open Technology Initiative, at my foundation. We're working to reach out and find those folks with on the ground knowledge and build bridges and bring them to D.C., and to learn from all of you. It's one of the reasons I wanted to spend so much time on Q&A. Because these connections are vitally important.
What we don't know, in D.C., is astounding. But, it never stops us from making decisions. The more information flow we can get going between all of you and your allies, friends, and compatriots, and all of us who know how to take that knowledge; translate it when it needs translating; and put it in front of the correct people - D.C. is this labyrinth of complexity of enigmas of riddles - it's impossible to fully comprehend how things work unless you're in there. It starts infecting your brain and all that other stuff. We should talk and communicate. My contact information is all over the place, and I'm one of most easily found people to get in contact with on the Web. Thank you for that question.
Chair: I didn't see any other question there, so I'm going to throw in my own little question there because I have a mic. Combining some of the comments there on revolution starts at the grass root level, and combining what can we all do to help, another thing to be thinking about is how much education you're doing in your own community, with your actual peers.
I just moved into a new house, and my wife is utterly insistent that we pay for a landline, for no other reason than we can call 911 in the event of an emergency. My belief is that if an emergency is so bad, my land line goes down before my cell phone goes down. That's my belief. We have those debates. I've gone out and educated her on things, and hopefully she can tell some other person.
Another quick story; I share an office with another company. They decided they want phone lines at every desk. They called, I'm assuming AT&T, and they pay $500 a month for 8 phones lines. The neighboring office to us hooked up an Asterisk server, got some basic thing; they pay $20 a month and they have as many phones as they want set up in their office.
We told our office mates this. We said, "Hey guys, you're kind of overspending by about $6,000 a year. It's been three months, and they haven't changed their phone service, yet. A lot of the things we could do to inspire the change that's going to help these people at the level, well above us, is getting the word out there and getting a lot more grumpy people annoyed at their phone companies for more than just bad service, but really wanting to have change happen. I'm just planting that seed for you all.
Audience 4: This is less a policy question and more of a conversation I had about seven years ago, with a colleague, Scott Petrack. What I don't understand is why we all have highways that are paid for by our tax dollars, yet there is not ubiquitous access to my home. I'm not talking about computers. You have to buy your own car. The fact that we still have to pay - and I think part of getting over the media control of everything is just the cost of simple connectivity. I think a very important policy that would be wonderful, if Obama took it upon himself, would be - they talk about homes for everybody. How about just basic connectivity so every little kid, who knows where, can contribute? I think that's an important step.
Sascha: That's a great point; it really goes to the heart of what it means to live in a civil society in the twenty-first century. We have highways, parks, landscaping; we have schools and primary education. We have fire service and police, all these sorts of different elements of what it means to live in a society, today.
Communication is a fundamental human right. It's like Article XVIIII of the International Declaration of Human Rights. Everyone has the right to communicate. Yet we, as a society, haven't figured out yet that this is vitally important to the health of our democracy. I think it's finally dawning. We no longer have an FCC Chair. Michael Powell is talking about the Mercedes divide. We no longer think, "Oh, broadband, that's this elite thing, this big diamond bling". We actually need this in our everyday lives.
I wrote an editorial for The Guardian, that talks about this exact issue. I'm sure if you Google my name and Guardian, it will pop right up. It talks about what it really means to live in a civil society, how is it possible that we don't make this a priority in today's day and age. Thank you.
Audience 5: There is a universal service obligation around phone systems. Isn't it time listening [0:04:12.9 unclear] arguments to change this universal service obligation, to say, "Okay, everyone has the right of 100 Mb Internet connection?" Why not go in that way?
Sascha: I agree. I'd love to see it happen. I'm working to help make that happen. Unfortunately, it will only happen once there is enough demand aggregation.
Audience 5: Keep on trying.
Sascha: Come join me.
Audience 6: If I may, especially when you put it that way, AT&T will love you. We will collect taxes so we can pay AT&T to make sure you get a 100 Mb pipe that might have 12 or 13 Mb of through put, but they're going to love it.
Audience 5: I have my doubts that they can fulfill that.
Chair: We just have a little bit of time left, and one more question over here.
Sascha: This was the rationale behind the Universal Service Fund, in its beginning. What people forget is that when we were doing this sort of mega-monopoly of AT&T, and had Universal Service Fund enriching this one company, they also had, by law, a mandate of 7.5% profit cap. That was done because it was understood that without that profit cap, you would have corporate excesses and malfeasance, etc. It at least helped curb the worst components of that. That was the idea. I'm actually less concerned about specific business models and much more interested in the outcomes and on the ground realities. e do have to be cognizant of the interplay between public subsidies and corporate and private enrichment.
Audience 7: In your last 19 seconds, could you outline your top three priorities, in terms of policy?
Sascha: Sure, in terms of policy, I'm looking for opening up the public airwaves, and government spectrum. I'm looking for utilizing open technologies to lower the costs, lower the transaction costs, to disintermediate all these technologies. I'm looking to expand the number of folks working in D.C. on these issues to include people like you. Thank you.
