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November 25, 2003

FCC VOIP Forum agenda

The FCC has posted the agenda for the December 1 VOIP Forum. I'm on the first of two panels.

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November 24, 2003

Riding the rails

I'm trainblogging on the way up to Boston, where I'll be speaking this
evening, then doing a few meetings tomorrow.  With the option of
using my Treo 600 as a modem, I now have pretty ubiquitous
connectivity, and to quote McDonalds, I'm lovin' it!

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November 21, 2003

NTIA spectrum event

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which managed government spectrum, is holding a forum on
spectrum policy on December 9, with other events planned in January and
February.  This is part of the Bush Administration's spectrum task
force initiative, launched in June.

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November 20, 2003

Upcoming events in DC

I'm participating in two events in Washington, DC in two weeks that might be of interest to readers of this blog.

First, I've been invited to speak at the FCC's Voice Over IP Forum
on December 1.  This will be an important event for the future of
the VOIP industry.  Several states are already trying to impose
traditional telephone regulation on VOIP services.  The FCC needs
to address this issue at the federal level, and spell out a clear set
of rules that allow VOIP innovation to occur without unnecessary
uncertainty or regulation.

Second, the New America Foundation and Public Knowledge are holding a conference on December 4 entitled "Shared Airwaves, Shared Content." 
They will be releasing a spectrum policy paper I've written called
"Radio Revolution." George Gilder will give the keynote, and Mike
Godwin of Public Knowledge will also be releasing a paper on digital
rights management. 

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November 19, 2003

Verizon admits voice is just an application

Lawrence
Babbio, vice-chairman of Verizon, announced that the telco would start
offering voice over IP to its DSL customers next year:

"VoIP for the mass market is coming," said Babbio, "and just like with LNP (local number portability) there is nothing anybody can do to stop it." Babbio said Verizon would be very aggressive in meeting or beating the pricing of any consumer VoIP service. The company is currently planning a two phase strategy. Phase One, beginning in Q2 2004, will be a non-QoS consumer VoIP offering that will be positioned as a second line service for DSL users. Verizon will either outsource the service or build the application itself. They will offer several plans for local/LD/international calling, as well as free on-net calling. It will also include numerous Web-based features, such as a voice portal, voice-dialing, web-based voicemail, and address book integration. Phase Two, beginning in Q4 2004, will be a managed network, QoS-based VoIP service designed to meet Verizon's traditional wireline quality standards.

This follows similar announcements by other Bells, though I haven't seen this much detail before.  What's interesting is that Verizon is evolving toward a DSL and wireless company, rather than a wireline phone company.  VOIP will be a way to sell DSL, just as Verizon's WiFi hotspots at payphones are a way to sell DSL.  And with number portability, an increasing percentage of Verizon customers will use a mobile phone for their primary line. 

This is absolutely the right transition for a company like Verizon to
make, though it will be difficult to pull off.  Many of us have
long intoned the mantra that "voice is just another application on
converged data networks."  We're finally seeing it happen big
time. 

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Economic impacts of broadband

The Broadband Industry Group, a coalition of ISPs in the UK, has released a report suggesting
that widespread competitive provision of broadband would add ₤22
billion (about $40 billion) to the British economy by 2015.

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November 18, 2003

The Triumph of Good Enough

My latest column for The Feature, on converged mobile devices.

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November 17, 2003

Knowledge Navigator: a walk down memory lane

A speaker just played Apple's famous Knowledge Navigator video from
1987, projecting the personal computer of 2010.

What struck me
was the slide listing the projected hardware specs: a 40GHz processor,
a 120GB hard drive, wireless connectivity, and a 1GB portable optical
storage device. Other than the processor, all of that is readily
available today, and we should have 40GHz CPUs well before 2010.


On the other hand, the humanistic user interface in the Knowledge
Navigator video seems as far off as ever. We should keep that in
mind when we project out new applications and services based on
technological capabilities.

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A hotspot in my pocket

I'm at a workshop at a conference center with no WiFi.  The
alleged reason is that we're "somewhere close to" the National Security
Agency headquarters in Fort Meade, MD. 

The good news is that I'm able to get online via my Treo.  Using a utility called PDANet, I just plug the phone into my laptop, click a button, and I'm online over Sprint's CDMA network at 96.6kbps. 

These days, I expect a WiFi connection wherever I go.  But the
reality is that hotspots are far from ubiquitous, even in major cities
and high-traffic locations in the US.  The cellular network,
through a powerful device like the Treo, provides an ideal fill-in
mechanism for near-ubiquitous connectivity.

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November 15, 2003

Burning the midnight oil

I've...been...working...on...a...weblog...

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November 13, 2003

For my next Treo trick....

This is just too cool.  I'm listening to streaming Internet radio
stations on my phone.  It's a true emergent service, a brilliant
illustration of the end-to-end principle at work:

MP3 files --> Shoutcast --> SprintPCS network -- > Pocket Tunes on my Treo

And it just works.  I click on a link, it loads, it plays. 

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Two Cheers for More Unlicensed Spectrum

As expected, the FCC approved an
additional 255 MHz of spectrum in the 5 GHz range for unlicensed
wireless devices.  This was the result of a deal several months
ago between major technology companies and the military, which uses the
spectrum for some of its radar systems. 

The additional spectrum is very welcome.  It's a credit to Michael
Powell that he has taken concrete steps to facilitate the growth of
unlicensed wireless networks, with his support of WiFi, ultra-wideband,
and now this step. 

However, there are two elements of the FCC's action that are
troubling.  The first is that the technical standards for the band
were determined through a private negotation.  A compromise with
the military was necessary to free up the spectrum, and it was an
accomplishment to get any agreement at all.  However, because a
few large companies essentially represented the private sector in the
negotiations, it's not clear whether the standards adopted will allow
for development of innovative new services.  "Open spectrum"
advocates such as David Reed have expressed serious reservations that
the FCC's limitations will hamstring the new band.

The second concern is that this allocation will be seen as sufficient
for the full potential of unlicensed to be realized, especially
last-mile broadband.  Even without the FCC technical limitations,
it's important to note that this is high-frequency spectrum. 
Radio waves at 5 GHz don't propagate long distances or penetrate
obstacles well.  The new bandwidth will improve capacity for
802.11a wireless LANs, but but it may not be effective for the
longer-range scenarios that broadband to the home entails. 

So let's congratulate the FCC for what it's done, but not pretend
they've done everything they should.  The battle for open spectrum
continues!

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The other Werbach

For those of you in San Francisco, yes, the environmentalist Adam Werbach who was appointed to the public utilities commission
by the acting mayor (provoking outrage from the real mayor, Willie
Brown) is my brother.  He's the interesting one in the family.

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Where Joan Krok's money is going

I just got interviewed for an NPR segment on voice over IP, which should run tonight on the "Marketplace" show.

UPDATE: The RealAudio stream is here.

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November 12, 2003

Is VOIP Regulation a Done Deal?

David Isenberg thinks
the FCC has already decided how to regulate Internet telephony, based
on some comments from former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt and a letter by
current FCC Chairman Michael Powell.  I'm not convinced.

Not necessarily contracting anything Reed apparently said, but here are a few points:


I remember when I received the ACTA petition to regulate VOIP back in
1996.  As a matter of course, the FCC puts petitions for
rulemaking on public notice, and we did so in that case.  There
was a huge outcry in the VOIP community that the speed of the public
notice meant the FCC was rushing to regulate.  Well, it has been
seven plus years since then, and five years sine the FCC's "Stevens
Report" on VOIP.  From the beginning it was clear there was a hard
issue to address about the impact of VOIP on Universal Service. 
What's nefarious about the FCC finally taking on that issue in a public
proceeding?

As to whether the Commission has already made its mind up about what it
plans to do, that's a fair question.  The Chairman certainly went
into the media ownership and Triennial Review proceedings with a clear
point of view.  This time I'm not so sure.  Powell made a
point to stop by the FCC's Technological Advisory Council last month to
ask for help in figuring out what to do about VOIP.  There's
nothing in his prior record that suggests he's hell-bent on regulating
the new technology like the old. 

I personally believe the FCC needs to take action on VOIP, in order to
eliminate regulatory uncertainty.  They emphatically should not
impose the litany of traditional telecom regulation, including
universal service obligations, on all forms of VOIP.  The best way
to avoid that happening in the future is for the current Commission to
draw some bright lines, rather than pretend the issue will go
away. 

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WiFi and the Web

Intel's Sean Maloney compares WiFi to the Web:

The first time I saw a browser was 1992. It was like science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke's line, "Any good technology is indistinguishable from magic."

You get the same feeling when you first use broadband wireless. Sitting in San Francisco International Airport, watching rugby on my notebook computer and synchronizing my Intel Outlook e-mail at warp speed is a magical experience. I used to spend an hour and a half or two hours a day futzing around, synchronizing my e-mail, as do so many road warriors. Now (snaps his fingers), it happens like that. It's magical.

The era now does have analogies to 1994. You know that there is too much hype. On the other hand, you know that it is going to change everything.

Exactly right.  The irrational exuberance is there, and the uncertainty about where the killer apps will emerge, but underneath is something real and lasting.

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November 11, 2003

A government-controlled Internet?

Scary news from a Financial Times article about the upcoming UN World Summit on the Information Society.  As feared, the event is being used to push for government control of the Internet.  The failings of "non-governmental" ICANN in managing the domain name system are being cited in support of this position.
"Critics argue that the Internet is a public resource and should be managed by national governments at an international level, by a body such as the International Telecommunications Union. Defenders of the status quo, namely the United States and the European Commission, claim that government control could stifle the free flow of information and ideas. These arguments seem to be losing ground to new challenges, such as spam, privacy and security issues, hate speech and child pornography, which may require international regulation and enforcement."  (via Dewayne-Net)


A big reason for the chain of
events that led to ICANN being created was to prevent just this sort of
governmental takeover.  ICANN making a mess of things could have
been expected.  What surprises me is the pressure for government
control to respond to issues like spam and inappropriate content. 
Even in the US, there are an increasing number of voices in the private
sector making this argument.  I don't think they understand the
Pandora's Box they are opening up.

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Number portability and the telco death spiral

The
FCC's decision to require local number portability between wired and
wireless phones by November 24 could have a mjaor impact on the telecom
industry.  According to the New York Times:

"Industry analysts estimate that 3 percent to 7 percent of telephone users - or 4.5 million to 10.5 million people - no longer have traditional land-line phones and rely on cellphone services exclusively. As many as 15 percent of mobile phone users said they would consider abandoning their traditional phone service and moving to exclusively mobile service, according to a survey taken last spring by the Yankee Group, a market research firm."

If 15% of customers really do turn off their landline phone service in the next few years, the impact on the local exchange carriers would be dramatic.  Back of the envelope numbers:
$5.4 billion is a big number.  And it might be a serious understatement, because those most likely to switch are the most active customers, who buy the extremely high-margin value-added services like voicemail and caller ID.  When all's said and done, the local telcos could be looking at a $10 billion revenue hit, targeted at their most profitable offerings. 

And we're not even talking about VOIP yet.

I have to say, Verizon's decision to brand both its wireliness and
wireline businesses under the same name is looking very wise right
now. 

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November 10, 2003

We must close the grid computing gap!

According to a New York Times article,
the leading technology companies in grid computing are IBM, HP, and
Sun, plus startups such as United Devices.  One could also add
Avaki, Entropia, DataSynapse, and Platform Computing to those mentioned. 

Every one of these companies is based in North America.  Other
than Platform, they are all based in the US.  So explain to me
why the Times' headline is "Europe Exceeds U.S. in Refining Grid Computing"?  I must be missing something.


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Telepocalypse Nails It x 2

Martin Geddes, who works for an unnamed big telco, has a fabulous blog
called Telepocalypse that I've linked to a few times already.  Two
of his posts last week deserve broader distribution.

One gives the best explanation for something I've only had an incohate conviction about: the importance of ENUM to the future evolution of the convergence of telecom and the Internet.

The other post gives a numerical illustration
of another point I've been making for a while: the yawning revenue gap
between the current voice-dominated industry of circuit-switched
telephony, and the future converged industry of packet data.  As
Martin recognizes, the numbers don't add up.

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Michael Powell's radical spectrum policies

Sarah Lai Stirland has an article in the Seattle Times
about Michael Powell and spectrum policy.  A good overview, which
quotes a recent paper I co-wrote with Greg Staple, a Washington telecom
attorney.  The current version isn't available online, but
derivatives will be published soon in ABA Communications Lawyer and IEEE Spectrum.

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All men are Socrates

Tim Bray, co-creator of XML and a member of the World Wide Web Consortium's Technical Advisory Group, weighs in responding to Clay Shirky's attack on
the Semantic Web.  He admits he is not a total supporter of Tim
Berners-Lee's Semantic Web vision, but tries to defend a less ambitious
version of the idea.  Yet he inadvertantly proves Clay's
point. 

Here's Tim's argument about why the Semantic Web would actually be useful:

"Right now, if I hear of some company by name (for example, let’s imagine a
company called “Example Corporation”) I know that if I stick
www. in front of the name and .com after it, then I
can point a web browser at www.example.com and find out a bunch
of stuff...."


"So imagine that given any www.example.com, I could count on
there also being a data.example.com, which would typically have
all these facts available in some straightforward XML dialect, so that I
could use a program to do the tedious basic factfinding work."


What Tim wants would indeed be useful.  It's the equivalent for
corporate Websites of the ancillary information that can be gleaned
from personal Weblogs: who the author is, who his or her friends are,
and whether there's an RSS syndication feed for the blog.  As Clay
points out, though, the Weblog community has actually solved this
problem.  Not through the Semantic Web, but through clever
hacks.  The one for personal information is FOAF,
and the one for syndication feeds is RSS autodiscovery.  As Clay
notes, autodiscovery is widely adopted depite the lack of any formal
standards work:

"The real lesson of RSS autodiscovery is that developers can create valuable meta-data without needing any of the trappings of the Semantic Web. Were the whole effort to be shelved tomorrow, successes like RSS autodiscovery would not be affected in the slightest."
Tim Bray makes the valid point that betting against Tim Berners-Lee is dangerous.  After all, hypertext was also considered a formalistic failure before the Web.  But here's the difference.  Web hypertext caught on because it was a lightweight solution to a real problem: There was all sorts of content on the Internet but no flexible mechanism to link it together and annotate it.  Proponents of the Semantic Web, are still trying to invent problems to fit their solutions.  When true pain points arise, like RSS autodiscovery, developers come up with quick-and-dirty solutions. 

In a similar vein, I've spoken with several venture capitalists recently about Technorati and Feedster,
two aggregation services for RSS feeds.  The VCs see the buzz
around blogs, syndication, and social networking.  Yet they can't
figure out function the aggregation services provide.  The best
argument I've been able to come up with is the following: Technorati
and Feedster are on the path to the Semantic Web that actually
works.  They are attacking a very big problem -- the
machine-readable Web -- by addressing small problems that are real and
immediate. 



(The title of this post, BTW, is an
old illustration of the problem with syllogisms.  Clay's main
critique of the Semantic Web is that it relies on such formal logic,
which maps poorly to the real world.  The joke goes: "Socrates was
a man.  All men are mortal.  Therefore, all men are Socrates!)

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November 7, 2003

Arnold Kling gets mad at Jack Valenti

Arnold doesn't like the broadcast flag requirement recently adopted by the FCC. His solution:

"Another subsidy that "free TV" enjoys is the allocation of spectrum. I
hereby declare that subsidy null and void. I am announcing the Jack
Valenti Spectrum Re-allocation. As of November 4, 2003, the spectrum
that was allocated for HDTV is now allocated for spread-spectrum wireless."


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FCC VOIP proceeding

CommsDesign:

"The
Federal Communications Commission said Thursday (Nov. 6) it has
scheduled a Dec. 1 hearing on regulatory issues raised by the emerging
voice technology. Shortly after the forum, FCC officials said, the
agency will launch a review into the migration of voice services to
IP-based networks."

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Google Constellation?

Some of you may remember a product from Netscape around 1997 called
Constellation. This was back in the days when Netscape was riding high,
having rejected a huge buyout offer from Microsoft.  Constellation
was a frontal assault on the Windows franchise -- an attempt to make
the browser the primary interface for accessing files and
applications.  Microsoft responded with various mechanisms to put
Web content on the Windows desktop, and tightly integrated Internet
Explorer into Windows.  Of course, Contellation failed, Netscape
lost its browser lead, and the company was never heard from
again.  (Well, maybe that's an exaggeration, but you get the idea.)

So what to make of Google Deskbar. 
In an eerily parallel development, Google reportedly rejected a $10
billion buyout offer from Microsoft, and is now launching a product
that puts Google directly onto the Windows desktop.  Google's
executives are much wiser that Netscape's, so you don't hear any
sabre-rattling about how they are going to crush Windows.  Google
CEO Eric Schmidt has been at two companies -- Sun and Novell -- that
bore the brunt of successful Microsoft assaults, so you can bet he
understands the game he's paying. 

Perhaps Google has to go after Windows, or be a sitting duck when
Microsoft comes after its search franchise.  That's clearly what
Microsoft intends.  With its extraordinary financial and research
assets, Microsoft can close the technical gap with Google's search
engine.  Whether it can overcome Google's mindshare is another
question. 

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November 6, 2003

The missing piece for wireless is... wireless

TelephonyOnline: "Cometa intends to test WiMAX in a backhaul role in early 2004 in its initial commercial market of Seattle, Weis said."
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November 5, 2003

The first VOIP telco

VC Fred Wilson announces that
ITXC, Tom Evslin's VOIP backbone company, is merging with Teleglobe to
form the world's third largest long-distance company.  This is a
significant development.  Like several of us, Tom recognized years
ago that VOIP was the future of the telephone business, but he actually
did something to make it happen.  I have great respect for both
Fred and Tom, so it's nice to see them succeeding.

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November 4, 2003

VOIP regulatory developments

Two interesting nuggets in this article.  Qwest plans to offer retail VOIP in Minnesota, and the FCC will hold a VOIP roundtable on December 1.

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November 3, 2003

Alternative compensation systems for digital media

John Palfrey of the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School provides an excellent overview of proposed compulsory license mechanisms for digital music: 

"These proposals suppose that the copyright system currently used in the United States, Europe, and many other countries, to stimulate and reward the development of digital content would be replaced by a system in which the creators and producers of such content were compensated by governments in proportion to the frequency with which their products were consumed."
The folks at Berkman, which just received a substantial grant from the MacArthur Foundation to explore such "alternative compensation systems," are to be complimented for their honesty.  These are mechanisms for governments to subsidize musicians by taxing ISPs.  I think that's a bad idea.  Why not subsidize bloggers who create popular posts?  Or creators of popular shareware?  Or great CSS templates?  Let's all get on the gravy train! 

I just hope the meeting at Berkman on December 5
includes opponents as well as proponents of these compensation
systems.  They are worth debating and exploring, but it's wrong to
position them as the only alternative to the status quo of RIAA
lawsuits against file sharers.


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One word, and it's not "plastics"

John Edwards, guest-blogging at Lessig.org:

I'll close with a word about just one technology: wireless. I see a lot of wireless as I campaign--from the farms of Iowa to the classrooms at Dartmouth. At the Rock the Vote debate tomorrow, we’re going to be getting questions by wireless.  Right now, "Wi-Fi" is offering mobility and encouraging affordable broadband in places that wouldn’t have it otherwise.  But the FCC could do more to encourage wireless --with market reforms that get rid of outdated license constraints and free up more unused spectrum for sharing.  At the same time, no company should be getting exclusive rights to the airwaves for free.  We've seen enough corporate giveaways already.

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Media and the limits of markets

Jeff Jarvis is all worked up
about Larry Lessig's and Mark Cooper's crusade against media
concentration.  Take a deep breath, Jeff.  Cooper's book
makes a traditional liberal argument that the media business is too
important for democracy to be left to market forces.  As someone
in the media business, Jeff understandably recoils against this
position.  He's right that there is more than a hint of
paternalism in the argument.  (On the other hand, for all those
years conservatives were supposedly shut out of the mass media, I
didn't hear them resigning themselves to the market's verdict.) 

Putting that debate aside, I think Jeff is too quick to lump Lessig and
Cooper together.  They agree on the symptoms, but have different
diagnoses of the causes.  Larry is eminently better than me at
expressing his own views (and most other people's views as well). 
Let me just try to explain the distinction.  Lessig doesn't reject
markets; he questions whether markets are in fact operating.  It's
the same story as in copyright, where instead of getting caught up in
what "the market" could produce under current laws, he questions
whether those laws strike the balance that the Constitution
demands. 

When it comes to media ownership, forget about Rupert Murdoch.  At
the core of broadcast media is control over radio spectrum. 
Spectrum allocation has been subject to absolute government management
since 1927.  Whatever industry emerges on top of that base may
bear more or less indicia of a competitive market, but it's never going
to be one.  So instead of debating whether government should be
involved in the media business, let's talk about what shape that
government involvement should take. 

And meanwhile, let's push for a truly radical change: deregulation of wireless communication. 
A true market it media content requires a true market in broadcast
platforms, which requires a true market in wireless devices... aka open
spectrum. 

There's a paper here, which perhaps
I'll have time to write, on the birth of neomodern economics.  Now
if only I didn't waste so much $@#%!$# time blogging....

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A must-read piece [1]

A must-read piece
by Brian Anderson on OpinionJournal.com, on how and why the right is
winning the battle of ideas.  Those of us who aren't conservatives
must do more than get mad.  We must develop long-term strategies
to get even.

"The left has never before had its point of view challenged and its arguments made fun of and shot full of holes on the public stage," concludes social thinker Michael Novak, who has been around long enough to recognize how dramatically things are changing. Hoover Institute fellow Tod Lindberg agrees: "Liberals aren't prepared for real argument," he says. "Elite opinion is no longer univocal. It engages in real argument in real time." New York Times columnist David Brooks even sees the left falling into despair over the new conservative media that have "cohered to form a dazzlingly efficient delivery system that swamps liberal efforts to get their ideas out."


Here's what's likely to happen in the years ahead. Think of the
mainstream liberal media as one sphere and the conservative media as
another. The liberal sphere, which less than a decade ago was still the
media, is still much bigger than the nonliberal one. But the nonliberal
sphere is expanding, encroaching into the liberal sphere, which is both
shrinking and breaking up into much smaller sectarian spheres--one for
blacks, one for Hispanics, one for feminists and so on.


It's hard to imagine that this development won't result in a broader national debate--and a more conservative America.

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MCI and the death of telecom as we know it

Om Malik is all worked up about MCI emerging from bankruptcy and launching a devastating price war.  I say don't worry, be happy. 

There are really only two intellectually honest viewpoints about the
future of the telecom industry.  Om's perspective is on one side,
where the most thoughtful advocate is Eli Noam of
Columbia University.  The argument is that telecom is locked in a
deflationary death spiral, which only the stabilizing influence of
regulators and oligopolies can avert.  Conventional wisdom puts
FCC Chairman Michael Powell in this camp, but I think he's a believer
in the other perspective, where I generally find myself. 

The alternative argument is that the death of the telecom inudstry as
we know it is inevitable, and efforts to pull it out of the tailspin
will only prolong and increase the pain.  Ten years ago, there was
a $200 billion annual business in the US based primarily on charging
usage fees for voice communications.  That's going away. 
Something else may replace it, but it will be a data internetworking
industry with voice as one lucrative application.  The more we
spend our energy pulling back from the brink, the less we focus on
defining what will come out the other side.  And the less we think
the unthinkable and work on making the inevitably painful transition
less painful.  That's what's at stake in the upcoming FCC voice
over IP proceeding, among other places. 

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There's a there there

ENUM and SIP.  Two acronyms that mean nothing unless you're a
Net-savvy telecom geek (like yours truly).  Word to the wise: pay
attention.  These are the bridges between the the world of
telephony and the world of the Internet.  People like Jeff Pulver and James Seng are recognizing that something significant is afoot in the arcane world of network addressing and signaling. 

Voice over IP has been around commercially for at least eight years,
but it's now reaching a critical stage of maturity.  One side is
consumer adoption of services like Vonage and Skype, but that's just
surface activity.  Deep integration on the back end is a more
profound shift.  It's the difference between making a phone call
over the Internet, and voice as an internetworking application. 
Or to put it another way, the different between the Internet as a
subset of telecommunications, and telecommunications as a subset of the
Internet. 

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Here come the meshes

Nortel and several startups are trialing wireless mesh-networking products, typically using 802.11a as a backbone to link meshes 802.11b nodes.  (via Wi-Fi Networking News)  I
assume 802.16 (WiMax) backhaul will be part of the mix as more
standards-compliant chipsets come on the market.  Meshing and
wireless backhaul will take WiFi to the next stage -- from thousands of
purely short-range nodes to larger islands of connectivity.

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Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The relentless cycle of decentralization

Telepocalypse: "The days of Vonage are probably numbered because their own success will cause further arbitrage and disintermediation."
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Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Sour notes at MIT

The story of MIT service designed to allow legal music sharing on
campus has taken an inauspicious turn.  My law school classmate
Jonathan Zittrain, quoted in the New York Times article,
has it right.  The copyright system for music is broken, so
completely broken that not even the experts fully understand the state
of the law.  The legal system is increasingly becoming a battering
ram against any form of innovation involving digital media. 

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Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack