[258] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Spectrum: Why Google is Right,
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (privacy@vortex.com)
Mon Jul 23 11:47:37 2007
Message-Id: <200707231446.l6NEkPmq024021@chrome.vortex.com>
To: privacy-list@vortex.com
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2007 07:46:24 -0700
From: privacy@vortex.com
Reply-To: PRIVACY Forum Digest mailing list <privacy@vortex.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Errors-To: privacy-bounces+privacy-forum=mit.edu@vortex.com
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
[ The outcome of battles related to both Network Neutrality
and Spectrum Auctions, by virtue of their impacts on hardware,
software, and operational characteristics/limitations, are
likely to have immense privacy implications. -- Lauren ]
Spectrum: Why Google is Right, and the Phone Companies are So Very Wrong
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000262.html
"And there's another thing that's going to come as a
surprise to you. There are quite a few people who
actually dislike The Phone Company."
Arlington Hewes -- President of "TPC"
"The President's Analyst" (1967)
Greetings. My first real exposure to how The Phone Company manipulates
information (that is, lies) to further its own ends came when I was
around twenty years old or so, at the height of "Phone Phreaking"
decades ago.
I found myself in a downtown L.A. conference room of the California
Public Utilities Commission, defending the operations of the
extremely popular free telephone entertainment (i.e. jokes and
skits) line with which I was affiliated. (For telephone historians,
this was "ZZZZZZ" -- at the time the last listing in the Los Angeles
telephone directories.)
Two young colleagues and I faced off a similar number of AT&T
representatives, who were attempting to convince the CPUC that "Z"
was an imminent danger to the formidable Bell System, by virtue of
"Z" receiving so many calls that it was supposedly saturating toll
and local switching equipment around the country! AT&T had prepared
a beautiful report explaining their collected data (complete with
colorful graphs, reminiscent of Arlo Guthrie's "twenty-seven 8x10
color glossy photos" from "Alice's Restaurant") to drive home their
point.
AT&T apparently assumed that they could easily steamroll a few kids.
They were wrong.
It only took a quick skimming of their report for me to realize that
while their numbers were not unreasonable, their underlying
assumptions and arguments were totally bogus. As I politely pointed
this out, the AT&T reps looked at each other in apparent confusion,
and the CPUC official in attendance seemed to have a grim look on
her face.
The upshot was that she told AT&T that their case was not convincing
and "Z" would not be shut down. There's more to the story but that
doesn't really matter here.
Fast forward some three decades. Thanks to consolidation and collapse
of most effective "last mile" telecom competition, the players look
much the same. AT&T morphed into ... well, "The New AT&T," in much
the same way that "It's not the same old line" General Telephone
eventually mutated into Verizon.
Telecom control is still the name of the game, and whatever needs to
be said, whatever promises can be made that can be ignored later,
are still the modus operandi of choice for the telcos, especially
now that wireless operations are such crucial parts of their spheres.
There is a common thread underlying telco arguments against both
Google's support of Internet Net Neutrality and Google's Spectrum
Auction proposals. That thread is fear -- fear of losing control,
fear of real competition -- and the fear of sliding into gradual
oblivion through a tactical error, much as Western Union made when
they declined the opportunity to buy the basic telephone patents in
1876 at a budget price.
No fallacy or pressure is too small -- or large -- to be deployed by
the phone companies in this battle. Younger readers will not
remember a time when you couldn't legally buy your own telephones or
other equipment to hook up to the public phone network, and when the
telephone companies actively checked phone lines to determine how
many phones were attached (could this surveillance be defeated? Yes.)
Nor do most people realize today that at one time, AT&T insisted
that a simple privacy device that slipped over a telephone mouthpiece
would cause grave disruption to telephone operations and so must be
banned -- a position the FCC at the time supported (the infamous
"Hush-a-Phone" case, decided against AT&T and the FCC in 1956).
The latest technique is to either state or imply that simply because
a large, powerful company like Google supports a concept like
Network Neutrality or "open access" to spectrum, it must be
anti-consumer in some manner. But in reality, it's the traditional
telephone companies and their positions, especially when considered
alongside their sordid history of failing to live up to agreements,
that is the anti-consumer side.
The Google positions on these matters could of course financially
benefit Google greatly. So what? Both neutrality and open networks
would also be of immense benefits to consumers generally,
particularly if provisions were included to guarantee reasonable
access for innovative, smaller firms as well as established, larger
enterprises.
But the telcos are what the telcos always have been, and their basic
playbook hasn't changed since the dawn of first voice and then data
communications. Unfortunately, on the big issues such as we're
dealing with now, they are simply not to be trusted, and their
arguments can only be viewed through the prism of their past
inequities.
I'm not an apologist for Google. I simply attempt to understand and
explain these issues the best that I can. But as far as I'm
concerned, even though the phone companies and Google are all major
commercial, profit-making enterprises, I have no difficulty at all
in suggesting that from both consumer and technological reality
points of view, Google has the right approach in these areas, and
the phone companies are, in actuality, indeed still giving
us the same old tired and distorted anti-consumer lines.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com or lauren@pfir.org
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Co-Founder, PFIR
- People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
Co-Founder, IOIC
- International Open Internet Coalition - http://www.ioic.net
Founder, CIFIP
- California Initiative For Internet Privacy - http://www.cifip.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
_______________________________________________
privacy mailing list
http://lists.vortex.com/mailman/listinfo/privacy
