Wired State

I'm Sorry, I Can't Cry About AT&T Selling Terrorism-Related Phone Data to the CIA

AT&T Lobby. Photo by eTombotron.

Everybody complaining about this today like Chris Soghoian and company from the ACLU are leaving out the terrorism part.

The information is NOT the content of your phone call -- the companies don't tape your speech from telephone wires or retain the data from your voice over the Internet.

Heres what it's actually about:

The program adds a new dimension to the debate over government spying and the privacy of communications records, which has been focused on National Security Agency programs in recent months. The disclosure sheds further light on the ties between intelligence officials and communications service providers. And it shows how agencies beyond the N.S.A. use metadata — logs of the date, duration and phone numbers involved in a call, but not the content — to analyze links between people through programs regulated by an inconsistent patchwork of legal standards, procedures and oversight.

Every day, I wake up in the morning and look through the news and think to myself, "Today's the day that maybe I'll be finally convinced that something Snowden has divulged is worrisome, and maybe he's right." As I click on a story every day, whether it is "the one" -- Merkel's phone? Undermining encryption? And every day, I come away saying, "No sale."

At this point, I'm pretty sure, after six months or so of the Snowden thing, that nothing will convince me that he is right and I am wrong -- in fact, more and more information is coming forward that shows him in an increasingly unfavourable light -- like that deception of his co-workers.

Some people think that represents a training from a hostile foreign intelligence like Russia or China. I think it's just like 4chan.

How many zillions of customers have I had in Second Life that wept about their account compromised. Why? They gave their password to a trusted friend or lover or business partner "just for a second" and they stole everything or wrecked everything. Why? Because the scammer told them they would "help" with somehing. Perhaps something broken on their simulator, or something they couldn't figure out to build, or something they couldn't access to remove without permissions or whatever -- some annoyance. And that trusted party would say, "Let me help -- give me your PW for a minute and I'll take a look -- you can change right after I'm done." Famous last words.

I think it's more likely Jacob Appelbaum suggested this to him than Ivan Ivanov from the FSB.

But wait, am I actually saying maybe some day Snowden's revelations *might* convince me?

Yes, truly, I do ask this question, even though I'm one of the greatest antagonists to the entire Snowden Snow Job and all its promoters.

And that's because I think you have to always be your own devil's advocate if you can. Why not? After all, I don't have a stake in the government being right on this. I view the NSA's dragnetting as legitimate, but if it turns out to be, it will only be a secondary issue to the initial dragnetting that is Google, Facebook, etc.

That's why I'm not for forming little guerilla clusters on Twitter and constanting badgering and heckling the opposition but trying to use reasonable arguments with them. To be sure, they'll view ANY critical response as "bullying" and "harassment" because they are paranoid loons. So what? Some are reasonable and it's worth comporting oneself so they can't make a case that, for example, you used their private health tragedies as some form of attack against them.

So I've said no one has come up with a case, so come up with one. Let's say Snowden finally came up with a file on, oh, Code Pink's Medea Benjamin. I definitely have very different views than she does, but I share her concerns about drones and the fact that they are not under military control but CIA control. As much as her whole shtick isn't for me, I wouldn't want her to be persecuted by the government, hounded or harassed, unlawfully put under surveillance. She has a right to dissent and we all depend on her ability to maintain it. Even so, she goes beyond mere freedom of association and expression to "direct action" -- which all the kids and even 1960s types like herself have moved a slider on very duplicitously in our day. They use this oxymoron (Jacob Appelbaum is particularly notorious for this) -- "peaceful direct action."

Direct action is not peaceful. It is not non-violent. It is coercive. It often triggers and provokes vilence (think: Gaza Flotilla). It is not going limp and submitting to arrest; it is blocking traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. It's refusing to disperse when the permit for the march expires. Sorry, it's unlawful and there has to be consequences to such behaviour. Nowadays Occupy and WikiLeaks and Anonymous all howl in rage if they engage in unlawful behaviour -- hacking and blocking real-life streets -- and then whine that they are persecuted and they were only doing "non-violent" activity. Baloney. It is violent because it is coercive. It's not shooting a gun or breaking a window, even, but it provokes the use of force, and that leads to things like the infamous pepper spray cop. Few people realize that the demonstrators not only didn't disperse, they whistled to their friends and put another ring around their sit-in that then blocked the police themselves and traffic. So sorry, that's when the pepper spray comes out.

But... let's say Medea discovers she is a target of surveillance and begins to howl. Should I join her? Well, for one, I don't think that direct-action anti-war activists get to demand absolute privacy and absolute encryption for their anti-state anarchist and radical activity. So I think it's more than fine for the FBI to watch her using open sources, just as I think it's fine for the FBI to watch anti-war.com -- I'm not sharing the pearl-clutching that Spencer Ackerman is showing over some of this. If there was clandestine surveillance of their private life, say, following them at their homes, following them as they associated with friends or family or even had private work meetings, I would say that looks unlawful. But sending a field agent to a public lecture? Of course not. Reading their blogs and reporting on their doings regularly? Of course not. The Southern Poverty Law Center loves to follow extremist movements of the right; it won't do it for the left. So the FBI has to.

As for the CIA, I think following someone who hooks up with Imre Khan in Pakistan and then takes part in an anti-American march that is absolutely uncritical of the Taliban also deserves a look-see. It's a public event, after all. Is there grounds for a wire-tap? No, not that we can see. This is radical activity, but not illegal activity. The "direct action" consists of bursting into hearings and other public meetings and running around with protest signs or big "watching us" glasses. This deserves a disorderly conduct charge or simply an eviction, but doesn't warrant a wire-tap -- and no judge has issued one.

So let's say we found that the NSA hoovered up Medea's metadata -- everyone she called while in Europe or Pakistan. Why? Because she contacted Pakistani Taliban apologists who were being watched by the CIA because they were part of the Taliban milieu. I can't see that I'd object to this legitimate and lawful activity on their part.

But what if the NSA or CIA intercepted the content of all her phone calls and her friends' phone calls without a warrant? That would be unlawful most likelyl. Worse, what if they used that content to stage various annoyances for her -- spread rumours, leaked personal information that might be detrimental to the conservative press, that sort of thing. That's COINTELPRO, that's unlawful.

The people supporting Snowden and absolute encryption don't recognize the right of society and law-enforcement to surveil radicals like Justin Raimondo or Medea Benjamin at all, in any form. But I do. Because they are a threat to all of our freedoms and human rights if they come to power, which they are bent on doing. These are not mere commentators or reformers; they are people who want to bring down the government. They have radical, authoritarian ideologies in the end -- Benjamin doesn't blink about the Taliban and myopically focuses on America; Raimondo is a conspiracy loon. They are entitled to untrammeled freedom of expression and -- by the way -- get it. But they aren't entitled to undemocratically take over by force.  People who run through a hearing on drones or surveillance to "make a point" today maybe just "make a point". But tomorrow, they may get their friends and run through a hearing to shut down the functioning of Congress. I'm not for letting them do that.

Meawhile, everything I see in the CIA and AT&T story sounds fine to me:

o the government request is lawful as it is related to terrorism cases, not "everything"

o when it has overreached, it has been slapped down by the DOJ, and that shows the system works

o there are real cases in which real terrorists are stopped, or the claim is made that they are stopped (Muhtorov). No need to allow another Tsarnaev Brothers story to reoccur.

o selling the data doesn't bother me -- it's work, it's effort, let them pay

o AT&T is often the telecom the geeks love to hate because it's a telecom, antithetical to Google and the Internet companies they prefer. Too bad. It's a good thing there is a separate bastion of telecoms in our society that can stand up to Google.

Call me when you have a case.

No, Your Cell Phone Service Isn't a First Amendment Right

On the day after Sandy touched down in Manhattan and half the city went dark, people clustered around a closed, dark Starbucks cafe simply because the free wireless there was still working and they could still try to use their cell phones. (C) Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

I was reminded of Susan Crawford's lawfaring on behalf of the collectivists and the redistributionists when Katrin Verclas put her in her list of favourite tech women -- a list I challenged not because I'm against women's rights -- I'm all for promoting more women in tech and working on girls' education -- but because it was so fake because the people in the list actually hadn't done real innovation, but just in a few cases, served men who did (i.e. Wikipedia).

I was tipped off to this article of Susan's, Why Cell Phones Went Dead After Hurricane Sandy by a gay Australian who was trying to convince me that we should all give up freedom of speech and freedom of association in America in order to obtain gay rights, i.e. the Boy Scouts, chik-fil-A etc should all be compelled to drop the articulation of their beliefs in public, and should drop any membership requirements they had for their organizations. That's not what I believe will work, and I patiently explained about Supreme Court rulings, concepts of the rule of law, and even the fact that Maryland just got gay marriage passed on the ballot now -- without any publicized fights with chik-fil-A and the Boy Scouts. How about that!

The route to equality lies through the statehouse and getting legislation passed and demonstrating and campaigning for that legislation for equality before the law -- not hate campaigns that urge the removal of other people's rights to freedom of speech. This man said glibly that we should all give up a little of our rights for the sake of the whole society and claimed that's already how society is run. But that's certainly not true -- we don't have to do that and it doesn't lead to the results he imagines.

Some of that collectivist logic is what backs the whole fake "net neutrality" gambit, which is a bid by veteran die-hard anti-copyleftists to convert their long-time struggle to decriminalize piracy -- which consistently failed both in courts and in the public mind -- to a "rights-based" struggle that would claim that there was a "right" to bandwidth that was akin to freedom of speech. Never mind that this positive right was not a negative right (to speak in legal terms); never mind that they never had any idea of how to pay for all that broadband, which is a scarce resource. "Net neutrality" has tended to fail, even when Obama put his fellow collectivists in the FTC and FCC -- whatever gains have been made have not been made for mobile -- and I can only say: good. Go redistribute yourselves  elsewhere, guys.

Fast forward to Verizon, the FCC and Sandy. I'm one of the thousands of people in Manhattan who had no power for 12 days in Flood Zone A -- then got it back, only to lose it again overnight in a transformer fire that forced a new evacuation of the building and no power again. So I truly get this, better than Susan Crawford, who didn't sit like I did in a dark cavernous tower with no light or power, and increasing cold, garbage and presence of rats, hauling buckets of water up the stairs in the dark to try to flush toilets that increasingly wouldn't flush.

Each day, I would trudge uptown 25 blocks to get to the zone where power remained -- and try to find a place not already mobbed by the hipsters to try to charge my phone. It was damn hard. But even when I *did* get my phone charged for a short duration to try to contact my family members, some of whom were spread out in other refuges because it got impossible to live in our building obviously, Verizon wasn't working. That is, it would work sometimes for text messages or for some reason, Twitter. But for what may have been heavier lifting -- email download, voice phone calls -- it just hung and didn't work. Well, as they say, that's life in the big city. I don't view Verizon service as a "right". It's not a utility in the sense that Con Ed -- electricity -- is a utility.

Yet increasingly, people like Crawford are trying to convert cell phone service and Internet provision as utilities like water or electricity or gas, none of which worked during the hurricane blackout.

Are they in fact utilities? Oh, I'm happy to have that debate, but it's a debate that is not automatically solved with socialist solutions. Go back and read about the Tennessee Valley Authority and the break up of Bell Telephone into baby bells and whatever you want to do, but don't tell me that the answer is to make taxpayers pay for the kids to download their Lost episodes, take pictures of themselves hanging out in Starbucks, and gab about how they haven't had a shower. #firstworldproblems

I had to marvel that an entire dorm of healthy, resourced, wealthy kids at NYU preferred to sit in another building to which they were evacuated, sucking up power from a generator to charge all  their gadgets and tapping on their laptops and calling home to whine to Mom and Dad that they had no hot water --instead of forming groups and going out to get the water being delivered at least to fire hydrants and help take it up the many flights of stairs in all the high rises in the projects on the East Side, especially to elderly and disabled. Why did they all cluster and whine and watch music videos and College Humor episodes and try to figure out how far they were willing to hike to get their lattes instead of serving as volunteers?

Anyway...Crawford believes the answer is to regulate those hated telecoms that the geeks all loathe and force Verizon to provide more coverage. In other words, so that I can't just text my dispersed fellow refugee relatives and friends or get tweets from my assemblyman with hard news, but so that I can make voice calls and download attached files in work email as well. Why? This is a test of the emergency system. The emergency system does not include your Lost episode and funny cat pictures, you know?

And even if Twitter and messages didn't work, I would understand. Why? Because this is a company that has to pay huge expenses as it functions. It is facing downing of wires and equipment and towers *itself*. It is doing the best it can to function. Do I really need to subject it to the strain of an entire NYU dormitory or a Starbucks full of hipsters who want to chat and share Instagrams of themselves by downed trees? Do I really need to subject it to the strain of 300 page translations I'm working on or accessing of Russian news videos or Facebook with hard news needed for work? No. It's supposed to be, you know, for communications, first of all for those first responders. This isn't about the First Amendment WHATSOEVER; it's about CONSUMPTION, and about a private company providing services need to regulate CONSUMPTION THEMSELVES.

And so no, I don't think Verizon needs to get regulated so that it is FORCED to provide services to everybody regardless of their CONSUMPTION LEVELS to "enforce" the First Amendment. That's absurd. Crawford, at Harvard, surely gets the difference between negative and positive rights. But she wants to put a heavy spin on the notion of "Congress shall make no law" into a regulatory burden to ensure the means to First Amendment rights are supplied forcibly by the state.

Doesn't she get that this leads to the state restricting speech all over then? You don't put states in charge of your rights. You don't, as this witless Australian told me (who should know better, because the law in his country doesn't work this way), that the state doesn't "give you" the rights to freedom of speech and association -- they are inherent, inviolable, endowed by the Creator (and you don't have to believe in God to understand the inherency of rights in a natural law concept -- but of course, natural law is the last thing that Susan Crawford wants to turn to for refuge.) The objective here is to have states not take away rights, not give them; the objective is to have the state *not take away cell phone service* or Internet access as the state does in Turkmenistan. But that's not what Crawford is talking about; she thinks Verizon should be subsumed under the state and do its bidding. And not even via Congressional legislation or a judicial decision, but a bureaucratic executive branch directive at the FCC or FTC.

Cell phones went dead -- to answer the question Susan poses in the headline -- because Verizon had to make legitimate, needed decisions about how much to serve its customers when its system itself was on both assault and overload. And that's okay. Private companies with public missions still get to do that. If people find -- as they found with some of the regional power companies -- that these private entities did not serve the public, and were shoddy or negligent in their work, then they will demonstrate, call their Congress people, get the companies to change -- as indeed people in my complex are going to be doing with Con Ed and their assemblymen regarding the fact that the transformer in one building was 40 years old and should have been replaced years ago by law.

What you can't do is convert cell phone gabbing, picture taking and exchange, Facebooking, etc. into a similar service provision as water and electricity. Yes, water and electricity are used for frivolous purposes, too -- people take more showers than they need to and use their electricity to do all kinds of things merely for entertainment. But hey, water and electricity don't cost anything near as much as broadband to produce and provide and therefore the costs for the customer are nothing compared to cell phones; nor are they as scarce a resource.

And I'm simply not buying the scarifying over this that comes with earnest NGOs piously intoning that we are all going to face abusive loss of our rights because of the failure to regulate telecoms the way the redistributionists wish to:

This particular lawsuit is just one push in a longer effort by Verizon and the other high-speed Internet-access providers to get immunity from oversight. AT&T Inc., just last week, filed a petition with the FCC seeking wholesale deregulation of its wires. According to Harold Feld of the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, this would make the company immune to all laws promoting consumer protection, competition and universal affordable communications. California became the most recent of more than 20 states to eliminate its authority over digital networks.

Er, immunity from oversight? Or refusal to subject its private business to the whims of redistributionists? Scoffing at the law? Or in fact making private decisions that they are entitled to make in a market in a capitalist system? De-regulation because they are abusive and want to hide from justice? No, de-regulation so that they don't face lawless Bolshevism.

If California eliminated state control over digital networks, I have to wonder if it wasn't for the prudent reason that they needed especially in Silicon Valley to promote innovation and freedom in this sector, not a socialist grab.

Susan Crawford and friends have to get in touch with the fact that CONSUMPTION is the issue here in a marketplace. As much as they try to portray Internet usage as a function of educational access especially for the poor and minorities or even Bibles for religious believers -- they'll stop at nothing to jerk a tear -- the reality is that the kids aren't sitting and learning with Khan videos or studying their math homework but watching Youtube, and the poor and the disabled are merely exchanging the same heavy jpegs of their cats as all of us. The Internet is about entertainment and socializing as much as it is about education and emergency communications, and companies that supply it have the right to reduce its flow in the interests of economy. Sorry, but I'm not going to fight for the right for people to play WoW and send instant videos of their girlfriends in a flood zone. And yet that's EXACTLY what people did in this flood zone, or 10 blocks away from it if they were fortunate to still have power.

 

"Evil ISPs Are Evil"

The little telecom DSL box that controls your world, that gets Google and their fanboyz crazy... Photo (c) by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick.

Paul Venezia has an article about Internet metering on infoworld.com -- and it's a perfect exemplar of the snarky geek's assault on the Internet Service Providers and telecoms and the flogging of the typical Google-lobby arguments against metering or controlling traffic because bandwidth is a scarce resource.

You can tell from the snark and the vitriol dripping from the paragraphs reciting these well-worn geek saws about ISPs are wheeled out not from "science" but "politics".

And the first thing to understand about this politics is that it is a kind of craftsmen class war, if you will, or competing industrial warfare replete with sabotage -- part of which is articles like Venezia's.

GEEK CLASS WARFARE

The first class is the geeks -- computer programmers, Internet engineers, website designers and such -- the people who call themselves "the Internet" when of course, they are only part of the Internet and should know their place better, like gas station attendants and garage mechanics.

The primal need the geeks have is to disguise the cost of themselves to their clients, who are usually not ordinary consumers or end-users, but enterprise, or small business, who have to hire them to run the Internet in their offices or who work in large IT companies supplying the Internet's functioning. Their costs aren't cheap and don't seem to be coming down -- they start at $50 an hour as consultants and as staff they easily command six figures. From the earliest days of the Internet, the programmers had to "liberate" the content of things like newspapers that they wanted to bring over the Internet line to get more people using it because they had to remove from the view the fact that they -- and their machines -- cost a lot to install in an office.

Few offices have ever "saved money" by installing networks and computers. Even if they automate tasks that human clerks used to do, as it has been aptly pointed out by critics more than once, a more expensive programmer or network administrator now replaces some of the cheaper clerks -- and the machines, while they seem to be coming down in cost, seem to replicate like bunnies -- before, it was just a computer on your desk, now it's your laptop and phone that your company might also be paying for -- and someone will justify a tablet as well. All of these -- and their servicing, because they break down all the time -- add thousands and millions of dollars to IT budgets as well as personal expenses and make life more expensive, not less even if "the cost of computers and bandwidth are coming" down as the geek snarks always tell you. They hide the cost of themselves, which is only going up, and the number of their gadgets, which is doubling and tripling.

So this class of people -- I call it the Google lobby because it's Google first and foremost, and then everyone relying on Google products specifically and the Google paradigm of free content and ad revenue -- are very, very keenly interested in making other people pay for their work tools and the highways of their business and not have any more costs than they have to bear already, so they can make more money. They want telephony to be done all over the Internet "for free," as it is on Skype. They find ISPs and telecoms evil, piggy and selfish and even "corporate welfare clients" of the state because they are "in the way" of their vision of an Internet paid for by other people, which they get to use to "innovate on top of" and get paid their consulting or staff fees -- which, as I noted, aren't cheap.

REAL ENGINEERS

Meanwhile, the telecoms are filled with engineers, people who don't have to "build apps" for yet another way to share a song with your girlfriend who are also called engineers, but real engineers who have to actually go out and build towers, string wires, get wireless signals working, and serve individual customers, which geek programmers typically never have to do, or if they do, it is in a business setting where their "customer" is only the person who hired them and supervises them, not even the individual users in the office.

These business and industries have different profiles, cultures, ethos, etc. And they clash because they are selling the same thing: communications for people and increasingly, things. These communications are increasingly penetrating every aspect of life, so that where once it was just a phone, or then it was a phone and fax, now it is phone, fax (things never fall out of use completely), DSL line or other dedicated computer line, smart phone, laptop, tablets -- and then all the things in your home that are starting to be wired and connected to the "Internet of things," about which I have warned.

From the cold perspective of "The Internet" -- the geek bosses who control your connection, ultimately, because they must install it and fix it when it breaks down -- the telecoms are dinosaurs. They should get gone. They don't need to exist any more. Google will get into the phone business, and replace Apple. Voice can all be done over the Internet, and so can everything else.

Except Apple is a huge, powerful, rich force to conjure with, and won't go down easily. While it angers many people that Steve Jobs was hoarding billions of dollars and not hiring people or giving to charity, I can see why he built up this war chest to fight the battle needed with Google. And from the perspective of the consumer, it's a good thing when titans clash, because then they aren't in a totalitarian system under the thumb of only one power, and the titans have to reduce their prices and try to serve customers more or at least be a little mroe responsive to them.

THE 'NET NEUTRALITY' REACTIONARIES

Venezia's arguments are the same one repeated everywhere this discussion surfaces, as it does increasingly in the "net neutrality" wars. I think the very term "net neutrality" is a fake, contrived socialist term that should be changed to "bandwidth consumption management' or something like that to reflect the reality of the technocommunism forces battling for its "free-ness".

Infoworld.com calls Bill Snyder's arguments on this "conservative" and thereby contrasts Venezia then as "progressive," but the reality is, the progressive, socialist approach to the Internet is by far the more reactionary and conservative, based on ideologies of 150 years' vintage that have been disproven by the Soviet and other communist experiments around the world. What's far more modern and advanced is the marketplace where scarce goods are supplied by a free market, not doled out by the state, and people are paid for goods and services and commerce can thrive.

Metered Internet is probably something we will be facing at least in some places, because bandwidth doesn't come out of thin air but requires machines, electricity, people, lines, etc. to provide. Those costs have to be covered, even if geeks want them disguised. Telecoms manage their covering; they pay for them. This fact is something those arguing for "net neutrality" stubbornly ignore, and try to cover up with two arguments:

1. "Telecoms are subsidized and therefore the public should get more out of them." Well, subsidies is just a socialist word -- you could turn it around and call it "incentives". I'd like more numbers on this entire issue, but even if the "government pays for telecoms," it pays for them for a reason: they provide a necessary service, and they provide jobs. The incentive for them to do business, in other words, pays off. They are not welfare clients just sucking down tax-payers' moneys and then demanding more to go the next round; they produce. They are not Google, hijacking content, selling ads against it, and then reluctantly removing it under fire (they took down five million pieces of content last year from DMCA notices!).

That's why the entire notion of "corporate welfare" that the left brandishes in their assault on capitalism is so silly and infantile -- government use of tax-payer funds to incentivize a sector that serves people and provides jobs, including union jobs, can't be the evil the left suggests -- and however we may wish to criticize it as inefficient, it just doesn't compare, when you think of other boon-doggles like Obama's "green job" subsidies that ended in ruin.

And whatever these subsidies, what are they as a percentage of the ISPs overall revenue? And what ways is Google subsidized in its business, in fact, by subsiding ISPs? (That equation is *never* contempalted by the "net neutrality" nerds). And what way is Google also subsidized by states or municipalities supplying free Internet access and or wi-fi and broadband that benefits Google's ad sales business, basically, it's core enterprise?

2. "The Internet is already paid for so telecoms shouldn't charge more for content but let others innovate and build -- they are stifling innovation"

Er, paid for, by telecoms, so they should get to do what they need to do to stay in business. I saw what you did there, Google -- supplying free wi-fi in the New York subway or to entire towns in Kansas, trying to prove you can "do it better". I don't believe you.

INNOVATION IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR TECHNOCOMMUNISM

I've come to see -- especially from reading Fred Wilson's blog -- that "innovation" is just another word for technocommunism. It often involves merely jacking a siphon into the state's pipeline and siphoning off oil or gas -- in a world where AT&T and Verizon play the role of the state. In this case, the Internet is supplied by "somebody else" (the telecoms) and the FourSquares and Twitters and Tumblrs and all the things Fred invests in ride on top of this "for free" while the beneficiaries of the VC cash -- the start-ups -- either live off their VC stipends until they are sold to something bigger and everyone can cash out, or they put in ads and earn ad revenue against the hijacked content of other people, supplied over routes paid for by other people.

In other words, Verizon or Comcast has to hump Twitter or Youtube or Tumbl or Facebook over the "Internetwebs" for free, because their customers demand it, even though they are paying the same costs they paid 10 years ago (I am still paying $37 a month for Verizon DSL). My Internet use -- and my gadgets' Internet use -- is probably 10 times more than it was 10 years ago, but my fee is the same. That's going to have to give -- and I get that, especially because I don't pay any subscription fee for Facebook or Youtube or Twitter, despite heavy photo and video usage, even though I'd be willing to -- if those services then paid for their bandwidth instead of demanding a handout -- like they accuse the telecoms of getting LOL.

Venezia is outraged -- the horror! -- that Verizon might get into the content business the way AOL has, and might charge for either conveying heavier content or supply content of its own for no charge or less charge than those using their highways. But the outrage is entirely misplaced and entirely communist in nature. Why shouldn't a company that paid for the bandwidth and supplies the wires and the gadgets to access it provide a loss leader of content to compete with Netflix, which is siphoning off their gas, so to speak?

After all, um, Google is competing with Netflix now by having a dirt-simple interface over which you can get movies for cheap to see on Google Play. That's what this is all about, people!

THE INTERNET KILLED MY NEIGHBOURHOOD

I have nothing but undying scorn for Netflix. I had a perfectly good video store -- actually, 6 video stores within walking distance, all of them bustling, 4 of them Blockbusters and 2 of them independents -- and all of them were killed by "the Internet" i.e. Netflix. Within a year, when Netflix began delivering over the Internet instead of in mailed packages, they all died, scarring my neighbourhood with empty stores that didn't rent out. With them went choice, variety, and most important business and jobs, and the ecosphere of things that spring up around such giant stores -- the little delis that existed around them.

I used to go to the Blockbusters or the independent store and browse up and down the aisle. On Netflix, I can only see the top -- the screen -- and try to go around pre-fabbed categories that sometimes make no sense and then look at their pre-fabbed offerings based on whatever algorithms they use, painfully having to load page after page, and try to browse. Netflix works great if you already know of a movie you want and search for it -- it doesn't work great to browse and discover.

In a store, you browse by genre and alphabet and have the serendipity you cannot get online. You have the staff picks. You see your neighbours in the store, and they tell you something they liked. You see foreign films that serve your neighbourhood's actual people that just aren't on Netflix. And so on.

Netflix, meanwhile, destroyed everyone else's business with their Internet delivery -- then jacked up the prices, after they had everyone hooked, sparking the outrage of their customers, many of whom quit on them. And flocked to piracy. So this was a win, everybody? Jobs killed all over my neighbourhood, businesses killed that really didn't "need" to be killed "because of the Internet," and then everyone flocks to pirates like the now-seized tvshack.net? Which incurs more losses for the content industry?

Venezia argues that the cost of bandwidth has been lowered, and therefore is indignant that "ISPS are still claiming poverty. But once you come out of the Google lobbyist fog on this question, you see the issue -- it doesn't matter if bandwidth is cheaper because there are way more customers making way more demands on that bandwidth. Duh! Geeks don't understand the central issue of the telecom: CUSTOMER SERVICE AND MORE GADGETS!

SAY IT WITH ME NOW, LOUDLY, CUSTOMER SERVICE

That's because geeks don't have customers; they have clients.

It isn't at all "to the detriment of everyone" if my ISP now gets into the content business or even starts metering my hugely-bandwith intensive Second Life streaming, foreign TV, Skype, huge files of documents and photos for work, etc. -- which is way heavier than my aunt's occasional email, work files and Youtubes on Sunday although possibly not as heavy as my son's online war games, constant video watching and constantly pushing of photos on Facebook and such.

In fact, if the ISP delivers content for free as a loss leader to raise their prices on that much heavier load *on* the bandwidth and *many more customers* especially in mobile, THAT'S OK. In fact, that's business, that's capitalism, and that has to be done. It has to be done to cover costs; it has to be done to pay for people; they have unions with demands, and that's ok, too, although I've expressed skepticism about Verizon.

The alternative is gapingly obvious -- socialism, if not coercive communism, whereby the government pays for bandwidth "like a utility" -- although it isn't like water, that people need to live, or electricity, that people need to be part of the modern world and do their jobs and feed their families; it's largely socialization and entertainment that comes through the bandwidth, and therefore the idea that the government should fund it, instead of taxing it as it does cigarettes and alcohol, seems risible.

Venezia thinks ISPs and telecoms don't "really" care about bandwidth because they cope with the rising demand and keep making it possible for greedy Netflix and content-robbing Youtube to thrive. But he thinks they are "crazy" for caring that Netflix and Google's Youtube get a free ride -- and get to make their income off other people's money. Why? This is purely a technocommunist position. At least admit what your beliefs are: pure technocommunism of the "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us" and "expropriating from the expropriators" variety. And admit that what you want is even more socialism from Obama, even more government control of the Internet via an executive agency, the FCC, which "net neutrality" "liberationists" want to achieve, and then all the coercion and deprivation *that* entails. Admit it. It's the Big Lie I can't stand...

And...Venezia talks as if Google Play, which can advertise on Google Search any day of the week and drive millions to its doors, doesn't exist and won't take a chunk out of Netflix's business. Hungarian "goulash communism" and Yugoslavia's "workers' self-management" was always competing against the more bumbling Soviet communism, you know?

INTERNET OF THINGS = BANDWIDTH HOG

Venezia is right to flag the "Internet of things" (although he doesn't call it that) -- the household devices like TVs or toasters or whatever that will "run on the Internet" or "your smart phone". They will be even bigger bandwidth eaters. And something has to give, somewhere. And in a free market society such as we still live in, that will be prices, not government agencies supplying socialism out of thin air. Pandora, Spotify, or itunes Streaming will have to pay more for what they do, and charge more, or die. Free is not viable. And yes, companies like AOL will compete, and that's good. Venezia is one of those people who loves competition to telecoms, but hates it when it's to Internet companies.

ISPs don't have to get "monopolistic"; they will just have to charge more and/or supply more loss leaders, and content seems the obvious low-hanging fruit.

OH, THOSE EVIL WALLED GARDENS...

There is nothing intrinsically evil about "walled gardens" as the geeks told us for years around Web 1.0 and the early Web 2.0. Surely they have to concede now that the giant walled garden of Facebook, heading to a billion members, is the winner of the war they thought they had won back in the 1990s over AOL with free open source browsers. AOL "lost," but then put in a free messengering system used by every teenager on the planet with an Internet connection. AOL "lost," and they "still make unsuspecting people pay for Internet connection" as geeks snort, yet they bought the geek and lefty flagship publications of TechCrunch and Huffpo and they continue to prevail with them and with music content they supply on their channel.

Venezia ends with an apocalyptic, hysterical geeky vision, calculated to stampede his fellow geeks into hatred and clicking on ads for various causes to kill telecoms and support the Google business model, such as the "Internet Freedom" goon squad are putting up everywhere. He warns:

Their [the ISPs'] ultimate goal is to turn the Internet into cable TV, with themselves at the center, getting paid coming and going. They want the whole pie, and it would be a wholesale disaster if we were to give it to them.

Uh...It's more like this: the Google and associated lobby ultimate goal is to take over the content streaming of the Internet, too, and we see Google doing that -- buying phones, supplying software to phones, buying Youtube and starting Google play. That's the more scary prospect, because these people own search, which means they own intentions and privacy of billions of people in searchable ways that telecoms don't match even carrying all our conversations.

The reality is that these two different industries and different cultures and different business models compete, and it's good that they stay in competition and one doesn't supplant the other. The telecoms are no more likely to "turn the Internet into cable TV" than Google will be able to take all telephony away from Apple and others. Already Google provides TV shows for $4.95 on the Internet, and Venezia isn't making a peep -- it's ok when Google turns the Internet into cable TV, but not when Comcast does it, you know?