A contribution from Marco Fioretti, reacting to an earlier post:
“I would like to share some thoughts and doubts I’ve had for years about the “fast, universal Net access for everybody” dogma.
I deliberately focus on what is actually doable, good and necessary
today (0 to ~30 years), not on how life could be or will be for our
grand-grandchildren.
There are a few concepts to re-analyze together here:
1) production, replication and distribution of digital goods costs nothing, or practically nothing
2) centralized infrastructures (think YouTube, Flickr, etc…) are much more expensive than distributed infrastructures (file sharing networks from Napster to TPB and beyond)
3) regardless of its architecture, the costs of the infrastructure should/could be distributed (socialized)
4) fast, cheap, unmetered internet access is good, necessary and a human right, like education, etc…
Concept #1 is, very often, a myth. Producing and keeping up and running all the material infrastructure needed to copy and distribute willy-nilly “immaterial” goods has a huge cost. Huge. Read for reference:
* http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/one-loaf-per-child/2007/06/14
*http://p2pfoundation.net/Thoughts_on_P2P_production_and_deployment_of_physical_objects
* http://www.infoworld.com/d/green-it/report-us-companies-waste-28b-year-powering-unused-pcs-758 http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/data-centers-are-becoming-big-polluters-study-finds/?ref=technology
* http://www.socialroi.com/interesting-facts-about-digital-waste.html http://sitemaker.umich.edu/section002group3/e-waste
* http://www.afro.who.int/heag2008/docs_en/New%20and%20emerging%20threats.pdf
* http://www.ban.org/photogallery/
With respect to concept #2, bandwidth is bandwidth and storage is storage. I am not sure that changing from concentrated to distributed would reduce so much the order of magnitude of the cost mentioned in the links above. More on this in a moment.
I am not sure that performance and reliability would always be at least equal in the distributed case. Downloading a video from a professional server farm like YouTube’s takes more or less the same time now and one month from now. Whereas downloading via torrents is faster only if you want what everybody else is downloading, or at least seeding, in the same moment. This is a minor point however.
A more important issue is if the real cost of one billion desktops and fast bidirectional connections, all “forced” to be servers/sources because there is no centralized structure built in a much more professional, highly efficient way, using much less raw materials and energy. Are there any data about this?
Back to the cost of distributed vs “centralized content distribution” networks. I recently found some numbers about a very efficient, highly decentralized content distribution networks, ie spam. Spam today is mostly generated and redistributed by infected desktops but still dissipates 33TWh/year:
* http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=7316
* http:??www.softlist.net/press/pandalabs_says_half_a_million_computers_are_infected_with_malicious_bots_every_day-62.html
* http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/08/spam-malware-online-security
So, the first two points could be summarized as “no matter how you do it, production, replication and distribution of digital goods of the scale advocated by proponents of universal access, worldwide free flowing culture and communication, etc…has a very big, very material cost. Better wake up and accept it”
At this point, we can move to “who should pay for it”. It’s an important decision, because the cost **is** huge but the benefits to society of fast, universal connectivity should be even bigger.
Personally, I am sure that there are a lot of important things that, from a human/civil right standpoint, everybody should have the possibility (someetimes the duty!) to do online: communicate, study, check what the government is doing to keep it under control, publish opinions, work, etc… I’m convinced that the more people actually use the Internet in this way, the better, so I could agree with a law that says “doing these things is a basic right, so everybody must be connected and the related costs must be entirely socialized”
The point is, to do all those things you don’t need broadband. Not the kind the ISPs want to sell these days, to transform the Internet in the next TV.
I think that to make your own life and the world better, a stable, flat-rate connection at 512KBps or so is enough these days, so I could support socializing the costs of connecting everybody in that way. I would be happy if flat rate Internet offers where I live didn’t start at ~20 Euro/month for 5 MBps but from something like 5 Euro/month for 512KBps. Why don’t they?
But is it really necessary and fair to subsidize the cost of both the access and (above all) the backbone infrastructure that would be needed to keep everybody hooked at 5, 10, 20 MB?? I’m not saying it would be bad, but if it costs too much (especially in these times) and it isn’t really necessary…
There are tons of “content” online that could take much less space and bandwidth. I find all the time podcasts or video tutorials which are in that form ONLY because the author wouldn’t take the time to transcript what he said. So we’re all left with something that takes much more to download, isn’t indexable as efficiently as text, is much slower to navigate back and forth, much harder to mix and mash with other content…
Here are a few cases where real fast broadband isn’t, IMO, something whose costs should be socialized (remember that you can’t really separate the costs of access from those of backbone)
– if you’re stuck with cloud computing or software as a service,
including any webmail or online office suite, that is if you gave up
control of who owns and sees all your data. If so, you have a
separate problem which would remain even if bandwidth were really
gratis
– online games
– digital bulimia, that is downloading everything you find, even if
you’ll never need it, “just because it’s there”
Please note that, even if you’re a “producer”, ie a private citizen who blogs on whatever argument, a small business or an artist who puts online his/her works, it can MAKE much more technical/ecological/ economical sense to rent for that a virtual server in a professional datacenter in a country which gives a minimum of warranties about civil rights… than to run a website from the second-hand PC in your closet which could break every second and consumes much more power than a virtual one (Virtual servers are NOT cloud computing!).
The solution? Maybe it is to subsidize “basic flat connectivity” as described above, and let everything else to be paid directly by those who have or feel the need for it.
More exactly: instead of an infrastructure based on the dogma that everybody needs and wants 10+ MBps to everything else worldwide, dimension network and fees so that the basic connectivity costs much less than today, but the “heavy users” pay by themselves the burden they place on the network (ie on everybody else and the environment), since very often what they’re doing is NOT bad, but isn’t really necessary to society as a whole.
This is NOT an attack to net neutrality, of course. In this context, a good read is “Net neutrality: An American problem?” (I agree with those Australian ISPs!).
This approach is just recognizing that advertising like “for just one low fee you’re entitled to unlimited traffic” (which, by the way, is exactly what keeps running today’s decentralized file sharing networks!!!) never was nothing more than an unsustainable marketing scam.
This isn’t even anything new, by the way. It has been a well known fact of life among webmasters for YEARS that “if an hosting provider gives you unlimited bandwidth, he’s either incompetent or not 100% honest. There can’t be anything like “unlimited bandwidth”. All hosting providers cut traffic, because their network would melt or cost too much otherwise. It’s just that the good ones tell it to you fair and square in advance, in the contract, how and when they will do it”. Search in any webmaster forum and you’ll find posts repeating these concepts since the nineties, and they never changed.
So the only news here may be the wish that literally everybody (not just “professionals”) can become a producer, or at least a (re)distributor, without analyzing if the goal is (at least in the medium/short term) intrinsically sustainable, or generally worth of being completely socialized.”
Marco,
I mostly agree. A bit surprised about a few points. Here’s my opinion and rationale for supporting the concept.
The potential to use the per cloud appropriately and broadly;
to bring healthcare for all
to bring education for all
to bring local agriculture opportunities for all
to bring dignity and justice for all
In fact, the bio-diversity we can preserve in island states would be an example, the cultural preservation for historical parts of the world. We must be mindful of the readiness to take on or practical expectations for those who are what I call global citizens who are spiritually and physically tied to the Order of the Earth (not intended to reference any organization) like the desert or mountainous regions.
First, these populations are not interested in having the earth disturbed and happen to have a pretty good handle on their niche in the world.
Students are likely to gain the most from internet access for all and will make excellent stewards bridging the divide between the elders and leading the youngest into an education for all model.
Let’s say, we are both looking through a practical set of glasses.
a) a per cloud would definitely be Step 1
b) servers in each island or hardest to reach-number of servers and personal storage would be at the local level stakeholders discretion and sponsoring budgets.
c) Intimacy Gradient Level 3 – Proposed – SSE Social Sharing Economy – Every major telecom in the world has an online provisioning tool for major accounts which can assign three types of connections to each per cloud for each user.
c.o. The security protections around video have still never been proven. We never put video on the networks only machine to machine on a point to point connection in the early days of video conferencing.
c.i. If true-the management between end points, recovery and traffic re-routing is a feature in the national account services, including fault tolerance transport video on one connection, data on another and voice on the third.
c.i.i Billing systematically if done by design-I typically align the telecom billing to the chart of accounts.
c.i.i.i. Disaster Recovery-a capability we can plan for and deliver and test as part of the implementation. I’ve done this for 39 branches in the mortgage industry.
c.iv. Government sponsored-a government services agreement (GSA) promises the best price for services and governments are national accounts. Service Level Agreements.
c.v. Governments are the governance role in human rights and civil rights etc. Enables a way to hold them accountable.
d. Innovation – Intimacy Gradient Level 4 Healthcare – Telemedicine my interactions with a medical professional should be through my per cloud rather over the www.
d.i. Billing transactions should be validated by me rather than submitted after a hard-copy arrives or anything similar.
d.i.i. my medical records should be in my per-cloud
d.i.i.i. my disability or my child’s should be published to my school or work or my child’s. Not determined by a survey or anyone other than my medical physician.
e. Intimacy Gradient level 5 education where virtual schools and online home-schools live.
f. Intimacy Gradient level 6 Justice where the family, civil, and criminal court system and any interactions or legal rights are published and updated. A work clearance being one that seems important. A service that informs if any chances are made, etc.
With the above in my view, how can I inspire you to help?
Soon crowds of internet users will realize they already pay all the costs for that connectivity, so will instead pool their funds to buy and own ISPs for the sole purpose of receiving the results.
When crowds of users own the means of production, the price they pay as consumers is exactly the costs they pay as co-owners and profit does not even exist!
There is no reason to kowtow to random owners of the goods and services we need when we, as groups of consumers, can be the direct owners ourselves and so never again need to beg someone to do what we consider right, but what their shareholders consider wrong.
When we, as consumers, own the inputs of production, we own the outputs automatically, even without buying those things, and the costs of production is all we must pay, and finally we will have full and absolute dominion over that production as we always should have had.
This is easy to see for an owner in solitary confinement:
The owner of an Apple tree does not buy Apples from himself, that would be silly!
The co-owners of an Apple orchard do not need to by the Apples from themselves, that would be silly!
But somehow the multi-owner version of that arrangement has eluded us.
Consumer Cooperatives do not do this – the ‘members’ must *buy* the product from some central authority and be charged profit at that time, and pay sales-tax and also loose real control over how that production is achieved.
And so Imputed Production simplifies production by eliminating the final transaction for those who prepay for goods and services *iff* each investor is receiving real co-ownership in the physical sources.
…
That solves the ‘static’ case, where each person owns exactly as much inputs as the predict they will need of outputs.
To address the ‘dynamic’ case, where the prediction was too high or too low, and also the case where a newcomer is buying surplus, we must understand how profit is inversely related to property.
When a consumer owns enough inputs (owns enough of the Apple orchard or taxi fleet), then the price they pay is exactly the costs of the operation for their portion and profit is undefined (does not occur). This proves the origin of profit is the consumers’ lack of ownership in the means of production.
But when a consumer needs more than they predicted (more Apples or more taxi rides), and if there is surplus to sell, then they can buy those outputs *late*, and will most likely pay profit during that transaction.
Charging profit against latecomers is not the sin of Capitalism. The sin is not recognizing that profit must be treated as an investment from that payer, causing latecomers to gain ownership in the *growth* of that production (planting more Apple trees or buying more taxis).
Treating profit as the payer’s investment causes growth to be autodistributed to those willing to pay for that growth, and causes profit to continuously approach zero (undefined).