On this episode of Spark, it’s our innovation special. Click below to listen to the whole show, or download the MP3 (runs 54:00).
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Where Good Ideas Come From
We cover a lot of good ideas on Spark. But here’s the question: where exactly do goods idea come from? What happens in the space between not having an idea, and having an idea? Steven Johnson has been thinking a lot about that lately. Steven’s the author of a number books about science and culture, such as The Ghost Map and Everything Bad is Good For You. His latest is Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. (Runs 21:09)
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- Full uncut interview with Steven Johnson
- Where Good Ideas Come From at Amazon.ca
- Where Good Ideas Come From at Chapters
- Where Good Ideas Come From at LibraryThing
Internet Architecture and Innovation
Barbara van Shewick is a Stanford law professor and computer scientist. She says that a big part of what’s made the Internet so successful is its underlying structure, or its architecture. And as the architecture of the internet changes, its ability to foster innovation is endangered. (Runs 26:45)
Play audio:
- Full uncut interview with Barbara van Schewick
- Internet Architecture and Innovation
- Internet Architecture and Innovation at Amazon.ca
- Internet Architecture and Innovation at Chapters
- Internet Architecture and Innovation at LibraryThing
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Barbara van Schewick never mentioned the fact that internet providers enjoy quasi monopoly status, granted by the government. If a new, small provider wants to start providing internet services in Toronto, for example, they can't.
These monopolies are what makes internet providers so powerful and consumers so weak.
Her proposal is to pile up more regulation to fix the problems that the regulations have caused.
Not very clever and a very shallow analysis.
having listened to spark for years i've never before been prompted to visit the blog. However after hearing Barbara van Schewick talk about the "great competition" amongst canadian isp's cast doubt on her familiarity with canada and it's isps. (fairly eloquent description of net neutrality, nothing new for anyone who's familiar with it)
In the vast majority of the country there are 2 companies to choose from – cable or dsl. It's immaterial if your cable choice is rogers or shaw – the fact is you'll never be able to choose between them because each have a monopoly on certain areas.
The smaller providers are merely resellers of the large companies services, and thus the network control is with a tiny number of companies.
This is the exact opposite of "strong competition".
Anyways, I agree that we need regulations guaranteeing net neutrality.
A few thoughts on this episode.
Canadian ISP's are not a competitive marketplace. Yes, there are a number of companies that are trying to exist, but when it comes to wires into the home there are generally two or less options in a given geographical location: the phone company and the cable company.
These companies exist as a government exception to property law in the form of right-of-way as they are able to put cables above and below private and public property without having to negotiate with individual property owners. Governments only grant this exception to a small number of companies, and historically this came with regulation in the public interest.
The CRTC is largely abandoning this public interest requirement. While ISP's should be free to compete on transit (Connections between ISP's, etc), the CRTC is allowing the phone and cable companies to impose inspection, filtering and business models on competing ISP's which must utilize that "last mile" government granted monopoly connection to reach customers homes.
One example problem is Usage Based Billing (UBB). Actual costs of the network are fixed based on what physical connections you have (Fiber, etc). Whether a connection is flooded or empty, the cost is the same: there is no "per byte" cost to the providers.
ISPs over-subscribe their connections to other parts of the network based on the idea that not all customers will use all the bandwidth available on that last mile at the same time. There are many different network management practices for how to handle congestion on over-subscribed transit connections, and the way different ISPs differentiate themselves is by having different management practices.
The CRTC has allowed the last-mile monopolies the ability to charge per-megabyte transfer costs, effectively nullifying the competitive marketplace by imposing one specific management practice on everyone. No real competition can exist, and if this decision is allowed to stand it will ultimately cause the closure of ISPs that compete with the legacy phone and cable companies.
Canada is effectively in the same or worse situation as the USA, but because it requires more detailed analysis of our marketplace you have mistakes being made by those in other countries trying to make comparisons as Barbara van Shewick did.
Note: The wireless situation isn't that much different, and with the incumbents protected through foreign investment limits we will have a hard time getting out of it. I'm a WIND mobile subscriber, but all it takes is a change of government (or even priorities) to remove the cabinet exception and this competitor ceases to exist.
We really need structural separation between the infrastructure (wired and wireline) from the services built on top.
Listened with interest to Barbara van Schewick's talk about the basic nature of the internet.
It has certainly changed from an open and inexpensive means of access and expression for all people to a more TV-like highway of commerce and self-absorption. Particularly poignant to me was the mention of Telus as an example of an isp which has shut down sites to which it objected because they have issued two denial of service orders on my phone line and made my internet so unreliable that i have had to cut the phone off, leaving me with no access whatsoever because there are no alternatives where i live. I'm not sure specifically why they are targeting me but one must ask; "Is this Canada?"
I think that her point about new internet startups being shut out, and innovation being stifled due to preferential access only applies to a certain class of potential new applications. The internet as a whole, and broadband connections to the last mile are a lot faster now than they were five or ten years ago. Streaming video is a reality for most people with broadband connections.
If you want to introduce a new application like eBay, or like Twitter (both *huge* and good examples of innovation) you don't *need* exceptional, low-latency, high-bandwidth access to your end users. You just need to pay normal access fees according to how your bandwidth grows. For the average user, your applications bandwidth (for something that is *not* streaming video) is going to fit into a tiny corner of your overall bandwidth allocation. So, the introduction of preferred hosting or CDN's getting preferred access, as in the Comcast/Netflix/Level 3 brouhaha in the US is really specific to applications with very high bandwidth/low latency requirements. Everything else, that is, the vast majority of innovative applications on the web, are going to be fine, and are not going to suffer.
If you're really setting out to deploy a new type of video sharing application, or similar type of high-bandwidth application, well, then, you need to factor these preferred CDN network arrangements into your business plan. Just like her example of trying to build a car in your garage to compete with GM – it can't be done.
It may not be perfect, and it may stifle certain types of innovation, but I think it's a reality, and I reject the argument that ISP's can't work out special arrangements with CDN's or content providers, where the bandwidth requirements of those CDN's or providers are really changing the connectivity requirements of the ISP. (as in the Netflix/Level 3 situation, where they were, indeed, going to be streaming a great deal more traffic, in one direction, into Comcast's network)
I don't know if Twitter, to take an example, has any such preferred arrangements, but I doubt it. Although I'm sure that their internet bandwidth requirements are, at this point, enormous, it's because they have a zillion subscribers, not because each subscriber is consuming a lot of bandwidth. As a startup, I'm certain they had no need of preferential arrangements to compete, and probably don't have any need of them today.
In the interview Barbara says that "anyone" with some knowledge of programming can innovate on the internet. But programmers are really a minority, an elitist group. Is insuring the internet is open to innovation "good for the rest of us" or just for this small group?