Yesterday evening in London I spent a fascintating few hours with Marc Weber - one of the founders and leading spirits behind The World Wide Web History Project.   He and his colleagues are recording for posterity as much as possible of the early days of the web and the Project's own website is without doubt a unique meta space for anyone interested in understanding the "who, how, why and when" of the World Wide Web.  I told Marc how much I had valued being able to visit the railway museum in York and study the record of how objections and obstacles to the railway revolution had been overcome by the early entrepreneurs.  I found (and still do) these lessons from history, extremely pertinent and helpful in gaining insight into how to respond to some of the issues and arguments from those opposing the deployment of the new 'disruptive' infrastructure for the current information revolution.  Anyway, Marc was gracious enough to think that my story of the 'open public local access' challenge since the early 1980s was worth getting on the record and so so with his digital camera and recorder running for an hour or so, I related to him what happened in the UK (thanks to the unqique broadband-promoting UK public policy of the time) and also, what happened in 'my head' as I was able to develop ideas, visions and dreams of what future life might be like in an open access, symmetrical and interactive broadband world way before the web-giants we all know so well, made it a reality.  I only hope that in some future decade or century, energetic entrepreneurs will find Marc's diligent recording of the past as useful and inspiring as I found the record of the 19th century railway pioneers....

I have just returned from a week in New York and Boston - and the talk everywhere is about 'net neutrality' and how those who are advocating the importance of preserving this are just downright bone-headed.   The latest clever PR offering from the telco-lobby is an engaging short cartoon....

Like most people at the moment, I am absorbed with the football World Cup finals underway in Germany.   Not only is the BBC broadcasting most of the matches via the terrestrial network, but they are also live-streaming them onto their website.  Quite right too.

Imagine my amazement when I read in the UK press yesterday that the Government TV Licensing Authority that is charged to collect £10.96 ($20 US) per month (from every household in the UK with a colour TV set, is on the lookout to whack a £1,000 penalty fine ($1,850 US) on anyone watching the streamed World Cup broadcasts on their home office or laptop computers without having first purchased a license!...

Some time ago I had the pleasure of meeting Dr Vinton Cerf (Vint) - one of the 'fathers of the internet' who played such a vital role in creating the TCP/IP protocol that underpins it.  He now holds the post of "Chief Internet Evangelist" at Google. Vint has popped up in my mind in the context of the discouraging news coming out of Washington this week on the legislative actions of the House of Representatives over their attempts to 'preserve net neutrality'.  Although I believe the lobbying efforts and tactics of those who support net neutrality (as I most certainly do) were misguided, nevertheless it is a vital issue.   
These latest events suggest a clear swing in favour of existing telco vested interests and against the interests of the likes of Google (or indeed all of us!) who champion the cause of "open" neutrality.
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(The ‘punch line’ of this blog entry – is read this! )

I have long proclaimed that in the emerging world of abundant connectivity that the digital technologies combine to deliver - that any business model that differentiates between “content creators” and “content consumers” will ultimately be doomed.  I have possibly hung on to this mantra rather longer than I should because of the appealing alliteration.  However I have made a new resolution now that I am finally and fully convinced of the absurdity as well as the immorality of persisting with laws which attempt to differentiate on the same basis.  I refer of course to the laws of copyright underpinned by the notion of intellectual property.  Indeed, I am going to attempt to go one step further and desist altogether from using the term “content” to that rich matrix of sound, video, script, data which, as sentient beings we take in and give out in the course of our daily lives.  I am not sure where the term “content” came from as applied to what we sense from media with our ears, eyes and imaginations.  The word ‘content’ if my memory of schoolboy latin remains accurate, comes from the past participle of the verb, continere – ‘to contain’.
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I am in the City of Eindhoven (home of Philips) where I am advising the City of Eindhoven on its ambitious and well advanced plans to develop an OPLAN.  It is encouraging to see such an enlightened municipality as this, which expresses its main strategic objective as being that, "The primary value of, and benefit from, this network (in the short and the long run) rests with the citizens, businesses and institutions of Eindhoven as users".  And that is the essence of the OPLAN concept - enabled as it is by the fundamentals of the underlying digital technologies of 'abundance'....

A couple of months ago, UK's leading ISP (and the incumbent telco), British Telecom  began pulling the plug on around 4,000 of its broadband punters because of "excessive usage".   BT claimed that these net users  - making up less than 0.2 per cent of the company's 2.3m ADSL  users - were consistently using up more than 100 gig each a month.   According to BT, these "exceptionally heavy users" were in "consistent breach of their "fair usage policy" and have failed to respond to requests to contact BT to discuss the matter"!
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