Interesting column on what the future may hold for being online.
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To: chapman@mcfeeley.cc.utexas.edu
From: Gary Chapman <gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu>
Subject: L.A. Times column, 2/1/99
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Friends,
Below is my Los Angeles Times column for today, Monday, February 1,
1999. As always, please feel free to pass this on, but please retain
the copyright notice.
Our news here is twofold: first, about the great honor I've recently
received by being appointed to the selection committee for the Turing
Award, the highest award in computer science, the field's equivalent
of the Nobel Prize. This is a nearly overwhelming honor, especially
because I'm the only person on the committee who is not a computer
scientist. In any case, I thank the ACM for this honor and I look
forward to serving on the committee for the next four years.
Second, Carol and I are headed to Southeast Asia this coming Friday,
first to Singapore and then to Bali. In Singapore I'll be speaking at
EdTech '99 (http://www.moe.edu.sg/iteducation/edtech/welcome.htm).
We'll be there a little less than a week, and then in Bali on
vacation for a little more than a week, back in Texas on the 21st of
February. (Consequently, at least one column and maybe two may be
mailed out a little late, as we plan to be disconnected from the
Internet.) We're both excited about this trip, looking forward to the
food and sights in Southeast Asia.
Hope everyone is doing well and enjoying 1999 so far!
Best,
-- Gary
Gary Chapman
Director
The 21st Century Project
LBJ School of Public Affairs
Drawer Y, University Station
University of Texas
Austin, TX 78713
(512) 263-1218
(512) 471-1835 (fax)
gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu
http://www.utexas.edu/lbj/21cp
------------------------------------------
If you have received this from me, Gary Chapman
(gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu), you are subscribed to the listserv
that sends out copies of my column in The Los Angeles Times and other
published articles.
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------------------------------------------
Monday, February 1, 1999
DIGITAL NATION
In Battle of the Internet Titans, Users Are Likely to Be the Losers
By Gary Chapman
Copyright The Los Angeles Times, 1999, All Rights Reserved
I use a cable modem for my home Internet service these days, and,
quite frankly, I'd be angry if I had to part with it. It's pretty
reliable, it's on all the time (no more screeching dial-up), and it's
blazingly fast.
With this cable connection, I have to use Time Warner Cable as my
Internet service provider, or ISP. My Internet access is bundled with
my cable modem connection, which means there's no evidence of an
extra charge for Internet access. But if I wanted to buy service from
another ISP and use my cable modem, I couldn't.
That's because cable companies are not regulated by the government as
common carriers, a phrase and a rule that does apply to telephone
companies. Common carriage means that telephone companies are
required to carry over their lines anything the telephone system
supports and without their intervention between the caller and who is
being called. The telephone company can't favor one grocery store
chain over another, for example, and route customers' calls to the
preferred store.
In other words, a common carrier cannot control both the wires and
the content on those wires.
But the cable industry has escaped this regulation because, first,
the delivery of TV channels through a cable wire was considered a
natural monopoly, because no community wants many different cable
companies snaking their multiple wires on poles or under the ground;
and, second, because being able to sell the full range of TV in a
specific community was viewed as the economic incentive to invest in
and build a cable network in the first place.
Now comes the complicated part: the Internet. Everyone wants the
Internet to be faster and less congested. The solution is broad-band
telecommunication connections, a technical and industry term for
technologies that are much faster than what you can get with a modem
and a telephone wire. The two leading broad-band media right now, for
consumers, are cable and DSL (for digital subscriber line), a service
that allows the telephone companies to get more speed out of the
copper wire that's already in your house.
The reason these two particular technologies are leading right now is
fairly obvious: They don't require rewiring large parts of the U.S.
Most homes have telephone wire that can handle DSL, and more than 70%
of U.S. households can be served by cable. This means that the battle
is on between big telephone companies and big cable companies for an
unbelievably huge market.
But what we're seeing is telecom's version of the old African saying,
"When elephants fight, the grass gets trampled."
First, we're seeing a wave of mergers, characterized by the recently
proposed acquisition of the cable company Tele-Communications Inc. by
AT&T, and big deals like the pending partnership between America
Online and Bell Atlantic. The TCI-AT&T deal is further complicated by
the fact that TCI owns a large share of the Internet service company
carried on some cable systems, called @Home, and @Home itself just
agreed to pay more than $6 billion for the Internet portal and search
engine company Excite.
A few heads started shaking in Portland, Ore., over the implications
of these kinds of deals. Portland and surrounding Multnomah County
are served by TCI, which asked for a license transfer to AT&T,
pending the two companies' merger (which still has to be approved by
the Federal Communications Commission). Both the city and county
governments insisted that for the license transfer to go through,
they would need assurances that AT&T would open its cable system's
Internet access to competitive ISPs. AT&T said no way, so Portland
refused the license transfer. TCI and AT&T promptly sued the city of
Portland and Multnomah County.
The city of Los Angeles recently faced the same dilemma. TCI is not a
big cable carrier in L.A., but its license, and the question of open
access on TCI networks in Los Angeles, would be important precedents
as the city begins reviewing all its cable franchises later this year.
The city took a Solomonic approach 10 days ago, opting for a
resolution that will require AT&T to abide by any rules adopted by
the FCC. The city also began a 90-day study on the future of open
broad-band access in Los Angeles, a study that will be conducted by
the city's Information Technology Agency.
Last Thursday, the FCC punted the whole issue by saying that no
changes in broad-band access are required at this time, a conclusion
that must certainly be related to the agency's no-win, high-pressure,
nail-biting and head-whirling situation.
Open access to broad-band services is not only threatened by cable
companies. Telephone companies offering DSL connections are also
trying to lock customers into their own information services, and
hence their own partnerships with content providers, like AOL. Not a
single independent ISP in Texas can offer DSL yet because
Southwestern Bell makes the wholesale price for DSL higher than what
they charge their own individual customers.
Why should anyone care about this? There are several issues at stake.
First is that the Internet doesn't have to work this way, and in fact
shouldn't work this way. We already have about 6,500 ISPs in the
United States, which must be the definition of competition. They
offer a wide variety of services, prices, levels of support, etc. But
most of them could be wiped out in a few years if present trends
continue.
Second, if you have to buy an information service provider when you
select what wire you want in your house, you're going to be looking
at the user interface of a huge, monolithic, vertically integrated
corporation. Your first encounter with the Internet is likely to look
a lot like walking into a shopping mall -- boring, redundant and
absolutely writhing with advertising. It is true that you can buy
e-mail from someone else, or change the home page in your browser,
but most users don't know this.
Third, this competition -- really just a battle among a few titans --
means the U.S. will overbuild its telecommunications infrastructure.
We'll wind up investing tens of billions of dollars in redundant,
underused or even never-used network wires. It's as if we'll be
building highways on top of highways, 10 deep.
That means the cost to consumers to pay off this redundant investment
will be unnecessarily high, simply because we refuse to think of
telecommunications as public infrastructure. We could have one wire
into our homes or under our streets -- a fiber-optic cable -- that
could do everything. Then we'd have competition among a million
different services, the way things should be, instead of having to
choose between two or three leviathan telecom companies and their
lucky partners.
Of course, given the way things are going in the U.S. these days,
bigness and blandness is probably what we'll get. Unless, of course,
citizens get mad and offer to help the FCC and local and state
governments fight better, smarter and harder.
Gary Chapman Is director of The 21st Century Project at the
University of Texas at Austin. His e-mail address is
gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu.
------------------------------------------
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published articles, including his column "Digital Nation" in The Los
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To unsubscribe from the listserv, follow the same instructions above,
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Please feel free to pass along copies of the forwarded articles, but
please retain the relevant copyright information. Also feel free to
pass along these instructions for subscribing to the listserv, to
anyone who might be interested in such material.
Questions should be directed to Gary Chapman at gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu.
--============_-1294238314==_ma============
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Friends,
Below is my Los Angeles Times column for today, Monday, February 1,
1999. As always, please feel free to pass this on, but please retain
the copyright notice.
Our news here is twofold: first, about the great honor I've recently
received by being appointed to the selection committee for the Turing
Award, the highest award in computer science, the field's equivalent of
the Nobel Prize. This is a nearly overwhelming honor, especially
because I'm the only person on the committee who is not a computer
scientist. In any case, I thank the ACM for this honor and I look
forward to serving on the committee for the next four years.
Second, Carol and I are headed to Southeast Asia this coming Friday,
first to Singapore and then to Bali. In Singapore I'll be speaking at
EdTech '99 (http://www.moe.edu.sg/iteducation/edtech/welcome.htm).
We'll be there a little less than a week, and then in Bali on vacation
for a little more than a week, back in Texas on the 21st of February.
(Consequently, at least one column and maybe two may be mailed out a
little late, as we plan to be disconnected from the Internet.) We're
both excited about this trip, looking forward to the food and sights in
Southeast Asia.
Hope everyone is doing well and enjoying 1999 so far!
Best,
-- Gary
Gary Chapman
Director
The 21st Century Project
LBJ School of Public Affairs
Drawer Y, University Station
University of Texas
Austin, TX 78713
(512) 263-1218
(512) 471-1835 (fax)
gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu
http://www.utexas.edu/lbj/21cp
------------------------------------------
If you have received this from me, Gary Chapman
(gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu), you are subscribed to the listserv that
sends out copies of my column in The Los Angeles Times and other
published articles.
If you wish to UNSUBSCRIBE from this listserv, send mail to
listproc@mcfeeley.cc.utexas.edu, leave the subject line blank, and put
"Unsubscribe Chapman" in the first line of the message.
If you received this message from a source other than me and would like
to subscribe to the listserv, the instructions for subscribing are at
the end of the message.
------------------------------------------
<fontfamily><param>Geneva</param>Monday, February 1, 1999
DIGITAL NATION
In Battle of the Internet Titans, Users Are Likely to Be the Losers
By Gary Chapman
Copyright The Los Angeles Times, 1999, All Rights Reserved
I use a cable modem for my home Internet service these days, and, quite
frankly, I'd be angry if I had to part with it. It's pretty reliable,
it's on all the time (no more screeching dial-up), and it's blazingly
fast.
With this cable connection, I have to use Time Warner Cable as my
Internet service provider, or ISP. My Internet access is bundled with
my cable modem connection, which means there's no evidence of an extra
charge for Internet access. But if I wanted to buy service from another
ISP and use my cable modem, I couldn't.
That's because cable companies are not regulated by the government as
common carriers, a phrase and a rule that does apply to telephone
companies. Common carriage means that telephone companies are required
to carry over their lines anything the telephone system supports and
without their intervention between the caller and who is being called.
The telephone company can't favor one grocery store chain over another,
for example, and route customers' calls to the preferred store.
In other words, a common carrier cannot control both the wires and the
content on those wires.
But the cable industry has escaped this regulation because, first, the
delivery of TV channels through a cable wire was considered a natural
monopoly, because no community wants many different cable companies
snaking their multiple wires on poles or under the ground; and, second,
because being able to sell the full range of TV in a specific community
was viewed as the economic incentive to invest in and build a cable
network in the first place.
Now comes the complicated part: the Internet. Everyone wants the
Internet to be faster and less congested. The solution is broad-band
telecommunication connections, a technical and industry term for
technologies that are much faster than what you can get with a modem
and a telephone wire. The two leading broad-band media right now, for
consumers, are cable and DSL (for digital subscriber line), a service
that allows the telephone companies to get more speed out of the copper
wire that's already in your house.
The reason these two particular technologies are leading right now is
fairly obvious: They don't require rewiring large parts of the U.S.
Most homes have telephone wire that can handle DSL, and more than 70%
of U.S. households can be served by cable. This means that the battle
is on between big telephone companies and big cable companies for an
unbelievably huge market.
But what we're seeing is telecom's version of the old African saying,
"When elephants fight, the grass gets trampled."
First, we're seeing a wave of mergers, characterized by the recently
proposed acquisition of the cable company Tele-Communications Inc. by
AT&T, and big deals like the pending partnership between America Online
and Bell Atlantic. The TCI-AT&T deal is further complicated by the fact
that TCI owns a large share of the Internet service company carried on
some cable systems, called @Home, and @Home itself just agreed to pay
more than $6 billion for the Internet portal and search engine company
Excite.
A few heads started shaking in Portland, Ore., over the implications of
these kinds of deals. Portland and surrounding Multnomah County are
served by TCI, which asked for a license transfer to AT&T, pending the
two companies' merger (which still has to be approved by the Federal
Communications Commission). Both the city and county governments
insisted that for the license transfer to go through, they would need
assurances that AT&T would open its cable system's Internet access to
competitive ISPs. AT&T said no way, so Portland refused the license
transfer. TCI and AT&T promptly sued the city of Portland and Multnomah
County.
The city of Los Angeles recently faced the same dilemma. TCI is not a
big cable carrier in L.A., but its license, and the question of open
access on TCI networks in Los Angeles, would be important precedents as
the city begins reviewing all its cable franchises later this year.
The city took a Solomonic approach 10 days ago, opting for a resolution
that will require AT&T to abide by any rules adopted by the FCC. The
city also began a 90-day study on the future of open broad-band access
in Los Angeles, a study that will be conducted by the city's
Information Technology Agency.
Last Thursday, the FCC punted the whole issue by saying that no changes
in broad-band access are required at this time, a conclusion that must
certainly be related to the agency's no-win, high-pressure, nail-biting
and head-whirling situation.
Open access to broad-band services is not only threatened by cable
companies. Telephone companies offering DSL connections are also trying
to lock customers into their own information services, and hence their
own partnerships with content providers, like AOL. Not a single
independent ISP in Texas can offer DSL yet because Southwestern Bell
makes the wholesale price for DSL higher than what they charge their
own individual customers.
Why should anyone care about this? There are several issues at stake.
First is that the Internet doesn't have to work this way, and in fact
shouldn't work this way. We already have about 6,500 ISPs in the United
States, which must be the definition of competition. They offer a wide
variety of services, prices, levels of support, etc. But most of them
could be wiped out in a few years if present trends continue.
Second, if you have to buy an information service provider when you
select what wire you want in your house, you're going to be looking at
the user interface of a huge, monolithic, vertically integrated
corporation. Your first encounter with the Internet is likely to look a
lot like walking into a shopping mall -- boring, redundant and
absolutely writhing with advertising. It is true that you can buy
e-mail from someone else, or change the home page in your browser, but
most users don't know this.
Third, this competition -- really just a battle among a few titans --
means the U.S. will overbuild its telecommunications infrastructure.
We'll wind up investing tens of billions of dollars in redundant,
underused or even never-used network wires. It's as if we'll be
building highways on top of highways, 10 deep.
That means the cost to consumers to pay off this redundant investment
will be unnecessarily high, simply because we refuse to think of
telecommunications as public infrastructure. We could have one wire
into our homes or under our streets -- a fiber-optic cable -- that
could do everything. Then we'd have competition among a million
different services, the way things should be, instead of having to
choose between two or three leviathan telecom companies and their lucky
partners.
Of course, given the way things are going in the U.S. these days,
bigness and blandness is probably what we'll get. Unless, of course,
citizens get mad and offer to help the FCC and local and state
governments fight better, smarter and harder.
Gary Chapman Is director of The 21st Century Project at the University
of Texas at Austin. His e-mail address is gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu.
------------------------------------------
To subscribe to a listserv that forwards copies of Gary Chapman's
published articles, including his column "Digital Nation" in The Los
Angeles Times, send mail to:
listproc@mcfeeley.cc.utexas.edu
Leave the subject line blank. In the first line of the message, put:
Subscribe Chapman [First name] [Last name]
Leave out the brackets, just put your name after Chapman.
Send this message.
You'll get a confirmation message back confirming your subscription.
This message will contain some boilerplate text, generated by the
listserv software, about passwords, which you should IGNORE. Passwords
will not be used or required for this listserv.
Mail volume on this listserv is low; expect to get something two or
three times a month. The list will be used only for forwarding
published versions of Gary Chapman's articles, or else pointers to URLs
for online versions of his articles -- nothing else will be sent to the
list.
To unsubscribe from the listserv, follow the same instructions above,
except substitute the word "Unsubscribe" for "Subscribe."
Please feel free to pass along copies of the forwarded articles, but
please retain the relevant copyright information. Also feel free to
pass along these instructions for subscribing to the listserv, to
anyone who might be interested in such material.
Questions should be directed to Gary Chapman at
gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu.
</fontfamily>
--============_-1294238314==_ma============--
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