Right as a first post I am going to do my very best to keep this super short relative to what I want it to be (otherwise people do not read it) and I've scanned previous threads and deem it to be very relevant. It really needs a book to be written!
What I want to do overall is to draw attention to the conference that I am organizing next month - March 12-14, at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View - the Emerging Communications conference (eComm) see www.eCommMedia.com In short the telecoms industry is being disrupted at many levels by P2P. As I stated in an O'Reilly article: "Increased customer-owned processing power, coupled with an ever faster worldwide homogeneous network (the Internet), is causing the world to reorganize along peer-to-peer modes of operation, and this is disrupting whole industries. " (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/etel/2007/01/11/the-ims-debate.html) So in terms of structure and relationship to customers, the mentality is very much a top-down one. After all telecoms is based on scarcity of resources (e.g. transmission and processing) that are managed in a top-down fashion and rented out. This is out of step with the emergence of what Yochai Benkler calls the "networked information environment". In terms of protocols the market is not going from a single global signalling system (SS7) to a native IP based one (SIP) but rather instead is fragmenting. Fragmentation will continue to be along P2P lines - P2P communication application and solutions. Skype is the best example today. After all communications is P2P! So a lot of the battle telecom operators are going to be engaged in is akin to the loosing fight that the traditional music industry has been engaged in. Just as the music industry has tried fighting using DRM (or taking legal action against music lovers) to keep the business model intact (a business model that has been a physical distribution model of goods), the telecoms industry is trying to create circuits over packets and use "quality of service" techniques to police traffic in their favour ("P2P mitigation"). Finally telecommunications innovation is being democratized (in other words is moving more to P2P modes) - a significant momentum is just starting with open handsets (Android), less open handsets (iPhone SDK soon to be) and open spectrum networks (700Mhz in the States). It was for this reason that I asked Michel Bauwens (of P2P fame) to do a keynote. Michel has videos on YouTube see: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=michel+bauwens&search_type=&search=Search (I think Michel is on this list) We have began discussions on P2P and telecoms and in one interesting email discussion Michel said to me: "The main reason for having such a conference is to bring to the core of the debate the shift from centralized modes of tele-communicating to edge to edge communication. I'm not sure this is what you want to hear, but this also means that telecommunications is being divorced from the 'telecommunications/telephone' industry sector to a much larger combination of players. We have to move, and are moving, towards a generalized and open infrastructure, with different kinds of infrastructrures combining and converging, but giving birth to a wide diversity of devices and content carriers. Digital convergence combines with digital divergence. This poses an essential problem however which I would like to summarize as follows: abundance creates infinite use value, but only enclosure captures limited exchange value. Let me put it another way: the market is about a tension between supply and demand, but a context of digital abundance goes beyond the market. Let me give you an example of the contradiction it poses for the telecom industry in the long run: what is clear is that we need a generalized fiber to the home infrastructure; it is also clear that you can charge for the building of that infrastructure. But, once it is there, you can't really charge for traffic anymore, but it won't be scarce in any way, and paying for traffic would be like paying many times over for the same infrastructure. Because the industry knows this, it is presiding over a gigantic market failure in that infrastructure building. It either won't built it, or where there is actually fiber, it won't use it, instead choosing for many antiquated means of transporting data. This means that for me moment, in objective terms, the industry is a deadweight, slowing rather than promoting technical progress." To try and get more of the P2P lot along I've had the discount code 'p2phackers' created which knocks 15% off the conference registration. I hope to see some of you there. Regards Lee _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
