Category Archives: ideas

Jon Zittrain of Harvard Law School has been doing some good work developing useful and interesting courseware, which the Berkman Center offers for free. If you’re interested in helping provide feedback, check out his post to cyberprof. Continue reading →

So this is the best I’ve seen so far: The Talbott Hotel in Chicago has free wireless in the rooms and public areas. No registration at all. The signal strength is at the maximum; the connect time was exactly 5 seconds.

Competition is amazingly great way to get great infrastructure built. Someone ought to tell the FCC. Continue reading →

CIO Insight posted a piece by me about spectrum yesterday, and it was quickly slashdotted. But they posted a side-bar, not the piece. The actual piece is now up. The piece they posted tries to explain how to understand a “wireless commons.” Continue reading →

There’s a new piece by Eli Noam posted (for free for 2 weeks) at the FT about spectrum policy. This follows the brilliant and much discussed piece by David Weinberger on Salon explaining David Reed’s views about “interference.”

Noam has been in the middle of the debate between the spectrum-as-property types and the spectrum-as-commons types for a long time. As his piece concludes, “spectrum should be free to access but not free of charge.” The reason is an assumption that is at the core of his and the spectrum-as-property school of thought: “Eventually, any resource whose utili[z]ation is of value, yet whose use is without a charge, will be over-utili[z]ed.”

The more I hear these property and quasi-property types talk, the more I believe that this is the core assumption that needs to be attacked. There are two possible lines of attack, both, in my view, true, but only one which is useful. Continue reading →

We’ve opened registration on the March 1 spectrum conference. Continue reading →

Thanks to everyone who responded to my request yesterday. My inbox and comment box are now deluged with fantastic ideas, and I’m now way behind in responding. Please don’t stop with the ideas. I’ll catch up in the replies soon. But thank you. I am astonished by the generosity.

Aaron once wondered what he should do with his life. Option 4 was answer email (3069 in his inbox). This is a worthy discipline for anyone, though we need a norm of slack for email. I’d love a script that posted the number of emails in my inbox and the average time to reply just so I don’t inadvertently insult someone who’s used to conversing with Mitch.

More soon, but thanks again for the help. And to pass the time quickly, I recommend Cory‘s book. Continue reading →

I’ve been hiding away in Japan working on a book that’s tentatively titled “Free Culture”–“free” as in the verb. I’d be grateful for any help with two questions that are continued below. Continue reading →

Matt wonders what one does with 100 mbs. Great question. In Korea, where, as I was told, copyright laws are “immature,” they are free to stream TV to their computers. That uses chunks of bandwidth, and creates great new competition for video. (If only we (or Canada) could be “immature” again.

But remember Mr. Gates’ thought about how much memory a PC would need: 640k. Give us bandwidth, and we’ll find a way to use it. Continue reading →

As cable companies continue to increase the cost of broadband service, and as telcom monopolies are strengthened by changes in FCC policy, it is now absolutely clear what the broadband endgame will be in the US: wireless. Think of a city where every single street light is a node in a mesh (for an example, see meshnetworks), and thus where the cloud of the internet sits on the street like the fog in San Francisco. For almost nothing, cities could provide IP light, as cities provide street lights. Neutral, end-to-end, fast, and cheap. (Apologies for this uncharacteristically optimistic post. Just a preview of the moot.) Continue reading →

Joi makes a great point about the character of different spam control methods. While in the narrow sense, this is not an end-to-end issue (as Saltzer, Clark and Reed framed it), in a general sense, spam solutions can be divided into those that respect end-to-end values, and those that don’t. The label+bounty solution (which has a nice discussion on /. and which I’d lose my job over if it doesn’t work), I’m happy to acknowledge, is end-to-end respectful. Continue reading →