greenpoint design

Pre-emptive Recycling

A big part of information management is filtering out the crap you don’t need. This morning, NPR’s excellent Marketplace program mentioned an IM tool whose time has come: Catalog Choice.

Catalog Choice is a way to opt out of many of the catalogs that are crammed into your mailbox each day. Each year some 19 billion catalogs are mailed to Americans. And each year 18.9 billion of us chuck them straight into the recycling bin. That’s a lot of wasted paper, time and energy. Catalog Choice gives consumers the option to say “no thanks” in advance.

Unlike the National Do Not Call Registry, which is maintained by the FTC, Catalog Choice is a private non-profit venture. The project is funded by the Overbrook Foundation , the Merck Family Fund and the Kendeda Foundation. The well conceived and easy-to-use site design was done by Makalu Media.

Google vs. Telcos

Google’s introduction of Android a few weeks ago has been the source of much speculation in the blogosphere. One of the most interesting takes on this development is Tim Wu’s piece in Slate last Friday titled Yes Google Is Trying to Take Over the World. The article predicts an ongoing war between open systems, as represented by Google, and closed systems as embodied by telcos like AT&T and Verizon.

Comcast Throttles Uploads

This morning NPR’s On The Media had a fascinating piece about Comcast and net neutrality. In a podcast titled “Please Don’t Share” OTM interviews an AP reporter who found that Comcast was blocking uploads from customers using file-sharing software like BitTorrent. In one instance, the upload of a version of the Bible was blocked , or “delayed” over a file-sharing network. Apparently the ISP, which is also the country’s largest cable TV provider, attempted to disguise its interference with a proxy.

Certainly file sharing uses a lot of bandwidth, but network providers should not have the ability to selectively throttle some content. This principle was codified in the common carriage rules that governed emerging telephone networks in the early 20th century and it is at the core of the Network Neutrality debate today.

Common carriage is an old concept from English common law. It held that the free flow of goods over a common network — like shipping lines or stage coach lines — was of such a high economic and public value that it should be protected by law. Columbia Business School professor Eli Noam wrote a prescient paper on this topic in 1994 called Beyond Liberalization II: The Impending Doom of Common Carriage, which made a strong case for the economic benefits of maintaining common carriage principles in information networks.

But this is not just an economic issue. It is a question of free speech. If Comcast can deny or delay information traveling over its network based on file size or mode of transfer, what’s to prevent it from throttling content it disagrees with? Does a network provider like AT&T or Verizon have the right to block content from a source it deems distasteful? What happens to the public debate if a few corporations control the transmission of information?

This is why Congress needs to act now. We need legislation this year that guarantees Network Neutrality.

For more on the history of telecom, see The Fundamentals of Telecommunications on the University of Massachusetts’ servers.

Wikipedia’s 2 Million Milestone

An alert nerd over at Slashdot noticed that Wikipedia had clocked its 2 millionth article in the English edition on Sunday.

Whatever reservations you may have about Wiki-reality and consensual knowledge, you have to admit it’s a resounding success in terms of participation.

I just want to find the guy who dumbed down my article on the Nor’easter of 1978.

US Lags in Broadband

Today the Washington Post’s Foreign Bureau posted an interesting piece about broadband internet service in Japan and how it has outstripped American connectivity. The median download speed in Japan is 61 megabytes per second, while the average American’s throughput is about 2 mbps. Furthermore, the Japanese pay less for their net connections.

Why is that?