September 2009

[Commentary] Web Squared is less a new direction than an exploration of what becomes possible when the building blocks of Web 2.0 (such as participation, collective intelligence and so on) increase by orders of magnitude. There's also a qualitative change happening as the Web becomes more closely integrated with the real world via sensor-based smart phone applications. Web Squared is another way of saying "Web meets World." The first generation of Web 2.0 applications harnessed the collective intelligence of users typing on keyboards. Whether it was links and clicks (Google), articles and edits of shared knowledge (Wikipedia) or votes (Digg), the application was driven by explicit human actions. Five years in, collective intelligence applications are increasingly driven by cascades of sensor data being thrown off by devices, often without explicit human intervention. Today's smartphones contain microphones and cameras, as well as motion, proximity, location, and direction sensors. They have their own eyes, ears, and sense of touch. Revolutionary new applications connect those senses to cloud databases and programs running on massive server farms. Where the Web Squared world gets really interesting, though, is when applications use all the senses of a device, coordinating them much like the human brain coordinates our senses, to draw conclusions that would be difficult with one sense alone.

Fiber to the home (FTTH) has been touted by many as the next great leap in broadband connectivity, and was discussed at the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference. In Japan this service has already become the leading method of broadband connectivity, with speeds reaching 1 Gigabits per second (Gbps), and a seemingly endless potential for application development. Professor Masatsugu Tsuji from the University of Hyogo presented an analysis on how FTTH has become the dominant connection method in the country. Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation is the dominant corporation in the FTTH market with a market share of nearly 70 percent. The cost of these services is also much lower in Japan versus the United States: in Japan, a 1Gbps connection costs less than $40. Because some individuals still prefer to keep their older digital subscriber line connections, NTT must maintain two networks, a copper network for DSL and a fiber network. Japan does face a problem in fostering competition, however, with the high costs associated with fiber connections making new market entry quite difficult. In the US, the question of municipally-owned networked, while popular in recent years, has been lower on the policy agenda. Bert Sadowski of Eindhoven University of Technology looked at how a municipal network added competition to the FTTH market in the Netherlands.

The House Commerce Committee will mark up the Informed P2P User Act (HR 1319), a bill that seeks to protect computer users from unauthorized peer-to-peer file-sharing. The bill would establish the unauthorized use of a computer by a P2P program to be an unfair and deceptive act. Unauthorized use would include failing to inform computer users that their computers were being used as part of the file-uploading network. Computer owners would also have to give "informed consent" before their computers could be used for P2P file sharing. The bill's sponsors include Reps Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), Joe Barton (R-TX) and John Barrow (D-GA). Rep Bono Mack's constituents include Hollywood studios concerned about the sharing of pirated films and TV shows via the P2P protocol, which translates the power of multiple computers into faster downloads of big files like video.

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission in regard to a previous petition filed by four electric companies that sought to impose the Telecom Rate on pole attachments used by cable operators for VoIP and broadband services. The rate proposed by American Electric Power, Duke Energy, Southern Co. and Xcel Energy would result in double or triple the current rates that cable operators pay for pole attachments, the NCTA said in its petition. The NCTA petition said the approach by the electric companies would increase the cost of deploying and operating broadband networks by hundreds of millions of dollars annually, and would have a negative impact on promoting universal broadband access as put forth by the FCC's National Broadband Plan. Many of the same lines that carry the broadband services also provide VoIP services to cable customers. The NCTA said the pole attachment rate that it proposed in its Broadband Pole Attachment rulemaking would facilitate greater investment in broadband networks by lowering costs, especially in the rural areas that are currently underserved by broadband and where there are more poles per customer. The NCTA also advocated the same pole attachment rates to all broadband providers.