The major nugget of gold in this set, of course, is Pool, whose book lays a lot of valuable background. In addition, I'd argue that anyone who read only the assigned chapters, and therefore who didn't read Chapter 4 (on the First Admendment and print media), should go back and read that chapter as well.
Why? Because it gives some valuable background and historical perspective on what has historically been protected (and not!) in print media. This sort of perspective is sometimes lacking in certain arguments I've seen advanced, supposedly based on the First Amendment and the handling of print, that purport to talk about how it should be applied in cyberspace. It also shows just how dangerously close we came to a very heavily censored physical mail postal system, and how little force was required at any given point in history to tip the balance one way or the other. Considering the explicit language about print and mail in the Constitution, the degree to which we almost had all mail heavily censored by default should be a loud cautionary tale to the much more poorly-protected subject of speech in cyberspace. (Its discussion of the boundary between "speech" and "action" is also cause for some thought. Even Black and Douglas, the most pro-First-Amendment absolutists the Court has seen, supported restrictions on speech when it was tied to action. Yet a narrow reading of how computer messaging works (to say nothing of how viruses work! and what about Telescript?) could leave the speech/action boundary particularly fuzzy in cyberspace. Beware legal challenges on this front by tricky prosecutors.)
In addition to Pool's book, I particularly liked the summary articles by The Economist in Part II, though, as being a nice wrapup of the issues for a nontechnical audience---The Economist is generally quite good in preparing lucid summaries of issues for nonspecialists, and this was no exception. The Business Week pieces were somewhat pallid by comparison, but that's not surprising, given Business Week. The Harvard Business Review article was nice, in particular for its emphasis that new architectures must cannibalize old ones, and that companies that don't eat their young will have them eaten for them by others.
Okay, let's move on to a discussion related to turf wars.
Where do I start? If I was feeling argumentative, it would seem that talking about either Gilder's paper or the Wired interviews would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Of course, I've been feeling argumentative for weeks now, so let's go shoot some fish. When we're done with the catch, I'll go back and talk about, e.g., the article about Diller and QVC. I won't really talk about the Gordian Knot pieces, either in Part II or Part III, since, while interesting and very informative, I don't take issue with them and would be reduced to simply summarizing the good parts. (Perhaps we should get Solomon back for a whole day, stick a tape recorder in front of him, and let him go at it---we'd get a whole book the size of The Gordian Knot with all sorts of other information in it. The amount (and rate!) of fascinating factoids he can emit is amazing.)
The scariest thing about Gilder's piece, in my opinion, is that he is listened to in high circles. It's pretty obvious that he doesn't understand technically what he's talking about; instead, he leans on platitudes and a reiteration of the American Dream sort of mentality that maintains that anybody can get rich quick if they only apply themselves. Even more startling, however, are his economic comments; one would have hoped that at least in economics he had more of a foothold.
For example, in the third paragraph on the fifth page (pity the pages aren't numbered), he comments that, since banks are just information systems, then anybody can be a banker, and that, ipso facto, productivity can increase because everybody's moving money around.
It's not entirely clear to me what planet he's from, but most economists generally acknowledge that, assuming sufficient liquidity, the important thing in measuring productivity is growth in goods and services, not how finely one can smear the cash around. An argument that banking is productivity sounds suspiciously close to arguing that the leveraged buyouts of the 80's, that created so much debt and destroyed so many companies, were in fact the most productive thing anyone could do---why build widgets when one can be more productive speculating in the future of widget production?
I also have to wonder about his comments about the Malone model. Gilder claims that the "Malone model", in which one tightly controls content and charges monopoly rent on the conduits, is in fact being abandoned by Malone himself. On the other hand, Malone jokes in his Wired interview about shooting the head of the FCC; says that they want to move more and more into programming and international sales, because both of those are farther out of the reach of the FCC; and talks about the importance of "branded product". (I'll have more to say about Malone later.) This certainly doesn't sound like someone who is trying to go into common carriage.
It seems that Gilder is trying to have his cake and eat it, too. He cannot deny that each cable company is trying to be more rapacious and monopolistic than the next, in an attempt to own all the market. Yet he also cannot swallow any attempt to force competition on a failed (e.g., overly monopolistic) "market", claiming instead that, once the market is completely swallowed by a very small number of very large players, then open, nondiscriminatory, common-carriage style communication will become a reality. I don't buy this argument on historical grounds, and he fails to convince me with any evidence of it. Instead, he claims that only monopolistic control will end the bandwidth shortage that otherwise requires control of content---yet somehow sees that only "the government" is a "500-pound gorilla" and yet monopolistic business interests will magically avoid such abuses.
This weird "less is more" philosophy also informs his discussion of Microsoft. He claims that aggressive antitrust enforcement in the early 80's would have diminished Microsoft's market share (probably true), but then says that this would have led to less software diversity, not more, because a large number of applications would not have a common platform to run on. Yet, not understanding the technology, he misses just how poorly most of these applications do run, and how much better off we might be if consumers had had an actual choice in their computational enviroments. Perhaps we would not be limited only to the PC (based on assembly language, and later C, and incredibly unstable, where a single application can crash the entire machine) and the Mac (based on Pascal, and later C, and incredibly unstable, where a single application can crash the entire machine). It's been known for more than a decade that there are much better architectures available (and, lest you be confused, am I am surely not talking about UNIX), both for users and for programmers, that could have opened the floodgates to higher-quality, more-responsive, faster-to-develop-and-ship software. Yet the lack of genetic diversity in operating systems has instead shafted us all.
Gilder also fatally confuses raw cable bandwidth with available upstream bandwidth, blithely talking about the huge bitrates available with cable without stopping to think that this applies only if everyone is seeing the same bits---in short, only if everyone is essentially a passive receiver with severely restricted upstream bandwidth. He's right that the raw bandwidth of a cable plant can indeed be huge, but misses the point that it's the architecture of how it's used, in particular whether there's much in the way of symmetry and upstream bandwidth, that makes it useful for anything besides home shopping.
Well, enough bashing on Gilder. Let's turn our attention to Malone, who makes a nice segue, having been cited prominently in Gilder's piece. Malone and TCI appear to be the monopolists par excellence of the cable plant. He makes no apologies for this. Indeed, his Wired interview is practically a celebration of this, giving him a nice little political opportunity to bash on the RBOC's without himself taking much heat.
Malone presents a rather likeable character, and seems the perfect interview material for a magazine like Wired. Further, the Wired interviewer lets him get away with some outrageous statements, such as his comments that "[TCI] is really very naive politically". For one thing, he is deliberately conflating Washington lobbying with the sort of politics required to control potential entrants to its market (either in bandwidth or in content) and to absorb those who are already there. Perhaps what Malone really means is, "Washington hasn't hassled us enough yet to deserve a lot of our political attention," but I find this, too, hard to believe from someone who jokes about killing the head of the FCC. (Yes, I realize it's a joke---but the FCC and antitrust actions could be a damaging annoyance to TCI in the future. I find it difficult to believe that TCI does not already, and won't in the future, lobby very hard to ensure that this does not come to pass.)
Malone talks a lot about Ray Smith. Let's turn our attention to him for a moment. It's interesting to compare Malone's version of the why the TCI/Bell Atlantic merger collapsed (a "schizophrenic" company---just like his "house divided" comments about SGI) with Smith's ("John's cash flow went down"). There's an interesting amount of finger-pointing going on here, which is hardly surprising, but neat to see in cold print. (It was obvious to everyone who knew anything, of course, that the cries of "regulation killed the deal!" that rang out at the time were bogus---yet I wonder how many people still thing government regulation scotched it? At least Malone and Smith have the good sense not to try to use that old canard during their interviews.)
The Wired interviewer seems somewhat more antagonistic to his subject in the Smith interview than he was in the Malone interview. This tends to elicit more useful information, and it's a pity that the Malone interview was such an admiration session. Nonetheless, there are some peculiar statements made by Smith about, for example, telephone service via cable that go unchallenged. (Example: He talks about how many cities have competing cable plants, hence a call could only be routed to someone on the same cable. Yet he fails to grasp that interconnection of these plants for telephone traffic is possible, though just four paragraphs later talks about how Bell Atlantic's wireless presence is fundamentally enabled by the fact that they are tied into multiple providers. I find this lack of parallelism bizarre.)
Malone and Smith have, in many respects, a fairly "converged" vision of the way they think the future will go. They differ primarily because of their backgrounds and where their sunk costs are. That vision is primarily one of high-bandwidth video to the home, with just enough upstream bandwidth to buy things and change channels. While it might seem initially surprising for a telephone company (but not a cable company) to be thinking like this, considering the one-to-one, no-content-control regime of existing audio service, it is hardly surprising when one considers that the first priority of the RBOC's is to take enough market share away from the cable companies that they can get their own services in place. No one truly believes that the is much of a profit to be made in providing upstream bandwidth---even those who know how the Internet functions dismiss it as a profit center, since little commerce has happened yet on the Internet. (It seems that the amount of bandwidth required to actually support the Internet is so small that it's not worth the attention of any player, and that's probably true---total Internet traffic is currently buried in the noise when compared with total telephone audio traffic, much less the [higher bitrate but far less unique because it's broadcast] total cable traffic.)
As a result, both visions of the future leave a lot to be desired if one hopes for something other than higher-bandwidth couch potatoes.
Speaking of couch potatoes, let's talk, very briefly, about Diller. The New Yorker article was a wealth of odd information (including its focus on Diller the PowerBook fanatic).
It's interesting to look at QVC because it's essentially the king of consumerist culture, and of viewing wideband, interactive networks as a selling medium whose upstream bandwidth is essentially limited to placing orders. Its very popularity (100K orders a day? up to $1M an hour when the hawking is good? $1B a year?) makes it a virtual paragon of How To Do Interactivity if you're a media maven. Consequently, it's served as a very strong exemplar. Everybody wants to do another QVC.
[And if you want my view of how widespread, interactive, video consumerism will affect society, we need go little farther than the following fascinating bit of demographics, though it has little to do with the article per se. It seems that QVC and HSN have recently experienced hours-long drops of 30 to 50% in their revenue on certain days at certain times. Why? Because those times are when particularly juicy bits of the OJ trial were broadcast. In the future, we won't have to worry about celebrities being dissuaded from committing, or being accused of committing, headline-grabbing crimes. They'll be coerced into a life of good repute because being otherwise is bad for business...]
And yet, even someone who is supposedly as infatuated with the new technology as Diller apparently became is thinking of communications networks as essentially grand consumerist tools. It's a pity he didn't discover the Internet as well, with its focus on communication with other actual live people, but such is life. Malone, Smith, and Diller indeed have a common vision of the next few decades of communication, and it isn't particularly pretty if you're concerned about participation in content. I can hardly blame them in their turf wars---they're trying as hard as they can to grab the biggest and most lucrative markets they can, just as fast as they can. Yet I have to wonder if anything will ever motivate such giants of industry to add just the few percent that's necessary to facilitate actual communication instead of blind consumption. I must say I'm pessimistic.
Lenny Foner