“I got a phone call one morning saying, ‘Steve, the office is full of Secret Service agents, and they’re not letting anyone in,” Jackson said. “They were chasing a demon that wasn’t there. They were on the trail on the notorious 911 document. The whole thing was a comedy of errors.”

Video of the event will be online soon; we’ll post the link when it’s available.

Austin was a hotbed of pioneering Internet activity in the early 1990s, and one event that put us on the Internet map was the March 1, 1990 Secret Service raid at Steve Jackson Games, an Austin company that produced role playing games with science fiction themes. All the company’s computers were confiscated, and as a result Steve Jackson sued the U.S. Secret Service, and won. The raid and court case made Steve a focus of the nascent cyber liberties movement - it was the first major case for the national Electronic Frontier Foundation, and subject of a bestselling book by Bruce Sterling, called _Hacker Crackdown_.

Why did the Secret Service raid Steve Jackson Games? Why did Steve retaliate with a law suit, and how did he win a case against the U.S. government? On this 20th anniversary of the raid, EFF-Austin invites you to gather at Independence Brewing in Austin to get the answers. We’ll have a rousing panel discussion of the case, and its place in history, featuring Steve Jackson, Bruce Sterling, and attorney Pete Kennedy. You can also sample locally-brewed Independence beer!

Please consider making a donation to EFF-Austin when you attend (or via the Paypal link on this site).

Sponsored by EFF-Austin and Plutopia Productions. This event is FREE (as in beer), but we strongly encourage donations to EFF-Austin.

Austin, as a tech hub and an Internet-savvy community, would be a fantastic test bed for this FTTH experiment. Austinites are highly connected and sophisticated Internet users and would perfect beta testers for super high-speed service. Also, with the city’s two major Internet Access Providers (AT&T and Time Warner Cable) experimenting with usage caps and metered service, the city may soon need just such an uncapped high-speed alternative service.

Google is asking for community nominations from individual users, community groups, and local governments. The company will be accepting nominations until March 26, 2010. We urge Austinites to let Google know that they think Austin would be a perfect test site and to send in their nominations for Austin early and often.

Matthew Henry is an EFFA board member and a partner at McCollough|Henry, PC

Next time you run into someone who thinks of the Internet like that, you might want to point them to this video produced by TheEuroIX.  It’s simple, clear, only has a slight bias to support their business model, and makes really good points about why net neutrality is a good thing.

http://npocamp.eventbrite.com/

Austin Non Profit Camp is being spearheaded by David J. Neff, Jon Lebkowsky, Maggie Duval and Matt Glazer. Their goal is to take the successful Bar Camp model and apply it to expand understanding and awareness of free and Open Source technology within the non-profit community in Central Texas.

How It Works

Non profits and technology folks come together to have conversations about the issues that they face in a no sales, no cost environment. We bring tech experts together with nonprofits in a context that will facilitate mutual understanding.

In addition to scheduled speakers, attendees will have the option to sign up to speak about issues and solutions they know best.

Nonprofit attendees collaboratively problem solve issues they face with running and promoting their organizations, workshopping with local technologists about the latest and most effective technologies and methodologies. These conversations will help nonprofits filter what’s useful from what’s not and keep their organizations humming and on track.

Topics

Google Apps, Data Exchange/Salesforce, Google Grants, Social Media, Marketing, Cloud Computing, Email Marketing, Fundraising in Social Media, ZERO COST Infrastructure, ROI of The Cloud

Event Details

Date: November 14th
Time: 10:00 a.m. - :00 p.m.
Location: ACC Eastview Campus
3401 Webberville Road

Keynote Delivered by: Holly Ross from NTEN

http://npocamp.eventbrite.com/

Austin Non Profit Camp is sponsored by: EFF-Austin, NTEN, 501 Tech Club, Plutopia Productions, Austin Social Media Club, 501derful.org, Social Web Strategies, GNI Strategies, Lights.Camera.Help. and Soma Vida. A special thank you/shout out to the Center for Community Based & Nonprofit Organizations at Austin Community College for providing the incredible space.

The Internet Then and Now

The Internet Then and Now

Description: The Internet was built originally as a dumb network – a transmission network. When commercial interests became involved, the battle for control of packets as emerged as well. Jon and Julie will explore the inherent conflicts in having entities such as AT&T and Time Warner Cable as both connectivity/access AND content and application providers. What can we do to keep bias out so all have the ability to connect?
Presenters: Jon Lebkowsky and Julie Gomoll

The End Of Free and Unfettered Internet Access: How Network Operators Are Restricting Internet Use

The End Of Free and Unfettered Internet Access: How Network Operators Are Restricting Internet Use

Description: Network Operators have made several attempts in the last few years restrict access to Internet services and content through selective bandwidth restrictions and service blocking. In some cases they deploy equipment that examines Internet content in order to determine if the service delivering it should be limited or restricted. Will this become the norm in the future? What does this mean to free and unfettered access to Internet content and services?
Panelists: Matt Henry and Michael Hathaway Moderator: Jon Lebkowsky

Online Activism and Government 2.0

Online Activism and Government 2.0

Presenter: Gregory Foster

Media, Mentoring & Technology in the Classroom

Media, Mentoring & Technology in the Classroom

Description: Media Diversity Council Founder / Executive Director, Carl Settles Jr. discusses how to leverage social networks and mentoring to develop sustainable approaches to diversity and economic empowerment.
Presenter: Carl Settles

EFF-Austin is coordinating One Web Day Austin, September 22 at Austin Centre, 5pm-9pm. Download the event flyer (pdf). | Learn more about One Web Day.

The previous workshop IIW2008b was memorable for the many sweet apps (several from Google) that made use of OAuth and the marathon session on evaluating different options for discovery facilitated by Eran Hammer-Lahav (and lots of great suggestions from John Panzer, et al.). One of the principles of the open space talks is that sessions don’t necessarily end at any particular time.

The conversation about discovery continued across multiple sessions at IIW2009a. The topic of discovery is as fundamental as the social construction of reality. From a node’s perspective on the network, it can be summarized in two steps:

• Given a resource (identified by a URI), where can I find information about it?
• What format is this ‘information about’ in? How do I make sense of it and use it?

Here is video of Eran Hammer-Lahav’s lunch session “Introduction to Discovery: How do we Interact with the Unknown?”

I was very impressed by the work John Bradley and others are doing with interoperability testing for user-centric identity (OpenID, etc.). Allen Tom discussed the OpenID User Interface Extension and showed off some of the work with puffypoodles.com. Here’s his recap at the Yahoo Developer Blog. Of course, Facebook announced it is now the biggest OpenID relying party at the workshop.

Guillaume Lebleu facilitated Identity and the Future of Money. Guillaume reviewed several complementary currencies that have sprung up on the web in the last year.

It’s amazing to overhear everyday conversations today. Talk of messages on a wall, bizarre notions of friendship and fan pages are common. The social web experience shared by millions of people is sadly monolithic. Are these new contexts getting in the way of a more interesting voyage of discovery? If we want a healthier (perhaps less addictive) experience, do our spaces on the web allow us to realize that intention?

The next Internet Identity workshop will be November 3-5.

According to Time Warner, usage caps and metered pricing are the “fair” way to charge for broadband service. Why should light Internet users pay just as much as heavy users that download 100 times more data? Or as Time Warner COO Landel Hobbs asked, “When you go to lunch with a friend, do you split the bill in half if he gets the steak and you have a salad?” What Time Warner and Hobbs are implying, of course, is that their costs are based on usage and that providing service to heavy users is more expensive than for light users.

Time Warner’s fairness justification seems intuitive and sounds good, but there’s a problem with its premise. Broadband providers’ costs are not directly tied to usage. A user could download 10GB of movies today and turn off her computer tomorrow, and Time Warner’s costs for those two days wouldn’t be materially different. This is because broadband providers’ infrastructure and peering costs are largely fixed. Once these expenses have been sunk, the cost of providing service to both heavy and light users is nominal. In this regard, Time Warner is really selling access to its network, rather than gigabytes. So, I think Hobbs’s question would be more accurate if he asked, “When you go to a movie with a friend, do you split the bill in half if he watches every minute and you take a nap?” Of course you do because you’re paying for admission and how you choose to use that access is of no consequence to the theater’s costs or ticket prices.

Instead, metered pricing plans and usage caps are a strategy intended to salvage diminishing cable revenues by forcing users to use less Internet. Users have been watching increasing amounts of video online, with some abandoning their cable service altogether in favor of broadband (an effect that has been sped by the struggling economy). This presents an obvious dilemma for broadband providers that also offer a cable product, like Time Warner: as online video watching goes up, the revenue-generating cable usage goes down. Online video is bad for business because a cable company directly profits from its cable content through advertising, pay-per-view and video-on-demand, but can’t profit off Internet content. The fact is that Time Warner is offering competing products and the company has a vested interest in cable video prevailing over Internet video. Time Warner introduced metered pricing and usage caps to make its customers turn off their computers and pick up the remote.

The public backlash that forced Time Warner to (temporarily) acquiesce demonstrated that Internet users don’t want to return to metered pricing, but Time Warner already knew that. The company thought it could get away with introducing a hugely unpopular pricing scheme because it knew that its customers have very few broadband options. The vast majority of users are served by a phone company and cable company duopoly, which can hardly be said to be a free and functioning market.

Time Warner targeted cities for metered pricing and caps where it knew that its customers wouldn’t cancel their service. At the time the plan was announced, each of the four cities (Austin, San Antonio, Greensboro and Rochester) were served by phone companies (AT&T and Frontier) that were themselves in the process of implementing usage caps and metered pricing. Time Warner knew that the only other broadband option available in these cities was intent on doing the same thing and that its customers had nowhere else to go for unlimited service.

This is exactly the type of behavior that happens in unregulated monopoly markets (and duopoly markets are little better as they inevitably tend towards implicit collusion). Without sufficient competition, broadband providers have no incentive to improve their product. This is why America’s broadband access and speeds lag embarrassingly far behind Asian and European countries that have functioning broadband markets with multiple providers. Only when we have a broadband market with more providers and some semblance of competition will we see an end to unfair and unpopular practices, like cable-revenue protecting usage caps.

06/01/09 UPDATE: Last week, Time Warner CEO Glenn Britt essentially admitted that the competitive threat of online video to traditional cable is the driving force behind the company’s capped and metered pricing model. Mr. Britt told investors, “If, at an extreme, you could get all of the programming you get over cable for free on the Internet, over time people will stop buying (TV).” Unfortunately, the public collateral damage of forcing customers to use less Internet and more TV is not a consideration in Time Warner’s plans. The Internet is a medium for free expression and a facilitator of unrestricted communication, education, and commerce. Television simply is not.

Matthew Henry is an EFFA board member and a partner at McCollough|Henry, PC

The exponential growth of Internet traffic has been a hotly debated reality from the the very beginning. Historically there have been two reactions to exponential Internet bandwidth demand, fear, and denial. Funny how that hasn’t changed for 25 years! Meanwhile bandwidth demand, and the capacity to support it continues to grow hand in hand regardless.

On the business front there are three intertwined factions each with self serving businesses motivations:

1. The Venture Capital funded Internet businesses that seek to grow as much stock value as possible on services delivered over the Internet in order to achieve unrealistic exit opportunities for their investments. They run roughshod over the internet and poison the Net Neutrality debate with their own brand of pirate capitalism masquerading as Internet socialism. They present the perfect enemy to the next faction, the Phone and Cable guys.

2. Phone and Cable service companies, stuck in a 19th century business model they adopted from Thomas Edison. They fear the encroachment of the Internet on their core services. They strive to constrain the last mile of the Internet to being an information service, lest it replace the antiquated Infrastructure that delivers their voice and video services with a more efficient service delivery model that better meets the demands of consumers.

3. Cisco and its business strategy to dominate the Internet infrastructure market by making Internet protocols and equipment unnecessarily complex to block competition. They are the arms dealer in the Net Neutrality war. Through their “strategic under specification” strategy within the IETF standards groups, they have convinced the world that complex packet examination, reordering and discard is the best method to insure quality of service. This, as opposed to avoiding congestion through intelligent capacity planning and management using simple, reliable and low cost packet routers.

I’ve worked in all three of these businesses. Hell, I even researched the capacity problem for DARPA in the 90s. Needless to say what drives the self serving commentary on Internet capacity/demand remains the same - FEAR and DENIAL.

Is it any wonder that analysts, researchers, the press and the general public are confused? The fact is, the phone and cable broadcast business models should have died in the 20th century and they are doing everything the can to keep their businesses on life support. Add to the mix the threats of venture funded upstarts and the lure of Cisco’s “Kill Your Competitor’s Packets” endgame solution, and you have the perfect war - Two bitter enemies and an arms dealer to keep them alive and fighting indefinitely.

… and now for the rest of the story:

First and foremost, Internet backbone bandwidth is well compensated for by ISP’s and the customers they host. This bandwidth is not free. As demand for capacity requires lighting up more dark fiber, customers are there to pay for this, the fiber is there to be lit, and the routers can be added to support drive the traffic. Currently, backbone Internet data paths are well maintained. These links are well utilized (90+%) and have none of the random spikes of bandwidth demands that the alarmists would like us all to believe. The only real spikes in the backbone occur when a backhoe cuts a line or a backbone router crashes due to software failure. Physical layer failover mechanisms provided by SONET and other similar technologies resolve these failures in microseconds. The fact is that the Internet backbone is more reliable than ever, and shows little sign of dying an untimely death. So the real “capacity” problem exists with the last mile, which remains under the control of the very business that want the Internet to fail or better yet just go away.

What’s funny is, I find myself working with utilities and regulators on Smart Grid technology over the last few years. The Internet poses the identical threat to the electric utility business model. This industry is being transformed by the growing demand for distributed renewable energy and the need for a vast and ubiquitous information grid to manage an increasingly complex electric grid. They fear the Internet so much, that they are attempting to build their own capacity constrained private service network. These Advanced Meter Infrastructure (AMI) networks are being extended to utility meters and into controls and displays in customer premises. They will likely fail just as Compuserve and Prodigy did, and for the same reasons - they simply cannot compete with the service delivery capabilities and low cost network capacity of the Internet. Its like deja vu all over again! The utilities biggest threat? Google’s recently announced PowerMeter service! Now all three 19th century style utility businesses have their sights on killing the Internet!

Sadly, the Smart Grid needs the Internet to survive and thrive. There is no possible way to build a private network fast enough to support services promised to energy consumers. I sincerely hope that recent hype and government stimulus money to accelerate Smart Grid growth will help to offset some of the other agendas that seek to constrain the last mile of the Internet.

One thing is for sure, if the Internet fails, it won’t be due to us all watching Hulu, but because someone decided to shut it down to keep their dying business alive for a few more years. Unfortunately, it could result in the failure of the Smart Grid and ultimately turn the lights out for all of us.

Michael Hathaway is an EFFA board member and founder of Pico Innovations