December 2012

[Commentary] A decade and a half ago, as Internet adoption began to accelerate, David Isenberg wrote what may well have been the manifesto for the revolution, “The Rise of the Stupid Network.” He argued that seismic shifts were shaking the very foundations of the telecommunications industry: data traffic was overtaking voice, circuit switching was succumbing to packet, price-performance was radically improving, and customers were increasingly taking control. The network, he contended, should be “stupid,” carrying bits from point A to point B, and not doing much else. Functionality was best delivered by intelligent endpoints interacting over a dumb network. As he foresaw, the interoperability benefits of a ubiquitous protocol like IP, which has now worked itself into our smartphones, tablets, and TVs – not to mention everything from electric meters to light bulbs – cannot be denied. And, thanks to Moore’s Law, even preschoolers can have hundreds of GigaFLOPS at their disposal for less than the price of a swing set. Of course, 15 years is a long time, especially in the field of computing and communications. So the question is, does Isenberg’s line of thought still hold true? I would argue that, rather than stupid networks, we’re entering an era of “pervasive intelligence,” where endpoints are intelligent, but the network can be as well. Networks can be smart. Tunable. Programmable.

[Weinman is a senior vice president at Telx, a provider of interconnection and data center services]

Macmillan CEO John Sargent sent a letter to authors and agents on Wednesday afternoon, saying that the publisher does not plan to follow Penguin’s lead and settle with the Department of Justice in the e-books lawsuit. But, Sargent said, Macmillan voluntarily entered new retailer contracts that conform with many of the requirements in the DOJ’s settlement. Macmillan is the smallest of the big-six publishers, and the only one that is wholly privately owned. Sargent says there are two reasons Macmillan is not settling: “First, it is hard to settle when you have done nothing wrong. Much as the lawyers explain to me that settling is completely standard business procedure, it still seems fundamentally flawed to me somehow.”

More importantly, he writes:
“Since the very beginning, the government’s demands have never wavered in all our discussions. They still insist on the two year discounting regime that forms the heart of the agreement signed by the three settling publishers. It was our belief that Amazon would use that entire discount for the two years. That would mean that retailers who felt they needed to match prices with Amazon would have no revenue from e-books from five of the big publishers (and possibly the sixth) for two years. Not no profit, no revenue. For two years. We felt that few retailers could survive this or would choose to survive this.”

A large group of Silicon Valley and New York tech leaders signed a full-page advertisement in the New York Times for Demand A Plan, a mayor’s organization pressing for gun safety in the wake of the recent tragic school shooting in Connecticut. “It’s Time. Demand a Plan to End Gun Violence,” reads the ad, which was signed by a plethora of major digital players. They include, in part: SV Angel’s Ron Conway, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, Skype’s President Tony Bates, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, advisor Bill Campbell, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, Findery’s Caterina Fake, Emerson Collective’s Laurene Jobs, Code Advisors’ Quincy Smith, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, and Zuckerberg Media’s Randi Zuckerberg.

As the world continues to react to the horrific school shooting in Connecticut, many people are grasping for potential social explanations for mass shootings. As usual, violent video games are being offered as a scapegoat in some corners, with everyone from Fox News pundits and bottom-feeding attorney Jack Thompson to the NRA and Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod suggesting that the popularity of virtual violence may lead to more real-world violence in some way. Unfortunately for these talking heads, the data just doesn't seem to support their assertion. Max Fisher at The Washington Post helpfully compiled a graph mapping the per-capita spending on video games in the top ten national markets on one axis and the per-capita gun-related murders in those countries on the other. Far from showing a strong link between the two statistics, the graph actually shows a small negative correlation—as video game spending goes up, gun-related murders tend to go down.