Jim Moore’s blog: Innovation, Strategy, Public Policy

This
piece from Cringely is hugely important:  It discusses the
widespreasd potential of large backbone players to tag the VOIP packets
of their favored applications, provide enhanced quality of service to
taged packets, and thus advantage their services and cripple those of
others.

This is not just a VOIP issue.  ANY end-to-end service can be disrupted
this way.  Essentially, this is a case of oligopoly players configuring
their  “essential services” so as to advantage themselves.  This will
constitute the illegal abuse of market power, and is akin to the
“tying” that Microsoft was deemed guilty of.

Where I don’t agree with Cringely is that we, the people, have no recourse.

We do have recourse in the rules regarding dominant players in highly
concentrated markets.  The matter Cringely raises should be
attended  to closely by the Federal Trade Commission and the US Department of Justice. 
Professionals  in both of these agencies can make their careers
prosecuting the cable and telco companies on this matter.

We need to wake up the government regulators, the small and large
business trade associations, and the consumer protection lobby.

We need to make our message very clear, and get it out  to
sympathetic congresspeople, governors, and professionals in the FTC and DOJ.

At the very least we need to recognize that:

(1) from an economic and legal point  of view cable companies and
telcos have become “dominant competitors” in the overall broadband
market and, more to the point, in given regional markets;

(2) from a technical and a legal point of view these dominant 
companies provide “essential services” to an ecosytem of third parties,
not limited to VOIP companies but to any net services company. 
These companies in turn provide services to millions of consumers,
small and large businesses.

(3) in order to avoid prosecution, the dominant companies need to
assure that their essential services will be provided on a fair,
non-discriminatory basis to all of their customers.  The basic
Internet packet delivery services are the common carraige of our
information-based society and economy.

(4) the public interest goes very very deep in this matte.
Internet  packet delivery services are the public roads of our
time.  Those who own and maintain the roads must not discriminate
in favor of traffic generated by subsidiaries and allies of
themselves. 

Control of these information highways must not be used to exploit and
in some sense to tax America’s small and large  businesses, and
its millions of consumers, by forcing them to buy communications and
information application services from subsidiaries and allies of the
oligopoly broadband providers.

Read the entire Cringely article now!

This is a fascinating review of the new Yahoo APIs and new developer initiatives, by Paul Bausch, the author of Amazon  Hacks.

John Palfrey, Ethan Zuckerman and I have been messing around with the
newsilike.com experimental site that allows

1.  filters to be bound to RSS feeds,
2.  clusters
of bound and unbound RSS feeds to be grouped and
3.  displayed in
flexible categories or tags, and
4.  the resulting news mix to be posted dynamically on the
web for all to see,
5.  in montages displayable by category, time, or source. 

Very interesting news gestalts emerge. 

Sort of like “news playlists” as John wrote this afternoon.

Here are six somewhat idiosyncratic newsilike news playlists:

http://Ethanz.newsilike.com
http://Jpalfrey.newsilike.com
http://Politics.newsilike.com
http://Podcast.newsilike.com
http://Entertainment.newsilike.com
http://World.newsilike.com

Some of us have begun to believe that there can be artisty in the programming of aggregators.

This is especially true if the aggregator allows filtering of feeds to
focus down  on a particular topic.  And it the
aggregator  allows  tagging  or categorizing feeds in an
ad hoc manner. 

And if the aggregator  lets you publish your aggregator display and make it  available to the public.

John Palfrey, Nick Caramello and I decided a while back to create an
aggregator with these features, and make it free to users (ad
supported) and  totally web based.  The aggregator is
available free in very rough beta.  Perhaps we should call it a
“true beta.”

Our explorations in “aggregator artistry” are very preliminary, but some of
the early experiments have been fun and informative even as they are quite
simple.

Here are four samples you may find intriguing:

http://world.newsilike.com is a kind of melange of world
news–including entertainment, sports, as well as politics and so on.
And it keeps up with Dave Winer on podcasting, by filtering his
scripting news feed to look for pod articles.

http://politics.newsilike.com is the creation of Berkman director John  Palfrey.  Right, left, you have it.

http://sports.newsilike.com has  just been  begun, but it
already has something  really fun.  We filtered a 
number of sports feeds for “Spring training” and then assigned the
results to the Spring Training category.  See the results at
http://sports.newsilike.com. Who ever knew those sports writers could
be so bright and hopeful!

Finally, http://entertainment.newsilike.com has a nice little feed from Daily Variety. Juicy.

These aggregators are just the beginning, we think, of a fun new
activity: Creating and sharing public aggregator-driven experiences.

The following screen shot almost speaks for itself:

RSS has the promise to be a fast, inexpensive, and powerful way to
link people together..So far it has the advantage of being relatively
spam free..

John Palfrey of Harvard’s Berkman Center (and, full disclosure, one of my colleagues at newsilike) coined the battle cry “Don’t Mess With RSS!” yesterday.

Unfortunately, some very big players who should know better are starting to pee in the soup..

Tonight as Nick and I played around with the newsIlike beta, we hit the
following sequence of spam, attributed to BusinessWeek Online!  I’ve
enclosed a screen shot that details the crime.  Just study the image above to see the evidence in full glory.

While the ads come across as from BusinessWeek Online, close study of the browser address line at the bottom of the page gives away the source: someone called “industrybrains.com.”  Ironic name, I presume.