Preview: The Freedom To Connect Conference

A gathering of thinkers and legislators (and even some who are both) will discuss the future that nobody's ready for, the next round of disruptive changes, even as those changes are already beginning.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [February 26, 2007]

Next week, we're off to the Freedom To Connect conference. The conference is run by David Isenberg, formerly of Bell Labs. Today, Isenberg is a consultant (he calls himself a prosultant).

We've attended this annual conference for a few years now, and have written a number of articles about it.

The conference focuses on keeping the internet open and available to everyone. This deceptively simple topic is a hot one today, as the phone and cable companies and their equipment suppliers fight consumer advocates and new internet companies over the definition and scope of Net Neutrality.

The politicized debate doesn't reach this conference. Instead of bringing in lobbyists and large corporations, the conference focuses on those people who have built and changed the internet. Isenberg himself is one of them, with his 1997 essay The Rise of the Stupid Network, in which he told his large and powerful employer that it was doing everything wrong.

Isenberg predicted that a network without a central operator, with no Ma Bell, would be superior to the phone company's central planning, in which each innovative service would require permission to exist from the secretariat in New Jersey.

Because he is a network engineer, Isenberg focused his comments on network design. But Isenberg's ideas resemble the ideas of others, who reached the same conclusions from different scholastic specializations. Like Gilder, he predicted an end to bandwidth scarcity. Like the heroes of the open source movement, he predicted that collaboration and openness could beat proprietary systems.

The commons is our future
And for his latest conference, he has invited professor Yochai Benkler to set the theme.

Isenberg says Benkler has three key hypotheses about the internet. He says Benkler asserts that the internet:

1. reduces the value of proprietary strategies and makes public, shared information more important,
2. encourages a wider range of motivations to produce, thus demoting supply-and-demand from prime motivator to one-of-many, and
3. allows large-scale, cooperative information production efforts that were not possible before, from open-source software, to search engines and encyclopedias, to massively multi-player online games.

In short, the conference will explore how the internet is changing not just the economy, the specific jobs that people do, but also economic strategies, the ecosystem itself, enabling new collaborations and combinations.

People
Attendees will be well qualified to talk about these questions

Past speakers have included former FCC Chairmen, notable professors and researchers, and significant internet innovators. This year's program is as impressive as any in the past.

After Benkler, Vermont's governor, Jim Douglas, will speak.

The closing keynote goes to science fiction author and blogger Bruce Sterling. Sterling has also written nonfiction. He wrote the book The Hacker Crackdown: Law And Disorder On The Electronic Frontier. The book describes how "an obscure fault in an aging switching system in New York was to lead to a chain reaction of legal and constitutional trouble all across the country." (p.3) This book in particular is well worth reading, even today, 17 years after the events described.

Other notable speakers on the schedule include Jonathan Adelstein of the FCC, Reed Hundt (formerly of the FCC), Michael Calabrese of the New America Foundation (and perhaps the smartest commentator on wireless policy), as well as some notables who have spoken before: Weinberger, Crawford, and Baller.

That's what the conference will be about. It's a broad topic, so we cannot predict what we'll end up writing about, but we do predict that the conference (and the articles that result from it) will be interesting.

— End