At Freedom to Connect, Isenberg Asks Tech Industry to Save the World

Isenberg likes the people who make up the technology industry and knows most of the important ones, but at the conference, he pointed out that an epic global disaster is a possible outcome, and asked us all to work together to avoid it.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [April 14, 2008]

David Isenberg opened his Freedom to Connect conference with unusually passionate remarks, recorded in full here in his blog. He ditched the rhyming from previous years.

That's because there's a new sense of urgency. It's not peak oil or the closing of the internet frontier. It's this:

Our planet is in danger of becoming hostile to life. I'm not talking about the flooding of Miami and New York and Bangladesh. I mean that because of the carbon we humans put in the air, Earth could become Venus, a place where life can't live. So I believe—and I put this forward as a hypothesis—I believe that we can use the Internet to conserve more atmospheric carbon than its infrastructure generates. Furthermore, I believe we can use the Internet for global participation that transcends tribalism and nationalism to end war . . . for discussion!

So it's no longer the fight against the telcos for the freedom to connect. It's no longer the fight for democracy against governments like China and Pakistan that want to restrict it.

The most important thing we can use the internet for, Isenberg believes, is to save the world. And there's not much time to do it.

Isenberg, an opponent of the current AT&T monopoly strategy who hails from Bell Labs as if it were his birthplace said, "It is the story of a Goliath composed of a thousand Davids. I am one of them."

Science and its application built the internet and the industries that are causing global warming and Isenberg believes that intelligent action and investment can cure the problems that unintelligent investment has caused.

The corporate hierarchy, and its tendency to promote based on anything but merit must change.

"It is a story of a system that couldn't possibly be merit-based, because managers had to rise through eighteen layers of management in a 20-some-year career. It is the story of an AT&T CEO that said the Internet was a toy. It is the story of an executive who drove AT&T's computer business into failure, then he presided over AT&T's NCR's failure, and then he was promoted again."

One of the many things that make the conference unusual is that it is held in a movie theater, and a live participatory text commentary is projected on the screen behind the speaker. Commentators quickly noted that they'd like to "fix" Congress the way you'd fix a dog. Brad Templeton has a more elaborate idea.

It's not Congress alone—regulators are also to blame, and especially the FCC.

"It is a story of hundreds of facilities based competitors that were created with the stroke of a President's pen in 1996, and then—just a few years later—these same companies were put out of business by a million tiny pen strokes by the Courts and the FCC ."

Isenberg is astounded by the telecosmic bandwidth potential of fiber. In his speech, he notes that each fiber can carry 160 different wavelengths and that each wavelength can hold 10 Gbps. ISP-Planet's readers do not need a lesson concerning the potential applications of a 1600 Gbps pipe. Isenberg would like to see one running down every street.

That's the goal.

The rest of the conference, over two quick days, filled with hour long sessions each of which itself had enough material for a whole day, described the challenges we face. Over the coming weeks, you'll see more about the Freedom to Connect conference. This is your introduction to the topic.

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