Well, geeks are certainly inheriting my earth.
On January 13, my company named Carol Bartz, a self-avowed math nerd and former punch-card carrying member of her college computer club, as its CEO. In her own words:
I was a real nerd. I love, love, love, love math. Back in the late ’60s, math meant being a teacher if you were a woman. I wasn’t interested in teaching. Then I took my first computer course. It was crazy. It was like math, only more fun. I switched to computer science.
Exactly one week later, on January 20, my country turned over executive control to Barack Obama, a CrackBerry addicted comic book geek. In his inauguration speech, Obama vowed to “restore science to its rightful place”, “wield technology’s wonders”, and even addressed “non-believers” — wording that in any sane universe should be entirely unremarkable, yet in ours appears to represent an unprecedented milestone.
I can’t recall a two-week span filled with so much geek pride and cautious optimism.
Back to the Carol Bartz quote. Reading it brings a smile to my face. It also reminds me of my mom, who, convinced it was her only option, taught middle school for a few years before returning to medical school to pursue her passion, enjoying a successful career as one of the first women radiologists.
I highly recommend Bartz’s essay, which mixes biography with prescience and insight. Bartz describes how technology and the Internet are transforming collaboration and improving productivity, at the same time ushering in an era of information overload, email bankruptcy, and misuse of the extra time technology affords. Remarkably, she wrote about these things in 1997!
It’s amazing to think how things have changed since 1997. My own first web experience, courtesy Mosaic, came in 1994, the same year Yahoo! was founded. In 1996, PayPal predecessor and public company First Virtual wrote their own keystroke-sniffing malware as a stunt to bolster their urgent call to “NEVER TYPE YOUR CREDIT CARD NUMBER INTO A COMPUTER”. Ebay was founded in 1995, PayPal in 1998. In 1997, Friendster had neither come nor gone, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was 13.
Yet Bartz’s words seem more relevant than ever today.
The key to understanding net neutrality: Anonymity=good, egalitarianism=bad
For a long time I was terribly confused and conflicted about net neutrality (and embarrassed about being uncommitted on such a core issue in my industry). On the one hand, paying more for higher quality of service is only natural and leads to better provisioning of resources and less waste. HD movie watchers can pay for low latency streaming while email users need not. Treating their packets the same is madness, even worse legislating it so. On the other hand, many people I respect including economically literate ones vociferously argue for net neutrality. And Comcast “shaping” Skype traffic scores an 88 on the Ticketmaster scale of evil.
The key to understanding this debate is recognizing the difference between anonymity and egalitarianism. A mechanism is anonymous if the outcome does not depend on the identity of the players: two players who bid the same are treated equally. It doesn’t matter what their name, age, or wealth is, what company they represent, or how they plan to use the item — all that matters is what they bid. This is a good property for almost any public marketplace that ensures fair treatment, and one worth fighting for on the Internet. AppleT&T should not block Google Voice just because it’s a threat. In fact, even without legislation, it’s almost impossible to bar anonymous participation on the Internet. Service providers can, if forced to, encrypt their packets and hide their content, origin, and purpose, making them indistinguishable from others.
However no one would argue that everyone in a marketplace should receive identical resources. Players who bid more can and must be distinguished (for example, by winning more items) from players who bid less. So, while it’s wrong to discriminate based on identity, it’s absolutely essential to discriminate based on willingness to pay. That is the difference between an egalitarian lottery (silly) and an anonymous marketplace (good).
Somehow the net neutrality debate has confounded these two issues. I agree that any Internet constitution should include that all packets are equal regardless of their creator or purpose (charging $30 for “unlimited” data and in addition 30 cents per 160-char text message scores 72 on the ticketmasterindex). However, users or services who are willing to pay for it can and should receive higher quality. To do otherwise virtually guarantees wasting resources.
Update 2009/08/27: Mark Cuban (as always) says it well. [Via Tom Murphy]