Aeschylus wrote “In war, truth is the first casualty”. The ability to engage in intellectual civil discourse must rank right up there.

More than 4 years ago, I wrote a posting called “4 degrees of impersonal communications” that described the different ways we engage with people and different behaviours associated with the increased levels of anonymity presented by the nature of the interaction.

In small towns, people talk differently to each other, in part because everyone knows each other. People are more civil because it isn’t possible to vanish behind a cloak of anonymity that people enjoy in bigger cities.

It was once suggested to me that people say things in emails that they would never say to someone over the phone. And, over the phone (especially in a voice message), we seem willing to speak in ways that one would never consider saying face-to-face.

I will add that people say things in anonymous comments on blogs that add a further dimension. Perhaps it is a sign of the indifference associated with mass anonymity.

On Twitter and on bulletin boards, I have had comments made about me that are beyond the ridiculous. Adherence to truth and reasoned thinking is clearly not a prerequisite for publishing on Twitter. 

One of my favourite tweets in the usage based billing discussion was:

@Mark_Goldberg you should resign, apologize to the Canadian people for stifling progress, publicly denounce CRTC and then dismantle it #ubb

Not sure what I would resign from, although my son tells me that he is eagerly preparing to take over the consulting practice. And the Prime Minister may want to know that I am getting set to not only denounce the CRTC, but banish them all to a remote location where they will be forced to watch the National Geographic Wild channel, except during meals when they will need to listen to Ryerson Campus Radio. I feel the power!

As I did 4 years ago, let me commend to you a piece written by Andy Rutledge called Anti-social Media.

The social aspects of social media are often as anti–social as it gets. In our online community discussions, we say things we’d never say to another face–to–face and we behave in a manner that would likely otherwise get us punched in the face. And rightly so. We’ve grown comfortable with the idea of dispensing with our subjectivity to one another. This is a very bad idea.

Much of the social media has become a venue for us to practice our most anti–social behavior and exercise our basest motivations. And we’re rewarded for this activity by the fact that others delight in engaging us at a similar level, fueling the engine. And this activity is supposed to be the new and valuable community mechanism to lead us into the more enlightened future? I don’t think so.

Can we rise above anti-social behaviour in social media or develop better filters to shut out the noise?

A number of stories have appeared in the past week regarding growing mobile data demands.

Last week, the ITU chief called for governments to take “urgent action now” to support mobile broadband growth.

Mobile operators have been investing billions to upgrade and improve the capacity and performance of their networks, but in some high-usage cities, such as San Francisco, New York and London, we are still seeing users frustrated by chronic problems of network unavailability.

Yesterday, Openwave Systems and Juniper Networks announced plans to work together to improve the economics of delivering video over mobile networks. According to Openwave, video is expected to represent 65% of all mobile traffic by 2013.

Our insatiable thirst for spectrum will be one of the areas that will be covered at The 2011 Canadian Telecom Summit. Kim Perkidou of Juniper Networks will be delivering a keynote address and Dave Caputo of Sandvine will be speaking on the panel looking at solutions for government and industry to deliver on the expanding requirements.

As the ITU observed, “Mobile broadband is increasingly the technology of choice for hundreds of millions in the developing world, where fixed line infrastructure is often sparse and expensive to deploy.” Mobile and fixed wireless provides an alternative for universal broadband in Canada. A panel at this year’s Canadian Telecom Summit will be examining how existing networks, coupled with fibre and wireless technologies deliver broadband to all.

Early bird rates expire in less than 2 weeks. Have you registered yet?

I’m looking for some loose change. About $100M per year.

A friend asked me what I thought of Obama’s announced plan to free up 500MHz of spectrum, invest in 4G for rural areas, and build out nationwide public safety network. He wrote

Spectrum auctions as public policy tools – deficit reduction and public safety. I always get kind of uneasy when government does this multi-purpose policy stuff. Theoretically, they could hit a homerun and get it all right, but do you really have confidence that they will?

The plan to harvest broadcast spectrum to make more available for fixed and wireless communications is great. You have to stop and consider how wasteful it is for so much spectrum to be reserved for the exclusive use of a minority of TV viewers still accessing over-the-air signals. So we should all endorse the potential for improved utilization of the resource.

But I question: Why is this being tied to other programs, such as rural service expansion? Are there other cost programs that are tied to revenue generators? If the spectrum auction doesn’t generate the target levels, will rural expansion be killed, or will it compete with all other government programs? How do you set up sustainable funding?

In some ways,  the asset sale is being transformed into another durable program, although the government doesn’t own the asset – some lucky winner is chosen to whom we hand over our cash. In a sense, it represents an asset swap, as contrasted with the way some governments using the sale of assets to balance current account deficits. [Apparently, in its zeal to carefully manage the zillions of dollars of our taxes, the government has cut back on hiring a financial advisor to teach the difference between capital and expense, between asset sales and recurring revenues.]

It doesn’t strike me as a way that I would spend my money; I don’t plan to use money from sales of assets to pay current expenses until retirement time.

Let me say that in general, I don’t like rural expansion programs from the government. It means picking winners and subsidizing broadband based on geography, rather than an economic needs test. I have shown in earlier posts that we have huge numbers of people in cities who need help with affordability of internet access services as much as, if not more than, middle or upper class rural dwellers – many of whom have access to alternatives.

If some rural and remote dwellers can’t afford to pay what the service needs to be priced at, then isn’t a targeted, needs-based subsidy a better approach, dealing with the broader issue of digital affordability (devices and services)?

Let’s face it, rural infrastructure subsidies are politically appealing because they lead to three distinct photo opportunities for each hand-out: the initial cheque; the construction ground breaking; and finally, the initial service activation. And let’s not forget the reminders that will go into election campaign material from the incumbent.

On the other hand, targetting affordability sprinkles a little bit of money all over the place. There is no great photo opportunity. We have to fix this.

We’re going to auction spectrum in Canada in the next year for a couple important frequency bands. Based on the AWS auction of a few years ago, we could again be looking at raising billions of dollars from the sale of these assets. I’d like to propose a way to use those funds in a meaningful way. Go ahead and take the money raised and apply it to our mortgage – the national debt.

But retiring that amount of debt frees up some interest payment relief – current account savings – in the order of $100 M per year. That would fund a sustainable program to put technology into the hands of economically disadvantaged Canadians. That amount of money each year should fund about a third of my Million Computers, meaning that such a program on a continuous basis should allow for maintenance and technology renewal every 3 years or so.

Taking the cash from the sale of an asset and setting up an endowment is a reasonable approach to money management. Further, it is an indirect and competitively neutral way of returning a kind of stimulus to the communications and technology sector that is funding the spectrum auction, helping to grow the market for services and technology.

Will the proceeds from the next spectrum auction create a sustaining legacy to drive a more digitally connected country?

If you love your computer, you’ll clean it once in a while.

Last summer, I mentioned that System Mechanic helped re-tune our computers to improve performance. The folks at Iolo Technologies tell me that Monday is Clean Out Your Computer Day; the second Monday in February happens to fall on Valentine’s Day this year. Hence my opening statement, if you love your computer, you should think about cleaning it up this year.

Some facts and figures:

• In the UK, technology is above domestic relationships as a cause of stress (19 to 20 percent), according to British Association of Anger Management.
• Executives waste six weeks each year looking for lost items and information, according to a study published in the Wall Street Journal, adding up for huge corporate operating losses.
• 30 percent surveyed have witnessed physical attacks on computers, while 62 percent say their colleagues regularly swear at their PCs out of frustration

While we continue to develop the concepts to move forward on the One Million Computers project, please consider community projects like the Little Geeks for your slightly used machines. They will refurbish P4 desktops and get them into the hands of kids who can extend the life of machines before they go to e-waste recycling.

The CRTC’s Public Notice for the Review of billing practices for wholesale residential high-speed access services has a sentence in the pre-amble that I am having trouble with.

The Commission’s approach in reviewing this matter will be based on two fundamental principles: (1) as a general rule, ordinary consumers served by small Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should not have to fund the bandwidth used by the heaviest retail Internet service consumers; and (2) smaller ISPs should continue to be in a position to offer competitive and innovative alternatives.

I get part 2: that the alternate ISPs should be able to stick around to compete and hopefully innovate.

What I don’t get is part 1: that ordinary customers served by the alternate ISPs should not have to fund the costs of serving the heavier users.

The CRTC uses the modifier “small” in front of “ISPs”. If I stretch, I might be able to understand the first part, if the CRTC referred to “all” ISPs. But I find it troubling either way that the CRTC’s first fundamental principle in this review appears to be manipulating retail pricing of internet, rather than focussing solely on the second part – getting the wholesale regime right.

If part 2 is done right, then the alternate ISPs are able to “offer competitive and innovative alternatives”.

I don’t think the first of the CRTC “fundamental principles” makes any sense the way it is written. If we have a competitive enough industry for retail price forbearance, then why is the CRTC weighing in on consumer pricing by “small ISPs”.