Gotta love that line!

For some us more adult types, though I question my membership in adulthood every now and then.

I worked in telecom in the days of the early Web and dial up at speeds that would accurately be called narrowband. (48.8 bps modem) I was also an early adopter of the Web which struck me as simply wonderful when I found it. What a place! And what a pile of information at my fingertips! Even if the best search engines of the day were piles of steaming crap. Oh yeah, and places like usenet where you really got to hang out with the copyright outlaws even though you almost certainly faced computer death if you spent half the night downloading a 5 min porn clip or the latest code to improve the performance of Windows 3.x!

I remember our network engineers getting really upset at people, like me, who kept lines tied up wandering the Internet and Web instead of leaving them idle which was how things were done in those days, and still are, on calculations of how many calls on what days, what time and so on determined the number of lines in an office. Darn but that Internet was dangerous!

At the time my employer was a month or two away from rolling out ADSL as an end user “feature” I was at a sales conference about how to build something for a start up company that they wanted that would send and receive data and mail at high speeds. Sales came up with an expensive package that included a nailed down T3 connection from their site to our nearest central office which, while broadband in any sense of the word was broadband isn’t what they wanted. There was no proposal for email or other things this customer wanted because sales felt that would eat into potential profit from ADSL or HDSL down the line and what was this thing called the Internet that I and a couple of other techie guys kept talking about? One of them went so far as to call it a fad. Surely it would go away. And surely they weren’t serious about hooking up to the local cableco for data (!!) that was telco turf and what did a cableco know about that?!

They put the proposal in and I got the phone call I knew I’d get from my contact there who wanted Internet access at what was passing for broadband in those days and, no, ISDN just wasn’t good enough. I did a runaround sales and got the company an “evaluation” install of corporate ADSL which was really HDSL by another name, the company whipped up a web site, got their email address and they were off. I also got to deal with an unhappy salesguy who lost his commission on his expensive, unworkable and out of spec proposal to them. I told him that it was his name on the sale so he’d get something, anyway, and to be happy and maybe he ought to look into this fad a little deeper.

I’m writing all of this to illustrate that from the moment I heard about the Web I was on it and have never stopped using it, or the broader Internet that it rides on.

Like the young women in the car SOPA and PIPA infuriated me. As much for the certainty that it wouldn’t work as it’s clumsy attempt to censor the Internet. Like the young women I’m a digital native, though, perhaps, digital immigrant is more appropriate as while I understand their view of the world, the Web and the Internet and completely share it even though I didn’t grow up with it.

I started out on a Tandy 1000 desktop (oh, gawd!), not a laptop, eventually went to the laptop and now the smart phone.

The problem is that the “content” industry takes advantage of politicians, bureaucrats and others who are digital outsiders. Few, if any, of these people have any idea of the impact the Web and the Internet have had on the world, on trade, business, culture and identity. It’s easier to brand what you don’t understand as lawless then it is to embrace it. Particularly if you don’t use it or on the outside looking “in”.

We haven’t seen the end of SOPA/PIPA/CISPA kind of legislation nor have we seen the end of ACTA/TPP kinds of “trade agreements” which are more about protecting analog turf than adapting to what digital natives or digital immigrants already know to be the truth about the Web and the Internet. It’s NOT lawless but it does have a culture of its own and a way of doing things that is different than the analog world.

It demands speed in releasing “content” so that consumers can get it. And without geographical restrictions which are now meaningless. This is the adaptation the “content” industries refuse to make. Why is beyond me because I’m sure they’d make a bundle just by making the adaptation, perhaps more than they are now. But they won’t because it’s out of their comfort zone, and how they’ve done business since forever. Then again, it was also how buggy makers had done business forever and we know what happened to them. More to the point we know what happened to telegraph only companies who didn’t move into telephony.

Too bad, so sad. Nothing at all to do with copyright at the end of the day but service.

So, I think I’ll adopt the phrase “Life, Liberty and Blazing Broadband”, print it out and pin it to the wall.