Werd I/O

Net neutrality is the principle that "Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication." In other words, all of my Internet data is treated the same, whether it's from Netflix, Skype, Baidu, your personal website, or a startup nobody's heard of. If I'm competing with Netflix, I can't pay your access provider to have my movies stream faster than theirs.

When net neutrality rules were adopted in the US by the FCC in 2010, the conservative Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund disingenuously painted it as follows:

The Federal Communications Commission's new "net neutrality" rules, passed on a partisan 3-2 vote yesterday, represent a huge win for a slick lobbying campaign run by liberal activist groups and foundations. The losers are likely to be consumers who will see innovation and investment chilled by regulations that treat the Internet like a public utility.

These rules were themselves a compromise, which neither pleased conservatives like Fund, nor net neutrality advocates. However, it did ensure that Internet traffic saw some protection.

Fund was flat-out wrong. The Internet should be a public utility; whereas some have tried to paint net neutrality as being a set of anti-business principles, they in fact protect the Internet as an open marketplace for innovation. The rules ensure that businesses will not be penalized on the network for being new, and allow new technologies and approaches to flourish. Removing these rules allows ISPs to control the market, whereas a utility Internet ensures that free trade is possible.

Verizon, the US telco formerly known as Bell Atlantic, had been fighting to overturn the FCC ruling for commercial reasons:

And in court last Monday, Verizon lawyer Helgi Walker made the company's intentions all too clear, saying the company wants to prioritize those websites and services that are willing to shell out for better access.

She also admitted that the company would like to block online content from those companies or individuals that don't pay Verizon's tolls.

On January 14th, Verizon won.

The implications are that net neutrality is dead and buried, and that carriers can begin to charge the fees for access that Verizon referred to. In turn, this may open the floodgates for unequal access to the Internet everywhere; although the FCC only has jurisdiction over communications in the United States, enough of the Internet is transmitted over the domestic backbone to make a difference.

Not only does that affect the quality of the Internet and the ability for new Internet businesses to operate - it also, together with last year's extensive NSA revelations, disproportionately affects American Internet businesses. One of the founding principles of the Internet's architecture is that traffic can be re-routed; why wouldn't other nations begin to work around the United States's compromised network?

All is not necessarily lost. Michael Copps, a former FCC commissioner, recently wrote that broadband should be reclassified as "telecommunications".

On Wednesday, Copps wrote a blog post titled, "The Buck Stops At The FCC," calling upon the commission to "reclassify broadband as 'telecommunications' under Title II of the Communications Act." The effect of that move would be to designate Internet service providers as "common carriers," making them subject to increased FCC regulation.

Common carriers "transport goods or people for any person or company and [are] responsible for any possible loss of the goods during transport" - as opposed to contract or private carriers, which may refuse to carry anyone else's goods. This would effectively turn the Internet into the utility John Fund was so afraid of.

Copps continues:

Without this step, we are playing fast-and-loose with the most opportunity-creating technology in all of communications history. Without this step, we are guaranteeing an Internet future of toll-booths, gatekeepers, and preferential carriage. Without this step, we stifle innovation, put consumers under the thumb of special interests, and pull the props from under the kind of rich civic dialogue that only open and non-discriminatory communications can provide.

Lest we think it's as simple as this, the EFF recently released its opinion that the FCC can't - and shouldn't - save net neutrality. Granting the organization power over the Internet itself gives it too much power to regulate what has been, traditionally, an open, international medium:

Internet users should be wary of any suggestion that there is an easy path to network neutrality. It’s a hard problem, and building solutions to resolve it is going to remain challenging. But here is one guiding principle: any effort to defend net neutrality should use the lightest touch possible, encourage a competitive marketplace, and focus on preventing discriminatory conduct by ISPs, rather than issuing broad mandatory obligations that are vulnerable to perverse consequences and likely to be outdated as soon as they take effect.

The Internet is a marketplace; there can be no doubt about that. I think that the incumbent businesses coming out against net neutrality tend to be ones deeply entrenched in old technologies: after all, both telephone and broadcasting are effectively technology businesses. They just happen to be ones whose underlying technologies are obsolete. Their businesses are hurting because something better has come along, which is meeting the needs of consumers in a more efficient way, and they're struggling to adapt.

Too bad. The Internet will win, and with it, consumers. There is nothing to be gained by restricting it; certainly not in the long term. Net neutrality will create wealth, it will create jobs, and it will set the stage for innovation for decades to come.

I grew up on American folk music. My fondest memories are gathering with my extended family in Massachusetts to sing informally. I knew the lyrics to This Land is Your Land or Charlie and the MTA long before I knew the words to anything they would play on the radio.

I also grew up with progressive values. On the American side of my family, there have been union leaders, college professors, thinkers and writers; people who cared about social justice, for whom the works of people like Pete Seeger were meaningful. As the New York Times writes:

His agenda paralleled the concerns of the American left: He sang for the labor movement in the 1940s and 1950s, for civil rights marches and anti-Vietnam War rallies in the 1960s, and for environmental and antiwar causes in the 1970s and beyond. "We Shall Overcome," which Mr. Seeger adapted from old spirituals, became a civil rights anthem.

He was in a group called the Almanac Singers, which also included Woody Guthrie, another legendary progressive folksinger. Their album Talking Union and Other Union Songs was admitted to the Library of Congress as a historically significant recording. Union Maid is on that album, as well as a famous recording of Which Side Are You On?; but it's the lyrics of Talking Union itself that I think are particularly brave. It was originally written in the 1940s, in the midst of World War II - and then re-released at the height of the McCarthy era!

If you want higher wages, let me tell you what to do;
You got to talk to the workers in the shop with you;
You got to build you a union, got to make it strong,
But if you all stick together, now, ‘twont be long.
You'll get shorter hours,
Better working conditions.
Vacations with pay,
Take your kids to the seashore.

He was the kind of artistic hero who embodied the values I aspire to, and who does not seem to exist anymore.

Over on MetaFilter, I commented:

He was, sadly, blacklisted for being a communist, and recognized as a living legend by the Library of Congress. An anti-war singer, a champion of workers rights, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and a children's entertainer; an undeniable part of America's cultural history. I enjoyed this full-length concert with his half-sister, Peggy.

Here's his version of If I Had a Hammer, which he co-wrote; there's also a Smithsonian Folkways episode about him, which is an hour long and a free download.

Like a lot of people, the thing that first got me into programming was games. I'd learned rudimentary BASIC as a kid, but it was as a teenager that I started to get a taste for the thrill of making something and sharing it with other people.

Adventure games had always been my favorite. I remember playing a port of the Colossal Cave Adventure; later, I got hooked on Infocom's very well-written output, particularly the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game, which was co-written by Douglas Adams himself. Finally, I came across LucasFilm Games, who published The Secret of Monkey Island, which is still my favorite piece of digital entertainment of all time. (Honorable mentions from other genres include SimCity 2000, Railroad Tycoon and Populous; to my shame, I never got into Civilization.)

But it wasn't those games that inspired me to build.

Whereas Monkey Island and its brethren were produced by companies that sometimes felt like (and sometimes literally were) movie studios, the shareware games movement was a rich mine of scrappier, but somehow more creative games. Jeff Minter's Llamasoft was probably the pinnacle of this; its game Llamatron was an off-kilter take on Robotron: 2084 but featuring a llama that battled against mutant Coke cans, Mandelbrot fractals and Mr Potato Heads. (It's worth mentioning that I've never been particularly interested in illicit substances, although I can't speak for Mr Minter.) Its anarchic design was liberating, and it felt doable. It was actually doing some sophisticated things behind the scenes, but nonetheless, for a beginner coder, Llamatron felt within reach.

I started learning as I wrote in Prospero Pascal, and then shared what I'd built with my friends Marcus Povey and Tom Nunn, who were also building. Something happened that was new to me: I felt playfully competitive with them, and everything they built spurred me to try and create something better. It was a virtuous circle. We were 14.

My first game involved a simple maze that was slowly revealed as you walked around it, cribbed in part from one that Marcus had already written. Subsequently, each game became a little more sophisticated. The Numerator ("he's always on top") was a take on Llamatron with a wave audio backing soundtrack. Mr A Goes For a Block was a psychedelic take on Sokoban that made it onto some early-90s shareware CD-ROMs. I wrote a space game with 3D starfields and a collaborative maze game where you flipped between two characters at different ends of the same labyrinth who needed to work together to get out. My crowning achievement, eventually, was Mr Sheepz, another game clearly heavily inspired by Jeff Minter, wherein you had to eat sheep grazing in increasingly-complex fields before giant sheep-eating snails got to them first.

And then I turned my attention to the web and never looked back.

Lately I've become aware of a whole new subculture of independent game developers, who have been experimenting with new forms, narratives and designs, using the web as a medium. Using HTML5 and JavaScript, sometimes in conjunction with engines like CreateJS, Turbulenz and many, many others. Others are building mobile apps; others are building the same kinds of full-screen desktop games that I used to.

My friend Tef recently moved into a flat of indie games devs, one of whom organizes an event called The Wild Rumpus, after Where the Wild Things Are:

It was in August 2011 in a glamorous Nandos (a sordid middle-class chicken hut chain where every dish tastes like cayenne pepper dissolved in lemon juice) that George says he was asked to help form a committee to hold something called ‘The Wild Rumpus’. The Wild Rumpus is game roughhousing: the informal event takes place in a hired bar, features simple lo-fi multiplayer games you can play with friends between drinks. They use projectors and huge screens, and the games are always visually mesmerising, competitively thrilling, or require players to engage in social theatre lubricated by beer. It’s always busy, and there is as much pleasure in spectating the bright colours and social friction that the games bring as there is in actually playing games there. “Closer in spirit to party, playground, or even drinking games, these are all games that you can’t play at home on your own” it is declared. The atmosphere is in between that of a game night with friends and an electro-pop club night with extremely well-behaved patrons.

At the first XOXO, meanwhile, one of the standout moments was discovering a game called Johann Sebastian Joust, which is played by multiple people with controllers, but no screen. It's the kind of game that blurs genres, but that's not the point; it's fun, sometimes hilariously so, and the technology creates a framework that feels like an augmented playground. Indie Game: The Movie, screened at the same event, is as inspiring as any movie about individual creativity.

Games never really went away, but the interconnectivity of the web, the openness of our platforms and the ubiquitous availability of simple technology means that there's more opportunity to experiment than ever before. It's not all about running and shooting things, which I've always found pretty snoreworthy (dalliances with the original Wolfenstein 3D and Doom aside).

It's been a while. I think it would be nice to pick up some tools and build some stupid fun.