SMART Letter #53
PRESERVING INCUMBENT ADVANTAGE
March 19, 2001

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           SMART Letter #53 -- March 19, 2001

            Copyright 2001 by David S. Isenberg

           isen.com -- "impossible to circumvent"

     isen@isen.com -- http://isen.com/ -- 1-888-isen-com

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CONTENTS

>  Preserving Incumbent Advantage

>  Quote of Note: Face Recognition at the Superbowl

>  The First Internet Earthquake

>  Father Unlike Son: Forebear Forswears Forbearance

>  Quote of Note: ITU Discovers Metcalfe's Law

>  Consultants to Patrimonial Bureaucracy: A Clarification

>  Quote of Note: Courtney Love Takes Big Music to Court

>  Quote of Note: Don Michael, in memoriam

>  Conference on my Calendar

>  Copyright Notice, Administrivia

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PRESESERVING INCUMBENT ADVANTAGE

by David S. Isenberg



Bob Pepper, a senior FCC staff member, points out that voice 

telephony used to be integral to the physical telephone 

network, but now the Internet has made voice telephony yet-

another-application.  



Pepper's analysis suggests a way to think about how Big Music 

is reshuffling the protocol stack.  Like voice telephony, 

music used to be tightly tied to physical media -- first to 

the instruments of sound creation, the musical instruments 

themselves, then to vinyl records and analog magnetic tape.  

The computer and then the 'net decoupled music from its 

physical medium.  



Here the astute reader would comment, "Like, duh."  Indeed, 

John Perry Barlow pointed this out in about 1994.  



Here's the anti-duh: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act 

(DMCA) re-couples the information to the physical layer.  But 

the coupling is de jure, not de facto.  In other words, 

yesterday it was *physically* impossible to separate the words 

from the paper and the sound from the squiggled vinyl; today 

it is becoming *legally* impossible.



Similar re-tyings are beginning to crop up.  For example, 

police and spies used to "tap" telephones with no-tech 

alligator clips.  But when voice and voltage go separate ways, 

alligator clips don't work.  So the police asked the U.S. 

Congress for CALEA (the U.S. communications assistance for law 

enforcement act).  CALEA replaces alligator clips with 

technology specified by law.



So Big Music and Big Brother, unable to maintain their 

incumbent advantage in the face of technological progress, are 

making it illegal for others to take them out of the loop.  

-------



QUOTE OF NOTE: Thomas Colatosti

  "[The facial recognition technology used on 72,000 

   football fans at Super Bowl 2001] was a significant 

   technological feat that's been widely acknowledged in 

   the law enforcement community as a success.  Yet, 

   amazingly, instead of being hailed as a boon to public 

   safety . . . it was criticized as a threat to privacy." 

Thomas Colatosti, CEO of Viisage Technology, the company that 

created the face recognition technology, speaking on a panel 

at Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2001, quoted on 

http://SecurityFocus.com/news/173.

[Amazing that some people don't want to live under state 

surveillance. -- David I]

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THE FIRST INTERNET EARTHQUAKE

by David S. Isenberg



The Seattle earthquake of February 28, 2001 was the first 

Internet earthquake.  The Internet stayed up when the cellular 

network overloaded and emergency 911 service went down. And 

the story "broke" in several Internet sources before the major 

news organizations had it.  



When Bellheads are on the defensive, they talk about the 

reliability of the phone network.  If they're really cornered, 

they use emergency 911 service as if it were the hidden gun 

strapped to their ankle.  ("OK, you've got me, but (bending 

down) let me pull up my socks before you take me in.")  Well, 

we're wise to that trick.  The day-after-earthquake story 

below, from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, excerpted below, 

drives the point home.



  "One 66-year-old Burien woman died of a heart attack that 

   she suffered during the earthquake. Her husband called 

   911, but was unable to get through. He went to a local 

   fire station and retrieved paramedics who were unable to 

   revive her, authorities said. 

[snip] 

  "After the ground stopped shaking, so many people tried 

   to use their cell phones that the region experienced Ash 

   Wednesday's equivalent of the Mother's Day effect -- 

   communication systems temporarily crashed. That left 

   some people feeling even more cut off from the rest of 

   the world. 

[snip] 

  "In Snohomish County, the phone went down, but customers 

   at Caffine.com, a cybercafe, never lost their Internet 

   connections.  'The chat screens just lit up,' said Don 

   Davidsen, 'with 'Wow! Did you feel that?''"

From the Seattle Post Intelligencer, March 1, 2001 

http://seattlep-i.nwsource.com/local/main011.shtml 



Users of metafilter.com made each other aware of the quake 

(and were bragging to themselves about scooping the big news 

organizations) hours before the majors had the story, see 

http://www.metafilter.com/comments.mefi/6093.]

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FATHER UNLIKE SON: FCC FOREMAN'S FOREBEAR'S FUNCTIONARY 

FORSWEARS FORBEARANCE

  "A competitive market requires a regulator that is 

   free from political pressure and is able to take 

   vigorous enforcement action against competitive abuses.  

   [Broadband services] are new services, and evolution can 

   go either two ways.  The domination of the monopoly 

   carrier can dominate broadband [sic], or it can be an 

   opportunity for new types of carrier services."

Unnamed State Department Official at U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, 

from "U.S. calls on Japan to increase telecom deregulation" 

by Reed Stevenson, Reuters, cited in Total Telecom Asia, March 

2, 2001 

http://www.totaltele.com/view.asp?ArticleID=37545&Pub=TT&Categ

oryID=828



[Father Colin Powell's State Department draws a hard line 

against monopoly telecom incumbents -- when they're in Japan.  

Son Mike's FCC, here in the U.S. of A, is less inclined to use 

words like "vigorous", "enforcement" and "action" in the same 

sentence.  Mike would rather forbear (refrain from, cease, 

desist, avoid, shun, hold back, be tolerant in the face of 

provocation).  The unifying force behind this apparent 

inconsistency is the business interests of incumbent U.S. 

network service providers. -- David I]  

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QUOTE OF NOTE -- ITU Discovers Metcalfe's Law

  "A network is only as valuable as the people it connects.

   When additional end users gain access, it increases the

   communications possibilities not only for that end-user,

   but for every other individual and business connected to

   the network."

ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau (BDT) Report: Trends 

in Telecommunication Reform 2000-2001: Interconnection 

Regulation, (March 7, 2001).  

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CONSULTANTS TO PATRIMONIAL BUREAUCRACY 

by David S. Isenberg



I got an unsettling response to "Accenture? Bullshient!" in 

SMART Letter #52 (see http://isen.com/archives/010216.html) 

from a respected friend who works with several consulting 

companies that, he says, "are not deserving of this kind of 

wrath, [where the people] are earnest, very smart, and deliver 

real value in very concrete and testable form."  Indeed, in my 

experience, too, most consultants are bright and well 

motivated, and working with them is usually fun and 

productive.  



In SMART Letter #52, I was trying to address the role that 

consultants play in the distorted system of office behavior 

that seems to be endemic in very large U.S. corporations.  

Social anthropologist Robert Jackall named this pattern 

_Patrimonial_Bureaucracy_ (see SMART Letter #22 

http://isen.com/archives/990601.html).  Jackall describes 

corporations as "bureaucratic" because on the surface there 

are rules and processes, and as "patrimonial" because behind 

the procedural curtain, power and prestige are determined by 

bonds of personal loyalty and reward that often contravene 

stated procedure.  Thus, belonging to the right country club 

can be a stronger determinant of corporate success than having 

a good idea or running a productive department.  



In such a system, employees who have achieved several 

promotions understand the de-coupling of merit from reward.  

They are motivated to protect, and even obfuscate this 

decorrelation in defense of their turf.  They turn procedure 

to serve patrimony.  One result is that good work must filter 

up one step at a time so each level's boss can own it.  But 

the filter can be severe -- good work must fit each boss's 

personal agenda.  As a result, good work and bright people 

often remain unrecognized. 



In a patrimonial bureaucracy, senior managers feel isolated by 

the sycophants (yes-(wo)men) around them.  So they hire 

consultants, who, because they are outsiders, are freer to 

take up a constructive agenda, quicker to find smarter ideas, 

and more likely to engage in constructive criticism.  

Furthermore, because they are outsiders, consultants tend not 

to threaten the hard-won status of the covert aristocracy.  So 

consultants fill a useful role in a patrimonial bureaucracy.



However there are at least two things wrong with this picture.  

First, consultants are tempted to aggrandize this advantage if 

they are to be successful by their own metrics -- given 

powerful entree they expand.  Second, consultants tend to 

bypass internal ideas, talent, and processes where these 

interfere with their expansion -- they're less likely to say, 

"You're already doing that, so you don't need to hire us for 

the same thing."  The result of such consulting, especially at 

the hands of a large, successful consulting firm, is a weak, 

co-dependant company.



Like lawyers, who perform many useful functions but take a bad 

rap, consultants are an easily identified component of the 

pathology of big company culture, but are just one component 

of a complex syndrome.  I should have set a more explicit 

context in SMART Letter #52 -- when long-time readers of the 

SMART Letter don't get where I'm coming from, it's my fault.

-------



QUOTE OF NOTE: Courtney Love 

  "I could end up being the music industry's worst 

   nightmare: a smart gal with a fat bank account who is 

   unafraid to go down in flames fighting for a principle," 

Courtney Love Seeks to Rock Record Labels' Contract Policy, by 

Chuck Philips in latimes.com, Wed Feb 28, 2001 

-------



QUOTE OF NOTE: Don Michael, in memoriam:

  "[We have a] deeply engrained belief and expectation 

   that more information will reduce uncertainty because

   it is the basis for control of things, markets, the

   future, people, and even self . . . [But] it is no 

   accident, I think, that in Western mythology, humans

   were forced *out* of the Garden of Eden by the first

   information revolution -- when Adam and Ee ate of the

   tree of knowledge.  The bites continue, and reentry

   remains barred."

From "Too Much of a Good Thing? Dilemmas of an Information 

Society" by Donald N. Michael, in _Technological Forecasting 

and Social Change_, 25, 347-354, 1984.

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CONFERENCE ON MY CALENDAR



April 3-6, 2000, Sunset Beach NC. Corning CLEC Forum.  I'll be 

speaking on April 5.  George Gilder, newly freed from the role 

of stock-picker to resume his career as technology visionary, 

will speak on April 4.  I think you need to represent a CLEC 

to attend.  For more info contact Bob Whitman 

WhitmanRJ@corning.com.

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Redistribution of this document, or any 

part of it, is permitted for non-commercial purposes, 

provided that the two lines below are reproduced with it: 

Copyright 2001 by David S. Isenberg 

isen@isen.com -- http://www.isen.com/ -- 1-888-isen-com 

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