The Internet is changing. In a few short years, Internet use will come predominately from mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets rather than traditional PCs using fixed broadband. A fully mobile broadband Internet offers exciting opportunities for innovation in networks, devices, and applications with enormous benefits for the economy and society.

The shift from a wire-centric Internet to a mobile one has profound implications for technology, policy, and applications. A new report by ITIF Research Fellow Richard Bennett explains how mobile networks are changing as they become part of the Internet, the implications mobile networking has for public policy, and how policymakers can facilitate the transition to mobile broadband.

Join us for the presentation of the report and a panel discussion among leading representatives of diverse viewpoints on Internet policy.

Date: Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Time: 9:00am- 10:30am
Location: 1101 K Street Suite 610A Washington, DC 20005

Presenter

Richard Bennett
Research Fellow, The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
Respondents

Harold Feld
Legal Director, Public Knowledge

Morgan Reed
Executive Director, Association for Competitive Technology

Barbara Esbin
Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Communications and Competition Policy, PFF

Click here to RSVP.

An aggressive “buy-one-get-one” promotion by Verizon Wireless helped RIM’s BlackBerry Curve move past Apple’s iPhone to become the best-selling consumer smartphone in the U.S. in the first quarter of 2009, according to market research firm The NPD Group.

RIM’s consumer smartphone market share increased by 15 percent to nearly half of the entire smartphone market in Q1 2009 versus the prior quarter. Apple’s and Palm’s market share both declined 10 percent each.

Part of this is driven by the new iPhone coming around in June, but Curve is not exactly state of the art in the Blackberry world. Take this as another example of conventional wisdom not being too wise.

What Policy Framework Will Further Enable Innovation on the Mobile Net?

Richard Bennett, [bio forthcoming]
Harold Feld, Public Knowledge [bio]
Alexander Hoehn-Saric, U.S. Senate Commerce Committee [bio]
Larry Irving, Internet Innovation Alliance [bio]
Blair Levin, Stifel Nicolaus [bio]
Ben Scott, Free Press [bio]
Kevin Werbach, Wharton School of Business [bio]

I suspect we’ll spend the bulk of our time on the interaction between regulatory agencies, standards bodies, and industry groups. The case studies are how the process worked for Wi-Fi with the FCC opening up some junk spectrum, the IEEE 802.11 writing some rules, and the Wi-Fi Alliance developing compliance tests. In the UWB world, the model was a novel set of rules for high-quality spectrum followed by an IEEE 802.15.3a collapse and the subsequent attempt by the Wi-Media Alliance to save it. We probably will have UWB someday (wireless USB and Bluetooth 4.0 will both use it,) but the failure of the standards body was a major impediment.

With White Spaces up for grabs, we’d like to have something that’s at least as good as 802.11, but we really need to do a lot better.

Another topic of interest is whether mobile Internet access services should be regulated the same way that wireline services are regulated, and how we go about drafting that set of rules. The current state of the art is the 4 or 5 prongs of the FCC’s Internet Policy Statement, but these principles leave a lot to the imagination, as in all of the interesting questions about network management, QoS-related billing, third party payments, and the various forms of disclosure that may or may not be interesting.

The Internet is troubled by the fact that it’s worked pretty damn well for past 25 years, so there’s been no need to make major changes in its services model. It’s clear to me that some fairly disruptive upgrades are going to be needed in the near future, and we don’t want to postpone them by applying a legacy regulatory model to a network that’s not fully formed yet.

As I had to go to the office as soon as the installation was completed, I haven’t had time to play with my privileged fast lane service, but I did enough to notice a fairly dramatic difference even in ordinary activities like reading e-mail. I use an IMAP server on the host that handles bennett.com, and its location in Florida tends to make for sluggish response when deleting mail or simply scanning a folder. It’s so fast now it’s like a local service. (People who use the more popular POP3 e-mail protocol won’t understand this, so don’t worry about it – when you delete an e-mail it’s a local copy, but mine is on the network.)

So the main effect of this super-fat Internet pipe is to make network services and content as readily accessible as local services and content. Which is a very wonderful thing for a couple of reasons: accessing content and services from the various machines I have connected to the Internet from home involves maintenance and security hassles that aren’t always worthwhile, so it’s convenient to outsource data to a system in the cloud that’s secure, well maintained, and backed up. It’s very easy to do that now, all the way around. And for the data that I still access locally, such as media files and the like, an off-site backup will be very painless.

One of the next exercises is going to be media streaming from my server in Florida to my TV in California, after I’ve got all my data encrypted and backed up. At this point, I’ve got three devices at home connected to the Internet that are something other than general-purpose computers: a TiVo, a Blu-Ray player that also does Netflix streaming, and a Blackberry that does goes to the web via 802.11a/g Wi-Fi. At any given time, I’ve got two to four general-purpose computers on the ‘net as well (more if we count virtual machines,) so it’s clear that the balance is turning in the direction of the special-purpose machines. This is what makes Zittrain sad, but it shouldn’t. It’s in the nature of general-purpose systems not to require much multiplication; one that’s fast but stationary and another that’s lighter and mobile and one more that’s super light and ultra-mobile is about all you’ll ever need. But special purpose machines multiply like rabbits, as more and more purposes are discovered for networked devices.

So the future is obviously going to embrace more specialized (“sterile tethered appliance”) machines than general purpose machines; that’s a given. The “Future of the Internet” question is actually whether the general-purpose machines also become more powerful and capable of doing more things than they do now. In other words, don’t just count machines, count functions and applications. The failure to understand this issue is Zittrain’s fundamental error. (Gee, the fast Internet made me smarter already.)

Attaching a controller/monitor to my aquarium that I can access across the Internet is the next exercise, and after that some security cameras and an outdoor Wi-Fi access point. It never ends.