Freedom to receive information in wired and wireless communication networks: controlling the switches and the airwaves.

-- By NikolaosVolanis - 26 Feb 2010

Freedom to receive information is a fundamental prerequisite for individual autonomy, and a primal requirement in any decision making process, allowing us to perceive the state of the world, and evaluate alternative outcomes. Moreover, it is a prerequisite and cornerstone not only of individual development but also political freedom, in the sense that it enables political participation in the public sphere.

Yet, the current state of affairs, both in the wired and wireless communication industries seem to indicate that the exercise of the specific right is weakened as a result of private intermediaries (telecommunications operators) as well as regulation. My aim is to briefly describe why this is so.

Wired communications

With regard to wired communications, the threat for freedom of speech is primarily related with what has eventually came to be identified as a "network neutrality" debate. As an example of this threat, I chose an old (1999) Cisco Systems technical white paper, which makes the case pretty clear: in describing the advantages of a new sort of routers for cable operators, Cisco explained that if the operators' users want to subscribe to a service that "pushes" information to their computer "you could restrict the incoming push broadcasts as well as subscribers' outgoing access to the push site to discourage its use. At the same time, you could promote your own or a partner's services with full speed features to encourage adoption of your services"

This threat could be mitigated if the user had a range of alternative channels of communication to her home and knew how the information flow is managed. Still, this is not an option for the vast majority of the population, as a result of the near-monopolistic market structure for fixed-line communications: By the end of 2003, more than 96% of homes and small offices in the US that had any kind of high-speed Internet services received their service from either their incumbent cable operator or their incumbent local telecommunications operator (Benkler, Y., "The Wealth of Networks", Yale University Press, 2006, p. 152). It seems that the inherent characteristic of the proprietary wired telecommunications market as a natural monopoly, gravitates into a consolidation of either a lopsided duopoly or a monopoly. This is primarily exemplified exorbitant costs that are required for investing in the "access" part of the network, particularly in the "last mile" of the network, that is, the final leg of delivering connectivity from a communications provider to a customer.

Wireless Communications

A different situation exists in the wireless communications market, which is still regulated on the basis of scarcity of available spectrum, which, in turn, it is based on century-old engineering assumptions using oscillation as a single engineering approach for wireless transmission of multiple messages. New communication technologies, however, have allowed us to use multiple parameters instead of one to separate our messages, since nowadays radio transmitters can transmit at the same frequency without interfering with each other and without confusing the receivers. In professor Benkler's words: "Just like automobiles that can share a commons-based medium - the road - and unlike railroad cars, which must use dedicated, owned and managed railroad tracks - these new radios could share "the spectrum" as a commons" (Benkler, p. 88).

In addition, in a mentality similar to that of volunteer/distributed computing and p2p file-sharing, where users share their resources (in one case computational power, in the other case, storage and files), users can also share the excess capacity of sophisticated radio transceivers to increase capacity and connectivity of a network. This "cooperation gain" - that is, the improved quality of a system gained when the nodes cooperate - may be considered as a prominent base for capacity scaling, and it is heavily used in "mesh networks", in which nodes help each other forward messages and decipher incoming messages from the cloud of radio emissions.

That said, it is not absurd to consider that technology today allows us think about telecommunications networks outside the narrow context of proprietary ownership by large operators: instead, the advent of wireless communication technology has progressed to the point where it is now possible or users to own equipment that cooperates in mesh networks to form, not only the core of mobile communication services, but also the "last-mile" infrastructure of the fixed network. In this sense, Radio networks can now be designed so that their capital structure presents more similarities to the Internet decentralized infrastructure, leaning towards a model of commons-based physical infrastructure for wireless communication networks and for the last mile of landline communication networks. And considering that the the salient characteristic of commons, as opposed to property, is that no single person has exclusive control overt the use and disposition of any particular resource in the network, the benefit for individual and policital freedom is obvious, as there is the threat of information manipulation by the network owner is mitigated. By contrast to commons-based model, property, by design, imbues the owner with legal and technological powers to asymmetrically exert influence over the users (such as "the market for eyeballs" in the context of advertising). Commons, on the contrary, are not based on assymetric constraints, similar to those imposed by property or regulation.

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