It was law professor Lawrence Lessig who famously noted that code is law on the internet. Now even the engineers are realizing that regulators could break the net, and they're meeting at the Freedom to Connect conference.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [March 28, 2006]

Nobody needs to ask why I attend ISPCON. It's the conference of the ISP industry, this is ISP-Planet, and, anyway, I'm on the board.

But before ISPCON, I'll be attending Freedom To Connect (F2C). I attended last year and wrote quite a few articles and I wrote them before "net neutrality" became a political buzzword.

The conference's organizer, David Isenberg, recognized the monopoly problem some time ago. He's the guy who told AT&T that it owned the wrong network back in 1997 in his essay Rise of the Stupid Network.

In the present day, with the Bells ready to take on google and everything else good about the internet (see Editorial: The Fight the Bells Will Lose and VoIP Battleground in RBOC Monopoly War), it seems that AT&T wishes to solve the problem of owning the wrong network by shutting down any piece of the internet it cannot own. Isenberg believes the opposite should happen. He is one of many noted signatories of the fast fail letter to the FCC, urging reglators to let the Bells die off (as is Doc Searls).

In his keynote last year at Jupitermedia's now-defunct Wi-Fi Planet Conference & Expo, Wi-Fi vs. Telcos, Isenberg warned of a telco-topia future in which, "there is a little improvement [in bandwidth], but there is no competition."

Even the non-technical press is noticing. The notable quote currently featured on the ISP-Planet home page is from a USA TODAY editorial that says:

While other industries have decided to race forward to keep pace with innovation, this one sees a bright future in turning back the clock. Maybe there is even a black, rotary-dial telephone in our future.

Bringing the digerati together
As a former Bell Labs employee, and a famous one, Isenberg knows many of the engineers who built the internet. Last year's conference featured a keynote speech by Vint Cerf. This year, the list of speakers remains impressive, and some speakers have attained more prominence.

Susan Crawford is now on the board of ICANN. Her speech last year, We, the Internet, is as good a description of the purpose of the conference as any other.

One other way of describing what the conference is about is by citing the words of a famous person who was not present at the conference last year, Doc Searls. He wrote an article in Linux Journal titled Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes. That's a problem the ISP industry faces every day.

People care about the ISP industry. Being an ISP isn't just about clipping coupons on monthly subscriptions. It's about delivering the freedom to connect in the face of powerful interests that want to rebuild the monopoly. Isenberg warns that in a telco-topia future, the Bells will buy out cable, and the monopoly will return, more powerful than ever.

The guiding principles of the Freedom to Connect conference are cited on Isenberg's blog:

• Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• U.S. Bill of Rights
• The Geneva Convention
• 1996 Telecom Act

Connect to ISPCON
If you miss Isenberg's own conference, you'll have another chance to hear him at ISPCON, where he will be keynoting. He asks our industry:

So you've built a great service business with plenty of happy customers who rely on you for access, content, websites, VoIP, applications, and hosting each day. A lot of good that beautiful house is if it can't touch a single street, the post office,or grocery store, let alone a highway to the next town. Folks, the economics of every Internet business are on track to be turned completely upside down. Is the sky falling? You betcha. Is this a big deal for every single business built on the innovation platform formerly known as the Internet? Yep. Why are Google, eBay, Yahoo and Vonage so utterly frightened and you aren't? Even our old friends like Cisco have aligned with the RBOCs to enable your de-prioritization IF they want to allow you online. Can you afford to operate in this environment?

— End