For 21 years now, the industry elite have assembled for Esther Dyson’s PC Forum (www.edventure.com/pcforum/pcforum.html)to evaluate how far computer technology has come and to guess where it’s going. Once again, Silicon Prairie is there, scouring for clues regarding the future of the industry and offering daily coverage.
Monday’s presentations addressed the scientific underpinnings of the topic “Let’s Be Clear: Identity, Transparency, and the Net.” Tuesday conversation turned, roughly, toward how to create a practical infrastructure for these Big Ideas.
The link was performer Anna Deveare Smith’s after-dinner speech Monday night, in which her autobiographical tales repeatedly showed how Big Ideas affect Little People. How do these lofty ideas about access, disclosure, and privacy get real? The rich among us can afford T1 lines to our homes, but most of us aren’t rich.
In a one-on-one interview with Forum organizer Jerry Michalski, Bob Pepper, the FCC’s head of plans and policy, spoke frankly about the slow progress in telcom competition since the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, particularly how the initial beneficiaries have been businesses, not individuals.
Pepper then joined a panel of newfangled telephony executives and warned that high-tech companies need to have the same presence in D.C. that telcoms have.
John Sidgmore, CEO of UUNet and vice chairman and COO of UUNet’s owner WorldCom, suggested that the venerated Moore’s Law, which posits a doubling of computer processing power in 18 months, has been sped up: in the Internet access business demand doubles every 3.6 months.
He let loose a few clever quips (“Bill Gates thinks bandwidth should be free. Well, I think software should be free.”), yet he did focus on some solutions to current shortages of bandwidth and phone numbers As he put it, “the current infrastructure will not scale.” He theorized that content could be divided into local and long-distance content like local and long-distance phone calls are billed and classified differently.
Internet Telephony, the panel members agreed, changes the rules for the telcoms. Sidgmore cracked that the field has come a long way since “two years ago when it was people screaming at their computers,” while Tom Evslin, chairman and CEO of Internet Telephony pioneer ITXC, promised that “cheap phone calls are only the first application of Internet Telephony.”
He envisioned an environment in which “circuit switching goes away, voice becomes a type of data,” and the current clogging, in which “my living room is in a different area code than bedroom because of phone number exhaust.” is relieved.
Strangely, for a panel that was advertised as addressing how these broad issues touch individuals, the topic of universal service, or subsidized service to poor or rural communities, was barely touched.
Stephanie Forrest, of the University of New Mexico, followed up John Holland’s keynote of the day before with a talk on “identity and immunity,” positing that the human immune system can be an effective a model for understanding computer security. She deepened the analogy by pointing out that hackers have to infiltrate only a few programs and protocols to wreak damage in many places. Championing diversity (though careful not to attack the virtual Wintel monopoly), Forrest likened the similarity across systems to “planting the entire state of Iowa with only one strain of corn,” something potentially disastrous. In the few remaining moments of her talk, she sent up a few trial balloons regarding how to make every computer unique, which provoked some laughter in the audience.
Forrest was then joined by Washington lawyer Stewart Baker and Verisign president and CEO Stratton Sclavos in an investigation of how her theories might be applied to the most crucial privacy technology issue today, at least among this crowd: cryptography.
As is often the case at such conclaves, the panel was heavily stacked in favor of non-restrictive cryptography laws, and much of the session felt like a preaching-to-the-converted exercise. The usual arguments reigned (most of them concluding “the government doesn’t understand us”) and finally one questioner noted “we’ve heard all this before” and then asked Forrest if her research could lead to “a way out.” She didn’t answer.
All academic notions were tossed aside when Jeff Berg, chairman and CEO of talent agency giant International Creative Management, talked about how “talent,” be it in front of a camera or in a high-tech executive’s office, is changing its relationship to traditional management. During a panel in which Berg was joined by i-traffic’s Scott Heiferman and c/net’s Halsey Minor, he kicked off a lively argument by claiming that branding of talent on the Web is still limited. Minor countered by building off the notion of Web sites as places where “content matters more than personality.” Of course, that doesn’t explain Matt Drudge.
(Minor has written previously about how Drudge’s popularity is due primarily to his content being covered elsewhere.) The conversation led to an understanding of how the entertainment and Internet businesses are becoming more alike, though the question that was supposed to define the day’s panels — how these business changes trickle down to the individual — remained unanswered.
———-
Do you have questions about PC Forum? We’re here. Write us. (views@vineyard.com)
