Death From Above
For the March, 1995  Electronic Frontier column
in Communications of the ACM
by
John Perry Barlow


Over the last 30 years, the American CEO Corps has included an
astonishingly large percentage of men who piloted bombers during World War
II. For some reason not so difficult to guess, dropping explosives on
people from commanding heights served as a great place to develop a world
view compatible with the management of a large post-war corporation.

It was an experience particularly suited to the style of broadcast media.
Aerial bombardment is clearly a one-to-many, half-duplex medium, offering
the bomber a commanding position over his "market" and terrific economies
of scale.

Now, most of these jut-jawed former flyboys are out to pasture on various
golf courses, but just as they left their legacy in the still thriving Cold
War machinery of the National Security State, so their cultural perspective
remains deeply, perhaps permanently, embedded in the corporate institutions
they led for so long, whether in media or manufacturing. America remains a
place where companies produce and consumers consume in an economic
relationship which is still as asymmetrical as that of bomber to bombee.

The lop-sided character of this world view has been much on my mind lately
with regard to various corporate projects on what they are all too pleased
to call the "Information Superhighway" (evoking as it does the familiar
comforts of Big Construction by Big Government in cooperation with Big
Business). The cable companies and Baby Bells have a model for developing
the next phase of telecom infrastructure which, were it applied to the
design of physical superhighways, would have us building them with about
five thousand lanes in one direction and one lane in the other.

The only more manipulative consumer architecture I've seen is the quarter
mile of one way conveyor belt which sucks the unsuspecting off the Strip in
Vegas and drops them into the digestive maze of Caesar's Palace Casino
without any return route at all.

Nursing such gloomy metaphors as these, I was encouraged to receive an
e-mail message recently from Gordon Bell, one of the Titans of computing,
with the cumbersome but evocative subject: line, "Building Cyberspace with
One-way Streets - Bad idea? Conspiracy? Short-sightedness? Incompetence?'"

In it, he exhorted me and a number of better qualified digerati (including
The Media Lab's Nicholas Negroponte and Bellcore Vice President and telecom
god Bob Lucky) to put our "bodies in front of the backhoes that are
installing asymmetric networks that simply mimic cable TV."

There followed a passionate argument against what appears to be the default
asymmetry and the following vision of a better future:  "The distinction
and needs between homes and offices will disappear.  Also, there needn't be
places like information warehouses that are the sole video providers into
the network to form new franchises and monopolies.  Every home should, in
principle, be capable of being a producer or consumer.  This needs to be
the goal of the information highway."

Unfortunately, as things stand, it isn't. At least it is in no way the goal
of the institutions that  currently building the more overtly commercial
aspects of it. Whether cable companies or telcos, they see the NII as
pay-per-view on steroids. They seem to envision their economic future in
creating for the Generican consumer the ability to watch any movie or
re-run without risking such human interaction as a trip to the video store
might  produce.

The strangest aspect of this vision (or trance) is that pay-per-view has
been available for nearly twenty years and has never, to my knowledge,
managed to penetrate more than 18% of its possible target market of cable
subscribers. The idea that this unpopular service will power our economic
future would seem preposterous on its face were not some many billions
headed that way.

Institutions from John Malone's TCI to Oracle are building titanic video
servers, the mothers of all mainframes, in order that they might blast down
at you "My Mother, the Car" or "Motel Hell" at any moment you might hunger
for that sort of thing. From these great repositories of digitized dreck
will dangle a thatch of fiber/coax tentacles, one of which will presumably
extend its coaxial tip into your living room.

One design model popular with the RBOC's and at least one cable company
would  initially offer a gigabit comin' at ya and about 200 kbps of back
channel, presumably to support the "buy" button on the remote controller of
your set-top box and other such boons of "Interactive" Television.

In this model, the telco runs a fiber into a neighborhood of about 500
homes, connecting subscribers to that point with coax and modems.
Downstream from the distribution point there would be about 200 MHz
available, from which the modems can derive about 5 bits per Hz., giving
one gigabit for video services of whatever sort.

Upstream is a different story altogether. There you've only about  30 MHz.
available in the whole neighborhood router, and the modems only derive
about 2 bits per Hz., leaving a pool of 60 Mbps to be shared by the 300
customers, or, as I say, about 200 kbps. Not much more than AppleTalk.

To be honest, that's a little misleading. The back-channel 60 Mbps pool can
be switched dynamically between users. Thus the average available might be
as much as 1 Mpbs, given that not everybody in a neighborhood will be
sending bits upstream all the time.

While this wouldn't be all the bandwidth a byte-pig like me might want, it
would be a hell of a start. But there is also the question of whether it
will even be available to the customer. Most of the models I've seen, cable
or telco, seem to reserve it for their own purposes. I believe if they were
willing to open it up to the users, they would, as Mitch Kapor speculates,
"quickly find there was far more demand for the service than they
imagined." Mitch goes on: "This would be agood thing as it would speed up
their accepting the inevitable."

What about the economics? A  full fiber installation might cost as much as
$1500 per home. At 100 million homes, that's quite a bottom line. No one is
seriously going to ask the telcos and cable companies to pop for an up
front investment of 150 billion in a market even they can't seriously
believe in, but one wonders why they are designing such hard asymmetry into
their local distribution systems.

For one thing, this $1500 is only five hundred more than the $1000 which is
the rough average cost of installing a new copper pair. Given that there
are many new hookups, both cable and telco, installed daily and many
equipment upgrades as well, it's probably more accurate to say that the
incremental cost of nearly universal fiber-to-the-home would be something
on the order of 20 to 25 billion. That's still real money, but a price one
can imagine the market bearing.

Furthermore, it would seem a good bet on a highly imaginable future to lay
dark fiber in these trenches while they're open, a relatively cheap thing
to do, and to install the expensive parts - the lasers at each end - when
the market is ready.

But very few of the new connections and upgrades being installed at the
moment are taking advantage of the opportunity. When the trenches close
they are, in most cases, closing on coax alone. Laying the fiber will
require their being reopened.

There are other non-recoverable costs associated with the asymmetic
approach the Big Boys seem stuck on. When the folks at the edges start
clamoring for upstream capacity, it will be necessary to replace all those
ADSL modems and other neighborhood routers of fixed asymmetry at a time
when they will be, in my projections, fairly new. We can argue about the
time frame, but it seems wasteful to be installing new equipment that will
be junk sooner than not.

What are the economic or technical disadvantages of designing the fiber
drop-to-home architecture so that it would provide flexible bandwidth
allocation now, even allowing upstream asymmetry if called for? I mean, I
thought one of the beauties of ATM was it ability to rapidly re-deploy
routing and bandwidth on demand.

The answer I get  back is that there is no serious demand for upstream
services while the cable business has at least demonstrated a market for
downstream services. If you take this answer seriously, which I don't, this
is a little like a  petroleum company stating in 1900 that since there
wasn't much of a market for gasoline it was going to stick resolutely to
medicinal oils, based on proven market demand. Fortunately, it wasn't too
difficult to retool refineries to produce gas when the automobile hit big,
but one wonders how much it's going to cost to replace all those fixed
asymmetrical modems and .

Actually, I think it would take a market demonstration of retina-searing
obviousness to veer the cable-tel dinosaurs lumbering in the direction of
symmetry. In the meantime, there is a good chance such emerging mammals of
local bit provision as Broad Band Technologies, Inc., WilTel, maybe even
your local electric utility, will have done such a good job of addressing
the upstream digital market that remaining entry share will be too limited
to feed the thunder lizards.

It already seems obvious to me, and to anybody who's launched Mosaic
lately, that the market for upstream bandwidth is about to explode.
Bandwidth is one of those things like money, sex, and power. The more
you've got, the shorter it feels. And there are now a critical number of
Americans who know what bandwidth is and why is feels good.

Look at what's happened on the World Wide Web, where traffic grew 1,713% in
1994. (Which, though down from the previous year's 443,931%, is still
pretty rapid growth.) These figures reflect a burgeoning generation of
Web-sters under 25 who have already started to give up television in
droves. Not even the instantaneous availability of every Brady Bunch
episode is going to lure them back. They want to interact with other
people, not "content," and they are using computers to do it.

Indeed, this generation's "what's your sign" pick-up question is already
"where's your home page." And what's the point of having a home page you
can't illuminate with QuickTime videos of  yourself being morphed into a
Klingon or an audio clip of the latest cut by your band? Kids like these
are going to want their home pages at home and not on some distant server
where security considerations are going to prohibit rapid, interactive
updates. Furthermore, these are kids who went all the way through college
at the end of a T1. They're as likely to patiently await images to form in
the developing bath of modem transfer speeds as they are to take up a life
of prayer and contemplation.

Businesses are rushing to put up Web sites which will contain their
catalogues and from which people will be able to order all manner of goods,
hard and soft. If you're selling anything made of bits, whether it's
Photoshop filters or interactive pornographic films, you're not going to
require your customers to receive their orders at 200 kbp. Nor will it make
business sense to rent space in the virtual mall of one of Larry Ellison's
monster nCube servers.

Then there are the increasingly fuzzy boundaries of the American work
place. People are commuting less and traveling more. They want to be able
to jack in, either at home or in the Marriot which all too often serves as
home, and get the same access to information they have on the ethernet in
their official office. Nobody wants to be on a LAN  which runs at 14,400
baud, whether their office is traditional or virtual.

I could go on at great length but it wouldn't matter. I would convince no
one in the telcos or cable companies. The problem isn't the lack of a
potential market. The problem isn't cost. The problem is consciousness. And
culture. What they see is what you get.

This was especially evident to me recently when I had an opportunity to
debate these issues publicly with John Malone at a conference at the
University of Colorado. Now John Malone is a very smart man. Up close, he
has, like Bill Gates, the kind of leaping intellectual force which is likely
to make anyone feel like the lazy brown dog.

John Malone knows the media transport business. But when all you've got is
a hammer, everything looks like a nail. He knows broadcast. He knows
one-to-many. He knows strategic bombing. He is no more likely to recognize
the potency of such guerrilla markets as are growing on the Web as General
Curtis LeMay was to regard the Viet Cong as credible opposition.

I kept trying to convince him that there would be an enormous and growing
upstream surge as more and more individuals and small businesses put up Web
sites, rattling off a long list of all the things which are already
appearing on them.

Finally he conceded the possibility with some exasperation, but said that
even if he could see a way of making money there, providing upstream
bandwidth was not necessarily a business he particularly wanted to be in.
For almost theological reasons, he wanted TCI to remain in the center even
if all the action moved to the edges.

In fairness, George Gilder thinks Malone may have been putting me on. When
I mentioned this episode to Gilder, he said, "Faced with 150 channels of
DBS competition, with better resolution and audio than the studio NTSC at
the headend, cable has to serve computers with bandwidth or it will go out
of business.  All the cable people I talk to--including many who work for
John Malone--know this very well." They may know it in their minds, but can
they have the religious conversion necessary to know it in their hearts.

And indeed we are talking about religion here. On one side you've got the
monotheism of Control, the one-to-many system which has dominated the West
at least since the Industrial Revolution, possibly since Gutenberg;
possibly since Moses. And done a damned fine job of creating civilization,
I might add. A necessary thing in its day.

Surging toward these battlements of God Above All are the galloping,
barbarous hoards of pantheism, guerrillas all, from the Cypherpunks to Newt
Gingrich. I sometimes wonder which of these I really want to win, but I'm
pretty sure which one is going to. It's B-52's vs. punji sticks. It's
machine against nature. Sooner or later, nature takes the game.

No matter how much death they rained from above, the bombers lost Viet Nam.
They're going to lose Cyberspace too. For exactly the same reasons.