The Importance of Net Neutrality

Although I remain a huge admirer of Lawrence Lessig, I am ashamed to admit that I never fully understood the importance of net neutrality until last week. Mr. Lessig described network neutrality in these urgent terms in 2006:

At the center of the debate is the most important public policy you've probably never heard of: "network neutrality." Net neutrality means simply that all like Internet content must be treated alike and move at the same speed over the network. The owners of the Internet's wires cannot discriminate. This is the simple but brilliant "end-to-end" design of the Internet that has made it such a powerful force for economic and social good: All of the intelligence and control is held by producers and users, not the networks that connect them.

Fortunately, the good guys are winning. Recent legal challenges to network neutrality have been defeated, at least under US law. I remember hearing about these legal decisions at the time, but I glossed over them because I thought they were fundamentally about file sharing and BitTorrent. Not to sound dismissive, but someone's legal right to download a complete video archive of Firefly wasn't exactly keeping me up at night.

But network neutrality is about far more than file sharing bandwidth. To understand what's at stake, study the sordid history of the world's communication networks – starting with the telegraph, radio, telephone, television, and onward. Without historical context, it's impossible to appreciate how scarily easy it is for common carriage to get subverted and undermined by corporations and government in subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways, with terrible long-term consequences for society.

That's the genius of Tim Wu's book The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.

One of the most fascinating stories in the book is that of Harry Tuttle and AT&T.

Harry Tuttle was, for most of his life, president of the Hush-a-Phone Corporation, manufacturer of the telephone silencer. Apart from Tuttle, Hush-a-Phone employed his secretary. The two of them worked alone out of a small office near Union Square in New York City. Hush-a-Phone's signature product was shaped like a scoop, and it fit around the speaking end of a receiver, so that no one could hear what the user was saying on the telephone. The company motto emblazoned on its letterhead stated the promise succinctly: "Makes your phone private as a booth."

If the Hush-a-Phone never became a household necessity, Tuttle did a decent business, and by 1950 he would claim to have sold 125,000 units. But one day late in the 1940s, Henry Tuttle received alarming news. AT&T had launched a crackdown on the Hush-a-Phone and similar products, like the Jordaphone, a creaky precursor of the modern speakerphone, whose manufacturer had likewise been put on notice. Bell repairmen began warning customers that Hush-a-Phone use was a violation of a federal tariff and that, failing to cease and desist, they risked termination of their telephone service.

Was AT&T merely blowing smoke? Not at all: the company was referring to a special rule that was part of their covenant with the federal government. It stated: No equipment, apparatus, circuit or device not furnished by the telephone company shall be attached to or connected with the facilities furnished by the telephone company, whether physically, by induction, or otherwise.

Tuttle hired an attorney, who petitioned the FCC for a modification of the rule and an injunction against AT&T's threats. In 1950 the FCC decided to hold a trial (officially a "public hearing") in Washington, D.C., to consider whether AT&T, the nation's regulated monopolist, could punish its customers for placing a plastic cup over their telephone mouthpiece.

The story of the Hush-a-Phone and its struggle with AT&T, for all its absurdist undertones, offers a window on the mindset of the monopoly at its height, as well as a picture of the challenges facing even the least innovative innovator at that moment.

Absurdist, indeed – Harry Tuttle is also not-so-coincidentally the name of a character in the movie Brazil, one who attempts to work as a renegade, outside oppressive centralized government systems. Often at great peril to his own life and, well, that of anyone who happens to be nearby, too.

But the story of Harry Tuttle isn't just a cautionary tale about the dangers of large communication monopolies. Guess who was on Harry Tuttle's side in his sadly doomed legal effort against the enormously powerful Bell monopoly? No less than an acoustics professor by the name of Leo Beranek, and an expert witness by the name of J.C.R. Licklider.

If you don't recognize those names, you should. J.C.R. Licklider went on to propose and design ARPANET, and Leo Beranek became one of the B's in Bolt, Beranek and Newman, who helped build ARPANET. In other words, these gentlemen went on from battling the Bell monopoly in court in the 1950s to designing a system in 1968 that would ultimately defeat it: the internet.

The internet is radically unlike all the telecommunications networks that have preceded it. It's the first national and global communication network designed from the outset to resist mechanisms for centralized control and monopoly. But resistance is not necessarily enough; The Master Switch makes a compelling case that, historically speaking, all communication networks start out open and then rapidly swing closed as they are increasingly commercialized.

Just as our addiction to the benefits of the internal combustion engine led us to such demand for fossil fuels as we could no longer support, so, too, has our dependence on our mobile smart phones, touchpads, laptops, and other devices delivered us to a moment when our demand for bandwidth – the new black gold – is insatiable. Let us, then, not fail to protect ourselves from the will of those who might seek domination of those resources we cannot do without. If we do not take this moment to secure our sovereignty over the choices that our information age has allowed us to enjoy, we cannot reasonably blame its loss on those who are free to enrich themselves by taking it from us in a manner history has foretold.

It's up to us to be vigilant in protecting the concepts of common carriage and network neutrality on the internet. Even devices that you may love, like an iPad, Kindle, or Xbox, can easily be turned against you – if you let them.

How to Write Without Writing

I have a confession to make: in a way, I founded Stack Overflow to trick my fellow programmers.

Before you trot out the pitchforks and torches, let me explain.

Over the last 6 years, I've come to believe deeply in the idea that that becoming a great programmer has very little to do with programming. Yes, it takes a modicum of technical skill and dogged persistence, absolutely. But even more than that, it takes serious communication skills:

The difference between a tolerable programmer and a great programmer is not how many programming languages they know, and it's not whether they prefer Python or Java. It's whether they can communicate their ideas. By persuading other people, they get leverage. By writing clear comments and technical specs, they let other programmers understand their code, which means other programmers can use and work with their code instead of rewriting it. Absent this, their code is worthless.

That is of course a quote from my co-founder Joel Spolsky, and it's one of my favorites.

In defense of my fellow programmers, communication with other human beings is not exactly what we signed up for. We didn't launch our careers in software development because we loved chatting with folks. Communication is just plain hard, particularly written communication. How exactly do you get better at something you self-selected out of? Blogging is one way:

People spend their entire lives learning how to write effectively. It isn't something you can fake. It isn't something you can buy. You have to work at it.

That's exactly why people who are afraid they can't write should be blogging.

It's exercise. No matter how out of shape you are, if you exercise a few times a week, you're bound to get fitter. Write a small blog entry a few times every week and you're bound to become a better writer. If you're not writing because you're intimidated by writing, well, you're likely to stay that way forever.

Even with the best of intentions, telling someone "you should blog!" never works. I know this from painful first hand experience. Blogging isn't for everyone. Even a small blog entry can seem like an insurmountable, impenetrable, arbitrary chunk of writing to the average programmer. How do I get my fellow programmers to blog without blogging, to write without writing?

By cheating like hell, that's how.

Consider this letter I received:

I'm not sure if you have thought about this side effect or not, but Stack Overflow has taught me more about writing effectively than any class I've taken, book I've read, or any other experience I have had before.

I can think of no other medium where I can test my writing chops (by writing an answer), get immediate feedback on its quality (particularly when writing quality trumps technical correctness, such as subjective questions) and see other peoples attempts as well and how they compare with mine. Votes don't lie and it gives me a good indicator of how well an email I might send out to future co-workers would be received or a business proposal I might write.

Over the course of the past 5 months all the answers I've been writing have been more and more refined in terms of the quality. If I don't end up as the top answer I look at the answer that did and study what they did differently and where I faltered. Was I too verbose or was I too terse? Was I missing the crux of the question or did I hit it dead on?

I know that you said that writing your Coding Horror blog helped you greatly in refining your writing over the years. Stack Overflow has been doing the same for me and I just wanted to thank you for the opportunity. I've decided to setup a coding blog in your footsteps and I just registered a domain today. Hopefully that will go as well as writing on SO has. There are no tougher critics than fellow programmers who scrutinize every detail, every technical remark and grammar structure looking for mistakes. If you can effectively write for and be accepted by a group of programmers you can write for anyone.

Joel and I have always positioned Stack Overflow, and all the other Stack Exchange Q&A sites, as lightweight, focused, "fun size" units of writing.

Yes, by God, we will trick you into becoming a better writer if that's what it takes – and it always does. Stack Overflow has many overtly gamelike elements, but it is a game in service of the greater good – to make the internet better, and more importantly, to make you better. Seeing my fellow programmers naturally improve their written communication skills while participating in a focused, expert Q&A community with their peers? Nothing makes me prouder.

Beyond programming, there's a whole other community of peers out there who grok how important writing is, and will support you in sharpening your saw, er, pen. We have our own, too.

If you're an author, editor, reviewer, blogger, copywriter, or aspiring writer of any kind, professional or otherwise – check out writers.stackexchange.com. Becoming a more effective writer is the one bedrock skill that will further your professional career, no matter what you choose to do.

But mostly, you should write. I thought Jon Skeet summed it up particularly well here:

Everyone should write a lot – whether it's a blog, a book, Stack Overflow answers, emails or whatever. Write, and take some care over it. Clarifying your communication helps you to clarify your own internal thought processes, in my experience. It's amazing how much you find you don't know when you try to explain something in detail to someone else. It can start a whole new process of discovery.

The process of writing is indeed a journey of discovery, one that will last the rest of your life. It doesn't ultimately matter whether you're writing a novel, a printer review, a Stack Overflow answer, fan fiction, a blog entry, a comment, a technical whitepaper, some emo LiveJournal entry, or even meta-talk about writing itself. Just get out there and write!