I don’t have a mobile phone. Many people think that’s crazy, I only know a small handful of people who are in the same boat as me. There are a number of reasons why this is the case. First and foremost, mobile carriers are actively working against many things that are essential to open societies and democracies: almost all of them are in collusion with the Bush administration in breaking the law and violating the trust of their customers in the warrantless wiretapping cases that are in the news now. Even worse, they are actively lobbying Congress for retroactive immunity for breaking the law, and sadly there is a good chance they’ll get it.

Their whole business model is all about minutes, they want to get you to spend money on a per minute basis, even though their costs basically do not change in relation to minute usage. Their costs are almost all fixed on a monthly basis. But since they can make more money charging per minute, they don’t use an internet-style periodic charge for unmetered service.

Telecoms are also very actively lobbying to stop governments from setting up their own wireless networks. Sadly, they have been quite successful in this. Philadelphia has been running a free wireless network in its center for a while, and it served as the inspiration for a number of other municipalities to try the same thing. In New York City for example, it would cost the city less to run a wifi network than it does to run the streetlights. No one would say we should privatize the streetlights or even put meters on them, so you’d have to stick a quarter into the streetlight to get 15 minutes of light.

Sure, the capital expense would not be small, but if you deploy the network using the existing power grid and physical infrastructure of the streetlights, it will be much cheaper. The per-unit costs of streetlight versus outdoor wifi access points, they are comparable. When you look at electricity usage, wifi takes a tiny fraction of the amount of power, think 400W for a streetlight versus 15W for a wifi access point. Then through in mesh and powerline internet distribution, and you have a robust and ubiquitous internet infrastructure. Yes, mesh and powerline have not been deployed and tested on a grand scale, but there are already a number of successful implementations of both. Mesh networking is so cheap that people in many cities are building citywide mesh networks out of their own pockets (e.g. Funkfeuer and Freifunk).

In any case, I will continue to struggle with the spotty and difficult VoIP-over-wifi experience, until we have networks that promote our shared values rather than fight to destroy them all in the name of profit.

Ten years ago, if you had asked yourself whether people would voluntarily sign up by the millions in order to for private companies to make a profit from your relationships to your friends, colleagues, family, etc. you might have thought that this is a preposterous idea. Yet now we have many such sites, including some that rank in the top ten for traffic on the internet.

Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and basically all of the social networking sites do just that. There entire business model is based around the idea that they are going to try to get you to direct as much as your social interactions as possible through their site so that they can sell as much advertising as possible. One interesting thing is how these companies got themselves into this position. Most of these social networking sites started as a non-commercial project, perhaps with some initial intentions of turning commercial, but perhaps not. After generating a substantial user base, they have switched to completely commercial.

Facebook is a great example of this idea, since they are constantly expanding all of the options available for interacting. Their open API encourages more people to create ever more ways of interacting with people via Facebook, and that in turn drives people to use it. I see two directions that this could go. First, they become ever more popular, and the vast populace that used to spend so much time behind their televisions will now spend their time behind their computers. So while it is purportedly all about friends, it will in effect take people away from their friends and encourage them to only interact with their friends via these commercially mediated spaces.

Second, most people realize that their relationships are better when someone else is not mediating them for their own profit, so these sites fade from popular use. There is definitely value to social networking sites, but this seems to me to be the achilles heel of the genre. As long as they are tightly focused, like LinkedIn, which focuses on business connections, it seems to me that they won’t suffer nearly as much from the ills of commercialization.

Perhaps it would be possible to start a non-profit social networking site, which could encourage creativity without the pressures of the business world. It may sound crazy, but wikipedia and craiglist are two examples of how to make such a thing work.