It's the last day of PC Forum <http://www.edventure.com/pcforum/home.cfm> in Scottsdale, Arizona, and the monitor screens scattered around the halls outside the meeting room are running retrospective slide shows. There are pictures of Steve Jobs when he had more hair and less beard, of Steve Ballmer when he had the same hair and less weight. Old copies of Esther Dyson's monthly newsletter flash by, all remarkably predictive of trends to come. The EDventure folks (Esther's company, which puts on the show) selected these artifacts carefully, no doubt; but they had plenty to choose from -- and a good excuse: its the show's 25th aniversary.

Through most of the past quarter century PC Forum has been focussed on beginnings. I once told Esther she ought to have a plaque on her desk that says "the curve starts here." If the hat's old, she'd rather let other publications, other conferences, wear it. The show tends to attract folks who like to think out loud about originalities, and schmooze with others who do the same. That's how I got to know Bob Frankston (co-inventor of the spreadsheet) and lots of other interesting folks. I single out Bob because a few minutes ago he was giving me the particulars of his contributions to emacs back in his days at MIT. It was at PC Forum that I first heard Brian Arthur talk about the economics of increasing returns, where I heard Jeff Hawkins talk about how brains work, back before he developed the PalmOS. Many (perhaps most) of my conversations with well-known folks in the computer industry (from Bill Joy to Bill Gates) have taken place here. In fact, PC Forum is the first conference where I publicly tested the idea that "markets are conversations" -- long before it became the first thesis of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Now EDventure's own tagline leverages the meme: "The conversation continues".

The theme this year is "Back to the Frontier." There seem to be two frontiers involved : 1) The wireless edge of the Net, growing in the same out-of-control way that its copper and fiber parts did in years past; and 2) The Net's bazaar-like commons, which the entertainment industry and its allies in Congress seek to replace with a distribution system for digital-rights-managed "content" -- an intent about which the backbone and last-mile providers (telephone and cable companies, primarily) largely find agreeable.

As usual, the conflicts are between sets of opposed imperatives. One side pushes toward free, open and unregulated; while the other pushes more or less in the opposite direction. I came here to add as much weight as I could to the free/unregulated/commons side of the argument. Toward that end, I solicited help from readers in Biting the Hand that Beats You <http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5930> which went up at the Linux Journal site on Sunday morning, just before the conference started.

The first note I got, from a guy who prefers to remain anonymous, laid out the challenge quite well:

Somewhere, though Google-Help-Me I can't find it, John Perry Barlow talks at length about the political implications of unequal upload/download speeds on home broadband systems: he's basically saying that the architecture has political consequences: who talks, and who listens.

The BoomBells are similar: consider this:

FREEDOM OF THE PRESS BELONGS TO THE GUY WITH THE T-3 CONNECTION

"Sure I want to be the biggest telecom company in the world, but it's just a commodity. I want to be able to form opinion. By controlling the pipe, you can eventually get control of the content." -IDT chairman Howard Jonas

Here's my version of the shape of the future, Doc. Hang tight.

Son of SCCCA goes through. passes. but gets hopelessly, terribly bogged down in implementation and grandfathering-in of current hardware. It won't turn out to do the job

So the next move is content filtering on the wires: if we can't make your computer, which you own behave properly, we'll damn well do it on our computers, which we own, which your computers have to talk through.

And this is not hard, by the way: take an algorithm like TunePrint, which gives a signature not-unlike a content hash to a piece of music. Have a big database of file hash values, and when you see a big file you don't recognize, put it through tuneprint. If it's a copy of something you own, block ALL FURTHER TRANSMISSION OF THIS FILE. How hard can it be? "CAW" - content-aware firewalls: firewalls for content.

Here's the key: your broadband terms of service? "To comply with SCCCA, if we can't verify you have authorization for that piece of music, we'll pull it off our pipe".

End-game for freedom of the internet as we know it, and as we see closer and closer alliances between the Content Faction and the Pipe Faction, this kind of thing becomes increasingly probable. Indy music producers end up having to get (probably-expensive) digital certificates so that they can sign their own music and put it into the "policed data" files, so it doesn't get filtered out as "unknown - could contain a permutation of something we own or be encrypted".

Do you see where I'm going with this? Filtering of all internet content for copyrighted material is not impossible, or even difficult. Don't transmit anything which is encrypted, set up a "hosts" system which allows places which are genuinely producing new data to be set as "always transmit from here" (say Nasa) - or simply require every file you carry to be signed and have copy protection policy set.

This is what we're up against...

I believe the Barlow piece in question is "Death From Above" <http://www.eff.org/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/death_from_above.html>, written in 1995. An excerpt:

...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.

I am by nature an extreme optimist, especially about the Net. I believe this new world we made will naturally resist every effort to control it. But the "content" industries are enormous beasts accustomed to life in the protected habitat they call "the regulatory environment". In fact they are so firmly established at the top of their protected food chain that that their influence extends not only to regulation and enforcement, but to lawmaking as well. Which is one reason why, ever since the Net showed up, lawmakers and regulators in the U.S. have been working to make the Net into pay-per-view on steroids.

These fat old beasts see far more threat than opporunity in the kind of free and open markets -- bazaars, really -- that the Net supports. That's why they are working tirelessly to maintain the supply-controlled system that would rather pipe fertilizer to the couch potatoes they call "consumers" than to discover new ways to do business with freshly empowered *customers*. Back in 1998 the Ditital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) (which was written by and for the entertainment industry) made many common Net-supported activities illegal. And just last week Senator Fritz Hollings (democrat of South Carolina) introduced the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CDBDTPA), which is the latest version of the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), which Hollings introduced last September. Here's how it starts:

A BILL
To regulate interstate commerce in certain devices by providing for private sector development of technological protection measures to be implemented and enforced by Federal regulations to protect digital content and promote broadband as well as the transition to digital television, and for other purposes.

At PC Forum, Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) <http://www.eff.org> began calling the CDBTDPA the "Anti-Mammal Dinosaur Protection Act (AMDPA)". Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News, wrote a Call to Action <http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/2922052.htm> right from the show floor:

The offenses against the public interest have been piling up, one after the other, but we've been acting like the proverbial frog that just sits there in a pot of water slowly brought to a boil. The frog gets cooked because it doesn't realize what's happening until too late.

Lots of other dinosaur protection opponents are here. Ian Clarke of Freenet <http://freenetproject.org>, for example. He was on the "peer to peer content distribution" panel. Except for Ian, everybody else seemed to talk almost exclusively about "delivering content" to "consumers". No matter how noble their intentions, these guys were still blathering in terms provided by the same old industrial producer-to-consumer market model. Nothing peer-to-peer about it.

On Sunday I had lunch with Bob Frankston, who is easily the most talkative human being I have ever met, as well as one of the smartest. Here are a few quotes from my notes:

"I think wireless should be like the light in front of your house. It should be a public thing."
"Very little of the internet is intrinsic."
"The corporate user is not going to drive change. They're scared of the Internet."
"Imagine if radio came before telephony. People would be saying 'Who wants to talk personally? Broadcasting is everything. We need to protect the right to that.'"

It became clear to me after awhile that one problem the Good Guys have is that they're still trying to explain what this new thing -- the Net -- really is. The Bad Guys, on the other hand, are simply convinced it's a content shipping system. Meanwhile, both the laws and the lawmaking process agree with them. In other words, while it's clear to some of us that the Net is a place, it's a lot clearer to all of us that it's also a mess of pipes.

There is another asymmetry involved. Nearly everybody driving conversation about the Net in business sits on the supply side. They make or distribute "content," or have some "solution" for making, storing, moving or keeping track of "content". Customers are so far outside the conversation, and so isolated from the action, that they're still "consumers". Just like TV.

In the course of the conference, a powerful assortment of people took to the stage and spoke about "The Battle for the Soul of the Net" (Hillary Rosen of the RIAA, Mitch Kapor of the EFF and the Open Source Applications Foundation, Les Vadasz of Intel, Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington), "Turning Media and Entertainment Upside Down" (J.C.Herz, author of Joystick Nation, Konrad Hilbers of Napster, Steve Perlman of Moxi Digital, Mike Ramsay of TiVo), "Overcoming the Broadband Bottleneck" (Garry Betty of Earthlink, Rick Ellenberger of Broadwing, Mike Volpi of Cisco), "The Powell Doctrine" (FCC Chairman Michael Powell) and other subjects. There was some news, of sorts. Hillary Rosen made it clear that she believes her own industry can barely begin to imagine a business model for dealing with fully empowered customers. Both Perlman and Ramsay (Moxi and TiVo) mentioned that their systems ran on Linux. Perlman (in response to a question of mine from the floor) expressed Moxi's ability to carry Internet radio.

But it wasn't until one of the late panels, "Identity on the Frontier" (with heavies from Microsoft, Sun and General Motors), that a central problem -- and its solution -- became clear to me. There was a missing party at this table: the *customer*. All these guys were looking for ways to impose yet another identity management system on "the consumer". Yet our most personal identities, like the Net itself, are unmanageable. Identity is something that proceeds from the inside out, from me to the world, not from the world to me. All the identities by which the world labels me are secondary, not primary. My primary identity is mine alone. I should be able to remain anonymous (or pseudonymous) or do business with other parties on my terms as well as theirs. "Natural markets are about relationships," my third-world friends tell me, "not just transactions."

As it happened I was a guest at the conference of PingID, a new open source-based company run by Andre Durand, who also founded Jabber Inc. (I'm on the advisory boards of both Jabber Inc. and PingID.) Andre's belief is that the power of the Net cannot fully support natural markets (only some of which is about commerce, and even less is about transactions) because it lacks personal identity infrastructure -- a set of tools and interfaces surrounding the individual that gives the him or her the power to engage in business on his or her own terms. Yes, a personal identity infrastructure would also serve as a rights-protection shell to keep the individual safe from the crapstream pouring out of the content pumping industry's pipes, but that purpose would be secondary. The primary purpose would be to provide new means to do business. So, while Sun's Liberty Alliance and Microsoft's Passport both propose infrastructures imposed on the individual from the outside, PingID proposes an infrastructure that's built up from the inside, by an open source effort.

Whether or not PingID works technically (it's still new to say), it starts off in the right place: at the customer, rather than the vendor. And, naturally, it proceeds as an open source project.

Without a fully empowered personal identity, customer relationships with vendors will be on the vendors' terms alone. And that's not even very good for the vendor.

Let's look at a scenario.

My handheld thingie has a GPS that sees I'm in Scottsdale. Thanks to my relationship with Zagat's and the Wine Spectator magazine -- one in which I gladly pay a tiny fee for a stream of relevant information about restaurants in the local area, Zagat's and Wine Spectator's Jabber servers push out information and recommendations over an XML stream, and both those companies get a small micropayment. This kind of thing has been conceived before, but only on vendors' terms. With a customer-empowering personal identity infrastructure -- including simple protocols, APIs, hooks, tools and whatever -- we'll make the Net a powerful platform for consensual business.

Note that I am not proposing in this scenario anything that supplants what should be on the Web for free, generously provided by everybody who knows it's wise to put as much useful information as possible within reach of a browser and Google's curious bots. I'm talking about a new way to do business that's compliant with the laws of the bazaar that have been around since Ur.

It is outside the scope of any company to provide the personal ID baseware I need to assert a fully empowered customer identity in the world. That can only come from an open source effort involving independent developers -- a project like Apache, Sendmail, SOAP, Linux and Jabber. Yet all kinds of companies can make use of my identity's presence in the marketplace, if I choose to present myself as a customer there.

Real infrastructure supports whole industries, not single companies. That's what a personal identity infrastructure would make possible. When all relationships become voluntary, the industries that depend on involuntary passivity by masses of consumers -- such as the junk mail business -- will face a choice: take advantage the customer's new platform, or go the way of the steam engine.

Maybe, after 25 years, it's about time we got started on this -- or something like it. Because if we don't, what's left of the Net will be drowned in fertilizer.