DC Circuit court rules in Comcast case, leaves the FCC a job to do

Today's ruling in Comcast v. FCC will certainly change the terms of debate over network neutrality, but the win for Comcast is not as far-reaching as headlines make it appear. The DC Circuit court didn't say, "You folks at the Federal Communications Commission have no right to tell any Internet provider what to do without Congressional approval." It said, rather, "You folks at the FCC didn't make good arguments to prove that your rights extend to stopping Comcast's particular behavior."

I am not a lawyer, but to say what happens next will take less of a lawyer than a fortune-teller. I wouldn't presume to say whether the FCC can fight Comcast again over the BitTorrent issue. But the court left it open for the FCC to try other actions to enforce rules on Internet operators. Ultimately, I think the FCC should take a hint from the court and stop trying to regulate the actions of telephone and cable companies at the IP layer. The hint is to regulate them at the level where the FCC has more authority--on the physical level, where telephone companies are regulated as common carriers and cable companies have requirements to the public as well.

The court noted (on pages 30 through 34 of its order) that the FCC missed out on the chance to make certain arguments that the court might have looked on more favorably. Personally and amateurly, I think those arguments would be weak anyway. For instance, the FCC has the right to regulate activities that affect rates. VoIP can affect phone rates and video downloads over the Internet can affect cable charges for movies. So the FCC could try to find an excuse to regulate the Internet. But I wouldn't be the one to make that excuse.

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Imagine a world that has moved entirely to cloud computing

For April Fools Day I'm offering a short story about a future world that has moved entirely to cloud computing: Hardware Guy. The cloud still scares as many IT managers as it attracts. But the advantages of cloud computing for maintenance, power consumption, and other things suggests it will dominate computing in a decade or so. Meanwhile, other changes are affecting the way we use data everyday. Movements such as NoSQL, big data, and the Semantic Web all come at data from different angles, but indicate a shift from retrieving individual facts we want to looking at relationships among huge conglomerations of data. I've explored all these things in blogs on this site, along with some other trends such as shrinking computer devices, so now I decided to combine them in a bit of a whacky tale.

Why health care is coming to the Open Source convention

This year for the first time, O'Reilly's Open Source convention contains a track on health care IT. The call for participation just went up, soliciting proposals on nine broad areas of technology including health data exchange, mobile devices, and patient-centered care.

One correspondent asked a bit timidly whether it would be all right to submit a proposal if her company didn't use open source software. Definitely! The Open Source convention has always been about a wide range of computing practices that promote openness in various ways. Open source software is a key part of the picture but not the whole picture. Open data, standards, and collaborative knowledge sharing are also key parts of the revolution in today's health care.

This new track is as much a response to urgings from friends and colleagues as it is an O'Reilly initiative. We could use help spreading the word, because the deadline for proposals is tight. In this blog I'll explain why we created the track and why OSCon is a promising venue for trends that will move and shake health care in positive ways.

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Current activities at the Electronic Privacy Information Center

When Marc Rotenberg founded the Electronic Privacy Information Center in 1994, I doubt he realized how fast their scope would swell as more and more of our lives became digitized and networked. Now it seems like everything that happens in society has an electronic component and a privacy component. I had the chance to drop in to their office on Monday and heard about the front-burner items they're working on.

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Report from HIMSS Health IT conference: building or bypassing infrastructure

Today the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference wrapped up. In previous blogs, I laid out the benefits of risk-taking in health care IT followed by my main theme, interoperability and openness. This blog will cover a few topics about a third important issue, infrastructure.

Why did I decide this topic was worth a blog? When physicians install electronic systems, they find that they need all kinds of underlying support. Backups and high availability, which might have been optional or haphazard before, now have to be professional. Your patient doesn't want to hear, "You need an antibiotic right away, but we'll order it tomorrow when our IT guy comes in to reboot the system." Your accounts manager would be almost as upset if you told her that billing will be delayed for the same reason.

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Report from HIMSS Health IT conference: toward interoperability and openness

Yesterday and today I spent once again at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in Atlanta, rushing from panel session to vendor booth to interoperability demo and back (or forward--I'm not sure which direction I've been going). All these peregrinations involve a quest to find progress in the areas of interoperability and openness.

The U.S. has a mobile population, bringing their aches and pains to a plethora of institutions and small providers. That's why health care needs interoperability. Furthermore, despite superb medical research, we desperately need to share more information and crunch it in creative new ways. That's why health care needs openness.

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Report from HIMSS Health IT conference: from Silicon Valley technology to Silicon Valley risk-taking

I'm in Atlanta for the biggest US conference in health care IT, run by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). This organization, along with the branch of the federal government responsible for dispersing funds for a medical records overhaul, has to do a huge job in an extremely short time. I'll report what I hear (and how I interpret it) over the next few days, aiming both at people who care in general about the future of health care at particularly at readers who are wondering whether their next career move may be into health care.

Although many people have been saying that the medical field would benefit from a Silicon Valley approach to technology, it's coming to seem that even more important would be a Silicon Valley approach to risk-taking. I'll look at the events that created this imperative.

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NoSQL conference coming to Boston

On March 11 Boston will join several other cities who have host conferences on the movement broadly known as NoSQL. Cassandra, CouchDB, HBase, HypergraphDB, Hypertable, Memcached, MongoDB, Neo4j, Riak, SimpleDB, Voldemort, and probably other projects as well will be represented at the one-day affair.

It's generally understood that characterizing a movement by what it's not is awkward, and it's hard to find an elevator speech to encompass all the topics of NoSQL Boston. Are these tools for "big data" problems? Usually, but sometimes even small web sites can find them useful. Are the tools meant for processing streams such as log files? Sometimes, but they can be useful for other text and data processing as well. And do they reject relational principles? Well, so you'd think--but different ones reject different principles, so even there it's hard to find commonality. (I compared them to relational databases in a blog last year.

The interviews I had with various projects leaders for this article turned up a recurring usage pattern for NoSQL. I was seeking particular domains or types of data where the tools would be useful, but couldn't see much commonality. What connects the users is that they carry out web-related data crunching, searching, and other Web 2.0 related work. I think these companies use NoSQL tools because they're the companies who understand leading-edge technologies and are willing to take risks in those areas. As the field gets better known, usage will spread.

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Innovation Lessons in "Start-Up Nation"

One might expect Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle to come from the pen of business school or economics professors, but the biographies of authors Dan Senor and Saul Singer reveal policy backgrounds. Both were advisors in the U.S. Federal Government.

These backgrounds give a clue that Senor and Singer aim beyond questions of how to be a successful entrepreneur or high-tech executive. In fact, their book is a serious investigation of the social, historical, and psychological traits that produce extraordinarily creative people--and significantly, creative people who can translate their cranial light-bulbs into technologies with the potential to change the world.

The book has garnered a fair amount of news coverage, but still not as much as it deserves, in my opinion. It took me only about three hours to read, and I highly recommend it as a refreshing--but not necessarily reassuring--perspective on a country that is profoundly misunderstood and misrepresented by media outside its diminutive borders.

In this blog I'll summarize the traits that that the authors find make Israel a successful incubator for innovation, distinguishing between traits that other countries can emulate and traits that seem uniquely embedded in Israel's historical and geographic circumstances. Finally, as I usually do in these book reviews, I'll lay out three observations that came to my mind while following the authors' argument: the importance of hard data, flipping axioms, and the creative role government can play.

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One hundred eighty degrees of freedom: signs of how open platforms are spreading

I was talking recently with Bob Frankston, who has a distinguished history in computing that goes back to work on Multics, VisiCalc, and Lotus Notes. We were discussing some of the dreams of the Internet visionaries, such as total decentralization (no mobile-system walls, no DNS) and bandwidth too cheap to meter. While these seem impossibly far off, I realized that computing and networking have come a long way already, making things normal that not too far in the past would have seemed utopian.

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