Six years after CERN invented the World Wide Web, an AT&T engineer noticed that that his company was obsolete and wrote an essay called, "Rise of the Stupid Network." There is a disturbing reassertion of Smart networks by telco companies built on non free software, spectrum ownership and lawsuits to prevent the build out of municipal networks. In 1997, David Isenberg noted:

The astute reader might by now suspect that the main beneficiaries of the Intelligent Network are the telephone companies themselves. Nevertheless, telephone companies propound a "philosophy" that the Intelligent Network makes it easy to introduce new services and new technologies, and to meet new customer needs. ... Internet Telephony, because the Internet Protocol works at the level that user software manages the session, takes the telephone company out of the value equation. The Internet breaks the telephone company model by passing control to the end user.

He went on to vent some frustrations had while trying to improve services on AT&T's voice quality. His team spent two years figuring out how to add a little more bass to voice without blowing up every piece of voice equipment but the wires. He concluded, "Want a different voice quality? With a Stupid Network, you'd get a different program, install it in your intelligent end user device and run it."

These observations are common sense and very old news today. After more than a decade of relative network freedom, no one would go crawling back to Ma Bell would they? No one willingly.

With no sense apparent irony and perhaps great foresight, Isenberg credited Bill Gates with understanding the "new value proposition" of stupid networks. Gates is widely derided for having missed the world wide web in the early 90's, especially in his writing and toy computer software, Windows 95, which did not have a web browser. Gates understood the proposition as an extortionist. The value would no longer come from owning networks and charging users for each and every particle of service, it would come from owning computers through non free software and charging for every particle of service. It is likely that telcos understood this lesson too, though they practiced it with less success after being broken up.

So it was with great surprise and alarm that I learned that there are now almost as many subscribers to "broadband" cell networks as cable modem and dsl subscribers in the US. Persistent networks are being used as bait to get people to surrender their software and network freedom. AT&T got to this position by suing to stop municipal networks, through rampant corruption in spectrum auctions, and a series of mergers and acquisitions that have combined most of their once mighty empire. They have also embraced free, to them, software. Android, the most "open" of smart phones, is not free software. As Richard Stallman put it,

we can tolerate non-free phone network firmware provided new versions of it won't be loaded, it can't take control of the main computer, and it can only communicate when and as the free operating system chooses to let it communicate. In other words, it has to be equivalent to circuitry, and that circuitry must not be malicious. There is no obstacle to building an Android phone which has these characteristics, but we don't know of any.

"The Cloud" through AT&T is a dystopian throwback to dumb terminals and computers owned by others that should not exist in a world that's overflowing with cheap computers, radio devices and networks.

Alternatives exist to falling back into the wiretapped world of 1960's telco. The most obvious alternative is to demand software freedom for smart phones and network freedom for cell phone networks. As Isenberg demanded fifteen years ago, "just deliver the bits, stupid." Open Spectrum is the technically and ethically proper replacement to spectrum auctions that is ready, fast and finally in production testing but threatened. Another good solution is to cooperate and build out municipal networks. There are several of these running in the US in cities like Tacoma which provide excellent and fair service. We should be so lucky to have any but we should demand all of these alternatives.