There is, in most respects, not much room for the little guy. Still, many companies attempt to eke out a living by raising capital and earning free cash flow on the basis of moving the needle down a couple of stairs in the telecom industry’s giant race to the bottom. Frankly speaking, as consumers, we need these guys … they create the price pressure that leads to market pressure that forces the cabal to lower their prices. Without them we’d all still be paying $1/minute to call one or two counties over. But rarely (and I suspect Bernie Ebbers would verify this) do they ever make any real money over the long-term.

Because of my history as one of Cisco’s early Packet Telephony product managers, and having architected and helped to launch a few different services including BuzMe and RingCentral, I see a lot of VoIP deals. I’ve taken to referring to many of them as “stupid phone tricks” (in a nod to Letterman) which are clearly designed to take advantage of some gap in arbitrage within the telecom industry.

Unfortunately, this has been the model of telecom “innovation” for many, many years. The first Cowboys in the telecom game were of course the CallBack kids. They allowed you to make calls from Brazil to the USA, for example, paying the long-distance rate for calling from the USA to Brazil instead of the other way around by “ringing both ends” of the call after you first dialed their local or toll-free number to instantiate the call. This significant inconvenience was trumped by the massive savings incurred for folks living in Brazil calling to their USA-resident relatives.

With long-distance deregulation came the rise of prepaid calling card services, which did something similar. Again you traded the convenience of just simply dialing the person you wanted to call for having to call a pilot number, entering a complex string of unmemorable digits, and THEN entering the number you wanted to call in order to save a little dough. The services made money, though, because you and I would usually lose our cards or forget our numbers before we fully expended the value in the cards. This model is called “breakage”. To my utter disappointment this represented the larger part of the market I was dealing with while at Cisco.

More than 8 years ago I recall being asked by my boss, Alistair Woodman, to write an opportunity evaluation of the recently-ratified SIP protocol. My response, over the course of weeks of researching and talking to everyone involved, was a breathless vision espousing nothing short of a complete re-think of the entire Telecom industry. SIP has some epic flaws and paradoxes, like its assumption that we’d all be on IPv6 by 2001, and its paradoxical empowerment of edge devices while making no accommodations for firewall/NAT traversal or P2P.

But it was a pretty good stab at unhanding control of telecom from the cabal and placing it in the hands of scrappy innovators. And as the VON shows once attested, there are some pretty feisty and intelligent people lurking within the telecom business. For a time I hoped to have been one of the more noteworthy ones.

With the benefit of hindsight we now know that SIP just hasn’t panned out (certainly not in the way I had hoped it would). It’s become just another signaling protocol in the transport of fairly uninteresting voice calls within the existing structure of telecom. Let me repeat that in another way: The incumbents took a protocol which was conceived and designed to blow them out of the water, and used it to cost-optimize their networks. As a protocol, SIP is incredibly successful in having propagated in Telecom in the less than 7 years it’s been deployable, but I suspect its effects on the industry would today leave its creators a bit cold.

My breathless assertions that thanks to SIP the web geeks would take over Telecom — first derived in 1997 and held by me until at least 2002 — have never even come close to fruition. SIP, because it unbundles signaling from the calling path and especially because it allows for rich metadata to travel through the network with SIP messages, is rife with potential for adding value — but no one, not even Skype (which uses a protocol clearly inspired by SIP but which fixes a lot of its problems) has deployed it in a way that takes complete advantage of this to stimulate innovation.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Cubic Telecom. There’s a small amount of real innovation there, but it largely falls into my “Stupid Phone Tricks” category. It might or might not save you a lot of money making and receiving long-distance calls while you roam on your mobile phone, but does nothing to abate the greater crime that is mobile roaming charges. After I wrote about Cubic, David Pogue of the NY Times was attracted into their orbit, but got burned when others realized Cubic’s rates weren’t quite so attractive as they’d said they were. Controversy erupted and their launch marketing was irreversibly damaged (see here also) by the Streisand Effect of their attempts to correct and adjust perception.

A Googling of “telecom innovation” yields 10,700+ hits but, sadly, no real innovation. What you will read, instead, are examples of creative cost-optimization (Voice Mail was really a way to eliminate the answering machine at home, and the receptionist at the office). You’ll also see some incredibly creative and extravagant attempts to defeat the inconvenience associated with the CallBack model. Cool, but not fundamentally enabling.

What Cubic is presently caught up in is the fact that their dubious cost savings are hampered by the fact that calling mobile phones, for example, in Europe is always going to be expensive and hugely differentiated in terms of pricing from calling land lines in Europe. The rise of draconian mobile pricing models combined with the steep decline in global long-distance calling rates results in a more and more limited opportunity to cost-optimize and more and more pitfalls for the consumer. Unfortunately, Cubic’s a great example of how this happens and how it can bite one in the ass.

There are a number of artificial bottoms in the telecom industry. Long-Distance was the first and most obvious of these: when there was sufficient market pressure from a few successful VoIP guys (and other telco competitors) to reduce costs, the incumbents simply did so. Why? Their costs to provide long distance were arbitrary. Their only consideration was how much margin they could take without losing customers.

There are a couple of false bottoms in mobile at the moment (who am I kidding, there are half a dozen) including roaming, long-distance, and SMS. SMS is a great modern example of this and here’s why:

The cost for a mobile network to transact an SMS message are incalculably small — on par with your ISP handling an email message. Yet it’s become an enormous cash cow for the mobile phone industry — imagine if your ISP charged you a penny for every email sent or received. A small number of companies such as hotxt (now trutap) rose to try and take a notch out of the carriers on this front, but were ultimately thwarted by the fact that they have to take pot shots at the carriers from within their own ecosystem.

It’s not that easy to attack the SMS business model by requiring users to instead install an app and send and receive messages over wireless data, which is also ridiculously expensive.  It’s kind of like borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, and in any case I’m not sure what it accomplishes for the third-party service.  Not fun. And not particularly innovative.

There is encroachment now, by mobile telecom into terrestrial telecom, and subsequently by platforms like the iPhone and OpenMoko and the rumored GPhone. I guess this means there’s some hope for change. But all of them appear to be embracing the traditional approach to telecom and stepping up to milk the cow in collusion with the big carriers. And this, friends, is a shame. Because innovation will only be barely perceptible if we continue to allow Telecom Monopolists to write the rulebook.

-Ian.

There is some apparent overlap in both offerings, in that they are both essentially smart CallBack services.  But the positioning and nuances of the service offering are in fact quite a bit different.  While on one hand I think MaxRoam represents a more comprehensive solution targeted exclusively at mobile roamers, I think that Lypp is a significantly more frictionless service which you can make use of in myriad ways, not exclusively to avoid long-distance bilking on your mobile phone.

In particular the Lypp API, coupled with the fact that you can easily instantiate calls with multiple parties via SMS and Instant Messaging,  is a game-changer.  The notion of spontaneous conferencing is actually, finally, possible.  And if you coupled Lypp (via its API) with a smart calendar-based scheduling system you’d have yourselves a pretty kick-ass enterprise conferencing solution.

But overall, the Lypp model applies wherever you have a situation where two parties elect to chat via voice while using some other medium.  Viewed from this 30,000 foot precipice, you can see that Lypp has utility in applications as far-flung as online dating, business-to-business calling, and even chat radio shows, call centres, and unified communications.

This means that in some ways Lypp competes with Jangl and Jajah, however it should probably in the end be marketed more as a toolkit like VOXEO.  Come to think of it, all of those companies are run by friends of mine, too.

What I find ironic is that the base concept of CallBack is not new … it’s been around since the early 1980s, when smart telecom entrepreneurs realized it was substantially more expensive to call from, say, Brazil to the USA than it was to call from the USA to Brazil.  These CallBack drones, much like the Prepaid Calling Card industry, were among the first major VoIP platform customers of ours when I was a lowly Product Manager in the Packet Telephony Division at Cisco.

Most of those companies died or were absorbed as their major market differentiator (price) eroded and they were commoditized by Big Telco.

CallBack services are generally easy to replicate on VoIP platforms.  What’s having a disruptive effect now is that with so many open-platform VoIP solutions and generally cheap computational power, it is possible to rapidly develop scalable telecom applications in ways that were formerly only accessible to the likes of Nortel and Cisco.

It’s clear though that among this latest batch of telecom evolutionaries there is some real innovation.  There are, however, lessons to learn:  While the clear temptation of most of these businesses will be to hinge their value
proposition on lower-cost in exchange for slightly lower convenience, this is a losing business.

The challenge is to innovate and let new capabilities and opportunities continue to drive innovation and product design.  This is an area where no Big Telco executive has any real lasting insight.  Elephants are terrible tapdancers.

In honour of the beautiful summer we’re having DJ Heavy Smurf has created a new mix for listening to while at your local beach, tanning salon, lawn, or (if you’re Martha Stewart) in your jail cell..

Paper Thin Suntan packs 18 tracks on one mix, journeying from 92 BPM to 117 BPM over 79 minutes and 55 seconds. Insodoing it winds its way around the world from France to Norway to Lebanon to Honolulu to Brooklyn to London and Brazil,

The Smurf hopes you enjoy it at: http://heavysmurf.com

Track listing: “Paper Thin Suntan”

Air All I Need 92 BPM Jaffa Sneakin’ 94 BPM Elak Remember Me 96 BPM Royksopp Cry Baby 96 BPM Thievery Corporation Lebanese Blonde 97 BPM Bebel Gilberto Bananeira 97 BPM Fantastic Plastic Machine Honolulu, Calcutta 98 BPM Blue Boy Remember Me 99 BPM Roy Davis, Jr. Lyrical Trip 101 BPM Nightmares on Wax Ease Jimi 102 BPM Fila Brazilia Freedom 103 BPM Saint Germaine Acid Jazz 105 BPM Royksopp Eple 107 BPM Marschemellows Soulpower 110 BPM Telepopmusik Breathe 112 BPM Spiller Groove Jet 114 BPM Fred Derby 116 BPM Jamiroquai Little L 117 BPM

It’s encoded as 192kBps MP3… like most of the others…

-Enjoy!

Flying the unfriendly skies Mar 22nd 2003 From The Economist Global Agenda

America’s big airlines say the war in Iraq could make their current dire predicament turn catastrophic. But this may not be enough to win them further state aid

COULD President George Bush be forced to order the nationalisation of America’s airline network to save it from total collapse? A report on the dire state of the airlines’ finances, published last week by the Air Transport Association (ATA), which represents them, insists that such a dramatic scenario is “not unrealistic”. Since the terrorist attacks in America on September 11th 2001, its airlines have lost a combined $18 billion, in spite of the big aid package that Mr Bush granted the industry shortly afterwards. Now, with a war being waged in Iraq, passenger bookings falling sharply and airlines making heavy cuts in their schedules, America’s main carriers predict that their losses this year, given a fairly short war, will be almost $11 billion. If the war drags on or there are more terrorist attacks in America, the losses could reach $13 billion.

United Airlines, the world’s second-largest carrier, which is already in bankruptcy proceedings (as is US Airways, another big carrier), added to the gloom on March 18th by saying that it was a “distinct possibility” that it may soon close altogether unless it achieves further cuts in wage costs. Though its staff unions have agreed to temporary pay cuts worth $840m annually, the airline is seeking long-term savings on labour costs of around $2.6 billion a year. New forecasts from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on the same day were rather less doom-laden than the industry’s own predictions. Even so, they suggest that passenger traffic will not return to 2001’s levels until perhaps 2006 (see chart).

The FAA admits that its forecast of a gradual recovery in air traffic is at risk from the war and from any further terrorist attacks. A reminder that such risks are real came on March 19th, when home-made bombs were found, and three men arrested under Britain’s Terrorism Act, at an apartment near London’s Gatwick Airport. This follows an incident last month in which a grenade was found in the luggage of a passenger arriving from Venezuela.

America’s transport secretary, Norman Mineta, said the government would be “ready to move very quickly” to provide further aid on top of the $15 billion package announced after the September 11th attacks; and a bill to be introduced in the House of Representatives on March 19th by James Oberstar, a Minnesota Democrat, proposes that the government compensate the airlines for any losses due to the Iraq war and reimburse some of the extra security costs they have suffered since the 2001 terrorist attacks. However, there does not seem much prospect of getting extra subsidies past sceptical White House officials, who are more preoccupied with the likely heavy costs of pursuing the war.

The ATA’s report argues that America’s airlines have already taken significant “self-help” measures to cut their costs and rationalise their schedules. Around 100,000 airline jobs have been cut since September 2001. A further 70,000-100,000 are forecast to go. On March 21st, Northwest Airlines, the world’s fourth-largest carrier, added 4,900 to the redundancy count and said it was cutting 12% of its flights.

This is partly due to the downturn in bookings caused by the expectations of a war in Iraq, and the rise in the cost of fuel, which has doubled in the past six months. But the airlines have also been suffering from a fall in business travel due to the collapse of the dotcom boom. In all, the crisis in the industry goes beyond what might be expected from “normal” market forces, they argue, so there is a strong case for the government to come to the rescue. What the airlines want especially is reimbursement for the $4 billion of extra costs they claim to have suffered due to the extra security measures imposed on them by the government after the September 11th attacks. They also want cuts in taxes on air travel, which they reckon have risen by 180% since 1991, about six times the rate of inflation.

The 1991 Gulf war, triggered by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, caused years of losses for America’s airlines. After operating profits of $1.8 billion in 1989, they suffered more than $6 billion of losses in the following three years. Four firms (Pan Am, Eastern, Midway and Markair) went into liquidation. Despite enjoying a period of prosperity in 1995-2000, the industry enters the second Gulf war in an even worse state: the combined debt of America’s big “network” airlines is $100 billion, compared with their combined stockmarket valuation of just $3.2 billion in February.

Latin American airlines are also struggling. On March 21st, Colombia’s Avianca filed for bankruptcy protection in the American courts, as it sought to renegotiate debts of $130m. And Brazil’s heavily indebted flag-carrier, Varig, is seeking an operational merger with its local arch-rival, TAM.

Also on March 21st, KLM of the Netherlands became the latest European carrier to announce big cuts in continental and transatlantic flights. But in general Europe’s and Asia’s airlines are in a better position than America’s to withstand the slump in bookings caused by the war. Formerly troubled carriers like Lufthansa of Germany and Iberia of Spain are in better shape than they were, after making big cost cuts. Europe’s airlines are expected to share profits of $2.6 billion this year, reckons UBS, a bank, while Asia’s will make $3.2 billion.

Back in America, the FAA forecasts that, while the big network carriers will have a slow recovery, short-haul flights (dominated by leaner cut-price airlines) and air cargo will enjoy strong growth. United’s problems are partly the fault of its own staff, who got a stake in the airline in lieu of pay as part of a restructuring in 1994, and have used it to block painful but necessary cost cuts. The management’s threat to close the airline permanently is as much aimed at twisting its unions’ arms to make concessions as at pleading with the government for handouts.

The big airlines that are in bankruptcy proceedings are able to hold off their creditors and can thus try to grab market share by undercutting their rivals, forcing the whole industry to continue offering uneconomically low fares. Unless the government and the airline unions give in to the carriers’ demands, the industry’s crisis could well drag on until one or more of America’s main carriers is forced to close for good. In the meantime, hardy passengers who are prepared to brave the risks of air travel can enjoy fantastically cheap fares. The ATA reckons that tickets, before taxes, are cheaper in nominal terms than in the late 1980s, and therefore much cheaper in real terms. Enjoy it while it lasts.

November 28, 2002 Postcards From Planet Google By JENNIFER 8. LEE

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.

AT Google’s squat headquarters off Route 101, visitors sit in the lobby, transfixed by the words scrolling by on the wall behind the receptionist’s desk: animación japonese Harry Potter pensées et poèmes associação brasileira de normas técnicas.

The projected display, called Live Query, shows updated samples of what people around the world are typing into Google’s search engine. The terms scroll by in English, Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Japanese, Korean, French, Dutch, Italian – any of the 86 languages that Google tracks.

people who shouldn’t marry “she smoked a cigar” mr. potatoheads in long island pickup lines to get women auto theft fraud how to.

Stare at Live Query long enough, and you feel that you are watching the collective consciousness of the world stream by.

Each line represents a thought from someone, somewhere with an Internet connection. Google collects these queries – 150 million a day from more than 100 countries – in its databases, updating and storing the computer logs millisecond by millisecond.

Google is taking snapshots of its users’ minds and aggregating them. Like a flipbook that emerges when successive images are strung together, the logged data tell a story.

So what is the world thinking about?

Sex, for one thing.

“You can learn to say ‘sex’ in a lot of different languages by looking at the logs,” said Craig Silverstein, director of technology at Google. (To keep Live Query G-rated, Google filters out sex-related searches, though less successfully with foreign languages.)

Despite its geographic and ethnic diversity, the world is spending much of its time thinking about the same things. Country to country, region to region, day to day and even minute to minute, the same topic areas bubble to the top: celebrities, current events, products and computer downloads.

“It’s amazing how similar people are all over the world based on what they are searching for,” said Greg Rae, one of three members of Google’s logs team, which is responsible for building, storing and protecting the data record.

Google’s following – it is the most widely used search engine — has given Mr. Rae a worldview from his cubicle. Since October 2001, he has been able to reel off “anthrax” in several languages: milzbrand (German), carbonchio (Italian), miltvuur (Dutch), antrax (Spanish). He says he can also tell which countries took their recent elections seriously (Brazil and Germany), because of the frenzy of searches. He notes that the globalization of consumer culture means that the most popular brands are far-flung in origin: Nokia, Sony, BMW, Ferrari, Ikea and Microsoft.

Judging from Google’s data, some sports events stir interest almost everywhere: the Tour de France, Wimbledon, the Melbourne Cup horse race and the World Series were all among the top 10 sports-related searches last year. It also becomes obvious just how familiar American movies, music and celebrities are to searchers across the globe. Two years ago, a Google engineer named Lucas Pereira noticed that searches for Britney Spears had declined, indicating what he thought must be a decline in her popularity. From that observation grew Google Zeitgeist, a listing of the top gaining and declining queries of each week and month.

Glancing over Google Zeitgeist is like taking a trivia test in cultural literacy: Ulrika Jonsson (a Swedish-born British television host), made the list recently, as did Irish Travelers (a nomadic ethnic group, one of whose members was videotaped beating her young daughter in Indiana) and fentanyl (the narcotic gas used in the Moscow raid to rescue hostages taken by Chechen rebels in late October).

The long-lasting volume of searches involving her name has made Ms. Spears something of a benchmark for the logs team. It has helped them understand how news can cause spikes in searches, as it did when she broke up with Justin Timberlake.

Google can feel the reverberations of such events, and others of a more serious nature, immediately.

On Feb. 28, 2001, for example, an earthquake began near Seattle at 10:54 a.m. local time. Within two minutes, earthquake-related searches jumped to 250 a minute from almost none, with a concentration in the Pacific Northwest. On Sept. 11, searches for the World Trade Center, Pentagon and CNN shot up immediately after the attacks. Over the next few days, Nostradamus became the top search query, fueled by a rumor that Nostradamus had predicted the trade center’s destruction.

But the most trivial events may also register on Google’s sensitive cultural seismic meter.

The logs team came to work one morning to find that “carol brady maiden name” had surged to the top of the charts.

Curious, they mapped the searches by time of day and found that they were neatly grouped in five spikes: biggest, small, small, big and finally, after a long wait, another small blip. Each spike started at 48 minutes after the hour.

As the logs were passed through the office, employees were perplexed. Why would there be a surge in interest in a character from the 1970’s sitcom “The Brady Bunch”? But the data could only reflect patterns, not explain them.

That is a paradox of a Google log: it does not capture social phenomena per se, but merely the shadows they cast across the Internet.

“The most interesting part is why,” said Amit Patel, who has been a member of the logs team. “You can’t interpret it unless you know what else is going on in the world.”

So what had gone on on April 22, 2001?

That night the million-dollar question on the game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” had been, “What was Carol Brady’s maiden name?” Seconds after the show’s host, Regis Philbin, posed the question, thousands flocked to Google to search for the answer (Tyler), producing four spikes as the show was broadcast successively in each time zone.

And that last little blip?

“Hawaii,” Mr. Patel said.

The precision of the Carol Brady data was eye-opening for some.

“It was like trying an electron microscope for the first time,” said Sergey Brin, who as a graduate student in computer science at Stanford helped found Google in 1998 and is now its president for technology. “It was like a moment-by-moment barometer.”

Predictably, Google’s query data respond to television, movies and radio. But the mass media also feed off the demands of their audiences. One of Google’s strengths is its predictive power, flagging trends before they hit the radar of other media.

As such it could be of tremendous value to entertainment companies or retailers. Google is quiet about what if any plans it has for commercializing its vast store of query information. “There is tremendous opportunity with this data,” Mr. Silverstein said. “The challenge is defining what we want to do.”

The search engine Lycos, which produces a top 50 list of its most popular searches, is already exploring potential commercial opportunities. “There is a lot of interest from marketing people,” said Aaron Schatz, who writes a daily column on trends for Lycos. “They want to see if their product is appearing. What is the next big thing?”

Google currently does not allow outsiders to gain access to raw data because of privacy concerns. Searches are logged by time of day, originating I.P. address (information that can be used to link searches to a specific computer), and the sites on which the user clicked. People tell things to search engines that they would never talk about publicly – Viagra, pregnancy scares, fraud, face lifts. What is interesting in the aggregate can be seem an invasiion of privacy if narrowed to an individual.

So, does Google ever get subpoenas for its information?

“Google does not comment on the details of legal matters involving Google,” Mr. Brin responded.

In aggregate form, Google’s data can make a stunning presentation. Next to Mr. Rae’s cubicle is the GeoDisplay, a 40-inch screen that gives a three-dimensional geographical representation of where Google is being used around the globe. The searches are represented by colored dots shooting into the atmosphere. The colors – red, yellow, orange – convey the impression of a globe whose major cities are on fire. The tallest flames are in New York, Tokyo and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Pinned up next to the GeoDisplay are two charts depicting Google usage in the United States throughout the day. For searches as a whole, there is a single peak at 5 p.m. For sex-related searches, there is a second peak at 11 p.m.

Each country has a distinctive usage pattern. Spain, France and Italy have a midday lull in Google searches, presumably reflecting leisurely lunches and relaxation. In Japan, the peak usage is after midnight – an indication that phone rates for dial-up modems drop at that time.

Google’s worldwide scope means that the company can track ideas and phenomena as they hop from country to country.

Take Las Ketchup, a trio of singing sisters who became a sensation in Spain last spring with a gibberish song and accompanying knee-knocking dance similar to the Macarena.

Like a series of waves, Google searches for Las Ketchup undulated through Europe over the summer and fall, first peaking in Spain, then Italy, then Germany and France.

“The Ketchup Song (Hey Hah)” has already topped the charts in 18 countries. A ring tone is available for mobile phones. A parody of the song that mocks Chancellor Gerhard Schröder for raising taxes has raced to the top of the charts in Germany.

In late summer, Google’s logs show, Las Ketchup searches began a strong upward climb in the United States, Britain and the Netherlands.

Haven’t heard of Las Ketchup?

If you haven’t, Google predicts you soon will.

———–

November 9, 2002 Global Trade Looking Glass: Can U.S. Have It Both Ways? By DANIEL ALTMAN

Policies adopted by the Bush administration to advance specific domestic and international goals are undermining the White House’s own efforts to open markets through trade’s global rule-making body, some foreign officials say.

In particular, new farm subsidies and other barriers to the American market have led some of America’s trading partners to doubt Washington’s commitment to free trade, in spite of its ambitious proposals to reduce distortions in world markets. Those doubts, combined with the United States’ pursuit of trade agreements outside the World Trade Organization, have also diminished the pre-eminence of the W.T.O., the critics say. That change may impede a crucial round of global trade negotiations begun substantially through American diplomacy last November in Doha, Qatar.

“The United States was very supportive of some of the positions that those of us from the developing countries took at Doha,” Kofi K. Apraku, Ghana’s minister of trade and industry, said in a telephone interview. “What happened at Doha gave us hope that we could work together.”

But the mood has changed in the last year, he added. “There is a lot of concern and a lot of worry in our country about the United States’ commitment to carry forward the momentum that was created in Doha,” Dr. Apraku said.

In response, Robert B. Zoellick, the United States trade representative, said that all negotiators have to balance domestic concerns with those of their trading partners. “Many countries had to stretch politically and then had to deal with sensitivities back home,” he said in an interview earlier this week, “so a pause for repositioning is understandable.” Mr. Zoellick added that he was optimistic that the talks would succeed on schedule. “We’re not refusing to discuss anything,” he said. “I believe we can get the Doha negotiation done by 2005, if key developed and developing countries make the effort.”

Chief among Ghana’s concerns is the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002, generally referred to as the farm bill. The law will protect American farmers from slumps in the business cycle, but critics say it may also encourage farmers to overproduce. That would depress world prices for crops. Ghana does not export all the same crops as the United States, but Dr. Apraku said the bill set a bad precedent.

“It is a major concern for us in Ghana,” Dr. Apraku said. “We are a developing country. Agriculture is very important to us.” Farming accounts for 36 percent of Ghana’s economy and 60 percent of its jobs.

Ghana is not alone. “It is clear that the United States farm bill is not very popular in Canada, either,” said Pierre S. Pettigrew, Canada’s minister for international trade. “It certainly requires more explanation on the part of the United States.”

Experts estimate the farm bill, signed by President Bush last spring, could increase federal spending on agriculture by 70 percent over the next six years, to as much as $180 billion, potentially violating limits for farm support set during the last round of global trade talks, but Mr. Zoellick’s office disputed that.

Supachai Panitchpakdi, the director general of the W.T.O., said the increase in subsidies under the farm bill had hampered the new round of global trade talks. “It has created some questions, some doubts in the mind of some countries,” he said, “and has sometimes been used to delay some of the proposals.”

Dr. Supachai also noted that the talks were behind schedule. Negotiators missed a deadline for submitting a report on trade preferences for poor countries to the W.T.O.’s general council. “When the members missed the July deadline,” he said, “the prevailing view of the developing countries was a bit of disappointment — that they were let down.”

Mr. Zoellick said that the deadline had come too soon, since the overall shape of the negotiations — whether they would apply to tariffs, subsidies, quotas or other items — was still unclear.

He also said critics were overstating concerns about the farm bill. “The farm bill does nothing in terms of tariffs or market access,” he said. “It doesn’t change our policy on export subsidies.” Additional annual appropriations to subsidize farmers, he asserted, could make the situation problematic.

In addition to complaints about specific policies, some critics have also objected to Mr. Zoellick’s simultaneous pursuit of trade pacts with individual countries, with regional bodies like the Free Trade Area of the Americas and with the W.T.O. While that approach ensures against any one set of talks collapsing, diplomats say it also puts some negotiating partners at a disadvantage. Small countries in particular often lack the expertise to engage in three sets of talks, and the comprehensive negotiations at the W.T.O. could be shortchanged.

“The fact that our trade negotiators are so busy with the W.T.O., with the F.T.A.A. and with the bilaterals, causes a problem for all of us, not only for smaller countries,” Mr. Pettigrew of Canada said.

The Workers’ Party of Brazil, which will soon govern that country’s economy, the biggest in South America, plans to make the Free Trade Area of the Americas — not the W.T.O. — a top priority. “The schedule is more urgent on that,” said Giancarlo Summa, a party spokesman, “and of course there will be much more diplomatic pressure.”

The Free Trade Area of the Americas would lower and eliminate tariffs on goods traded among 34 countries on the two continents, and could shape the rules for trade in services and foreign investment.

For Chile, by contrast, a long-awaited bilateral agreement with the United States is “in the front of the road,” said Osvaldo Rosales, the country’s top trade negotiator.

Though Mr. Rosales asserted that bilateral and regional trade agreements would serve as an important test for American leadership in the W.T.O., he also said that the existence of such pacts could make the negotiations at the W.T.O. more difficult.

Dr. Apraku was even blunter. “These negotiations will reduce the scope of the W.T.O.’s influence,” he said.

Though a proliferation of trade deals could enhance African countries’ negotiating skills and influence, it could also deflect attention from the overall effort to improve the living standards of the poorest countries by bringing them more fully into the global trading system.

Mr. Zoellick affirmed the United States’ commitment to seeing negotiations through at all levels. He said he intended to complete free trade agreements with Chile and Singapore by the end of this year, and the pan-American and W.T.O. negotiations by the end of President Bush’s current term.

Yet worries about populist governments in Argentina and Brazil seem to have made neighboring nations more eager to sign bilateral deals. Panama, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and other countries have approached the United States, Mr. Zoellick said.

“They don’t want to be left out,” he said.

That suits Mr. Zoellick. “We will work with Brazil because its participation is important,” he said, “but if it doesn’t work, we’ve got to have alternatives.”

Developing countries have also taken issue with Mr. Zoellick’s opinion of the United States’ importance to the global trading system.

“Doha wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for the United States,” he said. “The United States has an added responsibility for the trading and international economic system as a whole,” he added later.

Rafidah Aziz, Malaysia’s minister of international trade and industry, said that view might be overblown. She predicted that Mr. Zoellick would be “tearing his hair out” if he tried to strong-arm smaller members of the W.T.O. “No one can force anyone to do anything there, least of all the United States,” she said.

Sherman E. Katz, a scholar of trade policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy center here that Mr. Zoellick used to head, said that the United States still provided much of the intellectual energy behind talks on complex issues like intellectual property and trade in services. He concurred, though, with Ms. Aziz’s central point.

“We can’t throw our economic clout around on the W.T.O. table as much as we used to,” he said.

Poorer members of the W.T.O. do not face an easy task. At least 50 issues related to carrying out the last global trade pact — a primary concern of developing nations — are on the table to be discussed before the end of this year.

“We are mobilizing ourselves so that we can have some leverage, make some difference, in these meetings,” Dr. Apraku said. “We do not want to be marginalized.”

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-Ian.

—— http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/internet/10/17/aol.discs/index.html Campaign: Send AOL CDs back

From Rusty Dornin CNN

EL CERRITO, California (CNN) –Don’t know what to do with all those unwanted America Online compact discs that scream “Sign on today”?

Jim McKenna and John Lieberman say they have the answer: Send them back. In an effort to get AOL, part of CNN’s parent company, to stop sending the CDs, the two men started a Web site asking people to send the discs to them.

Once the two have collected a million discs, they say they’ll drive them to AOL’s headquarters in Virginia and dump them at the Internet giant’s door.

“We’re going to AOL and say, ‘You’ve got mail. Please stop this,'” McKenna said.

AOL is not the only company that sends out the free CDs, which entice customers with offers of over 1,000 hours of free Internet access. The marketing strategy also is used by AT&T, Earthlink and others.

But AOL — with 35 million subscribers worldwide — uses the tactic most frequently. The AOL discs appear in magazines, at the movies, in the mail and at parties, but an AOL spokesman wouldn’t say how many discs are sent out every year. The spokesman did say that customers who aren’t happy about getting the CDs can send them back so the company can recycle them.

McKenna and Lieberman are getting a little help for their cause from a waste management company, which publicized their campaign in a recent newsletter.

“You’re wasting a lot of natural resources,” said landfill manager Janet Schnyder. “You’re causing pollution and you’re basically sending something that people don’t want.”

They launched their campaign after going to the video store one night and getting an AOL disc with their rental. Then when they got to Lierberman’s house there was another disc waiting in the mailbox, complete with plastic wrap and additional packaging. All of it added up to a lot of garbage.

“We thought, ‘You know. Somebody’s got to do something about it,'” McKenna said. Having fun

Their Web site has brought in about 70,000 CD’s from as far away as Brazil and Africa. In the process, the two are having a lot of fun.

Their homepage shows pictures reportedly sent in by frustrated disc recipients. There’s a snapshot of a room wallpapered with the CDs and another of a dog with a disc clenched in its jaw.

This “pooch can’t stand it when the unsuspecting postal worker drops off another unwanted AOL CD,” the site says.

McKenna and Lieberman scratch the CDs so they can’t be sent out again and then they loop them on string — giving the unwanted discs the appearance of giant strands of silicon. The two stress they are not anti-AOL.

“We’re not defaming AOL or the corporation or anybody that does business with them,” McKenna said. “We are asking them politely to stop. And we’re just doing it in a creative way.”

Find this article at: http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/internet/10/17/aol.discs/index.html

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-Ian.

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http://teachanimalobjectivity.homestead.com/files/return6.htm

(From: “Sane Cows, or BSE Isn’t the Worst of It,” by Edward Luttwak, in the February 8 London Review of Books.)

At the Wye Plantation on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the department of agriculture of the University of Maryland raises beautiful Black Angus cattle with all the latest equipment and best techniques. It produces bullocks and breeding heifers but serves as a model for Maryland’s “cow-calf operations” that produce beef for the table rather than milk. The results are impressive: 90 percent of the Wye cows produce a calf each year, and steers are ready for sale by their eighteenth month. I went there to find out how my family’s primitive Bolivian ranch might be improved–only 60 percent of our cows give birth in any one year, and our steers grow so slowly that we must keep them for thirty months to achieve worthwhile weights for the market.

Cattle are capital, and were indeed its very first embodiment, yielding their offspring as interest. The higher the birthrate, the higher the rate of return, if costs are equal. And time is money with cattle as with any other form of capital: a steer sold at thirty months earns less net revenue than one sold after eighteen months at equal weights, prices, and costs. All in all, the Maryland numbers showed that there was much to be improved on our ranch.

The Maryland experts were interested in how we ranch and how we sell our cattle, given the 200 roadless kilometers to the nearest town (by rafting downriver to Brazil). They were eager to help. Our humped Nelor cattle conceive by the fifteenth month or even earlier, give birth after nine months of gestation, and can become pregnant again a few weeks later, just like the Wye cows. But our fertility rate is so much lower, I learned, because if cows and bulls are left to commune according to their desires, many cows resist impregnation, prefering to raise their calves for at least six months before becoming pregnant again. Artificial insemination is the remedy. In Wye all cows ready to breed again but not visibly pregnant are tested with sonograms by the resident vets, and those carrying no embryo are separated from the herd to be frequently tested, with a thermometer inserted into their vagina, until estrus is detected. At that point, the frozen semen of prize bulls is defrosted and injected, and the procedure is repeated until sonogram results are positive.

With our cattle dispersed over 78 square miles of savanna grassland interrupted by islands of tropical forest, we cannot emulate any of those practices. With one-by-one animal husbandry impossible, our cows and bulls are left to graze and procreate on their own, except for the few days a year when our eight cowboys, their older children, the manager, and I round up all the cattle we can find to corral them for counting, the branding of yearlings, castration, foot and mouth vaccination, the feeding of vermifuge, and fumigation against external parasites. During the long rainy season, when swollen streams and swamped pastures drastically limit movement even on our sturdy criollo horses, we do not even know where our cattle are much of the time, let alone which of our heifers is ready for impregnation. In any case, we have no sonogram machines or the electricity to operate them; our cows are too wild to be tested for estrus with a thermometer; and we can’t preserve semen, for we have no refrigeration. The only way we can increase the fertility of our cows–the key to our entire profitability, as we have no dairy cattle–is to provide enough bulls. In Wye they keep a few “clean-up” bulls with their 170 cows to complement artificial insemination, but we have forty bulls for each lot of 500 cows, deliberately sellecting smaller-framed animals because young heifers flee from the very large bulls that win prizes–heavy and slow, they seem to enjoy standing around looking impressive but mount few cows and earn their keep only with extracted semen. Our calves are also born smaller, of course, but that is no disadvantage at birthing time, when our heifers easily drop their young without any help at all, let alone the pulling chains, winches, and risky cesareans used by cattle raisers in all advanced countries.

There was one consolation in my failure to learn anything useful about fertility. Our procreation costs start and end with our bulls, bought at $400 each–and we can eventually recover more than that when we sell them for meat in their eighth year. At Wye, by contrast, as in all commercial cattle-raising ventures in Europe and the United States, high fertility does not come cheap. Sonogram machines, veterinary care, even the semen, at more than $30 a shot, are all very expensive, and there are many more abortions and stillbirths when cattle are bred for size, to jump-start the race to the market. Doing my sums, I discovered that for us a 60 percent live-birth rate was better than Wye’s 90 percent in spite of all the extra bulls we have to keep, simply because of the vast difference in the cost of keeping animals in the first place.

At Wye, as in almost every cow-calf operation in Western Europe or the United States, cattle cannot feed themselves all year round on green pasture. Only hobby farmers with few cows and a lot of land have the ten acres or so of decent land per head that are needed–and even they must usually provide baled hay durring the coldest winter months when grass stops growing. With all the better land in Europe and North America taken up by the intensive or arable farming that inherent productivity or subsidies make more profitable, almost all commercial cattle raisers must complement whatever green pasture they have with hay and other feeds at a cost of roughly $250 per year per head–it makes little difference if they buy the hay ready-bailed or grow it themselves, with tractors, harvesters, fuel, fertilizer, weed killers, and pesticides. The leftover straw of cereal crops and other roughage that may cost little or nothing is used, too, but lactating and pregnant cows and those fast-growing steers must also be fed more costly, more protein-rich concentrates, such as maize, oats, barley, grain sorghum, wheat, beet pulp, oilseed or soybean meal, molasses, synthetic urea, and, until recently, processed animal offal, including the sheep brains that have led to present difficulties. Our cattle, by contrast eat only the natural grasses of the savanna, picking and choosing among different plants at different times of the year to find all the nutrition they need, except for salt with mineral additives that costs us $3 per head per year.

We can afford to keep all those extra bulls and the 40 percent of our cows that fail to give birth in any one year because each steer we sell can pay for the salt of eighty-three heads. Since feeding costs us 1 percent of what cattle raisers in Europe or North America must pay, their animal husbandry holds no lessons for us. True, we must keep our steers for thirty months before they are ready for market, but that only costs us $7.50 in salt as opposed to the $375 or more in hay and concentrates eaten by a Maryland or British steer by the time it is ready for sale at eighteen months. Of course, there is the interest on delayed revenue to be reckoned, as well as the much lower weight of our steers, but given our abundance of grass it simply does not pay for us to minimize time and maximize weight at high cost, let alone fatten our animals in feedlots with expensive concentrates and supplements.

In other words, while European and North American cattle raisers pay their dues to the corporations that supply them with everything from tractors and fuel to bagged concentrates, we pay our dues to nature by accepting its pace and limits. So far that has been a rewarding choice: our return on cattle capital exceeds 30 percent, more than twice what North American and European cattle raisers can expect, though their corporate suppliers fare much better of course. The profitability of the entire sector is so tenuous in the United States that many ranchers stay in business only because they are not in business at all but rather keep their ranches for pleasure of display, a la W. Bush or Ted Turner, losing money each year, which they bill to the taxpayers by way of loss credits against the earnings of their real trade. Recently “buffalo” (bison) ranching became fashionable among the tax-loss crowd, though it was attempted by some desperate cow ranchers as well, who discovered that costs are even higher–not least for steel-tube fencing–and profits even lower. Among the dwindling band of genuine ranchers, a great many are consuming their capital year by year by accumulating mortgages against their land. As the number of independent ranchers and farm-based cattle raisers continues to decline in the States, as it would in Europe but for subsidies, they are replaced by large scale corporate operations, some of them immense; but they, too, are not faring well.

All that frantic productivity is thus an attempt to offset miserable margins with sheer quantity, which in turn drives down prices, reducing profitability even more. During the last two years, we have sold finished steers in the border town of Costa Marquez, in the back of Rondonia, one of Brazil’s least developed areas, at prices ranging from $1.05 to $1.45 per kilo, measured at 50 percent of live weight (“pencil shrinkage”), only a few cents less than the price to be had in Chicago for animals on which far more money has been spent. But then if Amazonian ranching were not so inherently profitable, Amazonian forests would not be endangered. (For the record, we preserve our forests intact; our land in San Joaquin Province is on the very edge of the uninterrupted rain forest that begins just across a ten-mile lake but is still mostly savanna grassland that was never deforested.)

At the Wye plantation I learned something else, or rather saw it while we were talking. It was the veterinary chart of a Maryland cow-calf operation, with seperate rows for pneumonia, diphtheria, infectious bovine rhinotracheitis, parainfluenza-3, bovine viral diarrhea, bloat, three kinds of clostridial infections, cocidiosis, pinkeye, cancer eye, foot rot, actinomycosis lump jaw, hard lump jaw, acidosis, laminitis, nitrate poisoning (from heavily fertilized pasture), and many more conditions. Treatments were also listed with antihistamines, dexamethasone, adrenaline, sulpha boluses, dimethyl sulfoxide, nitrofurazone, and novalson, as well as several vaccines, vermifuges, fumigants, homely iodine and castor oil, and many, many applications of antibiotics–a long list of them, starting with penicillin and going on to LA-200 and others equally obscure to me.

The reason I found this chart startling–though I later learned that it reflected normal conditions throughout Europe and North America–was that on our ranch we get by with one vaccination, two vermifuge doses, and two fumigations per year, all done by ourselves since there is no vet within reach. How could it be, I asked, that Maryland cows needed all those medicines, and the frequent services of veterinarians? The experts pointed out that a great variety of medicines was indeed essential, for otherwise cattle would die of disease. They estimated that veterinary care and supplies added some $50 per head per year to the average cost of upkeep.

We, too, lose cattle to disease as well as to jaguars, maned wolves, and anacondas (yes, they can swallow a newborn calf), but our combined losses have been running at roughly 1 percent per year. No, I was told, it was nothing like that: without several specifics and lots of antibiotics, cattle raisers would lose a great many head, and in feedlots mass deaths would be inevitable, for infections spread immediately among animals kept within inches of one another. Again, I asked why cows in salubrious Maryland–or Britain, for that matter–were so much more vulnerable to disease than our cows, which live in the intensely tropical Amazon basin, dense with every form of life, including a myriad of microorganisms, internal and external parasites, and blood-sucking vampire bats that carry all manner of diseases.

I received two answers. The first was that our slim Nelors, while much less productive of meat and useless for milking, were resistant to disease because they were the offspring of natural sellection undistorted by veterinary interventions, rather than cattle systematatically bred for productivity alone. The second answer, however, was the more conequential; unlike humans or pigs, who can eat anything organic, animal or vegetable (except for grass or wood, because our stomachs cannot break down cellulose), bovines are pure herbivores. Their four-part ruminant stomachs break down the cellulose in grass that we can’t digest to extract all the proteins, vitamins, minerals, and calories they need. Conversely, cattle can’t easily digest proteins, beyond the tiny amounts consumed by the microbes in their first stomach (the rumen), which break down cellulose. Yet for the sake of rapid weight gain and rapid procreation, European and North American cattle are fed with cereals and all those other concentrates that contain even more protein, as well as pre-bloom alfalfa hay, which is itself 16 percent protein. One result is that European and North American cattle raisers are always in danger of losing their animals to bloat, a foamy gas buildup in the rumen that presses against the lungs with a suffocating effect. Anti-foaming agents and trocars are kept on hand to puncture the rumen in emergencies.

The other results of feeding proteins to herbivores are much less dramatic, altogether more prevalent, and of far greater significance for human health: chronic diarrhea and acidosis, which hardly ever kill cattle outright but disrupt their immune systems, exposing them to all the diseases I saw on the Wye chart and a few more besides.

To put it plainly, nearly all beef cattle in Europe and North America are permanently unhealthy and survive in a chronic state of low-level sickness only with large doses of antibiotics. Because they are cheap and induce water retention that increases weight, antibiotics are just the thing for cattle raisers and feedlot operators–whose animals could not survive a week without them. For those who eat the resulting beef no ill consequences need follow individually, though I myself am nauseated by the idea of eating the meat of sick animals pumped full of antibiotics and assorted medicines–since visiting Wye, I eat only Argentine beef when I can get it, and my own when in Bolivia.

Public health, however, is another matter. At a time when old diseases such as TB are reappearing, and wounds and fractures are once again followed by stubborn, even lethal infections because many bacteria strains have become highly resistant to antibiotics, their use in mass quantities by cattle raisers adds to the problem. Until recently, it was thought that humans could not absorb antibiotics from cooked beef, but research prompted by bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) has incidently disproved that reassuring belief. One result is that people who eat beef may be spared an infection now and then; another is that they, too, are contributing to the evolution of increasingly resistant strains of bacteria.

The much larger issue is the entire logic of European and North American beef production in its present form. Tens of millions of head of cattle are raised in spite of the lack of anything like enough green pasture for them. In Western Europe, subsidies provide an incentive to raise beef cattle even without any pasture at all, or almost none, as in Tuscany, for example, whose Chianini–the source of the much-celebrated Florentina steaks–is the largest of all cattle breeds, but where meadows are a rarity among all those vineyards and villas. When I questioned the systematic use of antibiotics by the entire industry of both continents, the Wye experts replied that without them there could be only grass-fed beef, which tastes wonderful, as any visitor to Argentina can attest, but is too tough for palates used to the very soft flesh of grain-fed animals, further softened by immobility in feedlots–and by antibiotics. But their stronger retort was that beef fed on grass alone would be necessarily scarce and expensive. It no longer could be an everyday food for virtually everyone, but only for the affluent, and only an occasional treat for the poor or parsimonious. Yet at same time cardiologists unanimously assert that most people in Europe and North America eat far too much beef–that it should be an occasional treat rather than an everyday food, which many eat twice a day.

The veterinary profession has therefore systematized, indeed normalized the raising of unhealthy cattle to acheive the very abundance that makes people unhealthy. In its rarity, BSE is only an extreme consequence of feeding animal proteins to herbivores that can’t eat even alfalfa in any quanity without ill effect, let alone sheep brains. If the unending BSE drama finally attracts public attention to the habitual malpractice of the cattle industry, we may yet see North American and European herds reduced to their naturally fed size, that small fraction of present numbers for which green pasture can be provided all year round. And if that supply is insufficent, the pampas and savannas of South America can provide all that is needed, my ranch included, of course, with its beautiful Nelors.

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Duncan Campbell Thursday June 13, 2002 The Guardian

European satellite TV viewers can watch live broadcasts of peacekeeping and anti-terrorist operations being conducted by US spyplanes over the Balkans.

Normally secret video links from the American spies-in-the-sky have a serious security problem – a problem that make it easier for terrorists to tune in to live video of US intelligence activity than to get Disney cartoons or new-release movies.

For more than six months live pictures from manned spy aircraft and drones have been broadcast through a satellite over Brazil. The satellite, Telstar 11, is a commercial TV relay. The US spyplane broadcasts are not encrypted, meaning that anyone in the region with a normal satellite TV receiver can watch surveillance operations as they happen.

The satellite feeds have also been connected to the internet, potentially allowing the missions to be watched from around the globe.

Viewers who tuned in to the unintended attraction on Tuesday could watch a sudden security alert around the US army’s Kosovan headquarters, Camp Bondsteel in Urosevac. The camp was visited last summer by President Bush and his defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

A week earlier the spyplane had provided airborne cover for a heavily protected patrol of the Macedonian-Kosovan border, near Skopje. A group of apparently high-ranking visitors were accompanied by six armoured personnel carriers and a helicopter gunship.

Nato officials, whose forces in former Yugoslavia depend on the US missions for intelligence, at first expressed disbelief at the reports. After inquiring, a Nato spokesman confirmed: “We’re aware that this imagery is put on a communications satellite. The distribution of this material is handled by the United States and we’re content that they’re following appropriate levels of security.”

This lapse in US security was discovered last year by a British engineer and satellite enthusiast, John Locker, who specialises in tracking commercial satellite services. Early in November 2001 he routinely logged the new channels.

“I thought that the US had made a deadly error,” he said. “My first thought was that they were sending their spyplane pictures through the wrong satellite by mistake, and broadcasting secret information across Europe.”

He tried repeatedly to warn British, Nato and US officials about the leak. But his warnings were set aside. One officer wrote back to tell him that the problem was a “known hardware limitation”.

The flights, conducted by US army and navy units and AirScan Inc, a Florida-based private military company, are used to monitor terrorists and smugglers trying to cross borders, to track down arms caches, and to keep watch on suspect premises. The aircraft are equipped to watch at night, using infrared.

“We seem to be transmitting this information potentially straight to our enemies,” said one US military intelligence official who was alerted to the leak, adding: “I would be worried that using this information, the people we are tracking will see what we are looking at and, much more worryingly, what we are not looking at.

“This could let people see where our forces are and what they’re doing. That’s putting our boys at risk.”

Former SAS officer Adrian Weale, who served in Northern Ireland, told BBC Newsnight last night: “I think I’d be extremely irritated to find that the planning and hard work that had gone into mounting an operation against, for instance, a war crime suspect or gun runner was being compromised by the release of this information in the form that it’s going out in.”

· Duncan Campbell is a freelance investigative journalist and a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and not the Guardian correspondent of the same name

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