One of the problem of not attending meetings for a while is you start to forget someone name. Okay, at least I have that problem. So many times that someone come forward to say hi and I have to struggle to remember their name, esp. I cant see their name tag.

For those whose name I forgot, I am sorry. I have a good memory for faces but very bad with names. Its nothing personal.

Anyway, I dont really remember much what happened today. I was in a series of meetings, then running around finding people to talk to on a project I am working and poof dinner time. Oh yea, I had dinner. Twice. Once with Prof. Qian, Mao Wei and Wu Guowei and then another hosted by PIKOM chairman.

Between the geek talks, the usual WSIS/ICANN stories (gosh, the Tunsia hotel story was funny :-), one particular incident left a strong impression on me. One of my friend has a Thai wife who also attended the latter dinner. It is obvious she is anti-Singapore anti-Thaksin (at least at this moment). My friend, her husband, said this to me: “To her, Temasek is the like the invader of Thailand”.

To a country who is very proud that they never being conquered in the last century, not even World War II, and the only southeast asia that never colonized by Western power, that say a lot. I guess that’s why there is 200,000 people turn up for a protest right now.

On a lighter side, she also mentioned she holds a PPS card and that they fly in here on SingaporeAir. She wasn’t too happy when I told her SingaporeAir is owned by Temasek :-)

I missed my flight from Singapore to Perth. It was really silly; I was doing my email in the lounge and I forgot the time :( By the time I ran to the gate, they just closed it. *sigh* The next available flight was at 9:30am the next day, so I ended up having to stay at the transit hotel for a night. That’s was really werid.

Anyway, as I only arrived in Perth in the afternoon, I missed the APCAUCE regional update on antispam activities. *sigh*

But not too late to join the APRICOT workshop reception. While there were only 50+ people attending the pre-conference workshop, seem like everyone was pretty happy with the workshop. And the dinner was good.

Over dinner, Bill Manning mentioned that the DoC is doing a request for information on IANA. It was quite werid because I cannot find it on NTIA website. Anyway, the request for information can be found at FBO website instead. Particularly, note this “The Department of Commerce, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (DOC/NTIA) is exploring options for Contractor performance of three, interdependent technical Internet coordinating functions.“.

Not too sure what it means but my gut feeling says this is pretty significant.

Btw, a couple of people gave me funny looks when I login to Warcraft. Speaking of which, you might be interested to check out some news on our guild: C|net and 1Up, both got Slashdotted. It’s a really cool guild. Just a couple days ago, after a semi-successful run with some guildies, Joi whispered me: “You know the warrior in your group? It would be funny for you to know he is John Crain from ICANN.” John and me know each another…we just didn’t know each another in the game :-)

I am now waiting for my flight to Perth for APRICOT 2006. Sitting at the Krisflyer lounge, I have a feel a bit out of place…Perhaps I havent travelled for a while. Ever since I told my boss I am leaving IDA, I grounded (myself) from any travelling. Its going to difficult for me and my boss to justify given he knows of my intention to leave.

So in some way, I am glad it is over and I am now able to travel again. I feel so out of touch…;-) Anyway, see you in Perth!

The Blogger Panel was a smash – they schedule it as a main session rather than a breakout session which means we have much more audience than last year. Andy was a great moderator and my fellow panelists didn’t hesitate the take any questions, even the tough ones like why are we qualified to be up there :-)

I didn’t have the chance to take a shot at the “China story” but we have many other interesting discussion like what will shape the VoIP industry in the next two years – more start-ups, more mega buyouts, more innovative applications and more regulations. The last is mine and Jeff jump at it the moment I said the word “regulation”.

After then panel, we got together for dinner and debate never stop :-)

Oh yes, David Isenberg joined us for dinner. I was sitting at the other corner with David, Tom, Aswath.

I spent most of my time at the Communication Policy Summit.

The most exciting session got to be Lawful Intercept session, with speakers from Drug Enforcement Administration and Federal Bureau of Investigation explaining why they need CALEA and they did a great job. Unfortunately for them, their opponents John Morris and Brad Templeton did an even better job. In short, no one deny the law enforcement agencies the right to do legal intercept but the objection is how it is implemented. As it is current proposed, it is trying to retro fit a new technology into an old model, making technical requirements like 0.2s timestamp that increases the cost of implementation without any explaination why it is needed, and most importantly, why the industry should spend millions/billions of dollars to implement which is incomplete and easy to circumvent (it does not deal with IP-to-IP so all the terroist needs to know is www.skype.com).

The other session I enjoy is session on policy reformation. The two hour session is extremely informative covering topics like (1) inter-state/carrier settlement (2) universal access fund (3) VoIP jurisdiction. For (1), it looks like US Congress don’t really know what they want but they want FCC to solve it. Conclusion is that it is not going to be resolved anytime soon. For (2), the issues seem simpler, or at least California Commissioner Susan Kennedy thinks it can be resolve easily by associating the contributions with phone numbers. The debate is more of a re-definition of what is “universal access” as no one wants to use the money to build an old copper infrastructure especially if you can get broadband IP infrastructure for cheaper cost. (As it stands, the universal services is bias towards copper network). For (3), Susan surprised me by saying she supported FCC to have jurisdiction over VoIP instead of the PUCs. In her words, “take it away from us before we hurt ourselves”.

Well, I disagreed so we had a little discussion. Her final statement surprised me but it also explained a question I had for a while: after FCC waive the “right-of-way” for new fiber laid, how are they going to balance the market? Where is the wedges they can use on the fiber operators?

The discussion goes this way:

Me: I agreed with everything you said. I believe in free market and I prefer competition over regulation. But as you said, you have 80% DSL and 92% cable pentration so there are still some small pocket people who has no choice in their carrier and …

Susan: For them, we have universal access funds.

In other words, the universal access funds are being used to create competitions (she confirmed this after the session).

Everything makes senses now: Using universal access funds to create competitions at the same time deregulating the “right of way” (The government should avoid regulating a monopoly in the hopes of making it “The Good Monopoly”. Instead, devote resources to promote competition and abundance. see Lessons learnt from history).

But shouldn’t it be called “Universal Competition Funds” then?

Just arrived Boston to participate in the VoIP Bloggers Roundtable at VON. This is my 3rd time in Boston and I really like Boston; No, really … of all the places I being to, Boston is one of the few cities I dont mind to settle down.

Back to VON, the panel on Tuesday evening includes Andy Ambramson, Mark Evans, Tom Evslin, Martin Geddes, Stuart Henshall, Om Malik, Jeff Pulver, Aswath Rao. I thought we missing the European bloggers like James Enck but I am sure the audience will fill in the gap.

So what do I want to talk about on the panel?

China Telecom blocking Skype

This is particularly important to those with a “China-play” ie, almost everyone. We don’t know how they will be doing the blocking but that’s not important. Remember what I said about the next ten years? That we will be “additional billion ordinary Internet users who consider Internet just as a tool, and the uses of it is far more important then the technology driving it”. We already seeing it in Japan, where broadband pentration is higher than PC pentration, ie, people subscribing to broadband for just the VoIP.

What’s this means is despite the geeks calling for “end-to-end”, “net freedom”, or whatever, the users don’t really care. And they will continue to buy whatever the operators offer them, even from China Telecom who banned Skype.

What about regulators? Well, effective regulators requires 3 criterias (a) strong regulator with broad legistrative foundation (b) sound market or consumer interest principles (c) in a highly regulated market. Without (a), any decisions made by the regulator can be overturned by the higher power-to-be. Without (b), any decisions are likely to be a step backwards. Without (c), regulators have no basis to intervent.

In other words, don’t hold your breath for MII to intervent in China Telecom vs Skype. Yes, I am aware of Tom.com (aka Li family) influence in China but that’s from very top-down, if they ever make it happen.

China already have over 100M (see cnnic july report) internet users which is ~10% of the Internet population today. And 100M is less than 0.1% 10% of the China population. So when China catch up with the rest (60-80% pentration), wanna guess who will matters more in future?

Btw, the story don’t just stop in China – I expect to see similar stories from other countries with monopoly carriers.

ps: Hmm, maybe there is a business in selling carrier-grade Skype blocking tools (via Kevin Werbach) ^_^;;;

¹ thanks to Antoin who corrected the math; my excuse is that 22hrs flight do that to people sometimes.

Had a great lunch meeting with my fellows editors of Tomorrow.sg. Now, we need to go back do some more thinking on the next step.

And now, I just checked into Howard Plaza Hotel for APAN Taipei.

Took some photos of Louvre Museum and had some fun making paronomic view of it, using Open Source Software of course!

Tools used (1) Hugin to align the photos and (2) Enblend to stitch the align photos together and optionally (3) Autopan-SIFT to generate control points for Hugin.

Bob Park has an excellent instruction on how to create paronoma view using these tools.

Today is the last day of IETF. And it is also one of the most important reason why I am attending IETF this time – ENUM or specifically Carrier ENUM.

The (User) ENUM part of the meeting went quite well easily but I think I surprised quite a few people when I stood up and objected to Shin’s mobileweb registration (basically, a ENUMservice for mobile web). Now, Shin is a close friend but I think it is a bad idea to start putting session negiotation information into ENUM. Its a slippery slope to go near there – DNS should remains as DNS – you throw something at it and it give you back something. The capability negiotation should be done within the session setup, and especially HTTP already provides User-Agent negiotation that serves the need.

I can understand why mobileweb would make sense – It is very helpful for a registry/registrar who can start to market a new product (“register your mobile web address now!”) but lets not taint the protocol.

The Carrier ENUM portion of the meeting is far more exciting. Two ideas was thrown around (1) use of non-terminal NAPTR record and (2) use of some defined carrier label delegation under the e164.arpa tree to tie Carrier ENUM tree under e164.arpa. After some interesting discussion, the rough consensus seem to be leaning towards Michael’s proposal using carrier label delegation. I still dont like it but ah, rough consensus is rough consensus and I lost :P.

Most surprising is that the room also have rough consensus that Carrier ENUM as part of the ENUM working group work. This is quite different from the last time we have such discussion where people objects quite strongly against it. In this regard, everyone wins :-)

On different note, SPF/SenderID seem to be dying.