My latest Guardian column, “We must ensure ISPs don’t stop the next Google getting out of the garage,” talks about how the policy debate over “Digital Britain” has ignored the most important aspect of a digital nation: a fair deal on open network access.

But the real problem of per-usage billing is that no one – not even the most experienced internet user – can determine in advance how much bandwidth they’re about to consume before they consume it. Before you clicked on this article, you had no way of knowing how many bytes your computer would consume before clicking on it. And now that you’ve clicked on it, chances are that you still don’t know how many bytes you’ve consumed. Imagine if a restaurant billed you by the number of air-molecules you displaced during your meal, or if your phone-bills varied on the total number of syllables you uttered at 2dB or higher.

Even ISPs aren’t good at figuring this stuff out. Users have no intuition about their bandwidth consumption and precious little control over it.

Metering usage discourages experimentation. If you don’t know whether your next click will cost you 10p or £2, you will become very conservative about your clicks. Just look at the old AOL, which charged by the minute for access, and saw that very few punters were willing to poke around the many offerings its partners had assembled on its platform. Rather, these people logged in for as short a period as possible and logged off when they were done, always hearing the clock ticking away in the background as they worked.

We must ensure ISPs don’t stop the next Google getting out of the garage

The final Hugo Award ballot is finally online (and, presumably, in the post). If you’re registered to attend this summer’s Worldcon in Montreal, Anticipation, you’re eligible to vote in one of the most prestigious science fiction awards in the world (and yes indeed, I am a double nominee, thanks for asking!).

Once again, John “Mensch” Scalzi (a triple nominee) has assembled a Hugo Voters’ Packet consisting of electronic versions of practically every nominated work. If you’re a registered Hugo voter, he’ll supply you with a copy of the whole damned thing.

Final Ballot for the 2009 Hugo Awards
and John W. Campbell Award

The 2009 Hugo Voters Packet: Now Live

I did a live video-chat with some enterprising high-school freshmen at Arapahoe High School in Littleton, CO, a cabal of enterprising kids who are lobbying the school-system to add Little Brother to the statewide curriculum (!). We had a great chat — they’re really bright and lovely kids and clearly passionate and engaged!

Earlier this year, I had the privilege of participating in the closing panel at the Convention on Modern Liberty with Billy Bragg, Lisa Appignanesi, Feargal Sharkey, Paul Gilroy and Henry Porter. The Convention was a whole-day event with artists, activists, scholars, Parliamentarians, regulators, teachers, cryptographers and others. On the closing panel, we were asked to give closing thoughts on the event — I talked about the fact that British authoritarians have promised us security in exchange for taking away our liberty, but have not delivered; we’ve lost our freedom and been made less secure.

The Convention’s just uploaded the videos from the event, and I really enjoyed watching it from the other side of the stage, especially Billy Bragg’s talk. The last question — “What has moved our rights forward?” — was especially good.

Evening Plenary: Pen Session

Cory Doctorow at Convention on Modern Liberty

Final thoughts at Convention on Modern Liberty

Rolling Stone Argentina has a great interview with me about copyright, conducted by Ignacio Román.

Bueno, muchos músicos están despertando. Quizá no les guste lo que está pasando con Internet, porque durante toda su carrera les llenaron la cabeza diciéndoles “no te dejes copiar”. Pero de ahí a ir en contra de sus propios fanáticos… En Estados Unidos, miles de personas fueron enjuiciadas, pero esas ganancias no fueron para los creadores. El artista promedio quiere ser recordado como el tipo con el que sus fans perdieron la virginidad, no como el tipo con el que sus fans perdieron el disco rígido. Es terrible que cada vez que pienses en, por ejemplo, Tom Waits, digas: “Por culpa de ese tarado perdí mi tesis de diez años que estaba en el mismo rígido que su álbum”.

I shot a long video for the upcoming EU/Schoolnet event in Rome — they’ve started putting pieces of it online. Here’s me talking about “sexting,” media literacy and hysteria.