Im Rahmen meiner Diplomarbeit über Freie WLAN Netze führte ich eine Reihe von Interviews mit NetzaktivistInnen aus diesem Bereich. Hier ein Auszug aus dem Interview mit Julian Priest, dem Mitbegründer von der Londoner consume.net Bewegung und Verfasser des consume Manifestes, einem sehr frühen Grundsatz-paper über das Grundverständnis Freier Netze.

subnet:

What was your personal motivation for getting involved with free networks and starting activities in London?

Julian Priest:

Well, it started from necessity. I was running a design business. We were using dial-up and this was very slow and expensive. DSL wasn’t rolled out – this is in about 1996 I suppose. The people across the road from us had a web business and a kind of public access, a cyber-cafe and they had got together and rent a leased line for 40.000 pounds a year which was half a megabit up and half a megabit down. We wanted to connect to it. It was only three meters across the street and so we thought about just running a wire across the street and looked into the legal issues about that. It turned out, that unless you aren’t a registered telephone company, you aren’t allowed to string a wire over a public right of way and because we were a company and wanted to be legal, we decided to look for another solution. We found out about the 802.11 equipment and bought some that was really expensive. We built this link across the road with a BSD router and then we connected our whole building up to their whole building. And than in about 2000 James Stevens, who was running this cyber-cafe called backspace – it was like a public hacker lab – and me got together and wrote this kind of manifest, we suggested people people connect up to our network and that it could spread out.

subnet:

You talked about the manifest you wrote together with James Stevens. There was the idea that these networks shouldn’t be formalized in a kind of club or institution, but be loose connections which are completely selforganized. What do you think about that now, some years later?

Julian Priest:

Well, there is two things on. There is the kind of structure of the group, that sets out to build something. I think what we were frightened of, or what we didn’t want to do was to build another organisation which takes over the roll of the existing providers, so we wanted to distribute the ownership and operation of the network as widely as possible and we thought at that time, that mesh was an idea and a technical solution for doing that. But at the time when we started it, mesh wasn’t a reality in a way that it is now and so I would say, what happened, was that the community formed around trying to build this way of building an infrastructure and peoples interests. Primarily we were originally motivated by the technical challenge and than formed a community around, trying to figure it out in a way of an open discussion structure. I guess that’s how we look at it now. That kind of idea of complete selforganization and complete autonomy basically wasn’t supported by the technology we had avaliable by then. The kind of technology we had was a kind of hand stitched static routed network which didn’t configure themselves automatically and took lot of work and afford to build. So what actually happened was that instead of having this kind of citywide mashed network, we had pockets of community action where people got to know that and they quickly realized the strengths of what we purposed wasn’t the technical solution, but more a social network of people working together in some sort of collaborative action.

subnet:

You said, that communities are a very important aspect of building free networks.

Julian Priest:

Yes, I think that is what’s surprising, how deeply felt that urge to collaborate was. In the meetings we talked about ownerships, about operating free networks as a kind of resistant idea. If you can own and operate your radio network you have control over how you are operating and how you are connecting and we recognized that those network connections that you make and how you make them and the terms under which you make them are political acts as much as anything else. If you own your network, you can take control over your communication infrastructure yourself. Most network infrastructure was owned only by a small number of players and it would be easy for them to form a cartel and create a network where some content was privileged over others. So the cause of the idea, owning your own network is to assert control over how you connect and don’t connect and the terms under which that happens. A funny thing is that a lot of people said that this is never gonna happen but if you’re looking, what’s happening in the states with the network neutrality … They want to privilege some content over other content and everyone who wants to use it, is designed to certain bend.

subnet:

I’d like to speak a bit more about this community aspect. How do you think a community can be established or stuck together within a free network? What are good means for doing community work?

Julian Priest:

The things that I’ve seen work best, are having spaces, that you can regularly use to meet. I think having regular face-to-face-meetings with people and places, where you have resources available to be able to learn and share information works best. So physical space and regular meetings are really useful, like this ideas of a resource center. There is different types of community. There is some places where you have the target to build a whole network, so the community comes together and builds a network and there are some ways of working, where you have groups who’ve got together to build network components which can be easily installed by other people. They make the social engagement necessary from the individuals so that is much lighter. When we started, it was more like „ok, who knows how to manipulate BSD-routing tables“ you know, the level of technical knowledge and personal integration was much greater. Some of it is more like implementing existing technologies and some is more like hacking. And this two things are quite different.

subnet:

When you consider the two aspects of Free Networks, the Internet connection and the community with its local means of communication, what do you think is the most important aspect?

Julian Priest:

Normally it depends where you are. Access is the first thing. There are two kinds of discourses: For one access is about social inclusion, this whole thing of digital divide. The idea is, if economy runs over the network, without access you are out of the economy, out of the social loop, out of the political loop. You are kind of disempowered without broadband access. So that is the access argument. So that is the first thing. Interesting is that in places where you are saturated with information like London for instance, when you walk down the streets, you see billboards TV and so on. In those places, people will build community networks and wireless networks primarily to take control over information they want to share. It’s kind of a paradox. It might be as valuable to have your own network in a place where there is a saturation of connectivity. I mean I’ve seen people set up networks to get around acceptable use policies on commercial ISPs, they wanted to do something with their own media, they couldn’t do somewhere else. I haven’t a clear answer on that. I think the most valuable of the Internet as communication medium is that it allows you to access kind of networks of people who doing other things like developing free software this sort of group forming nature of networks.

subnet:

What do you think would be possible application to run locally on the network?

Julian Priest:

I talked about this recently, there is nice project called ‚Hive Networks‘. What they are doing is service broadcast and discovery on local networks with a subnet basically. So if you have a wireless network in a street you can have this very local media at the full bandwidth of the network. If that is a g-network, that is 54 mBit, so you have quite a fast local network just within the subnet and the services announced themselves. A service might be an mp3 collection or a collection of photos or videos and that might announce itself into the local physical networks. That is one thing, you know, it might be like a streamed radio show or any kind of local thing. I was even told about planting this devices in a city. It’s like a media cash, a kind of drop box where you just can drop off stuff to or pick up stuff from it and which is public or semi public local media. This is working in London, and they are doing some experiments with this things.

subnet:

Let’s move on to some future perspectives of free networks. If you think about the development of the free network movement, have the goals changed through the time and what do you think will be the future challenges free networks are facing?

Julian Priest:

It certainly changed. It changes all the time and it definitely hasn’t staid still ever, since I’ve been involved with it. It got a lot more diverse, there are a lot more people doing it and it wasn’t just one local attempt to address one particular set of political needs. It is quite a flexible toolkit of different ways of dealing with very different needs in very different situations, you know, different countries, different regulatory regimes, different social cultures of cooperation. There is still some threat that runs through it all, that binds it together. It’s not very clear, if something is a free network or a municipality network or a community network or even a WISP [Anm. Wireless ISP]. Those boundaries are very flexible and fluid. It’s basically because it’s an infrastructure and infrastructure is something that is common despite culture and need. It’s like a road, you drive down and you might not speak the same language as the person in the next car and you might never have met the person in the next car, but you can still share the same road. Free networks are infrastructure, so they have all of that kind of diversity both on top of them and in the way that they are constructed because they are build from social action of people.

subnet:

Do you think in the future free networks are more an extension or an antipole to the Internet?

Julian Priest:

Well, it is the Internet. I mean that is just part of the Internet. When does it stop being Internet? There might be an IP address like 192. … or something other you got from a DHCP of a local server but packet is travelling across there, they might be routed or nated but it is part of the Internet. The Internet is not like one thing, it’s a collection of networks.

subnet:

If you think about the telecommunication companies, which are widening their connections and within the next years will also provide broadband in most rural areas, what will be the position of Free networks then?

Julian Priest:

The funny thing is, that the cost of billing in 2003 exceeded the cost of networking. The cost of networking goes down and in 2003 in the UK the cost of billing got higher than actually the cost of providing access, thats three years ago. The fibre in the ground has a almost infinite mathematical capacity the switching gear is what defines how fast it goes and the switching gear currently doubles in speed and halves in price every 9 month, which is twice as fast as computers. So what are the expensive things about a network? It’s billing, because it is complicated to bill, so it’s actually cheaper not to bill or to bill a flatrate. Flatrate is better value for the firm company. It’s commoditized and they are competing with a lot of people and they have an enormous service supply, so they can’t make any money out of selling network access. That is the reality. In the UK the local loop, which goes from the fibre head to the subscriber is done over copper and copper in the ground is so expansive to maintain. Now they make sure to have fibre or wireless, but they have much copper in the ground and the technology is old, the copper is flaky, it is expensive to maintain. They’d rather not being pay that bill plus you can’t sell connectivity straight for anything because it’s not worth anything even if you are buying 20 mBit. So in an environment like that they can’t make any money out of just selling networking and they got this expensive last mile. So they want to get out of billing, get out of the local loop and hand it over to the user, installed community wireless meshed networks for instance, and they sell additional services like network security.

subnet:

You don’t think that there will be a competition or a conflict between already established free networks and the ISPs?

Julian Priest:

There is a conflict, and the conflict has to do with the question „Who owns the user?“. If you are just talking about access, it is the one thing. If the inside of a network is the commodity, than the interface to it is, where the value is. There are two competing things. In the one hand, they want to get out of the loop and there might be a situation where they could work with communities that way, but in the other way they also want to be in your living room. They want to be as close as possible to the customer at the end of the network. If the telephone company owns the access point and the connection, like in the UK, they are able to sell a mobile phone like we talked before to the consumer, so that the consumer can make his own VoIP with WiFi connection on no cost, and when they are out on the road, over GSM. But what that allowed BT to do, is that they can sell the user a mobile phone, which is as close as you can get to the consumer. That business model – what they do and how they do it – has adapted to the environment, which was engineered by free networks.

(Interview: Christof Autengruber)