Japan Times /NY Times

Net neutrality never stood a chance

Farhad Manjoo

STATE OF THE ART

I remember the first time I ever heard about net neutrality. It was around 2004 or 2005, and when the full idea was explained to me hey, let's prevent phone and cable companies from influencing the content we see online I was surprised there was even a fight about the idea.

It seemed obvious that the internet's great promise was that it operated outside the purview of existing communications monopolies. Because phone and cable companies couldn't easily dictate what happened online, the internet was exploding in dozens of genuinely new ideas. Among those were blogs, Skype, file-sharing, YouTube, Friendster, Netflix ideas 1 that scrambled our sense of what was possible in media and communication, and, in the process, posed existential threats to the established giants.

Other than the phone and cable companies themselves, I couldn't see why anyone might oppose the simple premise of protecting the environment that had made all these things possible. Did they hate clean water, too? Yet a decade and a half later as Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, buries net neutrality alive with his repeal of its rules, an act that took effect Monday I'm no longer surprised that there was a fight over this. Instead, I'm surprised that net neutrality lasted this long. Activists are still fighting to resurrect it, and while they are winning some battles after all, net neutrality, remains extremely popular I'm increasingly resigned to their long-run defeat.

Net neutrality was too good for us. And even if rules are restored, the notion that the internet should afford at least a minimally competitive landscape for new entrants now seems as antiquated as Friendster.

What's driving this view is what has happened over the last decade, which hasn't been too kind to disruptive competition online. By the time Tom Wheeler, an F.C.C. chief under President Barack Obama, handed down rules to protect neutrality in 2015, we had already strayed quite far from the internet of the early 2000s, where upstarts ruled our lives.

Today, the internet is run by giants. A handful of American tech behemoths Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft control the most important digital infrastructure, while a handful of broadband companies AT&T, Charter, Comcast and Verizon control most of the internet connections in the United States.

The idea that large companies can't dictate what happens online is laugh able now. Big companies, today, pretty much are the internet. In this world, net neutrality didn't have a chance.

So, what now?

There's a misunderstanding that the repeal of net neutrality will result in immediate and drastic change online. That won't happen. With lawsuits and legislation pending, with the media still paying attention and with activists poised to pounce on obvious infractions, broadband companies are going to be extremely careful, in the short run, to be on their best behavior. The internet won't be slower tomorrow. You won't be blocked from certain sites. You aren't going to be charged more.

As I argued last fall, a vibrant network doesn't die all at once. Instead it grows weaker over time, with innovative start-ups finding it ever more difficult to fight entrenched incumbents.

I've also noted often over the last few years that big companies have been crushing small ones over and over again for much of the last decade. One lesson from everything that has happened online recently Facebook, the Russians and Cambridge Analystical bots and misinformation everywhere is that, in the absence of stringent rules and enforcement, everything on the internet turns sour. Removing the last barriers to unfair competition will only hasten that process.

It's not going to be pretty.

"History shows us that companies that have the technical capacity to do things, the business incentive to do them and the legal right they will take advantage of what is made available to them," said Jessica Rosenworcel, an F.C.C. commissioner and a Democrat, who voted against the repeal of net neutrality last year.

By repealing neutrality rules, the government has just given our online overlords that legal right, she cautioned.

"Now they can block websites and censor online content," Ms. Rosenworcel said. "That doesn't make me feel good and if you rely on the internet to consume or create, it shouldn't make you feel good, either."

China paves a road with solar panels

JINAN, CHINA

Experiment broadens Beijing effort to dominate renewable energy market BY KEITH BRADSHER On a smoggy afternoon, huge logging trucks and oil tanker trucks thundered down a highway and hurtled around a curve at the bottom of a hill. Only a single, unreinforced guardrail stood between the vehicles and a ravine.

The route could make for tough driving under any conditions. But experts are watching it for one feature in particular: The curve is paved with solar panels.

"If it can pass this test, it can fit all conditions," said Li Wu, the chairman of Shandong Pavenergy, the company that made the solar panels that carpet the road. If his product fares well, it could have a major impact on the renewable energy sector, and on driving, too.

The experiment is the latest sign of China's desire to innovate in, and dominate, the increasingly lucrative and strategically important market for renewable energy.

The country already produces three quarters of the solar panels sold globally, and its wind-turbine manufacturing industry is also among the world's largest.

The potential appeal of solar roads ― modified solar panels that are installed in place of asphalt ― is clear. Generating electricity from highways and streets, rather than in fields and deserts packed with solar panels, could conserve a lot of land. Those advantages are particularly important in a place like China, a heavily populated country where the demand for energy has risen rapidly.

Because roads run through and around cities, the electricity could be used practically next door to where it is generated. That means virtually no power would be lost in transmission, as can happen with projects in outlying locations. And the land is essentially free, because roads are needed anyway. Roads must be resurfaced every few years' at great cost, so the installation of durable solar panels could reduce the price of maintenance.

Solar roads could also change the driving experience. Electric heating strips can melt snow that falls on them. Light-emitting diodes embedded in the surface can provide illuminated signage to direct drivers to exits and alert them to traffic hazards.

Such roads are finally becoming viable. Prices have fallen drastically in recent years ― thanks in large part to soaring Chinese production, a solar panel costs a tenth of what it did a decade ago. Road builders in China even want to design solar roads that can wirelessly recharge electric cars running on them, emulating a recent American experiment.

China's leaders in solar road development are Pavenergy and Qilu Transportation. The two companies are working together here in Jinan, in Shandong Province, with Pavenergy making panels for Qilu, a large, state-owned highway construction and management company that operates the road.

The surface of these panels, made of a complex polymer that resembles plastic, has slightly more friction than a conventional road surface, according to Zhang Hongchao, an engineering professor at Tongji University in Shanghai. Professor Zhang, who helped develop Pavenergy's road surface, said that the friction could be adjusted as needed during the manufacturing process to ensure a level of tire grip equal to that of asphalt.

The location of the solar road on a long curve at the bottom of a hill was not Pavenergy's first choice. The site was chosen because of its proximity to an electricity substation, ensuring that it would be connected to the grid. China is adding solar and wind energy sites so quickly across the country that power generation projects farther from substations sometimes face delays of years in getting connected.

The main Western rival to Pavenergy and Qilu is Colas, a French road-building giant that has developed 25 experimental solar roads and parking lots, mostly in France but also in Canada, Japan and the United States. The biggest of Colas's solar sites, a country road in Normandy that opened a year and a half ago, has only half the surface area of the new solar highway in Jinan. Colas has been leery of putting solar panels on high-speed roads like the Chinese highway because of safety concerns; Professor Zhang said the panels were completely safe.

Still, a number of challenges mean the wide deployment of solar roads is a long way off. For one, they are less efficient than rooftop solar panels at converting the sun's light into electricity. They lie flat and are intermittently covered by vehicles, so solar panels on a road produce only around half the power that rooftop ones tilted toward the sun do.

Solar roads are also more expensive than asphalt. It costs about $120 a square meter, or about $11 a square foot, to resurface and repair an asphalt road each decade. By comparison, Pavenergy and Colas hope to be able to bring the cost of a solar road to $310 to $460 a square meter with mass production.

Panels on a highway would most likely need to be replaced less often than asphalt, Professor Zhang said. And a soworth of electricity from each square meter of solar panels. So it could roughly pay for itself, compared with asphalt, over about 15 years.

Less clear is whether the panels would be able to take the pounding of millions of tires each year for more than a decade, or whether they might be stolen. Several square feet of solar panels disappeared less than a week after they were installed in Jinan in late December, raising worries of theft or even industrial espionage.

Local police officers, facing criticism for not providing better security, said that the panels must have been crushed into tiny pieces and scattered by heavy trucks. Pavenergy declined to comment.

In the United States, installing solar roads is more complicated. With the exception of some bridges and sections of interstate highways, American roads tend to be built with a lot of asphalt, but with less concrete underneath than roads elsewhere, said Kara M. Kockelman, a transportation engineering professor at the University of Texas.

The problem with asphalt is that it compresses slightly under the weight of trucks. The blue silicon of solar cells, the panels' electricity-generating component, can withstand being mashed by many tons of weight. But the nearly paper-thin cells snap when bent, like a thin sheet of sugar. (This is not as much of an issue in China, where highways are built with very thick concrete bases.)

Still, executives in China are hopeful. They say that the technology is ready and that they are not concerned even by the complications of American highway construction.

"If conditions permit," said Xu Chunfu, Qilu's chairman, "I would like to build a solar road in the United States."

Trump is not playing by your rules

David Brooks Occasionally you can see eternity in a speck of time, and occasionally you can see the logic of an entire historic moment in one event. And so it was with the Group of 7 summit meeting last weekend in Quebec.

The failure of that summit wasn't fundamentally about trade, or even the Western alliance. It was about the steady collapse of the postwar order and the way power structures are being reorganized and renegotiated across societies and across the world.

The postwar order was a great historic achievement. The founding generation built a series of organizations and alliances to fight communism, create a stable trading system, combat global poverty and promote democracy.

But the next generation lost the thread.

European elites were so afraid of nationalism that they fell for the illusory dream of convergence ― the dream that nations could effortlessly merge into a cosmopolitan Pan-European community. Conservatives across the Western world became so besotted with the power of the market that they forgot what capitalism is like when it's not balanced by strong communities.

Progressives were so besotted with their own educated-class expertise that they concentrated power upward and away from the people at the same time that technology was pushing power downward and toward the people. Elites of all stripes were so detached they didn't see how untrammeled meritocracy divides societies between the "fittest" and the rest.

Those who lost faith in this order began to elect wolves in order to destroy it. The wolves ― whether Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, Rodrigo Duterte.-Recep Tayyip Erdogan or any of the others ― don't so much have shared ideology as a shared mentality.

It begins with 1, some monumental sense of historic betrayal. This leads to 2, a general outlook that says the world is a naszy place, and 3, a scarcity mindset that says politics is a zero-sum game in which groups must viciously scramble to survive. This causes 4, a pervasive sense of distrust and suspicion, and 5, the rupture of any relationship built on friendship or affection, and finally 6, the loss of any sense that there is such a thing as the common good.

Wolves perceive the world as a war of all against all and seek to create the world in which wolves thrive, which is a world without agreed-upon rules, without restraining institutions, norms and etiquette.

What you see then is not merely a disagreement about trade or this or that, but two radically different modes of politics, which you might call high trust politics versus low-trust politics.

The Group of 7 is an organization built in a high-trust age. It's based on the idea that the member nations have shared values, have shared historical accomplishments, have a carefully nurtured set of relationships and live in a community of general friendship. Canada and the U.S. are neighbors and friends.

But in the low-trust Trumpian worldview, values don't matter; there are only interests. In the Trumpian worldview, friendship is just a con that other people try to pull on you before they screw you over. The low-trust style of politics is realism on steroids.

Whether it's on the world stage, at home or in his own administration, Trump is trying to transform the nature of relationships. Trump takes every relationship that has historically been based on affection, loyalty, trust and reciprocity and turns it into a relationship based on competition, self-interest, suspicion and efforts to establish dominance. By destroying trust and reciprocity he creates an environment in which he can thrive.

This is a fundamental challenge to the way politics is done. What Trump did to the G-7 is essentially the same thing he did to the G.O.P. He simply refused to play by everybody else's rules and he effectively changed the game. Trump is really good at destroying systems people have lost faith in.

It's why he is more comfortable dealing with dictators like Putin and Kim Jong-un than with democrats like Justin Trudeau. He and the dictators are basically playing the same game.

The episode illustrates that the core divide in our politics is no longer the conventional left-right divide. The core issue in our politics is over how we establish relationship. You can either organize relationship at a high level ― based on friendship, shared values, loyalty and affection ― or you can organize relationship at a low level, based on mutual selfish interest and a brutal, ends-justify-the-means mentality.

The grand project for those of us who believe in a high-level, civilized world order is to find ways to restore social trust. It is to find ways to restructure power ― at all levels ― in order to reinspire faith in the system. It is to find common projects ― locally, globally and internationally ― that diverse people can do together.

As Jonathan Sacks writes in his 2007 book, "The Home We Build Together," there's only one historically proven way for people to build community across difference. It's when they build things together.

In his inaugural address as president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela said, "The time to build is upon us." So it is now. That's the only way to head off a moral race to the bottom.

What umbrellas can teach us about diversity

The rainy season is upon us in most parts of japan. It is called "baiu" or "tsuyu" which literally translates as "plum rainy season" ― so-called because plum get ripe around this time of the year.

While the name is rather exotic, it is the month when we have so much rain. Because of that, June is not the ideal month for tourists to visit )apan. Two other months 1 strongly recommend avoiding are July and August as it is so hot and humid in Tokyo ― though there are some places like Hokkaido that are spared from the rainy season and remain comfortable.

Even though this may not be the ideal month to visit Japan, tourists from overseas might find people's behavior here rather interesting. That is, how so many people carry around umbrellas.

Visitors from the United Kingdom might not give a second thought to the number of umbrellas. But North Americans may be surprised to see this rather unique behavior and wonder what is going on.

I first noticed that this behavior of Japanese may not be universal around the world when I saw quite a few people in the United States, for example, walking in the rain without umbrellas. They seemed not to be so bothered by it. I realized that what we take for granted as a custom in the country of origin may not be common practice elsewhere.

So, I tried to explore the background of this seemingly unique behavior in Japan. First, I started with facts. According to the Global Umbrella Study results, the number of umbrellas per capita in Japan is 3.3 ―the largest in the world. The global average is 2.4.

Through further research, I hit upon several hypothetical reasons to explain the behavior. For example, one hypothesis is that the number of rainy days in a year correlates with umbrella-carrying behavior. If it rains a lot in the area, it is natural that people learn to carry around umbrellas. However, this hypothesis was rejected as Japan is ranked 13th in the world (with some 100 days) in terms of rainy days.

Another hypothesis centers on the duration of rain. As rain tends to persist (it often rains day in and day out with only a few clear days in June), people make it a custom to carry umbrellas, knowing that it will likely rain at some point in the day.

Another reason that sounded convincing was high humidity. Compared with many parts of North America and Europe, it is more humid in Japan and it does not dry out quicldy after rain so people try to avoid getting wet even in a light rain. The number of people in Japan bothered by their clothes getting wet is 25 percent, second only to the U.K. at 39 percent.

Some interesting features in Japan regarding the umbrella sets it apart from other countries. In Japan, 62 percent of the umbrellas in use are the standard type and just 21 percent are the folding type, compared to 55 percent worldwide. Now transparent vinyl umbrellas account for 10 percent of the total in Japan because they are inexpensive (costing from¥500 to¥l,000) and are disposable. They're particularly popular among the younger generation and make up about 25 percent of the umbrellas they own.

Over the past two decades, disposable umbrellas have been imported to Japan in large quantities, mainly from China. Their low price is one of the reasons for their popularity and the increased frequency of sudden downpours in recent years may also have led people to buy them. Umbrellas seem to have become such a low-ticket item that they may not mind misplacing or losing them. In fact, train conductors warn against leaving umbrellas on the subway on rainy days, indicating how often people forget them.

Another peculiar rain-related tendency of Japanese people is their frequency of checking the weather forecast ― up to 3.4 times a day, which is 1.1 times more than the world average of 2.3 times a day. Some people argue that the frequency in which Japanese check the forecast and their wariness of rain are related to their almost universal behavior of carrying umbrellas. Whether chis behavior points to the preparedness of the Japanese is unclear, but the theory sounds reasonable, as people here think of rain as a nuisance given the humid climate and try to avoid the inconvenience of suffering from the consequences.

The historical development of umbrellas in Japan is quite interesting. Umbrellas were first developed in the 8th century and the first Japanese-style folding umbrella was made during the 16th century. It used to be for aristocrats but became a daily item for ordinary people in the 17th century.

During the Edo Period, umbrellas became props for kabuki, Japanese dance and tea ceremony and formed an important part of Japanese culture. Accordingly, the artistic aspect of umbrellas were pursued in addition to the practical use. It was in the early 1800s that the Western-style umbrella was brought to Japan from the U.K., but their production did not begin until after the Meiji Restoration in the late 19th century.

Though the umbrella is a minor example, it teaches us at least two things. One is that observation is very important visiting new places. Noticing the differences between one's own country and others, however small they may be, can be the first step to realizing that diversity exists. Noticing diversity leads to more questions about the backgrounds and reasons, which may help people become more aware and sensitive to different lifestyles. We talk about importance of diversity today, but tend to focus on gender, race, nationality, etc. Even small things such as umbrellas can lead to a new awareness of diversity found in cultures and lifestyles.

Today, there are at least two opposing views about diversity. One school of thought encourages people to appreciate diversity as it leads to constructive and healthy debate. The other is based on an intolerance of differences.

The latter may divide people into small worlds of their own where they confirm to their own beliefs and make little effort to see the differences and their potential.

Which view we take is up to us. It starts with paying attention to small differences such as umbrella-carrying behavior and an inquisitive mind to explore the reasons behind differences. People may not like the rainy season, but it can offer a key to better understanding how people act differently.

Yoko Ishikura is a professor emeritus of Hitotsubashi University and serves as an independent consultant in the area of global strategy, competitiveness and global talent. She is a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council.