Column: Bits versus Electrons Empowering People ... and Their Things Bob Frankston EMPOWERING & OVER THE LAST year, many of us have discovered that the Internet offers abundant capacity for causal video calls and streamed video. This happened because we have pooled the available networking capacity and turned it into a common packet medium. Yet when it comes to connected devices, we deny ourselves opportunity by treating each path as special. We lose synergy by asking for a special Internet of Things. I am empowered to innovate because I have the skills to use software to create my own solutions and to program around limitations. I also can choose to create solutions that match available opportunities. Ambient Connectivity-the ability to assume connectivity everywhere, would be transformative. It would provide a resource that empowers people to think beyond the web and deploy medical monitors that work anywhere. They could implement crop monitoring without depending on a provider making a profit. The key is to recognize that the value of connectivity is on the whole. Once we pool our resources and pay for a common infrastructure it becomes a resource for innovation. We will quickly Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2021.3095702 Date ofpublication 30 July 2021; date ofcurrent version 6 October 2021. find that we already have an Internet of Things and do not need a special network for each purpose. In this column, I will look at howwe can step back from a complexity of seeing each network and applications as a special case and, instead, viewing it as a common infrastructure-an abundant commons. PREFACE In my previous column, I cited an article from IEEE CE Magazine. It showed many ways to take advantage of connectivity on farms and in villages. Applications ranged from tracking crops and livestock to accessing community services and the rest of the Internet. They can be implemented using existing Internet Protocols to overlay disparate facilities. The hard part is making the connection between the two endpoints. This chart (see Figure 1) from the article brings the problem into sharp relief. Navigating the paths and assuring that the right services are available is daunting. It is difficult to justify the investment in a special infrastructure for each purpose in each place. If the applications were already implemented, perhaps the value would be apparent. PUBLIC PACKET INFRASTRUCTURE The solution is to go back to the powerful idea that gave us the Internet-separating the relationships from the endpoints from the complexity of November/December 2021 Published by the IEEE Consumer Technology Society 2162-2248 ß 2021 IEEE 53