I published an opinion piece today for CNET arguing against recent calls to reclassify broadband Internet as a “telecommunications service” under Title II of the Communications Act.
The push to do so comes as supporters of the FCC’s proposed Net Neutrality rules fear that the agency’s authority to adopt them under its so-called “ancillary jurisdiction” won’t fly in the courts. In January, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard arguments in Comcast’s appeal of sanctions levied against the cable company for violations of the neutrality principles (not yet adopted under a formal rulemaking). The three-judge panel expressed considerable doubt about the FCC’s jurisdiction in issuing the sanctions during oral arguments. Only the published opinion (forthcoming) will matter, of course, but anxiety is growing.
Solving the Net Neutrality jurisdiction problem with a return to Title II regulation is a staggeringly bad idea, and a counter-productive one at that. My article describes the parallel developments in “telecommunications services” and the largely unregulated “information services” (aka Title I) since the 1996 Communications Act, making the point that life for consumers has been far more exciting—and has generated far more wealth–under the latter than the former.
Under Title I, in short, we’ve had the Internet revolution. Under Title II, we’ve had the decline and fall of basic wireline phone service, boom and bust in the arbitraging competitive local exchange market, massive fraud in the bloated e-Rate program, and the continued corruption of local licensing authorities holding applications hostage for legal and illegal bribes.
Continue reading →
The Treasury Department today announced that it would grant the State Department’s December request (see the Iran letter here) for a waiver from U.S. embargoes that would allow Iranians, Sudanese and Cubanese to download “free mass market software … necessary for the exchange of personal communications and/or sharing of information over the internet such as instant messaging, chat and email, and social networking.”
I’m delighted to see that the Treasury Department is implementing Secretary Clinton’s pledge to make it easier for citizens of undemocratic regimes to use Internet communications tools like e-mail and social networking services offered by US companies (which Adam discussed here). It has been no small tragedy of mindless bureaucracy that our sanctions on these countries have actually hampered communications and collaboration by dissidents—without doing anything to punish oppressive regimes. So today’s announcement is a great victory for Internet freedom and will go a long way to bringing the kind of free expression we take for granted in America to countries like Iran, Sudan and Cuba.
But I’m at a loss to explain why the Treasury Department’s waiver is limited to free software. The U.S. has long objected when other countries privilege one model of software development over another—and rightly so: Government should remain neutral as between open-source and closed-source, and between free and paid models. This “techno-agnosticism” for government is a core principle of cyber-libertarianism: Let markets work out the right mix of these competing models through user choice!
Why should we allow dissidents to download free “Web 2.0″ software but not paid ones? Not all mass-market tools dissidents would find useful are free. Many “freemium” apps, such as Twitter client software, require purchase to get full functionality, sometimes including privacy and security features that are especially useful for dissidents. To take a very small example that’s hugely important to me as a user, Twitter is really only useful on my Android mobile phone because I run the Twidroid client. But the free version doesn’t support multiple accounts or lists, which are essential functions for a serious Tweeter. The Pro version costs just $4.89—but if I lived in Iran, U.S. sanctions would prevent me from buying this software. More generally, we just don’t know what kind of innovative apps or services might be developed that would be useful to dissidents, so why foreclose the possibility of supporting them through very small purchases? Continue reading →
Of the many tech policy-related books I’ve read in recent years, I can’t recall ever being quite so torn over one of them as much as I have been about Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. There were moments while I was reading through it when I was thinking, “Yes, quite right!,” and other times when I was muttering to myself, “Oh God, no!”
The book is bound to evoke such strong emotions since Lanier doesn’t mix words about what he believes is the increasingly negative impact of the Internet and digital technologies on our lives, culture, and economy. In this sense, Lanier fits squarely in the pessimist camp on the Internet optimists vs. pessimists spectrum. (I outlined the intellectual battle lines between these two camps my essay, “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society.”) But Lanier is no techno-troglodyte. Generally speaking, his pessimism isn’t as hysterical in tone or Luddite-ish in its prescriptions as the tracts of some other pessimists. And as a respected Internet visionary, a gifted computer scientist, an expert on virtual reality, and a master wordsmith, the concerns Lanier articulates here deserve to be taken seriously— even if one ultimately does not share his lugubrious worldview.
On the very first page of the book, Lanier hits on three interrelated concerns that other Net pessimists have articulated in the past:
- Loss of individuality & concerns about “mob” behavior (Lanier: “these words will mostly be read by nonpersons–automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals.”)
- Dangers of anonymity (Lanier: “Reactions will repeatedly degenerate into mindless chains of anonymous insults and inarticulate controversies.”)
- “Sharecropper” concern that a small handful of capitalists are getting rich off the backs of free labor (Lanier: “Ultimately these words will contribute to the fortunes of those few who have been able to position themselves as lords of the computing clouds.”)
Again, others have tread this ground before, and it’s strange that Lanier doesn’t bother mentioning any of them. Neil Postman, Mark Helprin, Andrew Keen, and Lee Siegel have all railed against the online “mob mentality” and argued it can be at least partially traced to anonymous online communications and interactions. And it was Nick Carr, author of The Big Switch, who has been the most eloquent in articulating the “sharecropper” concern, which Lanier now extends with his “lords of the computing clouds” notion. [More on that towards the end.] Continue reading →
This looks like a good one to me. An ITIF event tomorrow called “Info-Communism:” A Progressive Path Forward or a Political and Intellectual Dead End?
Overheated rhetoric around information policy and intellectual property damages the quality of the debate. In this paper, featured speaker and Syracuse University information studies professor Milton Mueller warns against pouring these debates into old ideological molds. Doing so preserves controversy rather than fostering the discovery of common ground. (Or “commons” ground—couldn’t help it!)
I don’t know that this forum will solve the problem, but I know it will be interesting. The sign-up page indicates that the event will be streamed.
Noam Cohen has a great piece in The New York Times today, In Allowing Ad Blockers, a Test for Google, explaining how Google’s decision about allowing ad blocking extensions for the new beta version of its Chrome browser puts Google’s much-ballyhooed talk about openness to the test. So far, Google is passing, with two such extensions (AdThwart & AdBlock) available in Chrome’s extensions gallery. With a combined 130,000+ users, these tools seem destined to be as popular among chrome users as AdBlock Plus has been among Firefox users: nearly 67,000,000 downloads and, according to the Times piece, 7+million active users.
Google has taken a sanguine attitude towards the issue, perhaps because as Adblock Plus creator Wladimir Palant notes, “Ad blockers are still used by a tiny proportion of the Internet population, and these aren’t the kind of people susceptible to ads anyway.” (In other words, the users most likely to download an ad blocking extensions, are likely to be more “ad-blind” and less likely to click on ads anyway.) Google’s director of engineering has noted how cautiously Google weighed its decision to allow ad-blocking programs “because Google makes all of its money from advertising.” But in the end, as the Times notes:
[H]e explained that the prevailing thinking was that “it’s unlikely ad blockers are going to get to the level where they imperil the advertising market, because if advertising is so annoying that a large segment of the population wants to block it, then advertising should get less annoying.”
“So I think the market will sort this out,” he said. “At least that is the bet we made when we opened the extension gallery and didn’t have any policy against ad-blockers.”
Michael Gundlach, creator of the AdBlock extension for Chrome (no direct connection to Palant’s AdBlock plus for Firefox, despite the similar names),
who once worked for Google in Ireland helping to ensure that ads kept appearing on Web sites, says he does not fear for media companies that increasingly rely on online ad revenue. Sounding like a firm believer of Mr. Rosenberg’s embrace-the-chaos manifesto, Mr. Gundlach said a brighter day would emerge from the challenge of ad blockers.
Extensions like his, he said, will make “every one else change their ways, to make ads more useful. Everyone wins, that’s competition. The ideal result would be to retire this extension because the entire Web was covered with ads that people loved and no one wanted to block them.”
What is this but a call for more relevant and less annoying web ads? Ironically, of course, personalized advertising is currently under attack on all fronts, and some experts have asserted that users don’t really want ads tailored to their interests—or, for that matter, news or discounts, either—on the basis of highly questionable opinion polls, as I’ve described. Continue reading →
There was a very interesting front-page article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday by Julia Angwin and Geoffrey Fowler wondering whether Wikipedia, the wildly popular online encyclopedia, was dying because of new posting guidelines which have apparently led to a drop off in the number of volunteers contributing to the site. In their article (“Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages“), Angwin and Fowler note that:
In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier, according to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega, who analyzed Wikipedia’s data on the editing histories of its more than three million active contributors in 10 languages. Eight years after Wikipedia began with a goal to provide everyone in the world free access to “the sum of all human knowledge,” the declines in participation have raised questions about the encyclopedia’s ability to continue expanding its breadth and improving its accuracy. Errors and deliberate insertions of false information by vandals have undermined its reliability.
The article suggests that new posting and editing guidelines may have something to do with the drop:
But as it matures, Wikipedia, one of the world’s largest crowdsourcing initiatives, is becoming less freewheeling and more like the organizations it set out to replace. Today, its rules are spelled out across hundreds of Web pages. Increasingly, newcomers who try to edit are informed that they have unwittingly broken a rule — and find their edits deleted, according to a study by researchers at Xerox Corp. “People generally have this idea that the wisdom of crowds is a pixie dust that you sprinkle on a system and magical things happen,” says Aniket Kittur, an assistant professor of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied Wikipedia and other large online community projects. “Yet the more people you throw at a problem, the more difficulty you are going to have with coordinating those people. It’s too many cooks in the kitchen.”
Let’s say it’s true that the new guidelines have resulted in fewer people contributing. Is that that automatically a bad thing? I suppose it depends on other variables that are harder to measure. Namely, quality metrics. This is where every discussion about Wikipedia gets sticky. Continue reading →
One might have thought European Commission antitrust regulators had their hands full with harassing Microsoft about the “Browser Ballot” (our comments) and fining Intel, but apparently they’re already looking for new targets so they can “stay busy”: Sun disclosed on Monday that the EC had objected to the “combination of Sun’s open source MySQL database product with Oracle’s enterprise database products and its potential negative effects on competition in the market for database products.”
It’s difficult to see how Oracle’s takeover of Sun would reduce competition in the intensely competitive database market. Since Sun’s MySQL software is open source and uses the strongly “copyleft” GNU General Public License (GPL) v2, Oracle will have little control over its future evolution. If Oracle decided to stop updating MySQL tomorrow, anyone in the MySQL development community could simply “fork” the project. Oracle knows this. (Do the European regulators?) If anything, Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun indicates that they are embracing the business model of commercial open source. In Sun’s case, that has meant striving to lead the best collaborative project possible and making money on providing the best product support.
European antitrust regulators should be celebrating this deal, rather than obstructing it.
There was some buzz earlier this year when the White House used the free, open-source Drupal content management platform for Recovery.gov. Now the administration’s marquee Web site Whitehouse.gov will be using it.
The AP story linked just above does a good job of recounting the benefits of open source in this application: chiefly, low cost and high security.
Arnold Kling wrote recently on the Library of Economics and Liberty blog relating the work Elinor Ostrom did to win the nobel prize in economics to how the Internet enables private provision of public goods—no regulation, little to no centralized authority at all.
Open source is nothing if not an example of that, and it’s good to see this use of open source joining many others across the big, beautiful Internet.
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Posted in: Antitrust & Competition Policy, Broadband & Neutrality Regulation, Miscellaneous, Open Source, Open Standards & Peer Production, Telecom & Cable Regulation 
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
