Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
There are officially more cell phones than land lines in the United States. I ditched my last landline in 2003 and I haven’t looked back.
If there was ever a philosophical argument for regulating telephone service as a “natural monopoly,” there certainly isn’t any more. These days, the Baby Bells are just four competitors in the vibrant market for telephone service. Their phones just happen to be the anachronistic ones with cords still attached to them.
(Hat tip: Ezra)
Alex Leary of the St. Petersburg times is on the story of an “intruder” who “hacked” into a wide-open WiFi and “stole” Internet service. Fortunately, the good guys caught him in the act, and now he’s facing hard time.
Mr. Leary, needs to take a deep breath and calm down.
Here’s something he might ponder once he’s got his blood pressure under control: on a recent trip to the Midwest, I probably “stole” Internet access from a dozen open access points around town. When I needed to check my email or look up an address, I’d drive down the street until I found myself within range of an unsecured wireless network. Then I logged in, checked my email, and logged off.
It’s almost certain that the owner didn’t even know I was there. The amount of bandwidth I “stole” was trivial, probably worth a fraction of a penny. I didn’t try to hack into anyone’s computer or snoop their private data. So am I a criminal?
ISPs will point out that such access technically violates their Terms of Service. Which is true. Comcast, for example, prohibits its broadband users from “making available to anyone outside the Premises the ability to use the Service (i.e. wi-fi, or other methods of networking).” But the TOS is an agreement with the guy who owns the access point, not with the guy who’s barrowing it. If Comcast has a beef with how its customers are using their service, they should take that up with the customer, not the guy driving by on the street. More to the point, this is the sort of thing that’s best dealt with with benign neglect. That provision in the TOS is to prevent a whole apartment building from sharing one broadband connection, depriving the ISP of revenue. But allowing me to use a WiFi network for 30 seconds isn’t going to make me any less likely to sign up for home broadband.
But I guess people have a tendency to get freaked out about things they don’t understand. When everything about a computer network is a mystery to you, I imagine it’s frightening to think that random strangers might have access. But whether or not you think it’s ethical to log into an unsecured wireless network, it’s certainly not a huge deal. Trading kiddie porn and stealing credit card numbers are a big deal, but one can do that with any Internet connection. There’s nothing special about WiFi in that respect.
Moreover, it takes all of 2 minutes, and virtually no technical savvy, to set a password for your access point. The procedure depends on which one you’ve got, so consult your manual, but most likely it involves opening your browser, typing in a number like “10.0.0.1” for the address, and clicking a “change password” button. If you don’t want people sharing your network–and more power to you if you don’t–that will deter 99.9% of the people who might try to log in. And I’d certainly be open to the idea that the remaining .1% should be liable for criminal sanctions.
A more tech-savvy reporter likely would have made fun of the bumbling flatfoots who think checking your email on a wide-open computer network is a felony. Of course, a more tech-savvy policeman wouldn’t have made an arrest in the first place.
A hearty, bellowing but gentlemanly “shout out” to the Liberty Belles, a new blog that seeks to inject a lady’s touch to the discussion of libertarian issues. One of the resident bloggers, Anastasia, is a CEI intern this summer. Her blogging conveys her witty, interesting, and energetic persona – and will surely be matched by the four other belles. So check them out! From their blog:
We stand for free minds, free markets, free…Well, let’s say we don’t mind you holding the door for us, we just don’t want the government doing it. For too long, the word on the street has been that the movement for freedom and limited government lacks its Lady Liberty. Women’s voices are largely absent from the conversation, despite the calls and catcalls of our fellow men.
Beware lowly citizens of Planet Cyberspace, an ominous new threat lurks in your midst. Its name is Google and this beast won’t rest until it has taken control of all our minds. At least that’s what Wired columnist Adam Penenberg would lead us to believe.
In a June 23rd article entitled “Beware the Google Threat,” Penenberg spins a dark and foreboding tale of “big, bad” Google’s apparent sinister plot to take over the world and control our minds. You think I’m kidding? Well, let’s dissect Penenberg’s apocalyptic article in detail.
I would say I called the Grokster decision. The “substantial non-infringing use” standard did not exist in a vacuum. Rather, it was embedded in a set of considerations concerning the motivations and impact of a company’s business model. In Sony’s case, the Betamax was clearly an innovative new piece of hardware that incidentally enabled copyright infringement. Grokster, in contrast, was a novel way to evade copyright law that incidentally allowed people to share a few legal files. Rather than buying Grokster’s fatuous arguments and mechanistically applying the “substantial non-infringing use” standard where it clearly didn’t make sense, they looked at Grokster’s actual behavior and business model and concluded–correctly in my opinion–that Grokster was obviously a program designed to facilitate copyright infringement.
The interesting question is whether the court has created a new standard, a successor to “substantial non-infringing use”, that will provide the technology industry with a safe harbor for innovation. On a cursory reading, it appears that the opinion is decided narrowly enough–focusing on Grokster’s specific business model and the ample evidence that they fully intended to attract illegal file-traders–that this shouldn’t strike fear into the hearts of future entrepreneurs. As long as a product is designed for a legitimate use, the fact that many of its users engage in piracy shouldn’t put the product under a legal cloud. I could be wrong, though.
(Cross-posted to the Bit Bucket)
So, let me get this straight, if I own a broadband cable network, I don’t have to allow competitor’s access to my network, but, on the other hand if I own a home on a desirable plot, I not only have to allow those competing for the use of that resource (my home and land) onto my land, but have to essentially give it to them. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad the Court upheld property rights in Brand X, But I’m curious why they didn’t apply the same rationale as they did in Kelo. As Adam notes below, the rationale in Kelo could have easily been applied to other property, such as cable networks. Open access advocates have made that very case for years.
I know everyone in the high-tech world is waiting for the Grokster and Brand X decisions to be handed down but, in my opinion, the most important decision of this Supreme Court term was handed down today in the property rights / eminent domain case of Kelo v. New London. The result was an unmitigated disaster for property rights.
The 5-4 decision (which went the wrong way thanks to Justice Kennedy) basically said that under the banner of “economic development,” the State may take private property whenever it wishes. This is a disastrous result for small land owners in particular since they will no longer have any reasonable protection from local governments who seek to re-zone certain communities to appease various special interests. But I should also point out that this decision, the third bad decision for property rights this term, could also come back to haunt communications and media companies, and others in the high-tech sector. That’s because this Court has just made it infinitely easier for the State to use various “public use” rationales for taking property of any variety. We’ve spent that last decade fighting about the rights of telecom and cable companies in the battle over forced access, and decisions like Kelo won’t make it any easier for those companies to defend the property right they are entitled to in the networks they develop.
Anyway, I could go on at length about what a disaster this decision is, but I will instead just cut-and-paste some of the remarkably powerful wording that Justice O’Connor used in her dissent, which was joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice Scalia, and Justice Thomas. At least these four justices still appreciate the importance of the Constitution, the Fifth Amendment, and property rights.
I’m sure that the pro-municipalization movement will be buzzing today about the front-page Wall Street Journal story entitled, “Phone Giants Are Lobbying Hard to Block Towns’ Wireless Plans.” But I hope those pro-muni forces also flip back to the B section of today’s Journal and read Walt Mossberg’s Personal Technology column on the latest developments in private wireless broadband. And they should also check out a very similar report by New York Times technology columnist David Pogue on page C1 of today’s paper.
In these two articles, Mossberg and Pogue review the new wireless broadband technologies coming to market today and point out that speeds are getting much better and coverage is growing rapidly. For example, Verizon’s $1 billion investment in its EV-DO wireless broadband network is finally bearing fruit. Speeds are 400-700 kilobits per second and coverage is available in 32 major metropolitan areas. And out-of-market coverage is provided too, albeit at slower speeds. Rivals like are rushing to build out similar networks and get newer, faster, more capable devices to market too.
Entrepreneur and engineer Burt Rutan has won high praise, and rightly so, for developing private spacecraft. When it comes to developing space policy, however, his appreciation for private solutions flames out. In his interview by Ted Balaker, recently published on Reason Public Policy Institute’s website, Rutan unveiled his next mission for the spaceline industry: A journey to Planet Regulation.
I have an essay on the Tech Central Station website today entitled, “What Ever Happened to the Big Media Boogeyman?” In the piece, I note that just a few years ago, everyone was running around making Chicken Little predictions about how the media sky was set to fall on our heads in the wake of the AOL-Time Warner merger and the FCC’s media ownership decision. But today, by contrast, all the headlines tell a very different story: the old media players are in big, big trouble with all the new form of competition they now face.
Read the entire article here. And don’t forget, I’ll be debating these issues at the National Press Club this Friday along with former FCC Commissioner Susan Ness. Event starts at 10:00. Here’s the event / registration link.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
