Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and now FBI Director Robert Mueller (see Adam’s post) are fond of reminding us that the Internet creates opportunities for terrorists and sexual predators. But for law enforcement, the Internet is a gift. For example, it allows undercover agents to pose as children for the purpose of apprehending sexual predators. Consider this anecdotal evidence of the success of these operations:
In a speech today before the International Association of Chiefs of Police, FBI Director Robert Mueller called for data retention mandates for Internet service providers to record their customers’ online activities. Declan McCullagh has complete coverage over at CNet.
Several of us here at the TLF are concerned about these growing calls for mandatory data collection and have written about it. See these past essays:
* “Mandatory Data Retention: How Much is Appropriate?” by Adam Thierer, June 26, 2006.
* “Internet Data Storage Is The Wrong Way To Combat Child Sexual Exploitation,” by Hance Haney, Sept. 20, 2006.
* “Data Retention on the Move,” by Jim Harper, June 1, 2006.
Jim DeLong analyzes Universal’s lawsuits against YouTube competitors Grouper and Bolt:
I bet that if one looked at the contracts between Google and Universal, one would find clauses binding the signatory states to undertake such copyright wars. Now that YouTube has built up its viewership, perhaps largely on the basis of a casual attitude toward copyright, it makes sense for it to pull up the ladder. No one is more vehement in support of property rights than a buccaneer who has gotten rich. Besides, as a simple matter of competitive balance against other deep pockets, such as Sony, if YouTube must incur the ongoing costs of carefully tiptoeing down the path of righteousness, then it has a strong interest in being sure that others must incur similar costs.
These developments will not prevent new sites from arising, but it means that such sites must start with pockets deep enough to engage in the monitoring necessary for compliance. They will also probably be forced to get licensed from the get-go for the inevitable violations
Legal compliance as a barrier to entry! Personally, I love it, because it is so wonderfully entrepreneurial.
I can think of a number of words to describe this strategy, but “entrepreneurial” isn’t one of them.
The U.K.’s Guardian newspaper reports that Iran has just banned high-speed Internet connections in an effort to restrict access to foreign culture:
“In a blow to the country’s estimated 5 million internet users, service providers have been told to restrict online speeds to 128 kilobytes a second and been forbidden from offering fast broadband packages. The move by Iran’s telecommunications regulator will make it more difficult to download foreign music, films and television programmes, which the authorities blame for undermining Islamic culture among the younger generation. It will also impede efforts by political opposition groups to organise by uploading information on to the net. The order follows a purge on illegal satellite dishes, which millions of Iranians use to clandestinely watch western television. Police have seized thousands of dishes in recent months.”
One wonders how long such a strategy can really work since communications and computing devices continue to get smaller and faster every day. Unless you shut down all the networks and tightly restrict access to all the potential digital devices out there, especially wireless devices, then this approach is not likely to work in the long run. For example, a recent story in the Washington Post noted how despite strict communications and media laws in Saudi Arabia (the country once sought to ban cell phone cameras), the youth of that country are finding ways around media restrictions:
“Cellphone technology is changing the way young people meet and date in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, one of the most insular, conservative and religiously strict societies in the world. Calls and texting–and more recently, Bluetooth–are breaking down age-old barriers and giving young men and women discreet new ways around the sentries of romance.”
Nonetheless, the combination in Iran of a totalitarian religious state and a traditionally closed culture could mean that their restrictions will be fairly effective, at least in the short term, in preventing people from gaining access to culture and information outside their borders. But we’ll see how long they can hold back the growing tide of digital information and the relentless march of technological progress.
Related to my last post and Monday’s quote of the day, USA Today had an article on Monday headlined “closed systems leave song buyers out in the cold.” There’s little in the article that regular readers of TLF haven’t seen before, but the fact that a mainstream, lowbrow newspaper is starting to cover the issue indicates how far mainstream perceptions have shifted. Three years ago, when Apple launched the iTunes Store, the people warning that DRM would create compatibility nightmares for consumers were largely regarded as Chicken Littles. Now as Microsoft gets ready to release a third major DRM format that’s mutually incompatible with the previous two, the problem is becoming a practical headache for millions of consumers. If you’ve built up a music library at the iTunes Store, there’s no easy and legal way for you to become a Zune customers: you’ll have to download an illicit conversion program (which probably won’t be terribly user-friendly), burn all the songs to CD and re-rip them into Zune, or repurchase each and every song from the Zune store. None of those options are appealing to the busy professionals that are most likely to buy high-priced music devices. It’s only a matter of time before frustrations reach a boiling point.
I’m starting to think that my prediction of a DRM-free music industry by 2020 was pessimistic. I wouldn’t be surprised if a customer backlash forced the majors to start offering music in open online formats before the end of the decade.
We’ve all heard that the five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It seems to me that Hollywood is going through a similar process with respect to the slow-motion train wreck that is digital rights management. When I started writing about DRM policy a couple of years ago, we were somewhere between the denial (“sure, CSS got cracked in a matter of months, but MovieLink and CinemaNow will save us!”) and anger (“If we tighten the screws a little bit more, those damn consumers will pay up!”) stages. Now, we’re starting to see signs that they’ve moved to the bargaining stage. Techdirt notes an article that suggests MPAA CTO Brad Hunt at least recognizes that they’ve got a problem:
During a question and answer session after the talk, Hunt conceded that many people already are frustrated at having to buy multiple copies of the same content to use on different commercial devices.
“I understand that if we frustrate the consumer, they will simply pirate the content,” he said. “The issue we face today is that consumers are buying content that uses specific DRM and that, in turn, is gradually creating a world of separate DRM systems.”
Hunt said the MPAA recognized the need to create an interoperability DRM solution (or, a DRM ecosystem as he described it) and said that “the consumer, if he or she has already purchased licensed material, should certainly be able to transfer that content to any other new or old device.”
So they’re in the bargaining stage: “OK, consumers hate the current crop of DRM, but if we roll out a kinder, gentler DRM with better interoperability, then consumers will jump on board!” The problem, of course, is that the lack of interoperability in the current generation of DRM formats isn’t a fluke. As I’ve argued before, interoperable DRM is a contradiction in terms. DRM technologies will always be plagued by compatibility problems, because they’re designed to restrict compatibility to approved devices.
Still, recognizing that you have a problem is the first step toward fixing it. It will probably take Hollywood a few more years to realize that all DRM is bad–that companies promoting “open” DRM schemes are selling snake-oil–but at least they’re taking the problem seriously. It’s only a matter of time before they move onto the stages of depression and, finally, acceptance. Then, maybe they’ll finally start tackling the difficult job of building online video systems that cater to the needs of their paying customers rather than treating them like criminals.
In this recent post, TechCrunch briefly assessed some concerns with Google’s office strategy. As most TLFers probably know, Google has online offerings in the works that could substitute for the word processing and spreadsheet software on your computer – just like Gmail did with e-mail.
And just like Gmail, documents and information would remain on Google’s servers so they can be accessed anywhere. This is a great convenience, but brings with it several problems, namely:
The fact that unauthorized document access is a simple password guess or government “request” away already works against them. But the steady stream of minor security incidents we’ve seen (many very recently) can also hurt Google in the long run.
Arrington’s post goes on to highlight a series of small but significant security lapses at Google. If Google wants companies and individuals to store sensitive data on their servers, they have to be pretty near perfect – or better than perfect.
Then there is government “request.” Arrington makes appropriate use of quotation marks to indicate irony. Governments rarely “request” data in the true sense of that term. Rather, they require its disclosure various ways – by warrant or subpoena, for example, by issuing “national security letters,” or by making a technical “request” that is backed by the implicit threat of more direct action or regulatory sanctions.
The cover may feature Kim Jong-il, but you should skip past all that nuclear weapons stuff when you read this week’s Economist magazine and go straight to their special survey on telecommunications. In typical Economist fashion, the series of articles–cited earlier by Jim Harper–covers the length and breath of telecommunications from a global perspective.
Being fairly parochial, however, I found their comments on the neutrality regulation debate in the U.S. of particular interest:
…self-styled defenders of the internet like to portray the net-neutrality debate as a fight to stop evil telecoms firms messing with freedom and innovation. The reality is rather more complicated. For a start, the internet is not, in fact, neutral today. Fast broadband connections already cost more than slower ones, for consumers and businesses alike. As well as buying fast pipes and building huge “server farms”, big companies such as Google and eBay also pay extra for specialist “content delivery” services, such as Akamai, to make their websites download even faster. None of this has hampered innovation or hurt small companies.
Via Amanda, who as a medical student sees the value of organ transplants on regular basis, the Washington Post has a sensible editorial on reforming our organ donation system:
All state governments and the District have tried to encourage donations by asking people to sign up when they apply for a driver’s license. But not enough people respond to this prompting, so it’s time to consider extra incentives. Three types of incentives merit attention. The decision to pledge organs could be linked to the chance of receiving one: People who check the box on the driver’s-license application when they are healthy would, if they later fell sick, get extra points in the system used to assign their position on the transplant waiting list (other factors include how long you have waited and how well an available organ would match your blood type and immune system). Another sort of incentive is financial: Georgia has experimented with a $9 discount on its driver’s-license fee. A final reform would shift from opt-in organ donations to an opt-out system: Unless you went out of your way to check a box on your driver’s license application to indicate that you did not want to give organs, you would be considered a potential donor.
These strike me as common sense and frankly rather timid steps toward increasing the supply of organs for transplant. I find it depressing that these proposals are likely to be considered controversial among “bioethicists.”
Here’s Yochai Benkler’s take on the evolution of the telecom sector, from page 152 of The Weatlh of Networks:
Throughout most of the 1990s and currently, communications and information policy around the globe was guided by a wish to “let the private sector lead,” interpreted in large measure to mean that the various property and property-like regulatory frameworks should be strengthened, while various regulatory constraints on property-like rights should be eased. The drive toward proprietary, market-based provisioning of communications and information came from disillusionment with regulatory systems and state-owned communications networks… In the United States, this model translated into efforts to shift telecommuniations from the regulated monopoly model it followed throughout most of the twentieth century to a competitive market, and to shift Internet development from being primarily a government-funded exercise, as it had been from the late 1960s to the mid 1990s, to being purely private property, market based. This model was declared in the Clinton administration’s 1993 National Information Infrastructure: Agenda for Action, which pushed for privatization of Internet deployment and dvelopment. It was the basis of that administrations’s 1995 White Paper on Intellectual Property, which mapped the most aggresssive agenda ever put forward by any American administration in favor of perfect enclosure of the public domain; and it was in those years when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) first implemented spectrum auctions aimed at more thorough privatization of wireless communications in the United States…
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
