Tim Wu will be presenting his paper “Wireless Net Neutrality” at an FTC workshop on network access tomorrow on Wednesday. (BTW: The workshop is free and open to the public.) Basically he’s arguing for Carterfone to be applied to the cell phone industry. The Washington Post has a write-up of the ideas behind the paper and reaction from both sides of the debate.
Until federal regulators issued a landmark ruling in 1968, Americans could not own the telephones in their homes, nor attach answering machines or other devices to them. Now, a growing number of academics and consumer activists say it’s time to deliver a similar groundbreaking jolt to the cellphone industry, possibly triggering a new round of customer options and technical innovations to rival the one that produced faxes, modems and the Internet.
Wireless carriers, which limit what customers may do with their phones, say the move is unnecessary and potentially harmful. But in articles, blogs and speeches, a number of researchers are asking why the companies are allowed to force consumers to buy new handsets when they change carriers, pay a specified carrier to transfer photos from a camera phone, or download ring tones or music from one provider only.
Carterfone was a great decision when it applied to Ma Bell, the quintessential monopoly, and wouldn’t compute for today’s wireless carriers. True, cell phones are locked (except when they’re not, as the article points out, because carriers will often unlock them for you when your contract expires). The one thing the article doesn’t mention is that cell phones are also subsidized. You can always buy an unlocked phone for a premium. I would love to see a greater market in unlocked phones, but if there’s no demand from consumers, I’ll just have to wait along with the proponents of regulation. Question: Unlocked phones are the norm in Asia and Europe. How are they priced there? How do service plan prices compare to U.S.?
The Washington Post runs an article today about police tracing online criminals–mostly pedophiles–to a physical address only to find an unsecured Wi-Fi hotspot and not the criminal. The good news in the article is that the police seem to understand that just because something illegal happened over your IP address, it doesn’t mean you did it. The bad news is the “there oughta be a law” implication present in the article. Here’s how the reporter, not a quoted source, describes Wi-Fi:
Open wireless signals are akin to leaving your front door wide open all day–and returning home to find that someone has stolen your belongings and left a mess that needs cleaning.
One way to combat it is for people to secure their wireless networks by making them password-protected. But, authorities said, businesses and cities that offer free connections need some way to track the users, such as filtering measures that could scan to see who is accessing the network.
I don’t get the “stolen belonging” analogy, and the “mess that needs cleaning” is a stretch. I’ll let our resident piggybacking expert explain why. Police should be supported in their pursuit of criminals, but there are a lot more innocent people using coffee shop hot spots than pedophiles.
Jane Ginsburg of Columbia Law School has a paper called “The Pros and Cons of Strengthening Intellectual Property Protection: Technological Protection Measures and Section 1201 of the US Copyright Act.” The paper paper is a thorough and readable survey of recent legal decisions regarding the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions.
The paper highlighted something that I hadn’t given a lot of thought to before: the DMCA ostensibly prohibits two separate kinds of circumvention. Section 1201(a) prohibits circumventing “technological measure that effectively controls access” to a protected work, as well as “trafficking” in devices for that purpose. Section 1201(b), in contrast, prohibits trafficking in devices that circumvent a “technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner.” Ginsburg discusses this distinction at some length.
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Steve Jobs appears to have made a convert of the Economist on the merits of ditching DRM, which, as far as I’ve seen, has not come down firmly on the anti-DRM side previously:
The music giants are trying DRM-free downloads. Lots of smaller labels already sell music that way. Having seen which way the wind is blowing, Mr Jobs now wants to be seen not as DRM’s defender, but as a consumer champion who helped in its downfall. Wouldn’t it lead to a surge in piracy? No, because most music is still sold unprotected on CDs, people wishing to steal music already can do so. Indeed, scrapping DRM would probably increase online-music sales by reducing confusion and incompatibility. With the leading online store, Apple would benefit most. Mr Jobs’s argument, in short, is transparently self-serving. It also happens to be right.
Hat Tip: Julian
The siren call of Cyren Call seems to have gone a bit flat yesterday. Morgan O’Brien, the company’s founder, testified Thursday to the Senate Commerce Committee on his plan to give 30 MHz of spectrum to public safety agencies, rather than go through with a planned auction. According to Anne Veigle in Communications Daily (subscription), senators were less than impressed. “This is creating a new FCC, isn’t it?” asked Vice-chair Ted Stevens (one FCC presumably being more than enough). Former FCC chair Michael Powell, in a letter to Stevens, was even harsher. “Follow the money,” Powell wrote: “Who is going to benefit the most, those in uniform who are sworn to serve or those in suits who are set to profit?” The theme was picked up by Senator McCaskill of Missouri. “I’m assuming that this proposal is predicated on the idea that it will make a profit,” she said to O’Brien. That probably wasn’t the aspect of the plan the telecom entrepreneur wanted to stress. All in all, it doesn’t sound like it was a good day for Cyren Call.
Yesterday I testified before a joint House/Senate Science & Technology committee of the Georgia General Assembly. SB 59 would make it illegal for a social networking site like MySpace to give minor children access without permission from a parent. It would also give parents surreptitious access to their children’s pages.
My testimony mirrors that of Adam’s recent post detailing how industry is responding to online safety concerns. Parents and children both need to use existing resources and tools and educate themselves about online safety.
We don’t need to government to enact “regulation 2.0” to keep up with web 2.0. There are serious authentication and privacy issues implicated by the Georgia bill. We can stay safe online without new legislation.
Eric Bangeman at Ars is reporting that music giant EMI is seriously considering allowing its music to be sold DRM-free:
Reports are surfacing that EMI is in negotiations with some of the leading music stores to offer a substantial portion of its music catalog without DRM, with an announcement due as early as today. Under one scenario, music stores like Napster, Real Rhapsody, and others would fork over sizable advance payments in exchange for the right to sell music as unprotected MP3s. Another industry source reports that EMI was also discussing the possibility of selling MP3s on MySpace using SnoCap.
All of the parties reportedly involved are remaining close-mouthed on whatever negotiations may be taking place, but the scuttlebutt is that the negotiations have been going on for months. Needless to say, any decision by one of the big four labels to make a sizable chunk of its music available for download sans DRM would be ground-breaking.
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I’ve got a new article up on the Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today’s Youth Act. (Internet SAFETY. Get it?) This is part of the GOP’s “law and order” agenda, which they think will play well with voters in 2008.
The legislation would require mandatory labeling of pornographic websites and increase the already-draconian penalties for various offenses related to child pornography. But here’s the really scary part:
The bill requires that e-mail and Internet service providers retain records about their customers’ online activities for use in law enforcement activities. Failure to comply with regulations issued by the attorney general will get you a year in the slammer.
The legislation gives the executive branch essentially unlimited discretion to determine what data must be retained, and for how long. Indeed, the bill appears to open the door to requirements that ISPs retain records of their customers’ activities indefinitely. That raises serious privacy concerns, because once the records are available, there will inevitably be pressure to increase the number of people who have access to them. For example, the movie and recording industries would undoubtedly love to get their hands on the traffic records of those suspected of illicit file trading. Indeed, one member of Congress, Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) was so concerned about the dangers of mandatory data retention last year that he proposed legislation requiring ISPs to delete personal data within “a reasonable period of time.”
Such regulations could be especially burdensome to small organizations and individuals. The law appears to apply to anyone running a web or e-mail server on the public Internet, even an individual running a server in his basement. The law is too open-ended to predict how burdensome the resulting regulations would be, but it would certainly upset many Ars readers if they were required to hire a lawyer to verify that their log rotation policies wouldn’t land them in jail.
As far as I can tell, the bill gives the AG totally unlimited discretion in dictating what information ISPs would have to retain. So if he wants them to retain records of every website their customers visit, and every email they send and receive, and keep them forever, he can issue regulations requiring that. I’m not sure how common it is for Congress to give the executive branch this kind of unbridled discretion, but I kind of thought the whole purpose of the separation of powers was to ensure that the people who write the laws are not also the ones who will be interpreting them.
Yesterday I explained that in my view first responders don’t need more spectrum to address their interoperability problem, but instead a different approach to using the spectrum they already have. So if Congress shouldn’t allocate more spectrum for public safety, what should it do to address the problem?
Cyren Call is absolutely right about a lot of things: That we should opt for national networks, rather than 50,000 individual and incompatible radio systems for each locality or agency. That everyone benefits when public safety spectrum is shared with commercial users (as long as first responders have priority). That given the opportunity, the private sector will build public safety networks that first responders can subscribe to. Where Cyren Call goes wrong is in insisting that we need new spectrum to achieve this.
What Congress can do is very simple. Open up spectrum already allocated for public safety and allow private companies to build networks on that spectrum. Allow the FCC to assign spectrum allocated for public safety to commercial carriers (like Verizon or Cyren Call or whoever) directly. Require in the licenses1 that the carrier build a network up to public safety specs. Allow the carriers to sell excess capacity to commercial users, but ensure that first responders have priority. Voila, commercial provision of public safety communications. Don’t want to stop there? There’s more Congress can do.
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While debate rages over what to do with the frequencies soon to be vacated by broadcasters (see the last post), another debate is raging over what to do about those using them now. At issue: whether to subsidize converter boxes for millions of old TVs in basements and kitchens that will be made obsolete by the February 2009 analog cut-off.
In late 2005, Congress authorized up to $1.5 billion for such converter boxes. Last year, the Department of Commerce proposed rules for the program, concluding that households with cable TV should not be eligible for assistance (on the sensible ground that they will not lose access to TV). Now there’s word that the Department of Commerce is planning to reverse itself, and let cable households get in on the program. The rationale: many of these households have third and fourth television sets that are not hooked up to cable.
Commerce has been under pressure from–among other places–Congress to include these forgotten basement televisions in the program. In particular, a November letter from John Dingell and 19 other members positively waxed poetic about the issue: stating that millions of consumers would be “disenfranchised” and that the original Commerce plan “disadvantages the poor, the elderly, minority groups, and those with multiple analog television sets in their home.”
Maybe it’s just me, but I had never thought of “those with multiple television sets in their home,” as an oppressed minority. And “disenfranchise”? This isn’t voting rights, it’s television. In fact, its not even that–its the right to a third TV in your basement. In fact, its the right not to have to pay $50 (the expected price of a converter box) to get that third TV in your basement to work.
This is the sort of thing that gives Washington a bad name. I fulminate more on this in a just-released Heritage paper.
Stay tuned (well, at least until February 2009).
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.