You don’t have to look far over the horizon to know what life in America would be like if we had a national ID. On Saturday, the Associated Press reported that a mall in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin is considering requiring ID from youths before they can enter. This decision would be much easier if there was a nationally uniform ID system.
With IDs and credentials of different designs and from different issuers in our hands today, ID checking is relatively rare, and rarely automated. Nonetheless, companies like Intelli-Check are pushing electronic ID-checking systems for nanny-state purposes. They would have a much easier time if all of us carried the same card and it was effectively mandatory. Keep in mind that more ID checking equals more personal data collection.
In tiny Earlville, Illinois, a woman named Joy Robinson-Van Gilder has started a one-woman crusade against her local public school which decided to use fingerprint biometrics to administer the purchase of hot lunches in the cafeteria. Despite her wishes, they fingerprint scanned her 7-year-old, for a time refusing to allow him hot lunches if he wouldn’t use their system.
The starting point for this kind of program is using it to manage lunch payments, but the ending point is a detailed record of each child’s eating habits and the school usurping the role of parents. It’s no wonder government schools are at the center of so much social conflict.
There is nothing inherently wrong with identification or with biometrics but, unless they are adopted through voluntary choice, they will be designed to serve institutions and not people.
I know it’s just hideously trite for my very first post on TLF to be about net neutrality, but there it is. Let it go.
I’m taking an (unintentionally) hilarious political writing class right now, so something that’s been on my mind is issue framing. Framing network pricing structures as an issue of “neutrality” has been phenomenally successful, because neutrality is a concept that is intuitively appealing. For our part, there have been sort of clumsy efforts to shift the framing by adding “regulation” to the end of it, so it’s net-neutrality-regulation-this or net-neutrality-regulation-that, but it’s a bit of a mouthful and it doesn’t really solve the problem.
So I tried to come up with something better, or at least more rhetorically effective, and I think there’s a case to be made for “network price controls,” which is basically what we’re talking about. I know it certainly doesn’t cover all the philosophical problems one might have with mandated neutrality, but it certainly covers the core of the economic problem.
Just think of the time we’ll save! Instead of saying:
“Yes, well, neutrality may seem superficially appealing, but it will create disincentives in technology investment, broadband deployment, and higher speed transmissions, all of which we’re totally going to need when the exaflood comes, not to mention the subsequent yottabyte flood that will follow once we figure out how to actually send people over the Internet or whatever,”
we can just say:
“Price controls cause shortages,”
which most people pretty well already know. And for the folks who don’t know, mention long lines at gas stations and how network price controls are sort of the equivalent of charging the same amount whether you’re filling up a Honda or a Hummer, and you’ll still come in 10-15 seconds under where you’d be with the exaflood.
Tim Wu has an interesting (rough draft of a) short paper here that re-conceptualizes the network neutrality issue as a question of termination fees. He draws a little diagram showing you connected to eBay like this:
And Wu says:
What is notable is the lack of termination fees, or fees charged to reach customers. That is, your ISP, ISP1, doesn’t charge eBay an additional fee to reach you. Similarly, eBay’s ISP, ISP2, doesn’t charge you any money to reach eBay.
Viewed from this perspective, much of the current network neutrality debate can be cast as a debate over termination fees. The “priority-lane” proposals advanced by AT&T and others can be understood as proposals to begin charging a fee, not for transport, but to reach their customers.
That charging such a fee is possible as a matter of technology and economic power is clear. In our diagram above, in order to reach you, eBay must go through ISP1. In telecom jargon, ISP1 has a “termination monopoly” over you. Provided eBay wants to reach you, it would have to pay the termination charge ISP1 wants to charge. The diagram below shows this.
It seems to me that Wu makes precisely the same conceptual error that Yochai Benkler makes in The Wealth of Networks.
My brother Andrew is a programmer out on the left coast, and he’s released a web-based steganography program:
PicSecret encodes messages by subtly altering images in a way that’s nearly invisible to the naked eye. Unlike some other steganography programs, the advanced technology in PicSecret allows the image to be converted between image formats without destroying the hidden message. Only the picture itself, and not a particular image file, is needed to transmit a PicSecret message. In addition, PicSecret uses strong error detection and correction techniques to allow the secret message to survive format conversion, resizing, and other transformations that would destroy messages encoded using less sophisticated technology.
One of the cool things about the Internet (and which Tim Wu rightly points is lacking about today’s phone networks) is that absolutely anybody can launch a new software product for a tiny amount of money. All you need is a server, some bandwidth, and the time it takes to develop the software.
Anyway, below the fold you will find a picture of Snoop Dogg. Go here to decode it and read my secret message.
I got my hands on the new public safety communications bill that John McCain introduced last Thursday, but which is not yet available on the web. Unlike what has been reported here and elsewhere, McCain’s bill isn’t a straight-up implementation of the Cyren Call plan. With some trepidation, I say there’s actually quite a bit to like.
McCain’s bill does take 30 MHz now slated for commercial auction and designate it for public safety, which in my book is a bad idea because public safety already has plenty of spectrum, and consumers would forgo the benefits of new commercially available spectrum. But here’s what he does: he sets up a “working group” of first responder and government representatives who will write a report to the FCC outlining what an ideal public-private interoperable network on the 30 MHz would look like. The FCC is then authorized to auction the 30 MHz as long as all the bidders agree to use the spectrum to provide a network that matches the report’s specifications. In some ways this is a lot like the Frontline Wireless proposal. If there is no bidder, however, then the Cyren Call plan kicks in and a Public Safety Broadband Trust Corporation, established by the bill, can buy the spectrum using FCC loan guarantees.
So what’s to like? Well, what there is to like is in the first part of the bill assuming the Cyren Call contingency doesn’t kick in.
IEEE’s Spectrum has published an article in defense of patent trolls. Mike Masnick has a good critique of the article here. But I wanted to point out something that I think the article gets right (sort of):
The pejorative label [“patent troll”] itself does harm. Legal decisions, and more notably settlements, in patent cases are affected by the media’s portrayal of the parties. If a company is slapped with a disparaging label by the media and that labeling affects business, sales, cooperative arrangements, and the company’s stock, there is an incentive to settle or withdraw from a litigation that may be the impetus for the label. Limiting or restricting patent protection only to that which is “commercialized” thus inhibits the progress of science. Such inhibition contradicts the principles of the patent system established by the U.S. Constitution.
Against Monopoly points to a YouTube video tracking some history of the “Amen Brother” beat and sampling generally.
The video reminded me again of the upwelling of creativity that occured in the late 80’s before sampling came on the the radar screen of copyright holders.
“Amen Brother” is important, of course, but there are many other beats that contend for top honors. I went looking for James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” beat and came across this list of beats, calling itself “The 30 Greatest Hip Hop Drum Breaks & Samples of All Time.” Well, I’m not so sure, if it doesn’t have Funky Drummer, but listening to the beats connotes the dozens of songs that succeeded them. It’s an exciting window into our culture.
The point? Creative works are not just outputs of creative people – they’re also very much inputs to new creative works, a point made well by Greg Lastowka and Dan Hunter in their Cato Policy Analysis Amateur-to-Amateur: The Rise of a New Creative Culture.
I’m putting the wraps on a big paper on the dangers of mandating age verification for social networking websites. One of the questions I ask in the study is exactly how broadly “social networking sites” will be defined for purposes of regulation? Will chat rooms, hobbyist sites, listservs, instant messaging, video sharing sites, online marketplaces or online multiplayer gaming sites qualify? If so, how will they be policed and how burdensome will age-verification mandates become for smaller sites? Finally, does the government currently have the resources to engage in such policing activities since almost all websites now have a social networking component? I explore these and other questions in my paper.
But now I have another type of site to add to list, and not one that I originally gave much consideration to: online newspapers. Over the weekend, the USA Today relaunched its website, not only to freshen up its look, but also to fundamentally change the ways the site works. According to the editors, the new features of the site will give readers the ability to:
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, law professor Sabrina Safrin is guest blogging about the development of intellectual property law, particularly patents, in light of patent-holder behavior. Her forthcoming law review article
argues that property rights evolve in reaction to each other. The creation of property rights for some engenders the demand for related property rights by others. These demands and resulting recognition of property rights may have little to do with the value of the resource in question or efficiency concerns.
Interesting idea, sort of a game-theoretic explanation for the recent explosion of patents, with an embedded suggestion that things are out of whack. Here’s Eugene’s introduction of her and her first post.
In case you missed it, Paul Kouroupas left a good comment following up on Thursday’s post:
What you (and others) are missing is an appreciation for the havoc the Bell Companies can wreak with regulation. Look at the experience of the VoIP providers. They launched an innovative product that competes well with Bell Company service. Just as they started gaining traction and attracting investment capital the Bell Companies claimed VoIP traffic should be subject to “access charges”. Most industry observers would tell you their argument was specious at best, but they made it anyway because it triggered a regulatory process that continues to this day and leaves a black cloud hanging over VoIP services. This cloud dampens investment enthusiasm and raises the costs of VoIP providers.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.