I’ve been laboring for a few months on a paper about government transparency on the internet and I’m happy to say that it’s now available as a working paper. In it I show that a lot of government information that is supposed to be publicly available is only nominally available because it’s not online. When data does make it online it’s often useless; it’s as if the .gov domain has a prohibition on XML and reliable searches.
First I look at independent third parties (such as GovTrack.us) that are doing yeoman’s work by picking up the slack where government fails and making data available online in flexible formats. Then I look at yet other third parties who are taking the liberated data and using them in mashups (such as MAPLight.org) and crowdsourcing (such as our own Jim Harper’s WashingtonWatch.com). Mashups of government data help highlight otherwise hidden connections and crowdsourcing makes light work of sifting through mountains of data. If I may corrupt Eric Raymond’s Linus’s Law for a moment, “Given enough eyeballs, all corruption is shallow.” In the coming days I plan to write a bunch more on how online tools can shed light on government, including a series dissecting the FCC’s website–not for the squeamish.
I believe opening up government to online scrutiny is immensely important. If we’re going to hold government accountable for its actions, we need to know what those actions are. The Sunlight Foundation has been doing fantastic work on this front and I would encourage you to visit them and especially their Open House Project blog. I would also encourage you to send me any comments you might have on my paper as I’m still perfecting it before I submit it to journals.
The Financial Times has an interesting email discussion between Richard Epstein and Harry First on the merits of antitrust actions against Microsoft.
As Jerry wrote up briefly over the weekend, Comcast is alleged to have been “shaping” traffic over its network. Proponents of broadband regulation have already gotten a bit conclusory, even triumphal, expecting that this makes the case for public utility regulation of broadband service.
But I expect that we’ll soon learn more about the situation, and the conclusions to be drawn from it will be less obvious. There might be legitimate security reasons for what Comcast has done. We’ll see. We should expect full disclosure from Comcast.
My take: If Comcast is “shaping” traffic inconsistent with their terms of service, for non-network-security reasons such as copyright protection or surreptitious usage control, they shouldn’t be doing that.
More important is the meta-point: Independent testers found what they believe to be an impropriety in Comcast’s provision of broadband. They called it out, and interested parties among advocacy organizations and the media swarmed all over it. Comcast has to answer the charge, whether meritorious or not.
These are market processes working their will, and the outcome will be reached in short order – whether Comcast backs away from an improper practice, whether we learn that Comcast was not acting badly, or whether Comcast amends its terms to reflect what it thinks serves customers best.
This doesn’t conclude the discussion of whether there should be regulation. It allows us to refine the discussion: The proponents of regulation should now be challenged to write the regulation that would suss out this kind of (still alleged) misbehavior, distinguish it from appropriate network management, and ban it – without wrapping provision of Internet service in red tape or creating regulatory capture that suppresses competition. Good luck with that!
Obviously, more to come.
The Financial Times posted an article this week about the ongoing push by state attorneys general to impose age verification regulation on social networking sites and followed it up with an outstanding editorial entitled “Out of MySpace.” They note:
Age verification… just will not work. The practical problems are considerable. Fourteen-year-olds do not have drivers’ licences and credit cards that can be checked via established agencies. The sites could insist on verifying the parents, but anyone who believes that a teenager will not “borrow” his father’s Visa has never been 14 years old.
The consequences of successful age verification, meanwhile, would be even worse. Minors would be driven off mainstream sites such as MySpace and Facebook and on to unaccountable offshore alternatives or the chaos of newsgroups and minor bulletin boards. There they would be far more vulnerable than on MySpace, which now makes efforts to keep tabs on its users.
That’s exactly right and it very much follows what I have found in my own research. If you’re interested, check out my paper “Social Networking and Age Verification: Many Hard Questions; No Easy Solutions,” as well the transcript of an event I hosted in March on “Age Verification for Social Networking Sites: Is it Possible? Is it Desirable?”
As I wrote about here, the last big showdown in the states took place in North Carolina in July. But it won’t be the last.
The AP reports today the results of an investigation it conducted on Comcast’s “traffic shaping” practices as they relate to BitTorrent. The bottom line, if the AP is correct, is that Comcast interferes with packets coming from both ends of a BitTorrent communication. Comcast allegedly inserts messages pretending to be one or the other end requesting that the transmission be reset. Susan Crawford has a technical explanation on her blog.
If this is a consistent policy, this is much worse than the meaningless one-off snafus such as Madison River, Pearl Jam, or NARAL. While this is technically legal, and should always be, it’s a bit indefensible. No doubt Comcast and every other access provider should have the ability to manage their networks to ensure that a minority of users doesn’t slow down or increase costs for the majority. However, they should be transparent about what they do.
As the AP reports it (and I’m really looking forward to clarification), “Comcast’s technology kicks in, though not consistently, when one BitTorrent user attempts to share a complete file with another user.” If that means any BitTorrent user, even if they’re not a heavy user, then the policy seems over-broad to me. In its acceptable use policy,1 Comcast reserves the right to take any measures it deems necessary to deal with subscribers who use too much bandwidth (although how much is too much is not clearly defined). But if the AP is right, this is targeting a specific application, not specific users.
What this all points out to me, however, is that we don’t need regulation prohibiting these kinds of network management practices. The problem is not the practice, but the lack of disclosure, and as Google’s Andrew McLaughlin has said, it’s more of an FTC issue than an FCC one. The other issue this brings up is Adam’s favorite: Why not just have a Ramsey two-part tariff style metering after instead of interfering with legitimate applications?
Entertaining stories, but here’s what really caught my eye:
A few weeks ago I [sat] next to a US Senator on a commercial coast-to-coast flight. While I read up on the FISA debate, he played a pong-like game on his phone almost the entire time. Hello?
No need to read the whole thing.
It appears that Senator Lamar Alexander has a different tactic in his
opposition to a federal prohibition of the states ability to tax Internet
access (he’s been an ardent with his states’ rights rhetoric in the past).
In support of a temporary ban, not a permanent one, he’s
saying that it’s in the public interest that Congress periodically review the
ban so that it can keep up with new technologies. He even says that "since
the moratorium was enacted in 1998, we’ve extended it twice while changing the
law substantially to meet changing technology." Um, not really.
The Senator has it backwards about why we had to revise the
moratorium twice. It’s not to update the law for new technologies.
Instead, it’s to close loopholes that states have used to tax what the
Moratorium said they could not tax.
Note this excerpt from the House Judiciary Committee report:
While it is true that Congress has made changes to the law
virtually every time it has extended the moratorium, those changes have largely
been directed at preventing states from circumventing the law….For
example, the definition of ‘‘Internet access’’ was modified in 2004 to prevent
states from taxing Internet access providers that purchase capacity over wire,
cable, fiber to connect end-users to the Internet backbone. That definition is
modified again in this bill, also to ensure that States do not tax the Internet
backbone. Why does Congress have to make this change again? Because eight
States (AL, FL, IL, MN, MO, NH, PA, WA)
continue to tax the Internet backbone, despite Congress’ clear admonitions
to the contrary.
Now’s also a good time to remind the Senator that rural
areas of Tennessee aren’t going to get the next generation of broadband
buildout if new taxes suppress consumer demand. Here’s why:
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.