Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Poor Stewart Baker. He’s the DHS policy guy who has been pushed forward to argue that signing “MOUs” (memorandae of understanding) with one or two states overcomes the dozen+ states that have passed legislation opposing or rejecting the REAL ID Act.
It’s true that REAL ID has had a good couple weeks. Arizona’s Governor claims to have signed up her state – oh, except for everyone from the ACLU to the John Birch Society saying “Hell NO!”
A DHS announcement says they have released grant money for REAL ID compliance.
The REAL ID Demonstration Grant Program will provide $31.3 million for checking motor vehicle records in other states to ensure that drivers do not hold multiple licenses, and for verification against federal records like immigration status. This grant will help standardize methods by which states may seamlessly verify an applicant’s information with another state and deploy data and document verification capabilities that can be used by all states, while protecting personal identification information.
That’s fully .18% of the $17 billion it will cost to implement REAL ID!
(That’s easy to mock, of course, but even $31.3 million is enough to keep cash-strapped government contractors and other hangers-on lobbying for implementation.)
Since I can’t find the announcement online, I’ll reproduce the whole thing after the break. To see the grant documentation – there’s no permalink – go to www.grants.gov, click on “Find Grant Opportunities” in the navigation, click on “Browse by Agency” in the navigation, click on “Department of Homeland Security,” and skim down. It’s currently on the second page.
By Drew Clark
I got the news today from an insider: National Journal’s Technology Daily, which covered the tech and information policy on the inside for nearly nine years, is closing down in January.
I’m no longer a part of Technology Daily, having left in August 2006 to pursue another journalistic opportunity. But I was there from November 1998 until last year, serving as a senior writer for the publication and writing more than 2,400 stories for Tech Daily. When something that you’ve been a part of for eight of its nine-year-life dies, that affects you. It’s time for a moment of appreciation.
Blogs of condolences have already been posted by the 463, by Tech Liberation, and by Andy Carvin’s Waste of Bandwidth (which has the e-mail that went out to Tech Daily subscribers last night).
The Register‘s latest rant against Wikipedia was sent to me by one of the people mentioned in the article. It purports to explain how “the Wikipedia elite [has decided] to take a topic as weighty as the health of US financial markets under its control without informing the public of its decision.” What follows is a long and rambling story about a dispute between Overstock.com head Patrick Byrne and Businessweek reporter Gary Weiss. Weiss, apparently, is the puppetmaster behind a grand conspiracy theory designed to keep the public in the dark about the evils of a practice called naked short selling by preventing a link to Byrne’s PowerPoint presentation on the subject from being linked to from the relevant Wikipedia paget.
Seriously. A guy named Judd Bagley soon got into an edit war over the link with another user. Bagley wanted the link included, the other user didn’t. Bagley thinks the other user is Weiss. Weiss says he’s never edited Wikipedia. The article goes on to explain more disagreements Bagley had with various Wikipedia editors. Not having followed the story, I have no idea if the ban of Bagley was appropriate. But there certainly doesn’t appear to be anything in there that comes close to damning evidence of Wikipedia’s “inner circle.”
Even the Register admits that “There’s no denying that Judd Bagley is, shall we say, overzealous when it comes to Wikipedia.” There’s clearly a lot of personal history here that I don’t know, and so I have trouble getting too worked up over the fact that Wikipedia has been attempting to block him from the site. What the article does not do is provide any evidence that there’s more going on here than a petty personality conflict. There’s a lot of rumor and innuendo, but no specific evidence of wrongdoing by “the Wikipedia elite,” whoever that is. And the Register article has an hysterical tone that makes me extremely skeptical of the scant evidence it does provide. El Reg clearly has an axe to grind, and so I’m not about to take their word for it when they say there’s a grand conspiracy going on.
I’ve concluded that one of the central fault lines in the network neutrality debate is over the extent to which physical ownership of a data pipe gives an owner the practical ability to exert fine-grained control over the use of that pipe. There’s an implicit assumption on the pro-regulation side of the debate that if AT&T owns your DSL line, then it has the physical ability to, say, prohibit you from watching online videos or require you to use their email or VoIP services. Lessig and Lemley, for example, made this point repeatedly in their 2000 paper without ever explicitly justifying it. For example:
Under the design proposed by the cable broadband, AT&T and Time Warner affiliates would have the power to decide whether these particular services would be “permitted” on the cable broadband network. Cable has already exercised this power to discriminate against some services.
This is backed up by a footnote citing various restrictions mentioned in @Home’s terms of service. But as I noted previously, the fact that @Home’s terms of service formally prohibited some category of network activities did not mean that, as a practical matter, users were unable to take advantage of that service. To the contrary, it’s extremely common for users to use their network connections in ways explicitly prohibited in the terms of service, and ISPs have struggled to crack down on those who do so. The fundamental issue is that classifying traffic is a very hard problem, one that almost certainly can’t be solved in the general case. Which means that any automated filtering regime can be circumvented. And of course, having human beings monitor every user’s traffic and impose restrictions on those who violate the terms of service would be far too labor-intensive to be worth the trouble. So ISPs are forced to resort to extremely crude tactics to accomplish their filtering goals, and these tactics, in turn tend to produce both a lot of bad PR and the emergence of new, more sophisticated evasion tools. In the long run, it’s not at all clear to me that this is a battle ISPs could win, even if they had free rein to implement any policies they wanted without fear of regulatory intervention.
I can’t help but notice how debased the Google-DoubleClick merger discussion has become.
It started this morning when I read on Scott Cleland’s blog that C|Net journalist Declan McCullagh failed to reveal that his wife worked at Google in publishing his great article exposing Commerce Committee Joe Barton’s selective interest in privacy and merger issues.
So selective is Barton’s interest in privacy that he favored the USA-PATRIOT Act and the REAL ID Act. Now there’s a privacy hawk for you.
Now I discover that the Electronic Privacy Information Center has petitioned to have FTC Chairman Deborah Majoras recuse herself from any review of the merger because of her and her husband’s relationships with a law firm that represents DoubleClick.
Matt Lasar has put together a very entertaining article illustrating how “Faux Celebrity FCC Filings [are] on the Rise.” What he’s referring to is the fact that just about anyone can file comments with the FCC, even fake celebrities or dead historical figures.
The whole process has become a complete joke. Some of my research on the FCC’s indecency complaint process has illustrated how one group–the Parents Television Council (PTC)–has essentially been able to stuff the complaint ballot box at the FCC by filing endless strings of computer-generated complaints from its website. The PTC then fires off letters to the FCC and Congress that essentially say, “Look! Millions of Americans out outraged by the content on TV and are clamoring for regulation!” In turn, that nonsense gets included in the congressional record when legislation is introduced, and politicians claim “the American people have spoken” and are overwhelming in favor of regulation.
It’s all nonsense, of course, because the vast majority of those “complaints” were just the same PTC form letter. But the same games are at work in the debates over media ownership policy and Net neutrality regulation. Jerry Brito and Jerry Ellig have shown that, in the FCC’s Net neutrality proceeding, “Close to 10,000 comments were submitted to the FCC, yet all but 143 were what the FCC calls “brief text comments,” many of which were form letters generated at the behest of advocacy groups.” The same thing is at work in the media ownership debate. A couple of radical anti-media activist groups stuff the ballot box with computer-generated complaints. And the Washington Post recently ran a piece raising questions about how the public filing process is potentially being abused in the XM-Sirius merger fight.
But Matt Laser documents how truly absurd this process has become when the likes of Paris Hilton, Donald Trump, Joseph Stalin, and even Jesus Christ end up submitting “comments” for the “public record.” Here’s some of the highlights from Lasar’s writeup:
According to this AP story, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee…
has expressed concern in a letter to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey that the Justice Department may “rush through” an approval of Sirius Satellite Radio Inc.’s $5 billion purchase of its rival XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. [Conyers] also said he was “dismayed to learn” that Thomas O. Barnett, the head of the department’s antitrust division, may approve the deal “over the objections of department staff.” The Judiciary Committee oversees antitrust issues. Rep. Steve Cabot, an Ohio Republican, also signed the letter. The two members said they haven’t yet taken a position on the transaction, but urged Mukasey to “preserve your ability to personally participate in the department’s deliberations.”
Only in Washington would it be considered “rushed” to take a year to review a proposal. Absurd.
Via the 463, a great tech policy publication, National Journal’s Tech Daily, will be shutting down.
This is a loss, but it also represents progress. TechDaily was a subscription service that was quite expensive – more than a thousand dollars per year. (It won’t matter now if I reveal this to any TechDaily reporters, right? . . .) I long ago switched to TechLawJournal, coming in at $250 a year for reporting that serves my needs well. (TLJ reporter David Carney is a machine, people!) And, of course, there are dozens of resources that are completely free.
So, sayonara, TechDaily, and thank you.
TechCrunch reports that Jackass 2.5 will debut online, for free.
Sure this is an important development in the evolution of entertainment business models to accommodate modern communications, but I’m just as excited because it’s such an advance for our culture!
Dudes! Jackass 2.5!
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
