Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Today’s Wall Street Journal profiles ($) Free Press, a media activist group that opposes loosening ownership rules for broadcast stations. As the Journal reports, the group has been wildly successful in its drive to block further consolidation in local markets, organizing thousands to protest and contact the government.
Free Press’s stated concerns are “diversity of viewpoints and coverage of local issues.” But no surprise, there’s more than a bit of media elitism at work, too.
My DRM piece was noted in a piece on fair use and DRM. I am among other things critiqued for referring to information as a “product” and the end user as a “consumer.” For Pete’s sake! The article adds some more substantive claims about fair use, which I’m happy to respond to. But before I get there, enough of the deconstruction already!
Quite a lot of energy is being expended in various circles thinking about what language is used to frame various debates in copyright. It’s not that the issue isn’t worth thinking about at all–language can be used in tricky ways and carelessly, so that the underlying concepts are obfuscated. But for the most part, if the concepts are the problem, fiddling with the language won’t fix it. Some people use the concepts of efficiency and marginal cost pricinghttp://weblog.ipcentral.info/archives/2006/08/the_marginal_co.html in ways
There’s a whole genre of libertarian thought about things that can and can’t be property. Other people, for example.
Then we get to intellectual property arguments. Can ideas and images be property? Some say no, because it amounts to making a claim on a thought in someone else’s head. I don’t see why not, so long as the right is defined in such a way that one stays out of other’s heads, and focuses on their behavior (making copies for example).
Despite our differences on many issues, David Isenberg was kind enought to invite me to address the “Freedom to Connect” conference this week. Luckily, David didn’t ask me to comment on Net neutrality, municipal networks, or anything like that or else it is likely I would have been drawn and quartered on the stage!
Instead, David asked me to give the audience an overview of some the things happening on the First Amendment front in Washington right now and focus on the prospects for data retention and age verification mandates in particular. I was about to write up my remarks from the event, but Susan Crawford of Cardozo Law School and Andrew Noyes of National Journal were there and did a much better job summarizing what I had to say, so check out their blog posts if you are interested.
Last week I was a guest on a Seattle radio station (KVI 570) program hosted by conservative talk show host Kirby Wilbur. He invited me on to talk about various First Amendment issues including efforts to regulate video games. Like many radio hosts I’ve dealt with in the past, he was very sympathetic to my free speech leanings. But Kirby Wilbur has another good reason to love the First Amendment: It’s the only thing he has to rely on in his fight against our nation’s absolutely absurd campaign finance laws.
Here’s Kirby’s story. Back in 2005, Mr. Wilbur and his KVI colleague John Carlson had the audacity to speak their minds about a ballot initiative pending in their home state of Washington. The ballot initiative was an effort to repeal the state’s recent gas tax increase. Proponents of the tax (mostly municipal government officials) were none too happy to hear people speaking their minds about the issue on a talk radio show. So, they decided to file a lawsuit demanding that the grassroots “No New Gas Tax” organization that had mobilized to fight the tax actually disclose the value of the hosts’ radio advocacy as an “in-kind campaign contribution”! And, amazingly, they got a judge to agree with them!!
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.
(Cross-posted from Cato@Liberty)
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.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
