Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
The D.C. Examiner reported yesterday that the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles plans to embed drivers’ licenses with SmarTrip chips, the RFID chips increasingly used to access the Metro system.
This is another step taken to make Metro access more convenient – oh, and more subject to surveillance.
A few days ago, Lauren Weinstein announced the formation of an organization called “Network Neutrality Squad,” an “open-membership, open-source effort, enlisting the Internet’s users to help keep the Internet’s operations fair and unhindered from unreasonable restrictions.”
This, I assume, is a part of his proposal to create an infrastructure for collecting and processing metrics associated with network neutrality, which I find to be a generally good idea. ISPs should be held to their Terms of Service and their Terms of Service should conform to customer expectations, including expectations with regard to neutrality (or non-neutrality), along with all the other dimensions of Internet access service that matter.
Needless to say, the founders of this group (at least the ones I know and what I know of them) probably favor government regulation of broadband service in the name of ‘net neutrality. An early correspondent reveals what I view to be an upside down view of the world, writing:
[B]ecause ISPs are not currently subject to common carriage rules they can pretty much do anything they want as long as they conform to their published terms of service which are usually written to allow just about anything the ISP cares to do.
The solution to the problem is matching Terms of Service to consumer expectations. That’s what Terms of Service are for; they’re a contract reflecting the agreement between the company and the consumer. Common carriage regulation would be a mistake.
Consumers can and do push back against ToS they don’t like. This was done again recently when one dimension of AT&T’s ToS was found to be ridiculous. The Internet is a communications medium, and the community of users is well-equipped to name, shame, and punish violators of consumer interests and demands.
Whatever the ideology of the project, I suspect that any legitimate deviation from consumer expectations it turns up will be corrected by market processes long before regulation ever could. If the project unwittingly helps market processes conform Internet service provision to consumer demands, all the better.
Larry Lessig has a good talk about free culture. There’s nothing in there that won’t be familiar to people who’ve read Lessig’s book, but it does a good job of briefly and succinctly laying out his basic argument.
One thing that’s worth mentioning, though. Lessig’s telling of the Causby decision is a little misleading. Yes, Justice Douglas rejected Blackstone’s notion that, in general, property rights reach to the heavens. But the Causby’s still won. What Lessig doesn’t mention is that the airplanes in question weren’t just flying over the Causby’s land. Their land was adjacent to a military base and the airplanes were at extremely low altitude when they crossed the Causby’s land, creating deafening noise.
I don’t really understand why Lessig gives the misleading impression that the Causbys lost the case. Yes, it complicates the story a little bit, but I think it would be perfectly possible to tell the story accurately and still preserve his basic, entirely valid, and quite powerful point about the importance of common sense in the law.
I used Lessig’s story myself a couple of years ago. Unfortunately I didn’t do my due diligence of reading the original case and so I wound up giving the same misleading impression Lessig did. Were I writing that article today, I definitely would have framed it differently. The full story is plenty powerful; there’s no need to oversimplify it.
Must reading from George Ou of ZDNet on the Comcast kerfuffle. (He benefits from a detailed exchange with Richard Bennett, as we also did when Richard was kind enough to join us for a TLF podcast on the issue two weeks ago). George goes into great detail about what is going on here and why it’s so important that people understand a bit about technology and network engineering before rushing to impose regulation making routine traffic management illegal. Ultimately, George concludes:
BitTorrent is by far the largest consumer of bandwidth and a single BitTorrent user is capable of generating hundreds of times more network load than conventional applications. Throttling the number of BitTorrent connections or any application that has similarly aggressive characteristics is critical to keeping the network healthy with reasonable round-trip response times. That means a better gaming and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) experience since they are both highly sensitive to network latency despite the fact that they are low-bandwidth. If the Net Neutrality extremists get their way and get the Government to ban active network management, cable broadband customers will suffer and those web hog TV commercials might just come true.
Bruce Owen, one of the finest communications and media economists of our generation, has written a powerful piece for Cato’s Regulation magazine asking, “After the long fight to end the ‘common carrier,’ why are we trying to resurrect it?” He’s referring, of course, to the ongoing efforts by some to impose Net neutrality regulation on broadband networks. In his new article, “Antecedents to Net Neutrality,” Owen points out that we’ve been down this path before, and with troubling results:
[T]he architects of the concept of net neutrality have invented nothing new. They have simply resurrected the traditional but uncommonly naïve “common carrier” solution to the threats they fear. By choosing new words to describe a solution already well understood by another name, the economic interests supporting net neutrality may mislead themselves and others into repeating a policy error much more likely to harm consumers than to promote competition and innovation.
Net neutrality policies could only be implemented through detailed price regulation, an approach that has generally failed, in the past, to improve consumer welfare relative to what might have been expected under an unregulated monopoly. Worse, regulatory agencies often settle into a well-established pattern of subservience to politically influential economic interests. Consumers, would-be entrants, and innovators are not likely to be among those influential groups. History thus counsels against adoption of most versions of net neutrality, at least in the absence of refractory monopoly power and strong evidence of anticompetitive behavior — extreme cases justifying dangerous, long-shot remedies.
The brilliant Fake Steve Jobs has a great post on Google’s announcement of its new Open Handset Alliance. You should go read it right now because it’s all priceless, but I love this particular bit about openness:
Finally, has anyone else noticed the way Google is kind of desperately grasping at straws lately? They spend years trying to do something other than search and nothing works. Then, despite their big brains and IQ tests, they get totally blindsided by Facebook and have to gin up this ridiculous OpenSocial thing. Just like with this phone thing, they round up all the losers in that social networking space to form some dumbass alliance. You know how it looks? It looks weak. Companies don’t form alliances and consortia when they’re winning. Also, whenever you see companies start talking about being “open,” it means they’re getting their ass kicked. You think Google will be forming an OpenSearch alliance any time soon, to help also-rans in search get a share of the spoils? Me neither.
I love that Kevin Martin put out a press release (PDF because the FCC has apparently never heard of HTML) praising the Open Handset Alliance. So we’ll see press releases from now on each time a communications company announces vaporware?
While I’m on the subject, I wish someone would explain to the rank-and-file online Ron Paul activists how badly their behavior reflects on the campaign, and on libertarianism more generally. Ars did a story on the spambots similar to Wired’s story, and the comment section was flooded with comments by people who had registered for accounts the day before. The comments ranged from boilerplate campaign talking points to comments that make them look completely insane. For example:
I find it far more likely that this botnet spam attack is not the design of the Paul campaign or any of its supporters. It is far more likely that this is the release of a first round of direct cyber attack against the Ron Paul campaign. I base this opinion on the fact that the attack is becoming clearly targeted at the youtube videos of Ron Paul. Youtube links to his videos are beginning to be inserted into the the body of these spam message and as a direct result the video’s are being pulled by youtube for violation of their terms of use policy.
This attack method can do far more harm than good for the Ron Paul campaign so I will make a guess that this is the work of those in the NSA using cyber war tactics out of loyalty or possibly under orders to use this stealth attack method to derail the Ron Paul campaign by using the campaign’s online strength against them.
Yup, that definitely sounds like the most plausible explanation. In fact, I can’t believe I didn’t think of it myself!
This army of over-enthusiastic online supporters puts the Paul campaign in a bit of a bind. It’s not like they can put out a press release saying “Dear supporters, please stop making fools of yourselves.” And because these campaigns are spontaneously organized, it’s not clear who the campaign would contact to privately ask them to tone it down. On the other hand, if my first exposure to Paul’s candidacy was a comment-spam flood in the comment section of my favorite blog, I’m pretty sure I’d be turned off.
Even worse, it’s likely that the most obnoxious comment spammers are also the least likely to realize that they’re among the obnoxious ones. So the Paul campaign might be able to tone down the volume of commenting, but at the cost of making the median comment even nuttier.
Since the Paul campaign probably can’t say it, I will. Maybe if I say it a few of the comment-spamming horde will find their way here. Ron Paul comment spammers, you’re making fools of yourselves and embarrassing the campaign you want so much to help. An occasional, respectful post supporting your candidate is great. A flood of angry, paranoid rants is just going to turn people off. If you want to see Ron Paul win the election, please knock it off.
Update: Sigh, you can click the comments for several examples of the point I’m making here. For Ron Paul supporters who are new to this blog: I’m a libertarian and I gave Paul $50 yesterday. So I’m not criticizing Paul or his views. Rather, my point is that you’re not going to win any converts through angry rants or indiscriminate comment spam. All you’re going to accomplish is to irritate people who might otherwise be sympathetic to your message.
I like Ron Paul and I’m happy he raised a boatload of money yesterday. I wish he didn’t attract so many crazy supporters, though. Confidential to Thomas DiLorenzo: Insinuating that Wired‘s coverage was driven by political bias only makes you look like a nutjob.
Incidentally, if the Paul campaign hasn’t specifically condemned the pro-Paul spam campaign, they should do so posthaste. I’m sure they’re telling the truth when they say they had nothing to do with it, but spamming is a sufficiently scummy activity that they should be explicitly repudiating it.
Comcast’s terms of service and other consumer broadband service documents make no mention of any restrictions on the use of “peer-to-peer” applications like BitTorrent, or of any Internet network management.
AT&T and Time Warner Cable, two of the other big broadband providers, do mention restrictions on “peer-to-peer” services in their consumer broadband documents. Verizon Communications does not mention the phrase, according to an analysis of the four broadband providers conducted by DrewClark.com.
Unlike Time Warner Cable, Comcast fails to mention any “management,” “network management” or “reasonable network management” of its consumer broadband service in its documents.
Of the four providers, however, Comcast makes the most extensive warning to consumers against the “excess” use of bandwidth. For example, Comcast declares that the consumer “shall ensure that your use of the Service does not restrict, inhibit, interfere with, or degrade any other user’s use of the Service, nor represent (in the sole judgment of Comcast) an overly large burden on the network.”
Last week, a mob of anti-media activists gathered outside the FCC to protest what they regarded as the agency’s willingness to embrace a radical deregulatory agenda on the media ownership front. The critics fear that the whole media marketplace is being gobbled up by a handful of evil media tycoons in New York and LA. If only the critics spent some time reading the headlines in the media outlets they criticize, they’d know that the marketplace reality is quite different.
In fact, over the past few years, I have been documenting the ongoing DE-consoldation taking place in America’s media market. This series has built upon the themes and evidence I first presented in my 2005 book, Media Myths: Making Sense of the Debate over Media Ownership, in which I made the case that the media marketplace was far more dynamic than critics cared to admit.
And today we have yet another case study of DE-consolidation to report: Media tycoon Barry Diller announced yesterday that his conglomerate IAC/Interactive Corp. would be splitting into not 2, not 3, not 4, but FIVE different divisions. IAC controls more than 60 brands including Ticketmaster, Ask.com and the Home Shopping Network, but they have not been able to find a way to build “synergies” (an over-used business school term if there ever was one) together. And so Diller is separating those divisions so that they can pursue their “core competencies” (another business school term, but one that does not get enough attention).
Here’s how the NY Times summarized what is going on:
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
