Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Don’t take your eye off the ball, people. The FTC’s assessment of $2.9 million against ValueClick does not mean that CAN-SPAM is working. The Inbox at Privacilla.org has about 25,000 spam messages in it – because Rackspace’s hosted email product has such ineffectual anti-spam technology. Oh, and because CAN-SPAM, which was supposed to “can” spam – meaning “end it” – didn’t.
Over at Techdirt (and here on TLF), Tim Lee takes issue with my post suggesting that Wikipedia should consider selling ads instead of asking for donations. He has a good point, which is that right now the only reason to volunteer to work for Wikipedia is because you’re passionate about it, but that might change if money became involved. But I think Tim overstates his case:
Being a member of the Wikipedia board would no longer be a thankless exercise in public service, but would be a relatively glamorous opportunity to direct hundreds of thousands of dollars to one’s pet causes. Over time, the senior leadership positions would be sought out by people who are more excited about doling out largesse than editing an encyclopedia.
I’m not sure why that would be the case. By that rationale we could never have large philanthropic foundations because they would attract self-interested directors. As long as their actions are transparent and they are accountable to the wikipedians, I don’t see why the money couldn’t be directed for the benefit of Wikipedia. And if the directors enjoy some vicarious “glamour” as a result, then I think that’s a fine reward for hard work—it might even attract better candidates than are interested today.
Since it’s Sunshine Week I’ll stress that the key is transparency. And Tim is right on this point, too: institutions matter. Right now Jimmy Wales is taking some heat for conducting his Wikipedia business in a less than transparent manner. If that’s how Wkipedia is going to operate, them perhaps money will corrupt it and Tim is right that “there’s no reason to think an institution built to edit an encyclopedia is going to have any special competence to oversee the spending of millions of dollars.” Still, I guess I’m just more optimistic about what the Wikipedia community is capable of.
P.S. Yeah, I love Twitter! Check me out at twitter.com/jerrybrito.
Over at the popular gaming site 1up.com, a gentleman who worked briefly for the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) has posted a provocative article entitled, “How to Fix the Game Ratings System: An insider’s take on what’s wrong with the ESRB.” In the piece, Jerry Bonner, who worked at the ESRB for 6 months according to GamePolitics.com, argues that “Something desperately needs to happen [to reform the ESRB] because the alternative — a government mandated and controlled rating scheme — is a downright frightening concept.” He continues:
“let’s fix [the ESRB ratings process] before things really get out of hand and a new government-appointed ‘Secretary of Interactive Entertainment’ is making the decisions as to what we can and can’t play. I know I don’t want that. I know you don’t want that. And I know that the people at the ESRB don’t want that. Let’s all make damn sure it doesn’t happen, shall we?”
Well, I can certainly agree with Mr. Bonner that a “Secretary of Interactive Entertainment,” or any sort of extensive government regulation of video games, is a very frightening prospect. The problem is, the “solutions” he outlines in his essay could actual put us on that path.
Just minutes after writing this post, which relied on Valleywag’s recounting of a paywalled WSJ story, I came across a link to the actual case.
The actual case says (at page 12): “There was no error in excluding the classified information.” Valleywag’s version: “The appeals court agreed that classified documents related to those negotiations were improperly excluded.” (For you non-lawyers, that is the opposite.)
But the circuit court’s analysis is awfully interesting, and I think it’s wrong. I’ll copy the whole thing because it’s so brief and then run it past some analysis of insider trading law:
Via Valleywag – and unbelievably I’m relying on Valleywag for hard news – former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio will get a new trial after the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that evidence was properly excluded from his trial. Nacchio claims that he expected income from government contracts but the contracts were canceled when his company declined to comply with government demands for customer information. The trial court didn’t allow this allegation into evidence.
As I speculated last October, the administration is probably working so assiduously on immunity for telecom firms because the telecoms have information about yet more administration surveillance activities than has been revealed to date. Nacchio’s new trial may bring some of this information to light.
Update: Sure enough, Valleywag is not reliable.
Chris Soghoian has an important post on the C|Net News blog examining a Google statement to him about whether it has facilitated or participated in government surveillance.
In response to Chris’ question, “Is Google sharing ‘huge volumes’ of search records with the government?”, a Google spokesperson said, “Google was not part of the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program.”
That’s answer that should peg anyone’s non-denial denial detector. Google should be more direct and forthcoming.
Ironically, despite writing about technology for a living, I have a bad track record when it comes to adopting new web tools. I only joined the Facebook and RSS bandwagons last year for example. At Jerry’s virtual urging, though, I’ve broken down and joined the Twitter revolution. Now you, too, can read all the interesting things I have to say in 140 characters or less.
One of the things that annoyed me about the sign-up process is that it asked me for my GMail/Yahoo!/whatever password in order to add all of the people in my address book to my Twitter watchlist. This is a Bad Idea, and especially now that sites are starting to offer dedicated APIs for this purpose, there’s no excuse for demanding peoples’ passwords.
I’ve got a Mac. Any recommendations for good Twitter-related software I should be checking out?
The Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its latest “State of the News Media” (SOTNM) report. As a journalism junkie and a student of information history, I always look forward to these reports, especially because they are jam-packed full of very useful information and statistics about the health of various media sectors, something I have spent a lot of time discussing here in my ongoing “Media Metrics” series of essays.
This year’s SOTNM report contains some conclusions that are sure to provoke controversy and criticism. I thought I would just mention the one conclusion that is sure to be the most controversial. Namely, the report concludes (this is from the Executive Summary):
The verdict on citizen media for now suggests limitations. And research shows blogs and public affairs Web sites attract a smaller audience than expected and are produced by people with even more elite backgrounds than journalists. [p. 1]
[…]
The prospects for user-created content, once thought possibly central to the next era of journalism, for now appear more limited, even among “citizen” sites and blogs. News people report the most promising parts of citizen input currently are new ideas, sources, comments and to some extent pictures and video. But citizens posting news content has proved less valuable, with too little that is new or verifiable. … The array of citizen-produced news and blog sites is reaching a meaningful level. But a study of citizen media contained in this report finds most of these sites do not let outsiders do more than comment on the site’s own material, the same as most traditional news sites. Few allow the posting of news, information, community events or even letters to the editors. And blog sites are even more restricted. In short, rather than rejecting the “gatekeeper” role of traditional journalism, for now citizen journalists and bloggers appear for now to be recreating it in other places. [p. 3]
I suppose my fundamental problem with this conclusion is that it is simply too early to be making sweeping conclusions about the impact of user-generated media and Web 2.0 reporting on the overall health of the news media.
Over at Techdirt, I disagree with Jerry’s point (and Mike Linksvayer’s) about the concept of ad-supported Wikipedia. While the organization could certainly do some worthwhile things with the money, I think there’s a significant danger that fighting over the money could begin to overshadow the Wikimedia Foundation’s important mission of ensuring the integrity of the Wikipedia editing process itself.
Superficially, this might seem at odds with libertarians’ general inclination to view profit-making as a benign phenomenon. But I think the essential point here is actually one that libertarians make a lot: money generally matters less than institutions. Increased spending—on schools, narcotics control, wars, whatever—will only have beneficial effects if the underlying institutional framework is designed to use that money effectively. If your institutions aren’t designed to utilize resources effectively—if, say, you’ve got a bureaucratic monopoly school system or a hopelessly confused military strategy—then injecting additional resources into those institutions isn’t going to produce any positive results. Those additional resources will simply be dissipated into pointless rent-seeking.
There’s nothing dysfunctional about Wikipedia, viewed as an institution for editing an encyclopedia. But there’s no reason to think an institution built to edit an encyclopedia is going to have any special competence to oversee the spending of millions of dollars of free money. And given that arguments about money could easily distract and divide the already-fractious Wikipedia community, I think it’s probably smart to avoid that quagmire entirely.
Look at that. Another example of the “so-called ‘libertarians’ and their complete and total absence during our FISA fight.” Seriously, Julian’s got a great piece in the LA Times:
In the FISA debate, Bush administration officials oppose any explicit rules against “reverse targeting” Americans in conversations with noncitizens, though they say they’d never do it.
But Lyndon Johnson found the tactic useful when he wanted to know what promises then-candidate Richard Nixon might be making to our allies in South Vietnam through confidant Anna Chenault. FBI officials worried that directly tapping Chenault would put the bureau “in a most untenable and embarrassing position,” so they recorded her conversations with her Vietnamese contacts.
Johnson famously heard recordings of King’s conversations and personal liaisons with various women. Less well known is that he received wiretap reports on King’s strategy conferences with other civil rights leaders, hoping to use the information to block their efforts to seat several Mississippi delegates at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Johnson even complained that it was taking him “hours each night” to read the reports.
Read the whole thing; Julian describes similar abuses in the Harding, Truman, Kennedy, and Nixon administrations. While I certainly hope that Presidents Obama, Clinton, or McCain wouldn’t do anything like this, it would be naive to enact legislation that requires us to simply trust them.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
