September 2008

“‘Local’ is just one set of ripples on the lake of information”

by on September 9, 2008 · 10 comments

Over on the Poynter Online blog, Amy Gahran has a very smart piece on some of the confusion surrounding debates about “media localism.” In her essay asking “How Important is Local, Really?”, she challenges some of the assumptions underlying the Knight Foundation’s new Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.

I particularly like her line about how, “in many senses, ‘local’ is just one set of ripples on the lake of information — especially when it comes to ‘news.’ And for many people, it’s not even the biggest or most important set of ripples.” That is exactly right. Today, local choices are just a few more choices along the seemingly endless continuum of media choices. It’s foolish to assume that “media localism” in a geographic sense is as important now as it was in the past for the reasons Gahran makes clear in her essay:

I’m glad that the Knight Foundation is asking basic questions about what kinds of information people need support community and democracy. However, I question the Commission’s strong focus on geographically defined local communities. It seems to me that with the way the media landscape has been evolving, geographically defined local communities are becoming steadily less crucial from an information perspective. I suspect that defining communities by other kinds of commonalities (age, economic status/class, interests, social circles, etc.) would be far more relevant to more people — although more complex to define.

Continue reading →

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Dead Air Walking: Prisoners Face Loss of TV After Digital Transition

by on September 8, 2008 · 10 comments

Haven’t they been punished enough?  Inmates in our nation’s prisons may find themselves without over-the-air television next February, unless Congress acts to fill a gap in the subsidy program for TV converter boxes.  That’s right: according to a story run last week by Associated Press, “the upcoming switch to digital television is presenting a challenge to prison officials who want to make sure prison TVs are up and running. When broadcasters make the switch in February, televisions that aren’t hooked up to cable, satellite or a converter box will be reduced to static”.

The reason?   Under the converter box subsidy program established by Congress, prisons are not eligible for the $40 subsidy for the converter boxes needed to let old televisions pick up broadcast signals after next February.  That means — unless prison officials somehow find $40 elsewhere — or unless their penal institution has a cable or satellite subscription — incarcerated murderers and thieves will be forced to watch static.

Honest to god.  I’m not making this up.  This was an actual news story.  The AP story went on to explain that “[w]hile TV might seem like an undeserved luxury for inmates, both prison officials and prisoners said the tube provides a sense of normalcy.”

Oh, now I understand.  “Normalcy.”  I didn’t understand that prison is supposed to provide a sense of normalcy.

Excuse me while I sit in stunned silence for a moment.

One interesting side note.   I found the AP story on the website of WYFF in Greenville, SC, which — perhaps not surprisingly — is an over-the-air TV station.  Go figure.

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Privacy Solutions (Part 2): Adblock Plus

by on September 8, 2008 · 16 comments

By Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka

The goal of our “Privacy Solution Series,” as we noted in the first installment, is to detail the many “technologies of evasion” (i.e., user-empowerment or user “self-help” tools) that allow web surfers to better protect their privacy online—and especially to defeat tracking for online behavioral advertising purposes.  These tools and methods form an important part of a layered approach that, in our view, provides an effective alternative to government-mandated regulation of online privacy.

In this second installment in this series, we will highlight Adblock Plus (ABP), a free downloadable extension for the Firefox web browser (as well as for the Flock browser, though we focus on the Firefox version here).

Adblock Plus

Purpose: The primary purpose of Adblock Plus is to block online ads from being downloaded and displayed on a user’s screen as they browse the Web.  In a broad sense, this functionality might be considered a “privacy” tool by those who consider it an intrusion upon, or violation of, their “privacy” to be “subjected” to seeing advertisements as they browse the web.  But if one thinks of privacy in terms of what others know about you, Adblocking is not so much about “privacy” as about user annoyance (measured in terms of distracting images cluttering webpages or simply in terms of long download times for webpages).  In this sense, ABP may not qualify as a “technology of evasion,” strictly speaking.  But, as explained below the fold, ABP does allow its users to “evade” some forms of online tracking by blocking the receipt of some, but not all, tracking cookies.

Cost: Like almost all other Firefox add-ons, both the ABP extensions and the filter subscriptions on which it relies (as described below) are free.

Popularity / Adoption: While there are a wide variety of ad-blocking tools available, Adblock Plus is far and away the leader.  ABP has proven enormously popular since its release in November 2005 as the successor to Adblock, which was first developed in 2002 and reached over 10,000,000 downloads before being abandoned by its developer and even today garners nearly 40,000 downloads a week.  This history of Adblock provides further details.

ABP was named one the 100 best products of 2007 by PC World magazine and is now the #1 most downloaded add-on for Firefox with over 500,000 weekly downloads, up significantly for just a few months.  In a blog post last month, ABP creator Wladimir Palant estimated that “no more than 5% of Firefox users have Adblock Plus installed,” but that percentage is bound to grow larger as more people discover Adblock.  As one indicator of ABP’s popularity, the number of Google searches for “Adblock” has nearly eclipsed the number of searches for “identity theft,” which seems like a far more serious concern than having to look at web ads. Continue reading →

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Software and a Digression

by on September 8, 2008 · 4 comments

My recent comments on a developers experiment in combatting software piracy, posted here.

And an absolutely brilliant adventure in free speech marital event planning, here (OT).

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Aliens Love Firefox Too!

by on September 7, 2008 · 16 comments

Crop circles prove it!

Firefox crop circles

(Note: For the record, I do not believe extraterrestrials are visiting Earth).

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Grouping Recent Net Books: Internet Optimists vs. Pessimists

by on September 6, 2008 · 47 comments

[Note: I updated this discussion and chart in a subsequent essay. See: “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society.”]

A number of very interesting books have been released over the past year or two which debate how the Internet is reshaping our culture and the economy. I’ve reviewed a couple of them here but I have been waiting to compile a sort of mega-book review once I found a sensible way to conceptually group them together. I’m not going to have time to cover each of them here in the detail they deserve, but I think I have at least found a sensible way to categorize them. For lack of better descriptors, I’ve divided these books and thinkers into two camps: “Internet optimists” versus “Internet Pessimists.” Here’s a list of some of the individuals and books (or other articles and blogs) that I believe epitomize these two camps of thinking:

Adherents & Their Books / Writings

Internet Optimists

Internet Pessimists

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks

Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur

Chris Anderson, The Long Tail and “Free!”

Lee Siegel, Against the Machine

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

Nick Carr, The Big Switch

Cass Sunstein, Infotopia

Cass Sunstein, Republic.com

Don Tapscott, Wikinomics

Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited

Kevin Kelly & Wired mag in general

Alex Iskold, “The Danger of Free”

Mike Masnick & TechDirt blog

Mark Cuban

And here’s a rough sketch of the major beliefs or key themes that separate these two schools of thinking about the impact of the Internet on our culture and economy:

Beliefs / Themes

Internet Optimists

Internet Pessimists

Culture / Social

Net is Participatory

Net is Polarizing

Net yields Personalization

Net yields Fragmentation

a “Global village”

Balkanization

Heterogeneity / Diversity of Thought

Homogeneity / Close-mindedness

Net breeds pro-democratic tendencies

Net breeds anti-democratic tendencies

Tool of liberation & empowerment

Tool of frequent misuse & abuse

Economics / Business

Benefits of “free” (“Free” = future of media / business)

Costs of “free” (“Free” = end of media / business)

Increasing importance of “Gift economy”

Continuing importance of property rights, profits, firms

“Wiki” model = wisdom of crowds; power of collective intelligence

“Wiki” model = stupidity of crowds; errors of collective intelligence

Mass collaboration

Individual effort

So, what to make of this intellectual war? Who’s got the story right?

Continue reading →

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Free Press: Internet Too Important to Tie Up in Legal Limbo

by on September 5, 2008 · 10 comments

Communications Daily (subscription) reported today on the avalanche of lawsuits being filed challenging the FCC’s Comcast “net neutrality” order.   Four were filed this week in four different U.S. appeals circuits — the lucky court that will actually decide the case will be decided by lottery.

The story quotes Ben Scott of Free Press, the energizer rabbit of pro-regulation media groups, decrying Comcast’s appeal.  “The Internet is too important to let Comcast tie it up in legal limbo,’ he says.  “Congress should act now to pass Net Neutrality laws that clear up any uncertainty once and for all.”

Huh?  On what planet, exactly, is Free Press based?  Put aside for the moment the question of whether Comcast is responsible for the legal chaos that has ensued from the FCC’s decision to regulate the way it manages Internet traffic.   Strangely enough, when Free Press petitioned the Commission to get involved, I didn’t hear them decrying the “legal limbo” it would cause.

But even more jaw-dropping is the idea that Congress could “clear up any uncertainty” by adopting its own Internet regulations.   The mind boggles.   The last major congressional foray into communications policy was the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which spawned over half a decade of litigation.  There are still children of telecom lawyers going to college off the fees generated by that one.

And that legislation was a relative piece of chocolate cake compared to the torte of net neutrality.   Proponents of mandated neutrality — which Commissioner Robert McDowell has likened to a regulatory Rorschach test — can’t even agree on what it is.  Lord know how long it would take the courts to sort it out — if ever they are able to.

Free Press is right, of course, to worry about the endless litigation which will — and already is — being caused by FCC Internet regulation.   Rather than even more rules from Congress, however,  the solution is for the FCC to reverse course on the regulation it unwisely imposed last month.

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Privacy Solutions (Part 1): Introduction

by on September 5, 2008 · 10 comments

By Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka

Whatever ordinary Americans actually think about online privacy, it remains a hot topic inside the Beltway. While much of that amorphous concern focuses on government surveillance and government access to information about web users, many in Washington have focused on targeted online advertising by private companies as a dire threat to Americans’ privacy — and called for prophylactic government regulation of an industry that is expected to more than double in size to $50.3 billion in 2011 from $21.7 billion last year.

In 1998, when targeted advertising was in its infancy, the FTC proposed four principles as the basis for self-regulation of online data collection: notice, choice, access & security. In 2000, the Commission declared that too few online advertisers adhered to these principles and therefore recommended that Congress mandate their application in legislation that would allow the FTC to issue binding regulations. Subsequent legislative proposals (indexed by CDT by Congress here along with other privacy bills) have languished in Congress ever since. During this time self-regulation of data collection (e.g., the National Advertising Initiative) has matured, the industry has flourished without any clear harm to users and the FTC has returned to its original support for self-regulation over legislation or regulatory mandates.

But over the last year, the advocates of regulation have succeeded in painting a nightmarish picture of all-invasive snooping by online advertisers using more sophisticated techniques of collecting data for targeted advertising. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has responded cautiously by proposing voluntary self-regulatory guidelines intended to address these concerns, because the agency recognizes that this growing revenue stream is funding the explosion of “free” (to the user) online content and services that so many Americans now take for granted, and that more sophisticated targeting produces ads that are more relevant to consumers (and therefore also more profitable to advertisers).

Continue reading →

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EULA Meta = Markets

by on September 5, 2008 · 6 comments

A good illustration about how information on products and services reaches consumers, and how the overall bargain between businesses and consumers is formed, comes in the shape of this Ars Technica story about Google’s new Chrome browser.

Intrepid Ars reporter Nate Anderson writes (two days ago now):

Today’s Internet outrage du jour has been Chrome’s EULA, which appears to give Google a nonexclusive right to display and distribute every bit of content transmitted through the browser. Now, Google tells Ars that it’s a mistake, the EULA will be corrected, and the correction will be retroactive.

Standing in the shoes of a great mass of consumers who one assumes wouldn’t like that EULA term, Anderson quickly and effectively bargained Google back from it. Writing about the episode, he (and other, less prominent outlets) dealt Google a PR slap for even including such a term in the first place. The mighty Google is chastened and has corrected what it calls an error.

It’s a commonly held belief that consumers are powerless to fight large corporations, and it’s true that a single consumer is unlikely to be successful bargaining with a large company about some dimension of the goods or services it provides, especially if he or she has peculiar tastes.

But this episode shows how the media act as a conduit through which consumers bargain with large corporations – successfully. When the corporation has gotten on the wrong side of a significant enough consumer interest in their product, it will back down so quickly that it’s easy to miss.

This is the market at work. It’s imperfect, but it’s the best way we’ve got to figure out what consumers want and get it delivered to them.

[Update: Aw crap – just went to catch up on my TLF reading and see that Berin already had it covered. He’s a smart fellow, and you should listen to him.]

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Comcast to FCC: We’re not gonna take it

by on September 4, 2008 · 6 comments

After a little bit of suspense, Comcast today filed suit in federal court challenging the FCC’s authority to sanction it for “unreasonable network practices.” I say suspense because there was speculation that Comcast might have decided to look the other way and live with a decision that didn’t really force it to do much that the market hadn’t already made it do. I’m happy to see that they’re not standing for Kevin Martin’s blatant overreach. As I’ve said many times before, the FCC has no authority to punish a company for behaving “unreasonably” when it has never established a criteria for what is reasonable.

I don’t know to what statement specifically Saul Hansell is referring, but in his New York Times post breaking the news, he wrote:

Kevin Martin, the commission’s chairman, has argued that making rules in advance is not a good method to regulate fast-moving markets like Internet service. Under his stewardship, the commission has published broad principles and has taken action only when it found that objectionable practices have occurred.

I love that. Making laws before we apply them isn’t really efficient.

If you want every gory detail about why the FCC’s order should fall, I heartily recommend to you Barbara Esbin’s recent paper [PDF] on the matter. Esbin is a fourteen-year veteran of the FCC and, among other things, in her paper she explodes an argument that I’ve been hearing lately, namely that the FCC has “ancillary jurisdiction” to regulate broadband network management practices. She writes:

As Commissioner Adelstein stated: “[T]he Order sets out the Commission’s legal authority under Title I of the Act, explaining that preventing unreasonable network discrimination directly furthers the goal of making broadband Internet access both “rapid” and “efficient.” This appears to be a paraphrase of Section 1 of the Act, which recites the Act’s purposes and the reason for creation of the FCC, including “regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio so as to make available . . . a rapid, efficient, Nation-wide and world-wide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges…” But because Title I is also considered the source of “ancillary jurisdiction,” that is akin to saying that the FCC can regulate if its actions are ancillary to its ancillary jurisdiction, and that is one ancillary too many.

Amen.

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