October 2008

book review: Palfrey & Gasser’s “Born Digital”

by on October 10, 2008 · 150 comments

Born Digital coverEarlier this year, I mentioned an outstanding book that John Palfrey of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School co-edited entitled Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering.  It’s an excellent resource for anyone studying the methods governments are (unfortunately) using to stifle online expression across the globe.  It’s one of the most important technology policy books of the year.

Well, it looks like John Palfrey will have a second title on this year’s “Best Tech Books” list.  I’ve just finished his new book with his Berkman Center colleague Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, and it is definitely worthy of your attention. In my book review posted today on the City Journal’s website, I argue that “Palfrey and Gasser’s fine early history of this generation serves as a starting point for any conversation about how to mentor the children of the Web.”  It’s a comprehensive and very even-handed discussion about a variety of concerns or Internet pathologies, including: online safety, personal privacy, copyright piracy, offensive content, classroom learning, and much more.

My City Journal review is down below, but in coming weeks I will be posting some additional thoughts about some specific things in the book worthy of more attention (including a few things I disagreed with).  Overall, I’d say Born Digital is a close runner-up in the race for “Tech Book of the Year,” closely trailing Jonathan Zittrain’s Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (which I have reviewed multiple times) and Nick Carr’s The Big Switch.  But I found far more to agree with in Born Digital than I did in those two books.  Highly recommended.

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Financial Failures Spark Phishing Expeditions, and Other CyberSecurity Issues at upcoming NetChoice Event

by on October 10, 2008 · 12 comments

As if the financial crisis and government bailout isn’t already a bit fishy to some taxpayers, now it’s the subject of a social engineering phishing exploit. The Federal Trade Commission issued a warning that

Phishers (pronounced “fishers’) may send attention-getting emails that look like they’re coming from the financial institution that recently acquired your bank, savings and loan, or mortgage. Their intent is to collect or capture your personal information, like your credit card numbers, bank account information, Social Security number, passwords, or other sensitive information. Their messages may ask you to “update,” “validate,” or “confirm” your account information.

October is Cyber Security Awareness Month and in celebration NetChoice will hold a lunch event at the Russell Senate Building on Thursday, Oct. 16 from Noon – 1:30pm. Panelists include:

  • Ken Silva, Chief Technology Officer, VeriSign
  • Michael Kaiser, Executive Director, National Cyber Security Alliance
  • Steve DelBianco, Executive Director, NetChoice

If interested, let me know and come on by.

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Does This Really Surprise Anyone?

by on October 10, 2008 · 15 comments

According to ABC News:

Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.

It’s a simple formula: Lack of oversight produces abuses. Members of Congress may scurry around and declare outrage, but the responsibility is their own as much as anyone else’s.

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Bandwidth prices fall sharply

by on October 9, 2008 · 7 comments

A new report from TeleGeography finds that bandwidth prices for backbone transit continue to decline rapidly across the globe. In San Francisco, for instance, the price per mbps of Gigabit Ethernet transit has dropped 38 % in the past 12 months. Developing countries are also enjoying substantial price cuts in 15 to 20% range.

But if the Internet’s core is controlled by an oligopolistic cartel—as Tim Wu argued in a recent New York Times essay—then why does bandwidth keep getting cheaper?

Perhaps it’s because the fourteen or so firms which offer backbone IP transit are competing fiercely to win over business from smaller carriers and enterprises. And as businesses of all sizes demand faster connectivity, more dark fiber is being lit, creating an expansion in network capacity. In DC, for instance, a price war has made high-speed commercial data services much more affordable, with one communications provider offering converged 10mbps full-duplex dedicated Ethernet over copper for less than the market price of four bonded T1 lines.

Why are some providers moving towards data transfer caps if bandwidth prices are dropping ? In part, it’s because backbone transit is not the only usage-variable expense that residential ISPs face. Last-mile bandwidth remains a highly contested resource in many neighborhoods, and the cost per megabit of bringing faster speeds to the doorstep far exceeds the cost of adding more wavelengths to a long-distance fiber optic line. As consumers demand greater speeds, providers are investing heavily in network upgrades—these costs are adding up, and there’s a strong case to be made that heavy users ought to shoulder a larger portion of the burden than light users.

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Negroponte’s “Daily Me” = RSS Feeds + Google Alerts

by on October 9, 2008 · 20 comments

I’ve been re-reading Nicholas Negroponte’s brilliant and extraordinarily prescient 1995 book Being Digital this week, and I just came to the famous section in Chapter 12 about “The Daily Me.”  It’s his visionary discussion of a future of personalized filters for all things digital to perfectly tune news and entertainment to your personal preferences. Here’s the key passage (again, remember that he wrote this in 1995, long before most of the digital things we take for granted today existed):

Imagine a future in which your interface agent can read every newswire and newspaper and catch every TV and radio broadcast on the planet, and then construct a personalized summary. This kind of newspaper is printed in an edition of one. […]

Imagine a computer display of news stories with a knob that, like a volume control, allows you to crank personalization up or down. You could have many of these controls, including a slider that moves both literally and politically from left to right to modify stories about public affairs.

These cotnrols change your window onto the news, both in terms of size and its editorial tone. In the distant future, interface agents will read, listen to, and look at each story in its entirety. In the near future, the filtering process will happen by using headers, those bits about bits.

Well, that future came about sooner than even Negroponte could have predicted.  We all have a “Daily Me” now; it’s called our RSS feed.  And there are other components to the “Daily Me,” such as iGoogle and Google Alerts, which provide automated search results served up instantaneously.  And there are many other digital tools and services out there today that help us personalize our media experience.

You really gotta hand it to Negroponte for being way ahead of the curve in foreseeing all of this at a time when most of us where still using Trumpet Winsock and 14.4 modems.  Hell, Al Gore hadn’t even built the Internet yet!

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Well, Isn’t This Cheery

by on October 9, 2008 · 6 comments

Peter Ferrara, offering us a taste of the dismal science for the American Spectator in reviewing a recent book’s economic predictions for an Obama Presidency (but what about civil liberties?). Hey, maybe they’ll send out more economic stimulus checks! We used ours this year to pay down a tax bill. It’s like the circle of life. (Other references to the Lion King will be swiftly and severely dealt with).

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Space Politics

by on October 9, 2008 · 7 comments

I have a post on space politics at the WashingtonWatch.com blog. “If you think Washington politics is restricted to the debates among politicians, think again.”

I’m sure TLFer Berin Szoka knows this better than I do.

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Esbin’s Early History of the Net Neutrality Debate in U.S.

by on October 8, 2008 · 8 comments

My colleague Barbara Esbin, a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Communications and Competition Policy at The Progress & Freedom Foundation, was asked to pen a short history of the net neutrality wars in the U.S. for a French publication, La Lettre de l’Autorité.  Her essay provides an excellent, concise overview of where we’ve come from and where we might be heading on this front.  I’ve pasted the entire essay down below, or you can download the PDF here.

________________________

Net Neutrality Regulation in the United States
by Barbara Esbin

PFF Progress Snapshot
Release 4.21 October 2008

The United States moved closer to “Net Neutrality” regulation this year when the Federal Communications Commission found that Comcast, a cable broadband Internet service provider, violated a set of Internet policy principles the FCC adopted in 2005 by limiting peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic. The ruling was the culmination of a ten-year effort that began as a call for wholesale “open access” to the cable platform for third-party Internet service providers. Requests for open access first emerged in 1998 when the FCC considered AT&T’s acquisition of cable operator TCI. The FCC rejected open access, but the issue quickly re-emerged in a subsequent proceeding to determine the appropriate regulatory classification of cable Internet service. Depending on how the FCC categorized cable Internet service, it would either be subject to telecommunications “common carrier” requirements, “cable service” requirements, or treated as a then-unregulated “information service.”

In 2002, the FCC classified cable Internet service as an “information service.” This meant that the telecommunications common carrier requirements — that service be provided upon request, without unreasonable discrimination as to rates, terms and conditions of service — would not apply to cable Internet services. The FCC’s decision was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in NCTA v. Brand X. Afterwards, advocates of open access re-directed their efforts away from advocating wholesale access for third-party ISPs, and towards rules aimed at consumer rights to a “neutral network” or “net neutrality.”

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Sergey Brin and Inequality

by on October 8, 2008 · 11 comments

Arnold Kling on the Sergey Brin effect and inequality:

Income inequality in the United States consists of two gaps. The first gap is an upper-lower gap, between those with a college education and those without. The second is an upper-upper gap, between those with high incomes and those with extraordinarily high incomes.

The upper-lower gap reflects changes in the structure of the economy. New technologies place a premium on cognitive ability. Harvard University economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have dubbed this “skill-biased technological change.” In today’s economy, more value added comes from knowledge work, and relatively less comes from unskilled labor.

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10 Years Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act – Success or Failure?

by on October 8, 2008 · 5 comments

It’s nearing Halloween, so it must mean the anniversary of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is just around the corner. In fact, it was 10 years ago, on Sunday, that Congress passed the DMCA, on October 12, 1998. The law was signed by President Clinton on October 28, 1998.

The information and news service that I have launched, BroadbandCensus.com, is “celebrating” the passage of the law with the inaugural event of the Broadband Breakfast Club. The breakfast event will take place on Tuesday, October 14, from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., at the Old Ebbitt Grill at 675 15th Street NW, Washington, DC.

This event will bring together several key stakeholders together to share perspectives on this topic:

  • Drew Clark, Executive Director, BroadbandCensus.com (Moderator)
  • Mitch Glazier, Senior Vice President, Government Relations, Recording Industry Association of America
  • Michael Petricone, Senior Vice President, Government Affairs, Consumer Electronics Association
  • Wendy Seltzer, Practitioner in Residence, Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic, American University Washington College of Law
  • Emery Simon, Counselor, Business Software Alliance

Breakfast for registrants will be available beginning at 8:00 a.m., and the forum itself will begin at around 8:30 a.m., and conclude promptly at 10 a.m. The event is open to the public. The charge for the breakfast is $45.00, plus an Eventbrite registration fee. Seated attendance is limited to the first 45 individuals to register for the event.

Future events in the Broadband Breakfast Club monthly series will feature other key topics involved in broadband technology and internet policy. In fact, you can mark your calendar for the next event on Tuesday, November 18, from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., also at the Old Ebbitt Grill.

For more information about BroadbandCensus.com, or about the Broadband Breakfast Club at Old Ebbitt Grill – on the second Tuesday of each month – please visit http://broadbandcensus.com, or call me at 202-580-8196.

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