The venerable Economist magazine has made a hash of my research on the growth of the Internet, which examines the rich media technologies now flooding onto the Web and projects Internet traffic over the coming decade. This “exaflood” of new applications and services represents a bounty of new entertainment, education, and business applications that can drive productivity and economic growth across all our industries and the world economy.
But somehow, The Economist was convinced that my research represents some “gloomy prophesy,” that I am “doom-mongering” about an Internet “overload” that could “crash” the Internet. Where does The Economist find any evidence for these silly charges?
In a series of reports, articles (here and here), and presentations around the globe — and in a long, detailed, nuanced, very pleasant interview with The Economist, in which I thought the reporter grasped the key points — I have consistently said the exaflood is an opportunity, an embarrassment of riches.
Continue reading →
TLF reader Timon makes a really good point about the choice between authenticated and unauthenticated networks:
Lawyers are trained to view complex questions and come up with balanced approaches to them — ie “balancing” privacy with police prerogatives and subpoenas. The technical world is rather the opposite; no matter how complex, an encryption algorithm, for example, either is or is not secure, and as soon as it isn’t it really isn’t. In a legal class it makes for good discussion to say, on the one hand, IP addresses should be private, except when they are used to commit a crime. In direct technical terms what this amounts to is a full surveillance state that is then ruled by court procedure: the law requires someone keep records of all mail or other communications, and then provide them to the authorities when told to. While under law there could be a protection of privacy, in technical terms there is absolutely no privacy, except that which the state decides to concede, the information it declines to look at but which is permanently stored on its orders and available for its inspection. It may seem to you that some people are just unwilling to split the difference and be reasonable, but it really is the case that where lawyers see gray others see black and white, with good technical reasons. There is no way to enforce copyright, for example, and allow anonymous speech online, as you seem to be picking up on. That is not because we are unwilling to be fair, it is a characteristic of information.
Demanding that government limit itself is never a very effective strategy, because if government can do something, it probably will. It’s far more effective to limit government by design. The Internet’s open architecture is, among other things, an important limitation on the government’s surveillance power. Precisely because there are so many ways to get on the Internet without authentication, the government has to do a lot of extra work if it wants to spy on people. For those of us who care about civil liberties, this is a feature, not a bug.
Of course, freedom isn’t free. The same characteristics that make the Internet resistant to a surveillance state also make it harder to enforce copyright, laws against child pornography, etc. This is unfortunate, but I don’t think it’s so unfortunate that we should be willing to toss out the liberty-enhancing benefits of the open Internet. Because as Timon says, there isn’t a middle ground here. Either ISPs have a reliable way to identify their users or they don’t. And if we require them to have this ability for what we regard as good reasons, it’s inevitable that the government will use that same power for bad purposes down the road.
Mike Masnick notes that a grassroots coalition seems to have killed Canada’s version of the DMCA. Of course, legislation backed by powerful interest groups is never dead for good, but for now, it looks like Canada will be DMCA-free for the foreseeable future.
It’s worth remembering that when the actual DMCA was passed here in the US 10 years ago, it faced very little serious opposition. Part of that is probably because Slashdot and the rest of the tech blogosphere was still in its infancy. But I think it’s also a sign of how much progress has been made in spreading awareness about copyright issues and getting non-geeks interested and engaged. I remember organizing an anti-DMCA organization at the University of Minnesota in the wake of the 2001 Sklyarov arrest and struggling to explain to non-techies what the DMCA was and why they should care about it.
The DMCA still isn’t a household concept yet, but knowledge and understanding of the DMCA and other copyright issues is a lot more widespread than it was a decade ago. And at least up North they’ve figured out how to translate that broader public interest into effective political advocacy. If the copyright reform movement continues growing over the next decade the way it has over the last decade, I think there’s a real chance that we’ll be able to stop the otherwise-inevitable Copyright Term Extension Act of 2018. I had sort of resigned myself to perpetual copyright extension, but ideas have consequences, and the debate may become so lopsided by 2018 that even the copyright industry’s millions may not be enough to buy them another 20 years of monopoly rents.
Ellen McGirt is undoubtedly a good business reporter. Her recent cover story for Fast Company “How Cisco’s CEO John Chambers is Turning the Tech Giant Socialist,” is a great piece that shows the many interesting and truly innovative reforms that Chambers has instituted at Cisco.
However, I think McGirt is trying too hard to be clever or just doesn’t understand what socialism really means. Socialism is a political system that uses the force of government to take money from some and give it to others. Cisco is a private enterprise that’s only asking for you to buy their products.
McGirt’s confusion seems to arise from the socialist-sounding rhetoric of CEO John Chambers. He uses what McGirt calls “Collectivist Catchphrases” like “Co-Labor” to describe Cisco’s approach to management. He’s replaced managers (what many consider the avatars of capitalism) with councils and boards; emphasizes information sharing, rather than hoarding; rewards cooperation, rather than back-stabbing ladder-climbing.
But Chambers is no socialist, he’s a capitalist responding to a problem as old as business itself: How do you give those with good information and good ideas, the power to get things done?
Continue reading →
I want to associate myself with Cord’s excellent post about whether Google pays its fair share for bandwidth. Let me also add a more theoretical observation: we know Google is paying its fair share because if it weren’t, the companies that provide it with bandwidth would raise their rates. That may sound like a tautology, but I think it’s actually an important point that tends to get lost in these discussions. Nobody forces ISPs to interconnect, so we can be confident that each party to the web of interconnection agreements we call the Internet is getting at least as much value out as he puts in.
The obsession with whether Google is paying its “fair share” for bandwidth is nonsense for precisely the same reasons it’s silly to fret over trade deficits and “unfair” trade deals. In both cases, people fail to appreciate that we’re talking about positive-sum interactions: interactions in which both parties are made better off and no one is made worse off. Just as the buyer and seller in any given international transaction values what he’s getting more than what he’s giving up, so too does everyone in the chain of contracts between me and Google get more from carrying our traffic than the cost of doing so. Each is making a profit, or at least expected to make a profit ex ante when they agreed to carry it. Which means that in both cases, interfering is likely to only reduce
This means that if you add up all the value Google gets from the Internet and subtract Google’s costs, of course the number you get would be positive. The fact that Google benefits more from the Internet than it pays isn’t an indictment of Google, it’s a reflection of basic economics. I’ve written before that the commonplace idea that there’s no such thing as a free lunch is actually nonsense. To the contrary, a market economy is a free lunch for everyone who participates: almost everybody gets dramatically more value from their participation in the economy than their cost of participation. The same is true of the Internet. Google, Google’s users, Google’s customers, and various network owners are all “free riding” on each other. And this isn’t a problem, it’s the whole point of having positive-sum social institutions like the Internet.
Precursor LLC released a study that claims to have calculated Google’s total bandwidth use declaring “Google uses 21 times more bandwidth than it pays for.”
The study is an attempt to foil Google’s pursuit of Net Neutrality as a federal policy by claiming that Google is already a kind of free-rider and its policy goals will only allow it to mooch more.
The study estimates the total bandwidth “used” by Google in a circuitous way. It calculates the bandwidth Google-originating data uses while traveling around the web, adds that to bandwidth used by search bots sending data back to Google, then assigns a dollar value to that bandwidth, and then compares that to an estimate of Google’s total outlays for bandwidth (a number which had to estimated as Google does not disclose this number).
The result: Google doesn’t pay for all the bandwidth used by data flowing in and out of its servers.
But this is true for any site on the web!
Continue reading →
It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that vigorous prosecution of the war on file sharing will lead to some deeply illiberal results. And our good friends at the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s Center for Digital Property periodically write things that confirm the point. Former PFFer Patrick Ross, for example, has compared the war on file sharing to America’s “lax” approach to drug law enforcement. And last year Jim DeLong made the argument that stopping file sharing will require copyright laws so draconian that they will make today’s laws, including the DMCA and lawsuits against 12-year-olds, look “ridiculously permissive.”
PFF’s new copyright guru, Tom Sydnor, seems to be equally enthusiastic about using ever-more-draconian legal penalties and restrictions on civil liberties in order to back up his vision of copyright. His latest target is online anonymity, as he argues that Boston University is guilty of “incompetence” for allowing anonymous communications on its network:
For those seeking to enforce federal laws or rights other than copyrights, this order is all bad news. London-Sire suggests that BU has made its campus network into a de-facto safe harbor for anyone using the Internet to commit any crime. It would seem that terrorists, pedophiles, phishing-scheme operators, hackers, identity thieves, and copyright pirates who can access the Internet through BU’s network now have a get-out-of-jail-free card–a judicial decision holding that any identifying data provided by BU is too hopelessly unreliable to support so much as the filing of a civil lawsuit.
What’s amazing about this argument is that it proves way, way too much: it applies to any network provider that allows customers to communicate without identifying themselves first. So, for example, the Panera down the street from me offers anonymous, free WiFi access. Terrorists, pedophiles, phishing-scheme operators, hackers, identity thieves, and copyright pirates can walk into Panera, commit a variety of crimes, and walk out, and in all likelihood Panera won’t be able to provide the police with any useful information about the culprit. (Panera might have logs showing the user’s MAC address, but these are not easy to match to an individual, and they can be spoofed anyway)
Continue reading →
One of the reasons that so many of us here take issue with proposals to expand regulation of communications, broadband, and media markets is because we have studied the horrendous inefficiencies of economic regulation in practice. We oppose regulatory proposals not because of a “blind faith” in free markets, but because we understand that even when markets stumble they correct themselves quicker and more efficiently than regulatory systems do. One can profess the supposed theoretical benefits of enlightened “public interest” regulation all they want, but the facts are the facts. And the facts do not support the proposition that government regulation generally enhances consumer welfare.
In that regard, Tim Lee’s new Net neutrality report for Cato does a nice job of surveying some of the past unintended consequences of regulation. Also, even though it is now 10 years old, I highly recommend “Economic Deregulation and Customer Choice” by Jerry Ellig and Robert Crandall. It’s an outstanding overview of why economic regulation of various industries failed consumers so miserably in the past.
But if you want even more shocking proof of how horrendously inefficient communications regulation can be in practice, then you must read my PFF colleague Barbara Esbin’s two essays this week on the Universal Service Fund (USF): “The High Cost of USF Support,” and “More FCC Support Fund Follies.” In these two essays, Esbin walks the reader through various grim reports and statistics that have been released recently documenting the failures of the USF.
Continue reading →
Today’s USA Today features a debate between the editors and me on the question of the impact media has on children and what should be done about it. Their editorial argues that “Today’s mass media penetrate deeply and quietly, inflicting real damage on young children, an increasing body of research shows.” Specifically, they are referring to a new study commissioned by Common Sense Media (CSM), which claims that a review of 173 studies shows “that a strong correlation exists between greater exposure and adverse health outcomes.”
In my response entitled “Don’t Scapegoat Media,” which appears in its entirety down below the fold, I argue that “Media have long been a convenient scapegoat for the woes of the world,” and that we must be careful not to assume correlation equals causation when surveying the impact of media on kids. After all, I argue, “how do [those studies] account for the other variables that influence youth development, including broken homes, bad parents, socioeconomic status, troubled peer relations, poor schools and so on? And how is media exposure weighted relative to these other influences? Is a beer ad really as much of a negative influence as an alcoholic parent?” Again, read my entire response below. [Of course, even if one assumes some media has an impact on some kids, there are plenty of ways for parents and guardians to take control over the media in their lives, as I have shown in my big book on the subject.]
I was also quoted in this Washington Post article about the new CSM study on Tuesday.
Continue reading →
Google has just 
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.