Braden has noted the release of John McCain’s tech policy–rightly decrying McCain’s socialistic community broadband concept. But far more outrageous, in my view is this bit of doublethink. First, the good part we should all applaud:
John McCain Has Fought to Keep the Internet Free From Government Regulation
The role of government in the Innovation Age should be focused on creating opportunities for all Americans and maintaining the vibrancy of the Internet economy. Given the enormous benefits we have seen from a lightly regulated Internet and software market, our government should refrain from imposing burdensome regulation. John McCain understands that unnecessary government intrusion can harm the innovative genius of the Internet. Government should have to prove regulation is needed, rather than have entrepreneurs prove it is not.
Amen! Even a hardened Ron Paul/Bob Taft/Grover Cleveland/Jack Randolph-survivalist/libertarian-crank like me can rally behind that banner. But then this self-styled champion of deregulation pulls a really fast one:
John McCain Will Preserve Consumer Freedoms. John McCain will focus on policies that leave consumers free to access the content they choose; free to use the applications and services they choose; free to attach devices they choose, if they do not harm the network; and free to chose among broadband service providers.
That sure sounds nice, but it’s all Wu-vian code for re-regulation, not de-regulation. You might recognize that McCain is talking obliquely here about the FCC’s 1968 Carterfone doctrine, which has consumed much attention on the TLF (see this piece in particular).
McCain then insists that he will be a bold leader for “good” regulations: Continue reading →
Ahoy, TLFers! You’ll notice that we’ve incorporated a new comment management system on the blog: Pronounced “discuss” (not “discus” as one might well assume–a potential branding problem indeed for an otherwise promising start-up), Disqus has exploded in the last few months (Google Trends) to over 30,000 blogs.
Disqus should help the TLF become even more of a true community–in which comments can be as valuable as blog pieces themselves and in which the line between “reader” and “author” is further blurred. Here‘s a list of cool things Disqus will let you, TLF’s valued readers to do:
- Track and manage comments and replies
- More control over your own comments on websites
- Never lose your comments, even if the website goes away
- Build a global profile, or comment blog, to collect and show off what you’re saying
- Easier to comment on websites using Disqus
- Reply to comments through email or mobile
- Edit and republish comments with one click
In particular, comments can now be directed as replies to other comments, creating clear discussion threads.
You might be wondering: “If Disqus is so darn awesome, why haven’t we incorporated it before?” The answer is that, until the new Disqus plug-in for WordPress came out a few days ago, comments were stored only on the Disqus site and merely replicated on partner blogs–making comments unsearchable, among other things. Now, we get the best of both worlds: Comments will beseemlessly duplicated and synchronized between our database and Disqus’s.
While it will still be possible to comment on the blog just as before (anonymously or merely without a Disqus account), we do encourage readers to take a minute (literally) to set up a free Disqus account. (For those of you who enjoy reading Terms of Use and Privacy policies or who just stay up late at night clutching their now-constitutionally-protected firearms and worrying about being tagged, tracked and someday unceremoniously culled from the herd, here are Disqus’s policies.) For the less privacy-obsessed, here‘s a general FAQ about Discus.
There are a number of bells and whistles you can enable–like tying your Disqus account to other social networking sites and adding a small image of yourself (or some other hopefully-family-friendly image). But the one important thing everyone who has posted comments in the past should do is to “claim” your old comments by entering the email address associated with those comments on Disqus. Continue reading →
Anyone interested in the long-running debate over how to balance online privacy with anonymity and free speech, whether Section 230‘s broad immunity for Internet intermediaries should be revised, and whether we need new privacy legislation must read the important and enthralling NYT Magazine piece “The Trolls Among Us” by Mattathias Schwartz about the very real problem of Internet “trolls“–a term dating to the 1980s and defined as “someone who intentionally disrupts online communities.”
While all trolls “do it for the lulz” (“for kicks” in Web-speak) they range from the merely puckish to the truly “malwebolent.” For some, trolling is essentially senseless web-harassment or “violence” (e.g., griefers), while for others it is intended to make a narrow point or even as part of a broader movement. These purposeful trolls might be thought of as the Yippies of the Internet, whose generally harmless anti-war counter-cutural antics in the late 1960s were the subject of the star-crossed Vice President Spiro T. Agnew‘s witticism:
And if the hippies and the yippies and the disrupters of the systems that Washington and Lincoln as presidents brought forth in this country will shut up and work within our free system of government, I will lower my voice.
But the more extreme of these “disrupters of systems” might also be compared to the plainly terroristic Weathermen or even the more familiar Al-Qaeda. While Schwartz himself does not explicitly draw such comparisons, the scenario he paints of human cruelty is truly nightmarish: After reading his article before heading to bed last night, I myself had Kafka-esque dreams about complete strangers invading my own privacy for no intelligible reason. So I can certainly appreciate how terrifying Schwartz’s story will be to many readers, especially those less familiar with the Internet or simply less comfortable with the increasing readiness of so many younger Internet users to broadcast their lives online.
But Schwartz leaves unanswered two important questions. The first question he does not ask: Just how widespread is trolling? However real and tragic for its victims, without having some sense of the scale of the problem, it is difficult to answer the second question Schwartz raises but, wisely, does not presume to answer: What should be done about it? The policy implications of Schwartz’s article might be summed up as follows: Do we need new laws or should we focus on some combination of enforcing existing laws, user education and technological solutions? While Schwartz focuses on trolling, the same questions can be asked about other forms of malwebolence–best exemplified by the high-profile online defamation Autoadmit.com case, which demonstrates the effectiveness of existing legal tools to deal with such problems.
Continue reading →
Web Pro News’ Jason Lee Miller seems to think he’s hoisted my colleague Bret Swanson, and The Progress & Freedom Foundation in general, on our own collective petard. Bret had responded to Tim Wu’s NYT op-ed by questioning Wu’s argument for developing “alternative supplies of bandwidth” to free us from the tyranny of the OPEC-like broadband cartel:
Unlike natural resources such as oil, which, while abundant, are at some point finite, bandwidth is potentially infinite. The miraculous microcosmic spectrum reuse capabilities of optical fiber and even wireless radiation improve at a rate far faster than any of our macrocosmic machines and minerals. It is far more efficient to move electrons than atoms, and yet more efficient to move photons. Left unfettered, these technologies will continue delivering bandwidth abundance.
Miller suggests that this response to Wu destroys arguments Bret and others at PFF have made against net neutrality regulation–a crusade led by Wu (who taught me Internet law, as it happens):
So what [Swanson is] saying is bandwidth scarcity is a notion invented by internet service providers and wireless providers to jack up prices and provide excuses for interfering with competing services on their networks. Nice. In a weird way, Swanson focuses so hard on disproving Wu’s analogy one way, he misses how the analogy is proved in another: a few organizations (government or not) controlling an important resource and forcing artificial scarcity in order to control the market for that resource is called a cartel.
Miller’s “Gotcha!” rests on the seemingly undeniable premise that broadband can’t be both abundant (as Bret argues) and scarce (such that ISPs must management traffic on their networks, however non-neutral that may be). But in fact, this seeming contradiction is inherent in the very nature of the Internet–and the way Internet access is currently priced. Continue reading →
I wanted to update readers on the micro-scandal surrounding the Progress & Freedom Foundation’s “Issues & Publications” database. As I noted on Monday, Google’s search engine automatically flagged that database as the victim of a malware attack: some unknown third party (probably as part of a large-scale attack on SQL databases that did not target us in particular) had taken advantage of a vulnerability in the PFF database to insert malcious scripts capable of infecting users’ computers. Google immediately and automatically flagged that database (and the PDF files within it) as potentially dangerous and shared that information through its Safe Browsing API with the StopBadware.org project, a “neighborhood watch” group that flags potentially dangerous sites.
I attempted to correct the impression of some readers that Google was deliberately censoring the PFF site because of our disagreements on the sensitive issue of net neutrality. Matt Cutts, a Google engineer, has explained this far better than I ever could.
I’m pleased to inform readers that Stopbadware.org removed our database from their blacklist yesterday: Continue reading →
TLF readers may have heard that Google was craftily censoring my free-market colleagues at the Progress & Freedom Foundation. Our good friend and invaluable TLF commenter Richard Bennett blogged over the weekend about how Google seemed to block access to our site when he tried to search for “net neutrality.”
This is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. Google is blocking net neutrality documents from the PFF’s web site, but documents in the same format that deal with other subjects are not flagged “dangerous.”
This is really outrageous, and a clear example of the problem with a monopoly gatekeeper.
This story made the rounds this morning and much of the DC Internet policy community was atwitter with allegations of censorship by Google. But as I explain in the comment I tried (unsuccessfully) to post on Richard’s blog, this is all an innocent and unfortunate misunderstanding: Continue reading →
Today we should remember not only Virginia planter and lyricist of American libertarianism Thomas Jefferson’s 1776 Declaration of Independence, but also Wyoming cattle-rancher and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow‘s 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. While everyone can find something to quibble with in it, especially given the changes of the last twelve years, Barlow’s Declaration remains the best creed of Internet Freedom yet written. Now more than ever, as Internet regulation gathers steam under the banner of preserving “Net Neutrality,” it is well worth re-reading as a stirring call against regulation:
Continue reading →
In case you’ve been in a pre-holiday daze this week, the blogosphere has been atwitter (not to mention a-twittering) with the news that the Hon. Louis L. Stanton, the Federal district judge presiding over Viacom’s massive copyright infringement suit against YouTube has ordered Google, which owns YouTube, to turn over its viewership records (12 terabytes). Most notably, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington has called Judge Stanton a “moron” for failing to appreciate that “handing over user names and a list of videos they’ve watched to a highly litigious copyright holder is extremely likely to result in lawsuits against those users that have watched copyrighted content on YouTube.” Whatever one thinks of the Viacom v. YouTube/Google case, Arrington’s concern is misplaced (if not hysterical) and his logic betrays his ignorance of how litigation actually works. Continue reading →
Global handset manufacturing giant Nokia has purchased the shares they didn’t already own in Symbian, Ltd., the company formed in 1998 as a partnership among Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and Psion and the developer of the Symbian mobile operating system, by far the world’s leading OS for “smart mobile” phones with 67% of the market, followed by Microsoft on 13%, with RIM on 10% (source).
But wait, there’s more (per Engadget)!
Here’s where it gets interesting, though: rather than taking Symbian’s intellectual private for Nokia’s own benefit, the goods will be turned over to the Symbian Foundation, a nonprofit whose sole goal will be the advancement of the Symbian platform in its many flavors. Motorola and Sony Ericsson have signed up to contribute UIQ assets, while NTT DoCoMo (which uses Symbian-based wares in a number of its phones) will be donating code as well.
Other Symbian Foundation members include Texas Instruments, Vodafone, Samsung, LG, and AT&T (yep, the same AT&T that currently sells precisely one Symbian-based phone), so things could get interesting. The move clearly seems to be a preemptive strike against Google’s Open Handset Alliance, LiMo, and other collaborative efforts forming around the globe with the goal of standardizing smartphone operating systems; the writing was on the wall, and Symbian didn’t want to miss the train. Total cash outlay for the move will run Nokia roughly €264 million — about $410 million in yankee currency.
Other reports note that the Symbian Foundation will eventually take Symbian open source, and that this move is as much as response to Apple’s closed iPhone platform as it is to Gogole’s open Android and LiMo platforms. (Although it is intriguing to note that AT&T, Apple’s exclusive U.S. partner for the iPhone, is among the backers of the new Symbian Foundation, perhaps indicating that even AT&T is hedging its bets.)
The fact that we will soon see three open source platforms (counting Google’s Android and LiMo) competing for market share provides yet another measure of the exceptionally high degree of competition in the wireless industry. Continue reading →
MIT’s Technology Review has a great review of a new biography of Georges Doriot (Wikipedia) by Businessweek Editor Spencer E. Ante entitled, Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital. Born in France, Doriot fought in World War I, then studied at Harvard Business School, served as director of the U.S. military’s Military Planning Division during World War II as a brigadier general, and in 1946 launched American Research and Development Corporation (ARD) as the first publicly owned venture capital firm.
Doriot’s legacy looms large today, even if his name is new to most:
Contemporaneously with ARD’s watershed investment in [Digital Equipment Corporation], others began walking the trails Doriot had blazed: Arthur Rock (a student of Doriot’s in the Harvard class of 1951) backed the departure of the “Traitorous Eight” from Shockley Semiconductor to form Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957, then funded Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore when they left Fairchild to found Intel; Laurance Rockefeller formed Venrock, which has since backed more than 400 companies, including Intel and Apple; Don Valentine formed Sequoia Capital, which would invest in Atari, Apple, Oracle, Cisco, Google, and YouTube.
Doriot himself would likely have felt at home among today’s embattled and outnumbered regulation-skeptics in the technology policy community:
he opposed both the dirigiste political economy of his native France and the tax hikes and anticompetitive laws enacted in the United States under the New Deal. Such regulations, he maintained, arrogated to bureaucrats the function of the markets; their worst feature was that they let government lend money to failing businesses. Ante notes that a former colleague of Doriot’s, James F. Morgan, recalled him as “the most schizophrenic Frenchman I’ve ever met”–devoted to his original land’s wine, cuisine, and language even as “the French capacity to make very simple things complicated drove him nuts.”
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
New TLF Comment Tool (Please Read!)
by Berin Szoka on August 14, 2008 · 21 comments
Ahoy, TLFers! You’ll notice that we’ve incorporated a new comment management system on the blog: Pronounced “discuss” (not “discus” as one might well assume–a potential branding problem indeed for an otherwise promising start-up), Disqus has exploded in the last few months (Google Trends) to over 30,000 blogs.
Disqus should help the TLF become even more of a true community–in which comments can be as valuable as blog pieces themselves and in which the line between “reader” and “author” is further blurred. Here‘s a list of cool things Disqus will let you, TLF’s valued readers to do:
In particular, comments can now be directed as replies to other comments, creating clear discussion threads.
You might be wondering: “If Disqus is so darn awesome, why haven’t we incorporated it before?” The answer is that, until the new Disqus plug-in for WordPress came out a few days ago, comments were stored only on the Disqus site and merely replicated on partner blogs–making comments unsearchable, among other things. Now, we get the best of both worlds: Comments will beseemlessly duplicated and synchronized between our database and Disqus’s.
While it will still be possible to comment on the blog just as before (anonymously or merely without a Disqus account), we do encourage readers to take a minute (literally) to set up a free Disqus account. (For those of you who enjoy reading Terms of Use and Privacy policies or who just stay up late at night clutching their now-constitutionally-protected firearms and worrying about being tagged, tracked and someday unceremoniously culled from the herd, here are Disqus’s policies.) For the less privacy-obsessed, here‘s a general FAQ about Discus.
There are a number of bells and whistles you can enable–like tying your Disqus account to other social networking sites and adding a small image of yourself (or some other hopefully-family-friendly image). But the one important thing everyone who has posted comments in the past should do is to “claim” your old comments by entering the email address associated with those comments on Disqus. Continue reading →