It’s ironic. The more that new technology makes it possible for people to communicate, the more that free speech is threatened.
Internationally, the censorship trend is worrisome. First, there’s this Guardian article about how Russia wants to create an internationalized domain name for .ru that would allow Russian speakers to use Cyrillic characters for typing the country code. Sounds great, but there’s the fear that the government would create an Internet just for Russia, providing the government with greater control over what is accessed on the global Internet.
Then there’s Saudi Arabia. A New York Times article confirms that the government has detained a Saudi blogger “for purposes of interrogation” about his writings about political prisoners. Apparently writing about political prisoners will make you one.
No surprise that China is still an active censor, the latest news being that China will restrict where Internet videos can be broadcast. Only websites that have a permit can broadcast or allow users to upload video content. “The policy will ban providers from broadcasting video that involves national secrets, hurts the reputation of China, disrupts social stability or promotes pornography,” the AP reports. Though as Forbes reports, this may only be a scare tactic threat for self-policing by sites like YouTube, because China’s government lacks the ability to filter video like it does text. China also just announced that it is cracking down on sex in all video and audio products.
What is a surprise is Australia’s ambitious net censorship proposal. According this Australian news article, the federal government would host a blacklist of sites that ISPs would be required to block. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy wants filters in place to shield children from online porn and violence.
Even in the digital age, government is “here to help” – only just may not “hear” (or read or see) anything.
Here’s your assignment: you’re a state governor who’s up for re-election, and your state is still reeling in the wake of a high-publicity suicide by a teenage girl brought upon by inflammatory statements communicated through a popular social networking website.
What do you do? Panic and quickly push through a reactive new law, (maybe even sock it to the social networking industry), or do you study the issue to come up with a sound approach? If you’re the Governor of Missouri, you create a multi-disciplinary task force to review current law and enforcement related to Internet harassment and recommend changes to better protect the citizens of your state.
Yesterday I was in Jefferson City to participate in this task force, which included representatives from the law enforcement, nonprofit, academic, mental health, and business communities. The task force met to specifically create the new crime of cyber-harassment in response to Megan Meier’s suicide almost a year ago, but still newsworthy and on the minds of many people as this New York Times article from last week shows.
Cyber-harassment can be devastating and dangerous to victims. Due to the ease of sending electronic communications, harassment that occurs online can be instant, frequent, anonymous, and permanently public. Cyber-harassers can easily impersonate their victims and even encourage third parties to unwittingly "flame" and harass a victim.
Tina Meier, Megan’s mom, opened up our task force meeting by recounting the tragic story of her daughter’s death. Megan was a 13 year old girl that had befriended what she thought was a boy on MySpace but turned out to be an adult neighbor that lived next-door.
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Do U.S. Internet companies "betray free speech"? A recent New York Times editorial believes so, and calls out Yahoo in particular for having a "gallingly backward understanding of the value of free expression." But the editorial missed the point, as my colleague Steve DelBianco spelled out in a letter-to-the-editor this past weekend:
Leading Internet companies want to do everything possible to
protect their customers, and several are working with human rights advocates to
develop ways to more effectively push back on the demands of repressive
regimes.
Despite your blithe assertion, however, these companies need
to abide by the laws of the land. These companies worry not only about
customers going to jail but also their own employees. For example, the head of
eBay India was arrested when a user posted an objectionable video to an eBay site.
The real question is as Steve asks: In a China
with no American content or online services, will the goals of free speech and
civil rights be better served? The answer should be an obvious and emphatic "No!"
We really don’t want our companies to get up and leave. Rather, we need a "playbook" of realistic
tactics online companies can use to effectively push back on government
demands for removing content or revealing user information.
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For those TLF readers living in the Washington, DC area and interested in copyright policy, there’s a symposium this upcoming Monday at GWU on the relationship between universities and copyright law. Entitled “Copyright and the University: An Academic Symposium” and sponsored by the Copyright Alliance, the cast of speakers include Marybeth Peters, Director, U.S Copyright Office, Peter Jaszi, Professor, Washington College of Law, American University, and economist Michael Einhorn, among others. Could be interesting, and it’s free.
I’d like to commend the new report from Rob Atkinson and ITIF, Boosting European Prosperity Through the Widespread Use of ICT. The report finds that information and communications technology (ICT) is essentially the vitamin D for supporting the kind of productivity growth that stimulates economic prosperity.
It prescribes 5 five healthy principles for European policymakers to promote greater ICT into their daily lives:
1. Integrate ICT into all industries instead of just focusing on replacing lower productivity industries;
2. Use tax incentives and tariff reductions to spark ICT investment;
3. Support early stage research in emerging ICT areas;
4. Encourage basic computer and Internet skills;
5. Dismantle laws and regulations that protect offline incumbents from online competitors.
However, as it is Europe we’re dealing with here, let me caution policymakers against turning these principles into industrial policy–particularly #s 2, 3 and 4.
I can envision enterprising advocates pushing–through legislation and regulation–open source and open standards as the solution for creating incentives for greater ICT uptake. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with open source/standards. I just have a problem with using politicized, and not market, forces to advantage some business models over others. I’ve discussed this before in previous postings on the European Commission’s flawed study on promoting the use of Free / Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS) in the European Union.
The cell phone industry serves as a good case study on the long-term innovative effects of prescribing a a universal technology standard.
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The outcome of yesterday’s hearing on an online dating bill
is succinctly captured by this AP news article headline: New Jersey concedes Internet dating plan,
yet pushes it anyway.
What? Legislators pass a bill through committee that they know is flawed?
Yes, if they think the sponsor will work to amend it. And The Internet Dating Safety Act (A-4304), the bill I testified against in Trenton yesterday, definitely needs to be fixed.
It’s not that anybody is against online dating safety. We just think that this bill, in its present form, will not create a safer environment for dating site users.
Here’s why. The bill has one particular serious flaw: it has the effect
(if not the intention) of promoting a flawed, unreliable, and incomplete
criminal screening method as a way to increase online dating safety.
Legislators should run away from any bill that promotes criminal screenings.
Intuitively, a criminal screening would sound like a good
idea. Who can be against more information about a potential date, especially
when it’s their criminal record? But if the information is no good, we have a
garbage-in, garbage-out situation that has the unintended consequence of
providing users of online dating sites with a false sense of security. Indeed,
criminal screenings are:
- Incomplete – criminal screenings can create false
negatives when criminal records don’t appear or may not include felony arrests
that were plead down to misdemeanors; and
- Not Inclusive – many counties don’t even report their
criminal records to a publicly accessible central database. For instance, in Illinois only 4 out of
102 counties report to a centralized database accessible to companies that
perform background screenings. Do we know what the database reporting situation
is in New Jersey?
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When and how does ICT interoperability drive innovation? This is the subject of a new paper on interoperability by the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society (the webcast of yesterday’s launch event at the Reagan Building is now available).
Co-authors Urs Gasser and John Palfrey have published a thoughtful and well-balanced study. There’s a lot to agree with, especially their essential conclusion: that interoperability is important for innovation in the IT sector and the market, not government, is the preferred mechanism for achieving interoperability.
But I also think this paper achieves something more, even if unintentionally. It helps debunk the rhetoric we’re hearing about "openness" (and there are many definitions) as the best and only way to achieve interoperability.
First of all, according to the paper, "interoperability is not an unqualified good and is not an end in itself." Furthermore, just because interoperability is not present doesn’t mean there’s a "market failure" — the authors cite DRM-protected music distribution and the growing shift toward unprotected music as a response to interoperability concerns voiced by consumers.
Importantly, the paper identifies that interoperability can be achieved by multiple means: IP licensing, APIs, standards (including "open" standards), and industry consortia.
As it affects innovation, interoperability can help some types of innovation, especially incremental innovations. But higher levels of interoperability may diminish incentives for radical innovations if the network effects of interoperable systems increase switching costs for consumers.
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The Tiffany & Co v. eBay trial began yesterday, and as this news article noted, the case is about who is responsible for the policing of counterfeit products on eBay.
It’s an important case, and implicates all e-commerce marketplaces, so it’s impact extends beyond just eBay. And its resolution may come down to whether you believe
sites like eBay are akin to a traditional retail store or more like a
facilitator between buyers and sellers, much like a flea market. Tiffany claims that eBay participates in and facilitates the
counterfeiting and trademark infringement of
its jewelry and other items in violation of the Lanham Act.
But here’s the kicker: Tiffany wants to enjoin eBay from selling any item on its site has hasn’t been made, sponsored, or approved by Tiffany. This goes too far, way beyond the policing of trademarks.
Instead, it appears that Tiffany would like to control the distribution channel, and use trademark law to do so. Retailers and distributors often hate that their products can be sold outside of their control. We’ve seen this attempt to control distribution when venues complain about the sale of event tickets on secondary market sites like StubHub, RazorGator and eBay.
eBay has an extensive program for dealing with intellectual property rights violations. Trademark owners should be vigilant when protecting their brands, not vindictive towards marketplaces that are themselves not the bad actors.
Domain name tasting was on today’s ICANN agenda at the meeting in LA. The GNSO Council, which represents commercial and noncommercial interests, considered this unsavory issue and voted to take a more thorough look at domain name tasting.
What is domain name tasting? It refers to an abusive practice in which speculators look for the best domain names where they can park ads, and take advantage of a five-day grace period between the time a new domain name is reserved and the time the registration fee must be paid.
Speculators routinely register large numbers of potentially attractive domain names and then carefully track how many accidental hits they generate. If a site fails to generate much traffic, the speculator can let the domain name lapse without paying anything. But if the site generates a lot of traffic, the speculator can use it to park ads, often from one of the large managed Web advertising networks like Google, and generate significant revenue with no effort.
WIkipedia describes the controversy:
The practice is controversial as practitioners typically register many hundreds of thousands of domain names under this practice, with these temporary registrations far exceeding the number of domain names actually licensed. In April 2006, out of 35 million registrations, only a little more than 2 million were permanent or actually purchased. By February 2007, the CEO of GoDaddy reported that of 55.1 million domain names registered, 51.5 million were canceled and refunded just before the 5 day grace period expired and only 3.6 million domain names were actually kept.
All this tasting taxes the DNS network, and increases the costs and burdens on legitimate registrants. Moreover, the ICANNWiki describes the consumer harm as follows:
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One of the largest issues to be considered here at the Los Angeles ICANN meeting is about WHOIS. As the AP reports, there are proposals to eliminate the WHOIS database, modify the information process, or call for more studies. Indeed, there’s a lot of people interested in this topic, particularly privacy advocates on the one side and trademark owners on the other.
But there’s more to this issue than privacy and IP rights. The reality is that WHOIS is important for law enforcement to track criminals that steal personal information.
What is WHOIS? It’s the publicly available database that reveals the contact information for who owns a domain name. ICANN has grappled about what to do with WHOIS for a long time, and this week we’ll see action by ICANN’s board of directors as to whether to approve a new proposal to create an operational point of contact (OPoC) or to even eliminate WHOIS, so that registrants don’t have to provide their contact information for the whole world — or the dictator in an authoritarian country — to see.
This is a controversial proposal. Registrars – the websites that you go to to register a name – would love to see OPoC because it gives them another point of revenue. They’d be the ones that could operate the systems to designate an OPoC. But there are a lot of questions raised. How does a point of contact relay information to the registrant? How quickly would it have to respond to law enforcement? Or a trademark owner?
In addition to the OPoC supporters, there are those that would like to abandon WHOIS entirely. This would be a mistake, as Saul Hansell writes in his New York Times blog:
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.