Blogger’s Note: I posted this blog entry over at BroadbandCensus.com earlier in the day. It’s the first of series this week — One Web Week — in which I’m taking a step back to look at the issue of broadband data and broadband transparency from a bit of a longer time frame. And today couldn’t be a more timely day to do so, with Genachowski’s speech highlighting a new sixth principle of Network Neutrality: broadband transparency! -Drew Clark
WASHINGTON, September 21, 2009 – Broadband data is important for the future of our country – and public and transparent broadband data is even more important.
Today, at this moment, new Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski is making a speech in which he is highlighting the vital principle of public and transparent broadband data.
For three years now, this principle has been the core belief animating my efforts as a journalist, and as the entrepreneur founding BroadbandCensus.com. Now, as we enter the fourth year since this saga began, it’s time to take stock and reflect on what BroadbandCensus.com has accomplished.
And with One Web Week having arrived, I’d like to lay out this history from a personal perspective. In this series of blog posts, I’m going to speak about what we’ve been through, who we have worked with to advance the principles of public and transparent broadband data, and what we ultimately aim to achieve at BroadbandCensus.com.
- Today’s topic: The debate begins, with the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in 2006.
- Tomorrow’s topic, on One Web Day: The founding of BroadbandCensus.com in the fall of 2007.
- Wednesday topic: The Broadband Census for America Conference in September 2008, and our work with the academic community to foster public and transparent broadband data-collection efforts.
- Thursday’s topic, in advance of the U.S. Broadband Coalition’s report to the Federal Communications Commission: BroadbandCensus.com’s involvement with the National Broadband Plan in 2009.
- The concluding topic, on Friday morning: The role BroadbandCensus.com and broadband users have to play in the creation of a robust and reliable National Broadband Data Warehouse.
The Beginnings: Why I Sued Kevin Martin’s Federal Communications Commission
BroadbandCensus.com was founded in October 2007 after I spent nearly a year and a half with the Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit investigative journalism organization based here in Washington. But the quest for public and transparent broadband data goes back further.
Continue reading →
I vented my frustration earlier today with the FCC’s failure to make comments it receives easily accessible to the public—which means, more than anything, making them full-text searchable. This may seem like Inside Baseball to many, but it’s not. It’s a failure of the democratic process, a waste of taxpayer dollars, and a testimony to the general incompetence of bureaucracies, regardless of who’s running them. It denies the public an easy way to follow what goes on inside Washington, while essentially subsidizing law firms who get to bill clients for having paralegals or junior associates do things that existing web technology makes completely unnecessary—like reading through every comment in a document (at the rate of hundreds of dollars per hour) instead of just looking for keywords in a full-text search.
Later in the day the FCC announced:
- RSS feeds for all news from the agency (1 general feed + 48 issue-specific feeds);
- “FCC Connect” a page for Social Media Sites—so you can follow the FCC on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook; and
- A “crowdsourcing platform” to discuss the administration’s plan to transfer nearly $8 billion from taxpayers to broadband providers.
I’m thrilled about the RSS feeds, which go a long way in letting all Americans know what the FCC does, supposedly in the “public interest.” Still, I can’t help but note that the FCC waited until after a huge discussion about whether RSS is dead to finally start using RSS in a serious way—fully a decade after the birth of the RSS standard. Better late than never, I suppose.
FCC Connect is also good news: once you have an RSS feed, there’s really no reason not to pipe that feed into as many platforms as possible—which is precisely why RSS isn’t dead, even if most people will never use an RSS reader.
But I’m less thrilled about the crowdsourcing platform. Continue reading →
WordPress has experienced a major security vulnerability, with a worm making its way around the ‘Net, attacking earlier versions of WordPress. Fortunately, because of the hard work of the WordPress open source community, the current (2.8.4) and most recent (2.8.3) versions are immune. Yet as with any piece of program, some users haven’t upgraded. In the case of WordPress (which we use at the TLF), upgrading can be difficult for sites that rely on plug-ins that aren’t always updated quickly when a new version of WordPress is released.
While my heart goes out to my fellow WordPress bloggers who may have experienced an attack, I’m just glad that, for once, the message isn’t that somehow we need the government to protect us all from cyber-catastrophes, but, instead, a little good-old-fashioned digital self-help! From the WordPress Blog:
WordPress is a community of hundreds of people that read the code every day, audit it, update it, and care enough about keeping your blog safe that we do things like release updates weeks apart from each other even though it makes us look bad, because updating is going to keep your blog safe from the bad guys. I’m not clairvoyant and I can’t predict what schemes spammers, hackers, crackers, and tricksters will come up with with in the future to harm your blog, but I do know for certain that as long as WordPress is around we’ll do everything in our power to make sure the software is safe. We’ve already made upgrading core and plugins a one-click procedure. If we find something broken, we’ll release a fix. Please upgrade, it’s the only way we can help each other.
As with parental controls and privacy, protecting your security online begins at home. Government can help to educate and promote empowerment solutions, and industry certainly has a role to play in both, and communities like WordPress can offer invaluable support, but at the end of the day, only you can protect yourself online!
The Wall Street Journal reports today that student loan borrowing for college “in the 2008-09 academic year grew about 25% over the previous year, to $75.1 billion,” with the average student borrowing $13,172 to pay for college. So it should come as an enormous relief that one Internet start-up, StraighterLine, has essentially made the university fully virtual, offering classes for just $99/month. While this may seem like a boon for students, especially the millions of Americans for whom even community college tuition seems an insurmountable obstacle to climbing up the economic ladder, such “e-Learning” offerings are already, predictably, coming under attack by entrenched interests in “Big Ed” (the professoriat!) as the “media-software–publishing–E-learning-complex.”
In Washington Monthly, Kevin Carey explains why “The next generation of online education could be great for students—and catastrophic for universities.” In a nutshell, the story is the same basic theme of Chris Anderson’s book Free!: digital distribution of information will ultimately drive costs down to zero. Carey shows how universities are essentially facing the same sorts of pressure from disruptive innovation as newspapers—except with more capital costs:
Colleges are caught in the same kind of debt-fueled price spiral that just blew up the real estate market. They’re also in the information business in a time when technology is driving down the cost of selling information to record, destabilizing lows.
In combination, these two trends threaten to shake the foundation of the modern university, in much the same way that other seemingly impregnable institutions have been torn apart. In some ways, the upheaval will be a welcome one. Students will benefit enormously from radically lower prices—particularly people like Solvig who lack disposable income and need higher learning to compete in an ever-more treacherous economy. But these huge changes will also seriously threaten the ability of universities to provide all the things beyond teaching on which society depends: science, culture, the transmission of our civilization from one generation to the next.
Whether this transformation is a good or a bad thing is something of a moot point—it’s coming, and sooner than you think.
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We’ve discussed extensively the controversy that recently erupted when Apple rejected Google Voice applications from the iPhone App Store. With the FCC sniffing around and tech pundits around the blogosphere weighing in on the merits of possible government intervention, it’s important to remember that jailbreaking an iPhone may be illegal under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). In other words, if you use a hack or workaround that enables you to run banned apps like Google Voice on your iPhone, you could be violating federal law.
The DMCA hasn’t stopped millions of iPhone owners from jailbreaking their phones and installing Cydia, an unofficial alternative to the official iPhone App Store. Cydia, which lets users download banned iPhone apps like Google Voice, has been installed on a whopping one in ten iPhones, according to its developers.
But jailbreaking programs and applications like Cydia are in risky legal territory. Developers who circumvent the iPhone’s copy protection systems are at risk of being sued by Apple, as are users who run jailbreaking software. Apple maintains that jailbreaking software is illegal under federal law, though it has not taken legal action against any unauthorized iPhone developers to date.
To clear up the muddy legal waters surrounding iPhone jailbreaking, Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has asked the U.S. Copyright Office to grant a legal exemption to iPhone jailbreaking on the grounds that users should be able to install apps of their choice on the phone without risking civil or criminal sanctions. In a recent DeepLinks post, von Lohmann argues that the FCC should throw its weight behind EFF’s call for exempting jailbreaking from anti-circumvention rules.
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The Obama administration has been greeted with enthusiasm by scientists who see the potential for “research-based policy.” Reason, not ideology, will govern. The New Scientist, among other zines, headlines “Let Science Rule: the Rational Way to Run Societies.” (May 28, p. 40-43) This is part of a larger theme: Behavioral economics is taking off. Continue reading →
Phase three of the White House’s Open Government Initiative ends this Sunday, and with it a tripartite experiment on receiving public comment about how to make government more open.
This is of course an important and monumental milestone. Never before have we seen the intersection of technology and public input to guide a governmental process on the front-end. Sure, we’ve been able to sound-off via email to our legislators when we support or oppose a bill, or file comments on a rulemaking–but there’s never been a coordinated, proactive solicitation for general public input. That’s why the Open Government Initiative is important.
It’s certainly One of Good Intent. That the process was itself an open process is a mild achievement, given that the theme was how to make government more open. But transparency is hard to achieve even with the best intentions. It may be that by opening the floodgates to public comment, we’ve increased the quantity of input, but not the quality.
A New York Times article from earlier this week raises the notion that soliciting comments isn’t easy, or maybe even productive. From the article:
[The White House] got an earful — on legalizing marijuana, revealing U.F.O. secrets and verifying Mr. Obama’s birth certificate to prove he was really born in the United States and thus eligible to be president.
Now, it’s easy to pick out a few extreme examples, but see it for yourself–the vast majority of the comments are off-topic, and some are even offensive or just flat out bizarre. Continue reading →
I recently subscribed to the Software Freedom Law Center’s podcast, and just finished listening to episode 5, in which SFLC director Eben Moglen talks about the history of copyright and patent law. It’s a bracing talk that’s bound to be controversial with a lot of people. And in particular, it’s framed in a way that’s not at all calculated to appeal to libertarians. With what I suspect is deliberate irony, he even uses the phrase “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” to describe what free software is all about.
Nevertheless, what struck me in listening to his talk was that even though Moglen’s rhetoric seems almost calculated to alienate libertarians used to aligning themselves with the political right, it’s awfully hard for libertarians to actually object to the substance of what the SFLC and the Free Software Foundation are doing. A quarter century ago, when Richard Stallman was upset with the trend toward away from free software, he didn’t run to Congress seeking legal changes. Rather, he sat down and started building an alternative. One that we know today as the GNU/Linux operating system. He did so without a penny of government support, and without expropriating any resources from his proprietary competitors.
And in the process, he provided a powerful counterexample to many of the standard tropes of copyright and patent debates. In a world where some of the most popular websites on Earth are built on the LAMP stack, it’s awfully hard to argue with a straight face that creativity will only happen if creators are given monopoly rights in their creations. The rest of us can argue until they’re blue in the face about what a world with weaker copyright or patent protections would look like, but Stallman and company have bypassed that debate entirely by offering an existence proof of what an alternative world would look like. It’s awfully hard to argue something can’t happen when it obviously has.
Which I think is what gives Eben Moglen the credibility to deploy what I might otherwise regard as absurdly overwrought rhetoric. Most revolutionaries preach about the utopia that will exist in the future. In contrast, Moglen is talking about a utopia that’s being built as we speak. And happily for libertarians, it’s a utopia that’s being built without a shot being fired, or a tax dollar being spent.
Russ Roberts’s excellent EconTalk podcast had an especially good episode last week as he had Eric Raymond of “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” fame on his show. ESR does a great job of explaining the economics of free software. And he offers a take on the network neutrality debate that is more reflexively hostile to the telcos than I think is justified, but that nonetheless gets the big points right: network neutrality is important, but government regulation isn’t a good way to protect it. He discusses his views in more detail here.
One minor quibble I had with ESR’s presentation: he distinguished Wikipedia from free software projects by saying that software could be judged objectively (either it works or it doesn’t) while editing Wikipedia is an inherently subjective activity. He suggested that for this reason, Wikipedia doesn’t work as well as free software. I think this ignores the central role of verifiability in Wikipedia’s editing process. The truth may be a matter of opinion, but it’s usually not a matter of opinion whether reliable sources have or haven’t made some claim. And as long as most of the reliable sources agree, which they generally do, it’s possible for an impartial observer to compare a sentence in Wikipedia with the corresponding sources and see if the sentence is a fair summary of the source.
Of course, this doesn’t work in every circumstances. Some topics are so intensely controversial that there is wide divergence among reliable sources, or sharp disagreement about which aspects of a topic to focus on. There’s just no getting around the fact that the Wikipedia articles on George W. Bush or abortion are going to be the subject of perpetual edit wars for years to come. But these articles are a relatively small fraction of what Wikipedia does. There are lots and lots of topics that are not especially controversial, and in those context Wikipedia’s decentralized editing process converges on the “right” answer (as judged by comparison to reliable sources) remarkably quickly.
On the flip side, it’s worth remembering that the free software movement has had a few bitter rivalries of its own over the years. Most of the time, free software converges on a reasonable answer and people walk away happy. Sometimes they don’t. Both free software and Wikipedia work astonishingly well most of the time.
Don Marti has some choice words for Braden’s post on Scott McNealy and government open source contracting:
Let’s say that one of those Rent-to-Own stores that sells electronics under a confusing, one-sided contract got a big idea. Hey, we’re going to get a piece of the government market for LCD monitors!
Wait a minute, though. The government has a competitive bidding process for electronics, and no bureaucrat is going to commit to paying two grand for a $300 monitor. Even if you could bribe him, somebody is going to look at the books eventually.
Looks like life is tough for our fine-print-slinging rent-to-own sales weasel. But all is not lost. Next step: hire a fake-Libertarian rent-seeking lobbying operation out of Washington, D.C. Now you can re-cast the corporate welfare you want as having the freedom not to get your rightful corporate welfare, I mean property, taken away from you.
Put some Libertarian-sounding spin on the rent-to-own monitor plan, and now it’s: There’s a Regulatory Mandate to buy only Open Bid Monitors! Why can’t we have Fair Competition betwen the Open Bid model and our business model?
I don’t think the name-calling is necessary, but Don does raise some interesting points. My thoughts:
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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.
More on the FCC’s e-Government Transparency Efforts: ECFS, RSS, Social Media & Setting Priorities
by Berin Szoka on September 11, 2009 · 12 comments
I vented my frustration earlier today with the FCC’s failure to make comments it receives easily accessible to the public—which means, more than anything, making them full-text searchable. This may seem like Inside Baseball to many, but it’s not. It’s a failure of the democratic process, a waste of taxpayer dollars, and a testimony to the general incompetence of bureaucracies, regardless of who’s running them. It denies the public an easy way to follow what goes on inside Washington, while essentially subsidizing law firms who get to bill clients for having paralegals or junior associates do things that existing web technology makes completely unnecessary—like reading through every comment in a document (at the rate of hundreds of dollars per hour) instead of just looking for keywords in a full-text search.
Later in the day the FCC announced:
I’m thrilled about the RSS feeds, which go a long way in letting all Americans know what the FCC does, supposedly in the “public interest.” Still, I can’t help but note that the FCC waited until after a huge discussion about whether RSS is dead to finally start using RSS in a serious way—fully a decade after the birth of the RSS standard. Better late than never, I suppose.
FCC Connect is also good news: once you have an RSS feed, there’s really no reason not to pipe that feed into as many platforms as possible—which is precisely why RSS isn’t dead, even if most people will never use an RSS reader.
But I’m less thrilled about the crowdsourcing platform. Continue reading →