Brrrrrr! It was cold at the opening reception of the PFF Aspen Summit.
But there was sushi!
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We’re installing a new commenting system on the blog, so you’ll find that all old comments will be gone for a little while. Don’t worry; they’ll be back shortly. We’ll have more info on the new system soon.
This morning’s Drudge Report features the stories everyone is talking about today, with reports on U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps winning another couple of gold medals, the latest on the Russia-Georgia war, and — of course — FCC commissioner Robert McDowell on threat of the Fairness Doctrine and net neutrality regulation.
Well, maybe the first two stories are getting a bit more attention, but McDowell’s remarks — made at The Heritage Foundation yesterday after a blogger’s briefing — is getting a surprising amount of coverage in the blogsphere and trade press.
The remarks were originally reported in a story on the Business and Media Institute website, in response to a question about prospects for a Fairness Doctrine revival. McDowell responded that it the issue hadn’t been raised at the FCC, but went on to state that there is a danger of similar rules put into place under a different name. A spot-on analysis, as we’ve argued many times before. (see video here.)
He then went on to say that the Fairness Doctrine “will be intertwined with the net neutrality debate” (net neutrality was the primary focus of his remarks at the Heritage briefing). Referring to concerns of regulation supporters — including what he called “a few isolated conservatives” that large corporations will censor their content, he said the “bigger concern should be if you have government dictating content policy.”
Most of the coverage of McDowell’s remarks interpreted McDowell as saying that the Fairness Doctrine itself might be extended to blogs (i.e, the Drudge headline: “Return of ‘Fairness Doctrine’ Could Control Web Content…”). Such a direct extension of the old broadcast-only fairness rules is unlikely though. Instead, McDowell I think was raising the danger that net neutrality regulation could be the source of such web content controls.
I’m always interested in stories about the unintended consequences of government regulation, but this story from Valleywag (Via a comment from Richard Bennett) doesn’t make a lot of sense:
The prospect of pay-by-the-bit bandwidth had immediate consequences for BitTorrent’s two main businesses: an online-media store delivered via file sharing, and a content-delivery network which competed with the likes of Akamai and Limelight Networks.
For users who would have to pay bandwidth fees to their ISPs on top of paying the usual charges, BitTorrent’s Torrent Entertainment Network store would soon look uncompetitive with the likes of Apple’s iTunes Store and Microsoft’s Xbox Marketplace — which prompted Best Buy to back out of talks to acquire TEN for $15 million.
As for BitTorrent’s content-delivery network, it was premised on the notion that BitTorrent would negotiate with ISPs to get privileged delivery for their file-sharing packets, while Comcast blocked others. With the FCC forcing Comcast to treat all file-sharing traffic equally, the promise of that business evaporated.
The obvious problem with this is that Apple, Microsoft, Akamai, et al haven’t negotiated privileged bandwidth agreements with ISPs either. If users have to pay their ISPs extra to download a 10 gig HD movie from BitTorrent, they’re going to have to do the same to download HD movies from iTunes or the XBox store. BitTorrent’s big advantage is that they face dramatically lower bandwidth costs on the other side of the pipe, because their users share files with each other rather than everyone getting bandwidth from the server. If bandwidth caps and metering doom BitTorrent, then they doom iTunes and the XBox store too. Somehow, I don’t think we’re about to see the end of video download services.
It’s over. The FCC, which voted to approve the merger between satellite radio firms XM and Sirius two weeks ago, finally released its formal report on the case on Tuesday, ending the drama 505 days after the firms submitted their application to the Commission.
The episode was not the FCC’s finest hour. The agencies once-vaunted “shot clock” — by which the FCC pledged to decide on mergers within 180 was left in shreds, with the counter going around almost three times before the circus finally ended. Even at that, XM and Sirius managed to claw their way to approval only by making an (ever-longer) series of “voluntary” commitments: including offering “a la carte” programming, capping prices for 36 months, making 8% of its capacity available to others to non-commercial and other entities, and extending service to Puerto Rico. Even more was being considered when the music stopped, including a proposal to require all satellite radio receivers to have built-in HD broadcast tuners as well. (Apparently, there was concern that broadcasters would be frozen out of the audio market, in which they hold a market share of about 96 percent).
This regulatory free-for-all contrasts with the approach taken by the Department of Justice, which — after a fact-specific inquiry, approved the merger – without conditions – five months ago. Continue reading →
MIT’s Technology Review has some great pieces on social networking in its latest issue. In particular, I enjoyed reading Erica Naone’s piece “Who Owns Your Friends?” Immediately this piece appealed to a libeartarian like me who is interested in privacy issues, especially because it framed the issues as one of ownership, not one of privacy rights.
The story begins by recounting the story of blogger Robert Scoble who wanted the emails of all of his Facebook friends in his Outlook address book. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t provide an export tool for this sort of thing in order to protect the emails of its users. Being a resourceful guy, Scoble contacted some buddies at Plaxo, a company that specializes in transferring data from one site to another. Plaxo provided Scoble with experimental tool that allowed him to extract email addresses from the profile pages of his Facebook friends. Unfortunately for Scoble, this data scrape triggered alerts at Facebook, shutting down his account.
Scoble later had his account reinstated, but this incident brought up an important question: Should data always be portable, or should some sites, like Facebook, be able to clamp down on portability in the name of privacy?
Early one morning, the Civil War crashed into my bedroom. A loud popping noise crackled just outside our window . . . I went to the window and saw men in gray uniforms firing muskets on the road in front of our house.
These men in grey uniforms weren’t soldiers, not even actors playing soldiers—these men were reenactors. They had found their way into the front yard of writer Tony Horwitz, inspiring him to write the bestselling Confederates in Attic.
For a new generation of civil war buffs there’s a way to reenact without the smell of bacon grease, gunpowder, and coffee grounds hanging in the air. Buffs old and young have many things in common—namely, abundant free time and obsessive attention to detail—but the younger breed prefers keyboards to Colt revolvers.
Sid Meier’s Gettysburg, released in 1997, marked a significant step toward satisfying generation X reenactors, but it still didn’t quite scratch the itch. More recent releases, like the History Channel’s cleverly named History Channel: Civil War was decried by gamers as boring while buffs were annoyed at its inaccuracy.
Because of all of this, a new community was born—or at least a sub-community.
Since the early days of video games, hobbyists have modified commercial video games—creating their own specialized versions with unique attributes and themes. “Modding,” as it’s often called, naturally appeals to the meticulous nature of the reenactor. Obsessions with detail and historical accuracy can now be expressed not only in recreating clothing and weaponry, but entire battlefield landscapes.
Electronic Arts’ Battlefield 1942 has been reworked to produce Battlefield 1861. Microsoft’s Rise of Nations as well as its Age of Empires series have also been re-worked to produce incredibly detailed Civil War games. Some of these efforts are the result of one lonely man’s hobby, but more often they are the result of a team of a dozen or more developers coordinating their efforts using online forums and email lists.
This kind of community of obsessive hobbyists is part of the reason why I don’t believe the PC gaming industry is anywhere near its death. There is such a huge amount of dark data out there—data that exists, but that hasn’t been aggregated into a useful form just yet. Much of the PC gaming community is non-commercial, unmeasured, but likely terrifically huge.
Continue reading →
I regret to report the end of William F. Patry’s Copyright Blog. Patry, author of a superb multi-volume treatise on copyright law and Google’s Senior Copyright Counsel, not only offered a feast of news and commentary for copyright geeks; he offered it up in style. Consider this, among the many sound reasons he cites for ending his blog:
Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.
In short, Patry found blogging about copyright simply too depressing to keep up. I certainly understand that feeling, though I find righteous indignation a fair remedy for weary sadness. At any rate, I thank Patry for his long and selfless blogging, wish him happier diversions, and look forward to the day when we can discuss copyright’s reformation with smiling pride.
[Crossposted at Agoraphilia and Technology Liberation Front.]
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 →