The ACLU has joined forces with Ron Paul supporters in a “strange bedfellows” coalition to raise money that will be used in primary challenges against Democrats who vote in favor of the FISA capitulation. Personally, I don’t see anything strange about libertarians and liberals joining forces on civil liberties issues, but if the label helps them get more media coverage, more power to them. Another example of those “damned, so-called libertarians” getting involved in the FISA fight.
This is how political debates get lost:
While nobody is suggesting the bipartisan breakthrough on an update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is in trouble, it’s clear that many liberal Democrats will be disappointed in a measure that provides a modest level of lawsuit immunity to telecommunications firms that helped the Bush administration with warrantless wiretaps.
In fact, despite Steny Hoyer’s best efforts to obfuscate matters, it’s quite clear that telcos are virtually guaranteed to get immunity. All they have to do is get the attorney general to send the judge a letter saying that the White House had told them it was OK. Since we know the White House wants immunity for these companies, it’s a safe bet that the administration will produce the necessary “certification” and the telcos will get their get-out-of-jail-free card. There’s nothing “modest” about the level of immunity the legislation offers to telcos, and it’s disappointing to see journalists buying this plainly misleading spin.
The Hill generally does a great job of covering the Hill, but this story needed some fact-checking:
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) will be brought to the House floor on Friday, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s (D-Md.) office said.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was brought to the House floor 30 years ago. What’s being brought to the floor tomorrow is an amendment to FISA that is likely to significantly weaken the system of judicial scrutiny established in that law.
This isn’t just nitpicking. Back in February, the president and his allies did their best to create the impression that FISA itself was expiring, and that the NSA would no longer have the authority to spy on terrorists. This was nonsense. FISA isn’t set to expire ever, and on top of that the president has all the authority granted by the FISA provisions of the Patriot Act. Writing that Congress is bringing “FISA” to the floor re-enforces this misleading narrative.
On June 10 at the National Press Club, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy organized a forum on technology policy in the Presidential campaigns, featuring former FCC Chair Reed Hundt, tech advisor to Senator Barrack Obama and former FCC Chair Michael Powell, advisor to Senator John McCain. One sees in U.S. elections such a fascination with the personal qualities of the candidates that one would think that the President ran the executive branch single-handed. But, of course, he doesn’t, and the teams matter. A relatively inexerperienced candidate might make up for this by having a knack for identifying astute advisors–or find his platform hijacked by a careerist with his own agenda.
Reed Hundt opened with an attack on Sen. McCain, including such details as McCain’s vote against the e-rate, the provision of the 1996 Telecom Act that funded Internet service to schools and libraries. This sally might have given him greater leverage had the room not been filled with tech-savvy types aware of the program’s difficulties–and the failure of the computerized classroom to produce any educational miracles. Then he offered an outline of an Obama administration’s tech policy. Continue reading →
I agree with Jim that the media’s treatment of Judge Kozinski has been outrageous. While reading up on the controversy, I was interested to come across this interview with Reason magazine. Here are his very sensible thoughts on copyright:
Reason: Do you see any big threats to free speech out there today? Kozinski: There are always threats to free speech. Government doesn’t like to be criticized. Owners of copyrights and other intellectual property rights are very grabby. They think they own everything, or they think they invented everything. And the big problem is drawing the line between what’s protected by copyright and what’s in the public domain. Nobody writes anything from scratch. We all build on the past from a shared public domain of ideas. We use copyrighted ideas to communicate with each other. For instance, when you say someone has a Barbie personality, it describes something without having to go into a thousand details. But Mattel, the inventor of Barbie, hates it. People who own those trademarks and copyrights want to control the way people communicate, and they have the ear of Congress right now. Congress just extended copyright terms again [in 1998]. Reason: So have we tipped the balance too much on the side of inventors as opposed to society’s interest in accessing their ideas when it comes to intellectual property rights? Kozinski: The problem is that some people think of copyrights as an extension of property rights. And that’s OK. But maintaining a public domain makes property more valuable. A lot of things that copyright owners complain about are things that are actually good for them. Movie studios were really worried about Betamax. It seems quaint now, but they almost killed the video store business. It’s now a big source of revenue for them.
As a friend points out, he’s not a perfect libertarian by any means, taking the wrong side on the Kelo decision, for example. But he’s certainly one of the most libertarian (and pro-free-speech) judges in the federal judiciary.
The Register reports that Google is developing yet another suite of free tools for broadband users–this time aimed at allowing users to monitor traffic-management/shaping conducted by their ISP.
“We’re trying to develop tools, software tools…that allow people to detect what’s happening with their broadband connections, so they can let [ISPs] know that they’re not happy with what they’re getting – that they think certain services are being tampered with,” Google senior policy director Richard Whitt said this morning during a panel discussion at Santa Clara University, an hour south of San Francisco.
The article provides a short-but-interesting history of how Google’s views on Net Neutrality have evolved in recent years and about the debate inside the company as to whether to governmental prohibition of traffic management/prioritization by enshrining some conception of Net Neutrality in law. Today, of course, the company has become perhaps the most outspoken corporate defender of Net Neutrality principles. Google senior policy director Richard Whitt shows no sign of rethinking Google’s commitment to those principles, but suggests that the monitoring tools being developed by Google might fundamentally change the calculus of the debate:
“The forces aligned against us are real. They’ve been there for decades. Their pockets are deep. Their connections are strong with those in Washington,” he said. “Maybe we can turn this into an arms race on the application software side rather a political game.”
As Verizon’s Link Hoewing observes, these tools promise to increase dramatically the transparency of network management practices. This increased transparency will provide a clearer picture of what ISPs are actually doing, something that is largely a subject of speculation today, while helping to remove the current uncertainty that fuels sometimes wild speculation about the “death of the Internet” and other calamities in a world without Net Neutrality. Psychologically, transparency may thus remove much of the need for perceived need for Net Neutrality mandates.
But, of course, as defenders of traffic prioritization argue, there will be instances where ISPs “deviate from Net Neutrality principles” by prioritizing certain traffic to enable advanced voice and video services over more intelligent networks. (Read, for example, George Ou’s post taking issue with aspects of The Register‘s story.) Of course, some will surely point to such instances as further evidence of the perceived “need” for regulation, but the fact that these practices will be rmore readily apparent to more users than ever before will in fact provide three powerful alternative mechanisms for disciplining ISP traffic management.
Today the Politico ran an article on online retail theft, an issue that NetChoice has been working on for a while now. In the article Retail Merchants want Feds to Crack Down Online, writer Lisa Lerer does a good job of laying out the position of traditional retailers:
The stores blame online auction sites — particularly those that allow sellers to offer items anonymously — for boosting the crimes from a few stolen razor blades to enough theft to supply a burgeoning industry. They want Congress to limit the types of items that can be sold online and to require the sites to investigate their sellers.
Retailers are also going to the states. There were bills in Maryland and Colorado, among others, that would prohibit a state’s residents and businesses from selling common consumer items such as cosmetics, non-prescription drugs, food products, and baby formula on any internet auction.
Here’s the reality: when retailers blame online marketplaces for organized retail crime, they don’t want you to know about the root causes of their theft problems. The National Retail Federation conducted its own study of the problem in 2005, and found that:
Cisco continues to do interesting work estimating the impact of video on Internet traffic. With the release of two new detailed reports, updating last year’s “Exabyte Era” paper, they’ve now created a “Visual Networking Index.” These reports follow my own series of articles and reports on the topic.
Cisco’s Internet traffic growth projections for the next several years continue to be somewhat lower than mine. But since their initial report last August, they have raised their projected compound annual growth rate from 43% to 46%. Cisco thus believes world IP traffic will approach half a zettabyte (or 500 exabytes) by 2012. My own projections yield a compound annual growth rate for U.S. IP traffic of around 58% through 2015. This slightly higher growth rate would produce a U.S. Internet twice as large in 2015 compared to Cisco’s projections. Last winter George Gilder and I estimated that world IP traffic will pass the zettabyte (1,000 exabytes) level in 2012 or 2013.
For just one example of the new applications that will drive IP traffic growth, look at yesterday’s announcement by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Partnering with my friend, the young graphics pioneer Jules Urbach, AMD previewed its Cinema 2.0 project, which combines the best of cutting edge technology and thinking from video games, movies, graphics processors, and computer generated imaging — with lots of artistic insight and inspiration — to create new kinds of interactive real-life real-time 3D virtual worlds, all powered not by supercomputers but simple video cards that you find in PCs and Macs, or from servers in the “cloud.”
A photorealistic 3D robot and city scene rendered in real time. (AMD; Business Wire)
The huge increases in bandwidth and robust traffic management needed to deliver these new high-end real-time services continue to show why net neutrality regulation and other artificial limitations on traffic management are complete non-starters from a technical perspective.
As James Gattuso noted last week, the XM-Sirius merger review has now entered the realm of the theater of the absurd. It’s not just that the FCC has lapped its 180-day merger review shot clock two-and-half times already (we’re over 450 days into the proposed merger, after all), but it’s the fact that there seems to be no end to the list of conditions that some regulatory advocates or policymakers want to extort out of the firms. After all, according to the latest press reports, the FCC has already managed to extract the following “voluntary” concessions out of them: a price cap on programming for potentially 3 years; a la carte programming requirements; new interoperability standards for satellite radio receivers; capacity set asides of something like 4 percent of their spectrum capacity (apparently about 12 channels) for non-commercial educational programming; and potentially the lease of another 4 percent of capacity to minority or women-owned enterprises.
These are astonishing concessions, and one is forced to wonder if the merger was really worth it and whether the merged firm will really be able to survive the intensely competitive media landscape it finds itself in with such constraints in place. Let’s not forget, although both firms have grown their subscriber rolls, they have NEVER found a way to turn a profit! And new audio options continue to pop up seemingly every week and bombard our ears with evermore news, information and entertainment.
Alas, all those concessions appear not to be enough to satisfy some on Capitol Hill. According to today’s Washington Post:
Nick Carr tells us that Google and the Net are making us stupid. And, over at Slate, Michael Agger calls us “Lazy Bastards” for how we read online.
So, what do you think? Is the Net destroying our attention spans and turning us in to mindless, robotic sheep?
[My own take… The Net isn’t making us stupid, but it is changing the way we process information and, for better or worse, affecting our patience regarding some forms of media / writing. The death of media scarcity and the rise of information abundance was bound to have profound implications for how we read, write and communicate—in most ways for the better, but perhaps in some ways for the worse. I doubt we’ll ever have a Shakespeare arising from the world of Twitter, for example, but I believe we are better off for having technologies and media platforms like it in our lives. We just all struggling to find balance and a sensible middle ground in a world where our senses are being bombarded with an unprecedented number of choices and volume of information. But I’ll take that predicament over our miserable past existence any day of the week. Down with scarcity; up with abundance!]
Are you still reading, or have I already lost your attention?!
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
