America’s Internet Transformation Demands an All-IP Future

by on October 31, 2012 · 0 comments

If the FCC stops moving forward on Internet transformation, the universal service and intercarrier compensation reform order will become a death warrant for telephone companies.

CLIP hosted an event earlier this month to discuss Internet transformation. What is Internet transformation? In a recent op-ed, FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai noted that it “is really two different things—a technology revolution and a regulatory transition.”

The technology revolution began with the commercialization of the Internet, which enables the delivery of any communications service over any network capable of handling Internet Protocol (IP). According to the National Broadband Plan, the “Internet is transforming the landscape of America more rapidly and more pervasively than earlier infrastructure networks.” In little more than a decade, the Internet destroyed the monopoly structure of the old communications industry from within and replaced it with intermodal competition. Continue reading →

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Book Review: Christopher Yoo’s “The Dynamic Internet”

by on October 2, 2012 · 0 comments

Looking for a concise overview of how Internet architecture has evolved and a principled discussion of the public policies that should govern the Net going forward? Then look no further than Christopher Yoo‘s new book, The Dynamic Internet: How Technology, Users, and Businesses are Transforming the Network. It’s a quick read (just 140 pages) and is worth picking up.  Yoo is a Professor of Law, Communication, and Computer & Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania and also serves as the Director of the Center for Technology, Innovation & Competition there. For those who monitor ongoing developments in cyberlaw and digital economics, Yoo is a well-known and prolific intellectual who has established himself as one of the giants of this rapidly growing policy arena.

Yoo makes two straight-forward arguments in his new book. First, the Internet is changing. In Part 1 of the book, Yoo offers a layman-friendly overview of the changing dynamics of Internet architecture and engineering. He documents the evolving nature of Internet standards, traffic management and congestion policies, spam and security control efforts, and peering and pricing policies. He also discusses the rise of peer-to-peer applications, the growth of mobile broadband, the emergence of the app store economy, and what the explosion of online video consumption means for ongoing bandwidth management efforts. Those are the supply-side issues. Yoo also outlines the implications of changes in the demand-side of the equation, such as changing user demographics and rapidly evolving demands from consumers. He notes that these new demand-side realities of Internet usage are resulting in changes to network management and engineering, further reinforcing changes already underway on the supply-side.

Yoo’s second point in the book flows logically from the first: as the Internet continues to evolve in such a highly dynamic fashion, public policy must as well. Yoo is particularly worried about calls to lock in standards, protocols, and policies from what he regards as a bygone era of Internet engineering, architecture, and policy. “The dramatic shift in Internet usage suggests that its founding architectural principles form the mid-1990s may no longer be appropriate today,” he argues. (p. 4) “[T]he optimal network architecture is unlikely to be static. Instead, it is likely to be dynamic over time, changing with the shifts in end-user demands,” he says. (p. 7) Thus, “the static, one-size-fits-all approach that dominates the current debate misses the mark.” (p. 7) Continue reading →

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The Problem with the “Declaration of Internet Freedom” & the “Digital Bill of Rights”

by on July 2, 2012 · 12 comments

We live in an entitlement era, when rights are seemingly invented out of whole-cloth. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that a bit of “rights inflation” is creeping into debates about Internet policy. Today, for example, a coalition of groups and individuals (many of which typically advocate greater government activism), have floated a “Declaration of Internet Freedom.”  My concern with their brief manifesto is that is seems to based on a confused interpretation of the word “freedom,” which many of the groups behind the effort take to mean freedom for the government to reorder the affairs of cyberspace to achieve values they hold dear.

The manifesto begins with the assertion that “We stand for a free and open Internet,” and then says “We support transparent and participatory processes for making Internet policy and the establishment of five basic principles:”

  1. Expression: Don’t censor the Internet.
  2. Access: Promote universal access to fast and affordable networks.
  3. Openness: Keep the Internet an open network where everyone is free to connect, communicate, write, read, watch, speak, listen, learn, create and innovate.
  4. Innovation: Protect the freedom to innovate and create without permission. Don’t block new technologies, and don’t punish innovators for their users actions.
  5. Privacy: Protect privacy and defend everyone’s ability to control how their data and devices are used.

This effort follows close on the heels of a proposal from Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) to craft a “Digital Bill of Rights” that, not to be outdone, includes ten principles. They are: Continue reading →

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Four Ways the Internet Changed Poker

by on June 29, 2012 · 1 comment

Delaware looks ready to become the second state after Nevada to authorize Internet poker as a gambling bill was approved this week by the state senate 14-6 with one senator abstaining.

In the wake of the Department of Justice’s Dec. 23, 2011 memo that for all intents and purposes said there were no federal statutes prohibiting intrastate online wagering on anything save sports, several states. Including Iowa, New Jersey and California, have started moving on legislation that would permit Internet poker, other casino games, and online purchasing of lottery tickets for residents and visitors inside their borders.

Poker players across the country would welcome the chance to play online once more. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) of 2006 did not make Internet poker illegal outright, but by prohibiting U.S. banks from conducting transactions with off-shore gaming sites, made it extremely difficult for U.S. players to open or maintain accounts with legitimate sites such as Bovada, Bodog and PartyPoker.

With legislation moving along, most gaming industry analysts see Internet poker becoming a reality in at least one or two states by the end of this year.

While the topic of online gambling is still controversial, poker is just one more place where the Internet has had an impact. Before the World Wide Web, you either had to live in Nevada or New Jersey (even in states that had casino gambling, not every casino had a card room) to play regularly. For most who did play, poker was a friendly diversion within a family or social circle.

In broadening poker’s appeal, the Internet also changed the nature of the game. These changes fully manifested themselves when Chris Moneymaker won the main event of World Series of Poker (WSOP) in 2003. Moneymaker was the first world champion to have qualified for the tournament at on line site. The WSOP was the first major live tournament he played. The bulk of his experience and expertise was acquired through online play.

In honor of developments in Delaware and elsewhere, and keeping in mind that the main event of the 2012 World Series of Poker begins July 7, and because it’s Friday afternoon, let’s look at four ways the Internet has changed poker significantly from the game your parents knew. For our purposes here, we will keep things in the context of Texas Hold ‘Em, today’s most popular poker game.

Continue reading →

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The Internet’s philosopher-king

by on March 15, 2012 · 0 comments

tumblr_m04g8byWGw1qdu5t4o1_500The cover story of this week’s *The New Republic* is [a review by Evgeny Morozov](http://www.tnr.com/print/article/books-and-arts/magazine/100978/form-fortune-steve-jobs-philosopher) of Walter Isaacson’s [biography of Steve Jobs](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1451648537/jerrybritocom/ref=nosim/). In 10,000 words it is more illuminating about what made Steve Jobs tick than Isaacson’s 656 pages of warmed-over anecdotes and Wikipedia glosses. Morozov gets it right when he draws the connection between Bauhaus and Apple–functionalism and simplicity über alles. But he doesn’t seem to like where this takes Apple or Jobs.

He calls Jobs’s adherence to the Bauhaus ideal “a kind of industrial Platonism” in which products have a true form or essence that must be discovered and revealed by a designer. What consumers *think* they want is irrelevant; they will know what they want when it is presented to them. That’s true as far as it goes, but Morozov is the real Platonist here.

Morozov’s ultimate indictment of Apple is that it refuses to consider the externalities its technologies impose on “society.” One may love one’s Apple products and how they have improved one’s life, but, Morozov says,

>We need to identify the other moral instructions that may be embedded in a technology, which it promotes directly or indirectly. And this fuller analysis requires going beyond studying the immediate impact on the user and engaging with the broader–let us call it the “ecological”–impact of a device. (“Ecological” here has no environmental connotations; it simply indicates that a technology may affect not only its producer and its user, but also the values and the habits of the community in which they live.)

What is this negative externality Apple’s technology is inflicting on the value and habits of our communities? It’s that apps will kill the open Internet, except not for the reasons we think. Morozov cites and dismisses Jonathan Zittrain’s [“generativity” critique](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0300124872/jerrybritocom/ref=nosim/) saying that Zittrain is concerned only with the threat to innovation. Morozov, on the other hand, is concerned with loftier “ethical and aesthetic considerations.” Namely, that Apple’s app paradigm “may be destroying the Internet in much the same way that the automobile destroyed the sidewalks and the playgrounds.”

>The point is not that we should forever cling to the shape and the format of the Internet as it exists today. It is that we should (to borrow Apple’s favorite phrase) “think different” and pay attention to the aesthetic and civic externalities of the app economy. Our choice is between erecting a virtual Portland or sleepwalking into a virtual Dallas. But Apple under Steve Jobs consistently refused to recognize that there is something valuable to the Web that it may be destroying.

After reading [a competing cover story about Portland](http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/insufferable-portland_631919.html?nopager=1) in another newsweekly, I’m not sure the choice is as clear as Morozov thinks it is. But the message is clear: like Portland’s planners do about a “livable city,” Morozov has a vision of what is the Internet’s pure form, and it’s not one left to messy markets.

Morozov quotes a *Newsweek* interview with Jobs just a few years after the Web was invented. Jobs sees it as “the ultimate direct-to-customer distribution channel.” He essentially predicts that you’ll be able to buy books online and that the bookstore will know what you like.

>That the Web did become a shopping mall fifteen years after Jobs made his remark does not mean that he got the Web right. It means only that a powerful technology company that wants to change the Web as it pleases can currently do so with little or no resistance from anyone. If one day Apple decides to remove a built-in browser from the iPad, as the Web becomes less necessary in an apped world, it will not be because things took on a life of their own, but because Apple refused to investigate what other possible directions—or forms of life—“things” might have taken. For Jobs, with his pre-political mind, there was no other way to think about the Internet than to rely on the tired binary poles of supply and demand.

The notion that Apple turned the web into what it is today singlehandedly is laughable. Apple was moribund until 2000, didn’t introduce the iTunes Store until 2003, and has never had a strong presence on the web. The web has become what it is today because the convenience of getting any book you want, whenever you want it, and cheaply [beats little bookstores stocked by proprietor’s whims](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/12/independent_bookstores_vs_amazon_buying_books_online_is_better_for_authors_better_for_the_economy_and_better_for_you_.single.html), however aesthetically pleasing they may be–which they’re often not. And for the record, I hope we can all agree the web is more than a shopping mall.

More to the point, though, Jobs was not as much a Pied Piper as we’d like to think he was. Depite all his marketing moxie, he was constrained by the market. If Jobs ever thought there was a true essence of a computer, it was the Power Mac G4 Cube. As Isaacson says, “it was the pure expression of Jobs’s aesthetic.” And it was a flop. “Jobs later admitted that he had overdesigned and overpriced the Cube, just as he had the NeXT computer.” Remember the NeXT cube? How about the iPod Hi-Fi? The buttonless iPod shuffle? Ping? Those tired poles of supply and demand told Jobs “no” time after time, but we might just as easily dismiss gravity or entropy as tired.

If Apple were to remove the browser from the iPad today, there would be, shall we say, less demand for the tablet. If at some future date there is no more demand for a web browser, and Apple removes it to little fanfare, then what is the harm?

I guess it is some Platonic Internet that we’d lose. A *pure* internet that we don’t know we want. One that only philosopher-kings can see. One they will discuss at “Berlin-based think tanks” and in the pages of “quarterly magazines,” as Morozov praises Google for sponsoring. And it’s an Internet the philosopher-kings would plan for us the same way Neil Goldschmidt and his friends planned Portland.

No thanks. I prefer a Steve Jobs, pursuing a functionalist ideal with little care for the consequences, yet checked by those tired poles and the “perennial gale of creative destruction” that will someday catch up with Apple.

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Let’s Craft the Perfect Internet Policy… No, Wait, It’s Already Been Done!

by on February 15, 2012 · 4 comments

Friends of Internet freedom, I need your assistance. I think we need to develop a principled, pro-liberty blueprint for Internet policy going forward. Can you help me draw up five solid principles to guide that effort?

No, wait, don’t worry about it… it has has already been done!

As I noted in my latest weekly Forbes column, “Fifteen years ago, the Clinton Administration proposed a paradigm for how cyberspace should be governed that remains the most succinct articulation of a pro-liberty, market-oriented vision for cyberspace ever penned. It recommended that we rely on civil society, contractual negotiations, voluntary agreements, and ongoing marketplace experiments to solve information age problems. In essence, they were recommending a high-tech Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm (to the Internet).”

That was the vision articulated by President Clinton’s chief policy counsel Ira Magaziner, who was in charge of crafting the administration’s Framework for Global Electronic Commerce in July 1997.  I was blown away by the document then and continue to genuflect before it today. Let’s recall the five principles at the heart of this beautiful Framework: Continue reading →

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The Internet, Politics, Lobbying & the “Big Spend”

by on January 24, 2012 · 4 comments

In the wake of last week’s big SOPA showdown, a lot of people are talking about the expanded presence and power of the Internet, online operators, and digital Netizens in Washington policy debates. I certainly don’t mean to diminish the importance of this particular episode. It certainly is historic, regardless of how you feel about the specifics of SOPA. What does concern me, however, is the way this episode is prompting questions about how much more “engagement” Internet companies need to consider inside the Beltway. For example, today’s Wall Street Journal features an article on “The Web’s Growing Muscle” and notes:

The Internet industry has found a rare sweet spot in Washington. With Google in the lead, the companies have begun building a strong traditional lobbying force in Washington. And, to complement that inside game, websites’ millions of users have become a powerful outside weight on Congress. What’s more, in a rare Washington double play, the concerns of Internet companies have found a sympathetic ear both in the Democratic White House and among Republican presidential candidates who otherwise can’t agree with Barack Obama on anything.

The piece concludes with a quote from an anonymous media executive saying “People are looking at what Google spent on lobbying and wondering, ‘Can we match that?’ It has to be a big spend.”

I cannot possibly think of anything more demoralizing than that. Continue reading →

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Vint Cerf on Why Internet Access Is Not a Human Right (+ A Few More Reasons)

by on January 5, 2012 · 22 comments

In an provocative oped in today’s New York Times, Vint Cerf, one of the pioneers of the Net who now holds the position “chief Internet evangelist” at Google, makes the argument for why “Internet Access Is Not a Human Right.” He argues:

technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things. For example, at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse. Today, if I were granted a right to have a horse, I’m not sure where I would put it.

The best way to characterize human rights is to identify the outcomes that we are trying to ensure. These include critical freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom of access to information — and those are not necessarily bound to any particular technology at any particular time. Indeed, even the United Nations report, which was widely hailed as declaring Internet access a human right, acknowledged that the Internet was valuable as a means to an end, not as an end in itself.

You won’t be surprised to hear that I generally agree. But there are two other issues Cerf fails to address. First, who or what pays the bill for classifying the Internet or broadband as a birthright entitlement?  Second, what are the potential downsides for competition and innovation from such a move? Continue reading →

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What Explains the Decline in Internet Safety Legislation / Online Content Regulation?

by on November 8, 2011 · 2 comments

This week I will again be attending the Family Online Safety Institute’s excellent annual summit. The 2-day affair brings together some of the world’s leading experts on online safety and privacy issues. It’s a great chance to learn about major developments in the field. As I was preparing for the session I am moderating on Thursday, I thought back to the first FOSI annual conference, which took place back in 2007. What is remarkable about that period compared to now is that there was a flurry of legislative and regulatory activity related to online child safety then that we simply do not see today.

In fact, just 3 1/2 years ago, John Morris of the Center for Democracy and Technology and I compile a legislative index [summary here] that cataloged the more than 30 legislative proposals that had been introduced in the the 110th session of Congress. There was also a great deal of interest in these issues within the regulatory community. Finally, countless state and local measures related to online safety and speech issues had been floated. Today, by contrast, it is hard for me to find any legislative measures focused on online safety regulation at the federal level, and I don’t see much activity at the agency level either. I haven’t surveyed state and local activity, but it seems like it has also died down.

Generally speaking, I think this is a good development since I am opposed to most proposals to regulate online speech, expression, or conduct. But let’s ignore the particular wisdom of such measures and ask a simple question: What explains the decline in Internet safety legislation and online content regulation? I believe there are three possible explanations: Continue reading →

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On the Hyphenation & Capitalization of Various Internet Terms

by on August 10, 2011 · 15 comments

I’m no grammar Nazi. In fact, I’m closer to being a grammar anarchist. I’ve been fighting teachers and editors for years about split infinitives (they rock!), contractions (fine in small doses), and run-on sentence (OK, they are probably right about that one, but I just can’t control myself).  Nonetheless, it makes sense to have some basic ground rules for grammar and good writing. Sometimes, however, those rules just can’t be found.

I raise this issue because I’m finishing up my next book and I find myself struggling with the proper hyphenation and capitalization of various Internet terms. After much consultation with the Mercatus Center’s grammar czar Jennifer Zambone, I think I have finally grown comfortable with two rules I have long ignored (or just been horribly schizophrenic about using consistently) in my past writing. They are: Continue reading →

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