I just realized that I forgot to blog last month about the release of the Family Online Safety Institute’s (FOSI) “State of Online Safety Report 2008.” As Stephen Balkam, CEO of FOSI, notes in the preface, the report is “[an] attempt to take an international snap shot of the incredibly diverse and innovative attempts to keep kids safe online, while also respecting free expression.” It features chapters on 9 different countries, including the US, the UK, Australia, Germany, Mexico, Canada, Austria, Netherlands, and Belgium.
Each chapter was authored by an online safety expert from those countries. Stephen Balkam was kind enough to invite me to submit the chapter on the state of affairs in the United States and it is included as Chapter 1 in the report. My contribution is based largely on material pulled from my big PFF report,
Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods.
FOSI hopes to improve and expand the report in coming years to give analysts, policymakers, the press, and other interested parties an in-depth feel for the state of play in many other countries. But it already serves as a uniquely importantly resource for those who want a snapshot of online safety efforts internationally. Here’s more of what Stephen had to say in the preface of the report about the current state of global online safety efforts:
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For someone who’s portrayed as an economic reformer that understands, for example, why a 35-hour workweek is a disastrous idea, French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s newly announce plan to tax Internet connections to subsidize television is quite shocking. From the IHT:
But France, like other countries around the world, is struggling to find ways to keep cultural industries, like video and music, afloat at a time when their traditional audiences are waning.
Sarkozy, proposing “a real cultural revolution” and stressing twice that his proposal was “unprecedented,” said: “I want us to profoundly review the requirements of public television and to consider a complete elimination of advertising on public channels.”
Instead, he said, those channels “could be financed by a tax on advertising revenues of private broadcasters and an infinitesimal tax on the revenues of new means of communication like Internet access or mobile telephony.”
Do I really have to spell out how this not only props up an antiquated technology that people seem not to want, but simultaneously stifles innovation of the technology that people
do want? You know, maybe we should tax digital cameras to subsidize Kodak’s film technology.
I also disagreed with this part of Yoo’s argument:
The Internet has historically been regarded as a “pull” technology in which end users specified the exact content that they wished to see. The explosion of content on the World Wide Web has increasingly given the Internet the characteristics of a “push” technology in which end users rely on intermediaries to aggregate content into regular e-mail bulletins. Even search engine technologies have begun to exhibit forms of editorial discretion as they begin to compete on the quality of their search methodologies.
Mandating content nondiscrimination would represent an ill-advised interference with the exercise of editorial discretion that is playing an increasingly important role on the Internet. Editors perform numerous functions, including guaranteeing quality and ensuring that customers receive an appropriate mix of material. For example, consider the situation that would result if a publication such as Sports Illustrated could not exercise editorial control over its pages. One particular issue of the magazine might consist solely of articles on one sport without any coverage of other sports, and there would be no way to guarantee the quality of the writing…
The same principles apply to the Internet as it moves away from person-to-person communications to media content. This shift argues in favor of allowing telecommunications networks to exercise editorial control. Indeed, anyone con- fronting the avalanche of content available on the Internet can attest to the benefits provided by editorial filters. This transition also weakens the case for network neutrality.
I think this misfires on several levels. The first is that he’s mischaracterizing what advocates of network neutrality regulations are trying to accomplish. I don’t know of any prominent advocates of regulation who think the regulations should apply to Google’s search engine, much less Sports Illustrated’s home page.
Of course editorial discretion is important in a world of increasing information.
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I’ve missed Dan. Four years ago, as Techliberation was just getting started, Dan Rather provided us (and most of the rest of the blogosphere) with a rich source of content and amusement as he tried to pawn off forged documents regarding George Bush’s National Guard service on viewers. 
In the end, Rather ended up with omelette on his face, and soon thereafter was ushered out of his anchor seat at CBS News.
Well, he’s now back in the news, thanks to his $70 million lawsuit against CBS for dropping him. Denying that he did anything wrong, the unashamed Rather says that CBS took him off the air in an attempt to pacify the White House. Right.
CBS is arguing — among other things — that it was under no legal obligation to keep Rather on the air. CBS lawyer Jim Quinn yesterday compared the situation to the New York Jets benching their star quarterback: saying that while he might not like it, but there’s nothing he can do about it.
According to the New York Post, Rather responded by pointing out that there’s a difference between him and the Jet’s QB. “I’m in the Television Hall of Fame,” he said.
And so humble too.
Stay tuned for more — the trial judge yesterday ruled against motions to throw the case out, meaning there’s much more fun to come.
Since I’ve mentioned Ron Paul a few times in this space, I wanted to mention that after appalling examples of racist and anti-gay sentiments from his newsletters came to light, I would no longer characterize myself as a Ron Paul supporter. Before Tuesday, the only evidence of Paul’s racism I’d seen was one issue of the newsletter. I took Paul at his word that the comments in question were written without his knowledge or approval, and that the writer was let go when they were brought to his attention. But now it appears that at least a dozen issues of his newsletter over a period of some 5 years contained similarly appalling comments. I no longer find Paul’s rationalizations plausible. Whether Paul wrote the newsletters himself is irrelevant. If he is not a bigot himself, he had no qualms about associating with bigots over the course of many years. I have more thoughts on Paul’s newsletters here and here.
Hanging out with an old friend over the weekend way outside the Beltway, he was asking me about copyright, and told me that the RIAA was coming out with a theory that copying music from CD’s that one owns to an iPod was now a target. I found that hard to imagine–it didn’t sound like an issue that RIAA would find it worthwhile to pursue, and indeed they’ve argued against liability in such a case on a few occasions (once on the theory that a license to do so was implied). And, indeed, the Washington Post has now pulled the story.
That such a rumor would spread points to deeper problems with press coverage of the music industry’s problems as a whole. Advocates have created an image of aggressive copyright holders proceeding without regard to their own long run interests in their own audience. By and large, journalists have bought into this. That the music industry and consumers have a real problem to solve–the difficulty of creating new business models without enforceable boundaries to keep out free riders en masse (not every single one)–has been neglected. That it is simply not plausible that an entire economic sector has mysteriously been populated by mean, short-sighted people is likewise ignored. Alas, some of us on the free-market side have bought into this, folks who one would expect to think in terms of the big picture and the long run, not personalities. Ah well.
One of the things I disagreed with in Yoo’s paper is that he puts a lot of stock in the notion that Akamai is a violation of network neutrality. Akamai is a distributed caching network that speeds the delivery of popular content by keeping copies of it at various points around the ‘net so that there’s likely to be a cache near any given end user. Yoo says that the existence of Akamai “attests to the extent to which the Internet is already far from ‘neutral.'” I think this is either an uncharitable interpretation of the pro-regulation position or a misunderstanding of how Akamai works.
Network neutrality is about the routing of packets. A network is neutral if it faithfully transmits information from one end of the network to the other and doesn’t discriminate among packets based on their contents. Neutrality is, in other words, about the behavior of the routers that move packets around the network. It has nothing to do with the behavior of servers at the edges of the network because they don’t route anyone’s packets.
Now, Yoo thinks content delivery networks like Akamai violate network neutrality:
When a last-mile network receives a query for content stored on a content delivery network, instead of blindly directing that request to the designated URL, the content delivery network may redirect the request to a particular cache that is more closely located or less congested. In the process, it can minimize delay and congestion costs by taking into account the topological proximity of each server, the load on each server, and the relative congestion of different portions of the network. In this manner, content delivery networks can dynamically manage network traffic in a way that can minimize transmission costs, congestion costs, and latency…
The problem is that content delivery networks violate network neutrality. Not only does URL redirection violate the end-to-end argument by introducing intelligence into the core of the network; the fact that content delivery networks are commercial entities means that their benefits are available only to those entities willing to pay for their services.
I think Yoo is misreading how Akamai works because he’s takes the word “network” too literally. Content delivery networks are not “networks” in the strict sense of physical infrastructure for moving data around. The Akamai “network” is just a bunch of servers sprinkled around the Internet. They use vanilla Internet connections to communicate with each other and the rest of the Internet. Internet routers route Akamai packets exactly the same way they route any other packets.
The “intelligence at the core of the network” Yoo discusses doesn’t actually exist in routers (which
would violate network neutrality), but in Akamai’s magical DNS servers. DNS is the protocol that translates a domain name like techliberation.com to an IP address like 72.32.122.135. When you query an Akamai DNS server, it calculates which of its thousands of caching servers is likely to provide the best performance for your particular request (based on your location, the load on various servers, congestion, and other factors) and returns its IP address. Now, from the perspective of the routers that make up “the core of the network,” DNS is just another application, like the web or email. Nothing a DNS server does can violate network neutrality, just as nothing a web server does can violate network neutrality, because both operate entirely at the application layer.
So in a strict technical sense, Akamai is entirely consistent with network neutrality. It’s an ordinary Internet application that works just fine on a vanilla Internet connection. Now, it
is true that one of the way Akamai enhances performance is by placing some of its caching servers inside the networks of broadband providers. This improves performance by moving the servers closer to the end user, and it saves broadband providers money by minimizing the amount of traffic that traverses their backbones. This might be a violation of some extremely broad version of network neutrality, and there’s certainly reason to worry that an overzealous future FCC might start trying to regulate the relationship between ISPs and Akamai. But Akamai is not, as Yoo would have it, evidence that the Internet is already non-neutral.
TLF readers may be interested in reading a piece I just wrote with John Berlau, a colleague of mine at CEI, about Hillary Clinton’s stance on video game regulation. Senator Clinton has taken a very aggressive stance against video game violence, suggesting the FTC should oversee how games are rated, opening the door to further interference with the ESRB system.
We’ve quickly received feedback from one of the heavy-hitters in the anti-gaming world. None other than Jack Thompson emailed John today. Thompson, a famous anti-gaming lawyer and activist, has supported a wide variety of legislative solutions to the supposed plague of video game violence. His email to John contained no text in the body, but the subject line read as follows:
You’re wrong. Video games inspire violence. It’s a public safety hazard and a legitimate governmental concern
He attached a PDF of a Stephen Moore column for the Wall Street Journal to back up this assertion. In the piece, Moore complains that his children have turned into zombies, claiming that video games are the “new crack cocaine.” Though I love Moore and his columns for the WSJ and agree with him more often than not, this is one of those instances of not.
Video games are addictive, I’ll say that from personal experience, but I’ve been able to wean myself off a nearly debilitating addiction to
Company of Heroes–I’m now down to a reasonable 4 hours a week. But games aren’t the new crack, they’re just a new diversion that neither kids nor adults should invest too much time into. Kids don’t have the self control to keep themselves away from them, so once parents let the kids vegetate for 8 hours a day, it is a tough job for parents to refuse kids their endorphin-producing joy-machines, but government won’t do a better job.
Instead of pushing for government action, which would be a 1st Amendment violation in addition to being ineffective, Jack Thompson ought to be trying to educate parents about sensible limitations for little ones and pointing them in the direction of Adam Thierer’s
Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods.
Even before Heritage did, the Department of Homeland Security emailed me an invite to the Heritage Foundation event, Making REAL ID Real: Implementing National Standards.
Headliner Stewart Baker from the Department of Homeland Security will be joined by pro-national ID lobbyist Janice Kephart (client: Digimarc) and a guy nobody’s ever heard of named Donald Rebovich.
Must miss! I do wonder what an event like this could be for, as it is assured to be devoid of content. (Rumor has it that the REAL ID Act regulations may come out this Friday.)
How big were tech issues in the furious election campaigning that just finished in New Hampshire? Not very, reports CNET’s Anne Broache. “Voters here are famously not described as tech-savvy,” she writes. “To be precise, they are famously not described as especially concerned with topics like Net neutrality and intellectual property rights that you, our dear readers, are.”
No surprise, but Broache, with help from Declan McCullough, did some real footwork to back up that disinterest, conducting a few man-in-the-street interviews with Hampshireans.
” We weren’t disappointed”, she says. “Nor, we’re happy to report, did we get punched in the face for bothering those gritty, flinty, and hardy residents with questions about Net neutrality. What we did learn is that Granite State voters are not exactly preoccupied with political skirmishes over rewriting patent law, increasing H-1B visas, and, of course, the throughly pressing concern of broadband regulation”.
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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.