And it works well!
Amazon.com sent me an email yesterday morning recommending that I buy my own book.
AFP is reporting that more than a hundred people with false identification documents were given employee security passes to Chicago’s O’Hare airport.
This is a good opportunity to compare conventional wisdom to actual security wisdom.
The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, ordinarily the source of quality thinking, has produced an embarrassingly bad paper called Don’t Shoot the Messenger: Telecommunications Carriers Deserve Immunity for facilitating illegal wiretapping and surveillance.
Here’s a sampling of the kind of reasoning that pegged my b.s. detector:
[I]n its legislation to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), Congress is poised to condone lawsuits against telecommunications carriers for complying with what they thought was a legal information-sharing program that was approved by the highest levels of government.
I excerpt below from an Investors Business Daily oped by Philip Stevens:
[A] powerful group of ideological nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs . . . abhor profit in medicine and are pushing the World Health Organization toward a global treaty that would completely change the way drugs are researched and developed… This Medical Research and Development Treaty, proposed by Brazil and Kenya, would have a central U.N. bureaucracy deciding what diseases to research while allocating funds, contracts and prizes accordingly. Its expert scientists would ensure that all diseases are given appropriate resources, including the handful of “unprofitable” tropical diseases in poor counties…
For those you who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) listen to our recent podcast on the Comcast kerfuffle, the Heritage Foundation has now released an edited transcript of the discussion. You can find it here.
With the shrill factor getting louder each day in this controversy, Richard Bennett and Ed Felton — as well as our TLF regulars — provide what I think is a good, fairly nuanced, discussion of the controversy.
Worth a read.
The D.C. Examiner reported yesterday that the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles plans to embed drivers’ licenses with SmarTrip chips, the RFID chips increasingly used to access the Metro system.
This is another step taken to make Metro access more convenient – oh, and more subject to surveillance.
A few days ago, Lauren Weinstein announced the formation of an organization called “Network Neutrality Squad,” an “open-membership, open-source effort, enlisting the Internet’s users to help keep the Internet’s operations fair and unhindered from unreasonable restrictions.”
This, I assume, is a part of his proposal to create an infrastructure for collecting and processing metrics associated with network neutrality, which I find to be a generally good idea. ISPs should be held to their Terms of Service and their Terms of Service should conform to customer expectations, including expectations with regard to neutrality (or non-neutrality), along with all the other dimensions of Internet access service that matter.
Needless to say, the founders of this group (at least the ones I know and what I know of them) probably favor government regulation of broadband service in the name of ‘net neutrality. An early correspondent reveals what I view to be an upside down view of the world, writing:
[B]ecause ISPs are not currently subject to common carriage rules they can pretty much do anything they want as long as they conform to their published terms of service which are usually written to allow just about anything the ISP cares to do.The solution to the problem is matching Terms of Service to consumer expectations. That’s what Terms of Service are for; they’re a contract reflecting the agreement between the company and the consumer. Common carriage regulation would be a mistake.
Consumers can and do push back against ToS they don’t like. This was done again recently when one dimension of AT&T’s ToS was found to be ridiculous. The Internet is a communications medium, and the community of users is well-equipped to name, shame, and punish violators of consumer interests and demands.
Whatever the ideology of the project, I suspect that any legitimate deviation from consumer expectations it turns up will be corrected by market processes long before regulation ever could. If the project unwittingly helps market processes conform Internet service provision to consumer demands, all the better.
Larry Lessig has a good talk about free culture. There’s nothing in there that won’t be familiar to people who’ve read Lessig’s book, but it does a good job of briefly and succinctly laying out his basic argument.
One thing that’s worth mentioning, though. Lessig’s telling of the Causby decision is a little misleading. Yes, Justice Douglas rejected Blackstone’s notion that, in general, property rights reach to the heavens. But the Causby’s still won. What Lessig doesn’t mention is that the airplanes in question weren’t just flying over the Causby’s land. Their land was adjacent to a military base and the airplanes were at extremely low altitude when they crossed the Causby’s land, creating deafening noise.
I don’t really understand why Lessig gives the misleading impression that the Causbys lost the case. Yes, it complicates the story a little bit, but I think it would be perfectly possible to tell the story accurately and still preserve his basic, entirely valid, and quite powerful point about the importance of common sense in the law.
I used Lessig’s story myself a couple of years ago. Unfortunately I didn’t do my due diligence of reading the original case and so I wound up giving the same misleading impression Lessig did. Were I writing that article today, I definitely would have framed it differently. The full story is plenty powerful; there’s no need to oversimplify it.
Must reading from George Ou of ZDNet on the Comcast kerfuffle. (He benefits from a detailed exchange with Richard Bennett, as we also did when Richard was kind enough to join us for a TLF podcast on the issue two weeks ago). George goes into great detail about what is going on here and why it’s so important that people understand a bit about technology and network engineering before rushing to impose regulation making routine traffic management illegal. Ultimately, George concludes:
BitTorrent is by far the largest consumer of bandwidth and a single BitTorrent user is capable of generating hundreds of times more network load than conventional applications. Throttling the number of BitTorrent connections or any application that has similarly aggressive characteristics is critical to keeping the network healthy with reasonable round-trip response times. That means a better gaming and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) experience since they are both highly sensitive to network latency despite the fact that they are low-bandwidth. If the Net Neutrality extremists get their way and get the Government to ban active network management, cable broadband customers will suffer and those web hog TV commercials might just come true.
Bruce Owen, one of the finest communications and media economists of our generation, has written a powerful piece for Cato’s Regulation magazine asking, “After the long fight to end the ‘common carrier,’ why are we trying to resurrect it?” He’s referring, of course, to the ongoing efforts by some to impose Net neutrality regulation on broadband networks. In his new article, “Antecedents to Net Neutrality,” Owen points out that we’ve been down this path before, and with troubling results:
[T]he architects of the concept of net neutrality have invented nothing new. They have simply resurrected the traditional but uncommonly naïve “common carrier” solution to the threats they fear. By choosing new words to describe a solution already well understood by another name, the economic interests supporting net neutrality may mislead themselves and others into repeating a policy error much more likely to harm consumers than to promote competition and innovation. Net neutrality policies could only be implemented through detailed price regulation, an approach that has generally failed, in the past, to improve consumer welfare relative to what might have been expected under an unregulated monopoly. Worse, regulatory agencies often settle into a well-established pattern of subservience to politically influential economic interests. Consumers, would-be entrants, and innovators are not likely to be among those influential groups. History thus counsels against adoption of most versions of net neutrality, at least in the absence of refractory monopoly power and strong evidence of anticompetitive behavior — extreme cases justifying dangerous, long-shot remedies.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.