The brilliant Fake Steve Jobs has a great post on Google’s announcement of its new Open Handset Alliance. You should go read it right now because it’s all priceless, but I love this particular bit about openness:
Finally, has anyone else noticed the way Google is kind of desperately grasping at straws lately? They spend years trying to do something other than search and nothing works. Then, despite their big brains and IQ tests, they get totally blindsided by Facebook and have to gin up this ridiculous OpenSocial thing. Just like with this phone thing, they round up all the losers in that social networking space to form some dumbass alliance. You know how it looks? It looks weak. Companies don’t form alliances and consortia when they’re winning. Also, whenever you see companies start talking about being “open,” it means they’re getting their ass kicked. You think Google will be forming an OpenSearch alliance any time soon, to help also-rans in search get a share of the spoils? Me neither.
I love that Kevin Martin put out a press release (PDF because the FCC has apparently never heard of HTML) praising the Open Handset Alliance. So we’ll see press releases from now on each time a communications company announces vaporware?
While I’m on the subject, I wish someone would explain to the rank-and-file online Ron Paul activists how badly their behavior reflects on the campaign, and on libertarianism more generally. Ars did a story on the spambots similar to Wired’s story, and the comment section was flooded with comments by people who had registered for accounts the day before. The comments ranged from boilerplate campaign talking points to comments that make them look completely insane. For example:
I find it far more likely that this botnet spam attack is not the design of the Paul campaign or any of its supporters. It is far more likely that this is the release of a first round of direct cyber attack against the Ron Paul campaign. I base this opinion on the fact that the attack is becoming clearly targeted at the youtube videos of Ron Paul. Youtube links to his videos are beginning to be inserted into the the body of these spam message and as a direct result the video’s are being pulled by youtube for violation of their terms of use policy.
This attack method can do far more harm than good for the Ron Paul campaign so I will make a guess that this is the work of those in the NSA using cyber war tactics out of loyalty or possibly under orders to use this stealth attack method to derail the Ron Paul campaign by using the campaign’s online strength against them.
Yup, that definitely sounds like the most plausible explanation. In fact, I can’t believe I didn’t think of it myself!
This army of over-enthusiastic online supporters puts the Paul campaign in a bit of a bind. It’s not like they can put out a press release saying “Dear supporters, please stop making fools of yourselves.” And because these campaigns are spontaneously organized, it’s not clear who the campaign would contact to privately ask them to tone it down. On the other hand, if my first exposure to Paul’s candidacy was a comment-spam flood in the comment section of my favorite blog, I’m pretty sure I’d be turned off.
Even worse, it’s likely that the most obnoxious comment spammers are also the least likely to
realize that they’re among the obnoxious ones. So the Paul campaign might be able to tone down the volume of commenting, but at the cost of making the median comment even nuttier.
Since the Paul campaign probably can’t say it, I will. Maybe if I say it a few of the comment-spamming horde will find their way here. Ron Paul comment spammers, you’re making fools of yourselves and embarrassing the campaign you want so much to help. An occasional, respectful post supporting your candidate is great. A flood of angry, paranoid rants is just going to turn people off. If you want to see Ron Paul win the election, please knock it off.
Update: Sigh, you can click the comments for several examples of the point I’m making here. For Ron Paul supporters who are new to this blog: I’m a libertarian and I gave Paul $50 yesterday. So I’m not criticizing Paul or his views. Rather, my point is that you’re not going to win any converts through angry rants or indiscriminate comment spam. All you’re going to accomplish is to irritate people who might otherwise be sympathetic to your message.
I like Ron Paul and I’m happy he raised a boatload of money yesterday. I wish he didn’t attract so many crazy supporters, though. Confidential to Thomas DiLorenzo: Insinuating that Wired‘s coverage was driven by political bias only makes you look like a nutjob.
Incidentally, if the Paul campaign hasn’t specifically condemned the pro-Paul spam campaign, they should do so posthaste. I’m sure they’re telling the truth when they say they had nothing to do with it, but spamming is a sufficiently scummy activity that they should be explicitly repudiating it.
Comcast’s terms of service and other consumer broadband service documents make no mention of any restrictions on the use of “peer-to-peer” applications like BitTorrent, or of any Internet network management.
AT&T and Time Warner Cable, two of the other big broadband providers, do mention restrictions on “peer-to-peer” services in their consumer broadband documents. Verizon Communications does not mention the phrase, according to an analysis of the four broadband providers conducted by DrewClark.com.
Unlike Time Warner Cable, Comcast fails to mention any “management,” “network management” or “reasonable network management” of its consumer broadband service in its documents.
Of the four providers, however, Comcast makes the most extensive warning to consumers against the “excess” use of bandwidth. For example, Comcast declares that the consumer “shall ensure that your use of the Service does not restrict, inhibit, interfere with, or degrade any other user’s use of the Service, nor represent (in the sole judgment of Comcast) an overly large burden on the network.”
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Last week, a mob of anti-media activists gathered outside the FCC to protest what they regarded as the agency’s willingness to embrace a radical deregulatory agenda on the media ownership front. The critics fear that the whole media marketplace is being gobbled up by a handful of evil media tycoons in New York and LA. If only the critics spent some time reading the headlines in the media outlets they criticize, they’d know that the marketplace reality is quite different.
In fact, over the past few years, I have been documenting the ongoing DE-consoldation taking place in America’s media market. This series has built upon the themes and evidence I first presented in my 2005 book, Media Myths: Making Sense of the Debate over Media Ownership, in which I made the case that the media marketplace was far more dynamic than critics cared to admit.
And today we have yet another case study of DE-consolidation to report: Media tycoon Barry Diller announced yesterday that his conglomerate IAC/Interactive Corp. would be splitting into not 2, not 3, not 4, but FIVE different divisions. IAC controls more than 60 brands including Ticketmaster, Ask.com and the Home Shopping Network, but they have not been able to find a way to build “synergies” (an over-used business school term if there ever was one) together. And so Diller is separating those divisions so that they can pursue their “core competencies” (another business school term, but one that does not get enough attention).
Here’s how the NY Times summarized what is going on:
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Bill Rosenblatt reports on EFF’s and other’s support for fair use in filtering. My take: A constructive step. It remains to be seen whether an objective “fair use” standard can be developed; and then again, whether it can be technologically implemented; if not, the answer will be a combination of process for “appeals” and simple licensing mechanisms.
In particular, this is a welcome departure from the “filtering is useless” stance. Certainly, filtering can be defeated. But ultimately something posted for public consumption must be in the clear. And not everyone will encrypt, especially if they are unaware that they are infringing. By and large, it ought to be possible to get copyright filtering for entire works to work at least as well as spam filtering–that is, not perfectly, but enough to get a handle on the problem.
In today’s New York TImes, John Ashcroft jumps on the bandwagon for giving telcos blanket immunity for their participation in illegal wiretapping programs:
At the outset, it is critical to understand what the immunity provisions the administration and Congress have negotiated actually do. This is not “blanket immunity,” as it is sometimes caricatured by its opponents. The Senate bill would confer immunity in only two limited circumstances: if the carrier did not do what the plaintiffs claim; or if the carrier did do what the plaintiffs claim but based on explicit assurances from the highest levels of the government that the activities in question were authorized by the president and determined to be lawful.
Longstanding principles of law hold that an American corporation is entitled to rely on assurances of legality from officials responsible for government activities. The public officials in question might be right or wrong about the advisability or legality of what they are doing, but it is their responsibility, not the company’s, to deal with the consequences if they are wrong.
To deny immunity under these circumstances would be extraordinarily unfair to any cooperating carriers. By what principle of justice should anyone face potentially ruinous liability for cooperating with intelligence activities that are authorized by the president and whose legality has been reviewed and approved by our most senior legal officials?
A couple of points immediately spring to mind here. In the first place, if “longstanding principles of law” tell us that the telcos are “entitled to rely on assurances of legality from officials responsible for government activities,” then why is new legislation necessary? Why can’t AT&T simply invoke those principles in court and get the lawsuits dismissed without Congress having to get involved?
Second, the claim that this is not “blanket immunity” is absurd. Obviously, AT&T and Verizon aren’t going to hand over customer data the executive branch
hasn’t asked for. And the executive branch would never admit that its information requests were unlawful. So granting immunity for any requests the executive branch says are lawful means granting immunity for any conceivable information request. That’s blanket immunity; there’s nothing “limited” about it.
Third, the “principle of justice” Ashcroft is looking for here is the warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment. The fundamental principle of the Fourth Amendment is that the
judicial branch, not the executive branch, gets to decide when a search is “authorized.” No matter how many executive branch officials “review and approve” a search, the search isn’t constitutional unless it’s approved by a judge.
But actually, if I were in Congress I would be willing to call Ashcroft’s bluff. I’d support immunity legislation on the condition that the president appoint a special prosecutor that would commence a top-to-bottom review of all the wiretapping programs the White House has undertaken, and bring criminal charges against the relevant administration officials (including,
ahem, Ashcroft himself) if he finds that any of them ran afoul of the law. Of course, the White House would never consent to that. Because they don’t really believe that executive branch officials should “deal with the consequences” of the decisions they make. To the contrary, I suspect one reason the White House is pushing so hard for immunity is that it would be embarrassing if a court found participation in its programs was illegal. They don’t believe anyone should suffer consequences for breaking the law.
The New York Times reports on Attributor, a company tackling the broad re-use of copyrighted material online:
The company has developed software that identifies an electronic “fingerprint” for a particular piece of material — an article, a picture, a video. Then it hunts down any place across the Web where a significant chunk of that work has been copied, with or without permission.
When the use is unauthorized, Attributor’s software can automatically send a message to the site’s operators, demanding a link back to the original publisher’s site, a share of revenue from any ads on the page, or a halt to the copying.
No word on whether the software also calculates whether unauthorized uses it finds are nevertheless fair uses. That aside, this sort of searching technology should help placate the fears of content owners over the sort of orphan works legislation I’ve proposed.
Matt is clearly right that geek activists are lousy at political organizing, and Internet utopianism may lull some of us into a false sense of security. But I think that, if anything, Benkler’s writing demonstrates the opposite tendency: his pronouncements tend toward the apocalyptic. For example, he says:
I think there are certain well-defined threats to this model. If we end up with a proprietary communications platform, such as the one that the FCC’s spectrum and broadband policies are aiming to achieve; and on that platform we will have proprietary, closed platforms like the iPhone, then much of the promise of the networked environment will be lost.
Now, I’ve written before that I think Benkler overhypes the potential of a spectrum commons. I won’t belabor that point, but I think his comments about the iPhone are particularly interesting. It’s certainly true that advocates for open standards like Benkler (and me) have much to criticize in the iPhone. But it’s a mistake to view the iPhone as a step backwards for open networks without looking at the broader context.
In the first place, Apple’s attempts to lock down the iPhone have sparked an enormous customer backlash and that backlash may have spurred Apple to release an SDK for the phone. I would bet money that the iPhone will be a de facto open platform within five years, with a thriving community of third-party developers.
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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.