I’ve been busy posting a lot of stuff elsewhere in the last week; here are some pointers to some of what I’ve been writing at Techdirt and Cato@Liberty lately:
Tom puzzles out the Petraeus Report’s recommendation for a more active military presence in cyberspace:
I first heard this on the radio, and it seemed a little weird to me. Not because I doubt the existence of insurgent-run websites filled with flash video of roadside bombs, LOLcatted stills from A Mighty Heart and comment threads filled with “INSURGENCY FTW!!”, “ANBAR SUX0Rz” and unflattering analogizing of Sunni Islam to the Playstation 3. I’m sure those sites are out there. I can even believe that they serve a significant recruiting function for people who do genuinely bad, genuinely non-virtual things. But it was a bit odd to hear a military commander say that, in addition to the attention we’re paying to people getting shot and blown up, we also need to spend more time dicking around on the internet, presumably countering the nasty internet trouble made by our enemies. For one thing, suppressing online content does not have a particularly storied history. Given that, it seems like the intelligence value of these sites would probably outweigh the utility to be gained by shutting them down. DMCAing the Mahdi Army’s MySpace page would just shut down a marginal source of propaganda. Why bother? It’d be far better to just quietly keep an eye on their top 8 (who is this shady “CamGirl69” character, anyway?).
In a follow-up post, he answers his own question:
In response to my last post a much-better-informed little birdy sent me a transcript of a Homeland Security Committee hearing about online Islamic extremism. It was an interesting read, and I may say something else about it later. But for now, here’s the part that was most immediately striking: “In an effort to raise its visibility and recruit new members… an Iraqi insurgent group held a website design contest open to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. And what was the prize given to the winner of that contest? The opportunity to launch a rocket attack against American forces in Iraq with just the click of the mouse from the winner’s computer.” It’s inhuman and morally outrageous, yes. But man, that’s a pretty good idea for an online contest. If you could just tone down the evil you might really have something there.
If you thought this post was going to be about Microsoft, you’re wrong. Now that the Redmond firm has been smacked down by EU regulators, other companies await a similar fate. The latest target is Qualcomm, who competitors say is charging too much in royalty fees for next-generation mobile phone chips. This is a very bad sign for continuing intellectual property development as it sends a message to technologists that you don’t really get to own what you create. EU regulators apparently think they should be the ones to decide what companies can charge for their goods. This is a fine state of affairs in the short term for competitors, but it doesn’t go over well with investors or for anyone who is hoping for greater innovation in the long run.
It’s hard to believe that Slashdot is turning 10 this month. Slashdot has been a fixture of the tech blogosphere since I started reading tech news online in 1998. I just barely missed getting a 4-digit Slashdot ID, and I wasted enough time reading Slashdot during college that I was one of the approximately 400 people selected to be a moderator during the site’s first experiment with mass comment moderation.
The site is now far larger and more influential in absolute terms, but I feel like it’s grown steadily less influential in relative terms, as the rest of the tech blogosphere has grown even faster. I also think it’s aged quite well, probably because Rob Malda has been at the helm since the beginning. (You’ve got to be a pretty devoted to a website to propose to your girlfriend on it.) Probably the biggest improvement to the site was when they stopped running Jon Katz’s clueless long-winded screeds. Since he left, Slashdot seems to have realized that political commentary isn’t really their strong suit and stuck to their core competence of tech news.
I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that Slashdot was the first tech news blog, which makes this the 10-year anniversary of the tech blogosphere.
Phil Windley has a mature and thoughtful post on the iPhone (inspired by a clever CrunchGear post) that captures a lot of the issues we’ve been discussing here.
Ryan Paul at Ars wrote up Lauren Weinstein’s network measurement proposal Sunday, as I did briefly last Friday.
In his summary of the “sides” in this debate, Paul casts supporters of net neutrality regulation as concerned with “widespread quality of service (QoS) discrimination that would stifle freedom of expression on the Internet and allow the broadband duopoly to set up exploitative digital toll booths to cash in on content delivery,” linking to another Arsticle – really an advocacy piece – extolling net neutrality regulation.
On the other side? – Paul writes, “Supporters of a tiered Internet argue that” –
Wait. ‘Supporters of a tiered Internet’?
In an attempt to explain the effect of market growth on copyright policy, I earlier told a parable, promising graphs to follow. In the meantime, I’ve drafted an entire paper on the topic, Outgrowing Copyright: The Effect of Market Size on Copyright Policy [PDF].
You can find the graphs describing the parable—actually, modified version of the story I told earlier—in that paper. Rather than replicate those graphs, here, I’ll offer you the paper’s abstract:
Does copyright protection offer the best means of stimulating the production of expressive works? Perhaps, at the moment, it does. If so, however, it will probably become inefficiently over-protective as the market for expressive works grows. With such growth, copyright owners will find it increasingly easy to engage in price discrimination against customers willing to pay a premium for particular expressive works. In so narrowly divided a market, the power to bar substantially similar copies will empower copyright owners to extract monopoly rents. And, yet, we have no reason to expect that copyright’s production or distribution costs will likewise increase. Holding all else equal, therefore, growth in the market for expressive works will at some point cause copyright’s social costs to outweigh its benefits. This paper explains that effect and discusses how policymakers should respond.
The paper includes not just graphs describing the parable of the village authors, but graphs of more general import. I might share some of those in upcoming posts.
[Crossposted to Agoraphilia.]
Verizon originally rejected Naral text messages, as Tim notes below, but it quickly changed its tune when the news became public. That’s because there is competition in the marketplace and public pressure made Verizon act faster that it probably has on any other issue in the last year. This is one more example of why Net neutrality advocates should relax and focus their efforts on problems that actually exist, such as the waste and corruption in the Universal Service system.
Also, I have been meaning for a while to post PRI’s new paper on Net neutrality, so here it is.
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