Forbes.com has just published an editorial that Berin Szoka and I penned about yesterday’s net neutrality announcement from the FCC.
by Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka
There was a time, not so long ago, when the term “Internet Freedom” actually meant what it implied: a cyberspace free from over-zealous legislators and bureaucrats. For a few brief, beautiful moments in the Internet’s history (from the mid-90s to the early 2000s), a majority of Netizens and cyber-policy pundits alike all rallied around the flag of “Hands Off the Net!” From censorship efforts, encryption controls, online taxes, privacy mandates and infrastructure regulations, there was a general consensus as to how much authority government should have over cyber-life and our cyber-liberties. Simply put, there was a “presumption of liberty” in all cyber-matters.
Those days are now gone; the presumption of online liberty is giving way to a presumption of regulation. A massive assault on real Internet freedom has been gathering steam for years and has finally come to a head. Ironically, victory for those who carry the banner of “Internet Freedom” would mean nothing less than the death of that freedom.
We refer to the gradual but certain movement to have the federal government impose “neutrality” regulation for all Internet actors and activities—and in particular, to yesterday’s announcement by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski that new rules will be floated shortly. “But wait,” you say, “You’re mixing things up! All that’s being talked about right now is the application of ‘simple net neutrality,’ regulations for the infrastructure layer of the net.” You might even claim regulations are not really regulation but pro-freedom principles to keep the net “free and open.”
Such thinking is terribly short-sighted. Here is the reality: Because of the steps being taken in Washington right now, real Internet Freedom—for all Internet operators and consumers, and for economic and speech rights alike—is about to start dying a death by a thousand regulatory cuts. Policymakers and activists groups are ramping up the FCC’s regulatory machine for a massive assault on cyber-liberty. This assault rests on the supposed superiority of common carriage regulation and “public interest” mandates over not just free markets and property rights, but over general individual liberties and freedom of speech in particular. Stated differently, cyber-collectivism is back in vogue—and it’s coming very soon to a computer near you! Continue reading →
Caroline Kennedy has abruptly dropped her bid for Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat. Her father, of course, probably ties with Andrew Mellon and Ronald Reagan as one of the greatest supply-side tax-cutters of all time. The economic boom JFK unleashed probably makes up for whatever damage—personal or national—done by the Kennedy clan over the years.
But whatever one thinks of Caroline in particular or the Kennedys in general, her departure from the “race” to succeed Clinton may go down in history as a catastrophe for Internet freedom, since it likely means that NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo will take the seat.
Cuomo has cast himself as a hero fighting to protect children by strong-arming ISPs into shutting down Usenets, as Ryan has explained. Jim correctly points out the “shake down” nature of Cuomo’s operation. And Adam has explained that this is all part of a broader assault on online free speech. While few are willing to discuss this taboo subject, it’s fair to ask whether the “solutions” Cuomo are really the most effective way to deal with the scourge of child pornography.
I’ll bet good money that if Cuomo makes it into the Senate, he’ll continue this fight on a broader scale—perhaps by pushing for legislation to mandate network-level filtering
a la Cleanfeed.
Update: Gov. Paterson has decided to appoint Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand to this seat rather than Cuomo. That’s the good news. The bad news is that this bully is still Attorney General of the Empire State. I have no doubt he’ll continue his war on free speech in his current position.
As TLF readers may know, I took over in July as Chairman of the Board of the Space Frontier Foundation. As I explained in my recent interview on The Space Show, SFF has been the leading citizens’ advocacy group for space commercialization since 1988. Dedicated to promoting Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill‘s vision of space settlement, as described in his 1976 masterpiece The High Frontier, the Foundation has always argued that “space is a place, not a program.”
We sent out the following press release on October 28, calling for a major transformation of the U.S. government’s space program by which the U.S. government would buy commercial transportation to the International Space Station. We’ll have more to say about this in the coming weeks.
Space Frontier Foundation Finds Funding Source for COTS-D
The Space Frontier Foundation today called upon Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain to invest the $2 billion in new funds they have promised to NASA for reducing the “Gap” in U.S. human spaceflight (after the Space Shuttle is retired in 2010) to spur innovation and competition in America.
Foundation Chairman Berin Szoka said “It’s time that our national leaders give American entrepreneurs a shot at closing this gap. Let’s take the two billion dollars in the candidates’ plans and fund up to five winners of COTS-D.”
The NASA Authorization Act of 2008, recently signed into law by the President, directs NASA to “issue a notice of intent [by mid-April 2009] … to enter into a funded, competitively awarded Space Act Agreement with two or more commercial entities’ for transporting humans to the ISS”-the “Capability D” of NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program (or COTS-D for short). But that directive is not yet funded.
Szoka continued, “Let’s have an American competition in space – to create good jobs, fuel innovation, and close the gap more quickly. With private funds matching government’s investment, we can dramatically leverage the $2 billion to produce breakthroughs in a new American industry – commercial orbital human spaceflight.” Continue reading →
The Federal Circuit significantly limited the patentability of software and business methods today. Mike Masnick at TechDirt summarizes the holding of the case as follows:
the court has said that there’s a two-pronged test to determine whether a software of business method process patent is valid: (1) it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or (2) it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing. In other words, pure software or business method patents that are neither tied to a specific machine nor change something into a different state are not patentable.
I’m sure several of my TLF colleagues will have a great deal to say about this. Tim Lee has already written about this on Ars Technica:
The Bilski decision, then, is a clear signal that the pendulum has begun to swing back toward tighter limits on software and business patents. However, it remains to be seen how far the court will go in this direction. Bilski was a relatively easy case. The applicant made little effort to hide the fact that he was seeking to patent a mental process, something the Supreme Court has clearly said is not allowed. Therefore, the Federal Circuit’s rejection of this patent doesn’t tell us how it will rule when confronted with software or business method patents that are tied more directly to a physical machine or a transformation of matter. And indeed, the Federal Circuit reiterated that some software and business method patents are valid, so we are unlikely to return to the near-prohibition on such patents that prevailed until the early 1980s.
Thoughts?
Debates about online privacy often seem to assume relatively homogeneous privacy preferences among Internet users. But the reality is that users vary widely, with many people demonstrating that they just don’t care who sees what they do, post or say online. Attitudes vary from application to application, of course, but that’s precisely the point: While many reflexively talk about the “importance of privacy” as if a monolith of users held a single opinion, no clear consensus exists for all users, all applications and all situations.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, this picture makes the point brilliantly—showing:
locations where [Flickr] users are more likely to post their photos as “public,” which is the default setting, in green. Places where Flickr users are more likely to put privacy controls on their photos show up in red.
Of course, geography is just one dimension across which users may vary in their attitudes about privacy, but the map makes the basic point about variation very well. Seeing what users
actually do in real life says a lot more about their preferences than merely polling them about what they think they care about in the abstract—as my colleagues Solveig Singleton and Jim Harper argued brilliantly in their 2001 paper With A Grain of Salt: What Consumer Privacy Surveys Don’t Tell Us (SSRN).
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.