David Leonhardt of The New York Times penned an interesting essay a few days ago entitled, “Do Video Games Equal Less Crime?” reflecting upon the same FBI crime data I wrote about earlier this week, which showed rapid drops in violent crime last year (on top of years of steady declines).  Crimes of all sorts plummeted last year despite the serious economic recession we find ourselves in.  Downturns in the economy are typically followed by upticks in crime. Not so this time.  Which leads Leonhardt to wonder if perhaps exposure to violent media (especially violent video games) could have played a positive role in tempering criminal activity in some fashion:

Video games can not only provide hours of entertainment. They can also give people — especially young men, who play more than their fair share of video games and commit more than their fair share of crimes — an outlet for frustration that doesn’t involve actual violence. Video games obviously have many unfortunate side effects. They can promote obsessive, antisocial behavior and can make violent situations seem ordinary. But might video games also have an upside? I’m willing to consider the idea.

Go Back to the Greeks

What Leonhardt is suggesting here goes by the name “cathartic effect hypothesis” and debates have raged over it for centuries.  Seriously, the fight goes all the way back to the great Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. And, as with everything else, Aristotle had it right! Well, at least in my opinion he did, but I am a rabid Aristotealian.  While Plato thought the media of his day (poetry, plays & music) had a deleterious impact on culture and humanity, Aristotle took a very different view. Indeed, most historians believe it was Aristotle who first used the term katharsis when discussing the importance of Greek tragedies, which often contained violent overtones and action. He suggested that these tragedies helped the audience, “through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.” (See Part IV of Aristotle’s Poetics,) Aristotle spoke highly of tragedies that used provocative or titillating storytelling to its fullest effect:

Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will then be greater than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design. We may instance the statue of Mitys at Argos, which fell upon his murderer while he was a spectator at a festival, and killed him. Such events seem not to be due to mere chance. Plots, therefore, constructed on these principles are necessarily the best.

Of “Tragic Wonder” & Balanced Passions

Again, what Aristotle believed was important about such tales was precisely that they help give rise to a heightened sense of “tragic wonder” that helped us purge away or balance out similar passions brewing in the human psyche. [For a broader discussion of the catharsis debate from Plato and Aristotle on down to the modern “media effects” psychologists and social scientists, see Marjorie Heins’s brilliant 2001 book, Not in Front of the Children: ‘Indecency,’ Censorship and the Innocence of Youth, p. 228-253.]

One might just as easily apply this thinking to many of the most popular video games children play today, including those with violent overtones. That’s exactly what Gerald Jones does in his book Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence:

One of the functions of stories and games is to help children rehearse for what they’ll be in later life. Anthropologists and psychologists who study play, however, have shown that there are many other functions as well—one of which is to enable children to pretend to be just what they know they’ll never be. Exploring, in a safe and controlled context, what is impossible or too dangerous or forbidden to them is a crucial tool in accepting the limits of reality. Playing with rage is a valuable way to reduce its power. Being evil and destructive in imagination is a vital compensation for the wildness we all have to surrender on our way to being good people.

Judge Richard Posner used similar logic when penning the 7th Circuit’s 2001 decision in American Amusement Machine Association v. Kendrick, which struck down an Indianapolis ordinance prohibiting anyone who operated more than five arcade games on their premises from allowing an unaccompanied minor to play games that would be considered “harmful to minors.” In the Kendrick decision, Posner noted that “To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it.”

Don’t Be the Boy in the (Intellectual) Bubble

Posner’s opinion for the court was a blistering tour-de-force that included a review of violence in literature throughout history. “Self-defense, protection of others, dread of the ‘undead,’ fighting against overwhelming odds—these are all age-old themes of literature, and ones particularly appealing to the young,” he noted. “To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it,” he argued. “People are unlikely to become well-functioning, independent-minded adults and responsible citizens if they are raised in an intellectual bubble.” This is a different sort of construction of cathartic effect hypothesis. In essence, Posner is explaining how exposure to violently-themed media helps to gradually assimilate us into the realities of the world around us.

Such thinking will undoubtedly remain controversial—perhaps even outlandish—to some. But the history of art and entertainment has always been filled with its share of controversies in terms of its impact on culture and society. Indeed, one generation’s trash often becomes a subsequent generation’s treasure. Sculptures, paintings and works of literature widely condemned in one period were often praised—even consider mainstream—in the next.  As The Economist magazine editorialized in the summer of 2005: “Novels were once considered too low-brow for university literature courses, but eventually the disapproving professors retired. Waltz music and dancing were condemned in the 19^th century; all that was thought to be ‘intoxicating’ and ‘depraved’, and the music was outlawed in some places. Today it is hard to imagine what the fuss was about. And rock and roll was thought to encourage violence, promiscuity and Satanism; but today even grannies listen buy Coldplay albums.” I’ve written more about such “moral panics” here in the past.

Humans Adapt

Here is the important point: somehow we get through it. We learn to assimilate culture into our lives that previous generations feared or loathed. As the late University of North Carolina journalism professor Margaret A. Blanchard once noted: “[P]arents and grandparents who lead the efforts to cleanse today’s society seem to forget that they survived alleged attacks on their morals by different media when they were children. Each generation’s adults either lose faith in the ability of their young people to do the same or they become convinced that the dangers facing the new generation are much more substantial than the ones they faced as children.” And Thomas Hine, author of The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager, argues that: “We seem to have moved, without skipping a beat, from blaming our parents for the ills of society to blaming our children. We want them to embody virtues we only rarely practice. We want them to eschew habits we’ve never managed to break.”

If you subscribe to the cathartic effect school of thinking, however, you typically do no fear social or technological change as much because you realize that human adapt. We learn to cope with cultural or technological changes, and in many cases we are actually made better off as a species because of those changes.

Can It Be Proven One Way or the Other?

But is there any hard evidence to prove or disprove the cathartic effect hypothesis? The problem is, as I have noted here before repeatedly, we must never forget the first iron law of statistical analysis: Correlation does not necessarily equal causation. Whether we are talking about those artificial lab experiments or the real-world data sets, we cannot lose sight of the fact that just because B follows A it does not mean A caused B. That is particularly the case when it comes to human behavior, which is complex and ever-changing.

That being said, I’ve also suggested that, at some point, a consistent trend in real-world crime data must suggest that at least the opposite is not the case. Thus, when it comes to the supposed relationship between violent media and real-world violence, I have to believe that if there was anything to the thesis that a correlation exists, we would have to see it manifest itself at some point in crime statistics. But we have now experienced roughly 15 years of steady drops in all categories of criminal activity, especially juvenile violence, while at the same time witnessing a fairly steady increase in exposure to video games and violently-theme media in general.

Incidentally, Leonhardt’s New York Times article cites a recent study by Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna that appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in May 2009 entitled, “Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?” which tried to use some hard data to evaluate the cathartic effect hypothesis. Dahl and DellaVigna found that:

exposure to violent movies has three main effects on violent crime: (i) it significantly reduces violent crime in the evening on the day of exposure; (ii) by an even larger percent, it reduces violent crime during the night hours following exposure; (iii) it has no significant impact in the days and weeks following the exposure. We interpret the first finding as voluntary incapacitation: potential criminals that choose to attend the movie theater forego other activities that have higher crime rates. As simple as this finding is, it has been neglected in the literature, despite its quantitative importance. We interpret the second finding as substitution away from a night of more volatile activities, in particular, a reduction in alcohol consumption. The third finding implies that the same-day impact on crime is not offset by intertemporal substitution of crime. An important component of these interpretations is the sorting of more violent individuals into violent movie attendance. These findings appear to contradict evidence from laboratory experiments that document an increase in violent  behavior following exposure to movie violence.

Of course, it’s just one study, so I’m not ready to rest my entire case upon it (or even dozens of other studies like it).  But I do think they’re on to something.

PFF Adjunct Fellow Mike Palage, who served on the ICANN board from 2003 to 2006, filed these comments (PDF) on the NTIA’s recent Notice of Inquiry regarding ICANN’s future.  Mike’s four key points were as follows:

1. ICANN’s Periodic Review of its internal operations and supporting organizations has failed, and has become nothing more than a “perpetual motion machine of public comments and documentation producing no meaningful results.” Only a second Evolution and Reform Process can solve ICANN’s current deficiencies;
2. ICANN must hardcode into its policies and its contracts the principle that its policies cannot supersede national laws;
3. ICANN must cease any operational role in technical infrastructure as required by its bylaws and focus instead on its mission as a technical coordinator; and
4. Congress must avoid “kicking the JPA can down the road” and instead provide much-needed leadership by creating a solid foundation for ICANN 3.0 in legislation after proper consultation with the Government Accountability Office.

I’ve been working closely with PFF Adjunct Fellow & former ICANN Board member Michael D. Palage on ICANN issues.  Michael had this to say about the ongoing saga of ICANN’s attempt to create new gTLDs.

During the recent ICANN Board meeting in Mexico City, the Board authorized the creation and funding of an Implementation Recommendation Team (IRT).  This team was to be comprised of “an internationally diverse group of persons with knowledge, expertise, and experience in the fields of trademark, consumer protection, or competition law, and the interplay of trademarks and the domain name system to develop and propose solutions to the overarching issue of trademark protection in connection with the introduction of new gTLDs.” This IRT is tasked to produce a report for consideration by the ICANN community at the Sydney meeting.

The IRT consists of 24 members:

• Chairwoman Caroline G. Chicoine; and
• Seventeen members; and
• Six ex officio members:  Four IPC-elected officers and two-GNSO elected Board Directors (Bruce Tonkin and Rita Rodin Johnston).  

I have a number of friends and colleagues serving on this team and I wish them well in their important endeavor.

I’ve previously proposed a number of rights-protection mechanisms that IRT should consider.  Today, I offer a few suggestions that I hope will guide IRT as they embark on their important work tomorrow.  In particular, I hope they’ll implement some of my suggestions intended to make the IRT process more transparent-so the rest of the global Internet can follow along with their important work and provide constructive input where possible.

By Mike Palage,  PFF Adjunct Fellow & former ICANN Board  Member

TPI’s Tom Lenard and Larry White released a study yesterday entitled ICANN at a Crossroads:  A Proposal for Better Governance and Performance (PDF).  ICANN is, indeed, at a crossroads:  A number of critical Internet governance issues will be decided over the next 6-12 months-such as:

• How to roll out new gTLDs like .BLOG, which I’ve discussed here and here (PDF).
• ICANN’s future as an increasingly independent organization, which I’ve discussed here. 

There is an acute need to better educate the public and policymakers about these complex issues and about how ICANN works-something that will be addressed by my upcoming primer on ICANN.  For that reason, I welcome TPI’s contribution to this important debate about the future of the Internet.  I share TPI’s concerns about the inadequacy of mechanisms currently in place to ensure ICANN’s accountability and the absence of any checks on ICANN’s ever-expanding budget. 

But I strongly disagree with TPI’s conclusion that:

ICANN should remain a nonprofit organization, but it should be governed by and accountable to its direct users: the registries and the registrars.  The seats on ICANN’s board could be rotated among the major operators in a manner that would reflect the diversity of viewpoints among the registries and registrars.

Having worn many hats in the ICANN eco-system-as a consultant for both registries and registrars and as a business user and IP attorney-I must say that adopting this model of direct-user control would be suicidal for ICANN.  Filling the ICANN Board with registries and registrars would create at least the appearance of a cartel, allowing those opposed to ICANN’s underlying model of public/private-partnership to capture the organization.  Neither capture by private interests opposed to the “public” part of the model nor a counter-attack by those who object to the “private” part of the model would be a good thing for Internet users or ICANN stakeholders.

Having invested over 10 years of my life in ICANN’s diverse and inclusive public/private partnership model, I speak from first-hand experience that ICANN is far from perfect as an organization.  I’ve often feared that ICANN is heading in the wrong direction and I’ve never hesitated to say so. But despite these shortcomings, the various stakeholders I work with in the seemingly byzantine “ICANN process” remain as committed as ever to the principles set forth in NTIA’s 1998 White Paper as the foundations of Internet governance.  The staying-power of this shared belief in a common set of principles among all stakeholders reaffirms my faith in the public/private partnership-whatever other changes need to be made.

Lenard and White are right about one thing:  We do need a new model for ensuring ICANN’s accountability after the expiration of ICANN’s current relationship with the U.S. Government.  But the model they suggest isn’t it—as Steve Delbianco has pointed out.

Former Washington State Governor Gary Locke will likely face some grilling questions at his confirmation hearing tomorrow in the Senate. But will he face any questions about the future of the Internet?

Senators will likely grandstand over the census, the bailout, and the AIG bonuses. The future of Internet governance, however, will surely be sacrificed at the altar of politics. But as my colleague Mark Blafkin writes in his blog post,  Al Gore may have invented the Internet, but the next Secretary will have a large role in determining its future:

As part of the Joint Project Agreement (JPA), the Department of Commerce is set to sever its agreement to backstop the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) at the end of the year.  While the Department of Commerce plays no role in the day-to-day management of the Internet, it has played an important role in both holding ICANN accountable for its promises regarding private sector-leadership, and protecting ICANN from institutional capture.  We should be thinking about asking these questions:

• Before the U.S. Government gives up oversight of ICANN, how do you believe the security of the core infrastructure of the Internet can be protected? For example, should NTIA agree to ICANN’s plan to take over all security management for the Internet root zone?
• How will ICANN’s accountability be ensured in the absence of Department of Commerce oversight – especially accountability to the private sector stakeholders?
• If ICANN is fully privatized, what can be done to protect ICANN from capture by foreign governments or the United Nations, which has asserted its own right to manage “Critical Internet Resources” – not the private sector?

These questions are of interest to many in the Internet governance community, if not Commerce Committee.

ICANN has just released a second draft of its Applicant Guidebook, which would guide the creation of new generic topmore generic top-level domains (gTLDs) such as .BLOG, .NYC or .BMW. As ICANN itself declared (PDF), “New gTLDs will bring about the biggest change in the Internet since its inception nearly 40 years ago.”  PFF Adjunct Fellow Michael Palage and former ICANN Board member addressed the key problems with ICANN’s original proposal in his  paper ICANN’s “Go/ No-Go” Decision Concerning New gTLDs (PDF & embedded below), released earlier this week.

ICANN deserves credit for its detailed analysis of the many comments on the original draft which Mike summarized back in December.  ICANN also deserved credit for addressing two strong concerns of the global Internet community in response to the first draft:

• ICANN has removed its proposed 5% global domain name tax on all registry services, something Mike explains in greater detail in his “Go/No-Go” paper.
• ICANN has commissioned a badly-needed economic study on the dynamics of the domain name system “in broad.” But such a study must address how the fees ICANN collects from specific user communities relate to the actual costs of the services ICANN provides. The study should also consider why gTLDs should continue to provide such a disproportionate percentage of ICANN’s funding—currently 90%—given increasing competition between gTLDs and ccTLDs (e.g., the increasing use of .CN in China instead of .COM).

These concerns are part of a broader debate:  Will ICANN abide by its mandate to justify its fees based on recovering the costs of services associated with those fees, or will ICANN be free to continue “leveraging its monopoly over an essential facility of the Internet ( i.e., recommending additions to the Internet’s Root A Server) to charge whatever fees it wants?”  If, as Mike has discussed, ICANN walks away from its existing contractual relationship with the Department of Commerce and claims “fee simple absolute” ownership of the domain name system, who will enforce such a cost-recovery mandate?  

But ICANN simply “kicked the can down the road on the biggest concern”: how to minimize abusive domain name registrations ( e.g., cybersquatting, typosquatting, phishing, etc.) and reduce their impact on consumers. ICANN seems only to have made a vague promise to engage in additional outreach and consultation on this problem.  But Mike has proposed a number of potential solutions that are narrowly tailored to protect brand holders while respecting the fair use rights of other, including: 

• A Rebuttable Reserve Names List that would minimize the need for defensive registrations of marks that have been subject to abusive registrations by freezing registration of domain names (e.g., DELTA.AIR) that precisely correspond to those marks (e.g., Delta Airlines’ “Delta” trademark)  for the 60 days leading up to the opening of a new TLD (e.g., .AIR)—although anyone can rebut this presumption upon making a fair use showing under existing UDRP principles.
• An Expedited Domain Suspension Policy, either  as a new policy, or an amendment to the existing UDRP, that would provide a faster and more cost-effective remedy for abusive domain name registrations on an ongoing basis, but only for marks that have been registered with a national trademark authority (or the equivalent thereof).
• A Uniform Proxy Registration Policy governing the use of proxy services that substitute their own contact information for the registration’s information in the Whois database; such baseline practices and safeguards would reduce abuse that could harm legitimate users while preserving the option of proxy registration for privacy-sensitive users.

Washington Internet Daily (subscription-only) reports that:

ICANN is also rethinking its timeline for launching the gTLD application process, it said. There will be a third draft guidebook, making it unlikely applications will be accepted before December, it said. The new draft leaves provisions on four major issues – security and stability, malicious misconduct, trademark protection and demand/economic analysis of the need for new gTLDs – unchanged pending further discussion, ICANN said. Comments are due April 13. 

PFF wil continue to respond to ICANN’s call for comment to promote responsible expansion of the domain name space.  Here’s Mike’s paper (click on the rectangle-in-rectangle button at the top right to maximize the iPaper viewer):

I’ve been working closely with PFF’s new Adjunct Fellow Michael Palage on ICANN issues.  Here is his latest note , from the PFF blog.

ICANN recently proclaimed that the “Joint Project Agreement” (one of two contractual arrangements that ICANN has with the U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) governing ICANN’s operations) will come to an end in September 2009. ICANN’s insistence on this point first became clear back in October 2008 at ICANN’s Washington, D.C. public forum on Improving Institutional Confidence when Peter Dengate Thrush, Chair of ICANN’s Board declared:

the Joint Project Agreement will conclude in September 2009. This is a legal fact, the date of expiry of the agreement. It’s not that anyone’s declared it or cancelled it; it was set up to expire in September 2009.

ICANN’s recently published 2008 Annual Report stuck to this theme:

“As we approach the conclusion of the Joint Project Agreement between the United States Department of Commerce and ICANN in September 2009…” – His Excellency Dr. Tarek Kamel, Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Arab Republic of Egypt

“Concluding the JPA in September 2009 is the next logical step in transition of the DNS to private sector management.” – ICANN Staff

“This consultation’s aim was for the community to discuss possible changes to ICANN in the lead-up to the completion of the JPA in September 2009.” – ICANN Staff

ICANN’s effort to make the termination of the JPA seem inevitable is concerning on two fronts. First, ICANN fails to mention that the current JPA appears to be merely an extension/revision of the original 1998 Memorandum of Understand (MoU) with DoC, which was set to expire in September 2000. Thus, because the JPA does not appear to be a free-standing agreement, but merely a continuation of MOU-as Bret Fausset argues in his excellent analysis of the relationship between the MoU and the JPA (also discussed by Milton Mueller). Therefore, it would be more correct to talk about whether the “MoU/JPA”-meaning the entire agreement as modified by the most current JPA-will expire or be extended.

Although previous MoUs with the USG have been extended, ICANN seems to be playing a game of chicken with the USG-hinting that it will not extend the current MoU/JPA if ICANN believes that it has completed its mission. Since it seems possible that ICANN really might walk away from the MoU/JPA without global stakeholder consensus that it has fully completed its obligations under the MoU/JPA, it is critical that we think about the consequences of such a unilateral move by ICANN. ICANN would likely argue that the bilateral contracts it has in place with registry operators-from which ICANN has carefully removed most references to the USG in recent years-provide a sufficient legal basis for ICANN to continue its current operations without direct USG oversight.

Some stakeholders have expressed concern about the idea of ICANN not being directly held accountable to any government entity, but ICANN appears to have attempted to preemptively address this concern, when it acknowledged in its 2008 Annual report that “[t]he California attorney general is the legal overseer of California nonprofit public benefit corporations such as ICANN.”

With the future stability and security of the Internet hanging in the balance, a neutral third party ought to analyze the current existing relationship between the USG and ICANN- before ICANN decides in September 2009 whether to renew the MoU/JPA or walk away. The General Accounting Office (GAO) is the ideal candidate for such a task, given its well-established reputation for independent analysis and prior experience studying these matters-especially its detailed 2000 analysis of the early stages of DoC’s relationship with ICANN.

In conducting a new study, GAO ought to consider the following issues:

• Since the original 2000 GAO report on ICANN, ICANN’s annual budget has skyrocketed to more than $60 million. That budget is set to grow significantly once ICANN begins accepting applications for new gTLDs on a large scale: Using ICANN’s own projections of new gTLD applicants and the minimum fees that will be assessed suggests that ICANN’s budget will soon exceed $100 million. As ICANN’s budget grows, one must ask: Are these fees-paid by largely gTLD registrants, registrars, and registries-consistent with the GAO’s conclusion in its 2000 report that ICANN is limited to recovering only actual costs (because “ICANN is a project partner with the Department under the memorandum of understanding, and it is the Department’s policy to allow project partners to recover only actual project costs”)?

• If ICANN walked away from the MoU/JPA without the USG formally acknowledging that ICANN had successful fulfilled its obligations under the agreement, would ICANN be able to rely upon its existing contracts with registry operators to continue collecting fees?

• In its 2000 report, the GAO asked whether the DoC “had the authority to transfer control of the authoritative root server to ICANN.” The GAO did not definitively answer this question, but concluded that it was “uncertain whether transferring control would involve the transfer of government property to a private entity” thus giving rise to implications involving the Property Clause of the U.S. Constitution (Art. IV, § 3, cl. 2.), which requires statutory authority for the disposal of government property.

• GAO investigated, but did not resolve, whether or not an act of Congress would thus be required to transfer control of the root server to ICANN. But GAO did not undertake the same analysis as to whether the contractual rights associated with the top-level domains themselves constituted “government property” requiring Congressional action for any to transfer to ICANN. This may have been because U.S. courts had, at that time, held that domain names were not “property” in general, but simply a contractual right to a service provided by the registration authority. But potentially changed with the Ninth Circuit’s 2003 decision in Kremen v. Network Solutions concerning sex.com. Thus, if the GAO concludes that ICANN’s gTLD contracts with registry operators involve property rights and that statutory authority would be required for the DoC to transfer these rights to ICANN, it is difficult to see how ICANN would be able to enforce these rights if ICANN ended its relationship with the USG as a project partner by walking away from the MoU/JPA-regardless of ICANN’s success in removing references to the USG in these contracts.

These are just some of the initial questions the GAO needs to answer well before September 2009, independent of whether the USG and ICANN decide to extend the MoU/JPA. The stakes are just too high for these questions to remain unanswered.

The 3rd meeting of the United Nation’s Internet Governance Forum (IGF) met this week in Hyderabad, India. One of the concerning takeaways is the increased posturing by governments to assert greater control over  the Internet.

For the uninitiated, the IGF is an outgrowth of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), and is meant to be a multi-stakeholder “talk shop” on public policy issues related to the development and governance of the Internet. It’s the forum for governments and social policy agendas, whereas ICANN is meant to be a technical body for coordinating the Internet’s naming system.

The U.S. had advocated for a minimal role for the United Nations and IGF, while many governments want to assert more control then they possess at ICANN. A compromise was struck at the final WSIS meeting in Tunis – “Enhanced Cooperation” – in order to defer choosing between existing or new mechanisms.

As my colleague Steve DelBianco describes it, it’s sort of like the way he handled his teenage son when he nagged him about getting a new car to drive:  work on ‘Enhanced Transportation’ instead.

Steve and NetChoice work to avoid a new mechanism for Internet Governance that’s designed by, and for, governments. Instead, preferring on Enhanced Cooperation within existing mechanisms.

Yet there’s danger on the horizon. My colleague Mark Blafkin reports in this blog post that at the Hyderabad meeting, politicians were spouting populist rhetoric about returning control of the Internet to “the people.”

Everton Lucero, the Brazilian representative to ICANN’s Government Advisory Council (GAC) delivered a beautiful speech filled with inspiring rhetoric about returning Internet Governance back to the concept of “We the People” and taking the power out of the hands of the “nobles and landlords.”  Unfortunately, that is all it was: a beautiful speech that ignored reality in an attempt to grab the power to control the Internet and censor content. Brazil’s government has shown an increasing distaste for Freedom of Speech, especially on the Internet.  The government had a recent documentary exposing some of the most egregious efforts at political censorship of the press pulled from local television.

Mark also cites info that Italy’s Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is reportedly planning to use Italy’s upcoming presidency of the G8 Summit to push for an international agreement to “regulate the Internet.”

The ol’ saying that information wants to be free is under duress at the Internet Governance Forum. We’ll have to stay tuned for the meeting next year in Egypt.

The Progress & Freedom Foundation has just launched the new Center for Internet Freedom.  CIF offers an alternative to the proliferation of advocacy groups calling for government intervention online by offering timely analyses and critiques of proposals that diminish the vital role of free markets, free speech and property rights.  We aim to drive the Internet policy debate in new directions by emphasizing a layered approach of technological innovation, user education, user self-help, industry self-regulation, and the enforcement of existing laws consistent with the First Amendment.  Such an approach is a less restrictive—and generally more effective—alternative to increased regulation.  

Here are some of the issues I’ll be working on as CIF’s Director in conjunction with my esteemed colleagues Adam Thierer, Adam Marcus, and adjunct fellows: 

• Defending online advertising as the lifeblood of online content & services, especially in the “Long Tail”;
• Emphasizing market solutions to problems of privacy protection, especially regarding the use of cookies and packet inspection data;
• Protecting online speech and expression both in the U.S. and abroad;
• Defending Section 230 immunity for Internet intermediaries;
• Opposing online taxation and legal barriers to e-commerce and digital payments, especially at the state and local levels; and
• Ensuring that Internet governance remains transparent and accountable without hampering the evolution of the Internet.

Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Net, has a very thoughtful post up on the Google Public Policy Blog today asking “What’s a Reasonable Approach for Managing Broadband Networks?” He runs through a variety of theoretical approaches to network load management. There’s much there to ponder, but I just wanted to comment briefly on the very last thing he says in the piece:

Over the past few months, I have been talking with engineers at Comcast about some of these network management issues. I’ve been pleased so far with the tone and substance of these conversations, which have helped me to better understand the underlying motivation and rationale for the network management decisions facing Comcast, and the unique characteristics of cable broadband architecture. And as we said a few weeks ago, their commitment to a protocol-agnostic approach to network management is a step in the right direction.

I found this of great interest because for the last few months I have been wondering: (a) why isn’t there more of that sort of inter- and intra-industry dialogue going on, and (b) what could be done to encourage more of it? With the exception of those folks at the extreme fringe of the Net neutrality movement, most rational people involved in this debate accept the fact that there will be legitimate network management issues that industry must deal with from time to time. So, how can we get people in industry — from all quarters of it — to sit down at a negotiating table and hammer things out voluntarily before calling in the regulators to impose ham-handed, inflexible solutions? What we are talking about here is the need for a technical dispute resolution process that doesn’t involve the FCC. If the anti-Net neutrality regulation crowd (and that includes me!) wants to be taken seriously when they talk about “self-regulatory” solutions, this sort of dispute resolution process becomes essential. And the pro-Net neutrality regulation crowd needs to understand that, even if they ultimately desire some role for the FCC here, regulatory resolutions to technical disputes are notoriously slow and ultimately will always be one step behind the technical dispute du jour.

Therefore, wouldn’t it be nice if, as Cerf suggests above, those parties with a technical dispute about network management had a way of talking things through immediately and before they went to the regulatory equivalent of mutually assured destruction?

All the relevant players in the broadband / Internet sector need to put their heads together and think about how to create a forum or process that can serve as such a technical dispute resolution mechanism. On a smaller scale, Comcast and Bit Torrent did this in a voluntary, bilateral fashion when they sat down to hammer out a collaborative agreement in March. As their press announcement noted:

Comcast Corporation and BitTorrent, Inc. announced today that they will undertake a collaborative effort with one another and with the broader Internet and ISP community to more effectively address issues associated with rich media content and network capacity management. While BitTorrent and Comcast are talking directly, they are also in discussions with other parties to help facilitate a broader dialogue and cooperation across industries.

But we know that countless more technical disputes will arise in the future at every layer of the Internet — not just with Comcast and BitTorrent. Thus, if we are really going to achieve “a broader dialogue and cooperation across industries” then what we really need is the equivalent of a multilateral trade negotiating process or forum to achieve sensible resolutions to complex technical difficulties surround Internet network management.

I am not prepared to say whether a new, formal organization is needed to accomplish this or if existing institutions and individuals (academic, trade associations, etc) might be able to work together to make this happen. For example, and I am just thinking out loud here so don’t quote me on this, what if we had the Internet Society working in conjunction with several major industry trade associations and some respected academic institutions to form some sort of collaborative, dialogue-oriented dispute resolution process? Sort of GATT or WTO for technical Internet dispute resolution.

Certainly that would be preferable to a politicized FCC taking over the show and making all these technical decisions, no? I’d be interested in hearing some input from others.