It’s time again to look back at the major cyberlaw and information tech policy books of the year. I’ve decided to drop the top 10 list approach I’ve used in past years (see 2008, 2009, 2010) and just use a more thematic listing of major titles released in 2011.  This thematic approach gets me out of hot water since I have found that people take numeric lists very seriously, especially when they are the author of one of the books and their title isn’t #1 on the list! Nonetheless, at the end, I will name what I regard as the most important Net policy book of the year.

I hope I’ve included all the major titles released during the year, but I ask readers to please let me know what I have missed that belongs on this list. I want this to be a useful resource to future scholars and students in the field. [Reminder: Here’s my compilation of major Internet policy books from the past decade.] Where relevant, I’ve added links to my reviews as well as discussions with the authors that Jerry Brito conducted as part of his “Surprisingly Free” podcast series. Finally, as always, I apologize to international readers for the somewhat U.S.-centric focus of this list.

Internet Freedom / General Net Regulation & Governance

Online freedom was a major theme in the field of information technology policy in 2011, especially with the continuing hullabaloo over Wikileaks as well as the various protest movements worldwide that tapped social media and mobile technologies to organize and protest. Increased government regulation and/or crackdowns often followed. Several books dealt with these issues. Morozov’s Net Delusion was one big wet blanket to the whole “Net-changes-everything” movement, but it went much too far as I noted in my lengthy review. Sifry’s book was a short manifesto making the opposite case.  Access Contested — the third edition in a series from the same authors — was another indispensable resource for Net researchers exploring censorship trends worldwide, with a particular focus on Asian countries in this latest edition. Finally, the Szoka & Marcus tome was an amazing collection of over 30 essays from a diverse group of scholars on a staggering array of topics. It was a great honor for me to contribute two chapters to the volume. I cannot recommend it highly enough—and it’s free!

• Evgeny Morozov – The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom [my review] [podcast]
• Micah Sifry – WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency [podcast]
• Ronald J. Deibert, John G. Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski and Jonathan Zittrain – Access Contested: Security, Identity, and Resistance in Asian Cyberspace
• Eddan Katz & Ramesh Subramanian (Eds.) –The Global Flow of Information: Legal, Social, and Cultural Perspectives
• Berin Szoka & Adam Marcus (eds.) – The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet
• Becky Hogge – Barefoot into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia
• Laura DeNardis – Opening Standards: The Global Politics of Interoperability
• Chris Marsden – Internet Co-Regulation: European Law, Regulatory Governance and Legitimacy in Cyberspace
• Philip Howard – The Digital Origins of Dictatorships and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam
• Virginia Eubanks  – Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age

Privacy, Security & Safety

Privacy policy and government surveillance issues have been the dominant cyberlaw policy issues of 2011, so it is unsurprising that we are starting to see more major publications in this arena. Jarvis’s book, in particular, generated intense debate and certainly represented one of the most important titles of the year. The Offensive Internet was a hugely important collection of essays since it represented the most forceful attack on the Net and freedom of speech to date. It was practically a jihad against Section 230 and online anonymity. I found it hugely troubling. The two primers on privacy listed below (by Solove & Schwartz and by Craig & Ludloff) were terrifically helpful, accessible booklets. I highly recommend students pick both of them up.

• Saul Levmore and Martha C. Nussbaum (eds.) – The Offensive Internet: Speech, Privacy & Reputation
• Jeff Jarvis – Public Parts [my review]
• Daniel Solove – Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff between Privacy and Security [podcast]
• Susan Landau – Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies
• Daniel Solove & Paul M. Schwartz – Privacy Law Fundamentals
• Terence Craig and Mary Ludloff  – Privacy & Big Data
• Frederick Lane – Cybertraps for the Young

Net Pessimism / Google-phobia / Copyright

Sorry for the extremely broad grouping here, but what ties these last few titles together is a general gloominess about the Internet and what it is doing to culture, learning, dialog, or particular ways of doing business. It’s a common theme in Net policy book these days, as I have noted here before.  I found the Pariser and Vaidhyanathan books to be extremely problematic [read my reviews]. Levine’s Free Ride and Patry’s How to Fix Copyright were the major online copyright policy books this year. Levine’s book offered an outstanding history of the modern copyright wars, but I couldn’t agree with most of his recommendations. Cleland’s book was less notable for its Google-bashing than the fact it represented the beginning of an articulation of a philosophy of cyber-conservatism. Brockman’s compendium of short essays on the Net’s impact on us was a real hodge-podge of views, not all of which were pessimistic.

• Eli Pariser – The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You [my review]
• Siva Vaidhyanathan – The Googlization of Everything, and Why We Should Worry [my review] [podcast]
• John Brockman (ed.) –  Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? The Net’s Impact on Our Minds and Future
• Sherry Turkle – Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
• Scott Cleland – Search & Destroy: Why You Can’t Trust Google Inc.  [my review]
• Robert Levine – Free Ride: How the Internet is Destroying the Culture Business and How the Culture Business can Fight Back
• William Patry – How to Fix Copyright

Net Policy Book of the Year

So, what was the most important info-tech policy book of 2011? I’d say it was Evgeny Morozov’s Net Delusion. As I noted in previous end-of-year compendiums, I regard an “important” info-tech policy book as a title that many people are currently discussing and that we will likely be debating and referencing for many years to come.  In other words, it’s a book that creates a sustained buzz.  Net Delusion has certainly accomplished that in major way and Morozov’s relentless policy writing and Twitter ramblings kept him near the center of many Net policy debates in 2011.

That doesn’t mean I agree with everything in the book, or Evgeny’s style, for that matter. His Tweetstream, like many portions of his book, often drips with relentless, caustic snark-casm. I enjoy that in small doses — hell, I’ve used it myself on occasion here and on Twitter! — but it gets tiresome when dished out endlessly and with the volume turned up to 11. More generally, as I noted above, not only do I think he ultimately fails to prove his thesis but the book is riddled with contradictions regarding the proper disposition of governments and corporations toward the Net and online freedom. Morozov is great at tearing down the grandiose, cyber-utopian visions and visionaries, but he’s far less effective at suggesting a coherent alternative vision.

Nonetheless, the importance of Morozov’s work cannot be denied. He’s opened a new front in the intellectual battle over the role of the Net in various political movements and causes. He aims to spearhead what we might think of as the “realist” movement that counters the more “idealist” (he would say “utopian”) approach, which already has many adherents in global Net policy debates. Morozov has opened the door to more skeptical thinking in this regard. Many others are now likely to follow in his footsteps, and when they do, they will all cite back to The Net Delusion. Likewise, the idealists will now be forced to respond to Morozov in any future tracts. Thus, we’ll be discussing and debating the themes in The Net Delusion for many years to come. That’s why it is the most important Net policy book of 2011.

Tech policy polemicist Scott Cleland has hit home with today’s “FreePress’ Faux Urgency on Net Neutrality.”

FreePress’ problem is that people have wised up to their repeated hysterical calls to “Save the Internet” from a problem that has never materialized as they recklessly warned. FreePress has failed miserably in finding or defining any real-world problem that needs radical intervention to fix.

Cleland is meaner to the folks at Free Press than I would be, but he’s right to note that the problems net neutrality regulation might fix haven’t materialized over a long period of, yes, faux urgency.

I sometimes enjoy picking nits with or lampooning our friend Scott Cleland, but today write to point out what an excellent job he did of advocating against net neutrality regulation last week on the NewsHour.

The set-up piece is interesting because of its government-centric take. Net neutrality, it says, is “a set of principles adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in 2005 that limits the ability of Internet providers to treat sites differently.”

The better view, I think, is that neutrality is one of “a set of technical principles that have been implicit in [the Internet’s] design since it began life.” Hey, NewsHour, giving the FCC credit for the neutral engineering of the Internet is like giving the rooster credit for the sunrise.

There’s a telling omission in the NewsHour’s telling of the Comcast Kerfuffle. See if you catch it:

The case began with actions by Comcast in 2007 to interfere with an online service called BitTorrent, a file-swapping site that allows consumers to swap movies and other material over the Internet, files that use a great deal of bandwidth. The FCC then told Comcast it could not block subscribers from using BitTorrent under the commission’s net neutrality rules.

Left out: Comcast had ceased interfering with BitTorrent before the FCC acted due to a variety of market pressures.

But take a look at the piece and Scott’s good advocacy in the discussion that follows the set-up:

Gigi Sohn, who I personally respect and who I agree with on many issues, reaches a bit far when she argues that Comcast degraded BitTorrent because it was a file-sharing site “unpopular with some folks in Congress and some folks elsewhere.” Collapsing net neutrality regulation and intellectual property issues may be good for Public Knowledge’s base, but it confuses many issues and weakens Public Knowledge’s arguments and support.

I think the record is pretty clear that Comcast degraded BitTorrent because of a conflict between the BitTorrent protocol and the DOCSIS protocol running on Comcast’s cable plant. (I know I can rely on comments to correct me or bring nuance to this claim.)

Neutrality was not a gift from government, and I don’t think making a mandate of a good engineering principle will improve the functioning of the Internet or the Internet ecosystem.

Ever since he’s been blogging, Scott Cleland’s blogging has been in overdrive. However, anyone willing to look behind the curtain of his latest post will discover that many of the attributes of Scott Cleland are attributes that are shared by the Zodiac Killer.

• First, Scott Cleland, like the Zodiac Killer, has a face. Eyes, nose, mouth—they’re all there. They are alike in this respect—Scott Cleland and the Zodiac Killer are both, unrepentantly, people with faces.
• Second, Scott Cleland, like the Zodiac Killer, speaks English. We know this from his blog posts—which are written in English—the same language the Zodiac killer used during his murderous spree in the San Francisco Bay Area between December 1968 and October 1969.
• Third, delving more deeply into the language of the Zodiac Killer and Scott Cleland, both use articles like “the”; “a”; and “an”. An equal propensity to use prepositions inhabits the writing styles of Scott Cleland and the Zodiac Killer.
• Fourth, like the top suspect in the Zodiac Killer case, DNA evidence does not implicate Scott Cleland. Diabolically, he has done nothing to indicate his participation in these crimes.

(Dropping the imitative send-up) Scott’s recent post implicating Google as similar to China is probably best described as conflation, a logical fallacy in which similarities between two distinct entities collapse them together.

Scott has many similarities to the Zodiac Killer, but lacks the one that matters: he never killed anybody.

Likewise, Google has many similarities with the Chinese government—all organizations do—but it lacks the one that matters: Google makes no claim to exclusive power to initiate force. That is the hallmark of government which is what makes government so dangerous. Related: Unlike China, Google never killed anybody.

In the struggle between Google and China, there is no moral equivalency. China oppresses a billion people. Google enlightens.

Google today unveiled the Data Liberation Front, a team of engineers in Chicago dedicated to ensuring that Google build “liberated products”—ones that have “built in features that make it easy (and free) to remove your data from the product in the event that you’d like to take it elsewhere.” We’ve spent a lot of time here warning about the dangers of Googlephobia, but now that Google has brazenly appropriated the TLF’s unique mock-Communist iconography, we’re starting to think that Jeff Chester and Scott Cleland may be right: Maybe Google really is trying to take over the world!

So we regret to announce our filing of a lawsuit in the Twelfth Circuit Court of Appeals to challenge Google’s infringement of our mark. We demand 50% of the $0.00 Google earns every time they “allow” users to port their application data out of Google to a competitor’s services! We will, of course, dedicate these royalties to the important project of educating and empowering users about how they can determine their own destiny online.

But seriously… We heartily agree with our Data Liberation Front comrades that users should be fully empowered to switch from one service to another online. This kind of competition is clearly the best protection for consumers in the Digital Age. Making switching easy should assuage not just antitrust concerns, but also concerns about how much privacy or security each web service offers to its users, no matter how big its market share: If you don’t like what a service offers, just take your data and leave! Who needs the government micro-managing the Internet when users have that kind of control?

Viva la (Technology) Revolution!

P.S. In case you haven’t seen it the Monty Python video we’re all riffing on:

http://www.youtube.com/v/gb_qHP7VaZE

by Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer

This morning, the House Energy & Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on “Behavioral Advertising: Industry Practices And Consumers’ Expectations.” If nothing else, it promises to be quite entertaining:  With full-time Google bashers Jeff Chester and Scott Cleland on the agenda, the likelihood that top Google officials will be burned in effigy appears high!

Chester, self-appointed spokesman for what one might call the People for the Ethical Treatment of Data (PETD) movement, is sure to rant and rave about the impending techno-apocalypse that will, like all his other Chicken-Little scenarios, befall us all if online advertisers were permitted to better tailor ads to consumers’ liking. After all, can you imagine the nightmare of less annoying ads that might actually convey more useful information to consumers? Isn’t serving up “untargeted” dumb banner ads for Viagra to young women and Victoria’s Secret ads to Catholic school kids the pinnacle of modern online advertising?  Gods forbid we actually make advertising more relevant and interest-based!  (Those Catholic school boys may appreciate the lingerie ads, but few will likely buy bras.)

Anyway, according to National Journal’s Tech Daily Dose, the hearing lineup also includes:

• Charles Curran, Executive Director, Network Advertising Initiative
• Christopher Kelly, Chief Privacy Officer, Facebook
• Edward Felten, Director, Center for IT Policy, Princeton University
• Anne Toth, Chief Privacy Officer & Vice President, Policy, Yahoo!
• Nicole Wong, Deputy General Counsel, Google

That’s an interesting group and we’re sure that they will say interesting things about the issue. Nonetheless, because four of them have a corporate affiliation that fact will inevitably be used by some critics to dismiss what they have to say about the sensibility of more targeted or interest-based forms of online advertising. So, we’d like to offer a few thoughts and pose a few questions to make sure that Committee members understand why, regardless of what it means for any particular online operator, targeting online advertising is very pro-consumer and essential to the future of online content, culture, and competition.  As Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg has noted, “Advertising is the mother’s milk of all the mass media.”  Much of the “free speech” we all cherish isn’t really free, but ad-supported!

Our Approach

We have previously set forth a framework for analyzing advertising policy issues in two PFF reports: “Online Advertising & User Privacy: Principles to Guide the Debate” and “Targeted Online Advertising: What’s the Harm & Where Are We Heading?” At root, our model depends heavily on two common-sense, and inter-related, principles:

1. We live in a world of trade-offs; and
2. There is no free lunch.

Their Approach

We are deeply concerned that too few people are talking about—or even understand the relevance of—those two principles in the debate over targeted online advertising. It seems that too many who wish to retard the further evolution of the advertising marketplace are living a lie based upon the antithesis of our model. Many privacy advocates seem to imagine that regulatory actions don’t have consequences and that Congress can simply mandate new privacy standards for the Internet without having any impact on the free flow of ideas supported by, and direct facilitated through, advertising.

Simply put, the privacy critics often imagine that their values are indicative of everyone’s values. Our blogging colleague Jim Harper of the Cato Institute has referred to this as “preference imposition” but we’ll use a simpler term: Elitism. In essence, privacy advocates seem to believe that:

1. People are too ignorant, busy or just plain stupid, and cannot be trusted to make wise decisions for themselves (or their children); and/or
2. Everyone shares the same values or concerns when it comes to privacy such that a national “baseline” regulatory standard (namely, mandatory “opt-in” regulations for data collection and use) should govern the entire online marketplace.

Let’s be clear: Such a mandate, and the thinking behind it, would greatly impoverish the future Internet economy. Too many people think of the Internet as a magic box that just keeps cranking out free goodies. But something powers that box of goodies: advertising.  More than anything else, it’s advertising that keeps the Internet “Free, Innovative & Open,” to borrow the slogan of our friends at CDT, which seems to flirt with joining the PETD movement, despite their well-earned reputation for pragmatic skepticism of government interference with the Internet.

The regulatory advocates complain that giving consumers the right to opt-out of data collection and use isn’t meaningful because very few consumers will exercise the opt-out.  Again, they presume that this must be because users just don’t know what’s good for them because of course if they really understood what was being done with “their data,” they would never choose to just “give it away” for a few scraps from the advertisers’ table.  It never occurs to them that (i) many, perhaps most, users just don’t care and that (ii) that their “ignorance” about the all specific details of “how the sausage is made” (online data collection and use practices for targeting advertising) may be completely rational.

But just as importantly, would-be privacy regulatory don’t seem to understand—or perhaps simply don’t care—that what’s true of opt-out is also true of opt-in:  in practice, few people will bother doing either.  In a world of perfect information and infinite time, of course, there would be no difference in outcomes with the two different rules.  But in the real world with real constraints on time, knowledge and everything else, mandating opt-in would make all the difference in the world by severely limiting the ability of advertisers to target advertising.

The Ignored Trade-offs

We’ve been assembling evidence on the real-world costs of restricting targeted advertising. Here are just a few data points we’ve seen to give you a sense of what’s at stake:

• Relevance to Users: The best evidence that users prefer seeing more relevant ads is their increased likeliness to actually click on an ad—instead of just ignoring it or trying to block it. The most recent study of this issue concluded that Click-Through Rates (CTR) can be improved by as much as 670% by using basic behavioral targeting as compared to simple contextual targeting—0r even more than 1000% using more sophisticated targeting. Conversion rates (the percentage of clicks that actually result in a sale) also strongly indicate that consumers find ads more interesting, and in one 2005 study, were estimated to increase up to 3000% with behavioral targeting.
• Macro: More Revenue to Fund All Services & Content: eMarketer (in June 2008) estimated that U.S. spending on behavioral targeting would grow from $.775 billion in 2008 to $4.4 billion in 2012—representing fully a quarter of display ad spending.  The total amount of money at stake is huge:  U.S. online ad revenues totaled $23.5 billion in 2008.
• Micro: More Revenue for Individual Publishers: Estimates on the increased profitability of behavioral targeting range as high as 1200% (eMarketer).

While these examples illustrate the broad outlines of the trade-offs ignored by privacy regulatory advocates, the key dilemma to understand is this: If, under an opt-in regime, publishers would be able to target advertising for webpages based on the keywords contained within those pages, and not on other content the user has looked at, the value of most Internet content will depend not on how many eyeballs it attracts but primarily on the economic value of the keywords that are directly associated with it. Pages with keywords related to products and services will fetch a fine price because advertisers will be able to make money off ads on those pages ( e.g., a site for digital camera reviews). But content with little commercial value will generate little revenue. Indeed, this is perhaps the single greatest problem faced by journalism sites. Who wants to advertise on a story about North Korea? How many users are going to be interested in taking a honeymoon in the DMZ?

But if such websites could target advertising to users’ user’s likely interests based on an anonymous profile of their interests created by collecting data about their browsing “behavior,” web content becomes valuable because of the audience it attracts, not just because the content itself serves as a rough proxy for a user’s interests. This democratization of Internet advertising revenue is essential for sustaining the future of journalism in particular, but also for “free” culture more generally.

As we noted in our response to the FTC’s proposed self-regulatory guidelines on data collection for advertising:

Depending on how regulation is structured, therefore, it is possible that new privacy mandates would severely curtail the overall quantity of content and services offered—and greatly limit the ability of new providers to enter the market with innovative offerings. Alternatively, or perhaps additionally, companies would change the character of their offerings and water-down sophisticated services that cater to consumer demand; in other words, the quality of service would deteriorate. Bottom line: Something must give because there is no free lunch. Regulation is a giant game of economic whack-a-mole: Attempting to control one of the primary variables of price, quantity, or quality inevitably results in non-optimal adjustments in the other two variables. The absence of price as a variable in this context means there is one less variable for the government to control in the first place. Simply stated, stifling the evolution of the online advertising marketplace will likely result in fewer free online services and less content, less high-quality online services and content, or some combination of both… We stand at an important crossroads in the debate over the online marketplace and the future of a “free and open” Internet. Many of those who celebrate that goal focus on concepts like “net neutrality” at the distribution layer, but what really keeps the Internet so “free and open” is the economic engine of online advertising at the applications and content layers. If misguided government regulation chokes off the Internet’s growth or evolution, we would be killing the goose that laid the golden eggs…. These observations are even more relevant to the online marketplace, where advertising has been shown to be the only business model with any real staying power. Walled gardens, pay-per-view, micropayments, and subscription-based business models are all languishing. Consequently, the overall health of the Internet economy and the aggregate amount of information and speech that can be supported online are fundamentally tied up with the question of whether we allow the online advertising marketplace to evolve in an efficient, dynamic fashion. Heavy-handed privacy regulation (or co-regulation) could, therefore, become the equivalent of a disastrous industrial policy for the Internet that chokes off the resources needed to fuel e-commerce and online free speech going forward.

Our Challenge to the Advocates of Privacy Regulation

For these reasons, we have repeatedly issued the following three-part challenge in our previous work to those who advocate the regulation of online advertising:

1. Identify the harm or market failure that requires government intervention.
2. Prove that there is no less restrictive alternative to regulation.
3. Explain how the benefits of regulation outweigh its costs.

We’re still waiting…

We’ve also made it clear that there is an alternative to the pre-emptive, one-size-fits-all regulation demanded by the regulatory advocates:  We’ve proposed a “layered approach” based on user education, user empowerment, self-regulation and FTC enforcement of privacy policies.  Our goal is as follows:

The ideal state of affairs would be to create a system of tools and data disclosure practices that would empower each user to implement their personal privacy preferences while also recognizing the freedom of those who rely on advertising revenues to “condition the use of their products and services on disclosure of information”—not to mention the viewing of ads! Self-regulatory efforts can be refined, especially through technological innovation to better satisfy the concerns of policymakers, privacy advocates, and average consumers. For example, if websites and ad networks participating in a self-regulatory framework supplemented their current “natural language” privacy policies with equivalent “machine-readable” code [ e.g., P3p], that data could be “read” by browser tools that would implement pre-specified user preferences by blocking the collection of information depending on whether the privacy policies of certain websites or ad networks met the user’s preferences about data-use. Such robust and granular disclosure, if implemented for behavioral advertising, would exceed the wildest dreams of those who argue that users currently do not read privacy policies—without disrupting the browsing experience or cluttering websites. But this system would only work if users had to make real choices about “pay*ing+ for ‘free’ content and services by disclosing their personal information.”

A Final Word About Advertising

On some level, this debate isn’t about user privacy at all, but about the alleged evils of advertising as inherently manipulative.  Jeff Chester straddles both camps.  His rantings about the use of “neuromarketing” boil down to the same simple idea that the Neo-Marxists have been pushing for decades:  Since people are stupid, ignorant and/or lazy (see above), they’re easy to control and trick with shiny objects, pretty faces, memorable slogans, and catchy jingles. No better response to this argument has ever been made than was offered in this 1959 magazine ad by the ad firm Young & Rubicam (emphasis added for Chester’s benefit):

There is no chestnut more overworked than the critical whinny: “Advertising sells people things they don’t need.” We, as one agency, plead guilty. Advertising does sell people things they don’t need. Things like television sets, automobiles, catsup, mattresses, cosmetics, ranges, refrigerators, and so on and on. People don’t really need these things. People don’t really need art, music, literature, newspapers, historians. wheels, calendars, philosophy, or, for that matter, critics of advertising, either. All people really need is a cave, a piece of meat and, possibly, a fire. The complex thing we call civilization is made up of luxuries. An eminent philosopher of our time has written that great art is superior to lesser art in the degree that it is “life-enhancing.” Perhaps something of the same thing can be claimed for the products that are sold through advertising. They enhance life, to whatever degree they can.

Scott Cleland is nothing if not interesting. And I was interested by a post he has up this morning: The Growing Privacy-Publicacy Fault-line – The Tension Underneath World Data Privacy Day.

Today is World Data Privacy Day. You can tell by the demonstrations and fireworks displays in capitals around the world. (ahem)

I’ll be speaking at a Dialogue on Diversity Internet privacy briefing on Capitol Hill this afternoon, in case you’re interested and have time.

But Scott’s point – privacy is in tension with the “publicacy” ethos of the Web 2.0 world – I think it’s a very interesting point.

My differences with him are two.

The first is semantic: I think the word he should use is “publicity.” It has the benefit of already being a word – and it’s capable of being pronounced as well!

The second, and more important, is where the ethos comes from: It’s a demand of people – not the Web 2.0 set, but all people.

Privacy and publicity are two sides of the same personal-information coin. People want some information to be kept private – we know that. But they have at least equal or greater demands to make information public – to give it publicity. This is why restaurants and bars are open, curtainless rooms. It’s why email, blogs, Flickr, Facebook and other social networking sites are popular.

The reason why privacy is sought-after and its twin “publicity” is ignored, is because publicity is the default. The laws of physics mean that information about you is automatically displayed when you walk on the street. Photons of light bounce off your body and convey personal information to the photo-receptors (or “eyes”) of people around you.

The ‘physical’ laws of the Internet are similar. You have to ‘publicize’ your IP address to have any contact with another on the Internet. You have to publicize lots of identity, biographical, and other personal information to have any meaningful contact with others on the Internet.

But imagine a world where privacy was the default and information did not naturally travel to others. People would demand publicity. Poeple would demand to be seen and remembered, to have details about their lives recounted by others.

Publicity is not an incursion on social norms being perpetrated by Google and other Web 2.0 types. Web 2.0ish things are a response to the broad implicit demand for publicity. Oh, it’s implicit to the point of contradictory: People say they want privacy even as their actions betray their longing for publicity.

The trick is for people to figure out how to give themselves publicity in the things they want known, and to maintain privacy in the things they don’t. That’s a problem that will most likely be solved by the passage of a few generations, when the technologies that are new today are familiar, and when people have reset their personal information practices and their expectations.

Precursor LLC released a study that claims to have calculated Google’s total bandwidth use declaring “Google uses 21 times more bandwidth than it pays for.”

The study is an attempt to foil Google’s pursuit of Net Neutrality as a federal policy by claiming that Google is already a kind of free-rider and its policy goals will only allow it to mooch more.

The study estimates the total bandwidth “used” by Google in a circuitous way.  It calculates the bandwidth Google-originating data uses while traveling around the web, adds that to bandwidth used by search bots sending data back to Google, then assigns a dollar value to that bandwidth, and then compares that to an estimate of Google’s total outlays for bandwidth (a number which had to estimated as Google does not disclose this number).

The result: Google doesn’t pay for all the bandwidth used by data flowing in and out of its servers.

But this is true for any site on the web!

Bandwidth is paid for by two sides of each transaction, so of course Google can’t pay for all the bandwidth it uses.  Google pays for all sorts of connections to its many data centers to get their data out there, but consumers also pay to receive that traffic.  In between Google and consumers lies the vast network of networks known as “the Internet” and as data changes hands bandwidth charges are levied and re-levied.

Saying that Google doesn’t pay for all of the bandwidth it uses is like saying that Best Buy doesn’t pay for all the gas it takes to get electronics to consumer homes.  After all, people have to drive to the store to buy them. But no one claims Best Buy is exploiting the American highway system.  This kind of claim would be nonsense.

In any complex, multi-layed distribution system costs will be spread across multiple parties.  Elaborate accounting of how much one business benefits from this sort of thing proves very little.

It’s also important to remember the other free-riders involved in this equation, namely the end users.  How much have you paid Google to search the net?  Zero.

Or, perhaps the cost of Google searches are built-in to your bill from your ISP.  This isn’t because Google burdens an ISP, but because Google makes their product of an Internet connection more valuable, by making the Internet more usable.

I’m sympathetic to those who don’t want Network Neutrality enshrined into law.  As Tim Lee, a fellow TLFer and Cato Institute scholar, has pointed out, we don’t need a law to have net neutrality.  Tim’s study, “The Durable Internet,” does a much better job of making this case than any accounting of Google’s bandwidth use.

It exalts terrorists and terrorism to try chasing their videos off the Internet, and it doesn’t work. Senator Lieberman’s quest to cleanse the Internet of terrorism has won a battle in a losing war by convincing Google to take down such videos. They can still be found on LiveLeak and can be hosted on any of millions of servers worldwide.

[In his eager anti-Google gafliery (“gadfliery” – the nominative case of the verb “to gadfly,” which I just invented), I’m sorry to say that TLF friend Scott Cleland has gotten it wrong.]

The better approach is to treat terrorists as the losers that they are. Their videos do not scare us, but provide us opportunities to observe, comment, and deplore them, perhaps even mocking their foolishness. In this video, at minute 2:18, terrorists appear to be training for the circus. We’ll really fear them when they can fend off lions with a chair.