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Sunday, October 31, 2010
Friday, October 29, 2010
Art Brodsky: Our Open Internet Under Siege
Netneutrality
via Technology on HuffingtonPost.com by Art Brodsky on 10/27/10
It's not at all difficult to look at all that went on over the last couple of weeks and wonder if the Open Internet was only a grand dream that never existed, or was a phenomenon that appeared all too briefly and then was gone. Either way, there are more losers than winners.
Once, the online world (which encompasses the pre-internet days) was, to use the expression, an "electronic frontier." Congress did what it could to protect the nascent environment, recognizing the great values it could bring. It ruled out taxes on internet access. It created a safe harbor to protect online providers (in the pre-internet days) from liability for material that rankles those subject to the rancorous online world. The complaints go back to the start of such protection, continue even through today, including those voiced by New York hotel operators critiqued by customers.
(We could observe that those who regularly spout the "Don't regulate the internet" meme are 14 years late. The safe harbor provisions in the 1996 Telecommunications Act and 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act "regulate" the internet by giving some legal protection from liability to online providers in content disputes, a concept similar to proposals requiring online providers not to discriminate in their content delivery would do. But we digress.)
The online world seemed almost as a DMZ from the regular business world, even as the internet ecosystem was built by, and populated by, millions of websites from those created by big companies and individual people. They combined to create something new and fresh, for a while at least.
That was then. Now, policymakers make noise about how important the internet is, but do little to protect and preserve the environment, which allowed the unique properties of openness and creativity to flourish. Now, for some, the internet world is simply a collection of more properties to be used as leverage in down-and-dirty business transactions. As usual, consumer desires, even if not legal rights, are getting left in the virtual dust.
Open Internet Expands Debate
The debate should revolve around what government policy will be to protect the Open Internet. That's a larger question than Net Neutrality, which deals with an ISP playing favorites with traffic. The Cablevision-Fox dispute over payment for programming is one example of the larger issue. Having TV stations and cable operators cut each other off is, unfortunately, become standard operating procedure (SOP) for these "retransmission consent" deals. Consumers lose regardless. The same contract runs out for Fox and Dish on Nov 1. Fox blocking Cablevision's internet customers is the new wrinkle.
More recently, the big broadcast networks said they would not allow their online offerings to be viewed by consumers using Google TV. And the point of that exercise is what, exactly? To siphon off some money from Google? To hamper the development of online video? To keep viewers from using the search engine to find online content that the networks don't want the viewers to find -- torrents of their shows, perhaps to be watched on a big television rather than a computer screen? Google TV is a Web browser, albeit one optimized for use on a TV.
Sony has already made a TV incorporating Google TV software, on the assumption that combining the TV experience with the Web experience would be a good one for consumers. There shouldn't be any disagreement about that. Sony, Logitech (which also makes an access device using Google TV) or any other company, should be able to build a device on whatever software platform it wants that allows people to have access to the Web and/or TV.
Under normal situations, the gatekeepers are the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and they are the ones at whom Open Internet policies are usually targeted. The FCC's 2005 Open Internet policy statement started from the perspective that the commission has jurisdiction over the access services that ISPs provide -- a perspective now thrown into doubt by a court ruling and the disinclination of the FCC leadership to resolve the problem. The FCC's policy that "consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice" could apply to other than ISPs as a matter of general principle. That's the way the internet should operate, and that's a policy that could be supported across the government.
'Browser Wars' Valuable History
The U.S. Appeals Court for the D.C. Circuit, in upholding a lower court's ruling that some of Microsoft's licensing practices were anti-competitive, demonstrated that there are limits. (Note: In reading the quote, where it says "give rise to tort liability," non-lawyers should substitute the words "be held responsible for smacking someone over the head.") The court
said:
Microsoft's primary copyright argument borders upon the frivolous. The company claims an absolute and unfettered right to use its intellectual property as it wishes... That is no more correct than the proposition that use of one's personal property, such as a baseball bat, cannot give rise to tort liability. As the Federal Circuit succinctly stated: "Intellectual property rights do not confer a privilege to violate the antitrust laws."
There is more to the government than the FCC, particularly in a case in which anti-competitive behavior is inflicted on an ISP and its customers, as opposed to anti-competitive behavior by an ISP. As Public Knowledge (my day-job employer) said in our Oct. 21 letter to the Commission on the Cablevision-Fox dispute, "network neutrality is not the end-all be-all of consumer protection and these practices could threaten the integrity of the open Internet as much as anti-competitive behavior by telecommunications providers." PK said those kinds of incidents "should be investigated by the FCC, FTC, Justice Department, or other agencies, according to their jurisdiction."
In setting terms to dictate which platform for viewing a website is acceptable, the TV networks are regressing a decade to the days of the Browser Wars. Back then, website owners tried to pick which browser would work best, or work not at all, with the content on the site. The fight was primarily between Netscape Navigator, the first true browser, and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Microsoft "won" by integrating IE with Windows at no cost and driving Netscape out of business. Today, the Microsoft browser has less than half of the browser market, down from having two-thirds of the market two years ago while trailing not far behind is Firefox, the open-source descendant of Netscape. Web standards are more tolerant of differing browsers now also.
Some people argue that dictating how a site will be viewed, either by which people or with which technology, is acceptable behavior because the intellectual property is privately owned, and the owners can decide what to do with it. That's true, only up to a point.
Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps in his statement on the Cablevision-Fox situation, as he usually does, captured the dynamic perfectly:
We must also understand that these seemingly "old media" debates can be used against the new media of the digital age, too. For a broadcaster to pull programming from the Internet for a cable company's subscribers, as apparently happened here, directly threatens the open Internet. This was yet another instance revealing how vulnerable the Internet is to discrimination and gate-keeper control absent clear rules of the road.
That behavior of blocking sites, or of having a site owner determine which software will be able to access the site, shouldn't be tolerated if an Open Internet is the goal of U.S. policy. If it isn't our policy, to be enforced by the FCC, antitrust authorities, then the Web as we know it will disappear even more rapidly than it now is.
$107 Sears catalog home, 1908 (assembly required)
via Boing Boing by Andrea James on 10/27/10
Image: Click to embiggen. 1908 Sears mail-order house No. 115 for $725.
I used to write ads for Sears, and I always admired their influence in American DIY/maker culture. They had a huge influence on reducing local general stores' price-gouging practices, and they gave consumers access to goods that were hard to come by (they started when there were no cars and only 38 US states). Back when Sears, Roebuck & Co. and Montgomery Ward were battling it out over who would be the analog version of Amazon, Sears offered increasingly ambitious and specialized catalogs. One of their most ambitious projects was mail-order homes, inspired by success of The Aladdin Company. Last year, Cory blogged about Thomas Edison's similar prefab concrete home venture. But Sears Modern Homes had huge success with their wood-framed homes from 1908 through the Great Depression. Their cheapest model was $107 in 1908 (about $2,000 today). Unlike a lot of modern prefab, these were made to last; you can still find these homes here and there around the country.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Net neutrality: Job-killing zombie
via POLITICO Top Stories by Douglas Holtz-Eakin,Sam Batkins on 10/27/10
Opinion: The political focus should turn to ending policies that put our prosperity in jeopardy. 
Gene Weingarten on the character that could have killed Doonesbury but didn't.
via Slate Magazine by Gene Weingarten on 10/27/10
My favorite Doonesbury character is Mr. Butts, the cheerful, chubby-cheeked, tobacco-hawking talking cigarette—not because he was the strip's best character, which he wasn't, but because of something else that he wasn't: the beginning of the end.[more ...]
Walter Isaacson pays tribute to his favorite Doonesbury character, Uncle Duke.
via Slate Magazine by Walter Isaacson on 10/27/10
Uncle Duke is my hero. He was able to make the move from journalism to diplomacy while maintaining continuity in his personal habits. I became an acolyte back when I was still a student. Uncle Duke was then serving as governor of American Samoa, and he got tapped by Ford and Kissinger to be ambassador to China. He uttered the classic line: "Those Chinese are an especially tricky people." With Honey as his translator, he navigates the shoals of geopolitics, Chairman Mao, and various manifestations of great disorder under heaven. (See the China strip here.)[more ...] 
Elizabeth Warren Wants to Turn CFPB into a Crowd-Sourced Wiki
via Firedoglake by David Dayen on 10/27/10
Elizabeth Warren
In my Monday post about Elizabeth Warren’s early efforts in standing up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, I mentioned her trip to the west coast this week, and her desire for technological solutions to consumer protection challenges. In an interview with the National Journal, Warren goes a bit deeper into that approach, suggesting that the agency could be bolstered through crowd-sourcing:
In an interview on Tuesday with National Journal, Warren said new techniques like crowd-sourcing – scaled-up variations on Wikipedia — make it possible to collect valuable information from millions of ordinary consumers who report problems as they arise. Using new systems to organize and find patterns in all that information, Warren said, the bureau could be able to spot new enforcement targets in a matter of days – an unheard-of response time for traditional regulators [...]
It is an entirely new approach for government regulators, but Warren said she believes the opportunities are great.
“It’s also about how we will receive information about how the world works,” she said. “It’s about how people will tell us about what is happening. I want you to think about this more like ‘heat maps’ for targeted zip codes where problems are emerging, or among certain demographic groups, or among certain issuers,” Warren said in her still-not-decorated office.
Essentially, she wants the CFPB to run like a blog. When TPM collects stories from their audience on how Social Security privatization is playing across the country, or when I ask for stories on individual struggles with HAMP, that’s essentially crowd-sourcing. Warren wants to put the power of the federal government behind that.
SIGTARP already has hotlines set up for, among other things, HAMP, and they have collected a wealth of information through that, all in their excellent TARP report here. And individual Congressional offices get information like this through constituent service. Warren seeks to coordinate that and make it easier to contact the government when a mortgage lender or a bank rips you off.
Warren will visit Google this week, in part to work on this vision. I think the only question with it is pick-up; whether people will know to upload their credit card or mortgage statements to the CFPB website, and whether Congressional offices, who get the bulk of this information, will funnel it to CFPB. But if it works, you have a much quicker and more nimble regulator, able to identify and react to problems in Internet time. And it could be a model for adoption across regulatory agencies.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Galaxy Zoo shows how well crowdsourced citizen science works
via Ars Technica by jtimmer@arstechnica.com (John Timmer) on 10/26/10
The Internet has enabled the public to participate in science in a way that was never possible before. Starting with SETI@home and a growing number of other projects that use the BOINC infrastructure, home computer users could contribute processing time to actual science projects and, in return, get a glimpse of some of the analysis that was being performed on their computers. But these projects left the public as passive participants, watching as their computers did all the heavy lifting. There are many problems where humans are actually better than computers, and a new set of projects is using the Internet to harness the abilities of non-scientists to contribute towards a scientific goal.
The best known project of this sort may be the highly successful FoldIt project, which turned protein energy minimizations into a game, enabling home users to help solve protein structures that could sometimes trip up a computer. But a number of other citizen science projects are being hosted on the Zooniverse site, named after one of its most successful projects, the Galaxy Zoo. Robert Simpson, a post-doc at Oxford, described the Galaxy Zoo experience at a recent Science Online meeting, and generously shared the slides from his talk.
Galaxy Zoo has been an attempt to get citizen science to classify all the galaxies present in various data sets, such as the Sloan and Hubble surveys, as elliptical, spiral, etc. in order to give astronomers a better sense of just what's out there. In the process, however, the citizens have also proven adept at identifying some unusual things that appear in these images and, in doing so, have contributed to the publication of at least five astronomy papers.
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The drawings, sketches, posters, and other art of Doonesbury creator Garry T...
via Slate Magazine by Brian Walker on 10/26/10
The drawings, sketches, posters, and other art of Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau.[more ...] 
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