Freedom to Connect
David Isenberg's Freedom to Connect (F2C) conference is taking shape. Take a look.
Complete connection, to everyone, all the time, isn't the optimal state for any network. The most creative networks are the ones that are sparsely connected, allowing interesting and unexpected things to happen. I'm not confident that more connection, for its own sake, is the top priority. Certainly freedom to choose to be connected is crucial.
Freedom to tinker — now, there's a crucial freedom. EFF's recent announcement of Endangered Gizmos caught my eye. Watch for even more gizmos to join the endangered list, as law enforcement and the content industry join forces to turn the internet into a telephone network.
It's just not fair.
What Would Ben Franklin Do?
I've been informed that spyware is not going away any time soon — the problem is enormous. So saying “awwww, just relax” isn't enough of a response. I stand (sit, anyway) corrected.
Hmm. What would Ben Franklin do about spyware? I'm reading the Walter Isaacson biography, which is a fine treatment of an elaborately enjoyed life.
Franklin was all for civic engagement. He was forever starting little groups to talk about things and then change the world — volunteer fire brigades, philosophical societies, universities — and he joyfully combined his social, civic, and work lives into a singular tapestry of meals, discussions, and outings. He was a consummate networker.
He was also, of course, an inventor and a craftsman (a “leather apron” man). He would have loved the internet. What would he have done to fix this plague?
It's clear: he would have tried to encourage small-group civic care and cooperation. He would have started an ISP lending library. He would never, ever, have assumed that any central authority was the answer. Through elliptical conversation and gentle prodding, he would have gotten networks of networks to work together in clever, immune-system ways.
He wouldn't have sought credit in the short run. But, in the end, Franklin the crafty self-publicist would have ensured that everyone knew that his decentralized approach had provided the answer to spyware. He was forever presenting himself to the public in canny ways.
Ben Franklin would have blogged – pseudonymously.
What's next: Spyware
Last year spyware legislation overwhelmingly passed the House (399 to 1). The Senate didn't act on it. We're going to see a lot of activity on this front again this year. But I'm not so sure legislation is such a great idea.
Three reasons:
1. Spyware is being conceived of as an assault on privacy interests, and draft legislation may be intended to set the stage for future broad privacy statutes. But spyware is a different kind of issue — it's about the imposition of an inappropriate, unsought-for relationship in code. That relationship can only be dealt with, to my mind, by tort law and with the help of juries and judges. It's impossible to define “spyware” in a way that won't capture lots of helpful software. The fact that FTC has been able to act with respect to spyware signals that a new statute isn't needed.
2. The draft House bill, HR 29, takes a very heavy-handed regulatory approach. It suggests that the FTC will spend an enormous amount of its resources (resources that could be spent bringing cases) on adopting a very detailed set of rules about the design of software. It mandates notices for online applications. These notices will be both annoying and ultimately meaningless (who will understand what it is they are consenting to?). GLB for bits.
3. And it won't work. Bad actors will move offshore and won't follow the rules anyway. Sure, a federal bill may preempt some wacky state approaches, but the cure may be both worse than the disease (design mandates for software! swirling useless notices!) and ineffective.
It's better to encourage evolutionary, adaptive, tool-based approaches to spyware. Indeed, the evidence is that spyware attacks are diminishing due to better tools being used by ISPs and network operators.
We have two models for viruses/attacks on our system: inoculation (or search and destroy) and the immune system. Let's go with the immune system approach: learning, memory, watching for unexpected data flows, and networks of helpful systems.
Democracy
Democracy, the play, is as much about democracy as internet governance is about governance.
Democracy-the-play is about trust and betrayal, people divided against themselves, true love (the spy who comes to love his target), and feelings of nonexistence (both in the spy and in the spyed-upon). The people never enter in except as upturned faces, shouting for Willy Brandt and applauding his speeches.
Internet governance is about making rules for information flows online. It's not about affecting the behavior of individuals (the traditional province of governments). It's not about the prerogatives of sovereignty, because there is no sovereign in online space. It's about what is allowed to be seen and understood, by machines and people. In the largest sense, it's about making rules for the membranes that allow information in and out of networks.
With democracy-the-play, we can understand the title as an indirect signal of division — everyone gets to speak, no one is understood, parties rise and fall (it's better than football, the spy claims at one point), countries spy on one another. At any rate, the narrative, multilayer quality of the title is apparent.
So far, with the title “internet governance,” we're taking the words themselves at face value. Sure, this is all about governance. We know what that is. We live with it every day.
But just like the play title, the words “internet governance” should be understood much more as a narrative, multifaceted phrase. The words say something about information flows and permeable membranes. We say we're governing, but we're actually planning on acting in a way that wouldn't be similarly possible in the offline world: creating barriers of code that will, we assume, constrain thought in constructive ways. No more bad or destructive information flows, if internet governance all works out.
It all depends on context. If you saw a play called “internet governance,” you'd be thinking nuanced thoughts about what those words really meant. Maybe, forty years from now, such a play will be produced on Broadway. Who will be the key characters? And what will the story line be?
Today's news
Google is going into VoIP. They see the power of their brand — they must — to connect people as well as web resources, and BT isn't doing much for fear of undermining their landline business. This is big news.
Why aren't all of the major content companies (like the studios) using their brands to connect people? Bright colors, well-loved logos — why not use them to make great, simple, really useful tools available for publishing videoblogs, sending voices across the oceans, and engaging in other entertaining forms of connection (as well as meaningful civic dialogue)?
Grokster
Watch for floods of briefs coming in tomorrow and again in late February. What's at stake? Whether a manufacturer (or software developer) with the ability to incorporate a technology that would limit infringement of copyrighted material should be obliged to do that.
This ties closely to the CALEA debate and the FBI contention that online services should be designed with their needs in mind.
Law enforcement and the content industry would be happy to see innovation happening here “according to the rules.” They'll say that even sonnets and sonatas were written with rules in mind.
Different kinds of rules for sonnets and sonatas — rules intended to set up expectations that then could be broken. My expectation here, for what it's worth, is that although law enforcement and the studios will claim some victories early in the game, they'll be defeated in the end by the complexity of the system with which they're grappling.
Snow emergency
If you don't own a car, and you don't have anywhere to go in particular, and you have plenty of books to read, a snow emergency is
is a very pleasant thing indeed. The news is alarming; correspondents standing in the dark with earflaps covered in snow, talking loudly and earnestly into their microphones. They have new graphics: BLIZZARD 2005.
I remember the blizzards of 1996 and 2003. In January 1996, people were skiing down Connecticut Avenue. I remember seeing Marion Wright Edelman trying to figure out how to go to work. The snow piled up outside my office window, looping around the beige metal railings that passed for architectural detail in that building. The firm effectively closed for an entire week — the managing partner, perplexed, said, “Where did those hours go?” No one fired us, no lawyers did anything, and it didn't matter at all. (I think things would be different today.) STORM COVERAGE.
In February 2003, I walked across town to visit a friend. The snow was piled high in the streets — plowing was apparently impossible. When I got there, finally, we sat and talked for a long time.
(Picture of Washington Square North from www.nyclondon.com, by R. Gardiner)
Mind the Gap
There are great technical entrepreneurs out there, and there are great policy people who really care about the net, but the two groups don't communicate as well as they should. Yesterday I was at a policy group meeting that was dedicated (in part) to discussing how to communicate with the “online community.” And one person there said, “What's Slashdot?”
It's not a big deal, not knowing what Slashdot is. But this moment shows we've got a gap of sorts. We're at a turning point in the history of the internet, and the techies and the policy people need to meet up.
Today at the vloggercon lunchbreak, I witnessed another sort of gap. Someone's mother called. The person who answered the phone took the phone from his ear and handed it to a friend across the table. “Here,” he said, “explain to my mother what this conference is about.” The person across the table gamely took the challenge, introducing herself to the mom on the phone and doing her best to explain the video blogging phenomenon. But I wasn't listening closely, because I was laughing too hard.
Mind the gap. We've all got a lot of learning to do.
(thanks to Mary Hodder for this post title)
California "get 'em all" bill
Watch out for Calif. Sen. Murray's SB 96.
It covers operating systems. It probably covers Big Sur, once the redwoods are fully wireless. We're going after technology wholeheartedly now, without bothering to think whether that's a good idea. Broadcast = good; P2P = bad.
Ed Felten has a good post on the bill.
The content industry would like to make any technology that doesn't monitor for copyright infringement illegal — and that includes the internet.
Phooey. I'm going offline now for 36 hours. Not out of pique — really — just going out of range for a while. I'm sure there will be lots of offline festivities to watch in the meantime.
Grokster and Freedom to Connect
Thematic Blog Entry coming up.
I have it on good authority that the state AGs are circulating another brief in connection with the Grokster case, to be filed against Grokster on January 24. This brief will probably be much like the one they filed [pdf] in support of the petition for cert: P2P = pornography; technology (even software and devices with substantial noninfringing uses) should be designed to avoid infringement; P2P = spyware; P2P = crime; Aimster was a great decision …. same kind of thing.
I don't understand why the states are getting involved at all. Don't get me wrong; state prosecutors are vitally important. But the Grokster case really has nothing to do with pornography, spyware, or crime. Instead, it has everything to do with the free flow of innovation. Should new technologies have to prove that they're monitoring for copyright infringement? Does the copying machine have to ensure that no one is using it for “unauthorized” purposes? Or should copyright owners go after the behavior of end-users instead? These are the Grokster issues. I'm not sure why the states feel the need to get involved, and I bet that some key tech/manufacturing interests are hoping that they don't file another brief.
Next: David Isenberg is putting together a great conference called Freedom to Connect for March 30-31 in DC (actually, in Silver Spring, but it's really convenient). I'm looking forward to participating, and I urge you all to sign up early and often.
A central message of the conference — and of this Thematic Blog Post — is that freedom to connect devices/applications to the internet is central. Conditioning the provision of devices/technologies/applications/connections on adherence to a set of rules is a destructive trendlet all over the world. The content industry wants this (see Grokster). The telecom industry wants this (see Bellhead/Nethead). Law enforcement wants this (see CALEA rulemaking). It's a good idea to shed light on this trend. David Isenberg is working hard to bring people together to have a good talk and see a lot of demos, and he is to be applauded.
(Finally, any time someone invites you to go to the Village Vanguard, say yes.)