Archive for July, 2005

Today, the Department of Homeland Security's Michael Chertoff announced that cybersecurity and telecommunications issues would be managed under a single new (yet to be named) Assistant Secretary. 

About a week ago, the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, and FBI asked [pdf] the FCC to make sure that all in-flight broadband communications were easily and immediately tappable.

The agencies also asked the FCC to mandate many more obligations for in-flight broadband carriers, including the obligation to record all traffic information and retain it for 24 hours after a flight lands and to require authentication and registration (by providing lots of identifying data including seat position) for all users of broadband aboard an aircraft.

Finally, law enforcement also asked for ”rules and/or policies concerning in-flight use of these [broadband] devices and related conduct to minimize any increase in air rage incidents which could potentially result from the unrestricted use of such devices on flights.”

So now the FCC is in charge of air rage.  Some have suggested that the Commission should also be responsible for the interstate highway system, because use of cell phones while driving can lead to road rage. 

We need to organize.

The FCC has been extremely solicitous to law enforcement, and this new DHS telecom/cybersecurity link is only going to strengthen the bond.  And the FCC's power to make law-enforcement friendly rules for all internet services has just been given an enormous shot in the arm by the Supreme Court's opinion in BrandX. 

Just look at recent history.  Law enforcement's comments in the CALEA proceeding foreshadow a world in which all manufacturers of internet applications will need to ask permission from law enforcement before they launch (so that they can be easily tappable by law enforcement). The DOJ is interested in having all ISPs store information for its use, and it is more than conceivable that the FCC could use its newly-enhanced ancillary jurisdiction over ISPs to ensure that this happens.

And FCC is suggesting in the E911 proceeding that all VoIP-capable devices and applications (including personal computers) be able to automatically report their location at all times – another expression of law enforcement desires for perfect information.

Look, everyone's been up in arms about intellectual property issues for so long that we're late to the true battles for the future of the internet.  The real fight is with two other incumbent industries:  traditional internet access providers (the great telco/cable duopoly) and law enforcement.  FCC seems happy to give these guys what they want, and there are no principled limits to the rules they're capable of cooking up. 

The only thing we can rely on is FCC's self-restraint.

Which is a resource in short supply.  Remember the broadcast flag?

So — I'm going to continue to make noise about the need for internet activism.  World Net Day seems ever more relevant.  I just need a few foundations and enormous online companies to see that their longterm interests lie in supporting the health of the internet.  For everyone.

Public Knowledge announced yesterday that the deadline for nominations for its IP3 awards is August 1, 2005.

That's soon.  So please, send in nominations ASAP to IP3nominees at publicknowledge.org!  The awards honor achievement in the areas of Intellectual Property, Information Policy and Internet Protocol.  (Hence “IP3″).

Last year's IP3 Award winners were Rep. Rick Boucher, (D-Va.); Danger Mouse, creator of the Grey Album; and Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive.

I'm honored to serve as one of the people deciding who will get these awards.  The other judges are Mike Godwin, legal director of Public Knowledge, who is heading the awards committee, Lateef Mtima of the Howard University School of Law, Hal Abelson of MIT, Alan Davidson of Google, Art Brodsky, communications director of Public Knowledge, and Siva Vaidhyanathan of NYU. 

Please write in.  Feel free to nominate more than one person, and certainly look beyond the shores of the US.

Right now, it's possible for me to imagine the nation of America.  I can do this not only because I know about America's geographic boundaries, but also because I've read publications in my native language that assume American nationalism and the existence of comparable “American” institutions (schools, newspapers, hospitals).  I'm comfortable with all this American-ness, even though a lot of it is imaginary.

According to today's Times, it's impossible to count the number of languages spoken in China:

. . . China's Han [is] the ethnic group that makes up more than 90 percent of the population. The Han speak as many 1,500 dialects, with the bulk of those concentrated in the southern half of the country.

1500 dialects — that's a lot.  And they're not even close cousin kinds of dialects, apparently.

The encounter at the Datian market began when the dumpling seller approached the foreigner with a phrase that sounded like “goodbye” in the Wu dialect. Knowing it must mean something else, the foreigner guessed she was asking his name, and provided it, producing a laugh from the woman who explained, switching to Mandarin, that she had asked if he had eaten lately.

And it's not just foreigners who have this problem.

To drive a few miles down the road from one village to another [in Datian County, Fujian Province] is indeed to plunge into a new linguistic universe. Things can be as confusing for someone from the next town as they are for the total outsider.  In one village near the county seat, where an old Daoist shrine sits high above the roadside, a man who said he spoke southern Min, one of Fujian's most widely spoken dialects, tried to exchange words with some boys who said they also spoke southern Min. A few words from each side, however, sufficed to show they were mutually unintelligible.

China is worried about the consequences of all this linguistic variety, according to The Times.  No one is saying that local languages have to go, of course, but China wants to have people understand Mandarin, so that its national identity will be coherent.

[This is beginning to sound like an "English first" post, but it's not -- stay with me.]

The application of this to the online world is worth thinking about.  I can imagine that at this very moment there are millions of other English readers and writers commenting on a million different things.  I can imagine that there are bloggers out there writing ironically for their readers, knowing that the readers will understand. I can imagine that many of these readers make pilgrimages to the English version of Google (we used to make pilgrimates to AltaVista) and to whatever Glenn Reynolds writes.  I'm confident that all this talk and creativity is going to go on even when no one is watching, and that it will have a character of its own that's different (a different voice and affect) from what happens in the offline world.

In other words, I can imagine a kind of online “nation.”  Without geographic boundaries.

Ecommerce Times reports that Google is investing in a broadband over power line company that is already experimenting with providing services in Cincinnati.  BPL is being explored around the world (and particularly in parts of Europe where transformer density is high), and it's exciting to think that there might be a real alternative someday to DSL and cable.

The power line company, Current Communications, is run by William Berkman (whose family has made some other good investments), and Goldman Sachs and The Hearst Corp. are also backing the project. With wireless hops from utility poles to homes, and with some assurances about security, this could just work.

Why does this matter?  Well, maybe there's something magical about the number three.  Having only two ways to buy fast internet access doesn't provide much choice and gives the cable and DSL guys enormous power (to, for example, (a)  forbid their subscribers from hosting web servers or (b) filter out VoIP services they don't like) without much risk that they'll lose out in the marketplace.  Three providers, and one an upstart with Google behind it doing-no-evilling, may loosen things up.

Granted, getting to three will take an enomous, audacious buildout.  But maybe that's what Google's there for.

I'm personally a little nervous about BPL because my formidable grandmother, Beatrice Lamb, had those initials — and no one who met her ever forgot the experience.  I won't go so far as to say she was shocking.  That would be too easy.

What are Yahoo! and AOL going to do? 

I'm struggling to compress ten years of online history from the mainstream user's perspective into a readable account, and the only way to do it seems to be to use AOL as a lense.  But wandering around online looking for the right stories to tell (AOL and otherwise) has been rewarding. 

Netcraft has great web server surveys accompanied by cheerful narratives.  They're seeing “dramatic growth” in server numbers, and it may be explained in part by “the explosive growth of weblogs.”  The growth is also likely explained in part by greater numbers of speculators hoping that people will miss-type domain names. 

Business 2.0 doesn't have an online archive; Red Herring does; Wired does; and the Pew Internet Project reports are great. But, boy, I could use some pointers to your favorite Joe Consumer perspective online history sources.  (The part after consumers piled on and ruined everything for the people who had really been enjoying themselves and actually writing code. Although maybe consumers will start writing code themselves someday.)  What has it been like for people who don't usually read Wired? (This is a plea for help — if you feel shy or the comment registration system doesn't work for you (it often doesn't), send me an email.)

I did a podcast interview today with Ernie Miller and Phil Weiser on BrandX, but — it won't be available for a couple of weeks.  What happened to internet time?  At any rate, a good time was had by all.

[update, 20 days later:  podcast is here]

Adam Liptak has a finely-wrought story in the Times now about the Judy Miller situation.  It must have been a painful headline to see in print:  New York Times Reporter Jailed For Keeping Source Secret.

Judy Miller didn't have enough of a story for the Times to publish.  No one knows precisely what crime the prosecutor is investigating.  And a journalist (someone that New York magazine intimates isn't liked very much) goes off to jail — charged with civil contempt — after shakily reading a statement about the importance of a free press.  It's all so strange.

Someone asked tonight, “Why is she protecting whatever jerk was her source?”  Reporters care a great deal about protecting all their sources, but some reporters involved in this situation have presumably talked to the prosecutor.  Robert Novak.  The Post's Walter Pincus.  Those reporters, no doubt ably represented, appear to have made the decision that the fact that their sources may have been committing a crime by leaking the CIA agent's name vitiated their privilege not to talk about that source.  Matt Cooper's source has let him talk, so he's talking.

Why is Judy Miller not taking this route?  The Times staunchly says that her approach is principled. It seems to me that this is a terrible test case, and it may undermine other reporters' efforts to claim the privilege in more appropriate circumstances.  I tend to think that the reporter's privilege is important — and we have other privileges that we care about as well, like the attorney-client privilege and the priest-penitent privilege, and all the rest — but these privileges are rebuttable under some circumstances.  On the other hand, because we don't really know what the prosecutor is up to, it's difficult to assess the propriety of asserting the privilege in this particular context.

So — I applaud principles and privileges, but this entire morass is bound to have negative effects on an already-troubled profession.  The prosecutor seems vindictive.  I wish he would back off — that's the piece that seems most moveable on this particular chessboard.

In the past, we've been able to recognize that consumers have gotten dumber in some contexts — and we've created laws to help them.  In the online world, consumers are arguably getting smarter.  But for some reason laws aren't arriving that recognize this trend.  Is consumer dumbness a one-way ratchet?

The specific analogy I'm thinking of has to do with landlord-tenant relationships.  Before the 1970s in America, leases were thought of as estate transfers.  The landlord made no promises at all about what the housing quality would be of a leased property.  Livable housing was not something that a tenant had a right to and courts refused to imply landlord duties to fix rental units if something went wrong.  So if a tenant failed to pay his rent, the landlord had a cause of action against him — and there were no defenses available based on horrendous conditions existing in the rented place. 

Then, in the 1970s, courts abandoned caveat emptor.  Many judges took the view that leases were contracts as well as estate transfers, and that landlords implicitly had promised to keep leased premises in habitable condition.  Thus, the old common law rule imposing an obligation on the lessee to repair the premises during the term of his lease changed to an implied warranty of habitability for all lease contracts.

There's a key opinion on this by Judge Skelly Wright, writing for the DC Circuit court [link is to great web resource on the case put together by Georgetown law professor Richard Chused].  Skelly Wright reasoned that the old common law rule absolving the lessor of all obligation to repair had come from a different time: 

Such a rule was perhaps well suited to an agrarian economy; the land was more important than whatever small living structure was included in the leasehold, and the tenant farmer was fully capable of making repairs himself.

So the old norm was simple:  in return for permission to use land, the tenant would pay rent, keep the land in good condition, and return the land when the lease was over.    Given that modern urban tenants would have no idea how to deal with “major problems, such as heating, plumbing, electrical or structural defects, the tenant’s position corresponds precisely with the ‘ordinary consumer’. . ”    Urban tenants, Judge Wright concluded, were far from the “jack of all trades” farmers whose skills formed the premise of the old common law rule.  So modern tenants couldn’t be assumed to be able to fix anything for themselves.

The jack-of-all-trades farmer tenant was replaced by the housing consumer.. 

This generally accepted story about the shift from medieval farmer tenants to modern housing consumers has had tremendous anecdotal appeal.  It has been repeated in countless cases. And it was based on a broad generalization about consumer empowerment – that consumers of rental property had become more helpless over time, less able to fix things, and more in need of legal protection.

In the online world, consumers are (arguably) getting more competent all the time.  From The Economist (Mar. 31, 2005):

“I am constantly amazed at the confidence level and sophistication of the average consumer,” says Mike George, Dell's chief marketing officer and general manager of its consumer business in the United States. Dell soared to the top of the personal-computer business by cutting out retailers and selling directly to consumers. If Dell changes prices on its website, its customers' buying patterns change literally within a minute. “That tells you people are well-researched and knowledgeable,” adds Mr George. . . . “In the past you would keep pounding the creative message out into the market place and look at reach frequency,” says Howard Draft, a veteran direct-marketing expert and chief executive of his eponymous New York agency, part of Interpublic. “Well, basically that is dead. What you have today is an informed consumer who is taking control of the way he learns and hears about products.

According to a 2005 Edison Media Research report [pdf], growing numbers (close to 70%) of internet users have found applications to use that help them block pop-up ads, spyware, and spam, and almost 80% of “heavy” internet users use such programs.  Consumers are learning.  Consumers aren't even “consumers” — they're producers! They're cooperating and blogging and working away in gigantic numbers, all across the world.

But we don't seem to have the language to talk about “empowered” consumers in a way that doesn't sound like a sales pitch.  More importantly, regulators don't think consumers are getting smarter online. And so they assume the worst, and the worst gets made into law.

[Many thanks to Y.B. for talking to me about this over gelato.]

Gaylord Nelson, a former senator from Wisconsin, died yesterday.  Mr. Nelson founded Earth Day and built the environmental movement in this country.

From today's Times obituary:

On a speaking tour of the West in 1969, Mr. Nelson came up with an idea for what he called “a huge grass roots protest” modeled after that era's campus ”teach-ins” to oppose the Vietnam War. At a conference in Seattle in  September, he announced that the protest would take place the following spring. The date chosen was April 22, 1970, a Wednesday.

More than 20 million Americans marked the first Earth Day in ways as varied as the dragging of tires and old appliances out of the Bronx River in White Plains and campus demonstrations in Oregon. Mayor John V. Lindsay of New  York closed Fifth Avenue to vehicles. Congress shut its doors so lawmakers could participate in local events. . . .

“The reason Earth Day worked,” Mr. Nelson said, “is that it organized itself. The idea was out there and everybody grabbed it. I wanted a demonstration by so many people that politicians would say, 'Holy cow, people care about this.' “

Thanks, Mr. Nelson.  Reminder:  World Net Day happens on the same day as Earth Day — April 22 every year.  And, like Earth Day, it's celebrated in a million different ways, many of which are collective happenings.

Once upon a time, we had three distinct forms of communications technologies — print, broadcast, and telecommunications.  Now they're all becoming one.  But instead of moving the regulatory model to the print end of the continuum — no prior restraints, no licensing requirements, no permission needed, freedom of speech, that kind of thing — we're heading towards a mushy “common carrier light” form of regulation.  We'll see the migration of obligations that used to be imposed only on common carriers (not necessarily interconnection or tariffing, but things like universal service and E911 and CALEA) to online applications.  Even though those applications feel more like print than telecommunications. 

But we don't only protest on World Net Day. We also celebrate.  And the day organizes itself. 

Back in September 1995, freelancer Mark Nollinger wrote an extensive profile of AOL for Wired.  AOL saw itself as reaching mainstream consumers in a way that the internet alone never would.  Steve Case was confident that simple access to affordable bundled content was what consumers wanted.

Case believes that Microsoft and the Internet players are not going to be cheaper or easier to use, and therefore, are not taking the approach that's going to build a mass market. He's convinced that his opponents' strategy of “disintermediation” – unbundling systems and letting users “roll their own” packages – is going to be too much of a hassle for Mr. and Mrs. Average Online Consumer. “I don't see any evidence to suggest that this is what the 93 percent [the percentage of Americans that were unconnected in 1995] wants,” Case says. “I think a subset of the 7 percent wants that. The people I talk to who don't yet use online services don't use them because they are still a little scared of them. Making it more complicated for people to connect and use the service, giving them a bewildering array of options to pick from – it's hard to imagine that's going to help.”

The reporter is enthusiastic about the AOL view of the world:

[I]f history is any guide, sell AOL short at your own risk. Some services may turn out to be cheaper, others may have cooler technology. But it's hard to imagine anyone having a better insight into the hearts and minds of American consumers. The folks at AOL have risen to the top by demonstrating that the online business isn't just about technology; it's about understanding what people really want – an easy, affordable, mediated experience. As the market grows and the common denominator lowers, that should prove to be more true than ever.

Ted Leonsis had advice for everyone who wanted to sell unbundled access to the web:

To the naysayers who persist in believing that the world is full of intrepid adventurers just itching to climb the mountains of cyberspace on their own, Leonsis has a final story about human nature.

As he relates it, the cruise-ship business was once fragmented into hundreds of tiny little companies. Then a guy named Ted Arison came along and discovered that what excited people the most about cruises was the idea of sailing to exotic foreign lands. So Arison started Carnival Cruise Lines. For a few hundred dollars, Carnival gave passengers a nice berth and all the food they could eat, and sent them off on a journey with people like themselves.

And when they arrived at that exotic foreign land, what did they do? “Well, half of them would run to the Hard Rock Cafe,” Leonsis says with glee. “A couple would buy a Swatch watch. And a couple would go eat some shrimp. And Carnival became a multibillion-dollar company.”

Then he delivers the punch line: “We have the opportunity to become the Carnival Cruise Lines of this environment.”

Ten years later, how does AOL's point of view sound?  Its subscriber base is down to about 22 million from almost 27 million in 2002.  (There may be a lot of churn in the subscriber numbers.)  But it's making money on online ads.  And it's getting rid of its walled-garden forums and moving its focus to aol.com (free webmail! Live8 streaming!), while announcing VoIP plans and streaming radio initiatives.  In a sense, AOL is reinventing itself by spiffing up online where the rest of us can see it. 

It sounds as if access to mediated content isn't (by itself, at least) driving AOL's business plans.  And that consumers are getting much better at making their own choices than the AOL of 1995 predicted they would.  Today more than 60% of Americans are online, and they want access and virus protection.  Not Carnival Cruises.