Blog break
No posts until January 3.
Commuting
When I was away from NY last year, sitting in a hotel room halfway around the world, I found myself checking Gothamist. It has a certain flavor. Here's a recent entry: The Most Inconvenient Commute Contest.
My commute, between my bedroom and my living room, was not all that bad during the transit strike. There was a shoe in the way at one point, but I made it through. That's because I'm just writing papers and grading exams; I don't have to leave home.
But these have been tough days for millions of other people. BlogNYC.net is selling commemorative t-shirts:
There are many many pictures of the transit strike atmosphere. Newyorkology has many useful strike-related posts (sample). It took people hours and hours to get home. NYCMetblogs is full of stories.
The big story has got to be, though, that lots of people stayed home and huddled around their broadband connections. Or maybe I'm just feeling slightly guilty for having avoided the entire thing.
Politics in a different era
Not to be tendentious, but it really does seem that we're lurching from one crisis of leadership to another here in the U.S. And none of them, for whatever reason, are sticking — so we go on lurching.
What went wrong?
I'm reading a biography of Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin called Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln managed to travel some very difficult political roads in his life, and I thought the book might be helpful in understanding political dirty pool — surely 19th-century dirty pool was just as dirty (maybe dirtier) than 21st-century dirty pool is.
Here's a paragraph that struck me yesterday:
It was a country for young men. “We find ourselves,” the twenty-eight-year-old Lincoln told the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, “in the peaceful possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate.” The founding fathers had crafted a government more favorable to liberty “than any of which the history of former times tells us.” Now it was up to their children to preserve and expand the great experiment.
Great experiment? Peaceful possession? And, the big one: a government more favorable to liberty than any other in history?
What went wrong?
Remarkable leverage
One of the big problems with the enormously problematic E911 Order [warning: very large and very strange pdf file] is that it required VoIP providers to hook into the legacy E911 system controlled by the Baby Bells without mandating that the Bells allow the VoIP guys to connect.
This was a tailor-made holdup situation for what was already an enormous holdup. (Remember that it took the wireless industry more than ten years to figure out how to work with the legacy E911 world, but the FCC only gave the VoIP companies a few months.) The Bells had full authority to give the appearance of being helpful while slowly dragging their feet and pushing the VoIP providers (their competitors) closer and closer to a deadline that (initially at least) was supposed to trigger mass cut-offs of VoIP customers for whom E911 service wasn't available.
Diabolical, right?.
Well, the scheme is even worse than that. The Bells are required to let local competitors (the people who know the acronyms call them CLECs) connect. CLECs can, therefore, provide VoIP guys with the access to the E911 system that they need to avoid being subject to enforcement actions by the FCC.
So this paragraph in a recent Drew Clark column caught my eye:
‘That [selling retail access to VoIP providers to selective routers] is probably a business opportunity for many of the carriers that are out there,’ [FCC Chairman] Martin said . . . ‘I have continued to believe that the competitive carriers are going to play an important role and many of our rules and regulations should be viewed as actually an opportunity for people.’
What? Let's get this straight. This means that the FCC is not only pushing for VoIP providers to be obligated to go through the legacy system—a solution that is bad enough in itself—but further ensuring that they must work with middlemen to do so. (If the Commission had wanted to open the legacy hardware to the VoIP people, the FCC could have done that.) And, to boot, FCC is propping up the middleman-market as an “opportunity” for their familiar regulated entities, telephone companies.
I'm pretty cynical about the entire E911 debacle, but this is breathtaking.
Let's go for BPL and hand it over to FERC. Soon.
(like the acronyms?)
Good causes
If you are looking around for places to park your tax-deductible contributions, I want to recommend two to you: Public Knowledge and Greenwood.
They don't compete with one another, so they can't be miffed about being included in the same post.
Public Knowledge had some great victories this year, and has more battles ahead. They won their case about the broadcast flag, they're fighting tech mandates on the Hill, and they're digging into a host of telecom issues. You can go here to donate to them.
Greenwood is a music camp in western Massachusetts that is dedicated to teaching kids about chamber music. It's a generous, kind place and you'd like anyone who ever went there (this is not a plug — I didn't go there). You can go here to donate to them.
I can't really pretend to tie these two things together. But these are tough times for telecom policy and chamber music and both causes should be supported.
Still looking for tools
In the ICANN context, it seems to me that we could benefit in many ways by having between-meeting discussions, asynchronously, using visual tools that incorporate text.
We might be able to come to decisions — something that is almost impossible to do in an email stream.
We might be able to continue communicating, rather than letting things sit for three months while we gather our strength for the next eight-day meeting.
We might be able to get quick input from people other than those who are able physically to attend meetings.
And, finally, we might make more visible ICANN's policy processes — something that is needed.
I received a few email messages after my last post about this subject, but I'm looking for more. Send word if you've worked with an online application that seems to facilitate this kind of work and is easy to use. And is free (or inexpensive).
Understanding law
Particularly in an era in which our own President doesn't seem to care much about what laws say, it seems important that at least the people drafting the laws — senators and representatives — have a pretty good fix on what they're writing down.
So I want someone to call both Mr. Sensenbrenner and Mr. Conyers and ask them to explain how the Analog Hole bill (introduced late yesterday - 35 page PDF) works.
I bet they won't be able to do it. Oh, maybe they'll say something about “protecting digital content in a terrifying time,” but they probably won't be able to go farther down the rhetorical ladder.
It's not an easy bill to parse. It looks as if two marking schemes, CGMS-A and VEIL, are going to be required to be acknowledged and adhered to through all analog-digital conversions of video. That's just my guess. The bill will probably affect an enormous variety of devices that have analog inputs.
Now, the existence of analog inputs has been heavily relied on in Hollywood's discussion of why the broadcast flag was such a dandy idea — “plenty of room for fair use! you've got all of those analog outs that we're leaving alone!” — so if these things disappear that has to affect the fair use balance. The bill appears to carve out private copying of broadcast television, but that's not very clear, and even that will presumably disappear as DTV is phased in.
More to the point, this bill has the appearance of a snarling, heavily-detailed technical mandate. It even has a Table W at the back, where the marking system is (impenetrably, to me) tied to a particular approved device response.
I await the responses of Messrs. Sensenbrenner and Conyers. Surely the proponents of such a technical bill will be able to explain it to us.
That's Not the Internet
There's an article [requires registration, sorry] by Hiawatha Bray in the Boston Globe from a couple of days ago making the rounds. It reports on yet another assault by incumbent telecom providers on the open internet. We need to leave these dinosaurs in the dust.
Here's their plan: to provide tiered access to online services. ”Regular” internet access would be pokey; “premium” access would be fast enough to allow for a good video experience; and no competing services would be allowed on the “premium internet.” Of course, the “premium” whatever – let's just go ahead and call it a “channel,” because this is just a dumb broadcast model plunked onto online life, borrowed from the mobile phone world – would not be the internet. There would be no place for start-ups who couldn't afford to pay their way in; consumer choice would be sharply limited; and walled gardens would be the order of the day.
BellSouth says this:
''When costs are being driven into an equation, they have to be recovered somewhere,” said Bill Smith, chief technology officer of BellSouth. ''Why do fundamental business economics not apply to the Internet?”
BellSouth and the others say they won't be able to provide high-speed access unless they can be confident they can monetize their networks — and avoid competition for their video and voice services.
They wouldn't be able to do this if we had more choices for broadband access. These companies are able to act like monopolists — raising prices for what should be commodity services — because they don't have competition. That's why the first move has to be to find alternative routes online.
The hard question is: how unhappy will Americans be with comfortable, broadcast-style, fully-packaged-and-protected highspeed access? Maybe not unhappy enough to revolt.
Meanwhile, Chairman Martin plans to take yet another legacy disaster, the Universal Service Fund, and have it siphon off funds from online applications. It's unclear how this will work, but recently proposed legislation would levy fees on any use of IP addresses.
According to the CNET story,
The mammoth fund–$4.7 billion was distributed during the first nine months of this year–has been beset by charges of mismanagement and fraud during its seven-year history.
So: Graft, fraud, taxes, slowed services, and walled-garden control. Someone on Capitol Hill needs to remember that the internet came to be the economic engine that it is because we restrained ourselves from acting this way. America should be leading the world in its enlightened approach to the internet — instead, we seem to be falling farther and farther behind.
Google Evening
I spent part this evening as part of a panel talking about Google Book Search.
The publishers take the view that any effect on any prospective market they might want to enter into fatally undermines a finding of fair use. The logical outgrowth of this position is that because there are innumerable possible markets out there, mass uses of any kind can't possibly be fair — to the publishers, scale matters enormously.
Translated: Google makes a complete scanned copy of books. That copy isn't made available to anyone else (other than the libraries with which Google has arrangements, and their uses are in turn sharply limited.) That reproduction is fair use, in my view, and doesn't require permission from the publishers.
Why? Because it's an essential step towards the transformative “snippet” view — can't get there without making a copy. And even though it's a complete copy, that doesn't mean the use isn't fair (see the ”multiple copies for classroom use” part of Sec. 107). And the existence of this reproduction doesn't undermine sales of the book. In fact, the snippet view may actually lead to many more sales.
Well, that doesn't satisfy the people who have sued Google. They point to the fourth factor in Sec. 107, and say, “Google's possession of this copy is having an effect on the POTENTIAL MARKET for the work. Google is working itself into a position to be the world's bookstore for e-books. We won't be able to create our own market along those lines, and so our potential revenues are being undermined.” Q.E.D.
The world is sufficiently unpredictable that anything could happen, right? So fair uses that threaten any possible secondary market can't exist, according to the publishers. In effect, they'd like to use copyright law to protect against network effects and first-mover advantages that they can't personally monetize.
I very much hope that Google won't settle this case. We need these issues decided.
Help Wanted: Free Speech Leadership
In the US, we are dangerously close to requiring indecency limitations on cable channels — next will come calls to similarly regulate satellite, and eventually online streaming video, all in the name of maintaining a level regulatory playing field. All of this is probably unconstitutional, according to the Congressional Research Service.
(Recent joke: Kevin Martin is so conservative that he wants to take the “F” out of “FCC”.)
In Europe, the Television Sans Frontieres initiative continues to steam along, with a new draft directive coming out from the Commission by the end of 2005. Draft language from July 2005 read::
Member States shall take appropriate measures to ensure that audiovisual content services are not distributed in such a way that might seriously impair the physical, mental or moral development of minors.
In respect of non-linear audiovisual content services [e.g., streaming online video requested by users] Member States are encouraged to put in place systems of co-regulation or self-regulation as well [as] systems of filtering, age verification, labelling and classification of content.
It's not clear to me what the plan is for the end-of-December legislative draft, but I will wager that some restrictions on online video pronounced in the name of protecting children will be included (”in order to protect the public and to avoid the distortions of competition,” in the words of a French official). Mandated standards will likely be set by government, to be implemented by industry.
Migrating a Television Sans Frontieres-like regime (which includes rights of reply, advertising restrictions, and other elements as well as “protecting children”) onto cable-satellite-internet in the US might have seemed unthinkable ten years ago. But times have changed.
Many members of Congress think that pornography on the internet has to be regulated, and mere unconstitutionality probably isn't a good enough reason for them not to pass such laws. And the FCC seems ready to break some kneecaps (= block some deals) in order to reach similar ends.
So here's what we need: an idealistic, persuasive, charismatic, well-informed mogul of the First Amendment. Someone who isn't conflicted by client representations or business interests. Someone who can talk to the whole country about the importance of the free flow of speech online and off. Someone who can lead.
Send word if you spot this person on the street or in a meeting.