Almost online
We've got a banner.
We've even got pens.
What we don't have — until later today — is a web site. But we will. Celebrate the internet! Sept. 22, 2006.
OneWebDay is one day a year when we all - everyone around the physical globe - can celebrate the Web and what it means to us as individuals, organizations, and communities.
As with Earth Day - an inspiration and model for OneWebDay - it’s up to the celebrants to decide how to celebrate. We encourage all celebrations! Collaboration, connection, creativity, freedom.
By the end of the day, the Web should be just a little bit better than it was before, and we’ll be able to see our connection to it more clearly.
OneWebDay is September 22 every year, starting in 2006.
The Possibility of Future Profits
In the 1890 article that launched privacy law in the U.S., Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis said:
The possibility of future profits is not a right of property which the law ordinarily recognizes. (in The Right To Privacy, 4 Harv. L. Rev. 193 (1890)).
These authors were trying to persuade their readers of the existence of a general right in individuals to be let alone. They didn't think this right to be let alone was a property right, because (in part) they didn't believe that the concept of property was broad enough to cover privacy. For example, if true but private facts were published about a man, and that publication made his life difficult (or ruined him), Warren and Brandeis felt that property law wouldn't necessarily protect him — because “the possibility of future profits is not a right of property which the law ordinarily recognizes.“
We now live in an era in which possessors of things they believe to be their “property” fervently believe that law protects their possibility of future profits.
One example: the continuing kerfuffle over Google Book Search, in which publishers are horrified that someone else may someday make money from the books the publishers sold in the past. They fervently believe that they should get a cut of all possible future revenue streams that others create based on these books, and that courts and judges should act immediately to enjoin any activities that might not fit with this model.
Another example: the historic fight over tiered internet access, in which high-speed access providers are horrified that someone else may someday make money from applications using these networks. The network builders fervently believe that they should get a cut of the revenue streams that others will create using these high-speed networks, and that the legislature should act immediately to bless their vision of the future.
What's troubling is how much sympathy both the publishers and the network builders are getting these days. We should thank them, agree that we stand on the shoulders of giants, and move forward without them. Using law to protect the possibility of future profits spells doom for innovation in this country. We don't (usually) protect existing business models with statutes or caselaw. And we shouldn't, notwithstanding the fervor and lobbying heft that accompany both of these claims to control the future.
Conversation
“[T]he current generation of email users is communicating much more often than recent generations and possibly more often than any previous generation since people huddled in caves with only conversation to pass the nights away.”
Thanks, Pew Internet & American Life Project. It's nice for the internet to get some good press once in a while. “Networked individualism” sounds (and is) much better than the stark, cruel “internet addictions” people used to rail about.
And those huge telecom carriers shouldn't be allowed to get in the way of the human need to communicate online. They'll never come up with the innovations that we might enjoy using to communicate in ever-more-interesting ways. A France Telecom executive said yesterday in Silicon Valley that calling the carriers “dinosaurs” was an insult to dinosaurs. From Washington Internet Daily:
“The big telcos will lose” if history is a guide, [Norman] Lewis said: “We're rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”These companies “are shackled by our business models. We are shackled by our legacy systems.” They've been organized around the revenue and opportunities in a conventional voice business that produces enormous revenue, he said. “The immediate response” when threatened is “to hold on to what you've got.” Fear of cannibalizing mobile business interferes with VoIP efforts, for instance, “so you have a certain amount of paralysis,” he said.
It wouldn't be good for the economy or for our insatiable need to keep in touch for the telcos to be in charge of “the internet.”
Paying for good service
Because the existing internet architecture doesn't guarantee that your packets will necessarily arrive, and because streaming video needs high speeds and some predictability, lots of sites work with middlemen (like Akamai, as in “One Out Of Every Five Global 500 Companies Trusts Akamai”). These middlemen in turn buy up strategic bandwidth from ISPs all over the world.
So the streaming site (say, Fox News) sends its content to a cache. Akamai takes the content and distributes it to servers that are close to ISPs. From a user's perspective, all of this is invisible. He makes his request of Fox, and, unbeknownst to him, he gets (for example) text from Fox and streaming video from a different route (a closer route) coming from an Akamai cache. Akamai helps Fox create a better user experience.
This all costs money. Akamai has to pay for servers and additional ISP connections.
The argument from at least one telephone company in favor of a “tiered internet” is that paying for good service is nothing new. Fox pays now to make sure that its users are happy. If, say, a telco starts only prioritizing video packets of its partners, in order to get this value-added service Fox will have to pay for it. What's the big deal? Fox and many other sites already do all kinds of things to ensure that their users are happy. They don't actually rely on the standard end-to-end internet model — they cache and adjust and pay through the nose.
The key semantic question seems to be: if services won't or can't pay for the telco special value-added services, are they being degraded? The telco would say “no — you pay for first class on airplanes, you pay for tolls to enter cities, but those who don't pay aren't harmed.” Their point is that they should be allowed to charge for special services, that Fox and others pay for these kinds of services all the time, and that no one will be hurt by the mere offering of these services.
The risks are greater than just hurt feelings and misunderstandings. If a telco makes an exclusive deal with any video streamer, then the rest will be second-best. Maybe not worse off than they are today, but not as zippy as the premium service. And start-ups may not be able to pay for any of this. Plus, there may be future start ups that are unrecognizable to us as start ups — amorphous net thingies without a home or a terrestrial bank account.
Harold Feld was at the same meeting with me today, and he's focused on what comes out of all of this prioritizing. Is the result “the internet”? In his words, “What the $#@! is the 'Public Internet'”? This term (another semantic struggle) is being used to refer to the non-prioritized offering of an incumbent.
It's all pretty difficult. It does seem to me that choosing to pay Akamai to buy cleverly-situated market-price ISP service for you is different than having to pony up to be carried to particular subscribers. It also seems to me that, yes, services that aren't “prioritized” are necessarily, over time, degraded — user expectations will change to be satisfied only with the highest speed access. (I get impatient ordering a sandwich in DC; this has happened to me only since I moved to NY where the deli-guys scare and intimidate you with their alarming speed.) I'm very worried about the risks to unborn technologies.
And, as Harold says, the whole “public”/”private” new distinction seems very strange indeed.
Bits, atoms, and broadband
Another cut on the “tiered internet” scuffle, this one inspired by Benjamin Reeve's work on the mismatch between “scientific” analysis/processes and information:
We can talk about “property” in a very reductive way. We can model it economically and make up mappings for it (literally). Property (atoms) can be reduced and understood as a series of computable relationships. I own that piece of land; you own the next lot over; we may have certain disputes or agreements, but the whole relationship can be understood as an algorithm or equation. We can be “scientific” about this relationship, in reductive terms.
Now, because information isn't conserved, because it can amplify and combine in unexpected ways and produce things that are greater than the sum of its parts, applying “property” analogies to it turns out to be extremely difficult. We can't (reliably) apply reductive understandings to it. We really aren't very good at understanding why information (like genetic coding, or money issues, or technological interoperability) does what it does when it does.
The new kinds of human activities that may be made possible by truly high-speed internet access are “informational” in nature. They'll be surprising and amplifying, and they'll evolve unpredictably.
But the network owners are trying to define everything in terms of property (a very atomic concept), as in “these are our pipes, we should control them.” This just doesn't fit the situation.
The great risk of acceding to the property way of thinking is that we'll lose the informational opportunities (call it innovation, but it's more than that) that would otherwise be possible. And we won't even know what we're missing. So, the graceful thing is to say, “okay, we understand that you believe you own your property, and we respect that, but if we honor your desires too much we'll be frustrating important as-yet-unknown informational events.”
Bits are different from atoms.
The military industrial Google-plex
There's a tremendous swirl of activity about the DOJ Google motion. Concern over the NSA scandal continues, although the Administration has apparently made it a central initiative of W's second term. Spin!
What's interesting about this swirl of events is that we're using informational privacy as a proxy for our feelings of concern about the current Administration. We can't tag them on the Iraq war because there's too much to take in, but we can read FISA and say “aha!,” and we can read their request to Google and say “see?”
At the same time, it's alarming to our limited human consciousnesses that neither of these things would ordinarily have come to light. Only because the NYT finally decided to publish do we know about the NSA scandal, and only because Google fought back do we know about the COPA subpoena. So part of our (perhaps overheated) concern is our sense of complete lack of control over our environment.
And it's even worse than we fear. I'm certain that everything is surveilled these days; that book by Patrick Radden Keefe (Chatter), last year should have let everyone know that the NSA always wants everything. Maybe using Google as private police is new; maybe it's not. Maybe MSN and the others were also part of the NSA scandal, but we just don't know. We have no idea how much data about us is interesting to others, and we're scared by that.
So we talk about legislation as an immediate reaction — it's an attempt to exert control over our world.
A broad privacy law would have to encompass both offline and online data, and that's an enormous job. I doubt we'll do well at it. And the costs of such a one-size-fits-all approach would undoubtedly exceed whatever benefits (in terms of a sense of control over our world) we glean from it. It will never, ever, cover government use and collection of data. So we'll just be punishing the private sector. Let's try to control the little things (like, say, literacy and the recovery of New Orleans) before we try to control flows of information.
The self-owned internet (II)
Networks (like the internet) that own themselves create new theoretical paths and concerns. Instead of grappling with hierarchically nested, mechanical bodies of law and inventing institutions that map to physical territories and produce coherent answers to linear questions, networks require us to confront new questions: in a collectively-owned commons, who governs?
The structure of the open network, with many nodes connected interdependently to many others, suggests that only collective values can govern it effectively. The existence of a constant pulse of creative activity in an open network, leading to unpredictable yet ordered results that cannot be explained as mere sums of their parts, suggests that particular acts of individuals, even large groups of individuals, may not be as important as they are in non-networked environments.
Rather, the relationships among those individuals, or among the groups in which they have membership, or among large nodes that serve to draw these individuals together, may be providing the interest and dynamism of the network. The relationship between the notes, rather than the notes themselves, is powerful in open networks. It is these relationships that create value.
But these relationships are wholly decentralized. If any individual attempted to stop the network in its tracks and demand an accounting of precisely what value he had contributed, so that he could propertize it and take it home to buy groceries, the network would not be able to respond and would collapse. Closing the network, making it exclusive, changes it into something that is no longer alive.
The telephone companies claim that they own “the network,” because they built it. But ”the internet,” as it is understood by the public, is owned by no one. Indeed, the internet arguably owns itself and has value of its own that is entirely independent of the identity of its access valves. This value is being captured daily by the “owners” of the internet—everyone. Over the last ten years, a wholly decentralized and global investment of time, money, and gifts created the internet, without any need for specific incentives provided by government (after the initial U.S. development projects had run their course).
So the internet is not only unowned, but it also has a liveliness and liberty of its own that is highly beneficial to mankind and requires protection. The role of government should be to prohibit any form of ownership (or other action) that unreasonably interferes with the openness of and access to and responsible use of this commons by the collective group.
We can start from the premise that there is a strong public interest (evidenced by Bush Administration as well as Clinton Administration comments) in having high-speed, unfettered internet access be available as widely as possible. We can graciously accept that there is a general public interest in protecting property and compensating property owners. But we can regard access to the commons of the self-owned internet as a more important public interest than protecting the private property of the telecom companies.
Ben Franklin
He won't mind if it's a couple of days late, because it's been 300 years: Happy birthday, Benjamin Franklin.
Franklin would have loved the internet. (He has his own search engine.)
Today's convulsions would have troubled him: fishing expeditions for data (a) (DOJ from Google/MSN/Yahoo!, with only Google speaking up in response); fishing expeditions for data (b) (the NSA scandal); telcos seeking protection money for transmitting bits not their own (the two-tiered internet); new attempts to squelch legal speech (son of COPA on its way); bad broadband stats (forget that 2007 deadline)…. As a man who was enthusiastic about communicating (in books, in letters, in pamphlets, at parties) he would have been worried that we were getting in our own way.
Franklin started out a monarchist, but the world's foremost amateur became an impassioned revolutionary near the end of his life. He was unafraid to speak up publicly. Faced with these issues, he would have formed volunteer brigades to take them on.
New gTLDs — auctions
I'm looking for comments so that I can understand the arguments about auctions better.
Concerns are often expressed about auctioning off new gTLDs — strong concerns — because of worries about what will be auctioned and what process will be followed to get to the point of auctioning.
Same concerns with lotteries (which I suppose would be like auctions except without a money element).
I know that the OECD made a proposal favoring auctions here and Profs. Milton Mueller and Lee McKnight made a proposal here. CircleID ran some articles here. Are there other materials on one side or another of this specific issue? What are the best arguments in this area?
Thanks for comments.
Worth reading
Al Gore made a fine speech today about the risks of broad executive power. It's not long, and worth reading.
The speech isn't solely about the NSA wiretapping legal crisis (although it certainly covers that issue carefully). It's more an indictment of the entire idea of unconstrained Presidential discretion.
We seem to live in a time of “inherent” and unquestioned powers, a time when “you're either with us or against us,” when every conversation is a litmus test of loyalty. The K Street Project is just one symptom of this problem; there are so many others that are far more serious. As Dean Koh said (and he's quoted by Gore), “If the President has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution.” Perhaps this President won't go that far, but the next one might — that's Gore's point.
Gore even got in a plug for the internet, as his very last word of concern:
It is particularly important that the freedom of the Internet be protected against either the encroachment of government or the efforts at control by large media conglomerates. The future of our democracy depends on it.
Back in 1994, Gore said this:
A nascent GII [Global Information Infrastructure] already exists. What we seek is a superior GII, one that has higher capacity, is fully interactive, faster, and more versatile. One that is less expensive to use than existing systems, and more accessible to all the people of the world. But our goal is not merely technological advancement – more bandwidth, faster switching, more powerful processing capability, and greater compression and storage capacity. We view technology not as an end in itself but as the means through which the GII can realize its potential to improve the well-being of all people on this planet.
Some good speeches.