Archive for October, 2006

Recently, the FTC issued a report on muni wifi (press release here).  It's the first report of the FTC's Internet Access Task Force. 

Commissioner Leibowitz issued a concurring statement supporting the report.  It's a useful statement – particularly footnote 4:

As an agency charged with enforcing the antitrust laws, we know the importance of competition well. Increased competition means lower prices and higher quality for consumers. But the lack of competition along the “last mile” of the Internet to consumers can have an even more profound effect than high prices in local markets. It can interfere with the growth and development of the Internet everywhere.

Thanks, Commr. Leibowitz.  He's citing the FCC numbers showing that more than 60% of U.S. zip codes have at most a choice between only two providers of broadband access, 40% have only one choice, and 13% have no choice at all.  He's noticed that “[t]he municipal broadband movement is a grassroots effort by this country’s local officials – many of whom recognize that broadband Internet access is increasingly essential to economic growth – to respond to real needs on the part of their constituents to make broadband more available and affordable.” 

He's aware of the risk to that economic growth posed by incumbents who in the recent past have wanted to make sure that municipalities couldn't provide broadband access to their citizens.  It's a strong statement, and it suggests that the FTC is ready to take up the cudgels on behalf of municipalities that want to install their own networks but are being thwarted by established telephone or cable companies.

The next report of the task force will be on network neutrality.  I have a feeling I know where that will come out – Majoras's comments in August amounted to a rallying cry for the incumbents. 

I hope that Commr. Leibowitz will be a temporizing influence on the task force.  If he understands the incentives of the existing providers of broadband access — and he seems to — he will acknowledge that they have every reason to manage networks in ways that will favor their own packets.  There are many things these network providers can do short of outright blocking that nonetheless harm “the growth and development of the Internet.”  He should be asking hard questions about promises of common carriage these providers made in exchange for the system of public subsidies and regulatory soft treatment that allowed them to build these networks. 

Most importantly, Commr. Leibowitz needs to understand that no one can see what's going on inside these networks.  We have no way of knowing what incremental discrimination is already happening.  There simply is no data.  To say “we will wait until there is evidence of harm” is to play on on the telcos' field — they are masters of obfuscation and creative accounting.  Claims of harm will be met by them with waving hands and wads of reports, none of which will be falsifiable from the outside.  

Think economically, Commr. Leibowitz:  the incumbents have managed to work us all the way back to the telephony business model.  Is optimizing on billing the best way to run a broadband network, in the long run? 

Economic growth keeps growing.  Human conditions keep keeting better (at least in some countries).  Things are not settling down into a steady state.  What accounts for this? 

The increasing returns that come with new goods.  Differentiation. An increasing variety of goods.  Technological change.  These things aren't external to the functional economic system — they are the components of the system that, with positive feedback, drive economic growth.

Diversity is something that Jane Jacobs focused on in The Economy of Cities in 1969.  She tells the story of Birmingham and Manchester.  In Birmingham in the 1850s there were many small businesses doing pieces of different things — no real specialization that you could see. Manchester, on the other hand, had huge businesses in textiles and was viewed as the city of the future.  But Birmingham stayed alive, and Manchester dimmed.  Diversity seems to be the key to growth.

To drive the development of new ideas (which lead to new products and services, which lead to growth), we'd need to invest substantially in infrastructure.  More funding for education.  More openness in academic publications.  More government investment in broadband infrastructure and treatment of it as a utility – a basic good needed to support the transmission and production of new ideas.  This seems like a good time for enlightened government support of technological development.

I'm at the annual Yale Law School reunion.  Dean Koh is doing a great job exhorting everyone to remember that the law school stands for excellence and humanity — and excellence in (presumably humane) fundraising.  He briefly described the credentials of this year's entering class.  Many people in the room said quietly to themselves “I would never get in now.”

Every reunion has a theme that brings alumni in for discussion.  This year it's the work-life balance. So there are panels entitled I Love My Job, But Working 24/7? and Work and Self.

I've been to other alumni weekends where the Friday dinner is a roaring, successful event, where you can't find a seat or make your way down the aisles because of the throngs of back-slapping alums happy to be back in the seat of Yale-dom.

The dinner tonight was not like that.  Sure, it was festive (and my table in particular seemed to be making an awful lot of noise), but there wasn't a huge crowd.  It may have been the topic of the weekend that was the issue. 

Or maybe everyone's still at the office.

Michael Carroll, a member of the Creative Commons board, was here at Cardozo today talking to a group of law review editors from all over the country.  He began by reminding the students that the idea behind student-edited law reviews was (at least originally) the dissemination of legal knowledge.  The room was quiet — they were all paying attention. 

He said that if the editors had a choice between increasing that dissemination (by, for example, making pdfs of articles available online) and making money for their schools (by, for example, reaping royalties from Westlaw and LEXIS, and getting paid for subscriptions), they should choose dissemination. 

But he also pointed out that that's probably a false choice — Westlaw and LEXIS aren't going away any time soon, and there is an audience for hardcopy subscriptions that isn't going away either. 

Michael argued very persuasively that there are large audiences that don't have access to Westlaw and LEXIS but will find articles online and cite them:  researchers who bump into things online serendipitously, researchers from other disciplines, underfunded researchers, and researchers from other countries.  He urged the editors to make sure that the authors they publish have the rights to make their articles available online. 

Michael pointed the editors to Creative Commons's ScienceCommons project, which aims to widen open access to factual data.  He noted repeatedly that other disciplines are very far ahead of the legal academic field in their efforts to open access to information.  And he praised the Duke Law Journal for having a long history of putting articles online.

Duke's editor pointed out that law professors with offers from his journal who profess to have a deep commitment to open access will publish articles with journals that are higher in the pecking order but don't put their articles online.  So the profession needs to support the idea that open access is important.

For me, the web changes the role of law journals.  Selection by a law journal can indicate quality, and editing assistance from good students is often very helpful. But the entire process is slow, laden with tradition, and strangely out of step with the actual practice of law. 

Peer-reviewed journals, with swift online posting, would make much more sense.  But that would mean that law professors would have to do a lot more work.  Some professors, like Michael, would rise to the occasion.

It was an inspiring talk.  I hope and expect that every student in the room took it to heart and will take its lessons home.  But I'm not sure that the current system of innumerable student-reviewed law journals is sustainable. 

[addition -- Don't miss the effort here to help push access to law review content.  Thanks to Michael Froomkin for the pointer.]

Cardozo often has visitors from foreign countries teaching here and generally giving a civilized air to the place.  Today one of them came into my office with a look of panic on his face.

“I thought that someone else was going to be traveling with me tomorrow to [name of city] from New York, but he can't go, and so I have to get there by myself.  And then I have to pick up a key at the law school there and find the place where I'm staying.”

Should he take the bus, take a train, take a plane; how was he going to find the law school; how was he going to find the place… all of this was terrifying to this person.

I go to [name of city] a lot, and so I had lots of advice.  Definitely take the train.  The subway leaves right from the train station.  Take the subway in the direction of [name of place].  Get off and walk this direction and then that direction, and you'll be at the law school.  Then I printed out a bunch of things.  Here's a train schedule.  Here's the subway map.  Here's the map of the law school.  Here are walking directions from the law school to the apartment.

It felt great to be helping the Cardozo visitor.  I've often been in foreign cities where all of this getting around seems so mysterious and I completely understood the feeling of panic.

He asked me if anyone had helped me this way when I was traveling.  I said that the internet was good at helping in these situations.  Lots of maps and directions.  Very empowering.

I'm looking forward to the day when the New York Times figures out how to deliver exactly the stories I want, in hard-copy printed format, to my door.  Personalization plus the feel of newsprint.  Yes, it'll be expensive, but these times demand my Times.  Reading online and reading offline are different experiences, and I'll forever be of the generation that wants a paper to hold.

Today I'm looking for news about North Korea.  It's a Wag the Dog moment — perhaps we'll all stop thinking about Foley if we're worrying about nuclear warheads. And I want to hear more about Anna Politkovskaya. 

Russia is unquestionably a dangerous place for journalists — less so than only Iraq and Algeria, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Thirteen of them have been killed since Mr. Putin came to power in 2000, a little more than two a year on average.

We need reporters like Anna Politkovskaya.  The LA Times had an opinion piece today that said:

…[T]he slaying of Politkovskaya. . . illustrate[s] that it is the messenger that matters. Insurgents, criminals, terrorists and corrupt politicians understand very well that it is the months or years of digging by professional reporters, many of them supported by traditional news organizations, that will expose misdeeds.

. . . . YouTube, Google, Flickr and many other websites offer valuable tools for keeping the world informed. But they are not a substitute for Politkovskaya and her colleagues.

Societies are judged on how they treat their most vulnerable citizens. We suggest that added to that calculation should be whether journalists have been threatened, assaulted and killed. Tell us how many journalists were assassinated in your country last year, and we will tell you what kind of society you have.

The sub-headline of the LA Times story suggests that the “killings of old-school investigative reporters prove their work is crucial.”  There must be a more straightforward way to prove that you're central to society.  I'm hoping that personalized printed paper shows up soon.  I don't want newspapers to die.

From the San Francisco Chronicle, a good-news story about the internet.  Back in 1954, a Harvard psychologist named Gordon Allport suggested that person-to-person contact could reduce prejudice.  But the contact had to happen in just the right way —

The contact must be pleasant, it must be fairly intimate and not casual, the participants need to perceive they are of equal status, and it must involve cooperation between groups working toward a mutually agreed goal.

A researcher in Israel, Dr. Amichai-Hamburger, is convinced that properly established online interactions can provide exactly this kind of contact.  He points out that people are relaxed when they're using their computers at home. 

Online cooperation is very common, a message can't hurt you physically, and with the right kinds of tools and a belief that a common goal is possible, I can imagine using the internet to make progress in many conflict-torn situations.  Use of an avatar allows people to feel “safe” and to speak freely. 

When it comes to deep-seated religious prejudices, the kinds of feelings that make people murder others because they believe the others are defiling the earth, I'm not sure how much online contact will help.  It can't hurt, certainly, and it's good to have a story about online communications that isn't negative.

If every seven years someone showed up with a camera and asked you how you felt about every facet of your life and then showed the result to millions of people, how would you feel? Some of the subjects in 49Up are clearly very upset about having been chosen to be profiled. They resent the intrusion and the effect the project has had on their lives.  They've been observed, intently, when they might have preferred to remain invisible.

It's very moving to see them as 7-year-olds, these 49-year-olds. Rather like having a family photo album that can talk. It was surprising to me how much of the talk was in anger, but from their perspective it hardly feels voluntary — this project has shaped their lives.

I talked today to a friend of mine from the Ukraine who is heartbroken over what is going on in her country now.  Yes, Viktor Yuschenko was elected President in December 2004 (“he was so handsome, you know, before he was poisoned”).  But then the people in the densely populated pro-Russia south voted in a Prime Minister who was also sympathetic to Russia.  It had been a very cold winter with great shortages of oil for heat, and enough people went along that the Ukraine ended up with a split government. 

Yuschenko, in my friend's eyes, has no power.  My friend is deeply worried about the corruption and lawlessness of present-day Ukraine.  “It is such a beautiful country,” she said, “but we have had so many decades of corruption, and maybe our expectations were too high after 2004.  We need to move slowly, step by step, towards a better life.”  My friend's dearest dream is that the Ukraine will join NATO.  She despises Russia. 

A group of researchers made a study tour to Ukraine recently under the auspices of the 21st Century Trust, and they're blogging about what they've learned here.  It's well worth reading — Ukraine isn't getting much coverage in US newspapers.

One of the researchers, and I suspect the instigator of the blog, is Maria Farrell, a very skilled ICANN policy person who likes to do these sorts of things on her days off. 

“Those who have used music metaphors to describe working together, especially jazz metaphors, are sensing the nature of this quantum world [where small activities affect others, even across distance].  This world demands that we be present together, and be willing to improvise.  We agree on the melody, tempo, and key, and then we play.  We listen carefully, we communicate constantly, and suddenly, there is music, possibilities beyond anything we imagined.  The music comes from somewhere else, from a unified whole we have accessed among ourselves, a relationship that transcends our false sense of separateness.  When the music appears, we can't help but be amazed and grateful.”

Leadership and the New Science, by Margaret J. Wheatley.