South Korea and Ireland
Great article here about the future of the internet — in South Korea. Everyone's a netizen. Everyone has cheap broadband. Nine out of ten 20-something Koreans are part of Cyworld. Online activists helped elect the President, and the President gives his first interview to OhMyNews.
South Korea made the decision ten years ago to invest in high-speed (competitive) internet access and subsidize cheap PCs — as a result, they have just about the highest broadband penetration in the world. Not only has the dream come true, but economic growth comes attached.
Meanwhile, someone sent me a Wall Street Journal Europe article about VCs carving up an Irish telephone company to treat transport like a utility. The big guys can watch the model and then think about selling their own networks to raise some cash.
Ireland is a model proving ground to attempt a split, says Robert Topfer, head of corporate finance at Babcock & Brown. Because Ireland has a relatively small population of about four million spread out over the island, it would be too expensive for any competitor to build a network reaching all the homes and offices, leaving Eircom with a monopoly. The company must share the network by leasing access to competitors and others such as Internet providers, but the system for doing that is clumsy and loses money and is a headache for regulators.
“We share, but we share begrudgingly,” Mr. Topfer says. The answer, he says, is to hive off the network and regulate it like a utility. For the regulator, such an outcome would be “nirvana,” he adds.
So the money guys see the advantage in separation.
As I've mentioned in the past, the EU telecommunications regulator keeps talking about separation and suggesting that taking this step would help the competitive picture all over Europe.
There are good ideas all over the place outside the borders of the U.S. — all we need now is bravery, and we'll be able to catch up. I hope.
A good day for users
Today the Supreme Court of California issued its much-looked-for decision [warning, pdf] in Barrett v. Rosenthal. Unlike that kooky dicta-ridden Craigslist case from last week, this one falls right in line with Zeran and lets online service providers (and users!) breathe a sigh of relief.
It's based on some strange facts. Rosenthal, the defendant, forwarded an allegedly defamatory article written by someone else to a newsgroup. The statute, 47 USC 230(c)(1), says that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” But the “user” part hadn't come up before in litigation.
Who's a “user”? The court decides that a user is — a user. Anyone using an interactive computer service. So by forwarding or posting the article, Rosenthal was a user. She shouldn't be treated as the information content provider and held liable for its content, because she didn't write the article.
The strongest and most useful part of the opinion squelches the argument that “distributor” liability was somehow left untouched by Section 230. If this argument had prevailed, “publishers” would be immunized from defamation liability, but “distributors” would be on the hook if they “knew or had reason to know” that there was some potentially defamatory material on their servers.
Nonsense, the court says. This would be terrible for interactive computer services — an impossible burden — because every time they received notice of something potentially defamatory (had “had reason to know” such a thing) they'd have to make a judgment about it and decide whether or not to continue the publication. Far too many bits flying around for that to make sense.
My favorite section of the opinion is the part pointing out that the legislative history of the Dot Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act, 47 USC 941, includes specific language making clear that registrars and registries with responsibility for .kids.us are “interactive computer services” for the purposes of Section 230. The committee report prepared in connection with the Act says that Zeran etc. was correctly decided. Bravo.