Archive for December, 2006

Yikes.  I've been tagged by David Weinberger, who says that he's sorry but that I have to now have to write five things most people don't know about me.  And then I have to tag five other bloggers.

Here are the five things:

1.  I hate Brussels sprouts and will do almost anything to avoid being near them.

2.  In eighth grade, I used to say “Cat!” urgently to my dog Cory so that he would drag me along the street on my skateboard.  He was absolutely convinced that there was a cat right ahead of us, just out of reach, and he'd run for a long time.  I was a pretty good skateboarder.

3.  I enter the New Yorker cartoon caption contest almost every week and I never win.

4.  I read the obituaries section of the newspaper first.

5.  I was a music major in college and got credit for violin lessons, which allowed me to have a great GPA, which made it possible for me to … go to law school.

I tag Nina Camic, Tonya Brito, Ann Althouse, Beth Noveck, and Harold Feld.

[tags: blogtag]

I've recently seen the first two installments of The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard's much-discussed trilogy. 

From a recent Ben Brantley review:

How could Americans, with their notoriously short attention spans, be expected to thrill to long conversations about the relative merits of German philosophers, conducted by historical figures (Michael Bakunin, Alexander Herzen, Vissarion Belinsky) who are hardly household names? (This is a play full of throwaway lines like, “We were discussing transcendental idealism over oysters, and one thing led to another.”)

Well, the plays are dazzlingly energetic and beautifully done, full of quick sketches of characters traveling through their lives in the mid-19th century while dreaming of a changed Russia.  I went off and read two Isaiah Berlin essays because Berlin is a hero of Stoppard's and his essays prompted (to some extent) Stoppard's writing of these plays.  What comes through, in the essays and the plays, is a deep appreciation for the unpredictability and dynamic nature of what happens next.  No single truths, no simple beliefs end up succeeding. 

For most of the second installment, Shipwreck, everyone is living far from Russia.  A critic, Vissarion Belinsky, can't wait to get back home — because in Moscow, unlike in Paris, literature means so much.  Political speech and discussion of ideas is suppressed in Russia.  In Paris, everything is noise, nothing rises to be heard.  But Belinsky dies of consumption when he returns to Russia.

Although the Times recommends a long reading list, you can understand what's going on without much background.  The plays are visually arresting, immensely talky, full of portent, and mostly sad.  The characters often dwell on Russia's backwardness, something Belinsky says is relieved only by the Russian novelists springing up.  People stumble through their time together, doing their best to muddle along, forgetting what effects high-mindedness can have on their friends and relations.  Michael Bakunin, in particular, keeps crying for action and revolution, and puts himself in the middle of tussles all over Europe. Turgenev stands stock-still and talks about the stunning visual moments that he constantly notices in his life — he should notice, he's a novelist.

These are big, turbulent, beautifully-lit plays.  They're more like a wash of sound than a tightly-knit paragraph.  I'm looking forward to the third one, and then to reading them (and reading up on them).

The National Center on Education and the Economy report that I wrote about yesterday is focused on one thing:  how to shape education policy to produce more people who can think creatively.

Thomas Friedman wrote about the issue earlier this week:

In a globally integrated economy, our workers will get paid a premium only if they or their firms offer a uniquely innovative product or service, which demands a skilled and creative labor force to conceive, design, market and manufacture — and a labor force that is constantly able to keep learning. We can’t go on lagging other major economies in every math/science/reading test and every ranking of Internet penetration and think that we’re going to field a work force able to command premium wages. Freedom, without rigor and competence, will take us only so far.

We should have the same goal from a communications policy point of view:  What's the set of policies that will facilitate creative thinking, generate new ideas, and help us keep our rate of economic growth increasing?

The answer is to focus on diversity.  But before you groan and think of forced educational programming or affirmative action programs of various kinds, let me explain:  my suggestion isn't that we go back to FCC's old role of using scarcity to require particular kinds of programming. (Red Lion: “because of the scarcity of [electromagnetic] frequencies, the Government is permitted to put restraints on licensees in favor of others whose views should be expressed on this unique medium.”) That kind of diversity means “the fostering of programming that reflects minority viewpoints or appeals to minority tastes.”

Rather, the new growth theory form of diversity is much simpler.  The internet, which will someday soon be cable/telephone/television all in one, is characterized by abundance, not scarcity.  Although we don't have competition in this country for highspeed internet access, we have a fiercely competitive internet above the access layer.  All the FCC has to do is support this fiercely competitive, idea-generating, diverse internet, and we'll all be better off.

The leap forward in technological change represented by the internet provides us with a tremendous opportunity to foster the kind of radical change in communications policy that the education community is already working on.  We should make sure that highspeed internet access is universal and unfettered — uncontrolled and unmonetized by the regional duopolies that control access in this country at the moment.

If we can consider changing the format of high school education, as Friedman and the NCEE are urging us to do, we can certainly consider changing the way we approach communications.  If we don't, as they suggest, we'll continue our steady descent as a country.

Here's an opportunity for leadership, change, and increasing returns:

A report [warning, large pdf executive summary] has been released by a panel called the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, organized by the National Center on Education and the Economy (funded by foundations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, Hewlett Foundation).  As reported by both Time Magazine and the New York Times, the New Commission states bluntly that leadership in the new world order of digitized global industries requires a “deep vein of creativity” that, in turn, requires substantial education (“comfort with ideas and abstractions”) that we're not providing in this country.

So our standard of living is going to fall.  Inevitably. 

To address this problem, the report (based on two years of work, many major economic and labor studies, lots of international comparisons) makes several recommendations about how education should work in the US.  Students should take board examinations in subject areas at the end of the 10th grade, which will serve to direct some students to community college and some to additional high school work towards eventual college admission.  And we should persuade the best students eventually to become teachers, by paying them more in the early years of their teaching careers and providing them with better benefits.  We should test students for the skills that will help workers in this new world, like creativity, self-discipline, the ability to work well with a team. We should change the way schools are managed, by privatizing them and making them accountable for their funding to the state rather than the local area — and allowing parents to send their children to any school whose reported results they liked. We should provide high-quality early childhood education, provide continuing education to adults, and generally make learning a lifelong (and competitively provided) experience.

Paul Romer is quoted in the Times coverage saying that this change-the-world effort “was driven by improvements in technology, much as advances in the early 20th century led to universal high school.” 

Investing in the educational changes suggested by the report could substantially increase our productivity as a nation — many increasing returns.  And technology — particularly an open internet — could help a great deal.

So Commr. McDowell is rumored to be walking the halls of Congress taking political temperatures about what he should do in connection with the AT&T/BellSouth merger.

McDowell used to work for Comptel, where he would have opposed such a merger, but Chairman Martin thinks (and has persuaded the FCC GC) that federal ethical guidelines that would require McDowell not to vote on the merger can be waived — because there's a 2-2 tie among the remaining four Commissioners.

I can't imagine being McDowell's shoes — being forced by political pressure to vote on something that an applicable set of ethical guidelines says you shouldn't vote on.  Excruciating.  No matter what he does, he looks awful to some large group of anxious and persuasive people with whom he frequently interacts. 

So here's the out.  If he can't stay recused, he can look to empirical evidence as to whether the merger will improve the public welfare — and that evidence suggests that the merger is not in the public interest.  Blogged here by David Isenberg, it's a study by Sumit Majumdar of UT-Dallas:

We find that the approval of the mergers in the past have clearly led to welfare losses for the American consumer. The approval of the ATT&T and SBC merger will lead to further substantial negative economic consequences for hundreds of millions of American consumers. Approval of the merger is not in the public interest. The local exchange sector has been re-consolidated and re-monopolized a generation after the divestiture of the original AT&T in 1984. Today’s lack of productive efficiency and technological progressiveness, particularly with respect to the deployment of broadband and network digitalization, of the merged US comjpanies means that the welfare of the US consumer has been significantly compromised in perpetuity.  To ensure that no forther compromises are engendered, and overall compromises exacerbated, the AT&T and SBC merger should not be approved by the FCC.

Today started with me spending hours trying to re-establish my identity with a host of private and public organizations.  Thanks to all – you've been great.  And I'm back.

So apart from noting a fun evening debating the implementation of Beth Noveck's spirited, worthwhile, and frankly awe-inspiring Community Patent proposal (details here), I don't have much to report.

But I do have a movie idea.  Ready?  Prior Heart.

It's the story of a fun-loving but eccentric patent examiner who runs across an invention that allows him to travel back in time — sitting right there in his cubicle, he's transported to Mount Vernon (? — has to be near the USPTO) in the time of Washington.  And he finds himself falling in love with the great man's niece, and suddenly in a position both to aid the General in a time of great peril (the patent examiner knows what to do because he's an amateur historian familiar with the intricacies of the renovation of the Mansion) (or something like that) AND to help the niece discover just how lovable she is.   But then, of course, at a tremendously inconvenient time he can't help having the memory of Crystal City float into his mind (those awful buildings), which jars him back into the present.  Poof!  But the niece turns out to be in the present too, as a lobbyist working on patent reform, and he looks into her eyes and remembers her.  But she doesn't remember him and she's mad about some narrow patent issue.  What to do?

Surely we need some entertainment vehicle that brings the drama of the Patent Office closer to home.

Okay, your turn.  Try these titles:  Novel and Nonobvious.  or…Examined Lives.

The GAO issued a report recently that seems relevant to the AT&T/BellSouth merger — particularly in connection with business lines.

The report says that ”in areas where FCC granted full pricing flexibility due to the presumed presence of competitive alternatives, list prices and average revenues tend to be higher than or the same as list prices and average revenues in areas still under some FCC price regulation.”  The GAO's report suggests that there isn't meaningful competition for commercial telecommunications business in the United States. “In the 16 major metropolitan areas we examined, available data suggest that facilities-based competitive alternatives for dedicated access are not widely available,” the study discloses. “Data on the presence of competitors in commercial buildings suggest that competitors are serving, on average, less than 6 percent of the buildings with demand for dedicated access in these areas.”

Here's more from Lasar's Letter on the GAO report, which was picked up by FreePress, which was picked up by the Benton Foundation — if only the Commission was picking all of this up as well.

Back in NYC, finally, after a long and remarkably low-energy board meeting on Friday.  We have a new Vice Chair, Roberto Gaetano, and a shared commitment to make the transition to a new Chair by the end of next year — this is Vint Cerf's last year as an ICANN board member.

The big events were the renewals of .biz/.org/.info and a gesture towards progress on internationalized domain names.  As I said publicly in several settings, I'd like to see the LSE report on the GNSO taken seriously and adopted wholesale — this would lower barriers to participation and generally make the GNSO's job much more coherent.  Along those lines, the contracts and the bylaws need to be brought into connection with eachother — from my point of view, the GNSO's key task is the creation of consensus policies that can be mandatory for registries and registrars.

I'd also like to see meetings improve, become more open, and produce results that can be acted on and interacted with remotely.  It would be good to have much more cross-cutting structured dialogue, rather than panels or serial comments.  I'm not pushing for just two meetings a year, because it seems that we need them for a host of purposes that aren't limited to policy-making — things like outreach, regional participation, and workshops on various subjects.  I'd like to try the Idea Tournament that Jordyn Buchanan has proposed.

The board is changing, and our discussions are frank and robust.  I'd like to see these discussions reflected in the minutes of these meetings, and I've been assured that this will be happening soon.

Right now, I have a much more mundane concern:  the display on my ThinkPad T41 no longer works reliably.  Maybe it was the travel, maybe it has indigestion, maybe it simply has had enough data and is ready to take a break.  Breaks all around.  I'll be offline for a while.

Ooookay.  Another big day (but you knew that).  We had the second part of the public forum this morning — my big issues were the GNSO LSE review and transparency stuff (tired, sorry).  Then the board went into its conclave between 2pm and 10pm, then we met for a chat in the bar, then, finally, we were done.

Tomorrow I have to report on the meeting about meetings, the meta-meeting, so here's what I'll say:

Positive remarks:  People have lots of positive things to say about ICANN meetings.  The scribes come in for universal acclaim.  The healthy culture of debate is appreciated — the idea that you can get to a mike pretty easily to speak your mind.  Hallway/networking very fruitful.  ICANN's meeting coordinators do a good job. 

Communications:  Translation is a key issue, and it would be good to have key documents available in major languages (we're working on that).  Some concern about doing business/legal document only in one language.  Lots of interest in agendas available in advance, and cross-cutting meetings focused on a single issue.  Each ICANN meeting should leave a footprint of some kind, by attracting local people who join in policymaking and stick with it.  Perhaps we need to set goals re how many participants we're seeking to attract from each region.   Need to get basic information out before the meetings.  Need to make it easier for newcomers to understand what's going on so they can get involved.  Maybe we should have a daily service that provides an overview of key discussions during ICANN meetings. 

Some of the most interesting meetings are small in size, but they're not publicly visible.  It may be everybody's responsibility to take notes about those smaller meetings and get them posted online. 

We're not getting remote conversations into these meetings — everything's a one-way broadcast.  It would be great to project the IRC channels in the meeting room.  In general, we need better online tools (and asynchronous, virtual meetings).

We should encourage people to set up satellite meetings-around-the-meeting — before and after.

We really need to speak more slowly to one another.

And, of course, we need to know why we're communicating!  What are these meetings for?  We have a narrow technical mission…We certainly need a better web site.

Meeting protocol.  Should we charge a small fee?  It would create a barrier, but it would help us cover costs.  How about voluntary fees?  How would we allocate fees?  Are we overdoing security, requiring badges and security?  (This may pose a big problem for local hosts.)  We should make it obvious which meetings are “closed” and which are “open,” and move towards as much openness as possible.  We should make meetings comfortable and open for attendees — better signage, better guidance, better context (what's the history of topic X?) etc.  Maybe we need to revive the Salzburg Seminar idea of funding participation at meetings through scholarships.

Meeting structure.  We have a good opening tutorial for newcomers, but then it's not clear what they should do next.  Our intake processes aren't good.  We need more joint cross-constituency discussions.  The room setup is awful for the public forums.  We shouldn't read reports (we're getting better at this).   More dialogue!   The nominating committee should be part of the first public forum at the beginning of the week.  The board gets over-scheduled, but these meetings shouldn't focus on talking up to the board.  The board meeting on Friday is too staged (we're going to loosen up tomorrow).  Maybe there should be a public meeting AFTER the private board prep meeting, for feedback on what we've decided on.

Number of meetings/location of meetings.  Who would get sponsors for non-local-hosted meetings?  Maybe ICANN should be renting the A/V equipment for all meetings.  We need to collect data about how many people come, and where they come from.  We need to find out whether holding these meetings actually benefits the local community.  Maybe we'd have more participation if our meeting locations were more predictable.  Maybe we need to consider having one of the three meetings in a “hub” location.  Visa issues are a major concern.  We're not sure whether two or three meetings is the right number, but we are sure that more dialogue is what should be happening at these meetings.

That's it — scattershot but well-intentioned.  The Board will have to take all of this in and decide what to do for 2008.

Today was another long one – tomorrow will be too.  Lots of concrete suggestions in the meeting about meetings this afternoon, including ideas about cross-group meetings, importance of speaking slowly (I'm an offender), importance of figuring out WHY we have these meetings.  You might think it's all about policy development, and I often do, but there are other things going on here — outreach, networking, appearance-creation — that are also relevant.

A great question:  what are newcomers supposed to do AFTER they've gone to the newcomers' roundtable discussion?  It's a hard place to find a point of entry — the learning curve takes about a year. And if you're interested as a vendor of IDN-related software, there's no constituency for you….  The transcript for the meeting about meetings should be available soon, and I'll link to it.

This morning was the GNSO public forum (mostly about contractual conditions and about the LSE review); tomorrow morning is the Board's public forum (many many things on the agenda).  Then the Board disappears for the afternoon and evening to deliberate.  By Friday afternoon another ICANN meeting will have ended.  Then I'll be able to get back to linking and blogging about things other than my schedule.