Freedom To Connect — next week
I want to make sure everyone knows about the Freedom To Connect conference next week — Monday Mar. 5 and Tuesday Mar. 6. Details and schedule here. The cost to register goes up substantially tomorrow, so think about signing up today.
Here's the current agenda:
March 5, 2007 (***subject to change***)
- 8:00 AM — Registration, breakfast
- 8:45 - 10:00 AM — Jim Douglas, Governor of Vermont, intro Tom Evslin, welcome David Isenberg
- 10:00 - 10:30 AM — Break
- 10:30 - 11:15 AM — Yochai Benkler on The Wealth of Networks
- 11:15 - Noon — Panel: Benkler, kc claffy, Mark Cooper, Elliot Maxwell, Gigi Sohn
- Noon - 1:00 PM — Lunch, box lunch on premises
- 1:00 - 2:00 PM — Demos: David Smith (Qwak), Cory Ondrejka (2nd Life)
- 2:00 - 2:45 PM — Enabling Technologies — James Salter, John Waclawsky, Sanjit Biswas
- 2:45 - 3:15 PM — Break
- 3:15 - 4:00 PM — Network Enabled Government, Rep. Steve Urquhart (Politicopia), Fred Hassani (Intellipedia), Micah Sifry (Sunlight Foundation), Allison Fine (Moderator)
- 4:00 - 4:30 PM — tbd
- 4:30 - 4:45 PM — Jeff Chester on Digital Destiny
- 4:45 - 5:00 PM — Book signing preview, Allison Fine (Momentum), Yochai Benkler (Wealth of Networks) & Reed Hundt (In China's Shadow)
- 5:30 - 8:30 PM — Reception/book signing in nearby restaurant, reception keynote by David Weinberger
March 6, 2007 (***subject to change***)
- 8:00 AM — Registration, breakfast
- 8:45 - 9:00 AM — Welcome to Day 2, David Isenberg
- 9:00 - 9:45 AM — Peer Production News Panel, Dan Gillmor, Mark Tapscott, Bill Allison, Jonathan Krim (moderator)
- 9:45 - 10:30 AM — Community Networks Panel, Sascha Meinrath, Michael Calabrese, Becca Vargo Daggett, Drew Clark (Moderator)
- 10:30 - 11:00 AM — Break
- 11:00 - Noon — FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, Ron Sege (intro).
- Noon - 1:00 PM — Lunch, box lunch on premises
- 1:00 - 1:20 PM — Demos: Yuval Klein (Plymedia), Nora Abousteit (Burda Style)
- 1:20 - 2:30 — Adam Thierer, Peter Swire, Jim Baller
- 2: 30 - 3:00 PM — Break
- 3:00 - 4:00 PM — Susan Crawford, Reed Hundt
- 4:00 - 5:00 PM — Bruce Sterling sums up (with Jasmina Tesanovic).
- 5:00 PM — Adjourn
Smolin report
People who wander by this blog will know that I'm a fan of Lee Smolin, whose Life of the Cosmos was my favorite book five years ago. I recently read his 2007 book: The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next.
The first half of Trouble with Physics is heavy sledding for a music major. Smolin is showing that while string theory has led to some worthwhile avenues of study, it's not a testable theory. It just can't be proven — in fact, it can't even be defined. It doesn't confirm or suggest anything beyond itself, and it can't be explained. Smolin describes the work of many brilliant people who have devoted their careers to string theory, and describes what they've been working on. Most of this was very hard for me to understand, but I think I got the point that string theory is the emperor's new clothes.
But it's not just the emperor — there's an entire metropolis of physicists who are similarly clad, according to Smolin. String theory is the dominant and domineering course of study. The theory is a kind of academic faith that cannot be gainsaid (and if you doubt, you're out). In fact, you probably won't be able to get a job as a physicist in the first place if you haven't lined up behind the theory.
The second half of the book, the cultural part, is fascinating. Smolin remembers that when he began his career there were giants around — real seers who were doing experimental, idiosyncratic work. Huge strides were being made in physics. Then string theory took over and progress stopped. Nothing has happened in at least twenty years, he argues; none of the big questions are being answered, and string theory doesn't show any signs of being helpful in answering those questions.
He's disturbed that physics has become characterized by groupthink, and he thinks the academic system is doing it. Not the people, the system. Academics spend a lot of time reviewing the work of other academics and ranking them. In the sciences, the academics are looking for grants, and those are given out based on a lot of conservative ranking work as well. The seniors shape the juniors, and the juniors start asking themselves how Prof. X or Prof. Y view their work instead of asking themselves how their work is contributing to science. So the whole ethic of scientific inquiry is disturbed; outliers don't get the time or independence to be alone and think, because they're too busy getting on the trail towards quiet, approved-of seniordom themselves.
Smolin wants physicists to encourage young seers, young outliers who are having interesting ideas but may not have any results to show for them. The craftspeople don't make scientific advances, in his view. He's interested in getting away from “normal” science and encouraging big foundational inquiries. It sounds as if he himself has been broad-ranging, interested in everything, happy to shape his own destiny. But even Smolin didn't question some assertions about string theory that turned out not to be adequately proven, according to him.
My favorite part of this cultural history is the “time alone” section — Smolin describes the careers of a few young seers that were lucky enough to go off by themselves and read deeply and widely. Years later, they emerged with startling insights and well-informed critical views.
Law is different from science. My colleagues let me write about anything I want to, and I don't have to get grants in order to survive. (Thank you, legal educational system.) It is true, though, that there's a rush to be “productive” (I remember when that word made me smile — now it's just part of the lexicon) at a very early point in your career, and you certainly don't get years alone to read everything under the sun. There are certainly seniors and juniors.
So I recommend this book to anyone who is curious about almost anything. Do your best to work through the first part, gaze out the window once in a while, and then absorb the second part. It may stay with you for a while.
Rationalizing network neutrality and media concentration
The two communications policy issues that have had the most mainstream appeal recently are network neutrality and media concentration.
Here's a question: Shouldn't it be difficult to be “for” an active government role in both? To be “for” network neutrality, it seems natural to have the view that the internet is displacing many prior forms of communications modalities — the press is in a free fall, people are watching much less broadcast television, etc. — and so it's even more important to get internet access policy right and avoid gatekeepers. You'd want to talk about the empowering, emergent communications taking place online.
But to be “for” limits on media ownership, it may be necessary to argue that nothing much has changed. You have to claim that broadcast and newspapers control news and culture, and so it's important to avoid more consolidation. The internet isn't changing the local news picture, you'd have to say, and so its existence doesn't change the media landscape. Blogs aren't legitimate alternative news sources.
Maybe I've got this wrong, but it seemed to me today to be at least difficult to agitate in favor of both ideas. There's a market failure in internet access, but is there a market failure in information?
Kids, the internet, and dubious legislation
Thanks to John Morris of CDT for pointing me to this recent CDT report: Child Safety and Free Speech Issues in the 110th Congress. [Disclosure: I am a Policy Fellow with CDT.]
There seems to be a lot of energy, Democratic and Republican, in favor of “doing something” to protect children online. The CDT memo carefully categorizes proposed legislation, points out that both the COPA Commission and the National Academy independently found that “(A) in light of the global nature of the Internet, criminal laws and other
direct regulations of content inappropriate for minors will be ineffective, and (B) education and
parental empowerment with filtering and other tools are far more effective than any criminal law,” and evaluates the constitutionality and likely effectiveness of several proposed bills.
Forced labeling of sites? Unconstitutional (”compelled speech”) and completely ineffective.
Preventing kids from viewing blogs and social network sites (DOPA)? Overreaching, ineffective, and unconstitutional.
Imposing special burdens on blogs and social networks? Very bad for the future (don't undermine Section 230, which has spurred economic growth and innovation).
Mandated data retention? Bad for personal privacy, makes intermediaries into private police, unnecessary, and really expensive.
Government blacklists of sites? Horrendous collateral consequences (based on the crude blocking methods available, lots of innocent materials will be blocked), ineffective, and unconstitutional.
(A new entry introduced on Feb. 15 by Sen. Pryor (S. 602) calls for the FCC to create blocking technologies that will “improve or enhance the ability of a parent to protect his or her child from any
indecent or objectionable video or audio programming, as determined by such
parent, that is transmitted through the use of wire, wireless, or radio
communication.” Including online communication. Whoof.)
The better approach, and the one CDT recommends, is to focus on education and actually prosecute bad guys (rather than just fighting with the internet).
CDT is manifestly correct, and they're doing a great job. But there are so many proposals, and so many people running for office who want to be seen as “protecting children,” that some of these efforts may stick. And pass. Any one of these bills if enacted into law would be quite destructive.
What happened to U.S. leadership in internet policy? We should be inspiring other governments to work on education and empowerment rather than ineffective and harmful gross blocking/filtering techniques. Instead, we're wildly proposing legislation without reflecting on the harm it could do to society and to the Constitution. This is risking our future and that of the global internet.
Recent requests
1. Neutrality Everywhere. Skype and others want the FCC to require that wireless carriers allow all applications to flow over their networks. (Jeff Pulver comment here; Nate Anderson article here.) This is going to be interesting. The wireless carriers are optimized on billing, and perhaps they should be asked to focus on communications as well. It's unlikely that the current Commission will deal with this well. Watch this space. I'll link to a copy of the petition when it's available.
2. Liability Everywhere. The Recording Industry Association of America wants people with ISP accounts to be responsible for all infringement occurring on that account. If they're successful with this argument, the next step will be to go after open access wireless hotspots. Like the one in my apartment in New York and the one that's helping me get online here in Cambridge, Mass.
3. Trademarks Everywhere. So Cisco and Apple did a deal over iPhone. What is Cisco going to do with the rest of the world about its use of IPTV? Cisco owns that trademark too: IP/TV, registered more than ten years ago. Maybe when the router business runs out of steam Cisco can make money from its licensing department.
Communications class
So far in the communications law class I'm teaching this term, we've read materials about indecency regulation, the digital television transition, and media concentration.
For today's class on media concentration, one of the students posted the following comment:
Okay, I give up. By now, FCC regulatory authority is such a shell game I can't keep it straight.
All of these stories have been pretty thick. Indecency regulation is premised on protecting kids (not scarcity), but doesn't cover cable and appears to extend to fleeting expletives that can be heard on any street corner. The DTV transition is more like a soap opera than a policy initiative. And the media concentration story has the FCC stuck between the D.C. Circuit and Congress and three million angry letter-writers. Luckily for us, the satellite radio industry has decided to merge in careful synchronization with our syllabus.
It's a good time to be studying this material. It's dramatic stuff. Just wait until we get to the E911, CALEA, and net neutrality stories. Perhaps we should put on a class play.
Misc.
I was about to write a long post about the Institute for Local Self-Reliance report that came out earlier this year. It's called “Localizing the Internet: Five Ways Public Ownership Solves the U.S. Broadband Problem.” Plus there's a new report out from the Alliance for Public Technology called “Achieving Universal Broadband: Policies for Stimulating Deployment and Demand” that is well worth studying.
But I thought I'd spend a few minutes this evening talking about the 90-year-olds I met this past weekend. I went with a college friend of mine to visit her grandmother — almost 100 now — at a place outside Philadelphia. At one point during the afternoon I was reading in the common room when a guy in a baseball cap sat down next to me and clearly wanted to talk. So I closed the book and asked him about his life. Let's call him Frank. He's 90.
Frank came to this country from Austria in 1938 after one of his cousins sent an affidavit promising to support him. He was 21. His parents never made it out, and he learned after the war that they died in a concentration camp. He started work in Brooklyn for a glue company as an errand boy, and studied at CCNY. The bookkeeper for the glue company saw him studying hard and was impressed — she asked him if he'd like to meet one of her school friends. He did, and the school friend was named Julia, and the two married six months later. Then in 1941 he was drafted and sent to guard the Suez Canal for more than two years. He came back safely and started work in a furniture design company in midtown. He was a skiier and led ski trips for a shop on the Upper East Side, riding buses to Vermont to teach people how to ski. The Austrian accent helped convince people that he was the right guy to do this. He lived on Long Island and worked there for a long time. He had a daughter. His wife died twelve years ago of cancer. He showed me pictures of his wife, daughter, and granddaughter. About 18 months ago his daughter insisted that he leave Long Island and move into the retirement community outside Philadelphia (where she lives). He likes it, but he doesn't really have any friends. But he has people to eat dinner with. His daughter visits occasionally. The bookkeeper who introduced him to his wife is still alive and lives in Massachusetts.
That's the story. But Frank told me this story over and over again, in different parts, stressing different things, remembering the name of the glue factory and the address of the furniture store. We were there for almost an hour, as the sun lowered in the sky and the light stretched into the next room. He started again, with the story of coming here alone in 1938, and it was all as fresh and new to him as if he'd just met me. Near the end of the hour he stretched the story just a bit, saying that he'd gone to the Suez only six months after meeting his wife. But I knew better. No, I said, it was 1941, not 1939, when you went to war. I said goodbye and we both said that it had been a pleasure to talk.
At dinner we sat with my friend's grandmother and two of her friends, all three of whom are in their mid- to late-90s. One of them was having trouble remembering what she had just said, but otherwise seemed in good health. The other friend was sharp and on top of things. My friend's grandmother was mostly occupied in looking lovingly at her granddaughter and listening to the conversation.
That's it, no big conclusions here. We're all living longer, and there's probably someone who would like you to visit them.
Timing issues
Google Book Search (Sept.2005 blog post here) and the telco-as-speaker argument (this week's blog post here) have something in common — they're both being shaped by the passage of time.
Google's fair use claim is deeply contextual. If a marketplace for licensing books for online indexing emerges, then (arguably) Google's failure to use that market cuts against its fair use defense. (This is like the Texaco-copies-of-scientific-articles case.)
And the more time that the telcos have to act like speakers (remember AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet U-verse Enabled?) the harder the arguments against their First Amendment claims.
So, from the nethead perspective, it would be good to have these arguments now rather than later. The more time that goes by, the weaker these arguments will get.
There's a bigger point here — both the argument that what Google is doing is copyright infringement, and the argument that any net neutrality rule is unconstitutional, are made by incumbents who argue they've made great private investments that need to be rewarded. They're both about wanting to ensure that barriers to entry are erected to new business models that threaten the incumbents' revenue streams. Both sets of incumbents need only bide their time and drag their heels in order for their reliance interests (or investment interests) to become so large that they seem persuasive to courts.
It doesn't seem right — but incumbents have an advantage when it comes to just standing still and waiting for the world to come around to their point of view.
String theory and communications policy
Lee Smolin's “The Trouble With Physics” has been occupying me recently. It's not an easy read. It's a cultural history of string theory as a grand, unifying, and profession-altering movement.
Smolin makes a key distinction between “background-dependent” and “background-independent” theories. Newton viewed the background of space and time as an absolute, a “fixed stage on which a grand drama is played out.” This kind of absolute fixed stage as a framework for theory makes the theory “background-dependent.”
Smolin points out that Einstein's general theory of relativity is different — no fixed stage, no absolutes, everything interacting and dynamical. So it's a “background-independent” theory.
For a theory to be successfully unifying, Smolin argues it needs to have a few key elements:
1. “have profound conceptual consequences”
2. lead to predictions of new phenomena
3. be testable in detail in the real world (something that hasn't happened with string theory).
The telcos' view of the internet is that it should be moved into a private, non-common-carriage model. They're clearly operating in a Newtonian, “background-dependent” way — their assumption is that the internet is a cable television network running over a telephone network, and that this fixed picture will remain in place. They have a grand unifying theory, and it is based on control: packet discrimination will bring us all to a better future. For them, this is a beautiful theory.
But does it match reality? Are quality of service guarantees really worth it (either to the telcos or to consumers)? John Waclawsky often argues (paraphrasing) that time sensitive applications are continuously being improved because of Moore's Law. Capacity is increasing and the underlying networking technology is working more quickly. So QoS doesn't add much.
Bottom line: It may be that the telcos' grand unifying theory isn't testable in reality. Like string theory.
I'm still working my way through Smolin and will report when I come out the other end.
ICANN has a blog
It's here.
I'm hoping that it will take off and be a lively blog. Welcome to the blogosphere, ICANN.