Archive for April, 2007

Two writers told me today that they struggle with attention.  For one of them, it's flitting from subject to subject that's the issue; for the other, email and web searches call beseechingly, constantly.  All of us have trouble focusing our minds on what needs to be done in order to make sustained intellectual progress.  I found the look of recognition that came from their eyes when we talked about attention to be both uplifting and saddening – so they're having trouble too – and I hope we all find moments of peace to contemplate in.  Maybe tomorrow.  There's always (usually) tomorrow.

Tonight was a session at the New School with danah boyd, Ethan Zuckerman, and Trebor Scholz.  I paid attention, unswerving attention, until I became so hungry that I could not pay attention any longer — but by then, luckily, the session was over and I could go out into the evening.  (It's not just email that gets in the way.)

All three had strong and interesting ideas to put across tonight, and questions to pose.  For danah, the key move was looking away from constant concerns about privacy to focusing on new forms of public life online — “non-universal” publics that depend on new online architectural realities (persistence, searchability, replicability, invisible audiences).  She points out that “we've got kids written out of public life” offline (it's too dangerous!) and so they're depending on mediated, online spaces to get access to their friends.  We're just at the beginning of these developments, and we have no idea how the properties of online communications will play out over time.  So we should pay attention.

For Trebor (they spoke in alpha order), the key move was the importance of “core site” mediated interactions (10 sites, like sina.com.cn, baidu, MySpace, taking up 40% of traffic) and noticing that a few context-providers are making money off the backs of many many people.  Twelve percent of all US online time is spent on MySpace; 170 million profiles; 85% of all US students are on Facebook.  He wants us to notice that platforms may be supporting particular politics (he's particularly scathing about MySpace) and taking advantage of the information and attention generated by their users.  Trebor asks whether “net publics” should have control over their content and actually share the monetary value generated by it.

Ethan usefully chimed in at this point, noting that he thinks it's fine for businesses to rely on user-generated content — it costs a lot to run a huge number of servers.  But his talk was mostly about the read-write politics made possible by online interactions, and he wanted to tell us that creative technical things happen in the most repressive regimes.  He pointed out that the famous HRClinton video came three years after a similar video featuring an unelected Tunisian dictator.  But that Tunisian ad was blocked in Tunisia.  But the block was evaded by Tunisian software.  There were lots of stories like this:  Bahrain blocked Google maps because Bahrainians were noticing that they could use some land distribution policies, but then gave up on the blocking because people were evading it.  Twitter can be used to let people know you've been arrested.   Philippine election fraud and corruption became the subject of wildly popular ringtones.  Video can be a tremendous medium for activism.  But the Open Net Initiative map of internet censorship will someday be just like the map of [lack of] press freedom.  We may focus too much on personalities, and not enough on the issues that oppressed Netizens are writing about. 

All three speakers talked about the importance of “media literacy,” of figuring out for ourselves what the provenance of online speech is.  And there was a certain amount of back and forth about big corporate online spaces.  Trebor is worried about “investing [his] memories” in those spaces and having that abused (and that none of his students seem one bit worried about this); Ethan and danah point out that no one forces you to use these spaces, that hyperlinks cut across them, that they're convenient, and that people just want to use them to see their friends. 

And then danah made the information overload/attention point that I knew must be coming, because I'd heard so much about attention today (paraphrase mine):  

Maybe we should be asking ourselves when the transparency of public networked space becomes socially disruptive.  There's only so much information you can cope with.  Twitter is complete overload, but I'm glad it's here because it will force us to examine the question of how to deal with it.  I don't have an answer. I'm just thinking “uh-oh”.

Micah Sifry has a nice post about plans for Personal Democracy Forum 2007, on May 18.  I wish I could be there, and I'll try to catch up with the talks and panels once it happens.

Harold Feld has a really useful description of what's going on in the 700 MHz auction:  “My Impossibly Long Field Guide for the 700 MHz Auction (It's Really Important, Even If You Haven't Heard About It Much In The Main Stream Media)”.

Don't miss Michele McLennan and Tim Porter's post – it's an excerpt from their new book about how newsrooms have to change.  Letting go, empowering staff, having a vision that gets adequate resources, and changing culture.

And I'm looking forward to hearing danah boyd speak tomorrow (here's a recent video).

Every once in a while I run across an essay that helped inspire Doug Engelbart to work on augmenting human intellect by using computers.  It's called “What Makes a Life Significant,” and it's by William James.  Today I read it again.

James's point is that a life has meaning when “inner joy, courage, and endurance are joined with an ideal.” 

What's an ideal? “[S]omething intellectually conceived, something of which we are not unconscious, if we have it; and it must carry with it that sort of outlook, uplift, and brightness that go with all intellectual facts.”

And there must be novelty in the ideal — novelty at least to “him whom the ideal grasps.”

What's yours?

Here's a
snapshot report that tells us how we're doing with IPv4
numbers.  It says we'll run out in 2012 or so. 
That's not very far away.

In 2005, the US Office of
Management and Budget said
[warning, pdf] that businesses should plan to move to IPv6-enabled
hardware and software.  But for people who aren't selling to
the government, the economic incentive to move to IPv6 isn't
great.  (The people who are selling to the government have to move
along.)

Because the internet is really all about communication, and because people are going to be using those IPv4 numbers for a verrry looonnng timmmme, everyone's going to need a strategy for communicating with both IPv4 and IPv6.  It's certainly worth discussing the various proposals floating around about how to deal with the exhaustion of IPv4 numbers (here's one). 

From the little I know (and that's very little), it looks as if (1) the “solution” here will be varied, (2) China and DoD will get there first, and (3) it will take a long time to move (if we ever do) to an IPv6 internet.

The only thing that ties this post together is the Washington metro.  I was in DC the last few days and heard Michael Calabrese of the New America Foundation speak at a CITI conference.

Calabrese mentioned a study by Mark McHenry near Dupont Circle (that's the metro stop tie-in) that found that only about 20-40% of the spectrum under 3 GHz (that is, everything from AM radio to microwave devices) was in use at all.  There's a lot of warehousing going on by licensees.

Calabrese also said that there's a tremendous lag time for spectrum policy change.  With the Spectrum Policy Task Force report of 2002, there seemed to be an agreement that deregulation (unlicensing) of some spectrum was a good idea.  That report urged a hybrid approach, but we now seem to have less flexibility than we did before the report was written.  Yes, there are some exceptions, including in the “white spaces” proceeding, perhaps, but more on that later.

Calabrese noted that the FCC keeps taking a property/zoning approach — “good fences make good neighbors.”  What's scarce at this point is government permission for unlicensed uses, because the majority of licensed spectrum is underutilized.  Moreover, user demand and technical capabilities could allow reallocation of spectrum on a second-by-second, opportunistic, dynamic basis.  We could have cognitive radios certified to protect licensed services.  (Here are comments from Dell, Google, HP, Intel, Microsoft, and Philips pointing out that they've given the Commission a low-power prototype device that can sense when a particular channel is in use and that can politely, immediately, deftly vacate that channel.)

Calabrese called for the FCC to open up frequencies that haven't been assigned or aren't in use nationwide.  (There's a lot of this — see Dupont Circle.)  He said that there are two objections that keep being made to the kind of dynamic frequency selection that he's talking about:  congestion and “letting the genie out of the bottle.”  As to congestion, he noted that there's no evidence of “tragedy of the commons” caused by opportunistic spectrum use.  On the contrary — wifi use has sparked enormous innovation.  We've got 300 million devices sharing what used to be thought of as “junk bands.”  We've got 45 million home networks using wifi, and 60% of enterprises and 50% of higher-ed institutions are using it.  We've got rural WISPs using it, using clouds of connectivity to cover their customers.  At the same time, we're wasting a lot of licensed bandwidth that could be used much more efficiently.  If there turns out to be a congestion issue someday, we can use peak pricing to help.  We could be managing all of this much more usefully.

The “genie out of the bottle” complaint, Calabrese says, is the concern that once unlicensed devices move in to spectrum we won't be able to get rid of them.  But we could condition certification of smart radios on their ability to be upgraded remotely.  Technology can fix a lot of problems.

Calabrese was followed by Tom Hazlett, who has different views.  In a nutshell:  the most social value is created by markets that are facilitated by exclusive rights.  “Suboptimal valuation is the real tragedy.”

The other DC metro station story I wanted to write about today was this one about Joshua Bell in the L'Enfant Plaza metro.  I hope you'll take a minute to stop and read the story.  It's prompted more than a thousand emails to its author, Gene Weingarten.  It's beautifully done.  I heard about it when I was playing viola quintets with people yesterday morning — their view was that only about five out of a thousand people these days pay attention to classical music, so of course few people stopped to listen to Bell.  Take a look at the reader comments here.

The Frontline petition filed in the 700 MHz proceeding asks the FCC to (as I understand it) designate a spectrum block of 10 MHz as “open access.” 

The E Block licensee would make connections to
the network available to any device maker or retail service provider on
reasonable commercial terms and may not grant exclusive use to any
customer.  Open access requirements would
be ensured by the E Block operator making public reasonable application
protocol interfaces.

Yesterday, a coalition of public interest advocates asked the Commission (in the same proceeding) to designate 30 MHz of spectrum as “open access.”  Three times as much. They also asked for a “service rule for broadband services operating in the 700 MHz band that
protects the consumer's right to use any equipment, content, application or
service on a non-discriminatory basis without interference from the network
provider.”  And they encouraged the Commission to not let the incumbents participate in the auction at all (or only through structurally separate affiliates), and to bar warehousing of spectrum.

This set of spectrum issues is shaping up to be fascinating.  The Frontline proposal seems to set the stage for an incremental move towards wireless net neutrality, and the New America-led proposal would open the door still more widely.  And I understand that in the “whitespaces” proceeding, a coalition of high-tech companies (including Dell, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Phillips) have provided a prototype device to the Commission that has advanced spectrum sensing and interference-avoidance features — in support of the argument that unlicensed devices can “safely” operate in vacant television channels.

Given that a huge amount of spectrum in this country isn't being used at all (even if it has been licensed), there's clearly a need to shake up spectrum policy.  It's going to be a very interesting spring and summer in this area.

Two enjoyable things:  First, Nina Camic's posts from her spring break.  I've never met Nina, but she's a law professor and she gets a lot out of life — the food! the pictures! the adventures! 

Second: the other night I went to a friend's house and met his ten-year-old son.  The son is absolutely obsessed with Tom Lehrer songs and has memorized a bunch of the lyrics.  And when I was ten I was obsessed with Tom Lehrer songs and memorized a bunch of the lyrics.  Maybe this is just something that happens to people in fifth grade. But I hadn't listened to them since then.  So the son put on a CD and we sang along.  It was revelatory. I now know how much I didn't understand about those songs when I was ten.  I also remembered huge chunks of text – and I don't think I could memorize something with such intensity now.

A third thing:  Jeff Jarvis is on a great roll, getting presidential candidates to interact online:

Here is my invitation to ask any candidate any question. Just record your question and upload it to YouTube (or use QuickCapture) and then tag it PrezConference
(just as Biden’s campaign tagged his reply). That way, we’ll see which
questions get answered and which don’t along with the answers. The tag
makes it a conversation.

Are you following the debate over state
franchising?  FreePress
is.  And there's a lot going on in many states.  According to
today's U.S. Communications Law Bulletin, there are video franchise bills
pending or passing all over the place that would take authority away from
municipalities and give it to the states — Ohio, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin,
Tennessee… Similar measures failed in Utah and
Idaho.  Lots of other states involved.

These are shaping up to be titanic battles between
the telcos (who want quick and easy access to video subscribers) and cablecos
(who got there first).  Here's a good overview of arguments against this kind of measure in Illinois.

Back in the spring of 2003, there was a big push at the state level to get theft-of-service laws passed that made it illegal for customers to attach otherwise-legal devices to cable and telephone networks.  The logic behind this effort was to avoid federal discomfort with broadcast flag rules by getting the same relief from the state.

Same thing here.  If net neutrality is going to tangle up the phone companies' attempts to get relief from state franchising laws at the federal level, they'll get what they need from the states.  The technique seems to work quite well.

I've been working on a brief essay about internet security.  The response to the Feb. 6 DDoS attack on the root servers can provide a useful institutional model for the future. 

No, there wasn't an “official” institution that led the response.  But the root server operators had learned from an earlier attack, and had moved towards anycast operations.  Anycast worked, and users didn't even notice that anything was going on.  While the attack was under way, the operators kept in close touch and coordinated their response with great effectiveness. 

All of the internet governance models we have right now have strengths and weaknesses.  For responses to problems like DDoS attacks, we'd need a forum for discussion that has (1) the non-mandatory merit-based processes of IETF, including real industry
involvement leading to substantial market pressure, (2) the globalness of IGF, (3) the agility of a private group, and (4) the clear voice of leadership that can be provided by government involvement.  And we'd need to avoid the problems that all of these fora have.

To prevent future attacks, we'll need to prevent machines from being
turned into zombies that can be directed at targets.  That's a big task
that requires coordination among many hardware manufacturers and
operating system designers.  It can't be mandatory, this coordination, because that won't necessarily lead to the right set of solutions — but it can be agile, global, and well-led.

OneWebDay 2007 is less than six months away now.  We're working on plans for a worldwide online mosaic that will build throughout the twenty-four hours of September 22, 2007.  You'll be able to see yourself working with others around the world to build something visually arresting and dynamic.

See the OneWebDay video – here on YouTube.

The idea behind OneWebDay (each year on Sept. 22) is to celebrate the way in which the internet has changed lives around the world.  We call it OneWebDay because we think that's a more human name than OneInternetDay, but we understand the difference between the Web and the Internet and we're celebrating the whole ball of wax.

We're encouraging physical events around the world that get people together in public places to celebrate and contribute something online.

If you'd like to volunteer, send an email to volunteer at onewebday.org and we'll get back to you promptly.