Archive for January, 2008

I just spent some time with OpenCongress.org, and I’m thoroughly impressed – and overwhelmed by what I should be following.  I need to establish feeds, watch bills, follow the gossip, and post comments.  It’s huge.  Everything you need in one place.  As Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation puts it, the site is jammed with “insanely useful P2P features.”

Just as an example, take a look at the entry for the recent House Appropriations Bill.  It passed in a hurry, it’s huge, no one knows what’s in it – and the President could make all of it meaningless with a single Executive Order.  You can access the text of the bill, see its timeline, read comments and news stories and blog entries about the bill, rate all of those comments and news stories and blog entries, see its voting history, follow other actions by its sponsor – endless.  Endless.  Almost as endless as the bill itself, which tipped the scales at 3400 pages.

You can track bills, get alerts sent to you, express your own votes on bills, do some social networking, follow bills on Facebook, and generally act as an informed citizen on all possible subjects.

What are you waiting for?  Get in there and scratch around a little.

Let me be very direct: except where the structure of the market has nondiscrimination built into it such as in a well designed system of functional or structural separation the incentive of the telecom company is to design new infrastructures in a way that controls or chokes off competition.

European Commissioner Viviane Reding, in a speech released today (thanks to Lars Hedberg for the pointer).

So what “new infrastructures” does the telecom company have in mind?  Benoit Felten had a post last April about the different qualities of fiber technologies that I found compelling, and Reding’s speech follows his line.

Even though passive optical networks and point-to-point fiber (or direct fiber – one line per customer) cost about the same to install (according to Benoit), PON is said to be much harder to open to competition. Here is Reding again:

It is unclear that passive optical networks can be unbundled in the way that we see today on copper networks.

And so passive optical networks are the favored choice of telecom companies, including Verizon in the US.  Less risk of regulatory intervention.

Meanwhile, municipalities forwarding open access plans are using direct fiber. Reding praises this approach for its forward-thinking quality:

Clearly by [installing direct fiber] these cities have created for their business and citizens a future proof network infrastructure and for the investors in the networks a very long term stable return on their investment given that ducts and dark fibre have a potential operating life of several decades.

Guaranteed open access.  Not “inter-modal” competition, but a single way of getting online, provided by a municipality, that is oriented towards the future.

Reding’s speech is clear and worth reading.  She’s saying that it’s reasonable to allow access providers a return on their investment (which they can get by bundling attractive content and services), in exchange for promises of nondiscrimination against other providers of bundles.  So that argument starts with open access, and can’t work without a fiber technology that allows for open access.

But she’s also saying that cities may want to do this for themselves if they can’t get the network providers to cooperate.

Defiant, Jeff Bezos says that Amazon is not going to comply with a French law that limits book discounts to 5%. He’s bound and determined to ship books for free. (IHT story here.) Bezos is paying the daily $1500 fine imposed by the Court of Bankruptcy of Versailles, which (prompted by trade unions) decided that free delivery was the same thing as a discount in disguise. And Amazon is collecting signatures on a petition to change the law.

Bezos has been planning this for years. When Amazon went into France in 2000, Newsweek reported:

Back in 1981 Minister of Culture Jack Lang, a voluble critic of American cultural imperialism, pushed through a law designed to protect small booksellers and publishers. It prohibits book discounts of more than 5 percent, and to this day the French still take the time to buy their books from local brick-and-mortar stores. Lang’s law will also impede Amazon, which wields deep discounts as its competitive edge. Says Gartner Group analyst Alexander Drobik, ‘I have to assume that Amazon people are betting that Lang’s law won’t last.’

Bezos is styling the law as “une tentative cynique d’éliminer la concurrence d’Amazon.fr,” which Babelfish tells me is a “cynical attempt to eliminate competition from Amazon.fr,” and asserts that if the law stays in place “France would be the only country in the world where the free delivery practiced by Amazon would be declared illegal.” Apparently comments accompanying the Amazon petition are not unanimous in support of Amazon – there is cynicism on all sides.

But here’s a blog post praising Amazon’s service: “I find this decision to be very important and very courageous because the Lang Law is anti-competitive.”

Perhaps instead of discussing the “Yahoo! France” case again this term, we’ll turn to the “Amazon France” case – market pressuring law.

I’m in transit today, so just a brief note here – iPhone users love Google, which is just a symptom of a larger story. WIRED reports that the iPhone is putting a lot of pressure on the traditional business model of the wireless carriers.

Content isn’t king online (despite the best efforts of the studios to glom together with network providers to make it so). And control isn’t king either. Unfortunately, the reality is that the wireless carriers have enough market power and enough regulatory oomph to keep the friction of their vertically-integrated models intact. Sure, everyone wants to reach Google, and the iPhone allows them to – but the carriers are under no obligation (market-based or regulatory) to allow you to reach something you haven’t heard of yet, or use a device of which they don’t approve.

As the world was celebrating New Year’s, the Australian government planned to mandate ISP filtering. The idea is that the Australian Communications and Media Authority would draft up a list of “unsuitable sites,” and ISPs would have to block them. Australians who want an unfiltered internet will have to call up and demand it.

No word on what the standard for “unsuitable” would be, or what effect on co-hosted sites this blocking system might have.

I’ve been trying to figure out what system the Australians plan to use – they keep calling it “clean feed.” And here’s the connection: it’s a BT invention that works (according to The Guardian) by routing blacklisted addresses through a secondary system.

The blacklist itself is secret, and all of the data about attempts to reach blacklisted sites is secret. Big problems for oversight.

Electronic Frontiers Australia makes clear that this is a terrible idea:

EFA has previously raised concerns about Australia joining North Korea, China and Burma in the club of nations who censor their citizens’ access to the internet. While the Minister makes no apologies for this alarming development, he has given us little reason to put our faith in his bureaucrats to administer such a system competently, transparently and fairly.

Lots of criticism, but it looks as if the new mandates are going to go into effect in a few weeks.

Communications minister Stephen Conroy has this to say in response to those pointing out that Australia is heading towards Chinese-style internet censorship:

Labor makes no apologies to those who argue that any regulation of the Internet is like going down the Chinese road…If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd Labor Government is going to disagree.

That’s the kind of argument that should get attention around the world. Child pornography is horrific, and so our ISPs are on the watch for it all the time. Mandatory filtering of “unsuitable” material, however, could go far beyond child porn and reach anything that a current sovereign felt was unsavory.

The “clean feed” move is unlike what happens in China in that users can opt out. The next step will be mandatory censorship. At the same time, our friends in Australia will have no way of knowing what’s being blocked.

Let’s hope we have our wits about us, and our litigators ready, when the same idea is raised in the U.S.

Raph Koster makes the point that virtual worlds are becoming more and more intertwined with (and perhaps indistinguishable from) the web.  Anything with an avatar, a way to have both real-time and not-real-time communication, and some spatial metaphors is both a virtual world and… Facebook.

So here’s a downloadable manuscript called The Web: Hidden Games.  It’s not the deepest piece of writing, but it’s an implementation of the Raph idea.   The author cheerfully suggests that Facebook, YouTube, and Digg are addictive because they’re really games.  They’ve got set rules, they’re fun, and you can try to beat the other guy.

For Digg, the game object is to get your story Dugg to the top.  With YouTube, you’re trying to charm the game gods into picking your video as a front-page item.  And with Facebook, it’s more about the amusing interaction – a Sims-ish game.

Hidden Games is a sweetly-kind how-to.  It shows you the main pages of these applications so that you won’t be alarmed when you sign up, and gives you a few friendly tips about life.  Here’s one:  “Do not be scared to approach anyone on Facebook.”  Or this one:  “Be proactive and write on others’ walls.”  Okay!  At any rate, not the most theoretical treatment.

But who am I to be so cranky.  The author’s right!  You shouldn’t be afraid to say Hi to people on Facebook.   Go, team.  We can theorize another day.

Tomorrow:  ISP filtering around the globe.

Educause and the New Media Consortium recently issued a report suggesting ways they think technology will/should change education and scholarship in the next few years.  Most of it is familiar stuff – user-generated content, social networking, virtual worlds.  (ArsTechnica’s Nate Anderson points out that first students have to know something before they can join the conversation.)

I was struck by the summing-up language in the report about scholarship.

Academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of snc with new forms of scholarship.  The trends toward digital expressions of scholarship and more interdisciplinary and collaborative work continue to move away fromthe standards of traditional peer-reviewed paper publication… [T]he academy will grow more out of step with how scholarship is actually conducted until constraints imposed by traditional tenure and promotion processes are eased.

As the report notes, “[t]here is a profound need for leadership at the highest levels of the academy that can see the opportunities in these shifts and carry them forward.”

And here’s a key section – try to ignore the use of “impact” and listen:

At few points in the history of the academy has there been an opportunity to really impact the ways in which learners and scholars interact.. . It will take visionary leadership to see and capitalize on these shifts.  At the same time, few leaders are  following critical trends.. and fewer still are speaking out on the issues that accompany them.

Maybe you’ve read Bruno Latour’s “Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world,” from 1983.  (Article here.)  It suggests that scholarly/scientific work is powerfully relevant when it’s translated effectively into the language of its audience.  Scientific work can have enormous leverage because of the circumstances and rules under which it is conducted.  Scholars have to figure out how to get beyond their usual walls, leaders have to give them credit for non-traditional publishing/explaining efforts, and the social payoff for these experiments may be quite dramatic.

The transition isn’t easy.  As the Educause report notes, new forms of scholarship like blogs and video clips are quite common in the real world, “but academia has been slow to recognize and accept them.  . . Proponents of these new forms argue that they serve a different purpose than traditional writing and research — a purpose that improves, rather than runs counter to, other kinds of scholarly work.”  It’s leadership that seems to be lacking.  Unless reward structures change, scholarly habits will continue to drift farther away from the goal of “raising the world.”

The Association of American Law Schools held its annual meeting over the last few days. One of the panel discussions, “Implementing Scholarship,” was particularly gripping, with NY Times reporter Adam Liptak, Stanford LS professor Deborah Rhode, and Yale LS Dean Harold Koh making strong statements.

You may remember that Liptak wrote a column in March 2007 pointing out that judges just don’t read law review articles.

Here’s a rough paraphrase of his remarks.

I had lunch with a law professor the other day, and I asked him what he thought of his students. “I don’t have much in common with them,” he said. “They all want to be lawyers.”

Judges don’t open up law reviews. The articles are in general bad – badly written, badly laid out, edited by students (which is insane). They’re so uninviting for readers. You’ll get to the nugget of the article, buried deep down in Section V, and it says something like “This issue deserves careful consideration.” The first footnote, where people cite famous law professors who read their piece, seems to be the most important.

I know from my own experience that students will ask to change conversational English to non-conversational English — “in many ways” to “in innumerable respects.”

SSRN is important and useful, and by all means post what you can as soon as it’s ready.

Judges want to see a roundup of what’s going on – focused, narrow discussion.

I’m troubled that when I get to a proposition that interests me, I’ll get a “see, e.g., [one case]” rather than a 50-state survey.

Maybe one reason Posner’s pieces are so widely read is that they’re short and they say a lot. Readable is really important.

Now, empirical work helps a lot – it’s very useful to me when it’s good.

And there are other ways (other than law review articles) to reach people. Blogs when done well are a signal development in legal scholarship. Sentencing policy, election law – immediate, thoughtful, many links. How Appealing is great. Legal scholars, writing with authority about what’s going on in legislation and cases moments after developments occur is immensely useful. Marty Lederman and Orin Kerr, for example. So that’s encouraging for the future.

Then Deborah Rhode (one of her books is called In Pursuit of Knowledge: Scholars, Status, and Academic Culture) stood up.  She’s saying that both academics and the mainstream press are doing a bad job of forwarding knowledge.

A very very rough paraphrase of just a few of her points:

As public intellectuals get more public they get less intellectual.  Scholars are bumping up against mainstream press structures that are doing a bad job, generally – balance is absent.  Journalism is competing with even worse forums.  Punditry is a problem; can be irresponsible.  On the other hand, educating reporters is a drag.  And it’s frustrating trying to place op-eds in mainstream newspapers – and even more frustrating when you hear from the public in response to those op-eds you’ve successfully placed.  Television is also difficult.

Reader-friendly styles aren’t what scholars are supposed to have — they’re not in the “gist” business.  But notoriety is addictive, and people find themselves saying more and more about less and less, giving off a buzz of intellectual activity with no work.  Part of the problem behind all of this is the reward structure that academics have — it deserves careful consideration. 

Next came Dean Koh, to take on the “implementing scholarship” question posed by the panel.  His point is that a scholar should be forwarding, with commitment, a central idea that he or she cares about.  Very rough paraphrase:

When I interviewed with Guido Calabresi, he told me that he had had two ideas:  the Cost of Accidents and the Common Law in the Age of Statutes.  I have just one idea: domesticating international law through norm internalization and vertical enforcement.  I have worked to influence government policy along these lines in a host of ways, by filing briefs, serving in government, giving advice on treaties, teaching, writing casebooks, writing articles, writing op-eds [many many examples].  

When my brother told my father that following his medical training he wanted to do research, and not be a medical doctor, my father said, “When a doctor comes to understand the body, he acquires a duty not just to observe disease, but to cure it.”

I believe that scholars should be responsible citizens, committed to a vision of the rule of law.  Your vision may not be the same as other people’s, but you should be committed to it.  Your work should be both relevant and designed to make the world a better place.  We have an obligation to use ideas to improve the world. 

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So go out there and be good readable law review article writers, forward the relevant, world-changing ideas you’re committed to – and make sure that the mainstream press accepts the right op-eds and doesn’t mangle them. And you should have a blog.

There are wonderful books about the story of the internet’s and web’s development.  I’m thinking of Mitchell Waldrop’s The Dream Machine, Katie Hafner’s Where Wizards Stay Up Late, biographies of Norbert Weiner, John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said, Tim Berners-Lee’s Weaving the Web.  Lots of them.

Now there are newer books about the social changes online, like David Weinberger’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined and Everything Is Miscellaneous, Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everyone (coming out soon), the wonderful Cluetrain Manifesto.

There’s a gap.  We need more narratives about people and new online efforts – John Battelle’s The Search is excellent, but it’s more about “search” than people.  Who is tracking the cultural history of the development of YouTube or Wikipedia (the people involved, the drama)?  Who is interviewing the people who dreamed up Dopplr and Facebook?

Maybe it’s all happening too quickly, and it’s clear we’re just at the very beginning.  We’ll need these stories, though, just as we needed the stories about the early internet engineers.  It’s true that groups and collective action are vital, and that’s what we’re hearing about right now, but there are also (always) personal stories of effort, invention, and unworkable (at the time) ideas that we’ll need to capture.

So take notes.