What I wanted to do with Bellhead/Nethead was focus attention on a hard question:  who should be in charge of the internet?  I emerged with the sense that it is time to stop being incrementalist about this question.  It's apparent that the FCC's current statute doesn't fit internet services well.  On the other hand, it's not clear to me that we should rewrite the act to fit the internet better.  And tweaking around the edges of the act just isn't working (and won't work).

We need to, as a country, take a firm stand and reaffirm the message of 47 USC 230:  no special-purpose meddling.  Of course fraud statutes and antitrust laws and copyright laws will continue to affect online activities -- as they should.  But if we enact special internet-service "social policies," every other country will too.  And if we act as if the internet is a US thing, every other country will act as if it's their thing.  Maybe we want access for the disabled -- another country will want censorship or privacy or who knows what.  Extraterritorial assertions of jurisdiction will become more and more aggressive.  We need to take the lead and restrain ourselves.  Otherwise, we face online mutual assured destruction.

It's tempting for telecom regulators all over the world to say "we should be in charge."  That's what the WSIS process is about.  We should resist all the incremental steps towards that end -- and that means resisting adoption of the agenda set forth in the IP-enabled services rulemaking (the subject of the conference).  We need to start from a blank page, and neither import old regulatory structures into the internet nor set up new internet-specific national (or global) regimes.

Andy Pincus gets it.  If you weren't there, you missed an extraordinary gem of a speech.  I'm very grateful for David Weinberger's stellar blogging -- David captured the essence of Andy's talk:

The Internet is global. We had been successful on pushing our "don't regulate the Internet" line, but with the World Summit on Information Services there's a serious push for world regulation of the Net. Countries have inconsistent demands. To defeat pro-regulation forces, we hvae to take a decentralized approach. We have to defeat them all, not patch them up. The ITU will have exactly the opposite approach.

That's right.  The ITU sees things from the bellhead, centralized control perspective.  The staff at the FCC are smart and kind people, but the small steps set forth in the IP-enabled services proceeding are part of the global trend that ITU is encouraging.  Let's think twice, breathe deeply, and remember that we understand the internet.  We -- the users of the internet -- are in charge.

I'm so grateful to so many people re yesterday's conference.  I thought I'd stop gushing about this as today wore on, but it's 9:30pm and I still feel grateful.  I'm so glad that Michael Herz and the Floersheimer Center wanted to hold the conference at Cardozo.  I'm so grateful that the university was willing to install an open wireless connection just for this conference.  I'm abashed by Weinberger's blogging.  I'm awed by Dan Gillmor's effective, thoughtful approach to online life.  I'm amazed that so many terrific people came -- and sorry that they all got rained on so hard when they left.  Sorry you had to rent a car to get home to DC.  I was so happy to see my cousin Benjamin -- and completely surprised. 

But I think the conference was more than a good time (at least, I hope it was).  It was designed to be a call to arms; a virtual trumpet.  There's a lot to pay attention to -- Induce negotiations, ICANN hearings, summits of various kinds -- but the big picture is the real news right now.  Big government wants to be in charge of the internet, and we have the opportunity to resist on a national level.

If you like music and you like inventors, go see Moog. Bob Moog sees his Moog synthesizers as part of the cosmic order of things -- he never planned that they would come into being, he thought that they would be for experimental music fans who wanted to create new kinds of noises, and he never thought they would be used for tonal, keyboard-driven sounds. One chance meeting led to another chance meeting, which led to a chance demo, and we ended up with Switched On Bach.

  The Moog is an analog instrument.  Bob Moog had no expectation that it would always work, and he says he was often very nervous at concerts.  He talks about being able to feel the sounds by looking at the circuit board, and he's such a gentle, entrancing guy that you have to believe him.  You can tune the circuits and fiddle with the sounds, live.

People hated this analog synthesizer when it first came out.  One interviewer stared at Moog and said, "Don't you feel guilty for what you've done?"

Moog changed the face of music.  He started as a theremin guy, and one thing just led to another.  Sometimes you just can't plan ahead of time.

There's a new Induce draft floating around as of late this afternoon.  It's not likeable; although it more carefully focuses on the showing of intent through conscious and deliberate acts, it still creates a risk of liability for manufacturers or service providers who make things available that permit public availability (eg, providers of peer to peer systems, including IM, and general purpose computers) of copyrighted works.  Initial impressions: 

1.  Great initial breadth: whoever intentionally induces infringement shall be liable as an infringer.

2.  Intentional inducement does require "conscious and deliberate affirmative acts that a reasonable person" would expect would result in widespread infringement.  That's better than actions just being "a cause" of infringement.

3.  Knowledge of infringement (even actual knowledge) is not enough to add up to intent.

4.  Private, noncommercial, non-public-distribution by endusers is not enough to justify a lawsuit under this act --  this may mean a motion to dismiss would work if the only evidence of infringement was this kind of end-user behavior.

5.  Advertising, financing etc. products and services is not the same as intentional inducement -- at least by itself.  These actions plus more could be intentional inducement.

6.  Injunctive relief should be limited to stopping infringing uses -- which means that judges will be in the business of blessing design deals insisted on by plaintiffs.

7.  Pattern or practice of inducement (shades of RICO!) may lead to statutory damages award -- amounts could be huge.

8.  Sony not affected by this act -- translation:  you won't need to sue for secondary copyright liability any more, because the broad language of this act will give you a cause of action for direct infringement liability.

We'll see what happens next.

I was at a joyous pre-IFP event tonight (tomorrow's seminar is all about just how bad copyright problems are for independent film-makers).  It was a gathering of the loyal opposition:  we're all for copyright, don't get us wrong, but we're not so sure that the trend lines are going in the right direction.  We had a fine time.

Perhaps we should have gone collectively (if only virtually) to the content session David Weinberger went to earlier this week.  Froomkin snips from Weinberger's post:

they’re going to win. They own Congress and neither Congress nor the entertainment cartel sees any reason to compromise. Their Lakoffian frame tells them that they’re stopping theft, end of story. So they are going to kill the Internet and they don’t even know it.

If these two groups ever met -- other than at a polite Hill assemblage to discuss the future of the Induce act -- could they have a civilized conversation?  Or is discourse impossible?

Last night I saw a presentation by Pam Gray and Xenogene Gray about their eGanges [pdf] system for depicting legal structures.  Their maps of law use soccer ball icons to show you when you're supposed to go down to a lower level of logic -- say, to see the elements necessary to make a certain proposition true.  Take a look at the pictures.

The eGanges system has got to be only a start.  Laws should be pictures as well as texts accessible through Findlaw.  We should have law museums, so that we can visit old bad laws.  We should have interactive subway maps of law.

You should be able to interact in whatever way you want to with a legal picture -- seeing where your facts fit, swimming in the river of the law, following the train -- whatever metaphor you'd like to use.  The text of laws will remain important; indeed, there could be competing "translations" of law into pictures.  You might want to use a particular picture of a law in your closing argument.  Perhaps that picture will be too prejudicial and your opposing counsel will object! 

It was a fine, creative evening, and it made me want to go back to "Property: The Video Game."  But there just aren't enough hours in the day.

Lessig's debate with David Boies is sold out tonight, and I've spent enough time on Bellhead/Nethead today (please do come -- David Weinberger is the designated blogger, so you can influence what he blogs by saying something particulary eloquent at the mike), so I thought I'd take the opportunity to rise above it all and point out just how important words are to policy.

Yes, words.  You may only care about clickable statutes and pictures of law.  But policy is driven by phrases.

The Broadcast Flag. The broadcast flag is beautifully and effectively named, because it is neither about broadcast nor limited to the waving of a patriotic "flag." Indeed, those who learn about the broadcast flag scheme quickly forget that it is focused on protecting digital television broadcasts and speak generally about the protection of digital content. And the "flag" is, in a sense, the least important part of the entire scheme.  All it does is signal "the following content should be protected."  The heavy lifting -- the encryption and locking-down of the content -- is done by the FCC mandate and by the machines affected by the mandate.

"Unregulation" of IP-Enabled Services. As the internet world has continued to explode, some of the regional Bell operating companies -- heavily regulated by the FCC -- are supporting FCC's call for "social polices" (not economic regulation) to be applied to IP-enabled services. Chairman Powell, in a separate statement accompanying the IP-enabled services NPRM, said "rules designed to ensure law enforcement access, universal service, disability access and emergency 911 service can and should be preserved in the new architecture." 

When Pulver.com filed a petition for a declaratory rulemaking with the FCC, asking that its Free World Dialup (FWD) service (which is essentially an instant messaging service with voice capabilities that does not connect to the traditional telephone system) be declared not to be a "telecommunications service," the FCC responded that FWD was an "unregulated information service subject to FCC's jurisdiction."  The Commission included some ringing language in its Memorandum and Order, saying: "This action is designed to bring a measure of regulatory stability to the marketplace and therefore remove barriers to investment and deployment of Internet applications and services." Chairman Powell's accompanying statement read: "Our ruling formalizes the Commission's policy of 'non-regulation' of the Internet and, in so doing, preserves the Internet as a free and open platform for innovation." 

Some media outlets read this "unregulation" and "non-regulation" language to mean that internet applications would remain unregulated by the FCC.

But "unregulation" does not mean "no regulation." Social policies," including design mandates under CALEA for a subset of IP-enabled services, are envisioned by the FCC to be part of "unregulation."

Other examples? send word.

The bill formerly known as Induce is steaming through Senate processes, and is now scheduled for a markup next Tuesday the 21st (see Ernie Miller and EFF for details) despite thousands of calls from concerned people. 

I spent a couple of hours talking yesterday to a small group about the broadcast flag.  The group came up with a series of hypotheticals -- what if you're a TV manufacturer who refuses to build to the broadcast flag standard?  Are you liable under the DMCA as well as the flag rules?  (Because the broadcast content was never encrypted -- you received it in the clear -- you're not circumventing controls over it.)  What if you're a software developer who sends around freeware that will allow users to get around the flag?  Again, is this a violation of the DMCA?  What if you give advice about how to avoid the flag? Liable, and if so how?  If the suit challenging the flag is successful and the flag regime is declared beyond the FCC's jurisdiction, it's not clear that the DMCA will cover these situations.

What's useful about the bill-formerly-known-as-induce to the content industry is that it provides cover if the flag fails.  It would fill in secondary liability holes left by the DMCA.  The text of the bill is a moving target, but its overall goal is clear:  leave no liability unaddressed.

I am a fuddy-duddy.  This is obvious for many many reasons, but also is demonstrated by the fact that (1) I went to play string quartets tonight and (2) I was twenty minutes early.  I have been walking around the block to avoid being too early since I was six years old.

But being early sometimes has its advantages.  Tonight, I spent my twenty minutes with the Lehman Brothers building at 50th and 7th.

This is a building of flat TV screen displays.  Sometimes ghostly images of employees (there's a loop) walk across the front of the building, but most of the loop is nature scenes with LEHMAN BROTHERS written across them, moving constantly.

Or bridges.  Or mountains.  (These images are from www.lightningfield.com.)

I'm going to take a stand here that demonstrates once again some intrinsic fuddy-duddiness:  I want buildings to be buildings.  This building was trying to give me a rich media, quasi-online experience.  It didn't allow me to imagine life inside the building -- instead, it screamed its brand in constantly moving images that grabbed my attention.  Granted, the building also told me the time -- there's a huge time readout area on the top panels -- and I like that in a building.  But otherwise I have no impression of the building, just a memory of lights so bright that they lit up the entire block.  (My host later told me that Times Square has a "minimum signage" rule to keep things bright and kinetic.)

I like buildings that don't pretend to be web sites.  I don't mind web sites that pretend to be buildings.  I'm a big fan of fully-immersive virtual worlds.  But you know what you're getting and you've chosen to go there.  You're not spending twenty minutes with a blinking building, wondering when the loop is going to start again. 

We ended up playing one of the big Brahms sextets (there are only two, and if you are a real fuddy-duddy you already know what keys they are in), and that was satisfying.  And I still use email.  People under 30 apparently don't do that any more.

If the end to end argument suggests that no lower layer should discriminate against the ones above it, and the First Amendment suggests that no state actor should discriminate against the speech of an individual (except when that speech is illegal), then isn't there an argument that the two are on a continuum?

After all, "speech" at the lowest levels of the protocol stack is pure action -- "send this along." In the US we feel that speech should be protected from state intervention.  When we're legislating about communications networks, should we try to enshrine the end-to-end argument in statutory texts?  We could see ourselves as extending the idea behind the First Amendment to protect fundamental communications from being interrupted by anyone, including but not limited to state actors. 

Or would it be futile to legislate end-to-end?  We might end up drafting tech mandates that limit companies in what services they can offer -- not a very attractive option.

Two big events in US cyberlaw history affecting intermediaries this week: first, a very lively and important decision [large pdf] finding that a Pennsylvania law mandating that ISPs block child porn sites is violative of the First Amendment because implementation of the law leads inevitably to massive overblocking. 

ISPs were blocking IP addresses (shared, sometimes, by tens of thousands of sites) and DNS addresses (shared, obviously, by all the resources at the third level and above) given them informally by law enforcement.  ISPs were doing this blocking in this way because it was cost-effective -- URL blocking (which would have been more targeted) was too expensive and difficult.  And they were doing this blocking nationally, because these ISPs couldn't implement blocking on a Pennsylvania-customer-specific basis.  All of this led to blocking innocent, legal speech. 

CDT and the ACLU challenged the constitutionality of the law mandating that ISPs block child porn sites identified by law enforcement.  These brave organizations were in the tough position of fighting a law addressing the worst human behavior.  Because of how that law was being implemented, it was having a negative effect that far outweighed its benefits. 

As the court says on p.88 of its decision, "More than 1,190,000 innocent web sites were blocked in an effort to block less than 400 child pornography web sites, and there is no evidence that the government made an effort to avoid this impact on protected expression."

A key section of the opinion, on p.91, states that "the Act allows for an unconstitutional prior restraint because it prevents future content from being displayed at a URL based on the fact that the URL contained illegal content in the past." If the Pennsylvania AG requested that a URL be blocked, and ISPs cooperated (and they always cooperate, because child pornography is absolutely abhorrent and illegal), the URL would never be "seen" again. The AG would never reconsider, and the ISPs would never lift the block.

URLs are places, like movie theaters. An illegal theater may become an art gallery -- and it should be allowed to reopen.

Another key portion of the decision finds that the burdens imposed by the Pennsylvania law are violative of the dormant commerce clause (at 99): "Defendant argues that the Act only burdens child pornography, which is not a legitimate form of commerce. To the contrary, the evidence demonstrates that implementation of the Act has impacted a number of entities involved in the commerce of the Internet – ISPs, web publishers, and users of the Internet." Laws directed at illegal activity unduly burden commerce when they have spillover effects on innocent players. Now all we need is a global dormant commerce clause.

This is a lively opinion.  It demonstrates a willingness to understand how the internet works, what ISPs do, and how facially appropriate legal actions may unreasonably disrupt the evolutionary flow of information and commerce.

The second big intermediary event this week was the dissemination of the Copyright Office's draft copyright bill.  This bill (not yet formally proposed) has potentially deadening effects.  Read for all it is worth, it would make copyright infringers out of anyone providing a service (like ISPs) when the service is "a cause" of individuals "engaging in infringing public dissemination of copyrighted works."

Unlike the Pennsylvania decision, which recognizes that illegal behavior by end-users (like posting illegal content) should not necessarily lead to liability for intermediaries where the remedy would have unreasonable spillover effects, the Copyright Office draft would hold all intermediaries and manufacturers liable when end-users infringe copyrights -- no matter what effect this liability has on innovation.  The draft attempts to temper this liability by limiting it to "public dissemination" of copyrighted works (how many people is a "public"?) and by saying that only intermediaries and manufacturers who make money on infringement (how much money?) will be on the hook.

The Copyright Office bill may be a deadly invitation to litigation over the role of technology in our society.  And it clearly doesn't recognize the need to focus on illegal behavior; it outlaws "products" and "services," even if they can be used for noninfringing purposes.  

I'm not saying that the bill, if passed, would kill off innovation.  But it would have substantial unintended consequences that would not be friendly to the continued evolution of technology.  

No one likes to talk about death.  How do we kill off industries who are trying to guarantee their continued survival through legislation?  It's a wholly logical move for them -- their strength lies on the Hill.  But it can't be good for the rest of the ecosystem. 

As we head into more stormy discussions about the future of internet governance, let's keep in mind the differences between hierarchies (like governments) and networks (like the internet).

In a hierarchy, "subsidiarity" is solved by having higher levels be authoritative over the ones below.  In a network, nodes may not be "equal" (networks are usually scale free and subject to power laws), but no node decides for another. 

Hierarchies provide certainty and finality, both desirable things.  Networks make dynamic decisions in a constant ebb and flow of connections, each node vying for the attention of the others.

Hierarchies can last for a long time or can crumble when attacked at a sensitive place.  Networks can heal themselves by routing around broken connections.

Networks are "better" -- in terms of their potential for the creation of complexity -- than hierarchies.  Because of the competition for attention and deference that happens on networks, interesting variations and combinations can happen. In a hierarchy, variation depends on the creativity of the highest levels.  Biological developments -- evolution -- happen in networks.

And everything is biological in the universe.

There is nothing more inspiring and humbling than the study of complexity.  Everything is revealed to be biological, variations competing contextually and endlessly to create an order to which all things tend, but an order that trembles on the edge of chaos.  Great stuff.

The problem is that humans -- and particularly humans selling products and services to the rest of us -- use "complexity" (the word) as an imprecation.  This has its effects, and I'm worried that too much dependence on the metaphors of biology and complexity will backfire. Or, on the other hand, we could work really hard at capturing the joy and benefits of "complexity" (the word) for ourselves.  But we have an uphill fight in front of us.

Let me illustrate.  I recently listened to a debate among Craig Mundie, Halsey Minor, and Larry Babbio at the August 2004 PFF summit on the Future of the Internet.  In answer to a question about where opportunities lay in serving consumers vs. businesses in the future, Halsey M. talked about the fact that 90% of online traffic is now coming from consumers.  He said that there is a huge opportunity to make the internet more productive for businesses, and that we'll be retooling businesses to take advantage of the internet's possibilities.

Then he began to analogize [broadly paraphrasing]:

Just as the utility grid allowed centralization of complexity -- and the industrial revolution allowed people not to have to worry about producing power any more -- the internet allows businesses to consume centralized complex services from others.  Google centralizes the complexity of search.  This means that companies can stick to their core competencies.

Craig Mundie agreed with him, saying that the complexities of infrastructure and identity mechanisms would be overcome by a few very large companies, and adding that "Without this scale [of services being provided by large companies], businesses can't change and grow."

These were eminently reasonable comments.  But they point to the "complexities" of identity management (a subject focused on particularly by Mundie) being handled by a few very big players, and, generally, to "complexities" created by the internet being smoothed for the consumption of businesses and consumers.

Complexity = bad for business.  That's the lexicographical development.

Complexity involves, by its nature, lots of choices, and a good deal of confusion if you are trying to predict the future.  But if you look at a complex system from the outside, you see emergent order - like the miracle of food delivery happening every day in the city of New York.

If identity management is something that is too "complex" for individual businesses to handle -- much less individuals -- and the perception is that it must be given over to a few large entities in order for businesses to function, we're heading in the wrong direction.  We need to take back the language of complexity -- or perhaps come up with another word.

The Copyright Office redraft [pdf] of S. 2560 got a lot of attention this week.  Essentially, the redraft suggests that if you do a single overt thing (raise an eyebrow? build a microchip?) that could (a) be "reasonably expected" to (i) cause an infringement or (ii) persuade someone to infringe, you're liable for direct infringement yourself. 

"Overt acts" aren't defined, but there are specific things listed that aren't overt acts -- like providing phone service to a "distributor of dissemination technology." Thanks.

The last time I wrote about the Induce Act, I suggested that we shouldn't jump up and down and attack it -- that Congress should hold a hearing and get people to explain why the bill would or wouldn't work.  That hearing happened in late July.  Most of the people testifying, save for the Copyright Office and the RIAA, said that the bill shouldn't go further.

Now the Copyright Office has circulated a redraft that, if anything, is likely to get people even more worried than they were about the original S.2560.  It doesn't seem like a move towards compromise.  If anything, it signals a hardening of position:  any technology that makes infringement possible (not just KaZaa or Grokster) can be reached under the draft, and the Sony/Betamax rule is dead. 

Sony is dead because the draft says that one possible "overt act" could be distributing a technology "that, when used as intended, automatically causes the user of the technology to infringe copyrighted works without the user making a specific, informed decision, for each copyrighted work at issue, about whether to engage in such infringement."  This boils down to:  if you build a technology that makes it possible to distribute works publicly (broadband access? mp3 players that connect to the internet? PCs?) you're liable.  Even if you don't meet current judicial standards for contributory or vicarious liability.

What's remarkable here is that the content industry feels that Grokster has given it an opening to broaden copyright liability beyond recognition.  Why haven't the comments of the many other businesses and advocates that opposed S.2560 been listened to?  Why are people stuck negotiating a special-purpose bill that doesn't seem to be special-purpose at all -- but, instead, seems to take on anything that might be used by an infringer?  Why is the Copyright Office (clearly not neutral on this subject) holding the pen?

I'm sure there will be many meetings about this draft, and I'm confident that reason will prevail.  I'm sure this redraft isn't the last word.  So I'm not jumping up and down.  I'm just amazed at this sequence of events.

Today is the 35th anniversary of the day the first node in the ARPANET (at UCLA) sent a message to another computer.  Next month will be the anniversary of the day that first node talked to the second node. 

And what was the first message sent from one node to the other?  It wasn't "was hath God wrought."  It was one computer saying LOG and the second receiving LOG and adding IN -- so they'd have LOGIN.

In Leonard Kleinrock's words:

We sent an L; - did you get the L;? YEP

We sent an O; - did you get the O;? YEP

We sent a G; - did you get the G;? CRASH!

That was the first message on the internet.

Mitchell Waldrop's The Dream Machine, in a section titled "ARPA's Woodstock," has Doug Engelbart saying the following on December 9, 1968: 

'The research program that I'm going to describe to you,' he began in that soft, strangely compelling baritone, 'is quickly characterizable by saying, "If, in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day, and that was instantly responsive to every action you had, how much value could you derive from that?"'

Happy many anniversaries.

Over at Terranova, Nathan Combs recently pointed to a Popular Science article suggesting that very few science fiction writers are brave enough to write about the near future:

Only a small cadre of technoprophets is attempting to extrapolate current trends and imagine what our world might look like in the next few decades. “We’re staring into a fogbank,” Stross says, “and we literally do not know where we’re going, only that we’re going there very fast.”

The Singularity -- "the moment when the world is as different from today's world as this one is from the Stone Age," as the article puts it -- is approaching, and it's foreshadowed in stupendous advances in knowledge of the brain, biology, networks, and genetics.  All of these things interconnect, and if you're feeling enthusiastic about all this you can lose the attention of your readers very quickly.

But stay with me, just for one more summer evening.

How close are we to a posthuman (or more-than-human) era, in which most people recognize that the line between "living" and "inanimate" objects is no longer real?  Can we envision what's possible once minds can be uploaded and shared? What will social life be like when "living online" becomes real -- and not just a turn of phrase?

Combs and the Terranova commentators look at these questions in light of the possibilities of virtual worlds, and whether they should be "games" (with heroic possibilities) or "simulations" (that are accessible to our current social physics minds).  The policy treatment of posthuman life is even more interesting.  Virtual worlds allow us to simulate these problems, and that's why State of Play II is essential.

But the imagination of writers (and law professors!) doesn't depend on what's viable in virtual worlds. How's your imagination doing?  What will your world be like in twenty years? What will "unlawful surveillance" mean then?  Will you know people differently? Will you feel allegiance to an online guild? Will you ever be alone? Will you be wiser? Will you live forever?

And what if the machine stops?

New favorite book, by Jasper Fforde (the first "F" is silent).  From a Salon review:

"Thursday's job is to track down stolen original manuscripts and spot forgeries, but in "The Eyre Affair" she gets recruited by another department in SpecOps, which is trying to capture the world's Third Most Wanted criminal, Acheron Hades. It turns out Thursday is one of the few people able to resist the hypnotic effect of Hades' infernally persuasive voice. Hades steals a device that allows people to enter into literary works, and he begins kidnapping characters from great novels, starting with a minor figure from "Martin Chuzzlewit" and moving on to Jane Eyre."

It's escapist literary detective fiction. Beach reading for people who don't really want to be sitting on a beach.

What are push-to-talk services? And why should they be subject to CALEA?  And why should we care?

From what I understand, push-to-talk are services offered (at the moment) by cellphone companies that allow you to communicate with a group immediately by pushing a button on your phone.  It's like walkie-talkie communication.  But there's no requirement that the underlying carrier be a cellphone company; you could do this over WiFi on the internet. 

These services are just like instant messaging, with voice added in.  The services don't use the traditional telephone system or traditional phone numbers (necessarily).  Instead, they use lists of devices -- like a buddy list -- to allow people to talk to one another.  They're half-duplex, which means only one person can talk at a time. 

And yet, in the Declaratory Ruling that the FCC issued on August 9, it said that commercial wireless push-to-talk services are subject to CALEA: "CMRS [commercial mobile radio service] carrier offerings of push-to-talk service that are offered in conjunction with interconnected service to the PSTN, but may use different technologies, are subject to CALEA requirements."

Why is this interesting?  Because CALEA has an express carveout for "information services," and something that doesn't connect to the traditional telephone network and doesn't use traditional phone numbers -- but does manipulate data -- would seem to be an information service.  Email, specifically, is an information service. 

How does the Commission avoid this carveout?  By saying that CMRS carriers who offer push-to-talk must by definition be doing so "in conjunction with interconnected service to the PSTN," even if they're only using packet-mode technologies for the service.

Now, this all seems like very inside baseball.  But it's important.  Deciding this push-to-talk element means that the Commission has already made the determination that things that don't connect to the traditional telephone system or use phone numbers are nonetheless subject to regulatory control. 

 There really isn't much of a difference between push-to-talk and instant messaging, except that the former is offered by cell companies who are happy to comply with CALEA (including Verizon), and the latter is offered by zillions of companies who are probably not closely following what the FCC is doing. 

Although the Grokster opinion was clearly right, yesterday's Yahoo! decision [pdf] is weak as a matter of both law and policy.

We have declaratory judgment proceedings to avoid the situation where someone who is acting like they want to enforce their rights can constrain the activities of someone else.The court can issue a declaration saying "yes, these rights should be enforced," or "no, these rights shouldn't be enforced," without waiting for the threatening actor to actually ask for their rights to be enforced.

Without this avenue, people who are threatened by worthless claims are stuck -- they have to act to protect themselves from the ever-present threat of suit, without ever getting things resolved.

In the Yahoo! case, Yahoo! asked the federal courts of California to declare a French judgment against Yahoo! to be unenforceable.  Yahoo! was the threatened party; it had received letters in California telling it that the threatening party planned to enforce its rights.

The federal trial court found that the threatening party was acting in a way that was antithetical to our First Amendment, and declared the French judgment unenforceable.

But the Ninth Circuit yesterday decided that the district court hadn't had personal jurisdiction over the threatening French party in the first place. It said that the letter from the party arriving in France, plus the use of the California marshal's service to serve Yahoo!, plus the threatening party's request of a French court to ask Yahoo! to comply with the French order, weren't enough "minimum contacts" with California to support the exercise of personal jurisdiction.

In a lengthy and careful dissent, Judge Brunetti disagreed. He said that the dispute was already ripe enough to be heard, because there was a real controversy between the parties. He said that the threatening party had sufficiently "purposely availed" itself of California's affordances to justify the exercise of personal jurisdiction. The majority opinion seems formalistic and weak in comparison to Judge Brunetti's dissent, which unpacks the cases in detail.

But the larger point here is that both lawsuits are legitimate. France has the right to declare entities within its physical jurisdiction to be violating its laws, and to attempt to enforce that judgment. Yahoo! has the right to seek a declaration that that judgment is unenforceable under US law.  If a foreign party does everything it can to sue a non-physically-present party, then its judgment is legitimate but may not be enforceable against that party.  If that non-physically-present party attacks the enforceability of that judgment, then it can use its own laws to do so.

Our laws allow for declaratory judgments when someone hangs a threat -- a sword of Damocles -- over someone else. The threatening parties in this case did just that.  The Ninth Circuit should have allowed such a declaratory judgment to be issued.  Instead, it read its own personal jurisdiction precedents too narrowly.

Enforceability is where the rubber meets the road in these international online cases, and we should allow disputes over enforceability to be heard and decided. Otherwise, online businesses all over the world will be unable to be certain that they can continue to act.  They'll be effectively constrained, even without actual judgments being enforced against them.

During oral argument in the Grokster [pdf] case, one of the three Ninth Circuit judges asked the appellants (paraphrasing):

If you shut down these services, infringement will continue -- people will continue to share files with no interruption. Do you agree with that, and if it's true, aren't we chasing the wind here?

The appellants' lawyer responded that, no, that wasn't accurate, that if the services (paraphrasing) "simply walked away, the system would eventually degrade and disappear, it would close down."  The judge persisted: 

But if these are opensource programs, they are very difficult to control even if we do issue an injunction.

The Grokster case raises the same fascinating questions about institutional competence that were dealt with in the Sony Betamax case.  Only Congress, the court suggests, can reshape liability theories for copyright infringement.  And the panel's questions suggest why this is so:  a judge's order is likely to be unenforceable in the quickly-changing world of technology.  No judge wants to chase the wind.

In the opinion itself, Judge Thomas uses a lovely word:  "quicksilver."  He says:

[W]e live in a quicksilver technological environment with courts ill-suited to fix the flow of internet innovation.

What does quicksilver mean?  It's defined as something that's liable to sudden unpredictable change; "erratic behavior"; "fickle weather"; "mercurial twists of temperament"; "a quicksilver character, cool and willful at one moment, utterly fragile the next."

In other words, online technological development is yet another example of a complex adaptive system.  Small changes made in response to feedback lead over time (in a permeable system through which energy is flowing) in nonlinear ways to unpredictable orderings that are far from equilibrium.  The universe is a complex adaptive system; even the laws of physics change over time. 

Bravo to the Ninth Circuit for neither trying to catch the wind nor freeze the quicksilver changes in technology.  And for using such evocative language. 

The Senate is asking [pdf] the Copyright Office for advice on the Induce Act. 

"Specifically, we would like your assistance in identifying key concerns that have been raised about S. 2650 and serving as our principal copyright adviser in a series of meetings designed to resolve any remaining issues."

These should be interesting meetings.  They may turn out to be similar to the roundtables that Rep. Tauzin held during the summer of 2002 at which he tried to convince industry representatives to agree to adoption of content marking technology that would be implemented by consumer electronics devices.  Tauzin followed these roundtables by floating a broad draft bill. The Tauzin draft would have given the FCC authority to mandate recognition of a "broadcast flag" by all digital devices that were capable of receiving a digital television signal, and to require that no equipment with analog outputs would be manufactured after July 1, 2005.

It was never introduced.

Here, by contrast, there is already a draft bill out on the table -- and a lot of legitimate concerns have been raised about it.  Maybe these meetings will serve to assuage these concerns.  We'll see.

The New Yorker is not something you can link to casually.  If only I could point you to an article by Oliver Sacks called "Speed:  Alterations of time and movement."  Sacks meditates on speededness and slowedness in parkinsonism and tourettism, as well as the speed of perception in people who are in near-death situations, and the slowness with which William James perceived the world when he took drugs.  He points out that "normal" people have a "remarkable latitude and resilient" balance between speededness and slowedness, and comes to the conclusion that most humans think and act at about the same pace.

One of Sacks's points is that parkinsonians don't perceive themselves to be moving slowly within a very confined space -- although non-parkinsonians will be amazed at the tiny, achingly slow movements that parkinsonians make.  And victims of Tourette's, similarly, don't know how fast they're going but pity the rest of us for our slow movements.  Like Nabokov was, Sacks is a great observer of nature, and he sees glorious beauty in both slow and fast powers of perception.

But we need not be held back by our neural limitations, he suggests:

We have unlocked time, as in the seventeenth century we unlocked space, and now have at our disposal what are, in effect, temporal microscopes and temporal telescopes of prodigious power.  With these, we can achieve a quadrillion-fold acceleration or retardation, so that we can watch, at leisure. . the femtosecond-quick formation and dissolution of chemical bonds...

We can, with the power of visualized data, watch movies of any trend in which we're interested.  Maybe, in fact, in the online world we can continue to unlock space as we unlock time.  With the visualization of information, we can "see" social spaces online that we can't see with our limited terrestrial neurons.  And things can happen there -- formation of social bonds, to carry this metaphor for just one more sentence -- that we'll be able to see in as speeded or as slow a way that we want.

Now, all this visualization won't replace text, and the legal world is full of words that need to be parsed.  But there's something to be said for virtual telescopes that show us new kinds of cinematic wonders. 

There's a documentary out now about Tom Dowd, a recording engineer.  The guy lights up when he talks about music and when he talks about technology.  He tells us that he was completely mystified when he first heard recordings by Les Paul, because Paul was playing four or five guitar parts at once.  Les Paul had figured out how to do multi-track recording, and Tom Dowd had to be there. 

Dowd went out and put together one of the first eight-track machines in the world.  Ten years later, he was still way ahead of everyone else; he invented sliders for multi-track recordings; at the time, the Beatles were recording in (at the most) three tracks.  There's this great reunion scene with Ray Charles, where Dowd and Charles tell each other how tricky technology used to be, laughing hard.

What was great about Tom Dowd, who died in 2002, is that he had a close, deeply musical rapport with the artists he recorded, and an equally close rapport with the machines he tinkered with.  He could talk about the past -- he was there -- but he wasn't longing for it.  In fact, he loved the flexibility and creativity of capturing sound digitally and manipulating every wave.

Here's the question:  do the founding engineers of the internet have the same feeling about the future that Tom Dowd did?  Many of them are still alive.  Are they excited about what will be possible as more of life moves online?  Or do they long for the early days, when they knew almost everyone online and hooking in another university was tremendously exciting?  Do they think of the internet as a social place, or as a place that's been wrecked by commerce? Do they feel a Dowd-like kinship with the people using the network, or do they feel overrun and ignored?

And who's doing the documentary?  Maybe EFF should do it.  Or a perceptive blogger.  Or someone who can explain to us how things work.  The internet of the future will thank us.

I love the Times.  I just filled out an email reader survey for them, but it was only about cultural events.  (I told them I liked the gossipy stories -- Just how sick is James Levine?).  They didn't give me a chance to say nice things about the part of the paper I currently love the most:  the serialization of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Every day this week, the Times is sending us a nice-sized portion of the book.  It's just the right length to read over coffee.  It's a great format:  big print, wide margins, the size of the Book Review -- very soothing.  The writing is wonderful, there's no advertising, and it feels like a gift to readers from the newspaper.

They've done this before, with The Great Gatsby and at least one other book.  But this is the first time I've experienced it, and I think it's great. 

I can't link to it.  You'll just have to go out and buy the paper.

FCC issued its NPRM today -- it's a 100-page pdf file.  I'm just beginning to study it, and I have four questions. 

1.  What exactly is a "managed" VoIP service?  Law enforcement says that providers of VoIP services that are "managed" or "mediated" are subject to CALEA as telecommunications carriers.  Before we get to the awkwardness of saying that someone is a "telecommunications carrier" under CALEA even though they're an "information services" provider under the Communications Act as a whole (and CALEA has a large exception for information services), it would help me to figure out what's meant by "managed."  It doesn't seem to mean only those services "connecting to the traditional telephone network," necessarily, although services that do connect to the PSTN would be covered. 

The FCC is trying hard to be clear, but I'm still confused.  They say "those services that offer voice communications calling capability whereby the VoIP provider acts as a mediator to manage the communication between its end points and to provide call set up, connection, termination, and party identification features..." (at 19).  They say that's different from disintermediated communications in which the VoIP provider has "minimal or no involvement in the flow of packets during the communication, serving instead primarily as a directory." (So Pulver.com is not a managed VoIP service.)  But the definition isn't limited to services that connect to the PSTN or use telephone numbers.

So is it true that if a company provides a private voice service that doesn't connect to the traditional telephone network or use telephone numbers, but does facilitate dedicated conversations somehow -- perhaps by using a private namespace -- it's subject to CALEA?  Would this include services that don't use IP or the public internet?  How can you tell if a service is a voice service or a service for carrying lots of other things, with just a little voice added in?

2.  Does the Substantial Replacement analysis hold water?  CALEA requires "telecommunications carriers" to make sure their services are capable of providing surveillance capabilities to law enforcement.  (I thought this was a "who" question, not a "what" question, and that FCC had to make determinations one by one as to who was a telecommunications carrier under CALEA, but I may be wrong about this.)  The FCC says there are two ways to be a telecommunications carrier under CALEA:  first, by being someone who is "engaged in the transmission or switching of wire or electronic communications as a common carrier for hire," and second, by being an entity that provides "a replacement for a substantial portion of the local telephone exchange service."

Let's start with the second part first.  The FCC is saying that if an individual, a person like me, is using broadband access instead of dialup access to the internet, that broadband provider is a telecommunications provider.  Why?  Because the functionality (the service of access to the internet) that used to be provided by traditional telephones is now being provided by broadband.  (at 24) But does that make sense?  Shouldn't "substantial portion" have something to do with market control in a particular geographic area?  In other words, if local telephones just aren't being used any more in a particular state, that service has been replaced.  Is it replaced one person at a time? 

As to the first part, the switching part, FCC appears to be saying that "switching" includes routers and software ("softswitches").  (at 23)  Equipment that provides addressing or intelligence functions is going to be subject to CALEA, even if it's not "technically" switching or transmission equipment.  Does this make sense?  Doesn't CALEA operate on switches understood the traditional way (as in telephone switches)?  Does this reinterpretation cover more equipment than it should?  Could it possibly cover home users, home networks, etc?

3.  How can you be an "information service" provider (and thus exempt from CALEA) at the same time that you are a "telecommunications carrier" because of your "substantial replacement" (and thus covered by CALEA)?  FCC says it's more important to look hard at CALEA's definition of "telecommunications carrier" than the rest of the statute, because this definition is broader than the Telecom Act definition of "telecommunications carrier".  They say that if they didn't read CALEA this way, they'd be stuck with an "irreconcilable tension."  (at 31).

Is this right?  Doesn't the reading-of-telecom-carrier-for-all-it-is-worth part of this statutory interpretation create the tension?  After all, if we read the whole statute equally, we'd see the blinking red light:  No CALEA Application To Information Services -- and stop there.  We'd say that if we read more into "telecommunications carrier," the exemption wouldn't make sense.  Aren't statutes supposed to be read as if they make sense?

4.  Is the FCC confident of its jurisdiction?  There's an interesting paragraph on p.35 that suggests that even if this interpretation of CALEA doesn't work out, the FCC could always reach non-common-carriers under its ancillary jurisdiction -- and impose on them law enforcement assistance requirements.  Ancillary jurisdiction is the same hook being used in the Broadcast Flag rulemaking and the IP-enabled Services rulemaking.  I'm finishing up an article about ancillary jurisdiction, so this paragraph caught my eye.  Is this Plan B?

Looking forward to illumination.  The FCC has clearly worked very hard on this and is being as careful as they can be.

Jerry Kang (UCLA, now visiting at Georgetown) has written about Pervasive Computing, and it does seem that sensors will likely be everywhere once their cost is sufficiently low.

Do we want to demand, through standards bodies or otherwise, that all sensors declare their presence?  I have never been convinced that requiring privacy statements to be posted on web sites was good policy.  Nor do I think that whois requirements (or labeling requirements generally for bits) are good ideas. 

But for some reason I initially feel differently about making sensors visible.  I don't feel the need to dictate what fields of information they must display or ensure that they have a kill function..  I just would like to know when they're around.

But.

Would making sensors visible dampen innovation in sensors?  Would it make the world less interesting or complex? Would we start wishing that we didn't know about sensors, because their maddening "I'm over here!" beeping was driving us wild?

Human beings are remarkably resilient.  The longterm message may be:  Get over it.  The world is watching you, but with any luck is too busy to care.  Individuals are just not that interesting. 

Let's assume we tried to create an Amnesty International-like organization for online life.  (Yes, EFF does this.  I'm a huge fan of EFF.)  What would the principles of this global organization be?  I tried to draft a list this afternoon:

Online Principles

1. Human beings are naturally inclined towards trust and collaboration. Policies of intermediaries or governments that frustrate trust and collaboration should be viewed with suspicion.

2. The world is a complex and diverse place. Conflicting values can coexist online. Policies of intermediaries or governments that attempt to impose unitary values -- and, in particular, that attempt to build such values into low levels of the protocol stack -- should be viewed with suspicion.

3. Any group or government that attempts to impose its values online on another group or government should be viewed with suspicion.

4. As much as possible, decisions about what should happen online should be implemented at the edge of the network.

5. As much as possible, decisions about what individuals should be able to do online should be made by those individuals themselves.

6. Netizens want to widen their contacts with people who are distant from them in time and space. Policies of intermediaries or governments that frustrate this contact should be viewed with suspicion.

7. Any machine or device should be allowed to connect to the internet as long as it respects basic protocols. Policies of intermediaries or governments that frustrate this connection should be viewed with suspicion.

8. Online access should not be conditioned on provision of government-mandated identifying information.

9. Individuals should have a choice of modes of online access available to them, at reasonable prices. One of those choices must allow individuals to host content themselves.

10. Individuals who subscribe to these principles should be ready to act collectively when necessary.

Here are the deliverables this AI-like set of affiliates could have:  people could brand themselves as netizens (suggest another word if you don't like that one); smart-mob-like protests could be organized against initiatives that seemed to run counter to these principles; and ISPs that didn't measure up could be boycotted. 

More deliverables would be good, but I need suggestions.  Creative Commons had something to offer -- licensing terms.  This new group would be a loose union of citizens of the internet, and wouldn't have a license to offer.  What else could this group of people offer to the world?  How do you instantiate online freedom?

Michael Binder of Canada had a good line on Friday [paraphrasing]:  "I've heard about e-government, e-rulemaking, e-commerce -- I say E-nough!"

I'm at a conference that has a single, shared, dialup connection supporting all of our wireless work.  Life has slowed down.  E-nertia!

Rob Pegoraro has a good follow-up column today in the Post.  He's making the right point:  the content industry wants control.  "Copy protection" as a term doesn't really capture what they want, and sounds benign.  This industry can't control the internet (yet), but they want to make sure that all the devices that connect to the internet are unable to transmit marked files online or connect to anything other than similarly compliant devices.

There's no reason these marked files, by the way, will be limited to digital broadcast content.  Once machines are configured to respect the flag (and all the kneecaps have been broken in the FCC's ad hoc interim procedure), any marked content, received by any compliant machine (including PCs), won't go online.  Could be public domain data that's marked.  Could be anything at all.  Doesn't matter where it came from.  This is quite a step.

And it's all about control.  E-nough!

The FCC internet policy working group held a roundtable discussion [pdf] today about international approaches to IP-enabled services. 

Michael Binder, of the Canadian government, had some interesting things to say.  (Binder's title: Assistant Deputy Minister, Spectrum, Information Technologies and Telecommunications Sector.  Binder says he's "not a regulator" but is nevertheless part of the government.)  

He said [paraphrasing]:  "As a government official, I don't see what the urgency is here [to regulate IP-enabled services].  This is very very early in the game.. . . One can argue that we should wait to see how it unfolds.  The notion of governments and bureaucrats and regulators actually designing a regulatory scheme for the future is hard for me to understand.  How to go into a back room and figure out how industry will go forward -- that's an interesting view.  Maybe once there are bottlenecks, regulation will be needed." 

When Bob Pepper of the FCC asked what government policies could foster the development of VoIP, Binder responded (again paraphrasing):  "Our regulator decided not to regulate the internet a few years back.  This was a major proceeding at a time before VoIP emerged, and we've stuck to this decision.  . . . Sprint and Vonage and others are all providing VoIP services.  One might ask, if they're all coming in, what is it you [regulators] want to change? . . . I think the market will take care of itself. If it's not a good service, no one will subscribe to it.  There should be regulation only if necessary.  What's the necessity?"

Jeff Pulver made some very useful remarks, including (paraphrasing):  "Around the world people have trouble believing things [some services] are really free.  This is radical for people, and certainly for regulators.  The real generation we need to think about is the IM generation.  Presence plus voice plus social networking creates a new era of online communication.  My role is to help protect the future, and make sure that innovation can happen.  Don't think of these services as substitutes for telephony -- think of the future."

This was a complex and interesting morning; the UK and Japanese regulators take quite different approaches than Canada may be taking (UK looks at whether something is a telecommunications service, and appears to be in about the same position as the US -- trying to figure out whether there is a market around which lines can be drawn; Japan has already decided that VoIP is a telecommunications service and is regulating accordingly), and several companies cried out for regulatory certainty. 

Nortel, in particular, said balefully that if regulators didn't provide this certainty businesses would have no reason to invest in the vastly improved and increasingly secure broadband networks that Nortel apparently believes must eventually supersede the internet.  Paraphrasing: "The internet is the wild wild west from a security standpoint . . . in order to scale, to make this a dependable, real-world network, companies need to come to commercial agreements about how to treat each other's traffic. This can happen without regulation, as it has with wireless carriers for treatment of roaming customers. . . . The empowerment of consumers to have control over how communications coming their way are treated and routed is key. The only way to make this scale -- the internet is fun but we need to get to scale -- is to create a network that is much more reliable and predictable than the internet will ever be."  I may be naive, but this seemed to me to be a pitch by Nortel.

The key tension here appears to be between BT's call for internationally consistent rules that allow companies to sell services, and Canada's point that it seems awfully early to be doing anything at all. There did not appear to be a clear call for emergency services, disabled access, privacy mandates, or any of the other policies discussed in the IP-enabled services NPRM, as far as I could tell -- particularly for services that don't interconnect with the traditional telephone network. On the other hand, there wasn't a huge push against them, and CALEA didn't really come up at all (except for an oblique mention of "safety"-oriented policies that would be discussed by the FCC in the near future).

Net impression:  Canada seems like a good place.  Even though this summary comparing the Canadian and US proceedings suggests that Canada is both more focused and more likely to regulate than the US is, Binder left the impression that Canada won't do anything at all.  But, again, he's not a (or "the") regulator.

I'm waiting for the FCC's NPRM on CALEA for VoIP to drop.  I am in acronym heaven.

Ed Felten has a nice description of John Morris's presentation at the PFIR conference here.  It's likely that FCC is going to try to thread the needle and describe some CALEA regime for VoIP that attempts to ensure that the regime doesn't apply to IM and email.  But, still, it's a big step for the FCC to reach the services that are somewhere in between ATT (little bit of IP added in) and Pulver.com (all IP) with CALEA.

And The New York Times is certainly noticing.  Today's story is worth reading.  CALEA is only part of the story.  The rest -- the implementation of the "social policies" that I've been pointing to -- is equally fascinating.

Have you downloaded Skype yet?

I'm here, having finally (with Froomkin's help) found a way to get online.  In exchange, I gave Froomkin a route map for the No.3 busline.

What's this conference about?  It may be about network security -- holding people liable for using legacy hardware and software that can be used to attack others.  It may be about spam and whether or not anonymity continues to make sense.  It may be about the glory of self-organizing systems and netizenship (it was for about 10 minutes, when I was talking.)  It may be about ICANN (although several people have professed to not be interested in bashing ICANN).  It may be about WSIS.

I can't tell what it's about.  I've taken the mike a few times to ask the group to focus on a problem and build something.  I said at one point that being here was like watching a big football team sort of wander aimlessly around the field.  Someone responded -- maybe it was Brad Templeton -- that these guys are here because they sucked at football.  (It's mostly guys here.)  It's so hard to harness this energy and get it working on something concrete.

Karl Auerbach is here, and he's suggesting that some regulations are good -- governments have legitimacy that others don't.  He's focusing on the "dangerous software/hardware" problem, and also providing some ICANN criticism.  He's concerned that users are being forced to pay at least $6 a domain name.  Others pointed out that there are some registrars who charge less than $6, and make up the difference on services.

Wendy Selzer is here, and I wish I could stay to hear whatever remarks she's going to make.  Ed Felten is wise in the hallways.  I've been privileged to mutter with David Isenberg in the back of the room.

I'm noting that none of us bloggers have managed to encapsulate this conference yet.  We're all just announcing that "we're here."  I think that's indicative:  it's 4:15 and we're not quite sure where in topic-space "here" is.

I'm going to assert that this conference is about the rise of netizenship and the need for a lobby for netizens.  Just as Larry L. has found a way to represent the public domain, we need to find a way to represent the end-user, and the power of that user to shape his/her own environment -- given adequate tools.

PS:  In case you were wondering, the internet hasn't melted down and isn't in danger of doing so.

After the sultry days and nights in Kuala Lumpur, it's great to be in Southern California.  I'm here for the PFIR conference tomorrow.  The conference hotel is at the corner of Lincoln and Manchester, just north of the airport, and after I checked in I took the No. 3 bus up to my home town:  Santa Monica.

The No.3 is a spectacular busline.  It costs only .75 to go all the way from south of the airport to UCLA -- fast.  Along the way, you see a lot of Lincoln Boulevard (junky), ICANN's headquarters (anonymous), the high school I went to (huge), the pastel-colored stucco apartment buildings south of Montana, and a lot more -- including a glimpse of the city fishing pier and momentary ocean views. 

It's a great day here, and it's nice to be back, if only for 24 hours.

I'm not sure what to expect from tomorrow's meeting.  I'm looking forward to seeing Neumann, Weinstein, Farber, Bradner, and whoever else is planning to come.  The somewhat apocalyptic conference announcement ("A continuing and rapidly escalating series of alarming events suggest that immediate cooperative, specific planning is necessary if we are to have any chance of avoiding the meltdown") makes me want to tell a few jokes. 

Instead, I'll focus on netizenship. I'll talk about the glory of self-organizing networks (and the order that emerges from them), and I'll point out that someone is already in charge:  us.  "Governance" does not necessarily involve "governments."  And I'll tell a few stories about this past ICANN meeting, including what happened during my lengthy cab ride with the manager of Burundi's ccTLD, .bi.

Although I usually try to tie these posts up into a neat package, there really is no connection between the internet and the No.3 bus.  Except that both work really well.