If you have any interest in internet governance, take a look at igf2006.info.  Everything about the upcoming meeting in Athens (the Internet Governance Forum) is there.  There are more than a thousand people going to this meeting. 

You can sign up for the site using a pseudonym (note to Ann Onymous), and you'll be part of a huge amount of online collaboration in connection with the meeting.  Create your own blog, add or edit a wiki, create a chatroom, a page, a new event -- whatever.  Everything known about the meeting is there, and the links to webcasts/audio casts will be up as soon as they're available.

Congratulations and thanks to Kieren McCarthy for getting this site up.  It's ready for use, and it's really useful.

I'll be facilitating a workshop in Sao Paulo about meetings structure and related topics.  I've written a paper that will be posted shortly in preparation for the workshop, and I'll post it here as well.

It's time to step back and evaluate ICANN meetings.  Different groups have very different reasons for attending, and we'd like to make sure that expectations for these meetings are addressed.  As a start, we'll be asking people to let us know why they go to ICANN meetings.  We have about 800 people showing up now, routinely, to week-long meetings whose essential structure hasn't changed in more than six years.  We could probably be doing a much better job at matching the meetings to the goals (many) of the people who attend.

So - think about it.  ICANN’s approach to meetings should be determined by core organizational goals and principles. How can ICANN’s meetings attract more constructive and effective engagement by members of the community? How can they be conducted more efficiently, at lower cost in time and money? How can they enhance the legitimacy of ICANN’s actions? Facilitating remote participation (and online work) is a top priority, but we have many other things to work on as well.  We'll talk about all of this in Sao Paulo.

So the mythical handset I want that (1) has a browser that works for all online content and (2) has wireless access will still not be perfect.  It will necessarily still have a pretty small screen.

Someone said to me a couple of days ago that he didn't think that screen would be immersive enough for virtual worlds.  I wonder about that. 

When you first go into a movie theater (one of the in-person ones that still exist in many cities), you aren't drawn in by the screen at all.  It seems like an artificial incursion on your life -- it even feels a little silly, all facing front to watch a rectangular expanse at the front of the room.  People chew popcorn noisily and you notice how old the curtains are that are hanging on the sides of the screen, how cheesy it is to draw those curtains back when it's time to start the film (audible old pulleys straining), and how dingy the room is.

But when the film begins, and if it's any good at all, you forget about all that.  The screen completely fills your vision.  I'm always surprised by how easily I forget that I'm sitting in a room watching a projection. It's a jolt to leave the room and have your sense of space snap back to the here and now.

I have a feeling that there's a tipping point for small screens, and that they don't have to be big to capture us completely.  They just have to be big enough to draw us in.

Which is a good thing, because we'll be playing in virtual worlds that are changing on the fly and feature scheduled happenings.  Or so BusinessWeek asserts this week. We'll recreate the world using presence detection ("my team is here with me") and timed events ("it's time for us to land that spaceship") while sitting near a wireless access point.  

We can keep the big laptop screens for weekends.

I'm going to Bulgaria early in the morning for an ICANN Board retreat.  I'll try to blog from there.  But things may be a little slow for a few days.

ICANN sent me a jacket -- it is navy blue and has a snappy ICANN logo on it. 

We have a lot to talk about at the retreat, and I'm hoping for the best.

The WSJ has an article today (subscription required) about a bunch of developments in US city wifi. 

MuniWireless.com (running a key conference today and tomorrow in Minneapolis) tells us that there are more than 300 cities across the US that are working on wireless access.  There seem to be widely varying ways of providing service, and the telcos are getting into the act.  From the WSJ article:

"It's all about the extension of the broadband access for our customers," says Eric Shepcaro, vice president for business development at AT&T.  "It's also about leveraging assets that we already have in place."

But look at Personal Telco in Portland.  Or Wireless Leiden in The Netherlands. Or everything Sascha Meinrath is doing. And don't miss NYC Wireless.

It would be good to know how well open, public, free, non-registration city wifi networks are doing in the US.  Once I get my mythical phone that is wireless enabled and open-platform (so that any developer can write software for it that allows me to easily use the location-based services I like), I'll need a free, open wireless connection wherever I go.

Is that too much to ask?

My phone is just a phone.  I'm not very attached to it and I've been known to forget about it for days at a time.  It has no net access, it can't take pictures, and its battery runs down very quickly.  I've drowned it twice by accident.

Four years ago, I was very attached to my Blackberry.  It was a small model and all it did was download and send email. I held onto it out of pure sentiment even after it became a dumb object incapable of doing anything but turning on and off. 

What if my phone had non-cellular wireless access, a keyboard, and a nice big screen? If mobile carriers weren't in charge of my access, I could do great things online using my phone. Looking over other peoples' shoulders, I can see that the user experience for internet-enabled phones isn't very satisfying. Many clicks, many steps, many waits.

I'm assuming that we'd have to get away from the mobile carriers because they have the highest walls of any walled gardens. Nothing new shows up unless a mobile carrier gives permission, and you have to pay a lot as a software provider to be admitted to a carrier's "stack" - their club of applications that users can access. Phooey. 

Couldn't a plain old wireless connection on a handset (we'd probably still call it a phone) do a better job?  Sure, we could hang onto the cellular connection for those times when we need to make a phone call and we're whizzing down a highway, but otherwise we could walk away from the control that mobile carriers exert.

If we did walk away, and walked towards wireless networks instead, how open and neutral would they be?  I have a lot to learn about the neutrality of municipal wireless networks as compared to what mobile carriers do. 

It seems to me that this is the future -- who wants to carry around a PC unnecessarily?  I'm looking forward to the day (I really am) when I have a gadget that inspires the same affection that my old Blackberry did.

Now that Bill Moyers has done an hour-long program about net neutrality, he should look into CALEA.  DOJ is circulating on the Hill a draft rewrite of CALEA extending it to the internet (and to applications that run on the internet), and it's full of enormous problems. (Earlier entry on this here.)

Among many other problems, law enforcement officials want designers to ask permission before launching.  They want to make sure that innovators notify the Commission of their new applications at the design stage.  This way they'll get the modifications law enforcement wants at an early point, and innovators will avoid retrofitting later. Sounds great, right?  No, it's not.  Extending CALEA to online applications is a huge and destructive step, as I've often said in the past.

This is relevant now because it's likely that the CALEA rewrite will come up for discussion during the lame duck session following the upcoming election.  Go, mainstream media -- take a look at this story.

I've been offline pursuing academic dreams for a day or so.  I'm working on a paper that tries to link up economic growth theory, social systems theory, complexity, and telecommunications policy.  It's moving along, and it's fun.  I have a low fun threshold.

In August I went to Berkeley to be part of a gargantuan IP scholars conference (84 papers in three days, or was it two days?) and someone told me about a Berkeley professor who was also interested in complex systems.  I wrote to her and she sent me to a book on autopoiesis (organizationally closed, self-creating systems).  That book had a lot about law as a self-creating functional system in it, and cites to someone I'd never heard of named Niklas Luhmann.

Since then I've been running around (slowly, using books) reading Luhmann and about Luhmann.  He's the social systems theory part of my current exploration.  He asserts that he's not trying to say what society should be, but that he's just describing how it works.  A key part of that description is to point out that society is made up of functional systems of communication (law, economics, politics) that are separate from another, that co-evolve (because they're "structurally coupled," or interdependent), that create themselves and their boundaries, and that only work with their own materials.

This sounds pretty abstract as a starting point, but I've been finding it illuminating.  It's like the old joke about how many psychologists it takes to change a lightbulb:  "Just one, but the lightbulb has to want to change."   The educational system can teach courses about discrimination, but that won't actually reduce discrimination.  The Green Party may be very strong in German politics, but that may just have created more political careers -- it may not mean that there are fewer power plants in Germany.  Politics and the economy have a close and interdependent relationship but one can't change the other (unless it really wants to change).

When these systems co-evolve, they may do so in unpredictable, non-linear ways.  There's no telling what effect a particular communication in one system (a new legal statute) may have on politics. It depends how the political system deals with the statute, in its own terms and using its own materials.

All of this is making two common phrases more meaningful to me:  "changing the facts on the ground" and "aligning incentives."  If it becomes economically prudent for employers to retain employees by having better work policies -- if that's more remunerative than letting employees churn through the doors -- then they'll change policies.  Protesting about work policies won't do it, because the employment system won't respond.  And law as a system can't predictably change another system unless that system's own materials are changed somehow.

So if you leave a great, inspiring conference about a subject you care about, and you feel vaguely dissatisfied instead of uplifted, it's because the system you wanted to change wasn't in the room.  And that system isn't going to change unless it's ready to.

I've been linking to James Enck's blog for a while now.  Read the Oct. 9 entry -- ten things he hates about telcos.  

And Hugh McLeod has a wonderful blog that's been recognized as enormously influential by FT. 

Do you ever look at Nina Camic's blog?  It's great. 

And I always read Tom Coates's blog.  Stylish and compact.

Speaking of compact -- that's it for today.  Tomorrow:  universal service.  :-)

Recently, the FTC issued a report on muni wifi (press release here).  It's the first report of the FTC's Internet Access Task Force. 

Commissioner Leibowitz issued a concurring statement supporting the report.  It's a useful statement - particularly footnote 4:

As an agency charged with enforcing the antitrust laws, we know the importance of competition well. Increased competition means lower prices and higher quality for consumers. But the lack of competition along the "last mile" of the Internet to consumers can have an even more profound effect than high prices in local markets. It can interfere with the growth and development of the Internet everywhere.

Thanks, Commr. Leibowitz.  He's citing the FCC numbers showing that more than 60% of U.S. zip codes have at most a choice between only two providers of broadband access, 40% have only one choice, and 13% have no choice at all.  He's noticed that "[t]he municipal broadband movement is a grassroots effort by this country’s local officials – many of whom recognize that broadband Internet access is increasingly essential to economic growth – to respond to real needs on the part of their constituents to make broadband more available and affordable." 

He's aware of the risk to that economic growth posed by incumbents who in the recent past have wanted to make sure that municipalities couldn't provide broadband access to their citizens.  It's a strong statement, and it suggests that the FTC is ready to take up the cudgels on behalf of municipalities that want to install their own networks but are being thwarted by established telephone or cable companies.

The next report of the task force will be on network neutrality.  I have a feeling I know where that will come out - Majoras's comments in August amounted to a rallying cry for the incumbents. 

I hope that Commr. Leibowitz will be a temporizing influence on the task force.  If he understands the incentives of the existing providers of broadband access -- and he seems to -- he will acknowledge that they have every reason to manage networks in ways that will favor their own packets.  There are many things these network providers can do short of outright blocking that nonetheless harm "the growth and development of the Internet."  He should be asking hard questions about promises of common carriage these providers made in exchange for the system of public subsidies and regulatory soft treatment that allowed them to build these networks. 

Most importantly, Commr. Leibowitz needs to understand that no one can see what's going on inside these networks.  We have no way of knowing what incremental discrimination is already happening.  There simply is no data.  To say "we will wait until there is evidence of harm" is to play on on the telcos' field -- they are masters of obfuscation and creative accounting.  Claims of harm will be met by them with waving hands and wads of reports, none of which will be falsifiable from the outside.  

Think economically, Commr. Leibowitz:  the incumbents have managed to work us all the way back to the telephony business model.  Is optimizing on billing the best way to run a broadband network, in the long run? 

Economic growth keeps growing.  Human conditions keep keeting better (at least in some countries).  Things are not settling down into a steady state.  What accounts for this? 

The increasing returns that come with new goods.  Differentiation. An increasing variety of goods.  Technological change.  These things aren't external to the functional economic system -- they are the components of the system that, with positive feedback, drive economic growth.

Diversity is something that Jane Jacobs focused on in The Economy of Cities in 1969.  She tells the story of Birmingham and Manchester.  In Birmingham in the 1850s there were many small businesses doing pieces of different things -- no real specialization that you could see. Manchester, on the other hand, had huge businesses in textiles and was viewed as the city of the future.  But Birmingham stayed alive, and Manchester dimmed.  Diversity seems to be the key to growth.

To drive the development of new ideas (which lead to new products and services, which lead to growth), we'd need to invest substantially in infrastructure.  More funding for education.  More openness in academic publications.  More government investment in broadband infrastructure and treatment of it as a utility - a basic good needed to support the transmission and production of new ideas.  This seems like a good time for enlightened government support of technological development.

I'm at the annual Yale Law School reunion.  Dean Koh is doing a great job exhorting everyone to remember that the law school stands for excellence and humanity -- and excellence in (presumably humane) fundraising.  He briefly described the credentials of this year's entering class.  Many people in the room said quietly to themselves "I would never get in now."

Every reunion has a theme that brings alumni in for discussion.  This year it's the work-life balance. So there are panels entitled I Love My Job, But Working 24/7? and Work and Self.

I've been to other alumni weekends where the Friday dinner is a roaring, successful event, where you can't find a seat or make your way down the aisles because of the throngs of back-slapping alums happy to be back in the seat of Yale-dom.

The dinner tonight was not like that.  Sure, it was festive (and my table in particular seemed to be making an awful lot of noise), but there wasn't a huge crowd.  It may have been the topic of the weekend that was the issue. 

Or maybe everyone's still at the office.

Michael Carroll, a member of the Creative Commons board, was here at Cardozo today talking to a group of law review editors from all over the country.  He began by reminding the students that the idea behind student-edited law reviews was (at least originally) the dissemination of legal knowledge.  The room was quiet -- they were all paying attention. 

He said that if the editors had a choice between increasing that dissemination (by, for example, making pdfs of articles available online) and making money for their schools (by, for example, reaping royalties from Westlaw and LEXIS, and getting paid for subscriptions), they should choose dissemination. 

But he also pointed out that that's probably a false choice -- Westlaw and LEXIS aren't going away any time soon, and there is an audience for hardcopy subscriptions that isn't going away either. 

Michael argued very persuasively that there are large audiences that don't have access to Westlaw and LEXIS but will find articles online and cite them:  researchers who bump into things online serendipitously, researchers from other disciplines, underfunded researchers, and researchers from other countries.  He urged the editors to make sure that the authors they publish have the rights to make their articles available online. 

Michael pointed the editors to Creative Commons's ScienceCommons project, which aims to widen open access to factual data.  He noted repeatedly that other disciplines are very far ahead of the legal academic field in their efforts to open access to information.  And he praised the Duke Law Journal for having a long history of putting articles online.

Duke's editor pointed out that law professors with offers from his journal who profess to have a deep commitment to open access will publish articles with journals that are higher in the pecking order but don't put their articles online.  So the profession needs to support the idea that open access is important.

For me, the web changes the role of law journals.  Selection by a law journal can indicate quality, and editing assistance from good students is often very helpful. But the entire process is slow, laden with tradition, and strangely out of step with the actual practice of law. 

Peer-reviewed journals, with swift online posting, would make much more sense.  But that would mean that law professors would have to do a lot more work.  Some professors, like Michael, would rise to the occasion.

It was an inspiring talk.  I hope and expect that every student in the room took it to heart and will take its lessons home.  But I'm not sure that the current system of innumerable student-reviewed law journals is sustainable. 

[addition -- Don't miss the effort here to help push access to law review content.  Thanks to Michael Froomkin for the pointer.]

Cardozo often has visitors from foreign countries teaching here and generally giving a civilized air to the place.  Today one of them came into my office with a look of panic on his face.

"I thought that someone else was going to be traveling with me tomorrow to [name of city] from New York, but he can't go, and so I have to get there by myself.  And then I have to pick up a key at the law school there and find the place where I'm staying."

Should he take the bus, take a train, take a plane; how was he going to find the law school; how was he going to find the place... all of this was terrifying to this person.

I go to [name of city] a lot, and so I had lots of advice.  Definitely take the train.  The subway leaves right from the train station.  Take the subway in the direction of [name of place].  Get off and walk this direction and then that direction, and you'll be at the law school.  Then I printed out a bunch of things.  Here's a train schedule.  Here's the subway map.  Here's the map of the law school.  Here are walking directions from the law school to the apartment.

It felt great to be helping the Cardozo visitor.  I've often been in foreign cities where all of this getting around seems so mysterious and I completely understood the feeling of panic.

He asked me if anyone had helped me this way when I was traveling.  I said that the internet was good at helping in these situations.  Lots of maps and directions.  Very empowering.

I'm looking forward to the day when the New York Times figures out how to deliver exactly the stories I want, in hard-copy printed format, to my door.  Personalization plus the feel of newsprint.  Yes, it'll be expensive, but these times demand my Times.  Reading online and reading offline are different experiences, and I'll forever be of the generation that wants a paper to hold.

Today I'm looking for news about North Korea.  It's a Wag the Dog moment -- perhaps we'll all stop thinking about Foley if we're worrying about nuclear warheads. And I want to hear more about Anna Politkovskaya. 

Russia is unquestionably a dangerous place for journalists — less so than only Iraq and Algeria, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Thirteen of them have been killed since Mr. Putin came to power in 2000, a little more than two a year on average.

We need reporters like Anna Politkovskaya.  The LA Times had an opinion piece today that said:

...[T]he slaying of Politkovskaya. . . illustrate[s] that it is the messenger that matters. Insurgents, criminals, terrorists and corrupt politicians understand very well that it is the months or years of digging by professional reporters, many of them supported by traditional news organizations, that will expose misdeeds.

. . . . YouTube, Google, Flickr and many other websites offer valuable tools for keeping the world informed. But they are not a substitute for Politkovskaya and her colleagues.

Societies are judged on how they treat their most vulnerable citizens. We suggest that added to that calculation should be whether journalists have been threatened, assaulted and killed. Tell us how many journalists were assassinated in your country last year, and we will tell you what kind of society you have.

The sub-headline of the LA Times story suggests that the "killings of old-school investigative reporters prove their work is crucial."  There must be a more straightforward way to prove that you're central to society.  I'm hoping that personalized printed paper shows up soon.  I don't want newspapers to die.

From the San Francisco Chronicle, a good-news story about the internet.  Back in 1954, a Harvard psychologist named Gordon Allport suggested that person-to-person contact could reduce prejudice.  But the contact had to happen in just the right way --

The contact must be pleasant, it must be fairly intimate and not casual, the participants need to perceive they are of equal status, and it must involve cooperation between groups working toward a mutually agreed goal.

A researcher in Israel, Dr. Amichai-Hamburger, is convinced that properly established online interactions can provide exactly this kind of contact.  He points out that people are relaxed when they're using their computers at home. 

Online cooperation is very common, a message can't hurt you physically, and with the right kinds of tools and a belief that a common goal is possible, I can imagine using the internet to make progress in many conflict-torn situations.  Use of an avatar allows people to feel "safe" and to speak freely. 

When it comes to deep-seated religious prejudices, the kinds of feelings that make people murder others because they believe the others are defiling the earth, I'm not sure how much online contact will help.  It can't hurt, certainly, and it's good to have a story about online communications that isn't negative.

If every seven years someone showed up with a camera and asked you how you felt about every facet of your life and then showed the result to millions of people, how would you feel? Some of the subjects in 49Up are clearly very upset about having been chosen to be profiled. They resent the intrusion and the effect the project has had on their lives.  They've been observed, intently, when they might have preferred to remain invisible.

It's very moving to see them as 7-year-olds, these 49-year-olds. Rather like having a family photo album that can talk. It was surprising to me how much of the talk was in anger, but from their perspective it hardly feels voluntary -- this project has shaped their lives.

I talked today to a friend of mine from the Ukraine who is heartbroken over what is going on in her country now.  Yes, Viktor Yuschenko was elected President in December 2004 ("he was so handsome, you know, before he was poisoned").  But then the people in the densely populated pro-Russia south voted in a Prime Minister who was also sympathetic to Russia.  It had been a very cold winter with great shortages of oil for heat, and enough people went along that the Ukraine ended up with a split government. 

Yuschenko, in my friend's eyes, has no power.  My friend is deeply worried about the corruption and lawlessness of present-day Ukraine.  "It is such a beautiful country," she said, "but we have had so many decades of corruption, and maybe our expectations were too high after 2004.  We need to move slowly, step by step, towards a better life."  My friend's dearest dream is that the Ukraine will join NATO.  She despises Russia. 

A group of researchers made a study tour to Ukraine recently under the auspices of the 21st Century Trust, and they're blogging about what they've learned here.  It's well worth reading -- Ukraine isn't getting much coverage in US newspapers.

One of the researchers, and I suspect the instigator of the blog, is Maria Farrell, a very skilled ICANN policy person who likes to do these sorts of things on her days off. 

"Those who have used music metaphors to describe working together, especially jazz metaphors, are sensing the nature of this quantum world [where small activities affect others, even across distance].  This world demands that we be present together, and be willing to improvise.  We agree on the melody, tempo, and key, and then we play.  We listen carefully, we communicate constantly, and suddenly, there is music, possibilities beyond anything we imagined.  The music comes from somewhere else, from a unified whole we have accessed among ourselves, a relationship that transcends our false sense of separateness.  When the music appears, we can't help but be amazed and grateful."

Leadership and the New Science, by Margaret J. Wheatley.

I had a visit today from a Taiwanese legislator who is interested in finding out about internet policy here in the U.S.  He said that Taiwan has required its DSL and cable companies to interconnect on standard fees with all ISPs. No vertical integration -- he seemed horrified by the idea that a telecommunications company would be a content company as well.  He was confident that internet access should be a public utility, not a privately-held entertainment source.

He was shocked (really, I'm not kidding, shocked) that his five-star hotel here in New York charged him $10/day for internet access.  He found that just outrageous.  In Taiwan, internet access is virtually free.

At one point, he noted that Taiwan watches Japan and Korea very closely and tries to compete with them in making low-cost broadband access available.  They're going great guns, so Taiwan is too.   

He asked me whether the US was watching Europe closely to see what they were doing -- we talked about northern Europe, and the UK, and I told him about the European Commission's rejection of Deutsche Telekom's plans.  "Aren't they your competitors?" he said.

I said that as far as I could tell the US doesn't care what Europe is doing with broadband access policy.  We don't feel that they're competitors of ours.  We're content to slide farther and farther behind, while feeling confident that we're leading the world.

Nice visit, a little chilling.  He really had trouble understanding why we were going in the direction we are.  He suggested that this scandal be widely publicized.

Say you're a juvenile offender of some kind -- some minor disgrace, but serious enough that you were sent to an institution with a locked door for a while.  Let's assume that after a certain amount of time (ten years?) your offense has been expunged from public files.  From your perspective, as a fine upstanding citizen who gets haircuts and takes a lunch to work, you have a clean record.

Now say you decide to change jobs.  You see something advertised that looks just right, and you decide to take the leap and try.  During your first interview with your prospective employer, he says to you "When you filled out this form for us you said you'd never been convicted of a crime.  But that's not true, is it?" 

What happened was that your record, when it existed and when it was public, was copied down in some way by (or maybe even sold to) a commercial company.  Why not?  It was available at the corner courthouse.  Although the public record was changed after ten years, the privately-held record persisted.  And now it has come back to life -- to your life.

You don't feel as if you were lying to your prospective employer.  Your lawyer told you those ten long years ago that your record would be clean and you would be free to start fresh.  But there's this guy across the table from you who paid a company to check up on you and now no longer trusts you.  You won't be getting that new job.

What's the right policy for something like this?  It can't be the right answer to make all public records secret.  There are good reasons to have the records of court procedures be public. Nor does it seem feasible to have all data tagged in some way so that it can be yanked back automatically when it ceases to be part of the public record.  Information wants to be available to be aggregated, and generally that's a good thing both for information and for people. 

It would be good if employers and educational institutions and insurance companies and other deciders didn't use datamined information in isolation -- if the guy across the table for you asked a few more questions, he'd get the whole story and probably wouldn't be as worried.  But people will always make decisions based on too few data points.

I don't have an answer.  My intuition is that the social risks of locking up information exceed the benefits of doing so.  But if you're the person trying to get that new job, you probably don't share that view.

On Sept. 25, when I was still recovering from OneWebDay, the FCC started a new bureau:  the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau.  (Press release here.  Order here.)

The PSHSB (let's pronounce it FISH-sab, okay?) has many responsibilities.  It will "serve as the point of contact for the U.S. Government in matters of international monitoring."  It will "represent the Commission in public safety, homeland security, national security, emergency preparedness, disaster management, defense and related matters requiring conferences or communications with other governmental officers, departments, or agencies."  Basically, everything the Commission does that has to do with these issues will be handled by FISH-sab.

It's an enormous mandate:

Develops, recommends, and administers policy goals, objectives, rules, regulations, programs and plans for the Commission to promote effective and reliable communications for public safety, homeland security, national security, emergency management and preparedness, disaster management and related activities, including public safety communications (including 911, enhanced 911, and other emergency number issues), priority emergency communications, alert and warning systems (including the Emergency Alert System), continuity of government operations, implementation of Homeland Security Presidential Directives and Orders, disaster management coordination and outreach, communications infrastructure protection, reliability, operability and interoperability of networks and communications systems, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), and network security.

Now, there's nothing wrong with coordination in times of emergencies, and it's true that many of FISH-sab's duties used to be spread around different bureaus.  But this new guy is responsible for "operability and interoperability of networks and communications systems."  That could mean anything at all, and certainly points to online responsibilities not  delegated by Congress to the FCC in the Telecom Act (in my view).  And this new guy is responsible for "communications infrastructure protection."  What's that?  Could be anything.  And "network security" is no small thing either.

We'll be hearing a lot about FISH-sab, I predict.  In fact, FISH-sab may swallow the whole Commission eventually.  A bureaucracy's main task is to replicate and extend its boundaries -- to protect its turf so it will continue to get resources.  This one, this new bureaucracy, looks like trouble.

Over the weekend, Congress approved a bill making it illegal for banks and credit card companies to make payments to online gambling sites.  (story here)

An enormous amount -- certainly more than half -- of online gaming happens here in the U.S.  We're addicted to online poker as a people.  (If they've heard about the proposed ban on payments, there are 23 million annoyed online poker players in the US today.)  That's a lot of revenue that casinos here in the U.S. would like to be gathering. But because prosecutors here take the view that online gambling violates the Wire Act, U.S.-based casinos can't get into the online gambling business.

The question is whether what's happened here -- outlawing payments to these offshore sites -- is merely designed to protect U.S. businesses.  Back in 2005, an appellate body of the World Trade Organization ruled that US gambling laws were covered by the General Agreement on Trade in Services, asserting that the US couldn't take advantage of a "public morals" exception (because there are some kinds of gambling that we legally favor).  The US ignored the ruling.

The bill passed over the weekend will undoubtedly be signed into law by President Bush.  Then we'll see what happens in the next WTO challenge.  If the UK goes after us instead of Antigua (online betting has a large UK financial presence) we may be risking alienating one of the few countries that still likes the U.S.