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.

Towards Neutral Ground on Net Neutrality, Simon Wilkie, Jonathan Aronson, Francois Bar. But Wilkie wants to talk about what's going on at Annenberg (USC).

He notes that on Feb. 10 the USC Annenberg Center hosted a closed conference on Net Neutrality. Included content providers, network operators, equipment manufacturers, academics, Wall Street analysts, public interest. They developed a broadly supported list of principles. Paper explains that process and proposal.

Long and extensive dialogue. Emerged with a "split consensus." Almost a consensus, with a few holdouts. More agreement than disagreement.

Annenberg Principles (see annenberg.edu). This is the first in a series of processes Annenberg wants to have/host.

First point of consensus: Net Neutrality is a horrible term. Too value laden and politicized. Need better terms. Ambiguity re what broadband meant. Speed, QoS? fixed and/or wireless. We're going to take 1.25Mbps to the home as the standard.

NN components: End to end principle -- any end user can access any other content provider or end user, attach any non interfering CPE, point of interconnection.

Nondiscrimination: two types -- customer level (based on speed, access, quality and quantity of service); transport level (in terms of interconnection, many types).

Four categories for transport level discrim:

DS1 -- "neutral" eg a posted tariff; any firm can attain a priority level by paying posted price.

DS2 -- "non-neutral" exclusive deal eg a preferred or affiliated content provider receives access to end users on exclusive terms

F1 foreclosure Type 1: network operator forecloses access to its subscribers from certain other content providers sites/users

F2 foreclosure Type2: network operator offers affiliated exclusive content only to its own subs.

In the discussion, even consumer advocates thought tiering okay -- charging more for higher capacity fine. Neutral transport price discrimination D1 may be efficiency enhancing. But discrimination of D2 and F1 is likely harmful. Discrimination F2 is ambiguous -- take a "wait and see" approach.

Modified end to end principle: we looked at what's available to consumers now. If there are deviations now, consumers shouldn't lose those if they are useful. Speeds of 1.25Mbps ubiquitous today. Allows delivery of VHS quality video. So let's modify the principle. They should have this 1.25 available in the marketplace. But be able to pay more for more.

Economic theory behind this: costs a lot to build a network. Vertical integration can be good. We've got mix and match components, so we can have multiple equilibria. Equilibrium does not imply efficiency. So bottom line is that we need better information on the market parameters.

Sunk costs: investments in network upgrades are sunk. Low marginal costs of moving bits. Competition in 'dumb' pipes' drives prices to marginal cost. Fixed costs not recouped -- therefore people won't invest. There's a need for some type of price discrimination.

Internet is really a two sided market. Needs an intermediary to make the market. Multiple sources of revenue for network providers increases incentive to invest. There's a hold up problem: if intermediary can extract rents then that discourages innovation at the edge (content providers and end users).

So - what to do? Market reality is a duopoly likely for the short term. Some potential entrants -- aws, sprint, clearwire, power line. But long legacy of entrant failures. Notes that incremental value of adding a MVPD customer is around $2000. Can't justify the investment, so has to be another revenue sources.

Case study 1 -- videotext market. Look at minitel v. Bildschrimtext (DT). Nascent information services. Technology developed in UK in 1970s. Minitel deployed by France Telecom in 1982. Bildschrimtext deployed by DT. Minitel still functioning, Bildschrimtext is dead. Minitel was open to any information providers. Neutral but not open. Non discriminatory access (like DS1). Created private information services as "kiosks". Huge initial success. Limited by use of only FT services. eclipsed by Internet. DT was closed -- controlled content, limited both innovationa and usage. Killed off in 2001. [pretty gross case study!]

Market falure - case study 2 Australian cable TV market, similar cultrue to US, similar suburban population. Duopoly policy. No program access rules. Each franchise gained exclusive access to movie studio libraries. Take rate about 20% compared with 85% in US. Implies significant welfare losses.

These are real issues. We're concerned about high prices because of lack of competition and we're also concerned about low quality.

Principles:

Both operators and customers should win.

Any regulation should be national and uniform and with a light touch.

There should be basic access to broadband -- meaningful, neutral internet connectivity. 1.25Mbps. Beyond this, all bets are off. Baseline should be reviewed every four years.

Customers should receive clear, understandable terms and conditions of service re preferred deals/content discrimination. FTC should enforce.

Sascha Meinrath and Victor Pickard paper on The New Network Neutrality is next.  Rough paraphrase of Victor's talk follows.

We're not just here to promote pro NN.  We're trying to begin a conversation that assumes importance of current argument but tries to think about next steps in order to be proactive.  People are paying attention, broad bipartisan coalitions are here -- we need a springboard, and we're trying to work on one.  NN is a battle worth fighting, but it's short-term.  NN isn't alone as an issue -- we still are way down in BB penetration.  And lots of undemocratic trends.  So we're broadening parameters to include a number of democratizing proposals.

A number of factors -- reframing of debate, complexity, shifting allegiances -- have separated democratic principles that should be considered together.  We need new historicism.  Need to look at last century and common carriage.

Paul Starr, Robert McChesney etc. show incumbents exploiting market advantages -- to hurt universal service and innovation.

So we'd like to go beyond econ and tech to normative principles about the role of the internet in society.  Need a renegotiated social contract with telecom providers.  We have ten principles/policy points.

[Sascha takes over]

So we think status quo is lame and we're opening up even more - that explodes the notion of what neutral network is.  We talk about historical precedents.  What we've done wrong we know -- so let's not do it again!  We look at common carriage.  While BrandX going on, we were saying NN was the big battle for 2006 -- and we were right -- but it was hard to get traction.  And now we think NN is just the first step.

So ensuring that network operators must lease their lines to other operators, explicitly allowing municipalities to be players, is critical.  We can't allow that kind of behavior.  AT&T breakup etc. sets same conditions that we faced in 1908.  AT&T destroyed many local carriers.  Open architecture and open source development is important -- a way to take control is to prevent access to hardware that might be perceived as open.  We noticed that 80% of wireless hardware owned by one company....

In the wireless realm in particular, we're moving away from open protocols and standards.  This has enormous implications for interconnectivity.  End to end architecture fits into that.  Maintaining an architecture that can allow for interconnectivity is important.  Vital to notice that conspiracy theories are often right! see NSA and CALEA.

He notes that Royal Post allowed for de facto "deep packet inspection," and our post was founded in reaction to that.  If you allow people to inspect packets, and require a mandate that that be done, you'll make legitimate packet inspection much more difficult.

We know that Windows Vista has DRM.  We know that allowing discrimination here will allow blocking of VoIP.  

We must remove notion that it's okay to remove the net bias of creating circumstances - conflation - of paying for premium services v. discrimination against those who do not pay for premium service.  These are two different things.  We need required minimums.

Interoperability is important. Systems need to talk to one another, and not be proprietary.  Too many actors are creating path-dependency.

Business-model neutrality.  Sascha is concerned about discriminating against municipalities.

Internationalization.  Also important to avoid American-centric management (notes ICANN).

Asks for feedback.

Craig McTaggart (of TELUS) paper is Was the Internet Ever Neutral?  Here's a rough paraphrase of his presentation.  All mistakes mine.

He asserts that the internet of today has many forms of discrimination and preferential arrangements -- caching, peering, filtering, and traffic management.  Points to Christian Sandvig saying that Lessig view is a myth.

Since the time that the public has been able to access the internet, it's been evolving in response to consumer demands, and we shouldn't stop now.  Internet's user population has changed dramatically since Arpanet etc. days.  It wasn't designed to support realtime bandwidth intensive applications.  In McTaggart's view (points to Ohm paper re myth of superuser), a lot of literature assumes that internet users are sophisticated, run their own routers.  But that's not true.  But those superusers have far too much importance in the policy discussion.  That's a problem for the mass market view.

Commercial ISPs have always served customer needs.  Meeting those needs may require changes to the internet's architecture.

Third: a neutral internet won't best serve consumer interests.  Mainstream users today have interests that are more important than historical architectural issues.  NN authors don't know better than users, and they keep patronizing users, who can act for themselves.  Consumers won't accept changes to the way their internet works.  But they'll love differentiated offerings.  So a non-neutral internet may better satisfy user demand. But we don't really know yet.

So -- while law professors are extolling virtues of the original architecture, tech community is long past this, and knows that architecture needs to change significantly.  End to end is a sacred cow.  Points to newarch, funded by DARPA, including Dave Clarke.  See "developing a next generation internet architecture" and GENI.  They want to create new core functionality, etc.

He says that NN proponents have an "end of history" way about them.

Noam asks for policy prescriptions.

Peha:  You're vulnerable to regulatory action if, when you have market power, you (eg) charge more for VOIP than for video.

Bauer:  I don't have an explicit welfare component to my paper.  My suggestion is that it would be a bigger mistake to adopt specific network neutrality rules and then decide we don't need them.  Congress should enable the FCC to adopt rules if needed. And don't prohibit municipalities to invest in broadband.

Lehr:  All versions of NN rules I've seen are bad.  We need general legislation (if we can craft it) that shows intent of what we're trying to do, and then have agency (without full discretion) enforce it.  Ex post alone is inadequate.  Trying to make the problem go away will help -- reform spectrum, don't block creative efforts by end-users.  Trying to design a framework for future is important.

Nachbar:  I'm in favor of bad legislation (joke!).  This NN problem is different because usually we don't mandate design in access fights.  That's the primary risk that we face here.  With a product like this, design is everything.  You can discriminate much more easily here than you could have with railroads.  So I'm more concerned about forms of discrimination here that are possible.  I think a strong non-discrimination norm enforced by standards would be a good idea.  And ex post is better.

Question:  old problems, new players, Noam has said.  Why don't we see differences in pricing here?

Lehr: We do need to see more price discimination.  We have a coordination problem here. 

Peha:  We have a choice from a tech perspective.  We can discriminate based on packet inspection etc. or you could throw capacity at the problem.  We did that in the 1990s.  Maybe we'll do that in the future.

Question:  What about consumer switching? won't people just migrate ISPs if there are discrimination issues? (from Martin from BT)

Lehr:  If you have competition, sure.  But switching costs can still be there.

Question:  What about just paying by bits or by service?

Peha:  That's technically possible, sure.  If the question is how to set the price, that's a hard problem.  That's what we're trying to figure out.

Question:  Assumption here is that pipe people can tax content providers. Cable systems show us that they have to pay more each year to content providers.  Why do you assume this is different?

Question:  In Netherlands, program providers PAY cable for access to the network.

Question:  What about looking toward the future -- barriers to entry for future entrants that won't have capital?

Question:  Market power is a necessary but not sufficient element for regulation.  What's the market definition?  And for content providers, they have a national market? shouldn't we look at national market from broadband access? (this from Yoo).

Question:  Innovation from IP is the most important -- not at platform level, which is like ISDN.

Question: Do we also look at market power for content providers? Also -- it's clear we don't like Telus-like discrimination.  And we don't like Madison River.  Both of those were acted on very quickly.  Largest driver for network infrastructure will require deep discrimination. (from Morgan person)

Panelists respond: 

Nachbar:  Market power is not at the root of a lot of things we regulate.  We could have competing police forces -- but we don't.  We've traditionally been more concerned about concentration in content.  Have to worry about nature of the product here.

Lehr:  Comcast owns a lot of content -- making a separation is hard.  Market power is one reason to justify, but not necessary for regulation.

Peva:  There is a terminating monopoly here, and I think that's the driving issue.  Existing antitrust rules well-designed for eBay, but not well-designed for last mile network provider. I'm not sure Telus would be in trouble in the US.  Biggest problem we have is duopoly for broadband access -- which is local.

Noam:  One day Google will ask for discriminatory pricing.

Interesting paper here from Jon Peha.  He's listing all the ways in which network discrimination can be helpful and harmful, and suggesting that both sides of the debate need to be addressed in any NN rules.  Very worth listening to.

Co-authored paper here from Bill Lehr, Marvin Sirbu, Jon Peha, and Sharon Gillett.  End users have tools too -- they shouldn't be viewed as passive in response to carrier discrimination.  But the arms race has costs that shouldn't be ignored.  And the issue remains complex and unresolved (good for those writing about NN).  Lehr asserts that the welfare implications of NN are ambiguous. 

I'm not so sure about that, because society needs diversity (requires it) in order to create greater wealth (monetary and otherwise).  Diversity above the network layer will be better for all of us. 

Thomas Nachbar is talking now about pre-New Deal public works cases.  Looking at lines of argument (eg, apartments in DC during WWI, political exigencies).  Necessity is a great justification (eg railroad).  But we often have things that we don't provide open access to - like food, and medicine, even though necessary.  If hold yourself out as providing a common resource, held to that (but that's mostly about civil rights).  How about market power?

Well, Nachbar points out that those who hold market power tend to be politically unpopular.  These cases are really rhetorical.  This isn't a traditional justification for open access regulation.  Wagons didn't have market power! 

Nachbar points out that all open access provisions have to do with networks.  There isn't an open access regime for bottled water.  Roads have always been subject to these requirements.  Always a special treatment of them.  How does recognizing this role help us be principled?

Nachbar gently suggests that we should look beyond market power as justification for open access.

ICANN today issued a press release and a series of documents about its relationship with the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Speaking only for myself, and not on behalf of ICANN, I want to make three points:

1.  ICANN is no longer bound by the specific set of milestones that were in its prior MoU with DOC.  With this freedom comes great responsibility.  Without detailed government oversight, and without market competition for policymaking for domain names, ICANN (and the ICANN Board) has a great obligation to be accountable to its community. 

2.  We have a very long way to go in creating adequate accountability and transparency mechanisms for policymaking for gTLDs, as a recent London School of Economics report demonstrated.  And this is only one aspect of ICANN's operations that needs improvement -- we still haven't figured out a rational way to involve individuals and we still don't have a rational process for adding new gTLDs.  ICANN has to continue to change for the better, and we have a lot of mileage to cover in this respect.

3.  The Preliminary Report of the recent Board meeting (here) reflects that the Board adopted the new agreement with the DoC.  It does not record the statements that were made by Board members, including me, at the time of that meeting -- these must be coming later in the minutes, which will need to be approved by the Board.  I was deeply concerned about the agreement's apparent wholesale ratification of the DOC's desire to retain the current WHOIS policy. It would be completely inappropriate to bind ourselves contractually to that policy in advance in order to satisfy the USG, particularly when members of the ICANN community have devoted tens of thousands of hours to discussing possible changes to that policy.

To me, personally, it doesn't make sense to require public display of private information as a condition of registering a domain name.

I have been assured, again and again, that ICANN's own current PDP processes are not undermined by this agreement, and that should a changed WHOIS policy be adopted by the Board it can be enforced without the DOC's agreement.  That was certainly the understanding I had in agreeing to adoption of this new agreement with the Department of Commerce.

All comments more than welcome. 

So we know from Technorati that there are about 75,000 new blogs a day. There are about 1.2 million posts a day, or about 50,000 blog updates an hour.

But are the writers writing about what the readers want to read about?  Maybe not.

1. Cicarelli
2. Pinky
3. Facebook
4. Chavez
5. Onewebday

[Yes, it really is great that people were looking for posts about Onewebday, right after wanting to know about Facebook and who that Chavez guy was]. 

But the bloggers were writing about

Bush
1. youtube
2. Islam
3. Microsoft
4. Politica

So it appears to the post-writer that the bloggers are not necessarily writing about what the readers want to read about.  Maybe blogging is still an elite sport.  Maybe the use of tags hasn't become sufficiently widespread.

This will certainly change over time.  Meanwhile, it's good news for onewebday that there's a large group of people out there interested in finding out more.

I really like Dave Burstein's newsletter.  It sounds like him.  Even when it's just saying that "Verizon has extraordinary things coming":

He says "GPON can go 250 down, 125 up" and because Verizon's fiber bandwidth is allocated dynamically users needing speeds of hundreds of megabits will have them.

(What's GPON?  It's a Gigabit Passive Optical Network, so no optical repeaters. I can hear Dave's enthusiasm.)

Dave says they will have reached 18 million homes by 2010.

And Dave also says that Verizon will make all online video content (not just its own) available through its set-top box. 

Thanks, Dave!  This means that Verizon is quickly making fiber networks available to people across the country (taking out of service the copper lines to which common carriage obligations applied).  The set-top box news is very interesting, and we'll see what happens there.

In other news, no vote this week on the Stevens bill.  But he's threatening to bring it up again after the elections.

Someone called me today asking whether I had any stories about weird informational things happening online.  He was focused on new strange advertising/promotional/lobbying efforts popping up.

I immediately pointed him to the avatars having their picture taken for OneWebDay.  And I told him about odd commentators on blogs that discuss net neutrality -- people who seem to be paid to look for pro-neutrality posts so that they can slap them down in the comments.  We discussed online astroturfing generally.  We talked about infiltration of chat rooms.

But if you have stories of the weird that seem to fit in with this theme, send a note or leave a comment.

After the events of last week, I thought a break was a good idea.  I was supposed to go away on a short vacation, but cancelled that (that's what led me to ponder the Hugh McLeod material from yesterday).  That's the second vacation in a row that I've cancelled.

But over the weekend I did in fact stay away from the computer.  I went to see two independent films that turned out to have surprisingly parallel plot lines:  young woman in terrible situation, oppressed by society, is rescued by a series of unlikely events that culminate in a parting shot of her in a car driven (in some sense) by a helpful man.  But there's another woman left behind in the terrible situation who is stuck with it, and turns to face her fate (and certain death).  No food in either movie (starvation very possible).  No freedom. 

The first one was Water, and the second one was House of Sand.  Very elemental.  Too much water in the first one, and too much sand in the second.

So canceling yet another vacation isn't such a big deal.  The Brazilian neighborhood in House of Sand is the very opposite of my neighborhood here in NY (see the movie -- it's a stunningly inhospitable place).  I'm not a widow in 1930s India.  Actually, everything is going surprisingly well.  Very cheering.