InternetNZ has set up a foundation in honor of Liz Dengate-Thrush, and has started it off with a large donation.  Please consider contributing.

I'm optimistic that these meetings are going to get better.  If you have ever been to an ICANN meeting and have suggestions about formats or aspirations, funneling them through the ICANNWiki would be great.  There's a specific meetings page here.

Last chance to make your views publicly known to the Board of ICANN during this meeting: tomorrow, Thursday, from 9am to 1pm.

The agenda includes a report from the Governmental Advisory Committee and the Security and Stability Advisory Committee, plus an update on strategic planning.  No reports from Board committees will be read.  We promise.

Then the Board will have an official meeting Friday morning. 

If you're interested in being on the Board, there's a Nominating Committee Workshop from 2-3pm tomorrow.   The Nominating Committee is very interested in finding new candidates -- information is here.  Many warm congratulations to Rita Rodin on her election to the Board by the GNSO.

Someday next week, after a sad trip to New Zealand to represent ICANN at Peter Dengate-Thrush's wife's funeral, I'll get back to blogging.  I heard tonight that there was a tie vote in the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee -- an amazing victory -- an 11-11 vote on net neutrality and Snowe-Dorgan.

2007 sounds like a good time to get legislative confirmation of a neutral internet in the United States.  I'm looking forward to catching up on the news.

These days of ICANNing are really busy.  I feel so far away from D.C.  I do know that the weather was awful there today and that the Dept of Commerce basement was flooded.

I also know that July 7 is coming up soon.  That's the date by which the Dept. of Commerce would like comments on their Notice of Inquiry on "The Continued Transition of the Technical Coordination and Management of the Internet Domain Name and Addressing System."

The notice is here.  Send comments to DNSTransition at ntia.doc.gov (you'll need to also send via paper).  Comments already received are here.

We miss Joi, but there's a chat channel for anyone interested in talking about the Marrakech meeting or particular policy topics:

irc://irc.freenode.net#icannmarrakech

I'm in Marrakech, Morocco for the latest ICANN meeting.  I had big plans for evaluating the FCC's recent USF for VoIP releases (a little hard to do in the absence of the Order, but we can try) and becoming a new expert on media concentration.

Can't do it.

There's too much going on here -- particularly when it comes to Whois.  My aim here is to support the GNSO process and continue to push for a timeline by which we can get some decisions on non-public access to registration data.  My other aim is to keep working on transparency of all kinds.  It's impossible to tell from the outside what goes on at these meetings.  I'd like to confirm that the GNSO is holding to the Board's expectations when it comes to new gTLDs.  (More nudging re deadlines.)  And I'd like to understand what happened to the GNSO Review -- one of the most important things ICANN is doing in 2006.

I can report that there are unbelievable markets here, crammed full of beautiful things, down dark alleys; the nights are clear and cool; the buildings are clay fortresses, or clay fortress-like; they have a mysterious currency that all has to be spent here -- and I'll be in meetings for most of the next seven days.  I'll send word when I can. 

Microsoft has now made it ridiculously easy for anyone to adopt a Creative Commons license in connection with material created using Microsoft tools.  Choose from a menu, and presto! one of those cool Creative Commons buttons will attach itself to your stuff.

Good for Microsoft.  I think this is a very positive, helpful, and creative thing to do.  If you want people to be able to use your material, they've made it simple for you to make that declaration.  And good for Creative Commons, a worldwide movement that is contributing daily to the public domain.

Press release is here -- early CNET article is here.

Update:  Download of the plug-in is here.

For the engineers, particularly the Original Engineers, the internet is a logical architecture that allows us to connect virtually any kind of networking machine together.  That architecture can change. 

Here's the 1995 Federal Networking Council definition of "the internet":

There are two key things to notice about the Engineers' approach.  First, this definition of the “internet” emphasizes globally unique addressing (supporting interconnectivity) and the use of TCP/IP, but makes clear that these elements can change.

IP can have “extensions/follow-ons,” TCP/IP can be subsumed by “other IP-compatible protocols,” and services using communications infrastructure can be made available privately or publicly, depending on what makes sense. Any logical architecture that provides for interconnection between networks and a set of agreed-on protocols (with some connection to the historical TCP/IP suite) will be “the internet” to the Engineers.

Second, the FNC/Engineer definition does not recognize the role of the transport pipes, because the Engineers are indifferent to transport.  What they care about is the logical architecture, the overarching set of protocols that brought different networks together.  And could change.

The telcos have a different way of looking at things -- they see "the internet" as the pipes, and don't care much about the religion of the original protocols.

But the two groups, the Engineers and the Telcos, have common ground:  the protocols are expected to change.  They can change and we'll still have "the internet". 

There's a third group -- let's call it the internet visionaries group -- who focus on the social and cultural effects of the internet, and use those effects to shape their own definition of "the internet."  What they care about are standards that allow end-to-end communication and relationships that the pipes don't control.  They're not so sure the protocols should change.  If they change, it won't be "the internet" any more. 

Jim Lehrer was on On Point tonight.  His point:  there will always be a demand for high-quality, professional news reporting.  And so therefore it will always exist.  Yes, people fire off emails and bloggers do their posts, but what they're all doing is reacting to the news -- and where did the news come from?  From professional reporters. 

If you listen to the clip, you can hear his total dedication to the cause of mainstream news gathering. Someone has to collect the news, he says.  Yes, we need to align the revenue streams with the news reporting, but we'll do that.  We'll survive, he says.  Online portions of news organizations are doing extremely well, he says.

Jay Rosen, meanwhile, is taking on the challenge:

It's a "put up or shut up" moment for open source methods in public interest reporting. Can we take good ideas like... distributed knowledge, social networks, collaborative editing, the wisdom of crowds, citizen journalism, pro-am reporting... and put them to work to break news?

This is the question to which Jim Lehrer's answer would be, "No way."  No such thing.  Professionals gather news and assess what's a story and what isn't.  Just a small matter of finding a sustainable business model, but we're not leaving.

To find out what Jay Rosen has in mind, and what the rest of the wise crowd thinks is possible for non-traditional news reporting, it sounds like the place to be is BloggerConIV (on June 23, late morning, San Francisco).

This story from the SF Chronicle today is a keeper.  AT&T/SBC was required as part of the merger to offer standalone (naked) DSL.  This means that consumers shouldn't have to buy traditional telephone service from AT&T in order to buy DSL service.

AT&T used to claim that DSL cost $29.99 a month.  Traditional telephone service cost (at least) $16 a month.  So the whole package (pre-merger-compliance) was about $45 a month.

Now, AT&T is offering DSL alone, as it is required to do.  The cost?  $44.99 a month.  AT&T would prefer that people buy packages, and so it is not making it cost-effective to buy DSL on its own.  Why bother?  From the Chronicle story, by Ryan Kim:

AT&T spokesman John Britton said the standalone price accurately reflects the real cost of DSL, and highlights the value the company places in its bundled service.

"Bundled services continue to deliver the greatest value to consumers," he said. "Most standalone services will have higher prices than bundled service."

Far be it from us, the blogosphere, to question AT&T's pricing policies.  But it does seem that the company isn't subject to real competition.  If it were, surely the unbundled cost of DSL would be substantially lower.  Hang onto this story. 

Here's the picture, from JG Etc.

Someone called me today to ask me what I thought about the connection (if any) between privacy and the recent CALEA ruling.

There are at least three possible responses I came up with -- only two of which I gave on the phone (things are always clearer after you hang up, aren't they?).  One is that CALEA is just about how things are designed, not whether law enforcement is entitled to ask service providers for data.  CALEA says "assuming a lawful warrant is being implemented, we want to make it easier for law enforcement to get access to data."  On this reading, extending CALEA to more services and more connections shouldn't make a difference to individual privacy vis-a-vis governmental requests for data -- government has to go to a judicial officer to get authority to ask for the data in the first place.

A second response, though, is that we have no idea how the FCC's adventurous extension of CALEA will change the privacy landscape.  The ongoing NSA scandal reveals that we don't know what this Administration is willing to do without a warrant.  We don't know how closely service providers are already cooperating with law enforcement/national security requests without needing the entire apparatus of warrants and judges.  We are in the dark.  In the dark, you can't see the change between one privacy regime and another -- it all looks the same.

A third response is that it's likely that extending CALEA's scope diminishes our privacy.  If it's easier for government to get access to data, because things have been designed in advance so as to be easily tappable, they'll get more data and will know more about us.  At the least, extending CALEA clearly doesn't heighten privacy protection in this country.

What do you think?

Net Neutrality is Bad for National Preparedness, says Center for Advanced Studies

NEW YORK, June 12 /U.S. Newswire/ -- In a research brief published by the World Policy Institute's Global Information Society Project, K.A.Taipale, executive director of the Center for Advanced Studies, Science & Technology Policy, asks whether imposing strict net neutrality regulation on telecommunications providers could put public safety and economic recovery at risk in times of national emergency.

How quickly can an innovation policy question be morphed into a security issue?  Answer:  Almost instantly.

All the incumbents familiar to us in internet policy questions -- law enforcement, Hollywood, and the telcos -- share an interest in deep packet inspection.  They all want to protect their existing, old-world business models. 

Law enforcement wants deep packet inspection because they have an insatiable desire for information (even if they have trouble parsing what they get).  Hollywood wants it because they want to know who's watching their movies, so they can shield their distribution windows.  And the dominant telcos want it so they can prioritize traffic and cableize internet access.

Watch this move.  We'll be seeing much more of this.  DHS would like to ensure that its packets get priority.  They'd like to change the essential internet protocols to make this possible.  As a society, we have to decide whether ensuring security (of DHS, of Hollywood, of the telcos) is worth the costs to our future such tinkering will cause.   

I was one of the crowd who helped Esther Dyson move out of her old office space last weekend.  My focus was the conference room.  Hundreds of internet business books, books about the brain, books about complexity, books about visualization, books (in short) that I either wanted to read or already had read were stacked on shelves in that room.  It was like a reunion of old pals, that set of books. 

Each one of those authors had big ideas and wanted to change the world.  The familiar covers were so attractive and hopeful.  Be an internet bazillionaire!  See everything differently!  Throw away every preconception!  Find wisdom in others!  Understand string theory!

Probably one of those books tells us that there aren't going to be books any more.  Books are so limiting, the book says.  They don't link.  They don't have streams of meaning that we can follow with our friends.   I probably packed up that book, without knowing it, sealing its fate along with hundreds of others. 

I packed up box after box.  I wonder if those boxes will ever be opened again.  Maybe a historian of the boom-bust-boom will want to reconstruct what it was like to be in the middle of those books, and to be sent an advance copy of "Smart Mobs." 

Several strong reactions to the D.C. Circuit ruling on CALEA coverage the other day. 

First, the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) has put out a major study [pdf] saying that "government attempts to impose a poorly conceived wiretap surveillance regime on domestic Voice over the Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone traffic could destroy American leadership in telecommunications. Such a move could stall Internet innovation, introduce new cyber security concerns, and expose hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting Americans to law enforcement surveillance."

The study has distinguished parentage - Susan Landau, Vint Cerf, Whit Diffie, Steve Bellovin, Matt Blaze, and others.

Second, the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) (of which I am a proud Policy Fellow) says that the CALEA decision is a "major setback for civil liberties."  Their full analysis is here.  CDT notes that, quite apart from its many legal weaknesses, the ruling leaves unanswered how exactly we're supposed to define "call-identifying information" on the internet.

For Tony Rutkowski's reaction, see his comment.

In a case filed in the Supreme Court of British Columbia about a month ago, the chief executive of the company that owns Kazaa has sued Jon Newton of p2pnet for libel.

The Register's Ashlee Vance has a story about the lawsuit here, including a link to the underlying complaint.  From the Register story, it looks as if what Newton did was quote from an AP story about the chief executive's actions.  And then a couple of people commented anonymously. 

Newton has put up a plea for legal help here. 

Given that many American IP law professors are about to descend on Vancouver this week, there should be some way to get Newton's case additional attention in the North American press.

[This is not a set-up for a joke about the competency of law professors.]

From the telco point of view, "consumers" are connected to "content" over the internet by three different pipes: (1) the big connection between "content provider" and a backbone; (2) the backbone itself (the biggest pipe of all); and (3) the connection between the "consumer" and the backbone. 

The network neutrality debate is about the third segment -- the piece between home and backbone.  That piece is offered by (at most) a duopoly in the U.S. -- large cable and phone companies who aren't competing very hard.  The Bells are the result of anticompetitive behavior (and are quickly re-monopolizing), and the cablecos have been the beneficiaries of exclusive franchises for a long time.

The telcos say:  Don't create regulation that is worse than the problem!  So far, all these abuses you're worried about are theoretical.  Google is well-armed -- they can sue if there's a problem in the future. And "consumers" are used to reaching Google and other "content providers," and they'll complain if they can't.

The two simple, sound-bite responses to the telco point of view:

1.  You've Told Us to Assume Abuses.  Ed Whitacre, CEO of AT&T, said:  "There seems to be a mentality [on the part of online companies] that they can put more and more through our pipes for free. . . We're the ones who built the network. You cannot make that sort of investment if you can't make a return on the capital. They're more than welcome to use our networks, but if they do, they're going to have to pay. It's not free." 

This means that carriers plan to charge "content sources" for crossing their broadband access points to reach "consumers."  That's differential treatment.  In the context of the market control that the telcos have, that will be immediately abusive -- of course they'll favor their own content and try to make exclusive deals.

2.  Don't Turn the Internet Into a Cable System.  What's all this about "consumers" and "content"?  We know that Americans like to post material of their own online.  Almost 50 million of us have already done that, and teenagers have grown up with interactive media -- almost 60% of them have created and shared content online. We're users, not consumers.  You're dimming our expectations -- we don't expect to be able to upload with ease, and we wish we had the same kind of broadband access as South Korea.

A third, meta-is-bettah point is this:  The telcos are wrong to think of the internet as a combination of three pipe segments.  Instead, as David Weinberger says:

The Internet is a medium only at the bit level. At the human level, it is a conversation that, because of the persistence and linkedness of pages, has elements of a world. It could only be a medium if we absolutely didn't care.

When the FCC says so, that's when.

Today, the D.C. Circuit ruled 2-1 that the FCC's views on CALEA coverage should be deferred to.  (I've posted many times about CALEA here.)

The brief background about CALEA is that it is a 1994 statute written to ensure that telecom carriers would build their facilities so as to be easily tappable by law enforcement.  "Information services" were explicitly left out of its coverage -- and were understood to include online applications like email. 

Now, although the FBI has made no showing that it's having problems enforcing subpoenas or warrants for information, law enforcement badly wants to extend the coverage of CALEA to include broadband access and VoIP services that connect to the traditional phone network.

The problem?  Congress didn't write the statute to include what law enforcement wants.  The FCC has helped law enforcemet in two recent orders that re-read CALEA to cover "information services" to the extent they are "substantial replacements" for local telephone service.  This is a weak legal argument, but the FCC has persisted.

Today, Judge Sentelle, writing for the majority, points out that the CALEA statute and the 1996 Act are different (in particular, the 1996 Act doesn't include a "substantial replacement" element).  The FCC has interpreted CALEA to cover information services in some circumstances.  The D.C. Circuit is saying that it should defer to the FCC's interpretation when it is making a "reasonable policy choice."

Judge Edwards's thundering dissent notes that deference isn't appropriate when Congress hasn't delegated authority to the Commission in the first place.  (Last year, I wrote an article saying the same thing.)  In a nutshell,

I was delighted to be present at the first meeting of the Austin chapter of DorkBot tonight.  You would have loved it.

DorkBot's history is here.  The tagline:  "People doing strange things with electricity."

Tonight we were standing around in a mysterious parking lot area outside a funky coffee place.  It was a sweaty hot night.  The group I was with got there late, so we missed the theremin demo (apparently someone made a 1984 Mac into a theremin).  Think Spellbound.

But the demos we saw were just great.  First there was software for a Nintendo DS2 that makes it really really easy to paint and squiggle and do a million things.  Really easy for a kid, really easy for an adult.  Cheers from the crowd.

Then there was a serious electrical show with Frankenstein-like zapping sounds and sparks:

Also cheers from the crowd.  Some members of the group backed up quite a bit from the display.  Usually techie demos aren't quite this....dynamic.

Before DorkBot we went to see the bats swarm out from under the Congress Avenue Bridge at dusk.  No one we asked knew the collective noun for bats.  A bevy of bats?  A belfrey of bats? Do you know?

It's sometimes hard to live in NY when all those issues and hearings and whatnot are happening in DC.

So:  I'm blind here!  There was a hearing about ICANN today before the House Committee on Small Business.

What happened? 

If the blogware comments don't let you in, send me an email at susancrawford at gmail and I'll post them for you. 

I've been working steadily for quite a while on a paper comparing the IP battles to the network neutrality battle.  As we've all discovered, these are very hard issues.  There aren't clear answers, although the social benefits of the neutral-substrate internet (like the social benefits of the public domain) seem to be ignored by the people claiming the need for protection of their property rights.

It's finally becoming clear to me that the social argument is the only real argument. 

Yes, the "incentives" argument made by the network providers is strange, in ways that are similar to the strangenesses of the IP incentives arguments.  (People build things without knowing they'll be paid back.  Some of these broadband access points have already been built.  Etc.)  And the market power of the current network providers is important and seems to trigger a need for government involvement.  The economic arguments are powerful as well -- there are substantial positive externalities created by access to the internet that shouldn't be captured just by the access providers.

The key, though, is that neutrality (or unbundling, my preferred way of doing this) will be better for society as a whole.  Awarding very strong property rights to the network providers, like awarding very strong property rights to content companies, won't be as beneficial to society as tempering those rights somewhat.  We've done this in the IP context with things like fair use and "limited times" for copyright and patent protection.  Indeed, the whole point of IP law is to encourage the creation of useful things for society; benefiting IP owners is a means towards that end.

Now we need to do this more directly with communications law.  Tempering the property rights of the powerful broadband access providers will result in -- overall -- better results for society.  The short history of the youthful internet has shown us what can happen when a substrate is essentially neutral.

Okay -- fire away. 

Blogware is apparently routinely blocking comments - sorry.

Oren Sreebny, who is Director of Emerging Technology at the University of Washington, tried to post this comment:

I think you've got the intent of at least the historical 
context of Internet 2 almost exactly backwards.

When the NSF got out of the business of running the backbone network 
of the Internet in the mid-90s, major research universities who 
already depended very heavily on the net for not only common 
communications functions like email but also for increasingly high 
bandwidth research applications started to get very nervous, 
especially when the telcos who took over running the backbone 
networks started talking about charging by the bit instead of by 
capacity of hookups.

Internet 2 was formed as a consortial effort, initially among those 
top research institutions, to have a strategy of providing some level 
of guaranteed, consistent connectivity among the institutions that 
would provide for a safer haven in an uncertain world. It turns out 
that the Abilene network that Internet 2 has operated has been very 
successful at providing that consistency, and provided very high 
bandwidths at far better pricing than individual institutions 
could've gotten by themselves.

But, of course, it turns out that in the end Internet 2 still is, at 
least theoretically, at the mercy of the telcos, as the bandwidth 
provided is, in the end, leased from the telcos.

To that end, there is a newer consortial effort among some research 
institutions that has actually bought its own fiber and is operating 
a new backbone network - this effort is called National Lambda Rail, 
which is attempting to provide a national scale infrastructure for 
research and experimentation in networking technologies and 
applications. (see www.nlr.net).

So I wouldn't read too much into the term "commodity Internet" - it 
was merely meant as a way of distinguishing the at-that-time-new 
commercialized Internet backbone from what the research institutions 
saw they needed, which was a way to get some dedicated connectivity 
among themselves to support research efforts.

Thanks, Oren.  Avoiding telco control of fiber seems to be a constant sphere of activity.

Internet2 documents (here's one [Word doc]) refer to the internet that you and I access as the "commodity internet."

What does that mean?

It could mean that it's what was left when the National Science Foundation dismantled its backbone and had private parties operate it.  On this reading, "commodity" just means "commercial."

It could mean that Internet2 is contrasting its highspeed architecture with the existing internet.  That's the usage here:

In 2005, a remotely operated vehicle made its way underwater as part of Ballard's expedition to explore hydrothermal vent fields in the mid-Atlantic Ocean. Back in a lab at the University of Washington, Associate Professor Deborah Kelley steered the craft, as if she were playing a video game, over Internet2. Live video feeds went to classrooms across the U.S.

"We can't do this with the commodity Internet, because of latency," says Tom Dudchik of Immersion Presents, an after-school science-education program founded by Ballard. "Commodity Internet" is researcher-speak for the regular Internet. "With Internet2, there is no latency, no delay, no need to wait for the vehicle to react or to overcompensate. I push it (remotely), it goes."

Now, you may remember this story from 2004 about the MPAA collaborating with Internet2, and you may recall that in late 2005 the RIAA joined in too.

There's been some thought that sniffers inside Internet2 and perhaps requiring use of devices that recognize and adhere to a broadcast-flag-like regime might make sense for the MPAA.  Here's a blog post headed Internet2: Orchestrating the End of the Internet.

One way this could all work together:  once there are highspeed connections that reach into homes and are subject to the control of the network providers (rather than subject to common carriage obligations), the network providers will be free to hook them into Internet2 instead of the "commodity internet."  This new network will be fast, will be fully-protective of content, will clearly differentiate between "content providers" and "subscribers," and will be fully authenticated.

But you may have other ideas about this.

Thanks to Tom Poe for pointing me to Internet2's use of "commodity internet."

Yesterday I did a short interview along with Profs. Volokh and Cherry about law professors blogging.  Is a blogger who is a law professor always a law professor, even when he/she is blogging?  What's the relationship between blogging and scholarship?  Should tenure committees consider blog posts?

I took a "law professors are people too" approach to the questions we were asked.  I see scholarship and blogging as separate endeavors, and I enjoy getting the chance to speak here without footnotes.  I feel as if I'm part of an enormous collaborative and creative endeavor online.  I don't expect for a moment that my colleagues will consider my posts when I'm up for tenure.

Jeff Jarvis, over at Buzzmachine, is having a similar (but more sophisticated!) look at the relationship between a profession -- journalism -- and the blog.   One of the comments takes the view that a journalist is always a journalist, and so

Unlike amateur bloggers who can rant, comment, express bizarre points of view or promote their latest acquisitions and obsessions with no concern for conflict of interest or even internal consistency, we are not mere citizens in the world of the blog and the MySpace profile, and it is about time we stopped trying to act as if we ever were.

The commentator writes on his own blog that all he's trying to do is warn journalists.  Jeff's response is that he wishes journalists would instead become better bloggers.

I agree with Jeff.  I think law professors as a group are ideally suited to blogging. 

Jarvis is asking us to unlearn it, to be reborn as non-journalists, to breathe the free air of blogging. It’s a big ask, but it’s the future, folks. It’s where the people are (even if our peers are burying their heads in printers’ ink).

Same for law professors -- breath the free air!  Enjoy connecting to people!  Plus -- plus -- write those articles.

Wired has a worth-reading article by Thomas Greene about a recent surveillance equipment trade show:

These devices [for mass electronic surveillance] are a bonanza for the communications hardware industry, vouchsafed by the U.S. Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act of 1994, or CALEA, which mandates that all new telephone company gear must be wiretap-friendly, or "CALEA compliant," according to the popular euphemism. This has led to a seller's market with equipment makers pushing their dual-use kits with exceptional confidence. The sales pitch has evolved beyond the traditional points of reliability, scalability, total cost of ownership and ease of deployment to exploit the hard-sell undercurrents of mass-scale commerce that's mandated by law and funded by taxpayers who are powerless to review the deals and evaluate their various costs and benefits to society.

Greene keeps asking questions about how these pieces of hardware could be misused by abusive governments with inadequate legal regimes.  A drunken reseller sets him straight:

"The NSA is using this stuff. The DEA, the Secret Service, the CIA. Are you kidding me? They don't answer to you. They do whatever the hell they want with it. Are you really that naive? Now leave these [hardware] guys alone; they make a product, that's all. It's nothing to them what happens afterward. You really need to educate yourself.

The extension of CALEA to online voice applications and broadband access providers is under review by the D.C. Circuit.  But the legal answer may not matter much to the entrepreneurial intercept community.

After all, their hopes for business success are being bolstered by the Administration, which is said to be pressuring ISPs to hang onto data for years -- and is always interested in surveillance.  Surveillance, storage, mandatory gateways -- it's a good time for trade shows aimed at aiding the war on terrorism.