It's a summer morning in Cambridge, Mass.  Yesterday afternoon the weather lifted after days of sweltering misery, making the shade real and softening the glare.  Cantabridgians don't believe in air conditioning, so the change was significant.  Time to head back to work. 

Divine Inspiration from the Masses and everything written about Wikipedia suggests that we might as well believe in ourselves.  But here is a short bit to begin the day of commuters, swaming through train stations on the way to do something more immediately remunerative (sorry to say) than edit a Wikipedia entry:

I would live all my life in nonchalance
and insouciance
Were it not for making a living, which
is rather a nouciance.

(Ogden Nash)

Someone sent me a clandestine copy of the CALEA draft.  I don't see how it could be worse.

The whole idea behind CALEA is to shift the cost of surveillance from law enforcement to industry.  (The statute isn't about the legality of requests for information -- the question is how much help industry should give law enforcement by making services easily tappable.)  The 1994 statute recognized these cost issues by setting up a fund of $500 million to repay the telcos who were required to comply.  It was also clearly limited to the large telecommunications carriers (traditional telephone companies) and to information identifying telephone calls, which was relatively limited and standardized from the outset.  The internet was not covered.

In this new draft bill, the costs of making surveillance easy have been firmly shifted to the tech industry in the U.S.  And innovators will have to satisfy law enforcement that their new applications and services are easily tappable and produce the data that government wants.  "Communication-identifying information" is very broadly defined, and includes (but isn't limited to!) "source and destination Internet protocol and other protocol addresses, the port number, packet file size, and user authentication and logon information, including session time and duration."

Here's what you need to know about the rewrite of CALEA now being proposed by law enforcement:  It's limitless.

(1)It covers every possible communications service and application (voice and data), using every possible medium.    

(2) To the extent any service is somehow not covered (because, say, it doesn't provide any routing or addressing attributes), the bill reserves unlimited discretion in the FCC to decide that it would be in the public interest to cover it.

(3) It says that communications-identifying information should be available in formats that law enforcement wants.

For example, the draft bill defines "communications carrier" to include any entity providing "replacement telephone service," and then defines "replacement telephone service" to include any service using "transmission, routing, addressing, or switching services" that make it possible for a customer using any technology to "send and receive any communications involving the human voice."

This would cover any gaming application that sets up its own namespace/voice system; any online conferencing service, any instant messenger client that is voice-enabled.  Webmail services are covered to the extent their provider makes available "transmission, routing, addressing or switching equipment, facilities, or services." 

All network access providers are covered, of course (as long as their services are offered to the public).  

All of the covered entities/people will have to get all communication-identifying information to the government on request in a "standard, commercially available, and reliable format."  The network access providers will have to isolate the stream of communications being created by the subscriber and store that stream for law enforcement (no limits on time).

There is much more here -- the FCC is to take into account noncompliance with CALEA in considering anything having to do with the covered entity (whether CALEA-related or not); the FCC doesn't necessarily have to give covered entities any reasonable amount of time to comply; and covered entities will bear all the costs of any modifications needed for equipment/services created after 1995. 

The requirement that all applications that include any routing component provide an easily-accessed back door to government and spit out standardized data is breathtaking.  And I'm sure there's more here that I haven't understood.

This is the bill that sends innovation offshore.

One of the questions that OneWebDay tries to get people to think about is: What do you want the web to be?  (And what helpful web-related action are you going to take on Sept. 22?)

Here's a forward-looking attempt:  the Metaverse Roadmap. 

As far as I can tell, the Metaverse Roadmap is an attempt to predict how the future web will affect society.  When video games, virtual worlds, and web applications all merge, what will we have?  Obviously, we'll have the metaverse, but what does that mean?

From the web site: 

Like other potentially disruptive new technologies, metaverse/3D web related technologies can each be expected to follow a hype cycle. Gartner's classic five phase technology hype cycle model, from 1. Technology Trigger, to 2. Peak of Inflated Expectations, to 3. Trough of Disillusionment, to 4. Slope of Enlightenment, to 5. Plateau of Productivity. Virtual reality technology, artificial intelligence, first gen web virtual reality (VRML), and others have all been through peaks and troughs. A dot.com peak, with companies basing their business models on inflated expectations for metaverse technology, followed by a trough, will almost certainly be a key dynamic of the next ten years.

Sounds great.  I hope I live long enough to see what happens after the hype cycle has run its course -- it's been great to see the rebound after the bust a few years ago.  Things are becoming so interesting right now.

I understand that the current thinking is that Sen. Stevens won't be able to collect the 60 votes he needs to stop debate on his bill.  This is, in my view, good news. 

But there are lots of other ways to get a job done.

For instance -- what if just the video franchise provisions (hard to fight those) and the universal service fund provisions (attractive to constituents even though the system is entirely broken) were peeled off and stuck in a large appropriations bill? that no one heard about until the day it was offered?

What if those provisions were attached to the E911 bill, which is largely helpful in giving competitive interconnected VoIP providers assistance the FCC denied them?

What if there was a lame duck session -- six weeks or so to do more mischief?

So all NN lobbyists will have to bone up on procedure.  We're heading into a period of legislative legerdemain.

Speaking of which:  I have heard about a really awful revision-to-CALEA draft that is being circulated.  Really awful.

From "Know It All," by Stacy Schiff:

This [Wikipedia] is not the first time that encyclopedia-makers have snatched control from an elite, or cast a harsh light on certitude.  Jimmy Wales may or may not be the new Henry Ford, yet he has sent us tooling down the interstate, with but a squint back at the railroad.  We're on the open road now, without conductors and timetables.  We're free to chart our own course, also free to get gloriously, recklessly lost. . . .

From "The Lobsterman," by Alec Wilkinson (related Q&A here) (about a skilled fisherman who was recently awarded a MacArthur genius grant for finding ancient fish spawning grounds -- "Where were the cod, once, and how do we get them back?"):

A predatory hierarchy that has a number of species at all levels is called a food web.  The food web in the North Atlantic is so meagre that it more nearly resembles a food chain.

So Wikipedia is a visual, arresting example of the evolving web at work.  You get the sense that Schiff really enjoyed finding all about its curious inhabitants.  And Wilkinson really enjoys hearing about forensic ecology involving interviewing ancient mariners.  Both of them are writing about webs.

Is there a predator, potential or actual, in the story of Wikipedia?  Any chance we'll ever create a "food chain" online, just by accident?

Welcome to the world, Dabble!  You didn't have to ask permission -- you just launched today, and you're a zippy new place that lets users create guides to online video.  (You've got a blog, too!  Good work!)  There's no telling what you'll be able to do in time -- you're the first of your kind. 

People are uploading video by the scores, and they'll need to be able to find what they like.  You're filling that need.

It's a need we didn't even know we had a year ago.

Dabble Land is an interesting place.  People have ideas, they have energy, and they just put their heads down and work.  (Go, Mary!)  Then they launch something new and watch it grow.

It's useful to contrast Dabble Land with Telco Land.  According to a fine article in BusinessWeek:

Welcome to Telco Land, a strange country where the biggest players talk more and more about innovation yet approach new ideas with baby steps, build little themselves, and when they think about technology are apt to believe it's a threat they have to fight.

The telcos keep claiming that innovation comes from them -- but today it's coming from Dabble Land.  And in fact Dabble may be deeply troubling to the telcos because its success depends on the popularity of user-generated video.  And user-generated video (which is not Telco-Land-generated video) is taking off in that old hockey-stick way we got so excited about six years ago.

Welcome, Dabble!  Let's hope that Telco Land keeps moving slowly.  They'll never catch up.

The reason there's a net neutrality debate in the U.S. right now is that there is inadequate competition in the market for broadband access services. 

When that competition heats up (either intermodal, which means that the competitor doesn't have to use existing DSL or cable networks, or intramodal, which means that the competitor DOES have to use existing networks), there will be much less reason to worry about the amount of gatekeeper control the network providers will be exercising.  Users will have choices.

The market for DRM, or "technical protection measures," by contrast, is competitive.  We have a full complement of techniques of all kinds, from all kinds of manufacturers, at many layers of the protocol stack.  These TPMs are competing and evolving in unpredictable ways.

So I was surprised to learn that there's a major movement afoot in France (and soon in other European countries) to mandate that all TPMs be interoperable.  In particular, the French Constitutional Court will rule someday soon as to whether a statutory provision to this effect should be upheld. 

The statute requires that "suppliers of technological measures shall provide access to the information essential to interoperability."  It doesn't seem to be limited to TPMs that have been found to be dominant in their markets -- in fact, the definition of TPM is very broad indeed:  anything that frustrates an unauthorized use of content.

"Information essential to interoperability," in turn, is defined as "the technical documentation and the programming interfaces necessary to allow a technological device to access."  In other words, any and all information someone claims to want with respect to interoperability will have to be made available.

Take a deep breath here.  Before you react with distaste for all DRM, remember that government-created technical mandates are generally not a great idea.  This one involves the creation of -- get this -- a "Regulatory Authority of technical measures."  That authority will take a look at interoperability claims and make a decision.  It will have the power to issue injunctions and financial penalties.

It's hard to understand why anyone would think this is a good idea.  Also -- bad ideas hatched in Europe often come to our shores later.  So we should watch this one closely.

For the last four hours or so, Yahoo! Messenger has been down.  I've been a loyal user for the last six years, and I wish Yahoo! was saying something about this.  What's wrong?  When will the outage be over?

Because Yahoo! isn't saying anything, frustrated users have taken to Yahoo! Answers.  There's a great story here.  Yahoo! gives people points for answering posted questions.  It's not clear to me what the points are for, but that doesn't matter.  People are out there diligently answering questions from other people and racking up points.

And, boy, are there a lot of questions to answer.  I went back and looked, and it seems that there are four or five questions a minute pouring in from Yahoo! Messenger addicts all over the world.  They all want to know what's wrong, and there's no saying what's wrong.  So the point-gatherers keep saying they don't know.  It's pretty good-humored most of the time, but there have been some ugly moments.

Someone wants to talk to his buddy in Iraq.  Someone's losing money by the minute.  Someone feels completely cut off.  Someone's mail is blocked.  Someone's really mad that Yahoo! isn't saying anything (actually, lots of someones are mad about this).  Someone thinks that maybe Yahoo! loaded too many features into Messenger.  Or screwed up with the merge with MSN.  Or it's too hot.  Or maybe Yahoo! just wants everyone to switch IM clients.

There have been moments of comic relief.  "I just want everyone to know that my husband did it," one woman said.  "It's Bush and Cheney," someone else said.  "Who else is taking advantage of all these points?" someone wanted to know.  Lots of responses to that one.  "What's an avatar and who made up that word?" runs another question.  Since everything has to be formed as a question, one person asks:  "Would it kill people to read the board and see that their question has been asked 500 times?"

In fact, the board has become a kind of buddy list for addicts, all of them sailing through the hours pounding at the keys and wishing that Messenger would come back up.  "Hey, we're chatting!" one guy says.  "Who needs Messenger?"

Yahoo!? Are you out there?  You may want to get these people back into the fold.  They're feeling pretty disloyal at the moment. 

So the train broke down in Philadelphia today, but that allowed seating arrangements to be reshuffled by the delay -- and I ended up across the cafe car table from a guy who knows a lot about cognitive science. 

Who's going to do best in difficult situations, like, say, a war?  Well, someone whose neurological attributes allow him to become very anxious (and very alert) very quickly but then to return to baseline swiftly -- and whose baseline is higher in the first place.  Phlegmatic people may not do well, and always-anxious people won't either.  Someone who has been through trauma before and has thrived.  Someone who is able to reframe things and move on.  Someone with a good support network.

How do we learn best?  By challenging ourselves -- not through repetition, but through trying to remember something under different circumstances and forcing ourselves to rebuild the thought-scaffolding.  Not by getting into a rut, either physically or mentally.  Visual learning helps too (he had never seen MindManager before and thought it was very cognitively appropriate).

Ah, but then we got to net neutrality.  I asked him what he thought.  He said, "Well, I don't like regulation."  We then went through a little visual mind map of net neutrality, and he had to agree (or perhaps he was just being polite) that for this moment in time, because we don't have adequate broadband competition we need to avoid privileging gatekeepers for internet access.  ("I can't stand cable prices," he said, encouragingly).  This moment in time will end when there's more competition -- hey, there's a spectrum auction coming up on August 9!  Wouldn't it be great if some large online companies joined in?

Anyway, it was a fine mind-map-meld as the train edged its way towards New York. 

(Most confusing announcement:  "We are encountering trespassers and must move slowly through this area.") 

It's morning in Redmond, Washington.  I was just watching CNN, and the anchor from New York was doing a story about the crisis in the Middle East.  He was leading into a segment about videos that people are making and posting online -- the sound of the air-raid sirens, a trip to a shelter, an explosion and its aftermath. 

With a voice of slight amazement and disbelief, stumbling a little, he said to the correspondent, "It's like a ... whole, virtual network out there."

The correspondent humored him and did a little spot about YouTube videos from the Middle East.  He said, soothingly, "These aren't getting thousands of hits, but they're getting hundreds.  People are definitely interested."  He also noted that people were using cameras in their cellphones to capture video.  "There are thousands of these things [devices] out there!" he said.

Yet another understanding of "network," then -- when a telco says it, they mean managed pipes; when an engineer says it, he means logical architecture; and when a TV news anchor says it, he means CNN.  Those little videos are subversive.

The challenge for the future of telecommuncations policy is to shift attention from telecom providers to the communications they carry.  This isn't easy -- there are legions of telecom lawyers in what Nicolas Lemann famously called "FCC World."  They're used to talking about "broadcast" and "cable" and "telephone" policy, but the secret is out:  everything is going online.

This is like suddenly paying attention to the rest of copyright law -- the part that isn't so author-centric.  There's an awful lot left in the copyright code (all those complicated statutory licenses).  Tim Wu made this point about copyright law very effectively in a Michigan Law Review article a couple of years back.

Interestingly, although we have a long statute about all the silo-ed communications providers, there isn't so much on the books about online communications  We have a few key elements in place -- safe harbors and immunities of various kinds for ISPs, rules about cybersquatting, special rules about children and information about children -- and we wouldn't want to start writing special-purpose laws covering online activity.  We have plenty of straightforward statutes that can be applied online.

There's a new balance to be struck next year (or in the years to come -- this may take a while).  Market concentration in broadband providers may dictate that they be forced to not "manage" their networks and to be commoditized.  General purpose  laws should continue to be enforced with respect to online activity.  But we shouldn't enact a flurry of "internet laws" just to give the communications lawyers something to do.  Instead, the complex, group-forming and order-creating ecosystem online should continue to be given a chance to evolve.  Indeed, we'll need to actively protect it.  Communications lawyers can become conservationists.

In a Net Neutrality Great Debate today with Dave Farber, Vint Cerf said he'd like to see an internet basics comic book.

I'm all for that -- great idea.  We need much simpler ways to get the message across about this transformative change in our lives.  It would be great if more people understood that the internet wasn't a giant telephone system, with someone controlling all the communications standing in the middle blowing a whistle.

Plus, there could be superheroes.  Clearly Cerf and Kahn would be superheroes, wearing "IP on Everything" t-shirts.  There could be great battles, triumphant time-markers ("birth of Craigslist!"), and thought-bubbles from regulators ("how do I deal with this crazy thing?"). 

The "democracy" arguments in the telecom policy world go both ways.  You can point to caselaw saying that getting information from diverse sources is "essential to the welfare of the public" and is the bedrock on which democratic government rests.  This language seems to support keeping access as neutral and open as feasible.

On the other hand, the access providers themselves want to make sure THEIR speech is respected, and will often co-opt these words for their own purposes -- don't regulate us, we want to be heard!  It makes sense to them to give the conduit editorial control over the information being sent down the tubes.

On the third hand, the access providers will reasonably say that proponents of the "democracy" theory have to prove that the benefits produced by making the widest possible diversity of sources available exceed the economic costs (to them) of doing so.

And you can't quantify democracy. 

Without giving up on democracy, can we come up with an additional principle that would support a decision in favor of openness/diversity of the online experience of real people?  One that can lead to quantifiable results?

Well, if you think of all online communications as a system (it's all converging, after all), it's clear that this system is more like the weather or the economy than a railroad network.  The future of this system is going to depend on giving it enough information to let it evolve (to have selection and adaptation run their course).  That evolution will create longterm value for everyone -- not just the access providers. 

To have the best possible evolutionary search mechanism that leads to this wealth (which may be nonmonetary wealth, just to warn you), we need to provide the best possible background/substrate/environment.  Rather than have the access providers provide the "fitness environment" (picking winners and losers), it will be better to have human attention provide the measure of fitness. More minds are better than one.  If we're paying attention, you'll win.  We'll back up our attention-paying with money.  We'll pick the winners and the losers.

To get this information flow going (users paying attention to other users, users paying attention to applications), some policy suggestions present themselves: 

1.  Make sure all Americans have access.  Fund Universal Service through a common pool of revenue.  Eliminate cross-subsidies and hidden sludge -- and have the end result be broadband internet connectivity.

2.  Don't enact video or audio flags.  They're another way of artificially controlling evolution in devices and content.

3.  Make spectrum available for competitive access services.

4.  Make video franchises available easily. 

5.  Mandate structural separation of access providers by layers. (If you're a pipe, that's all you should be.  We may have to pay you back for your stranded costs.)  It's clear that "unbundling" was a disaster, so we have to keep it simple.

6.  Don't impose unreasonably high charges for necessary inputs, like spectrum or access to telephone poles or rights of way.

Democracy will certainly be helped by all this.  Plus we'll be able to count up our wealth generated by this richer, self-ordered network.  Whatever that wealth is, it has to be greater than the returns expected by a few network access providers under a non-neutral regime. 

On the Telstra story, I received a note pointing out that both Telstra and the group of nine are bluffing mercilessly.  Telstra isn't really investing in its network (currently, at least) and seems to be ignoring the public interest.  The group of nine are probably just trying to make sure they get access -- bluffing in turn -- by talking about their (pretty soft) plans.

What Telstra is doing is similar to the Deutsche Telekom move that I've written about here before.  Give us complete freedom to exclude, or else we won't build the network.

On the Dandelife project, I received a few notes about the Timeline portion of the Simile project at MIT.  The website says:  "Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information."

I can't see a way to neatly pull these two additions together except by making some awkward joke about "lying about your age" (bluffing plus timelines), so I will close here.

We're not great at standard, everyday ways of using the graphical, networked screen -- blog posts are just text, and they disappear below the fold; pictures get posted, but you have to know the tag or run through huge slide shows to find anything -- all in all, many ordinary user applications seem pretty primitive. 

Between applications that display overwhelming amounts of aggregated data presented as colors and lines and balloons (which you gawk at -- the only reaction is "wow, that's interesting") and applications that display simple text, there isn't much.

So I was pleased to run across Dandelife on Ross Mayfield's blog.  I like the idea of creating a timeline of a life -- it could be about an imaginary life, it could be about an idea (an intellectual history), it could be about a writing project ("how my book came to life"), it could be about a building.  It's a way to visualize information that is just a little richer than what we have now.

In 1987, the Santa Fe Institute and Citicorp lined up ten leading economists to talk to ten leading physicists, biologists, and computer scientists.  Luminaries on both sides.

The physical scientists were astounded by the economists' old-fashioned equilibrium-based approach to problems.  One of the physical scientists later said that talking to them was like taking a trip to Cuba, where the streets are full of old cars.  The cars can be kept going by hard work and ingenuity, using salvaged parts.  But the entire system is out of touch with the modern world.

It's a great image, isn't it?  An entire discipline, cut off from the rest of the world by a sort of self-created intellectual embargo.  Very skilled minds can be hard at work, fixing the Packards with care and thoroughness.  And the cars will continue to work for a very long time.

As communications converge, continuing to have categories like "broadcast," "radio," "cable," and "telephony" makes less and less sense -- these categories are like the Packards.  We can tinker with them, believe in them, but the world will have moved on.  The system to be dealt with (all-IP, all-online) is a complex, evolving environment, characterized by nonlinear dynamics and self-created order.  How do you regulate that?

I sat next to someone on a plane recently who told me to look into the Telstra story. It seems that Sol Trujillo announced last year that Telstra would build a $3 billion fiber network -- but only if the company had "regulatory certainty".  Sound familiar?  Then today Dave Burstein sent around a snippet saying that Australia's Communications Minister is supporting the notion that nine carriers should build a broadband network that would compete with Telstra's planned fiber network.  (The Australian government owns more than half of Telstra, which adds an interesting dimension to this story.)

A somehwhat snarky story by Stephen Bartholomeusz in the Sydney Morning Herald pooh-poohs the competitive idea.  The competitors would have to build on top of Telstra's existing copper network, so Telstra could strand them by simply building their replacement fiber network (access to which Telstra would never provide its competitors, according to Bartholomeusz). 

It's hard to tell from this distance what exactly is going on.  If the Communications Minister wants to separate Telstra's wholesale from retail services, that seems to be an invitation to gleeful gameplaying on the part of the incumbent.  It's awfully hard (this happened in the UK) to make this kind of abstract packaging result in real competition.  On the other hand, the Minister may want to impose something stronger.

I always listen to the prophetic things strangers tell me on planes.  The Telstra story is full of drama and prompts reporters to say things like "it's back to rock-throwing." 

Telecommunications law in the U.S. used to be about serving the public interest by breaking up monopolies and assuring communication.  Now it seems to be mostly about protecting the investments of incumbents.  The monopolies are steadily re-combining.  All of this has enormous societal and economic effects.  Is this reframed purpose actually serving the public interest?  Perhaps the Australian Communications Minister can clue us in.

Thanks to Dave Burstein for the pointer.

Yesterday's post prompted a message saying, "What do you mean, private networks?"

In response to the first CALEA order last summer, the American Council on Education and many other entities and groups argued strenuously that imposing CALEA compliance on internal school networks would cost an enormous amount of money (and clearly was not contemplated by Congress in 1994).

The education groups had very strong statutory arguments on their side.  In CALEA, Congress exempted [look at (b)(2)(B)] from the assistance capability requirements all “equipment, facilities, or services that support the transport or switching of communications for private networks.”

In the 2005 order, the Commission noted this exemption, but seemed to take it away at the same time -- saying that "[t]o the extent … that these private networks are interconnected with a public network …, providers of the facilities that support the connection of the private network to a public network are subject to CALEA..." 

What? Just about all colleges and libraries with internal broadband networks of their own are connected via a commercial ISP to the internet.  Did the FCC mean by its use of "support" that everything included in these internal networks had to be easily tappable by law enforcement?  The Commission seemed to be willfully ignoring the statute. A sort of "down means up" reading.

In the June 9 D.C. Circuit opinion that upheld the Commission's CALEA trajectory, the court refused to worry along with ACE about the FCC's use of the word "support" -- pointing out that the Order expressly excluded "private networks."  End of story from the court's perspective.  ACE is reading this as reaffirmation of the exclusion.  Right now, the CALEA obligations fall on commercial ISPs, and not on private networks.

It's clear, though, that the Commission is retaining the power to extend CALEA to any private network in the future.  In the Second Report and Order that came out in May, the Commission said it would clarify whether gateway routers or other equipment (even if owned privately) providing interconnection to the public internet for private networks was covered by CALEA.

In the meantime, it's still a little unclear how far "private networks" extend -- do they include those gateway routers at the border of (let's say) a university network?  And what exactly constitutes a "private network"?  Does it include every homeowner with an unsecured wifi router at the end of their cable or DSL broadband service?  (I don't think so, but if anyone out there has an opinion please comment or email.)

A rehearing of the case by the entire D.C. Circuit might help.  Also, it may be that legislation will be introduced that will clarify that only commercial networks (offered to the public for a fee) are covered.  There will be news about CALEA's scope for months and years to come.

Not long ago, Brett Glass posted a message to Farber's list saying:

"The FCC Report and Order on CALEA (see http://cryptome.org/fcc070506.htm) appears to drag all broadband providers - including small, rural ISPs such as myself -- into a messy regulatory regime, merely because one of my customers might choose to use a VoIP service. Worse still, the requirements are vague and potentially extremely onerous."

Someone sent me an email asking "Is he reading the Order right?"  So I went off to look.

If you go to the August 2005 Order that asserted that CALEA covers "facilities-based" broadband internet access providers, you'll find that an entity can be covered if it:

1.  is engaged in providing wire or electronic communication switching service OR

2.  is engaged in providing wire or electronic communication transmission service AND

3. the Commission finds that such service is a replacement for a substantial portion of the local telephone exchange service AND

4.  the Commission finds that it is in the public interest to deem such a person or entity to be a telecommunications carrier for purposes of CALEA.

That August 2005 Order states that the FCC had already found that "switching" is the same as (or includes) providing "routers, softswitches, and other equipment that may provide addressing and intelligence functions for packet-based communications to manage and direct the communications along to their intended destinations."  So, in other words, if you're providing routing services you fulfill condition #1.  You're "facilities-based." 

The Commission found that broadband access services fulfill condition #3 because people used to use local telephone service to access the internet, and that such services fulfill condition #4 because deeming these entities covered by CALEA would "promote competition, encourage the development of new technologies, and protect public safety and national security."

So -- according to the Commission (whose interpretation has been deferred to by the D.C. Circuit), any entity providing access to the internet through a router (unless that entity is exempt for some other reason, for example because it is a private network operator) will need to assist law enforcement to tap its communications.  At its own cost. 

That means that every ISP falls under CALEA, because it operates routers.

So, yes, Brett Glass is arguably correct.

He continues:

"There is no rational reason to subject an ISP such as myself to the statute's expensive requirements. Yet, the FCC is trying to do so.  What's more, to add insult to injury, it has stated that it does not intend to allow ISPs to be compensated for the expense of making their networks tappable. In short, the FCC seems eager to impose requirements upon us which would do nothing to enhance homeland security but could well drive us and other independent ISPs out of business. This would ensure a cable/telco duopoly and hamper the expansion of broadband service to rural areas like ours."

Yup.

It's a beautiful summer evening in New York.  Lorraine Hunt Lieberson would have poured herself into Samuel Barber's "Knoxville, Summer of 1915" (unforgettable text by James Agee): 

...It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds' hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt: a loud auto: a quiet auto: people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually, the taste hovering over them in vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard, and starched milk, the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squaring with clowns in hueless amber.

If the porches were stoops, and there were many many cars, this would be New York.  I remember hearing Hunt Lieberson back in November, in Boston, when she sang Pablo Neruda poems that her husband had set for her.  This Agee text seemed like her to me tonight.

I'm looking for some books to read.  Last summer I was lucky enough to read (or re-read):

What the Dormouse Said (Markoff)

Dark Hero of the Information Age (Conway/Siegelman)

The Dream Machine (Waldrop)

I recommend all three of these very warmly.  Right now I've got a bunch of books about (or having to do with) Darwin waiting to be read.  But if, in addition, there were more like these three I'd be delighted.

Going back through the July 1945 Vannevar Bush "As We May Think" essay today, I was struck by how primitive most peoples' online experiences still are.  It's an obvious thought, but we still don't have the "associational trails" that Bush dreamed of.  You have probably heard of Bush's interest in a "memex," which he described as an "enlarged intimate supplement to [man's] memory."  But the trails may be new to you:

The process of tying two items together is the important thing.

When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard.  Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. . . . Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space.  Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly. . .

First [the user] runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected.  Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together.  Thus he goes, building a trail of many items.  Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. . . Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.

And his trails do not fade. . . Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.

Now, wikipedia is like a trail.  But because there is only one link type (this links to that), you can't see how someone else (much less thousands of someone elses) has weaved his/her way through a particular subject.  In a sense, we're still scrambling around in a pool of knowledge.  It's a deep and interesting pool, but each one of us has to find his/her way out -- very few trails out there. 

Virtual worlds can make these persistent, visual trails possible.  And if we all (everyone) had enough bandwidth....

I was glad to get a call today about blogger liability. 

The caller wanted to know where I thought the intersection of libel law and blogging was these days.  She mentioned the Tucker Max lawsuit, the Maine tourism campaign lawsuit, the Jessica Cutler/Wonkette connection.  I mentioned to her the Jon Newton lawsuit.

This is a murky area, and I have a feeling other people out there know much more about where the blog/libel discussion is than I do.  In an era in which anyone can be a publisher, libel law seems much less relevant -- rather than sue, you can just write back.  And if you sue, you're likely to bring the libel to the attention of many more people than would ever have heard about it in the first place.  You'll be ruining your reputation just by going to court.  And many bloggers don't have a dime, so if you're looking for damages you won't be satisfied by suing. 

On the other hand, if you believe that blogging is taking its place beside journalism, you have to also believe that bloggers who lie maliciously (and get linked to routinely?) should take their place as defendants.  Reputation remains important, and if a blog entry has an effect on your reputation you'll want some recourse.

On the third hand -- just where has your reputation been damaged by a blog entry?  In your home town, or in some online community?  If it's in an online community, shouldn't you be visiting that community's dispute resolution functions instead of a physical courthouse? And shouldn't you have to show impact via blogranking services?

After days of sitting on airplanes, it was nice to drive back to dramatic fireworks over the Manhattan skyline last night, and to talk about liability today.  Both are quintessentially American hobbies.