I'm enjoying "Inventing the People" by Edmund Morgan, which describes a grand progression of useful political fictions (from the divine right of kings to popular sovereignty).  I'm looking around for inspiring descriptions of political leadership, noticing that the U.S. stock market is tumbling because of slow economic growth.  I'm not sure the Morgan book will help, but even a well-thought-out political fiction might be helpful around now.  Seriously, though, leadership is going to be the key.

To be persuasive, this leader is going to need lots of real comparative data from around the world.  Plus pictures -- visualizations of that data (don't forget Al Gore riding a rising platform to show the extent of change in global warming).  Al's not running, but he has been great at being persuasive about his subject.

Working, working.  More later.

I want to make sure everyone knows about the Freedom To Connect conference next week -- Monday Mar. 5 and Tuesday Mar. 6.  Details and schedule here.  The cost to register goes up substantially tomorrow, so think about signing up today.

Here's the current agenda:

March 5, 2007 (***subject to change***)

• 8:00 AM -- Registration, breakfast
• 8:45 - 10:00 AM -- Jim Douglas, Governor of Vermont, intro Tom Evslin, welcome David Isenberg
• 10:00 - 10:30 AM -- Break
• 10:30 - 11:15 AM -- Yochai Benkler on The Wealth of Networks
• 11:15 - Noon -- Panel: Benkler, kc claffy, Mark Cooper, Elliot Maxwell, Gigi Sohn
• Noon - 1:00 PM -- Lunch, box lunch on premises
• 1:00 - 2:00 PM -- Demos: David Smith (Qwak), Cory Ondrejka (2nd Life)
• 2:00 - 2:45 PM -- Enabling Technologies -- James Salter, John Waclawsky, Sanjit Biswas
• 2:45 - 3:15 PM -- Break
• 3:15 - 4:00 PM -- Network Enabled Government, Rep. Steve Urquhart (Politicopia), Fred Hassani (Intellipedia), Micah Sifry (Sunlight Foundation), Allison Fine (Moderator)
• 4:00 - 4:30 PM -- tbd
• 4:30 - 4:45 PM -- Jeff Chester on Digital Destiny
• 4:45 - 5:00 PM -- Book signing preview, Allison Fine (Momentum), Yochai Benkler (Wealth of Networks) & Reed Hundt (In China's Shadow)
• 5:30 - 8:30 PM -- Reception/book signing in nearby restaurant, reception keynote by David Weinberger

March 6, 2007 (***subject to change***)

8:00 AM -- Registration, breakfast
8:45 - 9:00 AM -- Welcome to Day 2, David Isenberg
9:00 - 9:45 AM -- Peer Production News Panel, Dan Gillmor, Mark Tapscott, Bill Allison, Jonathan Krim (moderator)
9:45 - 10:30 AM -- Community Networks Panel, Sascha Meinrath, Michael Calabrese, Becca Vargo Daggett, Drew Clark (Moderator)
10:30 - 11:00 AM -- Break
11:00 - Noon -- FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, Ron Sege (intro).
Noon - 1:00 PM -- Lunch, box lunch on premises
1:00 - 1:20 PM -- Demos: Yuval Klein (Plymedia), Nora Abousteit (Burda Style)
1:20 - 2:30 -- Adam Thierer, Peter Swire, Jim Baller
2: 30 - 3:00 PM -- Break
3:00 - 4:00 PM -- Susan Crawford, Reed Hundt
4:00 - 5:00 PM -- Bruce Sterling sums up (with Jasmina Tesanovic).
5:00 PM -- Adjourn

People who wander by this blog will know that I'm a fan of Lee Smolin, whose Life of the Cosmos was my favorite book five years ago.  I recently read his 2007 book:  The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next.

The first half of Trouble with Physics is heavy sledding for a music major.  Smolin is showing that while string theory has led to some worthwhile avenues of study, it's not a testable theory.  It just can't be proven -- in fact, it can't even be defined.  It doesn't confirm or suggest anything beyond itself, and it can't be explained.  Smolin describes the work of many brilliant people who have devoted their careers to string theory, and describes what they've been working on.  Most of this was very hard for me to understand, but I think I got the point that string theory is the emperor's new clothes.

But it's not just the emperor -- there's an entire metropolis of physicists who are similarly clad, according to Smolin.  String theory is the dominant and domineering course of study.  The theory is a kind of academic faith that cannot be gainsaid (and if you doubt, you're out).  In fact, you probably won't be able to get a job as a physicist in the first place if you haven't lined up behind the theory.

The second half of the book, the cultural part, is fascinating.  Smolin remembers that when he began his career there were giants around -- real seers who were doing experimental, idiosyncratic work.  Huge strides were being made in physics.  Then string theory took over and progress stopped.  Nothing has happened in at least twenty years, he argues; none of the big questions are being answered, and string theory doesn't show any signs of being helpful in answering those questions.

He's disturbed that physics has become characterized by groupthink, and he thinks the academic system is doing it.  Not the people, the system.  Academics spend a lot of time reviewing the work of other academics and ranking them.  In the sciences, the academics are looking for grants, and those are given out based on a lot of conservative ranking work as well.  The seniors shape the juniors, and the juniors start asking themselves how Prof. X or Prof. Y view their work instead of asking themselves how their work is contributing to science.  So the whole ethic of scientific inquiry is disturbed; outliers don't get the time or independence to be alone and think, because they're too busy getting on the trail towards quiet, approved-of seniordom themselves.

Smolin wants physicists to encourage young seers, young outliers who are having interesting ideas but may not have any results to show for them.  The craftspeople don't make scientific advances, in his view.  He's interested in getting away from "normal" science and encouraging big foundational inquiries.  It sounds as if he himself has been broad-ranging, interested in everything, happy to shape his own destiny.  But even Smolin didn't question some assertions about string theory that turned out not to be adequately proven, according to him.

My favorite part of this cultural history is the "time alone" section -- Smolin describes the careers of a few young seers that were lucky enough to go off by themselves and read deeply and widely.  Years later, they emerged with startling insights and well-informed critical views. 

Law is different from science.  My colleagues let me write about anything I want to, and I don't have to get grants in order to survive.  (Thank you, legal educational system.)  It is true, though, that there's a rush to be "productive" (I remember when that word made me smile -- now it's just part of the lexicon) at a very early point in your career, and you certainly don't get years alone to read everything under the sun.  There are certainly seniors and juniors.

So I recommend this book to anyone who is curious about almost anything.  Do your best to work through the first part, gaze out the window once in a while, and then absorb the second part.  It may stay with you for a while.

The two communications policy issues that have had the most mainstream appeal recently are network neutrality and media concentration.

Here's a question:  Shouldn't it be difficult to be "for" an active government role in both?  To be "for" network neutrality, it seems natural to have the view that the internet is displacing many prior forms of communications modalities -- the press is in a free fall, people are watching much less broadcast television, etc. -- and so it's even more important to get internet access policy right and avoid gatekeepers. You'd want to talk about the empowering, emergent communications taking place online.

But to be "for" limits on media ownership, it may be necessary to argue that nothing much has changed.  You have to claim that broadcast and newspapers control news and culture, and so it's important to avoid more consolidation.  The internet isn't changing the local news picture, you'd have to say, and so its existence doesn't change the media landscape.  Blogs aren't legitimate alternative news sources.

Maybe I've got this wrong, but it seemed to me today to be at least difficult to agitate in favor of both ideas.  There's a market failure in internet access, but is there a market failure in information? 

Thanks to John Morris of CDT for pointing me to this recent CDT report: Child Safety and Free Speech Issues in the 110th Congress.  [Disclosure:  I am a Policy Fellow with CDT.]

There seems to be a lot of energy, Democratic and Republican, in favor of "doing something" to protect children online.  The CDT memo carefully categorizes proposed legislation, points out that both the COPA Commission and the National Academy independently found that "(A) in light of the global nature of the Internet, criminal laws and other
direct regulations of content inappropriate for minors will be ineffective, and (B) education and
parental empowerment with filtering and other tools are far more effective than any criminal law," and evaluates the constitutionality and likely effectiveness of several proposed bills. 

Forced labeling of sites?  Unconstitutional ("compelled speech") and completely ineffective. 

Preventing kids from viewing blogs and social network sites (DOPA)?  Overreaching, ineffective, and unconstitutional.

Imposing special burdens on blogs and social networks? Very bad for the future (don't undermine Section 230, which has spurred economic growth and innovation). 

Mandated data retention?  Bad for personal privacy, makes intermediaries into private police, unnecessary, and really expensive.

Government blacklists of sites? Horrendous collateral consequences (based on the crude blocking methods available, lots of innocent materials will be blocked), ineffective, and unconstitutional.

(A new entry introduced on Feb. 15 by Sen. Pryor (S. 602) calls for the FCC to create blocking technologies that will "improve or enhance the ability of a parent to protect his or her child from any indecent or objectionable video or audio programming, as determined by such parent, that is transmitted through the use of wire, wireless, or radio communication."  Including online communication.  Whoof.)

The better approach, and the one CDT recommends, is to focus on education and actually prosecute bad guys (rather than just fighting with the internet).

CDT is manifestly correct, and they're doing a great job.  But there are so many proposals, and so many people running for office who want to be seen as "protecting children," that some of these efforts may stick.  And pass.  Any one of these bills if enacted into law would be quite destructive. 

What happened to U.S. leadership in internet policy?  We should be inspiring other governments to work on education and empowerment rather than ineffective and harmful gross blocking/filtering techniques.  Instead, we're wildly proposing legislation without reflecting on the harm it could do to society and to the Constitution.  This is risking our future and that of the global internet.

1.  Neutrality Everywhere.  Skype and others want the FCC to require that wireless carriers allow all applications to flow over their networks.  (Jeff Pulver comment here; Nate Anderson article here.)  This is going to be interesting.  The wireless carriers are optimized on billing, and perhaps they should be asked to focus on communications as well.  It's unlikely that the current Commission will deal with this well.  Watch this space.  I'll link to a copy of the petition when it's available.

2.  Liability Everywhere. The Recording Industry Association of America wants people with ISP accounts to be responsible for all infringement occurring on that account.  If they're successful with this argument, the next step will be to go after open access wireless hotspots.  Like the one in my apartment in New York and the one that's helping me get online here in Cambridge, Mass.

3.  Trademarks Everywhere.  So Cisco and Apple did a deal over iPhone.  What is Cisco going to do with the rest of the world about its use of IPTV?  Cisco owns that trademark too: IP/TV, registered more than ten years ago.  Maybe when the router business runs out of steam Cisco can make money from its licensing department.

So far in the communications law class I'm teaching this term, we've read materials about indecency regulation, the digital television transition, and media concentration.

For today's class on media concentration, one of the students posted the following comment:

Okay, I give up. By now, FCC regulatory authority is such a shell game I can't keep it straight.

All of these stories have been pretty thick.  Indecency regulation is premised on protecting kids (not scarcity), but doesn't cover cable and appears to extend to fleeting expletives that can be heard on any street corner.  The DTV transition is more like a soap opera than a policy initiative. And the media concentration story has the FCC stuck between the D.C. Circuit and Congress and three million angry letter-writers.  Luckily for us, the satellite radio industry has decided to merge in careful synchronization with our syllabus.

It's a good time to be studying this material.  It's dramatic stuff.  Just wait until we get to the E911, CALEA, and net neutrality stories.  Perhaps we should put on a class play.

I was about to write a long post about the Institute for Local Self-Reliance report that came out earlier this year.  It's called "Localizing the Internet:  Five Ways Public Ownership Solves the U.S. Broadband Problem."  Plus there's a new report out from the Alliance for Public Technology called "Achieving Universal Broadband: Policies for Stimulating Deployment and Demand" that is well worth studying.  

But I thought I'd spend a few minutes this evening talking about the 90-year-olds I met this past weekend.  I went with a college friend of mine to visit her grandmother -- almost 100 now -- at a place outside Philadelphia.  At one point during the afternoon I was reading in the common room when a guy in a baseball cap sat down next to me and clearly wanted to talk.  So I closed the book and asked him about his life.  Let's call him Frank.  He's 90.

Frank came to this country from Austria in 1938 after one of his cousins sent an affidavit promising to support him.  He was 21.  His parents never made it out, and he learned after the war that they died in a concentration camp.  He started work in Brooklyn for a glue company as an errand boy, and studied at CCNY.  The bookkeeper for the glue company saw him studying hard and was impressed -- she asked him if he'd like to meet one of her school friends.  He did, and the school friend was named Julia, and the two married six months later.  Then in 1941 he was drafted and sent to guard the Suez Canal for more than two years.  He came back safely and started work in a furniture design company in midtown.  He was a skiier and led ski trips for a shop on the Upper East Side, riding buses to Vermont to teach people how to ski.  The Austrian accent helped convince people that he was the right guy to do this.  He lived on Long Island and worked there for a long time.  He had a daughter.  His wife died twelve years ago of cancer.  He showed me pictures of his wife, daughter, and granddaughter.  About 18 months ago his daughter insisted that he leave Long Island and move into the retirement community outside Philadelphia (where she lives).  He likes it, but he doesn't really have any friends.  But he has people to eat dinner with.  His daughter visits occasionally. The bookkeeper who introduced him to his wife is still alive and lives in Massachusetts.

That's the story.  But Frank told me this story over and over again, in different parts, stressing different things, remembering the name of the glue factory and the address of the furniture store.  We were there for almost an hour, as the sun lowered in the sky and the light stretched into the next room.  He started again, with the story of coming here alone in 1938, and it was all as fresh and new to him as if he'd just met me.  Near the end of the hour he stretched the story just a bit, saying that he'd gone to the Suez only six months after meeting his wife.  But I knew better.  No, I said, it was 1941, not 1939, when you went to war.  I said goodbye and we both said that it had been a pleasure to talk.

At dinner we sat with my friend's grandmother and two of her friends, all three of whom are in their mid- to late-90s.  One of them was having trouble remembering what she had just said, but otherwise seemed in good health.  The other friend was sharp and on top of things.  My friend's grandmother was mostly occupied in looking lovingly at her granddaughter and listening to the conversation.

That's it, no big conclusions here.  We're all living longer, and there's probably someone who would like you to visit them. 

Google Book Search (Sept.2005 blog post here) and the telco-as-speaker argument (this week's blog post here) have something in common -- they're both being shaped by the passage of time.

Google's fair use claim is deeply contextual.  If a marketplace for licensing books for online indexing emerges, then (arguably) Google's failure to use that market cuts against its fair use defense.  (This is like the Texaco-copies-of-scientific-articles case.)

And the more time that the telcos have to act like speakers (remember AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet U-verse Enabled?) the harder the arguments against their First Amendment claims.

So, from the nethead perspective, it would be good to have these arguments now rather than later.  The more time that goes by, the weaker these arguments will get. 

There's a bigger point here -- both the argument that what Google is doing is copyright infringement, and the argument that any net neutrality rule is unconstitutional, are made by incumbents who argue they've made great private investments that need to be rewarded.  They're both about wanting to ensure that barriers to entry are erected to new business models that threaten the incumbents' revenue streams.  Both sets of incumbents need only bide their time and drag their heels in order for their reliance interests (or investment interests) to become so large that they seem persuasive to courts. 

It doesn't seem right -- but incumbents have an advantage when it comes to just standing still and waiting for the world to come around to their point of view.

Lee Smolin's "The Trouble With Physics" has been occupying me recently.  It's not an easy read.  It's a cultural history of string theory as a grand, unifying, and profession-altering movement. 

Smolin makes a key distinction between "background-dependent" and "background-independent" theories.  Newton viewed the background of space and time as an absolute, a "fixed stage on which a grand drama is played out."  This kind of absolute fixed stage as a framework for theory makes the theory "background-dependent." 

Smolin points out that Einstein's general theory of relativity is different -- no fixed stage, no absolutes, everything interacting and dynamical.  So it's a "background-independent" theory.

For a theory to be successfully unifying, Smolin argues it needs to have a few key elements:

1.  "have profound conceptual consequences"
2.  lead to predictions of new phenomena
3.  be testable in detail in the real world (something that hasn't happened with string theory).

The telcos' view of the internet is that it should be moved into a private, non-common-carriage model.  They're clearly operating in a Newtonian, "background-dependent" way -- their assumption is that the internet is a cable television network running over a telephone network, and that this fixed picture will remain in place.  They have a grand unifying theory, and it is based on control:  packet discrimination will bring us all to a better future.  For them, this is a beautiful theory.

But does it match reality?  Are quality of service guarantees really worth it (either to the telcos or to consumers)?  John Waclawsky often argues (paraphrasing) that time sensitive applications are continuously being improved because of  Moore's Law.  Capacity is increasing and the underlying networking technology is working more quickly.  So QoS doesn't add much.

Bottom line:  It may be that the telcos' grand unifying theory isn't testable in reality.  Like string theory.

I'm still working my way through Smolin and will report when I come out the other end.

It's here.

I'm hoping that it will take off and be a lively blog.  Welcome to the blogosphere, ICANN.

This post was prompted by draft paper sent to me by Moran Yemini, a student at NYU.  Many apologies for not crediting him.  Watch for his paper -- it will be great.

What do you think of the First Amendment rights of broadband providers? 

The providers may think they have what lawyers might call a "bootstrapping" argument:

1.  Because there is no common carriage requirement for broadband access now

2.  We network providers are speakers (look at our IPTV!)

3.  And so you can't impose network neutrality on us without violating the First Amendment.

If network providers can successfully argue that they are actually "speakers" (like cable companies), then a network neutrality statute would have to survive "intermediate scrutiny" as a First Amendment matter.  (For legal beagles:  government would have a strong argument that network neutrality is content neutral, so "strict scrutiny" wouldn't be called for.)

To survive this scrutiny, the government imposing network neutrality would have to show that "the recited harms are real, not merely conjectural, and that the regulation will in fact alleviate these harms in a direct and material way."

In the cable context, the broadcasters were able to provide substantial evidence of harm -- that, absent a "must carry" rule, broadcasters were realistically likely to be hurt.

Here, network neutrality proponents are (arguably) conjecturing about harm.  And all the network providers have to do is hold on and not do anything too obvious.  If a neutrality statute passes, they can say that it can't survive this "intermediate scrutiny" and that the statute is therefore unconstitutional.

Of course, because we have no data whatsoever about what happens inside these networks, we'll have trouble providing substantial evidence of harm.

In the long term (and if a neutrality statute passes) this will become an important battleground.  It seems to me that making a huge fuss NOW about the lack of data is important.  That might persuade a court later that it is
impossible to show actual harm and that conjecture is the best anyone can do (it was good enough for the broadcasters), using the van Schewick argument that these guys have every incentive to discriminate in ways that help them.

I bet the telcos think of themselves as speakers, just like cable providers -- they're working on intertwingling their internet access with their IPTV, so that the whole thing will provide a First Amendment facade.

I'm off for ten days.  See you back here on Feb. 16.

I've been looking into IP address filtering by content providers.  I understand that IP addresses can be attached with confidence to geographical locations (at the country level, at least) about 80% of the time.  You have to make up the rest with heuristics.  So there are companies that are in the business of packaging those geolocation heuristics for sites.

Quova has a patent (No. 6,684,250) for

A method and an apparatus operates to associate a geographic location associated with a network address. At least one data collection operation is performed to obtain information pertaining to a network address. The retrieved information is processed to identify a plurality of geographic locations potentially associated with the network address, and to attach a confidence factor to each of the plurality of geographic locations. An estimated geographic location is selected from the plurality of geographic locations as being a best estimate of a true geographic location of the network address, where the selection of the estimated geographic location is based upon a degree of confidence-factor weighted agreement within the plurality of geographic locations.

Quova's competitor Digital Envoy has a patent (No. 6,757,740) for

A method of determining a geographic location of an Internet user involves determining if the host is on-line, determining ownership of the host name, and then determining the route taken in delivering packets to the user. Based on the detected route, the method proceeds with determining the geographic route based on the host locations and then assigning a confidence level to the assigned location. A system collects the geographic information and allows web sites or other entities to request the geographic location of their visitors. The database of geographic locations may be stored in a central location or, alternatively, may be at least partially located at the web site. With this information, web sites can target content, advertising, or route traffic depending upon the geographic locations of their visitors. Through web site requests for geographic information, a central database tracks an Internet user's traffic on the Internet whereby a profile can be generated. In addition to this profile, the central database can store visitor's preferences as to what content should be delivered to an IP address, the available interface, and the network speed associated with that IP address.

Both of these issued in 2004. 

Quova also has a 2006 patent (No. 7,072,963) for

A method and a system perform geolocation activities relating to a network address. A database of network addresses, and associated geographic locations, is maintained. A query, including a network address, is received against the database for a geographic location associated with the network address. Information, concerning the query received against the database, is logged. Geolocation activities relating to at least the network address are modified based on the logged information.

That's pretty broad -- a patent covering the modification of geolocation information based on queries.

So here's the question:  How widely are these services used?  If they are in wide use (and I bet they are for advertising services), does it now make sense to put content sites to the burden of complying with the laws applicable to the people/machines they know are visiting them?  Hmmm?

In the famous Yahoo! case, Yahoo! argued that it couldn't know where people were coming from and that therefore it couldn't block/filter usage of Yahoo.com based on geographical location.  Is that still true?  Google has its own geolocation heuristics. According to this press release, 35% of US online merchants were using geolocation tools as of the end of 2006.

All comments more than welcome.

(to find these patents, search this database)

I spent part of the morning today at a Women In Technology Summit at Harvard.  It wasn't a law professor crowd; it was a group of us older women talking to undergraduates.

Someone asked the members of my panel to talk about something interesting we'd worked on.  So that allowed me to spend a few moments telling them how much fun it is to be a law professor.  Everything I do is interesting -- at least to me -- and I learn something new every day.  Either I have an alarmingly low "interesting" threshold, or it really is a good job.

There was an impassioned talk (sorry, no links available apparently) by Debra Rolison of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory about just how bad it is to be an aspiring female academic in math or science.  Terrible discrimination, terrible prospects.  She's suggesting (as has the GAO in a 2004 report) that math and science departments undergo Title IX compliance reviews.  She points out that Title IX has been used for sports equipment/funding issues, but that its language isn't limited to sports.  (Under Title IX, all entities receiving any form of federal financial assistance have to
prohibit sex discrimination in their education programs and activities.) 

The women next to me had, like me, a background in private non-technical services industries (for them, investment banking; for me, law) and I think we all felt lucky that we hadn't tried to get tenure in a math department.

Coverage of Thursday's hearing in front of the Senate Commerce Committee has been fascinating.  Some nuggets:

Sensing the new climate, Mr. Martin in his opening statement steered clear of every difficult issue facing the commission by making no mention of the debate over the Internet discrimination legislation, indecency standards, the media ownership rules, universal service fees paid by telephone consumers, or the agency’s policies on consolidation in the telephone industry.  (The New York Times)

Here's Martin's belief that you can draw sharp lines between different online "services."  This is possible only if you think of the internet as a content delivery supply chain:

The FCC chairman's well-known aversion to sweeping Net neutrality regulations drew sharp questions from Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), one of the chief sponsors of a bill that would require network operators to follow nondiscrimination rules. By failing to include network operators in the scope of nondiscrimination requirements traditionally placed on telephone companies, "does that mean you favor discrimination?" he asked.

Martin said he might be able to handle such a requirement if nondiscrimination meant, "if you offer a service to one, you have to offer that same service to all." (CNET News.com)

And this odd bit:

One Republican senator, who vowed recently to propose limits on the FCC's authority to require so-called technology mandates like the "broadcast flag" copy protection scheme proposed for digital television, admitted he was somewhat unprepared to face the regulators--although it wasn't clear whether he was being completely serious.

"My staff had come up with a list of highly confrontational questions, but I somehow misplaced them this morning," said Sen. John Sununu of New Hampshire, adding that he promised to "make it up to (the commissioners) next time." (Instead, he peppered the regulators with questions about the technicalities of a seemingly uncontroversial topic: making "white spaces"--that is, unused chunks of spectrum that rest between TV channels--available for potential unlicensed use by wireless providers.) 
(CNET News.com)

Aha, CNET!  That last part isn't uncontroversial.  In fact, it may end up being quite important.

Comments were due recently in the white spaces rulemaking.  A lot to read, and no time to do it tonight.  But here's a first thing -- a report from the New America Foundation says:

This report answers the following question that is central to the FCC’s current rulemaking about whether to open the unused TV-band channels in each market for wireless broadband and other innovation: Can unlicensed TV-band devices using cognitive radio techniques completely protect licensed broadcast TV services? Some published reports have postulated an affirmative response to the question, while others have claimed the opposite. This report provides the engineering support to definitively resolve this question in the affirmative: cognitive radio techniques can be used by unlicensed TV-band devices to protect licensed broadcast TV services.

It's nice to see Dell, Google, HP, Intel, Microsoft, and Philips weighing in:

[T]he Commission should ensure that the TV white spaces are used for unlicensed operation; spectrum should not be allocated on a licensed basis. The Commission has concluded correctly that unlicensed operations may be better suited to adapt to the “shifting spectrum environment” characterized by low power operations in the TV bands. Indeed, the phenomenal success of the Wi-Fi industry is merely a prelude to the benefits the country can expect from making unused television spectrum available on an unlicensed basis.

I have a lot to learn about the engineering details, but I have a feeling this is going to be another rulemaking that (once decoded, once the acronyms are taken apart) will reveal a great deal about who is trying to shape the future of internet access in this country, and why.

Today was the first of several indecency days in my communications law class.  So just why do we treat broadcast and cable differently? 

At the end of it all, after we had carefully taken apart Pacifica and ACT III and decided that the whole construct was pretty incoherent and vague, I asked the class how they felt about having broadcast indecency rules eradicated.

I got a mixed reaction.  Sure, the legal part doesn't make sense, but if the rules go away the market will probably want more and more adult material.  And that'll be disturbing both to the people who have kids and to the people who don't have kids but want "safe" television and radio during the day.

This is not a generation of First Amendment absolutists.  In other classes, I've also found that this is not a generation of privacy/civil liberties absolutists either -- they're often comfortable with searches and surveillance of various kinds.  In some cases (definitely not all) they're willing to believe that all of that apparatus is likely to make us safer.  No big conclusions here, just noticing.

(I think my students are great.  Hi, students!)

Someone emailed me this afternoon, saying "To get web access in a way that supports your 'don't support the telephone monopolies' campaign, where do I go?  Whom to tell my friends to switch to?  (I've had it with my Verizon dsl -- too slow for my kids videos on YouTube), but aren't the cable companies just as problematic?"

Well, there really isn't anywhere to go -- although Verizon is not the same as AT&T, and Verizon FiOS might be a good solution for my email correspondent if it exists in his neighborhood.

There's interest today in a feasibility study [warning, enormous PDF] for city-wide municipal fiber in San Francisco.  It's expensive ($560 million) but bold.  Oren Sreebny says it's fascinating, and I agree. 

But it's not clear that fiber is necessarily neutral -- indeed, this article suggests cities think fiber networks would have to be prioritized in order to pay off.

I share my email friend's despair at speeds here; from my school connection I can't use VoIP or watch streaming videos of hearings and arguments.  Maybe we'll all be moving to San Francisco.

Sascha Meinrath says it would cost $15-20 million to provide all of NYC with a wireless network.  It hasn't happened for a long list of reasons -- problems with contracts, turf wars, vendors, all kinds of reasons.

According to the NYT, NYC just spent $140 million to build a super-duper hub-and-spoke wireless system for the police to use in the subways, and the city isn't done.  It will cost another $60 million to make it operational.  And it won't work.  So the police on the street won't be able to communicate with the police underground.

Sascha says the reason it's not working is that the super-duper underground wireless network has many many hubs. With lots of hubs, there's lots of interference.  Putting all the intelligence in the hubs also leaves the receivers as dumb, lonely boxes -- if the hub stops working, the receiver is done for.  Sascha's saying that NYC could have a cheap underground wireless network if the city was willing to let the receivers be intelligent parts of the architecture -- a mesh, in other words. 

I've written before about Sascha's mesh adventures, which I find quite inspiring.  I'm confident he knows what he's talking about.  But the clash of cultures won't work -- public safety people want hard-wired, centralized, hierarchical, stable solutions, not ad hoc networks they don't quite understand.

It's too bad - $200 million for something that doesn't work, and two mindsets that can't understand each other.

More here from Tom Evslin.

Say you're over 70, you've never typed, and you're generally afraid of technology.  What would it be like to try a computer for the first time? 

It's daunting.  I saw the process tonight.  The letters on the keyboard aren't in any useful order ("where would I find an R?"); the idea of dragging a cursor around is perplexing; and everything is too small and too light-colored to see properly.  The notion of an inbox almost makes sense, but embedded replies and the "sent messages" file don't.  A trackpad is even worse than the impenetrable keyboard, because for no reason things seem to just disappear from the screen.

After the initial email lesson was done (too much to attempt web access during the first lesson), a visiting 9-year-old showed the 70+ his web site.  "See?" he said, "Here are my pictures, and here's more about me, and...."  He's part of the We Generation -- comfortable with technology, likes online videos, ready to look things up.  The 70+ looked a little tired. 

We warned her not to stay up all night with the computer.  "It's safe with me," she said.  She said earlier in the evening that she was afraid of "losing her soul." 

I'm hoping that being able to send messages to her friends and grandchildren will be worth it.  Right now, it seems like a very steep learning curve for her.

OneWebDay is about eight months away.  Here's a video that tells the OneWebDay story.   And features Craig Newmark!

There are lots of ways to get involved.  Be a local organizer of OneWebDay events -- start having brainstorming meetings in February.  Adopt an assisted-living center, or a local school, and work with them on access/learning projects that can culminate in September. Find people around the world who would like to work on some kind of artistic online project with you -- an enormous collage, an emergent symphony, whatever.

And, yes, we'll take donations -- the OneWebDay.org site has a "donate" button.  We need help with the costs involved in getting the word out around the globe.

Thanks. 

Very cold evening in New York tonight.  In Times Square the steam from the constant construction was blowing sideways, and tourists were running awkwardly down the boulevards to get out of the icy blasts.

Two lasting images from today:

the Yale Center for British Art, not visited exactly, but thought of (prompted by an excellent lecture on Louis Kahn) -- it would be nice to visit:

and Bill Nighy, now performing in The Vertical Hour, a play that seems to be a vehicle for him -- he's all angles, as if he were being played by some cosmic puppeteer.

So the large telephone companies in this country don't want to be commoditized.  To avoid this fate, they're vertically integrating, calling Google names, and claiming that net neutrality opponents want to regulate the internet.  And worse.

Someone should tell them that being a gravel pit can be a great way of life, and can unlock broad economic growth for the rest of us.

Here's a 2006 presentation from Bear Stearns that was sent around recently. The presentation makes the point that last-mile internet access can usefully be compared to water, gas, and electricity -- it's a utility.  It's difficult to replicate, it attracts regulation, and it's essential to ongoing growth.

Being a utility is a good business.  The report notes that "utilities trade at a premium to telecoms" because of their "stable, predictable returns."  And structurally separating last-mile access from retail "services" would unlock great value, according to Bear Stearns, as well as being in a country's national interest.

The OpenNet Initiative says that 30 or more countries are actively engaging in internet censorship now.

According to ONI,

"China has earned the dubious distinction as the world leader in filtering Internet content. The Chinese state-run Internet censoring system is without parallel, both in the technical sophistication of the filtering apparatus and in the breadth of topics subject to blocking."

This PBS posting from last April describes how filtering works in China:

Government filtering occurs at the nine Internet Access Points (IAPs) where China connects to the global Internet. These IAPs provide bandwith to hundreds of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which must register with the state and censor the Web sites on their services. "It's not a single organization building these lists [of blocked addresses, domains and keywords]," says [Nart] Villenueve [Univ. Toronto]. "Each ISP is required to block bad Web sites, but they decide themselves how to implement this requirement."

Cyber cafes are also required to register and monitor users, and citizens with home Internet access must register with local authorities.

Here's a recent story about a Canadian's experience with the Great Firewall.

China is tightening controls on internet news content.  According to ONI:

The three most significant changes implemented in [a recent law] are adding categories of prohibited news Web site content (inciting illegal assemblies or conducting activities on behalf of illegal civil organizations), banning non-government opinion and analysis pieces, and greatly increasing requirements for individuals and small groups posting news.

The two new categories of banned material aim to discourage use of the Internet for political organization and mobilization, which are viewed by the Chinese state as subversive. Thus, for example, the increasing use of mobile phone messaging to organize protests not only violates these new regulations, but also falls under several established categories of prohibited content: harming the interests of the nation, disrupting the solidarity of peoples, and disrupting national policies, at least. Rather than changing the legality of using the Internet for "subversive" organization, these new regulations fortify state control over expression on the Internet and serve as a powerful reminder and warning against using the Internet for purposes the state views as threatening.

Banning non-government news commentary primarily affects major search engines and portals that are licensed to publish governmental news and certain types of approved, independently-gathered news. These sites must now stop posting commentary and analysis --except pieces generated by state news agencies -- effectively limiting Internet news to government-created or sanctioned news.

The blocking of internet sites is a human rights issue, and ONI's information is crucial.

Back in May 2006, you will recall, the FCC issued an order saying that facilities-based broadband Internet access providers and providers of interconnected VoIP services were subject to CALEA.  A legal challenge to FCC's statutory acumen had been filed, but (inexplicably) failed in June 2006.  (FCC apparently read CALEA while standing on its collective head -- many posts on that here.)

The deadline for compliance is May 14, 2007, but no one knows what compliance means.

I've seen messages from the askcalea.net industry forum (access to which is controlled by the FBI) that indicate that some vendors of "trusted third party" compliance services think that all providers have to work through them -- and some think that merely capturing packets and sending them to law enforcement will fulfill the statute's requirements.

Okay, so this may seem like narrow inside baseball, but it's not.  If law enforcement isn't content with a stream of packets, but instead forces small providers and VoIP companies to work through third-party vendors, that's a big cost-shifting exercise.  The big guys are fine with this, I'm sure.  So are the vendors. 

The Act does say that the government is not authorized to require "any specific design of equipment, facilities, services, features, or system configurations to be adopted by any provider ..." and is not authorized "to prohibit the adoption of any equipment, facility, service, or feature by any provider ...".  But it's all up in the air.

Today all of my students (in two classes) simultaneously tried to post to a class wiki.  I think, all in all, things went rather well.  There were a few problems -- someone accidentally put their comment in the navigation bar -- but more comments were posted than not.  So that's a victory.

Next:  commenting and linking!  I'm looking forward to the time when more of my students discover they can comment directly on someone else's post (politely, in italics or different fonts), and that they can link to anything online from the wiki.  And at some point someone will figure out how to reformat the entire thing so that it looks a lot better.  Perhaps someone will want to do a podcast about each class and link to it from the wiki. 

We're on our way.  This is a good moment to point to AboutUs.org and the Wikipedia List of Wikis.

I'm giving a talk in a few months about Internet Governance and Security.  A useful way to organize this topic (with many thanks to Steve Crocker) might be to look at different categories of internet security threats and try to figure out who deals with them. 

The bottom line seems to be (1) that there aren't numbers of governance structures that exist as forums for the discussion of security issues and (2) that most of the money looks backward instead of forward.  (ICANN's role in internet security is very limited -- it works on the DNS and IP address coordination only.  The root list changes on average once every two days, and there are hundreds of copies of it around the world, so it's not a high risk operation.)

There are infrastructure issues -- lines, switches, physical assets.  These are handled pretty well by individual companies who build in redundancy.  When the World Trade Center buildings collapsed, IM conversations around the world continued even though there were plenty of communications lines that were severed.

There are potential issues with hostile acts that cause packets to be deliberately addressed in ways that disrupt the routing fabric of the internet.  There isn't a single natural forum for these issues, as I understand it, but network operators and ISPs around the world worry about routing.  And building into each router authentication methods for all source and destination addresses would add enormous computational weight and delays.  There is likely a role for ISPs to check at the point of entry into their networks whether the source address for a given packet is authentic, but I'm not sure whether that can be more than a suggested best practice.  This should probably be a focus of attention -- but in what forum?

There are issues about denial of service attacks, but it's not clear how to tell a denial of service attack from traffic experienced by a popular web site.  I know CERT is out there, but I don't think it agitates for changes in practices.

So -- what needs to be governed?  There's a vast landscape of interactions out there. ICANN works on a small subset of these interactions, but comes in for a lot of attention because it's the only barn standing in that landscape. When it comes to the "governance" part of this topic, it seems as if there could be encouragement of forums for discussion of particular issues -- like routing -- that don't fall into any natural discussion place. 

The intersection between network neutrality and internet security is interesting.  I think ISPs should be able/encouraged to look for viruses, trojan horses, DDOS attacks, and routing mischief.  Arguably, this kind of inspection is part of transport -- inspecting for "content" isn't. 

But it is true that the distance between content and security can be defined out of existence.  For example, if DOJ feels that in order to achieve true CALEA surveillance capacity it has to work with vertically integrated, constantly-inspecting broadband providers that allow only a subset of "approved services" to cross their networks, I suppose it would oppose network neutrality. That seems like a shortsighted approach to me -- as I've argued in the past, there are much better ways for law enforcement to get the information it needs.

Network neutrality advocates will need to figure out how neutrality intersects with security.  My own view is that there isn't a conflict between these two values.

I'm about to leave Los Angeles and return to New York, hoping to be back in time for breakfast. I can hear the planes outside the window of this hotel.

When I arrived at midnight after the trip out, the car rental place was in complete disarray.  The computers were down.  The people were down.  Nothing was working.  Someone behind the counter decided he wanted to help me, and so he went out into the cold night and proudly brought me this:


I drove away with an (unintentional) screech of wheels.  The next morning, I started my LA driving adventures:  manuvering through terrible traffic, finding freeways, getting lost.  This afternoon I convinced my niece to do the driving for me, which was a huge relief.  She got a big kick out of the car.

It's always sweet and sour to come back here for me.  I went to high school here, but I don't know much about the territory.  I do recognize everything about how it feels to be here, and I always notice the pitiless sun and the solitary palm trees -- and also the sweetness of the air near the beach.  I notice the campiness and the ugliness of things.  It's a harsh place when you visit, and I think it gets easier once you've been here for a while.  I'm from here, but I don't feel a close connection to this place.

I visited the ICANN offices today in Marina del Rey, to meet the new Chief Operating Officer, Doug Brent, and to talk to several people.  ICANN is also "from" here, as a matter of history -- its offices are in the same building as ISI.  Should ICANN always be here?  Does it make sense?  This city is more about media than technology or governance.

But, as I say, it's about time for me to leave, so no grand pronouncements about anything much.  I sadly have to return the car.

In addition to the white spaces and 700 MHz issues I've mentioned recently, there's another spectrum matter that I keep bumping into and wondering about:  M2Z.

This is a bid to offer wireless broadband to all, if the venture can get the spectrum for free:

The company in a filing with FCC says if it was to get the soon to be vacated 2155 MHz to 2175 MHz spectrum for free for 15 years, it would offer universal broadband access nationwide, and in exchange it would hand over 5% of its gross revenues from its premium broadband service. In addition, it will give free 512 kilobits per second wireless access to one and all, which will be supported by advertising.

I can't tell how their petition is being received at the FCC.  For political reasons, they're promising an "automatic, default blocking of access to pornographic, obscene, and/or indecent material" and a secondary network for public safety.  But they're also promising a new nationwide wireless broadband system, and rumor has it that M2Z has $400 million in venture capital to implement their plans. M2Z stands for "move the cost of data transport to zero."

Daily Wireless says that the block of spectrum that M2Z wanted (20MHz of bandwidth) has been taken out of an FCC auction -- because "The FCC has decided that “free” nationwide broadband wireless (and exclusive use) is not an idea whose time has come."  I don't have confirmation of this -- expert advice welcome.

Big day at USC's Annenberg Center today.  Very interesting people -- many projects going on -- very glad I went.