1.  Yesterday I heard a talk by Gunther Teubner.   Teubner is the key person who writes about law and autopoiesis.  Some key snippets from my perspective (paraphrasing mine):

We're always tempted to say that there are democratic deficits everywhere.  We look for delegation and binding to political processes.  But we've gradually exhausted our democratic imagination through all of these experiments.  Maybe we should turn things around and look outwards at social institutions that are not necessarily democratic and yet are making great contributions to the world in their various sectors. . ..

By "self-regulation," I don't mean a closed field that doesn't look at the outside world.  Regulation is only possible when external pressure persuades/moves a system to change its direction.  Regulation only works with inclusion, so law does of course include political processes but re-understands and reconstructs them.

Teubner says that modernity is characterized by a lack of embeddedness/connection to particular nations or regimes.  He's not particularly easy to understand -- this was a very dense talk -- but the links between what he says and the internet are fascinating. 

It may be that we are at an interesting juncture in our history of explanations as to why some people get to tell other people what to do.  Online, there is no sovereign to whom we owe allegiance; things are all very modern in Teubner's terms.  But we still have regimes/systems online that have rules that we pay attention to because we've joined in.  These non-state actors are often given deference in various ways, and could be said to have "constitutions."  All in all, a thought-provoking time with Teubner.

2.  When I was spending time on E911 last year I was very grateful for a 2003 paper [pdf] by Dale Hatfield that explained exactly why 911 was so hard for wireless carriers to implement.  So I was troubled to read last week that the FCC had apparently squashed a 2006 report by Hatfield about more E911 implementation issues.  Here's the squib:

Satellite-based emergency 911 technology often can't pinpoint the location of cellphone users dialing 911 from homes, offices, sports arenas and other indoor locations, a never-released report commissioned by the Federal  Communications Commission concluded last year. More than 60% of wireless usage now takes place inside buildings. The report's author, Dale Hatfield, found that the rush to embrace wireless has only exacerbated the problem with the 911 service designed for mobile phones. So what happened? Hatfield's report says the public never heard about his concerns because the FCC decided to terminate the study a few days later. His report, details of which were presented to FCC staff, was never finished or released. He never presented the report directly to Chairman Kevin Martin or the other commissioners. "(The study) was terminated," says Hatfield, who performed the work on contract.. . . Hatfield says the unpublished report was supposed to be a follow-up to a 2003 report he did for the agency on the same subject.

A Pennsylvania Congressman, Mike Doyle, recently asked the FCC why this happened.  My personal theory is that the Commission doesn't want anyone to know just how hard it is to provide mobile 911 service -- and how much harder it is for VoIP providers to do it.  VoIP providers were given a few months to figure this out, while wireless providers have had a decade or more. [Here's the paper I wrote about all this.] 

Just another day at the FCC.