The FCC report on television violence came out last week. In the words of Commr. Adelstein: "Are we saying 'Law and Order' should be banned during hours when children are watching? It's anyone's guess after reading this."  Good reason story here, Christian Science Monitor story here.

As the stories note, it's an "oddly anachronistic" report, hand-wringing about the effects of TV violence on children in an era in which parents (for whatever reason) don't choose to use the many filtering/managing tools that are available to them.  You might conclude that (1) television's importance is diminishing because there are so many other sources of entertainment available, and (2) parents don't really think that there's a link betwen violent entertainment and violent behavior.  Or don't care. 

The Commission is calling for Congress to "implement a time-channeling solution that would more effectively protect children from violent programming and/or mandate other forms of consumer choice that would better support parents’ efforts to safeguard their children from exposure to violent programming."  But "time-channeling solutions" are content-based regulations that are heavy-handed and thus most likely unconstitutional.  Treating broadcast differently than other forms of media no longer makes sense.  Is broadcast content "uniquely pervasive"? "uniquely accessible to children"? It's certainly not scarce these days.  Pacifica has been an embarrassment from the beginning, and it's not clear that we'll be any less blundering when it comes to violence. 

What's violence, anyway?  I wince at almost everything.  If someone with my sensibilities is put in charge of this operation, we'll be stuck with nothing but Charlotte's Web all day long.  That can't be appropriate. 

Come to think of it, Charlotte's Web is actually pretty painful.  You have to worry about Wilbur being slaughtered the whole way through.  Forget it, it's off the list

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The second Access to Knowledge conference at Yale is going on this weekend.  (Conference site is here.)

Here's the wiki page for the Internationalized Domain Names panel (it has notes on it).  It was a distinguished panel, with Dr. Wei Mao, Ram Mohan, Hong Xue, Peter Yu, and Milton Mueller speaking.

Ram Mohan's talk about the need for a sustainable policy framework for IDNs was particularly interesting (see the wiki for more detail).  He talked about India as a case study -- 22 official languages, newspapers offered in 87 languages, and only one ascii-based DNS.  His view is that adequate technical and protocol standards already exist for IDNs, and that what's incomplete is the policy to govern the rollout of IDNs.  He had several suggestions for what principles should guide that policy, including avoiding user confusion, adopting the UDRP, and consulting with governments.

Hong Xue pointed out that the ICANN Board passed a resolution in Sept. 2000 saying that ICANN "recognizes that it is important that the Internet evolve to be more accessible to those who do not use the ASCII character set."

During yesterday's Ofcom-immersion, it was clear to me that Ed Richards wasn't interested in having some form of government-internet access-involvement story unfold in his country.

Ken Zita of Network Dynamics (who was just terrific) then got up and pointed out that in Asia they are unafraid to talk about telecommunications as part of "industrial policy."  (For me, that phrase connotes smokestacks and Margaret Bourke White photos, so I'd probably say "economic policy.")  For example, Zita continued, in S. Korea the government said where they wanted to go, invested in research and development, [and invested money and made micro loans], and they're now seeing 70% of adults (not just kids) involved in online social networks.  Very high speeds, very low cost.  Hong Kong is also not embarrassed to talk about economic policy and telecom.  Zita noted that opening up spectrum, as Ofcom plans to do, is a traditional telecom regulatory move.

In response, Richards said that, yes, it's true that some countries in Asia have this policy approach to telecommunications, and a couple of countries are doing this in Europe.  [Paraphrasing]:  "It's an overarching political choice.  It's not something we feel is a good idea in the UK."

[Update -- see snarky article here about Ofcom's failures.  Thanks to Dirk van der Woude.]

Today, we're reading that the Indian government "proposes to offer all citizens of India free, high-speed broadband connectivity by 2009."

Well, so far in the US we also haven't linked economic policy explicitly to universal highspeed internet access (although we should), so the best we can do is hope for more enlightened spectrum policy and assume that someone will show up to help.  The Commission is making noises about possibly being interested in "open access" requirements for part of the 700 MHz auction.  (Commr. Copps:  "I .. am pleased that we ask general questions about how the 'open-access' proposals made by some might encourage the development of a sorely-needed wireless 'third pipe' in the broadband market.")

According to Harold Feld, "this condition would prohibit the licensee from engaging in retail wireless service sales (on this spectrum), and require the licensee to lease wholesale spectrum on a non-discriminatory basis.  If adopted, it would make 30 MHz of 'beachfront' spectrum available for lease in every market in the U.S.  This proposal is in addition to the 'Frontline' proposal, which would create a public-private partnership with public safety to make up to 22 MHz of spectrum available under an 'open access' condition, but such commercial use would be 'preemptable' by public safety."

So it's not economic policy, it's tinkering with spectrum policy, but it's better to be asking questions that might make wireless highspeed access a realistic alternative here in the US.

Ed Richards, Chief Executive of Ofcom, was at Columbia today. 

He reminds us that Ofcom was formed in December 2003 "as a response to convergence."  They have authority over broadcasting, telecoms, spectrum management; they also have antitrust authority within those sectors, although Ofcom is "entirely dependent" of the UK government. 

Richards says that 95% of spectrum in the UK has been subject to command and control regulation.  So his vision is to move by 2010 to a "predominantly market-led" scheme to cover 70% of spectrum, "available for use by any technology," and subject only to avoiding harmful interference.  I believe Richards said that Ofcom is encouraging the release of spectrum by law enforcement -- something like a total of 350 MHz below 3GHz.

On net neutrality:  Ofcom sees NN like the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction issue -- when the issue is understood, "we in Europe wonder what the fuss is about."  But Richards does think that every country will have to consider this issue, although outcomes will vary.  He thinks there may be some advantages to consumers in treating different applications differently.  His major point is that he has there is a different view in the UK.  "If you have network operators who are dominant or have market power, charging for prioritization may be anticompetitive, then the regulator should intervene.  But if a network operator has no market power and is charging for prioritization, then it's a different question; their activities shouldn't be automatically construed as anticompetitive or necessarily regulated."

Richards continues, saying that the NN debate does give us insight into importance of disclosure to consumers -- consumers should be able to switch providers, and they should know which ISPs are making prioritization decisions.  This should be an obligation of suppliers to communicate this information to consumers.  In particular, he says that Ofcom is actively exploring whether network operators whose traffic shaping activities change materially should have to tell consumers -- and if these changes are significant consumers should be allowed to break their contracts with the provider without penalty.

Dave Burstein asked a strong question:  BT isn't giving 24 Mbps to anyone (really) -- it's 1 Mbps up and 8 down.  This means that London is behind Paris in terms of broadband.  How do you change that?  Give incentives to BT? but that might be a wasted subsidy.  Or do you provide a stick instead -- the regulator can point out that the existing copper is obsolete and lower the base rate that BT is allowed to charge.

Richards responded (paraphrase):  Yes, your facts are right, but "there will be change".  Why -- because people deserve it? because we're behind Paris?  I hope that we are not as concerned about politicians are about Paris.  I know that broadband is a big yardstick of national machismo, but you have to think about these things carefully.  You shouldn't sell your soul in the short term.  You could end up losing all the longer-term dynamic benefits of competition. True, we may be entering a time when the economies of scale/barriers to entry for new providers are even more profound, but you shouldn't leap ahead with a policy response out of a national sense of pride.

And here's where I heard it all come together. 

Richards said (paraphrase mine):  We won't give network providers money -- instead, we want to let the market make the decision.  Are consumers willing to pay for a higher-speed broadband network?  It has to be be funded by consumers.  I see no case for funding broadband by the government.  A national response of government funding would likely waste taxpayers money, preempt the market, and re-create a state monopoly. So we have to encourage consumers to pay more -- they need to like the service proposition that they get.  This can include content rights, bundles of services, etc.

Someone sent me a copy of Seed magazine today.  I have to say that I'm really grateful -- I'm interested in everything in this May/June 2007 number.  Right at the top of the cover is the headline:  How Complexity Arises.  And, hey, there's a drawing of Lee Smolin on p. 41, and a few words from him about whether the laws of nature evolve: [T]here is never perfection, but always time and change.

But the piece that grabs me is a conversation between David Byrne and Daniel Levitin about music, language, and memory.  Oh, it's great.  Levitin suggests that "music might be evolutionarily older than language."  Byrne talks about the emotional effects he can intentionally pull off when performing.  They both understand that "we use art and music to communicate so many things that language won't."

Musical experiences take us out of ourselves, Levitin says, and induce a state of half sleep, half wakefulness:

We don't really have the ability to explain how it happens or why.  But it does seem to have something to do. . with this balance between seeking order and predictability and violating that order and predictability.  And when you have a complex pattern of rhythm or pitch, which is what music is, you relinquish some of your control.

Someone asked me today to use this post to describe what it's like to play music.  I think David Byrne and Daniel Levitin are better people to ask, by far (so buy the magazine).

The instrument is always greater than you are, and in a sense there's no magic to it -- it seems as if you practice and have the guidance of a good teacher, you'll be a better player. I'm beginning to understand that strength comes from not using that strength, but from instead having an understanding of what you're doing and why, in great (but humble) detail. The Art of Practicing is a good guide to the meditative focus that musicians have. Sometimes I wonder what people do with their time who don't have to practice. 

But the real point is to play with other people.  The best description I've read of what it's like is in An Equal Music by Vikram Seth.  To listen completely to what's going on around you, and to react without time to react, is a tremendous joy.  When things are going well, and real music is emerging, there's a collective neurological cascade that can't be described but certainly exists. 

Right now I'm working with a singer and a pianist on a program of only delightful music.  Not kidding -- a bunch of tangos, little Kreisler pieces, Schubert's Shepherd on the Rock, Mozart and Bach duos, songs by Weill and Faure.  (Not one of these pieces was originally written for the viola, but I am shamelessly, enthusiastically bending them to my will.)  Playing these things with other people, once you're flying along and you've transcended all petty technical difficulties -- such as, for me, what clef I'm playing in -- is pure happiness.  That's what it's like.

Anthony Lewis is here at Cardozo this evening, speaking about whether to protect the confidentiality of the journalist-source relationship by statute. 

He has several core messages.  First, journalists shouldn't always be entitled to this protection.  What if a story has been planted with journalists by secret police or other bad actors?  What if a journalist has defamed someone by passing on the statements of confidential sources?  Should we provide no remedy to those whose reputations are ruined by journalists? Second, who is a journalist?  If there are 40 million bloggers, and they are witnessing the world around us, should they be kept from their citizen-duty of testifying?  Third, can't we trust courts to balance the benefit of the confidential information to society against the harm that would be caused by disclosure of the confidential source?  Lewis is 80 this year, but boy is he acute and well-spoken.  He doesn't think it's possible or appropriate to write a shield law that will work, particularly given that the government will demand a "national security" exception that will have the effect of swallowing the stated rule.  He wants reporters to look to courts for protection of their confidential relationships with sources on a case-by-case basis.

Max Frankel then gets up to respond.  His is the battlefield view.  We live in a garrison state, he says, and we have since the beginning of the Cold War.  Our presidents can classify millions of documents by executive order, and reporters can't work with any of this information unless they can have access to confidential sources.  Of course reporters must write, to protect our nation and reveal the bad acts perpetrated in the name of national security.  They must "publish and be damned."  And if a few prosecutors want to seek disclosure of confidential sources, well, let 'em try.  Reporters should make few promises about confidentiality, but when they make them they must stick to these commitments.  Don't let judges weigh the value of particular snippets of information to the public -- after all, these bits are woven together by reporters to build stories, and it's impossible to say what one disclosure may have contributed to the ecosystem (my word, not his) of a story.

Victor Kovner is next.  He optimistically and with great precision tries to clarify the discussion in a lawyerly way.  Reporters have an absolute privilege in many states not to serve as witnesses.  We have this law on the books in New York, and law enforcement has been able to continue its work.  And reporters have a qualified privilege not to reveal their sources.  This privilege stems from the First Amendment, from statutes in many states, and from the federal common law.   The Department of Justice's own internal guidelines on this subject, written under John Mitchell in the early 1970s, embody this qualified privilege:  only go after a reporter's confidential source when the information is material, when it is closely mapped to the underlying claims, and when there is no other way to obtain it.  ("Materiality, criticality, and exhaustion.") 

Kovner points out that Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald wasn't bound by these DOJ guidelines, and so he went after Matthew Cooper and Judith Miller for their sources.  As it turns out, the quality of their information wouldn't have overcome the qualified privilege, had the privilege been applied (or so Kovner believes).

Kovner finds recent opinions on the subject of the existence of a federal common law qualified privilege by Judge Tatel (DC Cir) (concurring) and Judge Sack (2d Cir) (dissenting) to be particularly well-written.  Counting noses, he's suggesting that there are judges who believe in the existence of this qualified privilege, legislators (at least one former journalist) who understand its importance, and prosecutors who already feel themselves bound by it -- and he even thinks that President Bush wouldn't veto a federal shield bill if it were presented to him.  The law would have to have a national security carveout, he has to concede, but he seems to think that would be better than no law at all.

But, as of the time I had to leave the room, Kovner hadn't explained how we'd decide who is a journalist.  Reporting from Cardozo Law School, I'm...

I remember going to an FTC workshop in November 1999 about "online profiling."  At that workshop, DoubleClick was getting a lot of attention.  People were concerned that DoubleClick was going to combine extensive personal offline information from Abacus (including the catalog-buying habits of tens of millions of households) with its own databases of online profiling information.

It was quite dramatic, as I recall.  Not too many people knew what a "network advertiser" was at that point, and DoubleClick seemed surprised at the focus on its plans.  (People were struggling to understand "cookies.")  I remember thinking that offline direct-mail companies had an awful lot of information to work with and no one ever seemed to tell them what databases they could use.  But I dimly recall that a DoubleClick executive promised at that meeting that they wouldn't merge these offline/online databases.

A while later the Network Advertising Initiative issued self-regulatory principles that required sites using network advertisers (sites allowing third parties to place and read cookies on visitors' hard drives) to disclose that cookies were being used and to make it possible for users to opt out of those third-party ads.

And then, as far as I could tell, the issue went to sleep for a while.  There are always concerns about identity theft, but these concerns aren't linked to online profiling by advertisers.  There are concerns about governmental over-collection of data -- but, again, it's not the private advertisers who are the problem.  Back in 2002 there were concerns about tracking in connection with medical and financial data, but the lawsuits seem to have boiled away. Companies routinely disclosed that third parties were cookie-ing on their sites.  And users got used to targeted ads.

Now, with Google's acquisition of DoubleClick, beaconing and cookie-ing and tracking are newsworthy again.  The Electronic Privacy Information Center has filed a complaint urging the FTC to keep Google from completing the deal. 

Google, for its part, says that it doesn't plan to combine the kind of cross-site information DoubleClick has with its own information.  Google also says that users should have the ability to opt out of cookies.  (EPIC's complaint is that Google matches queries to IP addresses and doesn't allow users to request that this linkage not be made.)  And Google has recently undertaken to anonymize its query data  (by changing some of the bits in the IP addresses and by changing cookie information) after 18-24 months.  (FAQ here.)  Google resisted the DOJ's over-reaching COPA-related query request last year and has joined with other companies in asking for baseline US privacy legislation.

EPIC's complaint doesn't actually say that Google has lied about its practices or that it is violating existing US statutes.  Its complaint is that Google doesn't give adequate notice of its data collection practices (collecting user search terms with IP addresses), but Google's home page is notoriously and intentionally simple.  People interested in finding out what Google is doing can navigate their way to find out.  I remember being presented with a good deal of privacy-related information when I downloaded Google Desktop, and choosing (I believe) not to have it "phone home" to Google. "Fair information practices" and the OECD Privacy Guidelines are not part of US law (yet).

Of course, the legal details don't matter that much here.  Google's services are so popular and it has such a big presence that its acquisition of DoubleClick raises suspicions all on its own.  There's something about cross-site, invisible-to-most-people network advertising that gives people the willies -- even if Google can't access DoubleClick's clients' data. 

This has the feeling of November 1999.  An acquisition of a complementary company in the advertising business -- an event that would go unnoticed in the offline world -- is making people worry about what might happen to the privacy of their machines.  So the lawsuit is being reported on (InformationWeek article here), and we'll probably have several workshops and more legislative efforts.

Another fine report from Pew, this one about teenage online social networking practices.  There's a lot to work with here -- from how many teenage kids are posting online profiles (61%, most of them 16-17, vast majority on MySpace), to how careful they are about how much personal information they post online (more careful than you might think), to how much their parents know about what they're doing.

It's this last point that is particularly encouraging.  The big split in the most recent Supreme Court COPA decision is between Kennedy and Breyer, with Kennedy saying that there are plenty of choices of relatively-effective (and certainly less-restrictive) filtering tools out there for parents to use, and Breyer essentially saying that parents are helpless so mandated shields of various kinds should be put in place to protect kids.   It turns out that, in fact, parents are knowledgeable and are giving advice to their children about what to do online.

In comparison to television and video games, the internet is a much more parent-regulated piece of technology.  Take a look at this:

More than eight in ten parents (85%) of online teens said that they had rules about internet sites their child could or could not visit, and a similar number (85%) said they had established rules about the kinds of personal information their child could share with people they talk to on the internet.

Most kid-used computers are in public places in homes; most parents are checking up on what their kids are doing online; and more than half of parents with online teens use filters.

This is a serious survey -- I hope it comes in handy when COPA comes back around again.

If you want to get access to a Congressional Research Service report, you have to hope that someone has made it available to OpenCRS.  You may be out of luck.  And that's not a good thing.  Or, you may never have heard of OpenCRS, and you'll be missing out.

Here's an op-ed by Ari Schwartz of CDT on the subject.  We -- all of us -- paid for these reports, and they should be freely available online.  (They're often really great reports.)

In a little more than a year, members of the public have downloaded more than 3.5 million CRS reports from OpenCRS.com. Making the full catalog of these reports readily available over the Internet will sate those demands and help produce a better-informed electorate.

I really like the candor of this quote:

The . . . telling defense for the decrepit CRS policy [keeping the reports offline] came from former Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, who was quoted as saying: “Let’s say that I’m working on an issue and I’m trying to look for some research that helps me to get my point across and, all of a sudden, the Congressional Research Service sends me over something and I read it and I say, ‘Oh, no, that’s not going to help.’ Let someone else do the research. Why give your opposition free research?”

Hah.

=== in other news, welcome to the blogosphere, Rob Frieden!

The FCC is asking whether it could be collecting better data on broadband deployment:

Notwithstanding the robust statistics and the more granular broadband data that have been reported on FCC Form 477 beginning September 1, 2005, the Commission continues to consider the need to improve its data collection, particularly regarding data reflecting broadband deployment and availability in rural and other hard-to-serve areas, and also regarding subscribership to new broadband-enabled services such as interconnected VoIP service.

Th Commission has come in for a lot of heat (from the GAO and others) for always having good news on broadband deployment.  Penetration is increasing! because if broadband is somehow available in a zip code, we count everyone in the zip code as covered --no matter how many actual subscriber there are.  We're doing better and better! because we count wireless carriers as an option, even though they're owned by the same old telcos and they're providing very-high-walled gardens.  So now's your chance to help them out in the data collection techniques department.

And why you're at it, you could file comments by May 16 about what's actually going on in the highspeed access world.  Here's the Notice of Inquiry.  Just may take a few years.  But, as I reported a while ago when the Commissioners met to consider this not very dramatic step, they're saying that they have zero evidence that there is any blocking or interference taking place.  Of course, no one really knows, because outside researchers aren't allowed in.  And our expectations are so low, and there are alway a lot of explanations as to why X or Y might be happening.  (E.g., Why couldn't I upload using my Verizon connection last night?  could be something having to do with a hop far away.  Who knows.)

So They Have a Lot of Questions.  Should keep everyone busy for a while.  We can chat about all this with our friends in the U.K.  Meanwhile, in Japan, Korea, Amsterdam, and a host of other places, they've got other things to think about.

I've been asked to write 5-10 pages answering the question "what's broadband good for?"  Although I'm tempted to say "and why do we have light?" I realize that it's meant as a serious question.  So I'll try to frame the answer in a transformative thought-provoking way.  I was going to post a substantial set of paragraphs on this, but I've just had a long session dedicated to uploading new pages to my site (uploading was just not working for me tonight). 

We used to think that the "content" "on" the internet was as diverse as human thought.  (That's a reference to the CDA case, now ten years old.)  Now we know that it's not "content on" - it's "communication using."  In fact, pre-packaged content is lessening in importance.  We're still at the very beginning of all this. The screens we have could still be used in more interesting and complex ways, and higher-speed connections will make that complexity more approachable for everyone.

And we'd like to be able to upload.  More tomorrow.

Two writers told me today that they struggle with attention.  For one of them, it's flitting from subject to subject that's the issue; for the other, email and web searches call beseechingly, constantly.  All of us have trouble focusing our minds on what needs to be done in order to make sustained intellectual progress.  I found the look of recognition that came from their eyes when we talked about attention to be both uplifting and saddening - so they're having trouble too - and I hope we all find moments of peace to contemplate in.  Maybe tomorrow.  There's always (usually) tomorrow.

Tonight was a session at the New School with danah boyd, Ethan Zuckerman, and Trebor Scholz.  I paid attention, unswerving attention, until I became so hungry that I could not pay attention any longer -- but by then, luckily, the session was over and I could go out into the evening.  (It's not just email that gets in the way.)

All three had strong and interesting ideas to put across tonight, and questions to pose.  For danah, the key move was looking away from constant concerns about privacy to focusing on new forms of public life online -- "non-universal" publics that depend on new online architectural realities (persistence, searchability, replicability, invisible audiences).  She points out that "we've got kids written out of public life" offline (it's too dangerous!) and so they're depending on mediated, online spaces to get access to their friends.  We're just at the beginning of these developments, and we have no idea how the properties of online communications will play out over time.  So we should pay attention.

For Trebor (they spoke in alpha order), the key move was the importance of "core site" mediated interactions (10 sites, like sina.com.cn, baidu, MySpace, taking up 40% of traffic) and noticing that a few context-providers are making money off the backs of many many people.  Twelve percent of all US online time is spent on MySpace; 170 million profiles; 85% of all US students are on Facebook.  He wants us to notice that platforms may be supporting particular politics (he's particularly scathing about MySpace) and taking advantage of the information and attention generated by their users.  Trebor asks whether "net publics" should have control over their content and actually share the monetary value generated by it.

Ethan usefully chimed in at this point, noting that he thinks it's fine for businesses to rely on user-generated content -- it costs a lot to run a huge number of servers.  But his talk was mostly about the read-write politics made possible by online interactions, and he wanted to tell us that creative technical things happen in the most repressive regimes.  He pointed out that the famous HRClinton video came three years after a similar video featuring an unelected Tunisian dictator.  But that Tunisian ad was blocked in Tunisia.  But the block was evaded by Tunisian software.  There were lots of stories like this:  Bahrain blocked Google maps because Bahrainians were noticing that they could use some land distribution policies, but then gave up on the blocking because people were evading it.  Twitter can be used to let people know you've been arrested.   Philippine election fraud and corruption became the subject of wildly popular ringtones.  Video can be a tremendous medium for activism.  But the Open Net Initiative map of internet censorship will someday be just like the map of [lack of] press freedom.  We may focus too much on personalities, and not enough on the issues that oppressed Netizens are writing about. 

All three speakers talked about the importance of "media literacy," of figuring out for ourselves what the provenance of online speech is.  And there was a certain amount of back and forth about big corporate online spaces.  Trebor is worried about "investing [his] memories" in those spaces and having that abused (and that none of his students seem one bit worried about this); Ethan and danah point out that no one forces you to use these spaces, that hyperlinks cut across them, that they're convenient, and that people just want to use them to see their friends. 

And then danah made the information overload/attention point that I knew must be coming, because I'd heard so much about attention today (paraphrase mine):  

Maybe we should be asking ourselves when the transparency of public networked space becomes socially disruptive.  There's only so much information you can cope with.  Twitter is complete overload, but I'm glad it's here because it will force us to examine the question of how to deal with it.  I don't have an answer. I'm just thinking "uh-oh".

Micah Sifry has a nice post about plans for Personal Democracy Forum 2007, on May 18.  I wish I could be there, and I'll try to catch up with the talks and panels once it happens.

Harold Feld has a really useful description of what's going on in the 700 MHz auction:  "My Impossibly Long Field Guide for the 700 MHz Auction (It's Really Important, Even If You Haven't Heard About It Much In The Main Stream Media)".

Don't miss Michele McLennan and Tim Porter's post -- it's an excerpt from their new book about how newsrooms have to change.  Letting go, empowering staff, having a vision that gets adequate resources, and changing culture.

And I'm looking forward to hearing danah boyd speak tomorrow (here's a recent video).

Every once in a while I run across an essay that helped inspire Doug Engelbart to work on augmenting human intellect by using computers.  It's called "What Makes a Life Significant," and it's by William James.  Today I read it again.

James's point is that a life has meaning when "inner joy, courage, and endurance are joined with an ideal." 

What's an ideal? "[S]omething intellectually conceived, something of which we are not unconscious, if we have it; and it must carry with it that sort of outlook, uplift, and brightness that go with all intellectual facts."

And there must be novelty in the ideal -- novelty at least to "him whom the ideal grasps."

What's yours?

Here's a snapshot report that tells us how we're doing with IPv4 numbers.  It says we'll run out in 2012 or so.  That's not very far away.

In 2005, the US Office of Management and Budget said [warning, pdf] that businesses should plan to move to IPv6-enabled hardware and software.  But for people who aren't selling to the government, the economic incentive to move to IPv6 isn't great.  (The people who are selling to the government have to move along.)

Because the internet is really all about communication, and because people are going to be using those IPv4 numbers for a verrry looonnng timmmme, everyone's going to need a strategy for communicating with both IPv4 and IPv6.  It's certainly worth discussing the various proposals floating around about how to deal with the exhaustion of IPv4 numbers (here's one). 

From the little I know (and that's very little), it looks as if (1) the "solution" here will be varied, (2) China and DoD will get there first, and (3) it will take a long time to move (if we ever do) to an IPv6 internet.

The only thing that ties this post together is the Washington metro.  I was in DC the last few days and heard Michael Calabrese of the New America Foundation speak at a CITI conference.

Calabrese mentioned a study by Mark McHenry near Dupont Circle (that's the metro stop tie-in) that found that only about 20-40% of the spectrum under 3 GHz (that is, everything from AM radio to microwave devices) was in use at all.  There's a lot of warehousing going on by licensees.

Calabrese also said that there's a tremendous lag time for spectrum policy change.  With the Spectrum Policy Task Force report of 2002, there seemed to be an agreement that deregulation (unlicensing) of some spectrum was a good idea.  That report urged a hybrid approach, but we now seem to have less flexibility than we did before the report was written.  Yes, there are some exceptions, including in the "white spaces" proceeding, perhaps, but more on that later.

Calabrese noted that the FCC keeps taking a property/zoning approach -- "good fences make good neighbors."  What's scarce at this point is government permission for unlicensed uses, because the majority of licensed spectrum is underutilized.  Moreover, user demand and technical capabilities could allow reallocation of spectrum on a second-by-second, opportunistic, dynamic basis.  We could have cognitive radios certified to protect licensed services.  (Here are comments from Dell, Google, HP, Intel, Microsoft, and Philips pointing out that they've given the Commission a low-power prototype device that can sense when a particular channel is in use and that can politely, immediately, deftly vacate that channel.)

Calabrese called for the FCC to open up frequencies that haven't been assigned or aren't in use nationwide.  (There's a lot of this -- see Dupont Circle.)  He said that there are two objections that keep being made to the kind of dynamic frequency selection that he's talking about:  congestion and "letting the genie out of the bottle."  As to congestion, he noted that there's no evidence of "tragedy of the commons" caused by opportunistic spectrum use.  On the contrary -- wifi use has sparked enormous innovation.  We've got 300 million devices sharing what used to be thought of as "junk bands."  We've got 45 million home networks using wifi, and 60% of enterprises and 50% of higher-ed institutions are using it.  We've got rural WISPs using it, using clouds of connectivity to cover their customers.  At the same time, we're wasting a lot of licensed bandwidth that could be used much more efficiently.  If there turns out to be a congestion issue someday, we can use peak pricing to help.  We could be managing all of this much more usefully.

The "genie out of the bottle" complaint, Calabrese says, is the concern that once unlicensed devices move in to spectrum we won't be able to get rid of them.  But we could condition certification of smart radios on their ability to be upgraded remotely.  Technology can fix a lot of problems.

Calabrese was followed by Tom Hazlett, who has different views.  In a nutshell:  the most social value is created by markets that are facilitated by exclusive rights.  "Suboptimal valuation is the real tragedy."

The other DC metro station story I wanted to write about today was this one about Joshua Bell in the L'Enfant Plaza metro.  I hope you'll take a minute to stop and read the story.  It's prompted more than a thousand emails to its author, Gene Weingarten.  It's beautifully done.  I heard about it when I was playing viola quintets with people yesterday morning -- their view was that only about five out of a thousand people these days pay attention to classical music, so of course few people stopped to listen to Bell.  Take a look at the reader comments here.

The Frontline petition filed in the 700 MHz proceeding asks the FCC to (as I understand it) designate a spectrum block of 10 MHz as "open access." 

The E Block licensee would make connections to the network available to any device maker or retail service provider on reasonable commercial terms and may not grant exclusive use to any customer.  Open access requirements would be ensured by the E Block operator making public reasonable application protocol interfaces.

Yesterday, a coalition of public interest advocates asked the Commission (in the same proceeding) to designate 30 MHz of spectrum as "open access."  Three times as much. They also asked for a "service rule for broadband services operating in the 700 MHz band that protects the consumer's right to use any equipment, content, application or service on a non-discriminatory basis without interference from the network provider."  And they encouraged the Commission to not let the incumbents participate in the auction at all (or only through structurally separate affiliates), and to bar warehousing of spectrum.

This set of spectrum issues is shaping up to be fascinating.  The Frontline proposal seems to set the stage for an incremental move towards wireless net neutrality, and the New America-led proposal would open the door still more widely.  And I understand that in the "whitespaces" proceeding, a coalition of high-tech companies (including Dell, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Phillips) have provided a prototype device to the Commission that has advanced spectrum sensing and interference-avoidance features -- in support of the argument that unlicensed devices can "safely" operate in vacant television channels.

Given that a huge amount of spectrum in this country isn't being used at all (even if it has been licensed), there's clearly a need to shake up spectrum policy.  It's going to be a very interesting spring and summer in this area.

Two enjoyable things:  First, Nina Camic's posts from her spring break.  I've never met Nina, but she's a law professor and she gets a lot out of life -- the food! the pictures! the adventures! 

Second: the other night I went to a friend's house and met his ten-year-old son.  The son is absolutely obsessed with Tom Lehrer songs and has memorized a bunch of the lyrics.  And when I was ten I was obsessed with Tom Lehrer songs and memorized a bunch of the lyrics.  Maybe this is just something that happens to people in fifth grade. But I hadn't listened to them since then.  So the son put on a CD and we sang along.  It was revelatory. I now know how much I didn't understand about those songs when I was ten.  I also remembered huge chunks of text - and I don't think I could memorize something with such intensity now.

A third thing:  Jeff Jarvis is on a great roll, getting presidential candidates to interact online:

Here is my invitation to ask any candidate any question. Just record your question and upload it to YouTube (or use QuickCapture) and then tag it PrezConference (just as Biden’s campaign tagged his reply). That way, we’ll see which questions get answered and which don’t along with the answers. The tag makes it a conversation.

Are you following the debate over state franchising?  FreePress is.  And there's a lot going on in many states.  According to today's U.S. Communications Law Bulletin, there are video franchise bills pending or passing all over the place that would take authority away from municipalities and give it to the states -- Ohio, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, Tennessee... Similar measures failed in Utah and Idaho.  Lots of other states involved.

These are shaping up to be titanic battles between the telcos (who want quick and easy access to video subscribers) and cablecos (who got there first).  Here's a good overview of arguments against this kind of measure in Illinois.

Back in the spring of 2003, there was a big push at the state level to get theft-of-service laws passed that made it illegal for customers to attach otherwise-legal devices to cable and telephone networks.  The logic behind this effort was to avoid federal discomfort with broadcast flag rules by getting the same relief from the state.

Same thing here.  If net neutrality is going to tangle up the phone companies' attempts to get relief from state franchising laws at the federal level, they'll get what they need from the states.  The technique seems to work quite well.

I've been working on a brief essay about internet security.  The response to the Feb. 6 DDoS attack on the root servers can provide a useful institutional model for the future. 

No, there wasn't an "official" institution that led the response.  But the root server operators had learned from an earlier attack, and had moved towards anycast operations.  Anycast worked, and users didn't even notice that anything was going on.  While the attack was under way, the operators kept in close touch and coordinated their response with great effectiveness. 

All of the internet governance models we have right now have strengths and weaknesses.  For responses to problems like DDoS attacks, we'd need a forum for discussion that has (1) the non-mandatory merit-based processes of IETF, including real industry involvement leading to substantial market pressure, (2) the globalness of IGF, (3) the agility of a private group, and (4) the clear voice of leadership that can be provided by government involvement.  And we'd need to avoid the problems that all of these fora have.

To prevent future attacks, we'll need to prevent machines from being turned into zombies that can be directed at targets.  That's a big task that requires coordination among many hardware manufacturers and operating system designers.  It can't be mandatory, this coordination, because that won't necessarily lead to the right set of solutions -- but it can be agile, global, and well-led.

OneWebDay 2007 is less than six months away now.  We're working on plans for a worldwide online mosaic that will build throughout the twenty-four hours of September 22, 2007.  You'll be able to see yourself working with others around the world to build something visually arresting and dynamic.

See the OneWebDay video - here on YouTube.

The idea behind OneWebDay (each year on Sept. 22) is to celebrate the way in which the internet has changed lives around the world.  We call it OneWebDay because we think that's a more human name than OneInternetDay, but we understand the difference between the Web and the Internet and we're celebrating the whole ball of wax.

We're encouraging physical events around the world that get people together in public places to celebrate and contribute something online.

If you'd like to volunteer, send an email to volunteer at onewebday.org and we'll get back to you promptly.

I really enjoyed the Google prank today, and CNET did well too.

I spent today in the Lisbon airport, waiting for a flight to take off.  I can see from emails and blog posts that the "what is ICANN?" question is getting some thought, and that's a good sign.  We need to re-examine what the organization is up to and on what basis it should be making decisions about new TLDs.  There's a major process underway to define how we go about opening up new TLDs, as I've mentioned here in the past, and I'm hoping that will suggest an objective way forward that doesn't involve so many Board judgment calls.

In my eight hours in the airport, a lot of different groups of ICANN-meeting people came through the lounge as they waited for their flights.

The ICANN Board voted today 9-5, with Paul Twomey abstaining, to reject a proposal to open .xxx.  This is my statement in connection with that vote.  I found the resolution adopted by the Board (rejecting xxx) both weak and unprincipled.

I am troubled by the path the Board has followed on this issue since I joined the Board in December of 2005.  I would like to make two points.  First, ICANN only creates problems for itself when it acts in an ad hoc fashion in response to political pressures.  Second, ICANN should take itself seriously as a private governance institution with a limited mandate and should resist efforts by governments to veto what it does.

Role of the Board

This decision, whether to admit a particular non-confusing, legal string into the root, is put before the ICANN Board because (1) we purport to speak on behalf of the global internet community and (2) the U.S. Department of Commerce defers to the judgments of that community when deciding what to tell its contractor to add to the authoritative root zone file.

As a Board, we cannot speak as *elected* representatives of the global internet community because we have not allowed elections for Board members.  This application does not present any difficult technical questions, and even if it did we do not as a group claim to have special technical expertise.  So this is not a technical stability and security question.  It seems to me that the only plausible basis on which the Board can answer the question in the negative (“a group of people may *not* operate and use a lawful string of letters as a top level domain”) is to say that the people affected by this decision have a broadly shared agreement that the admission of this string to the root would amount to unjustifiable wrongdoing.  Otherwise, in the absence of technical considerations, the Board has no basis for rejecting this application.

Let me explain.  The most fundamental value of the global internet community is that people who propose to use the internet protocols and infrastructures for otherwise lawful purposes, without threatening the operational stability or security of the internet, should be presumed to be entitled to do so.  In a nutshell, “everything not prohibited is permitted.”  This understanding, this value, has led directly to the striking success of the internet around the world.

ICANN’s role in gTLD policy development is to seek to assess and articulate the broadly shared values of the internet community.  We have very limited authority and we can only speak on behalf of that community.  I am personally not aware that any global consensus against the creation of an .xxx domain exists.  In the absence of such a prohibition, and given our mandate to create TLD competition, we have no authority to block the addition of this TLD to the root. 

It is very clear that we do not have a global shared set of values about content online, save for the global norm against child pornography.  But the global internet community clearly *does* share the core value that no centralized authority should set itself up as the arbiter of what people may do together online, absent a demonstration that most of those affected by the proposed activity agree that it should be banned.

Process

More than three years ago, before I joined the Board, ICANN began a process for new sponsored top level domains.  As I have said on many occasions, I think the idea of “sponsorship” is an empty one.  *All* generic TLDs should be considered “sponsored” in that they should be able to create policies for themselves that are not dictated by ICANN.  The only exceptions to this freedom for every TLD should be, of course, the (very few) global consensus policies that are created through the ICANN forum.  This freedom is shared by the country code TLDs.

Notwithstanding my personal views on the vacuity of the “sponsorship” idea, the fact is that ICANN evaluated the strength of the sponsorship of xxx (the relationship between the applicant and the “community” behind the TLD) and, in my view, concluded that this criteria had been met as of June 2005; ICANN then went on to negotiate specific contractual terms with the applicant.

Since then, real and “astroturf” comments (filed comments claiming to be grassroots opposition that have actually been generated by organized campaigns) have come in to ICANN that reflect opposition to this application.  I do not find these recent comments sufficient to warrant re-visiting the question of the "sponsorship" strength of this TLD which I personally believe to be closed. 

No applicant for any “sponsored” TLD could ever demonstrate unanimous, cheering approval for its application.  We have no metric against which to measure this opposition, and thus we have no idea how significant it is.  We should not be in the business of judging the level of market or community support for a new TLD before the fact.  We will only get in the way of useful innovation if we take the view that every new TLD must prove itself to us before it can be added to the root.

It seems to me that what is meant by “sponsorship” (a notion that I hope we abandon) is to show that there is enough interest in a particular TLD that it will be viable.  We also have the idea that registrants should participate in (and be bound by) the creation of policies for a particular string.  Both of these requirements have been met by this applicant.  There is clearly enough interest (including more than 70,000 pre-registrations from 1,000 or more unique registrants who are members of the adult industry), and the applicant has undertaken to us that it will require adherence to its self-regulatory policies by all of its registrants.  To the extent some of my colleagues on the board believe that ICANN should be in the business of deciding whether a particular TLD makes a valuable contribution to the namespace, I differ with them.  I do not think ICANN is capable of making such a determination.  Indeed, this argument is very much like those made by the pre-divestiture AT&T when it claimed that no “foreign attachments” to its network (like answering machines) should be allowed, in part because AT&T asserted there was no public demand for them.  The rise of the internet was arguably made possible by allowing many “foreign attachments” to the network – called modems.

We established a process for sTLDs some time ago.  We have taken this applicant through this process.  We now appear to be changing the process.  We should not act in this fashion.

Politics

Discomfort with this application may have been sparked anew by (1) the letter from individual GAC members Janis Karklins and Sharil Tarmizi (to which Amb. Karklins has told us the GAC acceded as a whole by its silence), and (2) the letter from the Australian government.

I am not at all opposed to receiving advice from the Government Advisory Committee.  But the entire point of ICANN’s creation was to avoid the operation of chokepoint content control over the domain name system by individual or collective governments.  The idea was that the US would serve as a good steward for other governmental concerns by staying in the background and overseeing ICANN’s activities, but not engaging in content-related control.  Australia’s letter, and concerns expressed in the past by Brazil and other countries about xxx, are explicitly content-based and thus inappropriate, in my view.

If, after creation of an xxx TLD, certain governments of the world want to ensure that their citizens do not see xxx content, it is within their prerogative as sovereigns to instruct internet access providers physically located within their territory to block such content.  Also, if certain governments want to ensure that *all* adult content providers with a physical presence in their country register exclusively within xxx, that is their prerogative as well.  (I note that such a requirement in the U.S. would violate the First Amendment to our Constitution.)  But this content-related censorship should not be ICANN’s concern, and ICANN should not allow itself to be used as a private lever for government chokepoint content control by making up reasons to avoid the creation of such a TLD in the first place.  To the extent there are public policy concerns with this TLD, they can be dealt with through local law.  Registration in (or visitation of) domains in this TLD is purely voluntary.

If ICANN were to base its decisions on the views of the Australian (or US, or Brazilian) government, ICANN would have compromised away its very reason for existence as a private non-governmental governance institution.    

Conclusion

I continue to be dissatisfied with elements of the proposed xxx contract, including but not limited to the “rapid takedown” provision of Appendix S,[1] which is manifestly designed to placate trademark owners and ignores the many due process concerns that have been expressed about the existing UDRP.  I am confident that if I had a staff or enough time I could find many things to carp about in this draft contract.  But I am certain that if I complained about these terms my concerns would be used to justify derailing this application for political reasons. I plan, therefore, to turn my attention to the new gTLD process that was promised for January 2007 (a promise that has not been kept) in hopes that we will someday have a standard contract and objective process that can help ICANN avoid engaging in unjustifiable ad hoc actions.  We should be examining generic TLD applicants on the basis of their technical and financial strength, and we should avoid dealing with “content” concerns to the maximum extent possible. We should be opening up new TLDs.  I hope we will find a way to achieve such a sound process in short order.

Today's overarching issue: how ICANN educates and communicates.  The organization had trouble telling people that new top level domains had been opened up (like .museum and .info) and so for years some web sites and applications that asked for email addresses rejected any TLD that wasn't com/net/org or a recognized country code.

Today during the public forum we heard from a lot of people who want better education/communication efforts.  Registrants need to know about the risks of registering a domain name and not keeping their information up to date with a registrar -- and might need to understand how the system works and what they're really getting when they register a name.  Hardware manufacturers might want to know about IPv6 and that they'd save effort/money by dealing with it now rather than waiting for later.  Users might want to know about IDN and what it means.  IANA might want to find a way to describe what it does so that people don't send them 13,000 emails a month complaining about things that IANA doesn't do.

Oh, and we also discussed .xxx.  More about that tomorrow.

The room wasn't actually buzzing with energy (in fact you'd have to say it was near empty), but there was a big governance biological petri dish moment today:  the ICANN experiment may become a private international organization, based in the US.  There are lots of steps between here and there, but it's starting.

Needed:  much more detail about accountability -- without the backstop of the USG and litigation pressures, and with no ability to remove Board members or GNSO Council members, who's going to tell ICANN when they've overstepped in some way?

Most of the public forum this morning at the ICANN Lisbon meeting was taken up with presentations about what ICANN is doing:  the President's Report [not yet available online], the report on the organizational plan, reports about the new web site [coming soon] and the new public participation site.  The increased transparency efforts are very good indeed. [Joichi Ito is taking pictures.]

There was a discussion about the RegisterFly situation -- again, very good communications at this meeting, with a fact sheet available, and an experienced group of commentators available to speak from the stage (from the At Large Advisory Committee, the registrars, and the Security & Stability Advisory Committee, among others).

Now we're in a public forum about new top-level domains, and Bruce Tonkin is pointing out that "natural persons no longer necessarily associate themselves with countries, but with international communities of interest."

Well, today for me began with an early morning committee meeting, then moved into a "welcome to ICANN" panel, and now I'm in a Board meeting that will last all afternoon. 

The "welcome to ICANN" session, ably led by Paul Levins, had some interesting moments.  The chair-elect of the Governmental Advisory Committee, Amb. Janis Karklins, in answer to a question about why some GAC meetings are closed to the public, indicated pretty firmly that he was working on opening up those sessions.  That's good news.

"Top level domains" are things like .com, .net, .de.  Historically, we haven't had very many of them, and the process for creating new non-country-code domains (.de and .fr are country codes) has been slow and often inexplicable from the outside.

The policy advice arm of the generic top level domain world within ICANN is called the Generic Names Supporting Organization.  (Generics are domains other than country codes, in general.  Generically.)  That group has a leadership council called the GNSO Council.

The GNSO Council is right now working on a set of policy recommendations about how to create new top level domains in a standard way.  As you might imagine, there are many questions being raised about how to resolve conflicts among applicants and what strings (sets of letters and numbers) should be considered acceptable -- also which strings should be "reserved" (made unavailable for various reasons).  ICANN's current draft operating plan puts aside more than a million dollars for this process.

The same communications principles/decisions keep coming up as part of this discussion.  What is ICANN's role?  Are new TLDs (that's the lingo) like spectrum allocation decisions (traditionally viewed as public resource management, in which the licensee takes on public trustee obligations) or like potential new newspapers (traditionally viewed as private actors subject to no particular licensing regime other than compliance with applicable law)?

My view is somewhere in the middle.  I think that the scarcity we now have in gTLDs has been entirely artificially created, and that it should be possible to have many more of them -- subject to the resource constraints of making sure that the applicants are technically and financially viable.  These resource constraints might require creation of a limited number of TLDs each year.  It's fine with me to have some kind of minimal "objections" regime to show whether there is some global consensus against the creation of a new string.  But in the absence of such a consensus, I'm not sure that ICANN has any particular legitimacy to serve as a gatekeeper for the content of particular strings.

I'm also not sure that the demand to create these things is limitless, and I think given the important roles played by search engines people will run out of energy to invest in a new TLD.  People "find" things online without searching for particular strings in their browsers -- instead, they search for names inside search engines. But for the moment, there are applicants who want to run new TLDs and they should have a predictable process to go through.  Once they're created, they'll need to be subject to global consensus policies about stability etc.

If you have any interest in this subject, follow the links above and you'll see where the GNSO is.

==update:  and there's a public forum on this topic on Monday here in Lisbon, from 2pm to 4pm (five hours ahead of NYC).  It will be webcast and you'll be able to send in comments before and during the forum.

Three years ago, EFF proposed a voluntary collective licensing system.  (The Progress and Freedom Foundation didn't like it.)  People who download music won't have to pay, but if they do pay some small monthly amount ($5), they'll be immune from infringement actions.  The fee will be bundled into monthly access bills, and you'll scarcely notice it.  If you're caught not paying, then you'll have to pay up.

This was/is similar to the fine work of Terry Fisher in Promises to Keep, first talked about several years ago. 

Both EFF and Fisher have some mileage to cover:  how to get all the music companies to sign up to a single collective rights society for online downloads, how to get the charges flowing, how to get the payments flowing back to labels (and maybe to artists, but we all know that labels get the royalties).

But it's clearly the answer, and we'll get there eventually.  Just a lot of mudslinging between here and there.  I realize that it isn't terribly bloggy to write about something that EFF and Fisher have been talking about for years, but it seems like a good moment to bring it up -- what with all the lawsuits these days.  Now that it's clear that other recording industry efforts just aren't working (WSJ headline:  Sales of Music, Long in Decline, Plunge Sharply), maybe collective licensing will start to look like a better idea.

===

Speaking of mudslinging, I'm in Lisbon for the next ICANN meeting.  A huge list of issues:

Board decision on .xxx

DNS Root server attack

Management Operating Principles on Transparency and Accountability

MOU signings with new Regional At Large Organizations

President’s Strategy Committee final report

WHOIS data

Registerfly accreditation termination and broader discussion of accreditation processes

IDN laboratory testing and next steps

ICANN Operating Plan discussion

I'll try to keep up with things here, but check all of those more-open-these-days ICANN sites and blogs for information.