Back in March 2004, the FCC issued a remarkable piece of paper -- an "IP-Enabled Services" notice of proposed rulemaking.  Someone sidled up to me and said, "it's all over!  This is Computer Four! The FCC is in charge!"

In a nutshell, the March 2004 notice suggested that the FCC believed it had jurisdiction over "IP-enabled services" (that is, anything using the Internet Protocol) under its "ancillary" powers in Title I of the 1996 Act.  (Translation:  even though the statute giving the FCC its power doesn't say anything about the internet, the FCC believes that it has authority to make rules about "services" that use IP.  It gets this authority, it believes, from a little line in the first, general Title of the Act that gives it "necessary and proper" internal housekeeping rulemaking authority.  So we're into a standardless, undefined area -- all the other Titles are quite specific.  So far no one is stopping the FCC and the Supreme Court BrandX opinion defers to the FCC's interpretation of its authority.  But I digress).

This was a dramatic statement.  The Domain Name System depends on IP.  All web sites depend on IP.  Email.  You name it.  The FCC said it was thinking about what "social policies" to apply to these "services."

Since then, we've seen several moves to apply particular "social policies" to, in particular, "interconnected VoIP" services and highspeed internet access providers.  The FCC has said that it can broaden what "interconnected VoIP" means, but for the moment it means voice applications that are capable of connecting to the traditional phone system (even if they don't actually connect).  It's a sort of "fruit of the poisoned tree" move -- as soon as some part of an application or suite of applications is capable of connecting, the whole thing/company has to be compliant.

The first three "social policies" have been E911, CALEA, and Universal Service funding.  Each is a story of its own.  (The CALEA story had a another milestone moment a couple of weeks ago when law enforcement filed a petition for an expedited rulemaking essentially saying that the wireless packet data they get is inadequate under CALEA -- they want more precise data.  This has potential design implications for any nascent service.) 

I've heard that today the Commission adopted a fourth "social policy" for "interconnected VoIP":  accessibility compliance under Sec. 255.  We'll see what the requirements are -- right now there's nothing on the FCC site.

So Twitter is too much and LinkedIn seems increasingly impersonal.  But Dopplr -- just right, at least for now.  I like the little thumbnails of people, I like that I can see who's in the town I'm in, and I like the simplicity.  Not a lot of bells, whistles, and meta-bettah-information - at least for now.  It's like...a calling card system for people who move around a lot. 

Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the practice of calling and leaving cards.  I know about it only from my (now late) grandmother and from a 1920s etiquette book that I bought at a garage sale once.  Basically, the idea was that people established At Home afternoons when they were available for calls.  But you would only call on people you already knew.  And the first time around, you would do no more than leave your card - then the recipient would decide whether to return or acknowledge your call.  Complicated - sometimes the cards would have corners turned up to signal particular messages.

So you start in Dopplr by being invited (just ask, lots of invitations floating around).  Then you ask other people if they want to be fellow travellers of yours.  Then they can see your trips, but they can decide in turn if they want to allow you to see theirs.  Just like the card system -- polite, signals sent and received, levels of acquaintance decided on -- but faster and spanning the globe. 

The visit that follows the signal - that's the interesting part across which a discreet veil will be drawn.

Many many comments filed here.  And the Commission is asking for comments in response to Google's question:  "Do the Commission’s existing rules governing commercial spectrum in the 700 MHz Band already allow licensees to utilize 'dynamic auction mechanisms,' such as real-time auctions and per-device registration fees"?

It's a big story, and I'll be blogging about it - lots of drama.

But my favorite story today (still catching up with email and news) was about lunch delivery in Mumbai:

The precision and efficiency of the dabbawallas have been likened to the Internet, where packets identified by unique markers are ferried to their destination by means of a complex network.

“There is a service called FedEx that is similar to ours — but they don’t deliver lunch,” said one dabbawalla, Dhondu Kondaji Chowdhury.

I've been in yet another meeting for the last couple of days, and that's IT.  Back on the blog on May 29.

So this afternoon my charge is to lay out all the NN issues to a bar association that doesn't have a telecom subcommittee.  Writing it all down took a while this morning.  It's a hard story to make simple.

Cringely says that "In the end the ISPs [network providers] are going to win this [network neutrality] battle, you know. The only thing that will keep them from doing that is competition, something it is difficult to see coming along anytime soon, rather like [a] lemonade-powered sports car."  He points out that cable systems can easily prioritize things if they see congestion, and that traffic shaping has the same effect as discrimination. (Not that we have any real data about shaping inside these private networks.)

So will we see competition?  I'm going to say that the spectrum auction later this year is raising hopes of that.  (Good Wired story here.)

Meanwhile, the 9th Circuit casts asparagus on sites that encourage people to fill out forms -- Section 230 immunity is at stake. (Eric Goldman roundup.)  It's an odd case.  I wonder whether the big online companies will appeal.  I hope they will.  This is potentially a bipartisan issue that the current Court might treat fairly.

I'm not planning to turn this blog into a travelogue, and the truth is that my journeys aren't as exciting as, say, Joi's or Nina's. 

But the people I've met in Cincinnati have been very kind, and I'm staying at a great old steamship of a hotel:


Tomorrow we astonish the Ohio State Bar Association with a passionate yet well-informed debate about net neutrality.  We're up against "How To Use Casemaker," so the competition is tough.  ("Your Source for Online Legal Research.")

I'll try to give the briefest, most persuasive answer I can to the question "Why is Net Neutrality Important?" Plus I've been called on to give the neutral professorial background segment.  It's a two hour debate.  By the end of it both teams should be able easily to switch sides.  I'm pretty sure it will be available online eventually.

Long days of reading about spectrum policy, and, in particular, the big auction of "beachfront" spectrum coming up later this year. 

Why can't some of this spectrum be left unlicensed?  Yes, we've seen great growth and ingenuity spurred on by having unlicensed spectrum being made available.  But Congress has said that the "commercial use" part of this spectrum has to be assigned through competitive bidding, and that means auctions and licenses.  The Commission believes that competitive bidding and auctions will "ensure[] that spectrum licenses are assigned to those who place the highest value on the resource and will be suited to put the licenses to their most efficient use."  Even though we have no idea, really, whether licensing is more efficient or more valuable to society than letting this spectrum be used by unlicensed devices.

How will this auction affect whether DSL/cable providers are subject to competition from wireless broadband providers?  Unclear.  The Frontline proposal is remarkably audacious.  Create a new nationwide block license.  Extend the license for 15 years, not just ten.  Require whoever bids for it to pay cash up front (billions) in order to win.  Require whoever bids for it to have a business plan that will involve building (at no cost to the public) a free public safety highspeed network.   Use of the new nationwide license will be preemptible by public safety emergency needs.  It's a pretty elaborate plan that might result in making available a new wholesale source of highspeed access with some watery neutrality.  But is it a giveaway to a former government employee -- will the rules be written so that only Frontline can win?  Does it make sense?  I have a lot to learn about this.

In the meantime, I've had two days of San Francisco light and fog, all for spectrum reading.

I'm locked away in a conference room at the Googleplex.  There was a tour before we started -- it was essentially mostly about food.  Free food.  Bagels, blood oranges, organic snacks, endless food.  A great deal of playfulness - perhaps Google has hired playfulness consultants.

So this week will end on a brief blogging note.  Rest assured that I am getting plenty to eat.

Have you visited the Internet Archive lately?  It's officially (as of this month) a library.  Coming soon: a tool that will make it really easy to upload videos and mark them with tags.  Now, you've heard of this already -- there are several commercial applications that do this.  But the Internet Archive is dedicated to archiving and preserving web content:

The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet - a new medium with major historical significance - and other "born-digital" materials from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, we are working to preserve a record for generations to come.

I visited the Internet Archive building in San Francisco today.  It looks as if the Internet Archive and OneWebDay will be collaborating, and I couldn't be happier about that.

One project that needs doing, and needs leadership and prodding:  interviews with people about their early web involvement and memories.  The Archive has a nice Computers and Technology video area, but a much more substantial project would be to have citizen journalists out there recording interviews and making the raw footage available to everyone via the Archive.  This may be a OneWebDay project in the making -- if you'd like to volunteer to work on this, the barriers to entry are vanishingly low.

The last in the series. "What is broadband good for?"

For

“For” can be understood as both a utilitarian word (“for what purpose is X used?”) and a pointer to a beneficiary (“for whom the bell tolls”).  Here is a moment at which I think  “for” could bravely choose one of these purposes. 

“For” in its utilitarian sense is tied to “what,” providing a kind of bookend service-oriented function within our little phrase.  What’s it good for?  What content-delivery supply-chain usefulness is broadband providing?  We are devoted to coming full circle, as human beings.  Repetition is the way we know things are reaching an end, and we long for resolution of difficult moments.  If we take this approach, “for” is just another instance of choosing online services and billing for them, rounding out “what” and “broadband” with a comfortably related “for.”  I think this use of “for” is selling “for” short. 

Of course, “for” is short.  But let us press on.

“For” could instead be used here in a higher-minded, more optimistic, more socially-responsible way.  Why wouldn’t we want to push “for” higher up the great chain of meaning?  Who are we to hold “for” back?

So here is my brief conclusion.  Internet access is “for” our collective economic and social future.  We are the beneficiaries, as are the generations who will follow us.  We can’t predict it, we can’t control it, but we can try to make it as interesting and complex as possible.  It’s “for” us.

==

Comcast CEO Shows Off Super Quick Modem.

DOCSIS 3.0, from Wikipedia.

"I wonder if Comcast will still have their blistering fast 376kbps upload speed when they increase the download speed."  Comment on Engadget entry.

Last week, the Susan Crawford blog featured a slow, close reading of the question/phrase "What is Broadband Good For."  We only got through "broadband" - that's the geologic pace of this blog.

Twice in the last week I've been presented with a lunch menu at a fancy midtown club that has the following entry as one of the choices for red wines by the glass.  I am not making this up (as Dave Barry would say):

Chateau Routas, Internet, 2004.

So, if the internet can bring forth a great glass of wine, surely it's good for other things as well.

Good

Communications policy suffers from a certain perspective-blindness.  Our tangles with line-drawing between “information services” and “telecommunications services” are embarrassing, because for anyone other than a communications lawyer these distinctions make no sense.  From a user’s perspective, cable modem access to the internet is transport. Just like a DSL connection to the internet is transport.  Users don’t care about the materials that are involved in transporting their communications. 

“Good” suffers from this same potential perspective-blindness.  Good for whom?  Who decides what’s good?  Good compared to what alternative state of the world?  The use of “good” is as weighted in its policy implications as “broadband,” and carries with it a large number of questions. Even without a clear goal, the regulatory actions we take affect outcomes and create controversies about which economic and social benefits should be preferred or can be attained.  We are stumbling forward, tinkering blindly with the greatest value-creation system we have ever seen.

Our national internet access policy suffers from a lack of a principled theory of “the good.”  Other countries are doing better at this.  In many Northern European countries, and in Asia, they’ve decided what’s “good” about internet access.  They understand that choices made by government to stimulate the production of new ideas can have an significant effect on economic growth, and they have explicitly linked communications infrastructure and internet access to economic policy:  better infrastructure leads to more new ideas, new ideas lead to a more flexible labor market, more flexible labor market and the ability of new businesses to operate at scale lead to economic growth.  Other countries are making these explicit, national, public choices to support national internet infrastructure in a variety of ways. 

We need a theory of "the good."  Mine is that "more, faster, open internet access is better for everyone."  Whether spectrum should be "licensed" at all is a fiercely-contested question.  We can’t predict what business sectors will flourish and which will die as a result of this policy, and that’s as it should be.  No one is guaranteed a return on their investment in this life.  We need a national social policy for internet access that takes the country as a whole and tries to do better for all of us, rather than for the few companies that currently control internet access.

[Disclosure:  I'm connected to David Weinberger through a web of mutual interests and conference-attendance.  I read his blog.  David is a member of the OneWebDay board.]

This is a book that was written to be blogged about.  (Other blog entries are here.)  I'm confident its author, David Weinberger, often thought to himself "So why am I writing a book if the world I’m writing about exists online?"  So let me rush to assure him that I am glad he wrote this book.  We still need books, which give us sustained single voices talking to us and can be conveniently carried around so as to be read on quiet trains or in quiet rooms.  It may be an old-fashioned medium, a book, but this one is written humbly and with no great claims to authoritative “last word” status.  And it’s good.

This lovely book was written to be taken apart – in a good way.  It asks us to reflect on how the great worlds of knowledge and authority have been changed beyond recognition by the advent of the internet.

In my view, which is only one of the thousands of views about this book (and that’s the way it should be), I think this book was written to bridge gaps between the people that are baffled by the web and the people that aren’t.  The people that aren’t may find instant anachronisms – mentioning X new business when X is already merged into Y, how slow! and why on earth didn’t he write about Z? – but the people that are baffled (even a little baffled) will need to sit back in their collective chairs and consider.  

Weinberger has written (or, at least, I think he has written – he may differ) about the distinction between information and knowledge, and between knowledge and authority.  And he’s letting us know that online groups of various kinds, consciously and unconsciously, without necessarily having any direction, are rewriting these distinctions and restating how they work.  Finally, he’s telling us that this is a great and joyous development.

Many wiser minds than mine have written about these distinctions.  Now, these distinctions fall apart at their margins, like the differences between atoms and bits.  You could say that a map is “information” and the best route between Boston and New York is “knowledge” – but as Weinberger makes clear, the map itself represents a judgment about what’s important to its particular audience.  But leaving that alone, we could say that we know the difference between information and knowledge.  We could bluntly say that information is unprocessed – a train schedule, a laundry list.  Some mind or machine processes that information in some way, by pointing to it or using it somehow, and metainformation (compressed, useful, expressive, having quality) emerges.  Metainformation, in turn, can be processed by human minds in ways that causes knowledge to emerge.  No sharp lines here, just sharpening and turning and pattern-revealing.  At some point, who knows when, knowledge can emerge as authoritative, relied on by others, agreed-to.  (My cousin Benjamin Reeve has written about “metainformational depth” and the quality that attaches to metainformation.)

What’s amazing about the online world, what makes Weinberger need to write this book, is that it enables everyone to participate in these emergent processes.  We could look at the amount of information available online and just shudder.  (My mother does this when she’s thinking about arranging for a stay in a hotel across the country.  Hi, Mom!)  Or we could say bravely that the ability to tag and disaggregate and reaggregate splinters of digital information in ways that we find sympathetic is an extraordinarily powerful skill that we are just beginning to learn.  It’s not so much that everything is miscellaneous but that nothing need be.  Shards of information are forever being gathered online, creating individual “knowledge” that is revelatory.  Weinberger finds music in the spaces between the notes, in the intersections and gaps and collections that make up online group-created knowledge.

In The Machine Stops, a short story by E.M. Forster that I keep pointing to across the years, the main character takes a journey across the physical world to visit her son.  They have been joined only by electronic communications for a long time.  She is unaccustomed to movement, and trembles when she climbs aboard the almost-empty airship – people have stopped traveling.  She thinks that only the machine, a very centrally-run machine, can give her new ideas, and she has begun to worship it.  When the airship is above the Greek islands she draws the shade closed, afraid of the sun, and says to herself, “No ideas here.”

Weinberger turns this vision inside out.  The internet is not the machine that Forster was afraid of.  Instead, because anyone can publish and link and annotate, and no one is in charge, the internet can reveal the wealth of ideas and interactions that we could only approximate in the past by musing about ancient Greece.  It isn’t visible, this emergent miscellany-knowledge, you can’t see the boundaries of the islands, but it’s amazing nonetheless.  We needn’t worship the machine, because there isn’t really “a machine” – just a sea of all-of-us in which meaning is constantly emerging.  Here’s a lovely moment towards the end of Weinberger’s new book:


So thanks to David Weinberger for writing this book. Small Pieces Loosely Joined (also written by Weinberger) was a very important book for me because it made me think about the web as a cultural construct rather than a curiousity.  I’m glad he wrote this one, and I treasure its expression of emergent discovery.

We still have some key words left in "what is broadband good for" -- both the "good" and the "for" are ahead of us.  But it's time for a break.

I've been taking breaks offline on weekends recently, and I recommend it.   I find it's really hard to make any sustained progress in writing or reading if I'm wondering who's sending me the next email.  (Not that my email traffic is that great - there's a lot of listmail and a lot of news.)  In fact, I can't write these days unless I intentionally isolate myself from online access. 

What's up with that?  I keep writing about how great it is, how productivity-enhancing and empowering and all-around helpful the internet is, but I can't write anything longer than a few paragraphs when I'm online.  I bet many people who check by this blog have the same problem. 

There are some architectural fixes for this.  There's a physical switch on the machine that prevents it from picking up wifi signals.  There's a chair in my office, a big, comfortable chair, that isn't anywhere near either a wireless signal or an ethernet connection.  There are libraries and benches that don't have access.  I need these architectural limitations.  It's a challenge to settle my mind down and concentrate.

And increasingly I need a day or two off each week to take a breath and reflect, both offline and online.  I'm a mix of the very old-fashioned and the very-electronically driven.  I spend hours working on playing an instrument whose sounds can be synthesized perfectly by Ray Kurzweil's machines.  So tomorrow and Sunday I'll take a break, and I'll be back here on Monday.

Before we continue the What is Broadband Good For serialization, a big cheer for Rick Whitt!  And thanks to Gordon Cook and his list for pointing to the article.  Another big cheer for David Weinberger and his new book, Everything is Miscellaneous, reviewed here beautifully by Cory Doctorow.  Small Pieces Loosely Joined is one of my favorite books of all time, and Everything is Miscellaneous will join that short list.

Broadband

We have reached the middle word, the heart of the matter.  I remember seeing Yehudi Menuhin run a master class about the Bach Chaconne once, with a white linen Indian overshirt over his tuxedo pants.  He played the piece for the students, and suddenly stopped to bow deeply.  He said that he bowed at that point because it was the exact middle of this great piece, and he wanted to show respect.

“Broadband” is both central to this essay and a loaded word.  It is used to draw a distinction between slow and fast speeds, and it implies speed – but this word does much more work than that.  To talk about “broadband” means that you either (1) understand “the internet” to be, essentially, the connections we use to access it or (2) that you’re not thinking about “the internet” at all but rather about some speeded, managed “service” that happens to use the Internet Protocol.

What is the internet?  Again, this is a mindset question.  To the engineers, the internet is a logical architecture, an agreement to chunk data into packets and send them on their individually-routed ways to their individually-numbered destinations.  To netheads, the internet is both the logical architecture (the standards) and the relationships that that architecture makes possible; these relationships, pulled together by interest and accident and characterized by shifting boundaries and unpredictable dynamics, are what is so attractive about the internet.. To the telecommunications companies, the internet is the collection of three physical transport links (last mile, middle mile, backbone) and nothing more.  To equate “the internet” with “broadband” is to give all prominence to the importance of last-mile speed, and to fall into the traditional telecommunications way of seeing the world.  This equation of “internet” with “broadband” subtly ends all discussion and focuses us only on the incentives the telecommunications companies say they need to build out these last miles.

It may be, however, that this use of the word “broadband” isn’t about “the internet” at all, but instead about a very special purpose use of IP:  the managed last mile.  (Bob Frankston often talks about this.) IP was of course designed to handle “video” in the same way that it manages “voice” and “data,” as undifferentiated packets with no guarantees.  The idea was that the ends of the network would take care of the guaranteeing.  This works rather well.  It leaves a lot of room for reinvention and new opportunities to be new. 

The managed last mile, by contrast, is potentially indistinguishable from a cable system with a cellphone overlay, optimized on billing and bundling.  I realize that Verizon and AT&T have different plans for our “broadband” future, but this use of “broadband” is what may be meant by AT&T’s “Your World Delivered” and Verizon’s “Our People.  Our Network” slogans.  It’s our network, we manage it, and we’re going to deliver content to you.  You’ll be passive, you won’t need to upload, we’ll take care of all of this for you and you’ll be happy. 

If I can convey only one idea in this short study of this short phrase, it is this:  the use of “broadband” as the portmanteau term for online communications has significant connotations.   The train left the station carrying this word long ago; the OECD studies “broadband” penetration, not “highspeed internet access” penetration, the President calls for “broadband” by 2007, and the Progress and Freedom Foundation identifies “many signs that the U.S. broadband market is showing healthy growth” – including the new “mobile wireless broadband” platforms.  If there is anything that isn’t highspeed internet access, it’s mobile wireless as it is now in this country. 

Even though the word “broadband” is in wide use, we should try to be candid about what it means, and careful to make sure that its differences from “the internet” are understood.  At the least, we should understand how the intentional use of “broadband” affects central communications policy debates.

We're moving on from yesterday's "What" to today's "Is."  But we will also have to think about Obama/MySpace, and there's a tie-in ahead.

What is broadband good for?

Is

After a few earnest paragraphs [see yesterday's very serious "What" discussion], it is always a good idea to take a break.  “That depends on the meaning of ‘is,’” we can all say at this point.  This is also a good tie-in to the Casanova theme with which I shamelessly tried to grab your attention at the beginning. 

There is something serious to say about “is,” though.  To think that what we are doing online now is somehow predictive of what we will be doing is another example of the human wish to categorize and clump.  It implies that we can measure and assess online activity in some helpful way now that should drive telecommunications policy for the future. 

With just ten years of experience with a user-friendly graphics-rendering browser behind us, and just ten years of the commercial internet under our belts, it seems naive to think that we have any idea what will happen next.  Many online eruptions are entirely unanticipated.  Who knew that classified ads would be destroyed, that we would all stop using phone books, that online presence-detection would become a nuanced, informational thing, that tens of millions of people would start publishing details about their lives online, and that IBM would be trying to make a business model out of Second Life?  Maybe all of you did.  If so, congratulations.  It’s safe to say, though, that a few other people didn’t.

=====and speaking of online eruptions, many thanks to Micah Sifry for carefully reporting on the Obama/MySpace volunteer story.  What a story!  Here's more from Micah.

Who would have thought that campaigns would feel the need to take over MySpace sub-areas?  I agree with Micah that the Obama campaign fumbled this one.  Anthony worked on this fan site for 2.5 years and the work got to be overwhelming.  He was asked to name his price and he did.  But the campaign decided that control was the better way to go. 

"Is" is changing daily, and our candidates aren't quite as dynamic as they should be - in all senses of that word.  I hope they get there.

What is Broadband Good For, someone asked me. 

In “Casanova in Bolzano,” a novel by Sandor Marai, an aging but powerful nobleman comes to pay a call on Casanova.  The nobleman has intercepted a letter written by his young and beautiful wife to the famous womanizer, and has come to convey a warning to Casanova.  But before he delivers the warning, he does a close reading of the letter for Casanova’s benefit.  The nobleman says:


The letter is very brief.  There are four words.  “I must see you.”  The nobleman takes his time with his interpretation.  “Next comes ‘must.’  Not ‘I would like to,’ not ‘I desire to,’ not ‘I want to.’  Immediately, in the second word of the text, she declares something with the unalterable force of holy writ.”

This slow exegesis is compelling and sinister, and while it is going on you imagine Casanova’s clever mind trying to map out a way to avoid the painful plans of the nobleman. 

I realize that communications policy is not always viewed as a dramatic subject.  But when I was asked to write a brief response to the question “What is broadband good for” it seemed to me that to take the words as simply a banal phrase would not do them justice.  Each word has a weight and import of its own.  The intentional choice of each of these words is, in fact, significant.  And it is much more fun to approach the task this way.  So, each day this week I will take on a separate word.  Let's start with

What

There is an implication hidden in “what.”  It implies a kind of “service”-oriented thinking.  “What” is something you can point to, draw lines around, and understand as a single or aggregated coherent thing/activity in the world.  When people want to hear about the activities their aging relative has undertaken during the past day, they say “what did you do today.”  They expect that the output will be a list of events, each with a distinct starting point and ending point.  Each item on this list will have a boundary and will fall within a category that already exists in the listening (even if slightly bored) mind of the other.  There will be errands (to, from, the shop visited, the item bought), conversations (who with, the plan made, the information exchanged), entertainments (music heard, videos seen), and, if the aging relative is employed, a series of work-related events (meetings, who attended, more conversations, outputs).

This “service” mindset for what people do or will do online has a long and distinguished pedigree.  This is the mindset that sees each communications modality as a categorizable, separate entry on a list.  New forms of these modalities occasionally arise, but they can easily be related back to the old form.  The use of “what” is a prompt for output-categories like “IPTV” and “VoIP” and “email”: a new form of broadcast television, a new form of telephony, a new form of terrestrial mail.  Each item on this list of “whats” has a clear boundary (“Verizon plans to roll out FiOS TV services in January”) and a start date.  Before January, there was no FiOS TV from Verizon, after January there will be.  The entire “IP-enabled services” rulemaking initiated by the Commission in 2004 has this “what” orientation.  The FCC stated that there that it was dealing with “services and applications relying on the Internet Protocol family,” and trying to decide how those “services and applications” should be regulated.

“What” “services and applications” will people use online?  To ask the question in this way assumes that we will be able to perceive boundaries around categories of online activity, that what we do will be recognizable to us and others as a new form of what we used to do, and that we will be able to talk calmly and intelligently about the substitutability of these services for regulatory purposes.  It assumes that the internet is a content-delivery supply chain – much like a railroad – that is a souped-up version of earlier communications modalities.

This focus on the application-layer, service-oriented view – celebrating the advent of Wikipedia, YouTube, eBay, Second Life, blogging software, and other new substitutes for the delivery-chain applications of the pre-internet era – provides an impoverished (or at least incomplete) perspective on communications. The landscape of the internet can usefully be perceived differently:  Human online communications are best captured intellectually as a complex adaptive system that can generate economic growth. New forms of persistent social interaction (often crossing application boundaries) are quickly evolving in direct reaction to collective human attention, and these communications are creating opportunities for the development of new ideas and new ways of making a living.  This has never happened before at the same rate, with the same directness, or with similarly persistent results. 

The use of “what” is meaningful.  It is intended to elicit a list of activities, a letter (now, an email) home from camp reciting events and activities.  To resist the use of “what” is quite a challenge – humans look for patterns and lists in everything they do. 

But the only answer to “what” in this context is “everything.”  Communications online will not necessarily fall into easily-categorizable chunks, even though they may seem to now.  We will hear that something like ten social-network sites account for about 40% of internet traffic. That tells us only that humans are social, not that these sites are “services” that replicate earlier “services” or will remain a definable category.  We are dealing with a transformative system, not a supply chain.  Communications policy should be about optimizing communications.

======================

The latest is that WSJ representatives can't/won't talk about the Vonage ad.  [from GigaOM]

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?