Category: Networks

Speaking of privacy

I went to the FTC’s second privacy workshop yesterday in Berkeley, and found it a generally interesting and worthwhile event, although it did exhibit some of the familiar patterns. Privacy, like net neutrality, isn’t as much a coherent issue as a grab-bag of grievances about a number of loosely connected concerns. Privacy is even more diverse and more incoherent than NN, which is after all driven by the desire to preserve traditional features of the Internet. Privacy seeks to change Internet tradition, which has never had any meaningful privacy but has simply created a sufficiently strong illusion of anonymity to make some people think there’s privacy on the net.

So what you have in privacy is two major issues of totally different character: (1) the capture of fleeting personal information by various services; and (2) the building of databases of personal activity and the subsequent analysis, use, and sale of the information they contain. These issues have to be resolved against the background of the Internet’s defective security architecture and tradition of people using handles instead of real names. When people feel anonymous, they misbehave, which is why there’s no much theft and generally churlish behavior on the net.

Congress is looking into these issues as well, and toward that end has held several hearings. I’m attaching testimony I delivered at one of these last Spring for your enjoyment. It holds up pretty well.

Open Internet Rules

Incidentally, ITIF filed comments with the FCC in the Open Internet rule-making:

The FCC should proceed with caution in conducting its inquiry into Open Internet rules, according to comments filed by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation today. All the evidence suggests that the Internet is thriving: network operators are investing and new applications, devices, services, and content are emerging at a dizzying rate. While there is a need to clarify the confused state of Internet regulation in the United States, there’s no compelling public interest for the FCC to adopt a stringent new regulatory framework. The Commission would do well to follow the example of fellow regulators in Canada and Europe who have recently concluded that the most sensible course for national regulators is to emphasize disclosure of terms of service and oversight of business and technical practices.

ITIF rejects the argument that the FCC lacks jurisdiction to regulate the Internet, but urges the Commission to carefully consider the evidence before enacting new regulations on Internet access services. The Internet is a complex “virtual network” designed to serve a variety of needs, and as such it does not readily lend itself to traditional telecom regulatory models. The Internet requires regulators to take a fresh approach. The first step for the Commission is to conduct a fair and probing analysis about how the Internet works today.

ITIF applauds the Commission for committing to an open process and feels that careful examination will lead to the conclusion that the Internet is fundamentally healthy.

The big issues here are that we’re not done with network engineering, nor are we done with developing the business models that make the most of network investments. So the companies who develop the insides of the Internet need to continue cooperating with the people who develop the outsides. The Verizon/Google, Comcast/BitTorrent and AT&T/Apple partnerships are instructive.

, ,

Chairman Genachowski Goes to San Francisco

GigaOm sponsored a conversation with FCC Chairman Julius Genachowki at their Intergalactic Headquarters in San Francisco today.

Watch live streaming video from gigaomtv at livestream.com

I asked the net neutrality question toward the end, and applauded the Chairman for the way he’s transformed the FCC. Genachowski brought some of his best staffers with him, and it was nice to meet and greet and share ideas. You have to admire anyone who can make such deep changes to a rather hidebound federal agency as quickly as Genachowski and staff have done.

, ,

FCC Broadband Deployment Research workshop

The long-awaited video of the FCC’s December 10 workshop Review and Discussion of Broadband Deployment Research is finally on-line. This workshop featured discussions of Yochai Benkler’s controversial Berkman Center report on unbundled DSL and Bob Atkinson’s report on current broadband investment dynamics in the US. As the FCC put it:

As part of the Commission’s development of the National Broadband Plan, the Commission has requested two independent studies. The Commission asked Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society to conduct an expert review of existing literature and studies about broadband deployment and usage throughout the world. The Columbia Institute for Tele-Information (“CITI”), based at the Columbia Business School in New York, conducted an independent outside expert review of projected deployment of new and upgraded broadband networks.

Benkler’s report was very politely decimated by Tom Hazlett, an actual economist who knows a thing or two about how Benkler cooked the books, intentionally or by bungling, and the relevant comparisons for the US. One of the many problems with Benkler’s report is that he didn’t do what the FCC asked him to do, which was to simply review the literature on international policies. Instead, he and his Berkman colleagues tried to aggregate all the data into a giant meta-study. Benkler violated the FCC’s “no original research” rule, which should have been familiar to Benkler given his fascination with Wikipedia.

, ,

Blair Levin Hints at National Broadband Plan

Amy Schatz of the WSJ joined in the questioning of Blair Levin on this week’s installment of The Communicators. Here’s an interesting part of her story:

Mr. Levin also dismissed criticisms last week from public interest groups unhappy the plan may not propose some ideas for encouraging competition, such as rules that would require Internet providers to share their lines with competitors.

“I find their criticism not very productive,” Mr. Levin said Monday.

FCC officials have been considering the ideas, some of which were laid out in a FCC-commissioned report by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

The report suggests that other countries have faster, cheaper broadband because they adopted open access, line-sharing rules years ago. But FCC officials appear to have backed away from the open access idea in recent weeks.

“The Berkman (study) did a fantastic job of pointing out what’s going on around the world,” Mr. Levin said. “There are certain things where what’s going on in other countries really isn’t germane for where we go from here.

The video is already up at the C-Span site.

Levin gets the private investment angle, and stresses the Columbia study over the Berkman study.

, ,

Steal These Policies

ITIF released a report today on digital piracy, Steal These Policies: Strategies for Reducing Digital Piracy co-authored by Dan Castro, Scott Andes, and yours truly. Here’s the blurb:

It is time for the U.S. government to take global theft of U.S. intellectual property, especially digital content, much more seriously. A new ITIF report finds that the U.S. government can and should do more to support industry efforts to reduce digital piracy, a growing problem that threatens not only the robust production of digital content, but U.S. jobs. While there are no “silver bullets” to reducing digital piracy, there are a number of “lead bullets” that can and should be implemented. Specifically, ITIF calls on the federal government to not preclude those impacted by digital piracy, including copyright holders and ISPs, from taking steps, including implementing technical controls like digital fingerprinting, to reduce piracy. In addition, industry and government should consider bold steps to limit the revenue streams of those profiting from piracy by encouraging ISPs, search engines, ad networks and credit card companies to block piracy websites and refuse to do business with them. These options should be part of a broad dialogue that engages all stakeholders, including government, content owners, website operators, technology developers, and ISPs and other intermediaries, on how to improve the global response to piracy. Toward that end, this report recommends that policymakers:

And here’s the video of the launch event:

One point that comes across better from the live event than from the paper is that piracy isn’t simply something that takes place between close personal friends, it’s a business that profits from the unauthorized sale of other people’s material. Whatever your views on Internet privacy and intellectual property rights may be, I think we can all agree that the business of piracy is wrong.

, ,

Speech, Democracy, and Open Internet Regulations

The video of the FCC workshop on Speech, Democratic Engagement, and the Open Internet is up on the FCC’s web site already. I can’t say there was much enlightening dialog in this event; it was pretty much the same tired old rhetoric we’ve heard for the last four years on the subject, with some exceptions.

One speaker, Bob Corn-Revere, was very good, quite clear about the potential dangers of the proposed anti-discrimination rule, and another, Glenn Reynolds, briefly mentioned reservations about them but didn’t amplify. Another speaker denounced volume-based pricing as a racist practice, and several others displayed astonishing ignorance about the nature of information bottlenecks on the Internet by way of proposing different rules for sites like YouTube and search services than those that would apply to ISPs. The reality is that people don’t stream video from their home computers today because of capacity limits, so any attempt to free video streams from content-based restrictions has to start with the services that people use to locate and host these streams.

So the workshop was pretty much a waste of time unless you just awoke from a five year long coma. Not that the FCC meant for it to be, of course, just that there wasn’t much there. And to make matters worse, the written testimony is not available from the FCC, but thanks to PFF you can see Bob Corn-Revere’s statement here.

, ,

Free Speech for Me, But When it Comes to Thee I Need to Think About It

The FCC will hold an upcoming workshop on free speech and net neutrality regulations that features a really interesting array of speakers:

Michele Combs from the Christian Coalition; Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit; Jonathan Moore, Rowdy Orbit; Ruth Livier, YLSE; ; Garlin Gilchrist, Center for Community Change; Bob Corn-Revere, Davis Wright Tremaine; Jack Balkin, Yale Law School; and Andrew Schwartzman, Media Access Project.

“Interesting” in that most of* this group shares a common viewpoint to the effect that net neutrality regulations are necessary to protect free speech on the Internet. This is not the only viewpoint that exists on the subject, of course: there are many of us who believe that the proposed framework of regulations is at best neutral to free expression and under many plausible outcomes, positively harmful.

The reason for this is that the proposed anti-discrimination rule makes it illegal for ISPs to sell enhanced transport to publishers who require it to deliver high bandwidth, live interactive services to people on the Internet. A broad non-discrimination rule pretty well confines the future Internet to the range of applications it supports today, low-bandwidth interaction and static content, and even those are in doubt on wireless access networks with limited bandwidth.

The Genachowski FCC has been very good so far on putting panels together with diverse viewpoints, so the stark failure of the Commission to respect viewpoint diversity in this particular case is rather surprising. It is particularly ironic that on a panel devoted to viewpoint diversity, in essence, that the Commission has chosen viewpoints that represent unanimity rather than diversity.

UPDATE: One thing I have to say about the FCC is that it’s a very responsive agency. I sent an e-mail to the panel coordinator late Friday complaining about the panel’s lack of diversity, and despite the fact that it was sent after business hours on Friday, I got a response today in the form of a phone call from an FCC staffer. The explanation they offer is that this panel is simply meant to cover Internet openness, and there will be additional panels on the issues I’ve raised from January to March. So the issue of whether new rules are needed to protect free speech will be covered in these future panels, and doesn’t need any discussion right now, per the FCC’s viewpoint.

The scheduling is hard to fathom. Earlier this week, there was a technical panel in which academics, operators, and equipment vendors with different viewpoints on net neutrality regulations educated Commission staff on Internet organization and traffic. That panel had people who range all the way from strong supporters of the regulations to strong opponents, but they didn’t explore the policy space directly. The upcoming panel simply happens to be more uniform in its views, but their charter is to explain how they benefit from Internet openness.

In the overall scheme of things, the Internet is not actually more open than many other networks with which we’re familiar, of course; the telephone network permits anyone to communicate with anyone, as did the telegraph network and as does the US mail. And you can’t do anything you want on the Internet, you have to abide by the law.

To the extent that the Internet is not open, it’s chiefly government that closes off particular avenues of expression: The obvious examples are the DMCA’s anti-piracy provisions, the US ban on kiddie porn, Germany’s ban on Nazi organizing and Scientology, and China’s ban on access to native Google searches. Each government has decided on policy grounds to close the Internet in ways that suit its interests, so if the regulations simply focus on commercial restrictions and enablements of forms of Internet-based speech and don’t restrict the power of the FCC to issue ex post and ex ante regulations, we won’t have accomplished much in this process.

The area of controversy is in between the technical issues discussed in the first workshop and the openness issues that will be discussed Tuesday. And as we will see, the advocates of net neutrality don’t understand enough about the Internet’s operation and potential to have much insight into whether and how it’s going to be regulated going forward.

*UPDATE 2: At least one of the speakers will in fact caution the Commission about diving in with the new regulations without clear evidence of harm.

What’s Cooking in Europe

I’ve been spending some time in Europe recently. A couple of weeks ago I took part in a roundtable at the Karlsruhe Inst. of Technology in Germany on open spectrum that combined one of most interesting gatherings of people of different viewpoints and ranges of expertise ever assembled in one setting. The group included a former chief national regulator, the technologist who wrote the first IEEE 802 standard for beam-forming, a very serious grad student working with Software-Defined Radios, as well as a number of legal academics and economists. Together we explored the obstacles and value of the wireless third pipe, including the research problems that will need to be solved to make it a reality. This is the kind of gathering that’s rarely assembled in the USA.

And more recently, I took part in a series of presentations and a general discussion about openness on the wireless Internet. One of the other presenters was one of the Pirate Party’s Members of the European Parliament, and others were the top strategic thinkers and managers from TeliaSonera and Huchison Whampoa Europe. This event followed on the passage of the EU Telecoms Package that wisely added a disclosure rule to the European Common Law and just as wisely refrained from adding an anti-discrimination rule. Did you know that Huchison offers a 3G-only phone with Skype pre-installed? They do, and it took them a lot of work to get Skype to run successfully on it.

A year ago, I would have said that Europe was trailing the US on the regulatory front, but today it certainly appears they’re on a more sensible course than we are in many respects. It’s important for a regulator to be humble and not approach his task with too much enthusiasm and creativity. These are fine traits in an entrepreneur, but in the hands of government can lead to grief. It’s best that we each remember our respective roles, in other words. It’s in the nature of technology to change, and regulations that are too prescriptive alter the natural order of things.

The Hippie who Hooked-up South Africa

Have you ever wondered how South Africa got connected to the Internet? It happened during the bleak days of apartheid, thanks to the valiant efforts of self-proclaimed hippie Randy Bush:

I suppose you are wondering what a computer scientist, engineer, and unrepentant hippie is doing at this lectern today. Well, I am also wondering the same. So I guess the best I can do with this honor and opportunity is to tell you about why I chose to do certain things and the small but occasionally pungent lessons I have taken away from these experiences.

Not everyone was willing to break the boycott in those days, but Bush had his reasons:

Well, I had been raised to boycott all dealings with South Africa, as well as Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, and other international pariah states. And I was being asked to directly support South Africa’s entry into the internet. Serious soul-searching led me to the conclusion that social change was not likely to be accomplished by cutting off communication. So I agreed on the condition that connectivity would be for universities and NGOs only, and only those which were not apartheid-supporting or enforcing. The administrative work and funding from the South African side was done by Vic Shaw of the FRD. In November 1991, a bit over ten years ago, the first direct full internet connectivity to South Africa (as opposed to store and forward email) was commissioned via a low speed leased line to my home office in the States. South Africa was the second country in Africa to become connected to the internet, preceded by Tunisia a few months earlier.

That’s quite an interesting legacy. Currently, Bush works for the Japanese government and as a volunteer with various non-profits.

UPDATE: Reader Andrew Alston says the credit doesn’t properly fall on Bush:

Randy Bush might have been involved, but he is DEFINITELY not the father of the South African internet, if that title goes to anyone its Mike Lauwrie from back in the Rhodes University days.

There you are, two points of view from which to choose.