Archives for February 2007
Bong Hits 4 Jesus
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In January 2002, a “Winter Olympics Torch Relay,” supported by private businesses, was held in Juneau, Alaska, Students were released from school to watch the Olympic torch pass by. Joseph Frederick, an 18-year-old senior at Juneau-Douglas High School, was late to school the day of the Olympic torch relay. When Frederick arrived, he stood on the sidewalk on the other side of the street from the high school. Frederick and his friends waited for the television cameras so they could display their banner reading “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.” When they displayed the banner then-principal Deborah Morse, who was across the street, grabbed and crumpled up the banner.
Hat tip J. Adamson.
That’s an awfully nice merger you have there, it’d be a shame if anything to happened to it
On the podcast last week I mentioned that if Kevin Martin’s FCC approves the XM-Sirius merger, one of the conditions it could impose is that the new entity accept indecency regulation that satellite radio is not currently subject to. Adam called this “regulatory blackmail,” and now I’m seeing a pattern.The WSJ reports that Spanish-language broadcaster Univision agreed to pay $24 million fine for violating the Children’s Television Act, which requires broadcasters to show three hours of educational programming a week. “In exchange, the FCC will approve Univision’s sale to a consortium of private-equity groups for $12.3 billion.” The fine is by far the largest the FCC has ever assessed. Not only does Univision have no choice but to accept the fine if it wants its sale to go through, but it seems like the commissioners don’t have a choice either.
The $24-million fine was negotiated by Mr. Martin’s staff, not the five-member FCC board. Several senior FCC officials, including at least one FCC commissioner, said they learned of the fine by reading the New York Times on Saturday. Despite some discomfort about the unusually high amount of the fine, the full FCC board is likely to vote for it. It would be politically difficult for FCC members to vote against enforcing children’s programming standards and the company has apparently agreed to pay the fine to clear the way for its sale.
Frontline Wireless joins the interoperability party
Yesterday I filed a public interest comment (PDF) in the FCC’s proceeding to create a national public safety broadband network in the 700 MHz band. Not coincidentally, so did Frontline Wireless, a new company started by former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt and former NTIA Administrator Janice Obuchowski among others. In their filing they propose a new plan to build a national wireless broadband network to be shared by public safety and consumers. This plan comes closer to the commercial provision of public safety communications that I’ve been suggesting, but it’s still a bit off. Below I’ll talk about the plan, but first some background.
As I’ve explained before, the digital TV transition frees up 84 MHz of spectrum. Congress has allocated 24 to public safety and 60 for auction. Morgan O’Brien’s Cyren Call asked the FCC to allocate additional spectrum to public safety for a national network by removing a 30 MHz block of spectrum from auction. The FCC denied the petition saying, quite rightly, that they didn’t have the authority not to auction off the spectrum Congress told them they had to. Cyren Call has since found a sponsor in John McCain who has said he will introduce a bill that would remove the 30 MHz from auction and give it to a “public safety broadband trust.”
The FCC’s current proceeding centers on what to do with the 24 MHz of spectrum that Congress did allocate to public safety. Specifically, the FCC asked for comment on its plan to take 12 MHz of this spectrum and license it to a nonprofit representing the public safety community that would in turn build a national broadband network, charge first responders a fee for service, and lease excess capacity on the network to commercial customers. Continue reading this post »
Media and neutrality regulation: contradictions?
Susan Crawford asks a good question: How does one reconcile being both “for” network neutrality regulation and rules against media concentration?To be “for” network neutrality, it seems natural to have the view that the internet is displacing many prior forms of communications modalities — the press is in a free fall, people are watching much less broadcast television, etc. — and so it’s even more important to get internet access policy right and avoid gatekeepers. You’d want to talk about the empowering, emergent communications taking place online.
But to be “for” limits on media ownership, it may be necessary to argue that nothing much has changed. You have to claim that broadcast and newspapers control news and culture, and so it’s important to avoid more consolidation. The internet isn’t changing the local news picture, you’d have to say, and so its existence doesn’t change the media landscape. Blogs aren’t legitimate alternative news sources.
One logical response might be that big media does control information and culture despite the emerging competition of the net and precisely because of this should we have neutrality regulations to protect the fledgling voices. Media ownership rules would also be necessary until the emerging competition on the net actually serves as a check on concentrated media. That’s just me thinking out loud, but I’m sure it’s not too off the mark from the argument we’re likely to see. What I always want to know, and what is rarely made clear, is how much competition is enough to make regulation unnecessary in either context.
Tech Policy Weekly
I’ve started a new podcast along with my friends at the Technology Liberation Front. It’s called Tech Policy Weekly, which pretty much tells you what it’s about.
On the first episode we talk about wireless net neutrality, the proposed XM-Sirius satellite radio merger, and whether a commons is an alternative to spectrum regulation. You can check it out here, and you can listen to it right at your computer. If you like it, please subscribe, and please tell your tech-inclined friends about it. Thanks!
Guardian: “Nearly a century after it was founded, Israel’s first and most famous kibbutz has voted to give up its early socialist ideals and to privatise itself.”
Cable competition not fast enough
Sunday’s Washington Post featured a story entitled, “Cable War Fails to Offer Rate Relief in Montgomery.” The gist of the story is that Comcast, the incumbent cable provider in Montgomery County, Maryland, is raising rates by 4 percent and residents are distraught that the much vaunted competition from Verizon has done nothing to curb prices.So much for the idea that “competition will bring down rates,” said Montgomery County Council President Marilyn Praisner (D-Eastern County), who has long clashed with the industry over regulation. “That clearly hasn’t happened.”
David Isenberg links to the story under the headline “Benefits of Competition my Ass” and asks, “Are you listening Kevin Martin?”
You would think Verizon has been providing service in the country for years and has settled into a cozy duopoly with Comcast. So when did Verizon get permission from the county to start competing with Comcast? November 28, 2006. That’s right folks, less than three months ago.
As the Post story notes, Comcast serves 200,000 households to Verizon’s 1,000. However, it will build out to most homes in four years. The story also notes–albeit in paragraph 14–competition on margins other than price: “Comcast, for instance, has improved its Internet speeds four times over the past three years without increasing its prices.”
Mitt Romney inconsistent despite flip-flops
Mitt Romney is being taken to task for changing his stance on many sensitive issues, such as abortion and gay marriage, in order to appeal to conservatives. But even if we take him at his words, his new positions are completely inconsistent. Here he is talking about abortion on This Week:Mitt Romney: Abortion is taking human life. There’s no question but that human life begins when all the DNA is there necessary for cells to divide and become a human being.
Is it alive? Yes. Is it human? Yes. And, therefore, when we abort a fetus, we are taking a life at its infancy, at its very, very beginning roots, and a civilized society, I believe, respects the sanctity of human life.
Stephanopoulos: So if abortion is the taking of a life, should women who have abortions and doctors who perform them be jailed?
Mitt Romney: My view is that we should let each state have its own responsibility for guiding its laws relating to abortion. … But I’d like to see the Supreme Court allow states to have greater leeway in defining their own laws.
Stephanopoulos: But if it’s killing, why should states have leeway?
Mitt Romney: You know, that’s one of the great challenges that we have. There are a lot of things that are morally very difficult and, in some cases, repugnant that we let states decide. For instance, Nevada allows prostitution. I find that to be quite repugnant as a practice.
Fair enough. He’s a federalist who believes states should decide important questions, even ones he characterizes as the taking of life. So how does he feel about gay marriage? Surely he’ll take a federalist approach on something that’s not a question of life and death.
Mitt Romey: I think every child deserves a mom and a dad, and that’s why I’m so consistent and vehement in my view that we should have a federal amendment which defines marriage in that way.
Was the RIAA deputized in Drama case?
The NYT Magazine has a feature this weekend on DJ Drama, the Atlanta mixtape producer whose studios were recently raided by SWAT teams at the apparent behest of the RIAA. It seems like the writer was working on a profile before the arrest. One thing that struck me:Kilgo works in the R.I.A.A.’s Atlanta office, and in the weeks before the raid, the local police chief said, R.I.A.A. investigators helped the police collect evidence and conduct surveillance at the studio. Kilgo consulted with the R.I.A.A.’s national headquarters in advance of the raid, and after the raid, a team of men wearing R.I.A.A. jackets was responsible for boxing the CDs and carting them to a warehouse for examination.
Men wearing RIAA jackets carting away CDs? Were they deputized? How’s an industry group involved in an alleged crime scene? Even if they consulted in the case. And really, RIAA jackets? Please.
American.com
You should bookmark The American, a new daily online and quarterly print magazine from AEI. In the few weeks I’ve followed it, it has surprised me with lots of good stories and ideas, usually by young writers, and quite often about technology. Just this week there’s a piece by Jens Laurson and George Pieler nominating Milton Friedman as the patron saint of blogging since the blogosphere is a free market of ideas where “price signals” abound in the form of links and comments and the best commentary rises to the top. Then there’s this piece by Joshua Tauberer on his Open House Project, which seeks to put Congressional records on the web and as structured data so they’ll be subject to computer-aided scrutiny. From the print magazine, Amy Cortese did some reporting on why internet wine sales are still in regulatory hell even after Granholm v. Heald. Other pieces are brilliant, too, so check it out.Spectrum and the definition of deregulation
Today Lawrence Lessig released the second in his series of presentations about what Congress should do on internet policy. The first installment was about orphan copyrights, and I addressed it here. Today, Lessig writes about “deregulating spectrum,” which is an apt title if by deregulating you mean regulating. Lessig likens the current command-and-control system of spectrum regulation to communism, and I think he’s right. He goes on, however, to argue that a property system is no longer the right alternative to regulation.Instead, Lessig suggests a market not in spectrum, but in devices that use free spectrum without causing interference to any other user. As he says in his presentation, this system would require “minimal rules governing the devices.” What he doesn’t say is who would set these “minimal rules” and what exactly would guarantee that these rules would remain minimal or even rational. The answer, as I explain in my new paper out this week from the Stanford Technology Law Review, is that government will set the rules, and the only tools that government has to make rules is its inefficient command-and-control processes. A “commons” model is not a third way between regulation and property, it is just another kind of regulation.
Lessig also exhibits lots of outrage at the fact that the current regulatory system is manipulated by special interests to suit their own purposes and not the interests of consumers generally. Well, how will things be any different when government goes about setting his “minimal rules”?
One last thing. I take umbrage to Lessig’s reference to those of us who support property rights in spectrum as “property-ideologues,” which I for one take as a pejorative term that implies an unthinking blind belief. He says, these are “people who I will, to be fair, refer to as ‘extremists.’” I may think that Lessig is wrong, but I don’t doubt that he’s considered empirical evidence, given lots of thought to different ideas, and come to his own conclusions for intellectually honest reasons. There can only be reasoned debate if the conversation is respectful, and I would appreciate it if Lessig showed some respect to his intellectual opponents.
Search, cache, and copyright
Google has lost its copyright appeal against Belgian newspaper publishers. There seem to be conflicting reports about what exactly Google was found liable for. Here’s the WSJ:A Belgian court ruled Tuesday that Internet search engine Google Inc. violated Belgian copyright law when it published snippets and links to Belgian newspapers on its Web site without permission.
And here’s the AP:
A Brussels court ruled in favor of Copiepresse, a copyright protection group representing 18 mostly French-language newspapers that complained the search engine’s “cached” links offered free access to archived articles that the papers usually sell on a subscription basis.
Snippets and entire cached pages are very different things. But whatever the case, what this case highlights is how unsettled copyright law is as it applies to search engines (and I’ll limit myself to just the U.S.). As for snippets, sure, there’s Kelly v. Arriba Soft, which found that indexing photographs and displaying their thumbnails is a fair use. But that’s just one circuit’s opinion, which is very persuasive, but not controlling in other circuits. Then there’s Perfect 10 v. Google, which cuts in the opposite direction. Continue reading this post »
Cartefone for wireless?
Tim Wu will be presenting his paper “Wireless Net Neutrality” at an FTC workshop on network access tomorrow. (BTW: The workshop is free and open to the public.) Basically he’s arguing for Carterfone to be applied to the cell phone industry. The Washington Post has a write-up of the ideas behind the paper and reaction from both sides of the debate.Until federal regulators issued a landmark ruling in 1968, Americans could not own the telephones in their homes, nor attach answering machines or other devices to them. Now, a growing number of academics and consumer activists say it’s time to deliver a similar groundbreaking jolt to the cellphone industry, possibly triggering a new round of customer options and technical innovations to rival the one that produced faxes, modems and the Internet.
Wireless carriers, which limit what customers may do with their phones, say the move is unnecessary and potentially harmful. But in articles, blogs and speeches, a number of researchers are asking why the companies are allowed to force consumers to buy new handsets when they change carriers, pay a specified carrier to transfer photos from a camera phone, or download ring tones or music from one provider only.
Carterfone was a great decision when it applied to Ma Bell, the quintessential monopoly, and wouldn’t compute for today’s wireless carriers. True, cell phones are locked (except when they’re not, as he article points out, because carriers will often unlock them for you when your contract expires). The one thing the article doesn’t mentionis that cell phones are also subsidized. You can always buy an unlocked phone for a premium. I would love to see a greater market in unlocked phones, but if there’s no demand from consumers, I’ll just have to wait along with the proponents of regulation. Question: Unlocked phones are the norm in Asia and Europe. How are they priced there? How do service plan prices compare to U.S.?
WaPo: ‘WiFi Turns Internet Into Hideout for Criminals’
The Washington Post runs an article today about police tracing online criminals–mostly pedophiles–to a physical address only to find an unsecured Wi-Fi hotspot and not the criminal. The good news in the article is that the police seem to understand that just because something illegal happened over your IP address, it doesn’t mean you did it. The bad news is the “there oughta be a law” implication present in the article. Here’s how the reporter, not a quoted source, describes Wi-Fi:Open wireless signals are akin to leaving your front door wide open all day — and returning home to find that someone has stolen your belongings and left a mess that needs cleaning.
One way to combat it is for people to secure their wireless networks by making them password-protected. But, authorities said, businesses and cities that offer free connections need some way to track the users, such as filtering measures that could scan to see who is accessing the network.
I don’t get the “stolen belonging” analogy, and the “mess that needs cleaning” is a stretch. I’ll let our resident piggybacking expert explain why. Police should be supported in their pursuit of criminals, but there are a lot more innocent people using coffee shop hot spots than pedophiles.
If you’ve missed any of the seven episode of 24 this season, you can watch them all for free at the Fox website. As much as I love 24, I’m afraid it’s jumped the shark. Enjoy it while it’s still around.
Steve Jobs oral history
Check out this oral history of Steve Jobs from the Computer History Collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. It’s basically an extended interview in which he talks about his biography, Apple’s origins, NeXT, Pixar, and much else. The neat thing is the interview was conducted on April 20, 1995 while Jobs was still in exile from Apple. Apple would buy NeXT a year later to use it as the core of Mac OS X and Jobs would return to eventually take over. Here’s one of his perspectives at the time:The Macintosh will die in another few years and its really sad. The problem is this: no one at Apple has a clue as to how to create the next Macintosh because no one running any part of Apple was there when the Macintosh was made–or any other product at Apple. They’ve just been living off that one thing now for over a decade and the last attempt was the Newton and you know what happened to that. It’s kind of tragic, but as unemotionally as I can be, that’s what’s happening. Unless somebody pulls a rabbit out of a hat, companies tend to have long glide slopes because of the installed bases.
Guilt and loathing about IM
Like many people, I have a love-hate relationship with IM. On the one hand, I see it’s potential for useful and efficient communication. On the other, it can be an invitation to interruptions, which for long periods of time cause me to stay away from IM. In a recent interview, Bruce Schneier had this to say about e-mail:
One of the properties of the Internet is that it takes interactions out of their normal social context. If I were at a gathering and I saw someone who I wanted to talk to, I would see him in context. If he were mobbed with people, I might decide to talk to him later. If he were engrossed in work, I might decide to say hello in passing. If he looked bored, I would be more likely to engage him in conversation.
The Internet lacks this context. When you send someone an e-mail, you send it into the void. Is the recipient busy? Is he feeling like talking? Has he been deluged with dozens of similar e-mails? You have no way of knowing.
The same applies to instant messaging, but I think this lack of context is worse for IM. The reason is that while e-mail is an asynchronous form of communication, while IM is not. That is, even if I’m busy when you send me an e-mail, there’s no expectation that I have to answer it right away–or at least there shouldn’t be. It should be perfectly acceptable if I answer you the next day. The “I” in IM, however, stands for instant.
Researching this topic, I’ve read a bunch of articles on IM etiquette, and I’ll list the good ones at the end. However, one in particular by Rafe Needleman captured exactly what I have felt for a long time:
I have not solved the interruption problem of IM. My half-way solution — which is not a good one — is that I don’t start my IM application with Windows. I have to consciously turn it on.
That done, I’m wide open for interruption. Some interruptions are good. If my buddy Tom down the hall wants to go out for lunch, an IM is a good way to set it up. If our product manager, Karen, has a quick question about a feature story we’re posting to CNET.com, IM is a useful way to communicate. But if friends or family members from outside work just want to chat, well, as much as I’d love to talk to them, I tend to get rather focused during work and don’t always have the time or the spare mental cycles for a warm, personal conversation. So I have to type, “I’ll ping you later,” and then suffer IM guilt for the rest of the day.
The problem with IM is that there is no easy way to set up plausible deniability for ignoring an incoming communication. By contrast, if your phone rings and you don’t want to talk, you just don’t pick up, and nobody’s the wiser. If your IM is showing “available” and you don’t reply to a message, you’re a jerk. On some IM programs, you can set individual availability states per buddy, but it’s a pain in the neck to manage. What I want is a global availability setting that shows me as neither “away,” nor “available,” but rather, “possibly available.” Then if I don’t answer a message, I can claim I was away from the office.
This is why I just don’t run my IM program most of the time.
And I think that’s why a lot of people don’t log in to IM. The problem stems from different expectations by different people about what IM is for or how it should be used or when. I’m generally of the opinion that long conversations should be carried on over the phone or in person. This goes double for catching up chit-chats unless the other person is somewhere to which international calling rates are prohibitive. For me, few things are worse than an IM that reads, “Hey, how have you been?”
As Needleman writes, I feel lots of guilt for saying that. What a jerk I must be since the other person is a friend being friendly. But to my mind, if you want to catch up, give me call. Another reason I feel guilty is that I must not really mean what I’ve said because I find myself engaged in some chit-chat conversations that are certainly worth it. For example, I have a good friend who just joined the Army and shipped off for basic training. He obviously can’t call me whenever he wants, but he does have access to IM (incredibly). Catching up over IM in that case makes perfect sense.
So, having pinpointed my inquietude, my next question was, who is breaching etiquette here? The interruptors or my jerk ass? As it turns out, both. I’m definitely to blame for not adjusting my status setting. I pledge to do it from now on. But I do have to say, as Needleman points out, that sometimes I’m busy but still very willing to answer quick IMs if they’re substantive. They don’t even have to be important or pressing, just a real purpose. Setting my status to “Busy” will be read by many as “Do not disturb,” which is not what I mean. But setting it to “Available” will be read as free for anything. My plan of attack will be to try to set a custom message that conveys my level of availability. I’ll let you know how it goes.
That said, there are some norms we should all follow when we initiate IMs. From a couple of the articles I’ve read:
Knock first: Open every message by asking whether you’re interrupting (”Is this a good time to talk about Davis?”). On your end, learn to say no when you’re busy: “Can’t now, how about at 2?” or “Later, OK?”
Don’t chat for long: If you have several things to discuss, use the phone. Also, because, as Schneier pointed out, there are no cues in cyberspace (no looking at one’s watch, no natural pause that leads to a goodbye) IM conversations can last painfully forever.
I’d love to know you’re thoughts on this, so I’m turning comments on. Here are some good articles on IM netiquette:
- Inc.com - IM Etiquette 101
- Forbes.com - Instant Messenger Etiquette
- Morgan McClintic - How to use IM
- Anne Zlenka of Web Worker Daily posted the bee-in-my-bonnet article How to Annoy People Using Instant Messaging and Stowe Boyd responded with the snarky Instant Messaging Etiquette. Boyd is the author of a 20-page report on the subject, Enterprise Instant Messaging: Ethics, Etiquette, and Best Practices (PDF).
What congress can do about interoperability
Yesterday I explained that in my view first responders don’t need more spectrum to address their interoperability problem, but instead a different approach to using the spectrum they already have. So if Congress shouldn’t allocate more spectrum for public safety, what should it do to address the problem?Cyren Call is absolutely right about a lot of things: That we should opt for national networks, rather than 50,000 individual and incompatible radio systems for each locality or agency. That everyone benefits when public safety spectrum is shared with commercial users (as long as first responders have priority). That given the opportunity, the private sector will build public safety networks that first responders can subscribe to. Where Cyren Call goes wrong is in insisting that we need new spectrum to achieve this.
What Congress can do is very simple. Open up spectrum already allocated for public safety and allow private companies to build networks on that spectrum. Allow the FCC to assign spectrum allocated for public safety to commercial carriers (like Verizon or Cyren Call or whoever) directly. Require in the licenses1 that the carrier build a network up to public safety specs. Allow the carriers to sell excess capacity to commercial users, but ensure that first responders have priority. Voila, commercial provision of public safety communications. Don’t want to stop there? There’s more Congress can do. Continue reading this post »
Public safety doesn’t need more spectrum
Ahead of tomorrow’s Senate Commerce Committee hearing on public safety communications, the Consumer Electronics Association released a report (PDF) it commissioned from Criterion Economics analyzing the Cyren Call plan. The report concludes that the Cyren Call plan would upturn Congress’s carefully crafted DTV transition scheme. It also calls into question whether the private sector would build a more expensive broadband network than it would otherwise have to in order to meet the more rigorous needs of public safety.Like I said, the study was commissioned by a special interest and it should be read in that light. (And by all means, read it yourself and make up your own mind.) However, the study does outline some basic facts that support something I’ve been saying for a long time: public safety communications does not need more spectrum, what it needs is spectrum reform. Here’s a sampling from the report: Continue reading this post »
Why no preloaded iPods?
Ever since the first days of the iTunes Music Store I’d always wondered why Apple didn’t see iPods preloaded with music. Why not sell a Beck iPod, say, with every track ever released on it and maybe his autograph etched on the back? When Apple came out with the U2 special edition iPod that included their music catalog in the price, it didn’t come preloaded, you had to use a coupon code to download the music.Well, today comes the answer that I can’t believe I hadn’t see before, because I’d look. iLounge reports that the settlement agreement Apple had with the Beatle’s Apple Music Co. over their trademark dispute included a clause that prohibited Apple from selling “physical media delivering prerecorded content[.]” This deal was struck before the iPod, so they never could have guessed its implications. In fact, the clause was probably just meant to cover CD sales.
Now that the two companies have resettled, you can bet you’ll see preloaded iPods. I wouldn’t be surprised if a Beatles iPod is the first.
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This is the personal site of Jerry Brito, a lawyer and writer in Washington, D.C. He’s an academic researcher and the creator of Unclutterer and several other blogs. More »
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