FCC & Net Neutrality: Part 1
The Net Neutrality issue has been hot the last few months, and it probably won’t be cooling with the Fall weather.? There is already one bill sitting in committee, and another from Byron Dorgan and Olympia Snowe on the way.? In addition to this, the big news toward the end of September was the FCC’s policy statement on Net Neutrality.? This was accompanied by the launching of the FCC’s new site OpenInternet.gov to go along with it’s sister site, Broadband.gov.
After reading over FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s speech and considering my comments, I felt that a lot of the nuances of what he talked about may get lost in a simple response.? So I decided that I would just break the whole thing down.? I’ll be splitting his speech up over several parts and providing responses to what he had to say.
If you’d care to listen to the speech in full first, then here you go:
You can also find the text of the speech unmolested by my comments here.
So here comes our break down, paragraph by paragraph.? My comments in bold.
Prepared Remarks of
Chairman Julius Genachowski
The Brookings Institution, Washington DC
September 21, 2009I?d like to thank Brookings for hosting me and this discussion about the future of broadband and the Internet.
We?ve just finished a summer of big-ticket commemorations, celebrating the 40th anniversaries of the Apollo landing and of Woodstock; 1969 was also a good year to be a kid in New York, with Joe Namath calling the Super Bowl, and the Knicks? season that ended with the legendary Willis Reed in Game 7. I grew up a long fly ball from Shea Stadium and soaked up every minute of the Miracle Mets? season. Maybe that?s why I tend to believe in miracles.
But perhaps the most momentous birthday from that famous summer of 1969 went by just a couple of weeks ago with little mention. Just over forty years ago, a handful of engineers in a UCLA lab connected two computers with a 15-foot gray cable and transferred little pieces of data back and forth. It was the first successful test of the ARPANET, the U.S.-government-funded project that became the Internet — the most transformational communications breakthrough since the printing press.
Today, we can?t imagine what our lives would be like without the Internet — any more than we can imagine life without running water or the light bulb. Millions of us depend upon it every day: at home, at work, in school — and everywhere in between. The Internet has unleashed the creative genius of countless entrepreneurs and has enabled the creation of jobs — and the launch of small businesses and the expansion of large ones — all across America.
Yes, the Internet has unleashed creativity and created jobs, and has done so without the help of the government or having any of its facets regulated.
That?s why Congress and the President have charged the FCC with developing a National Broadband Plan to ensure that every American has access to open and robust broadband.
There are several assumptions here.? First off, Congress has not charged the FCC with a National Broadband Plan, nor have they charged the FCC with regulating the Internet or determining that the Internet must exist under regulated, binding by law Net Neutrality rules.? The only thing Congress has done in regards to this issue was pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act which had two things in relation to these issues. 1) There existed monies in the stimulus package for the expansion of broadband into unserved and underserved areas.? The funding is limited, and less than half of what Verizon alone has spent on developing their entire fiber network.? It is the FCC who labeled and determined this to be a “National Broadband Plan.”? Congress simply provided money for the development of limited networks.? That is significantly different than being “charged” with accomplishing some mission that Genachowski apparently considers is his destiny as Chairman.? 2) Congress did not charge the FCC to ensure an open Internet.? Within the stimulus the language insinuates that grantees of stimulus funds must build networks under the guidelines of FCC policy statements.? It is therefore the FCC that determines what those policy statement conditions are, not Congress.
Additionally, this statement carries with it the assumption that access to the Internet is both desired by everyone and a right.
The fact is that we face great challenges as a nation right now, including health care, education, energy, and public safety. While the Internet alone will not provide a complete solution to any of them, it can and must play a critical role in solving each one.
These statements are a bit of a reach.? I understand that part of the job of the Chairman is to act as a pitchman for the Obama Administration’s platform and policy agenda, but these claims are weak at best.? I guess I can see where the Internet is a useful tool in research for health care and education, as far as ones ability to search out the best insurance policy or the ability to take an online class.? But as far as health care goes, one could just as easily open the YellowPages and make phone calls and write some stuff down.? But I certainly don’t understand how increasing Internet access will improve public safety and solve our energy issues in this context.? Is there by chance some Einstein-esque man with a secret energy solution that just cannot get his message out at the moment, and if only he had Twitter all our energy problems would be solved?? Something about beach front property in Colorado goes here.
Openness is the Key
Why has the Internet proved to be such a powerful engine for creativity, innovation, and economic growth? A big part of the answer traces back to one key decision by the Internet?s original architects: to make the Internet an open system.
Historian John Naughton describes the Internet as an attempt to answer the following question: How do you design a network that is ?future proof? — that can support the applications that today?s inventors have not yet dreamed of? The solution was to devise a network of networks that would not be biased in favor of any particular application. The Internet?s creators didn?t want the network architecture — or any single entity — to pick winners and losers. Because it might pick the wrong ones. Instead, the Internet?s open architecture pushes decision-making and intelligence to the edge of the network — to end users, to the cloud, to businesses of every size and in every sector of the economy, to creators and speakers across the country and around the globe. In the words of Tim Berners-Lee, the Internet is a ?blank canvas? — allowing anyone to contribute and to innovate without permission.
This is a fantastic paragraph.? Genachowski hits the nail on the head here.? Unfortunately he is too blind to see that government intervention is ubiquitous for not being hands off.? Regulated Net Neutrality is the exact polar opposite approach to what Genachowski has written here.? Government now has the power to pick winners and losers.? They have the power to know what data is being transferred by having the power to conduct deep packet inspection to determine the contents of data traveling across networks.? They will have the power to tell network operators how to manage their networks and how to manage the flow of data, slowing or speeding up the delivery of certain types of applications.? That is the essence of picking winners and losers right there.? Period.? Genachowski wants the Internet to be a “blank canvas” with a little FCC logo down at the bottom right hand corner.
It is easy to look at today?s Internet giants — and the tremendous benefits they have supplied to our economy and our culture — and forget that many were small businesses just a few years ago, founded on little more than a good idea and a no-frills connection to the Internet. Marc Andreessen was a graduate student when he created Mosaic, which led to Netscape, the first commercially successful Web browser. Mark Zuckerberg was a college student in 2004 when he started Facebook, which just announced that it added its 300 millionth member. Pierre Omidyar originally launched eBay on his own personal website. Today more than 600,000 Americans earn part of their living by operating small businesses on eBay?s auction platform, bringing jobs and opportunity to Danvers, Massachusetts, Durham, North Carolina and Lincoln, Nebraska, and many other communities in both rural and urban America. This is the power of the Internet: distributed innovation and ubiquitous entrepreneurship, the potential for jobs and opportunity everywhere there is broadband.
Yes, you too can create the next Amazon in your garage!? With all the grandeur of these statements, the fact remains that all of these massive Internet companies were established under current conditions.? Evidence of the success of the Internet without regulated Net Neutrality is evidence in support of the absence of regulation, not a promotion for regulation.? This paragraph is an argument for keeping the established norm, not for change.? The problem with Genachowski and Neutralians is that they are banking on some ridiculous cosmic notion that the Internet is currently neutral and that they must enact laws to keep it that way.? It is this notion of, “There isn’t a problem, but maybe, possibly, there might be in the future, so we have to do something about that at the risk of destroying the innovation inherent in the Internet and proper network management.”
And let us not forget that the open Internet enables much more than commerce. It is also an unprecedented platform for speech, democratic engagement, and a culture that prizes creative new ways of approaching old problems.
Then why mess with that system based on what essentially boils down to your bet that something bad may happen that the market itself could not correct, when actual case study shows that any violation to Net Neutrality principles has been met with swift action by market forces and immediately corrected within weeks or even days?
In 2000, Jimmy Wales started a project to create a free online encyclopedia. He originally commissioned experts to write the entries, but the project only succeeded after moving to volunteers to write them collaboratively. The result is Wikipedia, one of the top 10 most visited websites in the world and one of the most comprehensive aggregations of human knowledge in our history. The potential of collaboration and social media continues to grow. It is changing and accelerating innovation. And we?ve seen new media tools like Twitter and YouTube used by democratic movements around the globe.
Again, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Even now, the Internet is beginning to transform health care, education, and energy usage for the better. Health-related applications, distributed over a widely connected Internet, can help bring down health care costs and improve medical service. Four out of five Americans who are online have accessed medical information over the Internet, and most say this information affected their decision-making. Nearly four million college students took at least one online course in 2007, and the Internet can potentially connect kids anywhere to the best information and teachers everywhere. And the Internet is helping enable smart grid technologies, which promise to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by hundreds of millions of metric tons.
This is obvious marketing speak for the promotion of Obamacare and administration policy objectives that has nothing to do with anything we are supposed to be hearing about in this speech, which is supposed to be an FCC position statement on Net Neutrality.
At the same time, we have also seen great strides in the center of the network. Most Americans? early exposure to the Internet was through analog modems, which allowed a trickle of data through the phone lines to support early electronic bulletin boards and basic email. Over the last two decades, thanks to substantial investment and technological ingenuity, companies devised ways to retrofit networks initially designed for phones and one-way video to support two-way broadband data streams connecting homes and businesses across the country. And a revolution in wireless technologies — using licensed and unlicensed spectrum — and the creation of path-breaking devices like the Blackberry and iPhone have enabled millions of us to carry the Internet in our pockets and purses.
Yes, Genachowski, and this is what makes the Internet the most wonderful creation man has ever made.? It is a world without you, the government.? It is the last remaining frontier of the Wild West.? And I don’t mean that in a way to reflect the “red light districts” of the net.? I mean that from the perspective that the Internet is a world of self regulation.? Even the regulation on certain websites is determined by the members or owners that inhabit those sites.? It is because of this unbridled nature of the medium that such creativity has flowed.? It is kin to the Age of Enlightenment.? Discovery blossomed when one mans quest for power over another man was finally somewhat extinguished.
It is said that early America buoyed The Enlightenment via the American Revolutionary War.? America thrust off the chains of its oppressor, those that wished to control it, and it blossomed forth.? This is why the Internet has proved successful.? The barriers to entry that exist in many brick and mortar and “meatspace” opportunities are much higher than those of small business and upstarts on the Internet.? Especially in the Internet’s earliest days.? To regulate that now, and possibly restrict innovation and economic development based on a whim is just dumbfounding to me.
The lesson of each of these stories, and innumerable others like them, is that we cannot know what tomorrow holds on the Internet, except that it will be unexpected; that the genius of American innovators is unlimited; and that the fewer obstacles these innovators face in bringing their work to the world, the greater our opportunity as citizens and as a nation.
Does this seem like backwards logic to anyone else?? Genachowski praises the lessons we can learn of success under an unregulated Internet, and then goes on to promote the idea that fewer obstacles improve innovator output and end user opportunity, but he wants to regulate the Internet.? You know that noise Scoopy-Doo used to make when he was confused?? I just made that noise.? How do you limit obstacles by introducing regulation that increases obstacles?? Baffling…
To be continued…Part 2
-nick
MobileBurn: Large Carriers Unlikely To Chase Broadband Stimulus
MobileBurn is reporting today that it looks like larger network builders like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon are unlikely to chase stimulus dollars from the broadband expansion portion of the American Recovery Act.
I predicted this back on the first of April here.
These players are likely to stay on track with their own plans, using their own revenues to build out networks and avoid the potential regulation and oversight that government backed network build outs will probably bring.? The good news for smaller and upstart networks is that this may open the doors to some competition in underdeveloped and undeveloped areas of the country.? Though I prefer government not to be picking winners and losers, there are reasons why big players don’t build out in these areas.? They are either too costly, or won’t produce enough revenue for continued investment.
The problem here is the potential for government backed players to push non-backed network providers out of the market.? Something we will have to keep a watchful eye on in the future as new networks are rolled out using stimulus monies.
-nick
Personal Democracy Forum: The Future of the Conservative Movement
I?m sitting in a bar.
These things must be qualified though, right?
So I?m sitting in a sports bar. Sports bars are particular entities of the bar world in that they have televisions with sports playing on them while they serve the spirits of the normal bar. This isn?t to say that normal bars don?t show sports on their televisions. It just means that they are normally called something that starts with ?Mc? and they have fewer televisions.
This particular sports bar has a sponsor. It?s a Fox Sports Bar. Not to be confused as Fox, sports bar. But rather it is a Fox Sports, bar.
Like I said, these things must be qualified. Also not to be confused with quantified, which would be to essentially count something. And I?m pretty sure there is only one of me here and there is only one Fox Sports, bar present at this time. But that could change depending on the terminal.
Ah, yes. I?m in a terminal. Not conditionally, but in the transitional sense. In this case transferring myself to a plan, which has now been delayed two hours. If you thought to yourself, ?Bummer,? it was an understatement because I was already two hours early to the original flight.
Bummer.
So I?m sitting in a Fox Sports, bar, that resides in a terminal that is a part of an airport for which I am awaiting a plane to board which will take me to Atlanta four hours from now.
I?m involved in all of this because I have recently, at the point of this writing, left the Personal Democracy Forum Conference of the year 2009. Following day one of the event I was certainly frustrated. There were a number of reasons for this. For one, which I?ve already mentioned, I was beleaguered by the progressive presence. Yes, we are all tech people at this conference and we all want to talk about the influence of tech on politics. But there are certain things that, while all of that is true, tech people on the left and right just don?t see eye to eye.
For instance, I do not want network neutrality regulated. Period. Tech proponents of such a step are short sighted. Talk to someone who manages a large infrastructure. They will tell you that network management of packet transfer must take place. Good luck with the regulated network neutrality Internet when your whole neighborhood is trying to get time sensitive streaming 1080p video across your network at the same time and we have locked in regulation that will take ages to alter. In the spirit of Monty Python, ?I laugh in your general direction.? Is network neutrality important? Absolutely. I will not argue that point. But regulated neutrality is an entirely different beast.
But I digress.
Panelists were over heard making the following comments:
?This is what we need to do to see ?progressive? health care reform.?
?We need to pray to god for a hot summer to make people believe that global warming is real.?
?The ?Bush? recession.?
Additionally all our problems were blamed on the Bush Administration. Obviously our current problems are entirely his fault, along with Batman, Darth Vader, and probably God.
My point in bringing this up is that if the objective of PDF is to study the convergence of politics and technology, then let?s do that. It doesn?t necessitate bringing ideology into the mix.
I honestly believe that is what Andrew Rasiej and co-Founder Micah Sifry are trying to do.
I in no way believe there is an underlying motivation of promoting the ideals of the left. And with that being said, heaps of praise must be bestowed on these two gentlemen for their fine work in putting together this conference since 2004. It is interesting to consider the timing of this conference and the swelling online that began in Summer last year for Obama. One must consider if more conservative presence (as in the attendees) was existent at last years event, how that may have altered the online dominance of the left during the election. I don’t want to be ignorant enough to give PDF complete credit for what occurred. But if 1000 people left the conference, and each one told 10 people, and those 10 people told 10 people… You could see how easily the ball gets rolling.
The conference, all things considered, was a wonderful treat. One that I would not have experienced without the Google Fellowship and PDF?s recognition of the work my fellow authors and I have done on this site, which I am of eternal gratitude.
The conference provided tremendous insight into developing web presence, establishing a bond and communication with your audience, and tools that can over night transform a site from drab to dapper. The information of connecting with constituency and remodeling government websites to better connect and be more transparent with the citizenry is vital to the success of government in general and additionally vital to the revitalization of the GOP and conservatism in general.
This is a conversation that I hope more conservatives take more seriously and can join in on in the future. It is no secret that the left ignored talk radio early on and allowed the center-right to take a dominating lead. One that is irrecoverable for the left, as multiple failed attempts with Air America make astoundingly clear. It should be very becoming very apparent to the right that if they ignore the convergence of technology and politics in the same arrogant manner that the left did to talk radio that at some point the strangle hold in the areas of internet technology and constituency connectivity will equally be unrecoverable.
Show stoppers:
Best Moment: Finally hearing Tara Hunt explain live and in her own words what ?Whuffie? is. Equally great was getting to finally meet Tara after spending months Twitting with her.
Worst Moment: As mentioned in a previous column, the final panel of day one with Josh Silver, Executive Director of FreePress, was unbearably one sided. Conservatives question the positions of telecoms as well. But with no one there to present the center-right view on the future of telecommunications with regard to Internet regulation and expansion, the debate was completely one sided and a slaughter fest for Silver. My memory may not be entirely accurate, but at one point I believe he rolled them over and actually stuck a fork in the gentlemen from Comcast & AT&T.
My Jaw Dropped To The Floor And The Girl Next To Me With The Mac Had To Pick It Up For Me Award: Easily goes to Apture. If you are running any sort of online content machine or blog and do not have this application installed you will without a doubt be left in the dust! This app allows you to finally start linking to outside content without sending your readership away from your site, keeping them right where you want them to be; reading your material and clicking your ads. If you haven’t noticed, it has already been seamlessly integrated into our site.
Most Fun Presentation: Michael Wesch, The Machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube Culture and the Politics of Authenticity.
Most Thought Provoking Presentation: Danah Boyd, The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online.
I want to encourage more conservatives to take this intersection more seriously, and see them next year at PDF 2010.
Thanks for a great conference. I was very happy to be a part of the conversation!
-nick
The Personal Democracy Forum Doesn’t Help Conservatives
Monday was a very long day here in New York City. The Personal Democracy Forum Conference busted out of the gate bright and early and never seemed to slow. The conference and its attendees are a cornucopia of ideas and innovation. It certainly feels as if the applications built for and during the Obama campaign have spurred an entire new focus in the political realm. I feel like I’m a fly on the wall of the office that invented grassroots mailers. It certainly seems that we are witnessing the initial stages of a new era in politics.
Six month from now things will be very interesting. The first campaigns since the 2008 presidential race will begin cranking their engines. It will be the first big test as well. Letting all of us evaluate who “got it” after the last go round.
One has to understand that when they attend these sorts of events that there is certainly a goal of objectivity. The reason for attending is to discover the areas in which politics and technology are intersecting. How is technology, or possibly more specifically, the Internet changing politics? Are these changes creating the evaporation of results from the previous models? If so, how do we incorporate these new tools into our area of politics to create new successful models? That’s what we are hear to discover.
The reality though is that people that are passionate about anything can’t keep it from seeping out even when they are trying to hold back. There is nothing wrong with this. I take zero issue with individuals who wear their heart on their sleeve. At least it’s out there.
But at some point a balance issue develops. If panels are mostly chaired by a certain orientation of political enthusiast, the point of view is always the same. If the audience to which they are speaking is of the same enthusiasm, then they are preaching to the choir. The cheers and hardly applause comes because of political orientation and alignment and not because all political technology enthusiast share the same goals.
We don’t.
Case in point was the fine display of two sheep being led on stage for the final panel of the day. The sheep, in the form of two teleco representatives, had their achille’s slit so that they couldn’t escape and then were promptly ritually massacred by the Picadores Josh Silver. Silver, well known in tech policy circles for avoiding any concerns or facts outside of his own talking points was suburb in his beat down. I honestly couldn’t tell if the teleco reps were ill prepared or just trying to play the saint for the audience, the obvious antagonist.
But why was this happening? Silver has a particular motivation and a goal, and not one with which all parties in the tech policy community would agree. Why was no one with a differing point of view sitting on this panal? Not to defend the telecos, but to ask questions from a differing foundation, or to call Silver’s bluff. Where was Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, or Adam Thierer who started Technology Liberation Front? Where was Timothy B. Lee, CATO fellow and Ars Technica contributor? (Who in my humble opinion has hands down written the best scholarly explanation of network neutrality available. Which is mighty humble of me, if I do say so, considering I’ve written on it myself.)
I did appreciate hearing the audience gleefully suck up every drop the FCC commissioner Blair Levin had to say; especially the part where he told us that they were creating a plan. Really? The plan he is referring to of course is the National Broadband Strategy which comes due in February of 2010. What hardly anyone knows though is that the US Department of Agriculture who has used the Rural Utilities Services (RUS) division to improve broadband distribution in the past has been awarded funds for distribution from the stimulus. RUS plans to distribute its roughly $2.5 billion by September 30th, 2009. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration?who received the bulk of the broadband stimulus funds?will hand out their dollars in three phases occurring Spring of 2009, Fall of 2009, and Spring of 2010.
Spend first, formulate your plan later, Mr. Levin? Sort of seems counterproductive to planning at all.
Conservatives are boned at PDF 2009. There is certainly not enough representation amongst panel members. Some of this is absolutely not the fault of Personal Democracy Forum. We are under a liberal Administration, and that administration appoints liberal bureaucrats. An invite to Robert McDowell or Meredith Attwell Baker would have been nice. Maybe they were invited, and turned it down. This too is a possibility. At least Cas Sunstein with his Fairness Doctrine-esque “electronic sidewalks” for the Internet isn’t present.
I’m not laying the wood to PDF. Yes, from initial indications it doesn’t appear that the ideological sides are well balanced, and possibly they don’t know where to look. The real trouble however is the attendees.
The Personal Democracy Forum doesn’t help conservatives. Because conservatives aren’t there to be helped.
The numbers are simply overwhelming. I’d guestimate that the attendance is somwhere close to one thousand. I’d also venture to say that there are roughly five conservatives there. And I’m incorporating the one libertarian I saw with a Ron Paul button.
I’m dismayed.
I know these folks are out there. I’ve written about them. So where are they? After this past Fall why aren’t ogles of people from the right side of the aisle on Capitol Hill all over this event? Did the speakers shy them away? I don’t really think so. I’m a strong conservative-libertarian, and have been for years. And while there are a few people in the speaker list that irk me on the average day, I wouldn’t let them keep me from attending when the majority of lectures and panels are simply focused on an examination of content in some form, a discussion of getting content to an audience, or about tools to help you be more efficient and productive.
This is subject matter that conservatives need to hear. Maybe PDF needs to market themselves more to conservative circles on the web? Possibly all conservatives on the web are poor and couldn’t afford to attend? It could be that conservatives don’t fit in with all the Apple fan boys present at the conference. If there were more Dell owners then it might have been more balanced.
All thought provoking questions.
These are just initial reactions. I’m sure I will be thinking more about it into the second day of the event as I look for reasons for the paltry representation.
Secretly though, I think the liberals in the crowd are ecstatic. Why wouldn’t they be? It’s like someone serving up a box of free gold to anyone who shows up at the box and takes the gold. And only liberals are showing up, so they get to take home all the gold.
You can’t teach a dead dog new tricks. And you certainly can’t expect to win a fight you don’t show up to.
Very much looking forward to Tuesday.
-nick
thelobbyist goes to New York: Personal Democracy Forum 2009
Yours truly will be heading to New York City to attend this years Personal Democracy Forum conference. I was recently awarded a Google Fellowship to represent thelobbyist.net at the conference. You can see the list of awardees here. The conference is known as the largest of its type to investigate the intersection of politics and technology. And this years conference may be the most exciting yet as we have had a huge year with the successful uses of new media/social networking in various campaigns, most notably that of our current president, the coming of age of Twitter in grassroots movements such as this past Springs Tea Parties, and new technology uses in government like we.gov.
If you aren’t familiar with the Personal Democracy Forum conference, you can check up on it here.
On behalf of all of us at thelobbyist, we are honored and humbled by this invitation, and would like to send out a special THANK YOU! to those at Personal Democracy Forum for their selection of thelobbyist.net for a fellowship, and additionally to Google, Inc for providing the fellowship allowing us to attend the event.
Updates will follow to share what we’ve learned about the growing convergence of technology and politics.
-nick
Obama: 101 Days In Tech Policy
President Obama reached his 100 day milestone yesterday to mixed emotions and reviews across the media spectrum. But what did this milestone mean for technology policy?
The brightest spot could be Mr. Obama’s appointment of Melissa Hathaway to perform a 60-day review of federal cybersecurity procedures. Early reports of her charge have been encouraging. The report, however, remains unavailable to the public. Ultimately, the new administration must provide improved network security for our national infrastructure and bureaucracies while keeping government as far removed as possible from privately held networks and markets. The private sector must take the lead in experimenting with more robust data security and authentication technologies.
Obama’s approach toward intellectual property is one source of concern. Numerous Obama appointees, like the Copyright Czar, hail from large content companies. While there is nothing wrong with appointing individuals with a background in representing major intellectual property owners, the lack of alternative viewpoints in the Obama administration is troubling. Lately, there has been a worrisome trend toward the criminalization of certain online activities and applications, such as peer-to-peer file sharing. Non-commercial copyright infringement is wrong and should be legally actionable, but it should not be a criminal offense-especially not one that involves possible jail time. And file sharing applications, despite facilitating copyright infringement, also have many valid uses and do not deserve to be demonized. Going forward, Obama should consider a range of viewpoints and explore methods of allowing the free market to experiment with new licensing techniques and methods of delivering content that improve the consumer experience and deter content theft without necessitating bigger government.
Mr. Obama’s stimulus package includes roughly $7 billion in funds for the promotion of new broadband networks in unserved and underserved areas. For firms to be eligible for these funds, they must comply with ambiguous FCC rules concerning network neutrality. Neutral network management may be appropriate and ideal in many circumstances, but not all networks should be neutral in all situations. Not all network traffic is created equal, and some network operators may not wish to be all things to all people. President Obama should strip openness mandates from the broadband stimulus package and wait to hand out broadband stimulus funds until the National Broadband Strategy is completed early next year.
Concern exists with the appointment of Cass Sunstein as well. Sunstein has supported the idea of a mandatory “electronic sidewalk” for the Internet, stating that, “A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government,” Sunstein wrote. “Democratic efforts to reduce the resulting problems ought not be rejected in freedom’s name.” It has been called “The Fairness Doctrine for the Internet,” by Adam Thiere of The Progress & Freedom Foundation. The new administration should be advised to keep a tight leash on Sunstein and his Orwellian views of the 1st and 2nd Amendment.
Finally, steps taken toward allowing government officials to use cellular site data without a warrant raise serious Constitutional concerns. Justice Department lawyers do not consider the use of this data as a “search and seizure,” and they ignore the serious privacy implications of government agents tracking individuals’ locations via their mobile phone signals. Only with either a court order or the consent of end users should government be able to intercept cellular site data for law enforcement purposes. President Obama should order the Department of Justice to end warrantless interception of cellular site data on the grounds that infringes on Fourth Amendment protections.
-nick
Netflix Neutrality
Originally posted on OpenMarket.org:
A little over a week ago, Netflix was berated by a user who assumed that the company was throttling his streaming video connection. Slashdot picked up the story shortly afterwards, and an Engadget piece was soon to follow.
The ground shook, walls crumbled, worlds were torn asunder, Lance Armstrong fell off his bike. Not really.
Riyad Kalla, of the Break It Down Blog began to notice that the same movie was buffering differently on his PC versus his Xbox 360 when trying to load up a ?Watch Instantly? film from Netflix. In brief, he carried out some testing opening up multiple threads to the same movie and saw his downstream speed increase and thus concluded that Netflix was throttling his connection.
But Kalla?s methodology has been questioned as his testing does not prove Netflix is shaping traffic, only that there is probably a problem somewhere down the line with his connection. Additionally, it has been suggested that the way in which he tested, may have caused servers to think they were under DDOS attack which made the situation worse, and that he was using the old Windows Media player instead of Netflix?s new Silverlight multi-sourcing player.
But the bottom line of the whole scenario is whether a company offering a service is remaining faithful to their promise to deliver for the subscription rate their consumers are paying to receive said service? And the implication is that Netflix is purposefully throttling the connection of specific users who partake in the viewing of a great deal of content.
About a week after the initial blog post, Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer wrote an official response for Netflix on their blog. Hunt pointed out that,
Content from Netflix originates on CDN servers that are distributed around the US (just as our DVD shipping centers are) so that the data doesn?t have to traverse the Internet backbones to get to our customers, but instead can usually reach its destination via regional and metro networks that have much higher aggregate bandwidth.
Breaking that down, Hunt is describing the fact that Netflix?s content is disperse. They use CDN servers (Content Delivery Network) managed by Limelight Networks, so they?re the company we ought to be looking at.
Limelight Networks is a CDN that operates a massive, private fiber optic network. They claim to be directly connected to over 900 last-mile networks around the globe. Because of Limelight owns this large network, their distribution doesn?t have to be ?neutral.? In fact, it?s designed not to be. Limelight shapes traffic on their private network to deliver content as fast as possible and to provide the absolute best experience for the end user. That?s why services like Microsoft?s Xbox Live, Apple?s iTunes, Sony?s Playstation Network, and Netflix?s Watch Instantly use Limelight as their backend for content distribution.
But Limelight?s connections end at the user?s ISP. At that point, net neutrality takes over, and all packets treated equally. Congestion in this neutral last mile (or miles) can seriously deteriorate the quality of the content and the speed at which it is delivered. This can explain the difference in speed that Mr. Kalla thought were a result of Netflix throttling his downloads.
Additionally, products like the Xbox 360, the Roku, or any of the number of current Blu-Ray players that include Netflix streaming are very different, proprietary devices. The PCs and Macs that play Netflix movies can have hundreds of variations. We should expect content on these varied platforms to be displayed at varied speeds.
Hunt address this in the Netflix blog, noting that the network accessed by these various devices can even be different:
?different titles, and different encodes for different playback device types, may come from different CDNs or different servers at a particular CDN, so may have different paths and different bottlenecks. Accordingly, customers may see better performance on Xbox than their PC, or vice-versa. Equivalently, some titles may stream unaffected, while others suffer congestion. There is no purposeful discrimination between different clients ? we want them all to perform very well.
So much for Netflix trying to slow anything down. But why would they? Competitive pressure from Hulu and other streaming services is forcing Netflix to offer the best streaming service possible, not a purposefully degraded one. Mr. Kalla?s accusations would only make sense if Netflix weren?t in a very competitive market, but with all the video content flooding the Internet, that?s clearly not the case.
The one good thing to come out of this hype is the direct statement of intentions from Netflix?s CPO. Now users can hold Netflix to their statements about streaming neutrality. And they can easily hold Netflix to account by leaving their service for another, possibly free source of online video content.
The calls for regulaton may now cease.
-nick
Most Watched City In the World Doesn’t Want to be Watched…by Google
In what has to be one of the greatest ironies in the ‘free’ world, a lobby group in London has issued a formal complaint to the Information Commissioner (ICO) stating that 200 complaints have been filed against the Google “Street View” application because of privacy concerns. It is curious whether these same citizens are concerned about London’s famed “Ring of Steel” CCTV system being a threat to democracy and their privacy as well.
Maybe the UK government could just contract out Googles services and save everyone time…
-nick
Dungeons & Dragons Murdered My Vegetables
Today, the German president, Horst Koehler backed a ban on violent movies and video games after last weeks school shooting in Germany. This is a trend that continues to push forward.
Ignored is human nature, society, the news media’s often graphic display of violence and any other rational explanation. Any time at this point in history where an older person acts out in violence some type of mental illness is called upon, but when a young person acts out in violence they are impressionable, and video games or movies are the obvious conclusion.
When Columbine occurred, Doom and Basketball Diaries was to blame. The Matrix which had only been on the seen for 2 weeks also took some heat. Counter Strike, a tactical terrorist shooter, was blamed for the Virginia Tech massacre. And in 2005, the board game Dungeons & Dragons was blamed for a murder in New Jersey:
A South Jersey man is being held without bail on charges that he stabbed three people to death. District Attorney Bruce Casto is investigating a possible connection to Dungeons & Dragons: “I mean, you have many, many stab wounds and those Dungeons and Dragons fantasy games involve swords and knives and daggers and things of that nature. There may be a connection but I can’t say for sure.”
Makes you wonder if cooking is ever blamed for murder?
I began thinking about media in general after it was announced a Cleveland school yanked a Nintendo Power out of their library because it had a gun toting female on the cover about other media’s affect on earlier generations.
Here’s what I found (originally posted by Tom Standage in Wired Magazine):
Novels
“The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge. Parents take care to feed their children with wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind, whether they are furnished with salutary food, or with trash, chaff, or poison?”
- Reverend Enos Hitchcock, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family, 1790The Waltz
“The indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced … at the English Court on Friday last … It is quite sufficient to cast one’s eyes on the voluptuous inter twining of the limbs, and close com pressure of the bodies … to see that it is far indeed removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females. So long as this obscene display was con fined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is … forced on the respectable classes of society by the evil example of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.”
- The Times of London, 1816Movies
“This new form of entertainment has gone far to blast maidenhood … Depraved adults with candies and pennies beguile children with the inevitable result. The Society has prosecuted many for leading girls astray through these picture shows, but GOD alone knows how many are leading dissolute lives begun at the ‘moving pictures.’”
- The Annual Report of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 1909The Telephone
“Does the telephone make men more active or more lazy? Does [it] break up home life and the old practice of visiting friends?”
- Survey conducted by the Knights of Columbus Adult Education Committee, San Francisco Bay Area, 1926Comic Books
“Many adults think that the crimes described in comic books are so far removed from the child’s life that for children they are merely something imaginative or fantastic. But we have found this to be a great error. Comic books and life are connected. A bank robbery is easily translated into the rifling of a candy store. Delinquencies formerly restricted to adults are increasingly committed by young people and children … All child drug addicts, and all children drawn into the narcotics traffic as messengers, with whom we have had contact, were inveterate comic-book readers This kind of thing is not good mental nourishment for children!”
- Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 1954Rock and Roll
“The effect of rock and roll on young people, is to turn them into devil worshippers; to stimulate self-expression through sex; to provoke lawlessness; impair nervous stability and destroy the sanctity of marriage. It is an evil influence on the youth of our country.”
- Minister Albert Carter, 1956Videogames
“The disturbing material in Grand Theft Auto and other games like it is stealing the innocence of our children and it’s making the difficult job of being a parent even harder … I believe that the ability of our children to access pornographic and outrageously violent material on video games rated for adults is spiraling out of control.”
- US senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2005
This isn’t something new. Violence and murder existed at the beginning of human history in scripture. And it wasn’t the vegetables to blame. It’s something deeper and something that cannot be fixed with laws and regulations if you catch my drift. If kids are simply impressionable to anything in media, then we must also consider that the violent imagery in scripture affects kids in the same way. But this is and would be considered a ludicrous thought.
But it’s in the same vain as how the media portrays steroids. When Chris Benoit killed his family and then himself the culprit was steroids. Steroids caused him to “roid rage” and murder his family and take his own life. Then steroids supposedly caused the death of a whole list of wrestlers. Psychological disorders, abuse of other drugs, and abuse of steroids was completely incomprehensible. Yet at the same time, during the height of the steroid era in baseball, no baseball players were murdering their families or falling out dead. I guess steroids only negatively affects a certain type of athlete? Maybe the drugs are biased in how they affect athletes?
Where is the common sense?
-nick
Conservatives Just Don’t “Get It”
You’ve heard this right? Conservatives just don’t “get it” when it comes to technology, social networking, and Internet marketing.
Really?
I’m so sick of hearing this. What secret technology recipe do Dems and liberals hold in this medium? What have they done that is so damn special? Everywhere I turn I’m being fed this line about how liberals have cornered the market on online politics. Why? Because the Obama campaign used Twitter, Facebook, and put a donate button on their campaign website? Please…
MoveOn.org is certainly a big player in some areas of webspace, and they have no equal in the conservative cybersphere…yet. TheVanguard.org argues that they will be the conservative answer to Moveon. This is a promise we have heard before, so I will remain cautiously optimistic. But while we are on the subject, what is it that MoveOn has on it’s website that is so mind blowingly special?
I circled it for you in case you are a conservative/libertarian that just doesn’t “get it”:
The MoveOn page is filled with rhetoric and articles. As an aside if you look closely you will pick out blatant misleading numbers all on one page. Their email sign up claims 4 million members. The article under “Success Stories” claims 5 million members in the title. While just under the title the actual story print claims 4.2 million members. I wish my boss paid me an extra 80% on every 20% of the dollar I made. But I digress.
The big FTW that liberals all other the Internet sipping their techno-lattes are getting all worked up about is how many email addresses MoveOn has collected via what boils down to a newsletter sign up box, a donate button, and a graphic icon link to their Facebook and YouTube fan sites. That’s it folks. That’s what the big liberal Net geniuses are walking around heads in the clouds over. High-five guys! You conquered the Internetz!
What is the actual gain from this? MoveOn had close to $60 million in donations in 2004, and unless usual donors took their money straight to Obama, it’s safe to assume that the number was close to that in 2008.
While not in direct competition, The Heritage Foundation had a similar endowment in 2008 and also holds a similar size contact list. Being that Heritage is a think tank, and not a social club, many of their priorities are different. But there endowment certainly allows them to compete in the same spaces that a group like MoveOn is battling for ground in.
But what are the real numbers here? Why can’t conservatives compete in the webspace like they do in talk radio in meatspace? Why don’t we get it? What aren’t we getting?
WHAT WE DON’T GET IS THAT WE HAVE BOUGHT INTO A LIE THAT WE “DON’T GET IT”.
… in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.
?Adolf Hitler , Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X
Look at the numbers:
MoveOn is winning the Facebook war. That’s pure Paris Hilton “hot” right there. You guys can trade pictures and make cute references to the Messiah’s newest portrait in your status bar. But Facebook isn’t the only application in webspace. Liberals claim to be controlling everything. But the numbers don’t add up. The DNC less than half the subscribers or channel views than the much webspace belabored RNC on YouTube. And the RNC easily rivals MoveOn in YouTube channel subscribers, falling behind by only 500 subscribers, but actually having 65,000 more views of channel content. And Twitter, the Internet rage that is constantly talked about by liberals like they invented it is completely dominated by conservative and libertarian organizations! In fact MoveOn and the DNC don’t even have representation on Twitter. And let’s not even discuss individual members of Congress’ Twitter or Facebook adherence. They all have them. No one has an advantage.
So why are liberals and media outlets always saying that conservatives “get it”? Because of Obama.
The Obama campaign’s technology effort which receives ravenous attention didn’t invent these applications or even use them any differently than anyone else in the conservative movement, with the exception of my.barackobama.com which allowed individuals to organize local events online. Ultimately a brilliant strategy. But It is no secret that Obama implemented an 18 month online social networking strategy, while John McCain simply pushed hard at the end, running what amounted to be a 72 hour “get out the vote” train wreck. The reality of what happened last year was that Obama’s team produced an in depth Internet strategy from the very beginning. The Internet was not just a webpage used to promote his candidacy and explain his policies. It was used to connect like minded individuals through various ranges of social networking.
This isn’t something new to conservatives and libertarians.
It was new to John McCain’s campaign staff and John McCain. And by the time McCain got on board with a decent Internet strategy, that ship had sailed, and Obama’s web presence was rolling down a mountain like a Mac truck with no brakes. When liberal pundits are issuing their insults toward the other sides comprehension and use of Internet applications, they are thinking of the Obama campaign specifically, and not the broad strokes. What Obama did with technology and did early was a great move. But the uses of tech in his campaign was not some secret cauldron of witch brew which only liberals had the necessary skills to use. Conservatives have been using the same tools for years. And when we saw them being used by Obama and used successfully, we were sitting around all thinking, “This stuff should be obvious, we are all using it, why isn’t McCain.” Conservatives have it right. They’ve “got it”. In fact if you want a closer look at how well they get it, look to efforts like CEI’s openmarket.org, bureaucrash.com, globalwarming.org, or the Heritage Foundation’s stopspendingourfuture.org, 33-minutes.com or their joint venture ReadTheStimulus.org. Or try RedCountry.com, RedState.com, TopConservativesOnTwitter.com (#tcot), atr.org (Americans for Tax Reform), netrightnation.com; these go on forever.
The RNC’s loss of Cyrus Krohn is a tough blow. But you can’t build an empire with one hammer. And furthermore, the duties of the RNC specifically does not necessarily need to be creating and implementing new widgets and whatzits. It needs to be making sure that the next candidate is. If the RNC was behind at some point then let’s be clear, the RNC is not the conservative movement.
Realistically, there is also more to the story. While conservative get technology and use it effectively, the last campaign was riddled with problems. Mixed messages and feelings over the Bush policy, the party being sporadic with their message, and many conservatives feeling like they were being left behind and no strong voice to represent their political ideology. At the same time, Democrats were very united. Not by Twitter or Facebook, but by a common theme, ‘Paint McCain as another Bush — No more Bush!”
For conservatives to rebound, and additionally re-capture the votes of moderates and libertarians they don’t need to just use technology well. Getting a lot of followers on Facebook or Twitter will not win an election. Conservatives need a unified voice, a return to traditional conservative values, and a common theme.
Which they have found, in Obama.
-nick
?I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I’ve bought a big bat. I’m all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!?
