In a jointly-released press release, Consumer Federation of America, Free Press and Consumers Union said a recent CFA-commissioned survey provided strong evidence that “consumers want congress to protect [their] right to access information, services on [the]Internet.” According to the release:
The nationally representative survey found that more than 75 percent of Internet users polled are seriously concerned about not being able to freely choose an Internet service provider or being required to pay twice for certain Internet services. Another 70 percent were concerned about providers blocking or impairing their access to Internet services or sites, such as Internet telephone service or online retailers like Amazon.com. Fifty-four percent want Congress to take action to ensure that Internet providers are prohibited from engaging in these practices…more than two-thirds of users agree cable and telephone companies should adhere to the stated network neutrality principles, yet only 47 percent expect them not to engage in problematic behavior.
The poll’s findings were based on three nationally representative random sample surveys each consisting of 1,000 households, which was commissioned by CFA in November 2005.
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 8:55 PM | Print | Comments (0)In a post entitled “the self-owned internet,” Susan Crawford argues that the Internet is a “commons…owned by all for common use…and no sovereign ever showed up to which the people who ‘own’ the internet (that is, everyone) surrendered their ownership.”
In a follow-up post, Susan says:
If any individual attempted to stop the [Internet] in its tracks and demand an accounting of precisely what value he had contributed, so that he could propertize it and take it home to buy groceries, the network would not be able to respond and would collapse. Closing the network, making it exclusive, changes it into something that is no longer alive.
The telephone companies claim that they own “the network,” because they built it. But “the internet,” as it is understood by the public, is owned by no one. Indeed, the internet arguably owns itself and has value of its own that is entirely independent of the identity of its access valves. This value is being captured daily by the “owners” of the internet—everyone.
…So the internet is not only unowned, but it also has a liveliness and liberty of its own that is highly beneficial to mankind and requires protection. The role of government should be to prohibit any form of ownership (or other action) that unreasonably interferes with the openness of and access to and responsible use of this commons by the collective group.
We can start from the premise that there is a strong public interest (evidenced by Bush Administration as well as Clinton Administration comments) in having high-speed, unfettered internet access be available as widely as possible. We can graciously accept that there is a general public interest in protecting property and compensating property owners. But we can regard access to the commons of the self-owned internet as a more important public interest than protecting the private property of the telecom companies.
In her earlier post, Susan draws an analogy to the sea. She quotes an 1824 Supreme Court decision:
“When the Revolution took place the people of each state became themselves sovereign, and in that character hold the absolute right to all their navigable waters, and the soils under them, for their own common use, subject only to the rights since surrendered by the constitution to the general government.”
While acknowledging that “the internet wasn’t created by nature,” Susan says that it is nonetheless “a great gift, and it is very important to being a citizen, and for these reasons it is owned by all for common use.”
It’s fine to build a house on the seashore, or a wharf jutting into a lake, as long as you don’t keep people from navigating that ocean or lake. And, by the way, you can certainly have a privately owned thing on/in the sea, like a ship or a self-owned whale. But access to the sea has to be available.
…So — it’s fine to build special services and make them available online. But broadband access companies that cover the waterfront (literally — are interfering with our navigation online) should be confronted with the power of the state to protect entry into this self-owned commons, the internet. And the state may not abdicate its duty to take on this battle.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 8:35 PM | Print | Comments (0)
The EFF has issued a warning about a new gambit at play by Hollywood and the record companies to nip new technology in the bud. This effort comes about in the form of new broadcast flag legislation, which would limit access to TV or radio content by any new devices to
“customary historic use of broadcast content by consumers to the extent such use is consistent with applicable law.”
In essence, instead of allowing “fair use,” which is a forward-looking concept that enables a user to reasonably access a certain amount of content under certain conditions, “customary use” would make any new technological feature by its very definition a tool of copyright infringement. Moreover, the FCC would have the power to determine if a new feature falls into the “customary use” category. As EFF points out
If the feature is banned, courts will never have an opportunity to pass on whether the activity is a fair use. Voila, fair use is frozen in time. We’ll continue to have devices that ape the VCRs and cassette decks of the past, but new gizmos will have to be submitted to the FCC for approval, where MPAA and RIAA lobbyists can kill it in the crib.
The concept of “customary use” has raised an outcry among bloggers and copyleft-types. My favorite is this statement from Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing:
Hollywood’s crybaby capitalists accuse us of being “communists” with one breath, and in the next, they go begging to Congress to turn the FCC into device czars who keep the market from being disrupted by innovation.
Ars Technica has this deconstruction of the new bill and raises yet another alarm, this one about a provision dealing with “secure moving technology” that limits the extent to which content covered by the broadcast flag can migrate from its original receiving device to some other platform.
The broadcast flag alone isn’t enough, because what happens when you want to actually listen to the audio that the device has received? Unless you’ve got headphones attached directly to your digital radio, you’re going to want to move the signal from the digital radio to a stereo receiver (for “rendering” as the draft puts it), even if you’re not necessarily planning on ripping the music and uploading it to eDonkey. This where the “secure moving technology” kicks in. The “secure moving technology” ensures that whatever you do with the signal that leaves the digital broadcast receiver, it definitely won’t be anything you can’t already do right now. Furthermore, even some things that you can currently do will be outlawed if those things could facilitate piracy. This probably means that such devices won’t have much in the way of hi-fi analog outs.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:48 PM | Print | Comments (0)
The Miami Herald has this article today on how “sunshine” laws, laws that are designed to make the public policy making process more open to view, are being tested by technology, instant messaging and cell phone calls in particular. In Florida, which has one of the oldest and most extensive sets of sunshine laws in the country, questions are being raised about whether public officials are making all their actions transparent.
Under state law, a public record is any document made or received by a government agency in connection with the transaction of official business and must be made available for citizens to review. But as people increasingly use computers instead of paper to communicate, the definition of a public record is changing.
Even emails, which come close to a paper record traditionally covered by sunshine laws, are missing from some public records. One legislative staffer deleted hundreds of emails in the last days of the state legislature’s session in 2004, saying that the missives didn’t pertain to state government. But an examination of some of those deleted emails showed that many did in fact deal with state business.
One interesting item: Earlier this year Jacksonville’s mayor wanted to set up a system so that the city council’s members could text message each other, but that concept was nixed because text messaging isn’t transparent.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:37 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Richard Siklos has this interesting piece in today’s New York Times that follows on Google’s deal to buy dMarc Advertising. Siklos looks at two companies that, like Google and dMarc, are looking to make advertising and sales more efficient and targeted…only these companies are focused on video.
The first is Decisionmark, the software and logisitics company that helps DBS providers route local broadcast TV signals to the right local satellite viewers, narrowing the geographic reach of any station’s satellite audience. Decisionmark has a system that can do the same thing online.
But Decisionmark is dangling the prospect of having local TV affiliates do the per-program sales of hit shows such as “CSI” instead of letting Google and Apple reap all the benefits.
“The next thing that we’re all buzzing about is this concept of selling programming to people over the Internet,” said Mr. Goodmon [Capitol Broadcasting’s Jim Goodmon], whose flagship station, WRAL, is the CBS affiliate in Raleigh. “If CBS wants to sell ‘CSI,’ we would like to be able to sell it for them - in partnership with them - on our Web site. I think we’re in the best position to sell and promote that material on behalf of the network.”
The other company Siklos spotlights is only two weeks old — SpotRunner, founded by Nick Grouf and David Waxman, who were the co-founders of PeoplePC and Firefly Network. Firefly has developed a system that allows advertisers to buy cable TV ad spots for as little as $500, opening up the TV advertising world to small businesses, in much the same way Google opened up the web ad world.
It may not be Madison Avenue quality, but it puts you on the tube. And once a business signs up to use a particular ad in a market, it has exclusive use of it for the duration of the campaign. Spot Runner charges $350 to create and place the ad, and Mr. Grouf says the cost of time in some markets is less than small-business owners may think - as little as a few dollars a spot.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:02 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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