Freedom to Tinker

The gymnastics scoring in this year’s Olympics has generated some controversy, as usual. Some of the controversy feel manufactured: NBC tried to create a hubbub over Nastia Liukin losing the uneven bars gold medal on the Nth tiebreaker; but top-level sporting events whose rules do not admit ties must sometimes decide contests by tiny margins.

A more interesting discussion relates to a change in the scoring system, moving from the old 0.0 to 10.0 scale, to a new scale that adds together an “A score” measuring the difficulty of the athlete’s moves and a “B score” measuring how well the moves were performed. The B score is on the old 0-10 scale, but the A score is on an open-ended scale with fixed scores for each constituent move and bonuses for continuously connecting a series of moves.

One consequence of the new system is that there is no predetermined maximum score. The old system had a maximum score, the legendary “perfect 10″, whose demise is mourned old-school gymnastics gurus like Bela Karolyi. But of course the perfect 10 wasn’t really perfect, at least not in the sense that a 10.0 performance was unsurpassable. No matter how flawless a gymnast’s performance, it is always possible, at least in principle, to do better, by performing just as flawlessly while adding one more flip or twist to one of the moves. The perfect 10 was in some sense a myth.

What killed the perfect 10, as Jordan Ellenberg explained in Slate, was a steady improvement in gymnastic performance that led to a kind of grade inflation in which the system lost its ability to reward innovators for doing the latest, greatest moves. If a very difficult routine, performed flawlessly, rates 10.0, how can you reward an astonishingly difficult routine, performed just as flawlessly? You have to change the scale somehow. The gymnastics authorities decided to remove the fixed 10.0 limit by creating an open-ended difficulty scale.

There’s an interesting analogy to the “grade inflation” debate in universities. Students’ grades and GPAs have increased slowly over time, and though this is not universally accepted, there is plausible evidence that today’s students are doing better work than past students did. (At the very least, today’s student bodies at top universities are drawn from a much larger pool of applicants than before.) If you want a 3.8 GPA to denote the same absolute level of performance that it denoted in the past, and if you also want to reward the unprecendented performance of today’s very best students, then you have to expand the scale at the top somehow.

But maybe the analogy from gymnastics scores to grades is imperfect. The only purpose of gymnastics scores is to compare athletes, to choose a winner. Grades have other purposes, such as motivating students to pay attention in class, or rewarding students for working hard. Not all of these purposes require consistency in grading over time, or even consistency within a single class. Which grading policy is best depends on which goals we have in mind.

One thing is clear: any discussion of gymnastics scoring or university grading will inevitably be colored by nostalgic attachment to the artists or students of the past.

It’s a curious problem: how do you compare two completely unrelated voting systems and say that one is more or less secure than the other?  How can you meaningfully compare the security of paper ballots tabulated by optical scan systems with DRE systems (with or without VVPAT attachments)?

There’s a clear disconnect on this issue.  It shows up, among other places, in a recent blog post by political scientist Thad Hall:

The point here is that, when we think about paper ballots and absentee voting, we do not typically think about or evaluate them “naked” but within an implementation context yet we think nothing of evaluating e-voting “naked” and some almost think it “cheating” to think about e-voting security within the context of implementation.  However, if we held both systems to the same standard, the people in California probably would not be voting using any voting system; given its long history, it is inconceivable that paper ballots would fail to meet the standards to which e-voting is held, absent evaluating its implementation context.

Hall then goes on to point to his recent book with Mike Alvarez, Electronic Elections, that beats on this particular issue at some length.  What that book never offers, however, is a decent comparison between electronic voting and anything else.

I’ve been thinking about this issue for a while: there must be a decent, quantitative way to compare these things.  Turns out, we can leverage a foundational technique from computer science theory: complexity analysis.  CS theory is all about analyzing the “big-O” complexity of various algorithms.  Can we analyze this same complexity for voting systems’ security flaws?

I took a crack at the problem for a forthcoming journal paper.  I classified a wide variety of voting systems according to how much effort you need to do to influence all the votes: effort proportional to the total number of voters, effort proportional to the number of precincts, or constant effort; less effort implies less security.  I also broke this down by different kinds of attacks: integrity attacks that try to change votes in a stealthy fashion, confidentiality attacks that try to learn how specific voters cast their votes, and denial of service attacks that don’t care about stealth but want to smash parts of the election.  This was a fun paper to write, and it nicely responds to Hall and Alvarez’s criticisms.  Have a look.

(Joe Hall also responded to Thad Hall’s post.)

Over lunch I did something old-fashioned—I picked up and read a print copy of the New York Times. I was startled to find, on the front of the business section, a large, colorfully decorated feature headlined “Is Google a Media Company?” The graphic accompanying the story shows a newspaper masthead titled “Google Today,” followed by a list of current and imagined future offerings, from Google Maps and Google Earth to Google Drink and Google Pancake. Citing the new, wikipedia-esque service Knol, and using the example of that service’s wonderful entry on buttermilk pancakes, the Times story argues that Knol’s launch has “rekindled fears among some media companies that Google is increasingly becoming a competitor. They foresee Google’s becoming a powerful rival that not only owns a growing number of content properties, including YouTube, the top online video site, and Blogger, a leading blogging service, but also holds the keys to directing users around the Web.”

I hope the Times’s internal business staff is better grounded than its reporters and editors appear to be—otherwise, the Times is in even deeper trouble than its flagging performance suggests. Google isn’t becoming a media company—it is one now and always has been. From the beginning, it has sold the same thing that the Times and other media outlets do: Audiences. Unlike the traditional media outlets, though, online media firms like Google and Yahoo have decoupled content production from audience sales. Whether selling ads alongside search results, or alongside user-generated content on Knol or YouTube, or displaying ads on a third party blog or even a traditional media web site, Google acts as a broker, selling audiences that others have worked to attract. In so doing, they’ve thrown the competition for ad dollars wide open, allowing any blog to sap revenue (proportionately to audience share) from the big guys. The whole infrastructure is self-service and scales down to be economical for any publisher, no matter how small. It’s a far cry from an advertising marketplace that relies, as the newspaper business traditionally has, on human add sales. In the new environment, it’s a buyer’s market for audiences, and nobody is likely to make the kinds of killings that newspapers once did. As I’ve argued before, the worrying and plausible future for high-cost outlets like the Times is a death of a thousand cuts as revenues get fractured among content sources.

One might argue that sites like Knol or Blogger are a competitive threat to established media outlets because they draw users away from those outlets. But Google’s decision to add these sites hurts its media partners only to the (small) extent that the new sites increase the total amount of competing ad inventory on the web—that is, the supply of people-reading-things to whom advertisements can be displayed. To top it all off, Knol lets authors, including any participating old-media producers, capture revenue from the eyeballs they draw. The revenues in settings like these are slimmer because they are shared with Google, as opposed to being sold directly by NYTimes.com or some other establishment media outlet. But it’s hard to judge whether the Knol reimbursement would be higher or lower than the equivalent payment if an ad were displayed on the established outlet’s site, since Google does not disclose the fraction of ad revenue in shares with publishers in either case. But the addition of one more user-generated content site, whether from Google or anyone else, is at most a footnote to the media industry trend: Google’s revenues come from ads, and that makes it a media company, pure and simple.

The FCC’s recent Comcast action—whose full text is unavailable as yet, though it was described in a press release and statements from each comissioner—is a lesson in the importance of technological literacy for policymaking. The five commissioners’ views, as reflected in their statements, are strongly correlated to the degree of understanding of the fact pattern that each commissioner’s statement reveals. Both dissenting commissioners, it turns out, materially misunderstood the technical facts on which they assert their decisions were based. But the majority, despite technical competence, avoided a bright line rule—and that might itself turn out to be great policy.

Referring to what she introduces as the “BitTorrent-Comcast controversy,” dissenting Commissioner Tate writes that after the FCC began to look into the matter, “the two parties announced on March 27 an agreement to collaborate in managing web traffic and to work together to address network management and content distribution.” Where private parties can agree among themselves, Commissioner Tate sensibly argues, regulators ought to stand back. But as Ed and others have pointed out before, this has never been a two-party dispute. BitTorrent, Inc., which negotiated with Comcast, doesn’t have the power to redefine the open BitTorrent protocol whose name it shares. Anyone can write client software to share files using today’s version of the Bittorrent protocol — and no agreement between Comcast and BitTorrent, Inc. could change that. Indeed, if the protocoal were modified to buy overall traffic reductions by slowing downloads for individual users, one might expect many users to decline to switch. For this particular issue to be resolved among the parties, Comcast would have to negotiate with all (or at least most of) the present and future developers of Bittorrent clients. A private or mediated resolution among the primary actors involved in this dispute has not taken place and isn’t, as far as I know, currently being attempted. So while I share Ms. Tate’s wise preference for mediation and regulatory reticence, I don’t think her view in this particular case is available to anyone who fully understands the technical facts.

The other dissenting commissioner, Robert McDowell, shares Ms. Tate’s confusion about who the parties to the dispute are, chastising the majority for going forward after Comcast and BitTorrent, Inc. announced their differences settled. He’s also simply confused about the technology, writing that “the vast majority of consumers” “do not use P2P software to watch YouTube” when (a) YouTube isn’t delivered over P2P software, so its traffic numbers don’t speak to the P2P issue and (b) YouTube is one of the most popular sites on the web, making it very unlikely that the “vast majority of consumers” avoid the site. Likewise, he writes that network management allows companies to provide “online video without distortion, pops, and hisses,” analog problems that aren’t faced by digital media.

The majority decision, in finding Comcast’s activities collectively to be over the line from “reasonable network management,” leaves substantial uncertainty about where that line lies, which is another way of saying that the decision makes it hard for other ISPs to predict what kinds of network management, short of what Comcast did, would prompt sanctions in the future. For example, what if Comcast or another ISP were to use the same tools only to target BitTorrent files that appear, after deep packet inspection, to violate copyright? The commissioners were at pains to emphasize that networks are free to police their networks for illegal content. But a filter designed to impede transfer of most infringing video would be certain to generate a significant number of false positives, and the false positives (that is, transfers of legal video impeded by the filter) would act as a thumb on the scales in favor of traditional cable service, raising the same body of concerns about competition that the commissioners cite as a background factor informing their decision to sanction Comcast. We don’t know how that one would turn out.

McDowell’s brief highlights the ambiguity of the finding. He writes: “This matter would have had a better chance on appeal if we had put the horse before the cart and conducted a rulemaking, issued rules and then enforced them… The majority’s view of its ability to adjudicate this matter solely pursuant to ancillary authority is legally deficient as well. Under the analysis set forth in the order, the Commission apparently can do anything so long as it frames its actions in terms of promoting the Internet or broadband deployment.”

Should the commissioners have adopted a “bright line” rule, as McDowell’s dissent suggests? The Comcast ruling’s uncertainty guarantees a future of envelope-pushing and resource intensive, case-by-case adjudication, whether in regulatory proceedings or the courts. But I actually think that might be the best available alternative here. It preserves the Commission’s ability to make the right decision in future cases without having to guess, today, what precise rule would dictate those future results. (On the flip side, it also preserves the Commission’s ability to make bad choices in the future, especially if diminished public interest in the issue increases the odds of regulatory capture.) If Jim Harper is correct that Martin’s support is a strategic gambit to tie the issue up while broadband service expands, this suggests that Martin believes, as I do, that uncertainty about future interventions is a good way to keep ISPs on their best behavior.

Today’s New York Times reports on the impact of Apple’s decision to allow third-party application software on the iPhone:

In the first 10 days after Apple opened its App Store for the iPhone, consumers downloaded more than 25 million applications, ranging from games like Super Monkey Ball to tools like New York City subway maps. It was nothing short of revolutionary, not only because the number was so high but also because iPhone users could do it at all.

Consumers have long been frustrated with how much control carriers — AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint and the like — have exerted over what they could download to their mobile phones. But in the last nine months, carriers, software developers and cellphone makers have embraced a new attitude of openness toward consumers.

The App Store makes a big difference to me as a new iPhone user — the device would be much less useful without third-party applications. The value of third-party applications and the platforms that enable them is a commonplace outside the mobile phone world. It’s good to see it finally seeping into what Walt Mossberg famously calls “the Soviet Ministries”.

But before we declare victory in the fight for open mobile devices, let’s remember how far the iPhone still has to go. Although a broad range of applications is available in the App Store, the Store is still under Apple’s control and no app can appear there without Apple’s blessing. Apple has been fairly permissive so far, but that could change, and in any case there will inevitably be conflicts between what users and developers want and what Apple wants.

One of Apple’s reasons for opening the App Store must have been the popularity of unauthorized (by Apple) iPhone apps, and the phenomenon of iPhone jailbreaking to enable those apps. Apple’s previous attempt to limit iPhone apps just didn’t work. Faced with the possibility that jailbreaking would become the norm, Apple had little choice but to offer an authorized distribution path for third-party apps.

It’s interesting to note that this consumer push for openness came on the iPhone, which was already the most open of the market-leading mobile phones because it had an up-to-date Web browser. You might have expected less open phones to be jailbroken first, as their users had the most to gain from new applications.

Why was the iPhone the focus of openness efforts? For several reasons, I think. First, iPhone users were already more attuned to the advantages of good application software on mobile phones — that’s one of the reasons they bought iPhones in the first place. Second, Apple’s reputation for focusing on improving customer experience led people to expect more and better applications as the product matured. Third, the iPhone came with an all-you-can-eat Internet access plan, so users didn’t have to worry that new apps would run up their bandwidth bill. And finally, the fact that the iPhone was nearer to being open, having a more sophisticated operating system and browser, made it easier to jallbreak.

This last is an important point, and it argues against claims by people like Jonathan Zittrain that almost-open “appliances” will take the place of today’s open computers. Generally, the closer a system is to being open, the more practical autonomy end users will have to control it, and the more easily unauthorized third-party apps can be built for it. An almost-open system must necessarily be built by starting with an open technical infrastructure and then trying to lock it down; but given the limits of real-world lockdown technologies, this means that customers will be able to jailbreak the system.

In short, nature abhors a functionality vacuum. Design your system to remove functionality, and users will find a way to restore that functionality. Like Apple, appliance vendors are better off leading this parade than trying to stop it.

Barbara Simons, an accomplished computer scientist and e-voting expert, was recently appointed to the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) Board of Advisors. (The EAC is the U.S. Federal body responsible for voting technology standards, among other things.) This is good news.

The board has thirty-seven members, of which four positions are allocated for “members representing professionals in the field of science and technology”. These four positions are to be appointed by Majority and Minority leaders in the House and the Senate. (See page 2 of the Board’s charter.) Given the importance of voting technology issues to the EAC, it does seem like a good idea to reserve 10% of the advisory board positions for technologists. If anything, the number of technologist seats should be larger.

Barbara was appointed to the board position by the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid. Kudos to Senator Reid for appointing a genuine voting technology expert.

What about the other three seats for “professionals in the field of science and technology?” Sadly, the board’s membership list shows that these seats are not actually held by technical people. Barbara Arnwine holds the House Speaker’s seat, Tom Fuentes holds the House Minority Leader’s seat, and Wesley R. Kliner, Jr. holds the Senate Minority Leader’s seat. All three appear to be accomplished people who have something to offer on the board. But as far as I can tell they are not “professionals in the field of science and technology”, so their appropriate positions on the board would be somewhere in the other thirty-three seats.

What can be done? I wouldn’t go so far as to kick any current members off the board, even if that were possible. But when vacancies do become available, they should be filled by scientists or technologists, as dictated by the charter’s requirement of having four such people on the board.

The EAC is struggling with voting technology issues. They could surely use the advice of three more expert technologists.

Back when we were putting together the grant proposal for ACCURATE, one of the questions that we asked ourselves, and which the NSF people asked us as well, was whether we would produce a “bright shiny object,” which is to say whether or not we would produce a functional voting machine that could ostensibly be put to use in a real election.  Our decision at the time, and it was certainly the correct decision, is that we would focus on innovating in the technology under the covers of a voting system, and we might produce, at most “research prototypes”.  The difference between a research prototype and a genuine, commercial system are typically quite substantial, in general, and it would be no different here with voting system prototypes.

At Rice we built a fairly substantial prototype that we call “VoteBox”; you can read more about it in a paper that will appear on Friday at Usenix Security.  To grossly summarize, our prototype feels a lot like a normal DRE voting system, but uses some nice cryptographic machinery to ensure that you don’t have to trust that the code is correct.  You can verify the correctness of a machine, on the fly, while the election is ongoing.  Our prototype is missing a couple features that you’d want from a commercial system, like write-in voting, but it’s far enough along that it’s been used in several human-factors experiments (CHI’08, Everett’07).

This summer, our mission is to get this thing shipped as some sort of “open source” project.  Now we have several goals in this:

• Allow other researchers to benefit from our infrastructure as a platform to do their own research.
• Inspire commercial voting system vendors to build better products (i.e., solving the hard design problems for them, to reduce their cost for adopting innovative techniques).
• Allow commercial voting system vendors to build on our source code, itself.

All well and good.  Now the question is how we should actually license the thing.  There are many, many different models under which we could proceed:

• Closed source + patents + licenses.  This may or may not yield revenues for our university, and may or may not be attractive to vendors.  It’s clearly unattractive to other researchers, and would limit uptake of our system in places where we might not even think to look, such as outside the U.S.
• Open source + a “not for commercial use” license.  This makes it a little easier for other researchers to pick up and modify the software although ownership issues could get tricky.
• Open source with a “BSD”-style license. A BSD-style license effectively says “do whatever you want, just give us credit for our work and you’re on your own if it doesn’t work.”   This sort of license tends to maximize the ease with which companies can adopt your work.
• Open source with a “GPL”-style license.  The GPL has an interesting property for the voting system world: it makes any derivatives of the source code as open as the original code (unless a vendor reimplements it from scratch).  This sort of openness is something we want to encourage in voting system vendors, but it might reduce vendor willingness to use the codebase.
• Open source with a “publication required” license.  Joe Hall suggested this as another option.  Like a BSD license, anybody can use it in a product, but the company would be compelled to publish the source code, like a book.  Unlike GPL, they would not be required to give up copyright or allow any downstream use of their code.

I did a quick survey of several open source voting systems.  Most are distributed under the GPL:

• Adder
  
• eVACS (old version is GPL; new version is proprietary)
• Helios (code not yet released; most likely GPL according to Ben Adida)
• OVC (GPL with extensions to require change histories be maintained)
• Pvote

Civitas is distributed under a non-commercial-use only license.  VoteHere, at one point, opened its code for independent evaluation (but not reuse), but I can’t find it any more.  It was probably a variant on the non-commercial-use only theme.  Punchscan is distributed under a BSD-style license.

My question to the peanut gallery: what sort of license would you select for a bright, shiny new voting system project and why?

[Extra food for thought: The GPLv3 would have some interesting interactions with voting systems.  For starters, there's a question of who, exactly, a "user" might be.  Is that the county clerk whose office bought it, or the person who ultimately votes on it?  Also, you have section 3, which forbids any attempt to limit reverse-engineering or "circumvention" of the product.  I suppose that means that garden-variety tampering with a voting machine would still violate various laws, but the vendor couldn't sue you for it.  Perhaps more interesting is section 6, which talks about how source code must be made available when you ship compiled software.  A vendor could perhaps give the source code only to its "customers" without giving it to everybody (again, depending on who a "user" is).  Of course, any such customer is free under the GPL to redistribute the code to anybody else.  Voting vendors may be most scared away by section 11, which talks about compulsory patent licensing (depending, of course, on the particulars of their patent portfolios).]

People have been heaping blame on Yahoo after it announced plans to shut down its Yahoo Music Store DRM servers on September 30. The practical effect of the shutdown is to make music purchased at the store unusable after a while.

Though savvy customers tended to avoid buying music in forms like this, where a company had to keep some distant servers running to keep the purchased music alive, those customers who did buy — taking reassurances from Yahoo and music industry at face value — are rightly angry. In the face of similar anger, Microsoft backtracked on plans to shutter its DRM servers. It looks like Yahoo will stay the course.

Yahoo deserves blame here, but let’s not forget who else contributed to this mess. Start with the record companies for pushing this kind of DRM, and the DRM agenda generally, despite the ample evidence that it would inconvenience paying customers without stopping infringement.

Even leaving aside past mistakes, copyright owners could step in now to help users, either by enticing Yahoo to keep its servers running, or by helping Yahoo create and distribute software that translates the music into a usable form. If I were a Yahoo Music customer, I would be complaining to the copyright owners now, and asking them to step in and stand behind their product.

Finally, let’s not forget the role of Congress. The knowledge of how to jailbreak Yahoo Music tracks and transform them into a stable, usable form exists and could easily be packaged in software form. But Congress made it illegal to circumvent Yahoo’s DRM, even to enable noninfringing use of a legitimately purchased song. And they made it illegal to distribute certain software tools to enable those uses. If Congress had paid more attention to consumer interests in drafting the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or if it had passed any of the remedial legislation offered since the DMCA took effect, then the market could solve this Yahoo problem all on its own. If I were a Yahoo Music customer, I would be complaining to Congress now, and asking them to stop blocking consumer-friendly technologies.

And needless to say, I wouldn’t be buying DRM-encumbered songs any more.

UPDATE (July 29, 2008): Yahoo has now done the right thing, offering to give refunds or unencumbered MP3s to the stranded customers. I wonder how much this is costing Yahoo.

Recently Barack Obama gave a speech on security, focusing on nuclear, biological, and infotech threats. It was a good, thoughtful speech, but I couldn’t help noticing how, in his discussion of the infotech threats, he promised to appoint a “National Cyber Advisor” to give the president advice about infotech threats. It’s now becoming standard Washington parlance to say “cyber” as a shorthand for what many of us would call “information security.” I won’t fault Obama for using the terminology spoken by the usual Washington experts. Still, it’s interesting to consider how Washington has developed its own terminology, and what that terminology reveals about the inside-the-beltway view of the information security problem.

The word “cyber” has interesting roots. It started with an old Greek word meaning (roughly) one who guides a boat, such as a pilot or rudder operator. Plato adapted this word to mean something like “governance”, on the basis that governing was like steering society. Already in ancient Greece, the term had taken on connotations of central government control.

Fast-forward to the twentieth century. Norbert Wiener foresaw the rise of sophisticated robots, and realized that a robot would need something like a brain to control its mechanisms, as your brain controls your body. Wiener predicted correctly that this kind of controller would be difficult to design and build, so he sought a word to describe the study of these “intelligent” controllers. Not finding a suitable word in English, he reached back to the old Greek word, which he transliterated into English as “cybernetics”. Notice the connection Wiener drew between governance and technological control.

Enter William Gibson. In his early novels about the electronic future, he wanted a term for the “space” where online interactions happen. Failing to find a suitable word, he coined one — cyberspace — by borrowing “cyber” from Wiener. Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer popularized the term. Many of the Net’s early adopters were fans of Gibson’s work, so cyberspace became a standard name for the place you went when you were on the Net.

The odd thing about this usage is that the Internet lacks the kind of central control system that is the subject matter of cybernetics. Gibson knew this — his vision of the Net was decentralized and chaotic — be he liked the term anyway.

All I knew about the word “cyberspace” when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page.

Indeed, the term proved just as evocative for others as it was for Gibson, and it stuck.

As the Net grew, it was widely seen as ungovernable — which many people liked. John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” famously declared that governments have no place in cyberspace. Barlow notwithstanding, government did show up in cyberspace, but it has never come close to the kind of cybernetic control Wiener envisioned.

Meanwhile, the government’s security experts settled on a term, “information security”, or “infosec” for short, to describe the problem of securing information and digital systems. The term is widely used outside of government (along with similar terms “computer security” and “network security”) — the course I teach at Princeton on this topic is called “information security”, and many companies have Chief Information Security Officers to manage their security exposure.

So how did this term “cybersecurity” get mindshare, when we already had a useful term for the same thing? I’m not sure — give me your theories in the comments — but I wouldn’t be surprised if it reflects a military influence on government thinking. As both military and civilian organizations became wedded to digital technology, the military started preparing to defend certain national interests in an online setting. Military thinking on this topic naturally followed the modes of thought used for conventional warfare. Military units conduct reconnaissance; they maneuver over terrain; they use weapons where necessary. This mindset wants to think of security as defending some kind of terrain — and the terrain can only be cyberspace. If you’re defending cyberspace, you must be doing something called cybersecurity. Over time, “cybersecurity” somehow became “cyber security” and then just “cyber”.

Listening to Washington discussions about “cyber”, we often hear strategies designed to exert control or put government in a role of controlling, or at least steering, the evolution of technology. In this community, at least, the meaning of “cyber” has come full circle, back to Wiener’s vision of technocratic control, and Plato’s vision of government steering the ship.

Public policy, in the U.S. at least, has favored localism in broadcasting: programming on TV and radio stations is supposed to be aimed, at least in part, at the local community. Two recent events call this policy into question.

The first event is the debut of the Pandora application on the iPhone. Pandora is a personalized “music radio” service delivered over the Internet. You tell it which artists and songs you like, and it plays you the requested songs, plus other songs it thinks are similar. You can rate the songs it plays, thereby giving it more information about what you like. It’s not a jukebox — you can’t find out in advance what it’s going to play, and there are limits on how often it can play songs from the same artist or album — but it’s more personalized than broadcast radio. (Last.fm offers a similar service, also available now on the iPhone.)

Now you can get Pandora on your iPhone, so you can listen to Pandora on a battery-powered portable device that fits in your pocket — like a twenty-first century version of the old transistor radios, only this one plays a station designed especially for you. Why listen to music on broadcast radio when you can listen to this? Or to put it another way: why listen to music targeted at people who live near you, when you can listen to music targeted at people with tastes like yours?

The second event I’ll point to is a statement from a group of Christian broadcasters, opposing a proposed FCC rule that would require radio stations to have local advisory boards that tell them how to tailor programming to the local community. [hat tip: Ars Technica] The Christian stations say, essentially, that their community is defined by a common interest rather than by geography.

Many people are like the Pandora or Christian radio listeners, in wanting to hear content aimed at their interests rather than just their location. Public policy ought to recognize this and give broadcasters more latitude to find their own communities rather than defining communities only by geography.

Now I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be local programming, or that people shouldn’t care what is happening in their neighborhoods. Most people care a lot about local issues and want some local programming. The local community is one of their communities of interest, but it’s not the only one. Let some stations serve local communities while others serve non-local communities. As long as there is demand for local programming — as there surely will be — the market will provide it, and new technologies will help people get it.

Indeed, one of the benefits of new technologies is that they let people stay in touch with far-away localities. When we were living in Palo Alto during my sabbatical, we wanted to stay in touch with events in the town of Princeton because we were planning to move back after a year. Thanks to the Web, we could stay in touch with both Palo Alto and Princeton. The one exception was that we couldn’t get New Jersey TV stations. We had satellite TV, so the nearby New York and Philadelphia stations were literally being transmitted to our Palo Alto house; but the satellite TV company said the FCC wouldn’t let us have the station because localist policy wanted us to watch San Francisco stations instead. Localist policy, perversely, pushed us away from local programming and kept us out of touch.

New technologies undermine the rationale for localist policies. It’s easier to get far-away content now — indeed the whole notion that content is bound to a place is fading away. With access to more content sources, there are more possible venues for local programming, making it less likely that local programming will be unavailable because of the whims or blind spots of a few station owners. It’s getting easier and cheaper to gather and distribute information, so more people have the means to produce local programming. In short, we’re looking at a future with more non-local programming and more local programming.