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Archives for 2009

U.S. Objects to China's Mandatory Green Dam Censorware

June 25, 2009 by

Yesterday, the U.S. Commerce Secretary and Trade Representative sent a letter to China’s government, objecting to China’s order, effective July 1, to require that all new PCs sold in China have preinstalled the Green Dam Youth Escort censorware program.

Here’s today’s New York Times:

Chinese officials have said that the filtering software, known as Green Dam-Youth Escort, is meant to block pornography and other “unhealthy information.”

In part, the American officials’ complaint framed this as a trade issue, objecting to the burden put on computer makers to install the software with little notice. But it also raised broader questions about whether the software would lead to more censorship of the Internet in China and restrict freedom of expression.

The Green Dam requirement puts U.S.-based PC companies, such as HP and Dell, in a tough spot: if they don’t comply they won’t be able to sell PCs in China; but if they do comply they will be censoring their customers’ Internet use and exposing customers to serious security risks.

There are at least two interesting new angles here. The first is the U.S. claim that China’s action violates free trade agreements. The U.S. has generally refrained from treating China’s Internet censorship as a trade issue, even though U.S. companies have often found themselves censored at times when competing Chinese companies were not. This unequal treatment, coupled with the Chinese government’s reported failure to define clearly which actions trigger censorship, looks like a trade barrier — but the U.S. hasn’t said much about it up to now.

The other interesting angle is the direct U.S. objection to censorship of political speech. For some time, the U.S. has tolerated China’s government blocking certain political speech in the network, via the “Great Firewall“. It’s not clear exactly how this objection is framed — the U.S. letter is not public — but news reports imply that political censorship itself, or possibly the requirement that U.S. companies participate in it, is a kind of improper trade barrier.

We’re heading toward an interesting showdown as the July 1 date approaches. Will U.S. companies ship machines with Green Dam? According to the New York Times, HP hasn’t decided, and Dell is dodging the question. The companies don’t want to lose access to the China market — but if U.S. companies participate so directly in political censorship, they would be setting a very bad precedent.

Filed Under: Censorship & Filtering Tagged With: , ,

My Testimony on Behavioral Advertising: Post-Mortem

June 23, 2009 by

On Thursday I testified at a House hearing about online behavioral advertising. (I also submitted written testimony.)

The hearing started at 10:00am, gaveled to order by Congressman Rush, chair of the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection. He was flanked by Congressman Boucher, chair of the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet , and Congressmen Steans and Radanovich, the Ranking Members (i.e., the highest-ranking Republican members) of the subcommittees.

First on the agenda we had opening statements by members of the committees. Members had either two or five minutes to speak, and the differing perspectives of the members became clear during these statements. The most colorful statement was by Congressman Barton, who supplemented his interesting on-topic statement with a brief digression about the Democrats vs. Republicans charity baseball game which was held the previous day. The Democrats won, to Congressman Barton’s chagrin.

After the opening statements, the chair recessed the hearings, so the Members could go to the House floor to vote. Members of the House must be physically present in the House chamber in order to vote, so it’s not unusual for hearings to recess when there is a floor vote. The House office buildings have buzzers, not unlike the bells that mark the ends of periods in a school, which alert everybody when a vote starts. The Members left the hearing room, and we all waited for the vote(s) to end, so our hearing could resume. The time was 10:45 AM.

What happened next was very unusual indeed. The House held vote after vote, more than fifty votes in total, as the day stretched on, hour after hour. They voted on amendments, on motions to reconsider the votes on the amendments, on other motions — at one point, as far as I could tell, they were voting on a motion to reconsider a decision to table an appeal of a procedural decision of the chair. To put it bluntly, the Republicans were staging a kind of work stoppage. They did this, I hear, to protest an unusual procedural limitation that the Democrats had placed on the handling of the appropriations bill that was currently before the House. I don’t know enough about the norms of House procedure to say which party had the better argument here — but I do know that the recess in our hearing lasted eight and a half hours.

These were not the most exciting eight and a half hours I have experienced. As the day stretched on, we did get a chance to wander around and do a little light tourism. Probably the highlight was when we saw Angelina Jolie in the hallway.

When we reconvened at 7:15 PM, the room, which had been overflowing with spectators in the morning, was mostly empty. The members of the committees, though, made a pretty good showing, which was especially impressive given that it was Thursday evening, when many Members hightail it back home to their districts. Late in the day, after a day that must have been frustrating for everybody, we sat down to business and had a good, substantive hearing. There were no major surprises — there rarely are at hearings — but everyone got a chance to express their views, and the members asked substantive questions.

Thinking back on the hearing, I did realize one thing that may have been missing. The panel of witnesses included three companies, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook, that are both ad services and content providers. There was less attention to situations where the ad service and the content provider are separate companies. In this latter case, where the ad service does not have a direct relationship with the consumer, so the market pressure on the ad service to behave well is attenuated. (There is still some pressure, through the content provider, who wants to stay in the good graces of consumers, but an indirect link is not as effective as a direct one would be.) Yahoo, Google, and Facebook are household names, and we would naturally expect them to pay more careful attention to the desires of consumers and Congress than lower-profile ad services would.

Witnesses have the opportunity to submit further written testimony. Any suggestions on what I might discuss?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,

My Testimony on Behavioral Advertising

June 18, 2009 by

I’m testifying this morning at 10:00 AM (Eastern) at a Congressional hearing on “Behavioral Advertising: Industry Practices and Consumers’ Expectations”. It’s a joint hearing of two subcommittees of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce: the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection; and the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet .

Witnesses at the hearing are:

  • Jeffrey Chester, Executive Director, Center for Digital Democracy
  • Scott Cleland, President, Precursor LLC
  • Charles D. Curran, Executive Director, Network Advertising Initiative
  • Edward W. Felten, Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs, Princeton University
  • Christopher M. Kelly, Chief Privacy Officer, Facebook
  • Anne Toth, Vice President of Policy, Head of Privacy, Yahoo! Inc.
  • Nicole Wong, Deputy General Counsel, Google Inc.

I submitted written testimony to the committee.

Look for a live webcast on the committee’s site.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

CITP Seeking New Associate Director

June 17, 2009 by

In the next few days, I’ll be writing a post to announce CITP’s visiting fellows for the upcoming 2009-2010 academic year. But first, today, I want to let you know about a change in the Center’s leadership structure. After serving for two years as CITP’s first-ever Associate Director, David Robinson will be leaving us in August to begin law school at Yale. As a result, we are now launching a search for a new Associate Director.

As Associate Director, he helped oversee CITP’s growth into a larger, more mature organization, our move into a great new space in Sherrerd Hall, and two years of our busy activities calendar. He has been an integral part of the Center’s management and its research activities. David has done a fantastic job, and we’ll miss him, but we understand and support his decision to go on to law school as the next stage of his sure-to-be-stellar career. David will remain engaged with the Center’s research, and we expect to cross paths with him often in the future.

The new Associate Director will pick up where David leaves off, taking our Center to the next level in its development. The job is a fabulous opportunity to exercise leadership, vision and dedication: As a startup, we are improvising and learning while we grow, constantly looking for new and better ways to advance the policy debate and public understanding of digital technologies through both technical and policy research. Our first challenge was to get things started—now that we are established, a key priority for the new Associate Director will be building richer and deeper links and collaborations with other faculty members, policymakers, and the tech policy community generally. Here’s the official job description, soon to appear on the University’s “Jobs at Princeton” web site:

The Associate Director serves as a core organizer and evangelist for the Center, both on campus and beyond. Working with the existing Center staff, the Associate Director will develop, plan and execute the Center’s public activities, including lecture series, workshops and policy briefings; recruit visiting researchers and policy experts and coordinate the selection appointment process; cultivate research collaborations, joint public events and other activities to build faculty engagement in the Center; coordinate interdisciplinary grant writing as appropriate; and develop and maintain the Center’s website and other published materials.

One of David’s last projects at the Center will be to coordinate the search process for his replacement. The search will continue until the position is filled: We hope to have the new Associate Director in place by the start of the school year. Applicants should provide a cover letter, CV, and contact information for three references. These materials can be sent to David (or equivalently, once the University’s jobs site has the listing, they can also be submitted through that route). David will also be happy to answer any questions about the position.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,

The rise of the "nanostory"

June 12, 2009 by

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I offer a review of Bill Wasik’s excellent new book, And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture. Cliff’s notes version: This is a great new take on the little cultural boomlets and cryptic fads that seem to swarm all over the Internet. The author draws on his personal experience, including his creation of the still-hilarious Right Wing New York Times. Here’s a taste from the book itself—Wasik describing his decision to create the first flash mob:

It was out of the question to create a project that might last, some new institution or some great work of art, for these would take time, exact cost, require risk, even as their odds of success hovered at nearly zero. Meanwhile, the odds of creating a short-lived sensation, of attracting incredible attention for a very brief period of time, were far more promising indeed… I wanted my new project to be what someone would call “The X of the Summer” before I even contemplated exactly what X might be.

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