May 3, 2024

Posts Comments

Obama's Digital Policy

December 28, 2007 by

The Iowa caucuses, less than a week away, will kick off the briefest and most intense series of presidential primaries in recent history. That makes it a good time to check in on what the candidates are saying about digital technologies. Between now and February 5th (the 23-state tsunami of primaries that may well resolve the major party nominations), we’ll be taking a look.

First up: Barack Obama. A quick glance at the sites of other candidates suggests that Obama is an outlier – none of the other major players has gone into anywhere near the level of detail that he has in their official campaign output. That may mean we’ll be tempted to spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about him – but if so, I guess that’s the benefit he reaps by paying attention. Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch tech primary provides the best summary I’ve found, compiled from other sources, of candidates’ positions on tech issues, and we may find ourselves relying on that over the next few weeks.

For Obama, we have a detailed “Technology and Innovation” white paper. It spans a topical area that Europeans often refer to as ICTs – information and communications technologies. That means basically anything digital, plus the analog ambit of the FCC (media concentration, universal service and so on). Along the way, other areas get passing mention – immigration of high tech workers, trade policy, energy efficiency.

Net neutrality may be the most talked about tech policy issue in Washington – it has generated a huge amount of constituent mail, perhaps as many as 600,000 constituent letters. Obama is clear on this: He says requiring ISPs to provide “accurate and honest information about service plans” that may violate neutrality is “not enough.” He wants a rule to stop network operators from charging “fees to privilege the content or applications of some web sites and Internet applications over others.” I think that full transparency about non-neutral Internet service may indeed be enough, an idea I first got from a comment on this blog, but in any case it’s nice to have a clear statement of view.

Where free speech collides with child protection, Obama faces the structural challenge, common to Democrats, of simultaneously appeasing both the entertainment industry and concerned moms. Predictably, he ends up engaging in a little wishful thinking:

On the Internet, Obama will require that parents have the option of receiving parental controls software that not only blocks objectionable Internet content but also prevents children from revealing personal information through their home computer.

The idealized version of such software, in which unwanted communications are stopped while desirable ones remain unfettered, is typically quite far from what the technology can actually provide. The software faces a design tradeoff between being too broad, in which case desirable use is stopped, and too narrow, in which case undesirable online activity is permitted. That might be why Internet filtering software, despite being available commercially, isn’t already ubiquitous. Given that parents can already buy it, Obama’s aim to “require that parents have the option of receiving” such software sounds like a proposal for the software to be subsidized or publicly funded; I doubt that would make it better.

On privacy, the Obama platform again reflects a structural problem. Voters seem eager for a President who will have greater concern for statutory law than the current incumbent does. But some of the secret and possibly illegal reductions of privacy that have gone on at the NSA and elsewhere may actually (in the judgment of those privy to the relevant secrets) be indispensable. So Obama, like many others, favors “updating surveillance laws.” He’ll follow the law, in other words, but first he wants it modified so that it can be followed without unduly tying his hands. That’s very likely the most reasonable kind of view a presidential candidate could have, but it doesn’t tell us how much privacy citizens will enjoy if he gets his way. The real question, unanswered in this platform, is exactly which updates Obama would favor. He himself is probably reserving judgment until, briefed by the intelligence community, he can competently decide what updates are needed.

My favorite part of the document, by far, is the section on government transparency. (I’d be remiss were I not to shamelessly plug the panel on exactly this topic at CITP’s upcoming January workshop.) The web is enabling amazing new levels, and even new kinds, of sunlight to accompany the exercise of public power. If you haven’t experienced MAPlight, which pairs campaign contribution data with legislators’ votes, then you should spend the next five minutes watching this video. Josh Tauberer, who launched Govtrack.us, has pointed out that one major impediment to making these tools even better is the reluctance of government bodies to adopt convenient formats for the data they publish. A plain text page (typical fare on existing government sites like THOMAS) meets the letter of the law, but an open format with rich metadata would see the same information put to more and better use.

Obama’s stated position is to make data available “online in universally accessible formats,” a clear nod in this direction. He also calls for live video feeds of government proceedings. One more radical proposal, camoflaged among these others, is

…pilot programs to open up government decision-making and involve the public in the work of agencies, not simply by soliciting opinions, but by tapping into the vast and distributed expertise of the American citizenry to help government make more informed decisions.

I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds exciting. If I wanted to start using wikis to make serious public policy decisions – and needed to make the idea sound simple and easy – that’s roughly how I might put it.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Workshop: Computing in the Cloud

November 29, 2007 by

I’m excited to announce that Princeton’s Center for InfoTech Policy is putting on a workshop on the policy and social implications of “Computing in the Cloud” – the trend where companies, rather than users, store and manage an increasing range of personal data.

Examples include Hotmail and Gmail replacing desktop email, YouTube taking over as a personal video platform, and Flickr competing with desktop photo storage solutions. Facebook, Myspace and other social networks have pioneered new kinds of tools that couldn’t exist on the desktop, and more new models are sure to emerge.

I’m confident that this trend will reshape tech policy, and will change how people relate to technology. But I don’t know what the changes are. By drawing together experts from computer science, industry, government and law, I hope the Center can help those of us at Princeton, and workshop participants from around the country, get a better sense of where things might be headed.

The workshop will be held on the Princeton campus on January 14 and 15, 2008. It will be free and open to the public. We will have a series of panel discussions, interspersed with opportunities for informal exchanges of ideas. We’re still putting together the list of panels and panelists, so we haven’t yet published a schedule. If you’re interested in attending or want to get email updates about the workshop, please email David Robinson (dgr at princeton dot edu).

Here are some of the possible themes for panels we are exploring:

  • Possession and ownership of data: In cloud computing, a provider’s data center holds information that would more traditionally have been stored on the end user’s computer. How does this impact user privacy? To what extent do users “own” this data, and what obligations do the service providers have? What obligations should they have? Does moving the data to the provider’s data center improve security or endanger it?
  • Collaboration and globalization: Cloud computing systems offer new sharing and collaboration features beyond what was possible before. They make shared creation among far-flung users easier, allow or require data to be stored in many different jurisdictions, and give users access to offerings that may be illegal in the users’ home countries. How will local laws, when applied to data centers whose user base is global, affect users practice? Do these services drive forward economic growth — and if so, what effect should that fact have on the policy debate?
  • New roles for new intermediaries: Cloud services often involve new
    intermediaries such as Facebook, MySpace, eBay, and Second Life, standing between people who might have interacted more directly before these services emerged. To what extent are these services “communities”, as their providers claim? How much control do users feel over these communities? How much control do and should users actually have? How does the centralized nature of these intermediaries affect the efficiency and diversity of online experiences? Can the market protect consumers and competition, or is government oversight needed?
  • What’s next: What new services might develop, and how will today’s services evolve? How well will cloud computing be likely to serve users, companies, investors, government, and the public over the longer run? Which social and policy problems will get worse due to cloud computing, and which will get better?
Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Verizon Violates Net Neutrality with DNS Deviations

November 12, 2007 by

While many of us were discussing Comcast’s partial blocking of BitTorrent Traffic, and debating its implications for the net neutrality debate, a more clear-cut neutrality violation was apparently taking place on Verizon’s network – a redirection of Verizon customers’ failed DNS lookups, to drive traffic to Verizon’s own search engine.

Here’s the background. Suppose you’re browsing the web and you mistype an address – say you type “fredom-to-tinker”. Your browser will try to use DNS, the system that maps textual machine names to numeric IP addresses, to translate the name you typed into an address it can actually connect to across the Net. DNS will return an error, saying that the requested name doesn’t exist. Your browser (if it’s a recent version of IE or Firefox) will respond by doing a search for the text you typed, using your default search engine.

What Verizon did is to change how DNS works (for their residential subscribers) so that when a customer’s computer looks up a DNS name that doesn’t exist, rather than returning the name-doesn’t-exist error DNS says that the (non-existent) name maps to Verizon’s search site. This causes the browser to go to the Verizon search site, which shows the user search results (and ads) related to what they typed.

(This is the same trick used by VeriSign’s ill-fated SiteFinder service a few years ago.)

This is a clear violation of net neutrality: Verizon is interfering with the behavior of the DNS protocol, in order to drive traffic to its own search site. And unlike the Comcast scenario which might possibly have been justifiable as legitimate network management, in this case Verizon cannot claim to be helping its network run more smoothly.

Verizon’s actions have two effects. The obvious effect is to drive traffic from the search engines users chose to Verizon’s own search engine. That harms users (by overriding their choices) and harms browser vendors (by degrading their users’ experiences).

The less obvious effect is to break some other applications. DNS lookups that have nothing to do with browsing will still be redirected, because the DNS infrastructure has no way of knowing which requests relate to browsing and which don’t. So if some other application does a DNS lookup and the result should be a not-found error, Verizon will cause the result to point to a Verizon server instead. If a non-browser program expects to see not-found errors sometimes and has a strategy for dealing with them, it won’t be able to carry out that strategy because it won’t see the errors it should be seeing. This will even cause browsers to misbehave in some circumstances.

The effects of Verizon’s neutrality violation can be summarized simply: they interfer with a standard technical protocol; they cause harm on the whole, in part by breaking unrelated services; and they do this in order to override consumer choice by shifting traffic from consumer-chosen services to Verizon’s own services. This is pretty much the definition of a net neutrality violation.

This example contradicts at least two of the standard arguments against net neutrality regulation. First, it shows that violations do happen, and they do cause harm. Second, it shows that at least sometimes it’s easy to tell a harmful violation apart from legitimate network management.

But it doesn’t defeat all of the arguments against net neutrality regulation. Even though violations do occur, and do cause harm, it might turn out that the regulatory cure is worse than the disease.

Filed Under: Broadband Tagged With: , ,

Comcast and Net Neutrality

October 24, 2007 by

The revelation that Comcast is degrading BitTorrent traffic has spawned many blog posts on how the Comcast incident bolsters the blogger’s position on net neutrality – whatever that position happens to be. Here is my contribution to the genre. Mine is different from all the others because … um … well … because my position on net neutrality is correct, that’s why.

Let’s start by looking at Comcast’s incentives. Besides being an ISP, Comcast is in the cable TV business. BitTorrent is an efficient way to deliver video content to large numbers of consumers – which makes BitTorrent a natural competitor to cable TV. BitTorrent isn’t a major rival yet, but it might plausibly develop into one. Which means that Comcast has an incentive to degrade BitTorrent’s performance and reliability, even when BitTorrent isn’t in any way straining Comcast’s network.

So why is Comcast degrading BitTorrent? Comcast won’t say. They won’t even admit what they’re doing, let alone offer a rationale for it, so we’re left to speculate. The technical details of Comcast’s blocking are only partially understood, but what we do know seems hard to square with claims that Comcast is using the most effective means to optimize some resource in their network.

Now pretend that you’re the net neutrality czar, with authority to punish ISPs for harmful interference with neutrality, and you have to decide whether to punish Comcast. You’re suspicious of Comcast, because you can see their incentive to bolster their cable-TV monopoly power, and because their actions don’t look like a good match for the legitimate network management goals that they claim motivate their behavior. But networks are complicated, and there are many things you don’t know about what’s happening inside Comcast’s network, so you can’t be sure they’re just trying to undermine BitTorrent. And of course it’s possible that they have mixed motives, needing to manage their network but choosing a method that had the extra bonus feature of hurting BitTorrent. You can ask them to justify their actions, but you can expect to get a lawyerly, self-serving answer, and to expend great effort separating truth from spin in that answer.

Are you confident that you, as net neutrality czar, would make the right decision? Are you confident that your successor as net neutrality czar, who would be chosen by the usual political process, would also make the right decision?

Even without a regulatory czar, wheels are turning to punish Comcast for what they’ve done. Customers are unhappy and are putting pressure on Comcast. If they deceived their customers, they’ll face lawsuits. We don’t know yet how things will come out, but it seems likely Comcast will regret their actions, and especially their lack of transparency.

All of which – surprise surprise – confirms my position on net neutrality: there is a risk of harmful behavior by ISPs, but writing and enforcing neutrality regulation is harder than it looks, and non-regulatory forces may constrain ISPs enough.

Filed Under: Broadband Tagged With: , ,

Greetings, and a Thought on Net Neutrality

October 3, 2007 by

Hello again, FTT readers. You may remember me as a guest blogger here at FTT, writing about anti-circumvention, the print media’s superiority (or lack thereof) to Wikipedia, and a variety of other topics.

I’m happy to report that I’ve moved to Princeton to join the university’s Center for Information Technology Policy as its new associate director. Working with Ed and others here on campus, I’ll be helping bring the Center into its own as a leading interdisciplinary venue for research and conversation about the social and political impact of information technology.

Over the next few months, I’ll be traveling the country to look at how other institutions approach this area, in order to develop a strategic plan for Princeton’s involvement in the field. As a first step toward understanding the world of tech policy, I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately.

One great source is The Creation of the Media by Princeton’s own Paul Starr. It’s carefully argued and highly readable, and I’ve found its content challenging. Conversations in tech policy often seem to stem from the premise that in the interaction between technology and society, the most important causal arrow points from the technologies into the social sphere. “Remix culture”, perhaps the leading example at the moment, is a major cultural shift that is argued to stem from inherent properties of digital media, such as the identity between a copy and an original of a digital work.

But Paul argues that politics usually dominates the effects of technology, not the other way around. For example, although cheap printing technologies helped make the early United States one of the most literate countries of its time, Paul argues that America’s real advantage was its postal system. Congress not only invested heavily in the postal service, but also gave a special discounted rate to printed material, effectively subsidizing publications of all kinds. As a result much more printed material was mailed in America than in, say, British Columbia at the same time.

One fascinating observation from Paul’s book (pages 180-181 in the hardcover edition, for those following along at home) concerns the telegraph. In Britain, the telegraph was nationalized in order to ensure that private network operators didn’t take advantage of the natural monopoly that they enjoyed (“natural” since once there was one set of telegraph wires leading to a place, it became hard to justify building a second set).

In the United States, there was a vociferous debate about whether or not to nationalize the telegraph system, which was controlled by Western Union, a private company:

[W]ithin the United States, Western Union continued to dominate the telegraph industry after its triumph in 1866 but faced two constraints that limited its ability to exploit its market power. First, the postal telegraph movement created a political environment that was, to some extent, a functional substitute for government regulation. Britain’s nationalization of the telegraph was widely discussed in America. Worried that the US government might follow suit, Western Union’s leaders at various times extended service or held rates in check to keep public opposition within manageable levels. (Concern about the postal telegraph movement also led the company to provide members of Congress with free telegraph service — in effect, making the private telegraph a post office for officeholders.) Public opinion was critical in confining Western Union to its core business. In 1866 and again in 1881, the company was on the verge of trying to muscle the Associated Press aside and take over the wire service business itself when it drew back, apparently out of concern that it could lose the battle over nationalization by alienating the most influential newspapers in the country. Western Union did, however, move into the distribution of commercial news and in 1871 acquired majority control of Gold and Stock, a pioneering financial information company that developed the stock ticker.

This situation–a dynamic equilibrium in which a private party polices its own behavior in order to stave off the threat of government intervention–strikes me as closely analogous to the net neutrality debate today. Network operators, although not subject to neutrality requirements, are more reluctant to exercise the options for traffic discrimination that are formally open to them, because they recognize that doing so might lead to regulation.

Filed Under: Broadband Tagged With: , , , ,