From Farm Equipment to Wiki DNA Databases; Access to Tools

             I was recently given a piece of writing by Lee Worden which is to be published in West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California. It is titled "Counterculture, cyberculture, and the Third Culture: Reinventing civilization, then and now." It's worth talking about here because it deals with authority and counter-forces, protecting or upholding rights, the role of government and when it should be embellished, reevaluated, checked, or diverted, and how to integrate/evaluate and regulate technological advancements.

            Worden tracks a pretty surprising network of people from the mid 60's Whole Earth foundation; through the Apple, Wired, and all of the Dot-com 90's madness; into the free culture movement that spawned; and up to the current (shocking) synthetic biology movement and its anarchist twin, the Biohack movement. I was surprised by the connections, and it took a while to pull them all together. I made this chart to track some of it. 

            Lee points out surprising "ironies" (hypocricies?) in the ideologies held by Steward Brand and his fellow of hippies-turned-"Digerati," but finds some consistent threads as well: dismissal of regulation + acceptance of capitalism, staunch individualism at the expense of designated responsibilities and/or expense of accoutability. "Without the hindrance of rules and regulations," and, as I have written on the chart, with a "vehement embrace of the Enlightenment values of reason, individual initiative, and the grand narrative of progress through scientific discovery"¹

 

Legal Censorship

I've gone into the precident of 5 doctrines that were established to provide for free expression, and which have been reassessed and applied to new telecommunication mediums until the Internet.

I'm going to offer a few specific examples just to demonstrate that the principles of common carriage et al. are not voluntarily adhered to without government regulation. As Nunziato writes, "Broadband providers have the incentive to cater to the interests of the majority of their subscribers, who may disfavor certain types of unpopular—yet constitutionally-protected—expression"¹ This pooling is a bit Google-heavy at the moment, and I apologize for that, (sorry Google!) but I have followed some of the notes from Virtual Freedom and there is more documentation on Google than its competitors or ISPs. I will continue to look around and get a broader cross-section.

(A few examples of) censorship by ISPs, email clients, ads, search engines, news aggregators :

5 Doctrines to Uphold the First Amendment

         I introduced the division between the Negative/Affirmative way of interpreting the First Amendment in the last post. Nunziato breaks down  5 doctrines that have upheld the "Affirmative" conception of the First Amendment until the mid twentieth century, after which they were gradually, significantly weakened; the unwillingness of the court to apply these historical doctrines to new technologies and the increasingly narrow, negative interpretation of the doctrines has resulted in today's situation where there is little or no public space on the Net while privately controlled speech conduits go almost entirely unregulated.

       Because she writes with the thoroughness (read: redundancy) of a lawyer, I am going to further break those doctrines down, and describe them at their strongest, most "affirmative" embodiment in court rulings. Later I will address how they have since been weakened.

+ vs -

There is a difference between these two things:

1)  facilitating free speech in a democracy

2)  a democratic government that does not censor speech

            Nunziato quotes her fellow GWU Law School professor Jerome Barron: "'The marketplace of ideas' has rested on the assumption that protecting the right of expression [from government censorship] is equivalent to providing for it."¹

Dawn Nunziato's Virtual Freedom; Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age (2009) frames the issue by saying there is basically two ways to look at our First Amendment. One way, the government simply has no control over communications conduits (e.g. Comcast as an ISP, or Google's search engine, email, and news) who enjoy the ability to "dominate or monopolize the relevant forum for discussion"², because this ability is the legitimate outcome of competition in the marketplace.

In other words,

Layman's Terms

 I've been using some of these for a while. Others I will be getting into with Dawn Nunziato's Virtual Freedom. 
 Note: I'll update this entry with new terms and link you back here when it seems pertinent.

Packet switching: method of transmitting bits of data. Data is broken into 'packets' with a header that contains basic info ('to' and 'from' IP addy, program/app needed to read it) and sent on it's merry way through networks, routers, etc., in what is known as a "data stream" (upstream = from your comp to a server, downstream = from a server to your comp) then reassembled at destination. 

Deep Packet Inspection: accessing a packet's data "beneath" its header at points en route to its destination (i.e. routers turned inspection checkpoints) to assess what to do with the data--let it continue on its route, send/store a copy of its contents, divert it to another route, block or drop it altogether? This technology can be used to manage a network's security (keep spam out), to keep stats on what kind of data is being passed around and how often, to "eavesdrop" in the government surveillance sense, or just for good old fashioned censoring of unfavored data.  

Broadband: (as opposed to narrowband, which you will remember as: DO-do-do-do-do-do… EEEEEEEE RRRRRR eeeeerrrrrr) a term for any/all of the following types of vastly improved (from the old telephone copper wire) internet connections: coaxial cable wire lines, digital subscriber lines (DSL), wireless, fiber-optic wire lines, and broadband-over-power line (BPL).  You'll remember that Broadband providers are currently classified as data service providers rather than telecommunications services, and thus they wiggle out of common carriage regulation. 

"Last mile" Provider: the one who hooks up that little router in your living room. Your cables to their cables, wireless towers, etc., and ultimately on to the "backbone" networks which cross large distances (e.g. across the US). 

First-in-first-out / "best effort": the "traditional" method of data streaming, which treats all data equally, as opposed to prioritization of certain data based on it's source, destination, user identity, data type, port, and content. I think it is important to note here how Dawn Nunziato makes a distinction between ISPs filtering data based on it's content/viewpoint discrimination, versus prioritizing data based on applications or tiering service: "My argument is not centered on these other potential meanings of net neutrality, but focuses instead on the requirement that broadband providers serve as neutral conduits in facilitating Internet speech.<sup>"1







1</sup> Solove, Daniel. "Bright Ideas: Nunziato on Virtual Freedom: Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age" May 3 2010.
< http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2010/05/bright-ideas-nunziato-on-virtual-freedom-net-neutrality-and-free-speech-in-the-internet-age.html >

Nebulous Flowchart

     This is my low-tech Net map.

     I layered ~15 sheets of trace paper and kept a record for a couple of hours of the way I followed links. One page to the next = flip a sheet, use red link spot to orient new window box; back button = flip down a sheet and branch out from same site again; close a tab = end that series and start a new box. Pretty direct and kind of fun. 

     Yeah, I'd say it's equivalent to mapping the paths that various twigs and leaves take as they float by me, down the stream in my backyard; it's really just a record of movement, from memory, and neat looking but not very helpful if I want to retrace my steps--to make that kind of map I would have to differentiate between the links I follow.  It would also be useful to account for how often I access sites, etc. If it becomes more relevant to the topic at hand maybe I'll do an Internet map up proper.

Just a Tidbit

I present: a prediction by Ivan Seidenberg, Verizon’s CEO, more for humor than anything. This is a statement made in regards to net neutrality at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) five years ago, in 2006:

“‘Two years from now, no one will remember this because we’ll get this solved and move on,” he said. “The issue really comes down to the law is the law. We could take the position, because we’re using new technology, that we don’t need a franchise. My view of that is that it’s highly risky. We could end up getting down a path and finding ourselves with a problem. So we chose to deal with it face up and we decided to do it two ways: No. 1 is go in and comply, and then complain like crazy.’

However, he added that the debate may be moot in a few years.

‘Our view is that as people will come to their senses, we still will be regulated, we will still pay franchise fees we will still have to get permits, but we don’t need the extra added complication of municipalities trying to turn this into a big delay tactic,” Seidenberg said. “They’ll work hard at it, they’ll try and they’ll lose because the public won’t stand for this. To me, in two years or less than that, this is something that’s come and gone.’”¹

What was that bit about some trouble with long-term thinking? To be fair, I suppose they have been complaining like crazy.

¹Mike Farrell, “Seidenberg: It’s About Cost, Not Blocking”  Multichannel News, 2/9/2006 

< http://www.multichannel.com/article/122093-Seidenberg_It_s_About_Cost_Not_Blocking.php >

Common Vs. Contract Carriers, Does it Matter?

"Why do we have regulation of telecommunications?" writes Eli Noam, a finance and economics expert, a Columbia professor, smack in the middle of addressing the future of those very regulatory policies. Ok, I thought, here we go. Give me a nice concise summation of why we need them: "To some it is merely an exercise in capture and rent-seeking by powerful interest groups. To others, it is based on underlying public policy goals, including restriction of market power, free flow of information across the economy and society, and technological innovation." Oh, rent-seeking. I've already given my thoughts on the anti-regulation libertarians.  "There is truth in both views, and they are not mutually exclusive."¹ I am surprised. I find at this moment that I have been absorbing the Tim Wu school of thought, wherein nation-state government is an imperfect but necessary backbone upon which the Net is built. I realize that perhaps I have become overly dismissive of standpoints which decry government regulation as unfair/uncalled for. I decide to listen:

Slice of History, Maps

     I found a two part article, from PennState's Academic Computing Newsletter back in '98, which is a sprint through telecommunications history from the telegraph to the Internet. The concept of laying a single giant cable across the Atlantic is still somewhat beyond me. 

  A Slice of History,Part I  and  A Slice of Hisory, Part II

 

    At first, it was simple. There was point A, this side of the atlantic, and point B, over the water. There were no offshoots and there was a tight limit on how many communications could be carried across it. It is interesting to look through the kind of telecommunications mapping that follows. The middle two maps are of the National Science Foundation Network's (NSFNet) major routers, supercomputing centers, and network backbones of the internet in the US in 1987. The last two images are screen shots from "chat circles," a project out of MIT's Sociable Media Group which is a chat room that visualizes the dynamics of a conversation: who is talking most frequently with whom, who is carrying or dominating the conversation, or idling in the background.  With our ability to transmit and track more data, we have zoomed in on a smaller range of communication: the center maps are still grounded somewhat in hardware and geography, but the last delve into the very substance of a single conversation, now devoid of even abstracted geography.

 The Internet Mapping Project < http://www.kk.org/internet-mapping/ > is compiling a collection of individual's hand drawn, "own experience of the Internet" maps.


In fact, to follow: my own Internet map.






Images:
< http://www.computerhistory.org/internet_history/internet_history_80s.html >
< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable >
< http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/projects/chatcircles/ >

To Be Heard in a Democracy

Who has the ultimate authority here? I asked. Who gave you the authority? Verizon asks the FCC. And the bloggers cry, “no one has the authority to take away my free and open Internet that will facilitate my right to free speech!”

________________

My housemate Siri has been a part of counter-recruitment and demilitarization organizations in the Bay area for decades. She is familiar with the challenges of trying to change the status quo, particularly at the level of the US government. We were discussing the revolution in Egypt a few days ago and Siri said something that immediately resonated with me, in regards to the indignant attitude I have encountered and puzzled over repeatedly in blogs.

She said, “People talk about democracy as though it were a right handed down to them. As though every morning democracy will be served on your breakfast platter, and you can just put your feet up and enjoy it.”

As though it’s enough to be born in America. As though democracy doesn’t depend on our voices to function on our behalf. We might call it a God-given right, but no natural law keeps it; only human law keeps it. We will keep it so long as we continue to ensure that its protection is updated to fit the technology and ideology of the times.

________________

    To those who say: “let the markets decide,” or, “just keep the government out of it,” I say, I wonder who then is going to act on your behalf?

No ISP is designated as a common carrier in the US, and so are not yet bound to non-discriminatory service.  On the “self-regulating” side, Tim Wu states quite politely back in 2003:

“Basic economic theory suggests that operators have along-term interest coincident with the public: both should want a neutral platform that supports the emergence of the very best applications. However, the evidence suggests the operators may have paid less attention to their long-term interests than might be ideal... operators indeed had implemented significant contractual and architectural limits on certain classes of applications.”1  

To follow: common carrier and contract carrier designations, and a bit of the history of prickly relations between telecom cos and the government in regards to innovation







1 Tim Wu, “Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination,” Journal of Telecommunications and High Technology Law, Vol. 2, p. 141, 2003 < http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=388863 >

A More Artistic POV

I'd like to turn an eye to the present for a moment to consider a different sort of angle--artists! 

Cyber-Libertarianism, via "Who Controls the Internet?"

Is the FCC overregulating the Internet? Check out this introduction to an article by Larry Downes on Slate:

         “Our modern information frontier... ‘the Internet’ has likewise resisted efforts from governments to impose their provincial laws, local regulations, and moral disapproval disguised as legislaion... Digital life has its own norms and values, enforced by efficient and effective engineering... Internet communities tend to invent their own ‘systems of administration.’" 1

In regards to bandwidth tiering, for example, does a self-governing Internet mean one that is left to the businesses that own the hardware and software to shape, according to their will? Self-governing by users or providers--content providers or service providers? Is the FCC raising legitimate concerns on behalf of users, or overregulating? There are multiple “Internet communities” to consider.  Looking at the question I posted last time: Who has the authority to enact changes in this structure, or prevent them?

Larry Downes’ angle is not original. This is what I learned about the EFF in Who Controls The Internet?:

questions to go on

I am going to post a second approach of Who Controls the Internet? with the help of a debate between one of its authors, Tim Wu, and Christopher Yoo (also a professor of law) over Net Neutrality specifically.
[ The PDF of the 2003 debate is available here, and here it is posted on Entrepreneur 4 years later if you don't want a download ]


Until then, I thought I would help myself get another step beyond the surface meaning of a "neutral" internet by laying out a few questions:

How much of the structure and functionality of the Internet would be affected by proposed network changes? 

What kind of Internet structuring is good for which people?

Who has the authority to enact changes to its structure, or prevent them?

And somewhat incongruously but at least as important, how is this panning out internationally?

Who's in Control? 1

Having completed the second part of Who Controls the Internet, section title “The Government Strikes Back,” whoops, “Government Strikes Back” (the third section is unfortunately not titled “Return of the Free Network”), I am ready to begin talking about it.

There is a recurring theme, in this section at least, which is emphasized by the two authors and which looks like a good place to begin threading in current net neutrality questions: “a government’s failure to crack down on certain types of Internet communication ultimately reflects a failure of interest or will, not of power.”1

    They set the Internet in a larger timeline of advances in communication technology which at first encounter seemed above the law’s national borders but were eventually placed into each nation-state’s legal system, accordingly.

    “When a revolutionary technology first enters the public realm, it emboldens outlaws and seems immune from government control... eventually, the commercialization of the new technology needed to make it available to the masses fuels demand for property rights and government-enforced rules. After an initial period of uncertainty, the government responds to business and consumer demand to assert the control over the new technology needed to make it widely available.”2

This is raised as an important point because it causes us to consider why it is that the Internet in the United States does not function like the Internet in China. What does Who Controls the Internet? have to say about this? I’ll give you a hint: they say it’s not because we don’t have the technology, or time, or money to do so. It’s because our government negotiates the legality of new technologies in the light of the ideological importance of free speech, artistic expression, and entrepreneurial innovation in the United States.
    Let me move to another point in order to elaborate.

Perhaps the other most important point Who Controls the Internet makes is that many of us still conceptualize the Internet as a borderless communication medium, but that ideology has been debunked this past decade, through a series of court rulings and structural adjustments. Authors like Thomas Friedman have continued to push the idea that the web will erase national boundaries--citizens cannot be sheltered from complete accessibility to the ideas, laws, and cultures of other countries (oh, and the west will rule!). The only way to prevent this is to refuse to develop an Internet system and fall behind technologically.   Friedman, as quoted by Goldsmith & Wu: “What makes the Internet so dangerous for police states is that they can’t afford not to have it, because they will fall behind economically if they do. But if they have it, it means they simply cannot control information the way they once did.”3    

    The reality, counter Goldsmith and Wu, is that the Internet is not a magical place divorced from the reality of the physical world, but is composed of a network of hardware (i.e. cables, PCs, etc.) and relay points (e.g. ISPs) which make up a horde of intermediaries between the sources of information, goods, etc., and their individual targets. If an activity taking place on the Internet is brought to the government’s attention and deemed illegal, people at these intermediary points can be held responsible. This is largely effective, even when the source material is located offshore, out of the reach of a State, or when the individual targets are too numerous or difficult to find.

Who Controls the Internet? addresses China’s Internet policies, exclusively for a chapter,

and here the Internet as an unstoppable-force-above-the-State! is disproven. China, we learn, has both effective control over their net and a more advanced network than the US. They accomplish this with a combination of methods: security firewalls that filter access, according to a list of banned sites garnered by the Internet Police, at router checkpoints or information “gateways” into China4 (“John Gilmore’s idea... that ‘the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it’ is thus reversed: the router itself has become the censor”5); internal control via compliant companies (Yahoo China employs human & software filters on words like “democracy” in their chatrooms); identification and arrest of individuals creating or accessing illegal content (and they countered the anonymity of Wi-Fi with WAPI, which I will get into at a later date).
   

This isn’t the most complete list, but it’s a good start for conveying the effectiveness of their system. This is the nasty side of government control, and probably the kind people think of when phrases like “American voters want the government to keep its hands off their Internet”6 pop up in blogs and news articles. It is also likely to be alluded to by telecommunications providers like Verizon when they claim that the FCC is over-regulating or overstepping boundaries of control: “We believe this assertion of authority goes well beyond any authority provided by Congress, and creates uncertainty for the communications industry, innovators, investors and consumers.”7

    Don’t be fooled. Verizon is the one that has been trying to filter sites like BitTorrent. Do you believe that BitTorrent runs on an illegal business model, because it encourages illegal filesharing of copywrited material? Well, if you do, to whom do you want to give the ability to make and enforce that decision?  Do we believe the bit about our government’s responsibility to the ideological importance of free speech, artistic expression, and entrepreneurial innovation?  Our government is supposed to act on our behalf and has systems in place (I know, supposedly) to do so. What about a corporation? If we limit their legal obligations to our government via the FCC, whom are they responsible to other than--yes, I’m going to say it--their own bottom line?  





i Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu, Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) 89.
2 124.
3 101.
4 93.
5 94.
6 “Go Figure: 21 Percent of Americans Oppose FCC Internet Regulation.” By Stuart Fox,             TechNewDaily, 30 December 2010.  
<http://www.technewsdaily.com/most-americans-oppose-fcc-internet-regulation-1890>
7 “Verizon Sues F.C.C. to Overturn Order on Blocking Web Sites.” By Edward Wyatt, January 20,         2011. <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/business/media/21fcc.html>

Reading List

For the purpose of understanding my scope and perspective, here is the book list I am working with:

You Are Not A Gadget, A Manifesto  by Jaron Lanier 

Born Digital: Understanding The First Generation of Digital Natives  by John Palfrey 

The Master Switch: The Rise And Fall of Information Empires  by Tim Wu  

Who Controls The Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World  by Jack Goldsmith & Tim Wu 

Virtual Freedom: Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age  by Dawn Nunziato

 I will post other sources (and more books!) as they come up, including FCC documents, news sources, blogs, etc.

Not a Gadget, 1

You Are Not A Gadget considers tech-culture, and “2.0” digital mindsets more than it deals with politics of the Internet. Jaron Lanier did consider the cultural implications of an Internet that is “hogged” by a few (or even a single) hive-fed data dumping grounds (which in my mind leads almost directly to the central battle of net neutrality). He uses Wikipedia as his primary example, and caused me to reflect on my own methods of searching with questions like:

How close are most of the websites I search to Wikipedia itself? In other words, how many iterations of the same content do I bounce between, hosted on aggregators or news-streamers or bloggers? Who is actually generating content? How many unique voices to I come across, and is the number of individually created and operated websites shrinking as people opt for platforms like Facebook or Blogspot?

I haven’t yet digested Lanier’s book fully, and I certainly am skeptical of some of it. However, I am glad I began with You Are Not a Gadget because it lays a socially critical foundation that is familiar to me as an artist, with which I can approach the politics and history of the Internet. Here are some pieces I pulled from the end of the book, which was more engaging than the beginning half in my experience (perhaps I had to settle into it):

Jaron Lanier illustrates the merit of individual websites over an encyclopedia like Wikipedia by comparing what ThinkQuest began to accomplish with mathematics before Wikipedia derailed such ventures. ThinkQuest was

“a contest run by internet pioneers... in which teams of high school students competed for scholarships by designing websites that explained ideas from a variety of academic disciplines, including math... The contestants had to learn how to present ideas as wholes... their work included simulations, interactive games, and other elements that were pretty new to the world.”1

He makes the point that Wikipedia is easier, but rarely offers a unique or inspired encounter with information or ideas.  

“Even in a case where there is an objective truth that is already known, such as a mathematical proof,  Wikipedia distracts the potential for learning how to bring it into the conversation in new ways. Individual voice--the opposite of wikiness--might not matter to mathematical truth, but it is the core of mathematical communication."2

So the question that might connect this to the internet “pipeline” debate today is: will companies like Verizon channel searches through sites like Wikipedia if they begin divvying up bandwidth? Would that, in theory, be easier for them than serving all websites equally? Or will they limit what kinds of search engines are used? In both cases, our access to information will be reduced, and I imagine that people’s desire to publish their own, unique content might dwindle, knowing it wouldn’t be as accessible. 


1 Jaron Lanier You Are Not A Gadget, A Manifesto (New York: Borzoi Books, 2010)146.
2 147