Danny Weitzner's blog

The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy

A few weeks ago a colleague reminded me of one of the early definitions of privacy in the computer security literature from Saltzer and Schroeder (The Protection of Information in Computer Systems):

“The term “privacy” denotes a socially defined ability of an individual (or organization) to determine whether, when, and to whom personal (or organizational) information is to be released.”

This view reflects the widely held view even today amongst computer security architects that the way to achieve privacy policy ends is to control the release of information. To this end, great effort has been expended to design systems that control access to and flow of personal, sensitive information. While there are certainly good reasons to do this, access control alone has not, and never will, be sufficient to achieve compliance with privacy, copyright or other information-related rules.

The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy

Various people (including David Sheets, a student of mine at MIT, and Seth Finkelstein) have pointed out over the last few days that the ‘free’ municipal WiFi service offered by the City of Boston comes with mandatory content filtering that blocks all kinds of sites which are not even close to illegal nor are they sources of pornography that might be considered harmful to children. One the one hand it’s not hard to see why city officials want to avoid the headline: “Boston’s free network a conduit to porn for city’s children, foiling parents’ filtering software.” But does that mean that it’s either wise public policy or constitutionally-permissible for the city to offer wifi to the public with such sweeping and arbitrary constraints?

If the City is allowed to do this, then they can block just about anything: Web sites operated by the opposing political party, critiques of the Big Dig, not to mention http://yankees.mlb.com/. One has to ask whether this is really a path that any city would want to open up for itself?

As a constitutional matter, it’s not quite clear whether the government can require government-funded Internet service providers to filter content. In United States v. American Library Association, 539 U.S. 194 (2003), the US Supreme Court decided that the Congress could require libraries receiving federal Internet access subsidies (the e-rate) to filter out porn. However, it’s not clear whether this case applies to the muni Wifi situation. The Supreme Court explained:

A public library does not acquire Internet terminals in order to create a public forum for Web publishers to express themselves, any more than it collects books in order to provide a public forum for the authors of books to speak. It provides Internet access, not to “encourage a diversity of views from private speakers,” … but for the same reasons it offers other library resources: to facilitate research, learning, and recreational pursuits by furnishing
materials of requisite and appropriate quality.

For what purpose is muni wifi offered? It’s it precisely to create an expanded public forum to increase the flow of information and new web services around the city?

This will be an interesting issue to watch.

The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy

The New York Times reports (Patent Fights Are a Legacy of MP3’s Tangled Origins, Douglas Heingartner, 5 March 2007, C03) on the mess over patent licensing for MP3 technology. While most (including Microsoft) had assumed/hoped that if they paid licensing fees to Frauenhofer they’d have the patent basis largely covered, now Alcatel (armed with the former Bell Labs patent portfolio from Lucent) and others are showing up demanding licensing fees, too. Microsoft just got hit with a with $1.5 billion patent infringement judgment in the United States. Other vendors with MP3 as an integral part of their product are worried that they existing licensing arrangments may not insulate them from new demand for fees.

Leonardo Chiariglione, chair of the MPEG group, declares that this is a bad for MP3 deployment:

“I consider the situation in general not positive for the wide adoption of the standard, which is what I have been working on.”

At the same time he laments the fact that there is little the standards body (ISO and MPEG) can do. Says that Times article:

For those confused about where to turn to obtain an MP3 license for a new device or piece of software, he offers little solace. “The rule is that the MPEG working group is not allowed to consider patent issues in our technical work, so there is nothing I can do about it….”

W3C’s Patent Policy takes a more activist approach to such matters. We won’t standardize any technology that cannot be implemented royalty-free, and if we find that there are threats to the RF status of a standard after it’s adopted, we can convene a special group to take action, including recommending changing or rescinding the standard.

The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy

Last week, the US Congress House of Representatives Subcommittee on the Telecommunications and the Internet had it’s first hearing of the year, the subject of which was the Future of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee was the sole witness at this hearing. The topic and witness choice were notable for a couple of reasons. This is the first meeting of the committee in the new session of Congress and the Chair of the committee, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), announced his intention to take a long range look at the larger issues facing communications policy in the United States. This, by itself, is a wonderful idea. The fact that he decided to start this series of hearings with the World Wide Web, as opposed to so many other topics he might have chosen, really speaks to the central importance that the Web has in our society. The fact that he chose Tim to testify was great, too, IMHO.

The Committee covered a wide range of questions, including:

• how will the Semantic Web change science and health care?
• what are the key lessons to learn from the first phase of the Web about how to promote continued innovation?
• what should be done, technically or legally, about spam, pornography available to kids, identity theft?
• why did Tim decide to make Web technology available royalty-free?
• does support for royalty-free standards imply that content and services on the Web also have to be free?
• and even, a slighty sheepish question about whether teleportation might be possible in the future?

I’ve been to a lot of congressional hearings, especially in my earlier professional life as lawyer and advocate for Internet civil liberties organizations EFF and CDT. This was one of the most positive, thoughtful and forward looking hearings that I’ve ever been to. Here you could see the Committee actually looking out into the future about the potential of the Web and trying to figure out what they could do (or not do) to help assure that it continues to grow and be available to all for commercial, political, cultural and personal use. Too often, Congress gets bogged down in its somewhat inevitable but short-sighted role as mediator amongst special interests. This was Congress at its best. It was great to be there.

You can read Tim’s testimony on the Web.

Ironically enough, though it’s easy to read the testimony, it’s not so easy to get an archived copy of the video feed from the hearing. Though most Congressional activity is recorded on video and much of it is streamed live by CSPAN or others, there’s no organized way to get achived copies of the video. Carl Malamud is engaged in a serious effort to try to remedy this situation, including trying to encourage CSPAN to make it’s archive of congressonal video public.

In the meantime, Carl has kindly ripped the feeds from the hearing and put them up in 2 places (Google Video and archive.org)

I’m certainly going to be following Carl’s efforts and looking to help out where I can.

Update: C-SPAN has changed its policy and now provides public access with a Creative Commons license.

The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy

There’s been a lot of coverage (Sydney Morning Herald, Copyright ruling puts hyperlinking on notice, 19 December 2006) about a recent copyright case from the Australia Federal Court. This is an important case but to my reading the decision itself, it’s a mistake to see it as a general rule against linking to copyrighted material, as some of the press coverage suggests. Of course, it would cripple the Web if it became illegal to merely link to copyrighted material. As virtually all Web pages are copyrighted by someone, a rule that any link is an invitation to engage in copyright violation would mean one could only link to pages with permission. That would, indeed, break the Web.

But that is not was this case seems to say. From an admittedly cursory reading of the opinion, the Australia court seems to have tied it’s decision to that fact that:

“…it was the deliberate choice of Mr Cooper to establish and maintain his website in a form which did not give him the power immediately to prevent, or immediately to restrict, internet users from using links on his website to access remote websites for the purpose of copying sound recordings in which copyright subsisted.” (41)*

and the court went on to accept the trial courts finding that:

“… Mr Cooper [the defendant and operator of mp3s4free.net site] benefited financially from sponsorship and advertisements on the website; that is, that the relationship between Mr Cooper and the users of his website had a commercial aspect. Mr Cooper’s benefits from advertising and sponsorship may be assumed to have been related to the actual or expected exposure of the website to internet users. As a consequence Mr Cooper had a commercial interest in attracting users to his website for the purpose of copying digital music files.” (48)

To boil it down, though Cooper didn’t actually have the power to spot people from illegally copying the MP34 files to which he provided links, his intent was that people engage in copying he knew to be illegal and that he actually benefited from that behavior.

The court also addressed the defendants argument that a ruling against him could also outlaw search engines in Australia. The court said: “Google is a general purpose search engine rather than a website designed to facilitate the downloading of music files”

Copyright law has developed elaborate doctrine in order to try to determine when to punish those who have some role in enabling infringement as opposed to those who are the actual infringers. I’m not sure that that balance is always right, but this case, similar to the US Supreme Court case MGM v. Grokster is an effort to find a way to indicate when linking to copyrighted material goes beyond building the Web and violates the law. I’m not always happy about where that line is drawn, but it’s a lot more subtle than the simple technical question whether a link is provided or not.

* note that the Australia courts have adopted the enlightened practice of using paragraph numbers to refer inside an opinion, rather than relying on page numbers which neither work well with digital copies (such as web pages that lack pagination) and which give certain legal publishes undue control over search/retrieval services for legal documents.

The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy

Recently noticed this description of the Adobe Policy Server:

About Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server. Authors who protect their documents with Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server can audit what is done with each copy of the document (such as opening, printing, and editing). They can also change or revoke access rights at any time. If an author has revoked access to a document that is protected by Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server, Adobe Reader or Acrobat informs you that your access rights have been removed the next time you try to open the document.

I wonder how this works.

The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy

BusinessWeek technology columnist Stephen H. Wildstrom writes about The War for the Net’s Future. He describes the simplistic nature of the current debate (currently in a summer hiatus with the anti-neutrality side at a big advantage):

Like most policy debates, the Washington argument over “network neutrality” is thoroughly uninformative. Both the cable and telephone companies on one side and big Internet companies like Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) on the other claim to be protecting consumers. But there’s a danger we users could get trampled in this fight among elephants.
The problem is that everyone wants to get into the business of on-demand video — phone companies, cable companies, and players such as Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! (YHOO).

[..]

Fortunately, there’s a middle ground: We must acknowledge that public networks for everyone can exist alongside premium, private ones, and that these two types of networks can live by different rules. The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), a think tank on tech issues, argues for an approach that preserves the open nature of today’s Internet while creating space for premium networks. This solution truly serves the interests of consumers and most businesses.

CDT’s position paper describes the details of their position. I’m happy to have been able to contribute to CDT’s views through my paper: The Neutral Internet: An Information Architecture for Open Societies. (Full disclosure: I’m on CDT’s Board of Directors and founder of the organization, so I’m biased toward their way of approaching Internet issues.)

The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy

According to Reuters, the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee has said that ‘Net Neutrality’ is the toughest issue facing Senators, and that there is not yet sufficient support in the Senate for the bill that Stevens has proposed. ‘Net Neutrality’ will be the subject of committee votes tomorrow with various proposals being offered for the committee to consider.

Sens. Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican, and Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, plan to offer an amendment that would prevent broadband providers from giving priority to any individual company’s content. Snowe said that the debate would likely spill out of the committee and on to the Senate floor. “It won’t be the end of it, it will be the beginning,” she said.

The contention about the issue is, I believe, a positive sign. The committee has recognized that this a high priority but nonetheless complex issue.

The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy

I’ve just posted a paper on the ‘Net Neutrality’ issue, entitled “The Neutral Internet: An Information Architecture for Open Societies [PDF]. This paper argues that it is important for Congress to enact legislative protection for the essential non-disciminatory and neutral aspects of the Internet.

The United States Senate is likely to take a key vote on the issue this week, so it’s an important time to pay attention and make your voice heard.

The paper identifies four key aspects of the Neutral Internet that must be protected:

1. Non-discriminatory routing of packets
2. User control and choice over service levels
3. Ability to create and use new services and protocols without prior
   approval of network operators
4. Non-discriminatory peering of backbone networks.

I suggest that:

These principles taken together constitute the social contract among Internet service providers that has been indispensable to its great openness and success. They are equally important regardless of whether the service is broadband or narrowband, wireless or wireline, fiber optic, copper pair or coax. Understanding the Internet requires taking this holistic view of the Internet as a set of business, technical and social arrangements. While traditional telecommunications policy thinking divides the world into ‘facilities’ and different bandwidth levels, these are not the appropriate categories within which we should regulate or de-regulate the Internet. Indeed, the very foundation of the Internet is its ability to connect efficiently a broad array of quite different networks, allowing a publisher of information to reach a global audience without regard to which or what kind of network the recipient is on. To allow the nation’s leading Internet access providers to upend this fundamental global understanding would be to undermine the Internet itself.

There are those who argue that it’s dangerous to ‘regulate’ the Internet and therefore there should be no non-discrimination rules enacted. Some network operators are simply self-serving and want the freedom to take advantage of the tremendous wealth that the Internet generates without playing by the simple, common rules that make it so economically powerful and socially useful. Other well-meaning friends of the Internet worry that getting the FCC involved will risk mendlesome regulation and lead to unintended consequences. I worry about this too, but think that Congress should be able enact Internet Neutrality protections (for example by creating a right to complain against discriminatory conduct at the FTC or FCC) without too much risk. Think of regular old telephone service, whose cornerstone has been for more than 100 years basic commn carriage non-discrimination. True, many countries, including the US have all but eliminated the prices regulation aspect of common carriage. But we still maintain the prohibition against content discrimination simply because it’s vital to the way the telephone system works. This doesn’t result in burdensome regulation, but rather reminds everyone of the importance of maintaining an open voice telephone system.

At the same time, I suggest that some of the Net Neutrality proponents have actually distorted the debate (and hurt our changes to protect the Internet) by trying, intentionally or not, to extend Internet non-discrimination principles to other broadband services such as cable television. The paper explains:

By distinguishing between Internet Neutrality and more general NetNeutrality, it is possible to establish basic non-discriminatory neutrality requirements that will preserve the neutral aspects of the Internet that have brought commercial and non-commercial benefits to hundreds of millions of people around the world. At the same time, policy makers should carefully monitor the evolution of new broadband networks and services. As long as those new networks operate in a manner that does not actively interfere with or unfairly compete against Internet services, policy makers should allow the private sector a freer hand in designing and operating new broadband infrastructure.

I’d welcome comments on the paper and will likely write more about this in the coming days.

Update: Associated Press coverage of the paper: “All Online Traffic May Not Be Equal, 20 June 2006.”

The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy

There’s an interesting view on Net Neutrality posted on Dave Farber’s Interesting People mailing list. Someone who has a background as a technical executive at several (now bankrupt) telecom companies goes through an analysis of the cost of operating an Internet backbone network and then asks:

Why shouldn’t telecom develop a QoS overlay network to the bulk rate
internet? Its akin to FedEx and the Post Office. If there are
applications/services that need better QoS why would we not want to
have them? If AT&T invested the capex into the network, Shouldn’t it
cost Yahoo more per unit to ship QoS than AT&T? How does AT&T recover
their investment and make margin on the capacity Yahoo uses if they
don’t get to charge them more? Why shouldn’t AT&T seen an advantage
from investing the tons of cash it’ll take to roll this out? So what
the fiber is in the ground? Everything above that layer costs money
too…

The rest is worth reading, too.

The commentor, however, confuses the question about charges in my view: it’s not about whether the network operators can charge for a service, but about whether those charges are discriminatory and whether the fee structure changes from one in which everyone pays individually to reach the Internet cloud, versus a radical view that ISP A (AT&T, for arguments sake) can charge anyone who is served by another ISP for the privilege connecting to ISP A’s customers. Quality of service standards are a great idea and people should pay for them, but there’s no need to disrupt the basic flow of fees (everyone pays their own ISP) to do that.