Tim Denton is commissioner of theCanadian Radio and Television Commission. They held a hearing recently on broadcasting in new media. Can Canadian content be measured when TV is delivered over the Net? Should they be taxing ISPs to create a fund that would go into Canadian programming? Many entertainers testified in favor of the tax. “Not a single group raised the issue of free speech across the Internet.” Tim can’t imagine this being the case in the US.” Tim can’t announce the CRTC’s decision…

[Tags: tim_denton crtc canada ]

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Geoff Daily introduces a panel at Freedom to Connect. [Note: Live blogging. Unedited. Uncorrected. Incomplete. Flat out wrong. Thanks for playing.]

James Salter talks about the Smart Grid. The biggest problems on earth: Over-population and global warming. The second is a subset of the first. James at first thought Al Gore was a hypocrite, but now he’s convinced of the truth of what AG says. (James is a proud Republican.) American residential electric usage has tripled in the past 50 years, and the efficiency has gone down. (Efficiency = peak usage over average usage.) 40% of carbon comes from coal-fired power plants and 33% from cars. Obama says we should get greener by building windmills, etc. But the effective thing he’s doing is installing smart meters. Smart meters are networked. There are 140M lectric meters in the use. Only 6.7M are smart meters so far. He estimates it’d cost $2,500 per house — including fiber to the house — to lower the load factor significantly.

Q: Is fiber required for a smart grid?
A: Nope. But the apps will need more bandwidth over time.

Terry Huval of Lafayette, Louisiana tells about broadbanding the city. In 1998, the Lafayette Utilities System put in fiber for its utilities. In 2000, they were authorized to “establish a wholesale and governmental retail network.” Companies were allowed to resell access to private folks. In 2004, the city proposed fiber to home and business as its fourth utility. But then the “Local Government Fair Competition Act” passed, a bill favoring the incumbents. The Governor stepped in and negotiated a compromise. Then the private telcos successfully sued. In 2005, the public voted 62% in favor of the project. “It was looked upon as a huge benefit to local businesses.” It was viewed as being like electricity. Then, in 2006, tow unknown citizens filed suit. 2007, State Supreme Court ruled 7-0 in favor of the project. The whole process cost $3.5M. In 2009, they’ve started providing retail telecommunication services to residential and smaller business customers, at 20% less than the standard competitor. But the vision is to provide much more than basic TV and phone services. They provide the triple play for $85. For $138 you get 250 channels (including HD) and 30MB up and down Internet. Customers can build their own bundle. E.g., unlimited long distance for $31. Five cents a minute to reach much of the world. He stresses that they’ve listened to the community. So, they’ provide 100Mbps for peer-to-peer, free. “We think it opens up doors for all our citizens and businesses.” They enable Net access through your TV if you don’t have a computer. It’s limited, but they can Google… People love the service overall and consider it, proudly, to be “ours.”

Q: [bob frankston] Among the triple play, which funds what?
A: TV is the driver.

Q; [Todd of the Utopia project in Utah] Will you wholesale access to the network so that others can be ISPs.
A: No. At least not until our bonds are paid off.

Q: [brett glass] Where does Lafayette get its backbone connection?
A: AT&T and Quest, about $50-60/Mbps. It’s an over-subscription-based model. You assume you won’t have all of your sources using all of your resources at the same time.

[Terry now plays Cajun fiddle and sings. Awesome.]

Geoff Daily makes a quick announcement of a new alliance: “All Americans deserve equal access to the best broadband. The best broadband is fiber.” [I couldn’t get the URL. Sorry.]

[Tags: f2c09 f2c smart_grid ecology environment global_warming fiber ftth wifi ]

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[Note: Live blogging. Sloppy. Incomplete. Unchecked. Wrong. Flee! Flee!]

Chris Savage talks about “The Re-Birth of Intelligent Regulation and the Chicago School.” The Chicago School overemphasizes the value of individual thought (= “revealed preference theory”). When people make choices, that’s the best way to know what’s good for them (Chris says). But how can people know which wireless plan they want? “Empirical studies of decision making show that people don’t know what they want.” They don’t act rationally. They have trouble when there are too many alternatives, need to assess risk, etc. But, if you can’t assume that people know what they want, there’s no reason to think that the results from markets are good results. Hence, we need to regulate. If there’s no factual basis to think open competition will lead to the best outcome, regulators may have a role in shaping the outcome. But, timing matters and now is the time to make a “more citizen-friendly regulatory system.”

Derek Slater, a policy person for Google (and a former Berkman Fellow). He’s going to talk about MLab. We have all asked “WTF?” he says, especially when an app starts running badly. We don’t know what’s going on. We don’t have the tools to get the data that would help us understand that. Broadband policy needs data. mLab provides end-user testing tools. (It’s not just a Google project.) “We call it beta but that’s only because most people don’t now what alpha means.” Thirty-six servers at the moment.

John Peha, chief technologist of the FCC, talks about the “Mythology of Rural Broadband.” Myth 1: There’s less interest in broadband in rural areas. Nope. The percentage of US households with Internet overall and rural are almost the same, but rural has less broadband. They probably don’t like their Internet slow. About one third of rural households have no access to broadband of any ttype (except satellite). Myth 2: Customers are unwilling to pay the cost of the buildout. But there are spill-over benefits, affecting the community and not just the individual subscribers. Myth 3: Rural communities may not gain from the broadband they don’t have access to, but it doesn’t hurt them. Nah. “Reducing the size of a network harms those who remain.” Broadband is becoming the norm, hurting those who do not have it. Myth 4: “Government involvement in infrastructure always helps.” Nope. No “one size fits all” solution. We shouldn’t have the gov’t replicate solutions the market is doing well already. We shouldn’t assume that the market solves all problems. We’re getting some more spectrum in 2009 as the switch to digital TV kicks in, and there’s a new national broadband plan under development.

Q: [tim denton, CRTC commissioner] Expand on your point that we don’t know what market conditions will work, Chris?
Chris: We don’t know. It’s important for people, esp. regulators, to remember that.

Q: How can regulators make policy and maintain technological neutrality since technologies offer different capabilities?
Jon: Tech neutrality is a good thing to aim at.
Chris: I want to challenge that. We’re not neutral about houses that have electricity or not, or cars with airbags or not. The market won’t figure this out correctly, necessarily.
Derek: We need to set the goals and look at the data at what different technologies bring to the table.
Jon: The setting of the goals is the key part of that.

[amy wohl] I am a recovering Chicago economist. When the gov’t tries to fix market mistakes, it often introduces a lag that can create a new mistake. How can we help the gov’t make good decisions?
Chris: Elect the right people.
Derek: Infrastructure is special. That’s the message we need to be building on.
David I: Say more …
Audience: Because infrastructure is being built now but not being designed. [Tags: f2c f2c09 fcc broadband regulation ]

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[Note: All of these conference bloggings are rough notes, wrong, incomplete, poorly paraphrased, full of spellping errors, etc.]

Esme Vos begins by saying that municipal wifi is far from dead. The companies that failed at it generally failed not because they were doing muni wifi (e.g., Earthlink). She talks about some cities where it’s working. E.g., Riverside, Minneapolis, Cleveland. Philadelphia is now succeeding; they got some muni “anchor applications” and is expanding from there. About 50% of logins to the Philadelphia system are Apple products; the Phila project is not a failure. Esme also talks about Lompoc CA, which had been considerd to be a failure, but it’s been turned around.

Sascha Meinrath says his role these days is “to translate geek into wonk.” He says we need “alternative media dissemination and through these networks institute fundamental changes to civil society before it collapses under the weight of its own inequity.” [approx] Public-private partnerships have placed communities in subservient relationships to corporations. “Our very lexicon” about muniwifi revolves around ROI instead of fostering a 21st century civil society.

Ken Biba of Novarum talks about “Municipal Wireless 2.0.” His company measures wifi. What went wrong with 1.0? There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Fantasy business models and overhyped products. What went right? When there was skin in the game, it worked It worked for things like public safety, parking meters, and internal municipal communications. Wireless works as an extension to wire. (Wifi 802.11n is beginning to beat Wimax for bandwidth, he says. Wimax is about as good as 3G. [I’m probably getting this wrong.]) He says “Cellular data has doubled in the last two years.” Now getting 1000-1500kbps download via cellular.

L. Aaron Kaplan (who gave a Berkman talk last week) is giving a presentation on Funkfeuer and community wifi networks in Europe. He shows maps of mesh networks in Vienna, highly scaled, 240 roofs. Repeated in Graz, Bad Ischl, Weinviertel. The longest links are 30km. It’s also happening in Guifi.net Barclona, Djursland, Berlin Freifunk, Athens, Paris Sans Fils, czfree nework.

Dewayne Hendricks says the biggest barrier to wireless is the regulatory environment. “The tools make the rules,” he says. E.g., if you have smart radios, they’re better able to tell what’s going on than rules written on tablets. Look at what’s happening at the grassroots level. What if we went back to the original vision and made the entire spectrum open? Reality is making it harder to stop this movement. The facts are on its side. Remember Metricom? They spent a billion dollars to deploy, and where it was deployed, it was great. They put their radios on light poles. But when muniwifi 2.0 started, no one went back and learned from Metricom’s efforts in getting permits.

Q: [harold feld] How can we talk about these things that doesn’t make it sound like you have to turn a profit in a year?
Esme: Cities like Rock Hill N. Carolina said that they’re installing a wireless meter-reading service, or some such…a muni service. It was easier to get the network in…
Ken: Someone has to pay for it. Find an app where you can show real economic return.
Sascha: I’m business-model agnostic. We just need to get this done.
Isenberg: From the chat: Why don’t we use Verizon or Sprint, etc., to provide muni services, i.e., in police cars or for public safety??
Ken: It’s too expensive.
David Young (Verizon): We’re looking at new pricing models for low-capacity networks.

Q: Will the telcos resurface as worthy adversaries?
Ken: The need for video surveillance is driving the creation of high-capacity networks. You can’t do that on cellular; there’s not enough bandwidth.

Q: What about privacy?
Ken: Once you move into an Internet-connected world, you’re doomed.
L. Aaron: If you import hardware from, say, China, how do you now it’s a secure? The only solution is to build it on your own.
Sascha: Privacy and security are not mutually inconsistent, but there are problems when companise are privatizing your identity and data.
Ken: You could do end-to-end encryption now, but no one chooses to do so. [Tags: wireless wifi muniwifi broadband ]

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[April 1, but no joke: I spoke with Susan a couple of days ago and de-confirmed this “news.” National Journal got it wrong, and I repeated it, perpetuating the error. Sorry. Susan is indeed part of the Obama team, but reporting to Larry Summers, advising on tech policy, which is indeed fantastic. And true.]

Fantastic news:

Internet law expert Susan Crawford has joined President Barack Obama’s
lineup of tech policy experts at the White House, according to several
sources. She will likely hold the title of special assistant to the
president for science, technology, and innovation policy, they said.
Crawford, who was most recently a visiting professor at the University
of Michigan and at Yale Law School, was tapped by Obama’s transition
team in November to co-chair its FCC review process with University of
Pennsylvania professor Kevin Werbach. Her official administration
appointment has not been formally announced. Crawford may be best
known for her work with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names
and Numbers, the California-based nonprofit group that manages the
Internet address system. She served on ICANN’s board for three years
beginning in December 2005. She also founded OneWebDay, a global Earth
Day for the Internet that takes place every Sept. 22. Crawford, a Yale
graduate, clerked for U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie before
joining Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering where she worked until the end of
2002.

[Tags: susan_crawford technology internet ]

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“Unbundling” means that the companies that run the Internet wires to our homes and businesses also act as wholesalers to others who want to be our ISPs. Benoit Felten of the Yankee Group gave a talk recently arguing that this can be very profitable for all involved. (It also creates competition, which generally is good for us users.)

Scott Cleland disagrees with Benoit.

[Tags: broadband benoit_felten scott_cleland net_neutrality ]

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David Post is giving a talk at the Berkman Center about his book In Search of Jefferson’s Moose. I haven’t read the book yet, but it looks fascinating. It looks at cyberspace through Thomas Jefferson’s eyes. [NOTE: I’m live blogging, with all the weaknesses and inaccuracies thereupon. Be warned. And I’ve done a particularly poor job of capturing the details of David’s talk.]

David says the Net is all about scaling. “The Internet isn’t big because it’s the Internet. It’s the Internet because it’s big.” It’s the inter-network that got big. Jefferson figured out how to scale a democratic republic, which works at the town level but hadn’t worked at the national level. Likewise, he says, we need to be thinking about how scale law and governance for this new territory.

He gives the example of copyright. Even if you wanted to clear the copyrights for a YouTube, it’d probably take you 10 hours. Copyright doesn’t scale. “Copyright is supposed to be incentivizing creators” but these works only get created if people ignore copyright. Jefferson scaled a republic to continental scale, we need to do the same for the Net, he says. David says he doesn’t know how to do it. Not through the UN. “We need collectively to begin working on this.” He sees his book as the start of that conversation.

He says we should buy his book because “the omens are with me.” The day he sent off the final draft of his manuscript, a male moose was standing in front of his house in Vermont. The moose stands there for a day and a half. It’s the first one he saw in twenty years. Then, a week after the book was published, they found a complete fossilized skeleton of a mammoth under the new Thomas Jefferson law school, and under that was a whale, and under that there was a giant ground sloth of the same genus as the one Jefferson wrote a scientific paper about. His book is about scale and they find a mammoth, a whale, and a giant sloth under the Jefferson law school.

Q: [zittrain] You’ve vindicated a strand of thinking about the future of the Net. Just as Jefferson was living in a privileged time to think about frontiers, is cyberspace undergoing a similar transformation from frontiered to settled and suburbanized?
A: No. Not if we can keep it growing and, um, generative. There’s a self-fulfilling aspect to our discussions of this. It continues to be a frontier.

Q: [benkler] Why did you mention the UN? Are you suggesting we turn to it? What made the republic scalable was its loosely coupled architecture. That’s what made the Net grow. What is the shape of this international that’s not UN that’s presumably more grownup than cyber-jurisdictions, that retains this loosely coupled…
A: I really don’t know. It’s not too farfetched to think about small groups joining together into larger and larger organizations and coming to the table and saying they deserve respect as a law-making body. It might happen via real world courts that might say that they respect the local laws of this community on the Net.
Q: [benkler] What’s not sustainable about muddling through?
A: It’s totally sustainable, although there are scaling problems that will need to be addressed in some form or another. But then we’ll miss the opportunity to build something even more extraordinary.

Q: You say in the intro that this isn’t a scholarly work, but at the end you do take on the unexceptionalists [i.e., those who think the Net isn’t an exceptional case]. How do you get from your discussion of scale at the routing level to the application layer.
A: Take Wikipedia as an application. I’m not sure that it can continue to scale.

Q: I’m interested in the interaction between copyright law and publishers. We no longer need publishers for the dissemination of scholarly information…
A: I don’t know what the future of copyright looks like. A subtext of the book is to try to have people start fresh, at least as a thought experiment. How might we design copyright law? I don’t know what that looks like or how we get there from here, but it’s worth thinking about … The Jeffersonian insight is that there are two types of people: Those are instrumentalists who only want copyright law if it helps people to create. Others think it’s a moral or natural right. These two views are irreconcilable.

Q [zittrain] Do we need a constitutional convention for the Net? The Clean Slate project at Stanford, David Clark at MIT…What do you think about those projects? If you were at a Clean Slate meeting, what would your charge to them be?
A: They may be premature. I’d like to see a call to netizenship, i.e., citizenship in this space. Taking seriously this as a place where important things happen. At Clean Slate, I’d start with copyright because you could get a consensus among netizens that the system is profoundly broken and needs a new paradigm…maybe a hybrid of law and tech.

Q: [me] Do you worry that if there were a founding constitutional moment for the Net, it might provide an opportunity for, say, the Taliban to object to the very protocols of the Net (as well as the rest of the stack) because the protocols don’t permit the control of content? Might we end up with something far from what you and I want?
A: I worried about this when ICANN was founded. I don’t know, but I have Jeffersonian faith that more discussion is better than less. You have to shine your light and take the chances that you will lose those battles.

Q: [lewis hyde] The Google Books settlement is a constitutinal moment. Isn’t this an example of an ad hoc agreement: Two parties show up in court and the court settles it. If you could change one thing in the settlement, what would it be?
A: I don’t want to shoot my mouth off about that. The Google Books settlement illustrates a point about scaling. There are 40M people who have written books who aren’t represented.

Q: [ethanz] Why doesn’t the conversation start earlier than consitutional moments, i.e., with revolutions that give you the constitutional moment. When and how do we reach the point where we say we can’t just muddle along. We rebel against Facebook but we only get a new fiat from FB. When do we stand up and say that we need to govern ourselves?
A: That’s why I say constitutional moments may be premature. We’re in early days. When people live more of their lives in cyberspace, then I think they care more about the rules under which they live. [Tags: copyleft copyright thomas_jefferson david_post policy ]

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John Palfrey and Adam Thierer discuss and debate whether the Communications Decency Act needs to be altered to make those who host content more liable than they are now. JP believes they should be.

I’m on the road and haven’t had time to read the debate. As a kneejerk liberal, I start out sympathetic to Adam’s point of view. But I have enough (= total) respect for JP to be quite open to being convinced…

[Tags: cda john_palfrey adam_thierer digital_rights ]

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Charlie Leadbeater has posted a paper on why he’s unhappy with the British broadband proposal, Digital Britain. Given Charlie’s way with words, it’s not surprising that it’s a well-done piece, and it makes some essential points: First, you can’t solve problems just by throwing broadband at them, and, second, the Digital Britain proposal takes no account of the Net’s disruptive capabilities. (I’m summarizing to entice you, not to obviate reading it, people!)

[Tags: charlie_leadbeater digital_rights digital_britain broadband ]

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Lisa Tanzi, VP & Deputy General Counsel of Microsoft is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk called “A New Era of Computing: The Opportunities and Challenges of Cloud-Based Software and Services.” [Note: I am live-blogging, thus missing stuff, getting things wrong, writing badly, paraphrasing.] Her division at Microsoft is more on the enterprise side than the consumer side.

Microsoft is very excited about cloud computing (which I’ll abbreviate as CC)) she says. She’s going to give an overview but wants to spend time on the legal implications.

Lisa begins by putting CC into context on the history of computing timeline. Mainframes, PCs, Client/Server and WWW, and Cloud Services. During the CC era, people have multiple devices. Also, we’re seeing touch-based manipulation and other natural user interfaces. And there’s CC, defined as “providing software and computing power over the Internet.” With CC, you can pay as you go, connect all your devices, and provide wider access to “unprecedented computing power.” “But we at Microsoft don’t see it as an either/proposition.” People will want to have a mixed environment.

She goes through the benefits of CC for businesses, government, public sector, and developers. She shows a television ad.

Now she addresses some legal and policy issues. She begins with a scenario: A business launches a conferencing and email services offering. It’s HQ’ed in the US with data centers around the world. This creates jurisdictional issues — privacy, law enforcement, liability, running mixed source, data portability. But, she wants to focus on two sets of issues. First, moving data across borders: privacy, security and law enforcement. If the service provider doesn’t think it can reconcile the conflicting obligations, it may end up not launching the service. Or it might turn features on and off in different jurisdictions, although the software doesn’t always allow that, plus you lose some economies of scale.

“Governments are going to have to work together in new ways to find solutions to these issues,” Lisa says. Also, it may be that governments that figure out how to make it easier data across borders will have an advantage in attracting data centers.

Second, “How do the large bodies of traditional telecom regulations apply in this new world?” VoIP, email, IM are all affected. The laws vary quite a bit by jurisdiction, and they are usually written for different technologies. Law enforcement requirements, confidentiality obligations, emergency services (e.g., E-911) requirements, etc. How you do all this while enabling this new technology to evolve and be rolled out.

When it comes to data movement (her first point), imagine a German company that’s out-sourcing email to a CC provider that has data centers in France and Belgian. The data retention laws of Germany say that info has to be kept for 6 months, in France it’s 1 year, and in Belgium it’s 2. Whose law applies?

Some provincial laws in Canada require data in a CC system to be stored in Canada. But if a US company builds a data center in Canada, the Patriot Act may apply, and even if it doesn’t, exceptionalism is a bad way of doing business.

Q: Have you faced any specific cases where the mother country’s laws regulate or not?
A: A lot of these issues just aren’t resolved. Another real-world example: When we build a data center in another country, we go through an extensive process to make sure that we’re not in a situation of conflicting laws. Researching Japan we came across a statute that says electronic communications cannot be transferred outside of the country. It’s not very clear what that means. Can a subsidiary transfer info out of the country? Is there some new process we should be engaged in? Treaty-like solutions?

Q: Are you required to go to the highest common denominator among all the privacy and retention policies?
A: No clear answers. It looks like you can have a high water mark on privacy. And it gets yet more complicated if you have to deal with privacy based upon whether the person is, not where the data is.

Q: I use MS Word. To get it from my computer, the police have to get a warrant, etc. If I use MS Live, your CC service, the FBI needs a subpoena which means they don’t have to go before a judge and show probable cause. I’m worried that users are naively using online programs such as Google Docs and Office Live without knowing they’re online and that they’re lacking legal protection. What is MS doing to educate users?
A: We hope that it’s apparent to users that they’re storing documents online. The Terms of Use make the legality clear.
Q: No one reads Terms of Use.

Q: From the European perspective, the European Commission in2004 required MS to change its licensing policy. MS didn’t comply. In 2006, MS was fined. In 2008 there was another fine. Interoperability was the common thread. In 2008, another two cases were opened, against Office and Opera. It’s a neverending story. What’s your attitude toward interoperability?
A: We take our legal obligations seriously. We’ve announced interoperability principles. Windows Azure (MS CC) is in development. When it launches, the goal is to have it work with non-MS languages and development environments. It’s built on standard protocols. The entire industry would benefit from data portability.

Q: Users in cloud environments tend not to have much leverage. My non-profit in Zimbabwe just got kicked off its web host because Zimbabwe misunderstood US policy. The customer has no power in this scenario. I worry that for people who are very concerned human rights, data protection, etc., the early indications are that we should run like hell from CC. It’s too bad because technically CC is a much better way to do this. Unless large companies running clouds can offer assurance that they’ll fight for the rights of customers, the response from at least some class of consumers will be “Over my dead body.” Beyond harmonizing, how does this come into issues of free speech. What’s the responsibility of a company like MS to act as a defender of rights?
A: This fall we joined a global initiative to have companies protect privacy and freedom of expression. [Global Network Initiative] For enterprise customers would classify the situation differently. They want to impose obligations on the service provider: set up your physical security in a particular way, do retention in a particular way. For them those issues are being negotiated contract by contract.

Q: What are MS’s financial projections for CC?
A: We haven’t made any [well, made any public]. We’ll be making our business model clear sometime this year. Probably pay as you go.

Q: MS has pushed for a high bar for human rights when it comes to the Global Network Initiative. But CC makes it much harder. What are you going to do?
A: It’s a tough question. We’re working on it.

Q: What type of treaty might MS push for?
A: I was raising that as a discussion point. It’s sooo complex.

Q: Akamai has a similarly distributed architecture and business model. Have you looked at it and other such companies?
A: We have looked at what other companies do.

Q: Why aren’t you using SSL for the entire email session or for MS Office Live for Consumers?
A: I’ll get back to you.

Q: [jpalfrey] We at the Berkman Center pride ourselves on having great relationships and talking straight. From the perspective of users with less money than business and than other users, the value prop for CC is “free or cheap services.” When cheap services have been rolled out to the poor, there have been problems making it clear to users what their risks and rights are. So, as this CC rolls out, MS should have a “mitigation plan” in effect (e.g., signs on construction sites apologizing for the disruption). What would the mitigation plan look like?
A: I’ll take that one back to Redmond. I haven’t spent that much time on the consumer side of this. [Tags: microsoft cloud_computing digital_rights human_rights. ]

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