The role of technology and policy in transforming online culture – chronicled by David Ellis
digital literacy
New digital divide: is there a SOPA in our Internet future?
38 days
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“The nightmarish SOPA hearings” (cont’d from previous post)
Petri’s main beef with the Smith Committee is they’re unembarrassed, even proud, of their appalling inability to grasp anything technically relevant to the task at hand:
If I had a dime for every time someone in the hearing markup used the phrase “I’m not a nerd” or “I’m no tech expert, but they tell me . . .,” I’d have a large number of dimes and still feel intensely worried about the future of the uncensored Internet. If this were surgery, the patient would have run out screaming a long time ago. But this is like a group of well-intentioned amateurs getting together to perform heart surgery on a patient incapable of moving. “We hear from the motion picture industry that heart surgery is what’s required,” they say cheerily. “We’re not going to cut the good valves, just the bad — neurons, or whatever you call those durn thingies.”
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“Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works”
A piece posted on Mother Board the next day (Dec 16, when Smith adjourned the markup) continued the attack in the same vein. Author Joshua Kopstein, who describes himself as an electronic musician and computer culture journalist, wrote a kind of open letter to Congress, putting them on notice we ain’t gonna put up with their dumb asses any more (my paraphrase: Kopstein calls them “a bunch of jack-asses”… and of course I don’t have actual representation in Congress myself).
Like Petri the Post blogger, Kopstein is really pissed about the cavalier attitude of many of the Committee members to the well-being of the Internet, given how much is at stake – as this is ”legislation that seeks to fundamentally change how the internet works.” The author points to a couple of especially troubling themes in the markup debates. One has to do with security:
“When the security issue was brought up, Rep. Mel Watt of North Carolina seemed particularly comfortable about his own lack of understanding. Grinningly admitting “I’m not a nerd” before the committee, he nevertheless went on to dismiss without facts or justification the very evidence he didn’t understand and then downplay the need for a panel of experts. Rep. Maxine Waters of California followed up by saying that any discussion of security concerns is “wasting time” and that the bill should move forward without question, busted internets be damned.” (more…)
The new digital divide: SOPA-loving pols flaunt tech idiocy
41 days
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*“Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday. I got it Tuesday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.“
– Ted Stevens, Chair, Senate Commerce Committee (June 28, 2006)
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UPDATE: I just checked with the Judiciary Committee website (here) – and it seems the SOPA markup might not be continuing tomorrow (Dec 28) after all. At least it doesn’t appear on their sched. And the reddit SOPA page (here) says “SOPA markup postponed, new date will be posted here when it is announced.” OTOH, if it’s a go tomorrow (Dec 28), then you can watch the markup webcast from the Committee website. We’ll find out in a few hours. Meanwhile, please read on…______
Listen to the clip below, from 2006. Be amazed. Duration is 2:29 min (audio only), excerpted from the notorious 10-minute intervention delivered by Ted Stevens five years ago on what he thought was best for the Internet (i.e. best for the incumbent ISPs). As you listen, keep in mind that as then-chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Stevens was ex officio the chief Congressional lawmaker responsible for oversight of the Internet. (The Commerce Committee encompasses the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet.) Stevens’ diatribe was part of an attempt to block a net neutrality amendment to an omnibus telecomm bill – an amendment intended to prevent broadband providers from giving undue priority to any individual company’s content or services. Hey, where have we heard that one before?
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Did you catch the streaming video “problem”? It’s one of Stevens’ illustrations of the outrageous idea that a company should be allowed to tranmit content to customers online, when the outcome will be to jam up all those tubes; turn the Internet into a massively commercial operation; and prevent other end-users from getting their emails promptly. If you care to listen to the whole thing, I’ve uploaded the MP3 here (1.3 megs, ~10 minutes). The main target is his straw-man version of network neutrality (Stevens died at age 86 in the crash of a private plane in August 2010). (more…)
Sorry for UBBing: the CRTC giveth, Katz taketh away?
75 days
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Funny how we’re all still talking about last week’s CRTC decision on wholesale pricing for Internet access. The one thing pundits and stakeholders have agreed upon is to disagree about the possible outcomes of the decision. Especially when it comes to the money.
Take Nick Kyonka’s piece in last week’s Wire Report, which begins thusly:
“Incumbent Internet service providers (ISPs) and the smaller players who lease access to their networks are scratching their heads over new billing rates for wholesale Internet access and what those rates mean for long-term competition in the Canadian Internet service market.”
There’s lots more. Michael Geist and Peter Nowak have each been mulling the decision three times in the last week, including posts from each of them yesterday designed to interpret the various interpretations we’ve heard so far: see The UBB Decision Aftermath: Is the Pricing a Killer? (Geist); and On UBB, the fat lady has not yet sung (Nowak).
I have information that may help clear up some of the confusion. Rather than provide you with a hard-headed analysis of network costing issues, however, I’m going to indulge in a little textual exegesis… (more…)
Digital divides: UBB as part of a much bigger broadband mess
84 days
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The blogosphere has been abuzz recently over the FCC’s bold, brave outreach initiative, Connect to Compete. Not in Canada, you say? I do say, since there are four good 
reasons why Canadians haven’t got a snowball’s hope in hell of seeing a program of this nature until at least 2015:
1) Leadership. The FCC has been making headway with a real broadband strategy over the last 18 months, along with a set of network neutrality rules, because the vision comes from the top – the White House. Harper and his cabinet have never cared about world-class retail broadband, because that would put them on the wrong side of the consumer vs business divide.
2) Social policy. The most laudable thing about the FCC’s action is the agency’s deep conviction that the digital divide is a social issue requiring vigorous demand-side policies. C2C is a people policy, not a wires-and-boxes policy based on the kind of supply-side thinking that has led our nation to the bottom of the broadband barrel, if I may mix my containers. (more…)
Games, throttled: complain about Rogers, blame the CRTC (2)
131 days
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Complaints resolution flowchart, as appended to Rogers’ Sept 27 letter to the CRTC
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[Includes correction to the "plot" timeline]
As the news breaks (see petition link below)
I was just finishing this post (#2) when Jason Koblovsky sent me the much-anticipated response from Rogers to last week’s “warning” letter from the CRTC. 
The letter, which runs about 1200 words, was addressed to the CRTC’s Joanne Baldassi over the signature of Ken Thompson, Rogers’ Director of Copyright and Broadband Law. Get your red-hot pdf here.
The Rogers letter is an exquisite piece of evasion, obfuscation and self-congratulations. It indicates to me that when you put together the Commission’s ass-backwards approach (consumer complaints are first and foremost the consumer’s problem), along with Rogers’ business philosophy (the customer is always wrong), then the use of end-user complaints as a policy tool under the new guidelines won’t change a damn thing. The plot so far:
CGO fights Rogers, CRTC over WoW for 2+ yrs > CRTC issues warning to Rogers (Sept 16) > CRTC issues new complaints guidelines (Sept 22) > Guidelines get tepid reception (esp from CGO) > Rogers responds to CRTC warning (Sept 27) > CGO issues statement (“something doesn’t smell right”) > Petition launched at OpenMedia.ca (here).
Jason K sends the following correction: “The World of Warcraft case is almost a year old. It’s been ten months since the complaint was handed into the CRTC in January 2011. The CAIP and myself brought up the issue of misclassification prior to the WoW complaint in 2008. The CRTC has known about this misclassification problem now for over 3 years.”
I’ll parse the Rogers’ letter in the followup post, along with any early reactions from the blogosphere. Meanwhile, please have a look at the following comments from some of the usual suspects (including me) on what the new guidelines do and don’t do for consumers.
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Subscriber, heal thyself
The CRTC’s new “guidelines” on the handling of ISP complaints landed last week to decidedly mixed reactions among those who care about consumers (Telecom Information Bulletin CRTC 2011-609). PIAC counsel John Lawford dropped me a comment (see prior post) in which he expressed satisfaction with the general direction:
“Not a model of total clarity but a start. CCTS-like procedure, some transparency requirements and some threats of sanctions. I am concerned the actual online complaints form is not prepopulated with the requirements for this type of specialized complaint – nor the requirements the CRTC will be looking at to judge the complaint (see paras. 13-14 of the Information Bulletin).” (more…)
Beyond UBB: the CRTC’s war on Canadian consumers
197 days
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Economic practices are the most transparent ITMPs. They match consumer usage with willingness to pay, thus putting users in control and allowing market forces to work.
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In my previous post, I suggested the consumer ISP complaints revealed recently are bad enough, but only the tip of a much larger iceberg. The more unsettling issue is that the complaints in question were effectively secret and had to be dragged out of the CRTC through an Access to Information request by Michael Geist.
Yet there might be a silver lining in the complaints fiasco. It may prove to be a useful step in moving the debates on Canadian broadband away from the much-coddled incumbents and, at long last, over to Canada’s much-ignored consumers. Peter Nowak wrote a recent post on the fiasco, referring to it as “the net neutrality bombshell” – and suggested von Finckenstein’s inability to create a viable network neutrality framework will be seen as his “biggest failure at the CRTC.” (more…)
Misguided assumptions behind the CRTC’s broadband target (3)
245 days
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How do you know?
This is an important question in many walks of life. In the natural sciences, it’s the most important question.
I’ve been doing some work with my son recently and had a chance to see that for myself. As a medical geneticist, Jordan devotes a lot of time to carrying out research and sharing his findings with other scientists in peer-reviewed journals. In his field, the standards of proof are extremely high, both because molecular medicine is so complex and because peoples’ lives are at stake.
I’d be exaggerating if I said lives were at stake in my classroom. Yet what I teach liberal arts students in a seminar about the Internet is based on a sense of respect for the same principle: you can’t write a research essay based on hearsay.
Students make bold assertions without giving a thought to why we should believe them. Of course, it’s a lot less work for the student writer to forget the “proof” and move on. But it’s well worth the effort on everyone’s part to encourage an understanding of when empirical evidence is important and when it isn’t.
Which brings us to the CRTC. (more…)
