Darknet

We Own the Internet: Net Neutrality for the disengaged

Amy Gahran at E-Media Tidbits:

If you haven't yet managed to start caring about net neutrality, check out this hilarious advocacy site: We Own the Internet. It features several great bits of Flash video -- enthusiastic speeches by "Richard P. Merryweather, president & CEO of CT&TCOM American Communications."

A few choice excerpts from "Merryweather's" home page speech:

"[We're] the largest telephone company in the U.S. I want to make one thing perfectly clear: We own the internet. We acquired it last year with the help of the federal government, and now we're about to make some exciting changes. Some people object to this. ...But you see, an open internet is just too confusing for consumers, and not nearly as profitable for us. ...Who better to provide you with a 21st-century technology than a 19th-century monopoly?"

And that's just the home page! Definitely explore the site to see more videos. Regardless of your views on net neutrality, these videos are a riot. Especially the "Why You Really Count" page, and the phrasing of the references to real recent news coverage of this issue on the "Latest News" page. ...

AOL censors group opposing 'email tax'

Tim Karr at MediaCitizen: AOL Censors Opposition Group. AOL was caught red-handed today censoring email to AOL customers that included a link to the AOL opposition site www.DearAOL.com.

Congress turns deaf ear to Net neutrality

San Jose Mercury News editorial: Congress turns a deaf ear to need for Internet neutrality.

Craigslist and the free flow of information

Just catching up on Sunday's NY Times article on Craigslist: The Ads Discriminate, but Does the Web? Excerpt:

If this newspaper were to publish a classified advertisement for an apartment rental that said, say, "African Americans and Arabians tend to clash with me so that won't work out," it would be liable for housing discrimination under the federal Fair Housing Act.

Yet Craigslist.org, the enormous online forum, posted that very ad in July, and most legal experts say, as the law stands today, Craigslist bears no responsibility for it.

That is the result of a social bargain made 10 years ago, meant to nurture what was then a strange and nascent thing called the Internet. A part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 said that online companies are not liable for transmitting unlawful materials supplied by others.

Now that the Internet is more mature, some legal experts say, it may be time to re-examine that bargain, and to ask some fundamental questions. Are online companies common carriers, like the phone company or FedEx, and so not responsible for the content of what they transmit? Or are they like newspapers and magazines, which are held accountable for publishing advertising they had no part in creating?

Does it make sense to allow lawsuits against this newspaper for the letters to the editor in this section but not for postings from readers on the paper's Web site?

A lawsuit against Craigslist filed by a Chicago fair-housing group last month, over the "clash with me" ad and more than 100 others, asks those questions.

Court decisions so far have almost universally rejected claims against online companies that publish others' speech. Internet companies have been held immune from suits for libel, invasion of privacy, fraud, breach of contract and housing discrimination.

That means Amazon cannot be sued for its users' millions of reviews of the books and other products it sells. America Online is not responsible for the six million new entries posted on its message boards each month. EBay is not liable for damaging statements among the more than 2.4 billion feedback comments its members have posted. And search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo do not have to worry about the billions of Web pages they make available to their users. ...

Exactly. Sites like Craigslist, Ourmedia, Amazon, eBay and thousands of others could not exist in their present forms if the (absurdly named) Communications Decency Act was not the law. We'd all have to lay off developers and hire attorneys.

Jim Buckmaster, the chief executive of Craigslists, said imposing liability on the site for its users' postings would ruin it.

"Craigslist is in the business of placing services and tools in the hands of the consumer, knowing that the vast majority will use them responsibly, and counting on law enforcement to follow up in the few cases where they don't," he said. ...

Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, said that imposing liability on Craigslist would be a terrible idea; the burdens on the company would be too huge, and the impact would be devastating.

"One of the great advantages of the Internet is that you can have people who create really great products on a shoestring," he said. "If Craigslist were liable, they would really have shut down that part of the site."

But others argue that the unfettered days of the Web should be over. "The Internet has now matured to the point that we are beginning to see that the ordinary rules of law that govern our lives in physical space should also govern our lives in cyberspace," said Rodney A. Smolla, the dean of the University of Richmond School of Law and the author of "Free Speech in an Open Society."

"We understand the potential for harm in Internet communications," Mr. Smolla said. "We understand child pornography. We've seen the Internet as a tool for terrorism. We've seen the Internet as a libel-free fire zone. That will act as a push toward a more measured form of immunity." ...

I can only assume that Mr. Smolla knows what he's talking about -- and places very little value in the free flow of information on the Internet. Thankfully, his is not a majority view.

Internet freedoms come of age

Becky Hogge, managing editor of openDemocracy.net, at AlterNet: Internet freedoms come of age. As government entities around the world discuss what limits to put on the internet, it's time to call freedom of information what it is: a basic human right.

Net neutrality

At MediaCitizen, Tim Karr has an account of the network neutrality call he hosted on Friday with Stanford University’s Lawrence Lessig, Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy and his colleague at Free Press, Ben Scott.

A gated Internet

Missed this the other day in PC World: A gated Internet.

You fire up your computer and want to watch some clips of yesterday’s game. You go to your favorite sports Web site, but pages are taking forever to load. Maybe you stick with it. More likely, however, you run out of patience and surf to another site to see if its video clips download any faster. Lo and behold, they do. The next time you’re after some football highlights, the same thing happens. After a while, I bet you’d stop even trying your now ex-favorite sports site.

We’ve all encountered slowdowns at our favorite Web sites, much like highway traffic that goes from 70 miles per hour to 35 for no readily discernible reason and then speeds up again. Most of us curse a little, shrug, then go on with our days. But if certain Internet providers have their way, Web site slowdowns may soon not be all that mysterious, and may become far more frequent. ...

Free Press: End of the Internet?

They saved the Internet's soul

Wired News: On the 10-year anniversary of civil libertarians' challenge to the first internet censorship law, the freedom fighters who kept the net from becoming the Disney Channel square off against new challenges in a more complicated world.

Senators mull an Internet with 'restrictions'

The Nation: Senators Mull an Internet With Restrictions.

It may have been the first and last hearing the US Senate holds on Net neutrality--the principle that Internet users should be able to access any web content or use any applications they choose, without restrictions or limitations imposed by an Internet service provider. In the time it takes to watch Wedding Crashers, nine experts on Tuesday galloped through testimony before a handful of Senate Commerce Committee members in a hearing room packed with telecommunications and cable lobbyists.

The experts largely fell into two camps. Representatives of major telephone and cable companies and conservative academics urged government to get out of the way, encourage the growth of high-speed Internet networks and enable Internet system operators to "recoup their investments" without statutory or regulatory constraints. On the opposing side were the Internet "evangelists" and innovators who urged Congress to enact into law longstanding principles that preserve an open Internet where no company can restrict any individual's access to content or place barriers on any lawful application or activity.

Those representing telephone and cable companies promised that they would never--ever--interfere with the public's ability to access any lawful information on the Internet. Walter McCormick Jr., president of the United States Telecom Association (USTA), pledged, "We will not block, impair or degrade content, applications or services" that customers want to access. ...

Unfortunately, the heads of the companies that the USTA represents have not been making the same promises. ...

Google vice president and "Internet evangelist" Vinton Cerf disagreed. "There is not enough competition" for high-speed Internet, Cerf said, noting that only 53 percent of Americans have any choice among broadband service providers and that 19 percent of Americans have no access to high-speed Internet.

In an argument that some senators seemed to have difficulty following, Cerf, Stanford Law School professor and open-access guru Lawrence Lessig, and Vonage head Jeffrey Citron argued that one could not assume the continued existence of the freewheeling Internet that fosters innovation. That is because the FCC changed the rules, upending a forty-year commitment to open access and nondiscrimination. That decades-old commitment made it possible for "innovation without permission" and the development of the World Wide Web, Yahoo, Google and Amazon, Cerf said.

Those policies were altered in 2002, noted Lessig, when the FCC changed how it would regulate Internet service providers. Companies that built and maintained the Internet pipes had been regulated like telephone companies, and they were not permitted to discriminate among content providers or Internet applications.

Under the FCC's current regulatory regime, these old constraints are gone. That leaves the door open for companies like Verizon and AT&T to drastically change the rules, hogging bandwidth for their own products, like the films and games they'd like to sell to subscribers, and charging other content providers a premium for quality access to their customers, leaving little space for other content and applications. "The only companies that could afford to buy access to the fast lanes on the Internet...are companies that already have succeeded in the marketplace," Lessig said. "The next generation of Yahoos and Googles...would face barriers to entry."

"At the root, the network neutrality debate is about who will control innovation and competition on the Internet," Citron added. "Imagine if the electric company could dictate which television or toaster you could plug into the wall.... What would happen tomorrow if one of the network operators decided to block Google, Vonage, Yahoo or Amazon? What would be the legal recourse?... There is nothing in the statute or regulation today that protects consumers or Internet application providers from potential network discrimination."

Microsoft amends its policy for censoring blogs

NY Times: Microsoft amends its policy for shutting down blogs in China or elsewhere.

Outwitting the world's Internet censors

Short article in the NY Times: How to Outwit the World's Internet Censors. Excerpt:

Every day in China, [Berkman's John] Palfrey said, an underground economy of proxy server addresses comes alive — usually connecting to servers made available by volunteers around the globe. These addresses are passed along and traded, using elaborately coded language, on electronic bulletin board systems or chat channels.

Elsewhere on the Web, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) helps maintain Tor, a communications network that helps make Internet communications anonymous, and it appears to be accessible from within China. Peacefire.org offers a program called The Circumventor that lets anyone turn a Windows-based machine into a proxy, allowing others to use it to circumvent local Internet restrictions.

Even two small commercial companies, Dynamic Internet Technology and UltraReach Internet, offer software or Web services that try to poke holes in China's "great firewall." ...

No mention of darknets, oddly.

Legal Affairs package

A special package in Legal Affairs:

Without a Net: The Internet is vulnerable to viruses so lethal that they could gravely damage the online world—unless we upgrade law and technology now. By Jonathan Zittrain.

Cool Tools for Tyrants: The latest American technology helps the Chinese government and other repressive regimes clamp down. By Derek Bambauer.

Digital Borders: National boundaries have survived in the virtual world—and allowed national laws to exert control over the Internet. By Jack Goldsmith and Timothy Wu.

Principles for an open broadband future

Public Knowledge Calls for ‘Open Broadband Future.’ The full whitepaper is available here. Do I see the hand of Mike Godwin in this work?

It's a critically important issue. Excerpt:

Unfortunately, broadband services are at risk of being controlled by gatekeepers who have the ability to skew the marketplace against the interests of consumers. As a result of recent mergers in the telecommunications and cable industries, broadband provision is increasingly dominated by a duopoly that is under no obligation to ensure that their networks are open and accessible to all users and applications. Moreover, outdated government spectrum policies have placed artificial limits on broadband deployment. In large part because of these developments, the U.S. ranks only 16th in the world in broadband adoption. ...

The U.S. needs to enact a clear set of principles for broadband services to ensure that these networks are widely deployed, open, affordable and accessible to all consumers. Without such principles, there is great danger that any future legislation on these issues will become a grab bag of special interest provisions.

Palfrey discusses Net governance

NPR's "On the Media" featured John Palfrey, Executive Director of Harvard's Berkman Center (whom I finally met at the Syndicate conference last week), in a segment this weekend about regulation of the Internet. Listen to the mp3 here. Or, check out the Net Dialogue website for more details about this vital topic.