Adam Thierer's Blog, page 118

How Longer Healthspans Will Change Everything

My new book, 100 Plus, is about how science and technology will allow us to live longer and healthier – and how that will change the world.  This topic may be newish for this site, but many of the key issues are not.  What happens to economic growth in this tech revolution?  How does innovation play a part in resolving problems such as environmental waste?  Should we be worried about a divide between the haves and the have nots?  I address all these questions and more, including the impact on religious institutions.  The final chapter of the book details how leaders, including many in the traditional technology industry, are pushing ahead with reverse-engineering the human body – the next big thing.

Here is an excerpt of the book in the Wall Street Journal.

Cops Abuse Cyberstalking Law, Target Anonymous Speech

Hot-tempered police offers, pushover judges, and vague laws make for a dangerous combination. In July, a controversy erupted in Renton, Washington (a Seattle suburb) when the town's police department launched a legal assault on an anonymous YouTube user for merely uploading a few sarcastic videos poking fun at the department's scandals.

In an op-ed in The Seattle Times, Nicole Ciandella and I explain what happened in Renton and discuss the saga's implications for constitutional rights in the digital age:

According to Washington state law, a person is guilty of criminal "cyberstalking" if he makes an electronic communication using lewd or indecent language with the intent to embarrass another person. In other words, a Washingtonian who creates a raunchy email message, blog post or Web video to embarrass a foe isn't just playing dirty; he's technically breaking the law. One YouTube user recently learned this lesson the hard way.

Last month, the scandal-ridden Renton Police Department launched a criminal cyberstalking investigation against a YouTube user known only as "MrFuddlesticks." The user had uploaded a series of lewd, animated videos poking fun at recent allegations of wrongdoing by Renton police officers. In one video, a character talks about his civilian superior's lack of law-enforcement experience; in another, characters discuss the impropriety of a police officer who slept with a murder suspect.

Even though none of MrFuddlesticks' videos mention the city of Renton or any police officers by name, Renton police managed to convince a county judge to issue a warrant to compel Google, YouTube's parent company, to disclose identifying information about MrFuddlesticks' accounts, including credit-card details and even contents of Gmail messages.

You can read the rest of the essay here. (For more on the controversy, see Jacob Sullum at Reason's Hit & Run; also see Mike Masnick at Techdirt. For an exploration of the case's constitutional implications, see Eugene Volokh at The Volokh Conspiracy.)

Here on the TLF, we've repeatedly cautioned lawmakers about the dangers of criminalizing cyberstalking  (1, 2, 3, 4). Back in 2006, CNET's Declan McCullagh explained why all Internet users should be worried about vague, overbroad cyberstalking laws. As the troubling actions of Renton's finest illustrate, the potential for such laws to be abused is very real. Let's hope lawmakers in Washington and in the numerous other states with cyberstalking laws on the books take a hard look at their laws.

 

Adam Thierer on children's privacy online

On the podcast this week, Adam Thierer, Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in the Technology Policy Program, discusses his new paper, Kids, Privacy, Free Speech & the Internet: Finding the Right Balance. For kids, using the Internet has become second nature, but when sites that track a child's online activity can raise privacy concerns. A number of well-intentioned lawmakers are introducing regulatory measures that aim to expand the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Thierer discusses the unintended consequences that could result from regulations, like mandatory age verification and an Internet "eraser button." He proposes an alternative to regulation, which includes education and empowerment, placing importance on personal and parental responsibility.

Related Links

Kids, Privacy, Free Speech & the Internet , by Thierer"Erasing Our Past On The Internet", Forbes.comChildren's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, ftc.gov

To keep the conversation around this episode in one place, we'd like to ask you to comment at the webpage for this episode on Surprisingly Free. Also, why not subscribe to the podcast on iTunes?

Useful Chart Showing International Wireless Comparisons

Here's a terrifically useful chart from CTIA that offers some international wireless use and spectrum availability comparisons. [Click on chart to expand.] The average minutes of use and average revenue per minute differences are fairly staggering. But the really important takeaway from this chart is the last line, which depicts how little spectrum is dripping out of the faucet right now. Having just 50 MHz of "potentially usable spectrum in the pipeline" is troubling and needs to be addressed by policymakers immediately. America's wireless demands continue to explode, but supply isn't keeping up.

New Paper on Online Child Safety, Kids' Privacy & Internet Free Speech

My latest Mercatus Center white paper is entitled "Kids, Privacy, Free Speech & the Internet: Finding The Right Balance." From the intro:

Concerns about children's privacy are an important part of [the ongoing privacy debate]. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA) already mandates certain online-privacy protections for children under the age of 13. The goal of COPPA was to enhance parents' involvement in their children's online activities and better safeguard kids' personal information online. The FTC is currently considering an expansion of COPPA, and lawmakers in the House of Representatives introduced legislation that would expand COPPA and apply additional FIPPS regulations to teenagers. Some state-based measures also propose expanding COPPA

While well-intentioned, efforts to expand privacy regulation along these lines would cause a number of unintended consequences of both a legal and economic nature. In particular, expanding COPPA raises thorny issues about online free speech and anonymity. Ironically, it might also require that more information about individuals be collected to enforce the law's parental-consent provisions. There are better ways to protect the privacy of children online than imposing burdensome new regulatory mandates on the Internet and online consumers. Education, empowerment, and targeted enforcement of unfair and deceptive practice policies represent the better way forward.

The paper can be downloaded on SSRN, Scribd, or directly from the Mercatus website at the link above.

A Few Edits to Protect IP

For CNET this morning, I offer five crucial corrections to the Protect IP Act, which was passed out of committee in the Senate back in May.

Yesterday, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, co-chair of the Congressional Internet Caucus, told a Silicon Valley audience that the House was working on its own version and would introduce it in the next few weeks.

Protect IP would extend efforts to combat copyright infringement and trademark abuse online, especially by websites registered outside the U.S.

Since Goodlatte promised the new bill would be "quite different" from the Senate version, I thought it a good time to get out my red pen and start crossing off the worst mistakes in policy and in drafting in Protect IP.

The full details are in the article, but in brief, here's what I hope the House does in its version:

Drop provisions that tamper with the DNS system in an effort to block U.S. access to banned sites.
Drop provisions that tamper with search engines, indices, and any other linkage to banned sites.
Remove a private right of action that would allow copyright and trademark holders to obtain court orders banning ad networks and financial transaction processors from doing business with banned sites.
Scale back current enforcement abuses by the Department of Homeland Security under the existing PRO-IP Act of 2008.
Focus the vague and overinclusive definition of the kind of websites that can be banned, limiting it to truly criminal enterprises.

As I've written elsewhere, the Senate version was in some ways even worse than last year's COICA bill.  It imposes significant costs on innocent Internet users, and would do so with no corresponding benefits to anyone, including rightsholders.

The best thing the House could do would be to ignore this dud and work instead on reforming the broken copyright system.  That would do the most to correct the imbalance in endless copyrights and a shrinking public domain, eliminating much of the incentive for infringement that exists today.

But short of that, I hope at least that the most dangerous provisions are removed.

Ryan Calo on personal robots

On the podcast this week, Ryan Calo, a scholar at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, discusses his new article in the Maryland Law Review entitled "Open Robotics." Robots are frequently used in war, manufacturing, warehouse management, and even in surgery. Now, personal robots are poised to be the new explosive technology, and Calo anticipates their social effect to be on par with that of the personal computer. He discusses why he believes personal robots are more likely to thrive if they are built on an open model–rather than closed or proprietary framework–even though robots open to third-party tinkering may be subject to greater legal liability than closed, discrete-function robots. To protect open-model innovation, Calo recommends immunity for manufacturers of open robotic platforms for what end users do with these platforms, akin to the immunity enjoyed under federal law by firearms manufacturers and websites.

Related Links


Open Robotics , by Calo willowgarage.comRobotics and the Law, Stanford Law School's Blog

To keep the conversation around this episode in one place, we'd like to ask you to comment at the webpage for this episode on Surprisingly Free. Also, why not subscribe to the podcast on iTunes?

Trading IPv4 Addresses Starts Making Internet Elders Nervous

Paul Vixie, a renowned Internet pioneer who runs the Internet Systems Consortium, has written an article in ACM Queue attacking "those who would unilaterally supplant or redraw the existing Internet resource governance or allocation systems." The publication of this article is a sign of a growing, important debate around the reform of IP address registries in the age of IPv4 exhaustion.

Vixie defends the Regional Internet Registries monopoly on IP address registration services and its current, needs-based policies toward address transfers. I am sure that Paul sincerely believes in the arguments he makes, but it's also true that Vixie is the chairman of the Board of The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the regional address registry for North America. When Vixie argues that ARIN's exclusive control over Whois and address transfer services is beneficial and "in the physics" he is also defending the authority and revenue model of his own organization against a perceived threat.

And that takes us to another relevant fact. The argument Vixie makes is cast in generalities, but he is really attacking a specific firm, a holding company known as Denuo. Denuo has formed both a secondary marketplace called Addrex for the legitimate trading of IPv4 number blocks, and an IP Address Registrar company known as Depository. Let's set aside Depository for the moment (I will come back to it) and concentrate on Addrex, which has become the first end-to-end platform for legacy address holders to sell their IPv4 number blocks. Famously, Addrex scored a major success as the intermediary for the Nortel-Microsoft trade. But Nortel-Microsoft was unusually visible because it had to go through bankruptcy court. Is anything else happening? I spoke to Addrex's President Charles Lee since then to find out. "We are very busy signing up a growing number of global corporate and governmental customers to sell their unused assets," he said. I asked him what the buyer side of the marketplace was beginning to look like and he said "Our value proposition to large Asian network operators has resonated quite effectively and we expect to enter into many agreements with them over the coming months." Surely Vixie and the ARIN Board have gotten wind of this. So when Vixie begins a public attack on this company and its business model, he is signaling to the rest of us that ARIN is worried.

It should be. Vixie's article is premised on a stretched, invalid comparison of Denuo to the proponents of competing DNS roots. But alt.root proponents were almost always lightweight rebel-operators who could never, as Vixie correctly points out, make a stable, serious value proposition to end users. Even New.net, the alt.root blessed with millions in venture capital, never came close to success, because there was just not much value in offering someone registration under a top level domain that only one tenth or less of the Internet could see. (To salvage its unviable business model Net.net was pushed into a number of questionable tactics.)

Denuo/Addrex is most emphatically not like that. They have a simple, valuable business proposition to make to buyers and sellers of legacy address blocks: entities with surplus addresses can profit from them, entities who need more can get them. Businesses who use their services do not cut themselves off from part of the Internet – on the contrary, they help to maintain and secure their connectivity. And they do it without subjecting themselves to the uncertainty and bureaucracy of an ARIN "needs assessment." Moreover, although Denuo will no doubt benefit handsomely by being the first mover in this market, its success in no way depends on being the only person who ever pursues this business model. There is no reason why there could not be as many address brokers as there are real estate brokers.

But Vixie says this will all end in tears. Shorn of hype and rhetoric, Vixie's argument amounts to this: if people are allowed to trade addresses outside of ARIN's control, then we cannot have an accurate registration database that tells us who holds which address block.

That argument is obviously wrong. It would be a simple matter for ARIN (and other RIRs) to set up procedures to recognize and record transactions conducted by external parties – if they were willing to surrender pointless "needs assessments." We have thousands of stock brokers and dozens of exchanges independently trading shares, but somehow the world manages to keep track of who does and does not own a specific quantity of critically important stock certificates. So ARIN does not need to control, mediate and set policy for all IP address transfers in order to maintain an accurate database of who holds which address block. It simply needs to serve as a title agency where people come to record their transactions. It is in the self-interest of both sides of an IP address transaction to ensure that their transfer of rights was recorded and is published in a common, authoritative global Whois database. Think of your local county or village property recorder. They do not insist on being a real estate brokerage in their territory – much less the only brokerage. There are many parties who can independently engage in property transactions and then bring them to the property registry for verification and recording.

Vixie is not appealing to the "physics" of registration and database economics – indeed, Vixie's belief that industrial organization is explained by "physics" rather than economics is a bit odd. What's really happening here is that Vixie and others at ARIN realize that the only way to shield themselves against losing control over and revenue from the IPv4 address market is to leverage their monopoly over the IP address registration database. What they would like to do is discourage competing and independent address trading and registration firms by refusing to make changes in their Whois database to reflect independent transactions. In antitrust/economics terms, they are tying registration records, which do need to be integrated and uniform, to another potentially competitive service, address brokerage and post-allocation registration services, so that it can continue to enjoy a monopoly in both. The penalty for trading addresses outside of its transfer regime is to be banished from or ignored by ARIN's Whois database.

This is a risky strategy, and the community that ARIN claims to represent should question it. There are powerful economic incentives for legacy holders and companies that need more addresses to trade. Those trades are going to happen. There are also strong economic incentives for those holding legacy resources to avoid contracting with ARIN and other RIRs. Those companies could choose to sign up with Depository and other companies like it. If ARIN refuses to record them because it doesn't approve of the company or is not in control of the transaction, ARIN will be the one responsible for fragmenting and corrupting the IP address registration database.

Vixie's argument about Whois fragmentation is doubly wrong when one realizes that the Whois database ARIN runs is actually a mess when it comes to pre-1997 address blocks (slightly over 40% of the available space). There are hundreds of firms that no longer exist listed there, and thousands of registration records that have not changed in fifteen years. I reached out to Charles Lee of Addrex about Vixie's article to get his comments on it. He first issued a disclaimer that "generally, we…do not engage in public debates about Internet governance. We prefer to focus on our clients and serving their needs." But he felt that Vixie's posting contained "misleading inaccuracies" that required some comment.

"The present Whois system which Mr. Vixie defends with such verve absolutely cannot be relied upon. That is not a personal position or opinion. It is a fact. As an illustrative example let's use the now famous Nortel/Microsoft deal which was brokered by Addrex Inc. In that transaction not one of the 38 number blocks transferred from Nortel Networks Inc. to Microsoft Inc. were appropriately listed in any Whois database in the name of Nortel Networks Inc. It took hundreds of man-hours and over two thousand pages of documentation to reconcile the fiction of the Whois system entries to the reality of Nortel Networks. Unfortunately that now famous case is not the exception to the rule but rather the reality of the situation. For Mr. Vixie to even suggest that Network operators could, or should, rely on an identification system rife with such gross errors is unconscionable."

It's likely that private, commercially motivated firms will do a far better job of cleaning up the Whois records than ARIN will on its own. Denuo's Depository, for example, is already advertising its ability to research and verify "chain of custody" of address holdings. Depository has advocated a "registry-registrar split," analogous to the one in Domain Name Service, to allow competing firms to provide post-allocation registry services while maintaining the RIRs as a single, accurate registration database. Vixie's argument that competition from Denuo assumes that no "copycat" competition will ever emerge is 100% wrong. The structural reforms Denuo has advocated are actually designed to pave the way for more competition in that field hence their filing with ICANN to create an accreditation policy for all IP address registrars.

To conclude, Internet elders such as Vixie have done a wonderful job writing software and defending the Internet's standards and architecture against various threats. For this, we can be respectful and grateful. But expertise in technology does not necessarily translate into expertise in economics and public policy. Vixie's polemic in ACM queue shows us that expertise in one domain often becomes blind arrogance in another. Only someone determined to preserve ARIN's monopoly would ever make the claims he makes.

Trading IPv4 addresses starts making Internet elders nervous

Paul Vixie, a renowned Internet pioneer who runs the Internet Systems Consortium, has written an article in ACM Queue attacking "those who would unilaterally supplant or redraw the existing Internet resource governance or allocation systems." The publication of this article is a sign of a growing, important debate around the reform of IP address registries in the age of IPv4 exhaustion.

Vixie defends the Regional Internet Registries monopoly on IP address registration services and its current, needs-based policies toward address transfers. I am sure that Paul sincerely believes in the arguments he makes, but it's also true that Vixie is the chairman of the Board of The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the regional address registry for North America. When Vixie argues that ARIN's exclusive control over Whois and address transfer services is beneficial and "in the physics" he is also defending the authority and revenue model of his own organization against a perceived threat.

And that takes us to another relevant fact. The argument Vixie makes is cast in generalities, but he is really attacking a specific firm, a holding company known as Denuo. Denuo has formed both a secondary marketplace called Addrex for the legitimate trading of IPv4 number blocks, and an IP Address Registrar company known as Depository. Let's set aside Depository for the moment (I will come back to it) and concentrate on Addrex, which has become the first end-to-end platform for legacy address holders to sell their IPv4 number blocks. Famously, Addrex scored a major success as the intermediary for the Nortel-Microsoft trade. But Nortel-Microsoft was unusually visible because it had to go through bankruptcy court. Is anything else happening? I spoke to Addrex's President Charles Lee since then to find out. "We are very busy signing up a growing number of global corporate and governmental customers to sell their unused assets," he said. I asked him what the buyer side of the marketplace was beginning to look like and he said "Our value proposition to large Asian network operators has resonated quite effectively and we expect to enter into many agreements with them over the coming months." Surely Vixie and the ARIN Board have gotten wind of this. So when Vixie begins a public attack on this company and its business model, he is signaling to the rest of us that ARIN is worried.

It should be. Vixie's article is premised on a stretched, invalid comparison of Denuo to the proponents of competing DNS roots. But alt.root proponents were almost always lightweight rebel-operators who could never, as Vixie correctly points out, make a stable, serious value proposition to end users. Even New.net, the alt.root blessed with millions in venture capital, never came close to success, because there was just not much value in offering someone registration under a top level domain that only one tenth or less of the Internet could see. (To salvage its unviable business model Net.net was pushed into a number of questionable tactics.)

Denuo/Addrex is most emphatically not like that. They have a simple, valuable business proposition to make to buyers and sellers of legacy address blocks: entities with surplus addresses can profit from them, entities who need more can get them. Businesses who use their services do not cut themselves off from part of the Internet – on the contrary, they help to maintain and secure their connectivity. And they do it without subjecting themselves to the uncertainty and bureaucracy of an ARIN "needs assessment." Moreover, although Denuo will no doubt benefit handsomely by being the first mover in this market, its success in no way depends on being the only person who ever pursues this business model. There is no reason why there could not be as many address brokers as there are real estate brokers.

But Vixie says this will all end in tears. Shorn of hype and rhetoric, Vixie's argument amounts to this: if people are allowed to trade addresses outside of ARIN's control, then we cannot have an accurate registration database that tells us who holds which address block.

That argument is obviously wrong. It would be a simple matter for ARIN (and other RIRs) to set up procedures to recognize and record transactions conducted by external parties – if they were willing to surrender pointless "needs assessments." We have thousands of stock brokers and dozens of exchanges independently trading shares, but somehow the world manages to keep track of who does and does not own a specific quantity of critically important stock certificates. So ARIN does not need to control, mediate and set policy for all IP address transfers in order to maintain an accurate database of who holds which address block. It simply needs to serve as a title agency where people come to record their transactions. It is in the self-interest of both sides of an IP address transaction to ensure that their transfer of rights was recorded and is published in a common, authoritative global Whois database. Think of your local county or village property recorder. They do not insist on being a real estate brokerage in their territory – much less the only brokerage. There are many parties who can independently engage in property transactions and then bring them to the property registry for verification and recording.

Vixie is not appealing to the "physics" of registration and database economics – indeed, Vixie's belief that industrial organization is explained by "physics" rather than economics is a bit odd. What's really happening here is that Vixie and others at ARIN realize that the only way to shield themselves against losing control over and revenue from the IPv4 address market is to leverage their monopoly over the IP address registration database. What they would like to do is discourage competing and independent address trading and registration firms by refusing to make changes in their Whois database to reflect independent transactions. In antitrust/economics terms, they are tying registration records, which do need to be integrated and uniform, to another potentially competitive service, address brokerage and post-allocation registration services, so that it can continue to enjoy a monopoly in both. The penalty for trading addresses outside of its transfer regime is to be banished from or ignored by ARIN's Whois database.

This is a risky strategy, and the community that ARIN claims to represent should question it. There are powerful economic incentives for legacy holders and companies that need more addresses to trade. Those trades are going to happen. There are also strong economic incentives for those holding legacy resources to avoid contracting with ARIN and other RIRs. Those companies could choose to sign up with Depository and other companies like it. If ARIN refuses to record them because it doesn't approve of the company or is not in control of the transaction, ARIN will be the one responsible for fragmenting and corrupting the IP address registration database.

Vixie's argument about Whois fragmentation is doubly wrong when one realizes that the Whois database ARIN runs is actually a mess when it comes to pre-1997 address blocks (slightly over 40% of the available space). There are hundreds of firms that no longer exist listed there, and thousands of registration records that have not changed in fifteen years. I reached out to Charles Lee of Addrex about Vixie's article to get his comments on it. He first issued a disclaimer that "generally, we…do not engage in public debates about Internet governance. We prefer to focus on our clients and serving their needs." But he felt that Vixie's posting contained "misleading inaccuracies" that required some comment.

"The present Whois system which Mr. Vixie defends with such verve absolutely cannot be relied upon. That is not a personal position or opinion. It is a fact. As an illustrative example let's use the now famous Nortel/Microsoft deal which was brokered by Addrex Inc. In that transaction not one of the 38 number blocks transferred from Nortel Networks Inc. to Microsoft Inc. were appropriately listed in any Whois database in the name of Nortel Networks Inc. It took hundreds of man-hours and over two thousand pages of documentation to reconcile the fiction of the Whois system entries to the reality of Nortel Networks. Unfortunately that now famous case is not the exception to the rule but rather the reality of the situation. For Mr. Vixie to even suggest that Network operators could, or should, rely on an identification system rife with such gross errors is unconscionable."

It's likely that private, commercially motivated firms will do a far better job of cleaning up the Whois records than ARIN will on its own. Denuo's Depository, for example, is already advertising its ability to research and verify "chain of custody" of address holdings. Depository has advocated a "registry-registrar split," analogous to the one in Domain Name Service, to allow competing firms to provide post-allocation registry services while maintaining the RIRs as a single, accurate registration database. Vixie's argument that competition from Denuo assumes that no "copycat" competition will ever emerge is 100% wrong. The structural reforms Denuo has advocated are actually designed to pave the way for more competition in that field hence their filing with ICANN to create an accreditation policy for all IP address registrars.

To conclude, Internet elders such as Vixie have done a wonderful job writing software and defending the Internet's standards and architecture against various threats. For this, we can be respectful and grateful. But expertise in technology does not necessarily translate into expertise in economics and public policy. Vixie's polemic in ACM queue shows us that expertise in one domain often becomes blind arrogance in another. Only someone determined to preserve ARIN's monopoly would ever make the claims he makes.

TLF Turns 7

The Technology Liberation Front (TLF) turned 7 yesterday. We got underway on Aug 14, 2004 with this post. For more of the backstory of how things got started, see this post upon the occasion of our 5th anniversary. We're now up to 5,800+ posts and we've received almost 34,400 comments on those entries.

The goal of the TLF was to bring together liberty-loving technology policy analysts who were concerned about rising calls for government control of the Internet, digital technologies, and media and communications platforms. While we've slowed down a bit here in recent years, I'm quite proud of what we've done over the years to advance that vision and want to I thank everyone involved in the effort and all those readers who found it worth their time to stop by.

We'll keep fighting the good fight for technology and information freedom!