InternetPolicy.net

EU news

"As from today EU Member States must comply with the Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications... The Directive includes basic obligations to ensure the security and confidentiality of communications over EU electronic networks, including internet and mobile services. It sets out specific conditions for installing so-called “cookies” on users' personal computers and...the Directive also introduces a 'ban on spam' throughout the EU... Cookies (which register users' preferences as they visit websites) and other invisible tracking devices that can collect information on Internet users, such as 'spyware' may only be utilised if the user is given clear information about the purpose of any such invisible activity and is offered the right to refuse it. This will enable the user to decide which forms of access to his equipment are acceptable and which are not... With a limited exception - covering existing customer relationship - e-mail marketing is only allowed with prior consent. Disguised identities and invalid return addresses, often used by 'spammers', are also outlawed.... Member States can also ban unsolicited commercial e-mails to businesses. The Commission intends to issue a specific Communication on this subject by the end of the year..." Click here for the full text of the announcement just quoted.

Coincidentally, ICANN announced that it is opening an office in Brussels.

Eolas patent challenged by WWW Consortium

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has released a briefing document describing their challenge to the web-browser plug-ins and applets patent granted to Eolas Technologies:

"The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the global standard-setting body for the Web, has presented the United States Patent and Trademark Office with prior art establishing that US Patent No. 5,838,906...is invalid and should therefore be re-examined in order to eliminate this unjustified impediment to the operation of the Web... In an unprecedented step, Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the Web, sent a letter today to Under Secretary [of Commerce for Intellectual Property James E.] Rogan requesting that his office reinvestigate the matter. 'W3C urges the USPTO to initiate a reexamination of the '906 patent in order to prevent substantial economic and technical damage to the operation of World Wide Web...'"

More Internet police for Vietnam?

The Vietnam News List vnnews-l is distributing this report from Deutsche Presse-Agentur: "Vietnam may set up an additional police force to monitor 'online crimes' and prevent 'the storing and circulating of harmful information,' a security official said Tuesday. Vietnam already has an online security police force, but the ministry of public security proposal would mean [creating] a second 'special mission force dealing with Internet-related crimes,' a public security official told Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa)... The Vietnamese government operates a firewall which blocks access to dozens of sites critical of the communist regime. Following new legislation introduced last year, all domestic website content providers must obtain approval and a license from the Ministry of Culture and Information. Internet content providers must not post information that 'incites the people to oppose the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam or causes hostility between different ethnic groups,' said Bui The Vinh, a Ministry of Culture and Information official last year...."

Internet is not primarily a "mass" medium

UC Berkeley's School of Information Management & Systems has released a study that will probably be widely discussed in the months ahead: How Much Information? is an attempt to quantify the amount of new data produced and stored by humans in a given year. The latest edition gathers statistics for 2002, measuring and estimating the amounts transmitted by telephone, broadcasting and the Internet, and stored on paper, film, and magnetic and optical media. A similar study was performed in 2000 using figures from 1999. Click here for the project's homepage. There you will find links to the Executive Summary, comments on methodology and a pdf of the entire report. Some highlights, emphasizing the Internet:

• The amount of new stored information grew about 30% per year between 1999 and 2002
• Information flows through electronic channels (telephone, broadcasting and the Internet) were 3.5 times the volume recorded onto storage media.
• Phonecalls represent 98% of all new information transmitted electronically.
• Almost 533,000 terabytes of data flowed through the Internet last year. (A terabyte is about as much information as is printed on the paper made from 50,000 trees.)
• About 440,000 terabytes of that was email, sent as 31 billion messages.
• Almost 92,000 terabytes of web information was generated on demand from databases last year.
• Instant Messaging accounted for 274 terabytes of new information.
• The World Wide Web contains about 170 terabytes of information in static webpages. Apparently this figure represents just the page content, not the total amount transmitted in page-views. The latter would be the appropriate measure for comparison to the other categories of transmitted data, yet it is not estimated. Nevertheless, the static webpage content is quite a bit less than the amount of data sent via Instant Messaging, although it is 17 times as great as the Library of Congress' print collections.
• No overall estimate of the volume of P2P filesharing was provided, but KaZaA, the most popular service, says that its users exchanged almost 5,000 terabytes in over 600 million files.

Note that the Internet figures do not add up: P2P filesharing is omitted from the total volume of transmitted data. That probably represents less than 5% of the total, but still it should be taken into account.

From our point of view, the main value of this study is the overwhelming evidence it provides that the Internet is not primarily a "mass" medium like broadcasting. Therefore, it is wrong to regulate it that way, as countries from Belarus to China are inclined to do. The Internet is used mostly for private point-to-point and person-to-person communication, like telephone and postal networks. So if a regulatory model is needed, the latter two are the most appropriate, and the protection of online privacy should be of greater concern than content controls and censorship.

[Thanks to Techdirt for the pointer.]

Ukraine's secret police "alarm" RSF

"Reporters Without Borders expressed alarm today at attempts by the Ukrainian secret police (SBU) to take control of Internet operations in the country and intercept e-mail messages. 'In a country where the media is already monitored closely, the Internet has now become a key target for the SBU,' said secretary-general Robert Menard. 'Its bid to take over management of the national domain name '.ua', currently in the hands of the private firm Hostmaster, and its proposal that parliament legalise e-mail monitoring, will allow it to effectively gag online activity...' Hostmaster was taken to court by the government on 22 July to win control of the '.ua' domain name. The government has asked ICANN, the worldwide US body in charge of assigning all country domain names, to approve the proposed transfer but has had no response. The state telecommunications commission asked telecom operators and Internet service providers (ISPs) on 17 July to install equipment to monitor all traffic they handled. The Ukrainian Internet Association objected strongly to this as an unacceptable breach of privacy for Internet users and noted that for the moment it was still illegal. The SBU asked parliament on 19 August to legalise recording and interception of phone and Internet messages, ostensibly to help fight crime and supposedly bring the law into line with European standards..."

China installing surveillance software in net cafes

Interfax provides an important addenda to our item yesterday about Internet cafes in China. In addition to merging them into chains for better control over their management, the government is apparently also requiring the installation of "information management" software to monitor the customers' online activity. There is even a published specification for the surveillance software, which companies compete to provide: "...The system is the government's attempt to regulate and manage public Internet access services, Liu Qiang, official with MOC Internet Culture Office, told Interfax during an interview. 'Deployments in Sichuan and Guangxi Province have been accomplished and we are now implementing it in other provinces,' said Liu, 'The nationwide implementation was expected to be finished by the end of this year. However, the deadline has been rescheduled to mid 2004 due to the SARS outbreak this summer.' According to Technical Standard of Information Management System for Business Premises for Internet Access Services, the national industry standard released in November 2002, the system should be able to provide various functions including collection of user information, logging of the computer's history, surveillance, alerts on illegal games and content, and user screen monitoring, among others. 'Up to now, 22 software companies have developed qualified management systems in accordance with our national standard. Each province can choose one of the companies to implement its system province-wide to ensure system integrity within the province,' Liu added."

Legal & Market Aspects of Electronic Signatures

The European Commission's Information Society Directorate has just e-published The Legal and Market Aspects of Electronic Signatures. This is a 263 page (1.5MB, pdf) review of the EU member and accession countries' implementations of the 1999 EU Directive on electronic signatures, from both a legal and a practical perspective. With country-by-country and topic-by-topic analyses, it is virtually an encyclopedia of e-sig laws, policies, court cases and implementations in Europe. Best of all, the authors (Joseph Dumortier, Stefan Kelm, Hans Nilsson, Georgia Skoma and Patrick van Eecke) at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and Information Technology in Belgium have also created a website with links to the primary laws, certification authorities, regulatory bodies, etc. Well done!

Adelaide - "the first wireless city"

From an article by Amanda Akien on Prosperity4: "The Australian city of Adelaide, in South Australia, has become the first city in the world with a complete citywide Wi-fi network. With a population of one million Adelaide is home to three universities, as well as several major technology firms including Hewlett Packard and Motorola. The Federal and local government invested $5.75m dollars in the project in an attempt to attract more hi-tech business. The CitiLAN network has been set up by a consortium of public and private organisations in Adelaide, providing a comprehensive network of 40 access points... The project is now being extended to cover the whole city, including residential areas. Launched on 17 September, the CitiLAN service will be free to use until the end of this month..."

So what happens next month??

Internet: "public forum" or "broadcasting" medium?

This week's Global E-Law Alert from Baker & McKenzie highlights different paradigms from different countries:

In California, an appeals court ruled that the posting of some allegedly defamatory statements on the Internet was actually a legally protected exercise of free speech rights because the Internet constitutes a "public forum" under California law.

Meanwhile in Ontario, Canada, an appeals court disagreed with a lower court finding that defamatory information posted online qualified as a "broadcast" under Ontario's laws on libel and slander. The court noted that expert witnesses had differed on whether the Internet qualified as a "broadcast" medium, and the issue could depend on a detailed analysis of the legal definition of "broadcasting."

Ubiquitous access: what it may mean

A fascinating post by Naval Ravikant at the VentureBlog, inspired by an emerging tech conference at Dartmouth College, where ubiquitous wireless networking is already real. Two excerpts:

"Instant Messenger for voice will emerge - Just as ubiquitous wired connectivity led from email (sporadic and asynchronous) to IM (always-on and synchronous), so ubiquitous wireless connectivity takes us from cellphones to a push-to-talk model. A number of the staff and students here are trialing a very interesting device from Vocera, called a communications badge. It's a small, two ounce device that's basically just a microphone, speaker, battery, and 802.11 chip. People "push to talk" and use a voice-recognition enabled server to connect to other people. It's simple, cheap, fast, and significantly lowers the time and effort cost of contacting someone.... Eventually, you can see this device ending up in a hearing-aid form factor...

"Location based services emerge - Students here are already running calendar applications that alert them of their next appointment based on their current location and estimated travel time. People can walk up to a printer and hit "print," with the computer automatically routing the job to the physically closest printer. At UCSD, students with PDAs can see each other walking around campus, projected on real time maps and offer to get together, go eat, etc..."

China reining in Internet cafes

"The majority of local Internet cafes, currently exceeding 110,000 in the country, will be put under the management of large chain store companies within three years, as part of efforts by the Chinese government to rein in the fledgling and troublesome business," The People's Daily reported yesterday. "Liu Yuzhu, an official with the Ministry of Culture, said this Saturday at the First China International Exposition on Online Culture being held in Beijing... Less than 100 chain store operators will be set up in the future, to help regulate and standardize the sector. Not all of the Internet cafes will be chains, but the government will issue relevant regulations to ensure the healthy operations of these individual shops, according to the official."