InternetPolicy.net

Internet threat to political parties

Everett Ehrlich - Undersecretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs in the Clinton administration - wrote an important piece for the Washington Post (14 December 2003) which we missed. Fortunately, PoliticsOnline.com found it reprinted in The Arbiter, an online student newspaper in Idaho. Using research by Nobel-prize-winning economist Ronald Coase, Ehrlich explains why the Internet is driving nails into the coffin of political parties:

"Coase’s insight was this: The cost of gathering information determines the size of organizations. It sounds abstract, but in the past it meant that complex tasks undertaken on vast scales required organizational behemoths. This was as true for the Democratic and Republican parties as it was for General Motors. Choosing and marketing candidates isn’t so different from designing, manufacturing and selling automobiles.

"But the Internet has changed all that in one crucial respect that wouldn’t surprise Coase one bit. To an economist, the 'trick' of the Internet is that it drives the cost of information down to virtually zero. So according to Coase's theory, smaller information-gathering costs mean smaller organizations. And that’s why the Internet has made it easier for small folks, whether small firms or dark-horse candidates such as Howard Dean, to take on the big ones...

"Being a Democrat or a Republican isn’t enough of an advantage anymore – there are simply too many other places where people can get political information and find political bedfellows in an age of low information costs... The real question is whether – really, how – the two parties, like any other waning duopoly, will use non-market means to preserve their fading power..."

US Supreme Court to rule on web content "harmful to minors"

The latest issue of the Center for Democracy and Technology's Policy Post says that "CDT is urging the Supreme Court to rule unconstitutional a federal law that would place limits on legal Internet speech. Joined by a broad coalition of organizations representing Internet companies, publishers and others, CDT filed on January 15 a 'friend-of-the-court' brief challenging the Child Online Protection Act (COPA). COPA, adopted in 1998 but blocked from taking effect by lower courts, would make it a crime for anyone, by means of the World Wide Web, to make any communication for commercial purposes that is 'harmful to minors' unless the person has used technological means to prevent access by minors (such as requiring a credit card)... 'Harmful to minors' is a legal category that includes a wide range of social commentary and health information that is legal for adults to view.

"The range of organizations signing the brief reflects the broad concern with COPA's implications for the Internet and free expression. Those signing the brief included high-tech trade associations such as the Information Technology Association of America and the Computer and Communications Industry Association, content industry groups such as the Association of American Publishers and the Recording Industry Association of America, news media organizations such as the Newspaper Association of America and the Society for Professional Journalists, and the Freedom to Read Foundation of the American Library Association...

"The case is Ashcroft v. ACLU. Oral argument is scheduled for March 2, 2004. The Court's decision is likely to be issued in late May or June of this year. The coalition brief is at http://www.cdt.org/speech/copa/20040115amicus.pdf."

Internet prominent in US fraud complaints

2003 was the first year in which "Internet fraud" accounted for more than half of all fraud complaints filed in the United States, according to a report released this week by the US Federal Trade Commission. Kevin Poulsen noted in SecurityFocus News that "The Internet played a prominent role in 55 percent of all the fraud reports, up from 45 percent in 2002, and accounting for approximately $200 million in losses. The most popular Internet scams reported were online auction rip-offs -- 15 percent of the cases -- and spammy quit-your-job-and-work-at-home-for-big-bucks swindles, which made up nine percent of the complaints... The report does not attempt to identify how thieves obtained the data needed to steal more than 200,000 consumers' identities, but security holes and data leaks remained a grim e-commerce reality in 2003..."

ITU Workshop on Internet Governance

The Action Plan approved last month at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) included a request that the UN Secretary General "set up a working group on Internet governance, in an open and inclusive process...to investigate and make proposals for action, as appropriate, on the governance of Internet by 2005."

To assist the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in preparing its input to the process, a Workshop on Internet Governance will be held 26-27 February at ITU headquarters in Geneva. Invitations have been mailed out to some experts and all ITU member governments. Background materials and the agenda will be posted soon at http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/forum/intgov04/.

Since some governments want the ITU to regulate the Internet, this will be a very important process to monitor.

Powerline Internet comes to Africa

Direct On PC Ltd., a Nigerian ISP, has announced the launch of "Powernet," Africa's first always-on broadband Internet access service delivered to customers via existing electric powerlines.

Powernet's data transmission to home users is said to be at 300-800 MB/second (64KB/second backhaul). "Basic corporate" service is claimed to be at 1 GB/second - far, far higher than any verified PLC service known to us. Plug-and-play transmit/receive cards are available for desktop PCs, but for the time being, laptops and Macintoshes can only be supported through PC-based gateways. Since any electrical outlet can supply connectivity, local area networks can be created without any separate cables.

The managing director of Direct On PC, Sandeep Jayaswal, told the Daily Champion, a newspaper in Lagos, that Powernet does not cause interference. However, a white paper published last September by the BBC's Research Department after tests of two similar systems in England found that broadband powerline Internet had "demonstrable potential to cause interference to indoor reception of [radio] broadcasting" particularly in the shortwave band.

Nevertheless, this technology is able to increase the speed and affordability of Internet access in places with inadequate telecommunication networks, and that makes it a very exciting development.

Do web searches suppress controversy?

An article by Susan L. Gerhart in the latest issue of FirstMonday asks "Do Web search engines suppress controversy?" Ms. Gerhart checked to see if some well-known controversies were revealed in the search-engine responses to simple queries. She claims to have found that they were not. Her essay gives ideas on how to fix that.

Internet elections: Experts vote NO

The Security Peer Review Group, an expert panel assembled by the US Federal Voting Assistance Program to evaluate the Defense Department's Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE), says that voting via Internet has "fundamental vulnerabilities" and "the best course is not to field the SERVE system at all. Because the danger of successful, large-scale attacks is so great, we reluctantly recommend shutting down the development of SERVE immediately and not attempting anything like it in the future until both the Internet and the world's home computer infrastructure have been fundamentally redesigned, or some other unforeseen security breakthroughs appear... [A] 'successful' trial of SERVE in 2004 is the top of a slippery slope toward even more vulnerable systems in the future..."

Click here to read the full report, which is a harsh and detailed critique of all forms of Internet-based voting, relevant to all countries.

Internet sale of fresh semen

The Scotsman reports that a lesbian has given birth in Liverpool to a healthy baby after buying fresh semen last year on the Internet. John Gonzalez says this is the second live birth reported by same-sex couples using www.ManNotIncluded.com, his website in Scotland. The sperm used reportedly cost the woman 1500 British pounds.

ManNotIncluded.com bills itself as "the world's only confidential and anonymous sperm donation service." The issue of anonymity seems to be especially controversial. Customers may learn about the donor's race, eye color, height, weight, social background and educational achievement - but not his name. Scottish law apparently gives purchasers of frozen sperm the right to learn the donor's identity. However, ManNotIncluded.com sells fresh sperm and argues that this is exempt from the identity-disclosure law. Medical authorities say they will try to close this loophole soon so that Internet sales of fresh and frozen semen are similarly regulated.

Dilemma: wiretaps vs. Internet telephony

Stephen Labaton writes in today's New York Times about the conflict between "two cherished policies of the Bush administration" - deregulating major industries and expanding the government's ability to intercept phonecalls. As noted here earlier, the Justice Department and US intelligence agencies are upset with the Federal Communications Commission for treating Internet telephony as a minimally regulated "information service" rather than as "telecommunications" because that makes it harder to conduct wiretaps:

"In a series of unpublicized meetings and heated correspondence in recent weeks, officials from the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration have repeatedly complained about the commission's decision in 2002 to classify high-speed Internet cable services under a looser regulatory regime than the phone system... As a result of the commission's actions, said John G. Malcolm, a deputy assistant attorney general who has played a lead role for the Justice Department, some telecommunications carriers have taken the position in court proceedings that they do not need to make their networks available to federal agents for court-approved wiretapping. 'I am aware of instances in which law enforcement authorities have not been able to execute intercept orders because of this uncertainty,' Mr. Malcolm said in an interview last Friday...

"By contrast, some FCC officials and telephone industry executives say that if the commission buckles to the other agencies and forces the industry to take on a host of expensive obligations the development of promising new communications services may be stalled or squelched for years to come... 'What's most scary for industry and perhaps some people at the FCC is the notion that the architecture of the Internet will depend on the permission of the FBI,' said Stewart A. Baker, a former general counsel of the National Security Agency..."

Cato Institute lights a fire

Adam Thierer, director of the Cato Institute's telecommunications studies division, has written a screed entitled "Howard Dean's Plan for the Internet: Collectivism In, Property Rights Out." In it Thierer lambasts not just Dean but Lawrence Lessig, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, and anyone else questioning the commercialization of the Internet and intellectual property in general. That provoked bitter rejoinders from the likes of David Weinberger ("Inept Cato Analysis of Dean Net Policy"), David Isenberg ("Adam Thierer's latest blast - incompetent or dishonest?"), Howard Reingold ("Cato can't distinguish collectivism from collective action ") and Lessig ("Cato'$ Late$t"). We won't add our two cents, except to note that this is one of the hottest online policy debates we've seen in quite a while.