October 2007 - Posts

Creation, access and competition? How about legislation?
Wednesday, October 03, 2007 5:14 PM

The last split session of the day purported to cover “creation, access and competition” but the real subject took only just minutes to arrive and it was: intellectual property rights.

Chair William New from Intellectual Property Watch argued that “a topic doesn’t really exist until the OECD holds a conference on it”. But Kiyoshi Mori from the Japanese government proved him wrong – somewhat surprising the audience – by going straight into the issue of Net neutrality.

The Net neutrality debate has been raging, and continue to rage, in the United States but so far - despite constant efforts by US business to push it into the international arena – has been largely ignored by the rest of the world.

The reason is that most countries of the world don’t have a similar telecommunications infrastructure to the United States so there isn’t the telco tie-in and subsequent government role that has become entrenched in the US and been behind much of the debate.


P2P hunger

But Mori stood up and revealed some interesting graphs about how P2P networks were rapidly eating up all the new (enormous) bandwidth that Japan offers its citizens. This came as quite a shock to those that have held out Japan as the future – where you can purchase 100Mbit/s Internet connections and so enjoy extraordinary futuristic speeds of data exchange.

It prompted one questioner to ask whether there was a new law: that data rates will expand to fill the available bandwidth.

Mori himself seemed taken aback by the figures and confessed: “At first I thought that if had a wider use of broadband, it would go more smoothly, but the more we installed the more [peer-to-peer data exchange] happened.”

The figures appeared to show that this data exchange – and by implication widespread copyright infringement – is causing congestion within networks. And so Mori spoke of a “new legislative scheme” that would help cover the distribution of legal content and help tackle the infringement of property rights.


Interconnection

The “network neutrality” debate has just begun in Japan, Mori explained, and the first report on the issues had suggested developing new interconnection rules and reviewing current regulations.

When it came to the actual issue of copyright infringement, however, the debate widened. Anne Bucher explained she would not present the European Commission’s line because there currently wasn’t one. And for good reason, she suggested.

For one, she said, policy makers had not anticipated the participative web, the size of the communities, and the vast exchange of information. But secondly, self-regulation had done a good job so far. “One thing is that we do not have massive court cases,” she explained, adding, “my recommendation would be to be very cautious before moving”.

But that said, she was holding out self-regulation as the answer - she also felt that governments “may have to step in” and some point in the future.


DRM

Which moved us onto the efforts by companies to protect their content using digital rights management technology.

Urs Gasser recognised that he was being controversial when he said that in his view “the role of DRM is dead with respect to fighting piracy”.  Even the industry recognises that the attempt to stop people sharing information without approval had been lost, he said. It was now all about new business models, he said.

Bucher appeared to agree when she pointed out that recently music companies had responded to users’ wish to be able to move content from one platform to another and produced DRM-free songs.


Wider view

This isn’t the first time and won’t be the last that an issue has grown foggy because of the clear financial incentives that exist for people to push forward certain points of view. The Internet will continue to cause traditional business models to creak and strain.

The hard part is to decipher when the Internet is damaging industries and when it is refreshing them. The OECD has its job cut out trying to find which is which.

The transcript of this session is now available online here
by Kieren Mccarthy | with no comments
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Content: it's like rock n' roll
Wednesday, October 03, 2007 3:13 PM

The first session of the afternoon (stream A) covered the issue of user-created content i.e. what people stick up on the Internet. What became clear was that this subject – like music – produces a generational split.

On the one side, you have the younger generation: excited about the new possibilities, dismissing concerns as people not "getting it" but with a dramatic tendency to over-emphasise its importance. And on the other side: the older, wiser generation, but one that also struggles to understand exactly why people are so excited about it and so is overly cautious and occasionally dismissive.

What everyone can be sure of is that modern technology has allowed people to produce words and videos at an easier and faster rate than ever before, and the Internet has enabled people to share that publicly with as many people as never before. Or, most concisely, user-created content is here to stay.

So what?

The chair Michael LeBlanc kicked off the session with an interesting anecdote – he received dreadful service from a company, so he called to complain and nothing happened. He emailed and they were unhelpful. He tried to find a way of posting a complaint on their website – but there wasn’t a forum.

So he posted his complaint – in strong words – on his own blog. And now that post is extremely visible through Google whereas if he had just posted on the company’s website, it would have been subsumed by other comments. The upshot was that the company called him up a long time later to ask how they could help him and if he would remove the content.

In this context, it’s not hard to see the impact of the user-created content.


My generation

This discussion thread was dropped however when the next few panellists – the younger generation – gave presentations not on the impact that this content has, but on how terrific it was and what they were doing with it on their terrific websites.

The generational gap was then further highlighted when the last panellist took issue with even the term “user-create content” – which by now had inevitably been reduced to down to “UCC”. There is nothing new to this concept, Manon Ress argued, newspaper editorials are user-generated content, and graffiti is user-generated content. The problem, she says, is that this new terminology values all “content” as of equal value when it isn’t.

She also complained that among this wealth of content, there were no databases being created. “Have we seen evidence-based policies?”

But Ress had a different point to make, and that was the way in which this data/content/stuff is stored. If the process isn’t open and transparent and if the standards aren’t open, the information is going to decline and die, she argued. She also had a list of questions that people should consider before they start producing and hosting content: Is the data open and transparent? Can I store it? What is the interface?

It is, of course, the concern of the mature that information is retained, lessons are learnt and then clearly and carefully passed down; whereas the young are too busy enjoying being creative to worry about what the use or value of what they are producing is.

So where did the discussion get to?

“It is easy to make a blog,” LeBlanc summed up. “If a nine year old can start a blog, a government official can certainly start a blog.” Here’s betting that government officials’ content would use open standards and fit neatly into a database.

 

The transcript of this session is now available online here
by Kieren Mccarthy | with no comments
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Government 2.0 is more about culture change than technological change
Wednesday, October 03, 2007 2:16 PM

 The main themes I heard in the Government 2.0 session were:

* you have to change the culture of the organisation, change the expectations and processes for engagement, before you can take advantage of technology change

* government can gain a lot simply by freeing its data (creating APIs, to put it technically) for citizens to analyse and present as they see fit - the idea that there is more capacity for creation and innovation outside the walls of your organisation

Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation used a phrase beloved in the open source and Wisdom of Crowds communities: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", in the sense of (in my understanding) "given enough citizens examining the government, all legislation and politics is transparent".

Don Lenihen of Crossing Boundaries stated that the challenge was "more about engagement than technology".  He said that rather than citizens fighting one another for the attention of the government, we should get citizens talking to one another, with the government as facilitator.  He was concerned with the idea that Web 2.0 and technology are "inherently democratic", he said it takes a conscious effort to use the technology in positive, productive ways.

Quitterie Delmas talked about the use of blogs in the recent French presidential election, and showed a tool for visualisating the political affiliations and activities in the French blogosphere, blogopole.fr

Wolfgang Blau stated that we need a new narrative: from the pyramid to the circle, from hierarchy to collaboration.  He saide he felt we are returning to a culture and notion of government from before the age of broadcasting - local, non-commercial, and amateur (in a positive sense).

In the Q&A it was recognised that for most politicians the risk of moving to a collaborative system is high.

At the conclusion, it was suggested that a wiki could be created to gather examples of exemplary and innovative government use of the Internet.
 

by Richard Akerman | with no comments
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Will the Internet introduce competition between governments?
Wednesday, October 03, 2007 1:42 PM

The second session of the conference was split into two stream. Stream A in the main room was Business 2.0: Creativity and the Internet Economy. As with the first session, there was an intriguing mix of viewpoints followed by a wide-ranging discussion, so the best this blog can probably do is pick out one of the most interesting threads.

And what was perhaps most interesting was the role that governments needed to play in business. The Canadian government’s Michael Binder pulled together much of the discussion with a simple question to the panellists. “The rules that you say governments will need to introduce, would that need to be a global set of rules, or do you think that each country should have its own rules?”

This is an increasingly important topic. The Internet, as people constantly point out, has no understanding of geographic or political borders. What’s online is online. There is also a growing body of people that believe governments will have to change to fit in with the new reality of a global medium and start coalescing into a global body with a single set of rules, laws and guidelines.


Fantasy2.0

This ideology is nothing new. In fact, it is Fantasy 2.0.  You can still read the original online  - A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. And you should note that it is in plain text and plain HTML code. Fantasy 2.0 will no doubt come with RSS feeds.

The concept of the Internet as being uncontrollable and extra-government no longer holds water (it was most effectively neutered by the book “Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World”). And now the hope is that the Internet will somehow force governments to have to work on Internet culture’s terms. It also won’t happen.

But a very interesting and intriguing answer was given by entrepreneur Bob Young, who runs online publishing house Lulu.com.

He said he was a fan of competition and that he would like to see governments competing in the laws they introduce. The laws that end up working most effectively with the ways in which the Internet is changing society and business will end up as market leaders. And as a result, governments that have adopted those laws will attract more business from the global world we have entered.


Monopolies and freedoms

Bob Young also provided a couple of other interesting snippets. He argued that governments’ role was to maximize freedom. Entrepreneurs dreamed and worked every day toward building a monopoly, but it was governments - not business - that made that sort of market control impossible and so provided the driving force of competition.

Another area where governments may need to create new legislation, it was suggested, was identity. What is the right level of anonymity online?

Amazon’s Paul Misener pointed out that identity was not a problem for his company because at some point someone has to buy something or sell something and that means they had to identify themselves through credit cards. But what of the anonymity of blog posts? Young drew a comparison with Speakers Corner in London: “You can say what you want there, but if you incite a riot you will be arrested.”

It is not healthy to have full transparency. Humans are not two-dimensional beings and often the most successful people in our societies are precisely those who are capable of holding different and often conflicting views and opinions at the same time.


Astro-turf

The chair, David Crane of the Toronto Star, reviewed this identity issue by mentioning that his newspaper is obliged to find out that people sending letters to the editor are confirmed as real people before the letter is posted. Without that check, a powerful outlet could easily be manipulated (and in the US there are many famous examples of “astro-turf” letters being used to create false impressions, particularly in politics).

What is the balance to be struck? Can governments really act like businesses in a global market – producing the laws that will attract the customers they want? Is this the grand social change that the Internet will ultimately cause our planet?

In his summing up, David Crane, pieced together the various aspects of this discussion. Governments do have an important public policy role, he said – "not only with laws, but also with incentives". And, yes, "one of roles of government is to be the freedom fighter".
 

The transcript of this session is now available online here
by Kieren Mccarthy | with no comments
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backgrounder: government 2.0
Wednesday, October 03, 2007 1:28 PM

There are two streams of interaction that can be enhanced by an Internet-enabled government.

One is to provide services online that previously were only available through in-person or paper-based interaction.  The other is to use the participative web to engage with citizens, to enable a freer, more direct, more rapid discussion between government representives and citizens, and between citizens themselves.

The Guardian reported in 2006 that "In Canada, more than 50% of the population file their returns online. Denmark and Sweden have achieved even higher rates."

To some extent, it is a relatively straightforward technical AND process challenge to translate offline services into online capabilities.

For citizen engagement, the technologies are now becoming available, but there are few if any existing processes in place to build upon.

There are a few examples of the government opening up by using Web 2.0, for example, there are some official government blogs, including

I invite you to point out other examples in the comments.
by Richard Akerman | with no comments
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Research 2.0 - from scientists to citizens
Wednesday, October 03, 2007 12:15 PM

Bill St. Arnaud from CANARIE gave a presentation about "Participative Science", quite an exciting idea of using the participative web to go from traditional closed science grid networks to providing citizens the ability to access and analyse datasets themselves.

Earlier in the day, in response to a question about "what is the participative web beyond social networking" we had heard from Cyrus Beagley about the NetFlix Prize, in which the DVD-by-mail service is offering up some of its data for analysis, with a US $1 million prize for the best DVD recommender algorithm.

In his presentation, Bill pointed to Intel® Mash Maker: Mashups for the Masses, as an example of how tools for working with online data are becoming easier to use and more widely available.

In "ICT for Science - experiencing the future Internet", Mario Campolargo of GÉANT talked about the empowerment of users, the need to think about the interface between formal e-science grids and more informal networks for citizen access ("citizen grids").

It is clear that the rapid pace of change is pushing those involved with science infrastructure to think about ways to interact with a broader public, to take advantage of the energy and creativity of the general population, promoting greater understanding of and participation in science.  The rapid progress of these technologies has opened new horizons of research, making powerful research tools available.  As Diana Rhoten from the US NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure said in her presentation, "we are living in exponential times", which is enabling more computing power and data to be distributed more widely and used by more people than ever before.

by Richard Akerman | with no comments
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computer science transforming scientific research - Andrew Herbert
Wednesday, October 03, 2007 10:43 AM

 Andrew Herbert is Managing Director of Microsoft Research, Cambridge

I would summarise the underlying theme of his presentation as the application of thinking, methodologies, and tools from the realm of computer science to other scientific fields.

Here are some fairly raw notes on his presentation:

The sciences are all increasingly relying on computer science to reduce the time to insight.

Computational science - simulation, data mining, pattern recognition and many other techniques.

How will we produce researchers who have the the right balance of scientific background and computer skills.

"Computer science ideas are creating new ways of doing traditional science"

networks are also being used to create virtual scientific organisations

if science is ongoing on the network, why do we need conferences and printed journals -
 a revolutionary challenge to scientific publication

sensor networks enable real-world data to be used in simulations

using computers to automate scientific workflow... could we even automate some auspects of
generating scientific results

Where Is This Taking Us?

* ability to model drugs on personal gene machine [i.e. individual, unique people]
* monitor changes in personal gene machine

... personalised healthcare, customised for your body and genome

* sustainable bio-energy

Other Areas Being Explored from a CS perspective

* understanding the human brain
* confronting global epidemics
* understanding the origins, workings and ultimate demise of the universe

http://research.microsoft.com/towards2020science/
by Richard Akerman | with no comments
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Democracy as dictatorship
Wednesday, October 03, 2007 10:37 AM

A very interesting and wide-ranging discussion in the first session has now closed. But what stood out most was the issue of jurisdiction and the meta issue of forms of government.

Ginsu Yoon from Second Life was asked if Linden Labs weren’t in fact running a benevolent dictatorship. This sparked mention of terrorism in Second Life – apparently people have been using their pixelated virtual selves to blow up pixilated virtual buildings. Later on, Marc Rotenberg stood up at the mic to explain that the Electronic Privacy Information Center had inserted Second Life between San Marino and Singapore in its “Privacy and Human Rights” book (an extremely weighty tome) because it now considered it is own jurisdiction. Continuing the same theme, Cyrus Beagley, suggested there was an important role for governments in protecting people’s privacy.

Yoon explained that it wasn’t the first time Linden has been asked to impose rules on Second Life. But, he explained, as soon as you impose *any* rules, you are telling people how they need to behave online. This is, he explains, “democracy as dictatorship” and it was instead “up to people to form their own social rules”. Jonathan Taplin observed that far from democracy, there was a “certain level of anarchy in Second Life”.

So what is it – dictatorship, democracy or anarchy?

It’s probably telling that the CIA popped up at this point. Second Life is, it appears, the best method that the Central Intelligence Agency has ever found to teach its people Korean manners – how to teach people “not to do something culturally inappropriate”, according to Taplin, who said he spoke witha "mid-level" CIA employee about it. If that wasn’t enough, Yoon then posited that if terrorism became virtual people blowing up virtual buildings (rather than real people and real buildings), then it would be a “tremendous evolution” for humankind.

In one sense, he’s right, except try telling that to companies that in the future may spends millions on real estate and use it to run billions of dollars of trade through. If that was to get blown up, it would have immediate real-world consequences. In this utopia, we may be physically safer, but if the economy suffers (and money is increasingly a virtual series of 1s and 0s on bank servers) we may not be able to raise the money to pay our broadband bills and so be able to keep visiting the bombed-out virtual world.

As my fellow blogger Richard Akerman has pointed out the connection to the real world is where those servers are based. But even so, it sparks yet more issues of jurisdiction. If someone physically based in Korea breaks the laws of the United States in a virtual world contained on servers held in Brazil and a bank in Singapore fails as a result - a scenario that is not impossible to imagine - what do you do?


 

The transcript of the meeting is available here.
by Kieren Mccarthy | with no comments
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Virtual worlds as jurisdictions
Wednesday, October 03, 2007 9:59 AM

 There was a question from an EPIC representative.
He said they have just released their latest report, Privacy and Human Rights 2006
(it was released at a Montreal conference on privacy last month).

For the first time (perhaps the first time ever for a major international report),
they included Second Life as a jurisdiction that they reported on.

Ginsu Yoon of Second Life responded that we have to recognise that companies have a
real physical presence as well, they have servers and employees in the United States,
subject to US law.

--

Speaking personally, I think there is a big challenge in figuring out how to deal with
the intersection between the local physical reality and legal frameworks, and the global
differences in cultures and laws.

Earlier in the session, John Oxley had remarked that the world is getting bigger from a
government perspective while at the same time it gets smaller from an individual perspective

by Richard Akerman | with no comments
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Trying to make Net money the Bob Dylan way
Wednesday, October 03, 2007 9:24 AM

The opening presentations from the panellists have finished and there was an interesting array of perspectives.

Jonathan Taplin, who comes from an entertainment business and worked with Bob Dylan back in the day, suggested – naturally enough – that people look to the music industry to find a solution to what he sees at the biggest challenge for the participative web.

Namely, how to actually make money from the content that is flying across broadband links 24 hours a day. His solution: a copyright fee leveled at the ISP level, in the same way that songwriters are paid from the licence-fee pool.

The solution sounds right. But then as anyone that has been to Internet conference over the years they will recognise a familiar pattern: what appears to be a perfectly logical solution to an important issue.

History unfortunately is against this solution ever working (although not without a number of companies trying to form a business model around it and giving up two years’ later). It’s best not to forget that Google originally planned to make all of its money from selling its search tool to businesses to help them find material – the consumer front-end of it was just to help test the technology and get some awareness in the market. That business search model is tiny and Google makes all its money for the ad word business on its consumer search.

The lesson to learn is: if you ever predict the best method or system for making money, you can assured only one thing – that it won’t happen. Ginsu Yoon from Second Life argued later that it's still best to wait and see what happens - and Second Life's parent company, Linden, is, he explained, carefully watching the virtual economy that happens over their network. An economy that links to the real world (and real dollars) and currently sees $1 million a day go around the system. Michael Gill from Fairfax appears to agree. He feels certain that there is money to be made from companies providing high-quality content online, but that the "models are not yet in place".

Taplin used as an example the nine million people that viewed a video on YouTube of a US student recently being subdued with a Tazer gun by campus police in a debating forum. This was more eyeballs that most US cable stations ever manage, he pointed out.

And that’s just it: if there are nine million people looking at something in the spate of just a few days, somewhere, somehow there is money to be made from it. The frustration of businessmen is that they know this, but don’t have an agreed method for getting at it.

I don’t think we can’t expect that frustration to cease any time soon, not while the Internet continues to chop and change at such relentless speed.

 

The transcript of this meeting is now available online here
by Kieren Mccarthy | with no comments
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