Cory Doctorow has described Bill Patry’s book ‘How to Fix Copyright’ as “incandescent”. He also suggests that Bill is angry, something Bill himself denies. In this Social Music Summit ‘fireside chat’, in which Jim Griffin digs into Patry’s background, one can discern just how laid back – considering the cultural bomb he has just dropped – he really is.
Last OneWebDay – Sep 22 2011 – ISOC-NY hosted the Bob Frankston talk: Infrastructure commons – the future of connectivity in which he laid out the “Frankston Doctrine” – the heretical view that communities should build and operate their own communications infrastructure, entirely dispensing with telcos and usage-based billing. Long a lone voice in the wilderness, Frankston’s ideas are now beginning to get some love. On Valentine’s Day – Feb 14 2012 – OneWebDay founder Susan Crawford used her Bloomberg column The Case for Publicly Owned Internet Service to rail against State laws that prohibit municipal broadband initiatives.
Now, on Feb 25 2012, comes a searing GigaOM opinion piece from UK analyst Martin Geddes titled It’s the end of the line for telco .
Geddes opens:
The telecom industry has reached its peak. This is it. Look around you. Whatever you are doing in telecom, however you are making money in the field, it isn’t going to get better than this. This industry has acquired its maximum share of the economy. We are the digital railroad business at the height of the railroad barons. The only way now is down. We’ll see maybe one or two more mini-booms, a few more troughs, but the long-term trend has just gone into reverse.
and concludes:
Home networks don’t need service providers. You just buy a box and plug it in. Street-level networks don’t either — you can build a simple resilient mesh. Nor do town networks that join the kids with their school. We fundamentally don’t need communications service providers to manage data transmission. As long as we have a means to fund infrastructure, just as we manage with roads, we can do it for ourselves.
This is the beginning of the end of the Information Superrailroad, where all the bits are scarce and billable. Broadband ISP service is a branch line to nowhere.
Unlicensed wireless is the automobile, and local open fibers are the roads. It doesn’t carry very much very far right now, but it will. And with it, the fate of the telecom industry as constituted today is sealed. Like with the railroads, telcos will carry ever more traffic, and will protect themselves with political power. But their heyday is over, and a new disruptive model has emerged.
Bob Frankston will speak at the ISOC-DC event Connecting Everyone! Mesh Networks, Public Internet and the Drive Towards Universal Access on March 1 2012. There will be a webcast.
On Monday Feb 27 2012, The New Yorker “the Big Story” series presents THE WAR FOR THE WEB at Joes Pub NYC – a conversation about Internet piracy and free speech, featuring Lori Andrews (“I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did”), Pablo Chavez (Public Policy Director, Google), Clay Shirky (“Cognitive Surplus”), and Tim Wu (“The Master Switch”). Moderated by the New Yorker senior editor Nicholas Thompson.
The event is sold out but a limited number of tickets will be available at the door fifteen minutes before start time. A recording of the event will appear on newyorker.com.
On Feb 21 2012 the Wall Street Journal published an Op-Ed from FCC Commissioner Robert M. McDowell – “The U.N. Threat to Internet Freedom“. Commissioner McDowell says that at an World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12) next week “Russia, China and their allies” will be pushing hard to renegotiate the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) set at the World Administrative Telegraph and Telephone Conference held in Melboune in 1988 (WATTC-88). Key provisions in those ITRs facilitated the private expansion of IP-based networks opening the gates to the building of the Internet.
Commissioner McDowell lists several proposals that would emasculate the open successful multistakeholder process that has engineered the growth of the Internet and suggests that they will lead to an eventual balkanization of the network.
He concludes with a call to action to defeat the proposals.
A top-down, centralized, international regulatory overlay is antithetical to the architecture of the Net, which is a global network of networks without borders. No government, let alone an intergovernmental body, can make engineering and economic decisions in lightning-fast Internet time. Productivity, rising living standards and the spread of freedom everywhere, but especially in the developing world, would grind to a halt as engineering and business decisions become politically paralyzed within a global regulatory body.
Any attempts to expand intergovernmental powers over the Internet—no matter how incremental or seemingly innocuous—should be turned back. Modernization and reform can be constructive, but not if the end result is a new global bureaucracy that departs from the multi-stakeholder model. Enlightened nations should draw a line in the sand against new regulations while welcoming reform that could include a nonregulatory role for the ITU.
Pro-regulation forces are, thus far, much more energized and organized than those who favor the multi-stakeholder approach. Regulation proponents only need to secure a simple majority of the 193 member states to codify their radical and counterproductive agenda. Unlike the U.N. Security Council, no country can wield a veto in ITU proceedings. With this in mind, some estimate that approximately 90 countries could be supporting intergovernmental Net regulation—a mere seven short of a majority.
While precious time ticks away, the U.S. has not named a leader for the treaty negotiation. We must awake from our slumber and engage before it is too late. Not only do these developments have the potential to affect the daily lives of all Americans, they also threaten freedom and prosperity across the globe.
Internet Society Senior Manager for Public Policy Sally A. Wentworth has directly filed comments to the WCIT-12, including detailed recommendations (pdf).
She adds:
Further, any expanded regulation at the infrastructure level is likely to have an impact on growth and innovation and should be avoided unless absolutely necessary. In the rare case where a regulatory framework is needed, Member States should commit to ensuring that these are justified, and consist of high-level principles. Regulation should not interfere in commercial decisions, be based on specific technologies or business-models, or seek to substitute government (public-funded) action for the private sector.
The ITRs should enshrine a commitment to the use of open and voluntary international standards. Interoperability, mutual agreement, and collaboration are invariable requirements for the Internet’s survival. Many standards development organizations contribute to the smooth functioning of the Internet, and new standards development organizations have emerged over time, so it is potentially damaging to impose a preference for some standards development organizations (SDOs) over others.
The ITRs should reflect what has been learned about what works best for telecommunication regulation in the 24 years since the WATTC. In particular, its text should seek Member States’ commitment that their regulatory regimes be non-discriminatory, technology neutral, and encourage competition.
Finally, to continue to benefit from what we know about the Internet, the ITRs should strive to be permissive, not restrictive. The text could be improved by committing to develop “soft” regulatory practices such as “codes of practice” and “guidelines” wherever possible, and always in an open and transparent manner, consistent with current practices and with the outcomes of the WSIS.
Ms. Wentworth refers readers to the Internet Society document: Internet Invariants: What Really Matters
Weds Feb 22: The Internet Society’s Washington DC Chapter (ISOC-DC) will webcast live this mornings’s breakfast discussion ‘Social Media and Freedom, Promoting Democracy in the Middle East‘ via Ustream.
What: Social Media and Freedom, Promoting Democracy in the Middle East
When: Wednesday 22 Feb 201 8.30-10.30am EST | 1330-1530 UTC
Webcast: http://www.isoc-dc.org/isoc-dc-tv/
Hashtags @ISOCDC | #netfreedom
Discussion Leaders:
Davin Hutchins – Managing Editor, Middle East Voices at Voice of America
Sherif Mansour – Senior Program Officer, Freedom House
Sirwan Kajjo – Syrian human rights activist and journalist
On February 18 2012 the Internet Society’s New York Chapter (ISOC-NY) participated in the first ever FreedomBox Hackfest, held at the Columbia School of Law in New York City. The FreedomBox is an initiative “to create a network of personal servers to protect privacy during daily life, maintain beachheads of free network access during times of political instability, and open lines of communication during natural disasters.” The project is a direct consequence of the “Freedom in the Cloud” talk that Eben Moglen gave two years, almost to the day, earlier for ISOC-NY.
One foundational issue is the question of how the FreedomBoxes will identify themselves, discover their peers, and know which ones to trust. In our our first video we see a pair of presentations, one by Nic Daley, another by Isaac Wilder, that explore the problem.
ISOC-NY President David Solomonoff took the opportunity to sit down with FreedomBox Executive Director James Vasile to get some background on the project.
A contingent from the The Free Network Foundation was present at the hackfest and, indeed, a prototype of their “Freedom Tower” was in operation to provide participants with connectivity. FNF based local wireless networks, combined with FreedomBox distribution, can be the foundation of powerful community-based autonomous systems. David Solomonoff talked to Isaac Wilder and Marcus Eagan to find out more about the organization, and their forthcoming pilot project in Detroit.
On February 22, 2012 the New York Technology Council will host a panel, “Mobile Technology and Social Change” which will explore how mobile technology is being used as a tool for social change and justice. Speakers include Dani Diaz, Developer Evangelist, Microsoft; J.D. Hollis, Founder, near/far studio; and Hillary Hartley, Director of Integrated Marketing, NIC.
As you may see, non-members will be charged $20 to attend this event, however we have arranged for 15 free seats for ISOC-NY members, first come first served. RSVP via our meetup event to get one. There will be refreshments.
What: Mobile Technology and Social Change
When: Wednesday February 22, 2012. 6pm-8pm
Where: Microsoft, 1290 Ave. of the Americas,New York, NY 10019
Who: 15 ISOC-NY members via meetup.com (free). Others Register ($20)
Webcast: Will be taped for later.
Hashtags: #mobile | @nytechcouncil | #mobilenytech
Sincerely, I think Africans should be given the opportunity to participate in programmes like this. I work in a village in Nigeria as an ICT Facilitator and we have kick-started Mobile-health program. Since there is no time again,please i would like to participate in the subcequent ones> thanks
Please join us at the Internet Society Chapters and Members meeting on Monday 27 February 2012, 6pm Local time (UTC 12.30), hosted by the Internet Society India New Delhi Chapter. The details for remote and on-site participation are below.
LOCATION : Ashok Hotel, Diplomatic Enclave, Chanakayapuri, New Delhi 110019, India
ROOM: Room 294, 612-A Chiranjiv Towers,
TIME: 6.00pm-7.30pm IST | 1230-1330 UST | 0730-0830 EST
DRAFT AGENDA
==
1. Welcome and introduction – Brajesh Jain – Delhi Chapter – 10
2. 2012 Regional bureau update – Rajnesh Singh – 10
3. 2012 plans for Chapter Development – Anne Lord – 10
4. Round table chapter updates and exchange of 2012 plans – ALL – 30
5. Regional preparations WCIT – ALL – 30
6. AOB
7. Closing
(More …)
webcast archive: http://livestre.am/1jbyt | transcript
The Village Voice’s online version of this week’s cover story Rise of the Facebook-Killers begins by quoting Eben Moglen’s presentation at ISOC-NY’s Feb 2010 “Freedom in the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing>” event, but omits to mention ISOC-NY or link to the source. It then goes on to detail the subsequent diaspora project and the newly minted Federated General Assembly, without providing links to those either. Meanwhile the article is peppered with internal VV links. Way to engage your readers VV!
While Moglen gets the last word, his own Freedom Box project – which is mounting a major hackfest in NYC this coming weekend – doesn’t even get a mention.
On January 19 2012 the Copyright Society of the USA‘s NY Chapter presented The Future of Digital Licensing: Still Door-To-Door or One-Stop-Shop? . Speakers were Jay Rosenthal,Senior Vice-President and General Counsel at the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) and Anjali Malhotra, Manager, Content Partnerships, Music for YouTube. Moderator was Jim Griffin, Managing Director of OneHouse LLC. Video is below.
ipod | stills |
Ogunsuyi Ayodeji is discussing.
Reply