May 2007 Archives

Spending hours getting from one place to another via flying used to be almost enjoyable. The planes weren't full, the airline staff were pleasant and the schedules were usually on time. Now, most of those aren't the case, but recently I had a series of pleasant flights and found time to read a provocative article.

Jonathan Zittrain, writing in the Harvard Business Review has an article called "Saving the Internet" (HBR, June 07, p49). He uses a term I'd not heard before - generativity - to refer to the Internet's accessibility and openness. People across the globe can communicate, share and offer new services, opinions, or modify the work of others. Often with unintended results, this communications and sharing has resulted in a richness of innovation.

We may be facing a change to that, brought on by the very success of the Internet. Since bad uses as well as good spring from the generativity of the Internet, are we entering a time when people will sacrifice openness for security? Will we give up the PC model in favor of the cellular model - a limited device with strong access control governed by a central service provider?

He makes a compelling case why that may happen but also offers 4 generative models that have shown persistence and may help us find ways to add additional security while maintaining open access and connectivity:
- Netizenship. Think Wikipedia - a group of people or applictions who monitor and provide advice on security.
- Virtual Machines. Partition personal machines into safe zones and experimental zones.
- More help from ISPs.
- Network neutrality for mash-ups.

Policy is usually a dry subject causeing eyes to glaze over and heads to nod. The effect of policy is another thing. Last year an issue called Net Neutrality seemed to arise from nowhere, much to the surprise of the cable and telephone companies who had been pushing for major reform which never happened. This year a similar event may be underway with internet radio royalty payments.

Internet radio stations or web-radio, have paid royalties to Sound Exchange based on something called average tuning hours. Now though the royalty payment basis has changed to listener hours. This change will drive the total royalty payments to as much as triple the previous charge according to some internet radio operators.

There is an exception for non-commercial web radio stations who have low volume of plays.

An appeal to the original decision to change the rate calculation was, for the most part, denied. The fight has moved now to the Legislative front with a recent Senate bill introduced by Senators Brownback, and Wyden. Titled, Internet Radio Equality Act, the bill number is S. 1353. More information on this bill can be found at
< www.savenetradio.org/071510-wyden.pdf>.