What’s in a herd?

I got to work on a lot of exciting projects when I was at the Berkman Center.  Today, one of them officially launches: Herdict.org. Herdict (herd + verdict) came from the idea that when something goes wrong on the Net, it is often very difficult to tell where the problem is coming from.  A web page doesn’t load: Is it my own connection?  My ISP?  My government?  My typos?  Or, am I the only one getting this weird error message every time I boot up a program?

Even a very skilled user has a limited number of places to go for information when something doesn’t work.  They call a friend, check a message board, and run some diagnostics on the computer and the connection.  Herdict Web is part of a much bigger solution.  It’s a web site and a browser plug-in, and it’s a clearinghouse for web site accessibility.  So, if you can’t get to a site you can report that to herdict.org and that informaiton can be seen by anyone else.  Or, if you’re curious where a site isn’t accessible around the world you can see if anyone has reported the site as accessible or inaccessible.

I remember when this idea was a paragraph in Jonathan Zittrain’s law review article on Generativity.  I was roped into meetings with the designer early on, where Jonathan acted out his vision for the sheep icon: “It’s not an oblivous herd sheep, it’s an indignant sheep, on hind legs with one hand (foot) on hip.”  This is a major crowd-sourcing effort, of Internet users not content to be merely consumers but active participants in their online environment.

For me, about to return to places where the Internet is widely available but connections are slow and prone to hang-ups and blocking, it’s helpful to be able to see how widespread my browsing problems are.

And exciting to see a project I helped shape come to fruition.

Internet as mosh pit

For the past two years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Jonathan Zittrain on his book, The Future of the Internet – and How to Stop It. Throughout the process we kept thinking it would come together, but weren’t quite sure how. It’s clear that it has. Last night, Z appeared on the Colbert Report to talk about the book. Watch it soon, before comedy central takes it away!

Internet filtering and the “slope of the freedom curve”

When the OpenNet Initiative started writing “Access Denied” a little over a year ago, the writers were challenged to consider how the data on what governments are blocking their citizens from reading and posting on the Internet is impacting “the slope of the freedom curve”. At the book release party on Friday, Charlie Nesson brought up the question of whether we can look at government blocking behavior to color in the picture of 1) what governments proactively don’t want people to see and 2) what people are already doing that the government is trying/failing to stop.

In the field of History, there is a set of accepted historiographical methodology that looks at laws proscribed to past societies, in an attempt to understand what people are actually doing. The assumption is that if there’s a law against it, people are (or, if enforcement was good enough, were) doing it. Could looking at filtering behavior color in the recent picture, and connect it to past study?  How much of filtering is proactive, and blocking thing society doesn’t want anyway, like child porn, and how much is reactive?  And how do we, as researchers, tell the difference?

The FCC, policy overseas, and other ramblings

I spent the day taking pictures and wandering in and out of the FCC’s hearing on Comcast filtering BitTorrent, hosted by Berkman in Ames Courtroom at HLS. It was a heady day, full of debate and argument, and a pleasantly surprising amount of openness from the commissioners. They asked pointed questions of the panelists and gave time for responses, even asked follow-up questions.

With respect to my work with ONI, I was asked the question by a commissioner’s staffer of whether we look to FCC guidelines when we are assessing other governments’ filtering policies around the world. And honestly, I hadn’t thought of it that way before. We so often just look at the rest of the world and try to deduce a government’s actions, without looking at our own government as an example, or a starting point for an argument.

The candidness and deep sense of commitment I discerned from the commissioners and those who work on these issues every day might make me change my mind.

Tim Wu brought up the question of foreign policy at the hearing, that the decisions made about broadband traffic preference here at home could be used as an example overseas, and possibly misused. He cautioned the FCC to consider this when creating policy. So if we are to create policy that is not just exportable, but desirable as an example, what would it be?

Then came up the argument of abundance, that in this case traditional market regimes that are based upon scarcity are not necessary. The argument goes that telecoms (and other Internet services) create false scarcity in order to build value for their services, when in fact they could build a business model around abundance, which would serve the public better. If we simply had enough bandwidth, we would not be arguing about Comcast filtering BitTorrent traffic because they say torrents slow the network down.

Now comes the open question. If we are to create desirable exportable policy and consider a model of abundance, that better serves us here at home, what do we say to countries dealing with bandwidth issues across the board, where it is not an issue of false scarcity but true scarcity? Must they have a different policy? Is there ever a case in which we might adopt a sub-utopian policy at home in order to benefit those overseas?

Draft Lessig!

When CA Congressman Tom Lantos passed away last week, he left an empty seat. Those of us who have been watching Larry Lessig’s bold take-on of the flawed system of funding members of Congress were excited to see some rumblings towards encouraging him to run. The rumblings have been growing, and they’re having an effect. Larry Lessig posted a video describing his reaction to the DraftLessig (dare I say) movement. It’s fun when the person you’re trying to convince doesn’t have to be convinced to buy into the medium (blog posts and Facebook group), as well as the message.