Tag Archives: Internet

Net Neutrality, Let your Voice be heard

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The FCC is currently taking comments on the net neutrality issue. Please contact them. The agency is currently completely overwhelmed with the feedback on Net Neutrality, but even still, more voices might help tip the scales that are pretty obviously stacked against us. It’s like the scales used to weigh if the witch weighs the same as a duck in Monty Python’s Holy Grail. One of the most important things about net neutrality is the scope that the ISPs actually own in this debate. They are dictating the terms of this debate through money – they make the most, they charge the most, and they have monopolies. This cartoon really helps explain what the ISPs actually own (click here or the picture to see all of the comic).

Economix comix depiction of Net Neutrality

That’s right, basically if you live off a street that says “road not maintained by such and such county”(lots of them where I live) THAT’s the portion the ISP maintains. That’s why a lot of these arguments are over “the last mile.” Basically it’s the mile from their data center that connects to the backbone of the internet to your house. In other industries it might be maintained by one company, but any company can use it. Think about back when you had a modem. You could have that service provided by ANYONE – that’s why AOL got so big they offered free time to just about everyone. Almost everyone signed up and anyone could because the last mile wasn’t maintained by your phone company and had to be shared. DSL still has that requirement only Cable and FiOS don’t and that’s because they were classified as a “information service” rather than a common carrier. The highway above is a common carrier.

If you’d like to see this changed, please go to the FCC and comment (if you can) the link is here: http://www.fcc.gov/comments click on 14-28 and try to leave a comment.

It’s up to us to fight for net neutrality. I’ve left at least two comments. I’ve signed several petitions. I’ve donated to mayone.us all because one of these alone isn’t enough. I’ve contacted by Senator and I know he supports Net Neutrality. If your company is an internet company or uses a large amount of bandwidth on a regular basis see if your company will come out in support of Net Neutrality. It’s the only way we’ll win. We need to get over whelming support.

Driverless cars aren’t without ethical quandaries

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While driving home the other day I was thinking about the new Google Driverless car stuff that I’ve seen. It’s an interesting looking vehicle, see it below. Apparently, one of the reasons why Google went fully autonomous was that people would be first hyper vigilant, then so lazy that they completely trusted the car in any and every situation.

Google’s fully automated driverless car

I believe it’s likely that the first round of driverless cars won’t be fully automated. Data will eventually show that the fully automated cars are perfectly safe, but we’re a paranoid lot when it comes to new technology. I also think that there are definitely risks with a fully autonomous car in regard to hacking and spoofing the system. I have a feeling that will become a game with hackers to try to trick the car into thinking that a direction is safe when it is actually not. To continually combat these risks Google will have to make it very easy to update the software, possibly while driving, as well as the hardware. I believe this is one of the many reasons why Google just announced their 180 internet satellites that they will be launching soon.

However, I think that the best of intentions will likely lead to some serious issues for Google and law makers in the next few years. For some of them an author at the Guardian wrote a few of them. That being said, I think that the first cars will not be fully automatic until enough data comes into show they are safe going highway speeds consistently. I think that this will lead to issues for Google.

One of the things that is missed in the Guardian article above is that if you’re an Android user, those very things could happen already. Your phone already tracks not just GPS but also nearby cell towers, so you could very easily subpoena either Google or your cell provider for records of your whereabouts. However, the interesting thing that Google talks about in regard to safety, is that drunk driving will be a think of the past.

As I mentioned before I think that there will be a manual mode and I think there will have to be one for a while because of definite hacker threats. You’d need to override. I also think that this would require a mechanical switch that literally overrides the system. The system would still run, but would not be able to override the human driver. Maybe I’m just paranoid, but I don’t think that anyone can create a truly secure vehicle like this and if one is compromised then all of them would be under the exact same risk.

Now, let’s say a guy goes out drinking. Google knows where he is. Google knows that he took pictures of his shots Instagraming “#drinktilyoublackout!”. Google also knows that he texted a few friends through Hangouts fully integrated texting capability. Furthermore, he tweets to @Google “Getting Black out drunk no #DD #DriverlessFTW”. This guy then gets into the car, switches it to manual override for whatever reason gets in an accident, who is at fault here? Clearly the guy that’s driving right? Well, if he had a fully automated car with no other option he’d not hurt anyone. Google knows everything he’s doing. Google knows everywhere you go already because of how their devices work. The difference is now that they can control where you’re going and how you get there.

Is Google responsible for building a car with a manual override that could save people’s lives in other instances? Is the State responsible for mandating that Google put in that switch? Should Google have built in safety measures that make the user go through a series of actions or prove the driver is capable of overriding the car?

I think that we need to hash out all of these before these cars are allowed on the road. I also think it’s going to be vitally important that we understand what happens with that data from all our cars, who can access it, and if we really have any privacy in a fully automated car like that. Simply by participating in our culture with a cell phone we’ve already eroded our privacy a great deal in both the public and private realm. Driverless cars will further impact that and will likely end up being a highly political issue over the next several years. Taxis, Lyft, and Uber will be out of business – the Car2Go model will beat them out any day of the week if the cars are autonomous. Direct to customers, like Tesla is pretty obvious. Lots of changes are going to happen through these cars.

We can’t just let this happen to us, we need to make decisions about how we want to include driverless cars in our lives. They aren’t inevitable and definitely not in their current incarnation.

Comcast and regulation

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I believe that the 300 GB data cap that Comcast is tossing around is tomorrow’s 640k predictions from Microsoft. In 5 years when they are claiming to plan to implement it, 300GB will be woefully small. As it stands many games are 50GB and likely will only grow. As will the size of our movies we stream and other services that will develop in the next five years.

Comcast’s arrogant attitude towards it’s customers can only be described economically in one way: market failure.  If we had a strong competitive telecom market, Comcast would not be able to dictate prices in this way. We know this is true because we can see prices AND speeds that are significantly better elsewhere in the world.

There are two other results of this market failure, pushing regulation that prevents competition and preventing regulation that would prevent a foreclosure of another market. I’ll start with the regulation preventing competition.

In my last blog I mentioned an idea call private public partnership. This is the concept of a municipality working with a private enterprise to spread the risk of implementing a local high speed network because one of the big players won’t. Comcast and other telecoms have pushed and been successful at making these partnerships illegal in a few states. This means a small rural community can’t develop their own fiber network if comcast doesn’t do it for them. It also means a big city like New York couldn’t either. This type of regulation only hurts competition and helps comcast control the market. In the US these partnerships have worked well. Provo Utah sold theirs to Google.

The other way that Comcast is using this market failure is to push the idea that net neutrality is regilation. It is a bit, because it prevents comcast from using a monopoly to foreclose another market. This is what Microsoft got in trouble for with Internet Explorer.  Leveraging the monopoly of Windows to push out other browsers. In the EU the ruling against MS really help other browsers immediately. Comcast will likely try a similar tactic with their Xfinity platform by never having it count against your data cap. Pushing people to their platform and squeezing out Netflix.

The play to get Netflix to pay them is a long term play, hurts Netflix now, but essentially will be funding further development of Xfinity.  Don’t forget, Xfinity will likely get Universal content earlier as they own that conent. This will give their platform a distinct advantage over Netflix. It’s pretty obvious to everyone that the future of in home entertainment is streaming content. Hence, Google looking to buy Twitch.

Comcast is using the anti – regulation faction to fight net neutrality while leveraging that same group’s anti- government sentiment to prevent novel forms of competition to exploit customers and move into new markets. This is a dangerous problem because they will keep doing this to push out other competitors.

Book Review: The People’s Platform: Taking back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

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I just finished reading “The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age” by Astra Taylor  I really found this book to be interesting. I believe it offered a very different critique on the digital age than Evegny Morozov’s “Click here to Save everything” where he focused on the arrogance of the algorithm and total solutionism of the movement, Taylor focused on the cultural cost of our digital economy. I think combined the philosophizing of Morozov with Taylor’s discussion of the value of culture and the economic forces behind these changes is an extremely powerful argument. Alone they are both excellent, but I think they offer balancing points that compliment each other well.

First of all, I don’t think everyone will like this book. I don’t think a lot of my readers will like large portions of the book. However, even the most libertarian will agree with some portions of it. I think that’s the power of this book. It’s not really fair to one side or the other, although is really obvious she has a bias – which she wears pretty proudly. Knowing this bias is there allows the reader to decide which portion is Occupy Wall street dreaming or which is really a problem (of course one can go too far either direction).

Taylor’s cultural argument is powerful because we are all part of that economy. We all consume cultural artifacts or perhaps, like myself, make them. The fact that these have been commoditzed to a cost of nothing while still valuable is something we deal with daily. The choice between pirating a movie, renting, streaming it on Netflix, or buying it all are choices we decide on a regular basis. I think that even the most hardcore pirate buys a lot of cultural goods.

Many of us, even if we don’t produce cultural goods, know someone that does. You might watch a video game streamer, you might have a friend or two that are in various bands, you might read my blog or another friend’s blog. All of these people want to use these artifacts to either live on or perhaps enhance their career in some fashion.

However, in the digital space most of the companies that share or distribute cultural activities are funded by ads. Twitch makes most of it money from ads, Google makes $50 billion/year on ads, Facebook makes the most money on an ad whenever a friend “Sponsors” that ad with or without our active agreement to “sponsor” the ad.

Taylor argues that we need to help develop a cultural public space that helps create value for other cultural goods that you may not actually consume (which is why I wrote this blog).

Many of the ideas in the book are anti-corporation, but not because they make money. Instead, it’s because they make money in ways that aren’t obviously ads and that control our cultural destiny. She is pro-net neutrality, she supports companies making profits from ads, but she argues for more transparency that an article is actually sponsored.

Her argument isn’t that we should tear down companies, but instead that we pull back some of the power that these companies have simply taken without any real conversation. We need to look at the ethics behind the algorithms they are using and understand their biases. We need to enable true conversations about these topics. Ad driven content leads to self-censorship and lower quality products.

Is this book perfect? Not by a long shot, but it really made me think about some topics and I think that we need to have more conversations about not just ads, but also about why companies behave the way they do. We need to find a better balance than we currently have.

I rate the book 5/5 for making me really think about topics

The Value of Culture

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A friend of mine sent me a link about the variety of dialects found in Pennsylvania, it’s a pretty cool read. The article basically argues that because of the number of dialects, 5 in total, Pennsylvania is one of the most interesting states in the US for linguists. It reminded me of whenever I first moved to the Netherlands. I made a few friends and they were always making fun of the Limburgians because Limburgese sounds really funny. It’s has a mixture of Dutch, German, Spanish, and other stuff, plus they say the Dutch words really funny. So I decided to play them a PIttsburghese song, they couldn’t understand a word in the song. They actually asked me if it was English.

Which brings me to my next point, the Netherlands, which is roughly half the size of PA, has 2 languages at least 5 dialects (Limburgese is on it’s way to being a third language). Sure the country has a lot more people 18 million vs. 12 million, but there’s a lot more diversity in their language than in PA. Which is pretty interesting – especially considering that they’ve kept this variety whenever they also know somewhere between 3-5 languages (Dutch, English, German, Spanish, French for example). One of the concerns of the Slate article about PA is that the folks that leave decide to lose their accents which isn’t the case in the Netherlands.

These are all part of the local culture and language is one of the best representations of a culture. The words that people use to describe things really influences the way they want to live. For example the Dutch word “Gezellig” (link explains how to say the word) doesn’t really have an English translation the closest being “warm and cozy” for a room, but can be used in many different contexts (most beyond my understanding of the application). This word kind of represents a goal of a gathering, house, or anything. I think it strongly influences who the Dutch are and who they want to be their friends. It’s embedded in their culture.

I’m currently reading a book called “People’s Platform” which has a huge emphasis on culture and the cultural enablers of the internet. The internet is both the best thing and worst thing that has ever happened to our culture. It’s fantastic because I can still find out about awesome bands from friends all over the world, but it’s also extremely isolating because of algorithms that shape how we find content from 3rd parties. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve heard people express the thoughts that people are the best at recommending a new band compared to Pandora.

We have the opportunity to expand our culture a little bit if we put forth the effort. However, that’s a lot of effort. It’s hard to find people you have things in common with on some platforms and it’s easier to just find the popular people and follow them. I’ve made the effort to keep Dutch connects on my twitter feed because I loved living there. I have intentionally followed many women because I want to see their opinions as well as a few minorities. However, for the most part they are fairly under represented. It’s tough, because you want things that interest you on your twitter feed and a lot of people are into very different things than I am.

Which begs the question, how do we ensure a robust culture in an environment where we and our algorithms are actively trying to homogenize the cultural goods we interact with? This isn’t an easy problem to answer especially since we like free goods on the internet. I stream Pandora for free (ads on my phone), I haven’t bought an actual song or album in years. I want to support bands, but I know so little goes to the actual band these days. For Twitch I support 2 people (kbmod and nipnops) because I know the money goes to them to help produce the content I love. However, even with all the people paying, it’s not enough to allow nipnops to live solely on this income.

I think that we should seriously consider a living wage for artists and entertainers. I believe there is a need to support content I don’t like because we need to make sure that people see it. If the Dutch don’t understand all aspects of Americans (they’d never heard of Pittsburghese) how can we ever hope to understand other cultures if we don’t help enable them to reach us?

 

What are your thoughts?