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A Wall Street Journal story about a proposed agreement between Google and Internet Service Providers suggests that Google is pulling a double-cross, given its prior commitment to Net Neutrality. Unfortunately the details of the proposal haven’t been made public. But the consensus of the knowledgeable is that the WSJ misunderstands what is going on and that Net Neutrality is not threatened by Google’s proposal. A greater worry is perhaps about the implications of Google’s increasingly monopoly power over bits, but that wouldn’t mean that its packets got delivered faster than those of some minor player.) Thanks to Steve Schultze for pointing me to this collection of comments.

FCC chairman Kevin Martin proposed to make a slice of spectrum available to private companies that would deploy nation-wide broadband Internet service — with the catch that all indecent materials would be filtered out. I wrote about what a bad idea this was in the Boston Globe not long ago.

Under pressure from the White House and members of Congress, Martin has cancelled next week’s meeting at which this controversial plan was be voted. The White House is opposed to complicating the spectrum auction process; Congress doesn’t want the FCC to vote anything that will immediately wind up in court. In any case, only one company had shown any interest in the plan, and in the changed economic conditions, even that one might not have found it a profitable venture.

A bullet has been dodged. Let’s hope that the next FCC doesn’t revive this idea. Here is an excellent post explaining the dilemma that will be facing the Obama administration.

Google prides itself on the objectivity of the algorithm it uses for ranking search results. No payment for placement, and no editorial judgments being made behind closed doors. A recent interview with a top Google executive is creating some buzz that this may be changing just a bit.

Google offers a feature that enables users to re-order their own search results — useful if you expect to search for the same thing again and want it to appear at the top of the list. You would also be able to indicate that you don’t want a particular result to appear at all in the future. These are the faint square boxes to the right of search results — an up-arrow with a horizontal bar over it to promote a particular result, and an X to eliminate a result.

These re-orderings affect only your own subsequent searches. At least that’s the way things work right now. Here is the crucial passage in the TechCrunch interview:

[Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience  Marissa] Mayer also talked about Google’s use of user data created by actions on Wiki search to improve search results on Google in general. For now that data is not being used to change overall search results, she said. But in the future it’s likely Google will use the data to at least make obvious changes. An example is if “thousands of people” were to knock a search result off a search page, they’d be likely to make a change.

Now that raises a couple of interesting possibilities, as reported by two industry critics. The first is that a new front will be opened in the cat-and-mouse game with the search engine optimization companies. Perhaps, for example, you can get your competitor knocked off the first page of search results by getting enough users to do so individually. Google’s engineers are smart enough to counter such simple tactics, but perhaps not slightly more ingenious measures.

The other possibility is that there are human beings reviewing the patterns of movements, and making editorial judgments about which should be incorporated into the general search results. Mayer does say “they‚Äôd be likely to make a change,” and while this is just an interview and she probably wasn’t choosing her words as though she was under oath, it’s an interesting question just how the decision to re-order search results in response to user actions would be implemented.

As we discuss in Blown to Bits, there have long been individual cases of editorial judgment, though most complainants about their placement seem simply to have lousy web sites by Google’s explicit standards. One has to wonder if this latest tweak isn’t going to open a major can of worms. Happily, it’s the sort of thing that can be tested quietly, and abandoned quietly if it doesn’t work out well.

Blown to Bits is now available for free download, under a Creative Commons license. You’ll notice that the tab above that used to say “Excerpts” has been relabeled “Download,” and the Download page has links not just to excerpts but to PDFs of the individual chapters.

There has been a flurry of activity the last few days about a particular image on Wikipedia. I had intended to blog it sooner, and now it has — sort of — resolved itself. But there is a larger lesson that remains important.

The image was on the cover of an album called Virgin Killer, by the band Scorpion. The album was released more than 30 years ago. The cover shows a naked 11-year-old girl with an image of glass, cracked in a star pattern, strategically covering her genitals. Or perhaps, positioned so as to draw the eye to that part of her body. The cover was naughty enough that the music publisher changed the cover in many markets, but apparently no one has ever labeled it illegal child pornography, until this week.

In the UK, the Internet Watch Foundation blacklisted the Wikipedia page that discusses the album, which includes an image of the cover. Now the IWF is not a government organization, but the major ISPs rely on it voluntarily to identify pages and sites containing illegal child pornography. Because of some technicalities that are well explained here, that led to Wikipedia being uneditable from most computers in the UK. There was a furor, the Wikipedia folks refused to remove the image. Today the IWF backed down and unblocked the Wikipedia page, explaining that the image had been around like forever, and more people were viewing it because the IWF had censored it than ever would have viewed it otherwise.

Now there is a lot to be said about this, about how hard it is to censor the Internet and how delicately the whole thing is actually held together. But the most interesting observation is the one Chris Soghoian makes in this editorial. The U.S. has an agency much like the IWF — it’s called¬†The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). That’s the place U.S. ISPs go to get a list of objectionable web sites.

What’s odd about both the IWF and NCMEC is that they are agents of the criminal justice system that operate outside the government. That means their decisions can’t be appealed (though it looks like Wikipedia found some way to appeal the IWF decision). And their procedures can be kept secret — for example, NCMEC is immune from U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

So Chris states in his editorial’s title: It’s time for a child porn czar. Oh god, thought I; another federal bureaucracy. But he’s right, not because it’s good to create bureaucracies, but because we already have one, and it’s accountable to no one. If this censorship function is going to take place, at the request of the U.S. government, then let’s make it part of the government so we can know what it does.

P.S. The Virgin Killer album cover is easy to find; Google will take you to it immediately. I owe it to you to report that someone who should know thinks it really does qualify as child pornography under U.S. law, and therefore illegal to possess, even though in more than 30 years that’s never been charged by any authority. (In addition to which, you may well not like it.)

Jonathan Zittrain has a readable one-page summary of this book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it, in this week’s Newsweek. Between this and Hal’s review you can get a good sense of his argument. It’s an important one.

And that book and Blown to Bits have both made it on Adam Thierer’s List of the year’s Most Important Tech Policy Books.

P.S. I’ll be speaking at the Harvard Club of Boston Tuesday night, Dec, 9, and at the Harvard Club of Washington, DC on Thursday, Dec. 11. Still time to sign up, I think!

That’s the name of rule, no longer in force, requiring political balance in radio broadcasting. As the right has come to dominate talk radio and the left has taken control of both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, talk of reinstating the doctrine is on the rise. George Will has an excellent column today making that case that the doctrine would, most likely, prove to be unconstitutional. After all, the First Amendment doesn’t say that the federal government should guarantee that all sides are heard; it says that the government has to stay out of deciding what should be heard.

Will notes that part of the rationale for the fairness doctrine was the scarcity argument — that there was only so much radio spectrum so the government needed to have some rules for allocating it. As he states,

The court’s 1969 ruling relied heavily on the scarcity rationale. But Brian Anderson and Adam Thierer, in their book “A Manifesto for Media Freedom,” note that today there are about 14,000 radio stations, twice as many as in 1969, and 18.9 million subscribers to satellite radio, up 17 percent in 12 months; 86 percent of households with either cable or satellite television receive an average of 102 of the 500 available channels. Because daily newspapers are much more scarce than are radio and television choices, should there be a fairness doctrine for TheNew York Times?

I haven’t read the Anderson-Thierer book (but I should: Thierer wrote a nice review of Blown to Bits). But the numbers Will quotes are only part of the reason why the scarcity argument is bogus. The way the radio spectrum is divided is an artifact of 1930s radio engineering. There are much more efficient methods today — without which it would have been impossible for most people to have their own radio station, in the form of a cell phone. As we say in Chapter 8,

There is no reason to re-establish a “Fairness Doctrine,” like that which until 1987 required stations to present multiple points of view. If there were more channels, the government would not have any need, or authority, to second-guess the editorial judgment of broadcasters. Artificial spectrum scarcity has, in the words of Justice William O. Douglas, enabled “administration after administration to toy with TV or radio in order to serve its sordid or its benevolent ends.” Justice Frankfurter’s claim that “there is no room in the broadcast band for every business or school of thought” is now false.

To get broadcast regulation right, you need to know the history and you need to know the engineering. That’s the story we tell in Chapter 8 of Blown to Bits, a remarkable drama in which Marconi, John Romulus Brinkley, Hedy Lamarr, Felix Frankfurter, and Claude Shannon all play their parts. I hope Obama’s team knows the story.

John Markoff has a good story in the NYT today about the global war on malware, or malicious software, which has gotten a lot harder as computers have gotten connected to the Internet and have gotten powerful enough to serve as agents of the forces of evil. The theme is the scary side of Zittrain’s Future of the Internet– and How to Stop It, without the “How to Stop It” part. Markoff can’t find anyone to say that the problem of malware, and all the online thefts and destructiveness that go with it, are going to be solved any time soon. Markoff explains,

The sophistication of the programs has in the last two years begun to give them almost lifelike capabilities. For example, malware programs now infect computers and then routinely use their own antivirus capabilities to not only disable antivirus software but also remove competing malware programs.

Some people are trying, however, and the most impressive efforts are not coming from the places you might expect. One might have thought that the corporations that make the most money from the Internet would be most exercised about making sure that in five years people will still be prepared to use it. But in fact the most imagination is being applied by non-profits — essentially the people for whom Internet openness is a mission in life, not a meal ticket. Let me give a shout here to my friends at the StopBadWare project, who have lined up some important partners — Google, most notably –in this difficult fight.

Don Knuth, the father of modern computer science, has for forty years been paying people to discover errors in his books. Catching the master in some minor oversight or typographical inconsistency was a grand game, at which everyone won: the lowliest sophomore could become a local hero, while adding to the sum of knowledge embodied in Knuth’s great encyclopedia of the field. It became such an honor to receive a small check from Knuth that almost no one ever cashed them (most people, as Knuth wryly observed, cached them instead). The proud display of a Knuthian check has apparently caused his bank account numbers to leak into the public domain, and his bank accounts have been broken into. Here is Knuth’s explanation of how this happens, and the larger lesson:

Leading banks and investment funds have been foundering, because of bad debts and lack of trust; and other, less well-known kinds of fiscal chaos are also on the horizon. For example, due to an unfixable security flaw in the way funds are now transferred electronically, worldwide,¬†it is no longer safe to write personal checks. A criminal who sees the numbers that are printed at the bottom of any check that you write can use that information to withdraw all the money from your account. He or she can do this in various ways, without even knowing your name — for example by creating an ATM card, or by impersonating a bank in some country of the world where safeguards are minimal, or by printing a document that looks like a check. The account number and routing information are all that international financial institutions look at before deciding to transfer funds from one account to another.

The end of personal checks may not be a big deal–we can certainly see it happening de facto. I used to write dozens every month, but with online banking and electronic fund transfers, I am down to two or three per month, and even that number is decreasing rapidly. I hadn’t thought about this being a real loss to anyone. But for those of us who know the enormous symbolic value of a $2.56 check from Don Knuth, his new plan doesn’t feel quite the same:

After painful deliberation I’ve come up with a new plan, which I hope will be acceptable to all concerned, and perhaps even welcomed as an improvement. Instead of rewarding heroic bug-finders with dollars, I shall henceforth award brownie points, otherwise known as hexadecimal dollars (0x$). From now on it will be kudos, not escudos.

Instead of writing personal checks,¬†I’ll write personal certificates of deposit to each awardee’s account at the Bank of San Serriffe, which is an offshore institution that has branches in Blefuscu and Elbonia on the planet Pincus.

Times change. Checks were always a way of transferring information, so turning them into bits makes all kinds of sense, but sometimes even those monetary informational chits carry a lot of emotional clout.

Surveillance cameras have been popping up where I live, in Brookline, Massachusetts, a town contiguous with Boston but with a very distinct history. And governance: we still have an old-fashioned Town Meeting, where the elected representatives of our districts are ordinary citizens, who work with a Town Manager, not a Mayor.

As reported in the Brookline Tab, our local paper, folks have had enough of the profusion of cameras. This one article has all the themes laid out; it could be a template for debates elsewhere. The police chief:

“It’s never been our intent, and it’s not our intent, to spy on people. It’s our intent to take advantage of technology to make Brookline a safe place.”

The righteous citizenry:

Opponents of the system — which include the Progressive Democrats of Massachusetts, Brookline PAX, state Rep. Frank Smizik and several dozen residents — have described the system as the first step toward a slippery slope of police surveillance. Several residents referenced George Orwell’s dystopian novel, “1984.”

The conformists:

If the board chooses to reject the cameras, it would be the only community in greater Boston not linked to the system.

The privacy zealots:

Several said they feared that the Department of Homeland Security could eventually demand access to footage from the cameras, or that hackers could break into the network and view live video feeds. Archived footage would also be subject to public records requests, meaning that any member of the public could potentially access stored videos — something that has concerned even town officials.

The free-speech libertarians:

Abram Chipman, a Washington Street resident who holds a weekly vigil in Coolidge Corner protesting the war in Iraq, said he would feel less comfortable knowing police could be watching his activities. Joan Lancourt, a resident of Beaconsfield Road, said she worried the cameras would have a “chilling effect” on political protest in Brookline. “I was dismayed, because the potential for self-censorship is real,” she said.

Maybe it’s not really about crime, but emergency evacuation:

“Having a camera allows for prenotice, of some degree, of what is coming on the roadway,” said Gary Toth, a Gardner Road resident and volunteer for the Community Emergency Response Team.

Or maybe it really is about crime:

Two test cameras have already aided in several incidents, including a sexual assault and drunken driving crash.

The article also raises the proper questions about cost and about how long the data will be retained.

I love this town, because of its diversity. My kids’ elementary school classes had scores of native languages. But the other thing it has is a diversity of ideas, and a population prepared to express them — a good, old-fashioned, blooming, buzzing democratic cacophony.