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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That’s the name of rule, no longer in force, requiring political balance in radio broadcasting.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.

Since writing about the weird application of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in the Lori Drew case, I’ve gotten more fascinated, and bewildered, by all those terms you have to click “I agree” to in order to use web sites. You’ll recall that Drew was convicted of “unauthorized access” to a computer because she had made up a bogus MySpace identity, in contradiction to the MySpace Terms and Conditions, which stipulate:

By using the MySpace Services, you represent and warrant that (a) all registration information you submit is truthful and accurate; (b) you will maintain the accuracy of such information; (c) you are 14 years of age or older; and (d) your use of the MySpace Services does not violate any applicable law or regulation.

So apparently, under (b), you’re in violation of these terms if you say that Bobby is your boyfriend, and he dumps you but you don’t update your MySpace page to reflect that. (What else could it mean?)

The more you look at these “agreements” — which virtually no one ever reads — the stranger they look. Here is another clause from MySpace’s:

MySpace.com may modify this Agreement from time to time and such modification shall be effective upon posting by MySpace.com on the MySpace Website. You agree to be bound to any changes to this Agreement when you use the MySpace Services after any such modification is posted.

Now how weird is that? Is there any other circumstance under which you would sign a contract, one clause of which stated that the other party could change the entire contract at any time, without notifying you personally, just posting the revised contract in a public place, and that by signing the present contract you were agreeing to be bound by the terms of any such revised contract?

Google’s is also very odd:

2.1 In order to use the Services, you must first agree to the Terms. You may not use the Services if you do not accept the Terms.

2.2 You can accept the Terms by:

(A) clicking to accept or agree to the Terms, where this option is made available to you by Google in the user interface for any Service; or

(B) by actually using the Services. In this case, you understand and agree that Google will treat your use of the Services as acceptance of the Terms from that point onwards.

2.3 You may not use the Services and may not accept the Terms if (a) you are not of legal age to form a binding contract with Google, or (b) you are a person barred from receiving the Services under the laws of the United States or other countries including the country in which you are resident or from which you use the Services.

So in Massachusetts, where you have to be 18 (I think) to sign a contract, you can’t use the Google search engine, because by doing so you have implicitly agreed to Google’s TOS. And no child should ever have a Gmail account. You’d think they’d mention that a bit more visibly if they actually cared, wouldn’t you?

Such terms are stated, apparently, to give these services legal leeway to dump a tiny number of bad actors, not necessarily for their actual bad acting but for something. “Selective prosecution” is fine in civil matters, I suppose. But there is something strange about all this.

Lawyers, left to their own devices, will protect their clients to the max. They will want to get you if you venture somewhere near this tiny bulls-eye, so they will draw a legal circle a thousand miles in every direction around that spot. If you look like you are thinking about the bulls-eye in Harvard Square, they can throw you off the reservation because you wandered near Toledo.

What’s odd is that there doesn’t seem to be any counter-pressure. The TOS are rarely enforced, so there are not a lot of unhappy customers. When they are enforced, somebody loses access to a web site, not a big deal. There isn’t a lot of competition, so there is not much incentive for people to abandon one site because of its expansive TOS and sign up for another whose TOS are simpler.

So the situation seems unstable. What’s to prevent TOS from becoming ever more expansive, as lawyers get more clever and the sites’ gain experience about lawsuits from which they need to protect themselves?

I can’t imagine that even the Lori Drew decision, where adherence to TOS weirdly became a matter of criminal law, will make anyone start reading or paying attention to those documents.

Alex Beam has a good piece today on the complexities of Google Books. This is Google’s program of scanning in books, in furtherance of its general corporate mission of organizing all the world’s information and making it universally accessible. And, of course, to draw more eyeballs to their advertising while they are at it. Nothing wrong with that, and the Books site is, for the time being at least, laudably clean.

Now there was a certain disagreement between Google and certain authors and publishers about whether what Google was doing was legit copyright-wise, and Google recently settled up. That’s an important story. But Beam notes that libraries are having a different worry — they worry about Google becoming the sole point of access to digitized books. Some alternative venues exist and are growing. Certainly we should hope they succeed, simply because corporate monopolies are dangerous.

Beam praises Harvard’s library for dropping out of the deal, because the agreement between Harvard and Google imposed too many restrictions on the redistribution of the digitized material. What he doesn’t ask is why Harvard signed a bad deal in the first place. And the answer is: there was a different librarian and a different president then, and almost no one was consulted about the terms.

In a 2005 post entitled How Harvard and Google Got In Bed Together,¬†the ever-vigilant Richard Bradley noted that Sheryl Sandberg, who negotiated the deal on Google’s side, had been the chief of staff to Larry Summers, who, one might reasonably imagine, had a lot to do with cutting the deal on Harvard’s side (though the name in the news at the time was library head Sidney Verba, not Summers). See also a later post, Harvard Goes Ga-Ga Over Google.

Sandberg has been quite visible during the past few weeks defending Summers’ record on women, while his name was still in the air as a possible Treasury Secretary (for example, writing about Larry Summers’ True Record on Women).

I don’t doubt the truth of a word of what Sandberg says about Summers and women. The issue of women faculty has been way overblown as the source of Summers’ downfall at Harvard. The more serious issues had to do with the way he mixed friendships and business to Harvard’s detriment, most notably the scandal surrounding Andrei Shleifer’s role in Harvard’s venture to help the Russian economy. This deal between Harvard and Google also may have seemed good for both parties but could have used a few more independent eyeballs to prevent the problems that the new Harvard administration apparently identified. Has Summers learned his lessons about the wisdom of a bit more consultation and transparency?

The New York Times had an excellent story yesterday,¬†You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy? It has many of the usual themes — young people don’t value their privacy very much, especially if they get social connections in exchange for it. There is an interesting angle about how businesses are discovering the efficiencies that result from better interactions between workers, so this research is turning into a business management tool. But what I find most interesting is the orientation of the researchers doing this work.

“For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,‚Äù Dr. [Thomas] Malone [director of the M.I.T. Center for Collective Intelligence]¬†said. ‚ÄúIn some sense we‚Äôre becoming a global village. Privacy¬†may turn out to have become an anomaly.‚Äù

I wonder — is that a validated fact of anthropology? Whether it is or it isn’t, isn’t it also a statement with vast political implications in a nation dedicated to individual rights?

I’ve been writing about Internet censorship, not just in Blown to Bits but in the Boston Globe (The Dangers of Internet Censorship). In a fascinating piece entitled Blacklisted in Cyberspace, James McGrath Morris describes a form of censorship I hadn’t encountered, consciously at least.

Morris publishes a monthly newsletter about the craft of writing biographies. Hardly sexy stuff, you’d think.

He runs his copy through a spam-checking software tool, to see if the spam filters of his recipients’ email servers or personal computers are likely to discard the newsletter before it is even delivered. He was shocked to discover that his last issue had a spam score that was through the roof. Why? I’ll quote:

Three sets of words among the issue’s many articles could derail my e-mail: a reference to “young adult,” a common classification for books intended for adolescent readers; a sentence in my editorial — “Speaking of legal matters, it’s getting nasty out there” — referring to the growing number of lawsuits; and a distinguished biographer’s discussion of writing a book for children that included the following comment: “At my public library I queried the children’s division librarian — what works, what does not, who is ‘hot.'”¬†The inclusion of “young adult,” “getting nasty” and “hot” among the thousands of words in my publication was like poison.

What’s an author to do? “Write around” these everyday phrases to satisfy the demands of the spam-checking software? Perhaps — but if the next release of the software is even more censorious, where would it end?

Ever get irritated that you have to register with a Web site to see something? When what you’re looking for is a one-off, and you have no reason to think you’ll ever want to go back to the site again, it’s annoying to have to supply an email address and other information with which you can be spammed and otherwise hounded later on.

Enter bugmenot. Type in the URL of a site requiring registration, and it gives you back a handle you can use to get into the site. A great privacy-preserver.

Ethical? You decide. But I’ll bet almost every heavy Web user has used some deceptive measure to avoid being tracked (for example, a fake name or an email address reserved only for these registration demands).

Ethical or not, it looks like using this site could set you up for doing some hard time in a federal penitentiary. Lori Drew was convicted of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act because the jury deemed that by creating a fake identity as a boy, she had gained “unauthorized access” to the servers of MySpace, whose Terms of Service state that registration information must be truthful. By that logic, anyone using bugmenot is setting themselves up for indictment on the same charge.

The implications of the Drew decision are breathtaking. It looks like the federal government is getting into the business of enforcing truth-telling even in purely social uses of the Web.