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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.

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!

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?

Tennessee State University and Hampton University, two historically black institutions, are blocking students’ access to JuicyCampus.com, the leading site for vicious, anonymous gossip about (the sex lives of) college students. The administrators who made the decision cite the Virginia Tech tragedy. One said, “We need to be more thoughtful, and we really need to be more careful in targeting and attacking each other.”

I understand the impulse, but limiting what speech reaches a college campus is not a good idea. The arguments are hard to sustain. The administrator goes on to say, “¬†JuicyCampus gossip blog does not fit with the legacy, spirit, and reputation of Tennessee State University.” Surely true — so will he remove from the libraries works that do not meet that standard? Or filter students’ email to make sure their communications are fitting?

Of course, a blog is not exactly a book and not exactly an email, but can we define the ways in which it’s different that would justify a different standard?

Chris Soghoian has a fascinating article about filtering of search engine results in Argentina. This is different from what we write about that happens in China, where the lens is distorted. In Argentina, if you search for certain people using Yahoo!, you get back nothing at all. And it’s not because of official government policy; it’s because of private litigation. Someone simply goes to court and asks the judge to make them disappear, the judge enjoins the search engine company, and disappear they do. Google responds differently than Yahoo!, and there are many easy workarounds for those who experiment, but it seems to be a great leap forward in treating search engines just as a manipulable tool, not a public utility.

I have an op-ed in the Boston Globe today about Internet Censorship. The FCC proceeding to which the piece refers is Proceeding 07-195 (pdf). Here’s the beginning of the Globe piece:

SUPPOSE that government regulators proposed to read all postal mail in order to protect families from things they should not see. Anything not legally prohibited would be delivered. Any unlawful words, pictures, or videos would be thrown away.

This is the industrial consortium resisting global Internet censorship about which I blogged yesterday. The site is now up, and you can download three documents, on the principles, implementation guidelines, and governance, accountability, and learning framework. I cut and paste the central principles below:

• Participating companies will respect and protect the freedom of expression of their users¬†by seeking to avoid or minimize the impact of government restrictions on freedom of¬†expression, including restrictions on the information available to users and the¬†opportunities for users to create and communicate ideas and information, regardless of¬†frontiers or media of communication.
• Participating companies will respect and protect the freedom of expression rights of their¬†users when confronted with government8 demands, laws and regulations to suppress¬†freedom of expression, remove content or otherwise limit access to information and ideas¬†in a manner inconsistent with internationally recognized laws and standards.
• Participating companies will employ protections with respect to personal information in all¬†countries where they operate in order to protect the privacy rights of users.
• Participating companies will respect and protect the privacy rights of users when¬†confronted with government demands, laws or regulations that compromise privacy in a¬†manner inconsistent with internationally recognized laws and standards.

And this is from the implementation guidelines:

When required to restrict communications or remove content, participating companies will:

• Require that governments follow established domestic legal processes when they are¬†seeking to restrict freedom of expression.
• Interpret government restrictions and demands so as to minimize the negative effect on¬†freedom of expression.
• Interpret the governmental authority‚Äôs jurisdiction so as to minimize the negative effect on¬†to freedom of expression.

And these implementation items seems particularly interesting:

• Participants will refrain from entering into voluntary agreements that require the participants to¬†limit users‚Äô freedom of expression or privacy in a manner inconsistent with the Principles.
• Voluntary agreements entered into prior to committing to the Principles and which meet this¬†criterion should be revoked within three years of committing to the Principles.

Now the first one is just what the principles as a whole are about. The second one suggests that the companies signing onto these principles are supposed to get out of deals they have already cut with the governments — the very deals that created the pressure to bring these principles into being. That’s an important provision, and puts immediate action items in front of management of some companies.

An amusing “Bits” detail. This site was not live yesterday when I blogged about the initiative after seeing the New York Times story, and it did not turn up in a Google search done yesterday morning. It must have gone live yesterday afternoon. But apparently Google was indexing it, even when the page design was under development and had filler for content. Here is what the Google search shows as the page content for the Global Network Initiative site as of 8:55am EDT today: “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Morbi commodo, ipsum sed pharetra gravida, orci.” If you’ve used a graphic or web page design package, you’ll recognize as the default text.

One of the most serious problems facing the Internet is that the free flow of information it permits is blocked by a variety of national regulations and laws. We give several examples in Blown to Bits: Google’s concession to Chinese demands that its search engine not return certain results, and the judgment of an Australian court that Barron’s had libeled an Australian businessman by Web publishing, in New Jersey, something that was perfectly legal in the U.S.

Now a joint effort by several Internet companies and nonprofits including the Berkman Center as resulted in a set of principles about how to deal with censorship and privacy violations demanded by national governments. (New York Times story, Wall Street Journal story and related blog. I can’t find the actual text of the agreement anywhere.)

The rules apparently will not cause any immediate drastic changes — we can be confident that Google will still be in China a year from now — and for that reason have drawn criticism from some human rights groups. But this is a very tough issue, and something is better than nothing. Essentially what we have here is a parallel to the anti-apartheid Sullivan Principles for companies doing business in South Africa. (Probably less onerous on the companies than the Sullivan Principles, actually.) There was always dispute about whether the Sullivan Principles went far enough and whether they played a significant role in bringing about change, but I think there is no doubt that they raised global awareness, and that alone would be a step forward for the Internet privacy and free-speech issues.