Identity Woman

Independent Advocate for the Rights and Dignity of our Digital Selves

FCC

Net Neutrality Bill put forward – WooHoo!

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This was posted on IP Democracy about a Net neutrality Bill.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) unveiled his net neutrality bill today during a media conference call (MP3 here), outlining the bill’s provisions, which include the following:
– Broadband providers will not be allowed to interfere with, block, degrade, alter, modify or change traffic on the Internet;
– Broadband providers will not be allowed to create a priority lane where content providers can buy quicker access to customers, while those who do not pay the fee are left in the slow lane;
– Broadband providers must allow consumers to choose which devices they use to connect to the Internet while they are on the net;
– Consumers should have non-discriminatory access and service; and
– The broadband world should have a transparent system in which consumers, Internet content, and applications companies have access to the rates, terms, and conditions for Internet service.
The bill also has provisions covering a complaint-filing process at the FCC, which aggrieved parties could use in the event of a problem…….

FCC – They don't know what they are doing???

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This guest post on Discourse.net is quite interesting – the perspective of young folks working in government moving blindly through the system is an interesting one to remember. The highlighted part seems to highlight what is going on with the US government ( FCC & Commerce Department ) and the ICANN

The O’Connor resignation, though, has been reminding me of the year I spent, way back when, working for the Justice Department. Late in the year, Harry Blackmun announced his resignation, and I found myself part of an ad hoc team putting together a memo for a White House working group on the decisions of Richard Arnold, an Eighth Circuit judge then being considered for the top job. I got the gig helping to summarize Arnold’s jurisprudence not because of any merit of my own, and not because I’d done anything like this before (I hadn’t), and not even because I worked for a unit of the Justice Department that was concerned with such things (I didn’t), but pretty much by happenstance. I thought we wrote a pretty good memo, considering that none of us had ever vetted a potential Supreme Court Justice before, and we were making up our procedures as we went along.
What I began to realize then, and came to realize much more fully later on, is that government decision-making routinely is undertaken, with the best of intentions, by people who have never been in this situation before and are making it up as they go along. I was working for the government again a few years later — this time for the Federal Communications Commission — and found myself part of an interagency group trying to figure out what to do about the domain name system. That was the process that brought you ICANN. And the most salient facts about it were that (1) we had the best of intentions; (2) we didn’t have a lot of humility; and (3) we didn’t know what we were doing. And it showed.

Language is key

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Listening and watching Doc’s slide show at Syndicate. It is great. One of the challenges he highlights is “Language” as a challenge in describing the new new media…

Cognitive Linguistics 101
we talk about things in the terms of other things
The REAL Matrix is the set of concepts we use to make sense of the world. We are not conscious of them. But they do our thinking and talking for us.
The Real Matrix is metaphors we talk about everything in terms of other things. We literally borrow whole vocabularies. Unconsiously.
Every Metaphor is a box of borrowed words – Concepts that frame our understanding.
Time is Money – we waste it save it spend it invest it lose it and set it aside
Life is Travel – Birth is arrival. Death is departure. Choices are crossroads and careers are paths.
What do we understand the NET in terms of …
Define broadcasting as transporting content. Not as speech.
Broadcast moves content through media. Speech happens in place.
There’s a fight going on between metaphors on the Net and the Web

  1. We “move” “content” through a “medium” with a “transport” protocol. So, it’s about shipping.
  2. We “architect,” “design,” “construct” and “build” “sites” with “addresses” and “locations” with “traffic.” So, its about real estate.
  3. We “write” or author” “pages and “files” of “writing that we “browse.” So, its about writing.
  4. We “perform” for an “audience” that has an “experience.” So it’s about theater.

The FCC does not currently view the net as a place. It sees it as a broadcasting and communications infrastructure that they should regulate. See this post…

Speech informs. It is not about delivering content. The difference is critical – information is a commodity – it is derived from the verb to inform. Which is derived from the verb to form. Meaning that we actually form each other. We are changed by what we learn from each other. Authority is the right we give each other to form and shape what we know. Much of what happens on the net is sharing and improving ideas. This is how syndication happens and how new standards and practices grow in Blogging, podcasting, tags, identity and much more…

IDENTITY GANG is highlighted as an example of the snowball that can emerge out of conversations and how snowballs form.
Doc shows us the reason internet radio was killed – government regulation. This is the kind of government regulation that drives CATO and company crazy…I am beginning to see the reason they are anti-regulation – highly complex, requires teams of lawyers to discern and ‘follow’ correctly.
How do we use language in the identity space? How can be be more conscious of the language we are choosing to use? I hope that next ID Gang and at Catalyst we can have a few deep conversations on this. It also relates to policy usability. The terms we use to describe identity sharing policies must use appropriate language (metaphor) to describe what is going on.

BrandX and Identity Implications

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I had dinner with Susan Crawford this week (btw: she says hi to all you XNS guys 🙂 We talked about the lesser talked about Supreme Court Decision this week BrandX. Basically the FCC can now impose “social policies” which can be very onerous and costly. They could effectively kill VoIP services. It also seems that it has implications for our work building an identity meta-system on the net. If it classified as an information service? Any lawyers in the crowd who want to help us identity folk figure this out?

In BrandX, Justice Thomas gets very confused about the internet and ends up essentially announcing that everything a user does online is an “information service” being offered by the access provider. DNS, email (even if some other provider is making it available), applications, you name it — they’re all included in this package. And the FCC can make rules about these information services under its broad “ancillary jurisdiction.”
This is very very big. This means that even though information services like IM and email don’t have to pay tariffs or interconnect with others, they may (potentially) have to pay into the universal service fund, be subject to CALEA, provide enhanced 911 services, provide access to the disabled, and be subject to general consumer protection rules — all the subjects of the FCC’s IP-enabled services NPRM. I’ve blogged about this a good deal, and now it’s coming true: the FCC is now squarely in charge of all internet-protocol enabled services.