Internet Shouldn’t Make Government Too Transparent, House Hopeful Says

The key to open government is importing the Internet’s “social context,” said Matt Stoller, a liberal blogger who advises Edwards. He cited a “hyper-local” blog that sprouted during the 2005 New Jersey gubernatorial campaign: Parents complained about the high cost of swimming at a local pool, claiming the pool hired too many lifeguards, but the lifeguards themselves fought back in the online forum. “That’s a real success… taking what’s implicit and making it explicit,” Stoller said. Last summer’s broadband-policy writing project by Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., that sought Internet users’ comments in a wiki-style format, didn’t make a dent in Congress because “somehow we failed to connect that to local power,” said Stoller.

Blogging and analysis get noticed by campaign staff, said Obama tech adviser Alec Ross, whose day job is executive vice president of external affairs for One Economy, a digital-divide nonprofit. Staff always need complex material “distilled” quickly to the facts, Ross said. He called Obama’s campaign the most Web-savvy for its organization of thousands of offline events from Obama’s campaign site.

Micah Sifry, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, noted a similar interaction between the Office of Management and Budget and OMB Watch, which watchdogs the watchdog agency. In a few months, for less than $500,000, OMB Watch created a government-contracts database at FedSpending.org, whereas Obama’s transparency law authorized $14 million over three years for the same job. OMB saved taxpayers $13 million by licensing OMB Watch’s database for USAspending.gov, Sifry said. He noted the “soft launch” Monday of the Sunlight Foundation project at PublicMarkup.org that lets visitors comment section by section, as on a blog, regarding the foundation’s model “omnibus” bill for government transparency. The foundation is talking to possible sponsors in Congress, Sifry said.

Obama is pushing legislation to convert all government information, including official congressional correspondence, into machine-readable format, making it easy to post online for public review, Ross said. That would include letters from presidential candidate John McCain -- at the time, Senate Commerce Committee chairman -- to FCC commissioners on behalf of a telecom lobbyist, Ross said, admitting lawmakers won’t want to “suddenly… have their mail read.” Congressional critics plausibly can claim that such a system would cost too much, he said. Obama also wants to create a chief technology officer slot for the federal government, Ross said, to reduce the “ridiculous silo-ing” of similar functions in disparate agencies.

Edwards distinguished herself from Wynn in the primary by strongly supporting net neutrality, among other tech issues. The audience gasped to learn that her only home Internet access was dial-up, because her property was a few hundred yards from the nearest broadband pipes. Service providers won’t serve poorer areas without a mandate, she said.

But Edwards herself is unnerved at the Internet’s effect on discussion, she said, voicing skepticism about publishing all congressional correspondence online. Asked if that stance makes her a “gatekeeper” like a telecom company, Edwards said her position needs to be seen in context. Her official schedule, which she plans to post online if she’s elected to Congress, would show that she recently met with a lobbyist in the Maryland state house but not that she turned down the lobbyist’s offer to pay down her campaign debt, Edwards said. E-mail correspondence similarly constitutes a poor “window into policymaking,” she said. Transparency should be about “meaning, not voyeurism,” she said, later remarking that the audience -- which was communicating through a live chat shown on a screen behind panelists -- apparently had found her address and network access speeds in her neighborhood. At Stoller’s urging, she'll continue blogging once she’s in office, Edwards said. -- Greg Piper

Freedom to Connect Notebook…

Pursuing net neutrality through antitrust regulation would “really be undermining the entire fabric of the U.S. economy,” said Susan Crawford, visiting professor of Internet and communications law at Yale University and ICANN board member. Crawford said she couldn’t adopt the “quasi- religious tone” of some neutrality supporters but urged Internet users to lobby Congress to keep network operators from interfering with applications or content. Network operators aren’t monopolies, but rather oligopolies following “the letter of the law,” so “there will never be ruinous price competition,” especially with so few “retail-level” service providers reselling access, she said. The only “countervailing power” left is from users themselves, but net neutrality is “not connected to people who vote,” she said. Neutrality advocates need to show that an open Internet will “further your life purpose” and make people’s lives more significant, and make their message “as musical as possible,” Crawford said. -- GP

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Network congestion is “a worry” in Japan, said Adam Peake in a panel. Peake is an executive research fellow at the Center for Global Communications of the International University of Japan. Some U.S. net neutrality advocates argue that building network capacity would relieve ISP congestion woes. Japan has the world’s fastest, least expensive broadband, Peake said. But those benefits encourage users to “pump out a lot of traffic,” he said. About two-thirds of ISP backbone traffic is residential, he noted. Japan has implemented net neutrality principles similar to proposed FCC rules, but ISPs increasingly use packet-shaping to target P2P and manage traffic, he said. -- AB

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A Google message of wireless openness “is going to take root and it’s going to be difficult to dislodge it,” Google Android Group Manager Rich Miner said during another panel. Android, the search firm’s upcoming open-source operating system, will give consumers a taste for openness and teach them to value it, Miner said. The trait will influence how they pick a wireless carrier, breaking down “walls of innovation erected by handset makers [and] carriers,” he said. The first Android devices ship later this year, he said. But a more critical issue for wireless may be access to spectrum, said Michael Calabrese, a New America Foundation director. The 700 MHz auction raised the barrier to wireless entry, with the “DSL duopoly” Verizon and AT&T taking the most spectrum, he said. Verizon’s “Any Devices, Any Apps” effort is promising, but the “jury is still out” on how open the network will be and how Verizon will price it, he said. -- AB

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Net neutrality legislation that works and is “not twisted” is a “bit of an elusive goal,” Electronic Frontier Foundation Chairman Brad Templeton told the conference, warning that the history of telecom regulation argues against policy intervention. The Internet’s genuine innovation wasn’t the technology but the pricing model, he said. Applications no longer had to be “financially justified” if each user simply paid for access to a shared network. The “monster” that has emerged in the pricing model is the overselling of network capacity, with users expecting the advertised “unlimited” connection but network providers subjecting them to a saturated network, he said. P2P sharing has been blamed for consuming bandwidth to other network users’ detriment, but some applications always will be seen as bandwidth hogs, said Templeton. He said he worries that a “long term philosophy of beating down the winner” -- successful Internet applications -- is being developed, apart from any concern over P2P as a copyright issue. Trying to solve network management problems with legislation or regulations is “a bit like trying to put out a fire with corn-based ethanol,” a fuel whose creation uses more energy than it produces in output, Templeton said. It’s like requiring E-911 compliance from VoIP providers who wanted to provide experimental, perhaps free, phone service but ended up having to pay big phone companies for access to the required systems, he said. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act similarly required a $500 million investment to lead to a measly 25 or so federal convictions in 2006, and cost network product makers so much that they sold the same surveillance-friendly technology to repressive regimes, Templeton said. He recommended using solutions from “the edge,” that is, via innovation and not regulation. Communities can multiply their network speeds by laying cheap, dark fiber, and IP multicasting already is possible on nearly a third of the Internet with no upgrades, he said. Templeton credited Comcast with realizing that its most subtle attempts at throttling bandwidth, use of “synthetic packets” to hamper BitTorrent transfers, wouldn’t work, and praised the company for promising to upgrade network technology and add more local caching.