Irony: If You Want To Know What The FCC's Rules On Internet Openness Are, You Need To File A FOIA

from the openness-is-a-matter-of-degree dept

We've already talked about how the FCC was going to approve heavily watered down (and written in conjunction with AT&T) "net neutrality" rules today -- which it did. However, one aspect of all this that is particularly ridiculous is the fact that the FCC voted on rules which it has not released, and which it claims may be adjusted before they are released. Considering that these rules are supposed to be about internet openness it seems pretty ironic that the rules are secret. Jeff Jarvis noted this irony in asking if he needed to file a Freedom of Information Act request just to find out what was voted on. He followed it up by filing just such a request that seeks not just the rules, but also details of correspondences and meeting notes leading up to the creation of the rules. We'll see what the FCC comes back with.

Filed Under: fcc, freedom of information, internet, openness
Companies: fcc

What Would Happen If Wikileaks Got Its Own Top Level Domain?

from the a-freedom-tld? dept

With all the talk about how the whole Wikileaks/domain name seizures issue is about a centralized vs. decentralized internet and even talk of a more decentralized DNS system, IP Watch raises an interesting question. With ICANN's plans to allow just about any TLD, what would happen if Wikileaks were to apply for its very own TLD?

Given ICANN's official statement that it does not take down domain names and has no technical or legal authority to participate in such forms of censorship (and, in fact, we've noted in the past that ICANN has refused to meet with IP Czar Victoria Espinel about this, noting that it would not be appropriate), would it allow such a TLD to be created, and then take a hands off approach?

What if it wasn't even a .wikileaks (or just .leaks) TLD, but a more general .open DNS, managed by an organization that agreed not to censor anything, no matter what the cause?

Filed Under: dns system, icann, openness, tld, top level domain, wikileaks
Companies: icann, wikileaks

$1,595 To Talk With The FCC About Telco Policy? Lobbyists Welcome; Average Citizens... Not So Much

from the how-policy-is-made dept

Michael Marcus is noting that the Practicing Law Institute is holding a Telco and Policy Regulation "Institute," that will include a Q&A with "FCC commissioners and other senior officials." It looks like three commissioners will be there, along with four other senior officials including the heads of "wireline competition," "wireless telecommunications," and "engineering and technology." The issue, Marcus points out, is that this Q&A with key regulators costs $1,595 to attend. Affordable for lobbyists, but not so much for anyone else.

But Marcus' bigger concern is that the public won't find out what was said at the event without ponying up for the recording -- where previous recordings cost $797 for audio and $1,595 for video. As he notes:

Now I do not disagree that it is useful for public officials to meet in fine hotels with industry moguls, brief them on upcoming policy issues and answer questions. The key question is whether the rest of us will find out in a reasonably timely what was said. (Some of us might like to ask questions also, but that is getting off subject.) I have previously proposed to the the FCC's reboot.fcc.gov site that asks about "What are ways in which the FCC can better engage the public in open proceedings?" that videos of such presentations be made available to the public at the normal FCC terms - free online, nominal charge for copying - within a few days of such an event. As with the other many suggestions received from the public via this site, this has not been resolved.

Again, it's understandable that it costs money to attend such events. It's costly to put them on, and events are a big business. But it gets a little troubling when public policy may be influenced at such events and the details of what was said are not revealed.

Filed Under: openness, politics, transparency
Companies: fcc

New York Times Insists It Can Stay Part Of The Conversation With 'First Click Free'

from the yeah,-good-luck dept

While I've still been linking to NY Times articles for Techdirt posts, if there are decent stories on the same subject elsewhere, I've been starting to use those other sources instead. That's because I know we're getting closer and closer to 2011 -- when the NY Times has promised to lock up its content behind a paywall. The company still keeps pretending that it can have the best of both worlds, and is apparently insisting that the paywall won't remove it from the wider conversation because it will allow a "first click free" sort of program, whereby you'll be able to read an article once if you click through from another site, before being asked to pay. While that might make the NY Times comfortable, it doesn't make me comfortable at all. If there are no other options, I may still link to NY Times content, but I'm certainly going to be a lot more cautious linking to it. Why would I even risk pissing off my readers by a lockout when I can point them to another site that actually wants that traffic?

Filed Under: conversation, links, openness, paywall
Companies: ny times

Good Ideas Come From Sharing, Random Collisions And Openness, Not Hoarding And Bursts Of Inspiration

from the once-again dept

This is a point that we've been making for years (and often highlighting the research that proves this), but innovation and good ideas tend not to come from the proverbial "spark of genius." Study after study after study has shown that's almost never the case. Almost all good ideas come from people building on the works of others, with a minor tweak here or there, or a random decision based on a suggestion from someone new, after an idea percolates for months or years. The more open systems are to sharing ideas and spreading information and allowing those collisions to happen, the more likely that new good ideas and new innovations occur. That's why it's so harmful that today's intellectual property systems are built on the false assumption that innovation really does happen through that "spark of genius."

Entrepreneur and author Steven Johnson is about to come out with a new book on this particular topic, Where Good Ideas Come From and has been writing and speaking about some of what's in the book -- which highlights these same points. People have been submitting both his recent TED talk and his recent WSJ piece that makes these points clear: As he says at one point in the video:

The key thing is to allow those hunches to connect with other people's hunches. That's what often happens. You have half of an idea and someone else has the other half, and if you're in the right environment, they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts. So, in a sense, we often talk about the value of protecting intellectual property. You know, building barricades, having secretive R&D labs, patenting everything that we have, so that those ideas will 'remain valuable' and people will be incentivized to come up with more ideas. But I think there's a case to be made that we should spend at least as much time, if not more, valuing the premise of connecting ideas and not just protecting them.

In the WSJ piece, he highlights an example of this in action:

Earlier this year, Nike announced a new Web-based marketplace it calls the GreenXchange, where it has publicly released more than 400 of its patents that involve environmentally friendly materials or technologies. The marketplace is a kind of hybrid of commercial self-interest and civic good. This makes it possible for outside firms to improve on those innovations, creating new value that Nike might ultimately be able to put to use itself in its own products.

In a sense, Nike is widening the network of minds who are actively thinking about how to make its ideas more useful, without adding any more employees. But some of its innovations might well turn out to be advantageous to industries or markets in which it has no competitive involvement whatsoever. By keeping its eco-friendly ideas behind a veil of secrecy, Nike was holding back ideas that might, in another context, contribute to a sustainable future--without any real commercial justification.

Of course, I think an even better example is the recent research on Alzheimer's that really only took off when everyone involved opened up their data and agreed to avoid patents. Or, how about the research on the human genome that compared patented and public domain gene research, and showed that the patents limited commercial viability. But when the genes were opened up to the public, much more value came out of it. The more you look, the more you find these results pretty much everywhere you look. And it's nearly impossible to find any evidence to support the idea of a "flash of genius" for key innovations in history. In fact, almost every key innovation in history has been shown to have come about to multiple people at once, as ideas are shared and the general progress of knowledge and innovation pushes forward.

This is important if you believe and support innovation. The fact that our entire regulatory system for innovation is based on a disproved theory that makes innovation more difficult should be seen as a serious problem and one worth fixing as quickly as possible.

Filed Under: good ideas, innovation, openness, sharing, steven johnson

Is Google's Closed Nature Its Achilles Heel?

from the attacking-where-it's-weak dept

There's been some well-deserved buzz lately about the new upstart search engine Blekko, which I've been playing around with a bit. Most of the attention has been focused on the concept of "slashtags" that allow very quick and dirty targeted search, or added parameters in a format that builds off of user suggested groupings of sites. It's a neat feature, but so far I have to admit I haven't found in that useful in my testing. What has struck me as significantly more interesting about Blekko is that it -- unlike just about every other search engine out there -- lets you dig in on the data the site used to determine the results rankings. This is the type of stuff that is a closely guarded secret at Google, in large part because revealing the data might make it easier to game.

And while Blekko founder/CEO Rich Skrenta (who, I should disclose, I've known for many, many years) has been clear from the very beginning that the goal is not to take down Google, but rather to carve out a decent, but highly profitable, niche in the search engine space, I do find this rather interesting. By opening up the details in a way that lets users dig in and find out how a site's ranking is determined, Blekko is doing something that Google can't easily copy. I always find this quite fascinating. We end up talking quite a bit on this site about the idea that some insist upon, that if you come up with something disruptive, big companies will just come along and copy the idea, killing off the small company. However, as we've detailed over and over again, this happens a lot less than you would think, in part because "copying" the innovation often will seriously upset an existing line of business or an existing way of doing things. That's what's so disruptive about disruptive innovation.

I have no idea if Blekko really will turn out to be disruptive in any way. But I find it quite fascinating that a big part of its attack on Google's marketshare is to enable a feature that would totally turn Google upside down in terms of how secretive it is about its algorithm and ranking. Google is often seen as a leader in the "open" technology world, but as we've pointed out before, while the company works hard to encourage others to be open, it can be incredibly closed itself. So it seems only fitting that its potential achilles' heel may be in the part of its business that it has kept quite closed.

Filed Under: openness, search
Companies: blekko, google

WordPress Trademark Transfered From For-Profit Company, To Non-Profit Foundation

from the didn't-see-that-coming dept

We recently wrote about Twitter's smart and open trademark policy, in that it readily and freely licenses its trademark to many companies, with only a few small exceptions. It looks like blog provider WordPress is doing its own interesting trademark move as well. The company recently announced that it has transferred the WordPress trademark away from the company itself and given it to the WordPress Foundation, a non-profit organization charged with promoting access to WordPress and related open source projects. In other words, even if the company's current execs lose control over the company, the trademark itself won't be abused by new owners, since the mark will remain with the foundation. Given how often we see trademark law being abused these days, both of these examples of smart, forward-looking companies taking a much more progressive approach on trademark really is quite refreshing.

Filed Under: non-profit, openness, trademark
Companies: automattic, wordpress

Academic Journals Seeing Benefits In More Open Peer Review

from the freedom-is-powerful dept

We recently discussed the idea of much more open, online-based peer review processes. In the ensuing discussion some claimed that such things might work for subject areas like math, where concepts could be reviewed and tested by others, but might not work as well in other areas. However, a recent experiment by the Shakespeare Quarterly to experiment with a more open, online peer review system apparently worked quite nicely:

Mixing traditional and new methods, the journal posted online four essays not yet accepted for publication, and a core group of experts -- what Ms. Rowe called "our crowd sourcing" -- were invited to post their signed comments on the Web site MediaCommons, a scholarly digital network. Others could add their thoughts as well, after registering with their own names. In the end 41 people made more than 350 comments, many of which elicited responses from the authors. The revised essays were then reviewed by the quarterly's editors, who made the final decision to include them in the printed journal, due out Sept. 17.

Even one of the authors who was quite skeptical of the program as "entirely won over" by the end, noting that the comments were "more extensive and more insightful" than he was used to receiving on his works.

Filed Under: openness, peer review

And Of Course: 'Surprising' Openness And Sharing Of Data Leads To Advancements In Alzheimer's Research

from the well,-duh dept

I think everyone who reads Techdirt -- including my parents -- sent over this story today. The NY Times has an article about the rapid advancements in Alzheimer's research after researchers agreed to immediately open up any data:

The key to the Alzheimer’s project was an agreement as ambitious as its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world.

No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort.

This should hardly be surprising -- except to those who insist that without the possibility of patents no research would be done on curing diseases. In fact, the only thing that should be surprising about this is the fact that anyone is surprised by it, or that anyone continues to insist patents are necessary in this kind of research. We've already seen how large groups of scientists sharing data leads to faster advancement in those fields, and how data that is locked up leads to slower advancement in research.

Thankfully, it appears that some folks are getting the right idea about this, and have set up a similar deal for research into Parkinson's disease, and perhaps it can finally lead to a rethinking of patenting federally funded drug research and (dare we hope?) a rolling back of the disastrous Bayh-Dole Act, which resulted in this desire of universities to lock up basic research.

But the key results here highlight the same point many of us have made for years: openness and sharing of the underlying data allows overall advancement in the space to move at a faster rate (prior to this openness, research in the area had apparently stalled out a bit). And, even with the open sharing of data and the lack of patents, there are still plenty of incentives to do the research, because they know that there is plenty of money to be made in selling the actual treatments that come out of this.

Filed Under: alzheimer's, data, openness, patents, research, sharing

Why Openness Leads To Greater Innovation: The Friction Of The Hold Up Problem

from the the-hold-up-problem dept

There's an article over at GigaOm that's discussing some of the economics of open source software, specifically in relation to the development of Flash, and as a way to explain why Apple is so anti-Flash. But the key point of the article, a reminder of the so-called "hold-up problem" in economics, which basically shows the additional transaction costs associated with having to rely on another party:

The reason is based on what economists call "the hold up problem." When a business relies on assets owned by another party, it may become dependent on that party's cooperation in the future. In this situation, the party with ownership of a key resource may gain the ability to "hold up" its partner, demanding an unreasonably high price. Hold up becomes a problem especially when a business needs to make large capital investments that assume future cooperation from the owner of a complementary asset.

While the article goes on to explain why the problem is particularly an issue in IT, and why that explains why so many companies rely on open source software (to avoid the hold up problem), it actually is a good explanation for the friction and higher transaction costs involved in all sorts of innovation that relies on solutions that are locked up either via copyright or patents.

The biggest conceptual mistake that people have in thinking that copyright and patents lead to greater output or innovation is that they have trouble understanding the nature of dynamic creativity or innovation. It's tough to realize that innovation and creativity are both ongoing processes. There is no beginning, middle and end. They just keep going, and a single "flash of genius" is meaningless if it does not become a part of that dynamic flow. But the "hold up problem" described above gets in the way nearly every time if you have to rely on some other party -- such as a copyright holder or a patent holder -- to give their approval. It's why we so fear a permission-based culture that doesn't let such things move forward. Each time that it happens, it not only slows down both creativity and innovation, but adds additional wasteful transaction costs that are a dead weight loss to society.

These cases are the norm. Research has shown time and time again that it's the ongoing process that matters, not any particular element of it. And to make that ongoing process keep moving forward, you need less friction, not more. The hold-up problem shows how friction decreases a market from functioning properly, and in many, many cases, both patents and copyright serve to do one main thing: to add a hold-up problem where none need exist. In other words, they serve to add friction to the processes of creativity and innovation, rather than to take away friction. That should be seen as a serious problem.

Filed Under: copyright, economics, friction, hold up problem, innovation, open source, openness, patents