Academic associations tend to be politically conservative.

I don’t mean they revere Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman, though plenty of scholars do. Rather, each group–representing a field’s professors and graduate students–tends to evade controversy, rarely taking a public stance on an issue that might divide the membership.

Thus, it is remarkable that the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) has declared its support for network neutrality.

The issue is too important to stay on the sideline any longer.

AEJMC represents a diverse group of scholars who research and teach nearly everything related to mass media. Based on our research–and, in some cases, years of industry experience–we know the media business, and letting ISPs pick online winners and losers is bad policy.

Nearly all revolutionary internet ideas–from Amazon and Google to Skype and Twitter–came from cash-strapped outsiders. Somewhere in the world right now, another tinkerer is developing what might become the next big idea. Before it catches on, though, ISP demands for a broadband toll might strangle this idea in its crib.

Also, some of the best stuff online never turns a profit. Imagine if, in 2001, Wikipedia had to pay through the nose just to compete on a level playing field with Encarta. It may have stalled, and even today, forcing Wikipedia into the slow lane would harm and might kill the project.

AEJMC is also concerned about the slow death of the daily newspaper’s business model. We embrace the internet age, but we also hope to ensure financial viability for “print” journalism. ISP tolls would make this much harder.

MSNBC and FoxNews could afford to pay extra for the rapid delivery of rich, interactive media. Most newspapers could not, forcing them to choose between deeper debts and worse user experience. Citizen journalists and exciting nonprofit experiments would also be muted by ISPs.

In addition to concern about the media system in general, we also have a selfish motivation to support network neutrality: Our roles as scholars and teachers. Academics in all disciplines depend heavily on the internet, and most of the educationally valuable content is not backed by big corporations.

If ISPs choose winners and losers online, the online content we professors assign would not often win. Would ISPs bend over backward to ensure my students’ access to the PDF of James Boyle’s Creative Commons-licensed book? Or the Internet Archive audio of WWII-era radio broadcasts?

Boyle and Archive.org are great, but I don’t expect them to pay off Verizon just to make my students’ downloads faster. This means my students have less access to educationally valuable content, they learn less, and the educational value of the internet drops. The same will be true of my research productivity.

As students of the media system and as researchers and educators, we have deep value and respect for the neutral internet. It is a privilege to have contributed to the drafting of the AEJMC statement, and I thank AEJMC President Carol Pardun for having the courage to lead this charge.

P.S. As if ISP profiteering weren’t enough, other interested parties are muddying the issue. The copyright industries, for instance, are desperately trying to force and cajole ISPs into serving as the copyright cops.

P.P.S. In the interest of full disclosure, I am the co-author (along with Minjeong Kim of Colorado State) of a research project examining the online framing of network neutrality. This project won a competitive research grant from AEJMC, though this is in no way related to my long-established opinions on this issue.

Now, the statement is out, and I’m listed as a contact. Later today, thanks to the good eye of Josh Stearns at Free Press, I’ll be writing a post for the SaveTheInternet blog.

Here’s the text of AEJMC’s statement on net neutrality:

AEJMC Supports Net Neutrality

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 26, 2010

Contacts:
Carol Pardun, AEJMC President (803) 777-3244, pardunc@mailbox.sc.edu
Bill Herman, AEJMC Member and Media Law Scholar, (215) 715.3507 (mobile), billdherman@gmail.com

AEJMC Supports Net Neutrality

The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) urges the Federal Communications Commission to adopt rules preserving open and nondiscriminatory access to the internet.

The debate about network neutrality is complex and contentious, but we wish to address a specific myth advanced by network neutrality opponents: that this regulation would stifle innovation and create disincentives for investment in next-generation broadband networks.

The AEJMC rejects this claim.

The most important internet innovations have not come from network providers, but from creative outsiders who built their inventions on top of a neutral network. Requiring network neutrality is vital to preserve competition and investment in internet content, services, and applications.

The FCC should codify the internet openness principles that already guide the agency, and Congress and the courts should support this move. The rules would protect both consumers and innovators of content, services, and applications from unfair discrimination by internet service providers. Perhaps most importantly, these rules would help preserve and develop the internet as a key tool for communication that serves our democracy.

This statement was issued by the President of AEJMC and through the President’s Advisory Council.

Related links

* Federal Communications Commission
* Network Neutrality (Wikipedia)
* “Net Neutrality” in the news (Google)

About AEJMC

The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication is a nonprofit, educational association of journalism and mass communication educators, students and media professionals. The Association’s mission is to advance education, foster scholarly research, cultivate better professional practice and promote the free flow of communication.

# # #

I had a rollicking good time, the questions were awesome, and the post-talk celebration was even better. If you want the Powerpoint, it’s here in all its 12.2 MB glory.

Further discussion welcome.

I’m not opposed to tiered pricing in principle, though TW appears to have handled it rather badly, and it still fails to solve the root problem of weak competition in the wireline ISP market. Also, I’m skeptical that it’s necessary–rather than a way for TW to keep maintenance costs down and prices up in a market where consumers have few other options.

I really appreciate Topolski taking on the ever-invoked myth that the internet is about to become so choked up as to become unreliable. This is the threat that the “Internet Tubes” will get full, invoked by then-Senator, now-convict Ted Stevens was threatening all the way back in 2006.

Basically, this threat is still a bogeyman and looks to be so indefinitely. Last year, Telegeography concluded, “Internet traffic is growing fast, but capacity is keeping pace.”

Further, DSL Reports debunks the “exaflood myth” in their typical sharply opinionated style.

For a more detached, scholarly view of internet traffic, see the Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies (MINTS) site. Chief investigator Andrew Odlyzko and company are doing great work here. He also suggests that, if anything, the rate of growth in wireline broadband traffic is decreasing. The most recent MINTS post cites a Cogent estimate of 30% growth in internet traffic in Q4 2008 versus 2007.

Last February, Odlyzko argued that, at least as far as the network industries are concerned internet growth may be too slow. This was even based on higher estimates of growth; Odlyzko’s estimate at the time was that internet traffic grows at about 50% per year.

The key is that the cost of managing a network declines by about one third per year. Even exaflood believer Lawrence G. Roberts adopts the latter estimate, following Moore’s law.

If the cost of managing network traffic next year will be roughly 2/3 of this year’s per-bit price, and total traffic is around 3/2 of this year’s total, network providers spend about the same year-over-year for network maintenance (2/3 * 3/2 = 1) and thus make the same profit per subscriber.

Of course, it’s very un-sexy to tell your stockholders that per-subscriber profits will be the same as last year, especially considering the ever-decreasing potential for new subscribers in a broadband market that is approaching saturation.

Thus, dare I suggest: Maybe the exaflood threat is actually about broadband providers leveraging their way into a new business model–whether the Tony Soprano business model of “Charge Google,” or the wireless carriers’ model of tiered pricing.

To draw a comparison with the wireless industry is instructive; even when wireless data transmission is more than doubling every year, wireless carriers keep charging lower prices for better service and rolling out every more reasonably priced all-you-can-everything plans.

Where there’s even modest (and far from ideal) competition, customers come out far better than in the duopoly-at-best home broadband market.

But then again, maybe “global traffic will exceed the Internet’s capacity as soon as this year.” That is, if you listen to Phil Kerpen’s commentary at Forbes–from January 2007.

A trickier policy choice can perhaps be summarized as “how do we deal with our own crazies.”  On either end of the political spectrum, there exist a tiny minority of tinfoil hat-wearers.  The most radical offline leftists set fire to auto dealerships and ski resorts.  The most radical offline conservatives start militias and shoot up churches.  Online, how are we to distinguish them, and what are we to do about them?

Conveniently, online crazies tend to grab hold of a popular conspiracy theory and not let go.  On the left, these are the “9/11 Truthers” and, post-2004, the “Ohio Fixed Election” folks.  On the right, we have the “Obama birth certificate” fanatics.

I raise this because I’ve started to think recently that Markos Moulitsas made a particularly important policy decision in the early days of DailyKos.  Wanna see how fast you can banned from DailyKos?  Post a 9/11 conspiracy diary.  Same with the 2004 election conspiracy theory.  Kos took a hard line on this talk and said that it would have no place on his site.  You want to help build a progressive majority?  Welcome to dKos.  You want to talk about statistically variations between exit polls and final results, or the spookiness of Diebold?  Banned.

The conservative blogosphere is currently experiencing a surge in traffic, as online conservatives have something more to complain about than all the liberals on tv (this supports a deeper theoretical argument about “political opportunity structures” and innovative campaign technologies, but I don’t want to give away the ENTIRE dissertation on this blog…).  From what I can tell, they haven’t drawn the same policy stance (I haven’t conducted a large-scale content analysis yet, so feel free to correct me in the comments).  Want to claim that Obama is a foreign-born Manchurian candidate?  Welcome!  Gateway Pundit, in particular, has soared up the conservative rankings in the past few months, all while exhibiting a type of borderline hysteria that cannot be too attractive to mainstream conservatives (you may not like Obama’s tax proposal, but that doesn’t make him Mao or Stalin).

My hunch is that this policy choice serves as sort of a path dependent critical juncture in the development of online political communities.  When a new visitor drops by the site, what is the tenor of the conversation like?  DailyKos has made a series of policy choices in support of their goal of being a “reality-based community.”  Whether you like them or not, the tenor of the conversation bears little resemblance to the caricature presented by Bill O’Reilley, and a reasonable argument for why dKos has gotten so large is because Kos chose to lop off the most extreme-left commenters, making the tenor of the conversation better reflect the preferences and opinions of the much larger population of less-extreme, but less outspoken, progressives.  Which conservative community blogs will take a similar policy stance, and how will it play out in the development of online conservativism?  Anybody have a good guess or two?

He also posted a PDF of the relevant section. See the highlighted portion on page 9 for the nondiscrimination requirements.

Over at Public Knowledge, Daniel McCartney’s take is that HBO is trying to own history. I’d have to agree.

As McCartney points out, HBO’s copyright claim is dubious at best–and that’s without even considering fair use–but the DMCA takedown notice system rewards over-enforcement. Generally, a (real or alleged) copyright holder says “Take this down,” the site complies, and that’s the end of the story.

In a more recent development, HBO was apparently shamed into changing their mind. Some clips are still down (like this one), but others remain.

For instance, here’s an amateur recording of Bishop Gene Robinson’s invocation:

Also, there’s even a professional recording of the coveted Pete Seeger/Bruce Springsteen performance of “This Land is Your Land”. Judging by the titling, this was made for or repurposed by a station broadcasting in another country.

For those whose clips get taken down, note that you might get Google (who owns YouTube) to re-upload the clip by filing a counter-claim.

IMPORTANT: If you file a counter-claim, you’re basically daring HBO to actually sue you, though considering their change of heart, the odds of a real suit seem slim. Depending on the clip, it’s a risk I might take, but I don’t expect everyone to agree.

This is why the DMCA takedown system rewards over-enforcement. The people on the “Take that down!” end of the transaction already have a team of lawyers, while those on the “Where the heck is my clip?” end generally don’t know their legal rights and don’t have the money to hire a lawyer.

On an unrelated note–the “This Land” performance–listen carefully to the lyrics. Note that two of the verses from Woody Guthrie’s original version are pretty socialist. These are generally omitted from the version taught in primary schools. Seeger and Springstein appeared to take particular pleasure in singing the full song.

In a 5-0 decision, the Commission issued a ruling allowing anybody to transmit messages in white spaces, within fairly limits on the generation of interference. By declaring the spectrum open to unlicensed experimentation, they’ve green-lighted the development of new technologies that some describe as “wifi on steroids.”

Unsurprisingly, Google is happy, and unless you’re invested in one of the incumbent industries on Wired’s list of losers (see first link), you should be, too.

Visit today’s FCC Daily Digest, where you can see the FCC press release and the five Commissioners’ statements.

It seems to me that her post could be best rephrased as “Is Reputation Tracking Obsolete?”  In that case, the answer would be a clear and definitive yes.

Reputation in its purest form is deep, contextualized, complex, and local.  I have a very different reputation with my colleagues in the Sierra Club than I do with other academics, and still another one with my drinking buddies.  All of those reputations are linked to different dimensions of my identity, and each is accurate in its own way.  They accrue over time, and they are exceedingly difficult to scale up from local context to general form.

Online, reputational data is put at a premium, because the purer the anonymity, the worse people are bound to act.  I haven’t seen any studies on this yet (I’ll get around to doing one someday, I suppose), but it’s pretty clear that when you require people to login before posting comments to a blog, they self-moderate a bit more, and when you add a Mojo system like they have at SlashDot and DailyKos, and “superuser” status contingent on high Mojo ratings, people behave better still.  That’s standard “Shadow of the Future” stuff, a basic finding from game theory, and replicated in a host of experimental settings.  So reputation systems incentivize good behavior while distributing the costs of punishing bad behavior.  As a basic example, consider how costly eBay would be if they had to provide top-down monitoring of all transactions.  Actually, you don’t need to bother considering it: without reputation tracking, there would be no eBay.  Period.

So is reputation obsolete?  Yes and no.  The thing we need to recognize is that when you divorce reputation assessments from their local, complex, and contextualized settings, you have to rely on rough proxies to fill in the gap.  Those proxies are not, themselves, reputation.  When an eBay buyer ranks the seller, that tells us relatively little about the seller.  When a DailyKos user contributes to a diarist’s “tip jar,” that functions as a “thumbs up.”  But real reputation isn’t the aggregate of online clapping and booing.  And as more diverse information becomes available online, the simplicity of aggregating clapping and booing seems like a coarse and outdated tool for measuring reputation.

I would suggest that the quality of reputation tracking is always going to hinge on three elements:

(1)relevance of the proxy data.  How good of an approximation does the online rating mechanism provide?

(2)Traffic levels.  I’m always entertained by low-traffic blogs that include recommended diary structures and such.  Online reputation tracking assumes huge inputs, but given the power law distributions of web traffic, we know that there are only going to be a select few webspaces that obtain that level of traffic.

(3)Gaming of the system or lack thereof.  This last one is long-term problematic.  Any high-traffic webspace is going to represent valuable online real estate.  The perverse incentives are there for actors to try to figure out the rules of the game and then innovate ways to get around them.  We haven’t seen a lot of innovations in reputations systems for years, and most of the literature seems to be focused solely on eBay.  So reputation tracking systems are probably obsolete at this point, simply because every system is going to have weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and there haven’t been many new developments (at least that I’m aware of — which is a decent indicator that if something great is out there, it sure hasn’t diffused very widely yet).

What we really need is reputation systems that take advantage of Metcalfe’s Law.  As processing speed and memory continue to double — as Information Abundance becomes still more abundant — we need to develop reputation tracking systems that use better proxies.  Donath asks whether “in a world where all action is recorded, is there still need for reputational information?”  I would respond, “Yes, all the moreso!”  If we broadly understand reputation data as a form of filtering and content management, we have little choice but to rely on reputation assessments, but we also need them to evolve along with the rest of the web.  In a world where all action is recorded, reputational information is all the more necessary so we can sort through the mess.  But likewise, as more types of data become available, we need to diversify the types of proxies we use for assessing reputation.  This will be particularly true as the mobile web comes into wider use, rendering whole new classes of data available.

The real challenge lies in figuring out how to sort and use that data, particularly keeping in mind the competing needs for reputational assessment/filtering and privacy.  The weaker the privacy norms, the stronger the reputation tracking can be.  I don’t think I particularly want my academic or Sierra Club colleagues to know my reputation among my drinking buddies, though (or vice versa, for that matter!).  The  tradeoff has steeply decreasing returns at some point, and there’s an important role for public scholars like Donath in helping to identify what that point might be.

Over at HuffPo, Hugh McGuire tells publishers to embrace the digital transition. He discusses why and how book publishers should eschew the music industry’s fear-driven tactics and meet customers where they are with what they want.