Policy Blog Entries by Mehan Jayasuriya

Back in July, I briefly mentioned Nathan Martin, the CEO and Co-Founder of an innovative mobile startup called deepLocal. Martin and his colleagues develop location-based services that deliver content to users via SMS messages--a method that allows owners of all sorts of mobile devices, not just smartphones, to use deepLocal's services. At an FCC En Banc hearing in Pittsburgh, Martin railed against the carriers for maintaining high barriers to entry for companies hoping to develop SMS-based applications. "Why was I able to do for free in a matter of days three years ago what today will take me half a year of approvals and cost me tens of thousands of dollars a month?" Martin asked, referring to the fact that he had once delivered messages using a homemade SMS gateway before deciding to go legit. "You own the channel, now let me compete!" Martin's story is a compelling one and you would think that the wireless carriers would heed his call, thereby encouraging developers to create innovative services that would, in turn, encourage SMS use. Instead, at least one major carrier, Verizon Wireless, has decided to make life even more difficult for SMS service providers like deepLocal, further discouraging innovation in the SMS services market in the process.

In the ongoing battle over intellectual property rights enforcement, facts and figures often serve as the ammunition of choice for both sides. As Wired's Threat Level blog points out, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been brandishing a familiar number lately, in an attempt to pressure the Commander in Chief to sign the recently-passed PRO-IP bill: 750,000 American jobs lost to intellectual property theft. That's a devastating number--representing some eight percent of all Americans who are currently out of work--and is made all the more resonant by our country's deepening economic crisis. It's a shame then, for the proponents of PRO-IP, that this 750k figure is about as real as the emperor's new clothes.

Over the course of the last year, we've seen an intense, international lobbying effort on the part of the entertainment industry to craft policies that would boot alleged filesharers off of the Internet. The folks over at TechDirt have been keeping a close watch on this front and point to legislation and negotiations in the UK, France, Australia and Canada that would institute a "three strikes" rule. As proposed, this three strikes policy would require ISPs to filter their networks for copyrighted content and send out notices of infringement to users suspected of engaging in filesharing--effectively turning ISPs into "copyright cops". As implied by the three strikes moniker, users would receive two written warnings before having their contract with the ISP terminated outright, upon receipt of the third.

Luckily, the EU Parliament saw fit to put an end to this nonsense last week, passing an amendment that prohibits member states from instituting three strikes policies, or "…measures conflicting with civil liberties and human rights and with the principles of proportionality, effectiveness and dissuasiveness, such as the interruption of Internet access," as the EU Parliament calls them. Thanks to this amendment, the threat of a three strikes policy in Europe seems to have passed. But here in the U.S. of A, three strikes isn't just alive and well--it's already being implemented, despite the notable absence of a policy mandate.

Feeling a little confused by the ongoing white spaces debate? That's understandable--after all, wireless spectrum issues tend to be pretty technologically complex. Luckily, the folks over at the People's Production House have put together a short video that explains the concept of white spaces in simple, easy-to-understand terms.

Public Knowledge President and Co-Founder Gigi Sohn testified in front of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation this morning, at a hearing entitled "Broadband Providers and Consumer Privacy". Alongside Gigi, the hearing also featured testimony from representatives for AT&T, Time Warner Cable and Verizon. Gigi spent the majority of her time focusing on Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), a technology that--as you may know--is receiving a great deal of Congressional scrutiny as of late.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: P2P filesharing might be the bogeyman du jour but streaming video is both the real bandwidth hog and the real target of the ISPs' bandwidth-throttling initiatives. In the wake of the FCC's landmark order reprimanding Comcast for its BitTorrent blockade, ISPs have been scrambling to figure out how to protect themselves from the coming 'exaflood,' without running afoul of the FCC. Comcast, for example, has rolled out 250GB bandwidth caps, in order to curb "excessive use" of the company's "unlimited" broadband Internet services. Given that Comcast is a provider of broadcast, on-demand and even streaming online video and given the fact that streaming video has been shown to account for some 35 percent of all traffic during peak times, the anticompetitive implications here should be fairly obvious. What's that you say, they're not quite obvious enough? Well, worry not friend, AT&T has gone ahead and made things even more clear.

Last week, Wired's Threat Level blog ran a great feature, which takes a close look at the RIAA's ongoing legal campaign against filesharers on the fifth anniversary of the first RIAA suits. Since then, the RIAA's campaign has expanded to include a whopping 30,000 lawsuits, nearly all of which have been or will be settled out of court. While the Copyright Act allows for statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringement (i.e. per song), the RIAA has been generous enough to settle most cases out of court for a few thousand dollars--thereby ensuring that most defendants choose a quick cash settlement over costly legal fees and months of litigation, regardless of guilt. Obviously, the RIAA has managed to raise quite a bit of money for its own pursuits through this legal campaign (not a single cent of which has gone to the artists the RIAA claims that it's working to protect, mind you). But what else has the music industry lobbying group accomplished during the last five years?

This past Tuesday, I rushed home from work to download, install and test Google's new web browser Chrome, like the dutiful geek that I am. The next morning, Chrome was the talk of the town, with tech blogs far and wide falling over themselves to praise the latest open-source browser. It's fast! It has a built-in task manager! It sandboxes individual tabs and processes! Yes, yes, these things are all true and are all very exciting. However, just a scant few hours after Chrome's release and the fanfare that followed it, the honeymoon was all but over. Thanks to a carelessly crafted End User License Agreement (EULA), Google managed to turn a PR dream into a PR nightmare--and in record time to boot. It was an impressive demonstration of the speed with which a backlash can brew, even by Internet standards.

A few days ago, I read an article on Ars Technica that described a new search site designed to help save the environment. Forestle, as it's called, is essentially a Google partner page that sticks a pretty green and white front-end on the same old Google search that you know and love. So, how exactly does it save the environment? According to the Germany-based non-profit organization that runs Forestle, all of the site's advertising income minus administrative costs is donated to The Nature Conservancy's adopt an acre program, which helps protect at-risk rainforests. Forestle's founder Christian Kroll told Ars that "0.1 square yards of rainforest are 'saved' with every single web search," and that within the site's testing phase, "more than 15,000 square yards of rainforest" had been saved.

Being the sort of person who performs a lot of web searches on the average day, I figured that there was no reason for me to not use Forestle in lieu of Google. After all, I would get the same search results and would be able to play an infinitesimally small part in saving the rainforests in the process. Keeping this in mind, I went ahead and installed Forestle's Firefox search bar plug-in, performed a few searches and then patted myself on the back for a deed well done. Little did I know, however, that Forestle wouldn't last long.

While there are a seemingly infinite number of ways to share and discover new music, few are as mythologized as the mixtape. From Nick Hornby's romanticizing of the format in High Fidelity to Library of America editor-in-chief Geoffrey O'Brien's assertion that the mixtape is "the most widely practiced American art form," no other amateur medium commands the same level of respect from fans and critics alike. While the general principles of mixtape making continue to live on in even the post-iPod era, with the exception of a few purist holdouts, most mixtape curators stopped using magnetic audiotapes long ago, in favor of the more convenient CD-R. Recently, however, even more advanced tools have emerged on the web, allowing would-be mixtape traders to widely disseminate their tastes while easily tapping into those of their friends.

One such site, Muxtape, allows users to upload, sequence and stream 12 MP3s in order to create virtual mixtapes. Web radio services like Pandora, meanwhile, allow users to discover new music--as mixtapes once did--based on their existing tastes. And social music sites like Last.fm allow users to broadcast their tastes automatically, by generating radio stations based on the user's listening habits. All of these technologies provide fans with new ways to interact with and discover music and have the potential to generate quite a bit of excitement for both independent and major label artists. That last fact seems to be lost on the recording industry, however, which, as usual, is too busy trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle to know a good opportunity when it sees one.