dyknown

Daft Punk took home the Album of the Year award at the 56th Annual Grammys for their funky nostalgia trip Random Access Memories. The competition was stiff this year, with fellow contenders Kendrick Lamar, Taylor Swift, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, and Sara Bareilles coming from multiple corners of the industry.

The French outfit's principle competition seemed to be Macklemore as the festivities wore on; the rapper won four Grammys, including Best New Artist and Best Rap Album for The Heist. Daft Punk, for their part, won five of their own, including Best Dance/Electronica Album and Record of the Year.

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gailsimone:

jacobtheloofah:

stephen king throwing shade like a fucking master

Wow.

That is fierce.

Who will run cyberspace?   It’s one of the most important questions in the world today.  Yet few outside a narrow group of policy wonks, lawyers, technologists, and international bureaucrats are paying attention to the question—much less the answer.

This post is intended to explain the issue in a bit of detail.  I’ve come, lately, to the conclusion that this is one of the most significant questions facing the development of cyberspace in the coming few years.  The answer we choose to the question of governance will, in the end, affect the whole world.  Today, the globe-spanning reach of cyberspace touches the lives of more than 2.5 billion people.  The so-called “Internet of Things” controls more than 1 trillion devices—everything ranging from cars and houses to industrial plants, elevators and even medical devices.  Every day (in 2012) we created roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data (that’s a 1 followed by 18 zeros).  Put another way, 90% of the data created since the dawn of human history was created (and passed through cyberspace) in the last two years.  As a world community our dependence upon and interdependence with the cyber domain is growing so fast that our conception of its size can’t keep up with the reality of it.  How we govern this distributed and dynamic space is profoundly important to the future prosperity of humankind.

And that’s why it is so troubling that some, in a rush to “internationalize” the governance of the internet, are rushing to change the current structure.  The system we have in place, imperfect as it is, has been, by any measure, successful in creating the opportunity for economic growth and intellectual freedom.  Yet some are not content to leave well-enough alone.  In my judgment the changes proposed would be mistakes of grave consequence.

What I hope to do in this post is three interrelated things:  1) Explain in summary fashion what the current internet governance structure is; 2) Describe the proposed changes, broadly speaking and why they matter; and 3) Outline some of the developments that we can anticipate in the next 12-24 months.  In the end, the most disturbing part of the analysis is that US leadership is lacking – partially as a result of Snowdenitis, but also because of a lack of attention. 

Where We Are Today — The current governance structure of cyberspace grew up over time – almost accidentally.  The operation of the network has been defined by two organizations – the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).  Taken together the two organizations both set the technical protocols and standards for operation of the network and manage the assignment of names in the cyberspace addressing directory – known as the domain name system.  Over the years they have proven to be relatively (though not, of course, completely) non-partisan and professional, typically operating by consensus.  But some around the world think that their policy making is highly influenced by the nations that are most technologically reliant on the internet and have contributed the most to its development and growth – nations like the United States and other Western democracies.  Others have the opposite concern – that their own governments don’t have a veto power over ICANN decisions.

One consequence of that influence is that the decisions of the IETF and ICANN lean, somewhat, in the direction of libertarian freedom – there is a strong predilection to reduce interference in the operation of the network to the minimum necessary for ordered liberty.  There is, for example, a great reluctance to use internet protocols as a way of monitoring or managing content because doing so smacks of an infringement on civil liberties.

One particularly good example of this mindset is the changing view of encryption in the IETF.  Several years ago many countries asked the IETF to incorporate an encryption standard in the Internet Protocols.  The IETF declined since, inevitably, encryption makes the entire network marginally less efficient.  Today, however, in the wake of the NSA/Snowden disclosures, the IETF has begun to reconsider that view point – not because of a change in the engineering but rather as a modest pro-freedom evolution of network protocols.  The effort is just beginning, and only time will tell if it comes to fruition, but it is emblematic of the nature of the “multi-stakeholder model” (MSM) for management of the network.

Complaints and Criticisms — Some non-Western international participants characterize this structure and Western-oriented influence as a form of American cultural imperialism.  And to be fair, they do have a point.  From the perspective of an authoritarian country “internet freedom” is just code for “disruption of the status quo.”  And we, in the West, likewise tend to be what Evgeny Morozov calls “cyber-utopians.”  We really do believe in the power of free expression to change political and economic environments and our not-so-covert objective in supporting internet freedom is to spread Western memes of democracy and capitalism.

As a result the non-Western countries want a different entity to manage the domain – and the one they’ve chosen is the International Telecommunications Union (the ITU dates back to 1865 but is now a part of the UN).   They argue that transferring authority to govern cyberspace to the ITU (or a similar international treaty organization) is a means of converting the “control” of the Internet into a conventional international process that dismantles the current position of global dominance of U.S. and Western national interests.  [As an aside, the concern rests on a false conception of “control” – there really is no central authority controlling the network – but that, too, is what some want to change.] In the ITU, like most UN institutions, a “one nation/one vote” rule applies – a prospect that would certainly change the MSM of cyberspace governance, with results that are unpredictable, but inevitably will have influence on the current model of internet business processes, which rely on a universal, global, united market, using invariant standards, protocols and parameters.

Supporters argue that giving the ITU a role in Internet governance is no different from the role that the World Customs Organization has in setting shipping standards, or the International Civil Aviation Organization has in setting aviation traffic rules.  Others are less concerned with the regulatory function than the fiscal one – the shift away from traditional telephony has impacted the revenue stream of many nations and an exercise of ITU jurisdiction is thought to be likely to restore some of the lost resources for many nations.

Events in Dubai – Against that backdrop, the ITU sponsored a meeting – the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) – in Dubai in December 2012.  The meeting was, in many ways, a confused harbinger of things to come.   Western nations tried to protect the status quo of a multi-stakeholder approach to internet governance, while more authoritarian countries, led by Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran sought to amend the International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs) and make them a legal ground for control over internet content.   [The ITRs have, for some time, been the principally technical standards that are the main product of the ITU – addressing things like frequency assignment and the like.]

In the end, the US won some points at the Dubai meeting.  At its insistence, the revised ITRs contained no mention of the word “Internet” and the Preamble was amended to require nations adopting the ITRs to do so in a manner “that respects and upholds their human rights obligations.”

Two results point however, to some greater conflict over internet management and, in my judgment, bode ill for the future of internet governance.  First, there was inclusion in the ITRs of a draft regulation directed at spam.  It is, I think, emblematic why authoritarian countries want to regulate political expression are so enamored of ITU governance  — they seek an international standard that allows each nation to manage its domestic internet however it pleases (in effect, giving international law approval to domestic internet content limitation).

Now, nobody likes spam (except, obviously, the spammers).  But it ought to go without saying that a mandate to end spam can only be implemented by reviewing the content of all email messages.  After all, spam is in the eye of the receiver and that perspective requires knowing what the message says.  So, though the eventual course of development for this particular regulation is uncertain, it seems likely that it will be taken as a license to monitor content by national governments.

The second anti-freedom result was an odd and procedurally suspect resolution proposed by Iran.  It read that “To foster an enabling environment for the greater growth of the Internet, . . . “all governments should have an equal role and responsibility for international Internet governance and for ensuring the stability, security and continuity of the existing Internet and its future development and of the future Internet, and that the need for development of public policy by governments in consultation with all stakeholders is also recognized.”  This was, in effect, an effort to reassert the role of sovereigns in making internet policy.

For both these reasons, the ITRs proved not to be the product of a unanimous consensus.  The vote was 89 in favor and 55 against.  Those objecting to the ITRs included many of the Western nations — the US, the EU, Australia, Canada, Japan, and others.  As with most international agreements, the ITRs must be ratified by individual nations; can be subject to reservations; and then must be implemented by domestic law.  The ITRs will take effect on January 1, 2015 – and they will only bind nations that ratified them.

Does It Matter? – So does it matter at all?  Some think that advisory international regulations that are non-binding should be of little moment or concern to the objecting nations.  On reflection, however, I think that doesn’t give the ITR’s due credit for importance.

Indeed, with all due respect, those who want to transfer regulatory authority over the cyber domain to the ITU or who are unconcerned about that possibility are making a mistake of significant proportions.  At best, such a transfer would diminish internet freedom.  At worst, it might fracture the network altogether, breaking the universality of the interconnected cyber domain.

First, and most narrowly, the analogy to commercial international organizations is a false one.  Aviation communications frequency requirements and standard shipping container sizes are not fraught with political significance in the same way that the regulation of cyberspace has become. International institutions like ICAO and the WCO succeed precisely because they manage the mundane, technical aspects of a highly specialized industry.   And when they do face more substantive concerns, their culture of consensus and cooperation suffices to smooth over most disputes.  By contrast, regulation of the network brings with it a host of highly contextual, political questions – perhaps no questions are more fundamental and more controversial that those which challenge basic state authority.  Many, therefore, fear that sovereigns seek international control of the network precisely because they want to stifle dissent and choke off the new medium of communication that has made maintaining the status quo hard.

Second, those who are not concerned underestimate, I think, the norm-setting value of international law.  To be sure, the ITRs don’t take effect of their own accord – they require ratification and implementation.  And if we dissent from their content they won’t bind America.  But it is a very different world where authoritarian countries can ground their repressive actions in an appeal to international law – one where Western interests in freedom of politics and economy will hold less sway.  Put bluntly, it matters in the court of public opinion if China can say “we are just implementing international law.”

And so some countries, concerned with outside influences, build firewalls to filter content.  Middle Eastern countries have proposed the construction of a separate Halal network intended to keep out non-Muslim influences.  And, in Belarus, “all visitors of Internet cafes and other public places of Internet access have been obliged to provide passports or other documents identifying [the] person in order to use the Internet.” Indeed, the instinct to filter content is not limited to authoritarian régimes — even liberal Western countries like Australia have proposed restrictions on Internet traffic, albeit for facially more legitimate reasons, such as limiting the spread of child pornography.  While these efforts proceed apace even in the absence of international authority, imagine how much more robust these efforts might be if they had the imprimatur of UN approval.

Third, and even more fundamentally, we should systematically prefer governance by ICANN and the IETF over that of the ITU for reasons beyond questions of national interest.    We should do so because it makes good economic sense.  The world economy and humanity’s overall general welfare would be better served by ICANN’s adherence (albeit imperfect) to a deregulated, market-driven approach to the development of cyberspace.  This approach compares favorably to the turgid, ineffective process of the international public regulatory sector.  If you consider that American or European processes are slow, you must realize that the problem will only be magnified in the international sphere.

Recall, again, the size and scope of the network.  Given the scale of the enterprise, the mechanisms for multinational cooperation are too cumbersome, hierarchical and slow to be of much use in the development of international standards.  Acceptable behavior in cyberspace mutates across multiple dimensions at a pace that far outstrips the speed of the policy making apparatus in the public international system (which, to cite just one example, has yet to conclude an updated trade treaty despite nearly two decades of effort).  We should all be concerned that there is no surer way to kill the economic value of the cyber domain than to let the public international community run it.

And, finally, the efforts at WCIT are I think a harbinger of things to come.  It is difficult to make predictions, but (as I’ll discuss in more detail in the next section) the morphing of the ITU is an ongoing process.  The next major meeting is in Busan, South Korea in 2014 and there we might see an even greater push for more direct control of network protocols (or perhaps not).  In my view, the only thing about the proposed transition of governance to the ITU that is certain is that it increases the risk of polarizing an already contentious domain even further.  We have seen the rumblings of what state-control of the network look like already, and the vision is not a pretty one.

What Lies Ahead – So, what’s next in this domain?  As I just noted, the ITU’s next plenipotentiary meeting will be in South Korea from late October to early November 2014.  Two events are on the horizon for that meeting.

First, some are talking about amending the Constitution of the ITU.  Doing so requires a two-thirds majority.  The current proposals range from an ITU “oversight” council to replacement of ICANN with ITU governing structures.  The later prospect, in particular, would be chilling and could result, in the end, on the amendment of technical Internet Protocols and naming rules to foster sovereign control of the network.  No drafts have yet been produced – and the Constitution requires that they be published by April.  At that point we may see exactly what steps might be proposed.

Bottom line:  The decision of some countries to not accede to the Dubai ITRs has already raised the possibility of degrading the interoperability of the network globally.  Revisions to the IP creation process or the DNS naming system might accelerate that degradation (since Western nations are also unlikely to follow authoritarian IPs) and accelerate the move toward the possibility of a “splinternet.”

Still, amending the Constitution would be hard.  If we take the 89-55 vote in Dubai as a baseline then those who would change the ITU’s Constitution to mandate internet governance were short of the necessary majority in 2012 – but perhaps not any longer.  For one thing, there were many members who did not cast a ballot in Dubai – total ITU membership is 193 countries, so 55 is already fewer than the 1/3 blocking minority necessary.  More to the point, however, those 55 votes have likely eroded since Dubai – thanks to Edward Snowden.

The Snowden revelations of NSA activity are troubling on a number of levels.  But the most disturbing aspect is that he has revealed that some parts of the US government are insufficiently cognizant of their broader responsibility to network governance.  Any fair assessment suggests that the US government has been a reasonable custodian of cyberspace freedom and governance, fostering the conditions that have fueled the domain’s explosive growth.  Yet Snowden’s disclosures make clear that some in American have sought to take advantage of that custodial position, thereby strengthening the argument of those who would seek to change the structure of Internet governance.

In other words it is by no means clear that those 55 votes are still in the US camp.   Many, including some of our closer EU allies, may be ready for a radical change in internet governance.  And as I’ve noted already, I think that sort of change would be a significant error – and the irony of Snowden’s actions is that they may have the unintended consequence of hastening the diminution of Internet freedom rather than arresting its erosion.

The second development is even more of a sleeper.  At the Busan meeting, the ITU will elect a new Secretary-General.  The incumbent, Dr.  Hamadoun Touré of Mali, is term-limited.  As of today, there is only one announced candidate for the position.  He brings to his candidacy a great deal of experience, including, most recently as Deputy to Dr. Toure in the ITU.  While such internal promotion is laudable, I will be forgiven if I express a small amount of concern – the candidate is Dr. Houlin Zhao of China.  Thus, one plausible scenario would be for 2015 to see a newly empowered ITU dealing with international internet public policy issues, and perhaps even asserting authority to create internet technical standards, under the direction of Dr. Zhao.

One final note:  The US is not really paying attention.  Again, as of today we have yet to name an ambassadorial rank leader for the US delegation.  And, frankly, I don’t think that the Executive Branch has as great a concern about these events as I do.  There is a crying need, however, for greater US engagement – notwithstanding the Snowden fall out.  More importantly, the US private sector needs to recognize that the lack of a strong US governmental presence is doing them harm – they need to quickly and decisively collectivize their efforts if they are going to avert potentially adverse results.

* * * * *

There is a real intellectual appeal to the idea of an international governance system to manage an international entity like cyberspace.  But, upon closer examination the idea is fraught with peril.  What is needed now is a reinvigoration of the existing multi-stakeholder structure combined with bilateral and multilateral agreements on narrow issues of general applicability.  Those who support the MSM and ICANN/IETF structure must acknowledge the dislocation that diminished revenue is having on some nations that are dependent on telecommunications taxes for a portion of their budget and, where possible, propose mechanisms to ameliorate the adverse effects.

More importantly, we should strive to instill confidence in ICANN and the IETF as stewards of cyberspace.  It may, for example, be necessary to further decouple those institutions from Western influence.    But even after the Snowden disclosures we must also recognize that the non-State structure currently in place is less subject to political manipulation than the alternatives.  These international institutions are multi-stakeholder groups where individuals, technologists, political organizations, innovators and commercial entities all have a voice.  The product of their consensus is more representative and more moderated than any system respondent to only sovereign interests can hope to be.

The way forward for the United States and other Western nations is to make common cause with allies and friends around the globe to establish cooperative mechanisms that yield strong standards of conduct while assuring the continuity of critical cyber freedoms against the challenge of authoritarian sovereigns.

Today is Saturnalia, an ancient Roman holiday whose celebration has become a Volokh Conspiracy tradition. OK, in reality it’s only a tradition in so far as I put up a post about it every year. But that’s as traditional as anything in the blogosphere is ever likely to get.

The Encyclopedia Romana describes this exciting holiday as follows:

During the holiday, restrictions were relaxed and the social order inverted. Gambling was allowed in public. Slaves were permitted to use dice and did not have to work. . . Within the family, a Lord of Misrule was chosen. Slaves were treated as equals, allowed to wear their masters’ clothing, and be waited on at meal time in remembrance of an earlier golden age thought to have been ushered in by the god. In the Saturnalia, Lucian relates that “During My week the serious is barred; no business allowed. Drinking, noise and games and dice, appointing of kings and feasting of slaves, singing naked, clapping of frenzied hands, an occasional ducking of corked faces in icy water—such are the functions over which I preside.”

Sadly, this year we have more than the usual number of strong contenders for the title of Lord of Misrule here in the Washington, DC area. I’m sure our commenters will have plenty of nominees. On the bright side, Saturnalia is definitely an appropriate occasion to purchase Volokh Conspiracy holiday gifts.

Happy Saturnalia to all you friends, Romans, and countrymen out there!

oliasis:

notyour-sidekick:

kleenexwoman:

did-you-kno:

Source

I have a few copies of “Playboy” from the 1970s stashed away somewhere. One of them has a letter where a guy writes in saying, “I met this really gorgeous, sweet woman, and we were planning to get married, but she sat me down yesterday and told me that she had a sex change before she met me. Mr. Hefner, should I marry someone who used to be a man?” and the response was, “So she had a sex change, big whoop. Would you be asking this question if she’d made any other change in her life before she met you? You love the woman she is now, and that’s all that should matter. If you want kids you can adopt or something.”

I feel so conflicted right now

Today Mailbox, the email application that claims to make it easy to get to "Inbox Zero," introduced support for Yahoo Mail, iCloud, me.com and mac.com email accounts. According to the company, Mailbox gets more requests for Yahoo Mail and iCloud support than any other feature.

Before today's update, Mailbox only supported Gmail accounts.

pleatedjeans:

toonhole

As part of its Google Takeout service, Google now allows users to download their Gmail and Google Calendar data. You can save all or just some of your email and appointments—the former in MBOX format, the latter in ICS (iCalendar)—right alongside any other Google Takeout archives you desire, including your data from Google+, YouTube, Contacts, Drive, Voice, your Google profile, your Google location history and Google Hangouts.

Archives for Google Calendar are available immediately, while downloads for Gmail will be rolling out sometime this month. 

Microsoft and Sony have just kickstarted the next generation of games with the new Xbox One and PlayStation 4. As of today, they're simply powerful, relatively affordable new boxes that play games. Tomorrow, they could be capable of much, much more.

For now, though, neither console has realized its potential, and there aren't many good games to start. They're also not backwards-compatible, so you'll only get an error message if you try to put old Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 discs in their drives. When existing video-game console libraries are chock-full of great titles, and wonderful PC and mobile experiences are cheaper and more accessible than ever before, would buying a PS4 or Xbox One this holiday season truly be the best choice? Both...

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URLs in Microsoft Word documents by default appear as hyperlinks, and also don’t automatically break across lines. This is sometimes fine, but I think it looks bad in briefs and similar documents. The hyperlink is underlined and set in a different color, good if you want to click on it but otherwise distracting. And the line before often ends up having lots of white space, which is also distracting and unattractive.

Here’s how I solve these problems:

1. Turn the hyperlink into plain text by selecting it and then hitting ctrl-shift-F9. Alternatively, if you don’t want hyperlinks added by default at all, you can turn off that option in the Word AutoFormat-As-You-Type configuration.

2. Tell Word that it can break the hyperlink at a bunch of likely places (usually right after slashes or periods) using Insert / Symbol / Special Characters / No-Width Optional Break. If you find yourself doing this often, you can easily assign a shortcut key to this special nondisplaying symbol.

You can of course include an optional hyphen instead, but I think it’s generally not good for a word in a URL to be artificially hyphenated, since then a reader might think the hyphen is part of the URL. You can also enter manual line breaks, but that’s not optimal, because you don’t want the URL to break at a fixed place — you want it to break at the place that yields the least internal white space, and that might change as the earlier lines in the footnote change, or as the article gets reformatted.

The downside, of course, is that the URLs will no longer be clickable; but in my experience that feature is generally not important in briefs, while looking good and minimally distracting is important.

One of the most common phrases in contemporary foreign-policy discourse is the declaration that the threat to use military force must be kept "on the table." Pundits and policy wonks say this all the time, and so do prominent politicians from both political parties. These days it's most commonly found in discussions about the U.S. relationship with Iran, but that's hardly the only place where we are constantly being reminded about the need to keep our powder dry and our finger on the trigger.

The more I think about it, however, the dumber that expression sounds. Why? Because for the United States, the option of using military force is always on the table, especially when we're dealing with weak states like Iran. After all, since the end of the Cold War the United States has used force over and over: in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Bosnia, Serbia, and a host of other places too. We've fired cruise missiles, Hellfires, and other sophisticated chunks of ordnance at a wide variety of targets, and you could add Special Forces operations and computer viruses (e.g., Stuxnet) to the list.

Of course, people do not use this admonition to keep force "on the table" in a serious or sophisticated fashion; it's just an easy way for politicians and pundits to show they're tough-minded and not averse to using the pointed end of the stick. In other words, it's a way to maintain your inside-the-Beltway street cred. But it's really a meaningless phrase, because countries like Iran (and others) are well aware that the option of using force is right there and could be used if U.S. leaders ever decided it would accomplish a genuine positive purpose.

In fact, this constant insistence that force must be "on the table" also reveals a pervasive blindness about how the United States looks to others. People repeat this phrase because they seem to think that other countries see the United States as a feckless wimp that will never do anything to harm them and that our politicians need to rattle sabers and bluster just to get other countries' attention. News flash: That's not how the rest of the world sees Uncle Sam these days. In reality, everybody knows the United States is still very powerful -- the sequester notwithstanding -- and other countries are well aware of the frequency with which we've been blowing things up in different places for the past 20 years. Our politicians may be trying to remind U.S. voters that they are willing to use force, but the rest of the world hardly needs to be told at this point.

In the vast majority of cases -- including Iran -- the use of force makes no sense because it won't advance U.S. policy goals and could in fact make things worse. And the only way to give the option of using force more coercive bite is to make it look like we are really about to use it, either by issuing an ultimatum (with a strict time limit) or by mobilizing forces in a highly visible way so that it really looks like we're coming. But that tactic has obvious risks: If the target doesn't capitulate and do our bidding, either we have to follow through with an attack we may not really want to launch or we pay the political costs of issuing a threat and then backing down. Issuing overt military threats is also a really good way to destroy the current coalition that is pressuring Iran and the absolutely best way to convince Iran that it has no choice but to sprint across the nuclear threshold as quickly as it can.

Given the many options that America's vast military power creates, the bigger challenge might be figuring out how to convince others that force is off the table. If we want Iran to forgo nuclear weapons, for example, we should try to convince Tehran we're not going to bomb Iran and not going to try to overthrow the government. If we did that, the Iranians would feel less need for either an active deterrent or a short timeline breakout capability. Bombing won't accomplish much and we probably couldn't overthrow them if we tried, but we certainly have the capacity to attempt either one. So how can we convince Tehran that we won't exercise either option?

In theory, President Barack Obama could make an explicit statement to that effect, or the two states could even sign some sort of "nonaggression" pact. Such pledges are never ironclad, however, and U.S. and Iranian officials both say they will judge each other not by words but by actions. The United States could also draw down its forces in the Persian Gulf region as a sign of good faith, but that's going to drive our other regional allies bonkers and would be quite imprudent in the short term. It's a tricky problem, but isn't it interesting that we seem to spend all our time thinking about how to make our threats credible, instead of thinking just as hard about how we could make our assurances equally convincing?

In the end, the real issue is whether potential adversaries can resolve the political issues that might bring the use of force into play. The option to use it is always right there on the table -- especially for the United States -- but most states don't worry about this very much because the political differences between them and us aren't serious enough to warrant a military response. The bottom line: We would get further in our efforts to resolve some of our differences with others if U.S. politicians and commentators weren't constantly reminding them that we have oodles of military power lying right there on the table ready to be used. I mean: It's not like Iran doesn't know that already.