Tag Archives: online politics

JavaScript Politics

r-anarchismIn a recent conversation on Twitter, Christopher Zorn said that Stata is fascism, R is anarchism, and SAS is masochism. While only one of these is plausibly a programming language, it’s an interesting political analogy. We’ve discussed the politics of the Ruby language before.

Today I wanted to share a speaker deck by Angus Croll on the politics of Javascript. He describes periods of anarchy (1995-2004), revolution (2004-2006), and coming of age (2007-2010). We’re currently in “the itch” (2011-2013). There are a number of other political dimensions in the slides as well. Click the image below to see the deck in full.

javascript-politics

If anyone knows of a video of the presentation, I’d love to see it. Croll also wrote an entertaining article with Javascript code in the style of famous authors like Hemingway, Dickens, and Shakespeare.

Net Neutrality: Why You Should Care

Image via TheNextWeb

Image via TheNextWeb

What is net neutrality? It’s the idea that Internet service providers (ISPs) should treat all traffic equally, not giving preferential treatment to certain users, types of data, or equipment. With FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski on the way out, nominee Tom Wheeler may not be able to avoid this fight if he succeeds Genachowski.

Here’s the Tim Wu of the New Yorker on the essence of the issue:

An important aspect of the Internet’s original design is that many prices were set at zero—what have been called zero-price rules. The price to join the network is zero. The price that users and sites pay to reach others is zero: a blogger doesn’t need to pay to reach Comcast’s customers. And the price that big Web sites charge broadband operators to carry their content is also zero. It’s a subtle point, but these three zeros are a large part of what makes the Internet what it is. If net neutrality goes away, so does the agreement to freeze prices at zero….

Admittedly, it is hard to know exactly how things would work out if the zero-price rules are abandoned. Cable still has serious market power, and might, on balance, be able to charge more than it gets charged. But if you’re a cable operator, why take that bet when you’re already sitting on giant profit margins? Why risk the best business going? Beyond cable operators, a battle royale over Internet programming and termination fees would ultimately be terrible for consumers; the Internet would start to get both worse and more expensive.

Think of it this way: net neutrality, which sets all these prices at zero, is effectively a grand truce between the big app firms and the infrastructure providers. It eliminates an unnecessary middleman: consumers deal directly with content vendors and app firms. That’s a much healthier market dynamic than one driven by hidden, passed-on costs. If cable TV isn’t a good enough example, consider the dysfunction of the health-care industry, where consumers never see what they are paying for. That’s what the present rule avoids.

YSPR will continue to monitor this issue and provide updates here.

Great Gatsby, Copyright, and the Public Domain

f_scott_fitzgerald_in_carIs the Great Gatsby in the public domain? The book was written in 1925 and Fitzgerald passed away in 1940. Copyright generally expires 70 years after the author’s death, so you could be forgiven for thinking the answer is “yes.”

If you live in Australia, Canada, or another jurisdiction outside the US, you can already get the book through sites like Project Gutenberg Australia. US residents should not click that link–had SOPA been passed, this site could have been censored for even providing the link. In these United States, however, Gatsby is still not in the public domain.

Here’s Duke’s Kevin Smith (who we’ve talked to before) on the convoluted reasoning behind this:

Let’s look for a minute at F. Scott.  Because he died in December of 1940, his unpublished works do enter the public domain in the United States as of 1/1/11.  His published works, however, are another story.  If a Fitzgerald work was published between 1920 and 1922, as This Side of Paradise was, for example, it is in the public domain.  But any works published in 1923 0r later, such as The Great Gatsby, are still protected.  After 1922 (and prior to 1963), a work that was published with copyright notice  and the copyright in which was renewed is given a term of 95 years from publication (the initial 28 year term plus a renewal term, after the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, of 67 years).  Thus published works from this time period are protected until at least 2019; — 1923 plus 95 years equals 2018, so works published that year will rise into the public domain on 1/1/2019.  The author’s date of death does not make any difference for these works.

This distinction seems designed to confuse librarians and other users of works.  An archive of Fitzgerald manuscripts, for example, could digitize and make available those items that were never published, or that were published earlier in F. Scott’s career (like Tales of the Jazz Age).  But a manuscript of Gatsby or Tender is the Night is still subject to protection.

The EFF had a nice explainer on this topic recently as well. Copyright restrictions aren’t just tougher in the US, they’re also subject to the whims of Congress. Congressional action can remove books from the public domain even after they’re put there by law, thanks to this Supreme Court decision.

How does this regulation affect the availability of books? Rebecca Rosen of The Atlantic called it the “missing 20th century” based on Paul Heald’s study, ”Do Bad Things Happen When Works Fall Into the Public Domain?” Here’s a chart of books available from Amazon by decade of publication:

Amazon pub domain-thumb-615x368-83391

Continuing to extend copyright protection every time Mickey Mouse gets close to being put in the public domain helps Disney, but it does not help the spread of knowledge. Don’t get me started on Hollywood, though–I’m off to see the movie.

Internet Sales Tax FAQ

sales-tax-santaWe’ve got a week of Internet politics-related topics queued up for you this week. Today we’ll take a look at the prospect of an internet sales tax. Later in the week we’ll discuss why The Great Gatsby still isn’t in the public domain, and then take an overview of the net neutrality debate. The FAQ’s below are a summary of this explainer from CNN.

What’s the current state of sales tax law? 

In the US Supreme Court’s last major decision on the issue (Quill Corp. v. North Dakota), it ruled that a retailer must have a physical presence in a state in order to be required to collect sales taxes in that state. Technically you are required to pay a use tax by your state if you order online from another state–just as you would be required to do so when purchasing physical goods outside your home state. But who actually does that? Virtually no one.

How much revenue would an online sales tax bring in?

The National Conference of State Legislatures estimated that states could gain $23 billion from sales taxes on internet commerce.

What’s going to change, and when? 

Last week the Senate voted 69-27 in favor of the so-called Marketplace Fairness Act. It now has to pass the House, where it will likely face more resistance. The Obama administration supports the bill, so if it passes the House it will become law. Even if passed the changes will go into effect no earlier than October 1, 2013. If you have any major online purchases in mind you may want to make them before then–another stimulus of sorts.

When will telephone polls have their “Literary Digest” moment?

literary-digestMention the name Literary Digest to a pollster and they will instantly know what you are talking about. Literary Digest is well-known for their famously wrong prediction that Kansas Republican Alfred Landon would beat Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the presidential election of 1936. Part of the problem was that, despite a sample size of 2.4 million and a response rate of nearly 25 percent, the groups that Literary Digest surveyed were not representative of voters. Respondents tended to be wealthier than average, since they were drawn from the Digest‘s subscribers as well as automobile registries and telephone books. Using a sample of “only” 50,000, George Gallup was able to predict the outcome correctly and the Digest soon went out of business.

What people forget is that 1936 was not the first time that Literary Digest had conducted a presidential poll or made a prediction. In the previous four elections–dating back to 1920–the Digest had always been correct. The 1936 election was a “falling off the cliff” moment for their polling methodology.

On Friday David Rothschild of Microsoft Research came and gave a series of talks for the Duke political methodology group. He covered a number of interesting topics, including prediction markets and online experiments. There was also a presentation about his work-in-progress analyzing 2012 polling data collected via XBox Live. One takeaway from that presentation is that, correcting for demographics of likely voters (as you might expect, XBox respondents were overwhelmingly male and young) the Xbox Poll tends to track the Pollster polling average.

An important issue that came up during the presentation was non-response bias. Telephone surveys now have vanishingly small response rates. They are further complicated by the shift to cell phones. Pollsters cannot use a computer to randomly dial (RDD) cell phones: the numbers have to be dialed by hand, which raises the time required and thus the costs of the poll. People are not “randomly” switching to cell phones either, so this biases the poll.

The demise of telephone polls will not be gradual. Organizations like Gallup will have their own Literary Digest moment in which their methodology–which has been highly accurate for years–will fall off a cliff. It is only a matter of time.

Etiquette in the Digital Age

writing_stylesIt happens whenever new communication technology comes into widespread use. Standard forms of behavior that worked well in the past are less suitable for the new medium. When the telephone was invented, people were unsure how to greet the caller. Thankfully Alexander Graham Bell’s proposed “Ahoy!” was not adopted. Similarly, recent technologies such as text messaging and smartphone internet access are challenging existing norms and creating new ones. This post describes some of those changes, but should not be interpreted as taking a position on which are appropriate.

One taboo is asking someone a question when the information is readily available on the internet. If you want to chide the questioner you might use lmgtfy.com, which stands for Let Me Google That for You.

Voicemails–a relatively new technology themselves–are on the way out, replaced by a follow-up text message if necessary. Caity Weaver has a list of when she considers voicemails OK and when they are unwarranted.

Personally I use e-mail sign-offs as if I was writing a short letter, but Matthew Malady wants to kill this bit of formality:

[E]veryone has a breaking point. For me, it was the ridiculous variations on “Regards” that I received over the past holiday season. My transition from signoff submissive to signoff subversive began when a former colleague ended an email to me with “Warmest regards.”

Were these scalding hot regards superior to the ordinary “Regards” I had been receiving on a near-daily basis? Obviously they were better than the merely “Warm Regards” I got from a co-worker the following week. Then I received “Best Regards” in a solicitation email from the New Republic. Apparently when urging me to attend a panel discussion, the good people at the New Republic were regarding me in a way that simply could not be topped.

After 10 or 15 more “Regards” of varying magnitudes, I could take no more. I finally realized the ridiculousness of spending even one second thinking about the totally unnecessary words that we tack on to the end of emails. And I came to the following conclusion: It’s time to eliminate email signoffs completely. Henceforth, I do not want—nay, I will not accept—any manner of regards. Nor will I offer any. And I urge you to do the same.

The difficulty with these emerging norms is the disparity in how different people use the technologies. My siblings and I text more than we talk on the phone and are OK with short informal messages, but when our grandmother texts us it is more like an email. Some workers use e-mail for regular communication in their office and may send and receive 100 or more messages a day, while for others it is a much less commonly used tool. It seems likely that different norms could emerge in these various settings, but this will require attention when you are talking/writing to someone outside your usual network. As these norms emerge it will give us a chance to observe the development of micro-institutions in real time.

Ruby’s Benevolent Dictator

The Ruby Logo

The Ruby Logo

The first version of the Ruby programming language was developed by Yukihiro Matsumoto, better known as “Matz,” in 1995. Since then it has become especially popular for web development thanks to the advent of Rails by DHH. A variety of Ruby implementations have also sprung up, optimized for various uses. You may recall our recent discussion of RubyMotion as a well to develop iOS apps in Ruby. As with human languages, the spread and evolution of computer languages raises an interesting question: how different can two things be and still be the same?

To run with the human language example for a bit, consider the following. My native language is American English. (There are a number of regional variants within the US, so even the fact that American English is a useful category is telling.) I would recognize a British citizen with a cockney accent as a speaker of the same language, even though I would have trouble understanding him or her. I would not, however, recognize a French speaker as someone with whom I shared a language. The latter distinction exists despite the relative similarity between the languages–a shared alphabet, shared roots in Latin, and so on. So who decides whether two languages are the same?

In the case of human languages this is very much an emergent decision, worked out through the behavior of numerous individuals with little conscious thought for their coordination. This is where the human/computer language analogy fails us. The differences between computer languages are discrete, not continuous–there are measurable differences and similarities between any two language implementations, and intermediate steps between one implementation and another might not be viable. So who decides what is Ruby and what is not?

That is the question Brian Shirai raised in a series of posts and a conference talk. As of right now there is no clear process by which the community decides the future of Ruby, or what counts as a legitimate Ruby implementation. Matz is a benevolent dictator–but maybe not for life. His implementation is known to some as MRI–”Matz’s Ruby Implementation,” with the implication that this is just one of many.

Shirai is proposing a process by which the Ruby community could depersonalize such decisions by moving to a decision-making council. This depersonalization of power relations is at the heart of what it means to institutionalize. Shirai’s process consists of seven steps:

  1. A Ruby Design Council made up of representatives from any significant Ruby implementation, where significant means able to run a base level of RubySpec (which is to be determined).
  2. A proposal for a Ruby change can be submitted by any member of the Ruby Design Council. If a member of the larger Ruby community wishes to submit a proposal, they must work with a member of the Council.
  3. The proposal must meet the following criteria:
    1. An explanation, written in English, of the change, what use cases or problems motivates the change, how existing libraries, frameworks, or applications may be affected.
    2. Complete documentation, written in English, describing all relevant aspects of the change, including documentation for any specific methods whose behavior changes or behavior of new methods that are added.
    3. RubySpecs that completely describe the behavior of the change.
  4. When the Council is presented with a proposal that meets the above criteria, any member can decide that the proposal fails to make a case that justifies the effort to implement the feature. Such veto must explain in depth why the proposed change is unsuitable for Ruby. The member submitting the proposal can address the deficiencies and resubmit.
  5. If a proposal is accepted for consideration, all Council members must implement the feature so that it passes the RubySpecs provided.
  6. Once all Council members have implemented the feature, the feature can be discussed in concrete terms. Any implementation, platform, or performance concerns can be addressed. Negative or positive impact on existing libraries, frameworks or applications can be clearly and precisely evaluated.
  7. Finally, a vote on the proposed change is taken. Each implementation gets one vote. Only changes that receive approval from all Council members become the definition of Ruby.

Step 3B is a particularly interesting one for students of politics. As you may have guessed, Matz is Japanese. (This is somewhat ironic since Ruby is the currently the most readable language for English speakers–see this example if you don’t believe me.) Many discussions about Ruby take place on Japanese message boards, and some non-Japanese developers have even learned Japanese so that they can participate in these discussions. English is the lingua franca of the international software development community, so Shirai’s proposal makes sense but it is not uncontroversial.

In Shirai’s own words this proposal would provide the Ruby community with a “technology for change.” That is exactly what political institutions are for–organizing the decision-making capacity of a community. This proposal and its eventual acceptance, rejection, or modification by the Ruby community will be interesting for students of politics to keep an eye on, and may be the topic of future posts.

Micro-Institutions Everywhere: Book ID Numbers

Pink identifies the prefix, current only 978 or 979. Purplse is the registration group element, identifying the geographical source of the book (1-5 digits). In light green is the publisher or imprint's ID, up to 7 digits. In yellow is the publication element for idenfitying the edition or format of the book. Highlighted in grey is the check digit, used to verify the number. "5" in red identifies US dollars as the currency for the price, highlighted in dark green.

Pink identifies the prefix, current only 978 or 979. Purplse is the registration group element, identifying the geographical source of the book (1-5 digits). In light green is the publisher or imprint’s ID, up to 7 digits. In yellow is the publication element for idenfitying the edition or format of the book. Highlighted in grey is the check digit, used to verify the number. “5″ in red identifies US dollars as the currency for the price, highlighted in dark green.

If you are a bookworm like me, you have evidence of this micro-institution all around you. Grab a nearby book and look at the back cover, or a couple of pages inside the front cover. You will see a series of numbers that uniquely identify the book: its International Standard Book Number (ISBN). That 10 or 13-digit number serves as the worldwide identifier for books, helping customers at online retailers like AbeBooks, Half.com, and Amazon be sure that they are purchasing the right reading material without physically inspecting the product.

Ironically, it is those same online marketplaces and their accompanying e-readers that now endanger the future of the ISBN. The supply of ISBNs is finite, you understand, and demand is high:

The International Standard Book Number (ISBN), invented in Britain in 1965, took off rapidly as an international system for classifying books, with 150 agencies (one per country, with two for bilingual Canada) now issuing the codes. Set up by retailers to ease their distribution and sales, it increasingly hampers new, small and individual publishers. Yet digital publishing is weakening its monopoly.

Publishers who were in at the beginning got great blocks of ISBNs. Many have plenty still in stock. Some countries, including Canada, Hungary and Croatia, make them free to bolster book publishing. But in Britain, America and Japan, where ISBNs are needed for any hope of mainstream publication, they are costly.

Self-published writers understandably do not want to pay for a costly ID number when they are making small margins off of an e-book. If they are only selling through a single retailer (say, an Amazon Kindle edition) there is little incentive to get a unique number–customers will be able to find the book without it. And alternatives are cropping up:

Amazon has introduced the Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN). Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) tag articles in academic journals. Walmart, an American supermarket chain, has a Universal Product Code (UPC) for everything it stocks—including books. Humans are also getting labels: the Open Researcher and Contributor ID system (ORCID) identifies academics by codes, not their names. And ISBNs are not mandatory at Google Books.

It is foreseeable that one of these options will emerge as a privately-provided institution, replacing the ISBN. The transition is unlikely to be smooth, however–switching equilibriums rarely is. As you trace your finger across an ISBN number on a printed page, you are not only touching a micro-instituiton. You may be holding history in your hands.

Hackers vs. Diplomats

XKCD's Map of the Internet, 2006

XKCD’s Map of the Internet, 2006

Katherine Maher’s Foreign Policy piece got a lot of (deserved) attention last week. If the topic interests you, go read the whole thing. I’ll highlight the parts that are most relevant to our recent conversations on internet politics.

On the web as geography:

Like all new frontiers, cyberspace’s early settlers declared themselves independent — most famously in 1996, in cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Barlow asserted a realm beyond borders or government, rejecting the systems we use to run the physical universe. “Governments of the Industrial World,” he reproached, “You have no sovereignty where we gather.… Cyberspace does not lie within your borders.” …

Barlow was right, in part. Independence was a structural fact of cyberspace, and free expression and communication were baked into the network. The standards and protocols on which the Internet runs are agnostic: They don’t care whether you were in Bangkok, Buenos Aires, or Boise. If they run into an attempt to block traffic, they merely reroute along a seemingly infinite network of decentralized nodes, inspiring technologist John Gilmore’s maxim: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

On the promise of the internet for promoting freedom:

Information has always been power, and governments have long sought to control it. So for countries where power is a tightly controlled narrative, parsed by state television and radio stations, the Internet has been catastrophic. Its global, decentralized networks of information-sharing have routed around censorship — just as Gilmore promised they would. It gives people an outlet to publish what the media cannot, organize where organizing is forbidden, and revolt where protest is unknown.

On the changing reality–increasingly state-based control:

Recently, the network research and analytics company Renesys tried to assess how hard it would be to take the world offline. They assessed disconnection risk based on the number of national service providers in every country, finding that 61 countries are at severe risk for disconnection, with another 72 at significant risk. That makes 133 countries where network control is so centralized that the Internet could be turned off with not much more than a phone call.

It seems our global Internet is not so global.

From my perspective I can only hope that we will find the equivalent of “internet mountains” that will remain hard to govern. It is possible that some nation states will even facilitate this. (I am thinking here of The Pirate Bay’s move from a US-based .com domain to a Swedish .se address.) The emperor may still be far away, but he’s getting closer.

The New Netflix Strategy: Gambling on House of Cards

NetflixGamblingOne week ago Netflix introduced its first original series, House of Cards. The series details the life and crimes of (fictional) US Congressman Francis Underwood and his wife Claire who runs a nonprofit. What is unique about the series is that the entire season–13 episodes–was released all at once. Netflix and streaming services like it have acclimated us to watching shows in bulk like this. Is the new model sustainable?

I hope so, and Atlantic Wire reporter Rebecca Greenfield thinks the answer is yes:

With Netflix spending a reported $100 million to produce two 13-episode seasons of House of Cards, they need 520,834 people to sign up for a $7.99 subscription for two years to break even. To do that five times every year, then, the streaming TV site would have to sign up more 2.6 million subscribers than they would have. That sounds daunting, but at the moment, Netflix has 33.3 million subscribers, so this is an increase of less than 10 percent on their current customer base. Of course, looking at Netflix’s past growth, that represents pretty reasonable growth for the company that saw 65 percent growth from 20 million to over 33 million world-wide streaming customers. Much of that growth, however, comes from new overseas markets. But, even in the U.S., from one year ago, Netflix saw about 13 percent streaming viewer growth jumping from 24 million to 27 million.

The five times per year figure comes from a plan that Netflix CEO Reid Hastings revealed in an interview with GQ. Paying for subscription television like this is not a new idea–it’s a similar business model to HBO. But Netflix seems to have the execution right, at least with this first foray.

Perhaps the biggest difference with convention television is that it doesn’t matter how many people watched House of Cards during its debut week. As Hastings said in a letter to investors two weeks ago:

Linear channels must aggregate a large audience at a given time of day and hope the show programmed will actually attract enough viewers despite this constraint. With Netflix, members can enjoy a show anytime, and over time, we can effectively put the right show in front of members based on their viewing habits. Thus we can spend less on marketing while generating higher viewership.

For linear TV, the fixed number of prime-time slots mean that only shows that hit it big and fast survive, thus requiring an extensive and expensive pilot system to keep on deck potential replacement shows. In contrast, Internet TV is an environment where smaller or quirkier shows can prosper because they can find a big enough audience over time. In baseball terms, linear TV only scores with home runs. We score with home runs too, but also with singles, doubles and triples.

Because of our unique strengths, we can commit to producing and publishing “books” rather than “chapters”, so the creators can concentrate on multi-episode story arcs, rather than pilots. Creators can work on episode 11 confident that viewers have recently enjoyed episodes 1 to 10. Creators can develop episodes that are not all exactly 22 or 44 minutes in length. The constraints of the linear TV grid will fall, one by one.

I look forward to seeing more of this strategy, and as I proceed with House of Cards you may even get a post on its politics.