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Wikileaks and Distributed Information

Whatever your opinion about Julian Assange and Wikileaks’ release of US State Department documents, the whole affair has become a case study in censorship and open networks. As you’ve probably heard, Amazon kicked the Wikileaks site off their servers December 2 and EveryDNS booted the site December 3. Effectively, www.wikileaks.org is blocked, but if you go to www.wikileaks.ch you will find a working copy of the site. How does this happen?

James Cowie, writing on the renesys blog, does a good job of explaining the global game of whack-a-mole going on now with Wikileaks. As Cowie writes, “To prevent a repeat performance of the EveryDNS experience, the Swiss site [.ch is the Swiss country domain -- ed.] seems to have been selected for heavy reinforcement through DNS diversification. If you ask for the authoritative servers for wikileaks.ch today, you’ll find no fewer than 14 different authoritative nameservers, spread across eleven different autonomous systems, in eight different countries, from Switzerland to Canada to Malaysia.”

In short, the internet is doing what it was designed to do: transmit information even if one or two, or two hundred nodes on the net are disabled. As Cowie notes in his conclusion:

You can’t burn down the Library of Alexandria any more — it will respawn in someone’s basement in Stockholm, or Denver, or Beijing.

Meanwhile, New York Magazine’s Intelligencer column has a pretty smart take on Assange’s emerging social media strategy (hint: check out #cablegate on Twitter).

FCC Takes Half Step Toward Open Net

Yesterday Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski put forward a framework of rules for preserving an open internet. The chairman’s points are outlined in a brief Huffington Post article and can be heard in full in this  video of the chairman’s December 1 speech on YouTube.  “Our rules will protect against corporate gatekeepers prioritizing access to one person’s content over another’s,” Mr. Genachowski said.  In summary, the chairman’s points seem to agree with the principles of net neutrality. However, there is a lot left unsaid.

Unfortunately, Chairman Genachowski said nothing about reversing a 2005 FCC vote that categorized the internet as an “information service” not a “telecommunications service”. Congress has given the FCC broad powers to regulate telecommunications services; the regulation of “information services” is something of a gray area. Also, as noted in this New York Times article, the chairman’s remarks offer weak protections against “paid prioritization” or “specialized services”, two of the latest terms-of-art put forward by the telecoms to make tiered internet service more palatable. Also unsaid in Genachowski’s statement is any attempt to ensure open access to the net over wireless connections.

More can be found on the FCC site. The commission is set to vote on these rules December 21.

The Year the Net Ate TV

Both Hulu and Netflix posted impressive gains in the third quarter. Hulu earned $240 million in revenue in 2010, according to Mashable.  After just three years of operation, the internet-TV service now claims 30 million users and 253 content partners.

“In the third quarter, Netflix saw a 52 percent gain in subscribers to 16.9 million. Revenue increased 31 percent to $553 million,” the Washington Post reported. Most of the gains are in video streaming; in the fourth quarter Netflix expects to deliver more movies via the net than through the postal service.

Add this to the recent news that YouTube users are now uploading 35 hours of video every minute, and it’s not hard to predict that 2011 will be the year that the internet swallowed television. From a user’s perspective, this is great news. For the cost of a broadband connection and a Netflix subscription, couch potatoes everywhere can select what they want to watch from an expanding universe of movies, TV and homemade video. Cable companies and telecom ISP providers are less than thrilled by this trend. They have been busy lobbying the FCC to carve out a space for “specialized services” on the net.

This bid for an exception to the principles of network neutrality is just the latest bit of Orwellian obfuscation from the telecom lobby. Sadly,  it appears to be gaining traction with the Federal Communications Commission, if this muddled ArsTechnica piece is to be believed.

Netflix management was not deceived. In a recent statement to the FCC they wrote:

Netflix continues to believe that the risks posed by specialized services being provided over the same physical network as the public Internet heightens the need for oversight of such services. The Commission must assure that specialized services do not, in effect, transform the public Internet into a private network in which access is not open but is controlled by the network operator, and innovative Internet-based enterprises are permitted effective access to their consumers only if the enterprises pay network operators unreasonable fees or are otherwise seen by such network operators as not threatening a competitive venture.

Netflix and Hulu are just two examples of new companies that would not exist without a free and open network. Tens of thousands of other companies depend upon an open network to do business. What’s it going to take to get Congress and the FCC to codify the principles of network neutrality in law and enforce them with an administrative rule?

The Master Switch

In 1994, when I was  introduced to the WWW portion of the internet, my first question was, “Who owns it?”

“Everybody does,” was the answer at the time.  For the first two decades of the web’s existence, that was true. Now that may be changing.

Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu’s new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires looks at the cycle of creation-chaos-and-control in communication systems.  ”Information technologies give rise to industries, and industries to empires.” Wu said.  This cycle ultimately destroys the innovative spirit that creates new information technologies and the openness that typifies them in their early years. This pattern appears to be replicating itself with the internet, Professor Wu said in a recent NPR interview. For more detail, see The New Yorker for a series of video interviews with Tim Wu and Jefferey Toobin.

Wu has also been an advocate of network neutrality, the principle that all information carried on a given network is treated the same. For more of Professor Wu’s writing on this topic, see the Network Neutrality FAQ.

The issues of network neutrality and big capital trying to control information systems are not unrelated. Like the collusion of Western Union and the Associated Press 150 years ago, several players have been trying to consolidate content and its distribution over the net into one system.

A pair of articles, in the September issue of Wired ( “The Web is Dead” ),  by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff, persuasively makes the case for an emerging class of applications and proprietary software supplanting HTML in the next few years. As the authors write, the devices and software used on the net will shift from open (HTML, XML, etc.) to closed systems (apps, iTunes, video codecs).

“Indeed, there has hardly ever been a fortune created without a monopoly of some sort, or at least an oligopoly. This is the natural path of industrialization: invention, propagation, adoption, control, ” Anderson writes in his piece. Oddly, Tim Wu is never mentioned in the article.

Traffic in the WWW portion of the net has seen a consolidation with the big players. As Wolff write in his Wired article:

“the top 10 Web sites accounted for 31 percent of US pageviews in 2001, 40 percent in 2006, and about 75 percent in 2010. “Big sucks the traffic out of small,” Milner says. “In theory you can have a few very successful individuals controlling hundreds of millions of people. You can become big fast, and that favors the domination of strong people.”

That may be result of Google’s indexing of the web, which favors already popular sites, or a natural laziness on the part of readers who just want to get their info in a coherent package and move on to the next thing.

Both Anderson and Wolff cite the failure of internet advertising as a major force behind the move to closed systems and subscription services.  But they overlook the importance of open repositories — Wikipedia content, KML annotations, Yelp reviews, Twitter feeds — in supplying the information that makes apps worthwhile. Oligarchs may be moving the web toward closed systems, but they still need the rabble to provide the bulk of content.

Certainly the internet is evolving.  The web itself — the information wrapped in HTML and related languages — is a declining portion of all traffic online. Video content now accounts for 26 percent of traffic online, according to an October 25 usage study by Cisco, while P2P file sharing claims 25 percent of IP traffic and HTTP (primarily web pages cast in HTML) retains 26 percent.  In June, a Cisco study predicted that by 2014, 91 percent of all consumer traffic on the net will be video. The same report forecast a four-fold increase in internet traffic:  ”In 2014, the Internet will be four times larger than it was in 2009. By year-end 2014, the equivalent of 12 billion DVDs will cross the Internet each month.”  The “Internet” is the now-40-year-old set of standards  (notably Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP) that facilitates the transmission of all data types on the net.

All of these tools are transitory. The hardware and software we use now will seem quaintly absurd in a decade or so, but the idea of a global network open to everyone is concept that capital alone cannot kill.

Social Networks Lead Zeitgeist

Google released its annual tally of search terms for 2009 yesterday. Although “michael jackson” was the fastest rising global search term on the Google Zeitgeist list, it’s more telling that the other top five terms were all social networks. Slots two through five were occupied by “facebook”, “tuenti”, “twitter” and “sanalika”. Tuenti is a Spanish version of Facebook and Sanalika is a Turkish virtual world similar to Second Life.

Under the category Around the Home, Google listed the top How-To queries. These requests for instruction don’t change much from year to year, so it was no surprise that “how-to kiss” topped the list again this year. Here’s the whole list:

1. how to kiss
2. how to draw
3. how to knit
4. how to crochet
5. how to flirt
6. how to meditate
7. how to hack
8. how to sing
9. how to dance
10. how to fight

Google Trends provides more information about the popularity of this query over time. Apparently, curiosity about the osculatory arts remained constant until the middle of 2008 when “how to kiss” queries took off, as the chart below shows. Is there a correlation between recession and kissing? Well, they say the best things in life are free.

Growth of "how to kiss" query over time