Johannes Bauer, Professor of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media at Michigan State University and director of Special Programs at the Quello Center for Telecommunication Management and Law, discusses economic incentives facing Internet users and providers in addressing cybersecurity risks. The discussion also turns to the differences between cybercrime and cyberwarfare and recent examples of cyberattacks.
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The Federal Communications Commission released its 102-page fiscal year 2011 budget request to Congress this week. Here are some fascinating factoids about the agency that I’ll pass on without commentary, beyond saying that they caught my attention:
While President Obama’s recently released FY 2011 budget is drawing mixed reaction from the public, for space buffs the reaction is clear enough. The president has eliminated funding for an ambitious NASA program that would return humans to the Moon and set the stage for eventual flights to Mars in favor of investment in private space technologies. While this major program change is a step in the right direction, it does little to fix NASA’s fundamental problems and lack of direction.
As a self admitted space enthusiast, part of me is sad to see my chance of witnessing a moon landing slip away. My economic side is less upset – the current government space program is a very costly endeavor that results in very poor bang for the buck when it comes to innovations and “spinoffs” that result. The soon-to-be defunct moon plan, driven by the agency’s vague goal of “exploration,” would have continued this tradition and used resources that could be better allocated elsewhere.
While Obama has thankfully cut this vestige of Bush II’s presidence from NASA’s agenda, his solution is not much better. NASA will actually see an increased budget, much of which will go to maintaining the long-delayed International Space Station and funding private companies to provide space vehicles to service the outpost. Ultimately, the station is likely to be as cost ineffective and unnecessary as the cancelled moon program.
The president’s budget ignores one key fact – gone are the days when a burgeoning private industry relied on NASA to fund technologies that would help launch a value-added satellite industry. The current private trend is the development of vehicles for space tourism (mostly for the rich), a sector that seems to be doing well. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic service is planning the first commercial flights into space for sometime in the coming years. And numerous other entrepreneurs are laying out plans for space training, orbital flights, and even space hotels.
The growing commercial space industry is hardly one that suffers from market failures that would merit massive government funding, especially when those resources would be put to technology designed to reach another NASA boondoggle. And as history has shown, the next president could reverse course in another few years, causing further waste of billions of dollars.
Obama and space policymakers would have been well advised to take a giant leap and cut out NASA’s manned spaceflight program altogehter, returning the funds back to the American public where some of them could be invested in private space travel. Of course, such thinking may have just been too bold for the agency that sent humans to the moon 40 years ago.
A major violation of internet freedom is expected to arise in Italy, should the Chamber of Deputies approve a draft bill aimed at subjecting web services to the same rules that apply to the television industry. The Romani decree (after the name of Italy’s Vice Minister of Communications, Paolo Romani) transposes the EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive into the Italian legislative system, but in doing so it pushes several troubling provisions.
Under the current proposal, websites like YouTube or Vimeo that stream video over the internet would be required (1) to seek a Government license beforehand and (2) to prevent users from uploading illegal content through their infrastructure.
As is widely known, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is a former media tycoon and developed the first private television network in the country. Mr. Berlusconi’s family still controls and runs the company. The critics contend what we are seeing here is an egregious manifestation of Berlusconi’s conflict of interest.
What’s undeniable is that the Italian government fails to recognize the specificity of the internet: on the contrary, the regulatory culture they affirm is strictly linked to the world of old media, to which many of the current Government members used to belong (Mr. Romani himself is a former broadcasting entrepreneur).
Before the internet revolution, assigning liability for particular pieces of content required very little effort, because “editorial responsibility” was embodied in the structure of the media. But things are different on the internet. The decree shows no understanding whatsoever of the way user-generated content works and misses the crucial point: that is, the huge difference between actively selecting content (as a newspaper would) and merely enabling content dissemination by providing a platform for it to happen.
What should we expect now? It may be true that the surveillance and licensing requirements won’t affect bloggers and amateur creators–although the ambiguous phrasing of the proposal would leave excessive room for interpretation. But this doesn’t address the concerns about freedom of expression and the internet economy.
Services such as Youtube, Vimeo or the France-based Daily Motion are now the first and foremost source of competition for traditional broadcasting. Imposing an excessive administrative burden on them will hamper their growth and thus put Italy at a competitive disadvantage with other European countries. Moreover, the web has gained a preeminent role in empowering all sorts of points of view to be heard: restricting this opportunity would amount to major wound for individual freedom and the public discourse.
Finally, one further reason for revising the proposal relies on its open violation of the EU’s E-Commerce Directive, which excludes any UGC-related liability or preliminary scrutiny obligation can be imposed on internet service providers; confirming the bill will most likely expose Italy to an infringement procedure under EU law.
Mr. Berlusconi risks being remembered in the future as the person responsible for giving Italy a Chinese-style regulation of the internet: certainly not a brilliant legacy for someone who freed the country from the monopoly of state-owned television.
Edmund J. Walsh, shareholder in the electrical and computer technologies group at Wolf Greenfield, and Andrew J. Tibbetts, patent agent assisting the electrical and computer technologies group at Wolf Greenfield, discuss the benefits and costs faced by businesses when they incorporate Open Source software into their products.
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February 8, 2010
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