ARTS & FARCES internet

A 37-year-old terminally ill woman will choose a transplant recipient for her donated kidney live on a Dutch reality TV show. Three potential transplant recipients will compete for the donor’s organ on the Big Donor Show. The donor will make her decision, according to the BBC, “based on the contestants’ history, profile, and conversation with their family and friends.” Viewers will register their choice by text message.

Network chairman Laurns Drillich defended the show by telling the BBC, “the chance for a kidney for the contestants is 33%, this is much higher than that for people on a waiting list.”

The production company, Endemol NV, is most widely known for the Big Brother television series. Endemol claims the purpose of the show is to bring attention to the scarcity of organ donors. Funny, I thought the purpose of production companies was to make money. I wonder what Endemol’s shareholders—most notably the family of Silvio Berlusconi—think of this supposed altruism.

Update Sunday, 3 June 2007 10:35AM CDT: Turns out this was an elaborate hoax. The “donor” was an actress but the contestants were actual end-stage renal disease patients who were in on the scam. Dutch Education Minister Ronald Plasterk said the show was a “fantastic stunt” and an “intelligent way to draw attention to the shortage of donor organs.” The show’s producers said they hoped the outrage over the show would turn into anger over the lack of donor organs. The lack of donor organs is an important issue that should be addressed. This is simply the wrong way to do it.

David Isenberg has me convinced that the telecommunications and cable companies are structurally and philosophically incapable of network neutrality—the prohibition of “any service that privileges, degrades, or prioritizes any packet… based on its source, ownership, or destination.” He sums this up nicely:

“Netheads want to change the telcos and cablecos to preserve the Internet. Carriers want to change the Internet to preserve themselves.”

He’s also convinced me that the current network neutrality advocates—honorable and commendable as they are—are heading down the wrong path.

Separating the providing of network connectivity from the providing of content and services, not mandated network neutrality is the better path. Providers can pick one or the other, but not both. As Isenberg says, “network operators must not have a financial interest in the applications that they carry.”

It’s important that this happen immediately, in Isenberg’s view, because he reports that the carriers are testing a new infrastructure called Internet Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) “that will embed discrimination in their entire Internet access infrastructure.” IMS, if deployed, will render the net neutrality debate moot. Net neutrality will be gone forever, never to return. Network neutrality, after all, threatens an industry’s entire business model: tying an application to the underlying infrastructure. History has shown that the carriers can and will relentlessly wear down any policy that threatens their business model and viability.

Separating network connectivity from applications is, as Isenberg says, “a bright line. It will be obvious if carriers cross it or obfuscate it.” This is a huge undertaking and will take a long time, but seems to be the most reasonable course. We have to start now. The first step is framing the industry structure as a monopoly.

One of the things that’s disturbing about the really new media is the lack of funding for investigative reporting. It’s expensive and as traditional media shrinks, so does investigative reporting.

Berkeley just announced a really good step in the right direction. The university’s graduate school of journalism has established three post-graduate fellowships in investigative reporting. Open to all working journalists, preference is given to Berkeley’s graduate journalism program. The program is overseen by Lowell Bergman.

Fellows will be given an annual salary of US$45,000 plus benefits, office space, and support services.

So, top-tier j-schools, who’s next?

Scott Carney has a great package for Wired on an Indian organ sale scandal that’s incredibly well researched and reported. Fifty-two Indian hospitals are under investigation for illegal organ sales. Two of the facilities have already had their licenses revoked. Organ sales were made illegal in India more than 10 years ago but few believe the illegal but not underground organ trade will miss a beat. As a result of the scandal, the country is reconsidering its position, rethinking making organ sales legal.

When the transplant surgeons who are under investigation were convened last month, they argued, surprise, for the legalization of organ sales. Not everyone agrees. Nonetheless the going rate for a kidney is anywhere from US$6,316-US$85,000. But the donors see only a fraction of that sum (if anything at all).

Most creepy is the move to make cadaver organ harvesting mandatory. Some ethicists argue that such harvests should be “a routine procedure just like autopsies in murder investigations.”

“‘Routine recovery would be much simpler and cheaper to implement than proposals designed to stimulate consent because there would be no need for donor registries, no need to train requestors, no need for stringent government regulation, no need to consider paying for organs, and no need for permanent public education campaigns,’ wrote Aaron Spital, a clinical professor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and James Stacey Taylor, an assistant professor of philosophy at the College of New Jersey, in a controversial article published this year by the American Society of Nephrology.”

Ah, yes, the true sign of an open society: everything that is not prohibited is mandatory.

Verizon is currently facing a nasty lawsuit over its alleged disclosure of customer phone records to the National Security Agency (NSA). Last week, the company asked the court to dismiss the suit on the grounds that any disclosure was covered by the First Amendment. In case that doesn’t work, Verizon also continues to argue that even investigating the issue could violate state secrets.

But Verizon’s going full-bore with the free speech defense. The telco maintains that if the EFF and ACLU have concerns about the disclosure of customer call records, they should go after the government, not Verizon’s freedom of speech.

If all of that doesn’t work, the Bush administration has asked Congress to pass legislation immunizing all the telecommunications companies for cooperating in the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program.