ARTS & FARCES internet

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the international standards organization for the web, seems intent on embedding digital rights management (DRM) technologies into HTML5, the latest version of the web’s markup language. The Free Culture Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation—along with more than 20 other organizations—have all called for the exclusion of any native DRM capabilities in the HTML5 standard on the grounds that it violates the W3C’s core mission of making the benefits of the web “available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability.”

The Free Culture Foundation recently published an excellent rebuttal to the most common claims in support of DRM, noting:

1. DRM is about limiting functionality and selling features back to users as services.
2. DRM encourages proprietary, platform-specific software.
3. The entertainment cartel needs the web a lot more than the web needs the entertainment cartel.

Dave Winer has been developing outliners for his entire professional life. Not surprisingly I’ve been working in outliners my entire professional life. First with ThinkTank on the Apple ][ (a Winer product); then ThinkTank and MORE (both Winer products) on the Mac; and now OmniOutliner Professional (an Omni Group product) on the Mac.

Almost everything I do with text on the computer begins life in an outline. For example, this article originated and was roughed out in OmniOutliner Pro, then migrated to BBEdit for any necessary HTML markup, and finally copy-and-pasted to ExpressionEngine—the content management system on which ARTS & FARCES internet runs.

My project notes, books, articles, wikis, and other manuscripts all start as outlines.

For almost as long as I’ve had a website—sometime around 11 January 1993, when the domain was registered—I’ve wanted to be able to easily publish my outlines on the web. By “easily publish” I mean with one click. Yeah, I’m lazy. One click.

Before you hit that “report an error” link at the bottom, I know all about OmniOutliner Pro’s two HTML export functions. The dynamic option is the most useful, rendering a static HTML page with an accompanying JavaScript file and set of icon images for bullets, tip-downs, and checkboxes. But once it’s in the browser, it’s read-only.

Now comes Winer’s newest company—Small Picture, Inc., a collaborative endeavor with Boston-based Kyle Shank—with a fully dynamic and interactive JavaScript outliner that works in any HTML5-compatible browser. Small Picture is unveiling its outliner in a rolling unveil. Each Monday, another piece of the puzzle is released and the picture comes more into focus.

Here’s what I’m hoping for with Small Picture’s outliner: Full-blown support for importing and exporting Outline Processing Markup Language (OPML) files. With one click. And then an easy way to embed the server-side JavaScript in Apple’s OS X Server wiki module. Both should be easy-peasy. OPML is, after all, another Winer creation and it should be a simple matter to call the JavaScript file from within the wiki module of Apple’s OS X Server. Oh, and I’d also like for it to be really small and efficient.

Former US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair and current cable industry lobbyist, Michael Powell, has acknowledged cable internet connectivity data caps had nothing to do about network congestion. Instead, the cable industry’s current story is that data caps are necessary to preserve “pricing fairness.” The new cable industry party line and just as bogus as the old cable industry party line.

At its core, the cable internet connectivity trifecta is—and always has been—crystal clear: Raise rates paid by captive customers, impose bandwidth data caps, and eliminate regulation.

Powell, addressing a Minority Media and Telecommunications Association’s Broadband and Social Justice Summit, told moderator David Honig that concerns about congestion were “wrong” and that “our principal purpose is how to fairly monetize a high fixed cost.”

Insisting that the vast majority of cable broadband subscribers are subsidizing a “high-end elite,” Powell pressed hard for usage-based pricing:

“If you buy a hot tub and string it up with a whole bunch of inefficient lighting and run it all night long, you are going to pay more than your neighbor who puts his thermostat at 68 [degrees] and tries to conserve energy. It’s only right. If you want to go to the Denny’s buffet and fill up your bowl, you are going to pay more than the person who chooses broccoli spears.”

Inefficient lighting for hot tubs and broccoli spears at Denny’s indeed.

As Karl Bode, writing for DSLReports.com notes:

“If usage caps were about ‘fairness,’ carriers would offer the nation’s grandmothers a US$5-US$15 a month tier that accurately reflected her twice weekly, several megabyte browsing of the Weather Channel website. Instead, what we most often see are low caps and high overages layered on top of already high existing flat rate pricing, raising rates for all users. Does raising rates on a product that already sees 90 percent profit margins sound like ‘fairness’ to you?”

“Perhaps in ten years the cable industry will acknowledge what caps are really about: Driving up the cost of data for all users in order to offset the inevitable decline in TV revenues, while trying to retain the competitive upper hand in the age of streaming video.”

Update: Thursday, 24 January 2013 5:47PM CST: Demonstrating why she should be chair of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Susan Crawford’s New York Times op-ed, “How to Get America Online,” is a must read.

US Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) has proposed legislation, the Data Cap Integrity Act (.pdf 32KB) prohibiting internet service providers from favorably treating the network traffic of preferred online services at the expense of other network traffic. Additionally, the proposed bill grants the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulatory authority over data-caps (the limiting of the amount of data that an individual—or network—can move over the internet—instituted by internet service providers. According to Wyden’s draft legislation, the FCC “shall evaluate a data cap proposed by an internet service provider to determine whether the data cap functions to reasonably limit network congestion in a manner that does not unnecessarily discourage use of the internet.”

Wyden, in a media release, wrote “Data caps are appropriate if they are carefully constructed to manage network congestion but, as the New York Times has editorialized, they ‘should not just be a way for internet providers to extract monopoly rents.’” Wyden goes on to write that his Data Cap Integrity Act would “give consumers the tools they need to manage their own data usage, institute industry-wide data measurement accuracy standards for ISPs, and impose disciplines to ensure that ISP data caps are truly designed to manage network congestion.”

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is a tiny agency within the United Nations hosting the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) 3-14 December in Dubai. The conference is so opaque as to be fairly called “secretive” and access is heavily controlled. Proposals from the various member-countries are made available only by leaks.

The decisions made in the conference by the 193 participating countries will almost certainly threaten the open internet. After all, with the United Nations’ one-vote rule, only a simple majority is required to do pretty much damn near anything.

The purpose of the conference is to update the 25-year-old International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR) but representatives from several countries—the design of the ITU mandates that only countries are allowed to vote—are extending that purpose. While some 700 private organizations are ITU members (paying annual membership dues of up to US$35,000), they are voiceless in the organization.

Governmental proposals that justify surveillance of citizens and legitimizing other strong-arm tactics in the name of cybersecurity are quite disturbing. Russia, for example, has reportedly submitted a proposal calling for government to have an equal right in managing the internet and restricting public telecommunications access when used for “undermining the sovereignty, national security, territorial integrity and public safety of other States, or to divulge information of a sensitive nature.”

A proposal by the Arab States calls for governments to have the right to know how traffic is routed across the internet. Historically, servers on the internet have tacitly agreed to route all packets in the most efficient manner possible. Another proposal from a group of Arab countries seeks universal identification of all internet users.

Some argue that the war has already been lost and all that remains are minor clean-up operations. David Kravets, writing for Wired notes that governmental censorship of the internet is already a done deal:

“‘Member States already have the right, as stated in Article 34 of the Constitution of ITU, to block any private telecommunications that appear ‘dangerous to the security of the State or contrary to its laws, to public order or to decency.’ The treaty regulations cannot override the Constitution,’ said Hamadoun Toure, the ITU Secretary-General.”