Net neutrality - USA vs Europe

Coronavirus Crisis Vindicates the FCC’s ‘Net Neutrality’ Rollback is the title of a Wall Street Journal op-ed. The subtitle is: In Europe, meanwhile, heavy-handed regulation is forcing internet providers to throttle video speeds.

The article is behind a paywall. The title and subtitle summarize it nicely. The following excerpts tell more.

The widespread imposition of stay-at-home orders has underscored the critical role that access to the internet plays in modern society. In Europe, networks have struggled to meet bandwidth demand. U.S. networks have faced fewer problems adjusting to the increase in demand. The European Union has embraced a heavy-handed regulatory scheme designed to allocate access to the existing network, while the U.S. has emphasized private investment to expand network capacity.

European regulators were guided by the legal system developed to govern traditional telephone service largely built with taxpayer funds.  Rather than fold the internet into an outdated legal regime developed for a different era, the American vision concentrates on encouraging telephone and cable companies to compete by investing to increase their bandwidth. The only major deviation from this pattern occurred in 2015, when the Federal Communications Commission adopted a “net neutrality” rule applying legacy telephone regulation to the internet for the first time. The agency returned to its longstanding investment-oriented policy in 2018.

The U.S. and EU have seen dramatically different investment and utilization. Between 2010 and 2016, American providers invested on average annually 2.35 times as much per household as their European counterparts. This allowed the average U.S. household to consume more than three times as much data as the average European household in 2017, according to Cisco. [End].

The article doesn't say what net neutrality is. Wikipedia and Investopedia say more.

Stand Out of Our Light #3

Reading Stand Out of Our Light was a refreshing change from reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which I wrote about here. James Williams wasn't eager for a lot of government control the way Shoshana Zuboff was. Zuboff considers Google, Facebook, Twitter as enemies. She believes they have too much power over us and their platforms enable others having too much political influence. Williams in effect echoes Pogo, "We have seen the enemy and he is us."

For a more appreciative and optimistic article about personalized advertising, see this article. In my view it's too rosy, since there is some dark side to this new digital world. I sometimes get annoyed by being asked if I want to sign up for notifications, by popups, and having to scroll by several ads in order to read one article. I use an ad blocker. Fraud and scams lurk behind some advertising. On the other hand, I am amazed by the technology and appreciate a news feed that obviously recognizes my past attention.

Stand Out of Our Light #2

The last four chapters of Stand Out of Our Light concern our freedom of attention.

Chapter 10. Rejecting attentional serfdom may be the defining moral and political task of our times. To date, the problems of "distraction" have been minimized or minor annoyances. Yet the competition for attention and the "persuasion" of users ultimately amounts to a project of the manipulation of the will. Since the inception of modern advertising we have seen it continually seek not only to fulfill existing desires, but also to generate new ones, not only to meet people's needs and demands, but to produce more where none previously existed.

Chapter 11. Pitfalls are sidestepped and misconceptions are cleared. There are things we should avoid doing in response to the challenges of the attention economy. We must be vigilant of slipping into an overly moralistic mode. Metaphors of food, alcohol, or drugs can be signals of such over-moralizing. We shouldn't wholly rely on self-regulation by the advertisers or their platforms to solve all problems. Ultimately, there is no one to blame. At "fault" are more often the emerging dynamics of complex systems rather than the decision-making of a few individuals.

Chapter 12. Visions of rebellion and reform. A hand-drawn map to a place no one has ever been. In digital media, advertising rules. It has moved from "underwriting" the content to "overwriting" it. In advertising parlance, "remnant inventory" refers to a publisher's leftover space, which it can sell at very low prices. [This might refer to the many ads that appear below articles on my smartphone.] In the European Union, website owners must obtain consent from each user whose browsing behavior they wish to track with "cookies." [Here in the USA I have seen a flurry of these consent requests lately.]

Chapter 13. The music swells and the rocket hits. A new light appears in the sky. Rejecting the present regime of attentional serfdom requires rejecting the idea we are powerless. It means rejecting novelty for novelty's sake and disruption for disruption's sake. The right sort of redesign hasn't arrived yet, but it has begun. The degree to which we are able and willing to struggle for ownership of our attention is the degree to which we are free.

Stand Out of Our Light #1

Stand Out of Our Light is a book by James Williams. I enjoyed reading it, and it's short, only 130 pages.

It's about freedom and resistance in the attention economy, in which the Internet and smartphones are used to grab and keep our attention. The author used to work for Google but has since become a teacher of philosophy at University of Oxford. The title is derived from an amusing story told in Chapter 1 about the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes. He sometimes walked in the daylight carrying a lantern. When people asked him why, he replied, "I'm looking for an honest man." (That's not the amusing story.)

The author prefers to call the current era the "Age of Attention" rather than the more common  Information Age. The abundance of information easily accessed puts demands on our attention. The new technologies, the Internet and smartphones, challenge self-regulation. The design of technology embodies certain goals and values, and thus shapes the world we experience. The cyber- in "cybernetics" and the gover- in "government" both stem from the same Greek root: kyber-, "to steer or to guide" (p. 27).

In the twentieth century the modern advertising industry matured and began systematically applying new knowledge about human psychology and decision making. Advertising scope extended beyond providing information to include shaping behavior and attitudes. The goals and metrics of advertising became the dominant ones in the design of digital services. Google, Twitter, and Facebook are at core advertising companies. [Advertising is their dominant source of revenue.] Initially "cookies" were created to enable "shopping carts." Now they follow us as we navigate on our devices.

Chapters 7-9 of the book are organized by three metaphors.
- The "Spotlight" - Our immediate capacities for navigating awareness and action toward tasks. Enables us to do what we want to do.
- The "Starlight" - Our broader capacities for navigating life "by the stars" of our higher goals and values. Enables us to be what we want to be.
- The "Daylight" - Our fundamental capacities -- such as reflection, metacognition, reason, and intelligence -- that enable us to define our goals and values to begin with. Enables us to "want what we want to want."
These "lights" of attention pertain to doing, being, and knowing (p.49).

The Innovators #4

The Innovators gives several more stories of collaborators in the history of the the computer, including for example:
- Robert Noyes and Gordon Moore, the founders of Intel
- Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the founders of Apple
- Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the founders of Microsoft
- Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, developers of the Mosaic browser
- Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google.

Since these people are more recent and widely known, I won't say more. Readers wanting more can read the book or search the Internet.

History of the Internet

Brief History of The Internet at The Internet Society. Some of the co-authors were key pioneers.

Government Did Invent the Internet, But the Market Made It Glorious. The Mises Institute.

What was Al Gore's involvement?