Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

Sand, Sun and Spectrum Policy, By Craig Aaron, In These Times, August 30, 2005.

[T]he real scandal of the digital television transition is whatÕs going to happen to the analog spectrum thatÕs being vacated by the broadcasters and returned to the government.
After returning from the recess, Congress intends to auction off the public airwaves to the cell phone companies for at least $20 billion.

You wouldnÕt know from the paltry press coverage of this boondoggle that thereÕs an alternative. Instead of a one-time fire sale, Congress could open the airwaves to the public and lay the groundwork for universal, broadband access. All they have to do is set aside a portion of the spectrum as Òunlicensed,Ó meaning anyone can use it, not just the highest bidder.

maps blog at UCSC

This UCSC Libraries’ Map Room blog “is used to create a
searchable historical record of difficult reference questions. It makes
a great training tool for persons learning to work with the map
collection. The Blog also provides the reference librarians at UCSC with
a better understanding of the kinds of questions that can be answered
using cartographic resources.”

The above description is from an announcement of an upcoming CLA Academic Section and CARL North Information and Technology Interest
Group workshop,
“Is there a Blog or RSS Feed in Your Future?”
For more information on the workshop…

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve written a few times recently about municipal
wireless, broadband access, and the digital divide (The Digital Divide, Race, Class, and Municipal Wireless and
ALA gets on the broadbandwagon and Free community wi-fi is a library issue and What is Network Neutrality and Why Should Libraries Care?). Here is a list of some useful
background articles from industry, community activists, technologists, and journalists.

Overviews

• City-Driven Network War In The City Of Brotherly Love
  by Drew Clark, National Journal’s Technology Daily
  August 22, 2005 pm edition. [subscription required].
• Consultant Wayne Caswell provides this white paper overview of the issues:
  BIG BROADBAND: Public Infrastructure or Private Monopolies (PDF) By Wayne Caswell, CAZITech Consulting. He says that it is “…written for consumer advocates and policy makers to contrast the different incentives of incumbent ISPs, municipalities and other stakeholders. It suggests that the capital expense of extending fiber closer to premises is high enough to cause incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) to cherry pick the most profitable customers in green field installations, leaving others to fend for themselves. ThatÕs where public broadband comes in. The politics of broadband, however, can pose obstacles for municipalities that want their own networks, so the paper also includes a section explaining the fears of various stakeholders. Incumbent phone companies, for example, fear competition from voice-over-Internet-protocol alternatives and are using their deep pockets and powerful lobbyists to delay municipal networks as long as they can.”
• Broadband Properties magazine, May 2005 issue: “Focus On Municipal Broadband” has several papers from different points of view. A few are highlighted below.
• A Mayors Guide to Broadband
  By Sandy Teger and Dave Waks, Broadband Properties (May 2005).
  A plain-English guide to the six leading broadband technologies.

Industry Views

• The Case Against Public Broadband By Dave McClure, US Internet Industry Association.
  Broadband Properties (May 2005)
• Not in the Public Interest: The Myth of Municipal Wi-Fi by
  the New Millennium Research Council (February 2005)
  The telecommunications industry tends to oppose cities providing
  broadband access. This is an often-mentioned paper that summarizes industry views.
• Municipally Owned Broadband Networks: A Critical Evaluation,
  Heartland Policy Study No. 100,
  Written By: Joseph L. Bast,
  Published In: Policy Studies,
  (November 1, 2002)
  The Heartland Institute. It suggests, for example, that
  “…the purpose [of municipal broadband] is to subsidize a small number of community residents and businesses who want the highest quality broadband services but arenÕt willing to pay the full price for them.”

Behind the industry studies

• Some of the studies supporting the industry viewpoint claim to
  be objective but are written by groups with strong industry ties. For
  example,
  although The New Millennium Research Council (NMRC) claims that
  its reports are “completely independent,” it
  is actually owned and sponsored by Washington lobbying firm Issue Dynamics Inc. (IDI), whose clients include most of the major telecommunications companies in the United States according to stories in eWeek:
  Philadelphia to Announce Wi-Fi Expansion Plans
  (By Wayne Rash, eWeek, February 3, 2005)
  and
  Municipal Wi-Fi: Let’s Keep It Local (by Carol Ellison, eWeek,
  February 3, 2005). Ellison
  says that IDI clients include
  Ameritech, Bell South, Comcast, Pacific Bell, Qwest, SBC Communications, Sprint, U.S. West, Verizon and Verizon Wireless and that “These companies favor state legislation prohibiting municipal broadband (including Wi-Fi) projects or giving incumbent carriers veto power over them, such as Pennsylvania did.”
• muniwireless notes
  the background of the institute:
  The Heartland Institute is a proud member of Townhall.com which describes itself as follows: ÒTownhall.com is the first truly interactive community on the Internet to bring Internet users, conservative public policy organizations, congressional staff, and political activists together under the broad umbrella of ÒconservativeÓ thoughts, ideas and actions. Townhall.com is a one-stop mall of ideas in which people congregate to exchange, discuss and disseminate the latest news and information from the conservative movement.Ó

Community Views

• Ten Myths About A Publicly Owned Information Network in Minneapolis, and the Facts by
  The Institute for Local Self-Reliance at the NewRules Project
  (August 1, 2005).
  The New Rules Project is up front that it values “the new localism” which “encourages us to begin viewing our communities and our regions not only as places of residence, recreation and retail but as places that nurture active and informed citizens with the skills and productive capacity to generate real wealth and the authority to govern their own lives.”

• Who Will Own
  MinnesotaÕs Information Highways? by Institute for Local
  Self-Reliance and the New Rules project (June 2005). They argue that “a community owned system would generate benefits for these cities. It would, for
  example, provide a yardstick against which to measure the effectiveness
  of privately owned telecommunications networks. It would allow community
  services like fire and police and libraries and schools to take
  advantage of a low-cost, high-speed network. Most importantly, it would
  allow telecommunications customers a seat at the table as our
  communities elaborate their information futures.”
• Ten Myths About Municipal Broadband
  By Jim Baller,The Baller Herbst Law Group, Broadband Properties (May 2005).
  The attorney for many groups fighting incumbent-inspired state restrictions on muni systems, Baller makes a forceful case for public broadband.

Llibrary sues over controversial Patriot Act, By Chris Sanders, Thu Aug 25, 2005, Reuters

The suit — filed on August 9 and made public by the ACLU on Thursday — calls the FBI’s order to produce library records “unconstitutional on its face” and said a gag order preventing public discussion of the lawsuit is an unlawful restraint on speech.

The Whiteness
of Wi-Fi, By Roberto Lovato, In These Times, August 23,
2005.

In this short article, Lovato draws parallels between the
transformations brought on by railroads in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries and the Internet and broadband access today.

While we hear so much these days about the ubiquity of Internet access
and the rapid spread of broadband access (A Nation Online:
Entering the Broadband Age, National Telecommunications and
Information Administration, 2004), reports often overlook or even
consciously hide the fact that distribution of access is not equal
across all races and economic classes (Bush Plan
‘Digital Distortion’ By Jeffrey Benner Feb. 7, 2002 Wired. The Digital
Divide: Who is in and who is out? December 02, 2004, LAZ).

Invoking W.E.B. DuBois, the black social critic, and
activist and writer, Lovato briefly tells the battle over municipal
“Wi-Fi” (wireless) access in Philadelphia. There, city leaders
announced a program to provide universal access to Wi-Fi, wireless
technology and were opposed by telecommunications and cable companies.

Like the railroad barons of DuBois’ time, the CEOs and lobbyists of
telecom and cable giants worked against the interest of Philadelphia’s
majority. Claiming unfair competition, representatives of big business
lobbied Pennsylvania legislators to outlaw free municipal Wi-Fi for the
75 percent of Philadelphia’s poor who Neff estimates have no access to
the Internet. Media reform advocates and local officials defeated those
efforts earlier this year in a victory that has become a benchmark for
activists in other cities.

…Like those turn of the century railroads, the Internet has connected the
entire country and transformed many industries. Were he alive today,
DuBois might similarly conclude that the digital divide has a color line
running through it.

…free to low-cost Wi-Fi access represents a threat to big telecoms and
cable providers that reap billions by charging for Internet access while
tapping into the publicly-owned electronic radio spectrum that
facilitates wireless communications.

More information on the issue can be found in:

• The
  Ever-Shifting Internet Population: A new look at Internet access
  and the digital divide, The Pew Internet & American Life Project April
  16, 2003 (full report in pdf)
• Connection discrepancies: Unmasking further layers of the digital
  divide by Elizabeth Davison and Shelia R. Cotten, First Monday, Volume 8,
  Number 3 — March 3rd 2003.

CIO Today has a three part article By Jack M. Germain on Google and privacy. Title of the series: “Google Has Your Data: Should You Be Afraid?”

• Part One An overview that concludes, “Google is bent on monetizing every user through keeping a careful watch on every Web page users access and every file users open on local machines.”
• Part Two an in-depth investigation of Google’s privacy policies. “From Google’s viewpoint, once users grant consent by using Google’s services, the collected data is beyond the user’s reach forever.”
• Part Three an in-depth investigation of user trust and privacy law as they relate to Google’s data-capturing activities. “…audit logs are turning up evidence that Google systems are infected with spyware and other stuff…. Google is [not] doing a good enough job at protecting users’ privacy…”

Thanks to beSpacific!

Boing Boing: Google stealthily monitoring clickthroughs from search-results

BoingBoing reports that Google is monitoring
what you click on from its search results and
doing so in a way that is “stealthy.” It is indeed!
BoingBoing gives examples of exactly how it’s
done and how to see what’s happening.
Cory notes:

I have no doubt that most of Google’s intended uses for this are beneficial to Google users. For example, Google can use this to refine its search results based on which links Google users click most often.

However, there is a grave privacy implication here, especially when coupled with Google’s never-expiring cookie: this new (?) practice means that Google now has a record not just of all the searches you performed, but potentially of all the links you’ve clicked through on its site.

The History and Future of the Book: Digital Copyright

Ok, maybe not as bloodthirstingly exciting as a WWF cage match, But pretty close!

On the 14th of April 2005, Cornell University hosted a debate between an EFF staffer (Fred Von Lohmann), a copyfighting academic (Siva Vaidhyanathan), and legal heads of the RIAA (Cary Sherman), MPAA (Fritz Attaway), Napster II (Avery Kotler) and NBC/Universal (Alec French). The three-hour debate raised numerous issues not only to do with peer-to-peer filesharing, but also with the history of expression, with the rights of publishers and distributors, with those of writers and readers, viewers, and listeners, and with the potential futures for digital texts. You can download the whole thing as audio or video.

Rewriting the Past: How Search Engines Construct and Forget Time
by Iina Hellsten, Loet Leydesdorff, and Paul Wouters
New Media & Society (forthcoming)

Internet search engines function in a present which changes continuously. The search engines update their indices regularly, overwriting Web pages with newer ones, adding new pages to the index, and losing older ones. Some search engines can be used to search for information at the internet for specific periods of time. However, these Ôdate stampsÕ are not determined by the first occurrence of the pages in the Web, but by the last date at which a page was updated or a new page was added, and the search engineÕs crawler updated this change in the database. This has major implications for the use of search engines in scholarly research as well as theoretical implications for the conceptions of time and temporality. We examine the interplay between the different updating frequencies by using AltaVista and Google for searches at different moments of time. Both the retrieval of the results and the structure of the retrieved information erodes over time.

Thanks to beSpacific!

ABA Journal: Librarians Lead Legal Battles Over the Patriot Act, Copyright, Tech Issues

All right! Just as the American Bar Association writes that ALA is becoming a force to be reckoned with as Òone of the most active players in legal fights over technology, copyright, national security, censorship and privacy lawÓ, I ran across this resolution CD #20.7 (which was a bitch to find on ALA’s website; when are they switching over to a new CMS and will it be open-source?!) passed at ALA’s Annual conference in Chicago regarding wireless broadband.

I’m so glad ALA has a dog in this fight. Here’s what I’d like to see in any municipal WiFi system:

1) Low or *preferably* no cost WiFi access (low = less than $10/month). Costs should be covered by the businesses using the network to conduct business, not by the citizens accessing the network. Citizens *should not* have to subsidize businesses more than they already are! There could also be an addition of 1/4 cent (or some small fraction, I haven’t worked out the math) on the municipal sales tax devoted specifically to supporting the network.

2) Low or no barriers to accessing the network. This means not having to fill in forms, give personal information, or any of that stuff. We should just be able to turn on our computers and connect, securely and privately!

3) Support for low-income families including computer training and heavily subsidized laptop purchases. The Digital Divide will not go away unless ALL of us pitch in to assure that ALL of us have access to the “information society”.

RESOLVED, the American Library Association support legislation, including S.1294, that protects the rights of municipal governments to provide broadband wireless networks to their communities;

and be it further RESOLVED that, the American Library Association oppose H.R. 2726 because it denies municipal governments the right to locally determine broadband deployment thus making
broadband wireless development the exclusive purview of corporate entities;

be it further RESOLVED that, the American Library Association encourage its state chapters, affiliates and others in the library community to monitor and participate in debates on state legislation or policy proposals in order to ensure that local governments are not prohibited from providing broadband wireless networks to their residents, businesses and educational institutions;

and be it further RESOLVED that, the American Library Association continue to work with allies and
coalitions, such as the National League of Cities and the National Association of Counties to preserve local governmentsÕ rights to determine how broadband wireless deployment is to be instituted within their communities and institutions.

[Thanks Jessamyn!]