A recent issue of The New Yorker had a fine essay by Mike Spies about the joys of discovering and listening to music. But its overall tone is rather melancholic:

We seem to have created an environment in which wonderful music, newly discovered, is difficult to treasure. For treasures, as the fugitive salesman in the flea market was implying, are hard to come by -- you have to work to find them. And the function of fugitive salesmen is to slow the endless deluge, drawing our attention to one album at a time, creating demand not for what we need to survive but for what we yearn for. Because how else can you form a relationship with a record when you're cursed with the knowledge that, just an easy click away, there might be something better, something crucial and cataclysmic? The tyranny of selection is the opposite of freedom. And the more you click, the more you enhance the disposability of your endeavor.

Of course, this is a common complaint -- that digital abundance is somehow devaluing our experience of art. It's a close cousin of the idea put about by the copyright industries that the lower the price of something, the less you value it (neatly confounding two quite distinct concepts -- "price" and "value".) But the post by Spies rises above that, partly because it is so poetic in its phrasing, and partly because it gets down to specifics. Here, for example, is his description of some of the pleasures enjoyed during that now-lost era of analog scarcity (the music was already digital, but the packaging wasn't):

When I returned to my dorm, I unwrapped the cellophane and turned the album over in my hands, flirting with it, searching for clues about what lay within. The cover image of the singer seemed to tell the story of a man who, perhaps in order to avoid great pain, had entered oblivion, but done so in style, with a cool cigarette sticking straight out of his mouth. The question was: How did he get to oblivion, and why did he seek it out in the first place? The answer, needless to say, was the CD itself: the music, the sonic promise.

There seem to be two distinct elements here. The first is "clues" for the music: that cover image of the singer. In the pre-Internet days, such images had considerable power because they were one of the main ways musicians were visualized for the public. Today, a simple image search will bring up hundreds, if not thousands of images of musicians engaged in lots of activities, both cool and uncool. But for anyone who was truly "searching for clues" about the music, even the uncool images might, in their authentic awkwardness, offer vital hints.

The other element, of course, is the music itself, and its "sonic promise". But again, to understand any given piece of music, is it not useful to have access to the pieces written before and after it by the artist, the pieces that influenced it, and those that it influenced? Or what about all the pieces written in that year, or for the same musicians, or played at the same venue? Those complex cuts of the totality of recorded music -- the rich and surprising playlists that people make and share -- are something that the Internet with its digital abundance is uniquely well-placed to supply in a way that CDs never could. Isn't that multidimensional richness something to be welcomed, not feared?

On the one hand, Spies seems to be saying that today it's too easy, that we don't do enough to earn the pleasure of our music by spending time as we did in the old days:

if I was going to buy a CD, back when I bought them, I had to eke out some time, and even pray for a little luck, as I could spend hours in a dimly lit store, and leave with nothing. So I had to make a conscious decision that I was going to take my chances.

But on the other, he seems to be lamenting the fact that it's just too hard, that we can never know whether we have found what we are looking for, because there is always more to explore:

how else can you form a relationship with a record when you're cursed with the knowledge that, just an easy click away, there might be something better, something crucial and cataclysmic?

Perhaps he just needs to recognize that, as in so many domains, the shift from analog scarcity to digital abundance brings with it a need to change our own ways of thinking and listening. Now, the difficulty of finding music that we like -- the hours spent bent over racks of CDs in that "dimly lit store" -- has become a challenge that is physically trivial, but mentally far more demanding because it is unconstrained and almost limitless in its extent. It's no longer about arriving at that definitive record that is "crucial and cataclysmic", but more about enjoying the journey through, and connections between, entire sequences of wonderful musical performances.

I suspect that the generation now growing up with digital abundance will have no difficulty forming their own deep and important emotional bonds with collections of music that they have discovered not through a slow process of seeking and finding in the physical world, but by constant, high-velocity adventures through an equally valid digital space.

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Recently, among the "oversharers" online, I saw a few people link to a column by NYTimes' columnist Roger Cohen, using one of the hackiest of all the "old curmudgeon" hack columns around: bitching about the banal stuff people talk about on Twitter. It's been done hundreds of times, and it's mostly been done better than Cohen's weak attempt. And, of course, it's easy to take such things out of context. The most common complaint that people make: people sharing info about their lunch, with the obvious presumption that no one could possibly care about what someone's eating for lunch. And yet... context matters greatly. Just as an example, one of the things that made me once realize how useful Twitter was in the early days, was when I saw someone I knew only via the internet, mention that he was eating lunch at a restaurant that I really liked in another city. Combined with the fact that I was going to be in that city the following week, we arranged to meet for lunch the following week at the same place. That "banal and useless" oversharing of info actually resulted in something quite useful: tidbits of information leading to a personal connection.

Separately, as I (and tons of others) have suggested in the past, if you find the people you follow say banal and silly things, follow better, more interesting people. And yet, as came out about a week after Cohen's silly column was published, it wasn't even a case of Cohen following silly and banal people. It turns out that, while he implied he was following such people on Twitter, in reality, he went searching for silly and banal tweets... and found them on a site that shares exactly that kind of info. Here's what his original column said:

Now I was determined to get through 2012 without doing a peevish column, not wishing to appear cantankerous or curmudgeonly, determined to be sunny and youthful as the times demand, but everyone has a tipping point. Mine occurred when I came across this tweet from Claire:

“Have such a volcanically deep zit laying roots in my chin that it feels like someone hit me with a right cross.”

Good to know, Claire.

I was just recovering from that when I found Deanna tweeting that she had “picked up pet food” and was heading to “the dreaded consult on colon stuff. The joys of turning 50.” As for Kate she let the world know the status of her labor: “Contractions 3 minutes apart and dilated at 2 cm.”

Social media does not mean that you have to be that social.

Except... apparently Cohen's "tipping point" did not actually come when he "came across" those tweets. That's because the second "tweet" was not actually a "tweet" and did not even happen in 2012 (or 2011 for that matter). The first was actually a tweet, but also did not occur in 2012 or 2011. And these weren't something that he just randomly "came across," but rather something he went looking for. You see, the NYT appended the following editor's note:

In this column, the author suggested that he was moved to talk about over-sharing and anxiety online after he came across two comments on Twitter. In fact, both comments were taken from a Web site, www.oversharers.com, that the writer consulted as part of his research. One of the comments, from Claire, was from a Twitter feed; the other, from Deanna, was from Facebook. They were both written in 2010. The writer should not have implied he stumbled across them while reading recent Twitter feeds.

In other words, this esteemed NYT columnist has proven that among the billions upon billions of tweets and Facebook status updates out there, if you go searching, you might possibly be able to find two (well, one tweet and one Facebook status update) in which someone says something that a person totally unconnected to them might find uninteresting. Perhaps we can soon expect one of the NYT's famed trend pieces, about how aging NYT columnists are now resorting to hacky, overdone premises, in which they misrepresent reality to try to make a point that doesn't really make much sense.

We already noted this morning that the US, a bunch of European countries, and a sprinkling of other nations around the globe have refused to sign the new ITR agreement put together at the ITU's World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), even as ITU officials congratulate themselves on a job well done. Many people have asked who signed and who didn't. The ITU has an official list of signatures, which seems to slightly conflict with some earlier reports. Here's their graphic: Perhaps more useful is this map, in which the signing countries are in black and the non-signing are in red. You might notice a few patterns. Also, reporter Dave Burstein kindly sent along the full list (embedded below), with signatories in green, non-signatories in red and everyone else in white. The "everyone else" apparently includes countries who haven't paid up their dues and thus can't technically sign on yet, or who don't "have their credentials in order." In other words: bureaucratic blah blah blah. Europe, of course, dominates the non-signing countries. It's somewhat meaningless, but if you tally up population, the signatories cover 3.8 billion people, while the non-signatories cover 2.6 billion. And there are another ~600 million in play in those other countries.

So, what does it all mean? Very little right now. Even those countries that signed on still need to go through a ratification process -- and one hopes that people in some of those countries will realize that it's bad to be supporting a regime that wants political bureaucrats having anything to do with the internet, even if it's dipping a toe in the water. However, many of the countries don't much care about that, and simply want the new rules so they can try to control parts of the internet (and/or profit from it). The rules won't actually go into effect for a while. While they aren't binding, it is pretty customary for signatories to eventually adopt such rules locally.

The real story here is a world in which there are two competing visions for the future of the internet -- one driven by countries who believe the internet should be more open and free... and one driven by the opposite. Whether or not the ITU treaty is ever meaningful or effective, these two visions of the internet are unlikely to go away any time soon. The next decade is going to be filled with similar clashes as certain countries seek to limit what the internet can do, for their own political needs and desires. Seeing the initial breakdown of who's in which camp is useful, but this isn't over yet.

Beer has been around for centuries, and it's arguably responsible for the development of civilization and the prevention of waterborne illnesses. Beer is still evolving and improving as food scientists play around with the yeasts and the ingredients that go into making modern beers. Before you head off to happy hour, check out a few of these beer-related factoids.

• Microbiologists are engineering beer foam that lasts longer by identifying a gene in yeast for producing proteins with better bubble stability. But will nose grease still work to get rid of the foam? [url]
• It looks like beer and tastes like beer, but it's not beer. It's a soft drink. Is there a point to non-alcoholic beverages that taste like their more potent relatives? Has Star Trek trademarked Synthohol yet? [url]
• Drinking some beer (or wine) could enhance creative problem solving. Being too focused on a problem might blind a person to outside-the-box solutions, so alcohol's effects on the brain might provide a certain amount of distraction to allow more free-thinking creativity. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

It's been a while since we checked in on Julian Assange. Last we heard, the United States had just classified Wikileaks as an "enemy of the United States," but that was all the way back in September. This, of course, was after Assange had been granted asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in the UK. With what has to seem like the entire world crumbling down around him, I'd have to guess that Assange is keeping a low, mum's the word profile.

Mr Assange said plans to register an Australian WikiLeaks party were ''significantly advanced''. He indicated he would be a Senate candidate, and added that "a number of very worthy people admired by the Australian public" have indicated their availability to stand for election on a party ticket.

Yes, Julian Assange, currently confined to Ecuador's embassy, is going to start his own political party. While many have focused on the news that he's running for Senate, that's not actually new -- having been previously reported back in March. In case you thought you had somehow slept through news that the US had dropped its investigation of Wikileaks or that Sweden no longer wanted to extradite him, you haven't: both issues are existing issues that might, possibly, get in the way of Assange actually serving as an elected official. However, as a wider party, what would the Wikileaks party stand for?

He said a WikiLeaks party would advance WikiLeaks' objectives of promoting openness in government and politics, and it would combat growing intrusions on individual privacy.

A laudable goal, and one that might find natural allies with The Pirate Party. Still, while (as with many things Assange-related) this has the feel of a publicity stunt, there's a chance that the more interesting idea is what will happen if the Wikileaks Party can really find others to be members and run for office:

If Mr Assange were elected but he was unable to return to Australia to take up his position, a nominee would occupy a Senate seat.

So, perhaps the real goal is to have someone high profile, like Assange, spearhead the effort of building out a party focused on these issues, even if there's little chance he can actually serve. Well, that or this is another example of Assange being a genuine pain in the ass.

We've pointed out that the unconstitutional FISA Amendments Act (along with its secret interpretation), look likely to get renewed before the end of the year. Senator Wyden is willing to drop his hold, but if he doesn't get certain amendments in, he wants to limit the length of the extension to a short period for the sake of having a debate. Of course, that's the same thing that happened almost exactly one year ago.

Techdirt has joined a number of organizations, including EFF, Free Press, the ACLU, the American Library Association and many, many more in asking the Senate to actually debate the issue. The folks at EFF have set up a tool to help anyone reach out to their own Senators on the subject as well.

We write to share our concern about the reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act and the dwindling time remaining to have a meaningful debate and amendment process before your target adjournment at the end of next week. We ask that you contact your party leadership and let them know that you expect ample time for floor debate, privacy and transparency amendments, and possible conference with the House on ultimate legislation.

The FISA Amendments Act is a sweeping authority that allows the government to collect international communications without a warrant, even if an American in the US is on one end. After four and a half years, there is no information publicly available describing how many Americans are caught up in this surveillance program or what is done with the information once collected. There also hasn’t been a single minute of Senate floor time scheduled for debating the merits of this program or to considering amendments that would increase transparency of this program and insert basic privacy protections for our sensitive information in preparation for this reauthorization.

Is it really that ridiculous to think that the open debate we've been promised for years should be had before we reauthorize these tools? Is it really ridiculous to think that the NSA and other intelligence officials should be required to publicly reveal such basic things as how many Americans have had records swept up by intelligence agencies under these loose rules?

We kind of knew this was going to happen all along. But as the FCC is figuring out how to distribute a bunch of useful spectrum, some in Congress are taking the short-sighted, anti-innovation approach of demanding that it be auctioned off for closed uses, rather than made unlicensed for wider benefit. This is a debate that should have ended ages ago. Open spectrum drives innovation -- unquestionably. Just look at the rise of WiFi and Bluetooth and what that's enabled over the past decade plus. The impact of those two technologies has greatly outweighed any benefit from licensed, locked up spectrum. But, of course, the telcos want that spectrum locked up and limited for use just by their own services (even as they increasingly piggyback on unlicensed spectrum to save money). And, in true corruption laundering fashion, they're able to put forth a "plausible" explanation for why the FCC should auction it off rather than open it up: money. That is, if the FCC auctions if off to telcos for closed use, the federal government can likely raise somewhere in the range of $19 billion (some reports suggest much higher: the CBO predicts nearly $25 billion, and others have suggested it could go even higher than that). That's a decent chunk of cash, obviously. So, Congress is now whining about how the FCC's plan to support unlicensed spectrum is some sort of ridiculous give away by the federal government:

Representative Greg Walden, an Oregon Republican, who is chairman of the panel, said the law that gave the F.C.C. the ability to conduct “incentive auctions” of newly available spectrum required “maximizing the proceeds from the auction.”

For the F.C.C. to obtain the highest price for the spectrum it sells, it should limit the size of guard bands, Mr. Walden said; he said the six-megahertz minimum size proposed by the F.C.C. was unnecessarily fat.

You see, apparently these members of Congress don't want the FCC to do what's best for the country or for innovation. It doesn't want the FCC to do what's best for long term growth (which, in turn will increase tax revenues over the long term). No, these members of Congress instead are only focused on the big upfront number of getting cash now from telcos, even if it means less innovation, less useful tools for the public and less tax revenues down the road. I guess it shouldn't be any surprise that telco companies are among the top five contributors to Walden's most recent campaign (coming right after... lobbyists). Whatever happened to that idea that elected officials should have to wear patches, a la Nascar, of who funds their campaigns?

We've obviously been highly critical of Intellectual Ventures over the years, as the company is doing tremendous harm to the innovation world by effectively setting up tollbooths and legal threats that take money away from actual innovation and funnel it into inefficient uses. Recently, we wrote about how another firm, IP Checkups, was planning to unveil Intellectual Ventures' infamous web of shell companies, which it uses to shuffle patents around, to hide who the real beneficial holders of the patents are. In response to this, the Spicy IP blog did interesting interviews with both IP Checkups and with Intellectual Ventures. Intellectual Ventures was represented by Nicholas Gibson, International Marketing Director at the firm. You can read the two interviews, but I just wanted to focus on one of the more ridiculous, and blatantly intellectually dishonest statements of Gibson's. IV management is somewhat infamous for these kinds of things, but they really ought to be called out on their bullshit more frequently. Spicy IP points out that IV claims to hold 40,000 patents and growing... and wonders how any technology company could figure out if they're infringing and how they should go about getting a license. Gibson responds by pretending this is easy.

Any company selling a technology and wanting to try and check if the product is infringing someone else's patents, need only go to the USPTO (or corresponding websites for the Japan Patent Office, Chinese Patent Office, etc.) and look up patents and publicly available patent applications that fall in the same technology category and class. When they are doing their search for prior art and pre-existing patents in particular fields, they should be looking for the technology represented in the patents, not for who owns the particular technology. If IV happens to own one of the patents they discover, by all means please come and talk to us about taking out a license.

Simple, right? Ignoring, first of all, just how many international patent offices one would really need to go to, the idea that it's somehow easy to look up what patents you might infringe is a complete joke. And anyone who's serious about the patent system admits that. First of all, it assumes (totally incorrectly) that by reading through a patent application you can just tell if what you do is infringing. That's a riot. Most patents are written for lawyers to understand, not actual developers or designers. Second, they're written so broadly and so opaquely, so that they can only be deemed infringing after a product has come to market successfully. It's nearly impossible to track down the patents you might infringe on.

A few months ago, we highlighted a careful study by Tim Lee and Christina Mulligan (at Yale) about why it's mathematically impossible to actually look through all relevant patents when it comes to software. While Gibson and Intellectual Ventures are pretending -- against all evidence -- that patent boundaries and classifications are clear, well-defined and easy to figure out, the reality is quite the opposite. As the Lee/Mulligan paper noted, if software companies actually wanted to do a real prior art search through the patent database, we'd need a lot more patent lawyers:

we estimate it would take at least 2,000,000 patent attorneys, working full time, to consider whether all these software-producing firms have infringed any of the software patents issued in a typical year. Even if firms wanted to hire that many attorneys, they couldn't; there are only 40,000 registered patent attorneys and agents in the United States.

The thing is, nearly everyone in the space, on any side, seems to recognize that the broad and fuzzy boundaries of patents is a real issue to be dealt with. That Intellectual Ventures feels it's okay to pretend that the system works just fine, when all of the evidence shows that's not even close to true, suggests just what kind of company it is.

For reasons that I do not fully understand, Paul Krugman is a name that gets people really worked up for often irrational reasons -- mostly having to do with red team / blue team political arguments that have little bearing on actual economics. My personal preference is to ignore the whole somewhat meaningless "left/right" dichotomy (no matter where a particular economist is normally associated) and focus on the actual economics being discussed. And, recently, Krugman has been doing some deep thinking on what he's referred to as the question of robots or robber barons. The issue may be a little deep in the weeds for folks who aren't econgeeks, but it is both really interesting and really important to think through.

The short version -- hopefully translated sufficiently via my "econgeek to normal people" translator -- is that there are economic metrics out there suggesting that things should be much better than they are: in particular, companies are making massive profits. But, at the same time, wages are not showing any sort of increase. Krugman uses this graph to demonstrate the point: As the graphic shows, as a percentage, wages ("labor") have been dropping. If the output is not going to wages, where is it going? Krugman uses the term "capital," which, basically (in this case), just means return on investment for assets: that is, if you own stuff, you're getting a return on it, which is going into your pockets rather than to people doing work. Of course, when you look just at percentages of a single factor, things can quickly get misleading -- and at least some have suggested that looking at just the percentage going to labor may be exaggerated by a hidden third factor, such as land. While using terms like "labor" and "capital" are standard in economics, I find that they actually can distort the conversation (and even Krugman notes that some of the discussion veers into what sounds like "Marxist" discussions on "capital" and "labor").

A simpler and perhaps more useful way of looking at things is: Where is the money going and how is it spent? And, as it stands now, over the past ten years, the amount of money going to wages, as a percentage of money being made, has been going down. So what's it all mean? Krugman has two theories -- both of which may actually be true to varying degrees.

• Robots: The idea here is that automation has meant fewer jobs, and thus has held down wages and kept the supply of workers high. This is an old argument, of course, but perhaps one worth thinking about. We'll discuss it more below.
• Robber barons: That is, monopolists. The argument here is that when you see an aggregation of wealth to "capital," it suggests that the free market is somehow "stuck," and one possible reason is that the "owners of capital" have effectively created monopolies, allowing them to retain more than a free market might allow, via monopoly rents.

If you think both of those suggestions sound somewhat anachronistic, you're not wrong. Both of those possible arguments sound quite similar to the complaints people made a century or so ago. And, as with that situation, I'd argue that the two explanations that Krugman puts forth may both have some element of truth, but also may not tell the whole story by a long shot.

Let's start with the robots. For years, many have suggested that greater productivity from automation leads to lower demand for human employees, thus creating less demand for workers -- leading to lower salaries, high unemployment and all that jazz. Many people (myself included) have often used the term "luddites" for this, after the original followers of Ned Ludd, who believed that the industrial revolution was destroying jobs, leading to the "Luddites" smashing machines. The term is used pejoratively, because the original Luddites, for the most part, weren't just wrong but were ridiculously wrong. Far from destroying jobs, automation eventually created many new jobs.

And, instinctively, I have the same reaction to the argument when put forth here. We've heard this claim for so long, that greater productivity leads to fewer jobs -- but in practice it has never come true. It has, certainly, meant that there has been job displacement, and potentially a shift in job skills requirements -- which can be very difficult for those whose skills are no longer relevant. But, in the longer term, such automation has always created more jobs.

Does that necessarily mean that this shall always be the case? Not necessarily, but I'd argue that the long history of it being true suggests that you would need very, very strong evidence to back up the claim this time around -- and I'm not convinced we've seen that. Of course, playing devil's advocate to myself, I can see one plausible argument that someone could make (even if I don't think it's true): automation in physical work increased demands for jobs in other sectors -- such as services and information processing (desk jobs). But the information age revolution has now started to automate many of those jobs as well, and it's not clear where we move along the spectrum from there. That is, as the argument goes, that new jobs have always been created further along the spectrum from manual labor to services to information processing, but we've more or less hit the end of the line.

I find this difficult to believe for a few reasons. First, the same argument was made in the past every time some new fears about automation came along. And every time it turned out that there were new job opportunities. I can't see that changing now. At all. If it becomes true that labor is really increasingly available or cheap, that will create all sorts of new opportunities to make use of it. The news that Apple is going to start making some computers in the US is just a small indication of that possibility coming true. And, yes, even if they're using a robot-centric process, they're still creating domestic jobs. But, further on that, there's tremendous opportunity coming out of disruptive innovation to create new jobs where none really existed previously. The number of people making a living by selling goods on things like eBay, Etsy or Amazon is astounding. Even newer tools like Kickstarter and Indiegogo are creating additional possibilities, and we write about all sorts of interesting business models all the time -- creating new opportunities. Similarly, we've seen things like distributed call center services, such that people can work from home and be productive. In fact, this could help explain some aspects of wage decline, as some people, who might have formerly not been in the workforce at all, can now work part time from home.

But, of course, job displacement is messy, and figuring out where the new job opportunities are, and how they apply on a wider scale, is not a smooth process at all. It takes time to work out the kinks -- and that could explain the lag in wages. It could simply be the dip in efficiency as we enter that chaotic period of experimentation and attempts at new things before it becomes more clear where the new job opportunities will be.

The "robber baron" argument makes a lot more sense to me -- and it even appears that Krugman may be leaning bit more that way, after hearing from some other economists:

Barry Lynn and Philip Longman have argued that we're seeing a rapid rise in market concentration and market power. The thing about market power is that it could simultaneously raise the average rents to capital and reduce the return on investment as perceived by corporations, which would now take into account the negative effects of capacity growth on their markups. So a rising-monopoly-power story would be one way to resolve the seeming paradox of rapidly rising profits and low real interest rates.

Of course, I think that the use of the term "robber barons" is potentially misleading as well. This isn't necessarily a case of the Andrew Carnegies, JD Rockefellers, JP Morgans and Cornelius Vanderbilts of old. Instead, it often seems that what we're dealing with are less super greedy "robber barons" (and yes, I know some people will point to examples that suggest otherwise -- especially on Wall Street) and more of a fight against innovation. This goes back to my recent discussion on corruption laundering, in which companies are able to secure favorable regulations that actually help them against disruptive upstarts by arguing that allowing the upstarts will harm "jobs" or will upset the economic apple cart.

In the end, that leads me to wonder if what we're really seeing is a third thing, which can account for both the "robots" and "robber barons" story lines and tie back to that corruption laundering situation: the rise of what Andy Kessler has referred to as political entrepreneurs vs. market entrepreneurs. In that scenario, you have companies who aren't quite robber barons, but are adept at using the political system to engage in a form of "corruption laundering" to put in place regulations that limit true competition and the kind of innovation that helps to speed up the creation of new jobs.

In some sense, we've discussed this before, in noting that politicians often fear disruptive innovation because it "destroys jobs" even as it's creating new ones. So they pass regulations that hinder disruptive innovation, in an attempt to "protect jobs." But the end result is that the few larger players in the industry tend to suck up control of that industry and, as such, limit job growth (and begin to profit by being able to capture the monopoly rents). They can employ greater automation to suck more profits out of their own business, but also can hold back the disruptive innovation that creates new jobs.

So, in that scenario, you get higher profits and fewer jobs -- with increasing automation. But you're missing out on the important disruptive innovations that help create the new jobs. Part of the problem with the "robots" storyline from Krugman is that it assumes all technological advancement is equal: that big companies automating is the same thing as disruptive innovation that enables new jobs. I don't think that's true. Either way, these are certainly big and important questions worth thinking about and exploring.

If you have spent thirty minutes in the past year surfing the internet for anything revolving around memes, you know what bronies are. They're a rather passionate adult fanbase for My Little Pony and they love to create stuff to express their fandom. We previously covered (surprisingly) that Hasbro appeared to be a company that embraced this fanbase, realizing that all the additional attention and exposure would only serve them.

Well, reader PonyRock alerts us to news that Hasbro hasn't completely come over to the light side of the force, having recently shut down a fan-made MLP game. For their part, the makers of the game appear to bend over backwards in professing understanding of Hasbro's position, even after spending a year and a half developing their game.

Hasbro is not to be blamed here. As per U.S. Trademark law, as soon as an infringement comes to light, they are obligated to defend the trademark, or they will lose it. They had no choice in the matter, regardless of what they thought of the project or how it benefited them.

As I said, very gracious, if perhaps a bit incorrect. Hasbro likely did indeed have other options beyond a strict takedown of the game, which is now lost to everyone. If they had wished instead to continue to embrace their rabid fanbase, I would imagine they could have issued a zero dollar or low-cost license to the developers, allowing the game to go forward and potentially benefiting from even more exposure. Instead, the nuclear option was chosen, resulting in the game disappearing and exposure of the takedown instead of the game.

Despite the developers being more than fair to Hasbro regarding the takedown, the comments on the article are rather negative towards the company. I almost wonder if all the bending over backwards towards Hasbro might not be part of a strategy to get the company to reconsider and go the route described above. It'd surely be the better route. Going nuclear gains nobody anything.

We've argued, for a long time, that just railing against "middlemen" misses the point. There are always middlemen. But not all middlemen are created equal. The distinction, that we've discussed multiple times, is the difference between enablers and gatekeepers. That is, historically, many middlemen came to power because they were gatekeepers. If you wanted to do something -- be a musician, write a book, sell a new product -- you effectively had to get "approval" and support from a gatekeeper who had access to those markets. Being a gatekeeper gave them enormous power, such that the gatekeepers often became central to the market, rather than the people/companies they were working with and it also allowed them to craft ridiculous deals that were incredibly favorable to themselves, at the expense of those they were working with. That, of course, is why there tends to be so much inherent antipathy towards traditional gatekeepers.

In contrast to that -- and what we found most exciting about many of the new companies that had popped up over the last decade or two -- was the rise of middlemen as "enablers." These were situations where the middlemen weren't gatekeepers, and weren't "required" to do what you wanted to do. Instead, they were companies that helped give people/organizations a lift up on what they were trying to do, while keeping them and their work (rather than the middlemen) central to the market. So, when you see things like eBay or Etsy or Kickstarter, those are more enablers (and, yes, they do have some restrictions on use, but they're more policy based, rather than "can you make us money"-based).

Of course, the truth is that there's a spectrum along which these middlemen lie. It's not two separate buckets, where "enablers" are here and "gatekeepers" are there. Rather, intermediary companies often fall somewhere along that spectrum. It seems somewhat clear that, for the most part, newer firms are becoming successful by being enablers, rather than gatekeepers. But... they don't necessarily remain enablers their whole lives. One thing that is worth paying close attention to, is how companies shift over time, and when they start to shift from being enablers to being gatekeepers.

In fact, it seems like some of the big "clashes" we've been seeing in the tech/web world lately are along those lines. Lots of people have talked about Instagram and Twitter fighting with each other, which is just the latest in a series of "fights" among hot web companies blocking each other. Considering that many of these companies grew up on a web 2.0 ethos of openness and sharing -- and we're now watching them get more locked down, proprietary and limiting -- it seems obvious that some of these companies are moving along the spectrum from enabler to gatekeeper.

Anil Dash recently wrote a great post in which he frets about the fact that we're effectively losing key parts of the open web, which made the web great. You should read the whole post, as I couldn't do it justice summarizing it here. Again, it seems like many of his points are really about some of the more successful "internet" companies moving along that spectrum more towards the gatekeeper side of things, and that clashing with the more open spirit that the enablers built their reputations on. Dash, rightly, points out that this is self-correcting over time. We shouldn't necessarily fear the new gatekeepers, mainly because a gatekeeper business model, while lucrative in the short-term, is unsustainable in the long term. Companies, which move along that chain chasing the easy money, need to learn that they do so at their own peril. Becoming a gatekeeper merely opens up massive opportunity for a new enabler to disrupt you. That's a lesson that too many companies learn way too late.

That said, Dash fears that because a new generation is growing up in a world with more closed systems, that we may lose some generational knowledge of what came before:

This isn't some standard polemic about "those stupid walled-garden networks are bad!" I know that Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and LinkedIn and the rest are great sites, and they give their users a lot of value. They're amazing achievements, from a pure software perspective. But they're based on a few assumptions that aren't necessarily correct. The primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth. And the second, more grave fallacy, is the thinking that exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and sustainability of their networks.

The first step to disabusing them of this notion is for the people creating the next generation of social applications to learn a little bit of history, to know your shit, whether that's about Twitter's business model or Google's social features or anything else. We have to know what's been tried and failed, what good ideas were simply ahead of their time, and what opportunities have been lost in the current generation of dominant social networks.

I both agree and disagree. I'm among those who get a bit frustrated when I see new entrepreneurs trying something that was done before -- and they seem to have no knowledge of it (ditto for reporters who cover the big "new thing" without mentioning that half a dozen companies did exactly the same thing a decade earlier). But, some of that, I'll admit, may just be the onset of old fogeyism. Yes, there's value in knowing the past, and learning from it, but there is also value in the naivete with which some new entrepreneurs jump into the pool -- often not fully understanding the past. Will they repeat some of the mistakes? Sure. Absolutely. But not being burdened with the past can sometimes be a key ingredient in redoing something that failed in the past, and in somehow making that slight unexpected tweak that just makes it work.

So, I agree wholeheartedly that the "new gatekeepers" mean that we've lost some sense of what made the last generation of internet companies great. And I do hope that the next generation that comes along can similarly disrupt the last generation, often by being the enablers that break up their new gatekeeper role. And I think that companies who understand the history of how enablers disrupt gatekeepers should understand why progressing down that spectrum in search of short-term profits can lead to long-term pain. So I think it's wise for those companies to learn from history. But I'm less worried about the new entrepreneurs jumping into the space. They'll likely find their opportunities in being the new enablers, because that's where the disruption occurs.

Watching the cycles of innovation can be a fascinating (and at times frustrating) past time. Companies make the same mistakes over and over again. The ones, which actually don't fall for the usual traps, are few and far between. But, in the long run, the new startups tend to be pretty good at showing the old guard that they chose the wrong path.

We've been discussing the now annual rush to re-approve the FISA Amendments Act, despite the fact that the original bill was on shaky constitutional ground, and it's been made much (much, much) worse due to a secret interpretation of what the law means (a secret interpretation that many in Congress apparently have no interest in finding out about). Andrew Napolitano, a former judge, has penned an interesting column laying out many of the reasons why the whole thing is completely unconstitutional. First, he notes that the establishment of FISA itself is likely a violation of the 4th Amendment:

The constitutional standard for all search warrants is probable cause of crime. FISA, however, established a new, different and lesser standard -- thus unconstitutional on its face since Congress is bound by, and cannot change, the Constitution -- of probable cause of status. The status was that of an agent of a foreign power. So, under FISA, the feds needed to demonstrate to a secret court only that a non-American physically present in the U.S., perhaps under the guise of a student, diplomat or embassy janitor, was really an agent of a foreign power, and the demonstration of that agency alone was sufficient to authorize a search warrant to listen to the agent's telephone calls or read his mail.

Already troubling enough, but, as Napolitano notes, things weren't just left there. They've continued to stretch and change the conditions, taking it further and further into unconstitutional realms:

Over time, the requirement of status as a foreign agent was modified to status as a foreign person. This, of course, was an even lesser standard and one rarely rejected by the FISA court. In fact, that court has rarely rejected anything, having granted search warrants in well over 97 percent of applications. This is hardly harmless, as foreign persons in the U.S. are frequently talking to Americans in the U.S. Thus, not only did FISA violate the privacy rights of foreigners (the Fourth Amendment protects "people," not just Americans); it violated the rights of those with whom they were communicating, American or non-American.

It gets worse. The Patriot Act, which was enacted in 2001 and permits federal agents to write their own search warrants in violation of the Fourth Amendment, actually amended FISA so as to do away with the FISA-issued search warrant requirement when the foreign person is outside the U.S. This means that if you email or call your cousin in Europe or a business colleague in Asia, the feds are reading or listening, without a warrant, without suspicion, without records and without evidence of anything unlawful.

It's just those Patriot Act amendments (the FISA Amendments Act) that is being debated right now. And given some of the questions being asked by politicians who understand the "secret interpretation" of the FISA Amendments Act, it appears that it actually gives law enforcement the ability to go even further. So it's not even just about emailing or calling your cousin in Europe, but as long as law enforcement (a) claims that it's related to a terrorism investigation and (b) they have no specific knowledge at the time of acquisition only that the communication is domestic -- then they can collect just about anything. So, under that interpretation, it appears that the NSA can just collect well, almost anything, by saying that it's all for the sake of a permanent and all encompassing terrorism investigation, and since they're just collecting absolutely everything, they have no specific knowledge at the time of acquisition that the communication is domestic.

Considering that Napolitano's argument starts from the idea that FISA itself is unconstitutional, looking at where we are now from where we started, we're no longer just in "unconstitutional" mode, in which we've tip toed over the boundary. We're now in a full on, 100% "let's mock the Constitution" mode. And, Napolitano, like many others, wonders why almost no one in Congress is willing to point this out:

Moreover, everyone in Congress has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, which could not be more clear: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects..." shall not be violated, except via a warrant issued by a neutral judge upon the judge finding probable cause of crime. If we let Congress, which is a creature of the Constitution, change the Constitution, then no one's liberty or property is safe, and freedom is dependent upon the political needs of those in power.

The President and the leadership of both political parties in both houses of Congress have abandoned their oaths to uphold the Constitution. They have claimed that foreigners and their American communicants are committed to destroying the country and only the invasion of everyone's right to privacy will keep us safe. They are violating the privacy of us all to find the communications of a few. Who will keep us safe from them?

It's no secret that politicians use fear to increase their own power and to cut away at civil liberties. We have plenty of history that demonstrates that. It's just a real shame that so few people seem willing to speak out about this -- or that so few people even seem to care that the government has done this.

The Department of Homeland Security's stated aim of protecting the US from terrorism has been used as an ends to justify a variety of "means," many of which do little more than wreak havoc on civil liberties while spending a ton of taxpayer money. All sorts of questionable "solutions" to the terrorist problem have sprung from deep within the DHS, including $430 million spent on tuning its radios to a new frequency (which didn't "take"), alerting various law enforcement agencies on the dangers posed by food trucks and hotel guests, and so-called "Anti-Terror Centers" that failed to generate any useful anti-terrorist intelligence.

The above list is but a mere sampling of the wasteful and useless "programs" created under the DHS' purview. Now, a new report [PDF] by Sen. Coburn is exposing even more wasted tax dollars and questionable actions by the DHS. "Safety At Any Price: Assessing the Impact of Homeland Security Spending in U.S. Cities" was published earlier this month by Coburn's office and is addressed to the taxpayers.

In the opening statement, Coburn points out that throwing money at the "problem" isn't working.

We cannot secure liberty and guarantee security simply by spending more and more money in the name of security. Every dollar misspent in the name of security weakens our already precarious economic condition, indebts us to foreign nations, and shackles the future of our children and grandchildren... We can only defend our freedoms by ensuring the dollars we spend on security are done so in a fiscally responsible manner, meet real needs, and respect the very rights we are aiming to preserve and protect.

Making a point about the rights that have been steadily sacrificed in the name of "security" over the past decade-plus is a step in the right direction. Sacrificing liberty for security isn't popular with US citizens, but we have been given little choice but to keep funding the very machinery that endeavours to remove our rights. Attempting to dig deeper into the damage being done usually results in the invocation of "state secrets" and FOIA requests are delayed, dodged or redacted to the point of abstraction.

Coburn's report deals with both issues, the rights erosion and the reckless spending. He points out that recent cuts to the program, trimming its coverage of major cities roughly in half, have resulted in some aggressive lobbying to restore funding to its previous levels. But, after reading what the money was being spent on, it's a wonder the funding wasn't pulled sooner.

The results of the investigation find that taxpayer money spent on homeland security grant programs has not always been spent in ways obviously linked to terrorism or preparedness. Importantly, this does not mean money was spent outside the bounds of what was allowed. The decision by officials in Michigan to purchase 13 sno-cone machines and the $45 million that was spent by officials in Cook County, Illinois on a failed video surveillance network have already garnered national attention as examples of dubious spending. Both were defended or promoted by DHS.

Other examples have not received as much attention. Columbus, Ohio recently used a $98,000 UASI grant to purchase an “underwater robot.” Local officials explained that it would be used to assist in underwater rescues.

Keene, New Hampshire, with a population just over 23,000 and a police force of 40, set aside UASI funds to buy a BearCat armored vehicle. Despite reporting only a single homicide in the prior two years, the City of Keene told DHS the vehicle was needed to patrol events like its annual pumpkin festival.

Thirteen sno-cone machines and an armed vehicle capable of protecting a town from the terrors of the local pumpkin festival. Any study of government waste will turn up examples of "blank check" spending, where money is thrown at any number of ridiculous purchases simply because the money was available to spend. Just as common is the fact that no one of any import ever seems to question the money being spent before it's actually spent. Any sort of reflection on the waste is almost always limited to hindsight.

More disturbing than sno-cones and festivals patrolled by BearCat is the propaganda created with taxpayer funding that actively exhorts citizens to report their neighbors for a variety of nebulous reasons.

Some urban areas used their awards for local outreach, holding conferences, creating websites and posting videos on how citizens can spot signs of terror in their own neighborhoods. A video sponsored by the Jacksonville UASI alerted its residents to red flags such as people with “average or above average intelligence” or who displayed “increased frequency of prayer or religious behavior.”

Broadly defined "suspicious behavior" is a great way to make every citizen a suspect... and justify every violation of personal privacy. If you need warrantless wiretaps or a reason to indefinitely detain US citizens, all you have to do is start listing everyday activity as "suspicious." The report also points out how ill prepared the nation would actually be in the event of catastrophic terrorist attack, thanks to the fact that FEMA itself receives funding through the UASI program, money that has been spent in an equally careless fashion.

In part, FEMA has done very little oversight of the program, allowing cities to spend the money on almost anything they want, as long as it has broad ties to terror prevention. In fact, according to a June 2012 report by the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General, “FEMA did not have a system in place to determine the extent that Homeland Security Grant Program funds enhanced the states’ capabilities to prevent, deter, response to, and recover from terrorist attacks, major disasters and other emergencies before awarding more funds to the states.” Moreover, the agency failed to issue preparedness goals, intended to shape the use of UASI funds, until last year—nine years after the program was created.

At this point, despite several billion dollars worth of expenditures, the DHS and its affiliated agencies are still pretty much unable to prevent or respond to a terrorist attack. A lack of accountability may do wonders for politicians "bringing the money back home," but it does absolutely nothing to achieve the stated aims of an agency created directly in response to a terrorist attack. The report states very bluntly that the initial intent of the program has become little more than a new source of pork.

Dealing with the risk of attack requires understanding our limitations and focusing on the best things we do to prevent one—a concept referred to often as “buying down risk.” For programs like UASI that means establishing a framework for conducting a risk analysis and allocating resources where they are most likely to make the biggest difference.

Unfortunately, DHS and Congress have often let politics interfere, diluting any results. Instead of sending funds where they can have the biggest impact, money is spread around to parochial political interests. This ensures fewer complaints and broad political support, but does not necessarily mean we are safer.

As long term, well-funded programs tend to do, the UASI program has become little more than a charade played out to the tune of billions. Instead of focusing the funding and intelligence in areas most at-risk for a terrorist attack, expanding from seven urban areas to 66 over the course of the decade. Now that the list has been trimmed down to 31, the complaints -- and the dubious assertions -- are flowing back into Washington DC, in hopes of turning the money spigot back on.

Describing it as “a mistake,” on May 19, 2011, Rhode Island’s congressional delegation sent a letter to DHS Secretary Napolitano objecting to the Department’s decision to end UASI funding for the Providence metro area saying that Rhode Island is home to 1 million residents and is at greater risk of a terrorist attack because of its proximity to Boston and New York...

Often, those lobbying for large awards cited unlikely worst-case scenarios to inflate the threats they face. Legislators and some in the responder community from smaller cities argued that funds should be disbursed not only to obvious targets like New York City, but also to smaller locations. Some argued that since “terrorist attacks tend to start in smaller locales” and sometimes remote U.S. towns, these areas also need homeland security grants to help protect their communities...

This argument was made by officials from the Oxnard/Thousand Oaks area in California. Arguing against legislation offered by several lawmakers to limit the number of UASI-funded urban areas to 25, officials from the Oxnard/Thousand Oaks UASI asserted that “since most terrorists do not live or plan their attacks in the same city that is being targeted, [eliminating funding] may actually decrease the protection of other […….] Urban Areas.”

Oxnard/Thousand Oaks has been incredibly active in the "give us more money" arena, stating that it is "a safe community, but the threat is present all the time." This despite the fact that after receiving its initial funding, the governor went out of his way to assure the community that "no new information" about an "actual terrorist threat" had been received. It also asked for nearly $100,000 in additional funds to upgrade alarms and CCTV, stating that "minor security incidents have periodically occurred." During this same period of "periodic security incidents," the violent crime rate in Thousand Oaks dropped to an all-time low.

Here's a few more examples of what money can buy when no one's paying attention:

• Texas took in $1.1 billion in homeland security spending in 2011, which covered such purchases as a $24,000 latrine-on-wheels, a hog catcher for Liberty County, body bags, garbage bags, Ziploc bags and two 2011 Camaros at $31,000 a piece.
   
• A HALO Counter-Terrorism Summit held at a resort and spa, with an entrance fee of $1,000 per person paid with UASI funds. Counter-terrorism training was back-burnered in favor of tech demonstrations by visiting contractors. The only training that took place was a mock exercise utilizing "Hollywood magic" and a set with special effects, pyrotechnics and "state-of-the-art structures." The "terrorists" being "countered?" Zombies.
   
• In Louisiana, Jefferson Parish spent $45,000 on license plate readers -- which have been used solely to catch car thieves. Ascension Parish received $2,700 for a teleprompter, which was characterized as a "national priority to expand regional collaboration."
   
• The FDNY claimed $143,000 in "backfill" overtime expenses based on estimates rather than actual hours worked.
   
• The 13 sno-cone machines mentioned earlier? $6,200. Allowable because FEMA stated that could serve a dual purpose -- filling ice packs in an emergency.
   
• $45.6 million to Chicago for Project Shield, a network of surveillance cameras covering 128 municipalities. The program was ultimately shuttered.

There's much, much more in this thorough report, which details exactly how much money is being spent on a program with no end in sight that uses fear as leverage for additional funding. What started as a hurried response to a once-in-a-lifetime event has now become a vehicle for pork barrel spending, rights erosion and hundreds of "security" fiefdoms with their hands out.

 

The ITU's World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) is now over... and it played out almost exactly as many had predicted. After going back on explicit promises that the treaty would (a) not be about the internet and (b) would only be completed by consensus, rather than by majority vote -- the US lived up to its promise not to support such a treaty by officially stating that it would not sign. A number of other countries quickly followed suit including: the UK, Canada, Denmark, Australia, Norway, Costa Rica, Serbia, Greece, Finland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Sweden, New Zealand, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and Qatar (though some apparently said they could not sign because they first had to consult with their own governments -- so it's possible that some of these may change their mind, but many viewed such statements as a more diplomatic way of refusing to sign).

The US, on the other hand, was explicit in refusing to sign:

"It's with a heavy heart and a sense of missed opportunities that the US must communicate that it's not able to sign the agreement in the current form," said US Ambassador to WCIT Terry Kramer. "The Internet has given the world unimaginable economic and social benefit during these past 24 years. All without UN regulation. We candidly cannot support an ITU Treaty that is inconsistent with the multi-stakeholder model of Internet governance," Kramer added.

The US delegation also laid out the specific reasons why it refused to sign, and they're the same issues we've been talking about all along: (1) the attempt to expand the definition of the types of entities covered by the treaty from the big telcos to just about everyone running network (2) the explicit inclusion of internet and internet governance in the treaty (3) the claim of a mandate over cybersecurity and (4) the official regulation of spam. That last one hasn't received as much attention, but the US found the rules put forth for dealing with spam going way too far, and putting in place rules that would violate the First Amendment.

Of course, with so many countries bailing out, the ITU's promise that this would all be about consensus look positively laughable in retrospect. But, perhaps even more laughable is the response from ITU boss Hamadoun Toure whose claims read like those of a bureaucrat in complete denial. First he claimed complete "surprise" that the US and other countries walked away:

I couldn’t imagine they wouldn’t sign it. I especially was surprised by the reasons that were put in place. I had made it clear from the opening that [Internet and content were not a part of the discussion]. I invited ICANN to show that we want to build bridges. The telecoms society and internet society need to work together. I made an appeal to please help us build bridges. The fighting will not help the consumer that we are trying to reach here.

He kept going on and on insisting that the internet and internet governance were not a part of the agreement, even though they are. Of course, he then effectively admits that part of the goal is to be the key player in the internet

I have been saying in the run up to this conference that this conference is not about governing the Internet. I repeat that the conference did NOT include provisions on the Internet in the treaty text. Annexed to the treaty is a non-binding Resolution which aims at fostering the development and growth of the internet – a task that ITU has contributed significantly to since the beginning of the Internet era, and a task that is central to the ITU’s mandate to connect the world, a world that today still has two thirds of its population without Internet access.

So it's not about the internet, but the internet is central to the ITU's mandate. Of course, this claim is also a lie. The ITU's mandate does not cover the internet, but telecom infrastructure. One of the more nefarious moves by Toure and the ITU in this whole process was to continually blur the lines between telecom infrastructure and the internet, as if they were one and the same.

The word “Internet” was repeated throughout this conference and I believe this is simply a recognition of the current reality – the two worlds of telecommunications and Internet are inextricably linked. I demonstrated that from the very beginning by inviting my friend Fadi Chehadé, the CEO of ICANN, to address our conference at the beginning.

So... again, he's saying two different things. First, he claims that the treaty has nothing to do with the internet, and then insists that telecommunications and the internet are "inextricably linked," which explains why the treaty pretty clearly would impact internet governance -- which is why so many nations are refusing to sign.

Finally, there's this bit of self-aggrandizing bullshit:

History will show that this conference has achieved something extremely important. It has succeeded in bringing unprecedented public attention to the different and important perspectives that govern global communications. There is not one single world view but several, and these views need to be accommodated and engaged.

WCIT has shown us this truth and we have worked hard together to find a way that is acceptable to all. Let WCIT be the beginning of this dialogue. As our two worlds increasingly converge so must we increasingly converse and find a common way.

To be honest, this feels like a speech that was written before the events of the past two weeks, perhaps at that secret meeting to plan its media strategy. To sit there and claim that WCIT was about finding a way "acceptable to all" and one in which the focus was on "finding a common way" is especially laughable, given how the whole thing concluded. History may very well show that something extremely important was achieved, but it may just be that the achievement was demonstrating clearly what a charade the ITU is, and making it clear that it is not the right organization to have anything to do with internet issues. The ITU has been shown, once again, to be an out-of-date, out-of-touch, obsolete organization searching for relevance.

The simple fact is that the world does not need an ITU to "enable" the internet. The internet was built and expanded rapidly through other means, driven by demand and what it enabled people to do. The current system is not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but it has been working, and shifting to a model driven by international bureaucrats was never in the cards.

The internet does not need the ITU. The ITU needed the internet to remain relevant. The internet, however, does not work that way, and any attempt to move it into such a system of bureaucratic oversight was doomed from the start.

We just recently had written about how grandstanding politicians were on this rampage about how Twitter should be forced to censor accounts used by terrorists. This follows on similar complaints in the past by politicians against YouTube. So, it's good timing to see that the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank has put out a report, noting that there is a legitimate danger in "online radicalization," and that strategies need to be put in place to deal with threats. But, perhaps more importantly, they note that policies involving censorship are not a reasonable strategy.

The report evaluates the challenge of curbing online radicalization from the perspective of supply and demand. It concludes that efforts to shut down websites that could serve as incubators for would-be terrorists--going after the supply--will ultimately be self-defeating, and that "filtering of Internet content is impractical in a free and open society."

"Approaches aimed at restricting freedom of speech and removing content from the Internet are not only the least desirable strategies, they are also the least effective," writes Peter Neumann, founding director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King's College London and the author of the report.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out why: stifling such commentary often only emboldens people, making them think that they're "onto something" and attracting more interest from those who want to know who's done something so terrible that the US government wants to censor them. Of course, even with this report, it seems unlikely that politicians will give up this pointless grandstanding. It's just too easy and gets their names in the news.

This year's winner of the Nobel prize in literature, the Chinese writer Mo Yan, was a controversial choice. Some saw him as too close to the Chinese establishment, and thus insufficiently heroic -- unlike the previous Chinese Nobel prize-winner, the imprisoned dissident Liu Xiaobo.

While Mo was in Stockholm to pick up his prize, he gave a press conference where, inevitably, he was asked about this:

In addressing the sensitive issue of censorship in China, Mo likened it to the thorough security procedures he was subjected to as he traveled to Stockholm.

"When I was taking my flight, going through the customs ... they also wanted to check me even taking off my belt and shoes," he said. "But I think these checks are necessary."

Some will see this as confirming his supine attitude to state censorship. But maybe it's just an extremely subtle attack on airport security...

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