Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Adventures in Personalization

Posted on December 15, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

Amazon.com, after I completed a recent order:

“Thanks, A!

Your order is being processed, and you'll receive an e-mail confirmation shortly”.

(My first name on my birth certificate is “Andrew,” but I have been called by my middle name since birth. When I opened my first checking account, they refused to open it for a name other than the one on my driver's license — which copied from my birth certificate — and I became “A. Michael” for most commercial purposes, including credit cards, as a result. Although often a pain, prior to do-not-call the name differentiation was a good way to sort sales calls from personal calls.)

Posted in Internet | Comments Off on Adventures in Personalization

Charitable Giving Season

Posted on December 15, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

As the tax year draws to a close, people sometimes round out their charitable giving. There are always more good causes than there are dollars. While something could be said for combining one's giving into a single gift that might actually make a noticable difference to one group, Caroline and I have instead adopted a somewhat scattershot approach, which includes giving to homelessness relief, various educational institutions (here at UM, we give to a group which supports student-funded-fellowships in the summer: law students use them to work for pro bono groups—a double-effect donation), and a fund that helps provide lawyers for the indigent. We haven't yet decided whether and how much to give to whom in the upcoming election, perhaps because this year I seem to suffer from a problem a bit like a N-dimensional Buridan's ass.

You don't need me to tell you how to find similar groups active in your community. We do, however, give to two less-well-known charities that I think are worthy of your consideration if you are planning any charitable giving.

There are a handful of groups doing good work in the information privacy field, including the
ACLU and (significantly more often than not, but not inevitably) the Center for Democracy and Technology. [Update: And of course EFF does great stuff too! (But you knew that.)] And there are very good people at each of them. But of them all, my favorite is the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). I may not always agree with Director Marc Rotenberg on every detail, but I deeply admire his efforts and the organization he has built. EPIC's work is of consistently high quality on both the domestic and international fronts, and it is a leader in the causes of information privacy and electronic civil liberties. I believe that these issues will only become more important in the next five years. EPIC is both pioneering and effective. Donate here.

Another group that I believe delivers enormous bang for the buck is Ashoka, a US-based charity that gives grants to “fellows” — they call them “practical visionaries” — who work for institutional or economic reform, primarily but not exclusively in poorer countries. Individual grants are actually pretty low, a “living stipend typically for three years, depending on individual need and local salary standards”. So far Ashoka has supported 400 fellows in 48 countries — and they produce results. Donate here.

Posted in Etc | Comments Off on Charitable Giving Season

Back From Amsterdam

Posted on December 15, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

While I try to reassemble my consciousness through a haze of jet lag…

I'm back from I think was a fairly successful trip to Amsterdam. The Experts' Group meeting was perhaps more mainstream telecom than some of the events I would usually choose to go to, but that had its advantages, as it confronted me with some fairly alien viewpoints. Many of the participants were fans of the ITU, and seemed pretty convinced that it would be an improvement over ICANN. Here's a small sample of things they said:

  1. Both IP numbers and domain names are fundamentally akin to telephone numbering systems. It is not rational to treat such similar systems so differently.
  2. What is the ICANN value proposition? What does it do for the money that is worthwhile?
  3. The ITU has a proven track record of handling telephone numbers well, and would likely do the same for IP numbers and probably naming too.
  4. On the other hand, the ITU's handling of the WSIS event speaks badly for it. The event got completely out of control, and is a black eye for the ITU.
  5. Regulation of ccTLDs should be brought under government control as is the telephone system (in Europe!); remedies for anything that harms a business's or a consumer's legitimate interests in a domain name or IP number should be a matter of public/administrative law not private law.
  6. The nature of a private interest in a domain name and an IP number needs to be specified and clear; law and policy cannot tolerate the current uncertainty.

I suppose I tend to agree with 2 and 4, and with the first half of number 3. I disagree strongly with 1 and don't think I agree with 6 either. I am very unsure about what to make of 5, especially since I think that these ideas may translate poorly outside the European context.

Amsterdam is a lovely city, even in the cold and light rain. Everyone I met was very nice. The intrusion of English into the life of the city is a little shocking — natives are as likely to address each other in English if they don't know each other. Many of the ads on the street and on TV are wholly or partly in English. One hears a great deal of English on the street, and not just from people who look like tourists. And of course, everyone I dealt with professionally or commercially spoke great English. One Dutch colleague said modestly, “We are a small country. We have no pride,” but I don't believe this is correct. The Dutch do in fact have quite justifiable pride — for example, the Internet research group in the Amsterdam/Tilburg axis rivals if not surpasses the work done at Berkeley, the US leader in the area — but this pride does not overwhelm their fundamental practicality.

Posted in Law: Internet Law | Comments Off on Back From Amsterdam

I would post more links here if I could

Posted on December 12, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

Arrived safely, slept little. Not to complain or anything, but the hotel they booked me into has the most infuriating sort of internet connection in this lobby. First, it's web-only so I can't telnet to my email. Second it's got some sort of brain-dead filter on it, so that I cannot hit my news aggregator, which is web-based, because one of the blog or newspaper articles in the last week uses a naughty word (which is also a term of endearment for a cat, as in here p——y, here p——-y). And I can't read the recent comments on this blog, because the gentle readers have used ungentle language. Arrg.

Ok. Off to find some place that serves very very large quantities of coffee. Meanwhile get thee hence to Talking points memo which is full of important and highly disturbing news about Iraq. The only angle I can think of that's missing is that James Baker has been in bed with the Saudis for a long time, and to the extent part of the task is to get them to write off the $50billion (if memory serves) in debt Iraq owes them, or kick in new cash, he's the man for the job. But even so, from what one reads Iraq is not just a disaster, a quagmire, a total planning failure (worse than a mistake, a blunder), but now the administration is deep into CoverUp mode — neutering the inspector general, instructing the Iraqis not to count civilian deaths, employing Israelis to train what sound too close to Death Squads for my delicate tastes. Double double plus ungood.

Posted in Discourse.net | 1 Comment

Off to Amsterdam

Posted on December 11, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

The whole digital world is converging on Geneva for the WSIS talks. Proving again that I am incapable of herd activities even when it would be good for me, I'm going to Amsterdam to participate in a Round Table of the “Experts Group on Telecommunications Law” being organzied by the always impressive IViR, the Institute for Information Law of the University of Amsterdam . The modest paper title I was assigned (in 20 pages, please!) was “International and National Regulation of the Internet”. But what they really wanted to hear about, it transpires, is about ICANN/ITU and what it means for registry regulation. Short answer: wrong question.

It's a short, brutal trip: out today, back late Sunday. I imagine there are good Internet cafes in Amsterdam in which case I will keep the blog updated…and then change all my passwords when I get home.

Posted in Personal | 1 Comment

Andy Oram Talks Sense About Nonsense (WSIS Coverage, Actually)

Posted on December 10, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

This is the most sensible thing I've seen on the subject. And it still leaves out half of what I think is the story: the non-US perspective. Folks out there are getting real grumpy with what they see, with some justice, as US domination of the infrastructure.

Andy Oram, Gee, when did we give away the Internet? (An analysis of news about WSIS)

What king or dictator or bureaucrat has signed the document giving power over the Internet to one organization or another? Did I miss the ceremony?

One laughable aspect of news reportage is that the founders and leaders of ICANN always avowed, with the utmost unction, that they were not trying to make policy decisions and were simply tinkering with technical functions on the Internet. Of course, there is rarely such a thing as a merely technical function, and that truth has been borne out by the effects of ICANN's policies on “intellectual property” and on the allocation of domain names in general. Perhaps it's good for people to be talking openly of ruling the Internet.

But, in whatever ways ICANN has managed to wield its three-pronged fork (domain names, addresses, and assigned numbers such as protocols), it has never come close to being master of the Internet.

Now that the mainstream media have announced that the Internet is up for grabs, they are presenting the debate falsely as a two-sided fight between ICANN and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

…

So what is up for grabs? Certainly the right to define new top-level domain names (anybody visited a .museum site lately?) and to hand out to various favored organizations the plum of domain name registration (which really should be a nearly pure technical function, and has been turned into a heavy-weight, politicized activity by the “intellectual property” interests). But that's not really very much.

The fears that seem to be circulating around the domain name fight is that governments or other organizations will use control over domain names to censor the Internet. Ironically, the biggest threat to freedom in the use of domain names has been from the private sector, specifically the “intellectual property” interests. But the danger is present that governments will catch on (China seems to be doing so) and manipulating the system to restrict free speech. Still, with search engines becoming more popular and more powerful all the time, domain names are not the prime prizes they seemed in the late 1990s.

IP addresses are also a potential source of control that Internet users should be conscious about, if not worried about. Addressing can be abused mainly in a context of scarcity, and there has been debate for years over whether IP addresses are getting scarce. (They're certainly scarce when you ask the average local ISP for more than one!) A vigorous campaign to adopt IPv6 would remove most of the worry over this potential choke-hold.

And who ultimately is in charge of the Domain Name System? You are. You determine what domains you view. Somewhere on your personal computer is a configuration option that determines where you go to resolve top-level domains, and you can go far beyond what ICANN would like you to see.

Posted in Law: Internet Law | 1 Comment