Category Archives: Internet

First, CIA’s ‘Facebook’ Program Dramatically Cut Agency’s Costs via America’s Finest News Source.

Next, The Internet in Society: Empowering or Censoring Citizens? in which Evgeny Morozov takes on ‘cyber-utopianism’.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk8x3V-sUgU

Seth Finkelstein is cross with people like me:

I’m basically completely unable to get the law/policy types to realize the enormous extent to which Wikipedia is de facto subsidized by Google. Here, not only is Wikipedia getting yet another boost, but some of its arguable commercial competitors are being killed! It’s not because Wikipedia has some magic itself, in "community" or "civility", or whatever huckerism is being hyped. Rather, it has the algorithm support of Google.

I accept this is true. So?

Seth’s complaints seem to be (1) that Google’s ranking algorithms are not neutral; (2) that they tend to favor large corporate aggregator sites over blogs like his or mine; (3) that there is a real chance that this favoritism is driven by a self-dealing agenda, since Google owns sites like YouTube that do well off point 2, and even if that isn’t what drives it, we should worry about it; (4) that it is wrong to excuse Google’s choices on the grounds that true search neutrality is impossible, because neutrality might be possible if we worked harder on the problem.

Of these, I guess I accept that (1) is true. And (2) may be true, but I’m ready to believe that it satisfies consumer demand. So barring new evidence, I am only concerned about (3), that is the possibility of self-dealing and self-favoritism. For which we don’t yet have much evidence, although it pays to be vigilant. As for (4), well, Seth has me dead to rights.

And I still don’t see why Google’s favoring of Wikipedia should bother me.

James Grimmelman has posted a draft what may be his best paper to date, Sealand, HavenCo, and the Rule of Law. It is thoughtful, wry, informative, and entertaining.

Here is the abstract:

In 2000, a group of American entrepreneurs moved to a former World War II anti-aircraft platform in the North Sea, seven miles off the British coast, and launched HavenCo, one of the strangest start-ups in Internet history. A former pirate radio broadcaster, Roy Bates, had occupied the platform in the 1960s, moved his family aboard, and declared it to be the sovereign Principality of Sealand. HavenCo’s founders were opposed to governmental censorship and control of the Internet; by putting computer servers on Sealand, they planned to create a “data haven” for unpopular speech, safely beyond the reach of any other country. This article tells the full story of Sealand and HavenCo — and examines what they have to tell us about the nature of the rule of law in the age of the Internet.

The story itself is fascinating enough: it includes pirate radio, shotguns and .50-caliber machine guns, rampant copyright infringement, a Red Bull skateboarding special, perpetual motion machines, and the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of State. But its implications for the rule of law are even more remarkable. Previous scholars have seen HavenCo as a straightforward challenge to the rule of law: by threatening to undermine national authority, HavenCo was implacably opposed to all law. As the fuller history shows, however, this story is too simplistic. HavenCo also depended on international law to recognize and protect Sealand, and on Sealand law to protect it from Sealand itself. Where others have seen HavenCo’s failure as the triumph of traditional regulatory authorities over HavenCo, the article argues that in a very real sense, HavenCo failed not from too much law but from too little. The “law’ that was supposed to keep HavenCo safe was law only in a thin, formalistic sense, disconnected from the human institutions that make and enforce law. But without those institutions, law does not work, as HavenCo discovered.

Photo credit: Casey Hussein Bisson