Information Law Possum

So Pluto isn’t a planet anymore, at least in the opinion of the majority of voters at this year’s meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

I assume that astronomers need to categorize celestial bodies for some important reasons (perhaps teaching), and I gather that the new definitions of planets and dwarf planets are useful to them and their students.

But nevertheless, I don’t think the IAU–or anybody else–should authoritatively decide which celestial bodies may be called a planet and which may not.

The cateogry of planets is not one that (mainly) concerns experts: Planets are not asteroids, organic molecules, marsupials, or negligence. I expect that the majority of the population of the better-educated countries can cite their Roman/Greek names, and many people (but not me!) believe that their constellations directly affect their lives. In addition, the known planets have been hte object of poems, symphonies, and science-fiction literature. Pluto’s inclusion in the canon of planets might also help explain that NASA got $ 700 M of funding for the New Horizons mission to Pluto. It’s hardly imaginable that the same amount would have been allocated to explore a dwarf planet, and not surprisingly, NASA laments:

“Poor New Horizons. When it launched in January 2006 it was with all the prestige of the first spacecraft to study Pluto, the last unvisited planet in the solar system. That changed seven months later, when astronomers decided that Pluto was not a planet. For the time being, New Horizons is at least the first mission to a dwarf planet — the new class of objects into which scientists dumped Pluto.”

The cultural importance of the category of planets should forbid a professional organization to arrogate to itself the authority to define it. Nobody has done that for continents, either, and so there is a number of classification models that co-exist peacefully. Can you imagine that a Geographers’ Society would authoritatively decide that Australia is too small to be a continent and should be categorized as a dwarf continent, together with Greenland? Even if the U.N. tried to do that, most people would rightly think that diplomats have gone mad, just after solemnly declaring 2008 the year of the potato …

Now, things would look different if the IAU’s definition was only for “internal” use among members of the scientific community. But if that were the case, the IAU should and could have made that clear.

It will be interesting for sociologists to see whether people will stick with the old canon of planets or if they submit to the new definition. The latter would mean a significant increase of societal power on the part of the IAU, namely the authority to define certain important cultural categories.

P.S. if you feel the need to signal definitorial awareness, you will find some related t-shirts and bumper stickers here: http://www.cafepress.com/buy/pluto

My wonderful colleague Silke just gave me a pointer that a biometrical search engine, www.riya.com, already exists. Thus, you can replace the potential mood used in my previous post by the present mood and start re-thinking your image publication strategy …

Here’s a statement from Riya’s developers:

“Riya is a new kind of visual search engine. We look inside the image, not only at the text around it.

Use Riya to:

• Find similar faces and objects on many images across the web.

• Refine the results, using color, shape and texture.

Riya also has a personal search service that does face and text recognition in your photos. You can use our face and text recognition technology to:

• Train the system to recognize the main characters in the story of your life.

• Share photos with friends and family.

We believe the time has come to truly make photos searchable, to let people say I want “more like this” and get what they want, and to eventually allow every public photo in the world to be found.”

Riya’s beta version doesn’t work particularly well yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Google & friends had already offered to buy the company.

P.S. Guess where Riya’s CEO and co-founder, Munjal Shah has obtained his Master’s degree in computer science?

In July, Professor John Palfrey and Robert Rogoyski published an article called “The Move to the Middle: The Enduring Threat of ‘Harmful’ Speech to Network Neutrality”, which draws our attention to an important shift in the way how legislators regulate the internet: Instead of regulating end-points, governments across the globe have been targeting intermediaries (in particular ISPs) over the last years. The authors argue that this approach has important drawbacks which result from their inherent violation of the end-to-end principle.
Here are some lessions I personally learned from that reading:

Intermediary regulation - a powerful enforcement tool
Compared to end-point regulation, intermediary regulation is a very effective enforcement tool. Accordingly, it can make - and has made in most cases - bad policies worse. Examples are the censoring policies of repressive governments, such as China, Burma, and many others, but also copyright and TPM laws in democratic countries, which are widely perceived as having undesirable effects. But in my view, we cannot make the effectiveness of intermediary regulation responsible for the bad policies which can be enforced through it.

Does intermediary regulation curb (what kind of) innovation?
As the authors write, one of the well-known advantages of the end-to-end principle is its openness to innovation on top of the basic layers of the internet. I suspect that intermediary regulation can be used to curb innovation, e.g. if data that is expressed in a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol is systematically filtered. However, the existing cases of intermediary regulation seem to target certain types of content (e.g. pornographic, racist or political websites, or copyrighted MP3 files), and I am not sure whether these activities are apt to curb the development of new protocols or applications.

On the other hand, intermediary regulation might curb social innovation, especially the emergence of peer production of governance the authors mention: I believe that governance problems are regarded as problems of the government - and not of citizens - as soon as the government attends to a problem, and that the latter are more likely to do that if an effective means of enforcements such asi intermediary regulation is at their disposal.

Spillover effects: the most important practical problem
The authors mention spillover effects of intermediary regulation that take place at two levels:

• First, as intermediaries don’t have a direct stake in what content flows through their pipes, there seem to be considerable incentives for them to over-comply with the law.
• Second, for the same reason, but also due to insufficient technology and incompetence, intermediaries often apply overshooting means to block or filter traffic. Worse, many of the more straightforward counter-measures to prevent this are ineffective: The authors exemplify that in an impressive way, showing the inherent dysfunctionality of a procedure to ask the library staff to unblock URLs which are erroneously blocked by their automatic blocking software.

Is intermediary regulation evil?
The authors’ main conclusion is - in my eyes - that, when a democratic society considers targeting intermediaries to accomplish its policy goals, the costs and drawbacks of violating the end-to-end principle should be acknowledged. In other words, intermediary regulation is not evil per se.

A good example is child pornography, where end-point regulation has not been totally ineffective, as the many successful police raids prove, but it has inherent cost and jurisdictional limitations. On the other hand, the example of the British Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) demonstrates the effectiveness of intermediary (self-)regulation: When the organization set to work in 1997, 18 % of the child abuse content reported by citizens and reviewed by the foundation was hosted in the UK; now, it’s 0.2 %. (In contrast, 51% of child abuse content found by that organization is hosted in the US.)

Call for action
The (mainly negative) experiences with existing attempts to regulate intermediaries call for action: Information lawyers could assist legislators in pursuing legitimate policy goals through intermediary regulation, and companies in implementing the regulatory framework, by developing a best practice model for intermediary regulation. The model could contain recommendations concerning due process safeguards (for all stakeholders, not only for intermediaries), safe harbor rules (which could prevent anticipatory obedience, as long as they are simple), and much more. Unless we help making good intermediary regulation, we will continue to see bad regulation in the future!

Ok, this is not a political blog. But since I’ve known about Berkman intern Caroline’s thesis subject - the Iranian blogosphere and the public -, the following is both big and scientific news. :-)

NZZ Online, one of Switzerland’s best news site, broke the news today that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has started his own, RSS-enabled weblog at www.ahmadinejad.ir. The blog is available in Farsi, English, Arabic, and French. (It seems to have interoperability problems with Opera and Mozilla, so you might want to open it in IEX.)

His first post is an autobiography, enriched by his well-known anti-american statements.

Speaking of enriched - the blog supports RSS, but not Atom. Is that an attempt to take the heat off his government in the current nuclear controversy? Let’s keep fingers crossed.

P.S. I’m sorry, the word-play works better in German …