For the next few days I will be participating in a project aiming to apply the VID perspective to future Internet architecture (FIA) design eforts: the Values-In-Design Council.

The National Science Foundation has recently funded multiple projects to envision and  pursue new ways to build a “more trustworthy and robust Internet.” As described by the NSF:

The four basic research and system design projects funded under FIA explore different dimensions of the network architecture design space and emphasize different visions of future networks. NSF anticipates that the teams will explore new directions and a diverse range of research thrusts within their research agenda but also work together to enhance and possibly integrate architectural thinking, concepts and components, paving the way to a comprehensive trustworthy network architecture of the future.

The four FIA projects are described in more detail here.

Along with these technical projects, the NSF has also funded the creation of the Values-in-Design Council, a multi-disciplinary team of experts in the social analysis of digital information technologies, led by Helen Nissenbaum, who are tasked to work alongside the recipients of the FIA technical grants. As described by Nissenbaum:

Council members will serve as analysts and consultants to the FIA projects, helping to identify junctures in the design process in which values-critical technical decisions arise; locating design parameters and variations that differentially call into play relevant values; for and with respective projects, developing rich conceptual understandings of relevant values; for and with project investigators, operationalizing values to enable transition from values conceptions into design features; with FIA investigators, examining the interplay of values embodied in design with respective values embodied in law and policy; and where possible, verifying values in design through prototyping, user testing and other empirical analyses.

The full list of VID Council members is here.

At this week’s meeting, hosted by Colorado State University’s Computer Science Department, each of the four project teams will provide an update of their work, and then discussion will focus on this set of questions:

Who are the service providers in your architecture, and what is the resulting provider ecosystem? (Some of the FIA architecture seem to presume a provider ecosystem similar to today: a connected set of packet forwarders. Some presume other services related to carriage, such as storage providers. )

• What is the incentive of each of these actors to enter into their line of business? Where would your architecture require payments among actors to sustain viability?

Options for control: which actors can influence the behavior of a transfer?

• Does your architecture provide user control over aspects of service selection: routes, service qualities, or providers of support service (e.g. like DNS in today’s Internet)?
• To what extent does your architecture support or resist the goals of those who wish to control access to classes of information (e.g. governments, rights-holders). How does this position influence the balance of power in your network, and its viability? Which actors have the ability (or perhaps the easy ability) to block communication among willing end-points?
• IP addresses accidentally turned out to be scarce resources, for no good reason. What features of your architecture might turn out to be “scarce resources” or resources over which some potentially powerful actor could exercise control?
• Do you have hierarchies with single points of control at the root? Is there information you share with partners that has to be signed by a trusted third party?
• Are there policies that you have explicitly embedded in your design?

What is the range of services that the system provides to the higher layers?

• Compared to today’s Internet, would you expect the same sort of commercial entities at the higher layers?
• For example, (especially in the context of those architectures that emphasize information retrieval), would you imagine that there would be CDNs operating on top of your architecture?
• Does your architecture provide an API that defines the service interface of your system?

Interfaces among providers

• What types of information is expected to be exchanged between providers?  This goes beyond packet forwarding to include:
  • Routing information
  • Naming information (e.g. DNS zone transfers)
  • An interconnection agreement between providers in today’s Internet may have Service Level Requirements, or specify aspects of routing policies (cold potato, hot potato).  What would you expect to find in inter-provider agreements in your architecture?
  • To what extent do services provided to higher levels (see above) require negotiation or cooperation among the various actors that make up the overall network?
  • What mechanisms does your architecture provide for negotiation among service providers?
  • What range of functions are supported by the protocols and mechanisms that hook them together?
  • Operators are sometimes worried about all getting together to solve operational issues. It is hard to do and looks like anti-trust. What are the “top five” aspects of your architecture that require operational coordination?

Market forces and regulation

• To what extent does your proposal facilitate or limit the use of competition as a discipline on the market?
• If regulation were proposed to require some sort of non-discriminatory access or “network neutrality”, what might that mean in your design? Where might forms of discriminatory service emerge?

Evolvability

• How does your architecture allow innovation and the migration to new mechanisms?
• Which sorts of evolution seem to require global coordination, like the migration to IPv6 today?

Trust, isolation and availability

• What sorts of trust assumptions does your design make about the various actors that make up the ecosystem?
• Does your architecture provide means for instrumentation or data-gathering? What sorts of data? Internal structure of the network, usage, routes, outages, etc?
• To what extent does your architecture include tools to detect that actors are not functioning properly? Which actors have access to these tools?
• How do your options for control allow different actors to respond to actors that are not trustworthy or mis-functioning?
• Availability often implies “extra” or “diverse” resources. Does your architecture depend on resources that are otherwise under-utilized to achieve high availability. Is economics a barrier to a high-availability network? Both within a region and across regions, does your design allow the operator to trade off explicitly between cost and availability/resilience?

Implicit in these questions are various ethical concerns, including: autonomy, access, freedom from bias, control, and trust. I’m excited about the conversations that will unfold over the next couple of days, and will provide public reflections here as appropriate.

The Reputation Society: How Online Opinions Are Reshaping the Offline World
Edited by Hassan Masum and Mark Tovey
Foreword by Craig Newmark

In making decisions, we often seek advice. Online, we check Amazon recommendations, eBay vendors’ histories, TripAdvisor ratings, and even our elected representatives’ voting records. These online reputation systems serve as filters for information overload. In this book, experts discuss the benefits and risks of such online tools.

The contributors offer expert perspectives that range from philanthropy and open access to science and law, addressing reputation systems in theory and practice. Properly designed reputation systems, they argue, have the potential to create a “reputation society,” reshaping society for the better by promoting accountability through the mediated judgments of billions of people. Effective design can also steer systems away from the pitfalls of online opinion sharing by motivating truth-telling, protecting personal privacy, and discouraging digital vigilantism.

About the Editors

Hassan Masum is a policy and technology strategist and Affiliate Researcher at the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation at the University of Waterloo.

Mark Tovey is an Affiliate Researcher at the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation at the University of Waterloo. He is the editor of Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace.

This book was inspired by the “Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace” I helped organize at the Yale Information Society Project in 2007, and I’m excited to see the results of that event finally get published.

I’m also happy to note that I co-authored one the chapters in the volume with Anthony Hoffmann, a PhD student at UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies. Our contribution is titled, “Privacy, Context, and Oversharing: Reputational Challenges in a Web 2.0 World“:

When personal information is shared online, it may spread farther and faster than expected or inappropriately push intimate details to near-strangers. Zimmer and Hoffmann address the twin risks of information spreading beyond its intended context and the oversharing of personal information.

You can purchase the book at Amazon, etc. Enjoy!

Call for Papers

Internet Research 13.0: Technologies

The 13th Annual International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR)

October 18-21, 2012

MediaCity:UK – University of Salford
Salford – Greater Manchester – UK

Internet Research 13.0 will focus on the theme of technologies, understood in the broadest sense as crafts, techniques, and systems. The conference will examine the place of the Internet in the contemporary world and in relation to a range of existing and emerging technologies, considering its impact in a context where life is entangled with technologies of all kinds as never before. The conference will bring together scholars, researchers, students and practitioners from many disciplines to map and situate the development of the Internet as part of the history of human technology.

To this end, we call for papers, panel and pre-conference workshop proposals from any discipline, methodology, community or a combination of them that address the conference themes, including, but not limited to, papers that intersect and/or interconnect with the following:

• the speed and acceleration of technological change
• 
the past, present and future of technology
• emerging and converging technologies
• educational technology
• cultures of crafting
• connectivity and access
• space, location and mobile technologies
• technology, networks and attachments
• 
technology and the body
• 
technologies of the self
• technology, regulation and ethics

Sessions at the conference will be established that specifically address the conference themes, and we welcome innovative, exciting, and unexpected takes on those themes. We also welcome submissions on topics that address social, cultural, political, legal, aesthetic, economic, and/or philosophical aspects of the internet beyond the conference themes. In all cases, we welcome disciplinary and interdisciplinary submissions as well as international collaborations from both AoIR and non-AoIR members.

Submissions

We seek proposals for several different kinds of contributions. As in the past, we welcome proposals for traditional academic conference PAPERS, organized PANEL PROPOSALS that present a coherent group of papers on a single theme, as well as PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS which focus on a particular topic. We also invite proposals that will focus on discussion and interaction among conference delegates. A common form of this type is the ROUNDTABLE SESSION, but we would also like to encourage other formats, such as OPEN FISHBOWL SESSIONS. (See the Wikipedia entry under “Fishbowl (conversation)” for a description of this format. Fishbowl sessions should cover broad topics of interest to a wide segment of the AoIR community.) Finally, we invite short 5-minute talks on topics of interest to the community as part of our Ignite-IR panels. Please see below for more information on this format.

Deadlines

• 

Submissions Due: 1 March 2012 (Papers, Panels and Pre-Workshops. Details below.)
  NOTE: The submission deadline is a HARD DEADLINE; there will be NO extensions to this date.
• Notification: 1 May 2012
• Full Papers Submissions Due for inclusion in Selected Papers of IR: 1 July 2012
• Ignite-IR Final Proposal Deadline: 1 August 2012
• Ignite-IR Slides Due: 15 September 2012

Submission Requirements

• All papers and presentations will be evaluated in a standard blind peer review.
• PAPERS (individual or multi-author) – submit abstract of 600-800 words
• PANEL PROPOSALS – submit a description of 600-800 words on the panel theme, plus a 250-500 word abstract for each paper or presentation. The panel organizer must assemble these materials for submission
• ROUNDTABLE and FISHBOWL PROPOSALS – submit a statement indicating the nature of the discussion and form of interaction, and listing initial participants. (In the case of a fishbowl proposal, this will include the name of the moderator, and the names of the first four speakers for the fishbowl.)
• PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS – please submit all workshop proposals via email to atwood@aoir.org. Workshop proposals should include names of presenters and a 1,000-word description.
• IGNITE-IR – please submit a one-paragraph abstract and other information. Details at http://ir13.aoir.org/ignite-ir

Papers, presentations and panels will be selected from the submitted proposals on the basis of multiple blind peer review, coordinated and overseen by the Program Chair. Each individual may present only one paper during the conference, though they may be listed as a co-author on multiple papers. In addition to this one presentation, they may also appear on a panel, roundtable, or performance. The exception is the Ignite-IR lightening talk, which may be in addition to any other presentations.

Publication of Papers

Full papers submitted by the 1 July 2012 deadline will undergo review to be published in an open-access, online collection, Selected Papers of Internet Research (ISSN 2162-3317). A template and guidelines for preparing your final paper are available on the conference website (http://ir13.aoir.org/papers)

Selected papers from the conference will alternatively be published in a special issue of the journal Information, Communication & Society. Authors selected for submission for this issue will be contacted prior to the conference.

Pre-conference Workshops

On 18 October 2012, there will be a limited number of pre-conference workshops and symposia that will provide participants with in-depth, hands-on and/or creative opportunities. We invite proposals for these pre-conference workshops. Local presenters are encouraged to propose workshops that will invite visiting researchers into their labs or studios or locales. Proposals should be no more than 1,000 words, and should clearly outline the purpose, methodology, structure, costs, equipment and minimal attendance required, as well as explaining its relevance to the conference as a whole. Proposals will be accepted if they demonstrate that the workshop will add significantly to the overall program in terms of thematic depth, hands on experience, or local opportunities for scholarly or artistic connections. These proposals and all inquiries regarding pre-conference proposals should be submitted as soon as possible to both the program chair (atwood@aoir.org) and no later than 1 March 2012.

Contact Information

Program Chair: Feona Attwood, Communication, Sheffield Hallam University, UK. email: attwood@aoir.org

Local Conference Chair: Ben Light, School of Media, Music, and Performance, University of Salford, UK. email: light@aoir.org

Opening Standards: The Global Politics of Interoperability
Edited by Laura DeNardis
September 2011

Openness is not a given on the Internet. Technical standards–the underlying architecture that enables interoperability among hardware and software from different manufacturers–increasingly control individual freedom and the pace of innovation in technology markets. Heated battles rage over the very definition of “openness” and what constitutes an open standard in information and communication technologies. In Opening Standards, experts from industry, academia, and public policy explore just what is at stake in these controversies, considering both economic and political implications of open standards. The book examines the effect of open standards on innovation, on the relationship between interoperability and public policy (and if government has a responsibility to promote open standards), and on intellectual property rights in standardization–an issue at the heart of current global controversies. Finally, Opening Standards recommends a framework for defining openness in twenty-first-century information infrastructures.

Contributors discuss such topics as how to reflect the public interest in the private standards-setting process; why open standards have a beneficial effect on competition and Internet freedom; the effects of intellectual property rights on standards openness; and how to define standard, open standard, and software interoperability.

About the Editor

Laura DeNardis is Associate Professor in the School of Communication at American University. She is the author of Protocol Politics: The Globalization of Internet Governance (MIT Press, 2009) and a Fellow at the Yale Information Society Project at Yale Law School.

You can purchase the book at Amazon, etc. Enjoy!

Interfaces on Trial 2.0
By Jonathan Band and Masanobu Katoh
March 2011
ISBN-10: 0-262-01500-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-262-01500-4

We live in an interoperable world. Computer hardware and software products from different manufacturers can exchange data within local networks and around the world using the Internet. The competition enabled by this compatibility between devices has led to fast-paced innovation and prices low enough to allow ordinary users to command extraordinary computing capacity.

In Interfaces on Trial 2.0, Jonathan Band and Masanobu Katoh investigate an often overlooked factor in the development of today’s interoperabilty: the evolution of copyright law. Because software is copyrightable, copyright law determines the rules for competition in the information technology industry. This book–a follow-up to Band and Katoh’s successful 1995 book Interfaces on Trial–examines the debates surrounding the use of copyright law to prevent competition and interoperability in the global software industry in the last fifteen years.

Band and Katoh are longtime advocates for interoperable devices but present a reasoned view of contentious issues related to interoperability issues in the United States, the European Union, and the Pacific Rim[. They discuss such topics as the protectability of interface specifications, the permissibility of reverse engineering (and legislative and executive endorsement of pro-interoperability case law), the interoperability exception to the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the interoperability cases decided under it, the enforceability of contractural restrictions on reverse engineering;] and recent legal developments affecting the future of interoperability, including those related to open source-software and software patents.

About the Authors

Jonathan Band is an attorney who has written more than 100 articles on intellectual property and the Internet. He is an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University’s Law Center.

Masanobu Katoh is the former head of the Law and Intellectual Property Unit of Fujitsu Limited, a global information technology company based in Japan.

You can purchase it at Amazon and other sellers, and also download a open access copy at MIT Press.

I feel privileged to have my own essay, “Privacy Protection in the Next Digital Decade: ‘Trading Up’ or a ‘Race to the Bottom?”, published within the same pages as Tim Wu, Hal Varian, the Hon. Alex Kozinski, Stewart Baker, Jonathan Zittrain, Milton Mueller, Eric Goldman, and Yochai Benkler.

To learn more about the book, check out the foreword and introduction, or the table of contents. The book is available as a free PDF and the hardcover can purchased online. A free eBook will be available soon.

A free book launch symposium will follow the State of the Net Conference in Washington, DC the afternoon of January 19. Space is limited so RSVP here. (Unfortunately I cannot attend.)

This year, I participated in three main events: a pre-conference workshop on “Ethics and Internet Research Commons:  Building a sustainable future”, a session on “Networking and Social Sites” where I presented a paper on “The Laws of Social Networking, or, How Facebook Feigns Privacy”, and a panel discussion titled “On the Philosophy of Facebook“. Details below…

:::

Ethics and Internet Research Commons:  Building a sustainable future

This pre-conference was organized primarily by Elizabeth Buchanan, and featured brief talks by Charles Ess, Alex Halavais, Annette Markham, Malin Svenningson, and myself. We presented case studies that revealed key ethical challenges and identified important components of ethical decision making for Internet researchers, including:

• How does cultural specificity define research ethics and regulation?
• What constitutes a public text online and in what ways can and should they be used in research?
• Why do we consider firewalls and passwords to be the “gold standard” for determining if something was meant to be kept public or private?
• How do researchers work towards the imperative of sharing data while adhering to human subjects regulations?
• What ethical guidelines should be applied to trace data?
• How do researchers handle “closeness” in ethnography in ethical ways?
• What oscillations take place when a researcher is first known as a member of a group and then as a researcher?
• How is “empirical imperialism” affecting research ethics?
• What are the virtues of deception?

An excellent summary of the entire day is over at the Internet Research Ethics project website, which includes links to my slides.

:::

The Laws of Social Networking, or, How Facebook Feigns Privacy

I participated on an excellent session titled “Networking and Social Sites”, which also featured Robert Bodle and Christian Thorsten Callisen.

Bodle’s presentation, “Opening the social media ecosystem: the tenuous nature of interoperability, crossposting, and sharing among dominant social media sites, services and devices”, explored the values, characteristics, and conditions of interoperability between Facebook and its third party developer ecosystem. He found that while Facebook’s APIs provide new ways to share and participate, they also provide Facebook a new means to achieve market dominance, as well as undermine privacy, data security, contextual integrity, user autonomy and freedom.

Callisen’s talk, “The Old Face of ‘New’ Social Networks: The Republic of Letters”, was a historical contextualization of the so-called digital revolution within the longer history of “the virtual”. He showed how the Republic of Letters was essentially a networked virtual community for the reciprocal sharing of information, complete with its own techniques for simulating co-presence, protocols for information transfer and interaction, and varying levels of transparency and encryption.

My presentation, “The Laws of Social Networking, or, How Facebook Feigns Privacy”, was an expanded thought piece inspired by this blog post, where I suggest three natural laws that thwart attempts to provide users of social networking sites sufficient means to control their information flows:

• The first law is somewhat obvious: Social networking sites are incentivized to promote the open and unfettered flow of mountains of personal information.
• The second law, perhaps more of a corollary, follows naturally from this: Providing users robust and easy-to-use tools to control their personal information flows is counter to this profit maximization motive.
• Thus, the third law: Provide users privacy controls only when you must, and position them as both a great a sacrifice, as well as something users probably shouldn’t bother with; make privacy hard.

To support this argument, I discuss various public comments by Facebook’s management team, and show how the laws become encoded within the design of Facebook’s architecture and recent privacy “upgrades”. I concluded that the existence of the laws of social networking create — and perpetuate — a great power imbalance where users lack robust privacy controls, leaving them with limited ability to manage their personal information flows.

The rough text of my remarks can be downloaded here, and my slides are available here.

As an aside: I found it amusing that the most tweeted comment from my talk was a completely off-the-cuff remark criticizing Facebook’s claim that users have control over their information simply due to the existence of privacy controls. I noted that all the controls to fly  a 747 are in the cockpit too, but that doesn’t mean anyone can fly a 747.

:::

On the Philosophy of Facebook

Recognizing that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has built his social networking empire on the belief that “information wants to be shared“, a particular philosophy of information that directly impacts the values built into the design of Facebook, ranging from its user interface, privacy policies, terms of service, and method of governance, I organized a panel to explore the philosophy of Facebook and its broader implications for norms of privacy, identity, governance, sociability, and online life generally.

I was lucky to welcome the following speakers to IR.11 to discuss this important topic:

• Kate Raynes-Goldie, Curtin University of Technology, Australia
• Anthony Hoffmann, UW-Milwaukee, USA
• Korinna Patelis, Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus
• Trebor Scholz, New School University, USA
• Dylan Wittkower, Coastal Carolina University, USA

Unfortunately, we only had 1 hour (!!) for the panel discussion, but it was a very good 60 minutes; one of the few times I’ve heard Marx, Hegel, Kant, Rawls, Deleuze and Guattari, etc discussed at length at AoIR. We concluded that perhaps an entire pre-conference on the topic is in order for IR.12 (in Seattle in 2011).

Clearly, I’m not the only person engaged in such work here at UW-M (see the Center for Information Policy Research and other faculty research at the School of Information Studies, as well as related activities within the Center for 21st Century Studies, for example), but it is nice to have our focus area recognized.

The conference program is fantastic, featuring keynote addresses by Siva Vaidhyanathan, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Megan Boler. I’ll be presenting an updated version of my paper, “But the Data is Already Public”: On the Ethics of Research in Facebook, based on my critique of the “Tastes, Ties, and Time” Facebook data release.

I’ll also be participating in a pre-conference workshop on Critical Issues and Perspectives in Internet Research Methods and Ethics, where the focus will be on raising awareness of and sensitivity by researchers around critical methodological and ethical issues working particularly in online or Internet-mediated realms.

There already is a great tweet stream at #ir10, so please follow us if you can’t make it.

UPDATE: By most measures, the conference was a great success. As an organizer, I was only able to sit in on a handful of sessions (including my own), but others have blogged about here and here.

There are quite a few images up on Flickr, and I’ve created a Wordle from all the individual paper titles. Matt Allen blogged the AoIR general meeting, where the locations of the next two conferences were announced: Gothenburg, Sweden (2010) & Seattle, Washington (2011). See you there!