He asks the general counsel of Viacom what he does in the course of a day. Mike: Viacom is an entertainment company, but it’s diverse, from cable TV to Internet. It has 140 channels around the world (ComedyCentral, MTV, etc.), video games His day consists of planning, managing, and dealing with surprises.

Charlie asks Esther Dyson what she does during the day. “I’m a court jester.” She swims every morning. She’s retired. So she does what she likes, including sitting on boards, giving advice, writing, giving talks, working with “do-good” groups trying to foster democracy in emerging markets.

Reed Hundt, former FCC chairman, says he’s on 7 boards, kibbitzes on politics.

Charlie says that he speaks for Eon, Dean of Cyberspace, and she has some questions. Wikipedia is the instantiation of the building of the knowledge commons. Why didn’t it come out of a university?

Esther: It came from neither the university nor government because they have rules and process. They don’t welcome strangers. Wikipedia is just a rule set. And, btw, you should check out barcode wikipedia. The topics are products with barcodes. [Ah, the power of unique identifiers!]

Charlie says to Mike of Viacom that Harvard is in a sense a public media company. We sit on a huge archive of material, most of which is copyrighted. The permission system is mired in transaction costs. So, we can’t use our treasure unless we pay a huge amount in time and money to free it up. So, it sits there. You too site on a huge pile ofassets. You’re looking at the system from the other side.

Mike: The system that creates those books depends on an economic incentive.

Charlie: Suppose we had the network infrastructure but no copyright. If we had to make a new system, can we agree that we would not choose the existing system?

Mike: Yes. We would have created something with many different features. You should be allowed to decide how to make your works available. But disrupting those expectations undermines people’s willingness to make works.

Charlie: The Net is a true inflection point. It changes defaults. It starts you from an open space, and you create private spaces within it. That means that the answer to Mike’s argument should be: Yes, except things have changed. We should be in a hurry to change.

Mike: There are tons of examples of those changes. E.g., the record companies have given YouTube site licenses.

Esther: If you’re really going to start over, there’s a principle that if someone creates something, they ought to control its distribution. But there are lots of business models and varieties of contracts.

Reed: Here are some facts that might be true. Over the past 20 yrs, if you look at all content, the price of the hardware in that network has continuously declined. The price of sw has stayed flat. So, the predominant value of the Net is now software. That inhibits the take-up rate in poorer economies. Linux is a response to that.

Esther: The price of the sw isn’t the inhibitor. They’re happy to use stolen sw.

Mike: There are a lot of new, efficient licenses that have developed, including blanket licenses designed to reduce the transaction costs. And we’ve developed ways to get our content out everywhere. And getting clearances are a pain in the butt for Viacom, too.

Charlie asks if we should worry about what JZ has pointed to, the locking down of devices.

Reed says that what happened to the music industry will happen to “elite universities.” You can tell by the fact that universities don’t spend a lot on IT that they don’t know how to accomplish their mission in the new world. E.g., bring Western knowledge to China.

Charlie says that the open access movement wants to bring all knowledge to everyone everywhere.

Esther: Education is about more than making info available.

Charlie: We should be able to make education that is interesting to people around the world. But can you do that with Verizon in charge of the connection and the cellphones?

Reed: In most countries, it’s a state-owned company and has nothing to do with education. We now know that within 15 yrs virtually everyone will have a Net connection, and most will be a wireless connection. Universities need to get ahead of this parade or they won’t be a significant part of how people learn.

Esther: In India, she saw the multimouse, so you can stick a single usb device into a port, and it connects to 8 mice, each with its own cursor. Eight students at a time. That’s MSFT investing in emerging markets. She tells a story about S. Africa to make the point that we shouldn’t be looking for government solutions. We need open markets.

Q: (David Marglin) How do we welcome strangers? How do we beat our swords into plowshares?
Charlie: Harvard has gone open access. That’s news. Other universities notice. Elsevier notices.

Q: You’ve addressed how you broadcast your ideas. But that’s easy. Paris Hilton does that. Harder: How do you listen to all the people who have ideas? How about if Harvard could listen to all those people. And how about getting the science dept to talk with the art dept?

Q: If there were no copyright, we’d have a digital library of Alexandria. Copyright is about providing incentives, not about lowering transaction costs, etc.

Mike: The library wouldn’t exist if people didn’t have incentives. It’d be great if al content had metadata so rights could be cleared automatically, lowering transaction costs. [So there we have the two visions: A system of perfect control to lower transaction costs, and a commons. Me, I want the commons. [Tags: berkman berkmanat10 ]

Argument 1: “The Internet allows more speech from more people than ever before.” JP hands it to Ethan Zuckerman to talk about Global Voices. There are probably more than 100M outside of the US creating content on line, says ethanz. Global Voices tries to surface those voices. International news has gone from a supply problem to a demand problem. How do you find those voices? How do you understand (= translate, contextualize) them? How is your attention held? Ethan says that although he was initially skeptical of blogging, Salam Pax convinced him. But, it’s not perfect. E.g., governments (and sometimes corporations) try to cut down access to the tools. More worrisome, people don’t pay attention to much outside of what the mainstream media tell them to. “We haven’t found the way to shape the news agenda through social media.”

JP puts up the map of the Farsi blogosphere. In response to question about Cass Sunstein’s hypothesis, John Kelly (who made the map) that even though blogs cluster by political stance, they are still densely interlinked.

Argument #2: Although the Net lets more people tell the story, “states are finding more and more ways to restrict online speech and to practice surveillance.” JP points to the OpenNet Initiative, which tracks state blockage of speech.

Esther Dyson: To get Internet to help democracy, we need to fix the people. The Net is just a tool. We need profiles of courage. Also, there’s virality of protest.

Audience: We cannot rely on people doing the right thing. Many think that control and censorship are good things.

Audience: It’s not just a digital divide, but a media literacy gap.

Argument 3: “The Internet facilitates the formation of online groups, which in turn has great impact on democracy and governance.” Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation talks about Public Markup, which enables people to comment on bills, etc. JP asks if there are downsides to this increased transparency. E.g., the star wars kids who didn’t want the exposure. Can people be harmed by transparency and the power of collective action without recourse? Ellen replies, “Not yet.”

JP calls on Yochai Benkler. What questions should we be asking in the next ten years? Benkler responds: “I’m sorry, prof., I didn’t do the reading.” His serious reply is that we are moving from imagining and fearing, to actually gathering data and doing detailed analysis.

David Reed: While the Net is great at group-forming, there is an upper limit. Each group demands attention. There’s an attention economy that limits this. In the political space, you can starve out attention. [Tags: berkman democracy john_palfrey berkmanat10 ]

After Dean Kagan (correctly) identifies JZ with the Berkman Center, JZ begins by talking about the importance of the fact that the Net at its start was unconstrained by a need to make money. They therefore didn't have to count how many people were on it or how much they were using it. So, they made it so anyone could get on just be hooking in. Anyone can build on it. It explains the hourglass shape of the Net: Diverse media, diverse tasks, all going through Internet protocol. [Live blogging: JZ is a great speaker, and my scribbled notes don't come close to capturing the flow, much less the texture, of his talk.][Note: I'm posting this without re-reading or spellechecking so I can go join the hallway chat.]

IP reflects the constraint and lack of constraint. Ethernet, for example, relies on social conventions to keep the hardware following the protocol. Same with email. The natural way to create email would have been to set up an authenticated database. Instead, email assumes a distributed email address and assumes people won’t spoof addresses. Solutions to problems generally are postponed until the problems arise. He points to the informal, unpretentiousness of the IETF as typical of the founding attitude of the Net.

JZ points to the “generative” power of having programmable computers attached to an open network.

The heart of his argument: The social conventions may not be enough to prevent the “turning of the barge” of the Net. We are losing the fight. Our PC’s assume that codes running there are good and desired, whereas PC’s (and Macs) frequently run programs we don’t understand or want. Vint Cerf has said that perhaps 250M machines around the world are running code waiting for commands to do something evil, e.g., botnets. “This is an absurd situation. We would not allow our cars to be used for joyriding.”

E.g., Pakistan YouTube by exploiting a network weakness: An ISP altered its routing tables so that other routers thought it was one hop from YouTube, so YouTube traffic went that way.

“The Internet is a collective hallucination that works so long as we don’t stare at it too carefully.”

He puts up a 2×2: hierarchy <> polyarchy, and bottom-up<>top-down. (Polyarchy means lots of people can try out lots of things.) JZ says bottom-up = generative and top-down = sterile. He puts the Internet in the bottom-up, polyarchy quadrant. “This area works great until it doesn’t.”

So, then what do you about it? Have the government fix it? A Patriot Act for cyberspace, as Lessig fears? Sometimes the government does intervene, JZ says. E.g., it adjudicates domain name disputes. But he shows the ITU’s architecture for fixing the Internet: an enormously complex chart that is the opposite of the simple Internet hourglass. The changes is to quality of service (not best effort) and fully compliant with all regulatory requirements. That’s the future Internet being designed for us. Likewise, PCs are being locked down. He points to the Mac that says Macs are better because all the pieces come from a single vendor. Even with the coming of the iPhone SDK, all apps have to go through the Apple Store, subject to Apple’s regulations, as announced by Jobs: Nothing illegal, malicious, privacy violative, porn, bandwidth hog or “unforeseen.” JZ thinks that this type of lockdown, which is coming, is the worst of both worlds. Locked down appliances and gated communities.

He points to FaceBook being used as an alternative email, but with pretty hideous terms.

So what do we do? Perhaps the lower left quadrant: bottom-up hierarchy: Bottom up solutions with enough adherents that it has the heft of a hierarchy. We need social buy-in. E.g., Wikipedia has technology that makes the price of mistakes not to high and that lets people talk and come to agreement. That’s the kind of buy-in we want for stopbadware.com at the Berkman Center. But this also requires that we import some practices from the regulatory sphere, e.g., an appeals process to get people off the stopbadware list. We need ways of expressing our social preferences with the condience that they will be respected. But, he says, some of these social techniques can be subverted. And we don’t always agree on norms. When we don’t find solutions in that quadrant, we find ourselves turning to government.

Q: Scottt Bradnor: JZ is sort of right, but hyperbolic.

Q: David Reed: I sort of agree. There were a lot of skeptics when the American democracy was founded. The problems we’re suffering through are not the iconic ones. They’re more subtle. They’re about power shifts and whether commercial entities are really helping us. I’m not convinced the problems are insurmountable. [Tags: ]

Charlie Nesson talks about the values of the Center: “Open code, open acJcess, open talk, open education.” He asks us to build “the university” across all distances. “We are the future of the Internet,” he says.

[Tags: berkman terry_fisher charlie_nesson jonathan zittrain ]

This is not only quite an honor. It also will embed the Center even more directly in the full range of Harvard’s discourse.

[Tags: berkman berkmanat10 ]

The backchannel is at irc://irc.freenode.net/berkman. I assume it’s being webcast but I don’t know where. (I came into the conf room without a program.) The tag is “berkmanat10.” For more, check here. Also, STeve Garfield is streaming it live here.

[Tags: b@10 berkmanat10 ]

The pitch is that if you check into Zenzuu 30 times per month, they’ll give you 80% of the ad revs. And if you sign other people up, you’ll get a cut of their ad revs. All of which is fine, and reminds us of the absurd amounts of money we users generate for the social networks we use. But Zenzuu is so focused on the revenues that the video doesn’t mention a single feature of the site.

The fact that all the ads on the site are for Zenzuu itself pushes it over the edge into self-parody.

By the way, would you surprised to learn that Zenzuu’s privacy policy seems to suck, although I’m not sure because it’s in a font designed by and for squirrels.[Tags: social_networking_sites facebook myspace zenzuu ]

Do we now have a whole new — and easily spoofed — type of Celebrity Encounter? And how many degrees from Kevin Bacon does that make me?

[Tags: bluetooth celebrities ]

[Tags: publius governance ]

By the way, the Community 2.0 conference was an interesting gathering of people interested in various aspects of the various ways businesses build and are embedded in communities. [Tags: cluetrain marketing charlene_li groundswell ]