The Great Debate

It’s hard to imagine communicating without Skype, Facetime, X-Box, Twitter or a text on your smartphone. Mobile devices and other Internet Protocol (IP)-based services powered by high-speed broadband have revolutionized the way we connect with one another at just about every moment of our lives.

Millions of Americans are now abandoning traditional, copper-wire phone service. In just the past three years, U.S. smartphone adoption has increased from 16.9 percent to 54.9 percent, according to Nielsen. One out of three homes in the United States now relies on wireless-only technologies, according to the National Health Interview Survey.

Copper telephone technology has limited capabilities. It falls short in providing robust, high-speed Internet services that support IP-enabled applications such as Voice over Internet Protocol. Nor can it offer the next-generation healthcare, education and public-safety IP-based applications that consumers demand. Shifting our nation’s communications networks to all-IP is critical to ensuring consumer access to the most modern communications services.

As with the adoption of any new technology, the move to IP networks offers challenges and opportunities. A majority of Americans have already changed from voice-only telephone networks. Roughly 93 percent of U.S. households subscribed to switched-access phone service a decade ago, according to USTelecom, today it’s less than one-third and is projected to decline to one-quarter of households by the end of 2013.

Moving the dwindling number of consumers still on copper technology will likely require a public-private partnership that can ensure no one is left behind while also providing access to affordable 21st century technologies.

Technology is changing how power struggles are waged between the White House and Congress. For the last few years, negotiations between Democratic and Republican leaders have too often led to stalemate. The battle over how to avert the “fiscal cliff” is the latest example.

Since President Barack Obama’s reelection, he has begun to shift strategies — taking his case directly to the American people as a way to pressure Congress. After all, members of Congress ignore their president without penalty, but ignoring the opinions of their constituents can cost them their jobs.

Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both effectively used television to address the nation when facing off against a House of Representatives controlled by the opposing party. While TV will remain important, going directly to the American people continue to morph in the era of the Internet. Political messages can be customized and narrowly targeted.

Two years ago, frustrated by the powerlessness citizens expressed to me about the political process, moved by their transpartisan worries about the state of U.S. democracy, I began an experiment on Facebook: I sought to train “ordinary” people from all walks of life as reporters and opinion writers.

The community grew fast, to a reach of over 10 million and between 100,000 and 250,000 users a week. People joined from 23 countries. There was clearly an appetite for this kind of training and the material it produced.

More exciting to me as a journalist was that the quality of information these “ordinary” citizens were generating – once they had taken on board basics such as “what is double sourcing?”, the importance of “who, what where, why and how?” and the role of eyewitness accounts and original documents – rose very high.

Now that Congress has hit pause on its controversial Stop Online Piracy Act and nearly every argument about the merits and failings of the piece of copyright legislation has been made, it’s a good time to ask: what, in 2012, will it take to actually stop a bill like this?

Because despite the delay, the situation still isn’t looking so hot for those looking to bring down SOPA. Amendments to tone down the bill’s more disliked points have been routinely defeated in the House Judiciary Committee by numbers sufficient to pass the bill to the full House floor.

But, at this point in the process, numbers aren’t everything. In the wake of the Arab Spring, talk of censoring technology hits the ears differently. More important is that in SOPA’s short two-month life, opposition to it has catalyzed online and off. But to succeed, its opponents will have to both boost the volume of their public alarm and convince Congress that, in an Internet-soaked 2012, questioning SOPA needn’t be politically fatal.

By David Barroux
The opinions expressed are his own.

LES ECHOS/Worldcrunch — The first-ever E-G8 summit, beginning Tuesday in Paris with a notable lineup of government leaders and a “digital Who’s Who,” has been hit by a range of criticisms, from political hijacking to state censorship. But these attacks reveal only part of the truth. Sure, Nicolas Sarkozy, struggling in the polls, sees this as a chance to “presidentialize” his image while attempting to make his mark on this subject so attractive to the younger generation. But the self-interest driving his approach doesn’t necessarily mean it is uninteresting.

Long considered a free space that could develop on principles of self-government, the Internet has become so crucial to democratic life and economic growth that today it is legitimate for political players and large industrial groups to be involved in its management. States and multinationals would be wrong to want to plan and regulate everything, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they should simply stand back and watch.

Working in tandem, states and businesses can first act on the infrastructure. In past centuries, states financed the construction of roads or railways. Today, mechanisms should be found that allow private actors to invest in indispensible broadband information superhighways.

- Michael Fertik is the CEO and Founder of ReputationDefender, the online privacy and reputation company. The views expressed are his own. -

Facebook already knows a massive amount about you.  They know your age, what you look like, what you like, what you do for fun, where you go, what you eat, whom you know, whom you know well, whom you sleep with, who your best friends and family are, and, again, how old they are, what they like, and so on.

On top of that, Facebook has a well-known history of privacy breaches or at least snafus.  Publicly they seem committed to the notion that privacy is dead.  Their CEO and Founder has said as much.

Amid ongoing debates over the hazards of excessive digital exposure through such Web 2.0 social networking platforms as Facebook and Twitter, a new book by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger extols the virtues of forgetfulness.

Since the emergence of digital technology and global networks, forgetting has become an exception, Mayer-Schonberger writes in "Delete".

"Forgetting plays a central role in human decision-making," he argues. "It lets us act in time, cognizant of, but not shackled by, past events."

- Padraig Reidy is news editor at Index on Censorship. The opinions expressed are his own.-

Solicitors Carter-Ruck have withdrawn the terms of an injunction preventing the Guardian from reporting a parliamentary question by Newcastle-under-Lyme Labour MP and former journalist Paul Farrelly.

This has been seen - rightly -  as a victory for free expression, and a demonstration of the amazing power of the web in the face of attempted censorship.

-Joe White is chief operating officer at Gandi, an Internet domain name registration firm. The opinions expressed are his own.-

Despite the importance of domain names for companies and the extraordinary amount of money many have paid for them, the vast majority of businesses are unprepared for imminent changes to the Internet.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the international body that oversees the structure of the internet, is liberalising the market for domain name extensions – the .com or .net part of a web address – from the beginning of 2010. This means that anyone, in theory, can apply to operate an extension. So alongside .com, .net, and .org, we will see .whateveryoulike.

What if the Internet is not really a utopian democratic catalyst of change?

The Web is often seen as a positive means of instilling democratic freedoms in countries under authoritarian rule, but many regimes are now using it to subvert democracy, Evgeny Morozov, a contributing editor at "Foreign  Policy", proposes.

The Internet can actually inhibit rather than empower civil society, Morozov, argued in a lecture on Tuesday at London's Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

Social media platforms are being used by certain governments to create a "spinternet" to influence public opinion. They are also being used as part of a process of "authoritarian deliberation" to try and increase the legitimacy of authoritarian rule, he said.