Reading 10: Net Neutrality

Although net neutrality has been in the news quite frequently as of late, many Americans are still unlikely to understand exactly what the topic at hand refers to. Put simply, net neutrality is simply the assurance that all legal internet traffic is treated fairly and equally by internet service providers. The implication for the average consumer is that your episode of House of Cards from Netflix arrives via streaming to your computer at the same data transfer rate as a page you request from ESPN. Without net neutrality, it would be possible for internet service providers (ISP’s) to create “fast lanes” where some content would benefit from a faster delivery rate to the end customer over other traffic. Internet service providers would of course charge a premium for fast lanes. In the worst case scenarios, a lack of net neutrality could allow providers to throttle or prevent entirely the delivery of content at their will, such as content related to their competitors. As the internet plays an increasingly larger role in our lives, there has been a great deal of debate over the concept of net neutrality, with arguments over its legality, ethics, and even the role of the Federal Communications Commission in regulating internet traffic policies. Generally, content providers and a larger contingent of consumers have come down on the supporting side of net neutrality while internet service providers have argued against strict enforcement of net neutrality and even against the entire concept.

In my opinion, net neutrality is a good thing, and the FCC should be allowed to regulate the internet as if it were a public service/utility. While I naturally have reservations over unnecessary government intervention and regulation, in this instance, I believe that regulation is necessary to ensure continued innovation and a free marketplace. The primary concern in this matter should be a combination of ensuring that the market remains free and open to innovation and that consumers have fair access to the internet access they pay for.

Although service providers have argued that regulation stifles innovation, I believe that to be false in this situation. If service providers are allowed to offer fast lanes, block content, and interfere with traffic in other ways, it could place even more of a burden on new competition. Smaller competitors would be unable to compete with the lucrative deals forged by large providers. For example, if ATT were to strike a deal with Netflix for exclusive, superior fast lanes (or, far fetched as it sounds, even sole distribution rights), smaller providers would be unable to compete as Netflix is one of the top drivers of modern internet traffic.

It may seem strange to think of internet access as a public service and basic right, but we’re fast approaching that reality. I don’t think that access to the internet in general is a basic right; however, if one does pay for access to the internet, I do believe it should be a right to have fair and equal access to everything that the internet provides. Using an admittedly simple analogy – if I were to sign up for a library card, I would expect access to the entire library. We do get into some ethical grey areas when considering free internet access however. Facebook has been the subject of scrutiny over its “Free Basics” program in India, Egypt, and other countries. The program essentially allows free access to a specific set of services and sites while restricting access to others. Net neutrality supporters have argued this initiative directly opposes a free and open internet, while Facebook has argued that restricting to a subset of select sites is the cost of providing free access and getting the world online. While I strongly supported net neutrality previously in this post, I do see both sides of the argument when it comes to free internet access. I think this situation illustrates just how nuanced and complex the net neutrality issue can be. Governments and regulators have a series of tough decisions ahead of them. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the issue of net neutrality in the news consistently in the future.

Project 3 Reflection

After writing a letter to one of Indiana’s Senators on the topic of encryption and privacy in addition to my previous blog post on the topic for one of our course readings, I’m even more convinced that this hot button issue is vitally important to the future of our country and the world at large. As I wrote in our letter to the Senator, our phones and electronic devices are quickly becoming the hubs of our digital lives, storing personal photos, banking information, and other private data. The government nor anyone else should be able to interfere with the protection of personal data, due to the massive threat lessened data security poses to millions of innocent people. While the average person may have nothing to hide from the government, they do have everything to hide from the criminals who would take advantage of government sanctioned weaknesses in digital security. Unfortunately, letting in the government also means letting in ill-intentioned individuals of all sorts. The two go hand in hand. And worse yet, the conscription of Apple Engineers to work for the government by forcing them to write code they object to directly contradicts the American ideals of free enterprise.

Politicians from both sides of the aisle have voiced varying opinions on this divisive nature. While other topics may dominate Presidential candidate debates and the public consciousness, we’d be wise to heed the coming storm over personal data. As a computer science student myself, I care just as strongly about this topic as others more prevalently discussed by politicians. It certainly affects the way I perceive politicians and who I support.

Apple has justifiably stood strong in the face of F.B.I. pressure, and the issue seems bound for a variety of courts, including the Supreme Court – if not today, then tomorrow. As of right now, I’m really unsure who will win if/when it comes to that. A variety of high profile politicians and government agencies support the F.B.I. and its demands, while Apple has managed the rare unification of technology companies throughout Silicon Valley and beyond behind its own cause. I’m certainly not resigned to a 1984-esque, dystopian future of government surveillance and no private information. I don’t think millions of Americans will be either. The United States has time and time again refused to let fear dictate policy, especially in regards to personal liberties and rights. We must refuse once more.

Reading 08: Patent Trolls

On the surface, patents seem like a good thing. Just as trademarks and copyrights protect creators in other lines of work, patents are supposed to be a method of ensuring the financial interest of inventors. They are meant to encourage the open sharing of knowledge, ideas, and subsequent inventions under the supposedly reassuring guise of protection. From our reading on intellectual property, a patent is described as “an exclusive right granted for an invention – a product or process that provides a new way of doing something, or that offers a new technical solution to a problem.” That doesn’t seem so bad, does it? With a definition like that and an ultimate goal to “encourage innovation, which in turn enhances the quality of human life,” how could anyone argue that patents are bad? Going just by their definition, patents are good ethically because they protect the hard earned inventions of our nation’s brightest engineers, they’re good economically because they encourage competition and innovation in the marketplace, and they’re good socially because that competition and innovation breeds advances that benefit society. Patents may have been created with good intentions, but their transition to the modern world of technology and computer software has been anything but smooth. What once protected innovation now stifles it. What once guided companies to innovate and create their own products now persuades them to cease creative efforts entirely. What once encouraged anyone and everyone to be an inventor now turns people and even companies into trolls.

In my opinion, patents still have a place in society, if they’re reigned in from their current overcomplexity, ambiguity, and most of all, application to the software industry. Patents make complete sense when applied to a physical, invented object. The readings use the perfect example of Eli Whitney inventing and patenting the cotton gin. A patent on the cotton gin prevented others from profiting on Eli Whitney’s invention – something no one else had created before. It would be unethical if Whitney had to sit back and watch others benefit by selling something he spent a great deal of time and effort inventing. Worse still, society would be at a loss if Whitney was forced to hide a patentless invention for fear of others stealing it. Yet just as the example of the physical cotton gin perfectly demonstrates the good of patents, many modern cases of software patents demonstrate the bad. I’m not entirely set against all software patents, but I do think that patents are more naturally suited to being applied to physical inventions.

I think the real issue at hand is how ambiguous and vague patents have been allowed to become. In the “This American Life” podcast/radio segment, the hosts describe how current litigation is ongoing concerning existing patents that cover website functionality so that “when you scroll your mouse over certain sections, pop-up boxes appear.” Whatever happened to patents only being for ideas that are “non-obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art?” I think this example demonstrates that it’s not necessarily patents on software specifically that are the problem, but rather patents on broad, somewhat obvious and/or rudimentary software practices. Both the patent office and the Supreme Court are at fault for allowing the current state of vague software patents, as evidenced by the article “The Supreme Court doesn’t understand software, and that’s a problem.” That’s not just a problem – it’s a catastrophe for a world increasingly reliant on software for nearly every facet of life. In my opinion, this lack of understanding by the officials who grant, oversee, and rule on patent cases is the fundamental cause of today’s patent troll mess.

Unfortunately, I believe that the current status quo of patents and patent trolls is solid proof that the current system is broken. Even one of the leading technology innovators in the world, Elon Musk, acknowledges that “receiving a patent really just [means] that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit.” It might be time to reconsider the workings of a intellectual property measure that was devised specifically to protect people exactly like Musk. When an innovating technology company like Tesla abandons all of its patents in favor of an open-source model while a ‘company’ like Intellectual Ventures – that doesn’t actually create anything – hordes patents by the thousand, there’s obviously a problem.

Reading 07: Advertising

Before reading some of the provided articles for this week’s assignment, I rarely considered the broader implications of advertising, particularly the online variety and the role of computer science in it. Sure online ads are annoying, but that’s why the computer science Gods gave us Adblock – or so I thought. Now, after reading in more detail on the subject, I realize how significant and invasive online ads can be. And even despite this invasive nature of online ads, I also recognize the potential unethical nature of using adblock to circumvent them. Like many of the topics we’ve discussed this semester, there are many different angles to consider and a great deal of moral ambiguity.

When asked to consider ethical concerns regarding online advertising, the first thing that jumps to mind is how annoying – yet seemingly harmless – they can be. Two minute ads on youtube for movies I already know of or products I don’t care about simply waste my time, but they don’t seem to be actually causing any harm. Yet as our readings for this week demonstrate, advertisers are getting smarter, more cunning, and more unethical. I found the article Data Doppelgangers particularly interesting in its description of the way advertisers use large population statistics in an effort to trick us into feeling as if we’re being treated as individuals. While funny when targeted ads miss their mark and show us products completely unrelated to our interests and lives, its actually more concerning and unsettling when advertisers are able to properly target us based on data they’ve collected. As the article describes it, this produces an “uncanny valley effect.” Something about the rough approximation of apparent intelligence on behalf of a website’s targeted ads appropriately strikes us as disconcerting.

Beyond simply making us feel uncomfortable, online advertising, especially the targeted variety that uses specific individual data, can actually be based on particularly unethical practices – namely the gathering of private individual data by large companies for use or even sale without an individual’s express permission. As the reading from The Guardian discusses, Facebook users reveal – often unwittingly – potentially sensitive private data when using social media sites. Information in the public domain can be accessed and used by almost anyone. It seems pretty unethical for a company to make money off of selling data on my online actions. When I like pages on Facebook or post something, I’m not doing it for the monetary gain of some advertising data collector. But even worse, despite what you may think at the time, any bit of personal information shared on Facebook or any other social media site may come back to significantly haunt you. Just look at the distant past and questionable decisions brought up in heated political debates and attack ads during election season. This trend is only likely to increase as the members of the Facebook generation mature and enter politics themselves along with their own increasingly public follies on full display for anyone to see. And with advertisers gathering and potentially selling any and all data at will, even deleting something from Facebook or another site isn’t enough to guarantee that it never resurfaces. Maybe there should be more concrete measures in place to ensure companies safeguard user data and allow for individuals to better protect themselves from the unending spread of their personal information, but at the same time, individuals should be more aware of their actions in today’s internet age. Once something is online, it can rarely ever be completely taken offline.

Like many ethical questions, there exists another side to this ethical debate. When visiting websites, shopping online, or using social media sites like Facebook we rarely if ever explicitly give our permission for our data to be collected. But are we giving it implicitly? It’s almost impossible to think of a time when we didn’t have access to the internet and its wealth of resources and information – many of which are free from standard payment models. We don’t pay to google something. We don’t pay to look at a Wikipedia page. We don’t pay to read about our favorite sports team on ESPN. Or do we? Much of the modern internet is dependent on a model in which consumers freely divulge their information and accept the proliferation of their data in exchange for “free” access to their favorite sites and resources. I doubt many would trade this model for one in which we instead pay directly for access. This raises the question of whether or not it is truly ethical for an individual to use a tool like AdBlocker to circumvent online advertising. While I do use one myself, I do wonder if by doing so I’m actually breaking the implicit contract I’ve agreed to with the sites I visit. By and large, they provide free content to me in exchange for the ad revenue they generate by me simply seeing their ads. If enough people were to start using tools like AdBlocker, sites may even be forced to switch to a pure payment model, something few people would be happy about. For better and worse, data has become the currency of the internet, and that doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon.