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Netizens-Digest Volume 1 Number 500
Netizens-Digest Tuesday, April 15 2003 Volume 01 : Number 500
Netizens Association Discussion List Digest
In this issue:
Re: [netz] When Good People Go Bad
[netz] New York Times article
Re: [netz] When Good People Go Bad
[netz] Celebrating the wonder of human achievement.
Re: [netz] When Good People Go Bad
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2003 21:03:06 -0400
From: "Howard C. Berkowitz" <hcb@gettcomm.com>
Subject: Re: [netz] When Good People Go Bad
>>I may be confused -- help me out if so.
>>
>>1. Do the physical resources of the Internet define a commons? [...]
>
>
>There might be a more elegant way to understand the Net commons than
>by equating it with its "physical resources" (let me know), but at
>least as a first approximation, yes, I think so.
Some of the things that stress the pastoral commons analogy is we
don't just have sheep that line up and graze, each eating about the
same amount, and also starting to eat at about the same time.
Instead, we have sheep with basic appetites (say, mail and news),
sheep with reasonable additional needs (nursing ewes), and dominant
rams that want early premium access to show their status. We have
all of those things in a broadly-defined Internet. By broadly
defined, I am not limiting the definition to a commercial-free
environment for the exchange of textual information.
I mention these awkward analyses because there have been many
mentions of a right of equality of access. The reality is, however,
that various kinds of network access take different amounts of
bandwidth and precedence. It isn't technically meaningful to speak
generically of "equal access," even without addressing cost, until we
have a baseline definition of the level and type of service to which
equal access entitles a Netizen.
>
>>3. The original pastoral commons failed when certain individuals
>> grazed more than A sheep, with the hope of gaining profit from the
>> incremental revenue from the wool of A-S sheep. (Abuse case S-1)
>>
>> An Internet user that tries to use more than A bandwidth units damages
>> the commons. The innocent case is someone that consistently sends very
>> large files (I'm trying to stay away from the complexities of traffic
>> with different priorities). Let's say the total amount of bandwidth
>> needed for these files is 2A. (Abuse case I-1)
>>
>> A malicious hacker doesn't directly use the bandwidth, but launches
>> a denial of service that makes M*A units of bandwidth, where M is some
>> large number. (Abuse case I-2)
>>
>>What am I missing? Abuse case I-1 may not be malicious, case S-1 is
>>a conscious attempt to optimize individual profit, and S-2 is a
>>true attack? I'm confused, not challenging. To me, all three are
>>attacks against a commons.
>
>
>I might say that all three threaten the commons, but at least from
>the commons' standpoint all are attacks, yes. (I assume that that
>last "S-2" should have been "I-2"?)
Yes, S-2 should have been I-2.
>
>The key defining element of the tragedy of the commons, as defined
>by Hardin, is that it is driven by a large number of users (all of
>them, if we take him literally) who are driven to increase their
>demands on the commons because they derive economic benefit from so
>doing. As you say, case S-1 is a conscious attempt to optimize
>individual profit, but no _malice_ need be intended.
There is a complex interaction with respect to the Internet, not
necessarily user-driven. The early collaborative software -- mailing
lists, newsgroups, etc. -- were text-based and took trivial
bandwidth. These "cool" rather than "hot" media were economical of
resources.
If the focus had been on the message being communicated, rather than
the medium, we would probably be much farther along in the political
use of the net. Unfortunately, businesses, organizations with
political messages, and end users became enamored with
graphics-intensive web pages and the like, which vastly increase
resource demands.
It's worth noting that the IETF does the vast majority of its
collaborative online work in plain text. Even when we need simple
graphics to explain a point in an RFC, the basic way of expressing
that is text graphics such as
Box A-------------------Box B
PostScript and PDF are used in some final publications, but under the
IETF rules, they are not the primary documentation format. We really
don't have a standard means, for example, of sharing reasonable color
graphics representations of statistical information showing network
traffic -- much less trying to do glitzy Flash-style animations so
beloved of website designers.
The political participation message could have been much more
widespread if we stayed with a less-ambitious medium. However, the
drive toward graphic interfaces makes us much more broadband-centric,
and the entertainment industry has become the main financial support
of broadband.
Telephony, incidentally, is inherently not a high-bandwidth
application, but a specialized low-bandwidth application that needs
guaranteed, non-delayed, access to a small amount of bandwidth.
I mention telephony and video because these are commercial ventures
that support the deployment of broadband technology. I honestly don't
believe that broadband is a prerequisite to meaningful political
enabling on the net, but the general public won't believe that.
It's really a terrible analogy, but some of the corporate interests
can be looked at as offering to put fertilizer on the pastoral
commons as long as they get to advertise AOLTimeWarner Sheep Food.
>If in case I-1 a large number of users were driven to "overgraze"
>the Internet in order to derive maximum benefit from it, then I
>think that case would be conceptually similar to S-1. The difference
>(if any) is in numbers, more than motive (i.e., malice). That's what
>I meant by "tragedy dynamics" (sorry, I was rushing). My lay
>impression is that we do _not_ confront a tragedy of the Net commons
>caused by everyone's more or less innocent desire to increase their
>use of Net resources without limit, but I don't rule it out.
The problem is subtle. It's not that the users themselves overgraze,
but they unknowingly buy and implement applications that keep
increasing the demand on resources.
>
>Case I-2 is not a tragedy of the commons because (as I read it) it
>manifestly does not spring from what Hardin characterized as the
>inherent logic of the commons, namely that "As a rational being,
>each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain."
>
>This obviously doesn't mean that case I-2 isn't an important threat
>to the commons or attack on the commons.
>
>
>>>>>[ML] Just so we're analytically clear, the idea behind "tragedy
>>>>>of the commons" is
>>>>>that each individual is ineluctably driven by calculations of interest to
>>>>>increase his herd (and thus his impact on the commons) without limit.
>>>>
>>
>>This seems to be covered by my S-1 case above. I-1 is a
>>nonmalicious but irresponsible variant.
>
>Your formulation seems to imply that S-1 is "malicious," which I
>wouldn't necessarily concede.
My assumption of malice is that the users of the commons know they
are playing a cooperative game (from the game theory standpoint). As
long as they equalize their grazing requirements, the game is
non-zero-sum. As soon as they start jockeying for extra benefit, as
in the Prisoner's Dilemna, the game starts to move toward zero-sum.
Zero-sum isn't a perfect analogy, because in the short term, the
commons tolerates some overgrazing and the fair players have skinny
sheep. In the long term, it goes beyond zero sum to total
destruction, as the overgrazed commons simply can't support grass for
ANY sheep to eat.
> Otherwise, I agree.
>
>>>>>Defending the commons against a minority is a different issue.
>>>>
>>>>This is my I-2 case. But I see the same commons as being damaged.
>
>Yes, from the commons' standpoint it isn't much comfort to know that
>the attack doesn't technically count as a "tragedy"! We still need
>to deal with it. My point was only that Jay's indignation about
>Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" argument probably gives little
>clue how he thinks we should respond to case I-2.
I freely admit that the commons analogy gets very confusing when we
no longer have as simple an assumption as a finite amount of fodder
for a finite amount of sheep, but a situation in which the
technologies being used create greater demand by the same number of
sheep.
That *is* a mixed metaphor, but sheeplike behavior shouldn't be
ignored in trying to minimize the digital divide. The more demand
there is for resource intensive applications, the more expensive is
the "basic" connection and the more cost stress we put on overcoming
the digital divide. This stress is a here-and-now issue, not
something that future wealth creation can help.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2003 21:57:22 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jay Hauben <jrh@umcc.ais.org>
Subject: [netz] New York Times article
Hi,
There was a recent article in the New York Times that I found helpful
in trying to understand the current US policy directions. It looks at the
war in Iraq in the context of a larger national security agenda. I think
there are readers of this list who will find this article interesting. I
think it may indicate the context in which the fight for netizenship may
have to be fought.
I have put it at: http://www.columbia.edu/~jrh29/Demo.txt
Take care.
Jay
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2003 22:38:12 -0400 (EDT)
From: lindeman@bard.edu
Subject: Re: [netz] When Good People Go Bad
Howard,
Although I'm not necessarily concerned about fine-tuning the pastoral commons
analogy, I certainly agree with the following:
> It isn't technically meaningful to speak
> generically of "equal access," even without addressing cost, until we
> have a baseline definition of the level and type of service to which
> equal access entitles a Netizen.
Yup.
I think I ventured, in some rambling moment of weakness, that I thought at
least slow broadband counted as "basic" by now. So quickly Verizon DSL has
corrupted me. (Now that I'm no longer downloading big software packages as a
matter of course, I'd mostly be fine without it.)
> There is a complex interaction with respect to the Internet, not
> necessarily user-driven. The early collaborative software -- mailing
> lists, newsgroups, etc. -- were text-based and took trivial
> bandwidth. These "cool" rather than "hot" media were economical of
> resources.
>
> If the focus had been on the message being communicated, rather than
> the medium, we would probably be much farther along in the political
> use of the net. Unfortunately, businesses, organizations with
> political messages, and end users became enamored with
> graphics-intensive web pages and the like, which vastly increase
> resource demands.
Right. Most of the useful things I do with the Net depend on plain text, at
least in principle (although many of the academic databases supply scanned PDFs
instead).
> The political participation message could have been much more
> widespread if we stayed with a less-ambitious medium. However, the
> drive toward graphic interfaces makes us much more broadband-centric,
> and the entertainment industry has become the main financial support
> of broadband.[...] I honestly don't
> believe that broadband is a prerequisite to meaningful political
> enabling on the net, but the general public won't believe that.
That sounds about right, except that the last part is hard to be certain about
because I'm not sure that the general public thinks much about using the Net
for political enabling anyway.
> It's really a terrible analogy, but some of the corporate interests
> can be looked at as offering to put fertilizer on the pastoral
> commons as long as they get to advertise AOLTimeWarner Sheep Food.
Many of us think that corporate interests dump entirely too much fertilizer on
the pastoral commons already -- petrochemical toxic sludge, of course. No,
sorry, I don't even mean that, but you have to admit that I was sorely
provoked. <grin> I think the corporate role in the Net is a confusing enough
issue without dragging sheep into it, but your mileage may vary.
> My assumption of malice is that the users of the commons know they
> are playing a cooperative game (from the game theory standpoint). As
> long as they equalize their grazing requirements, the game is
> non-zero-sum. As soon as they start jockeying for extra benefit, as
> in the Prisoner's Dilemna, the game starts to move toward zero-sum.
OK, I now understand what you mean by malice. In real-life commons, people
often disagree or aren't sure about what counts as equal, and/or they have so
little sense of their own impact on the system that the image of "jockeying for
extra benefit" hardly applies. I just wouldn't want anyone to get the
impression that when people fail to cooperate in a positive-sum game, it must
be because some of them are "malicious." But in Hardin's scenario, I guess
it's fair to attribute "malice" in your sense to the herders.
> I freely admit that the commons analogy gets very confusing when we
> no longer have as simple an assumption as a finite amount of fodder
> for a finite amount of sheep, but a situation in which the
> technologies being used create greater demand by the same number of
> sheep.
>
> That *is* a mixed metaphor, but sheeplike behavior shouldn't be
> ignored in trying to minimize the digital divide. The more demand
> there is for resource intensive applications, the more expensive is
> the "basic" connection and the more cost stress we put on overcoming
> the digital divide. This stress is a here-and-now issue, not
> something that future wealth creation can help.
Grunt. What percentage of Internet-using households have broadband now? Does
it just not matter much because all the copper wire is gonna be obsolescent
regardless? (I never did get back to that Cook Report article....)
Mark
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2003 22:44:19 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jay Hauben <jrh@umcc.ais.org>
Subject: [netz] Celebrating the wonder of human achievement.
Hi,
The great strength and sometimes uniqueness of the netizens list is our
commitment to the documentation and celebration of the great human
achievements accomplished with respect to the net and the unsung people
who contribute. Here is where the positive and accurate picture of
cooperation and collaboration has a place as opposed to most of the
pundits who can only find what's wrong or what needs to be guared against.
The book Netizens begins the documentation of the mountains of small and
large contributions. Chapter one quotes the excitement of the dozens of
net users who wrote to Michael to express their appreciation of and
dedication to the net. Chapters on Unix and Usenet tell the stories of
people like Ken Thompson, Tom Truscott, Mark Horton, Henry Spencer and
many others who contributed their best efforts because they wanted
computing and networking to be widespread and wonderous.
The netizens list continues what the book began, being a home for those
who find the good that the net makes possible. We are more struck by the
strength and skill of the common collective then we are overwhelmed by the
story of human weakness and greed.
How did this mailing list become the singer of the praise of the power of
the collaborative strength that made the net possible? From the very
beginning, the list aimed to strengthen those who wanted to spread the net
and to create a netizens association based on the great potential of the
net to help empower people for greater control of their lives and
societies.
Those interested in Michael's founding call for this list, can find it at:
http://umcc.ais.org/~jrh/netizens/digest/Call_For_Netizens_list.txt
Michael's draft charter can be seen at:
http://umcc.ais.org/~jrh/netizens/digest/Charter_draft.txt
More about the list can be found by sending an email message to
majordomo@columbia.edu with the words
info netizens
index netizens
in the body of the message.
By finding examples of the constructive use of the net and people's
efforts to keep it public and expanding and uncensored we contribute to
the strength of those throughout the world who in whatever ways they can
keep up the fight for the empowerment of people via the net.
This list continues to carry on the spirit that by the little drops we put
into the bucket so one day shall it be full and overflowing.
JCR Licklider and the Michael realized there is a positive force that the
net strengthens. Their enthusiasm emboldened people to seek creative and
new solutions to problems. The net and netizens are living tributes to
these pioneers and visionaries.
The spirit of the net and netizens was captured in an editorial in the
ARPANET News in February, 1974:
"Inherent in the concept of a resource sharing computer network is
the idea of a cooperative, collaborative working mode. This calls
for a very special 'place for people's heads' -- a special ability
to be cognizant of and concerned for the welfare of the whole. This
long-term objective and viewpoint requires a personal feeling of
responsibility for the welfare of the network instead of the
short-sightedness of acquisitive self-interest.... With the backing
of ARPA-IPT in this endeavor... the ARPANET shows every promise of
becoming the global tool for enhanced communication and
understanding between nations and their scientists and people that
was envisioned for it in its beginning."
In this spirit may the list continue.
Take care.
Jay
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2003 23:49:23 -0400
From: "Howard C. Berkowitz" <hcb@gettcomm.com>
Subject: Re: [netz] When Good People Go Bad
At 10:38 PM -0400 4/15/03, lindeman@bard.edu wrote:
>Howard,
>
>Although I'm not necessarily concerned about fine-tuning the pastoral commons
>analogy, I certainly agree with the following:
>
>> It isn't technically meaningful to speak
>> generically of "equal access," even without addressing cost, until we
>> have a baseline definition of the level and type of service to which
>> equal access entitles a Netizen.
>
>Yup.
>
>I think I ventured, in some rambling moment of weakness, that I thought at
>least slow broadband counted as "basic" by now. So quickly Verizon DSL has
>corrupted me. (Now that I'm no longer downloading big software packages as a
>matter of course, I'd mostly be fine without it.)
If one of the central ideas of Netizenship is political
participation, the question is what level of service is necessary to
permit that participation? If we are talking about worldwide
enabling, then there really needs to be some sense of what needs to
be installed to allow equal participation in a less-developed country
that has little or no telecommunications infrastructure.
Rather quickly, I think, we start getting into an area of just what
we are trying to empower with Netizen access. I'm pretty comfortable
with the idea that text capabilities are quite adequate for most
political processes. If, however, we are looking to the Internet for
such things as widespread educational access, then graphics start
becoming much more relevant. Now, when I grew up, the schools had
motion projectors, but it was unusual to find them in homes -- and if
they were in homes, they'd be silent 8mm, not sound 16mm. Is there a
parallel today in which the idea of equal access breaks down -- that
there are some forms of connectivity that might be universal rights
for schools and hospitals, but not necessarily for homes?
>
>> There is a complex interaction with respect to the Internet, not
>> necessarily user-driven. The early collaborative software -- mailing
>> lists, newsgroups, etc. -- were text-based and took trivial
>> bandwidth. These "cool" rather than "hot" media were economical of
>> resources.
>>
>> If the focus had been on the message being communicated, rather than
>> the medium, we would probably be much farther along in the political
>> use of the net. Unfortunately, businesses, organizations with
>> political messages, and end users became enamored with
>> graphics-intensive web pages and the like, which vastly increase
>> resource demands.
>
>Right. Most of the useful things I do with the Net depend on plain text, at
>least in principle (although many of the academic databases supply
>scanned PDFs
>instead).
Probably fairly similar for both of us. Software downloads are
probably my biggest need for speed -- I actually wish that many of
the information resources I used were less graphics intensive, in
that their real content is in the text; the graphics are mostly
decorative. Not for everything -- graphics can be extremely important
content when I'm looking at medical resources, and high resolution
there is important. Fairly basic line graphics are quite adequate for
things like network diagrams.
But when I go to a commercial site, I tend to be deluged by graphics,
interactive scripts, etc., that supposedly "improve the experience."
Is there an issue of conspicuous consumption here?
>
>> The political participation message could have been much more
>> widespread if we stayed with a less-ambitious medium. However, the
>> drive toward graphic interfaces makes us much more broadband-centric,
>> and the entertainment industry has become the main financial support
>> of broadband.[...] I honestly don't
>> believe that broadband is a prerequisite to meaningful political
>> enabling on the net, but the general public won't believe that.
>
>That sounds about right, except that the last part is hard to be certain about
>because I'm not sure that the general public thinks much about using the Net
>for political enabling anyway.
But isn't that at the utter core of what has been proposed as Netizenship?
>
>
>> My assumption of malice is that the users of the commons know they
>> are playing a cooperative game (from the game theory standpoint). As
>> long as they equalize their grazing requirements, the game is
>> non-zero-sum. As soon as they start jockeying for extra benefit, as
>> in the Prisoner's Dilemna, the game starts to move toward zero-sum.
>
>OK, I now understand what you mean by malice. In real-life commons, people
>often disagree or aren't sure about what counts as equal, and/or they have so
>little sense of their own impact on the system that the image of
>"jockeying for
>extra benefit" hardly applies. I just wouldn't want anyone to get the
>impression that when people fail to cooperate in a positive-sum game, it must
>be because some of them are "malicious." But in Hardin's scenario, I guess
>it's fair to attribute "malice" in your sense to the herders.
It's probably worth considering there is a spectrum from completely
altruistic behavior (returning your "leftovers" to the pool), to
competition, to crushing monopoly...and perhaps even beyond that,
killing a resource for its short term value. We see that last in
situations ranging from street muggings to corporate raiders buying a
going concern and stripping its assets, the former concern then going
bankrupt.
>
>> I freely admit that the commons analogy gets very confusing when we
>> no longer have as simple an assumption as a finite amount of fodder
>> for a finite amount of sheep, but a situation in which the
>> technologies being used create greater demand by the same number of
>> sheep.
>>
>> That *is* a mixed metaphor, but sheeplike behavior shouldn't be
>> ignored in trying to minimize the digital divide. The more demand
>> there is for resource intensive applications, the more expensive is
>> the "basic" connection and the more cost stress we put on overcoming
>> the digital divide. This stress is a here-and-now issue, not
>> something that future wealth creation can help.
>
>Grunt. What percentage of Internet-using households have broadband now? Does
>it just not matter much because all the copper wire is gonna be obsolescent
>regardless? (I never did get back to that Cook Report article....)
The copper wire _is_ obsolescent. Look at the techniques being used
in very underserved areas. Many parts of Eastern Europe, for
example, are jumping directly to non-mobile wireless/cellular in the
local loop. It's pretty routine to run fiber to new multitenant
buildings, with high-grade, broadband-capable copper only in the last
few hundred meters. True "cable" TV is obsolete for high definition
TV--the drops to the home will start becoming fiber, perhaps with the
set-top box acting as a wireless base station for video, telephony,
and computer data.
------------------------------
End of Netizens-Digest V1 #500
******************************
