The Ice-Bucket Racket

Ever since the ice-bucket challenge swept the Internet this summer, raising more than $115 million for A.L.S. research, a legion of imitators has sprung up to try and cash in themselves. In the approaching holiday season, as fund-raising appeals swell, we can now smash a pie in our faces, snap selfies first thing in the morning or take a photo of ourselves grabbing our crotches, among other tasteful gestures, to express solidarity with various worthy causes. But the failure of these newer gimmicks to enjoy anywhere near the same popularity as the frigid original demonstrates the peculiar and finicky nature of our altruism — a psychological puzzle that both scientists and economists are trying to decipher. (...)

Most charitable efforts elicit our sympathy by showing us photographs of the afflicted and telling us tales of suffering. But just as people avert their eyes from beggars, most of us can shift our attention from stuff that depresses us. One great curiosity, and advantage, of the ice-bucket challenge was that it did very little to remind us of the disease that was its supposed inspiration.

Fund-raising professionals hoping to decode the magic of the challenge, however, will be dispirited to learn that this master game plan wasn’t exactly intentional. According to Josh Levin, a writer at Slate, the challenge appears to have instead emerged spontaneously from similar dares, like “polar plunges” into ice-cold lakes. At first, it simply consisted of using social media to dare others to dump a pail of ice water over themselves. Later, participants began donating $100 to any of a wide variety of charities. It became linked to A.L.S. only later, when a couple of pro golfers took the challenge and chose that as their good cause.

Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at Princeton University who has researched attitude change, thinks several factors allowed the ice-bucket challenge to become a viral and fund-raising sensation. Its public nature forced people to either accept the task or suffer damage to their reputations. Other stimulants to action included peer pressure from friends, the “helper’s high” that results from aiding others and the fortuitous participation of celebrities like Bill Gates and Katy Perry. Particularly crucial was the 24-hour deadline that the challenge gave to either drench oneself or shell out."When you make people set specific goals, they become more likely to change behavior,” van der Linden told me. “People like setting goals, and they like achieving goals.”

Two additional features were particularly clever, according to van der Linden. One was the ingenious way that the challenge fed our collective narcissism by allowing us to celebrate with selfies or videos of our drenched faces and bodies on Facebook and Twitter. An even deeper motivation may have been the precisely calibrated amount of self-sacrifice involved. “If you’re going to elicit money from people, it helps to have some way of doing it that is at least slightly painful, since that makes the whole experience about more than just giving away what may be a relatively trivial amount of money,” van der Linden said.

by Ian McGugan, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Joon Mo Kang

Leones durmiendo by Udri on Flickr
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The Anxiety of the Forever Renter

What no economist has measured is this: There’s something fundamentally demeaning about being a renter, about having to ask permission to change the showerhead, about having to mentally deduct future losses from deposit checks for each nail hammered into the wall to hang family photos. There’s something degrading about the annual rent increase that comes with this implied taunt to its captive audience: What are you going to do, move out?

I’m not worried about what it would mean for us to be a Nation of Renters, whether that would fray the social fabric or unravel homeownership’s side effects on civic participation or crime rates. Some people are worried about this. “FDR mentioned that 'a nation of homeowners is unconquerable,'” I heard the chief economist for the National Association of Realtors a few months ago tell a room full of policymakers suspicious of the mortgage home interest deduction. “We have to think,” he pleaded, “that maybe there is something more than numbers to a homeownership society” – as if we might devolve into some kind of chaos if enough of us didn’t care enough about our property to own it.

What I am worried about is the dill plant on my second-floor windowsill. I rotate it a little bit every day because it only gets sun from the western exposure. It has been dying since the day I brought it home. I want to put it in the ground, or at least outside. For several weeks over the summer, I tried furtively growing oregano in a small pot on the communal front stoop of our 20-unit red-brick apartment building. I carried cups of water out to it late at night when I thought no one was looking.

Eventually, it disappeared.

Earlier this year, my husband and I took a deep breath, purchased a power tool and did something permanent about our kitchen-storage problem: We drilled metal Ikea pot racks into the wall. Today the room is happily lined with saucepans. But every time I see the property manager coming or going from the building, I worry that she’ll ask to enter our unit, where she’ll spy what we’ve done to drywall that doesn’t belong to us.

More recently, my husband called our property manager to announce a long-awaited addition to our household that we thought would be welcome.

“I just got a job,” he told her, literally on the day that he had just gotten a job. “And my wife said when I get a job, I can have a dog. So I’m calling to tell you I’m getting a dog.”

As it turns out, we will not be getting a dog.

“You can have a cat,” she offered. (...)

Now we have each been at this – renting – for about a decade, and we’re reaching that point, married, starting our 30s, when it starts to feel like time to live in a more dignified way. We want to grow herbs outdoors and shop in the heavy-duty hardware store aisles and change the color of our living room. We want to make irreversible choices about wall fixtures and rash decisions at the animal shelter.

I've been thinking about all of these things a lot lately, while reading about the convincing reasons why homeownership no longer makes as much sense as it used to. Workers are no longer tied to factories – and the bedroom communities that surround them – because no one works in factories anymore. Now people telecommute. They get transferred to Japan indefinitely. Companies no longer offer the implicit contract of lifetime employment for hard workers, and so hard workers think nothing of updating their résumés every day.

And I think about my own transience: I’ve lived in eight apartments in six cities over the past nine years. My husband and I like to pick up and move (most recently, just eight blocks down the street from our previous place) as if we were selecting a new grocery store. We have a motto as a couple, which applies equally to weekend and life plans: “We’ll see how we feel,” we say.

We have trouble thinking beyond the nearest horizon, not because we don’t like the idea of commitment, but because we want to be free to theoretically commit to anything that may come up tomorrow. What if an incredible job offer wants to relocate us to Riyadh? What if we wake up Saturday morning and decide that we’ve tired of Washington, D.C.? What if – as many of our friends have experienced – one of us loses a job?

We’re both afflicted with a dangerous daydreaming ability to envision ourselves living anywhere we step off a plane. We never take a trip and think, “It’s wonderful to visit friends in Seattle,” or “Chicago is a great place for tourists in the summertime.” We always think: What if we lived here? Maybe we should live here? We could live in Key West! My husband has never even been to Portland, but we still nurse a sneaking suspicion that we should probably be living there.

In this way, we are the quintessential young professionals of the new economy – restless knowledge workers who deal in “projects,” not “careers,” who can no sooner commit to a mortgage than we can a lifetime of desk work. Our attitude is a national epidemic. It’s harder to get a mortgage today than it was 10 years ago. But a lot of people also just don’t want one any more. At the height of the housing boom, 69 percent of American households owned their homes. Housing researcher Arthur Nelson predicted to me that number would fall to 62 percent by 2020, meaning every residence built between now and then will need to be a rental.

I haven’t been able to figure out in my own household, however, how this aversion to permanence can coexist with our rising ire about renting. And I don’t know how whole cities will accommodate this new demographic: the middle-class forever renter.

Both Nelson and Florida have floated the idea that we need some kind of hybrid rental/homeownership model, some system that decouples “renter” status from income class, while allowing professionals who would have been homeowners 20 years ago to live in a comparable setting without the millstone. Maybe we allow renters to customize their homes as if they owned them, or we enable condo owners to quickly unload property to rental agents.

Short of putting us all in houseboats, I don’t know what these hybrid homes would look like, how they’d be paid for or if anyone will be willing to build them. But I suspect the trick lies outside of the architectural and financial details, that it lies in removing that fear of the approaching property manager, that lack of control over a dying dill plant. It lies in creating a feeling of ownership without the actual deed.

by Emily Badger, CityLab |  Read more:

Image: Reuters

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[ed. See also: Why Kim Kardashian is the world’s best marketer.]
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The Nightmare (Caminito del Rey. Álora, Málaga, Spain)
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Martha Rosler, Bathroom Surveillance or Vanity Eye, from the series Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain c. 1967-1972

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Inside the NFL’s Replay Command Center

The digital clock on the wall inside the officiating bunker at the NFL offices in Manhattan reads 16:25:15, or 4:25 p.m. on the East Coast. “Kickoff in Oakland,” says Austin Moss, the replay technician at the station monitoring the Cardinals-Raiders game. The upper-left 27-inch high-definition screen, one of four in front of Moss, shows Arizona kicker Chandler Catanzaro booting the opening kickoff into the end zone.

If you’re not careful, or you’re over-caffeinated, you can easily suffer sensory overload in this room, especially in the early window. On this Week 7 Sunday there were eight 1 p.m. ET kickoffs. But even in the late window, with only three games coming at you inside the room, it’s harried. Standing in the center, staring at the large split-screen monitor showing all three games, is the NFL’s vice president of officiating, Dean Blandino, dressed in khakis, a blue striped oxford shirt and blue sweater. To his left: Alberto Riveron, the number two man in the officiating department. They’re the adjudicators on this day—the two men in charge of the new system of replay checks-and-balances.

This room is called Art McNally GameDay Central, in honor of the longtime official and officiating executive. But on Sunday it’s Replay Central. In this space, 42 feet long and 36 feet wide, Blandino and Riveron ride herd on the first-year replay system and consult with referees on the field and replay officials in far-off stadium replay booths for every review in every NFL game.

The system was put in place to minimize the inconsistency in replay reviews, and to reduce the time the average review takes. While the referee on site is going through the preliminary mechanics of the replay process—checking for the challenge flag, communicating with the flag-throwing coach, announcing to the crowd and the television audience why the play is being reviewed and hustling to get under the replay hood on the sideline—Blandino can look at the replays and line up the one or two or three most applicable. That way, the ref on the field will be able to watch the relevant replays without having to spend time going through the entire range of them himself. The ref also has the voice of New York in his ear, telling him what’s important and eliminating the fluff.

But the natural question is: Are too many cooks spoiling the broth? Is replay actually better when the league office and the millions it can spend on technology—there are 82 television monitors and 21 NFL employees in this room the size of a Manhattan studio apartment—intercede in the business of making sure the seven-man on-field crews get third-down spots correct? Or is the New York influence too much Big Brother?

by Peter King, SI |  Read more:

Image: NFL

Why Banksy Is (Probably) a Woman

Banksy Does New York, a new documentary airing on HBO on Nov. 17, opens on a bunch of scofflaws trying to jack an inflatable word balloon reading “Banksy!” from the side of a low-rise building in Queens. These hooligans weren’t Banksy. Neither were the police officers who took possession of the piece after the failed heist and denied that it was art. Nor in all likelihood was the silver-haired man who sold $420 worth of Banksy prints for $60 a pop in Central Park, or the drivers who slowly trawled New York streets in trucks tricked out with Banksy’s sculpture, or the accordionist accompanying one of Banksy’s installations. While the film shares a lot of insights about street art, media sensationalism, viral phenomena, and the people who make Banksy possible, it doesn’t cast a light on who Banksy is or what she looks like. (...)

In the 2010 film Exit Through the Gift Shop, another documentary about street art, Banksy appears as an anonymous figure whose voice is disguised, but who is plainly a man. So that would seem to put the question to rest. Further to the point, the street artist Shepard Fairey referred to Banksy as “he” and “him”throughout an interview with Brian Lehrer the same year. Fairey would be in a position to know, presumably: He’s the closest thing Banksy has to a colleague. Fairey says that Banksy insists on anonymity, in part, to manage his image in the press. “He controls the way his message is put out very carefully,” Fairey says in the interview.

Yet these pieces of evidence confuse rather than clarify the issue. Exit Through the Gift Shop is a classic piece of misdirection. Over the course of the movie, the film’s would-be documentarian, Thierry Guetta, is exposed as a poor filmmaker. Partway through, Banksy takes over the production, turning it into a documentary about the documentarian instead. To complete the meta romp, Guetta, working under the nomme de rue Mr. Brainwash, proceeds to rips off Banksy’s style. All of this means that Fairey, Banksy’s co-conspirator in Banksy’s film, is an unreliable narrator.

During the very first interview that Banksy gave to The Guardian, another figure was present (“Steve,” Banksy’s agent). Another figure is always present, says Canadian media artist Chris Healey, who has maintained since 2010 that Banksy is a team of seven artists led by a woman—potentially the same woman with long blonde hair who appears in scenes depicting Banksy’s alleged studio in Exit Through the Gift Shop. Although Healey won’t identify the direct source for his highly specific claim, it’s at least as believable as the suggestion that Banksy is and always has been a single man. (...)

Part of what makes Banksy’s work so popular is that it doesn’t operate much like street art at all. Think about Invader or Fairey, artists who appear in Exit Through the Gift Shop: Invader’s 8-bit career began with a single “Space Invaders” icon that the artist reiterated endlessly. Fairey’s work started with a stencil of Andre the Giant prefaced by the word “Obey,” again, repeated over and over. While they’re both more like media moguls than graffiti writers today, Fairey and Invader started with the same strategy: to project themselves into public spaces by broadcasting themselves all over it.

That ambition to control a public space through this sort of redundant branding, to make the street your own, is a masculine one—and it’s shared by the overwhelming majority of street artists. (...)

Compared to the highly visible work of Invader or Fairey or dozens of other high-profile street artists, Banksy’s work is different. Girls and women figure into Banksy’s stenciled figures, for starters, something that isn’t true of 99% of street art. Banksy’s work has always done more than project “Banksy” ad nauseum. (In fact, a “handling service” called Pest Control exists to authenticate Banksy’s protean projects.) Banksy’s graffiti understands and predicates a relationship between the viewer and the street, something that graffiti that merely shouts the artist’s name or icon over and over (and over and over) doesn’t do.

Maybe it gives Banksy too much credit to say that her work shows a greater capacity for imagining being in someone else’s shoes.

by Kriston Capps, CityLab |  Read more:

Image: Andrew Winning/Reuters

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[ed. I feel this way about my golf clubs sometimes.]

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Fallen Arches: Can McDonald's Get Its Mojo Back?

[ed. I liked those wings, but they were pretty dang expensive.]

Perhaps no episode captures what’s ailing the world’s largest restaurant company better than the Mighty Wings Debacle of 2013. In September of last year, McDonald’s launched an ambitious program to sell deep-fried chicken wings across its 14,000 U.S. locations. The wings were a staple in Hong Kong, where the crisp cayenne-and-chili-pepper coating was developed. And a similar version tickled palates in Atlanta during testing. One blogger wrote: “Holy crap, those are really freakin’ good.” The wings were giant (“bone in,” as the jargon went) and meaty. And by the end of the heavily advertised eight-week promotion, McDonald’s was left with 10 million pounds of unsold chicken, a whopping 20% of its inventory. The Mighty Wings didn’t flap.

At corporate headquarters in Oak Brook, Ill., executives began pointing fingers. Some blamed the coating, which was too spicy for broad American tastes, they said. Some blamed the price, at a hefty $1 per wing. A box of five Mightys cost a buck more than the equivalent number at KFC. McDonald’s had justified the lofty price because the wings were so immense, taken from its suppliers’ gigantic eight-pound chickens. The wings were arguably a bona fide deal. But this brings up problem No. 3: Customers didn’t make that connection. Cost-conscious diners gazing up at the menu didn’t realize they’d be getting “absurdly huge drumettes,” as the blogger put it. “This was quality for price,” a former executive tells Fortune, “but McDonald’s is known for quantity for price.” McDonald’s might have thought they were value. Customers simply viewed them as expensive.

CEO Don Thompson, then in the job for a little over a year, had needed the wings to be a hit. The company’s performance had slipped on his watch, suffering from disappointing sales growth and deteriorating margins. Since then things have gotten worse—much worse. In late October, McDonald’s reported a significant loss of market share and its fourth straight quarter of negative same-store sales in its U.S. operations. Overall, the company reported a distressing 30% decline in profit. Expenses were growing even as sales were falling—a big problem for any company.

Analysts are now predicting that 2014 will be the first year of negative global same-store sales since 2002. “People have seen results go from the best in the industry to one of the worst in the course of three years,” says Stephens analyst Will Slabaugh. The year has been written off—there will be no bonuses for anybody.

Some of the pressures facing the company are beyond its control: higher commodity costs, fiercer competition, a restaurant industry showing little to no growth, and a strapped lower-income consumer. There have also been a handful of one-off disasters, including a supplier in China accused of selling expired meat and the closure of nine company-owned restaurants by the government in Russia. With its $28.1 billion in revenue—the average McDonald’s restaurant brings in $2.6 million in sales, compared to Burger King’s $1.2 million, according to research firm Technomic—the company’s scale makes it harder to move the needle. McDonald’s size makes it a target too, putting it in the cross hairs of minimum wage and nutrition battles.

But the company has even bigger—dare we say, Mighty Wing–size—challenges, not least of which is an existential one: McDonald’s is the quintessential quick-serve restaurant. It has risen to the top of the fast-food chain by being comfortably, familiarly, iconically “mass market” and so ubiquitous as to be the Platonic ideal of “convenient.” Neither of these selling points, however, is as high as it was even a decade ago on Americans’ list of dining priorities. A growing segment of restaurant goers are choosing “fresh and healthy” over “fast and convenient,” and McDonald’s is having trouble convincing consumers that it’s both. Or even can be both. “It is a battle over perception, and they’re losing,” says Aaron Allen, a global restaurant consultant.

by Beth Kowitt, Fortune | Read more:
Image: Adam Voorhes

The Mercenaries

Ex-NSA hackers and their corporate clients are stretching legal boundaries and shaping the future of cyberwar.

Bright twenty- and thirtysomethings clad in polo shirts and jeans perch on red Herman Miller chairs in front of silver Apple laptops and sleek, flat-screen monitors. They might be munching on catered lunch—brought in once a week—or scrounging the fully stocked kitchen for snacks, or making plans for the company softball game later that night. Their office is faux-loft industrial chic: open floor plan, high ceilings, strategically exposed ductwork and plumbing. To all outward appearances, Endgame Inc. looks like the typical young tech startup.

It is anything but. Endgame is one of the leading players in the global cyber arms business. Among other things, it compiles and sells zero day information to governments and corporations. “Zero days,” as they’re known in the security business, are flaws in computer software that have never been disclosed and can be secretly exploited by an attacker. And judging by the prices Endgame has charged, business has been good. Marketing documents show that Endgame has charged up to $2.5 million for a zero day subscription package, which promises 25 exploits per year. For $1.5 million, customers have access to a database that shows the physical location and Internet addresses of hundreds of millions of vulnerable computers around the world. Armed with this intelligence, an Endgame customer could see where its own systems are vulnerable to attack and set up defenses. But it could also find computers to exploit. Those machines could be mined for data—such as government documents or corporate trade secrets—or attacked using malware. Endgame can decide whom it wants to do business with, but it doesn’t dictate how its customers use the information it sells, nor can it stop them from using it for illegal purposes, any more than Smith & Wesson can stop a gun buyer from using a firearm to commit a crime.

Endgame is one of a small but growing number of boutique cyber mercenaries that specialize in what security professionals euphemistically call “active defense.” It’s a somewhat misleading term, since this kind of defense doesn’t entail just erecting firewalls or installing antivirus software. It can also mean launching a pre-emptive or retaliatory strike. Endgame doesn’t conduct the attack, but the intelligence it provides can give clients the information they need to carry out their own strikes. It’s illegal for a company to launch a cyberattack, but not for a government agency. According to three sources familiar with Endgame’s business, nearly all of its customers are U.S. government agencies. According to security researchers and former government officials, one of Endgame’s biggest customers is the National Security Agency. The company is also known to sell to the CIA, Cyber Command, and the British intelligence services. But since 2013, executives have sought to grow the company’s commercial business and have struck deals with marquee technology companies and banks.

Endgame was founded in 2008 by Chris Rouland, a top-notch hacker who first came on the Defense Department’s radar in 1990—after he hacked into a Pentagon computer. Reportedly the United States declined to prosecute him in exchange for his working for the government. He started Endgame with a group of fellow hackers who worked as white-hat researchers for a company called Internet Security Systems, which was bought by IBM in 2006 for $1.3 billion. Technically, they were supposed to be defending their customers’ computers and networks. But the skills they learned and developed were interchangeable from offense.

Rouland, described by former colleagues as domineering and hot-tempered, has become a vocal proponent for letting companies launch counterattacks on individuals, groups, or even countries that attack them. “Eventually we need to enable corporations in this country to be able to fight back,” Rouland said during a panel discussion at a conference on ethics and international affairs in New York in September 2013.

Rouland stepped down as the CEO of Endgame in 2012, following embarrassing disclosures of the company’s internal marketing documents by the hacker group Anonymous. Endgame had tried to stay quiet and keep its name out of the press, and went so far as to take down its website. But Rouland provocatively resurfaced at the conference and, while emphasizing that he was speaking in his personal capacity, said American companies would never be free from cyberattack unless they retaliated. “There is no concept of deterrence today in cyber. It’s a global free-fire zone.”

by Shane Harris, Slate | Read more:
Image: Charlie Powell

The Uniform I’ve Chosen for Myself

Some people express themselves through their clothes; they stretch the parameters of office dress codes with unexpected cuts, vintage menswear, and statement jewelry. I admire those people, but I am not one of them. The last thing that I want to do on a weekday morning, or at anytime, honestly, is think about what to wear, but I still want to look good.

So I developed a uniform:
• A gray or black long-sleeved V-neck shirt.
• A gray or black A-line skirt (Brooks Brothers, via Rue La La.)
• A scarf, which hopefully disguises the fact that I’m wearing a T-shirt with no bra to work.
• Tights if it’s cold, fleece-lined tights if it’s really cold.
• Black heels.

In winter, I swap the gray and black V-neck shirts for gray and black V-neck sweaters that are thin enough to tuck in. If I need to be more formal, I add a black blazer. If I want to be more casual, I swap out the skirt and heels for black pants (ok, glorified leggings) and a pair of flats.

I picked this particular combination of clothing because it’s appropriate for my office, reasonably comfortable, and flattering for my skin tone and body type. Obviously, everyone’s ideal uniform will look different. My only advice, if you’re looking to create your own, is to stick with neutrals. People are less likely to notice that you’re wearing the same thing every day if it’s unmemorable.

That’s the main issue with wearing a uniform. For whatever reason, it’s considered socially unacceptable to wear the same thing every day, unless you have a job where it’s mandatory. Every time that I think that I’ve solved the problem of “workwear,” I immediately panic and wonder if my coworkers are talking about the fact that I only seem to own four pieces of clothing, even though I’m not in a fashion-related industry; even though I can’t remember what they wore yesterday, and they probably can’t remember what I wore either; even though I have a pile of identical shirts, so it’s not like I’m wearing the same thing day after day and it’s becoming increasingly sweaty and dirty and gross. Even though I don’t really want to live in a world where you’re judged for not owning enough clothes.

by Antonia Noori Farzan, The Billfold | Read more:
Image: Antonia Noori Farzan

Iggy Pop and The Stooges

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Charles Sheffield

Gut–Brain Link Grabs Neuroscientists

Companies selling ‘probiotic’ foods have long claimed that cultivating the right gut bacteria can benefit mental well-being, but neuroscientists have generally been sceptical. Now there is hard evidence linking conditions such as autism and depression to the gut’s microbial residents, known as the microbiome. And neuroscientists are taking notice — not just of the clinical implications but also of what the link could mean for experimental design. (...)

Although correlations have been noted between the composition of the gut microbiome and behavioural conditions, especially autism, neuroscientists are only now starting to understand how gut bacteria may influence the brain. The immune system almost certainly plays a part, Mazmanian says, as does the vagus nerve, which connects the brain to the digestive tract. Bacterial waste products can also influence the brain — for example, at least two types of intestinal bacterium produce the neurotransmitter γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA).

The microbiome is likely to have its greatest impact on the brain early in life, says pharmacologist John Cryan at University College Cork in Ireland. In a study to be presented at the neuroscience meeting, his group found that mice born by caesarean section, which hosted different microbes from mice born vaginally, were significantly more anxious and had symptoms of depression. The animals’ inability to pick up their mothers’ vaginal microbes during birth — the first bacteria that they would normally encounter — may cause lifelong changes in mental health, he says. (...)

There are implications for basic research too. In another study to be presented at the meeting, veterinarian Catherine Hagan at the University of Missouri in Columbia compared the gut bacteria in laboratory mice of the same genetic strain that had been bought from different vendors. Their commensals differed widely, she found: mice from the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, for instance, had fewer bacterial types in their guts than did mice from Harlan Laboratories, which is headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Such differences could present a major complication for researchers seeking to reproduce another lab’s behavioural experiments, Hagan says. When her team transplanted bacteria from female Harlan mice into female Jackson mice, the animals became less anxious and had lower levels of stress-related chemicals in their blood. Hagan notes that when a lab makes a mouse by in vitrofertilization, the animal will pick up microbes from its surrogate mother, which might differ greatly from those of its genetic mother. “If we’re going to kill animals for research, we want to make sure they’re modelling what we think they’re modelling,” she says.

by Sara Reardon, Nature |  Read more:

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The White House Gets It Right On Net Neutrality. Will the FCC?

[ed. Of course, the major telecoms hate it.]

Over the past year, millions of Internet users have spoken out in defense of the open Internet. Today, we know the White House heard us.

In a statement issued this morning, President Barack Obama has called on the Federal Communications Commission to develop new “net neutrality” rules and, equally importantly, establish the legal authority it needs to support those rules by reclassifying broadband service as a “telecommunications service.”

This is very welcomed news. Back in May, the Federal Communications Commission proposed flawed “net neutrality” rules that would effectively bless the creation of Internet “slow lanes.” After months of netroots protests, we learned the FCC began to settle on a “hybrid” proposal that, we fear, is legally unsustainable.

Here's why: if the FCC is going to craft and enforce clear and limited neutrality rules, it must first do one important thing. The FCC must reverse its 2002 decision to treat broadband as an “information service” rather than a “telecommunications service.” This is what’s known as Title II reclassification. According to the highest court to review the question, the rules that actually do what many of us want — such as forbidding discrimination against certain applications — require the FCC to treat access providers like “common carriers, ” treatment that can only be applied to telecommunications services. Having chosen to define broadband as an “information service,” the FCC can impose regulations that “promote competition” (good) but it cannot stop providers from giving their friends special access to Internet users (bad).

Today’s statement stresses a few key principles:

1. No blocking. If a consumer requests access to a website or service, and the content is legal, your ISP should not be permitted to block it. That way, every player — not just those commercially affiliated with an ISP — gets a fair shot at your business.
2. No throttling.
3. Increased transparency, including with respect to interconnection.
4. No paid prioritization. “No service should be stuck in a 'slow lane' because it does not pay a fee.”

Wisely, the statement explicitly notes the need for forbearance. As we have said for months, reclassification must be combined with a commitment to forbear from imposing aspects of Title II that were originally drafted for 20th century telephone services and that don't make sense for the Internet. While forbearance doesn’t set the limits on the regulatory agency in stone, it does require the FCC to make a public commitment that is difficult to reverse.

This is an important moment in the fight for the open Internet. President Obama has chosen to stand with the us: the users, the innovators, the creators who depend on an open internet.

by Corynne McSherry, Electronic Frontiers Foundation |  Read more:

Image: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty

Michel Lefebvre
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