I’m sure you’ve all heard about this by now–you slashdotters may have read the text in full–but I can’t help a little reveling in the stupidity of capitol hill, where people get to decide what constitutes fair play in the noosphere without having a clue what that is or what it’s really for.

Thus, without further ado, Senator Stevens of the Commerce Committee explaining why he hates freedom (and net neutrality):

There’s one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service is now going to go through the internet [it's called environmentalism, Ted. Packets > packaging] and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.
Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

{maybe it’s because the internet hates washington. heck, ted, maybe it’s just your 14k modem acting up.}

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

So you want to talk about the consumer? Let’s talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren’t using it for commercial purposes.

We aren’t earning anything by going on that internet. Now I’m not saying you have to or you want to discrimnate against those people…

The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says “No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet”. No, I’m not finished. I want people to understand my position, I’m not going to take a lot of time.

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.

It’s a series of tubes.

And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?

Do you know why?

Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can’t afford getting delayed by other people.

Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.

Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it’s not using what consumers use every day.

It’s not using the messaging service that is essential to small businesses, to our operation of families.

The whole concept is that we should not go into this until someone shows that there is something that has been done that really is a violation of net neutraility that hits you and me.

And there you have it, folks. Ted Stevens tells it straight. Man, I better go find this movie site of his while the gettin’s good. From the way he talks about it you’d think it lets me steal other people’s bandwidth to get my movies or something. And I’m all for doing that where possible. Cuz, y’know, Time Warner is pretty strict on such matters. Though they’re pretty good about letting me stream content nonstop, even 24/7 if I wanted to. I wouldn’t expect Washington to understand the joy a hacker feels just knowing the internet truly is telco as opposed to premium cable w/ skinemax.

Anyway, the Daily Show explained the matter better than I could ever hope to.

I’ma let you in on a little secret, though, my esteemed friend. When it all goes to pot, and UFS and net neutrality get dumped, I may lose half my bandwidth but the state offices in Juno are gonna have to leech offa that single T1 line running out of Anchorage. And I’ll find it that much harder to care.

The EFF’s report “RIAA vs The People: Two Years Later”, after summarizing the case against suing p2p filesharers, goes on to describe one of the many new-school alternatives which both capitalize on p2p’s power and efficiency and provide customers with honest-to-goodness high quality unencrypted music files.

Two things separate Playlouder MSP from every other such business I am familiar with.

First, it isn’t just a subscription service to a secure download server or secure p2p network. It’s a high-speed broadband ISP, one that distinguishes itself by including in its utility fees an additional $5 per month, to be handed over to the recording artists and their labels in proportion to the popularity of their music on the network. By recasting itself as a service provider and collection agency, Playlouder ensures its customers can continue to use innovative technologies of their own choosing to get their music faster and easier, do whatever they want with it, and recover lost files at no additional charge, while recording artists get the double-benefit of exposure and payment.

Second, they are the the only flatrate music seller I know of that has actually struck deals with major record labels–specifically, Sony BMG. I know what you’re thinking, I thought it myself. Sony? Can’t be. Weren’t they the ones who just got smacked down for putting malicious software on their discs? And now they’ve gone across the pond and signed up with a service that lets people share their songs without retribution? I can only suppose maybe they’ve learned something from their mistakes, or are hedging their bets in fear of the fallout. Whatever the reason, services like Playlouder represent a significant step in the right direction.

Maybe.

My chief criticism is that the service’s features and restrictions as described at their webpage can only be accomplished with the help of surveillance and content-blocking firewall technologies. The copyrighted music and video files are blocked from reaching those not subscribed to the ISP, and have to identified by some kind of hashing / watermarking technique to determine the artist’s download rate. In an age when the majority of American ISPs seem entirely too ready to help NSA eavesdrop on the internet, I feel uneasy about condoning services that necessarily involve reading users’ traffic to any extent. After all, telecom companies use this same trick in an effort to unfairly block VoIP services like Skype from competing with their conventional phone lines.

So, is it a step forward or backward overall? I’m not sure. But I know what it’s not–another idiotic sidestep of the real issue, ignoring that the name of the game has changed since the internet.

How does one combine the manifold influences of all the greatness we are surrounded by, and turn it into something physically doable in one year?

I could try to chunk it into multiple smaller projects, but that requires so much more work and doesn’t give me the advantage of doing what I do so fantastically well: incorporate and synthesize. There are those who say, “Do one thing well”, yet there are equally many who say “Specialization is for insects.” I suppose I hold with the latter, with regard to myself. Olin embraces multidisciplinary studies and projects 100% of course, which every so often has led to great fun and productivity. But rarely does anyone drop into your lap the idea you were destined to fall in love with. When I’m in a creative funk, or even when I’m full of ideas–ok, especially when I’m full of ideas–I can become appallingly incoherent and unrealistic with my brainstorming. And that’s no good for right now. I want next year to be a blockbuster. I feel a lot of pressure to make up for lost time.

And I definitely can’t do that if I’m biting off more than I can chew. I need to resist the basic instinct to put everything on the front burner; something has to take priority at any given moment.

I know, I’ve discussed this half to death and I’ll discuss it the rest of the way given time. But that little sparkle in my eye has only grown stronger the more I talk public service with my Olin cohorts. One of the important offshoots of our efforts that I’d like to leave behind on campus is a Pirates of Olin group. I’ve posted some of my thoughts on the pirate forums (under Massachusetts):

I don’t think what I succeed in creating this fall will be precisely an interest group or political discussion group, but rather a public service, one that produces public domain art and software as part of an effort to spread awareness and a wider campaign to combat America’s commercial and social stagnation.

To lay it out cleanly and concisely in one place for those just tuning in, the Pirate Party is a political organization existing in multiple countries that seeks to:

–Reform copyright to reflect, rather than contradict, the realities of the information age, protecting both fair use and artists’ salaries.

–Reduce the power of patents, which currently hamper innovation and drive prescription medicine costs through the roof.

–End the creation of software patents, which reflect a dangerously naive understanding of the nature of software.

–Safeguard privacy and net neutrality, both of which are under attack from broadband carriers and their allies in the government. Privacy means not having all your internet transactions read by an FBI semantic sniffer trying to determine whether you are a terrorist. Net neutrality means you pay for telecom services as if they were, in fact, telecom services, not premium cable with skinemax on-demand. You can surf where and when you want without having your connection degraded to that of a 28K modem (laugh all you want, I remember when 28K was considered “fast”).

What can we do, right now, to help out? For starters, register with the party website and cruise the forums. There are a lot of interesting discussions taking place, as well as a number of open calls for contributions of artistic content in the form of opinion pieces, graphics and video advertisement submissions. All will be released into the public domain and used to promote awareness.

What on Earth have we done with you and your righteousness?

In these days of man-made and natural terror, of poverty and pollution, one could often swear we had dropped anchor and the rudder gotten stuck somehow on hard-to-starboard. Our constantly clashing political ideologies have handed us a paradox: let politics turn into a two-sided holy war and for the most part what you get is damnation for both sides. The home of the free then becomes the home of the cutthroats.

To clarify what I mean by holy war, consider the classic example of social security and welfare. Though all sides may agree that the current system is imperfect, they disagree on what to do about it (and, in my humble opinion, they’re both way off track). Not only do they disagree–they rant and rave and bite and claw each other all in the name of Getting It Right. Why? Because issues of this kind are so polarizing and deceptively complex that, in the absence of an audible plurality of opinion, most people learn nothing except how to toe the party line and justify themselves from a rehearsed script (further proof that conformity is a Bad Thing).

Even those who know the issue better are, I think, still frequently limited by the specious schools of justification invented by hard-liners and, all too often, have twitch responses to the mention of the subject that are revealing in an otherwise well-tempered individual. If I use the phrase “upward mobility” or “freedom from want” in describing a public service to a conservative, immediately I am forced to clarify that it is something other than welfare. Yes, I know that more of the same is not going to make the problems go away.

Why must I defend myself so? As best I can tell, it has to do with a thing called the free market (another hot topic for holy wars), which some interpret as forbidding us from giving away something for nothing, since that doesn’t follow from supply and demand. While I neither know enough economics nor am sufficiently foolhardy to attempt to debate this ideology, I will say this much: it is an ideology. The free market as studied by economists is an abstraction and should be used with care. It is not the law. It is not Ye Holy Hand Grenade. If you find yourself looking at people who say such things as if they’d just insulted your mom, maybe it’s time to turn that zeal dial down a notch.

How did it get this way, with Americans all at each other’s throats? Some feel that free-market economics and social darwinism have bred us to be vicious and sociopathic, but I do not. I think each generation of Americans has been born equally talented and capable of altruism. Consider the flower children of the sixties: they fought for civil rights and spread messages of peace and love across the land, despite being too stoned to drive straight. Imagine what we of the internet age can accomplish if we resolve to keep off hard drugs on weekdays and perhaps to not get caught up in our fathers’ pitched battles.

Our chief opponents, and here you free-marketers should agree with me, are the pigopolists and media barons and mass-producers-of-culture. Their monopolies prevent cultural diffusion and lead to lots of garbagey corporate music being played over the good stuff. If there’s anyone who makes the free market very not-free it’s them. The FCC is their bitch. As we speak, they are lobbying congress day and night for greater control of our interactions with them, to lessen the extent to which we own what they have sold us. They seek protection from market forces, but they make no effort to adapt. Unfortunately for them, iPod-using senators pick up on this sort of blunder. Thus, hope for a better, more rational world springs eternal.