PALFREY'S TURKEY VISIT

"Turkey at the edge"

The "Palfrey" reflections in Turkish press:
Sabah Daily, Milliyet Daily, Zaman Daily, Hurriyet Daily,
A video news-clip in CNN-Turk
and all of them!
-I wish I were here when he came. I was abroad...-

The Ethics of Social Networking

The Center for Internet and Society andThe Stanford Center for Ethics
present Thursday, Feb. 14, 200812:00-2:00pm
Stanford University Tressider Union, Cypress Room N-S

Has "online privacy?" become an oxymoron, or are we bound to develop a "new privacy" concept that prioritizes nuanced control of personal information? Is this new concept tenable?

What are the benefits and risks of the standardization of social networking? What impact does social networking technology have on interpersonal virtues? Are we witnessing the flattening of
social landscape by online networks? And can one be a college student without Facebook?

The Stanford Center on Ethics and the Stanford Center for Internet and Society invite you to a discussion of a host of ethical and social concerns generated by the evolving culture of social networking, particularly by Internet users' habits and Web 2.0 sites' practices and strategies ­just in time for Valentine?s Day.

Moderated by Dean Eckles, a research scientist and designer at Nokia Research Center. Panelists include Dr. BJ Fogg, Director of Research and Design at Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab, and lecturer at the Computer Science Dept; Jia Shen, Co-Founder and CTO of RockYou; and Shannon Vallor, Professor of Philosophy at Santa Clara University.
Come and add your voice to the discussion.

EU data regulator says Internet addresses are personal information

BRUSSELS, Belgium - IP addresses, string of numbers that identify computers on the Internet, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union's group of data privacy regulators said Monday.

Germany's data protection commissioner, Peter Scharr, leads the EU group preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of Internet search engines operated by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and others comply with EU privacy law.
He told a European Parliament hearing on online data protection that when someone is identified by an IP, or Internet protocol, address "then it has to be regarded as personal data."
His view differs from that of Google, which insists an IP address merely identifies the location of a computer, not who the individual user is - something strictly true but which does not recognize that many people regularly use the same computer terminal and IP address.
Scharr acknowledged that IP addresses for a computer may not always be personal or linked to an individual. For example, some computers in Internet cafes or offices are used by several people.
But these exceptions have not stopped the emergence of a host of "whois" Internet sites that apply the general rule that typing in an IP address will generate a name for the person or company linked to it.
Treating IP addresses as personal information would have implications for how search engines record data.
(Source: Silicon Valley)

"F2C": FREEDOM TO CONTENT

"Freedom to Content" - March 31- April 1, 2008

For the details click here!

Berkman@10: The Berkman Center Celebrates its 10th Year as a Research Center at Harvard Law School

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is proud to celebrate its tenth year as a research program founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. Founded in 1997, through a generous gift from Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman, the Center is now home to an ever-growing community of faculty, fellows, staff, and affiliates working on projects that span the broad range of intersections between cyberspace, technology, and society.

Through research, events, and discussion, Berkman@10 considers "The Future of the Internet" - to celebrate the work we have done together over the past decade, and to look ahead to what we hope to accomplish collectively in the next.
If you would like to make a comment on this "birthday" go to Palfrey's special page!

Breaking Down Digital Barriers:

International Study Examines the Issue of Interoperability Innovation, consumer choice and competition most important considerations Private sector well-suited to lead interoperability efforts

WASHINGTON, DC -- The findings of an international study released today by researchers from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the Research Center for Information Law, University of St. Gallen indicate that private sector leadership, more so than government intervention, is the optimal method for ensuring that technologies work well together and innovation flourishes. The authors of "Breaking Down Digital Barriers: When and How ICT Interoperability Drives Innovation" found that interoperability is generally good for consumers and drives innovation, but determined that there is no "silver bullet" solution to the issue. Interoperability has increasingly become more important because computer users -- whether they be consumers, businesses, or governments -- now tend to obtain hardware and software from different vendors and expect everything to work together. One approach to the issue that has received attention advocates government-mandated adoption of specific technologies to compel interoperability.
This study suggests that such approaches are unlikely to be the optimal approach to interoperability. "Interoperability leads to innovation and many benefits for consumers," said co-principal investigator John Palfrey, Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "The case studies we investigated produced clear conclusions: The ICT industry is achieving considerable interoperability every day in response to the needs of customers. There is often more than one way to achieve interoperability. Market-driven initiatives tend to provide the most long-term promise." "This research demonstrates that there is no standard application to achieve ICT interoperability," said Urs Gasser, co-principal investigator and Director of the Research Center for Information Law. "Attempting to impose universal answers can produce unintended consequences such as curtailing innovation, limiting consumer choice and reducing competition. Instead, each situation needs to be analyzed on its own, to determine the best way to achieve interoperability. Nor can we forget that interoperability is simply a means to larger and more important goals, such as consumer choice, access to content, ease of use and diversity."

The key findings

The research focused on three case studies in which the issues of interoperability and innovation are uppermost: digital rights management in online and offline music distribution models; various models of digital identity systems (how computing systems identify users to provide the correct level of access and security); and web services (in which computer applications or programs connect with each other over the Internet to provide specific services to customers).

The core finding is that "increased levels of ICT interoperability generally foster innovation. But interoperability also contributes to other socially desirable outcomes. In our three case studies, we have studied its positive impact on consumer choice, ease of use, access to content, and diversity, among other things."

The investigation reached other, more nuanced conclusions:
* Interoperability does not mean the same thing in every context and as such, is not always good for everyone all the time. For example, if one wants completely secure software, then that software should probably have limited interoperability. In other words, there is no one-size-fits-all way to achieve interoperability in the ICT context.
* Interoperability can be achieved by multiple means including the licensing of intellectual property, product design, collaboration with partners, development of standards and governmental intervention. The easiest way to make a product from one company work well with a product from another company, for instance, may be for the companies to cross license their technologies. But in a different situation, another approach (collaboration or open standards) may be more effective and efficient.
* The best path to interoperability depends greatly upon context and which subsidiary goals matter most, such as prompting further innovation, providing consumer choice or ease of use, and the spurring of competition in the field.
* The private sector generally should lead interoperability efforts. The public sector should stand by either to lend a supportive hand or to determine if its involvement is warranted.

Recommendations

The authors of the study propose a process constructed around a set of guidelines to help businesses and governments determine the best way to achieve interoperability in a given situation. This approach may have policy implications for governments.
* Identify what the actual end goal or goals are. The goal is not interoperability per se, but rather something to which interoperability can lead, such as innovation or consumer choice.
* Consider the facts of the situation. The key variables that should be considered include time, maturity of the relevant technologies and markets and user practices and norms.
* In light of these goals and facts of the situation, consider possible options against the benchmarks proposed by the study: effectiveness, efficiency and flexibility.
* Remain open to the possibility of one or more approaches to interoperability, which may also be combined with one another to accomplish interoperability that drives innovation.
* In some instances, it may be possible to convene all relevant stakeholders to participate in a collaborative, open standards process. In other instances, the relevant facts may suggest that a single firm can drive innovation by offering to others the chance to collaborate through an open API, such as Facebook?s recent success in permitting third-party applications to run on its platform. But long-term sustainability may be an issue where a single firm makes an open API available according to a contract that it can change at any time.
* In the vast majority of cases, the private sector can and does accomplish a high level of interoperability on its own. The state may help by playing a convening role, or even in mandating a standard on which there is widespread agreement within industry after a collaborative process. The state may need to play a role after the fact to ensure that market actors do not abuse their positions.

The report and case studies can be downloaded at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interop.

The research was sponsored by Microsoft Corporation. ### The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is proud to celebrate its tenth year as a research program founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. Founded in 1997, through a generous gift from Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman, the Center is now home to an ever-growing community of faculty, fellows, staff, and affiliates working on projects that span the broad range of intersections between cyberspace, technology, and society. More information can be found at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu.

The Research Center for Information Law, FIR-HSG, was established in 2000 by University of St. Gallen professors Jean Nicolas Druey, Herbert Burkert, and Rainer J. Schweizer. The research initiatives of the Center are aimed at analyzing and assessing legal frameworks and provisions that are regulating the creation, distribution, access, and usage of information in a given social subsystem such as the economic, cultural or political system; exploring the dynamic changes in information technologies and their impacts on the legal system. More information can be found at http://www.fir.unisg.ch/.

THE FUTURE of the INTERNET

Oxford Internet Institute - People - Faculty - Professor Jonathan Zittrain
The Center for Internet and Society (CIS) and
The Stanford Law and Technology Association (SLATA)
present
The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It
with
Professor Jonathan Zittrain
Monday October 22, 2007
12:45-2:00
Room 280B
Free and Open to the public (no rsvp required)
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/5563

The Internet we know and love at risk even as its freedoms are at a high water mark and rising. It's the changing slope of the curve that counts. Regulators and some business types (e.g., incumbents)have interest in being able to intervene more readily; they've been stymied since the 1990's because the Net has produced too many golden eggs to be worth shutting it down. The deciding vote is the "consumer" vote, and they want their MTV. Unfortunately that vote is itself shifting, in part because of the uncontrolled environment represented by Net and PC: too much spyware, too many viruses, too little reliability for the applications they want to use. Waiting in the wings is a new generation of "information appliances" that in the past have been laughable (think WebTV) but now are killer: iPod, XBox, TiVo, most mobile phones, Zune, PSP. These appliances, and a general appliancization of the PC itself, represent a very different environment: the immutability of an appliance to the consumer and third parties (think television set), coupled with use of the latest Net innovations to make the thing eminently alterable by (and only by) its maker and licensees. This talk maps out the bad implications of an appliancized -- and Web 2.0 -- world, and offers suggestions to temper it.

Jonathan Zittrain has recently co-authored Access Denied, a study of Internet filtering by national governments, and his book, The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It, will be released by Yale University Press and Penguin UK this winter. Papers may be found at http://www.jz.org.