Isaac Rowe

Project Descriptions

Fri, 10 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Awesome Inc U (2015)

Role: Lead Developer

Skills: HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, Git, Jekyll, Project development

As a development intern at Awesome Inc, I was responsible for the relaunch of the main site for their programming school, Awesome Inc U. Under the mentorship of Awesome Inc co-founder, Nick Such, I created page layouts using Bootstrap. I then modified, created, and streamlined the site content to meet the needs of users, and used Jekyll to connect the content to the layouts. Throughout the process, I used git version control and other software project management techniques. Since the project, there have been many additions and updates by later interns, but my layouts and project structure remains the backbone, and I still am listed as the top contributor by additions and deletions on the Github repository for the project.

deMYSTIFIED (2016)

Role: Writer and host

Skills: Writing, Researching, Storyboarding

A friend and I were looking for a project to pursue our interests and hone skills outside of school. He is very interested in video production, and like me, he is fascinated by technology. We decided to start a video series devoted to explaining, to a completely uninitiated audience, complex and controversial topics in a simple and entertaining way. I wrote and edited the scripts for all the episodes that have been released, and my friend was responsible for the production. Together we hosted the show, which we deemed deMYSTIFIED.

JobTrack

Role: Founder and CEO

Skills: Entrepreneurship, business management, prototyping, team-building public speaking

As part of Lexington, KY's installation of Startup Weekend, an international entrepreneurship competition, I pitched a company that uses leverages a candidate's non-traditional learning on online platforms such as Udemy to connect them with employers. In one weekend, my team, which consisted of two other people who supported my idea, created a mockup and prototype of our service, and developed a business model and user stories. We also received personal mentorship from the UP Global CEO at the time, Marc Nager. In the final demo and pitch, judged by local entrepreneurs, our team placed first. My teammates have since moved to other parts of the country pursuing their dreams, but I still plan to develop a working version of JobTrack in the future, as I still stand behind it as an idea.

Balancing Economic Freedom with Personal Safety

Fri, 02 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The United States’ laws concerning hacking and digital intellectual property are quite controversial. Opponents view them as broken laws that give corporate lawyers too much power while putting innocent people at risk. Proponents believe they are essential pieces of legislation in fighting online abuse and protecting intellectual property. To some, these laws are a safeguard for a productive, capitalistic society; to others, they are a threat to a free society. Much has been written about the widespread effects of these laws, but one facet remains underexplored. Security researchers often need to bypass encryption put in place by product manufacturers and view proprietary code in order to analyze flaws and make assessments. This kind of research is particularly important because researchers may find flaws that are life-threatening to users (like the ability to hijack a car or medical device), or they may discover illicit activity on the part of the manufacturer (like an EPA emissions test-cheating device). However, the act of bypassing encryption is made illegal by copyright and computer fraud law. Do the benefits of these laws outweigh the ethical problems created by impeding researchers? To answer this question, it is necessary for this discussion to first explore why these laws exist and what benefits they provide, then examine the importance of independent researchers as well as their plight. Finally, possible legal solutions to balance this ethical question will be suggested.

The United States has a number of laws meant to prevent hacking and to protect digital intellectual property. The bulk of the laws concerned with hacking are part of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), while those concerned with intellectual property are part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) (Constant 231, Hasenfus 308). The acts are quite large and have been involved in numerous different controversies for different issues, but one similarity of particular note is how both acts qualify the crimes they litigate in broad terms. In 1986, the United States introduced the CFAA. It served as a revision to the first ever statute on computer crimes, the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act, and defined a broad range of crimes. There were seven types of computer crime defined in the act and its 1996 Economic Espionage revision, and they mainly fall into the categories of stealing or damaging data or using protected computers without permission. However, despite the original intention of the term ‘protected computer’ to mean one that is of interest to the federal government, the term was broadened to include computers ‘used in or affecting interstate commerce,’ which encompasses many more devices. The act also fails to define other terms used widely in its content, including “access” and “authorization” (Constant 235).

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act was introduced in 1998 as a way for the United States to comply with World Trade Organization guidelines that were a part of an international treaty. Congress stated, “to comply with the treaties, the U.S. must make it unlawful to defeat technological protections used by copyright owners to protect their works” (Hasenfus 308). The problematic portion of this law is the section preventing the defeat of these “technological protection measures,” as they are called in the act. This section, Section 1201(a), or the “anti-circumvention clause,” goes beyond criminalizing the access of copyrighted work by criminalizing the very act of circumventing protection measures, effectively for any reason (Koberidze 229). Because Congress wanted the law to evolve as technology progressed, triennial petition periods were established to examine the enforcement of the law. Certain exemptions can be granted after public comments are heard by the Copyright Office (Koberidze 260).

Copyright holders are understandably opposed to changes in these rules, as it is in their best economic interest. Oftentimes, exemptions are used to exploit the company, as with a cell phone unlocking exemption that was granted and then revoked. It allowed for people to buy a phone with any carrier, then transfer it to another without hindrance, but it lead to some groups buying phones subsidized with subscriber payments made possible by locked devices and moving them to a different network, causing the carrier to take a loss (Hasenfus 305).

Generally, manufacturers and software companies are supporters of these laws, since both of the acts are critical to stopping digital piracy and protecting intellectual property. The DMCA made it possible for intellectual property owners to file complaints against people who share their material without permission, as well as litigate those who bypass their restrictions against such sharing (Hasenfus 308). According to George L. Lenard, the CFAA is particularly useful in providing legal recourse for companies when employees smuggle out proprietary code (14). Computer code, including software installed on cars or medical devices, is often the intellectual property of the company producing the device. It may contain components that are patented or copyrighted by the company, and provide a competitive advantage to them in business. For example, car companies have code to optimize their performance and fuel-efficiency, as well as sophisticated infotainment systems designed to stand out from the crowd (Bigelow, Newcomb). Companies have a capitalistic motive to protect their code from exploitation, and that capitalistic motive must be preserved, or companies may no longer innovate. For example, film copyright is managed just like software, and the Motion Picture Association of America reports that losses from piracy were $3.5 billion annually from 2002-2004 (Von Lohmann). Piracy estimates for software are conflicting, but the financial threat to these companies is growing. If security researchers were permitted to bypass restrictions, the door is left open to abuse by unethical researchers who may leak trade secrets or distribute copyrighted material.

Automakers warn that tampering with protected code on cars without official oversight incurs significant safety risks to the user by compromising protective features, and pose harm to the environment by undoing the manufacturer’s sophisticated calibration (Duffy 39). Similarly, they do not want third party companies producing unlicensed clones of what they produce, by accessing it under the pretense of security research. They also argue that their internal research is sufficient to ensure safety (Sellars). Unlike other fields, security research does not have a board of ethics or governing body, so researchers are left to their own discretion. This, unfortunately, does lead to researchers breaking DMCA and CFAA statutes and engaging in irresponsible practices such as drawing attention to products vulnerable to attack or damaging consumer hardware (Matwyshyn et al. 67).

Despite the risks posed to corporate interests, the existence of independent security researchers is imperative. These researchers, often a part of independent groups supported by nonprofits or universities, engage what is sometimes known as ethical hacking. These researchers bypass restrictions put in place to find flaws overlooked by others and may notify the manufacturer about the flaw, and, if they are ignored, they may publish their findings to catalyze change from the manufacturer or inform the public about the risk. However, anytime a technological barrier to access is hurdled, whether or not copyright is being infringed upon, the law is being broken. Very often the research focuses around securing networks and protecting privacy, which is acceptable under the DMCA (Matwyshyn et al. 69), but sometimes the research focuses on saving lives. When the law impedes this, the ethical implications become great. The best example of this risk is with independent vehicle research. In July 2015, researchers revealed to Wired magazine that they could remotely take control of a Jeep vehicle via an exploit of the UConnect onboard Wi-Fi and entertainment system (Greenberg). In doing so, they certainly violated the DMCA, but they revealed something overlooked by the manufacturer that concerned the safety of thousands of drivers. Similarly, Volkswagen benefitted from the cloak of copyright protection when it ran illegal code to cheat federal emissions tests, code which was protected under the DMCA (Duffy 34). The irresponsible researchers that companies fear are the exception: Matwyshyn et al. point out that “provided that vulnerability research is done ethically, researchers perform an important social function: they provide information that closes the information gap between the creators, operators, or exploiters of vulnerable products and the third parties who will likely be harmed because of them” (67).

The threat to researchers made by these laws is not hypothetical. Because of the vagueness in the laws, Sarah Constant notes that “the government has had a generous amount of leeway to be creative in bringing charges” (237). Even when researchers operate ethically, they may violate the law due to the inclusion of a company’s private terms of service as grounds for charges, which has been used to charge people for things like making fictitious MySpace accounts (238). In the most high-profile case, an activist named Aaron Swartz was convicted under the CFAA and committed suicide while facing the possibility of 35 years in prison for downloading 4.8 million academic articles and distributing them illegally. This was despite the fact that the owner of the articles declined to press charges— the attorney general wanted to make a point (Monarch 3-4). Medical device manufacturers have deep pockets and are extremely protective of their intellectual property, yet this area is one where the case for independent research is so ethically strong, since it directly connected to public safety. Out of fear for legal trouble, researchers in the medical industry applied for exemptions under the DMCA. As noted before, the law has a regular review and update process that allows for balance in an otherwise heavy-handed law. These exemptions are necessary for competition to be possible, for consumers to exercise their rights and for researchers to stay protected. Medical researchers from Harvard successfully received a circumvention exemption (Sellars), and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) helped procure one for vehicles, but these must be petitioned at every review to stay in effect, even without opposition, needlessly placing the burden on researchers to prove their cause (Pelegrin, Koberidze 264).

Multiple legal scholars recommend the clarification of terms in the CFAA in order to remove the ability for private terms of service to be used in qualifying crimes (Constant 245). One suggestion of doing this is to only charge for a computer crime if the unauthorized access causes harm to the owner. This keeps malicious hackers at bay while protecting average users and encouraging researchers to consider repercussions (Thaw 910). Also, considering protest acts using technology (like Swartz’) as acts of civil disobedience may prevent over-litigation of “ethical hacking” (Monarch 6). Another bill has been introduced, the Breaking Down Barriers to Innovation Act of 2015, which proposes precedents for the DMCA exemptions. That means that once a research group has proved its need to circumvent technological barriers, they need not keep fighting to maintain their exemption (H.R. 1883). This however, is only a stopgap, as the real solution may be to only consider it a crime when actual infringement on copyrighted content occurs, not when circumvention occurs (Koberidze 274).

An ideal solution would take the burden off of researchers constantly fighting to prove that they are not infringing upon copyright, so they can devote their time to serving the public. That way, the ethical dilemma caused by obstructing a privacy-protecting, life-saving public service is lifted from the law. In the same way, the integrity of corporations’ intellectual property must be preserved. One recommendation that stems from this discussion would be to institute a central board, independent of corporate interests, to oversee security research. This board would replace the DMCA exemption process and provide amnesty for CFAA and DMCA violations deemed necessary for research. They would be responsible for ensuring that best practices are carried out to respect intellectual property, stop copyright infringement, and avoid harm to property and data belonging to corporations or the public. In effect, this would carry out the intended purpose of the original laws by criminalizing the actual infringement of copyright or unauthorized access, not the use of tools and methods that could be used for copyright infringement or unauthorized access. Then security researchers could operate knowing that they will not be subject to litigation as long as they are operating ethically, which is currently not a guarantee. The public would benefit, as they now would be ensured both the best product through capitalistic competition and the safest product through thorough analysis. In order to adequately address the ethical concerns of intellectual property and research, the United States’ laws concerning the subject should be altered accordingly.

Works Cited

Bigelow, Pete. “General Motors says it owns your car’s software.” Autoblog, 20 May 2015. http://www.autoblog.com/2015/05/20/general-motors-says-owns-your-car-software/ Accessed 29 November 2016.

Constant, Sarah A. “The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act: A Prosecutor’s Dream and a Hacker’s Worst Nightmare - The Case against Aaron Swartz and the Need to Reform the CFAA.” Tulane Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property, vol. 16, 2013, pp. 231-48. Hein Online, heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/tuljtip16&start_page=231&collection=journals&id=241. Accessed 4 Oct. 2016.

Duffy, William.”Defeat Devices as Intellectual Property: A Retrospective Assessment from the DMCA Rulemaking.” The CCCC-IP Annual: Top Intellectual Property Developments of 2015. Intellectual Property Caucus of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, March 2016, pp 37- 45. National Council of Teachers of English, www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Groups/CCCC/Committees/TopIP2015Collection.pdf#page=37. Accessed 4 Oct. 2016.

Greenberg, Andy. “Hackers Remotely a Kill Jeep Highway - With Me in It.” Wired, 21 July 2015. https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/. Accessed 2 November 2016.

Hasenfus, Nicholas. “Unlocking Will Get You Locked Up: A Recent Change to the DMCA Makes Unlocking Cell Phones Illegal.” Journal of High Technology Law, vol. 15, no. 2, 2014, pp. 301-328. Hein Online, heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/jhtl15&g_sent=1&collection=journals&id=303. Accessed 4 Oct. 2016

“H.R. 1883 — 114th Congress: Breaking Down Barriers to Innovation Act of 2015.” GovTrack. 2015. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/114/hr1883. Accessed 1 November 2016

Koberidze, Maryna. “The DMCA Rulemaking Mechanism: Fail or Safe?” Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts, vol. 11, no. 3, 2015. Social Science Research Network, ssrn.com/abstract=272491*7. Accessed 4 Oct 2016.

Lenard, George L. “Using the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to Combat Improper Employee Competition.” Journal of Internet Law, vol. 8, no. 9, 2005, pp. 1 - 20. Business Source Complete. http://ezproxy.uky.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=16615409&site=ehost-live&scope=site. Accessed 29 November 2016.

Matwyshyn, Andrea M, Ang Cui, Angelos D. Keromytis, and Salvatore J. Stolfo. “Ethics in Security Vulnerability Research.” IEEE Security and Privacy, March/April 2010, pp 67-72. https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~angelos/Papers/2010/msp2010020067.pdf. Accessed 29 November 2016.

Monarch, Ben. “The Good Hacker: A Look at the Role of Hacktivism in Democracy.” Social Science Research Network, 8 May 2015, ssrn.com/abstract=2649136. Accessed 4 Oct. 2016.

Newcomb, Doug. “The Next Big OS War is in Your Dashboard.” Wired, 3 December 2012. https://www.wired.com/2012/12/automotive-os-war/ Accessed 29 Novemer 2016.

Pelegrin, Williams. “Unlocking Your Phone is Legal Again: What You Need to Know.” Digital Trends, 11 February 2015. http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/unlocking-your-new-smartphone-is-now-illegal-what-you-need-to-know/. Accessed 1 November 2016.

Sellars, Andy. “DMCA Exemption Granted for Med Device Research, Patient Access to Data.” Harvard Law Clinic Cyberlaw Clinic, 27 October 2015. http://clinic.cyber.harvard.edu/2015/10/27/dmca-exception-granted-for-medical-device-research-patient-access-to-data/, Accessed 1 November 2016.

Thaw, David. “Criminalizing Hacking, Not Dating: Reconstructing The Cfaa Intent Requirement.” Journal Of Criminal Law & Criminology, vol. 103, no. 3, 2013, pp. 907-48. Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection. ezproxy.uky.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=pbh&AN=89862800&site=ehost-live&scope=site. Accessed 4 Oct. 2016.

Von Lohmann, Fred and Wendy Seltzer. ‘Death by DMCA.” IEEE Spectrum. 1 June 2006. http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/death-by-dmca/0. Accessed 29 November 2016.

The Ultimate Website Tutorial

Thu, 11 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The information in this post can be found in condensed form in the slide deck below. But you’re missing out if you don’t read my magnum opus that follows.

#Intro

So you want to make a website? Good for you! Making a website was my first step into coding, and it’s not that hard to learn. If you follow these steps, you can have a working website in no time, made completely by you.

Making a website is not hard, it’s figuring out where to start that’s difficult. The problem is when I was first learning, I would try a tutorial that just taught what code to use without saying why. And if it tried to get me to figure out the code on my own to learn why, if was often tripped up by minor things that have nothing to do with what I needed to learn at that moment. Often, the things that adequately explained why things operate the way they do were quite dense and had little chance for hands-on. The flashiest and most enjoyable things are often also the most shallow and unsatisfying. So for a long time, my workflow was to try a flashy tutorial, thinking I knew what I was doing, then to go try it on my own and realize I had no idea how anything worked. The best way I can explain this is with a quote from programmer Jade Dominguez in “The Pain of Teaching Yourself to Code”

“The self-learner must gain conceptual awareness.

He may rely on a baseline collection of reference materials he’s discovered to do it. He may enlist tons of Google-fu to painfully acquire morsels of increased awareness. He may take this awareness and further refine his question on stackoverflow. He may go “keyword hopping” where initial searches lead him to unknown keywords for which he can refine his initial search to gain more awareness and repeat.”

My mission here is to make sure that your time is not wasted going down rabbit holes of confused Google searches because you don’t actually know what it is you are looking for. Additionally, the experience of gaining conceptual awareness as described above, however infuriating, is integral to gaining a full appreciation of what you are learning (Actually, I have no idea if it is actually integral, I’m not a cognitive researcher, but let’s just go with it). Therefore, I will aim to provide the fullest context I can without spoon-feeding, and try to point you to the places you should look, all in a narrative format.

The reason for the narrative format is because all of technology is built on what has come before it, by “standing on the shoulders of giants.” To understand why things are the way they are, you have to understand why they were the things they used to be, the problems they exist to solve. Then you can understand how they can be used to become what they will be in the future, and you become part of the progress, and it all just makes a lot more sense. This all sounds great in my head, but now it’s time to get down to learning.

First thing first, none of this tutorial is completely original. I have been influenced by multiple other great online resources such as HTML Dog, Codecademy, Khan Academy and Awesome Inc U. [Disclaimer: I intern for Awesome Inc, the initiative behind Awesome Inc U]

Secondly, I probably made a lot of mistakes that will cause you trouble. If you get stuck and need help, ask for help! You can contact me, or try looking up your question on Stack Overflow. Chances are that someone has had the problem before, and if you can’t find anything, try asking your own question.

If you know how to, you can just submit a pull request directly to this site to make a change.

One more thing. If you need inspiration, I would like to introduce my hero Adam Savage. He says a lot of great things about learning, but this one is nice and pithy, despite being repackaged into an ad for Discovery Channel (It isn’t actually his voice in the video). The monologue comes from a TED Talk he gave in November 2011.

May the Force be with you.

#Format

This post will be published incrementally, as I develop it, so it will be perpetually incomplete. I will, however, try to update it in complete sections so that each increment is actually useful. the sections will be formatted like this:

Title: A header to tell you what you’re about to read

Reading List: Part of the “conceptual awareness” thing I talked about earlier. Reading these is not required, but will definately expand your knowledge of the material and its context.

Recommended Tutorials: For sections that call for it, I will link to tutorials I find helpful for hands-on learning. These are essential for developing a workflow. You can do these before, after or during the section, but you should do them.

The rest is where I get to teach, rant, tell stories, drop pop culture references, and share how I think the best way to approach the topic at hand.

#History

Clickbait and Democracy in America

Sun, 29 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In the opening of the third chapter of Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville makes a surprising comment: “I avow that I do not hold that complete and instantaneous love for the freedom of the press that one accords to things whose nature is unqualifiedly good. I love it out of consideration for the evils it prevents much more than for the good it does.” This seems like an outrageous statement to a modern American who has never questioned the idea that the press should be as free as the wind. Tocqueville, while occasionally criticizing specific implementations or consequences, usually supports the underlying radical nature of American political solutions, but this time the verdict is decidedly less supportive than others. He apparently does not support freedom of press because of its principal, but because it is not as bad as censorship in its effects.

This passage is interesting for discussion because of its more disapproving stance, but also for the implications to its modern audience. Such observations about the state and influence of journalism are increasingly relevant today, as the vast most journalistic content that is consumed and shared is generally of low quality, despite the existence of many quality journalistic organizations. This phenomenon can be seen in the kinds of “viral content” that is spread on social media, where little effort is put into fact-checking or critical thinking about complex subjects and content is distilled into lists and images. Just this week, Yahoo News accidentally published an unfinished review of an unreleased pop album, complete with fill-in-the-blank segments like “[NAME RELEVANT SONG…THAT MATCHES DESCRIPTION]” to support an already fabricated “critical opinion” of the album. Cable news networks use sensationalist headlines, with creates the same ill effects. Even when higher-quality content is available, many people only read headlines before commenting upon a subject. For example NPR’s 2014 April Fool’s prank, a post with the inflammatory headline, “Why Doesn’t America Read Anymore?” contained only content instructing savvy readers to observe how their friends commented upon articles without reading by sharing the headline without context.

Many people wonder how this proliferation of pseudo-journalism came about. Some posit that the American people might be less educated that they have been in ages past, or that technology is antithetical to learning or “true journalism.” Long before the rise of digital media, Tocqueville foresaw these results. Specifically, Tocqueville notes that complete freedom of the press coupled with the low costs associated with producing journalism effectively destroys the value of the content itself, through supply and demand. Essentially, when the press is in the hands of the people, the content that is created is the content that is profitable. In an area where there is state control of the media, profits are not as important as presenting a good image, so there is not a capitalistic motive. Tocqueville says that sometimes capitalism and journalism are in opposition to each other, resulting in the dilution of quality in media, citing an example from the day’s newspapers:

To judge the difference that exists between the Anglo-Americans and us, I have only to cast a glance at the newspapers of the two peoples. In France, commercial advertisements take up only a very restricted space and even news items are not very numerous; the vital part of newspaper is the one where political discussions are found. In America three-quarters of the immense newspaper that is placed before your eyes is filled with advertisements, the rest is most often occupied by political news or simple anecdotes; only from time to time does one perceive in an overlooked corner one of the burning discussions that are the daily fodder of readers among us.

What this means for modern society is that perhaps government oversight is necessary to preserve excellent journalism, to prevent it from drowning in the flood of the information age. The chain is only as good as its weakest link, and by embracing a press by the people, the quality is reduced to that of the least common denominator. The result is that the “spirit of the journalist in America is to attack coarsely, without preparation and without art, the passions of those whom it addresses” Democracy gave America the press it deserved, but not the one it needed.

So what was to gain by all this? Embracing democracy in the press meant giving up the hope of having only the most elite journalists comprise the American media, but did that mean it was destined for failure? Probably not, and as Tocqueville illustrates, there is a distinct trade-off. In place of an esteemed media that employs elegant rhetoric to comment on political issues, the United States has a nearly unlimited amount of semi-professional citizen journalists that have the collective ability to leave nothing uncovered. The sheer magnitude of the American media machine makes up for its lack of finesse, providing an advantage over journalism in the Old World. Tocqueville , at the end of the section, concedes that there is merit to the American way of journalism:

The press still exercises an immense power in America. It makes political life circulate in all sections of this vast territory. Its eye, always open, constantly lays bare the secret springs of politics and forces public men to come in turn to appear before the court of opinion…When a large number of organs of the press come to advance along the same track, their influence becomes almost irresistible in the long term, and public opinion, struck always from the same side, ends by yielding under their blows.

Effectively, upholding complete freedom of the press means to prefer a multitude of amateur works over a few refined ones; quantity makes quality. America might not have the best or the brightest, but with complete freedom, it has the most, and by pure strength, it can outdo even the most elite. In the era of “crowdsource everything”, nothing could seem more true.

Net Profit

Fri, 26 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Note : This was written in February 2015 as a thesis paper for school. A blog-friendly version (read: more pictures, fewer words) may come soon.

Net neutrality, simply put, is the principle that a network operator, specifically an Internet provider, should treat all data on their network equally, and not block certain applications, devices or consumers access to the network. The most powerful network of our era, the Internet, which affects every facet of modern life, depends on net neutrality for its well-being. Therefore, net neutrality is necessary as a policy and should be implemented by the government.

The history of net neutrality as a policy dates back to networks older than the Internet, like radio, telephone and television networks. The Communications Act of 1934 is one of the earliest pieces of legislation that creates a separation between content distributors and network owners. The act establishes telecommunications networks as “common carriers” which means they operate like a public utility, and make their services available to the general population. Title II of the act states, “It shall be unlawful for any common carrier to make any unjust or unreasonable discrimination in charges, practices, classifications, regulations, facilities, or services for or in connection with like communication service, directly or indirectly, by any means or device.” The act also established the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate the industry according to these laws.

The effect of this regulation can be illustrated by a few court cases and regulatory decisions from this time. The first major landmark case was the 1956 Hush-A-Phone Corp. v. United States, in which the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that AT&T could not prohibit users from attaching their own equipment, including sound-quality enhancing devices, like the Hush-A-Phone device, to AT&T’s network (Wu, “Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination” 142). In a related decision, the FCC ruled that Carterphone, a device that allowed two-way radios to be connected to someone on a landline telephone, could not be banned by telephone networks, and also overruled the tariff that had previously given telecoms the exclusive right to manage equipment on their networks (“In The Matter Of Use Of The Carterfone Device”). The stance that followed was that as long as the equipment was not harmful to the network, or otherwise illegal, the network operators may not interfere with its usage.

While this established platform neutrality for telephone and television, broadband Internet was made subject to different regulation. This happened, first of all, because the Internet did not exist in 1934 when the act was passed, and when an amendment was passed as the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to address broadband, it was classified as an “informations service”, and was therefore not regulated as a common carrier (“Why It’s a Good Thing That Broadband Isn’t a Common Carrier.”). Because of this lapse in regulation, broadband Internet service providers (ISPs) often blocked both applications and devices from their networks. In the early phases of home broadband, this involved banning the use of Wi-Fi, so only certain devices could be wired into the network. Some recent examples of discriminatory behavior have occurred when mobile Internet providers like Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint blocked digital payment application Google Wallet from phones used on their network, so they could release their own similar application, Softcard, without competition (“In the Matter of Protecting” 40; Ammori ).

In 2003, Tim Wu, who was then working as Associate Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, coined the term “network neutrality” to describe the idea that all data on a network should be treated equally, in order to preserve a competitive market. Without it, he claimed, the best applications would never emerge and business on the Internet would never expand because if the network operators could block what they did not like, economic evolution would never occur, and the outcome would be decided before the consumer had any say (Wu, “Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination” 145). Broadband operators objected to this, citing the words of the 1996 Act: “It is the policy of the United States . . . to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation” (“Why It’s a Good Thing”).

In 2004, Michael Powell, chairman of the FCC at that time, presented four “Internet Freedoms” : Freedom to access content, to use applications, to attach personal devices, and to obtain service plan information. These guided the Commission’s decisions for the next few years, but their legal authority to make such rulings was challenged in court (Wu, “The Broadband Debate” 90). In 2010, after having a order dismissed by the D.C Court of Appeals, the Commission opted to pass net neutrality rules as official regulation, inspired by the principles established by Chairman Powell. These rules were called the “Open Internet Order” and were meant to derive their authority from Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act (Wheeler), but were met with immediate backlash from the industry. In 2014, a lawsuit against the Open Internet Order from Verizon was brought to the D.C. Court of Appeals, and the court ruled that because broadband was still classified by the Telecommunications Act under Title I as an “informations service”, the FCC had no legal authority to enforce their order, and the rules were thrown out. The FCC responded, following pressure from activists from many Internet based businesses and content distributors, as well as President Barack Obama, by seeking to gain legal authority to implement net neutrality by reclassifying broadband Internet under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, as a common carrier (Snider). Chairman Tom Wheeler, formerly a lobbyist for the cable industry, changed his stance on the net neutrality after receiving a record-breaking 4 million public comments on the issue, saying that the rules were backed by “long-standing regulatory principles, marketplace experience, and public input” (Wheeler). He then submitted rules for reclassification to the Commission for a vote, and in early 2015, the FCC voted to implement the regulation (“FCC Adopts Strong, Sustainable Rules to Protect the Open Internet” 1).

Throughout this history of theoretical argumentation and scrutiny from both the industry and government, net neutrality has produced varying opinions. The opinions lay on a spectrum, where one end is occupied by full objection to net neutrality, the proponents of which are the network operators themselves, who claim that because they own the infrastructure, they should be allowed to control it. Next would come those who argue that while they may ideally support separation of content and network, there should not be regulatory interference with operators, because it would disrupt the free market. They claim that the market would naturally come to a desirable outcome by responding to what consumers want. This group would include right-winged economists like Christopher Yoo, and are dubbed as “Deregulationists” by Tim Wu: those who are still “basically interested in innovation and open market entry” but primarily concerned with using non-governmental means (“The Broadband Debate” 69). The next group supports government involvement to ensure net neutrality, but would prefer that the rules were put in place as part of a bill of Congress, rather than have the FCC do it. They support the same rules proposed by the FCC, but want to shed the baggage of the Communications Act as well as avoid unnecessary stipulations that they say would hinder the industry. Such opinions belong to politicians such as FCC commissioner Ajit Pai and Republican congress members, and their main separation from others is the objection to the idea that Internet should be regulated as a utility (Pai 3). The final group, which includes the Democratic party members of the FCC, supports regulation of the Internet as a utility, pointing to various precedents in other systems. This type of regulation is the current form of net neutrality in place, but is likely to be opposed in court by the industry. With so many versions of an idea in play, it is crucial to understand what to support and why.

Through years of public debate and legislation, net neutrality has become a pressing issue. Despite criticism, the policy is a necessary part of the distribution of content over broadband networks, and government bodies should be responsible for enforcing it when the industry does not. There are a host of reasons for this need, all of which can be agreed upon by each of the different camps of ideology outlined previously. First, there are steep judicial and legislative precedents for governing infrastructures, which are quite analogous to the proposed net neutrality solutions for the Internet. There are also economic incentives to net neutrality regulation. Many economic principles of the capitalist system often appear excluded by net neutrality regulation to those who are unfamiliar with the policy, but under further investigation, it is very clear that net neutrality still respects the fundamental rules that many people, especially conservative Americans, have come to expect.

Many think that the repercussions of net neutrality regulation are not understood by proponents because the Internet is a young technology. In fact, net neutrality is supported by various court decisions through the years, including the Hush-a-Phone and Carterphone decisions discussed earlier, the positive repercussions of which are well known. Before Hush-a-Phone, all network attachments had to be approved by the network operator. Using a telephone that had not been approved by the AT&T Bell system would be grounds for termination of service. The Hush-a-Phone decision made it possible for consumers, rather than only operators, to chose what attachments they used on the network, as long as it was not harmful to the infrastructure or the other users. There was still some resistance, but with the Carterphone decision and pressure from the FCC, the market was open to consumer control. Without this, many innovations that depend on the original network would have never been developed. Tim Wu points out that the opening of the network to any non-harmful device led to answering machines, fax machines, modems, and now home networks, all built off the telephone network (“Hearing on Network Neutrality” 46). The operator of this infrastructure could have never foreseen the astounding future potential, and would have banned use of these innovations, if allowed, because they did not fit the intended purpose of the infrastructure. Even if they had provided their own innovations for the network, progress would have been much slower, and the quality much lower. In order for the full potential to be reached, the market had to be open to the fast-paced cutthroat consumer world that the AT&T monopoly protected it from for so long. The courts ruled to open up the networks, and both the consumer and the industry benefited.

When Internet providers violate net neutrality, they are violating the principles established by judicial precedent in these cases, principles that cause economic prosperity . For years, internet providers viewed home networking, something now taken for granted through technologies like Wi-Fi, as a violation of their Terms of Service agreements. AT&T went so far as to call home networking “theft of services” and warned subscribers of consequences. In 2002, when the practice became mainstream, 4 of the 10 largest cable companies in the United States “contractually limited the deployment of home networks” (Wu, “Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination” 159). However, this violates the principle of allowing non-harmful network attachments, because, although the use of routers was outside of what cable operators envisioned their network being used for, it did not harm the network.

Today most Internet providers have largely given up the fight against third-party devices, although there is sometimes debate over whether a device is harmful to the network or not. What Internet providers are frequently responsible for today is blocking content that they do not approve. If they perceive that an application or content stream may compete with its own offerings, or could be easily monetized as an add-on service, Internet providers are apt to take action against it. There are many examples of this behavior. Madison River Communications, a US-based regional ISP, blocked its customer from using Vonage in 2005. Vonage is a Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) application, meaning it can be used to send telephone calls over internet, sacrificing some quality for low-cost phone calls, including long-distance or international calls. Companies like Madison River usually have separate phone service packages that they sell (many of which now run on the same VoIP technology Vonage used for years), and Vonage was threatening that revenue stream. That same year, a Canadian company blocked a union’s website because of its strike against the company. From its original release up until 2009, Apple was restricted from offering Skype (which includes a form of VoIP) on the iPhone as part of their contract with AT&T, in order to ensure customers paid for “talk and text” minutes, rather than using their internet connection to make calls for no additional cost (Ammori).

Network operators block content quite readily, but hesitate to block devices because of the requirement to allow non-harmful attachments access, and this is inconsistent. The principle of what was decided in the Hush-a-Phone and Carterphone cases was that as long as an attachment did not have an adverse effect on the network, it must be allowed access, and this should include non-harmful content. After all, what is the difference between a third-party telephone headset and a third party phone app, other than that one is virtual? Both do not cause harm to the infrastructure of the network or impede other user’s access, and although both may take away a monopoly on a revenue stream for the operator, they create competition for the industry and choice for the consumer. Obviously, the court did not know about the possibility of the rule being used in the context of the internet, so legally enforcing network neutrality for content in the same way as network neutrality for devices is difficult, but regulators should understand the equality in principle. Anyone who agrees that Hush-a-Phone created positive repercussions by allowing consumers free access to devices should, in theory, agree that good net neutrality legislation will create positive repercussions by allowing consumers free access to content.

In addition to telephone network, there is another great equivalent to net neutrality in practice, one that millions of people take for granted every day: the electric power grid. The Internet is surprisingly similar to the power grid, beyond just the fact that both are types of networks. In The Broadband Debate, Tim Wu points out that the same reason people use the Internet is the same reason that they use the power grid, not because they care about electricity or how special it is, but because they care about the things that having electricity empowers them to do, like turn on light bulbs or run an air conditioner. In the same way, it is not the bandwidth itself that creates value, it is the content made available by that bandwidth. Similarly, consumers in both systems are accustomed to using their access as they please. Tim Wu has also pointed out on many occasions how odd it would be to violate these expectations in for electric customers. There is “no built-in favoritism for the VCR over the DVD player. You do not ask the electric companies permission before plugging in a new cordless phone.” Violating net neutrality by favoring certain applications over others, he says, is “as if the electric company one day announced that refrigerators made by General Electric would henceforth not work quite as well as those made by Samsung (Hearing on Network Neutrality; “Keeping the Internet Neutral?”).” If electric companies could monitor what kind of appliances were being used, they would be in the exact position of an ISP. If discrimination such as the above took place, consumers would obviously become outraged. But why, exactly? If the electric company owns the wires ( or in terms of the net neutrality debate, they “control the pipes”), shouldn’t they get to control how it gets used? There are two reasons that they could not do that. The first is lack of competition. It is not as if a consumer who wished to continue to use their GE fridge at the same level of performance could just switch to a power company that instead discriminated against Samsung or to one without discrimination at all, most households don’t have that choice. Indeed, the market of Internet Service Providers is quite similar. Eighty-one percent of Americans have only one choice in traditional broadband internet, and ninety-four percent have two of fewer choices. About a quarter of Americans have access to a different form of connection like fiber or satellite, but are limited to one provider in most circumstances. Many times if a different technology is available, it is not available as an alternative option to a traditional connection, but as the only option (Hearing on Net Neutrality; Internet Access Services). Normally, if a company makes a decision that a customer does not like, the customer can simply chose a competitor, forcing the first company to improve itself , but when there is no choice, there is no negative feedback for a company when they make decisions that harm the consumer.

The other reason it would be outrageous for an electric company to discriminate against appliances is ownership. Imagine if there was company with a power plant, and they had an agreement with the local utility company to deliver the current to homes. The company that controls the grid to home hookup might not own the power plant, and the company that owns the power plant might not be the same one that has to distribute it to consumers. The Internet works in the same way. No one entity owns all the cable or fiber that makes up the Internet. To get content from one side of the globe to another, bits of information pass through infrastructure owned by many different entities through a complex system of peering and transit. In the US, the majority of the backbone is owned by AT&T, but the delivery to each home is controlled by what are called “last mile” providers (Van Der Berg 1). These companies own little of the Internet infrastructure at large, but are responsible for distributing content to all the access points in a geographical area. The ISPs who are usually guilty of violating net neutrality are last mile providers, so when they discriminate, they are making decisions about content that they do not own, and taking undue advantage of their position as a gatekeeper. Usually the way discrimination with last mile providers works is instead of charging for bandwidth, the provider demands a company pay extra to ensure its data reaches the customer intact, or else suffer a performance hit. The incentive for the gatekeeper is now to reserve the best access for the highest bidders, and to maximize the payout, they create artificial scarcity in bandwidth, as monopolist might do (Wu, “Keeping the Internet Neutral” 582). Why should a company that only accounts for the last step in a long process make decisions for what is otherwise an open network? This is why it is not the right of Internet Service Providers to withhold content from consumers or otherwise provide preference for one type of content over another.

The most compelling reason for net neutrality is the catalyst it creates for technological innovation. There are many concrete examples, but perhaps the most outstanding is the story of Vonage. For years cable providers talked about the possibility of VoIP technology, but were reluctant to put resources into it because it would bite into their revenue stream from selling phone connections, and if a high number of subscribers used it, they would have to upgrade their aging networks. Vonage came on the scene by selling phones that plugged into the Internet jack, and routed calls over the general network (Wu, “The Broadband Debate” 72). The quality was as good as average cell service, and consumers saved money by only paying for one Internet connection, rather than an additional phone connection. If ISPs had been allowed to discriminate, as Madison River tried, VoIP would have never taken off, and consumers would still be using traditional phone connections. But after Vonage, not only did consumers save, the adoption of the technology incentivised the ISPs to upgrade their network, so most customers who buy phone connection through a cable provider now use the same VoIP technology the cable providers once spurned.

In the net neutrality debate, the phenomenon seen in this example is demonstrative of the end-to end principle which, at its basic form, is evolutionary economics. If the network operator is allowed to discriminate, it may favor certain applications over others, perhaps its own version of an online video application over others on the market. This product would obviously emerge as the top application, because it has the backing of the network. But this does not mean it is the best. Economics tends to work in an evolutionary sense, where the best products and services survive and the inferior ones are ignored by consumers. But as was shown before, that power comes from competition between businesses for consumers. The end-to-end principle states that the intelligence of the network comes from the ends (the consumer) rather than the center (the network operator) because the center, being only one entity, is inherently short-sighted. The end-to end principle puts as many players in the game as possible to ensure the result is, as Tim Wu says, “truly the fittest and not merely the favored” (Wu, “The Broadband Debate” 87). This might not seem extremely important, but consider what it means in a field other that the Internet. In the 1860’s, the primary network was telegraph, which was monopolized by Western Union. In a net neutrality violation that predated the term, Western Union signed an exclusive deal with the Associated Press (AP), and raised other news wires’ rates to costs so high they could not compete. The AP, in turn, had exclusive reporting deals with newspapers, so for many Americans, news came from only one source. This monopoly was abused to the point of deliberate censorship, so there are documented cases of the AP attempting to manipulate politics by omitting wires concerning politicians they did not like (Hearing on Network Neutrality).

In addition to being a catalyst for creating better technology that everyone can benefit from, net neutrality can protect valuable resources that could fall by the wayside otherwise. Without net neutrality, Internet providers could charge for content providers to have access to subscribers. Naturally, content that produces the most revenue would be able to acquire the best access, and providers would have an incentive to drop any content that was not cost-effective. Many people, such as Barbara Stripling, former president of the American Library Association, think that these priorities would lead to providers to deprioritize educational websites that might not be capable of generating revenue for the provider. As a result, rural or low-income areas that depend on the Internet for many vital education needs,would be unable to get access because of their inability to provide benefit for the provider (Cook 47).

These reasons should clearly point to net neutrality as a necessary tool to ensure the health of a valuable global resource. It is also necessary for the government to take responsibility for enforcing these regulations. Many people take issue with this, but the government is uniquely qualified to take such action. As was illustrated with the Vonage tale, the industry is often short-sighted when it comes to making informed decisions, and content providers are unable to protect themselves. The industry can safely ignore consumer advocacy groups, because they only make decisions in their economic favor, and their revenue streams are not in jeopardy. The other way for consumers to have a say is through the government. Many people are opposed to legislation, but the point of democratic government is to give people a say. The 2010 Verizon v FCC case showed that simply stating a code of honor is not enough, so net neutrality must be enforced by either Congressional action, which as so far been stalled, or a more legally sound stance from the FCC, which is coming in the form of Title II regulation. This is why net neutrality is a necessary policy that should be enforced by responsible government bodies.

There are some major concerns about net neutrality and its implementation, and that has led to various types of objection to the policy. Following the same logic used in favor of net neutrality, it is possible to discredit these arguments that many people, especially those who have a misunderstanding of the principle of net neutrality, frequently use. Some critics claim that net neutrality is not needed because violations of it are not a threat to the Internet economy, or because there are no violations to speak of. Others believe net neutrality to be a violation of free market principles, and that it is an excuse for the government to expand its reach into civilian Internet use. All of these reasons are commonly cited by the media and by legislators who attempt to fight net neutrality regulation.

In his dissent given against the proposed 2015 FCC reclassification, Republican commissioner Ajit Pai said, “So the FCC is abandoning a 20-year-old, bipartisan framework for keeping the Internet free and open in favor of Great Depression-era legislation designed to regulate Ma Bell. But at least we’re getting something in return, right? Wrong. The Internet is not broken. There is no problem for the government to solve.” He points out the same events that most proponents use in favor as net neutrality, events such as Madison River blocking Vonage, Comcast blocking BitTorrent or AT&T restricting Apple’s Facetime, and says that they “aren’t enough to tell a coherent story about net neutrality” (Pai 8). This is a prime example of the argument that net neutrality violations are not a problem. Pai lists dozens of popular devices and applications that depend on Internet connection, using them as evidence that the Internet has gone along fine without net neutrality regulation. But many of the devices Pai lists would not be possible without pressure from the FCC and consumers for ISPs to follow net neutrality. Home networking, as mentioned earlier, was only allowed by 4 out of the 10 network operators in 2002 although it was technologically feasible at that point. Not one had allowances for a consumer to operate a server out of their home, something that thousands of consumers do now, often to play online games or run online businesses from their homes (“Net Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination” 160). If broadband providers had not been pressured into allowing Wi-Fi use, very few of the devices Pai listed would be practical. So even if we look beyond highly publicized touchstone events, there is widespread evidence that net neutrality is threatened on a general level.

Even if there was not evidence for net neutrality violation, there is precedent for putting legislation in place as a future safeguard. A company would not discriminate without necessity, opponents say, because making customers unhappy would harm its business. But discrimination might not always be so rational. Tim Wu points out that a well-known piece of legislation exists for the purpose of making business rethink about how discrimination really helps their business: “In the employment context, the various discrimination laws have an explicitly educational function. For example, an express purpose of age discrimination legislation is to force employers to reconsider stereotyped perceptions of the competency of the elderly in the workforce” (“Net Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination” 157). A company might have once operated under the misconception that hiring a man over a woman who has better qualifications would be in their favor, but employment laws help them rethink what is truly beneficial to them. The argument that businesses will eventually come to an optimal solution because they will make decisions in favor of the customer sometimes falls short in the same way. This relates back to the end-to-end principle: the sum of consumer knowledge will produce the optimal decision, rather than a single company, because in Wu’s word’s, “Firms instead generally depend on a set of routines that survive unless the firm dies or manages to mutate its way of doing business. This latter capacity is limited by the limits of humans’ ability to predict or foresee the future” (“The Broadband Debate” 83). Because lack of competition has blocked out negative feedback from customers, the only way to tell ISPs that their “set of routines” for making decisions about blocking content is not in their best interest is through educational regulation like the FCC’s net neutrality.

In response to the common claim that net neutrality harms the free market, the end-to-end principle that was previously explained and the evidence of anticompetitive practices in the last mile prove that the opposite is true. There is one other facet to this argument: If content providers wanted to get around oppressive operators, why could they not just build their own network? Christopher Yoo, one of the leaders in the academic field arguing against net neutrality says that, “Once a sufficient number of last-mile options exists, it would matter little if one network chose to make Yahoo! its preferred search engine” (“Keeping the Internet Neutral?” 584). In addition to the fact that the infrastructure owners attempt to prevent market entry, which is enough evidence on its own that the system is broken, the practicality of building a new network is limited to only very well established companies with massive amounts of cash. Zixue Tai, an associate professor of Journalism and Telecommunications at the University of Kentucky compares it to politics, another field with high barriers to entry. He says, “Metaphorically, it is like the argument anyone can start his own political party in the U.S. Look at the reality – any prospect of a third party during times of elections is going to be crushed by the two major parties to nil” (Tai).

To some, net neutrality appears to de-incentivize investment in network infrastructure, because there is no way no gain additional benefit from optimizing certain services with the network (called “vertical integration”). Thomas Hazlett and Joshua Wright claim that net neutrality should not be enacted because it would classify network innovations, like digital voice systems that cable companies offer instead of traditional phone lines, as discriminatory (Hazlett 771). The key here is that those types of networks are closed systems, where the operator owns the infrastructure and is not acting as a last mile gatekeeper. If a company wants to build its own innovative, private network for its services, it is not in violation, but if it allows third-party access, it must be indiscriminate. Lawrence Lessig of Stanford confirms that innovation in the infrastructure would not cease with net neutrality. “My concern is not whether the technology that “pipe” owners use is proprietary or not,” he says. Broadband operators can do as they please as long as “they do so in ways that do not interfere with other network functionality, conflict with net values, or create negative externalities for the Internet generally. The Internet was meant to be extended” (Lenard 5).

Perhaps the most popular counter to net neutrality is the apprehension that many conservative Americans have to accepting government regulation. Pai claims that the government has historically had a hands-off approach to the internet, and should continue to do so because they don’t own it. “And no,” he says, “ the federal government didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. For all intents and purposes, the Internet didn’t exist until the private sector took it over in the 1990s, and it’s been the commercial Internet that has led to the innovation, the creativity, the engineering genius that we see today” (Pai 5). Actually this is not true, because the Internet would not be in the state it currently exists in without the Internet. In his testimony to Congress, Tim Wu points out that the basic protocols that dictate how the Internet behaves were developed with funds from the Department of Defense, and that the “funding of research and development was an astonishing success, in part because the resulting design was so good it hasn’t much needed government. The internet is by design diverse and decentralized, making competition on top of the infrastructure viciously competitive. That competition has ironed out many of the problems government might otherwise be needed to solve.” The government has been a part of the Internet from the very beginning, and as the discussion of the FCC’s history shows, legislation like net neutrality is nothing new. In fact, Wu says that net neutrality is the natural status quo of the internet, but legislation is required to keep it that way: “ Some of you may feel hesitant, feel that government’s role will necessarily be complex. It need not be. All government needs to say is this: leave things the way they are. It needs merely to recognize consumers’ rights to access the content and applications of their choice, free from discrimination, and give meaningful remedies when those freedoms are interfered with” (Hearing on Network Neutrality 52). These limits of interference, in theory also extend to the government itself, meaning it may not discriminate against content, as in censorship. Tom Wheeler puts it this way: “This is no more a plan to regulate the Internet than the First Amendment is a plan to regulate free speech” (“Open Internet Rules”).

Works Cited

Ammori, Marvin. “The Case For Net Neutrality.” Foreign Affairs 93.4 (2014): 62-73. Business Source Premier. Web. 27 Jan. 2015.

Cook, Vickie S. “Net Neutrality: What Is It And Why Should Educators Care?.” Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin 80.4 (2014): 46-49. Academic Search Complete. Web. 24 Feb. 2015.

Hazlett, Thomas W., and Joshua D. Wright. “The Law And Economics Of Network Neutrality.” Indiana Law Review 45.3 (2012): 767-840. Academic Search Complete. Web. 24 Feb. 2015.

Hearing on “Network Neutrality: Competition, Innovation, and Nondiscriminatory Access.” *United States. Cong. House. Telecom & Antitrust Task Force. *Committee on the Judiciary. By Tim Wu. 109 Cong., 2 sess. H. Doc. 109–109. N.p., 24 Apr. 2006. Web. 27 Jan. 2015.

Lenard, Thomas M., and Randolph J. May. Net Neutrality or Net Neutering: Should Broadband Internet Services Be Regulated? New York, NY: Springer, 2006. Print.

“Open Internet Rules” Tom Wheeler (Address). C-SPAN. 12 Feb. 2015. Web. 5 May 2015.

Pai, Ajit. “Oral Dissent on Internet Regulation.” Federal Communications Commission. Washington, DC. 26 February 2015. Formal Statement.

Snider, Mike, Roger Yu, and Emily Brown. “Keep It Simple: What is net neutrality?” USA TODAY Tech. *Digital Audio Recording. *SoundCloud, 9 Feb. 2015. Web. 28 Feb. 2015.

Tai, Zixue. E-mail interview. 27 Jan. 2015.

United States. Federal Communications Commission. Washington, D.C. FCC Adopts Strong, Sustainable Rules to Protect the Open Internet. N.p., 26 Feb. 2015. Web. 28 Feb. 2015.

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Van Der Berg, Rudolph. “How the ‘Net Works: An Introduction to Peering and Transit.” Ars Technica. N.p., 2 Sept. 2008. Web. 10 Feb. 2015.

Wheeler, Tom. “This Is How We Will Ensure Net Neutrality.” Editorial. Wired. N.p., 04 Feb. 2015. Web. 27 Jan. 2015.

“Why It’s a Good Thing That Broadband Isn’t a Common Carrier.” Platform. National Cable & Telecommunications Association, 27 Jan. 2014. Web. 13 Mar. 2015.

Wu, Tim, and Christopher S. Yoo. “Keeping the Internet Neutral?: Tim Wu and Christopher Yoo Debate.” Federal Communications Law Journal 3.59 (2007): N.p. *SSRN. Web. 27 Jan. 2015.

—. “Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination.” Journal of Telecommunications and High Technology Law 2 (2003): 141. SSRN. Web. 27 Jan. 2015.

—. “The Broadband Debate: A User’s Guide.” Journal of Telecommunications and High Technology Law 3.69 (2004): N.p. SSRN. Web. 27 Jan. 2015.

The Burden of Things

Wed, 18 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Note : This essay was originally written as an assignment for a creative writing class. If you find it to drag on near the end, understand that this is due to the fact that I was trying to reach a page length requirement. Thank you.

I recently went to Yucatan, Mexico on a mission trip with my church. No, this won’t be a cliché “what I learned on a mission trip” essay, although I did learn a lot about the people there and about my faith. But in a tangible sense, I learned a lot about economics in the real world and the relation between poverty and stuff.

In Mexico, there’s people in poverty who don’t have that many things. Real poverty, in the way that most people think about it. Most buildings are unfinished, many only have dirt floors, and none are more than a few rooms at the largest. When I hear people talk mention poor kids in other countries, this is what I picture.

But I’ve also come to realize that the there’s another type of poverty, and it is a completely different animal. Take, for example, the many homes in the Appalachian region of our state where people live in dilapidated structures, and where children’s lunches are funded by the state schools. Now look in their yards and back lots. Typically, I imagine seeing loads and loads of stuff. Multiple cars, trucks, tractors lay abandoned, while stacks on unused toys scatter the plot. How can a family with two relatively new cars and four rusting Ford F-150’s not be able to buy their kids food? And what are they doing with smartphones? It seems like poor prioritization.

Well actually they can buy food, if you could call it that. Fast food chains offer availability and affordability at the sacrifice of nutrition, which is why obesity is associated with poverty in the west, contrary to what was once thought. Real food that helps the body costs significantly more, because our society has put a higher value on health than others historically have. Now it is the privilege of the wealthy to be thin and eat simple foods, and the market has driven it out of reach for others.

In Yucatan, although the average income is about $10 USD a day, due to advantages in climate fresh food is easily available. Education, infrastructure, and security are out of reach, but food is not. The cost of living seems to me to be very to low, if you need it to be. The problem is that in America (and probably other developed countries) the essential things like food cost more and the “luxuries” like education and transportation cost less, leaving poor people in an unfortunate situation. At risk of sounding unsympathetic to those in the most severe of situations, many considered in poverty will get by just fine. But is mere continuance good enough? Is the guarantee of a life expectancy longer than the rest of the world enough to say, “That’s fine, these people aren’t poor anymore, move along”, or should we be constantly saying “We’re not quite there yet, these conditions need to improve?”

I should break off a bit here and clarify that I don’t think that well-to-do people are obligated to spend their disposable income on the poor, or that it is a sin, morally or socially, to be wealthy. Giving away money doesn’t solve the problem. More than anything, employment, education and technological advancements (An example of how those who spend resources on things other that overt philanthropy can have the largest impact) make a difference to these poor people.

These thoughts are all to say that I don’t know what to think about poverty, about whether it is relative to the environment around it, a line to be crossed, or a ladder to be climbed. These thoughts come most when I’m cleaning at home. I think, “Why do I have so much stuff?” and find ways to get rid of it. Many very poor people, like those in Mexico, would like to find ways to get more stuff. But as hungry people in America might tell them, stuff doesn’t help. Many of these things could help those in need, but it really doesn’t move them on the scale towards being better of in comparison with the rest of us.

I feel burdened with been privilege sometimes, which makes me sound like I’m some sort of suck up. I really am confused on what poverty really is. Is it surviving on the essentials and lacking everything else and being content? Or is it living in the excess but lacking the essentials and being miserable? Or does poverty even extend to someone who is fine but has nothing compared to his neighbors?

Last week I volunteered with some others at a food bank. “The face of hunger may surprise you,” they said, and I believe them. Now many people without food can receive it. The same people who have cars and trucks and go to school with rich kids but can’t eat have food. But what about kids in Mexico who have food but little hope of progress in the future? Is hunger the baseline for poverty? I don’t know, but I do think there is a responsibility to address this rather than ignore it. Not that we all need to give our money away, or can’t enjoy our own things, but we need to at least come to terms with this modern phenomenon of a hungry person with stuff. I have yet to find something that satisfactorily poses a solution to this dilemma. In the meantime, I have a lot of stuff that gets donated to Goodwill. Consumer goods are no longer the mark of wealth. The lack of excess things is a privilege in this nation. I hope that I am blessed to find myself in a spot where it doesn’t matter what kind of poor someone is, they can be helped. Again, I’m just running on post-missions trip save-the-world vibes. But it is a strange juxtaposition for a strange modern age. Such is the burden of too many things.

Tech Predictions for 2015

Tue, 27 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

2014 was a big year in technology. Wearable technology broke into the public consciousness, drones had everyone buzzing, smartphones got bigger (again), and large-scale cyberattacks grabbed headlines. Given that the consumer electronics industry is now intricately interwoven with modern culture, predicting the trends of the industry is akin to looking into the future. And because it’s not cool to be a clickbait post that makes vague and generally accurate but unhelpful predictions, each prediction will end with one very bold and probably ridiculous statement. That being said, here are my predictions for technology trends in 2015.

Update: On the Vergecast Ep. 135, the last day of CES, Casey Newton talks about two of my points (cars and IoT) with nearly the same opinion Listen to that podcast here, at 38:10 for the part about cars and about a minute later for the part about Internet of Things, which I find quite funny. I promise this article was written before I heard the episode.

Internet of Things gets a rebrand

The internet of things. One of the biggest buzzwords of 2014, but does the average consumer know what that means? Many manufacturers mistakenly think that adding a screen or a remote control app to every appliance makes it “smart” but I don’t entirely agree. While being able to start a washer machine at work with an iPhone is admittedly smarter than manually doing so, but that doesn’t make it part of the internet of things. The point of the IoT is to connect everything in a web of communication, like its namesake phenomenon, and I don’t see a whole lot of entries in that space. An example would be if a home security system turned on interior lights when it detected motion, or all devices went into “away mode” when one device, like a Nest thermostat does. A good rule of thumb is that if it’s not on the list of IFTTT channels (the digital manifestation of the internet of everything), it’s not actually the an IoT device. Until someone figures out the magic recipe for IoT, I think the hype will die, mostly because brands think people want their television to talk to their dishwasher.

Bold Prediction: The Internet of Things stops being “the thing”.

Self driving cars come of age

Back in May, Google revealed that the longtime project of modding Toyota Prii (yes, that is the plural of Prius) into self-driving vehicles had reached a new milestone: it’s own concept car. Looking like something out of a cartoon, the car has no pedals or steering wheel and is fully functional. Late in 2014, Google asked permission from San Francisco to test its prototype on the road.

Even just this should be enough to forebode the rise of autonomous vehicles, but it’s not just that: everyone is making self-driving cars. Tesla’s Model S P85D has some sweet self-driving features (but they’re quick to label it Autopilot, and not self-driving). Volvo is on the cutting edge as well. Many other car companies are introducing self-driving components, but there are lots of naysayers. I think the technology is progressing faster than we think.

Bold Prediction: In 2015, Google, likely in tandem with an established car manufacturer, will announce plans to introduce a completely self-driving car.

Tablets die a slow death

Since the iPad caught on, the use cases for tablets have been this: 1) when a phone proves too small for viewing the content (like movies), 2) when the television is too dumb to access the content (like Netflix), 3) or when the work too light enough to justify lugging out a laptop.With the ever-increasing size of smartphones, the plethora of ways to stream content on a television (Roku, Chromecast, Apple/Android TV, and the rise of inexpensive, lightweight laptops (Chromebooks), the use case scenarios for tablets are dwindling. The only hope for tablets is for them to become actual productivity devices, which so far has failed miserably. One one hand, iPads, Kindles, and Android tablets are built for consuming content, and are not equipped for what most people do for work or school (I know a few people who try this with frustration). On the other hand, Microsoft Surface tablets and other various hybrids are build for productivity and have had minimal success, mostly because for a tablet to be productive, it pretty much needs to be a laptop, and becomes a less fun tablet. Bottom line? Laptops are good at being laptops, tablets are good at being tablets. And now that phones are getting bigger, phones are getting to beating tablets at their own game.

Bold Prediction: Tablet sales, especially smaller ones, will shrink. Apple will introduce multitasking productivity features into iPads to distinguish them from iPhones.

Streaming content gets a boost

I think 2015 will be the year that studios realize that after the disc sales have died down, they gain nothing by keeping titles to themselves and off streaming services like Netflix. I eternally hate when titles disappear off Netflix, and I hope we will be seeing this less.

Taylor Swift might have gotten away with pulling off Spotify to sell more albums, but anyone with less star power than she would lose out. Even Swift, is not impervious to grumbling from the hordes of people who are used to are used to having access to any music they desire in exchange for a few advertisements. I think that Spotify will be willing to shell out a few more bucks to keep their claim on such a comprehensive library.

Bold Prediction: Taylor Swift comes back to Spotify.

Digital purchases go through the roof

This point is an interesting juxtaposition to the previous one, and while I think music purchases will decline in favor of streaming services, I think that consumers will be more willing to make digital purchases including digital movies, online services, and apps. In the past, many people balked at anything beyond free apps, and apart from Amazon, online purchase were rare. Now with the ease of Apple Pay, and the recent influx of people using Google Wallet to rent movies (a few million people signed up just to watch The Interview), people will be less hesitant to buy services.

Bold Prediction: Apple Pay takes off

Let’s see how those predictions pan out. Have a great 2015!

My Coding Testimony

Thu, 22 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In the beginning, there was a calculator. A TI-83 Plus, to be exact. Purchased off of Ebay for 8th grade Algebra, it was not a glamourous device. Someone said you could play games on it. I didn’t know how to get any on there. But there was a button, labelled PGRM, that seemed promising. “NEW”, “EDIT”, “EXEC”. Sounds familiar. I’ve never programmed before, but I get to know my way around computers faster than some. The first program is a Quadratic Formula calculator, using what we were learning in class, just some math functions. Eventually I realized that all the commands are cataloged in the calculator. A “Guess the Number” program results. Someone gives me a link cable. CatalogHelp, and a handmade pong game make it to my calculator (also MirageOS for games, finally). What enthralls me is that I am in control of making the calculator do whatever I want, but I just have to learn the right words, available from an infinite combination of commands.

9th grade geometry. My friend and I are bored in class and our teacher tells us that if we learn some code to present the lessons in a creative way, we would be exempt from the test. My friend, who had also recently dabbled in programming, shows me htmldog.com. Between that and W3Schools, we hack together a website with pages for each lesson. I can honestly say that while I did grasp HTML, I did not understand a single line of CSS that I typed/pasted in. As always, with enough blind following of tutorials and tinkering with code, I gained an understanding.

Somewhere in the Geometry site that still floats about on a Google Drive folder, there is code from a Mozilla Developer Network snippet. Of all the resources I used, that one was of the highest quality. I was very grateful to them, and to give back, I joined the documentation team to make edits to developer documentation (I had no idea what I was doing, but I could fix typos). One day (May 30, 2013 as Gmail tells me), a person saying he is a highschool student says he found some broken links while doing some minor edits (as I was doing). I immediately emailed him privately and asked him how he was learning coding. He said he learned JavaScript and Python from Codecademy.com. On June 24, I signed up.

A few web courses on Codecademy and many project websites later (My friend and I are working on posting all our documented old work), I have a working knowledge of HTML and CSS. I still don’t know what I want to know, and that is programming. I get bogged down in a JavaScript course. Another course I try is over my head. I somewhat muck along slowly.

This fall, I started an internship with Awesome Inc. I want to help their developers, but I can’t really help out too much, so I stick with writing, my other strength. Then I get asked to make a website, which I haven’t done in a while. I find it comes much easier this time. I catch the bug again. I find out that there are people super-willing to help with any question I have. I try a Udemy course on Jekyll. Not much programming, but it had good lessons in workflow, and I learned how to use Git. Last month, I had to set a metric that matters. Blog posts are hard to quantify, so I chose hours spent learning code (shooting for 60, with 10 in the first week).

I hope I reach my goal.

Trying my hand at Google Code-In

Sun, 04 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been into open-source for some time, ever since I brought my school’s old laptops back to life with my friend’s Puppy Linux disc. I was amazed at how a project could reach quality at or above that of it’s proprietary counterparts, and still remain free (both as in beer and as in speech). In this lies a revolution of open-source: if a project is free (of charge), then users are attracted, and if it is free (to contribute), then users who find it useful are motivated to contribute, which makes the project better and attracts more potential contributors.

I always wanted to get involved in the open-source community, but I am not technically advanced (yet!). But then I saw how Mozilla, the makers of Firefox, had ways for novices to contribute, like documentation and support. I got my feet wet by editing some articles on HTML standards. For people who don’t know what that means, I would recommend Mozilla’s Army of Awesome, where you can help Firefox users out on Twitter.

This brings me to Google Code-In. It’s no secret that I would like to become a programmer and work for a company like Google, but so far my CS and programming education has been largely self-guided and slow (Shoutout to Codecademy and my new best friend Sal Khan, seriously, their stuff is great), and I usually can’t contribute to things because they are mostly over my head. For those who don’t know, Google Code-In is a contest sponsored by Google where high school students can complete tasks for various open-source organizations for prizes. One task completed gets a certificate, three gets a T-shirt, and a completing a large number of creative tasks qualifies finalists for other prizes. Each student can only do 2 beginner tasks. So when my friend (the same one with the Linux images) sent me the link to the blog post announcing this year’s Google Code-In, I assumed I would not be able to help in any significant capacity.”Maybe I’ll try next year when I know more programming,” I thought to myself. But then I saw this on the FAQ and I was in:

#Open Source Fundamentals #You can contribute without being a coder! You do not have to be a coder to contribute to open source. There are many different skill sets needed to help an open source community thrive.

The guide went on to list ways to contribute: Documentation, Research, Outreach, Training, and User Interface. I don’t have to wait until I’m a coding master to help open source organizations, I can help now! What’s more, is that by helping in small, non-technical ways, I can still glean valuable information not only about programming, but about how to work with a community, help others, and challenge myself.

The first task I did with Google Code-In probably didn’t help Copyleft Games, the mentor organization much. It was marked “beginner”, and all I had to do was set up Copyleft’s 3D game engine on my computer, run a demo rendering, and take a screenshot. The task was really about introducing students to tools used for Linux development, but I still hit a few roadblocks. For example, did you know that you need Python 3, not 2 to install PySoy with WAF, and you need to compile Python with the --enable-shared flag in order for an interpreter to be embedded into another application? Neither did I. So here’s a thank you to Arc Riley, a mentor, as well as @ubuntor and @poxip, whose real names I may never know. Thank you for listening to my dumb questions on IRC (I also learned not to ask to ask, but to ask).

So here’s where I am now. While looking through more available task, I found a task from Sugar, the group that make software for those laptops they give to kids in Africa, titled “Introduce Yourself”. Here is what it said:

Write a blog post about why you are participating in Google Code-In, what you hope to learn from the GCI and how mariahvillarreal [a mentor] can help you. Include a picture. Share blog post through social media.

“No,” you think to yourself,”I’ve been fooled into reading this high-school kid just wrote to get a t-shirt from Google, he doesn’t care about this stuff at all!” Well, that is partly true. This post is a response to that task, and it does help me win a t-shirt. But this blog post serves as more than that. In order to express my gratitude for this task not being marked “beginner”, I have turned this in to something more, a call to action for everyone, even those not technically inclined, to contribute to open source, because that’s what Google Code-In is about. Open source is really important; nearly every piece of technology you use relies on some open source (you can find the GNU Open Source License on an Apple iPhone), and the best way to show gratitude is to give back to the community.

So in response to the prompt, I am participating in the Google Code-In because I believe in open source. I hope to learn more about programming but also about the communities behind each of these organizations. mariahvillarreal can help me by getting this word out. Thank you for giving me this opportunity, Mariah. Now show this to everyone at Sugar Labs. Judges at Google, share this to your friends. Tweet about it. Everyone can get involved in open source. I hope this little post helps inspire a few.