Why Do We Need Net Neutrality?

In his speech, Genachowski lists three reasons for why we need to be concerned about the future of the Internet:

• limited competition among service providers
• broadband providers, who generally sell phone service and cable TV subscriptions, and whose "rational bottom-line interests may diverge from the broad interests of consumers in competition and choice"
• as the Internet has grown, technologies for managing networks have become more sophisticated, but these tools "cannot by themselves determine the right answers to difficult policy questions -- and they raise their own set of new questions"

Back in 2004, then-Chairman Michael Powell proposed a set of four principles (PDF) based on the idea that ISPs should not be allowed to prevent users from accessing any lawful part of the Internet or from attaching "non-harmful" devices to the network. Today, Julius Genachowski proposed to add two more principles to this list.

Principle of Non-Discrimination

The fifth principle is one of non-discrimination -- stating that broadband providers cannot discriminate against particular Internet content or applications.

This means that ISPs would not be allowed to block or degrade lawful traffic over their networks or favor some content or applications over others. An ISP could not, for example, give its subscribers faster access to its own streaming video site, but slow down similar content from another site that is owned by a competitor.

Principle of Transparency

The sixth principle is a transparency principle -- stating that providers of broadband Internet access must be transparent about their network management practices.

Today, we often have to wonder if our ISP is actually shaping traffic and purposely slowing our torrent downloads. Google even got so worried about this topic that it released a number of tools that allow consumers to check if their ISPs are engaged in traffic shaping. If adopted, this would mean that broadband providers will have to disclose what kind of protocols they are blocking and how they are managing traffic on their networks.

According to Genachowski, the FCC has "an obligation to ensure that the Internet is an enduring engine for U.S. economic growth, and a foundation for democracy in the 21st century. We have an obligation to ensure that the Internet remains a vast landscape of innovation and opportunity." While he acknowledges that some parties would argue that innovation and investment are exactly the reasons why the government shouldn't adopt open Internet rules, Genachowski argues that an open Internet will ultimately benefit both consumers and businesses and that an open Internet "is the best thing we can do to promote investment and innovation."

As Kevin C. Tofel notes on jkOnTheRun, it is important to note that all of these principles will apply to platforms that have access to the Internet - including mobile devices. This could have major ramifications for mobile ISPs. For more about this, see Tofel's blog post which focuses on exactly what these rules could mean for mobile service providers and consumers.

Join the Discussion

If you want to join the discussion, the new OpenInternet.gov site allows for (moderated) comments. What's your point of view? Should the government take a more active role in keeping the Internet free and open, or is this an oxymoron and we should just let the market regulate itself?

Second Place: Gov Pulse: This application allows users to browse the Federal Register and create feeds on the most important proposals and information. Users can browse the latest government-related notices, respond to regulatory amendments and comment on everything from endangered species to homeland security.

Third Place: This We Know: This application gives you government-related info based on your zip code. It offers information on the number of factories within a 7 mile radius, the number of pounds of pollutants released, violent crime rates, cancer rates and related bills in Congress. This would actually be a great tool for environmental health advocates looking to make the connection between cancer hot spots and chemical pollutants.

Best Data Visualization: Quakespotter: This site creates a 3d visualization of earthquakes and matches it to data taken from those areas on Twitter.

For a complete list of entries visit the Sunlight Labs contest page.

That's right - someday soon you'll be able to log in to the websites of the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Insititute of Health and other government agencies with your accounts from Google, Yahoo and similar services. Below we discuss the privacy protection steps being taken, the usability issues and the ultimate significance of this announcement.

Participating companies include Yahoo!, PayPal, Google, Equifax, AOL, VeriSign, Acxiom, Citi, Privo and Wave Systems. On the government side is the Center for Information Technology (CIT), National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and "related agencies."

Conversation about whether and how best to implement a system of Federated Identity across government websites has been underway for at least the last 6 months. We wrote about the first public rumblings this summer. Kaliya Hamlin explains the state of the conversation in detail on her blog.

The two biggest questions will be protection of privacy and user experience.

Privacy Protections

OpenID board member and Facebook employee David Recordon explained to us tonight that participating government sites are not allowed to pass personal information about users from one site to another, even though we'll be logging in with the same accounts. Instead, when we authenticate ourselves with Google, Yahoo, Verisign or whoever our Identity Provider of choice is, that website will pass a different, unique URL to the government site we're logging in to.

The identity providers will keep track of all the unique URLs used to identify us to different government sites and we'll just need to remember one log-in. That means you'll need to trust your identity provider to keep your private information separated between agencies - it won't be up to the government sites themselves to do so.

User Experience

User experience has been one of the biggest issues around systems of federated identity since they began to proliferate. No decisions have been made yet about exactly how users will log in to these government sites, but we will be given a limited number of choices between providers that have been government approved. (If you own a domain that's an OpenID provider, you won't be able to use that.)

Most likely users will be presented with an array of logos to click on, launching a new window to communicate just with the identity provider. Once a user proves who they are to the identity provider, that company will then vouch for the user to the government site.

Why Is This Important?

This is a significant move for three reasons. First, it could make securely accessing government websites much easier for users. That would increase use of government services online and could kick off a virtuous circle of increased web-savvy service in response to increased citizen interest.

Second, federated identity provides not just easy "single sign-on" but also offers the opportunity for users to carry personal information with them from one website to another. This "payload" of information can help new websites we use quickly personalize our experience and deliver more intelligent service. That's likely to be complicated when it comes to privacy-centric areas like health, but there's a lot of potential there. If Google knows you've made plans to travel to another country soon, and if you're willing to expose that information to a government website, then the site could offer health-specific information about the country you plan on visiting for example. That's a long ways off, but it's part of the big vision of data portability.

Finally, when any large institution puts its weight behind an open standard then that creates more incentive for other institutions to get on board with the standard as well. Federated Identity systems like OpenID and Info Cards have seen growing amounts of support from different companies, but as that support grows then the information available to innovate on top of grows, the number of opportunities for users to access innovative services built on top of standards grows and the incentive for still more companies to get on board with open data, innovative technology and data portability grows as well.

To draw the standard railroad analogy, if one large railroad network adopts the new standard of rail sizes then trains that run on standard rails can travel further, the passengers can go new places and other networks have more interest in adopting the standard as well. On the information super-highway, the network of government websites are a very big railroad (if you will).

The pilot program will remain a discussion for some time. The OpenID and Information Card Foundations are good places to visit if you'd like to participate in the conversations that will inform later implementation.

Another Sunlight Foundation project is Get Represented. In a nutshell, Get Represented uses the GetSatisfaction model of public corporate discourse and applies it to Congress. Student Kyle Powers worked on this project for the Summer of Code in order to create a public feedback mechanism for government decision-making. Members of Congress have their own GetRepresented page and voters can comment, vote up articles and have public conversations with their representatives. While the final product is not yet available to the public, you can check for updates on the Sunlight Labs blog.

To view more Summer of Code projects visit the Google Open Source Programs page.

A number of UK government officials and departments already use Twitter, including the Foreign Office and the Communities and Local Government Department. With Andrew Stott, the UK Cabinet Office also has its own "director of digital engagement."

As the AP points out, most governments in Europe have only had moderate success on Twitter, though quite a few UK government accounts have a large number of followers and the Prime Minister's account has over 1 million followers.

A couple of interesting points from the guide:

• Whitehall staff should not follow users uninvited in order to avoid being accused of "Big Brother" style behavior - they can follow users back who follow them first, though
• tweets should be written in a human style ("informal spoken English") and go beyond links to press releases and announcements
• tweets should be frequent, timely, and credible
• tweets should include exclusive content, including insights from ministers
• all posts have to be cleared by staff at the Information Officer grade and above

Provide Thought Leadership, Monitor Twitter

A section about the government's objectives states that officials should use Twitter to provide thought leadership and give citizens a low-barrier method for interacting with government departments.

Williams also advises officials to monitor Twitter for mentions of "our brand, our Ministers and flagship policy initiatives, engaging with our critics and key influencers."

Twitter Policy

Interestingly, Williams also advices departments to post a Twitter Policy on their websites and link to it from their Twitter profiles. This policy includes information about what followers can expect (2-10 tweets a day, type of contents, etc.), as well as a notice that being followed back by a department "does not imply endorsement of any kind." The policy also states that staff will only respond during office hours, Monday to Friday (which might be a bit limiting given that social media doesn't exactly take a break on the weekend).

Overall, within the boundaries of what governments can do within social media without hitting the limits of what would be seen as acceptable and without breaking the governments' own rules, this guide seems extremely level-headed and contains numerous useful pieces of advice for individuals and businesses who are just discovering Twitter.

Said Open Source for America's David Thomas, "Technologies enabled by software freedoms can help make government IT deployment more secure, more cost-effective, faster to deploy, with greater privacy and the ability to help eliminate vendor lock-in."

Nevertheless, lobbying will be no easy feat as smaller open source companies will have to jockey for position against Microsoft during requests for proposals. Furthermore, in the past government officials have expressed security concerns with open source code. Critics argue that exposed source code can be examined by attackers and therefore poses a risk. Nevertheless, another argument for exposed code can be made in ensuring security. By moving away from proprietary software models and giving free access to a system's source code, governments are no longer dependent on a select few contractors for their defense. Instead, an entire programming community can be deployed to defend against attacks.

One of the government's key open source projects is actually with the National Security Agency. The agency already employs open source technologies to address multi-level security on government machines through SELinux. SELinux was first released as a modified version of the Linux operating system and has since taken on a life of its own as the NSA works with open source contractors to continue to tweak security. While Linux users were at first suspicious that the NSA might be using the code base to spy on their machines, no back doors were detected in the software. Today, thousands of government employees and Linux users protect their machines using SELinux.

Another successful open source government project is Sunlight Labs' Apps for America. In its first year, the project proved a resounding success in displaying how open source government efforts increases accountability and collective solutions. Apps for America yielded a number of great user-generated projects including call Congress Firefox plug-in and a site that tracks filibustering. Director of Sunlight Labs Clay Johnson was celebrated amongst other open source innovators at yesterday's Google O'Reilly Open Source Awards.

Tim O'Reilly said, "An invention has to make sense in the world it finishes in, not in the world it started." As new security risks take shape and new data sets become vital, governments need to consider open source solutions in their quest to provide better citizen-facing services.

If you'd like to contribute to government open source projects, check out Apps for America 2 and Open Source for America.

SMS service, which political dissidents had used to spread messages and organize protests, has been restricted since June 11, causing many Iranians to use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social sites to broadcast and communicate.

Iran's broken digital communication infrastructure caused many Iranians to turn to services such as Twitter, using proxies to work around government restrictions for web use. Twitter became so integral to Iranians' communication, particularly with the wider global community, that the U.S. State Department asked Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance which would have occurred in the immediate aftermath of the election and resultant protests. Other services rushed to add Persian translation features.

Hopefully, the unblocking of text messaging in Iran is a sign that communication channels are returning to normal. So, does this mean that everyone's new favorite color, "Solidarity Green," will begin to fade away from social web avatars sometime soon? Once the country and its government emerge from crisis mode, what news will come from Iran, and what will the Internet have to say about it?

For those of you who've not had the pleasure of residing in our nation's capital and the outlying cities and suburbs of Virginia and Maryland, public transpo is a large part of commuter culture. So, based on the Apps for Democracy feedback, the D.C. Department of Transportation got together with the Office of Planning and the office of the city's CTO to develop Where's My Bus? It's a mobile application (that works on the web, as well) for getting users real-time GPS information on buses along the five-route D.C. Circulator system.

So the city launched a contest for developers to use the data to solve some of the city's problems, allotting $50,000 in prize money. The first year's results included 47 mobile, Facebook, and web apps with an estimated value of more than $2.6 million. Smart town.

Here's more on this year's contest, dubbed the Community Edition:

In the first phase of the project, problems and issues were identified through a crowdsourced, open gov-type site, and developers were challenged accordingly in a second phase. App submissions for this year's projects end at 11:30 tonight. We wish we'd heard about it earlier, because this sounds like the kind of thing every city could undertake with great results. It might even scale for a state or national level contest.

Anyhow, the Where's My Bus app was developed by government offices to respond to citizens' stated need for real-time public transportation information. The app data is also being made available to the public to encourage private developers to improve on the model and release their own, even better apps.

According to an email we received from the app developers, "Harriet Tregoning, director of the DC Office of Planning, and Gabe Klein, director of the DC Department of Transportation see it, giving people up-to-the-minute information on where their next bus is, in the palm of their hands, has the potential to transform the experience of using public transit."

Here are a few screenshots of the dead simple app in action:

Kudos to the city for initiating Apps for Democracy and for taking the first step to modernizing and mobilizing public transportation. We can't wait to see how private developers will expand on this application.

The innovative system is a pleasure to use and is being open sourced for other organizations interested in crowdsourcing similar tasks. You can honestly do something useful and important in 5 minutes or less on this site.

TransparencyCorps participants get points for every small task they do and can get themselves on a charming leader board of "transparency leaders." It's all very cute but this really is important work to be done.

We'd love to see an iPhone app to do this kind of work while waiting for the bus or in the line at the grocery store. How about a Facebook app that pushes out notifications to our friends' newsfeeds: "I just took 2 minutes and summarized a congressional earmark request to fund an environmental study of a proposed industrial park!"

Unlike Mechanical Turk, where there are scads of workers because they get paid small sums, TransparencyCorps volunteers are unpaid. Promotion will no doubt be the site's biggest challenge. If ease of use can be maximized and some effective promotion done, we think this could be a really great project.

Like most military operations, the transition is very well-planned and strategic. "Classroom computers, dayroom and kiosk computers, new computers (such as life cycle replacement computers) and computers with minimal impact to mission readiness will be part of the initial implementation". Marcus D. Good, Chief of the Army's Information Technology Systems Support Division says, "The Army's mandate is to have 50 percent of all Windows-based systems migrated to Vista by July 31st and 100 percent by the end of the year".

As is the case with any technology changes, there is a certain learning curve that users must overcome. The Army is providing several resources to help its employees and customers through the transition including in-house training sessions, quick-tip handouts and free online training. Since many of the Army's employees already use Vista and Office 2007 in their homes it has shortened the learning curve overall, but for those unfamiliar with the new operating system and software, it has provided two sites, usarmy.skillport.com and train.gordon.army.mil for its employees to preview Vista.

NextGov reported from the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and said that Chopra only briefly alluded to the matter of Open Government in his initial testimony. That's very disappointing.

"No questions for Chopra...about the more contentious aspects of tech policy implementation," writes TechPresident, "Not a question on topics like the electric grid or patent reform or electronic health records -- the last of which was earmarked in the stimulus package for $20 billion in federal spending."

It was just two weeks ago that the Senate voting record became officially available in an accessible XML format, something that not all members of the Senate were excited about. In reference to that policy, John Wonderlich, policy director for the Sunlight Foundation, told a Politico reporter that "the secretary of the Senate has cited a general standing policy ... that they're not supposed to present votes in a comparative format, that senators have the right to present their votes however they want to...it's pretty bad."

We hope that Chopra brings good ideas regarding transparency of public data to the new office of CTO, but it's hard to know for sure if he's not asked about the matter in confirmation hearings. Vigorous debate is an important part of openness, but yesterday's non-event will instead be added to the list of departures from the new regime's promises of transparency.

Today the White House launched an official collection of photos depicting Obama's first 100 days in office on Flickr. The Creative Commons Foundation asks why these photos are licensed as Creative Commons Attribution (meaning you have to credit the source) instead of being in the Public Domain free for use in any context, as data created by the Federal Government usually is.

The answer to the question? The photos aren't Public Domain because Flickr doesn't offer Public Domain licensing as an option. That's a shame for every photo publisher, not just he White House. Creative Commons licensing makes it really easy for people who want to re-use photos to do so quickly and easily by allowing content creators to communicate their conditions for re-use ahead of time. If you just want to get your photos out into the world with absolutely no restrictions, though, Flickr doesn't offer that option. Or, if you're a government agency that wants to publish photos on the best photo sharing site on the web and make them Public Domain like you ought to - you're out of luck.

We're going to guess that the White House will be added to the list of selected partners participating in the Flickr Commons, where organizations like the Library of Congress have photos posted under a special "no known copyright" license. That won't solve the problem for the rest of us, though, and it's probably not a scalable solution for every government agency that would like to publish to Flickr.

Hopefully Flickr will be prompted to change its licensing options; other users have asked for Public Domain as an option for some time. We've asked the company for comment and will update this post if we get a helpful reply. Flickr's support for Creative Commons has been fabulous. The next logical step is to support publishing photos to the Public Domain.

UPDATE: Since posting this we've been pointed to an active conversation on Flickr about Public Domain, where we found a link to site co-founder Stewart Butterfield's explanation four years ago for not offering Public Domain as an option.

That's just what the nonprofit Sunlight Foundation is aiming to make more possible with its work to make government and related data more available with its new Apps for America contest. More than 40 open source applications and websites making use of that data entered the contest and today the six fabulous winners were announced. We've got a five minute screencast tour of the winners below.

Fillibusted - a site aiming to hold filibustering Congresspeople accountable for their actions.

Legistalker - a site that tracks news, Twitter, YouTube and other online activity by and about members of Congress.

HelloCongress - like Digg for Congressional priorities, with a twist.

Know Thy Congressman - a beautiful informational pop-up about Congresspeople that you can invoke anywhere you find their names on the web.

Yeas and Nays - a sophisticated Firefox plug-in that helps you click-to-call members of Congress.

E-Paper Trail - a data rich site to compare and learn about Congresspeople.

There are also a number of Honorable Mentions included on the Sunlight contest page.

Some of these look more useful than others so far but with a little extra support who knows? It's an increasingly data-driven world, but in order to truly get the most value out of that data the web needs interface and mashup developers. That's why it's such a great idea for Sunlight to support these and other developers the way they do.

Last month, two Virginia congressmen recommended Chopra for the job, saying "Chopra's public and private experience in the technology field made him the right candidate," and pointed out his focus on healthcare IT "is ideal for a position that will have responsibilities dealing both with stimulus spending on healthcare and environmental programs."

"I have named Jeffrey Zients, a leading CEO, management consultant and entrepreneur, to serve as Deputy Director for Management of the Office of Management and Budget and as the first ever Chief Performance Officer. Jeffrey will work to streamline processes, cut costs, and find best practices throughout our government.

Aneesh Chopra, who is currently the Secretary of Technology for Governor Kaine of Virginia, has agreed to serve as America's Chief Technology Officer. In this role, Aneesh will promote technological innovation to help achieve our most urgent priorities - from creating jobs and reducing health care costs to keeping our nation secure.

Aneesh and Jeffrey will work closely with our Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, who is responsible for setting technology policy across the government, and using technology to improve security, ensure transparency, and lower costs. The goal is to give all Americans a voice in their government and ensure that they know exactly how we're spending their money - and can hold us accountable for the results."

Tim O'Reilly, the man who coined the term Web 2.0, claims that Chopra has been instrumental in helping him better understand Government 2.0 and how technology can be utilized to build a better government. He offers eight reasons why Chopra is an excellent choice as Federal CTO.

We've embedded a video of the keynote Aneesh Chopra gave at this year's State of the Net Conference earlier this year to give you an insight into the thoughts of our new CTO. In this 50 minute talk, Chopra discusses health IT, broadband policy and open education among other things.

Would you like your local and state governments to offer iPhone apps? We can see some reasons for it and some reasons why it might not be such a good idea.

The possibilities to take government iPhone apps even further are endless. RWW reader Celeste LeCompte, for example, says "As a cyclist, I'd love to have a location-aware app for mapping & reporting potholes, seeing who else has reported [an] issue."

Is This Really Appropriate?

There's something about seeing governments spend money on an iPhone app that seems a little questionable though, especially at a time like this. With so many people out of work and losing their homes - is building an app for a device owned by the relatively well-to-do really a good priority? In theory such apps could increase economic productivity and thus more than pay for themselves. That's the kind of trickle-down argument that gets made all the time about everything.

The iPhone is also a very locked-down, proprietary system that is far from universally accessible. A universally accessible web interface could be more appropriate. Most government websites could really use some help too, so design energy put in that direction could be a better choice.

What do you think? Does it make sense for governments to spend money on building their own iPhone apps? If so, what would you like to see in one?