Tag: research

A Critical Moment for the Future of the Internet | Techonomy

A Critical Moment for the Future of the Internet By Fadi Chehadé

The Internet, the greatest invention of our generation — several generations in fact — is in many ways a reflection of the American Dream. It’s vast and open, unlimited in its potential reach. It’s inclusive and welcoming. Anyone can be part of it and make a difference. The fastest growing part of the global economy is Internet-based, and the Internet accounts for a significant and growing portion of global GDP. According to Boston Consulting Group, the Internet is contributing up to 8 percent of GDP in some economies, powering growth and creating jobs.

You’d be correct in arguing it’s an American-made innovation. We can trace the roots of the Internet back some 50 years to a U.S. Defense Department research program. But as the Internet has expanded globally, it’s become increasingly clear that one government cannot lay claim to it. The Internet is a worldwide resource. It belongs to everyone.

Appropriately, the U.S. Government has long understood the Internet’s global potential. That’s why it helped create the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in 1998 — a neutral, independent and private-sector led organization designed to coordinate the Internet’s domain name system functions. Its operations are not made under the direction of one government, but through a bottom-up, multi-stakeholder policy development process involving business, civil society, engineers, academics, everyday users and many governments (around 150 of them participate). Under that system, the Internet has flourished, connecting over 3 billion of us, through our billions of devices.

Over the past two decades, the U.S. Government has gradually lightened its touch in its stewardship over the key Internet domain name system functions operated by ICANN. These technical functions are known as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions. The U.S. Government is now prepared to give up stewardship over the IANA functions altogether.

But why? And why now?

The U.S. Government always envisioned that its role in the IANA functions would be temporary. In March of 2014, the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced its intent to transition out of its stewardship of the IANA functions. In its announcement, NTIA cited its belief that ICANN as an organization has matured and improved its accountability, transparency and its technical competence. NTIA also asserted that the Internet, managed and driven by the global community of diverse stakeholders, is in very good hands.

The current model of Internet governance is the only one that can keep pace with the global expansion of users, including where, how, how often and in what language they’re using it. Continual evolution is key: Internet governance must evolve to meet the changing needs of all users to ensure the network remains available, open, stable and secure. A report by Microsoft projects that the number of Internet users will grow to 4.7 billion in 2025, 75 percent of that growth coming from emerging economies. We must work together to take into consideration this changing landscape.

Many believe that if the U.S. Government does not step aside, other governments, including some that are uncomfortable with an open and inclusive Internet, will step in to try to capture control of it through intergovernmental organizations. Alternatively, governments could become motivated to break away from the one, unified Internet to form their own national or regional networks, essentially fragmenting the Internet we know today. The result of this could be a patchwork of incompatible networks spread across different nation states, with long-term social, cultural, political and economic casualties. Why take that chance?

The ICANN multi-stakeholder community brings together thousands of representatives from large and small businesses and civil society with technical experts, researchers, academics and end users from all over the world. Our role at ICANN is to coordinate this community. We are neutral and independent facilitators.

Many stakeholders have been working tirelessly over the past year to meet NTIA’s guidelines for the transition of their stewardship role to the global multi-stakeholder community. Since March 2014, the community has spent more than 400 hours together on calls and in meetings, working to develop a proposal that meets the following guidelines:

• Supports and enhances the existing multi-stakeholder model.

• Maintains the security, stability and resiliency of the Internet Domain Name System.

• Meets the needs and expectations of the global customers and partners of the IANA services.

• Maintains the openness of the Internet.

They also have to take into account that NTIA also specified that it would not accept a proposal that replaces NTIA’s role with a government-led or intergovernmental organization solution.

Should the transition fail, the United States could lose credibility in its quest to maintain an open, multi-stakeholder-driven Internet. The risk of fragmentation will grow and U.S. and global economies risk losing the commercial and social benefits inherent in the single, global, free and open Internet where innovation happens, and on which we’ve all come to rely.

I invite you to please join our process. If you have concerns, voice them. If you agree with the fundamental principles the proposal is based on, share that. Engage with the multi-stakeholder community and share your thoughts and opinions. It is critical to the success of our effort and the future of the Internet that we have as much participation in the process as possible.

Fadi Chehadé is the president and CEO of ICANN, a not-for-profit, public benefit corporation with participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. He will be speaking on a session at the Techonomy Policy conference June 9 on the Worrisome Future of the Internet.
To attend, you can register here. Original article published at Techonomy.com.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/techonomy/a-critical-moment-for-the_b_7513308.html

The USA FREEDOM Act, the President’s Review Group and the Biggest Intelligence Reform in 40 Years

The USA FREEDOM Act, the President’s Review Group and the Biggest Intelligence Reform in 40 Years
https://privacyassociation.org/news/a/the-usa-freedom-act-the-presidents-review-group-and-the-biggest-intelligence-reform-in-40-years/
 
Two years after the first story based on Edward Snowden’s leaks hit the press, the U.S. government enacted the USA FREEDOM Act, ending bulk collection under Section 215. As one of five members of President Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology, I applaud its passage—the biggest pro-privacy change to U.S. intelligence law since the original enactment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978.
There is a close fit between the Review Group’s work and the new law as well as multiple significant reform measures the Obama administration has already adopted without legislative change. In this era of partisan gridlock, the U.S. system of government has proved more responsive and resilient than many skeptics had predicted.
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The Slow Death of the University

The Slow Death of the University
By Terry Eagleton
Apr 6 2015
<http://chronicle.com/article/The-Slow-Death-of-the/228991/>
A few years ago, I was being shown around a large, very technologically advanced university in Asia by its proud president. As befitted so eminent a personage, he was flanked by two burly young minders in black suits and shades, who for all I knew were carrying Kalashnikovs under their jackets. Having waxed lyrical about his gleaming new business school and state-of-the-art institute for management studies, the president paused to permit me a few words of fulsome praise. I remarked instead that there seemed to be no critical studies of any kind on his campus. He looked at me bemusedly, as though I had asked him how many Ph.D.’s in pole dancing they awarded each year, and replied rather stiffly “Your comment will be noted.” He then took a small piece of cutting-edge technology out of his pocket, flicked it open and spoke a few curt words of Korean into it, probably “Kill him.” A limousine the length of a cricket pitch then arrived, into which the president was bundled by his minders and swept away. I watched his car disappear from view, wondering when his order for my execution was to be implemented.
This happened in South Korea, but it might have taken place almost anywhere on the planet. From Cape Town to Reykjavik, Sydney to São Paulo, an event as momentous in its own way as the Cuban revolution or the invasion of Iraq is steadily under way: the slow death of the university as a center of humane critique. Universities, which in Britain have an 800-year history, have traditionally been derided as ivory towers, and there was always some truth in the accusation. Yet the distance they established between themselves and society at large could prove enabling as well as disabling, allowing them to reflect on the values, goals, and interests of a social order too frenetically bound up in its own short-term practical pursuits to be capable of much self-criticism. Across the globe, that critical distance is now being diminished almost to nothing, as the institutions that produced Erasmus and John Milton, Einstein and Monty Python, capitulate to the hard-faced priorities of global capitalism.
Much of this will be familiar to an American readership. Stanford and MIT, after all, provided the very models of the entrepreneurial university. What has emerged in Britain, however, is what one might call Americanization without the affluence — the affluence, at least, of the American private educational sector.
This is even becoming true at those traditional finishing schools for the English gentry, Oxford and Cambridge, whose colleges have always been insulated to some extent against broader economic forces by centuries of lavish endowments. Some years ago, I resigned from a chair at the University of Oxford (an event almost as rare as an earthquake in Edinburgh) when I became aware that I was expected in some respects to behave less as a scholar than a CEO.
When I first came to Oxford 30 years earlier, any such professionalism would have been greeted with patrician disdain. Those of my colleagues who had actually bothered to finish their Ph.D.’s would sometimes use the title of “Mr.” rather than “Dr.,” since “Dr.” suggested a degree of ungentlemanly labor. Publishing books was regarded as a rather vulgar project. A brief article every 10 years or so on the syntax of Portuguese or the dietary habits of ancient Carthage was considered just about permissible. There had been a time earlier when college tutors might not even have bothered to arrange set tutorial times for their undergraduates. Instead, the undergraduate would simply drop round to their rooms when the spirit moved him for a glass of sherry and a civilized chat about Jane Austen or the function of the pancreas.
Today, Oxbridge retains much of its collegial ethos. It is the dons who decide how to invest the college’s money, what flowers to plant in their gardens, whose portraits to hang in the senior common room, and how best to explain to their students why they spend more on the wine cellar than on the college library. All important decisions are made by the fellows of the college in full session, and everything from financial and academic affairs to routine administration is conducted by elected committees of academics responsible to the body of fellows as a whole. In recent years, this admirable system of self-government has had to confront a number of centralizing challenges from the university, of the kind that led to my own exit from the place; but by and large it has stood firm. Precisely because Oxbridge colleges are for the most part premodern institutions, they have a smallness of scale about them that can serve as a model of decentralized democracy, and this despite the odious privileges they continue to enjoy.
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Good Riddance to the University

Cost Of College Degree In U.S. Has Increased 1,120 Percent In 30 Years, Report Says
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/15/cost-of-college-degree-increase-12-fold-1120-percent-bloomberg_n_1783700.html
The cost of a college degree in the United States has increased “12 fold” over the past 30 years, far outpacing the price inflation of consumer goods, medical expenses and food.
According to Bloomberg, college tuition and fees have increased 1,120 percent since records began in 1978.
Using this chart to explain its findings, Bloomberg reports that the rate of increase in college costs has been “four times faster than the increase in the consumer price index.” It also notes that “medical expenses have climbed 601 percent, while the price of food has increased 244 percent over the same period.”
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WHY has the tuition gone up?
Answer CEO SALARY
Answer THE AUTOMATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION
Answer MILITARY AND THE UNIVERSITY COMPLEX

[ECP] Educational CyberPlayGround K12 Newsletters

Student Debt / Strike Debt

Student Debt
The Lost Purpose of School Reform Diane Ravitch
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/apr/02/lost-purpose-no-child-left-behind/
“NCLB decisively changed the purpose of the law. What had once been a means of sending additional resources to schools enrolling poor students was turned into a testing mandate. By law, all students, regardless of disability or language proficiency, must be “proficient” on state tests by 2014. Congress and the Bush administration believed that their mandate could produce universal success in school, akin to passing a law proclaiming that all crime should cease by a date certain. Note to Congress: if wishes (or congressional mandates) were horses, then beggars would ride.  Not surprisingly, it didn’t work.”
richard branson: “It is possible that school is not necessary. I left school at 15.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-04-09/richard-branson-entrepreneurs-and-real-world-education
State AGs Urge Federal Forgiveness Of Student Loans Tied To Dodgy For-Profit Chain
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/09/federal-student-loan-forgiveness_n_7037128.html
Apollo Affiliate to Invest $1 Billion in Online Student Lender
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-14/apollo-affiliate-to-invest-1-billion-in-online-student-lender
Debt Collectors Lose Lawsuits Against Education Department It beat its aggrieved debt collectors in court
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/14/education-department-debt-collectors-lawsuit_n_7067292.html
US ED fines Corinthian $30 million for misrepresentation of job placement rates — will halt fed $ at Calif. Heald campuses
Federal judge tosses debt collectors’ lawsuits against  fined Heald College
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/14/heald-college-fine-jobs_n_7067056.html
@StrikeDebt “@usedgov is saying 4profits can steal billions so long they get cut in on the action too”
@StrikeDebt “Wells Fargo made billions off of 4profit Corinthian with help from the @usedgov which get’s it’s cut on the backend .”