Joris van Hoboken

The program - 15^th until 28^th of July - consisted of a rich mixture of plenary sessions, student presentations, personal contributions, social activities and plans for the future. I think it can be described most accurately as a storm, which slowly took hold of me and the other participants, and hopefully will have shaken some things up for good. The plenary sessions were the foundation on which further thinking, collaboration and discussion could be grounded. The tutoring, by Jonathan Zittrain, John Palfrey, and many others, was superior and magnificently diverse. I will get to speak about some of them in more detail below.

The 33 participants all presented a part of their work in smaller 45 minute afternoon sessions. These sessions were not so much meant to convince the others of the greatness of one’s work, but to get feedback and discuss various possible issues and options regarding the substance and methodology of the work presented. Apart from fellow participants, each session had an assigned faculty member to give feedback as well. I had the pleasure of having Urs Gasser comment on my work. He is an important (still young) information law scholar with positions in St Gallen and the Berkman Center at Harvard, and has published internationally on search engine law, which is my specific field. Apart from his feed back, others were there to comment in detail on my presentation which was critically but very well received.

One of the red lines in the program, continuing today, was the idea of exploring the history of the Internet and the ways it could be used to enrich our often specialized and mostly interdisciplinary studies of the Internet. It was Benjamin Peters, PhD candidate at Columbia University, New York, who started this thread of activities by putting together a small session, in which apart from him and me, David Weinberger, Lewis Hyde and Talha Syed were present. (Benjamin has also been writing about search engines and democracy) We discussed the relevance of history for our work and thought about the various ways a historical account of the development of technology could be used and for what scientific and rhetorical goals. My interest for this matter is both driven by a genuine interest in historical work, and the problem I face in the context of my research regarding the history of the web search engine. That history starts, either in the classical age, with the first libraries and classifications of knowledge, the rise of the library in modern history, the computerized information retrieval systems in the 1940’s, or in the beginning of the 90’s with the first search engines of the World Wide Web. It all depends what you look for and whether you want to present some kind of mainstream history of a phenomenon, study history for its own sake, or rather give an account of certain historical moments, whose outcome have resulted in the dominant present state of affairs, thus facilitating reflection on the contingency of societies’ legal, social and economic ordering. It is my present opinion that the growing dominance of search engines in the ordering of our knowledge, ideas, opinions and reputations are a radical historical event. I look forward to continue studying in this direction and applaud Benjamin’s efforts to organize a conference on the history of the Internet. I am currently, together with him and Balasz Bodo, looking into making an own contribution to that effort, of which I hope to write more later.

Apart from the numerous conversations and discussions I had in the periphery of the program – some of the most interesting with Balazs Bodo - I organized two small conversations myself, one about the connections and tensions between academic work and advocacy, and one about the conceptualization of the editorial layer of new intermediaries on the Web. Both were held during an enjoyable lunch at a local restaurant in Cambridge, MA.

My conclusion of the discussion about academics & advocacy, an important subject for me to understand and hear different ideas about, would be that it largely depends on your home institution. Its tradition of work and its network seem to determine to a large extent, the degree you would be able to combine the two effectively. Already the organizing institutions seem to have some remarkable differences. The Berkman Center, “a research program founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study and help pioneer its development”, lists advocacy as one of its primary efforts: “We engage in targeted efforts to effect law reform where we deem such activism to be necessary, both domestically and internationally, to protect and foster openness on the Internet.” The Oii is much less outspoken and seems more conservative. I think I can be happy to have the IViR as my home institution. They knew about my former work for Bits of Freedom when they accepted me and they are themselves involved in Creative Commons, a project that advocates a transformation in the use of copyright. I don’t see a problem myself. My aim is to be honest and conscientious, both in my work in academia and in my advocacy work. I believe in fair representation of arguments and judgments and put a lot of effort in getting to understand the people I do not necessarily agree with. Expert based advocacy fits perfectly into that scheme.

The second was about the conceptualization of the editorial layer of new intermediaries on the Web. Intermediaries such as search engines (Google), recommendation systems (Delicious), e-commerce platforms (Amazon, Ebay) collaborative encyclopedias (Wikipedia) and online hosting providers (YouTube, Flickr). All these platforms have ingenious systems of distributed algorithmic editorial control. Distributed, because the editorial output is determined by a range of non-institutional actors. Editorial in this context should be understood widely as the control (mostly algorithmic) of the content of information provided by these actors plus the way it is presented, ranked and made accessible. In the case of a search engine such as Google, the creators of websites are made part of the editorial layer of the search engine. For instance the title of a search engine result is written by the website editor and the ranking partly depends on the content and the links to and from the website. Also the user has a lot of control by choosing the right query and as a final example the amount of clicks on a result is used by search engines to adjust their ranking as well. The same applies in different forms to these other intermediaries, many of which allow tagging and use the tags to order their content. My question is first of all how we should study this new type of editorial control and finally what the distributive nature means for the accountability of the various actors involved. Tagging is one of the examples that is particularly interesting to study, as I learned from one of the participants, Alla Zollers, and one of the plenary sessions on the study of the blogosphere. She analyzes emergent social motivations for tagging. I will keep in touch around this issue with her in the future.

Apart from me, there were several others, most notably Michael Zimmer and Brian Fitzgerald, that put search engines firmly on the program’s agenda. Michael Zimmer, one of the participants, just finished his PhD at the Program in Media Ecology of the Department of Culture and Communication, New York University. His dissertation, under supervision of Helen Nissenbaum and others, start off with the idea of the perfect search engine’ and explores the Faustian bargain involved between perfect search and the resulting loss of privacy because of using it: “While designed to foster increased navigation within our spheres of mobility, the search for the perfect search engine also empowers the widespread capture of personal information flows across the Internet.” Interestingly, Michael and me, studying the privacy and freedom of expression implications of web search respectively, together grasp a fair amount of the fundamental normative questions relating to web search. So in our future work and discussions we will continue to be able to complement and learn from each other. Michael is a regular visitor of the Netherlands in his professional capacity, so also here we will run into each other, having the opportunity to discuss face to face. I should not forget to mention Jonathan Zittrain’s comments on Michael’s presentation. It was great to learn from him how to make a ‘perfect’ presentation.

Brian Fitzgerald, professor at the School of Law at the Queensland University of Technology came all the way from Australia, to speak about the future of copyright, focusing primarily on the liability of Intermediaries on the Internet. Search engines are one of his focus points. He and others just have a book out on the market, “Internet and e-Commerce Law - Technology, Law and Policy”, also addressing the issue of Intermediary liability in chapter 12.

Finally I would like to speak about the plenary session I probably enjoyed most, Talha Syed’s session on “The effect of IP rights/incentives on the motivational culture of innovative activity”, was a great philosophical talk about the problems of the current dominant thinking about the motivations of people to innovate. The readings were: Frey & Jegen, Motivation Crowding Theory, 15/5 Journal of Economic Surveys 589-611 (2001), Lerner & Tirole, The Simple Economics of Open Source, NBER Working Paper 7600 (2000) and Benkler & Nissenbaum, Commons-Based Peer Production and Virtue, 14/4 The Journal of Political Philosophy 394-419 (2006). From his introduction:

“Specifically, we will explore a series of positive and normative assumptions regarding motivations for innovative activity and the role of legal discourse and policy, assumptions that are usually shared by both advocates and critics: (1) that innovators are best modeled as “homo economicus”, i.e., maximizers of narrow self-interest, pursuing benefits that can be reduced along a single scale of pecuniary rewards; (2) that motivations for innovation are more or less invariant, or at least independent of institutional culture and legal policies; (3) that pecuniary incentives are neutral with respect to other motivations; and (4) that legal innovation-policy choices can be resolved solely on grounds of efficiency, freedom and/or distributive justice, remaining neutral with respect to the character of innovative activity.”

He explained us that although considering the current leading progressive information law theorists in the U.S., such as Benkler and Lessig, as allies, he would like to push them to take seriously the (underlying values of) intrinsic and social motivations of people, without translating them into the liberal framework; the liberal discourse of freedom, equality and efficiency. I agree it is a pity that much of the progressive liberal mainstream in legal theory takes their political standpoint as a given and does not address the possible counterarguments on the level of political philosophy and economy. I liked the talk so much because Talha seemed to have found a nice (Canadian?) middle ground between taking these great writers seriously and addressing the space for discussion in their political premises and assumptions. His reading list will also serve as an example for me in the years of study to come.

Thanks to all my colleagues, the tutors and not in the least the organizers for putting this great program together!

Here are the slides for my presentation at the Oii Summer Doctoral Programme 2007, at the Berkman center for Internet & Society. There are some good search engine law references in the end. I got more out of it then I hoped for; some great comments, both from students and faculty.

Adam suggested to think about the different perspectives in terms of practical (business) models, like William Fisher’s Noank media, which he had presented earlier yesterday.

Alla pointed to the continuing necessity of having enough focus and restricting myself in my work. She asked also the simple but relevant question: “How do you measure freedom of expression?”

One of the more critical remarks came from Fred. He missed a sense of the development of the technology and the protocols involved and the complexity of having any succes with regulations succes on that front. I generally agree with him. Regulating search engines through the technology is very hard to imagine. There is so much innovation going on.

Further more the question was raised whether the way I framed my research would be still relevant in a few years. I think I focused on a particular question for web search, the implications of freedom of expression for search engine law and regulatory involvement with web search engines, that will still be relevant in 2015. Of course web search will evolve. The way i defined search engines now is very open because of that. As James Grimmelmann notes in his article, “The structure of search engine law”, search engines include not only Google, Yahoo and Ask. Ebay is for a big part a search engine, as are p2p networks. Recommendation systems are another example. All these different search engines are going to evolve. How would that affect my research? Finally my answer would be that the work i chose to do, has to be done anyway, and the more people study this fundamental question for web search and the future of the web the better.

Urs Gasser, Berkman faculty, who was there to give feed-back on my presentation pointed to a big theoretical issue. In the presentation I framed the question about freedom of expression for web search, as a problem of conflicting ‘freedom of expression’ interests; of online speakers (to be included an ranked well), of the user (to freely search on the web) and of the search engine (to freely deploy their great technology). The question is how to solve this apparent conlict. Urs Gasser encouraged me to think about criteria, principles and different viewpoints to solve this conflict (and similar conflicts). If it is just a matter of balancing, the answer remains a little arbitrary. If I can come up with a convincing framework of criteria, that would be a really great contribution, because this is an old and fairly open issue.

Presentation SDP 2007

I am starting to enjoy myself better every day here in Cambridge, Ma. Yesterday was the last day of the first week of the Summer Doctoral Programme and a good one it was. We started off with a session about copyright - leads Brian Fitzgerald and Wendy Seltzer - focusing primarily on intermediary liability in the context of copyright infringement. I was looking forward to this session because of my dissertation I plan to deal with liability of search engine intermediaries as well. We talked about the Viacom- Youtube lawsuit and about different recent Perfect 10 cases in the United States. I was impressed by the way Brian Fitzgerald made the material and important issues understandable for the group; there are a lot of people without a legal background. My conclusion with regard to balancing copyright enforcement with freedom of speech was: It is better to have 10 infringing pieces on the Web than 1 non-infringing piece taken down.

The next session was about democratic participation and new media, lead by Henry Jenkins and Carrie Lambert-Beatty. Jenkins is the author of ‘Convergence Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide‘. They showed some great videos and talked about the boundaries of policial participation and the possible empowerment by new media.

In the afternoon we went to visit MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is quite close to Harvard but has a totally different atmosphere on the campus. We first visited the Media Lab, than the One Laptop Per Child project and after that Chintan Vaishnav, one of the PhD’s in our group, gave a wonderful tour around the campus, full of little witty anecdotes.

The Media Lab was amazing. If you want your child to study something technical you have to take it there. If I would have seen that when I was 13 or 14, I would have dreamt of going to study at M.I.T. for the rest of my high school period. The child in me was further rewarded at the One Laptop Per Child center, where we were allowed to play a little with them. I had read about these laptops and their functionalities in a Dutch newspaper a couple of weeks ago. That had made me think I would love to have one myself. I wish the OLPC all the best with further implementing this project.

We finished the day with a dinner at a wonderful chinese place. The chinese in our company, Mena Ning Wang and Sampsung Xiaoxiang Shi , ordered a range of great and tasty dishes. I alomost exploded after that. After dinner we walked around on Harvard Square, where a strange kind of commercial hysteria had taken a hold on the Cambridge population. There was a line of at least 2000 people waiting to buy a copy of the new Harry Potter book. At least they were waiting for a book. The iPhone hysteria was even harder to understand.

For more info on the various sessions and activities, visit our bloggers Ismael and Daithi. or our SDP aggregator.

This week and th enest two weeks I am attending the Summer Doctoral Programme of oii and Berkman Center at Harvard University in Boston. This afternoon Michael Zimmer gave a presentation about his dissertation I was especially looking forward to. It was called “the quest for the perfect search engine”.

Central in Michael Zimmer’s work is the trade-off between search engine user’s privacy and perfect recall. The idea is that in order to serve us better as tools for finding information search engines need to understand a lot about our backgrounds and interests, so that they can better interpret the particular search query the user enters. Examples of problems relating to queries would be apple (the computer, the type of fruit or the city?) and Paris Hilton (hotel or someone that seems to get a lot of attention in this country). Future examples are us asking the search engine where to go on holiday, what to vote(why vote at all, they could do that for us) and whether or not to like a certain movie.

I thought his presentation was great. It also made me think about my own research a lot. One of the more problematic points in his presentation (I think he probably goes into that in his dissertation) was that search engines might not have the incentive to become perfect in the sense of perfect recall. The reason for that might be that search engines should be seen more as advertisement companies than as information location tools. Thus data aggregation would not be so much a tradeoff with perfect search but instead with perfect advertisement. This makes the ‘faustian tradeoff’ quite different. (We are not getting perfect search with advertisent, but fairly good search with perfect advertisement).

Surely of equal value to me was the way Jonathan Zittrain and later Urs Gasser commented on the presentation and explained what could have made the presentation better and what could make a presentation perfect. I am going to see at least 15 other student presentations and I am sure this type of interaction and feed-back from our tutors will help me to make some giant leaps in understanding what it is to do a good presentation. Such an understanding is definitely something that is missing in most of Dutch academia, so I have a lot to learn. I am scheduled in the end of next week so I can already test some of the ideas I get.