Joris van Hoboken

Just came from the morning sessions of the New Network Theory Conference here in Amsterdam. Siva Vaidhyanathan had a great talk about Google staring with theology (!), Tiziana Terranova, and italian sociologist had a very interesting collage of notes on recent important books she had read. Her critical reflections on Benkler’s Wealth of Networks and her thoughts on the connection between networks cultures, social control and markets were insightful. After lunch it was Alan Liu, with a talk called ‘network knowledge’ who impressed me with an overview of knowledge policy and knowlegde policing.

Just printed out the FTC’s report on Net Neutrality and the Article 29’s opinion about the concept of “personal data” in data protection law. They are now piled on top of a growing mountain of articles reports and journals, so I guess I should start to get organized…

I just joined Michael Zimmer and left a comment on Google’s public policy blog.

The European Commission has launched a channel, “EUTube” on YouTube, where they post (some of) their audiovisual material. My first reaction is that this is a rather frivolous attempt to market the EU. I have doubts whether this is the right way to reach out to the public for a political institution like the EU, but maybe I’m just being conservative. See the EU observer for more details.

The New York Times has an article about the trend to power search engines with human editors. It repeatedly cites Matt Cutts, who also posted a reaction on his blog.

I used ChaCha a few times to find out how it works. They (underpaid Americans) use the same search engines as I can use, so that was not of any help to me. For some people that have no clue it’s probably a nice option. I’d rather search for it myself, so that I know I have all there is to find.

The legal position of a human edited search engine might change. I would say that it does not make much sense to lower liability standards in comparison to other publications. If Google gives a link to a madonna mp3 file, Google can defend itself with stating it did not know. If I ask ChaCha, I guess the person helping me would not be allowed to help me, or would she?

My guess at the main reasons why there are some recent attempts to power search in this way, is because to do it the algorithmic way ( which does certainly not exclude a human role in editing) means doing it the same as Google and the other big ones. Human powered search aims for a small piece of a very big pie.

News.com reports about a U.S. general that laments the traditional monopoly on detailed satellite photography has been gone, pointing to services such as Google Maps.  Lt. Gen. David Deptula, deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance says he knows of no specific attempts to suppress some of the images. “Instead, governments are trying to mitigate the effect through camouflage, concealment and deception, he said, providing no other details.”, citing News.com.

I wonder what the legal limitations of such a strategy (including deception) are. I guess it would in principal be illegal for the government to deceive its citizens with false information.

A German news source reports (here in English) that Google threatens to close its German Gmail service. Peter Fleischer says Google will do so if the German legislator will not alter its proposals, that would prescribe the registration of identification data of users of such services. Fleischer notes that users that want to use anonymous e-mail will move to use foreign e-mail services (including US based Gmail?!) that do not ask to enter personal data at registration.

The article 29 Working Group has broadened its research into the privacy policies/practices of Google, to include all Internet search engines. “The Working Party will deal with search engines in general and scrutinize their activities from a data-protection point of view, because this issue affects an ever-growing number of users,”, according to various news sources.

I think this is a very welcome move. Google should be scrutinized for sure, for being the most dominant player in the market. But the problem of user privacy and Internet search technology is deeper than one or a few companies’ privacy policy.

Last week I attended a symposium organized by ECP.nl about the Network Neutrality debate and its possible relevance for The Netherlands and Europe. I wrote an column (in Dutch) about it on XS4ALL’s weblog for debate. XS4All is one of the oldest Internet Service Providers in the Netherlands. They are one of the progressive forces in the Internet industry in the Netherlands.

The column speaks about the negative consequences for ISP’s, in terms of liability for content of Internet traffic related damage, were they to abandon their neutral, common carriage position with regard to the traffic they process. Michael Geist noted something similar in his post about the news that AT&T is heading for an alignment with Hollywood -after rethinking their strategic position- and consider filtering their networks to prevent copyright infringement.

Filtertechnics has won a case about the legality of its webspam filter for Google results in Germany. The Court of Appeals in Hamm, concludes that the website in question was in fact constructed with thousands of Doorway Pages, a construction with the sole purpose to manipulate the search engine. Filtertechnics had appealed an earlier ruling, in which Filtertechnics was ordered to stop denoting the particular site as spammy.

The case shines some light on legal questions about search engine’s guidelines, which include anti spam policies. The legal battles over webspam, or spamdexing, are a focal point in the conflicts between search engines and information providers.

The Court of Appeals states: In the case of a verifiable suspicion of search engine manipulation, Filter software is allowed to denote the particular site as ‘Spam’.

Interestingly, the court states that it does not matter whether the particular site does not contain any relevant material for the Internet user. It is enough that there is manipulation involved. The lower court had given a lot of weight to the spamdexing definition in the German Wikipedia, that states that the spam site would not contain any such useful information. According to the Court of Appeals the wider Spam definition in the context of Filtersoftware is in fact appropriate and user friendly, while Internet users exactly want to find the websites that really earn their ranking in search engines.

The Court concludes that spamdexing filters, in view of the flood of unjustifiable search engine results, are also permissible from the point of view of user protection. The user and the public have a legitimate interest to use suitable technical means to filter spam, which one was not primarily looking for.

TELEPOLIS has a nice article about Microsoft’s development of profiling users according to their browsing behavior. (Thanks to Theo Röhle).

Yesterday I was thinking that information profiles could be very interesting stuff to sell in the market place. I would love to use an American senior diplomat’s information profile, when using the next generation personalized search engine to search for international politics. Or maybe the profile of a 17 year old boy, when I’m too tired to work. Your own information profile can be so limited sometimes. I would surely pay for it, when it would really make a difference. Of course I would like to control my own one.