There is now an official site about the One Laptop Per Child project and the announcement of this prompted a small explosion of debate about their merits on the Association of Internet Researchers mailing list . It has encouraged me to blow the dust off the collection of links I have been holding on to since November and to weigh in myself a bit on the subject.

Others’ Criticism:

• Institute for the Future of the Book: hundred dollar laptops may make good table lamps “it’s hard not to laugh at the leaders of the free world bumbling over this day-glo gadget, this glorified Trapper Keeper cum jack-in-the-box (Annan ended up breaking the hand crank), with barely a word devoted to what educational content will actually go inside, or to how teachers plan to construct lessons around these new toys.”
• Further criticism in more depth by the (competing) Fonly Institute. I agree with their issues completely, though I think they rather ‘over-sell’ the problems. I do fear as they do that if this device doesn’t fly it might make it more difficult to get any future interest in a better thought through ICT programme based on low-cost computing.
• Ethan Zuckerman also frets about one key aspect the Fonly Institute and others highlighted: the optimistic forecasts by the laptop’s designers that students will spontaneously fiddle with and create with them.

Description

• A week ago Ethan produced an excellent in-depth technology overview which reveals among other things that while the laptops will be human-powered the hand-crank has been eliminated from the design.
• An eight minute video tour of the device was the first I came across several months ago - it might be interesting to compare to the overview above.
• If you are interested in description of the project from its leader there is a 55 minute video interview with Negroponte about it (which I haven’t managed to listen to yet).

My thoughts on the AoIR debate

I would say most of the discussion on the mailing list has been critical of the OLPC project. Much of the criticism is for reasons I agree with but some seemed a little doctrinaire. This is not an ‘inferior’ technology as Christian Fuchs suggests - it is an appropriate one. Even if ‘conventional’ laptops costing ten times as much were made available in the countries where the OLPC will be trialled, they would arguably be less useful as they would be less durable and would rely on more expensive components and software. These laptops will not tie their users in to Western commercial technology and standards as Christian fears (at least not any more than they are already) because they are based solidly on open source software. And rightly or wrongly these are not aimed at the countries whose inhabitants live on $2 a day - they are aimed at middle-ranking developing countries like China, India and Brazil which have enough money to consider this kind of investment in their children (though I would still argue that this major sum spent in ‘conventional’ ways on teachers or books would yield a better result).

Lastly, Jeremy Hunsinger says there is no plan for teacher or student training to go with these devices. This would of course be a big concern if true. It is true that the designers appear to have weirdly utopian ideas about children teaching themselves using these laptops with little or no teacher intervention (as echoed by Wojciech Gryc). See for example the OLPC FAQ - note it does not even mention as a question the need for training kids to learn with them and it says, among other things:

While the younger generations who are affected by this project become more computer literate and technologically developed in a modern sense, they will begin to have a more profound social leverage than their elders. The formative years of childhood, and the education received during that time span contribute to a wholistic result, which will present a tremendous contrast between those who have been given a computer-based education and those who have not.

Which is techno-utopianism at its finest. I can only hope that (since the wiki is open to anyone to edit) this is the view of a OLPC ‘fellow traveller’ not the staff. It is true that there have been a few promising pilots that demonstrated even Delhi slum children will teach themselves how to use computers out of sheer curiosity given the chance but I would be amazed if there has been enough research on how this works and under what conditions to satisfy the academic pedagogical community (has there been thorough discussion of pilot projects like the ‘hole in the wall’ one yet in academic journals and conferences?).

In any event I am a little more optimistic - since pilot organizations will be investing a lot of money (relative to their budgets) on these devices I would hope some of them at least will devote some careful thought to the issues that Jeremy and others pointed out and turn deaf ears to the OLPC team’s assurances that these are pure ‘machines for learning’ - no teacher input required.

David Brake

BoingBoing recently published an extraordinary allegation - a reader claims Yahoo’s new web ad publishing network tries to insist that non-US web surfers must not see their ads. Of course this is very difficult if not impossible for a potential content publisher to guarantee - but imagine if it was? If successful, Yahoo would be responsible for ghettoising the Internet just in order to make their ad network more efficient. I’m a little disappointed the media hasn’t picked this up yet - I can imagine the furore if some French ad network did the same thing to American content…
This is not a new problem, by the way. There have been repeated attempts to produce artificial national restrictions to Internet-distributed content. The BBC’s Creative Archive License for example appears only to allow UK residents to re-use their material.

One of the cliches of weblogging advocates is that webloggers are disinterested ordinary people whereas journalists are biased and prey to PR ’spin’. Well it turns out that PR agencies are increasingly targetting bloggers as well - with some success. This NYT story about Walmart feeding bloggers stories shows bloggers doing the kind of things “MSM” journalists are often accused of - copying and pasting press releases.

You can see some of the early reaction to the story already on the blog of one of the bloggers named in the story.

And one aspect of the story the NYT didn’t concentrate on - the PR agency in question, Edelman, has written a report last year (Ironically entitled Trust ‘Media’: How Real People Are Finally Being Heard) urging just this kind of active engagement with selected bloggers.

The US Department of Justice asked Google recently for a selection of the searches people made over a two month period, with the identities of the searchers removed. Google, to its credit, has resisted this while the other major US search engines have not. John Battelle and Danny Sullivan have further analysis of this issue.

There are four issues that arise from this which have not been prominently dealt with in discussions I’ve read:

1) If Google hadn’t resisted this request, would we have heard about the fact that AOL, Yahoo and MSN immediately complied?
2) How many people realise that Google (and others) frequently do keep track not just of what people search for but who searches for what?
3) Mightn’t there be some searches that tend to reveal the identity of the searcher even if the searcher’s IP address is concealed? Particularly if you examine them in time order? Update: Search Engine Watch just produced a lengthy analysis of this issue which suggests that this is probably not a big issue.
4) The DOJ doesn’t seem to have asked only for searches by Americans. Does it have any business looking at searches from international users who might (for whatever reason) have chosen to use yahoo.com instead of (for example) yahoo.co.uk?

Update: Tim Wu of Columbia Law School writes an excellent analysis of the whole issue on Slate, arguing that it’s simply excessive for search engines to collect these reams of personal data on what people are searching for.

An interesting and provocative (6000 word) piece on the openDemocracy site today - Democratisation, NGOs and "colour revolutions" by Sreeram Chaulia suggests that the recent revolutions in the Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan are not authentic democratic uprisings supported by NGOs but were largely brought into being by organizations substantially backed and led by the US. The author is clearly of the view that such great power meddling is inherently wicked.

Personally I prefer to look at the results - does it matter if the US "does good by stealth" in its own interests as long as it is in fact doing good? Is any governmental support for changing regimes bad, no matter how nasty the regime? The author states, "the orange and tulip revolutions are cases of ‘regime change’, not ‘regime-type change’, for they did not democratise Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan". I don’t know enough about what is going on on the ground to be able to judge but while Ukraine seems to be in a mess at least the electorate appears now to be an important element in the internal struggles in the Ukraine.

If there are readers out there who are political scientists or Eastern Europeans (or both) I would be curious to know what you think.

Update: Another cautionary voice - that of Prof. Mark Beissinger - is raised in Dissent Magazine.

ColdPlay’s new CD (reports boingboing and Digg) includes truly draconian digital rights management in an attempt to prevent piracy. I am more relaxed than some about DRM - if it is well-regulated but if record companies behave in this way they will certainly be shooting themselves in the foot (as some hope they will).

According to this report the disc won’t play on a wide variety of in-computer CD players and other devices that might enable you to turn the music into MP3s but the warning that this is the case is apparently only given inside the CD case (once you have bought it) and the company claims it will not accept returns except in the event of manufacturing-related problems.

This is unacceptable - what if (like me) you don’t listen to your CDs as CDs any more - you just turn them to MP3s so you can listen to them through your MP3 player? What if the only CD player you have is one of the long list of excluded players? This together with the Sony ‘root kit’ fiasco suggests that many entertainment companies are not being responsible in their self-regulation of DRM. If you are going to use DRM that is this restrictive you should be made to prominently label your discs so potential purchasers can know what they are getting.

A few days ago I wrote arguing that the case against continued effective control of ICANN by the US government needs to be made as the "hands off" American argument seems to be almost ubiquitous online. Well, I finally found an organization making this case - IP3 - Internet and Public Policy - which has just put out "ICANN Reform: Establishing the Rule of Law". Ironically it is an academic at an American university who is making this case. Prof Hans Klein argues in the paper:

ICANN?s history shows how private governance can be captured by powerful players. At WSIS governments need to create and enforce a legally-defined framework that limits the power of all stakeholders — including governments themselves. By establishing the rule of law, the politicized processes of ICANN can be replaced by predictable, fair, and efficient decision-making.

It looks as if Hans Klein’s work and those of other allied academics is finally getting some press coverage in the run-up to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

I do not have a strong view on who should govern the underlying technology of the Internet but I am beginning to become alarmed at how only one side of the debate seems to be being heard - at least online. Maybe it’s just in the parts of the Internet and mainstream media I read but there’s a remarkably consistent tale being told from Foreign Affairs to NPR to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Put baldly it says that letting other countries than the US have a say in the running of fundamental aspects of the Internet like the allocation of domain names is at best an unneccessary risk and at worst a plot by totalitarian regimes like Cuba, Syria and China to make the Internet more easily controlled. Strikingly (as I noted earlier) I am not aware of any comment pieces that put the other side. So I asked a friend of mine who has done research in this area, Lee Salter, what he thought and I provide his response below to, I hope, kick off a discussion:

Hmm, why non-US governance is important? Well, we can start by reversing the question ? why is US governance important? Well, it is important to US political and socio-economic interests ? control the internet and you control a great deal. This control is not direct or explicit, but like so much in the American Empire, indirect and implicit. For many in the USG control of the Internet is about extending a very particular American set of social relations around the world ? in much the same way as the domination of Hollywood sought to spread not just values, but specific forms of film making. On the other hand, there are some very explicit motivations, such as preparing American IT firms for the Internet in the first place to give them a ?competitive edge? when the net finally did start spreading. It also helps American concepts of (formalistic) free speech spread, not, of course, with the intention of really freeing people as such, but with the knowledge that the economic power of American (and European) media interests is such that they can flood the Internet with their content. In fact, we don?t even need to say that it is specifically American interests (though it is ? lots flows out of American through the Internet, but their parochialism prevents much getting in), because the functioning of the capitalist system (within which the Internet is embedded) is such that money wins most of the time. Finally, it helps American political interests in the same way as radio and television helped push American political interests during the so-called Cold War: Mark Poster cites Regan as saying that ?Electronic beams blow through the Iron Curtain as though it were lace?. The Internet, similarly, opens the world to the American vista.

From the other perspective ? why is non-American governance importance, well, it is a strange question ? shouldn?t each political community be able to govern itself? Isn?t that what the ?democratic values? and ?freedoms?, for which the USG has killed millions of people around the world, are for? And if this is not possible, should they not have an equal or at least proportional say in how governance takes place? Why should the rest of the world be subject to America?s will? I expect if the rest of the world had a say, there would be the ?threat? that quite a different Internet would emerge ? for example, the Americans pushed for TCP/IP when Europeans were arguing for X.25. Of course, X.25 would have allowed each state to develop internetworking that would be quite specific to that state, but the TCP/IP model was forced through. I don?t think that the USG would be happy to have others having a say in the governance of the Internet if that say runs the threat of being different to the US model, not least because it might hit American economic expansion.

The first keynote speaker at AoIR6 - Ang Peng Hwa - was an advocate of international regulation of the Internet and taking control of ICANN out of the hands of the US (see Ordering Chaos: Regulating the Internet - summarised here). Even the predominantly US audience at this year’s Association of Internet Researchers conference appeared sympathetic to his view (or at least not actively hostile!). The Economist (nominally British) takes different view [registration required]. The leader makes some interesting assertions quite quickly:

ICANN’s stewardship has succeeded because its focus has been not on politics, but on making the network as efficient as possible. The sometimes fierce debates that break out among techies have been conducted transparently.

I’m not an Internet governance scholar but from what I remember reading this is rather dubious.

It is also no accident that many of the countries loudest in their demands for the internet to be taken out of American hands are those, such as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that are keenest on restricting its use by their own citizens.

Well, as we have recently heard private Internet companies are hardly standard-bearers of freedom on the whole.

In the accompanying article the Economist did unearth an interesting factoid which didn’t come up in the keynote speech we heard (which was largely lacking in the all-important gossip about this process):

Some countries demanded that groups representing business and public-interest causes be thrown out of the room when governments drafted documents for the summit in November. In one instance, delegates from China and Brazil actually pounded on tables to drown out a speaker from industry.

I would really like to know what that industry speaker was trying to say…

Update: I have started to run across more and more US coverage (on American Public Radio’s Future Tense, for example, or on This Week in Tech which is currently the most popular podcast. I have yet to hear anyone invited to speak when the issue comes up from the anti-US-governance side on this issue. I suspect it is because they don’t know who to ask. So is there a media-savvy person prepared to point out the real or potential problems in US dominance over the Internet’s architecture and to make the case for international governance? For that matter, is there a good document available online that makes this case?

I just heard about the Blogathon. On August 6th, bloggers will participate in a 24 hour marathon of posting for charity - one post every half hour. I think this is a nifty idea and there are some good charities on their suggested list (though in fact you can blog for any charity you like). I encourage anyone reading to participate themselves. I might do so myself on my (not very) personal blog but I am not sure there are enough people out there who would be willing to sponsor it to make it worthwhile. However if I get ?100/$175 of sponsorship I will go ahead, so please visit my blog and pledge!

P.S. If there is anyone out there with detailed knowledge of development charities I would welcome some help in choosing one to support. I normally give money to Oxfam or Unicef - I did a little research a while ago and it appeared they were doing good work and had a good income to administration/marketing ratio. But one hears so much criticism of aid agencies and it makes me a little worried. Can you either reassure me that one of these would be a good destination for my own money and others’ funds or suggest another better development charity?