I'm not normally one to pile on good causes that do stupid things. Well. Wait. Yes I am. And really, I should stop making fun of cancer-related subjects. But really this registration form is one of the worst designed forms I've ever seen.
I'm not unfamiliar with marketing forms and surveys and registration forms. Part of my Masters work was in Marketing Analysis and I worked for many years as a web designer writing registration forms and surveys. I even wrote an automated survey generator - just type in some questions and answers, click a few buttons and instantly formatted survey or test with full grading and analysis. Anyway, the point is - I've seen a lot of forms and I understand how to make them correctly; or at least not incorrectly.
Some brief information about this form. It's a registration form to help volunteer for the American Cancer Society Run/Walk in Madison, WI the weekend of 4/8. I wanted to volunteer to help out with the run/walk. Not really sure what they'll need me to do, but I'm always happy to help. So, you go their main site and then you click on "volunteer registration" and you are presented with a form.
The first question (statement) is: "I am a cancer survivor" then a yes/no. OK, not a bad way to start - I can understand that they will likely give priority to cancer survivors since they ARE the American Cancer Society. If they have to choose between me (not a cancer survivor) and someone else that is a cancer survivor, they'd rather have the other guy. Fair enough. But I've had family members with cancer, it's not like I am unfamiliar with the issues. But, again, not a bad way to start - I understand it, and it's not required. I click 'no' and move on.
The second question (statement) is: "Select the Race with which you most closely identify." I half expect to see "5K run" and "5K walk" as the options. But no, the options are (in order): African-American/Black; American-Indian/Alaskan Native; Asian; Caucasian/White; Hispanic/Latino; Pacific Islander; Other. Leaving the options themselves alone, WHAT THE FUCK!? Why does this matter? I'm fucking volunteering to help you out. What do YOU care if I'm black, white, or asian? The only conclusion I can come to is that they want to find out who are the minorities so they can make sure they get them where the cameras are and/or that it's some sort of 'affirmative action' question. As if for VOLUNTEERING they are going to give preference to one race over another. Also interesting is the phrasing of the question: "which race do you most closly identify." What do you mean "identify?" Don't you want to know what race I AM? I may not identify with my own race. If I grew up among those of a different race, I may more closely identify with that race. They are my 'culture' and 'family' so to speak despite the fact that I am not, genetically, one of them. Clearly, they are ashamed to be asking the question because they are trying to be delicate about the phrasing. But why ask the question at all? What purpose does the question serve? Luckily it's not required, so I move on.
It doesn't get better with the third question: I have read and agree to the Terms and Conditions outlined above. This one's required and there is only one option: "yes." But, if you look at the form carefully you will notice something is missing. Yes, that's right - THERE ARE NO TERMS AND CONDITIONS! Not even a LINK to terms and conditions. What am I clicking 'yes' to? In virtually every other instance I would stop filling out this form right here. There's no way in HELL I'm going to click 'yes' to terms that I are not only presented RIGHT UP FRONT, but terms that I can't even discover from the page that I am agreeing to them on. I've been told that the terms are actually on the "participant's registration" but there is nothing on THIS FORM to indicate that. I reluctantly click "yes" because, really, how bad can the 'terms' actually be? Plus, I'm an attorney, and I know that I can't be held responsible for terms that I've never been given notice of. (let's set aside for the moment the fact that I have submitted a position paper to the American Bar Association that suggests that users have a duty to discover terms that they know exist, even if there is no notice of where exactly the terms are, and failure to discover the terms is not a defense to them)
The next question is: If eligible, I waive my incentive prize. What? What incentive prize? There is nothing here about incentive prizes. Why would I waive it? How do I get it? What is it? Well, there's no way in hell I'm going to waive a prize that may be rightly mine, so I leave this one blank.
Then they get into the name/address information. But they never ask me what I want to volunteer to do! I know that run/walks need a lot of people to a lot of different things. I've participated in many; I've volunteered for them once or twice. It is entirely possible that my EXPERTISE IN RUNNING AN EVENT MIGHT BE MORE IMPORTANT THAN WHAT FUCKING RACE I AM! But, alas, they will never know if I am the greatest timer of all time. Because I will be put into the hat and when they draw out names I may be put at a drink station.
Unless of course, they prefer to use a cancer survivor or a minority for that position.
Friday, March 31, 2006
Friday, March 10, 2006
Network Neutrality and Paying for the Intertron
A little background for those non-techies who stumble across this mess. Once upon a time in a land not so far away some really geeky dudes in the military wanted a way to communicate with each other in case phone lines went out. Telegraph was one option, but, being geeks, they wanted to invent something entirely new. They worked for an entity called "DARPA" (Defense something something something). The thing they created would be what we currently think of as some weird hybrid between IM and e-mail; sort of like SMS over phone lines. But, it was taking too much time and there was parallel work going on over at MIT and on the west coast at Stanford, so they turned over their research and, more importantly, the physical wires, to the public domain and asked the university folks to do it for them. The university folks were interested in a slightly different application - they wanted to not only talk to each other, but to share documents with each other online. What they realized is that the wires were good for not only sharing these IMs, but also for sharing documents. The only real difference was the language that the computers at each end used to talk to each other. But both messages could travel on the same wires at the same time because the network itself was neutral. In other words, neither the wires themselves, nor the intermediate connecting points, contained any preference for whether the thing they were transferring was an IM or a document. It was all data.
This is important because later more and more types of data made their way on to this thing that came to be called the internet. But the physical network didn't care. So long as it traveled in bits and packets, the network could care less what it was. Some time in the late 90s or so, the sheer amount traffic on these networks required more lines be laid. Since telcos and cable companies were already laying line, it made sense to use their lines. But the lines themselves are not fundamentally different, they still just carry bits and packets around the country without any regard or preference for what is contained in them.
Now, though, these 'private' lines far outnumber the 'public' lines. And the telcos have all established their own little gateways to get on to the internet (called ISPs). Many of them have very lucrative contracts with content providers (Time Warner, Disney, etc.) and most have, or are looking to establish, their own marketplaces for this content. They have realized that companies like Google (not an ISP) provide a very profitable service - they serve up content (of all types) and get paid for it.
Enter the argument. The telcos/cable companies basic argument is this: Google accounts for the vast majority of traffic on our wires, and if we add our traffic to their traffic we'll need to eventually put in more wires, so Google should pay us for this traffic. But the problem is even slightly more nefarious than that. What, say, AT&T has noticed is that Google and Skype and YouTube and others are doing is essentially competing with AT&T. AT&T offers phone and voip (Skype) and television (Google Video and YouTube) and they think that these others are essentially getting a 'free ride' on their lines for their competing services. So, their (AT&T and other telcos/cables) solution is this: let's charge Google and Skype and others for using our lines for these services. Now, their argument is even a little more nuanced than that - because to deny them outright unless they pay would be illegal. So, they are saying "we will provide a base level of service, but if you want to transfer enough packets for a high quality service, you'll have to pay us."
And that, my friends, is a problem. First of all it's a fallacy. They are already being paid for the traffic. When you and I pay for our ISP service - we are paying them for access to these exact kinds of services. It's not my fault that they charge me the same amount of money whether I use it strictly for email (a low-bandwidth use) or for video (a high-bandwidth use). But, the very essence of the internet is that it remain open to any and all types of uses. Because the next step is that only AT&T will allow video, only Comcast will allow voip, you get the idea. And then the net is divided up into these little areas that are controlled by the telcos and cables. Only those transfer mechanisms and protocols that they deign to be permitted will be allowed on the internet, and improvement and technological advance are rendered null because it is controlled by those that hold the right to allow it to travel over the wires in the first place.
So, what are the options? I'm a free-market kind of guy. I think that if the telcos and cables provide the wires and charge for access, that's fine, they have every right to do that. But they shouldn't able to control what gets on to the internet or how it is used. In my opinion, the best solutions is a 'usage' billing system - that way, those that use the 'high-bandwidth' applications pay more. This is, to me, a reasonable solution. If use the internet to watch TV and download movies and music and stream audio, I am using up a lot of band-width. If enough of us do this more lines will have to be laid. Telcos/cables should not have to be in a position where they do this gratis; it's not to be expected of them. So, those of that use more, pay more. We accept this for other utilities: water, gas, electric, etc. If we look at the internet as a utility (which it is because it a public service), then there's no reason to not charge like a utility.
A usage billing system will have one most immediate impact: a drastic decrease in the amount of traffic on the internet. Will it stop? Of course not. People want to use the internet. I will grant that if they had used this system initially, the internet probably would have never grown. But any more it is a necessity. There are things that simply absolutely must be done online. Provided the usage charge is reasonble, bills shouldn't change drastically; particularly because I imagine it will be a "stepped" or "tiered" charge rather than a purely usage fee. Something like: 0-5GB transferred per month = $20; 5GB-30GB $50; 30GB - 100GB $75, etc. Keep in mind that one downloaded movie is about 5GB (so for what most people pay now - about $50/month - they would be able to use the equivalent bandwidth of about 6 movies; quite frankly, I don't know if that's a lot or a little - I know that I currently have 6GB of downloads queued up in Azureus and that's about my normal download activity for a month - although, to be fair, this doesn't include all the back-ground transfers that go on - games I play online, etc. but it seems to me that 30GB is quite a bit of data and 100GB would be transferring my entire media hard-drive in one month; I would think that most people - and most people don't download tons of movies or play tons of video games, etc. - use between 5GB and 30GB of data in an average month). And each month you would just be charged for the amount of bandwidth you used that month. This is similar to the charging for certain applications, but it isn't discriminatory like the other model. It doesn't say "Google, you must pay $X if you want to transfer high quality video" it says to the consumer, "hey, I have no idea what the hell you were doing, but you used a whole lot of bandwidth." And that's a huge difference. As a consumer, I still have choices - I can choose to watch high-quality, or low-quality, I can choose not watch it over the internet at all. But the primary advantage is that it isn't discriminatory.
(An added advantage would be a drastic decrease in piracy; who's going to download libraries of data if they have to pay for it all - of course, it will decrease the amount of 'legal' downloading as well because then you are paying twice for it - admittedly this is a disadvantage, and a fairly big one at that - but I still think the theory is sound, and that this is just something that would be worked out - maybe a 'legal' puchase would act as a credit towards your monthly bill - or, more likely, legal downloads from authorized sources would not 'count' as traffic - though that starts to look less and less like network neutrality - but as long as there were a 'compulsory license' for payment of the bandwidth taken out of the purchase price and the authorizing agency was a third party - maybe the government?? sort of like a 'sales tax' is charged? the 'internet transfer tax' maybe would be collected and authorized by the government and remitted to an ISP fund that is split ratably amongst the ISPs based on number of users? - there shouldn't be too much of a problem? OK, I'll admit, this a pretty tough part of this problem).
I would place one caveat on this: a federal regulation that all houses that have either phone or cable lines must have internet access and that the first GB be free. The internet will have far more potential if every house has access to it. If the house pays for cable or phone, it shouldn't be a problem - it's just another type of data to travel over the line. Hardware developers could build the modems into the products (DSL into phones, Cable into cable boxes or just have the modem as part of the physical house/unit itself, sitting between the outside line and the inside line).
The other option, besides usage-billing, is reverting to government control over the internet. The federal government would buy the lines from the telcos/cables and they would lease it to the municipalities, whatever. I think this is silly, because I think that the free-market can do it itself. But, if private companies can't be responsible about it (and quite frankly, right now there's no reason to think that they can) then it is better off in the hands of the governments where they dole it out as a public utility and ensure that everyone has access.
Anyway. It's just a little rant/essay on why it's important to pay attention to how the telcos/cables are screwing their customers behind their backs. Luckily, it has appeared that the vast majority of the public is standing up to the telcos on this issue. Google has publicly said "bugger off we're not going to pay you." And the technology industry in general has made it clear how terrible of an idea eliminating network neutrality is. But, the telcos are insistent on pushing forward with this. And, if a reasonable alternative isn't developed, we will have many 'personal' internets - there will be an AT&T net, a Comcast net, a Sprint net, a Google net, a Microsoft net, etc. And that will be bad for everyone.
This is important because later more and more types of data made their way on to this thing that came to be called the internet. But the physical network didn't care. So long as it traveled in bits and packets, the network could care less what it was. Some time in the late 90s or so, the sheer amount traffic on these networks required more lines be laid. Since telcos and cable companies were already laying line, it made sense to use their lines. But the lines themselves are not fundamentally different, they still just carry bits and packets around the country without any regard or preference for what is contained in them.
Now, though, these 'private' lines far outnumber the 'public' lines. And the telcos have all established their own little gateways to get on to the internet (called ISPs). Many of them have very lucrative contracts with content providers (Time Warner, Disney, etc.) and most have, or are looking to establish, their own marketplaces for this content. They have realized that companies like Google (not an ISP) provide a very profitable service - they serve up content (of all types) and get paid for it.
Enter the argument. The telcos/cable companies basic argument is this: Google accounts for the vast majority of traffic on our wires, and if we add our traffic to their traffic we'll need to eventually put in more wires, so Google should pay us for this traffic. But the problem is even slightly more nefarious than that. What, say, AT&T has noticed is that Google and Skype and YouTube and others are doing is essentially competing with AT&T. AT&T offers phone and voip (Skype) and television (Google Video and YouTube) and they think that these others are essentially getting a 'free ride' on their lines for their competing services. So, their (AT&T and other telcos/cables) solution is this: let's charge Google and Skype and others for using our lines for these services. Now, their argument is even a little more nuanced than that - because to deny them outright unless they pay would be illegal. So, they are saying "we will provide a base level of service, but if you want to transfer enough packets for a high quality service, you'll have to pay us."
And that, my friends, is a problem. First of all it's a fallacy. They are already being paid for the traffic. When you and I pay for our ISP service - we are paying them for access to these exact kinds of services. It's not my fault that they charge me the same amount of money whether I use it strictly for email (a low-bandwidth use) or for video (a high-bandwidth use). But, the very essence of the internet is that it remain open to any and all types of uses. Because the next step is that only AT&T will allow video, only Comcast will allow voip, you get the idea. And then the net is divided up into these little areas that are controlled by the telcos and cables. Only those transfer mechanisms and protocols that they deign to be permitted will be allowed on the internet, and improvement and technological advance are rendered null because it is controlled by those that hold the right to allow it to travel over the wires in the first place.
So, what are the options? I'm a free-market kind of guy. I think that if the telcos and cables provide the wires and charge for access, that's fine, they have every right to do that. But they shouldn't able to control what gets on to the internet or how it is used. In my opinion, the best solutions is a 'usage' billing system - that way, those that use the 'high-bandwidth' applications pay more. This is, to me, a reasonable solution. If use the internet to watch TV and download movies and music and stream audio, I am using up a lot of band-width. If enough of us do this more lines will have to be laid. Telcos/cables should not have to be in a position where they do this gratis; it's not to be expected of them. So, those of that use more, pay more. We accept this for other utilities: water, gas, electric, etc. If we look at the internet as a utility (which it is because it a public service), then there's no reason to not charge like a utility.
A usage billing system will have one most immediate impact: a drastic decrease in the amount of traffic on the internet. Will it stop? Of course not. People want to use the internet. I will grant that if they had used this system initially, the internet probably would have never grown. But any more it is a necessity. There are things that simply absolutely must be done online. Provided the usage charge is reasonble, bills shouldn't change drastically; particularly because I imagine it will be a "stepped" or "tiered" charge rather than a purely usage fee. Something like: 0-5GB transferred per month = $20; 5GB-30GB $50; 30GB - 100GB $75, etc. Keep in mind that one downloaded movie is about 5GB (so for what most people pay now - about $50/month - they would be able to use the equivalent bandwidth of about 6 movies; quite frankly, I don't know if that's a lot or a little - I know that I currently have 6GB of downloads queued up in Azureus and that's about my normal download activity for a month - although, to be fair, this doesn't include all the back-ground transfers that go on - games I play online, etc. but it seems to me that 30GB is quite a bit of data and 100GB would be transferring my entire media hard-drive in one month; I would think that most people - and most people don't download tons of movies or play tons of video games, etc. - use between 5GB and 30GB of data in an average month). And each month you would just be charged for the amount of bandwidth you used that month. This is similar to the charging for certain applications, but it isn't discriminatory like the other model. It doesn't say "Google, you must pay $X if you want to transfer high quality video" it says to the consumer, "hey, I have no idea what the hell you were doing, but you used a whole lot of bandwidth." And that's a huge difference. As a consumer, I still have choices - I can choose to watch high-quality, or low-quality, I can choose not watch it over the internet at all. But the primary advantage is that it isn't discriminatory.
(An added advantage would be a drastic decrease in piracy; who's going to download libraries of data if they have to pay for it all - of course, it will decrease the amount of 'legal' downloading as well because then you are paying twice for it - admittedly this is a disadvantage, and a fairly big one at that - but I still think the theory is sound, and that this is just something that would be worked out - maybe a 'legal' puchase would act as a credit towards your monthly bill - or, more likely, legal downloads from authorized sources would not 'count' as traffic - though that starts to look less and less like network neutrality - but as long as there were a 'compulsory license' for payment of the bandwidth taken out of the purchase price and the authorizing agency was a third party - maybe the government?? sort of like a 'sales tax' is charged? the 'internet transfer tax' maybe would be collected and authorized by the government and remitted to an ISP fund that is split ratably amongst the ISPs based on number of users? - there shouldn't be too much of a problem? OK, I'll admit, this a pretty tough part of this problem).
I would place one caveat on this: a federal regulation that all houses that have either phone or cable lines must have internet access and that the first GB be free. The internet will have far more potential if every house has access to it. If the house pays for cable or phone, it shouldn't be a problem - it's just another type of data to travel over the line. Hardware developers could build the modems into the products (DSL into phones, Cable into cable boxes or just have the modem as part of the physical house/unit itself, sitting between the outside line and the inside line).
The other option, besides usage-billing, is reverting to government control over the internet. The federal government would buy the lines from the telcos/cables and they would lease it to the municipalities, whatever. I think this is silly, because I think that the free-market can do it itself. But, if private companies can't be responsible about it (and quite frankly, right now there's no reason to think that they can) then it is better off in the hands of the governments where they dole it out as a public utility and ensure that everyone has access.
Anyway. It's just a little rant/essay on why it's important to pay attention to how the telcos/cables are screwing their customers behind their backs. Luckily, it has appeared that the vast majority of the public is standing up to the telcos on this issue. Google has publicly said "bugger off we're not going to pay you." And the technology industry in general has made it clear how terrible of an idea eliminating network neutrality is. But, the telcos are insistent on pushing forward with this. And, if a reasonable alternative isn't developed, we will have many 'personal' internets - there will be an AT&T net, a Comcast net, a Sprint net, a Google net, a Microsoft net, etc. And that will be bad for everyone.
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