Crowd-Sourcing and Crowd-Hunting and the Boston Marathon Bomb Brothers.

How did the Boston Marathon Bombing brothers get caught? The release of videos played a key role. This decision to release this video has been called many things – a risky decision, a calculated bet, a crucial turning point, and a fortunate use of crowd-sourcing.

Let’s not get sloppy with the use of modern lingo. The release of the video might have been risky and calculated, and it even might have been crucial, but let’s not get carried away.

Crowd-sourcing had little to do with what happened. Collective intelligence comes in many different sizes and flavors, but let’s not give it credit when it does not deserve it.

Crowd-hunting is a more appropriate term. This will take a minute to explain.

Look, this is partly a reaction to a lovely article in the Sunday New York Times, which contained a wonderful recounting of this decision (written by Michael S Schmidt and Erik Schmitt). “Manhunt’s Turning Point Came in the Decision to Release Suspect’s Images” said the headline.

Paragraph six contains one sentence. Here is a partial quote…”The decision….was one the most crucial turning points in a remarkable crowd-sourcing manhunt for the plotters of a bombing that killed three people and wounded more than 170.”

Remarkable? Yes. Crowd-sourcing? No.

According to the online version of Merriam and Webster’s Dictionary, Crowd Sourcing is “the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.”

In practice it is also a cooperative activity. Usually a person or firm poses the problem, solicits and manages the help provided by the crowd, and takes care of the other details, such as making the contest rules, if any. Sometimes there are explicit awards and sometimes not.

Such as it was, the crowd was cooperative in Boston, to be sure. Everyone wanted to help if they could. Many sent in their videos of the finish line and tried to help the investigation.

But there were crucial differences between what happened after the Boston Marathon Bombing and crowd-sourcing.

• Most crucially, the cooperation only went so far. The suspects did not want to be found. The definition for crowd sourcing includes nothing about the “solution” putting up active resistance.

• Here is another difference. There also was (sort of) a leader soliciting ideas and managing the contributions, but it was hardly well  organized. To be sure, the feds and the state of Massachusetts and the city of Boston cooperated in some news conferences, and in the strategies to release video and photos. Every participant described this as chaotic. Not because anybody wanted it that way; that is just how things are in a major event.

• Also, more trivially, only a small part of this employed online methods and communications. The news media had a huge role, not just one web site releasing details and collecting suggestions. And it was not just CNN prattling away on every little detail. Some of the media was perfectly happy to amplify any little thing, even false rumors. For example, the New York Post ran a headline “Bag Men” with a circle around the picture of some poor guy who had nothing to do with the bombing. The competitive dynamic between the various news outlets played a key role in blowing many facts out of proportion, and setting the crowd off in the right and wrong direction.

• There is also this little problem: the actual facts don’t fit the label of successful crowd-sourcing. After all, the big break came when the brothers hijacked a car, and released the owner after driving with him for a while. Not killing the car-owner showed that the brothers still had some measure of humanity in them, but releasing him also shows they were not thinking clearly. They had talked about the bombing in front of the car-owner. Once he was released he called 911, and police put out an all-points-bulletin. The owner gave lots of details about his own car. The police spotted it a few minutes later, and that directly led to the death of the older brother.

• Facts get in the way again on the second big break. After the shooting on Thursday and the chase, the governor asked everyone to stay inside on Friday. This was supposed to help the police locate the second brother. This draconian measure was lifted after an entire day because law-enforcement concluded it failed. They had no clue emerged as to the second-brother’s whereabouts. Ten minutes later the owner of a boat in Watertown went outside to get a breather and found the injured brother in the boat in his backyard. In other words, this success was a byproduct of giving up on lock-down, not a strategic or deliberate use of crowds at all. The police were no longer using sourcing. Sourcing had not been allowed to work all day on Friday, since everyone stayed had been asked to stay inside, which is quite the opposite.

The most we can say is that there was an attempt to use sourcing to gather information in order to identify the suspects. The release of the photo did yield many useful clues, and set events in motion. It also probably played a role in the events at MIT, which led to the tragic death of a police officer. In other words, crowd-sourcing acted as a catalyst, but it did not play much of a role beyond that.

Crowd-hunting is a more appropriate term to describe what transpired in Boston. A working definition might be the following: “The practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content related to an unsolved crime by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, often involving one or more government actors, typically using a variety of media to communicate needs and relay updated information to the public.”

The FTC and Google: Did Larry Learn his Lesson?

The FTC and Google settled their differences last week, putting the final touches on an agreement. Commentators began carping from all sides as soon as the announcement came. The most biting criticisms have accused the FTC of going too easy on Google. Frankly, I think the commentators are only half right. Yes, it appears as if Google got off easy, but, IMHO, the FTC settled at about the right place.

More to the point, it is too soon to throw a harsh judgment at Google. This settlement might work just fine, and if it does, then society is better off than it would have been had some grandstanding prosecutor decided to go to trial.

Why? First, public confrontation is often a BIG expense for society. Second, as an organization Google is young and it occupies a market that also is young. The first big antitrust case for such a company in such a situation should substitute education for severe judgment.

Ah, this will take an explanation.

A dumb compromise to save the ACS and Economic Census

Last week I commented in this space about the Tea Party’s desire to make a symbolic cut in government by eliminating the American Community Survey and the Economic Census at the US Census. This would change economic statistics in the US, upending a system that has been in place since the end of World War II. And it really makes no sense for pro-business Republicans to be leading the charge, since business is one of the primary beneficiary of all this data about the US population and business.

Over the weekend, the economic correspondent for the New York Times wrote an opinion piece. She pointed out how many businesses had come out against this change, including the United States Chamber of Commerce, the National Retail Federation and the National Association of Home Builders.

The article did give a hint about what might actually be going on. To quote the article:

“Republicans may hope that when the Senate and House bills go to a conference committee, a final compromise will keep the survey, but make participation in it voluntary. Under current law, participation is mandatory.”

That observation is rather amazing, since there is no mystery to the answer. That question has been studied. Let me quote from the summary of a report on the consequences from imposing voluntary participation:

* “A dramatic decrease occurred in mail response when the survey was voluntary. The mail cooperation rate fell by over 20 percentage points and the final response rate after all three modes of data collection was about four percentage points lower…
* The estimated annual cost of implementing the ACS would increase by at least 38 percent if the survey was voluntary and the survey maintained the current reliability levels.
* The use of voluntary collection methods had a negative impact on traditionally low response areas that will compromise our ability to produce reliable data for these areas and for small population groups such as Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and American Indians and Alaska Natives.

Lower reliability and higher cost seem like a dumb thing to aspire to produce. Like I said last week, this proposal is just stupid.

Do not cut the American Community Survey: an editorial

The House Republicans recently voted to remove funding from the US Census. According to news reports, this action was motivated by a mix of Tea-Party symbolism and the legacy of a long-standing fight with the Census.

This post will present a short editorial. While I have sympathy for part of the motivation for this action – namely, the desire of every household to be left alone – it seems overwhelmed by everything in the other direction.

Let me put it this way. Though I tend to be a man of moderate language, removing funding looks very stupid. In this case I can bring many professional and personal observations to the topic.

What would you say to David Cameron about Google?

Why was Google invented in the US and not the UK? Jonathan Haskell, Professor at Imperial College in London, asked that question in his most recent blog post. What motivated him to ask it? He got a little nudge from his Prime Minister, David Cameron, who asked the same question.

Haskell justifiably hesitates to put too much emphasis on one single factor. At the same time, he wants to use the example to suggest that aspects of the law for copyright play a role. In particular, he stresses that the US has a legal notion called “fair use” while the UK lacks such a notion.

The argument stresses that fair use eliminates the need  for contracting every time a new use or user builds an incremental innovation using a small part of copyrighted material. This matters for certain online innovations — such as innovative search tools. More generally, fair use reduces the costs of innovations that make use of lots of little bits of copyrighted material. In the absence of fair use the innovator would have to contract with every copyright holder, which can be cumbersome or prohibitively expensive. Haskell’s argument stresses the the equivalent UK notion is much narrower, which raises contracting costs, and, thus, disables experimentation in many online activities.

I do not have any reason to disagree with this insight. The characterization of US copyright law is reasonable for this argument. However, not being an expert on UK copyright law, all I can say is that Haskell’s argument sounds plausible to me.

I would like to add one observation and pose two questions.

The observation summarizes something I said in a prior post about Google’s early history. Summarizing that earlier post,  Google’s success did not arise from a single epiphany. It came from the accumulation of many innovations. Google’s success  had many fathers, including Google’s imitation of, and improvement over, innovations done by Overture. That was accomplished with multiple inventions, including page-rank, as well as investment in more speed and reliability. It also including further development of its second-price quality-weighted position auction.  NSF funding paid for initial advance, and Silicon Valley’s ecosystem played a big role too. The efforts of many clever computer scientists played a role, as did the efforts of many bloggers.

Second, let’s pose a question. Does the US law for safe harbor play a role? Does the UK have anything equivalent? The US laws largely were defined in the DMCA, which passed in 1998. While I do not think the US safe harbor rules played a role in Google’s early growth, these processes certainly played a role in YouTube’s experience. Their importance has been widely recognized too. It has come up prominently in recent issues about reforming copyright law in the face of piracy.

The argument for safe harbors — e.g., adopting and executing routine procedures for taking down copyrighted material limits the liability to a hosting site — goes something like this: a well defined procedure for no liability helps innovators by giving them legal certainty about what does and does not violate another copyright holder’s rights. Does the UK have something equivalent?

The second question concerns antitrust. Does the application or lack of application of antitrust law play any role in the difference between the US and UK experience?  I usually think of US antitrust law as friendly to innovators, and particularly focused on keeping channels open, which helps entrepreneurs. It also leads to deconcentration of ownership. How does that compare with the UK?

I also ask this question partially as a result of a recent court decision in France. Yes, France has nothing to do with the UK, but this example is just too weird to go without mention, so please forgive the lack of segue. The French court found Google violated antitrust law because it gave away its maps for free. A french map maker complained and won their suit, apparently, by convincing a judge that free maps violated France’s antitrust laws. I have seen some wacky court decisions over the years, but on the surface this one sure seems inexplicable. Is the UK as wacky as all this?

To summarize, Jonathan Haskell asks a great question, motivated by his Prime Minister’s question. Why did Google start in the US and not the UK? He and I agree that multiple factors ultimately played a role. Haskell also suggests the definition of fair use has something to do with it. I wonder if safe harbors and antitrust also play a role.

What do you think?

Invasion of the Internet Body snatchers

If you have been musing about the misguided policies in SOPA and PIPA that generated protests, what do you make of misguided international governance of the Internet? This article in Politico raises an interesting possibility, that the ITU will assert itself into Internet governance, ostensibly to coordinate security and taxation across countries. As is well known, numerous countries would like to see this happen because it allows them to indirectly use the ITU to control pieces of the Internet.

I bet the same people who protested SOPA and PIPA would view this decision-making body with about the same paranoia as Donald Sutherland in the remake of “Invasion of the body snatchers.” Like Sutherland, they will want to stay awake forever, lest the aliens come in while they are asleep and steal the independence of the Internet.  (Alright, maybe that stretches the metaphor a tad, but you get the idea).

Of course, there is a key difference. The ITU is one of those international organizations that does not have to answer to anybody in particular. None of its decision makers have to stand for reelection. None of the leaders have much to fear from any web-based protest.

I do not know about you, but if the ITU sticks its nose into Internet governance I do not see this turning out well.

Don’t get me wrong. I have met several people from the ITU over the years. All of them have been very polite and thoughtful and well-spoken. But that is still not the same as being held accountable. 

How would the Internet community react to more international governance, such as from the ITU? If I had to guess — and this not going out on much of a limb — the same people who mistrust a few Hollywood lobbyists with the text of a law about piracy will trust the decisions of many non-US governments even less. Will they bend their behavior to abide by a directive that emerged from negotiations between a government in Paris and a government in Bejing or Moscow? How about, say, Kinshasa or Caracas? Ya, right.

I am just saying. The same instincts that led Sergey Brin and Larry Page to defy Bejing — and, mind you, at some financial loss to their firm — are the same instincts that fueled the SOPA and PIPA revolt. These sentiments exist widely.

It is nothing personal, nor foreign-phobic. These sentiments have been around for quite some time. For as long as I have been watching policy making in this space — which is approximately two decades — there has always been a big and vocal community who guards their independence. This community is thoughtful and a bit defiant, and, importantly, suspicious of any bottlenecks or concentration of authority.

As David Clark so succinctly and graciously summarized the sentiment in 1993:

We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.

Sure, the venue for the recent protests is new, and so is the instrument for protesting. But read the online chatter about SOPA and PIPA. It has the same tone and sensibility, less revolution, more evolution in the target and means. The ITU would get as much revolt today as any other authority.

Here is what I mean. Over the years various firms and authorities have become the target for this sensibility. More than two decades ago (in Clark’s speech) the targets were the largest telephone companies, especially AT&T in New Jersey and the global standards bodies trying to coordinate technical developments across countries in the early 1990s. Among the many concerns at the time, there was deep suspicion against the way any one decision maker would impose their interests too strongly, ruining the accomplishments of the community.

These same instincts would resist the ITU, should it try to insert itself.  Different venue, but the same protest.

In the article Phil Weiser  gets it right on target, “Part of the challenge is to defend the bottom-up governance model.”

Donald Sutherland understood the problem with the defense in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It means never going to sleep.

Puzzling over big wireless carrier mergers: An Editorial

Let’s talk about AT&T proposal to merge with T-Mobile. Why do the parties involved still consider this merger viable?

Executives at AT&T seemed to think this merger was a good idea many months ago. For all I know, that might have been the right conclusion with the information they had then. But that was then, and this is now, and too much information has come to light to hold that conclusion any longer. Based on what we know now the proposal does not make business sense.

This blog post will argue what should be obvious to any close observer of events, and certainly to the management at AT&T. There is not a viable business case for this merger any longer.

This blog post also will argue that executives at T-Mobile should begin planning to run their business as a stand-alone entity. They always had a viable business,  but that holds even more so now, since they will get a reasonable infusion of cash from the break-up of this deal.

How did the executives at AT&T get into the present pickle? They took a strategic gamble with the US legal system and lost. In their own internal deliberations today they should be acknowledging the loss, and –  for lack of a better phrase — simply move on. That is what their business needs.

So I am puzzled. Why haven’t all the parties declared victory and gone home? This post will consider the question.

Smartphone patents and platform wars

Firms in the smartphone market have been suing one another over patent violations. I cannot recall any other platform war that involved as many intellectual property disputes.

Look, society grants patents as part of trade-off. A patent enhances the incentives to generate new invention by giving the inventor a temporary monopoly. That trade-off should never be far from the top of the discussion. Let me say that another way: Artificial monopolies are clearly bad for the economy. There is no reason to grant them unless society gets something in return, such as more invention.

It is easy to speculate that something is amiss. Was society still on the good side of this trade-off when a non-practicing entity sued RIM-Blackberry for hundreds of millions of dollars, even though the dispute involved patents invented by someone who never got close to putting them into a viable business? Was society on the right side of this trade-off when a consortium spent four billion dollars for patents in bankruptcy court from Nortel, a firm that made some very bad bets during the dot-com boom and had run itself into the ground? Was society on the same side of the trade-off when Google felt so cornered that it bought Motorola for its patents, and, after it was announced, very few analysts saw any reason to point that Google also received tens of thousands of talented engineers as part of the deal?

This is a way of introducing a recent article, “Owning the stack: The legal war to control the smartphone platform.” I recommend it. It appeared in Ars Technica. It brought considerable clarity to events by explaining the actions and motives of various players in the recent patent wars involving smartphones. It was written by James Gimmelman at NYU law school, and recommended to me by David Laskowski, a student from a prior class at Kellogg (Thanks David!).

This post passes on that recommendation and offers a few comments.

The Open Internet Order

After a year of hearings and considerable public discussion, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted the Open Internet Order on December 21, 2010.

Fireworks flared on the blogosphere almost immediately. Net neutrality advocates cried that the order betrayed and sold-out sacred principles, while Tea Party supporters heaped scornful criticism at government activism. Both sides made intemperate and grim forecasts about the Internet’s future.

Levelheadedness left the political sphere as well. Pushed hard by Tea Party sympathizers, the House of Representatives passed House Joint Resolution 37 in April 2011, largely along party lines, disapproving of the order. As of this writing, the Senate hasn’t yet taken up the measure. President Obama promises to veto it.

Frankly, this conversation needs a calm and considered middle ground, not utopian visions abutting practical considerations. The Internet has never lacked government oversight, and Internet participants have occasionally compromised on neutrality to function. There are subtle economic issues to debate here, and simplistic absolutes don’t contribute much to finding reasonable economic solutions.

The Internet and Innovation: My Testimony to Congress

A couple days ago I had the privilege and pleasure to testify before the House Sub-committee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, which is part of the Committee on Energy and Commerce in the House of Representatives.

Broadly speaking, the topic was net neutrality. That is what the newspapers said.

Frankly, I hesitated to testify. I am always happy to talk with any government analyst who calls, irrespective of party affiliation. Congressional testimony is different, however, especially in this topic, which tends to yield more heat than light. Moreover, I am neither advocate nor opponent for net neutrality — at least as that phrase commonly gets used in US political debate. Why should I be a neutral voice in someone else’s political fight?

Ah, but I could not say no. Even with reservations, there still exists a professional obligation to show up. It is the right thing to do. Also, and I will admit to this, I was excited.

One other thing made it easy. The hearing did not concern the entire net neutrality debate. It concerned a rather specific question, something called House Resolution 37, which disapproves of the Open Internet Access Order issued by the FCC last December. If passed, the entire order would not take effect — not its provisions for transparency, blocking and discriminatory traffic.

I had testified at the FCC hearings leading up to to the order, and  had testified in favor of transparency provisions, for example. That made it easy. Such a blanket resolution — getting rid of everything — looked like throwing out the baby with the bath water. To me this resolution did not make sense.

One other broad motive shaped my views. I believe there actually is a big economic question on the table, and it gets lost in the popular debate. I hoped to bring attention to that. In a nutshell, if there is anything a government might be able to do, it might be able to foster economic growth by nurturing entrepreneurship on the Internet.

Those expectations were naive (of course), but we will get to that below. Anyway, that is why I agreed to come.

This post will share what I learned about how the existing political debate filters this topic.  Below is a copy of my oral testimony, and a link to my written testimony. After that comes many  observations about what sort of questions arose at the hearing. I hope others find this insightful and useful.