About the Talk:

“From Where to What: A New Architecture for the Internet”
The current TCP/IP internet architecture, designed in the 1960s and 70s, is a connection-based architecture which focuses on establishing and maintaining point-to-point conversations between machines, i.e. on “where” the information is located. In the last few decades, however,  the world has changed dramatically. Today’s applications (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, smart sensing) are primarily concerned with content distribution and collection, i.e. with “what” information users want.

In this talk, we introduce a new revolutionary internet architecture called Named Data Networking (NDN), which directly addresses the mismatch between the current connection-oriented internet architecture and the content-driven applications. NDN is a data-centric architecture where IP host addresses are replaced by a hierarchically structured naming scheme which allows one to name a specific chunk of data directly, without forcing the chunk to be a part of a conversation. We discuss the benefits of the NDN network architecture in terms of reducing congestion, increasing mobile access, and enhancing security. We also point out some of the main challenges in the development and implementation of NDN.

About Edmund Yeh:
Edmund Yeh received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering with Distinction from Stanford University in 1994, his M.Phil in Engineering from the University of Cambridge in 1995, and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2001. He is currently an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Statistics at Yale University. Professor Yeh is the recipient of a Humboldt Research Fellowship, an Army Research Office Young Investigator Award, the Winston Churchill Scholarship, the National Science Foundation and Office of Naval Research Graduate Fellowships, the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, the Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Scholastic Award, and the President’s Award for Academic Excellence (Stanford University). He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi.

You are cordially invited to the next Information Society Project speaker series event, scheduled for Friday, February 25, at 12:10 p.m. in Room 120 of Yale Law School.  This week we will be joined by Tarleton Gillespie, who will discuss “The Private Governance of Digital Content, or how Apple intends to offer you ‘freedom from porn.”

About the Talk: “The Private Governance of Digital Content, or how Apple intends to offer you ‘freedom from porn.”

Digital intermediaries like YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Apple, and Twitter are emerging as important new curators of public discourse.  These major online media platforms, social networking sites, and mobile technology providers all make decisions about what can be said and done on their sites and devices.  This is, of course, not surprising.  But the particular character of these decisions, and where, how, and why they make and enforce these rules, have real consequences for the contours of public expression in a digital age.  As more and more of our public discourse, cultural production, and creative interactions with others move online, and this handful of massive, privately-owned digital intermediaries continue to grow in economic and cultural power, it is crucial that we examine the ‘curatorial’ choices they make about the content they host.

Beyond the specific rules being imposed, the techniques they use for enforcing these policies can have their own implications.  They curate in particular ways, and they embody a relationship to content to the site’s users and to policymakers.  Some of these techniques, such as rating content and restricting access to it based on the age of the user, or trying to cultivate informal social norms of propriety and healthy debate, are like those long practiced by broadcasters and publishers.  Others are specific to digital platforms, either because they address the specific challenges and opportunities of user-generated content, or because they take advantage of the particular technical features of the information environment to identify, assess, and restrict content in ways that could not be done in an analog medium.  In this presentation Tarleton will catalog these emerging modes of private governance of content, and discuss the implications of these policies and interventions for the character of online public discourse.

About Tarleton Gillespie:

Tarleton Gillespie is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, affiliated with the Information Science program and the Science & Technology Studies department, and the author of the book Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture.  He is also a non-residential fellow with the Stanford Center for Internet and Society at the Stanford Law School.

Free Beer, and the Cost of Price

IP scholarship today is characterized by a kind of normative Demsetzianism – by the assumption that price is a virtue wherever it can cheaply be arranged. One camp urges that price should be extended as far as possible, and the other raises the cry of transaction costs and externalities. Both assume that price is valuable; they just disagree about when we can afford it. Is price invariably a virtue in the context of information, or does price itself have costs? This paper argues that although price is often treated in the IP literature as a kind of neutral technology, price is not neutral. It has certain affordances, certain structural implications for the values that we care about in the context of information policy. The conventional value of price comes from its ability to act as an inducement and a signal, but price will also have costs to the extent that it fulfills these aims. In efficiency terms, price may in fact induce too much, or at too great a cost. It may also distort, crowd out, or redirect non-market information production. When it acts as a signal, price generates costs for distributive justice, because price is not neutral to underlying resource endowments. While this is also true for material resources, in the context of information price is particularly troubling, because it is not obvious that it advances efficiency. Finally, when price acts as a signal it sets up a logic of surveillance that is in tension with information privacy, because, for example, of the relationship between price discrimination and privacy. The aim of the paper is to help us recognize the costs of price itself in the context of information, not to determine where these costs outweigh the possible benefits. But because the benefits in efficiency terms are more obscure than the IP literature generally acknowledges, compromises with the logic of price, made, for example, in the name of distributive justice or privacy, may be more readily justified that we have perhaps assumed.

About Amy Kapczynski

Amy Kapczynski is a Visiting Associate Professor of Law and Irving S. Ribicoff Fellow in Law at Yale Law School. She is also Assistant Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law (Boalt Hall). Her research interests center on international law, intellectual property, and global health. She helped lead efforts that resulted in Yale University and Bristol-Myers Squibb permitting generic competition and providing steep price discounts for an important anti-AIDS drug in South Africa. Drawing on this experience, she co-founded Universities Allied for Essential Medicines with other students in 2002. She received her A.B. from Princeton University, M. Phil. from Cambridge University, M.A. from Queen Mary and Westfield College at University of London, and J.D. from Yale Law School. At Yale Law School, she was Articles Editor of The Yale Law Journal and co-founder and Advocacy Director of the Yale AIDS Network. She was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship at Yale Law School and the Yale School of Public Health.