open access – Techdirt (original) (raw)

New Map Shows Community Broadband Networks Are Exploding In U.S.

from the if-you-build-it-they-will-come dept

The Institute For Local Self Reliance (disclosure: I have done writing and research for them) has released an updated interactive map of every community-owned and operated broadband network in the U.S.

All told, there’s now 400 community-owned broadband networks serving more than 700 U.S. towns and cities nationwide, and the pace of growth shows no sign of slowing down.

Some of these networks are directly owned by a municipality. Some are freshly-built cooperatives. Some are extensions of the existing city-owned electrical utility. All of them are an organic, popular, grass-roots community-driven reaction to telecom market failure and expensive, patchy access.

A breakdown of the new mapping data from the folks at ILSR notes that the number of community broadband networks has been increasing at about a rate of fifteen per year, up from the 8 per year cadence the organization saw between 2001 and 2008. The number of communities served by larger, popular community networks (like Chattanooga’s EPB and Utah’s UTOPIA) continue to grow.

Data routinely notes that community-owned broadband networks provide faster, cheaper, better service than their larger private-sector counterparts. Staffed by locals, they’re also more directly accountable and responsive to the needs of locals. They’re also just hugely popular across the partisan spectrum; routinely winning awards for service.

Many such deployments (like UTOPIA) involve building open access fiber infrastructure that numerous competitors (private, public, or otherwise) come in and compete over. In many of these areas, locals have the option of more than a dozen different ISPs to choose from, all providing broadband at a lower rate than what you’re used to from Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, or Charter.

That’s not to suggest community-owned broadband networks are some mystical panacea; they require smart leadership, strategic planning, and intelligent financing. But if done well, they not only drive significant fiber improvements directly to local markets, they incentivize lumbering regional private sector monopolies — long pampered by federal government corruption and muted competition — to actually try.

Widespread frustration with substandard U.S. broadband drove a big boost in such networks during COVID lockdowns. Since January 1, 2021, more than 47 new networks have come online, with dozens in the planning or pre-construction phases. Many are seeing a big financial boost thanks to 2021 COVID relief (ARPA) and infrastructure bill (IIJA) legislation funding (the latter of which hasn’t even arrived yet).

In response to this popular grass roots movement, giant ISPs have worked tirelessly to outlaw such efforts, regardless of voter intent. 16 states still have protectionist state laws, usually ghost written by giant telecom monopolies, prohibiting the construction or expansion of community broadband. House Republicans went so far as to try and ban all community broadband during a pandemic.

Lumbering regional monopolies like Comcast, AT&T, and Charter could have responded to this movement by lowering prices and improving service. Instead in many cases they found it cheaper to lobby politicians, sue fledgling networks, or create fake “consumer groups” tasked with spreading lies about the perils of community-owned broadband networks among local communities.

But based on the growth rate of such networks, these efforts have backfired, and locally-owned and operated broadband networks appear to be more popular than ever.

Filed Under: arpa, BEAD, broadband, community broadband, fiber, high speed internet, iiji, municipal, open access, telecom

Gates Foundation Shows That ‘Gold Open Access’ Was A Mistake, And ‘Diamond Open Access’ Is The Future

from the proper-open-access dept

The Gates Foundation is one of the most influential funding bodies in the world. According to one ranking, it is the second largest charitable foundation, and as of 31 December 2023 had an endowment of around $75.2 billion. That makes a shift in its publishing policy hugely important.

An article in Chemical & Engineering News explains that hitherto the Gates Foundation has paid the publication charges of work carried out using its grants, provided the final version is available freely. That’s what is known as gold open access. A number of Walled Culture articles have explained why that approach has failed. In March of this year, the Gates Foundation announced a “refresh” of its open access policies to “address ongoing challenges and advance systemic change in scholarly publishing”. From January 2025 the Foundation will be:

Requiring preprints and encouraging preprint review to make research publicly available when it’s ready. While researchers and authors can continue to publish in their journal of choice, preprints will help prioritize access to the research itself as opposed to access to a particular journal.

Discontinuing publishing fees, such as APCs [Article Processing Charges]. By discontinuing to support these fees, we can work to address inequities in current publishing models and reinvest the funds elsewhere.

Along with many other open access supporters, Walled Culture has been advocating a move to preprints as the primary publication medium for research. But the approach is not without its problems, notably in terms of the risk that bad players can use them to disseminate flawed research or intentional misinformation. In an attempt to deal with that issue, a new “verified preprint platform”, VeriXiv, has been launched by the Gates Foundation together with F1000, part of the Taylor & Francis group:

While preprints make the latest research available more quickly, their growing use in sharing findings ahead of peer review has added to concerns about the potential for disseminating misinformation. To support greater research integrity, VeriXiv will conduct rigorous pre-publication checks. Each VeriXiv submission will undergo twenty ethics and integrity checks to assess a range of issues, including plagiarism, image manipulation, author verification, and competing interests.

In addition, open research transparency checks will also check whether the data is available in an appropriate repository and whether methods have been included to support reproducibility. Each preprint will have clear labeling so that readers know the level of verification conducted on the article and which levels have been passed.

Preprints are a key element of diamond open access, where there are no charges for either the reader or the researcher. The momentum behind what was once a fringe approach seems to be growing. Last year, the open access group cOAlition S made an important move towards diamond open access based around preprints. In July of this year, the Global Diamond Open Access Alliance was announced at a UNESCO event. The switch by the Gates Foundation from supporting gold open access to requiring preprints is another important signal that diamond open access is the way forward for the widespread, free dissemination of academic knowledge – something that copyright has prevented for too long.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally published on Walled Culture.

Filed Under: diamond open access, gold open access, open access, preprints, research
Companies: gates foundation, verixiv

AT&T, T-Mobile Embrace ‘Open Access’ Fiber After Years Of Opposition

from the financially-incentivized-to-see-the-light dept

Thu, Sep 26th 2024 05:26am - Karl Bode

Two years ago, Techdirt’s Copia Institute released a report discussing how open access fiber networks were a potential path toward boosting fiber competition in the United States. Such networks, sometimes community owned, involve collaboratively building a centralized fiber infrastructure that multiple competitors can come in and compete over.

In instances where this has been successfully achieved — like Utah’s Utopia or in Ammon, Idaho — users sometimes have the option of dozens of different fiber ISPs, which in some cases can be switched between with just a few clicks on a web portal. The projects lower the cost of market entry. The competition drives down prices, improves service quality, and generally results in better broadband access.

Understandably big ISPs like Comcast and AT&T didn’t much like that, and spent years fighting such projects knowing they threatened their regional dominance. But now some executives at AT&T and T-Mobile appear to have seen the light, with both companies striking new deals to build or participate in such open access networks:

“Once staunch opponents of open access, Tier 1 Internet Service Providers are now entering a space that, in the United States, has been pioneered by local governments two decades ago.

In the last year-and-a-half, AT&T has embraced open access through its Gigapower joint venture with BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager with $10 trillion assets under management.”

In this case BlackRock is building the network, and AT&T would be the “anchor tenant” (the first ISP to sign up for service). The about face for AT&T is fairly significant; the company went from fighting such network vehemently, to their CEO making the rounds talking up the benefits of open access.

The approach always made sense financially and developmentally; AT&T and larger ISPs simply opposed it because they didn’t want anything disrupting their regional telecom monopolies or duopolies, which allow them to price gouge captive customers trapped in markets without competition. AT&T’s opposition was particularly venomous when community-owned networks (municipals, cooperatives) were involved.

What changed these companies minds? They’re lining up to potentially obtain more than $45 billion in broadband subsidies currently looming thanks to 2021 infrastructure bill legislation. That money isn’t expected to start flowing in earnest until next year. The bullishness is great to see, but it will be interesting to see if it remains intact once AT&T (a company with a long history of making promises it doesn’t deliver on) has nabbed their desired cut of taxpayer funds.

Filed Under: BEAD, broadband, competition, fiber, high speed internet, infrastructure bill, open access, telecom
Companies: at&t, blackrock, t-mobile

Is Your Google Scholar Profile Looking A Bit Empty? Need To Bulk Up Your Citations? Simple – Buy Some

from the that's-not-how-it-works dept

Techdirt has been reporting on the rotten state of academic publishing for more than ten years. Abuses include publishers willing to publish anything for a fee, and the sale of nonsense papers so that they can be used to bulk up an academic’s CV. But the world moves on, and Nature has a report about a new way to boost the number of citations claimed by a researcher: simply buy them. This latest academic publishing scam was discovered as a result of an investigation carried out by Yasir Zaki, a computer scientist at New York University Abu Dhabi, and his team. Nature explains:

In their sting operation, Zaki and his colleagues created a Google Scholar profile for a fictional scientist and uploaded 20 made-up studies that were created using artificial intelligence.

The team then approached a company, which they found while analysing suspicious citations linked to one of the authors in their data set, that seemed to be selling citations to Google Scholar profiles. The study authors contacted the firm by e-mail and later communicated through WhatsApp. The company offered 50 citations for 300or100citationsfor300 or 100 citations for 300or100citationsfor500. The authors opted for the first option and 40 days later 50 citations from studies in 22 journals — 14 of which are indexed by scholarly database Scopus — were added to the fictional researcher’s Google Scholar profile.

The rise of preprints as an alternative to traditional academic publishing has made this kind of fraud easier, Zaki’s research suggests. Preprints are simple to generate, and aren’t generally peer-reviewed, so it is easy to write them to order and slip in bogus citations.

But the larger problem is the way academics are evaluated when applying for jobs or being considered for promotion. An important metric is often an academic’s citation count. As part of their study, Zaki and his colleagues surveyed 574 researchers working at the ten highest-ranked universities in the world. The responses indicated that of those universities that look at citation counts when evaluating scientists, more than 60% obtain this data from Google Scholar.

There will always be unscrupulous researchers who try to game the system of academic evaluations, and others willing to help for a fee. As many scholars have been arguing for years, the real solution to all these abuses is not to tackle them piecemeal, but to change the entire system of academic appraisals. Another benefit of doing so would be to break the stranglehold that journals with high “impact factors” have on the scholarly world. That would allow an open access title to compete for papers based on its merits, not on its perceived importance for career progression.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky.

Filed Under: academic publishing, citations, google scholar, impact factors, nature, open access, peer review, preprints, whatsapp
Companies: google

Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks To Local Governments

from the just-build-it-yourself dept

Wed, May 15th 2024 03:40pm - Karl Bode

Tired of being underserved and overbilled by shitty regional broadband monopolies, back in 2002 a coalition of local Utah governments formed UTOPIA — (the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency). The inter-local agency collaborative venture then set about building an “open access” fiber network that allows any ISP to then come and compete on the shared network.

As we’ve noted over the years, regional monopolies like Qwest (now Centurylink or Lumen) didn’t much like that. They desperately tried to sue and harass the network out of existence in the early aughts, claiming the concept violated numerous local laws (it didn’t). These efforts failed, in part, because of widespread support among a public extremely tired of being ripped off by shitty monopolies.

Two decades later and the coalition just announced that 18 different ISPs now compete for Utah resident attention over a network that now covers 21 different Utah cities. In many instances, ISPs on the network are offering symmetrical (uncapped) gigabit fiber for as little as 45amonth(plus45 a month (plus 45amonth(plus30 network connection fee, so 75).SomeISPsareevenofferingsymmetrical∗∗10Gbpsfiberforaround75). Some ISPs are even offering symmetrical 10 Gbps fiber for around 75).SomeISPsareevenofferingsymmetrical∗∗10Gbpsfiberforaround150 a month:

“Sumo Fiber, a veteran member of the UTOPIA Open Access Marketplace, is now offering 10 Gbps symmetrical for 119,plusa119, plus a 119,plusa30 UTOPIA Fiber infrastructure fee, bringing the total cost to $149 per month.”

It’s a collaborative hybrid that blurs the line between private companies and government, and it works. And the prices being offered here are significantly less than locals often pay in highly developed tech-centric urban hubs like New York, San Francisco, or Seattle.

Yet giant local ISPs like Comcast and Qwest spent decades trying to either sue this network into oblivion, or using their proxy policy orgs (like the “Utah Taxpayer Association“) to falsely claim this effort would end in chaos and inevitable taxpayer tears. Yet miraculously UTOPIA is profitable, and for the last 15 years, every UTOPIA project has been paid for completely through subscriber revenues.

As other Utah cities have considered following suit, those same local monopolies have created dark money campaigns and even fake consumer groups to lie to locals that such efforts are still inevitable government boondoggles. Such sleazy lobbying campaigns are cheaper than actually competing or building the kind of networks these locals have spent several decades clamoring for.

For years, real world experience and several different studies and reports (including see our Copia study on this concept) have made it clear that open access networks and policies result in faster, better, more affordable broadband access. UTOPIA is proving it at scale, but numerous other municipalities have been following suit with the help of COVID relief and infrastructure bill funding.

Sometimes such networks are owned by local governments. Sometimes they’re community-owned cooperatives. Sometimes they’re the extension of the local city-owned utility. Sometimes they’re built on the back of public/private partnerships.

According to a database of such networks tracked by the Institute For Local Self Reliance (which I have done research and writing work for), there are now 450 municipal broadband networks in the U.S. Since January 1, 2021, at least 47 new networks have come online, with dozens in the planning or pre-construction phases. And this may be an undercount given the FCC’s failure to track them all.

But because big monopolies (and a bunch of Libertarian think tankers with covert financial ties to those same monopolies) didn’t like the idea for ideological or financial reasons, federal and state policymakers have vacillated between demonizing the idea of municipal broadband, or banned it entirely (17 states currently prohibit such networks, and House Republicans attempted a federal ban during COVID).

Again, this could have all been prevented if big ISPs like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, CenturyLink and others had actually delivered the affordable, ultra-fast access Americans have demanded for decades. It could have been avoided if they’d embraced competition. It could have been avoided if they’d properly used the untold billions in taxpayer subsidies they’ve received over the last thirty years to expand access.

Community and municipal broadband sees widespread bipartisan support. It’s an organic, highly local, response to decades of corruption and market failure these companies enabled at every step of the way. Any impact it has on regional telecom monopolies was entirely earned on the back of decades of hubris and greed.

Filed Under: broadband, community broadband, fiber, high speed internet, municipal broadband, open access, telecom, utah, utopia

More Open Access Training For Academics Would Lead To More Open Access

from the need-to-lead-the-academics-to-water dept

Open access publishing, which allows people to read academic papers without a subscription, seems such a good idea. It means that anyone, anywhere in the world, can read the latest research without needing to pay. Academic institutions can spend less to keep their scholars up-to-date with work in their field. It also helps disseminate research, which means that academics receive more recognition for their achievements, boosting their career paths.

And yet despite these manifest benefits, open access continues to struggle. As Walled Culture has noted several times, one reason is that traditional academic publishers have managed to subvert the open access system, apparently embracing it, but in such a way as to negate the cost savings for institutions. Many publishers also tightly control the extent to which academic researchers can share their own papers that are released as open access, which rather misses the point of moving to this approach.

Another reason why open access has failed to take off in the way that many hoped is that academics often don’t seem to care much about supporting it or even using it. Again, given the clear benefits for themselves, their institutions and their audience, that seems extraordinary. Some new research sheds a little light on why this may be happening. It is based on an online survey that was carried out regarding the extent and nature of training in open access offered to doctoral students, sources of respondents’ open access knowledge, and their perspectives on open access. The results are striking:

a large majority of current (81%) and recent (84%) doctoral students are or were not required to undertake mandatory open access training. Responses from doctoral supervisors aligned with this, with 66% stating that there was no mandatory training for doctoral students at their institution. The Don’t know figure was slightly higher for supervisors (16%), suggesting some uncertainty about what is required of doctoral students.

The surprisingly high figures quoted above matter, because

a statistically significant difference was observed between respondents who have completed training and those who have not. These findings provide some solid evidence that open access training has an impact on researcher knowledge and practices

One worrying aspect is where else researchers are obtaining their knowledge of open access principles and practices:

Web resources and colleagues were found to be the most highly rated sources, but publisher information also scored highly, which may be cause for some concern. While it is evident that publisher information about open access may be of value to researchers, if for no other reason than to explain the specific open access options available to authors submitting to a particular journal, publishers are naturally incentivised to describe positively the forms of open access they offer to authors, and therefore can hardly be said to represent an objective source of information about open access in general terms.

What this means in practice is that academics may simply accept the publishers’ version of open access, without calling into question why it is so expensive or so restrictive in allowing papers to be shared freely. It could explain why the publishers’ distorted form of the original open access approach does not meet greater resistance. On the plus side, the survey revealed widespread support for more open access training:

First, only 27% of respondents answered that the level of open access training offered as part of their doctoral studies was sufficient. Second, there was widespread agreement with a number of statements presented to respondents that related to actions institutions could take to support researcher understanding of open access. There was widest agreement with the notion that institutions should provide Web resources about open access specifically for doctoral students, followed by optional training for these students. The statement that suggested institutions should require doctoral students to undertake open access training received agreement or strong agreement from almost half of respondents (45%).

Although the research reveals widely differing views on requirements for open access training, and who exactly should provide it, there does seem to be an opportunity to increase researchers’ familiarity with the concept and its benefits. Rather than lamenting the diluted form of open access that major publishers now offer, open access advocates might usefully spend more time spreading the word about its benefits to the people who can make it happen – new and established researchers – by helping to provide training in a variety of forms.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon. Originally published to Walled Culture.

Filed Under: academic knowledge, open access, training

The Right To Advertise?

from the open-access-proved dept

Sometimes, an advertisement is worth a thousand op-eds. Last week, one of us co-authored an op-ed criticizing an amicus brief filed by the American Economic Liberties Project and several prominent law professors in the pending Supreme Court case NetChoice v. Paxton. AELP’s brief defends the constitutionality of a Texas law prohibiting social media companies from moderating – or “censoring,” at least according to Texas – user-generated content. Among other things, AELP argues that social media companies and newspapers have different First Amendment rights, because social media is “open-access” and newspapers aren’t.

AELP’s argument is based on two Supreme Court cases, Miami Herald and PruneYard. In Miami Herald, the Court held that Florida couldn’t require a newspaper to print a politician’s rebuttal to a critical article. And in PruneYard, it held that a state could require a shopping mall to permit political speech. AELP claims that social media is more like a shopping mall than a newspaper, because malls and social media are both open-access.

Not only is AELP’s legal argument absurd, but also its premise is false. Newspapers and social media are both open-access, so AELP’s own theory implies they should have the same First Amendment rights. According to AELP, social media and newspapers are different because everyone can publish on social media, but not everyone can publish in the newspaper.

Wrong. Sure, not everyone can publish an op-ed, but anyone can publish an advertisement. All they have to do is pay for it. The only difference between social media and newspapers is that access to social media is free, but you have to pay for access to the newspaper. Yes, newspapers reserve the right to exercise editorial discretion over which ads they’re willing to print. But that’s all social media companies want, and it’s what Texas is trying to prohibit them from doing. The Florida law at issue in Miami Herald required newspapers to give politicians a free right of reply, and the Texas law at issue in NetChoice does the same thing, by forcing social media companies to publish speech that is anathema to their advertisers. If newspapers can offer open-access to ads, but moderate what they print, then so can social media.

But the op-ed wasn’t enough. If telling readers about the problems with AELP’s arguments is good, then showing them is better. So we decided to demonstrate that newspapers are every bit as open-access as social media and exercise editorial discretion in exactly the same way.

So we bought an ad in the Miami Herald, criticizing AELP’s argument by demonstrating that newspapers are in fact open-access, so long as you’re willing and able to pay for access. As of today, our ad is scheduled to run from Monday to Thursday, pending approval.

Amusingly, our demonstration works whether or not the Miami Herald ultimately publishes our ad. If the Miami Herald prints our ad, it shows that newspapers are in fact open-access, because anyone can publish an ad. We were able to create an advertising account, schedule a campaign, and pay for it, in minutes. This default openness is moderated only by the paper’s reservation of the right to reject particular creatives. And if the Miami Herald refuses to publish our ad, perhaps deciding that it violates their social media community guidelines-esque “creative approval policies,” it shows that newspapers are open-access publications that still exercise editorial discretion over what they print. Heads, free speech wins, tails compelled speech loses.

Filed Under: ads, larry lessig, open access, pruneyard, tim wu, tornillo, zephyr teachout
Companies: aelp, netchoice

from the and-law-professors-should-understand-that dept

Something strange is happening in the legal academy, and we’re worried about it. On January 23, 2024, the progressive policy organization American Economic Liberties Project filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court case NetChoice v. Paxton, in support of a Texas law prohibiting social media companies from moderating – “censoring” in the words of the law – the speech of their users, especially conservatives. The brief was joined by several prominent progressive law professors from Harvard (Larry Lessig), Columbia (Tim Wu and Richard John), Fordham (Zephyr Teachout), and Emory (Matthew Lawrence).

Now, there’s nothing improper or even unusual about law professors writing or joining amicus briefs. One of us is a law professor who has written and joined several himself (and the other has worked with lawyers on and joined many amicus briefs as well). And there’s nothing wrong with progressives supporting conservative positions (or vice versa). The law can make for curious bedfellows. Here, both conservatives and progressives want the government to regulate social media companies more aggressively, albeit for different reasons and in different ways.

But there are some serious problems with the AELP brief: It objectively misrepresents the law it purports to describe. AELP claims that the First Amendment allows the government to prohibit social media companies from discriminating against speech they disapprove, because their websites are “digital commercial ‘properties’ made open by their owners for public use.” It relies on the Supreme Court’s 1980 PruneYard opinion, which held that the First Amendment allowed California to require a private shopping center that was open to the public to allow its patrons to exercise a reasonable right to free speech. AELP argues that social media websites are analogous to shopping centers, so the First Amendment allows Texas to regulate them in the same way, by requiring them to permit speech they disapprove.

While many lawyers and legal scholars think PruneYard is no longer good law (following later rulings that pared it back), it was never explicitly overruled, so AELP can still rely on it. But AELP should not misrepresent what PruneYard actually said.

As AELP admits, the Supreme Court’s 1974 Miami Herald opinion held that the First Amendment prohibited Florida from requiring a newspaper to print a political candidate’s reply to a critical article. According to AELP, PruneYard distinguished Miami Herald by holding that “open-access laws do not present the same First Amendment concerns as right-to-reply laws.” That is false. The Supreme Court didn’t say anything about open-access laws. It said that Miami Herald “rests on the principle that the State cannot tell a newspaper what it might print.”

AELP tries to salvage its imaginary distinction between open-access and right-to-reply laws by insisting that “the Miami Herald newspaper did not hold its pages open to all members of the public.” That is also false. Yes, newspapers exercise “editorial discretion” over which articles they print. But newspapers don’t just publish articles, they also publish ads. And they’re generally happy to publish advertisements by anyone willing to pay. AELP insists that “Newspapers are exclusive publications; the public cannot, at any moment, publish their views in the New York Times.” Yes, they can. All they have to do is buy an ad. So, newspapers are, in fact, “open to all members of the public” willing to pay for the privilege. In AELP’s terms, newspapers are and always have been “open-access.”

That’s fatal to AELP’s argument. According to AELP, the First Amendment allows states to prohibit social media companies from censoring users, because social media websites are “open-access.” But newspapers are also “open-access,” because anyone can buy an advertisement. So, AELP’s argument necessarily implies that the First Amendment also allows states to prohibit newspapers from censoring advertisers.

Wrong. The Supreme Court explicitly said the opposite in PruneYard itself. And if the First Amendment means anything, it means that the government can’t tell newspapers what to print.

What’s the real difference between Miami Herald and PruneYard? It’s simple. Newspapers are in the speech business and shopping malls aren’t. The First Amendment says the government can’t force you to share someone else’s speech, but sometimes it can require you to tolerate speech you dislike. And which is social media more like? The business that is in the speech business, or a shopping mall where speech has nothing to do with its business?

It gets worse.

The brief repeatedly tries to couch these laws in terms pretending that these are anti-discrimination laws.

Amici file this brief to encourage the Court to preserve a traditional state power—barring unreasonable discrimination by private industry in the exercise of its business operations.

But that’s also wrong. These are not anti-discrimination laws. And as another law professor, Daphne Keller, has pointed out, those defending the laws in Florida and Texas have only recently pivoted to pretend they’re anti-discrimination laws by grasping at straws for a reason why these laws could be constitutional:

Discriminating against someone based on her race and discriminating against her based on her tweets are not the same thing. The Texas and Florida briefs blur the distinction between the two by conflating different meanings of the word “discrimination.” The states’ laws were enacted to stop platforms from restricting speech based on the message it conveys. Doing that is “discrimination” in the most basic and literal sense: The platforms are making choices between different things, under rules that treat users differently based on what they say—much as the hosts of a lecture series might exclude speakers or audience members for disruptive or racist remarks. The states’ arguments equate this with the important and distinct issues addressed by civil rights laws. Those laws broadly prohibit discriminating against people based on who they are, like hotels or restaurants refusing to serve Black customers.

The brief, weakly, tries to address this distinction, by claiming that there are cases that support bans on viewpoint discrimination. Except, they get it backwards. The bans on viewpoint discrimination are against the government engaging in viewpoint discrimination, not in forcing private platforms to host all speech.

The brief attempts to tap dance around these different meanings of both “discrimination” and “viewpoint discrimination” by pointing to three things: (1) SEC restrictions on refusing to print shareholder proposals in proxies, (2) the Packers and Stockyard Act’s anti-discrimination clauses, and (3) a short list of PruneYard-like cases all revolving around shopping malls.

However, none of these make any sense here. The shopping mall cases we’ve already explained above. They are different, and even if you accept the brief’s description of “open to all,” we’ve already shown how Miami Herald says the results are different for organizations in the speech business.

As for the Packers and Stockyard Act, that too, has nothing to do with speech. Indeed, the law professors appear to be misrepresenting the law entirely. The prohibitions on discrimination in the law have nothing to do with viewpoint discrimination and the intentions of the law are about preventing monopolies and unfair competition through things like favoring some individuals for who they are, not what they say.

Finally, the SEC’s restrictions are the only ones that are actually speech related, but are very narrowly tailored to a very specific scenario in a highly regulated industry, where a proxy statement may be the only way to get across shareholder proposals to a specific audience: other shareholders who will need to make decisions based on those proposals.

So, these are not the same thing. They misrepresent the law. They misrepresent what was said in these historical cases. They misrepresent discrimination law and what “viewpoint discrimination” means.

We’re disappointed by this brief, because law professors should know better. It’s one thing for crackpots like former professor John Eastman to make legal arguments grounded only in wishes and rainbows. It’s another thing entirely coming from respected legal scholars. We know they want the government to be able to regulate social media companies more aggressively. Maybe a superficially clever argument clouded their better judgment.

But law professors have a professional obligation to describe the law as it is, not as we want it to be. It’s fine to argue that the Supreme Court should reinterpret the First Amendment to allow more speech regulation. It’s not fine to pretend that’s already the law.

Brian L. Frye is the Spears-Gilbert Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky. Mike Masnick runs this site.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, content moderation, discrimination, free speech, larry lessig, open access, shopping malls, social media, speech, tim wu, viewpoint discrimination, zephyr teachout
Companies: aelp, netchoice

Another Reason Why Diamond Access Makes Sense: No Economic Barriers To Publishing Rebuttals

from the helping-science-progress dept

Walled Culture has written numerous posts about the promise and problems of open access. An important editorial in the journal Web Ecology raises an issue for open access that I’ve not seen mentioned before. It concerns the fraught issue of rebuttal articles, which offer fact-based criticism of already-published academic papers:

Critical comments on published articles vary in importance; they can simply point to an aspect absent from a published article or offer an alternative interpretation or perspective. In some cases, they can point to fundamental flaws that undermine the published conclusions. The nomenclature of these – comments, replies, rebuttals – is variable, but their importance to scientific progress is unquestionable.

Rebuttal articles are a vital part of the scientific publishing process, since they help weed out mistakes made by other researchers, usually honest errors, but sometimes not. As the Web Ecology editorial notes, writing rebuttal articles is hard enough because of their necessarily confrontational nature. But anyone wanting to publish rebuttals in open access titles that are funded through article processing charges (APCs), generally paid by the researcher’s academic institution, has to contend with an additional problem. In this case, as well as writing cogent explanations why published research is faulty, people who wish to publish a rebuttal must generally pay an APC to do so. The Web Ecology editorial gives details of a particular case where several scientists spent considerable time and effort rebutting an article in the open access journal Ecosphere, about spiders that allegedly preyed on bats:

Their rebuttal article was peer-reviewed in Ecosphere, where it was accepted for publication (Daniel Montesinos has seen copies of the submitted rebuttal and of its acceptance letter). However, the authors of this reply were requested to pay an APC of USD 2100/GBP 1300/EUR 1700 for a rebuttal article that largely disproved the original publication. The authors of the reply, who had altruistically devoted significant time to writing their rebuttal, refused to pay. They felt that they were doing the journal – and science – a service and that it was unreasonable to charge them for it.

Because these authors’ APC request was denied, the original Ecosphere article, which they claimed was flawed, remained uncontested, while the rebuttal was not published there. Instead, the editors of Web Ecology stepped in and published it themselves. As they comment:

Clearly, charging authors for brief, well-founded criticism of published articles creates a highly problematic disincentive to fruitful scientific discussion. This uncontroversial stance should enjoy universal support, but it currently does not. This might be excused as a simple oversight. Historically, this had never been an issue because most journals did not charge any publication fees. However, today more than 40 % of all Web of Science publications are open access (Basson et al., 2022). It is time to consider the damaging effects of charging authors for critical comments in open-access journals.

Drawing on their experience here, they go on to make an important point:

When a clear error is detected, it is for the best interest of all to find a reasonable and ethical solution in the shortest possible time. For platinum/diamond open-access journals, this is not an issue. Web Ecology has charged no APCs since its creation in 2000, which shows the viability of making science truly available to the whole scientific community at a moderate cost while maintaining the highest scientific and publishing standards.

As Walled Culture has written, diamond open access journals (also known as platinum open access) charge neither the people who read their papers, nor the researchers who publish them. Instead, they are funded through other sources, something made easier by the minimalist kind of publishing that they typically engage in. The fact that they can publish rebuttals quickly and without demanding a payment to do so is yet another reason they are the best form of open access available.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon. Originally published to Walled Culture.

Filed Under: diamond open access, open access, rebuttals, research, science

from the protocols-mandated-over-platforms dept

Given just how many terrible state social media laws we keep seeing, it’s nice to finally see one that, conceptually, I agree with, though practically still worry about.

NY state senator Brad Holyman-Sigal has introduced a bill to require social media websites to provide an openly accessible API for others to build on top of. Senate Bill S6686 is definitely the kind of bill that fits with my belief that the world is better when we’re focused on protocols instead of platforms, and that platforms aren’t able to lock-in users and prevent others from building better services on top of the platforms.

So, conceptually, I like the basic idea in the bill, as described by a recent Bloomberg article about it.

New York would require social media platforms to provide free data to apps that allow users to block hateful speech under legislation state lawmakers are expected to consider next year.

Of course, every time this idea comes up, some people worry about potentially bad actors making use of the APIs. In short, the Cambridge Analytica scenario. But the law allows for blocking that access in those cases. The exceptions include:

A social media platform may deny or discontinue any user or authorized representative’s application’s access to the API if:

(a) The social media platform reasonably determines, consistent with access requirements clearly established in its terms and conditions, that allowing a user or authorized representative to connect or remain connected to the API would present an unacceptable level of risk to the security of the social media platform or its users; and

(b) The social media platform makes this determination using objective, verifiable criteria that are applied fairly and consistently across all applications and developers through which users may seek access to the platform; provided that the social media platform must retain records of any decision to restrict API access to any users or authorized representative, including the user, date, time, documented misuses and record of notification of violation.

There’s more in the bill, and it would certainly help companies like Block Party (which we’ve spoken about a few times here on Techdirt) build better tools to help users take more control over their own user experience, rather than relying on the underlying platform. As Bloomberg notes:

Block Party and similar apps allow users to use a variety of criteria to block hate-filled posts, notifications, comments, and other activity before they would have viewed it in their social media feeds.

Such software has thwarted millions of troll comments since Chou founded Block Party in 2021 after becoming the target of online harassment.

At the time, she struck a deal with Twitter to get free access. She said it was a win-win situation that allowed the platform to address harassment without devoting its own financial resources.

“You need third parties who are motivated,” said Chou. “Platforms are just not incentivized to build out that full suite of solutions for end users to control their experience.”

The bill—which would take effect 180 days after getting signed into law—would restore power to people who want to control what messages reach them on social media while leaving others free to say what they want online, according to Chou.

“Really what you’re doing is just giving people more control over what they’re seeing, not curtailing anybody’s ability to speak,” said Chou. “Freedom of speech is not the same thing as freedom of reach.”

In effect this would roll back some aspects of companies like ExTwitter and Reddit trying to restrict access to their APIs and putting up ridiculously expensive paywalls for that access. It would be tearing down walls and enabling more innovation.

That’s… the good side. I’m still not totally convinced this is a good bill, however. My first concern is simply that it’s a state bill. We keep noting that states have little to no authority to regulate social media, which is often run out of state, and the dormant commerce clause issues here are real, even if the intent of the bill is good.

Second, it’s not clear to me that there’s any limiting elements on who this applies to beyond “social media platforms” that do a few things that most social media platforms do. And that raises some concerns about smaller, more directed and targeted sites, which might not really be set up to provide such an API, but under this law might need to do so.

So, I like the concept of the bill, but I’m just not sure New York really has the authority to do this like this, and I worry on the margins about some of the way the bill is written.

Still, it’s way, way better than nearly all the other state bills I see these days about social media.

Filed Under: apis, brad holyman-sigal, new york, open access
Companies: block party