I’ve decided to explore this in a 3 part series: In this entry, I present a brief history of online identity ownership; in the next entry, I will compare and contrast the Facebook and Twitter TOS agreements; and in the last entry, I will look at the different approach people and companies are taking to managing those issues.

Online identity before the web

In the early days of the commercial internet, online identity was largely defined by which handle you were using on a variety of community-related services. You may have discussed things on usenet, an internet-wide service for discussion, or chatted on IRC, an internet-wide chatroom, but the fact was that neither of those services were owned by corporations. As a results, the mores dictating behavior on such networks were more a question of community standards than anything else. Because the communities were “relatively” small (and by relatively, I mean in relation to the size of online communities today), things worked out mostly OK.

While the internet itself had some internet-wide community tools, a few smaller micro-communities existed within that wider realm. Groups like the west-coast based WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) or the east-coast based ECHO (East Coast Hang Out) were even smaller groups without legal contracts but with established community norms for behavior. With communities numbering in the thousands, things were still manageable without contracting.

Enters the web

But then came the web and things got a little fuzzier. With the development of the web, two major new things happened: first, it became easier to navigate the internet, increasing the number of people with access to internet resources from the low millions numbers to several billions today. Secondly, and probably because of this increase in population, the number of corporate interest wanting a web presence exploded to the point of near ubiquity.

But with this came a first set of challenges. Internet Service Providers, the companies that offered access to the internet started providing individual users with the right to publish on the internet. However, along with those rights came the concept of “Terms of Services” (TOS for short) which defined what could and couldn’t be said on the services. These types of restrictions led some people to start thinking about what they needed to do to publish content on servers other than those ISPs.

Most of the people from that generation found the answer in ownership of a domain name. But ownership is an incorrect word as it is impossible to own a domain name. Today, one registers a domain, which means an individual or corporation is given the right to lease that domain name for a period of time from an accredited entity. So, for example, if I die and no one renews the lease on TNL.net, someone else could take it over.

This is far from an ideal scenario but it is, unfortunately, the best scenario currently available in terms of controlling one’s identity on the internet. Domain name registration is the closest thing anyone has to being able to owning their identity on the internet.

On to hosted services

While owning one’s domain name increases the level of control over what and how a person is represented online, it also means an increased amount of work in terms of ensuring that all the back-end pieces that make this stuff works are working. An average presence on the internet probably includes an email address and a web server. This means that someone who wants that basic set of services will need a system to run an email server to send and receive emails, and, at a minimum, a web server to serve pages, and a connection to the network. If the person wants to use software for a blog, he/she may also need a database and other components to make things work.

Unless you’re a massive geek or a large corporation, you’re unlikely to own all those components yourself. The amount of work required to keep such systems running is often higher than could be justified for a single user.

So a new group of service providers emerge to provide increasingly turn-key solutions to put behind one’s own domain name. Those companies, called hosted providers, can provide one with email services, web services, telecom services, etc… and all come with sets of legal contracts that highlight how those components can and cannot be used. This represent a return to the Terms of Services approach provided by ISPs in the 1990s and, while the contracts are generally fine for most people, they can have impact on services that are sitting on the bleeding edge of speech.

For example, it was the TOS put in place for Paypal and Amazon that were cited by those respective companies when they decided to cut off Wikileaks. Whether or not wikileaks actions were legal in the United States didn’t matter in those cases as the companies decided to make their own value judgements as to what to do with such a company. To say that such actions can have a chilling effect on free speech is merely to point out the obvious.

… and on to the social web

For many years, I’ve restricted my participation in a lot of social web components and warned others about what I see as an area that is ripe for abuse. Much as domain names were the way  to sidestep some of the issues associated being hosted on a particular ISP’s website, I worry that the “gated community” approach to a lot of web services is an area that ought to concern more people. A quick look at the Terms of Services of two of the more popular social services out there can raise some red flags (my next entry looks at Twitter and Facebook and their treatment of users).

At issue here is the fact that social services are largely hosting you. You, as an individual or corporation, get a complete infrastructure and, in exchange, only have to supply content. The services then can reuse that content in a number of ways and decide whether you are worthy or not.

This represents some pretty legal tricky grounds as individuals and corporations are now forced to swim in the same waters and the social services probably should study the corpus of laws established around domain names to figure out a model based on legal precedence. While that system is not perfect, it is the closest thing we have to a working model that balances out temporary ownership with high level of rights for holder of that temporary ownership.

Ultimately, identity ownership is bound to become one of the hot topic in the internet space as it touches on so many facets that there is no silver bullet solution that will make every happy: the challenge is in finding a compromise that will be agreeable by a majority of people.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Who owns your identity?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

It all really started when, in a discussion about video, Mary Hodder mentioned the words “community standards”. For some reason, those two words launched a whole new set of thoughts in my mind. In the early 90s, when I was in journalism school, I took a class on censorship. One of the interesting things our teacher highlighted was the idea that there was a grassroot movement appearing around the country to censor certain types of books. He highlighted some basic efforts at the time to remove books about evolution from high school bookshelves in the southern United States and how those efforts seemed separate initially but seems to pop up like mushrooms in different places to represent a cohesive whole. What they were pushing for was a change in each of the communities to the community standards in terms of assessing such material. While predicting the larger political fight over evolution of a decade later, our teacher highlighted to us how community standards were formed.

In the United States, the concept of community standards was established as law in 1973 when the US Supreme Court, in a case called Miller vs. California established that speech or other form of expression could be deemed obscene if a substantial portion of the local community, considered the average member of that community, considered it though. This opened the doors for many challenges to some form of speech.

Enters the Internet

Applying this type of standard was easy when the community could easily be located within a set of geographic boundaries. However, with the rise of the Internet, the gegraphic boundaries have dropped. Theoretically, a piece of content, once put on the internet, is available to all communities around the world. I say theoretically because many countries have found ways to block certain types of content they consider objectionable by forcing users in their country to go through proxy servers. Furthermore, some countries, like China, have had enough political muscle to force companies like Google to self-censor.

However, the more technologically advanced users can find a way to get around these types of restrictions and have access to the content, whether their government wants them to or not. Where it gets interesting is when one starts dealing with a virtual world. Of late, SecondLife by LindenLabs, has been getting a lot of attention. Looking at their site, it seems they have set up their own community standards for what can and cannot happen in the world of SecondLife. The question, however, is whether any of those terms could withstand a court challenge. As I look at cases like the China and Google case, or the rise of virtual world, I am starting to wonder how laws will be established to govern the internet. The question is what legal regime should apply to the Internet as a whole. Should we look at the most restrictive standards avalaible and comply to those, thus greatly reducing the value of net content as a whole? I doubt such approach would work as it would require a global agreement on such restriction and would probably give rise to data havens, located in countries that would refuse to sign on to such standards. A lot of Internet traffic would move to those countries, depriving countries adopting a highly restrictive model from realizing revenue in terms of hosting and traffic. Alternately, the net could adopt the most open type of standard, leaving some countries to ban the net outright, for fear that their users/citizens would have access to content they find objectionable. Ultimately, I suspect that rules will fall somewhere in the middle. As far as to how close to either end, it will depend largely on what lawmakers are willing to do.

Online World = Private Spaces

In essence, the issue becomes one of frictions between governments and private interest. When a company like LindenLabs establishes community standards for their space, it is akin to a private corporation establishing what amounts to law for what sits on their servers. The next question is what physical laws can apply to those server. If, for example, you were to take a user who lives in Europe spending some time in the SecondLife universe, what laws would apply to that user? European ones? American ones (based on where the server is located) ? Or something else? Under the current regime, it appears that these types of things could generate some frictions. What if, to take a more extreme example, a user in a country were to play in a virtual world located in a country his own government considers an enemy (for example, US and North Korea). What if that user were a productive member of the community, generating money in the virtual world on the servers of a country his government bans trade with? Would the hosting government or the user government be allowed to cease those assets? Similarly, what about speech? Could a user’s speech in a virtual environment be threatened because it does not meet the requirements of that company (in a fashion similar to suppression of speech in US shopping centers because they are private properties, could we see users of myspace being banned for saying things that do not align with what NewsCorp considers proper speech?)

Because virtual worlds are largely private communities, run by corporations, it seems that those scenarios are likely. When one injects sources of revenue in those communities, the potential for lawsuit is large.

A coming crisis

As Danah Boyd pointed out in a recent paper (paper seems offline, portion of the content I’m referencing is here):

Teens have increasingly less access to public space. Classic 1950s hang out locations like the roller rink and burger joint are disappearing while malls and 7/11s are banning teens unaccompanied by parents. Hanging out around the neighborhood or in the woods has been deemed unsafe for fear of predators, drug dealers and abductors. Teens who go home after school while their parents are still working are expected to stay home and teens are mostly allowed to only gather at friends’ homes when their parents are present.Additionally, structured activities in controlled spaces are on the rise. After school activities, sports, and jobs are typical across all socio-economic classes and many teens are in controlled spaces from dawn till dusk. They are running ragged without any time to simply chill amongst friends. By going virtual, digital technologies allow youth to (re)create private and public youth space while physically in controlled spaces. IM serves as a private space while MySpace provide a public component. Online, youth can build the environments that support youth socialization.

In the early 90s, I was tuned to the addictive nature of such space, when I spent a fair amount of time on LambdaMoo, the text-only grandfather of places like SecondLife. What it did was not only get me addicted to a game but changed my purview on virtual versus physical space, making the virtual as comfortable as the physical. As I moved from location to location for work, my virtual community was always in the same place. As such environments become more immersive, a whole generation will grow up seeing little boundaries between the physical and virtual spaces. Already, word has spread of people spending large amounts of time in those virtual worlds. If the proper legal system is not in place when those people grow up, frictions between the physical and virtual worlds will become the subject of front-page articles.

Establishing a baseline

I believe that some type of global agreement or directive will have to be set in the near future to establish how laws will work in the online world. Something similar to a General Agreement on Policing Online Communities (GAPOC), which would initially follow the same type of process that was established to establish such global rules as the Berne conventions on copyright or the GATT, would probably be a good place to start. Establishing a set of agreed upon principles as to what can and can’t be done in terms of policing online communities would help different countries then modify their own legal process to deal with this emerging phenomenon. I don’t really have any particular answers as to how such things would be done and will leave it to the legal scholars to figure out but am I the only one feeling that this is an upcoming issue?

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Where Virtual and Physical meet. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The New Gatekeepers

For all that is being said about the democratizing effect of the blogosphere, the truth is that systems of hierarchies that have existed for thousands of years still exist in the online world. It may be that humans are hard-wired for hierarchies and find an innate need to give more power to a certain amount of gatekeepers.

In the past, access to information was directly tied to monetary fortune. Before the advent of the printing press, books were very expensive so, as a result, the knowledge that was transferred through books was only accessible to one of two groups: rich people, knights and other people with some type of royal title, and religious leaders, including the people in monasteries who created those books. As a result, the information traded via books was largely centered on the creation and pursuit of religious ideas.

With the advent of the printing press, Gutenberg forced a certain level democratization in the information dispersal space. This new model allowed a wider group of people to create and consume written content. However, the creation costs were still high enough that they created a certain barrier of entry in the market due to the financial involvement required to publish a book. Over time, those barriers to entry were lowered but never to such a low level that everyone could create and distribute content.

In the early 80s, the introduction of the computer and of desktop publishing, along with some other technological changes in the printing business allowed for that barrier to drop even further. I remember starting a newspaper in college on a budget of only a few 100 dollars. For that price, I could actually print a few thousand copies of an 8 page newspapers.

With the advent of the web, those costs drop to even smaller level. While a newspaper or book could be created on the cheap, distribution was still expensive. With the advent of the public Internet, distribution costs became negligible. At that point, the new barrier to entry became a technological one: only people who knew HTML could actually create web pages.

With the advent of blogs, however, that technological barrier dropped to almost zero. Basically, know how to write and you too can become a publisher. This created an explosion of content which showed a true marketplace of idea forming.

However, it also created a sea of endless information that our current brains are unable to cope with and this is where a level of re-intermediation came in: because there was so much content being created, the blogosphere needed to have some guides that would help people navigate to what was considered good.
In a word, we created some new gatekeepers that we now know at the blogging A-list (and, to some extent, an equivalent B-list and C-list). Membership on it is limited and many have said that the way to disprove the power of the A-list is by showing that new members have appeared on it: what few are willing to admit is that the new members are really only allowed as one of these groups if they are vetted by enough existing members. This creates a self-fulfilling cycle where members of the small club of “blogs that matter” get to shape the agenda.

The Echo Effect

Because the group is relatively small, it has gained an increased importance in terms of defining what matters. Algorithmic solutions like Memeorandum (or even Google’s PageRank) help reinforce an echo effect from such small groups. Because the groups are within a category (whether it is politics or technology, the two prominent categories in that space), the impact of an individual can be increased through cross-linking between members of the blogging elite.

In the case of FON technologies, we have a company that has managed to show a wrinkle in the system: get endorsed by the core gatekeepers and you can influence the dialogue (I’ve noticed that effect myself, as my own presence within one of those groups seems to have magically opened some doors I didn’t know existed).

Because a core group of people are considered of higher relevance, what they consider important becomes the agenda. Because the blogosphere has also had some influence in terms of shaping what journalists decide to cover, this effect is now bleeding over into the non-blog world.

Creating Group Myopia?

The question, in all this, however, is whether we could be suffering from possible group myopia. What if a rumor is wrong and gets propagated by the gatekeepers? What is that impact?

The reason I am bringing this up is that I’m wondering if, by creating new gatekeepers, we could start creating a level of groupthink and ultimately increase group myopia. As the boundaries of different echo chambers are clearly defined (for example, few people on the left side of the political biosphere interact with people on the right side (and vice-versa)), are we going to see more polarization going forward.

The next question (and I’m not sure but I suspect that the same is true in non-blog media) is how we deal with this? Is there a way to ensure that all voices are given equal weight? Many people say that the problem is self-correcting but it still seems to me that issues could arise that would not only increase the power of top ranked bloggers but also help in force the dialogue in one direction or another.

I do not have answers for this but I hope that this entry will provoke discussion and would like to see what others have to offer as solutions to this problem. On the other hand, if I fail to influence the gatekeepers, I suspect that this entry will disappear into obscurity until a gatekeeper decides to discuss the same issue.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The New Gatekeepers. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

But that was not it. Instead it was spam. How do I know it was spam? Well, several reasons.

First of all, the email was sent to an address I used a long time ago to register a product. That email database was apparently resold and I have never received any legitimate email on it.

The next thing that alerted me to spam was the following message at the beginning of their email:

EmailResults.net is sending you this special message from Gov. Howard Dean as part of the terms of service/membership agreed to when you signed up with http://www.sportskill.com. Please follow the instructions at the end of this message if you prefer to not receive these special offers in the future.

Sportskill.com? This is a site that I probably would never visit (as it only offers fantasy sports leagues, a subject in which I have no interest). So, somehow, this site acquired a spam email address and is now distributing messages in support of Governor Dean.

I’d be interested in knowing whether the message was sent by Sportskill.com on its own or was agreed upon by the Dean campaign. If the latter is true (as the line Paid for by Dean for America at the end of the message seems to suggest), I would like to make sure that the Dean campaign is aware that spamming is NOT OK in the online world.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Dean Missteps. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Already, Governor Howard Dean, a democratic candidate in the 2004 presidential campaign is showing that good understanding of those new technologies can help increase the visibility of a candidate in an otherwise difficult field. At the current time, his site lists the fact that 255,173 people have signed up for his list. While the number may be small in terms of establishing a win in the long run, it is an interesting statistic. Witness, for example, the growth of social software networks like Ryze and Friendster, which both have over a million people with limited marketing being done.

For example, my Friendster page tells me that, through only 11 people, I am connected to over 100 thousand people. Let’s assume that only one percent of those people are actually interested in chatting with me and I am still dealing with a thousand people. Accounting for overlaps, Dean could turn his base of hardcore supporters into a group that needs to convince about 52 million people in order to win the next election. In terms of doing so, each of his supporters would need to convince 200 people (or less than one every other day until the next election) in order to ensure a win in the next election. This is a fairly major disruptive force in the long run.

I would venture to say that 2004 could finally become the year the Internet actually has an impact on presidential politics. Here are some areas where the Internet will have impact:

Financing

: In a semi-tongue in cheek challenge, Dean raised half a million dollars online in only a few days. This is hardly insignificant in that, up until recently, Dean was considered an also-ran who could not possibly get the nomination from the democratic field. His use of the online space for financing has allowed him to bypass the traditional channels of fundraising and take his case directly to his constituents, asking them to act and getting good results at it. I suspect that, as the campaign continues, all candidates are going to start paying more attention to this end of things as smaller constituent, in large numbers, can create large pools of cash.

Word of Mouse

: This is another area in which someone in the Dean campaign has a good understanding. While the mainstream was ignoring his campaign, something was happening in the weblog world. Dean somehow managed to capture the attention of webloggers and get himself hyped up in that fashion. This is another area worth keeping an eye on in terms of how it will shape the debate over the next few months. As Trent Lott probably knows by now, weblogs are a powerful voice that can slowly change the national dialogue. Considering Dean’s early lead in that space, there are good potential for a lot of this campaign being waged online.

I suspect that some of the smearing that usually accompanies presidential campaign will start moving to the online world within the next few months, with rumors and innuendos being circulated online as well as in the traditional media. However, this is going to be an interesting challenge as such rumors are usually tightly analyzed in the blogosphere. The question here is whether one can actually smear a candidate in the blogosphere without suffering some repercussions if the allegations are false (or even if they are correct, as the attempted smear may be worse than the actual act). Considering the fact that the blogosphere tends to be more leftist than the rest of the electorate (although there are now more right-wing weblogs cropping up), allegations against left-wing candidates will be dissected and countered.

Activism

: The next question, and really the only one important in a presidential election, is whether people in the blogosphere will actually go out and vote. While there is considerable discussion in the online world, there is little data about the correlation between online participation in political discussion and actual voting patterns. Considering the democratic debacle in the 2002 election, one might even be tempted to assume that the blogosphere is merely noise and that bloggers do not rally to the voting booths. If that is the case, the blogosphere could turn out to be creating a distortion effect that will have to be analyzed by pollsters in the future as it might affect polls in a negative fashion, making tracking polls almost irrelevant prior to election day. On the other hand, if bloggers turn to the voting booths in drove, pollsters will have to figure out how to break into that world and sustain a relationship with this new consistency.

The challenge for politicians in engaging the blogosphere is that they would have to enter into more of a conversation with their constituents. This will be an interesting challenge in and off itself as the blogosphere is not united by any underlying ideology, but by the use of a basic set of software tools. Establishing one’s own blog, as the Dean campaign did, may work well in starting that debate. But establishing the blog is only the first step. The next one (and the more difficult part) is to ensure that the dialogue continues and that the constituents feedback is included in the overall shaping of the campaign. This represents a challenge and a switch from the idea of a few people (generally members of a party, either Democrats or Republican) shaping the platform, to opening up to a wider group that may not always agree with one’s policy. Listen to the online world too much and you might loose some of your largest contributors, as well as the support of your party. Listen to your party too much, and you might loose potential voters. This political tightrope is one politicians will have to navigate carefully.

Any way you look at it, though, it appears that the Internet is now getting to the point where it will affect the presidential race. With over half of all Americans now being online, it is obvious that the net will have some impact. As to whether this impact will be major or not, it is too early to tell but, at the current time, it looks like 2004 may join 1960 as a year when a new medium changes the political landscape.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2004 : The Year the Internet Changes Politics. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

In the United States, cable television has what is called a tiered structure. That means that channels are grouped in packages that are then sold as a whole. The most basic service includes the regular “free” networks (for people who have low or no reception), the next package above that generally offers an extended set that includes CNN, ESPN and a bunch of other channels. Then, on the third tier, you can buy more expensive channels like HBO or Showtime, which are not supported by advertising.

If you were to draw a parallel to the online world, you would have Internet access being the basic package, then a pre-paid package which would offer access to a certain number of sites (similar to what AOL is starting to do by pulling Time and Entertainment Weekly behind its own service), and then would pay extra for a few one-off sites that may warrant it.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Paid Content on a tiered structure. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.