Assistant Commerce Secretary announces Internet policy change; military allows use of social networking

Here are a pair of governmental policy changes for the Internet that may have the potential to affect e-book-related matters.

The bigger change is that the Obama administration has announced the government is revising its policy on the Internet. Whereas for the first few decades of its life, the government chose to take a strictly hands-off approach, now it will be holding discussions on key areas of Internet policy, such as cybersecurity, Internet governance, and copyright protection.

The outcomes of such discussions will be “flexible” but may result in recommendations for legislation or regulation, [Assistant Commerce Secretary Lawrence Strickling] said in a speech at the Media Institute in Washington this week.

In a sense, it was only a matter of time before the government stepped in. It has a history of regulating communication media, after all. This may also have been prompted, in part, by the recent court decision stating that the FCC was overreaching when it tried to enforce network neutrality.

But looking at Strickling’s original presentation, the whole thing is awfully vague. And it’s worth pointing out that the government has not quite been as lassaiz-faire about the Internet as the article would seem to suggest. The Communications Decency Act, the Child Online Protection Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act—the government has already been more or less "regulating the Internet,” or trying to, since at least the mid ‘90s.

And it is a bit worrying that this comes at the same time as various European governments are pushing for world-wide “three strikes” Internet access revocation provisions to be recommended as part of the ACTA counterfeit and copyright treaty at the same time as our own government is one of the driving forces behind keeping ACTA away from the public eye.

Under these provisions, a customer need not actually be guilty of copyright violation to lose his Internet access; he just has to be accused of it three times. And he may have little to no recourse when it comes to getting his Internet access back.

Soldiers and Social Networking

The other government change is a happier one. The Department of Defense has announced a new, more permissive policy for social Internet media use by members of the military. Under this policy, soldiers will be permitted to use social networking sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and so on.

It will still be up to local commanders to approve or deny Internet uses for their units, but the policy is aimed at being more permissive than restrictive so any restrictions would have to be temporary, and service branches that have blocked social networking and media sites will be required to unblock them.

Since many soldiers rely on the Internet to keep them in touch with their friends and families back home in a much more timely manner than “snail mail,” it is a good thing that the strictures have been loosened to make that easier.

The Internet is the medium through which e-books are delivered, be it legitimately or illicitly, so any change that affects the Internet could potentially also affect our access to those books—for bad or for good.