I read an alarming guest editorial at the Wall Street Journal's Web site the other day. The article, “The U.N Threat to Internet Freedom,” was written by Robert M. McDowell, a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission.*

The article is quite a piece of work. McDowell believes the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union (ITU), under pressure from Russia and China, is poised to wrest control of the Internet away from existing technical advisory groups such as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and the Internet Society (ISOC). McDowell warns that the future of the Internet will no longer be in the hands of level-playing-field technologists, but under the control of national governments.

Among other things, McDowell predicts that the ITU is preparing to renegotiate a 1988 treaty and seize the power to, in his words:

• Allow foreign phone companies to charge fees for "international" Internet traffic, perhaps even on a "per-click" basis for certain Web destinations, with the goal of generating revenue for state-owned phone companies and government treasuries;

• Impose unprecedented economic regulations such as mandates for rates, terms and conditions for currently unregulated traffic-swapping agreements known as "peering";

• Establish for the first time ITU dominion over important functions of multi-stakeholder Internet governance entities such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the nonprofit entity that coordinates the .com and .org Web addresses of the world;

• Subsume under intergovernmental control many functions of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society and other multi-stakeholder groups that establish the engineering and technical standards that allow the Internet to work;

• Regulate international mobile roaming rates and practices.

It all sounds very dire. McDowell's article has sparked a ruckus at reddit, techdirt, and other technology-oriented online forums.

I agree with McDowell that a government takeover of Internet management would likely be disastrous. The Internet has grown and prospered largely because the technologists who administer it and plot its future are not beholden to national interests.

But I'm not going to ring the alarm bells just yet. As The Register points out, the ITU's publicly posted agenda doesn't include any of the issues that worry McDowell. The ITU lacks the resources to take over the Internet. An Internet takeover is contrary to the ITU's mission. And the ITU doesn't have the authority to execute the takeover McDowell fears.

Blogger Jerry Brito has additional doubts about McDowell's dire predictions:

Assuming every other country agrees to centralize control of the Internet, wouldn’t true control require the U.S. handing over the root to the UN? Why would we ever do that? And what does it mean to “Subsume under intergovernmental control many functions of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society and other multi-stakeholder groups that establish the engineering and technical standards that allow the Internet to work”? These are volunteer-run non-profits. How can they be “subsumed” by the ITU? Why would they submit?

And even if they are subsumed, all the power they now employ is merely putting out technical recommendations. It is the voluntary adhesion to these recommendations by the thousands of networks that make up the Internet which make them powerful. How would you mandate compliance with new standards from a centralized global body? Would nations have to make it illegal to belong to a rebel IETF putting out recs to compete with the ITU? I’m having a hard time envisioning how you ”repeal and replace” such a large, distributed, and successful bottom-up process.

The ITU is meeting at the World Conference on International Telecommunications in Geneva this week. If they agree to formulate an Internet regulatory plan, as McDowell fears, the plan could pass into law at the ITU's 2012 World Conference On International Telecommunications, slated for December in Dubai. The 1988 regulations governing the relationship between the UN and the Internet – the International Telecommunication Regulations – will be subject to renewal and renegotiation in Dubai.

A more comprehensive overview of what is at stake is available in The 2012 World Conference On International Telecommunications: Another Brewing Storm Over Potential UN Regulation Of The Internet, an article written by two attorneys at Washington-based law firm/lobbying enterprise Wiley Rein. I presume that the lawyers are speaking on behalf of an industry client. A history of Wiley Rein's lobbying efforts is available at OpenSecrets.org. It's not clear – to me, at least – who the firm's client might be in the current issue.

Is independent governance of the Internet really vulnerable to government takeover? I think it is. We've seen U.S. law-enforcement agencies take an increasingly aggressive stance regarding use of the Internet as a crime-detection and suspect-tracking tool (the news is full of more and more disturbing reports), and countries throughout the world are looking to censor or control the Internet for their own purposes. Governments are not doing enough to protect us from corporate interests and they are doing to much to morph the 'net into a tool for monitoring and controlling citizens.

Still, despite the real threats, I think McDowell is overreacting in this case. If other countries are (understandably) eager to reduce the U.S. government's control over the Internet, that may not be such a bad thing. The Internet is a global resource, and global participation in governance bodies is something to be desired, not feared.

Web recommendation: AT&T Bell Labs is rightly legendary in the programming world – indeed, in many technical fields. I enjoyed these observations about how and why Bell Labs was able to make such breakthroughs, an analysis by Jon Gertner of The New York Times. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He walks everywhere these days.

* The FCC is by law a five-commissioner body, but it's currently down to three members. President Obama has nominated a pair of attorneys, Jessica Rosenworcel and Ajit Pai, to fill the empty seats, but political wrangling is preventing their timely confirmation.

We all know that women are a minority in software development. This bothers us because it's not consistent with how we view the development world. In the ideal profession that exists in our minds:

• All coders have an equal opportunity to be hired – all that matters is the quality of their work.

• Once on the job, developers are treated fairly regardless of gender, race, and other factors – all that matters is the quality of their work.

• Compensation and advancement are awarded fairly in proportion to developers' contributions – all that matters is the quality of their work.

In other words, we view the world of software development as an open meritocracy.

The truth is more complicated. White men are hired disproportionately over other candidates with equal qualifications. Women programmers are widely subjected to discrimination and hostile work environments. And women are under-compensated and under-promoted compared to equally qualified men. We don't want to believe these things, but study after study confirms them. These are the facts.

According to the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics, women make up 58 percent of the workforce, but only 25 percent of the computing workforce. Between 2000 and 2009, the the percentage of women in the computing workforce dropped 13 percent, while the percentage of men in computing increased 11 percent.

A study by the London Business School revealed that software development teams are most innovative and efficient when they are composed of 50 percent men and 50 percent women. Any other ratio yields lower innovation and lower efficiency. Yet women remain under-represented.

Most of us are uncomfortable with these truths. We'd like to alter the reality to make it conform with our ideals.

Initiatives to open our field to full participation by women have largely been of two kinds.

Some address the “pipeline problem.” The idea is that women are under-represented in high-tech careers because our colleges and universities prepare too few qualified female candidates. Proposed solutions to the pipeline problem can be very inventive. Some activists start with research showing that boys and girls accept gender roles as toddlers, and advocate a wholesale revolution in the way society regards femininity. More commonly, activists attack the pipeline problem by creating incentives for young women to choose technical majors in college.

The second major focus has been networking. Women in tech have formed myriad organizations to provide information and support to other women. These peer-support organizations have attracted high-profile advocates, women who have beaten the odds and ascended to executive positions in high-tech firms.

Neither of these approaches can eliminate the systematic exclusion of women from an equal role in software development. To welcome women into our field – and make our teams more innovative and efficient as a happy result – we must start by accepting the truth about the barriers that currently exist. Then we must change the world. By changing ourselves.

Web recommendation: Unlikely, creative, outstanding nerdy projects! I love this site. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He woke up unaccountably happy this morning. Don't you love it when that happens?

As I have written elsewhere, Congress is debating the merits of controversial legislation intended to protect the movie and music industries from piracy of their copyrighted content. The legislation has had different names at different stages in the adoption process – E-PARASITE, SIPA, and currently the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. You can read the full text of the bill here. An analysis by the Center for Democracy & Technology is here.

The proposed legislation has attracted a lot of attention in recent days. Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt used the words “draconian” and “censorship” to describe the bill in a recent speech at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Google has joined AOL, eBay, Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo in sending a letter of opposition to the bill to Congress. Mozilla is rallying users to oppose the legislation. The Brookings Institution says the bill creates more problems than it solves. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's summary of industry opposition to the legislation is here.

Supporters of the bill include the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, Pfizer, the AFL-CIO, MasterCard, and the American Apparel & Footwear Association. Maria Pallante, director of the U.S. Copyright Office, says the act is “essential” to halting online piracy.

At the center of the controversy is a disagreement over how much damage online piracy does to content creators and owners. A recent study – detailed here – suggests that although piracy of music and movies is widespread, it does not do as much harm to the entertainment industry as Hollywood believes. Hollywood, for its part, sticks to its position that every illicit download is a lost sale.

There are three main problems with SOPA as it is currently conceived. First, the act allows the government to eliminate access to suspected copyright-infringing Web sites before the sites' guilt has been established. Second, the bill significantly weakens the “safe harbor” provisions of existing piracy legislation, the DMCA. The safe harbor provision gives site operators the benefit of the doubt, for example, when users upload copyrighted material. It is the safe harbor provision that allows YouTube to stay in business by making good-faith efforts to delete copyrighted content uploaded by users. Finally, SOPA allows the government to create a list of sites that are off-limits. American companies can't do business with those sites – for example, they can't place advertising on them. This provision puts the government in the position of deciding which sites are acceptable fare for Americans. The potential for censorship is obvious.

SendWrite.com is making it easy to write your Congressional delegation to urge opposition to the bill. Just click here.

Web recommendation: Sign-on bonuses are no novelty in Silicon Valley startups. And it is common for hiring companies to pay a bonus to those who perform matchmaker services and refer new hires to them. But the folks at Scopely.com have taken these bonuses to an absurd new level. If Scopely hires you or the person you refer, you will receive a year’s supply of Dos Equis beer, a portrait of yourself painted in oils, a tuxedo, Cuban cigars, beard grooming oil, a cologne called “Sex Panther,” and $11,000 wrapped in bacon. See for yourself by clicking here. J.D. say check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He likes gin rummy.

Congress is currently working on a bill that would cause significant alteration of the way the Internet works. Variously called the Protect Intellectual Property Act (the Senate version), the Stop Online Piracy Act (the House version), and the E-PARASITE Act (the House version), this legislation would make it much easier for the government to shut down or block access to Web sites suspected (or merely accused) of committing or facilitating certain copyright or trademark violations.

The bill in its various forms enjoys the support of music and motion-picture industry trade groups, who despite record revenues and profits seem to be almost comically frightened of the potential for pirates to disrupt their revenue streams.

Opponents of the legislation call it “the end of the Internet as we know it” and claim it “would officially bring Internet censorship to the U.S. as a matter of law.”

I support legal protection of intellectual property. I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't – I've collected decades of paychecks based on my generation of intellectual property for various companies. I believe that copyright, trademark, and patent regulations generally do more good than harm.

But SOPA/PIPA is bad law. It goes much too far. It gives government too much power to harm businesses and people before their culpability has been legally established. It criminalizes behavior that benefits the very enterprises the legislation has been drafted to support.

CNET's Molly Wood provides this explanation of the legislation's implications:

SOPA would allow rights-holders to get court orders to take down Web sites or blacklist entire domains based on accusations of infringement. The "infringements" themselves can constitute a single link on a single page of a site, or even an accusation that the site is taking steps to "avoid confirming a high probability" of infringement. Let me translate: if someone, anyone, who holds a copyright or trademark on anything, thinks you're deliberately not doing anything about something they consider infringement, they can get your site taken offline and there's virtually nothing you can do to stop them. What?

There's more, and the "more" is even more insidious. The bill would also allow a rights-holder to send an infringement notice to an ad network like Google or a payment processor like Mastercard or Visa. In that case, with zero legal proof of infringement, the ad networks or payment processors would have five days to stop doing business with the accused site--an accuser can kill the alleged infringer's business, with, again, no proof or legal recourse.

CNET's Larry Downes has written a detailed and objective report on the legislation: If you're inspired to read more, click here. Ars technica's take is here.

The good folks at fightforthefuture.org have set up a Web service that helps you write your Congressional representatives about the bill. If, like me, you'd like to do your part to torpedo the legislation, click here (there's an informative video, too). Or sign the We the People petition at whitehouse.gov by clicking here.

Web recommendation: The good folks at Journalism.org – the Pew Research Center's project for excellence in journalism – have completed a study of how tablet computers have changed the way people read the news. Among the report's findings are demographic details about the people who use tablets. Pew concludes that tablet users are better educated, more likely to be employed, and more wealthy than non-users. Is this information relevant to developers of tablet apps? Sure – it's always good to know more about your target users. The report is fascinating. J.D. say check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He once met Salman Rushdie.

Most programmers – like most American office workers – spend their workdays in cubicles. Unless you have ascended the ranked tiers of project, program, team, and department management to a sufficiently lofty level to be appointed an office of your own, you probably work in a cube yourself. Unless you are among the growing group of knowledge workers now toiling away from their homes, of course – but I digress.

Nobody likes working in a cubicle, of course. It's demeaning. It is a visible symbol of your unimportance to your employer. The important employees, the ones whose work is so valuable it can't be interrupted, work in enclosed places. In corporate culture, enclosed offices are like shrines. You must be a high priest to merit one.

It's no wonder employers erect cubicles for their workers. They are inexpensive to buy, install, and reconfigure. The U.S. tax code allows corporations to depreciate temporary offices much faster than permanent ones (seven years versus 49.5 years), giving employers a further financial incentive to rely upon them. And everyone else is putting their employees in cubes – so it must be the right thing to do.

But it isn't the right thing to do. It's dead wrong.

The hard figures allowing me to make such a definitive statement are not secret. They were published in 1987 in Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister.

In their study of hundreds of programming teams, DeMarco and Lister found that an enclosed, interruption-free environment was associated with a three-fold increase in developer productivity. This means that a company willing to make a one-time investment in enclosed offices can get by with 1/3 as many developers. Or accomplish three times as much work with the programmers it has. The only company I know that puts all of its developers in enclosed offices is Microsoft – and I'm not even sure it still does.

Obviously, employers are being penny-wise and pound-foolish by sticking with cubicles.

I know I'm taking a contrarian position in quoting Peopleware. The lastest fad in developer workspaces is the extreme opposite – great open spaces with no dividers at all, so the whole team can look into each other's faces all day long. I've read the justification for such workspaces, and they sound great...but there's no data to demonstrate that the workspaces help team members achieve higher levels of productivity. All of the hard evidence is in Peopleware. You can read the relevant parts here (PDF). And a great, fact-packed rant by my old friend Jack Gannsle (hi Jack!) here.

In a future post, I'll tell you exactly why cubicles don't work for programmers.

Web recommendation: Did the title of this post ring a bell with you? It should have – it's a reference to one of the seminal documents of our field: a letter to the editor of the Communications of the ACM written by Turing Award winner Edsger W. Dijkstra in March 1968. The letter – “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” (PDF) – is remembered as the founding document of structured programming. It still reads well today, though parts are dense (there's a good dissection of the letter and its implications here). J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He recently relocated to a small town outside Belgrade – stop by if your travels take you through Serbia.

Have you heard of the Freedom Box? It's the brainchild of professor Eben Moglen of the Columbia University School of Law in New York.

In February 2010, Moglen addressed a regular meeting of the Internet Society in New York. In his talk – video of which is available widely over the net, including here – Moglen discussed the security dangers of the current model of the Internet. Centralized servers maintain information about us plus logs that compile histories of our activities, Moglen points out. These servers are typically under corporate control and the user information on them is routinely used – misused – by their owners.

This is a dangerous computing model, Moglen says. And it's a bad deal for users. Free Web-hosting (as offered by Facebook and other social-networking sites) and e-mail (as offered by Google and other hosts) isn't really free: It's offered in exchange for full-time spying. Users have ceded control of vast amounts of their personal information without intending to, nor understanding the consequences.

Targeted advertising is just the beginning. Moglen cites a research project that found it was possible to identify closeted gay users on Facebook. The task was relatively easy, Moglen explains. And he warns that this kind of data-mining is just the tip of the iceberg.

The solution, Moglen says, is the Freedom Box – a small, inexpensive Web server that you plug into the wall and forget about. The Freedom Box handles your mail and file transfer and commercial transactions and social networking without exposing you to external servers whose sponsors may not have your best interests at heart. Such a server could be the size of a cell-phone charger, Moglen speculates, and sell for $30 or so once the devices are made in production quantities.

The software component of the Freedom Box is free, of course. A project to create and assemble the required software is under way at the FreedomBox Foundation. The software is based on Debian GNU/Linux plus readily accessible free-software components. The foundation's tech lead is Bdale Garbee, former project leader of Debian.

You don't need me to tell you that the current state of Internet security is a catastrophe waiting to happen. Check out the Freedom Box. Get involved by contributing money or code or ideas. It's good stuff.

Web recommendation: Why do software-development superstars have such primitive Web sites? I recommended Charles Petzold's site in a recent blog post despite its lackluster layout and 1990s-style design. Now I find that I need to point you to the personal site of free-software legend Richard Stallman, whose accomplishments as an Internet pioneer and political activist are too numerous to list here. Stallman is a little strident and a little paranoid for my tastes, but he is that rare individual, a certified idealist. And he has literally changed the world. His Web page is a cornucopia of thoughtful writing despite its bare-bones plain-text appearance. You'll find it here: http://stallman.org/. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He recently relocated to a small town outside Belgrade – stop by if your travels take you through Serbia.