I am going to propose something that may sound radical, but really isn’t. Legislation like SOPA ideally isn’t necessary in an ideal world, and this idea comes about through voluntary agreement. The Stop Online Piracy Act was proposed because of a tragic impasse, a lack of agreement between two powerful and deeply entrenched sides. Although one side has moral force on its side, being ‘right’ doesn’t mean it’s going to ‘win’. Like a classic game theory tragedy, both sides are losing.

To understand why I shall tell you a story. If management sages and internet gurus annoy you – it’s a story you might enjoy.

When he died in 1903, the prolific Victorian journalist and author Herbert Spencer was thought to be one of the cleverest people in the land, and England’s greatest philosopher. Such was his reputation, there was a clamour to bury him in Westminster Abbey. But in reality, Spencer was a hard-working clot, whose reputation fell more sharply and quickly than that of a disgraced fraudster.

Spencer knew all the right buzzwords, but was loathe to read past the first chapter of a book. Spencer even carried ear-plugs in case he was exposed to interesting new ideas, as he feared intellectual stimulation might keep him awake; he often inserted the ear-plugs midway through a conversation. He masked all this, and his books were phenomenally popular, because he stuck to opaque but calming generalisations. Rather than resolve a matter, his generalisations allowed him to waffle around it. (He also heaped on masses of detail to sidetrack the reader). When the novelist George Eliot complimented the old man on the lack of wrinkles on his forehead, Spencer replied that he’d never encountered anything that ever puzzled him.

Spencer may have been the Victorian Malcolm Gladwell, or Tom Peters, or Tim O’Reilly. Generalisations are a great way of avoiding looking at what’s really going on, and tackling a subject with arguments from first principles. Social media has turned this kind of showy avoidance of reality into a massive multiplayer game. Twitter is an ocean in which armies of cliches swim pass each other. You can even badge your avatar to remove any doubts in the audience about nuances in your position: ‘STOP SOPA’ being the most recent. SOPA has indeed been stopped, or fatally gutted.

While the legislation is now moribund, the underlying concerns behind SOPA haven’t gone away. No amount of bloviating is going to resolve this. The main provision of SOPA (and PIPA) is website-blocking, which has no friends here at El Reg. But SOPA will return next year, and the year after, until the issues have been tackled head on. The STOP SOPA stickers will return. It’s all avoidable and getting quite tedious.

The internet has a problem

In the Panglossian worldview of Silicon Valley, everything is perfect on the internet, it’s the best of all possible worlds, and any tinkering with this robs humanity of its last Utopian hope. This is a view of the world that actually owes much to religion, or the desire to recreate the certainty of religion. It’s faith-based, and isn’t a view grounded in reality, especially the reality of doing business. On the internet, fame may arrive quickly, but financial reward doesn’t follow. It’s the only area of business where this is true.

Now this is quite different to the argument that life must be fair: we know it isn’t. We don’t expect the bestselling fiction book to be the most subtle or sophisticated, or the No 1 record to be the greatest work of art (although many have been great works of art). You do need expertise to turn talent to popularity – but that’s a different argument. Nor does money guarantee success, and therefore security; that again is another argument. Financially successful businesses are quite entitled to drive themselves into the ground, and many do. The simple reality remains that in all fields of commerce – with the vital exception of one – money follows popularity.

The SOPA supporters’ argument is that this is entirely down to theft. Before we get down to it, let’s look at the specific core proposal. SOPA and PIPA have other measures, and some are important and hardly controversial. But SOPA was really written for one tactical purpose.

The hypocrisy of web-blocking

The meat of SOPA was concerned with blocking rogue foreign sites – such as The Pirate Bay – from being accessed by Americans. Site-blocking is regarded as illiberal and unloved, and may ultimately have been totally unnecessary, as we shall see. A block list, according to SOPA critics, put the United States on a par with regimes such as China, which prevent their citizens from reaching the internet. It’s certainly hard for US diplomats or policy-makers to take the moral high ground when preventing their citizens from merely seeing a website that is unlikely, on its own, to corrupt or deprave. Merely looking at The Pirate Bay shouldn’t be a crime. This was a strategic error by the IP industries: you may punish people for their actions, not their possible actions.

Yet the hysterical case made against SOPA was quite often dubious. SOPA was solely concerned with rogue sites beyond US jurisdiction, and so could not "make YouTube disappear", as angry anti-SOPA bloggers wanted us to think. And the ‘censorship’ argument needs the cold blast of reality to give it some context.

Remember that Google itself is a web censor on a quite significant scale, and in an arbitrary way. Last year, Google made 11 million sites disappear on a whim, removing the .co.cc domains from its search index because the sites were deemed by Google to be "spammy". Many were, but were all of them? We shall never know, and really, it’s beside the point: a single powerful corporation was making a subjective value judgement call to make a large chunk of the internet vanish. In this case Google was judge, jury and executioner, and the process had no ‘transparency’, another favourite buzzword of the critics. And this single corporation is a vertically-integrated operator of enormous social consequence. It holds monopolies on search and pricing; it creates de facto technical protocols; its decisions decide which small businesses survive or perish.

So this looks less like a row about censorship, but about who gets to do the censoring – and Google would dearly love to be in sole control. Bear that in mind the next time Google says it wants to keep the internet open.

As we know, Google benefits greatly from anti-social behaviour. In both the short-term and and long-term it has a strategic interest in not dealing with piracy. In the short-term, Google nets millions of dollars from its ad networks from pirate traffic. And long-term, rogue sites diminish the likelihood of a legitimate market of creators and consumers. So at some point in the future, having destroyed the legitimate institutions because they can’t make money, Google may slip into the role of the world’s de facto royalty collecting society – and creators will have nowhere else to go but Google. Meet the New Boss: he might not look like the Old Boss, but at least you got paid sometimes.

We’re nothing but our creativity

The deeper battle is a the historic one, about how much social and corporate responsibility new internet companies are obliged to take on board. The DMCA legislation of October 1998, correctly, let them off the hook for anything. This was done in the hope that new markets would be created without the constraints imposed by backward-looking copyright industries.

But now, after 15 years, things seem quite curious. It’s the web giants that are backward-looking, and who fight hardest against the creation of markets. (They’d much prefer to be personal data miners, rather than allow free commerce to flourish.) Silicon Valley has done very well wrapping angle brackets and pastel colour graphics around 30-year-old internet protocols and calling them innovation. IRC becomes Twitter, for example. As former vulture Ashlee Vance writes (a must-read), Valley’s Web innovation may not leave very much for our grandchildren – and is acquiring all the vanity of Hollywood.

Web companies may have thoroughly outgunned property rights owners in terms of light and noise generated online fighting SOPA, but that’s because the professional industry lobby groups focus like lasers on the lawmakers. And here, with the rise of China, the deeper argument is being won.

China today mirrors the dynamic growth of the United States 100 years ago, and has the same buccaneering disrespect for other people’s stuff. Which leaves the question of how to compete. The West doesn’t do manufacturing any more, so the ‘intangible’ or ‘invisible’ inventions are much more important. The West can’t afford not to protect its inventors and creators: if it can’t, there’s nothing to build the service economy of the future upon, and life becomes a diminishing series of asset bubbles. This is simple, brutal economics, and Utopian waffle about internet freedoms do not cut much muster – at least not on a planet where unicorns don’t have the vote, and the emerging Eastern economies are delighted to take what they can.

And the specific problem SOPA was designed to address – exquisitely demonstrated here by this independent film-maker at Pop Up Pirates – is very much a live one. Rights-owners argue that it’s because their property rights aren’t enforceable. For years we could argue that ‘harm’ took place because of the absent of cheap, decently-priced legitimate services. But with cheap streaming services coming online, that’s hard to argue now.

So there’s a problem, and we don’t like web-blocking legislation as a ‘solution’. Fair enough.

Wrinkle avoidance strategies

For years, copyright industries avoided old-age wrinkles by using enforcement to retain control – working against the grain of technology, rather than with it. Copyright industries are not natural enforcers, when they try it, they’re quite spectacularly clumsy. Take your pick from from an unsavoury list over the years that includes remote kill-switches for media, or creating and distributing millions of spoofed music files containing noise, or plans to insert spyware onto your PC that locks your computer or deletes your music. All pretty dumb. More recently, they’ve started to work with the implications of digital networks: with UltraViolet you buy a license, rather than repeatedly purchasing limited rights over and over again. That’s a step forward.

And it’s the sort of progressive thinking conspicuous by its absense in Silicon Valley, and its armies of ‘copyfighters’. They love the war too much for it to end. And to keep fighting, you must avoid thinking about constructive, mutual agreements. That might cause wrinkles. Spencer’s ear plugs are firmly in place.

Well, to return to where we started, legislation is quite unnecessary. That is, if ISPs abided by a clear and open voluntary code to respect creators’ rights, which required booting out the few serial offenders; if ad networks refused to support parasitic foreign companies; and if search engines shared revenue with media companies to whence they drove traffic, we wouldn’t need new laws. This is not a fantasy – it’s going to happen in the UK, remember. The UK has website-blocking legislation on the statute book, but Culture Minister Ed Vaizey wants a voluntary agreement – a most liberal solution – instead. Alas ISPs, service providers and search engines today see only risk in being socially responsible, not an opportunity.

As Friday’s exasperated joint White House statement points out, the copyright worries are justified, and entitled to some kind of enforcement – they won’t go away. A property owner must be able to enforce their property rights, with legal backup, and the effective sort, or the rights become meaningless. They shouldn’t be able to do so easily or cheaply, lest this becomes a substitute for innovation, for finding talent and marketing it effectively.

"Don’t limit your opinion to what’s the wrong thing to do, ask yourself what’s right," the Three Czars demand.

However, Silicon Valley’s problem – and one activists have – is that they’ve never thought about it like this. They’ve never seen a voluntary copyright enforcement backstop they liked: they were all problematic. Campaigners instinctively oppose everything – leading to ever more bonkers legislation.

Like Spencer, Silicon Valley doesn’t seem to want worry about it, it doesn’t want too many wrinkles in old age. This is why I call SOPA "what goes around, comes around" legislation. It isn’t nice, and it isn’t necessary, but we’re all here because Silicon Valley’s web companies refuse to grow up. The White House just told them they should. ®

This may not be what the corporate sponsor Google, which benefits from internet piracy and fights enforcement proposals, had in mind when it funded the research. Google is currently leading the opposition to the new SOPA legislation in the US, which obliges service providers to take greater responsibility.

Perhaps, as in Brecht’s poem, Google wishes “to dissolve the people and elect another”, until they get the answer they want.

Columbia University, who Google funded to conduct the survey, has a very hard time spinning it favourably for their corporate paymasters. They resort to the old trick of rephrasing the question until it got the desired answer. (Statisticians sometimes do something similar: it’s called “torturing the numbers until they confess.”)

Asked if websites should be “censored”, 46 per cent said yes, and 49 per cent said no. Fewer agreed if the question was posed in a way that implied legal content was being accidentally blocked. And asked if “the government” should “censor” websites, the number fell still further, with 36 per cent in favour and 64 per cent disagreeing.

The researchers stopped short of asking whether the public approved of the government unlawfully kidnapping their children while they censored websites and burned the Holy Bible just for fun, which is a pity. But you get the general idea. The answer depends on the question.

Two UK surveys have both shown strong public support for stronger law enforcement for online infringement. Even pirates agreed with the proposition that they were doing something a bit iffy, and would stop.

Which brings us to what wasn’t asked in the survey. There are some serious omissions.

In the UK, a mere 11 per cent disagreed with the statement that: “It is important to protect the creative industries from piracy.” But remember this new study is Google-funded research; they don’t want vital context like that spoiling the numbers. The same UK survey also showed that whacking free-riders is popular; 51 per cent polled in the UK thought serial copyright leechers should be punished more strongly, including many “pirates”. That question wasn’t asked by Columbia, either.

The survey instead asked if people had ever committed online copyright infringement, and the answer tells us something we already know: many people have, and the number rises among under-30s. It doesn’t ask if this is a regular occurrence, and how much is casual and how much is “hardcore”. The survey does ask how much of people’s personal collection is pirated, but what would be more useful is a “flow rate” (like the GDP measure), not the accretion, so we haven’t really learned anything about habits or behaviour.

The researchers instead ask whether the public like any of the punishments on offer, and guess, what? They don’t really like any of them very much.

Early data from France suggests most people stop pirating after just one letter, the number of people who have received two is tiny. Spending money on recorded music is now optional, and the copyright industries hope that people who love music go back to buying more, rather than spending the “saved” cash on beer and other entertainment, as they are free to do now. This is the justification for the legislation.

(Which is clumsy stuff, as your reporter never ceases to point out; there are other ways of discouraging anti-social behaviour than blocking sites).

No industry research into piracy is ever believed by opponents of digital copyright enforcement, the so-called “copyfighters”. This is for two reasons: studies have in the past have notoriously exaggerated the economic impacts of piracy for tactical reasons. Much like alarmist Greens, copyright groups want the threat to be seen as exceptional, requiring exceptional action. But secondly, pirates don’t want to acknowledge that piracy does anyone any harm – so they block their ears.

“What’s that you say? Never paying for anything hurts the creator? That can’t be true. And oh, I can’t hear yoooou!”

In fact, that seems to be exactly what happened here.

Read more at The Register.

What happens when competition watchdogs lose their teeth – and roll over to have their tummies tickled? Via the influential chair of the Commons Culture Media and Sport Select Committee, John Whittingdale MP, comes a very interesting story today. Whittingdale relates a conversation with John Fingleton, the head of the Office of Fair Trading. The MP asked if the agency had looked at the question of Google’s power in the marketplace.

Google has a dominant market share of paid search advertising, effectively setting the price of doing business on the internet for small companies. The conversation took place at around the time it became known that the European Commission began to probe the company, and its customers, in response to a series of complaints. The FTC opened its own investigation this summer.

“The head of the OFT told me that Google was a fantastic organisation, a fast developing company, and should be applauded,” the MP said.

The job of a business regulator, we hardly need point out, is not to swoon like a gushing schoolgirl delighted that a boy band star has swept into town. Fingleton had also offered his views – although a little more circumspectly – to The Guardian newspaper, in November 2009.

“We see a lot of customers benefit from what’s happening in this marketplace from very high innovation – it’s good for the British economy. We don’t want to send a negative signal about that,” said the watchdog boss.

The job of a regulator now includes “sending out signals”.

Google appears grateful for the support: Schmidt quoted Fingleton’s remarks in his MacTaggart lecture to TV executives recently.

The remarks will highlight Google’s close relationships with ministers and the permanent bureaucracy. A recent investigation into intellectual property was launched by Prime Minister David Cameron, citing concerns raised by Google executives, and soon became known as the “Google Review”. Its conclusions advanced copyright measures that could benefit large internet aggregators.

Last week, PR Week reported that a top Cameron strategist is joining Google. The Chocolate Factory lent the Conservatives’ chief strategist Steve Hilton a desk while he was working for the Conservatives, WiReD mag reported last year. Hilton’s wife Rachel Whetstone, formerly political secretary to Cameron’s predecessor as Conservative leader Michael Howard, is Google’s global head of communications and public policy.

Whittingdale was speaking at an iComp seminar; iComp is the group looking to clip Google’s wings. Whittingdate reiterated his personal view that government regulation is harmful. All the same, he said, he found the OFT’s insouciance quite remarkable.

We asked the OFT whether the conversation reflected its current view of Google, but it hadn’t got back to us as of publication.

Lib Dems are appealing to the vital online pirate vote at this year’s party conference, putting the membership on collision course with LibDem ministers in the coalition government. In a new IT policy paper called “Preparing The Ground”, a team of party activists led by Cambridge MP Julian Huppert calls for the Digital Economy Act to be gutted of its copyright measures. It also threatens new legislation to ensure all “traffic flows at the same speed”, and wants the IR35 contractor tax suspended.

Senior party figures speaking on condition of anonymity expressed dismay at the proposals. The LibDems are in government for the first time in 70 years, and have attempted to leave behind the Party’s old “sandal-wearing” image as a haven for single-issue-fanatics.

Two options are proposed for the Digital Economy Act: removing all the copyright legislation from the DEA, or calling for an additional vote on most of it. The second proposal also calls for the repeal of web-blocking powers, but Ministers say they won’t implement them anyway. The Digital Economy Act was passed by 189 votes to 47 last year.

The bearded, bicycling Huppert, a former UN youth organiser, told us he thought copyright legislation that existed prior to the DEA is sufficient for today – and he had never seen an online copyright enforcement measure he liked.

“Nobody has yet suggested one that is workable and proportionate,” he said.

That’s a pretty hard line, and one sure to bring cheers from hardcore downloaders. In the absence of sticks, Huppert told us he wanted education and better services. “There are already laws,” he told us, “people get prosecuted under these existing laws for copyright infringement online.”

The activists also call for the return of Clause 43 orphan works legislation, bringing in extended collective licensing for photographs and illustrations where a publisher can’t be arsed to ask permission can’t find the creator.

One speed for all

Also on the boilerplate list of digital activist grievances is a threat of new controls on network operators (aka “net neutrality”), with the paper insisting that more regulation “is liberal”. TV and video users and producers might be dismayed to read that “it is better to provide a level playing field – where traffic flows at the same speed“.

Video and gaming packets need to travel considerably faster – with lower latency and jitter – than bog-standard web-pages. Surely this was a typo?

“I can see the argument for some kind of traffic-shaping,” Huppert says. “That’s already done. That’s fundamentally different from stuff from the BBC going at a different bitrate.”

But wouldn’t that outlaw me paying for a premium movie service over IP? What harm was a private transaction like this doing to anyone?

That was “less” problematic, he said. “There’s nothing wrong with paying for a faster connection, or Channel 4 charging for movies, or dealing with an ISP to transmit them faster. What I don’t wish to see is Google paying money to an ISP to make Bing run slower.”

Huppert said the precedent was charging road users for premium services – fast lanes. “We don’t have roads you have to pay for,” he told us.

[Actually, we have several.]

But hang on – aren’t toll roads pretty common everywhere in the world already? The justification shifted once again: Facebook shouldn’t be able to withhold its service from an ISP by demanding money. Maybe they should try it, I suggested, as they wouldn’t need to scrape and hoard so much personal information. It almost sounds like an honest business model.

Nevertheless, the paper threatens that “privileging certain types of content or throttling download speeds on certain websites will lead inevitably to regulation”. Perhaps this is somewhat optimistic.

negative effect on creative industries, and proposes a new study to produce the answers desired. A move to allow the free public access to “the BBC archive wherever possible” was dropped from the published draft, El Reg understands.

I asked Huppert if the LibDems had done a costing of the suspension of IR35? “We don’t have the resources,” he said.

“In an ideal system there wouldn’t be such loopholes. I can understand why IR35 was invented. But it clearly doesn’t work very well, causes a large number of problems, and doesn’t collect very much revenue. ”

A bit like the 50p tax, then?

Julian laughed.

The LibDems will vote on a Policy Motion (F28) on Monday, 19 September

[link]

Berne is administered by the UN quango World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and changes are made only every few generations – it was last amended in 1979. Undaunted, a committee of “wise men” (actually, just three people) reporting to the EU’s Information Society initiative i2010 Digital Libraries Initiative has recommended “some form of registration as a precondition for a full exercise of rights” [Our emphasis].

The problem? Berne establishes most parts of copyright as an automatic, global right. Unravelling this would undermine the entire treaty – which isn’t likely.

The report by the “Comité des Sages” was welcomed by Neelie Kroes, European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda. The Sages comprising the “high level reflection group” were Maurice Lévy, chairman and CEO of advertising and PR company Publicis, German libraricrat Elisabeth Niggemann, and Belgian playwright Jacques De Decker.

The trio urged states to implement new legislation on collective licensing, obliging commercial copyright holders to donate work which would be made available for free. Rights-holders of in-copyright works would be remunerated “fairly” and would retain the ability to opt-out of the EU-wide database.

While the report encourages “public-private” partnerships there’s little incentive for rights-holders to stump up for the expensive process of digitisation – deals would be non-exclusive and “preferential” terms would expire after seven years. Copies of everything would have to be lodged with Europeana, the EU digital library project estimated to cost €400m when it’s complete.

The strangest recommendations in the Sages’ report are reserved for orphan works. They declare that:

“An orphan work recognised as such in one Member State on the basis of a search in the country of origin, should be recognised as orphan across the EU.” Similarly, “an orphan work that is made accessible online in one Member State should also be made accessible online in all Member States or even globally.”

So expect to see Albania suddenly lose all the metadata it has ever possessed on Norman Wisdom films*.

You can find more high-level reflections from the sages here and download the PDF from here.

Bootnote

* This is, of course, a joke. Albania is not yet an EU member…

SABIP was founded in 2008 in the wake of the Gowers Report, as a quasi think-tank focusing on copyright policy. New technology has allowed many more people to record and distribute material – “everyone’s a creator” – we’re told, and this hasn’t gone unnoticed. From publishers such as News International to giant web data aggregators such as Facebook, the pressure to weaken the individual’s rights remains enormous. All are eager to exploit amateur material, and drive down the cost of professional material.

At once, SABIP began to discuss the removal of copyright as an “automatic” right from creators, something that thanks to international conventions is recognized worldwide. It’s something that benefits individuals and amateurs more than multinationals, and it means that individuals can receive the full protection and moral rights of international copyright law for everything they do – without having to sign-up, click-through or take any action at all.

(For a recent example of commercial land-grabs, see the Daily Mail‘s TwitPic theft.)

SABIP obviously didn’t think so, and proposed to redefine copyright so certain “non-commercial” works were excluded. In its 2008 launch paper, it wrote:

While subject to international variation, the definition of works which attract copyright is very wide and includes much material which is not of commercial value, and arguably may not require copyright protection.

Might there then be advantage in reworking the coverage of copyright to separate the moral rights of creators of all types of material from the economic/commercial rights and to limit the latter only to those outputs that do have an economic value?

SABIP noted several obstacles to this radical redefinition of individual rights. Copyright is automatic by international convention – this would mean the UK ripping up the Berne Convention. Since the UK is one of very few net exporters of “stuff”, this would have had deep repercussions with possibly years of tit-for-tat trade restrictions.

No matter, by this year, the language had morphed again, but this time it duly made its way into Europe as the official position of the UK government. And so earlier this year, the UK proposed to Europe that:

The UK will push at European level for a general non-commercial and pre-commercial use exception to copyright.

And added, for good measure, that it would quite like to outlaw private contracts at will:

The creator contract/bargaining problem may be addressed in the first instance through a working group (perhaps with OFT involvement), looking at acceptable forms of contracting.

When asked what “pre-commercial” meant, civil servants replied that they didn’t know.

Traditionally what decides whether a work is commercial is pretty straightforward – the market. A picture of your toddler eating Alphabet Spaghetti Soup is typically worth nothing – unless somebody decides to stick it on a calendar. The SABIP proposal would have left the photographer with the moral right, but no automatic compensation right. It would also mean – quite strange, this – a bureaucratic apparatus pre-emptively picking what categories of work may benefit from a market, and excluding the rest. You may wonder how this would work – folk music non-commercial, dubstep commercial, perhaps?

SABIP also attempted to make itself busy in other areas outside copyright, gradually turning into a Spartist think-tank. In January for example (minutes), it raised the role of “the regulation of genetic modification (GM) and the appropriation of ‘nature’” and low-carbon technologies. You’ll struggle to find any mention of these in the Gowers Report, and neither has much crossover with copyright.

Photographers welcomed the demise of the quango. Stop43 noted yesterday

“Its reports were vacuous, based on questionable methodology, notably light on meaningful statistics, and in the main simply pleaded for further research to be carried out. A true QUANGO, then, primarily engaged in perpetuating itself and its ‘work’. Stop43 does not mourn its passing.”

Yet pre-commercial use is an IPO-inspired invention, and SABIP merely the ventriloquist’s dummy. The ideas live on.

Calder invites us to have a giggle, but really it’s not a bad list at all, and compared with the (cough) ‘futurists’ who have come and gone since, Calder and the participants did a good job. Alvin Toffler was repackaging these ideas, particularly mass amateurisation, many years later. As are thousands of Web 2.0 consultants today.

Read more at The Register

Actually, that’s how a few bloggers and even professional hacks have portrayed it. But what’s wrong with this picture?

Read more at The Register

The issue was made apparent when a trail of correspondence by administration official Andrew McLaughlin was exposed recently. McLaughlin is Obama’s deputy CTO – a freshly minted post, with CTO meaning either Citizens Twitter Overlord, or Chief Technology Officer – we believe it’s the latter. He was previously Google’s chief lobbyist, or ‘Head of Global Public Policy and Government Affairs’.

McLaughlin’s contacts were also exposed. In an irony to savour, the exposure was by Google itself, as it introduced its privacy-busting Buzz feature in February. As our Cade pointed out, it would be hard to imagine a better Google story.

Now GOP Congressman Darrell Issa, a ranking member of the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has asked why the Deputy CTO is prattling away on Google’s email service. Issa wants to know whether private, non-governmental emails are archived, as they should be.

He also wants to know what the retention policy is for information posted on Twitter and Facebook, who decides these things (pdf). Issa wants answers by 22 April.

As I noted last June, there are interesting parallels with the influence of think tank RAND on US policy in the 1960s – and some interesting differences. RAND was also a Church of the Algorithm, it took mathematical ideas and applied them to social and political problems. RAND’s most famous contribution was developing a nuclear policy based on game theory, developed by Robert McNamara, who went on to apply RAND analysis (disastrously) first to escalate, then to prolong the Vietnam war.

Google is merely a corporation, I noted. Then, the following month, Obama tapped the Berkman Centre, a pretty New Age techno-utopian think tank attached to Harvard Law School, to conduct an “independent” review of broadband deployment and usage. Like Obama, McLaughlin is himself a graduate of Harvard Law – the class of 94. McLaughlin had two senior stints at Berkman, from 1998 to 1999, and once again before joining Google.

Google is a Berkman sponsor.

There’s a broader issue than archiving emails here, and it’s eloquently illustrated by Andrew McLaughlin’s Gmail Buzz contact list. It’s that the range of ideas that Obama can draw upon, via his Googlers, is extremely narrow and ideologically rigid.

The boundaries of what he’s permitted to think are defined by Google. And that’s isn’t really in the best interest of either the President, or the US public.