Nowadays, you can pretty much assume a one-to-one correspondence between website addresses and the names of corporations. Take a famous name like Coca Cola, Microsoft, or General Motors, add “.com,” and you’ll find a website owned by the company. However, I remember the late nineties, when sometimes a URL with a corporate name would belong to a squatter who was hoping that the big company would buy him out. And sometimes the website was used to criticize the company in question–as an exercise of free speech, in my opinion.

Perhaps the “squatters” were all bought out, or perhaps they were scared away by cease-and-desist letters like this one:

Your registration of this domain name, which is essentially identical to our client’s trademark, is likely to cause confusion, mistake and deception, and hence constitutes infringement of our client’s trademarks and copyrights, as well as constituting unfair competition. Your offering the domain name for sale constitutes “cybersquatting,” and violates our client’s trademark and copyright rights. In view of the foregoing, we demand that you immediately cancel your domain name registration and provide us with copies of the executed cancellation documents.

I do not understand all the nuances of trademark law, although this site from the Berkman Center is helpful. I can, however, venture some opinions about the public interest:

1. It is important for people to be able to express and disseminate independent views about major corporations. For that reason, we have free speech rights to use the names of corporations in print and even in prominent places like the titles of books and tv shows. The Internet is a communications medium, built originally with public funds. I see no grounds for giving companies the rights to their own names in URLs any more than they should be allowed to control the titles of books.

2. It would be possible for someone to infringe a trademark by appearing to be, say, Coca-Cola. If I took the URL cocacola.com and sold soft drinks online, I would be confusing customers and profiting from the company’s investment. That would be against the public interest. However, there is no confusion at all if I operate cocacola.com as an anti-soft-drink website. Then clearly I’m not Coca-Cola. If I lower the company’s sales by criticizing it, then Coca-Cola must answer my arguments in the public forum.

3. There seems to be a moral problem with obtaining a website that includes the name of a famous company simply in order to sell it to the firm. This is classic “squatting.” You are monopolizing a piece of the commons that you know has special value for one particular entity. I don’t think that’s admirable. However, I’m not sure that it’s worse than other forms of rent-seeking that are perfectly legal, e.g., staking a claim to the best piece of land or building a bridge at the narrowest point on a river and charging tolls. The “other” Peter Levine who owns www.peterlevine.com has inconvenienced me, but he certainly hasn’t violated my rights. Besides, if you obtain a URL that includes the name of a corporation and you sell it to the highest bidder, you are offering critics of the company a chance to buy a platform for free speech. If the company places the highest bid, it has paid a premium for fending off critics. Perhaps that’s not such a bad thing.

I’m busy reading a thick pile of applications for J-Lab’s New Voices grants. These grants support “innovative community news ventures in the United States”–ranging from electronic magazines produced by identity groups, to podcasting services, to low-power radio, to public databases of value to geographical communities. The proposals are imaginative and various, just as they were last year.

One of last year’s winners is particularly interesting to me. It’s the Madison Commons in Madison, Wisconsin–an elaborate community news portal that combines reporting by ordinary citizens with news provided by professionals. The Commons also offers workshops to enhance citizens’ journalism skills, and it has developed partnerships with two for-profit print newspapers.

The Madison Commons can be traced back to a series of discussions in the late 1990s about “community information commons.” The Prince George’s Information Commons also originated in those discussions, which were funded by Ford. We envisioned a network of such projects at land-grant state universities. See this white paper (PDF) for the whole plan. The Madison Commons is much more robust than our Prince George’s County version, but it’s nice now to have two nodes–the beginning of a network.

Yesterday, I heard a talk about whether the Internet can help to democratize institutions such as the World Bank and WTO. Proposals for that purpose include posting internal deliberations online, allowing people to file comments by email, or even allowing anyone to edit draft documents on websites (“wikis”). The main response is that the Internet is just a tool; it doesn’t change the basic structure of governance. For instance, there are already lots of interesting and wide-ranging discussions within offices and departments of the World Bank. Outsiders could be enabled to participate in those discussions through online tools. But if real decisions are still made rather opaquely by a few individuals, then the online discussion will just mislead outsiders into believing that they have influence. The Internet itself does not change the incentives to share power.

I agree that the Internet cannot itself change the governance of institutions. However, to a degree, the Internet is changing the institutions that count. Two important examples:

Standards have powerful impact on our lives. They are what allow all our computers to interconnect. They can be constructed in such a way as to favor, disfavor, block, conceal, reveal, or otherwise influence all of our online transactions. But standards are not written by the institutions that were considered by political theorists 50 years ago: not by legislatures, courts, diplomats, or regulatory agencies. Sometimes, a person (e.g., Tim Berners-Lee) just writes standards and they proliferate. Perhaps they can be changed by means of political pressure, but not in traditional ways. For instance, no law or government could simply change the standards for email or the Web, which are thoroughly dispersed

Ten years ago, what a daily newspaper should do was an important question. Today, it is a less important issue, because newspapers have lost overall market share and clout to various kinds of websites, including blogs. Their market share could drop to zero.

[PS: My current grad student Tony Fleming has created a great specialized blog on the competition to be the next UN Secretary General. Tony provides detailed information and news as well as an opportunity to propose questions for the leading candidates. That’s a nice use of blog technology to press a major international body to be more transparent.]

I’ve come from Ohio to New York City for a meeting on “Media and Communications at the Crossroads: The Role of Scholarship for Media Justice and Reform.” At the meeting, my friend Lew Friedland just argued that daily news journalism is still essential to the “media ecology.” I’d put the argument as follows:

It’s true that people get news, ideas, and values from their family and friends and from multiple electronic sources, including the web portals of Yahoo and other Internet-service providers (which are regular news sources for 15% of young people); comedy TV (a regular source for 21% of youth); and talk radio (16%). (See this Pew Research Center poll.) However, Yahoo’s headlines simply come from wire services–hence, from reporters. Comedy writers get most of their material from daily newspapers. Friedland estimates that 90% of the news stories on local TV come from a local newspaper. Debates in the blogosphere are very often triggered by reported news. Fictional programs like “Law and Order” are inspired by print journalism. Therefore, influential conversations in the kitchen, the office water-cooler, and church often derive ultimately from a newspaper.

If this is right, then we cannot consider citizen media and other new means of communication and discussion in isolation. They are dependent on the state of conventional, professional journalism–which isn’t good. Newspapers are highly profitable but are cutting their staff and budgets for reporting. Two thirds of national journalists believe that bottom-line pressure is hurting news coverage–causing the press to avoid complex issues, to be sloppy, and to be timid. (Source.) Bloggers can complain about newspaper journalists from various angles; they can’t replace them.

Today is the last day of a great meeting on public media, a rich discussion enlivened by presentations of excellent projects (for instance, the National Black Programming Consortium, OneWorld, Global Voices Online, Location One, Public Radio Exchange, and PRI’s Open Source.)

“Public media” comprises all forms of communication that help a democratic public to do its work. The public’s work includes deliberating and debating issues of common concern, mobilizing people to participate in formal politics, and creating cultural products that represent and preserve a people’s heterogeneous values.

Three sectors can serve these roles; each has advantages and disavantages:

1. Corporations (broadcast networks, cable-TV providers, big software companies, newspapers, and publishers) can help the public to do its work. They sometimes meet public demand for news, debate, and information. They apply expertise, talent, and discipline; and they have access to mass markets. However, they generally make more money by providing and advertising commercial goods, rather than encouraging civic and political participation. They can attract the largest audiences by presenting politics in ways that amuse or arouse viewers but make them less likely to participate themselves. Corporate consolidation and market fragmentation make these problems worse.

2. “Citizen media” means material created and disseminated by individuals or small, voluntary groups: blogs, personal websites, photo galleries on Flickr, podcasts. These “many-to-many” media are far more diverse, open, and innovative than corporate programming. However, there are questions about the citizen media: Can unfunded individuals and networks create products that are more ambitious than short snippets of text, snapshots, and video–for instance, lengthy narrative movies and original news reporting? Even if a few very talented people can create these ambitious products, how can we help those with average skills to participate and find audiences for their work, which will not look professional? And how can we prevent all these individual producers from forming small, insular groups–how can we create a public dialogue?

3. The traditional “public media” are broadcast stations and producers funded (at least in part) by tax dollars. They have a strong tradition of commitment to the public’s interests, although they can certainly be criticized for attracting and serving a narrow slice of the population. In the United States, the organizations in the orbit of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have some strengths: reputation and public trust, a national network of local institutions, archives of excellent programming, talented employees, and some broadcast spectrum. They have the power to put individuals “on the air,” which attracts participation. However, their advantages are diminishing as more competitors arise (including citizen media producers), and as viewers shift from radio and TV to the Internet, where they have far more choice. People are increasingly alienated by the traditional model of station membership, in which you pay dues, receive some goodies, but have no direct impact on programming–and the fundraising drive just drones on. Public broadcasting stations must learn to use their spectrum and other assets to enhance public discussions and cultural collaborations. Their job is to help form publics that demand genuinely public media from all three sectors.

[Rebecca MacKinnon’s summary is on her blog.]