Farhad Manjoo

In response to the Gilmore interview, Salon received an angry letter from ICANN’s chief counsel, Joe Sims, and was also approached by Esther Dyson, who sought an opportunity to explain some of the “nuances” of ICANN’s operations.

What’s your current involvement in ICANN?

My current involvement is after I stopped being chairman they created something called the At Large Study Committee, and I was invited to join that, but I wasn’t chairman of it. It was chaired by Carl Bildt, who’s the former prime minister of Sweden. Part of the issue is that the At Large program gets … its strongest voices from Americans. And in a group like ICANN, Americans are insiders — so it was important that the chairperson not be another American.

One of the biggest issues is voting for board members. And let’s get real. The ICANN board at this point, right or wrong, is simply not going to accept that. Which to my mind is unfortunate because we have elected At Large board members and they’re by and large reasonable people — other than Karl Auerbach — who unfortunately has some good proposals and it’s counterproductive how he goes around trying to achieve that.

Why do you think it’s such a non-starter to have elected members?

I do not agree with that but that’s the board’s position. ICANN exists. It’s got a contract with the U.S. government. And you can disagree with them violently and say I don’t want to have anything to do with them, or you can say, as I do, hey, I want to change this thing and I want to fix it. And I accept the reality that I’m not going to ask for the impossible, but I’m going to try to do two things. I want to change the attitudes of the ICANN board and help foster an At Large organization that will help them to change their minds because it turns out to be a reasonable and constructive organization that provides useful input. At Large users have a role in the governance of ICANN. But the question is how to make that constructive rather than incoherent, and how to get ICANN to listen.

So if not elections, what other method is there to get the public involved in ICANN?

Well, the long-term goal is elections, but it’s not the near-term mechanism. Let’s get real. I can’t think of anything better than elections. You’ve got structures that make elections real, and one argument against them is — I’ve heard from members who say “In my country we’ve had too many elections where you just go out and round up a few hundred thousand peasants and you pay them and get votes.” And that’s what the ICANN board in part is scared of.

First you have to understand there’s two parts to this. There’s elections of board members and then there’s input into the policies, which I think in some ways is more important. When people sit down and they try to figure out rules for how the [domain name] registrars should operate, let’s have some users sitting at the table saying what works, pointing out the problem.

But do you have that now? One of the criticisms of ICANN is that you don’t.

No. Not effectively. Absolutely not. No. I mean, I’m not saying this is good. I’m saying I want to get inside and help it to change. But what you’ve got now is a stalemate where nobody wants to compromise. And my hope is that the Department of Commerce is going to force something of a compromise, by saying that we either will or will not renew your Memo of Understanding [a document establishing ICANN's institutional legitimacy].

But why should the Department of Commerce renew the memo? Why do we need ICANN?

We need ICANN to be exactly what it is — in part. We don’t need a big ICANN. It should be the place where you settle policy questions that need to be settled globally. Many policy questions don’t need to be settled globally. As far as I’m concerned “dot-name” should have different rules from “dot-com” and I don’t see that as a problem. So there are many policy areas in which I don’t agree with how ICANN works. And one of them is simply the less power it has the better, but it needs enough power to resolve conflicts that do need to be resolved. And therefore it needs to have all the important players to be not forced in but seduced in by an attitude that says: Come join ICANN because this is the place that we compromise on policy.

You know, there are some things that need to be consistent, not very many. The problem is right now is ICANN’s contracts for the top level domain names [.com, .org. etc.] are way too long. You measure them in thickness rather than length. There’s too many specific rules. At the same time there are probably places where they should come together. They need to figure out what should be done with the WHOIS [database of information as to what Internet names and numbers are assigned to individual users] — how that should be managed. They need to decide rules for each data element. It’s not that there should be no rules. There should be a minimum.

One of the things that John Gilmore says is that we don’t have to have a small number of top-level domains. We should have dozens or hundreds or thousands.

If people are redesigning the system from the start you’d probably do it entirely differently. But why could God build the world in only seven days, you know? Because he had no legacy systems.

Let’s face it, you’ve got legacy systems. You may think they’re immoral — I don’t, but you may. There are people who have trademarks and copyrights. Verisign has a very lucrative contract with the U.S. government. But the nice thing about the U.S. is you can enforce these contracts.

At some point you should interview Bob Frankston on this. One of the problems with the domain name system is that you’ve got identifiers mixed up with names. Your American Express number is an identifier, whereas a name has market value, it has connotations, etc. And they should have had a system of unique identifiers that were not names and everything would have been 10 times simpler. And Frankston says let’s create a new top level domain that’s strictly numbers and then let’s gradually move as many people over to it as we can, and then let’s have different systems — things like RealNames — that simply point to the unique identifiers. And then you don’t need to have this globally consistent naming system.

But unfortunately we’ve got it. In the long run you could create thousands of top level domain names, but you’d end up with the same issues. As long as you have names you’re going to have scarcity, and artificial scarcity. ICANN should create a whole lot more top level domains and take the artificial scarcity out of the market. But you do want a global system with a unique root that is kept consistent.

Let’s talk about Karl Auerbach. He’s a board member but he says that he’s never been allowed to see the financials, and now he’s suing to see them. And he’s taken a populist argument, saying it’s something the public should see, or that it’s something that ICANN is afraid of having the public see. What’s your feeling on this?

I probably should be very careful not to get messed up in a lawsuit. It’s very unfortunate, and I would say both sides are to blame that Karl Auerbach cannot get along with them. The board despises him, and they won’t listen to his good ideas, and he has some. And so he’s not productive. Look at me. The American at-large community despises me but I think I’m doing more good for At Large by working with ICANN than I would if I were out there simply criticizing them, not trying to improve them.

Do you think that the lawsuit will take some of the secrecy out of ICANN?

Well — I was chairman. I don’t think anybody’s getting rich out of ICANN. The directors are volunteers, which I’m not sure is a good idea. You look at the entire budget, and there simply isn’t a lot of money there to steal.

So why not release the numbers?

Because as I said both sides are unhelpful. I don’t think ICANN has anything to hide and they should have just opened up the books. Big deal. There’s nothing in there. They’re standing on a principle which I don’t think is worth defending. At the same time I think Karl should just sign [the non-disclosure agreement] and take a look. But instead he wanted to make a big fuss and do a lawsuit.

Let’s get real. In the scheme of things, the amount of money involved here is kind of piddling. A lot of people that talk about this think a million dollars is a big deal. But look at WorldCom — there are better places to spend your time if you’re just looking for misuses of money.

You’ve said that ICANN needs more resources. What does it need? And do you think it’s going to get them?

If they sort it out it will. It doesn’t need a huge amount — but take this thing about transparency: The real reason ICANN got such a bad reputation for transparency is because they had closed board meetings, which was a mistake. It’s still dealing with that legacy. But the fact is it’s hard to get an answer from them. And the reason is they don’t have anyone to write e-mails to the people who ask questions. Ask any P.R. guy. It takes resources. It’s one thing to have everything on your site that nobody can understand because it’s all written by lawyers, and it’s another to have people answer your questions. Unfortunately, yes it requires resources. It’s not simply a matter of saying we’re going to be responsive. It takes people and money. The problem is people aren’t willing to fund it because they don’t see it working effectively. The moment they see it working effectively, they’ll fund it.

He uses the chocolate to plug up the leaking tank of acid — sulfuric acid reacts with sugar to form a kind of glue. The sodium, scraped into the shell of the cold capsule and splashed into a sealed bottle of water, makes for a handy time-delay bomb, which proves useful for blowing through a wall that blocks the group’s escape. The smoke from the cigarettes illuminates the bunker’s laser-beam security system that he has to get through to move through the bunker (no secret underground research lab is complete without lasers); MacGyver uses the binocular lens to aim the laser at its own control unit, shutting down the security system.

But how does he get out of the bunker? Oh, that’s the easy part: MacGyver finds a switch that controls the lights in an above-ground control tower. He flashes the lights on and off to send an SOS message in Morse code. The guys in the tower, realizing Mac’s in the bunker, alive, call off the missile — and for the first of 139 times during the show’s seven-year run from 1985 to 1992, MacGyver saves the day.

This first episode is nearly perfect. It neatly telegraphs MacGyver’s soul: A laid-back fellow oozing can-do heartland ingenuity, MacGyver is handsome but dorky, charming but self-effacing, a friend to orphans and children with disabilities, tolerant of people from foreign lands, and though he has every opportunity for indiscretion, he’s always a gentleman around women. MacGyver, played by the affable Richard Dean Anderson, works as a secret agent for a vaguely defined defense contractor whose intentions are always of the best sort. His gigs are of the usual action-hero variety — find stolen missiles, escape assassins, rescue civilians, humiliate dictators. But his near chastity, along with his staunch opposition to guns and capacity to solve every problem through the judicious application of chemistry and physics, sets him apart from other action stars. MacGyver is the thinking man’s hero.

Though, actually, when you go back to watch his adventures two decades after they first aired, you discover Mac’s target audience probably consisted mainly of boys, not men. I started watching the 139-episode DVD boxed set a few weeks ago, shortly after gadget blogs gleefully reported that Lee David Zlotoff, the series’ creator, said he was thinking of making a “MacGyver” movie. This jogged in me memories of boyhood, especially of how, after watching each MacGyver trick, I’d feel a bit invincible: I was small, but I was clever. Like MacGyver, I could take them.

But to adult eyes “MacGyver” is often too goofy by half. It’s not just that his tricks are improbable. At times — like when he interprets a deaf friend’s dreams to find clues to an impending missile theft — they seem to violate the show’s premise, that science beats brawn. In these instances, MacGyver doesn’t use science; he uses magic.

Then there are the children he befriends and the liberal orthodoxies he defends — tendencies that bump the show’s preachiness dial. Mac’s always popping up in foreign countries — Afghanistan, Myanmar — and running into kids and peasants who are oppressed by unsmiling overlords. In just about every second episode, he’s teaching kids about the dangers of guns, a position that, we learn in one episode, he came to as a boy, when a friend of his was killed by a gun. The antigun thing is a little specious, though: MacGyver’s got nothing but nothing but love for explosives, painful booby traps, fire extinguishers rigged up as projectiles, and enormous boulders that he sets up to fall on villains. The real reason he doesn’t use guns is obvious — he’d be able to shoot his way out of most traps, and that would be too easy.

I don’t mean to get down on “MacGyver.” There’s something in its flaws worthy of re-viewing, a particular moment in America preserved on TV. MacGyver is meant to exemplify a certain noble strain of American power. He doesn’t take the easy way out, and when in a jam, he uses what he finds around him to ingenious effect. If you strain you see a greater American story here too — that his ingenuity is frequently too good to be true, and leads to pat, uncomplicated endings that call for no greater reflection.

There’s also something striking about “MacGyver’s” moment in TV. Watch this show as a yardstick to measure how far we’ve come. Even the simplest dramas today — I’m looking at you, “CSI” — are complex and multilayered next to “MacGyver,” which underlines and explains everything, gums up all dialogue with exposition and introduces new, throwaway characters in each episode. There’s much hand-holding here: Even in foreign countries, everyone speaks English, every villain is one-dimensionally evil, and every tender moment is helped along by a swelling score.

But that’s why I hope someone makes a “MacGyver” movie. Mac needs a makeover. Lift him up to big-budget action standards — give him a story line that can span a couple of hours; give him a girl to love, but who may also cross him; give him a more complex mission (maybe to find out who’s putting all the salmonella in our salads?); and give the whole package fast, Paul Greengrass-style editing. Also, make sure one of his crazy solutions involves Mentos — people online go crazy for tricks with Mentos. Do all that and we might yet have a lasting American hero.

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Read more of Salon’s Re-Viewed, offering a fresh look at great TV shows available on DVD.

I joined Salon in 2002, and since then I’ve written about, among other things, Smart Cars, robotic vacuum cleaners, muffin toasters, voting machines, architecture and 9/11, Tower Seven, Bill Clinton, Terri Schiavo, Florida’s elections, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” Malcolm Gladwell, Linux, Daniel Levitin, the copyright industries, Lawrence Lessig, The New York Times, Martha Stewart, a mnemonic to remember the Solar System’s planets, Google, garlic, stem cells, Comcast, Apple, Speedo, taxes, Social Security, Antonin Scalia, Barack Obama, the robots’ plan to take over the Earth, Howard Stern, Stringer Bell, Current TV, campaign finance reform, MoveOn, Howard Dean, Nintendo, Total Information Awareness, Java, Alice Waters, “The West Wing,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Washington Post, Judy Miller, and Hurricane Katrina.

I’m pretty sure there’s no other news outlet on the planet which would have given me such latitude, and I thank everyone here at Salon for that. I also want to thank all the readers who’ve read my work, not to mention praised me, hounded me, kept me up late at night swearing at the screen. Don’t ever change.

– Farhad Manjoo

It was thrilling not only for the splendor of the place — even their commodes are computerized — and the welcoming attitude of my hosts at the Authors@ program (the company buys your books and hands them out to employees for free), but also because Googlers seemed to intuitively grasp my argument and posed many penetrating questions.

Google records these things and posts them up on YouTube, so if you’re looking for something to watch while eating a sandwich at your desk, have at it:

Another thing on the book: I’ll be reading and signing at Book Passage in the San Francisco Ferry Building next week — 6 p.m. on Thursday, July 17.

If you’d like to talk about facts, rumors, conspiracy theories, and spin in the digital age, do stop by.

They were all fans of the first model, and they’re pretty happy about the new model’s new features. The reviewers say the phone’s 3G network access leads to a much zippier Internet experience, that its audio quality has been dramatically improved, and that it cozies up to Microsoft’s corporate e-mail system.

But there are some drawbacks, too: Mossberg finds the battery life lacking, and Pogue says that that the phone’s GPS antenna is too puny to be of much use.

Here’s Mossberg on the battery life:

More important, in daily use, I found the battery indicator on the new 3G model slipping below 20 percent by early afternoon or midafternoon on some days, and it entirely ran out of juice on one day. I overcame this problem by learning to use Wi-Fi instead of 3G whenever possible, turning down the screen brightness and even turning off 3G altogether, which the phone permits.

The iPhone 3G’s battery life is comparable to, or better than, that of some other 3G competitors. But they have replaceable batteries. The iPhone doesn’t.

And Pogue on GPS:

Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do with the G.P.S. According to Apple, the iPhone’s G.P.S. antenna is much too small to emulate the turn-by-turn navigation of a G.P.S. unit for a vehicle, for example.

Instead, all it can do at this point is track your position as you drive along, representing you as a blue dot sliding along the roads of the map. Even then, the metal of a car or the buildings of Manhattan are often enough to block the iPhone’s view of the sky, leaving it just as confused as you are.

None of the reviewers were provided with applications that third-party developers are creating for the iPhone (these will go on sale at Apple’s online App Store). Mossberg, though, writes that he tried out some of these apps on an older phone, and was pleased with the results:

I tested a game that used the phone’s motion sensors to control the action, and I tested several programs from America Online (TWX), including AOL Instant Messenger; AOL Radio, which streams music from the Internet; and AOL’s Truveo video search engine. All worked very well.

These apps will also work on old iPhones as well as on the iPod Touch.

The iPhone 3G goes on sale Friday at 8 a.m. But some enterprising folks have gotten a hold of them already — check out the Boy Genius Report blog’s unboxing photos.

I talked about how to get an iPhone in my video for Current TV this week:

It wasn’t hard work. Dolan popped into Potomac Video one afternoon and asked if he could look at Bork’s movie file. “There sure are a lot of them,” the assistant manager replied. “Is it OK if I make a Xerox copy?”

That was OK with Dolan; weeks later, he published Bork’s rental history in the D.C. alt-weekly the Washington City Paper.

Bork’s taste in movies was itself unremarkable (“First off, despite what all you pervs were hoping, there’s not an X in the bunch, and hardly an R,” Dolan wrote). But the publication sparked outrage from groups on the right and the left — including the ACLU and People for the American Way, which had vehemently opposed Bork’s nomination.

In 1988, Congress, spurred by the fear that the press might now easily unearth all politicians’ movie habits, passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, which remains one of the strongest privacy laws in the nation. The law prohibits stores from disclosing video histories unless ordered to do so by a court — and even then, customers must be given “the opportunity to appear and contest the claim” of any party seeking to learn what you watched.

I tell you all this as a historical wind-up to yesterday’s shocking news: In the ongoing copyright battle between Viacom and Google, a judge ordered Google’s subsidiary YouTube to hand over an enormous trove of data identifying who watched what and when on the video-sharing site.

Viacom’s lawyers argued that they needed this data to prove that “infringing” videos — e.g., clips of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” — were more popular than non-infringing user-generated videos. Presumably, if it proves this, Viacom might prevail in its argument that YouTube’s bread-and-butter was illegal videos, and thus owes some of its success — and billions of dollars — to media companies.

The database in question is astonishingly broad: Viacom asked for 12 terabytes of logs (approximately 12,000 GB) that detail each instance in which someone pressed Play on a YouTube video, plus the YouTube username of the viewer who watched it, the date and time at which the user pressed Play, and the IP address of the viewer’s computer. The database covers videos seen both on YouTube as well as those embedded on other pages: If you’ve never visited YouTube but have clicked on a YouTube video from your daily newspaper’s Web site, you’re in the database.

Google objected to Viacom’s request on the grounds that producing the database would be expensive, time-consuming, and would invade YouTube users’ privacy. The judge — Louis Stanton of the Southern District of New York — Judge Stanton dismissed all Google’s arguments. The company’s “privacy concerns are speculative,” he wrote. (PDF here.)

Such pat reasoning should give you a general sense of the depth of bone-headedness in Stanton’s ruling. As Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, the Robert Bork-inspired Video Privacy Protection Act applies not just to video cassettes but to “audio visual material” in general. Clearly it should apply here, and clearly, millions of YouTube users ought to have been given a chance to fight this invasion of our privacy.

But the real villain here isn’t Judge Stanton — it’s Viacom. I’ve previously raked the company over the coals for suing, rather than enjoying the fruits of, YouTube’s success (for instance last year, when it sacrificed potentially millions in ad dollars by pulling down the popular MTV clip of Britney Spears’ poor performance at the Video Music Awards).

But now Viacom’s sinking lower: Not content to fight just Google, the company looks to be manning the deck against us all. Sure, Judge Stanton might call this “speculative,” but think on it a bit: If Viacom’s willing to take on Google, what qualms will it have in suing you or me, recording industry-style, now that it knows what we did on YouTube? (Update: Viacom says it can’t use this data to sue you.)

All’s not lost. Google might manage to reverse this decision on appeal, and Viacom, gauging the outrage, could decide to withdraw or limit its request.

But our real hope here is legislative or regulatory action. Indeed, optimistic sorts might see a silver lining here.

As privacy scholar Jeffrey Rosen has written, “The politics of privacy tends to be largely reactive, fired by heartstring-tugging anecdotes that capture the public imagination.” Just as the airing of Robert Bork’s video history was the kick-start Congress needed to fix a clear privacy hole born out of then-new technology, this ruling might backfire on copyright holders, pushing lawmakers, finally, to curb the privacy-invading reach of copyright fights.

What we watch on YouTube is every bit as personal as what one rents from a store like Potomac Video. Indeed, it might be more private, and more salacious — imagine the fun you’d have if you were looking for unsavory data about a future Supreme Court nominee in 12 terabytes of YouTube logs!

In his floor speech in favor of the Video Privacy Protection Act, Vermont Sen. Pat Leahy argued that new database technologies capable of tracking private behavior called for new privacy regulations. That was two decades ago — and it remains true, still.

——

Update: A representative for Viacom e-mailed me to say that I’m overreacting. “We have no ability (and absolutely no desire) to use this data to sue end-users,” he argued, pointing out that all discovery documents in the case are bound by this confidentiality agreement.

Under this agreement, no one at Viacom will get to see these YouTube logs — only Viacom’s outside lawyers and experts, as well as court personnel, will have access to the data. The agreement also restricts the data to this case alone, which would seem to prevent the company from using the logs to sue users individually.

Michael Fricklas, Viacom’s counsel, told the New York Times, “I can unequivocally state that we will not use any of this information to enforce rights against end users.” He added that the company is looking into ways to “anonymize” the logs “to enhance the security of information that will be produced.”