Italy tries to outlaw anonymity on the Internet

The latest bill introduced by Representative Gabriella Carlucci would ban uploading any type of content on the Internet anonymously (text, video, sound, etc.) and enabling such use.

More info in Quintarelli’s blog (sorry, for now in Italian only).

Italian law turns increasingly illiberal. For bloggers too

The Italian Senate has passed a law-and-order bill that, pandering to fears about immigration-related crime, would severely restrict human and civil rights for immigrants, for the homeless, and possibly for Internet users. (The bill, sponsored by the Northern League,  now goes to the House).

If the bill becomes law in its current form:

• Doctors will be allowed to breach professional secrecy and may report to the authorities any foreigners who seek treatment and do not appear to be legally in the country. Both doctor’s groups and the Catholic church have spoken out against the measure.
• Vigilante groups will be allowed to start street patrols to monitor and report “events that can cause harm to public security, or situations of environmental distress”.
• Foreigners who marry an Italian citizen will have to wait two years before obtaining Italian citizenship.
• Homeless people will have to be registered as such in a database to be maintained by the Interior Ministry.

Finally, in a move that caused much outcry in the Internet community, the Christian Democrats’ UDC centrist party introduced an amendment that shows how little our politicians understand the Internet – not merely how online social dynamics work, but even what is technically feasible and what isn’t. If the bill becomes law, any time someone is suspected of instigating criminal behavior via the Internet, the Interior Ministry may request ISPs to put in place “filtering tools” so that the offending content is blocked from public view; ISPs who do not comply within 24 hours would be fined by €50-250,000. The amendment has apparently been introduced in response to the senseless noise created by some Facebook groups celebrating rapists and the Mafia. Yet, internet experts point out that there is no way to block a single offending piece of content: Italy’s government would then require ISPs to block entire domains. Star blogger Beppe Grillo has called for civil disobedience.

Brandeis and the Rose Art Museum: should a university not sell its collection?

The art world is loudly complaining about the decision of the trustees of Brandeis University to face the financial crisis by, among other measures, selling the modern and contemporary art collection housed in the university’s Rose Art Museum. Reactions so far call the decision “astonishing”, “a shame”, “unprincipled”, “a complete wrong message to donors“, and “bad economics” (because art, like other asset classes, is likely to fetch less now than it would have in the good times). The Association of Art Museum Directors said it is “shocked and dismayed” by plans to close the Rose.

It doesn’t end here. The Massachussetts Attorney General is to conduct a detailed review of the decision. A spokeswoman for the Attorney General’s office said: “They are saying that civilization doesn’t matter in the name of some kind of bottom line.”

Readers, you know how much I love modern and contemporary art. You know how passionate I am about it. Yet, I have to wonder: have all these people been living with their heads under the sand for the last year or so? I told you months ago that there was going to be less money for art. The writing was on the wall. It is not that civilization doesn’t matter – it matters enourmously, indeed. But in a crisis, you do what you gotta do.

So, let me come out and say it. I think the Brandeis trustees made the right decision. It is indeed a pity that the Rose has become a luxury that the university can no longer afford to keep, but if the alternatives are worse (freezing faculty hiring, cutting back on financial aid for students), then it is the right decision. If Stanford President John Hennessy wrote me another letter, saying this time that the trustees have decided to sell off the university’s art holdings, I would be saddened, but I would not complain. Let alone call the decision “unprincipled”.

The Attorney General’s spokeswoman also said: “It’s essential that students have access to real works of art [...] By subtracting the works of art from a college environment, you are betraying an enormous trust.” With all due respect, this is ridiculous. College fees are high, but do not include the permanent guarantee that you will have an art museum in your backyard, for your convenience. (Annual visitor numbers at the Rose were 13,000-15,000: a tiny number. The archeological digs at Venosa, near Potenza in Southern Italy, pull in more than that, according to 2007 data from the Italian Culture Ministry). For centuries, art students have been used to traveling, to go and study art where the art is. That’s how one becomes an artist (or a curator, or a critic, or whatever). Do we really want a generation of couch potato art students?

Collections are built and dispersed; at the end of February, the collection built up by Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé will be auctioned off by Christie’s, in what is likely to be the largest sale of a private collection ever. Sure, those pieces were bought and not donated. But how many donor’s grants to the Rose stipulated that the works could never be sold under any circumstances, including a global financial crisis that shrinks the university endowment at unprecedented speeds? and what does “never” mean? until the donor’s last descendant has died? until the artist’s work has gone out of fashion – and lost value? until the end of the universe? And if you were a donor, would you make such a draconian stipulation? If you were a museum, would you accept it?

Sure, the university could have sought students’ opinions before the trustees had to decide. Yet the students’ protest sounds disingenuous, as they know perfectly well that they would have protested a lot more if the university had decided to save the Rose but cut back on, say, student dorms and have students sleep in tents out there in the snow. The decision-making process could, and probably should, have been more participative. But at the end of the day, students are there to study, and administrators are there to administer: somebody has to make decisions. And Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz and the trustees, in this case, made the right one.

The tragedy of war rapes in Sudan: what can be done?

Sometimes your heart breaks. Your heart breaks from the pain and suffering in the world around you that seems close to ineradicable.

Consider this. The chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague recommended last July that a warrant be issued for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. He would be accused of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur. Torching and looting of towns and villages continue; five million Darfuris are either living in refugee camps or fully dependent on aid. Eleven humanitarian workers have been killed this year and 179 kidnapped (source: The Economist).

And this is where your heart breaks:

Already, NGOs on the ground in Darfur are suffering from a government backlash prompted by the ICC charges against Mr Bashir. Harassment by security officials has got much worse. The goons have spent days in NGO offices haranguing staff to hand over sensitive documents and computer files which, they suspect, could have been used as evidence against Mr Bashir. In particular, officials have been targeting projects that help women recover from sexual violence. The massive use of rape as a weapon in the army’s counter-insurgency war is a critical part of the ICC case. If a warrant is issued, the harassment will surely worsen to the point where many counselling projects will be shut down, as at least one has been already.

Rape is an act of war, and the Court seeks justice; but the act of seeking justice may leave rape victims even more helpless than they are now.

What can be done? What in the world can be done?

Italy and the 2008 Gender Gap Report: real or apparent progress?

Last year I commented on Italy’s deservedly low position in the rankings of relative gender equality produced by the World Economic Forum. This year, the 2008 Gender Gap Report tells us that we are no longer in position number 84: we have jumped up to number 67. We are still quite far from other European and mostly Catholic countries such as Poland (49), Spain (17), France (15) and Ireland (8).

This year’s data on Italy, states the report,

show very significant improvement in the percentage of women among legislators, senior officials and managers, members of parliament and in ministerial level positions.

One would have to look beyond the raw numbers to get a sense of the real impact of those ministerial level positions, I would guess; but we’ll leave that to the next refinement of the ranking metodology.

It is also true that we have more businesswomen in position of power this year; yet, we have no way to know where Marina Berlusconi (who recently joined the board of Mediobanca) and Emma Marcegaglia (who became head of Confindustria, and is the only Italian in the Wall Street Journal’s “50 Women to Watch“) would be today if it weren’t for their fathers’ success.

And hopefully those women legislators and members of parliament will think about crafting and passing some of those laws that the rest of us need before we can feel that Italy offers true equality of opportunity, regardless of gender.

Web mood: search technology, hostile judges, and new highs for celebrity auctions

This past week has been full of interesting events on the Web: here’s a quick roundup.

• The search technology battleground saw Microsoft add some new weaponry to its arsenal with the acquisition of semantic search engine pioneer Powerset. In light of the end of the Microsoft-Yahoo saga, this is actually a smart move. Yahoo would have brought to the Seattle troops a chunky slice of market access and a user base, but a search technology that, years after the integration of Overture, spent a long time chasing Google’s (“Panama”, anyone?) and is now admittedly doomed not to catch up.
  Powerset, on the contrary, is a different animal. The chances that Powerset’s approach will revolutionize search are small (and the big G is obviously not standing still), but the upside can be huge.
  Is the price (rumored to be about $100m) too small for Powerset to be the next big thing? I don’t think so. Not if, as GigaOM reports, a Powerset search “requires 100 times more processing than simple keyword searching and indexing”, according to Search Architect and Engineering Director Chad Walters. This means you need to sink a huge amount of money into data centers (or, I guess, rent a ton of capacity from Amazon Web Services, which ultimately can’t cost you less if you play for real). Get a bunch of VCs to fund your second round, and you will always have a Damocles’ sword pointed at your neck. Get Microsoft to open its wallet, be clear on what you’re going to deliver and when, and you actually have a chance of making it.
  Out of hesitantly nationalistic pride, let me add that Lorenzo Thione, one of the Powerset founders and the company’s computational linguistics guru, is a native of Milan and studied at the Politecnico di Milano before transferring to the University of Texas at Austin.
• Internet-hostile judges picked on both eBay and Google. A lower court in Paris upheld LVMH’s arguments against eBay and fined eBay to the tune of €40m not just for not policing counterfeits to the satisfaction of the luxury goods house, but also for allowing resale of perfectly authentic items – a French example of favoring restrictive sales practices, and a perfect display of those anti-competitive attitudes that make Anglo-Saxons look at us on the Continent as if we were a bunch of bozos. What LVMH seems to be trying to do is as if Mercedes told you: once you’ve driven your Mercedes for a while, you can’t sell it. You can’t return it to the dealer, you can’t trade it in for a new car, you can’t list it on your local bulletin board, and most of all you can’t put it for sale on the Internet, the evil Internet. You have to keep driving the car until it disintegrates, I guess. eBay has released a statement vowing to fight for freedom to trade on the Internet, and is appealing the decision. Myself, I am reluctantly quitting my favorite perfume ever, a 1925 vintage fragrance: Shalimar by Guerlain. Please join me in boycotting LVMH fragrances with the Christian Dior, Givenchy, Kenzo and Guerlain brands until the court’s ruling is reversed.
  In Google news, the spectacular cluelessness of the ruling obtained by Viacom from the federal court for the Southern District of New York, ordering Google to hand over log data about every YouTube video ever watched by every user, has already been vastly commented upon, not least by the EFF. In fact, some suggest Google should hand over the data in paper form – it should be about as much paper as the entire Library of Congress book collection, therefore more than enough for the Viacom legal department to have fun with for several lifetimes.
• Finally, some fun news. Most Western stock markets are down between 15 and 20 per cent since the start of the year, with China and India doing worse. Real estate is a mess, the banking sector is still looking shaky, and the word “stagflation” is hitting the headlines again. You’d think that the price of a charity lunch with Warren Buffett at the Smith and Wollensky steakhouse in New York would not reach the highs of previous years? Well, wrong. On the contrary, it has shot up even more than oil and steel. After fetching $620,000 in 2006 and $650,000 in 2007, all benefiting San Francisco charity Glide Foundation, the annual eBay auction offering lunch for up to 8 people with Mr. Buffett ended at $2.1 million.  The winner, Mr. Zhao Danyang, is a Hong Kong-based investment fund manager. Mr. Buffett is reportedly quite surprised.
  In Italy, on a much smaller scale, an eBay auction for a San Siro stadium seat next to Inter chairman Massimo Moratti for the forthcoming 2008-09 season Inter-Milan derby ended at Eur 5,050. Proceeds will benefit the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation of Europe and support the publishing and distribution of “Speak Truth to Power”, an educational project about human rights. The winner, a young Kuwaiti fan of the Italian club, has suffered though his favorite club’s years and years as an underdog, and must now be quite happy that Inter has grabbed back its opportunity to shine!

Courts overloaded? Just freeze a bunch of criminal trials…

.. including, of course, one involving the Prime Minister (read Reuters report here): after all, it’s not a mafia trial, or one for crimes involving violence, workplace accidents or crimes carrying penalties of more than 10 years. It’s just a corruption trial.

It’s too bad that, instead of processing cases faster to get rid of the backlog in the Italian courts (and instead of resplicating the few success stories we have: read about Mario Barbuto in Turin in Abravanel’s Meritocrazia), the best solution our government seems to be able to find is to just put everything on the back burner, hoping that the statute of limitations will take care of things. Is this justice? If you’re an ordinary citizen and a victim of crime, how are you supposed to feel about this?

Let them wed

America is an interesting place. California gets ready for same-sex marriages and will be the first US state to grant licenses to couples from any state; yet, in November Californians will vote on whether to amend the State constitution in order to define marriage as the legal union between a man and a woman. Governor Schwarzenegger, after vetoing twice legislation that would have legalized gay marriage, is now saying that, despite his personal views, he does not oppose the State Supreme Court ruling allowing it, and appears to view the wave of coming weddings as a much-needed shot in the arm for California’s economy.

California joins Massachussetts, the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Spain and South Africa in the list of places where it is legal for same-sex couples to get married. None of these places had same-sex marriages as little as twelve years ago, when The Economist published its “Let Them Wed” cover story, arguing for marriage rights on grounds of the benefits to society.

(Image courtesy of Vermont Teddy Bear).