Stephen Lawson reports here on BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker’s comments about net neutrality regulation at the eComm conference yesterday. Klinker used the word “regulation” to mean a couple different things in his remarks, but nothing he said justifies the headline PC World gave the story.
Here’s Lawson reporting Klinker’s comments:
“There is no ambiguity. There is not going to be, at least in the near term, a strong regulator for broadband,” Klinker told the eComm conference in Burlingame, California.
Instead, it is the public that will pass judgment on how service and application providers behave, Klinker said. “The public is our regulator.”
“The public is our regulator.” But
PC World ran the story under this headline:
“Broadband Has No Regulator, BitTorrent CEO Says.”
It will not be a government regulator; it will be the public. Perhaps Klinker regards the public as a weak regulator, but
PC World takes the public to be no regulator at all. Stupendous.
Even the strongest skeptic of markets believes that the public has some influence on businesses’ decisions and actions. With inaccurate headlines like this,
PC World could stand to learn what market regulation is like when readers stop reading and advertisers stop advertising.
It’s worth noting that Klinker almost certainly helped incite and organize public reaction to the Comcast Kerfuffle, enjoying a PR coup that is still paying his company dividends. Klinker knows a little bit about how markets regulate.
http://www.youtube.com/v/vF74D3kbbTI&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0
I really appreciate the venture capitalists (VCs) in Silicon Valley subsidizing my soapbox at Twitter. Seriously, it is an absolutely awesome platform for getting a message out to the masses. But at some point I worry that the gravy train will come to an end and that users will have to start picking up part of the tab. After all, will those VCs continue to subsidize Twitter if it never turns a profit? According to the Wikipedia entry about Twitter:
In total, Twitter has raised over US$57 million from venture capitalists. The exact amounts of funding have not been publicly released. Twitter’s first round of funding was for an undisclosed amount that is rumored to have been between $1 million and $5 million. Its B round of funding in 2008 was for $22 million and its C round of funding in 2009 was for $35 million from Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital along with an undisclosed amount from other investors including Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital. Twitter is backed by Union Square Ventures, Digital Garage, Spark Capital, and Bezos Expeditions.
Again, thank you VCs! But, like them, I do wonder when and how Twitter will bring in some cash. Is there a “freemium” model that could work? Perhaps. “Pro” or corporate accounts have been rumored to be in the works. Getting someone else to pick up the tab that way might bring in enough cash for Twitter to allow the free ride to continue for the rest of us. But what about advertising? It’s been the “mother’s milk” of most online media and platforms for some time now, and Twitter seems perfectly suited to insert a few banner ads or contextual ads here and there. It could be happening sooner than you think. Austin Modine of The Register notes in a new piece, “Twitter ‘Leaves Door Open’ for Targeted Ads,” that: Continue reading →
As Berin and I have noted here before (here and here), there seems to be no shortage of competition and innovation in the mobile operating system (OS) space. We’ve got:
- Apple’s iPhone platform,
- Microsoft’s Windows Mobile,
- Symbian,
- Google’s Android,
- BlackBerry,
- Palm OS (+ Palm’s new WebOS),
- the LiMo platform, and
- OpenMoko.
I am missing any? I don’t think so. Even if I have, this is really an astonishing degree of platform competition for a network-based industry. Network industries are typically characterized by platform consolidation over time as both application developers and consumers flock to just a couple of standards — and sometimes just one — while others gradually fade away. But that has not yet been the case for mobile operating systems. I just can’t see it lasting, however. As I argued in my essay on “Too Much Platform Competition?,” I would think that many application providers would be clamoring for consolidation to make it easier to develop and roll out new services. Some are, and yet we still have more than a half-dozen mobile OS platforms on the market.
Regardless, the currently level of platform competition also seems to run counter to the thesis set forth by Jonathan Zittrain and others who fear the impending decline or death of digital “generativity.” That is, technologies or networks that invite or allow tinkering and all sorts of creative uses are supposedly “dying” or on the decline because companies are trying to exert more control over proprietary or closed systems.
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.