According to eWeek, “Google’s begun testing [its proposed Mountain View, CA, muni wi-fi] network and, in so doing, has discovered it might need to add more Wi-Fi transmitters than originally thought to deliver the coverage and service quality it promised[.]” This follows “snags” in the muni wi-fi efforts in St. Cloud, FL. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: communications over a “commons” requires government-enforced low-power restrictions like those imposed on wi-fi. Low power works great when you’re in a small area you control: your home, a coffee shop, etc. Wi-fi, and unlicensed/commons communications generally, are not suited for municipality-wide reach (unless you define the municipality as city hall and the town square).
Intel has asked the judge to throw out AMD’s antitrust case against it. I find it hard to understand how a case like this is supposed to benefit anyone but antitrust lawyers. After all, the point of the law is to alter incentives so that people won’t do bad things. Yet that doesn’t seem to have happened in recent high-tech antitrust cases. Microsoft, for example, has adopted the strategy of ignoring the antitrust process entirely, and it’s worked pretty well for them. By the time all the appeals in its browser-tying case had been exhausted, the IE-Netscape battle was ancient history, and the courts had no appetite for aggressive punitive actions. Sure, it costs Microsoft some money in fines and legal fees, but that’s far preferable to neutering themselves by refusing to enter any new market where they might be branded monopolists. Likewise, the EU has levied some big fines against Microsoft, but they haven’t figured out any way to reverse Microsoft’s alllegedly anti-competitive behavior. Microsoft would likely be in much worse shape had they stayed out of the media player market out of fear of anti-trust prosecution.
This AMD-Intel dispute seems to have similar dynamics. The lawsuit concerns conduct by Intel that occurred in the first half of this decade, yet the trial won’t start until 2008 and likely won’t be resolved until a year or two later. Given how murky the law is concerning what is and isn’t legitimate conduct, the logical thing for Intel to do is to ignore the antitrust process completely. They should focus on competing in the marketplace and let the legal department do damage control after the fact.
Which calls into question what the point is in the first place. If companies are going to do what they would have done anyway, what are we getting for those millions of dollars in legal fees?
When it comes to the issue of Net neutrality–or what my PFF colleagues more appropriately call “Net neutering“–it seems like a lot of people are forgetting the old lesson that there is no such thing as a free lunch in this world. The latest example of this is summarized in this Reuter’s article discussing the possibility of the financial sector potentially gearing up to jump into the “Capitol Hill fight over the future of the Internet [to] stop an effort it says could add billions in costs just to maintain current offerings.”
The article mentions that Washington lawyer Philip Corwin, a partner at the law firm Butera & Andrews, has been circulating a memo to financial services industry officials warning that “Net neutrality is an issue that (financial services) firms ignore at their peril” because it would supposedly give Internet service providers a green light to impose big new fees on financial companies. Corwin says “all will suffer” and that today’s ISPs will become “gatekeepers” and an “electronic post office.” To counter this supposed parade of horribles, the Corwin memo counsels that the financial services sector should immediately push legislation in the House and Senate committees they regularly deal with that would assure the continuation of flat high-speed Internet pricing for online financial services.
What we’re talking about here, of course, is price controls for the Internet. Corwin’s memo and recent editorial in The American Banker both confirm what I’ve long suspected: that the entire Net neutering debate is really a debate about pricing freedom. And now, the financial services industry–one of the pillars of the American capitalist system–is apparently thinking about taking this freedom away from another corporate sector to advantage itself.
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Tim Berners-Lee has a good article on the importance of network neutrality. He does a good job of explaining why it’s an important principle, and how it was crucial to his creation of the World Wide Web. But his conclusion is frustrating:
To actually design legislation which allows creative interconnections between different service providers, but ensures neutrality of the Net as a whole may be a difficult task. It is a very important one. The US should do it now, and, if it turns out to be the only way, be as draconian as to require financial isolation between IP providers and businesses in other layers.
Policy is about trade-offs. To endorse a legislative end without giving serious thought to the means is a recipe for disaster. The details of the legislative approach matter a lot: it’s likely that any attempt to regulate network neutrality will have some unintended consequences, and so we need to look at a specific piece of legislation and figure out what those unintended consequences might be. Yet a lot of people supporting the concept don’t seem very interested in any of those messy details. They figure that once we’ve convinced people that network neutrality is a good thing, we can let the telecom nerds work out how to enact that moral conviction into law. If they get their way, I bet a lot of them will be surprised to discover that the real-world results of their crusade aren’t anything like what they had envisioned.
I’m pleased to see that my erstwhile employer, the Cato Institute, has a new blog. Not a lot of tech coverage so far, but for those of you who are interested in the libertarian take on other issues, there’s probably no better place to turn.
It seems that Steve Jobs has once again won his battle with the music industry:
Record labels have for months been calling on Apple Computer (nasdaq: AAPL – news – people ) Chief Executive Steve Jobs to reform the pricing of songs on his online music store iTunes. In particular, they want the billionaire to jack up the price of newer hits from the regular flat rate of 99 cents. But alas, it all seems to have been to no avail. On Tuesday, we learned that after finally renewing its contract with Warner Music Group, EMI, Bertelsmann and Sony joint venture Sony BMG, and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, Apple Computer has had the final say on pricing–and it’s staying at 99 cents.
I wonder if it’s beginning to dawn on the music industry that they created a monster when they insisted that Apple develop a DRM scheme. As more and more music fans become locked into Apple’s proprietary platform, Steve Jobs will be able to dictate terms to the labels, and may be able to cut them out of the loop entirely by dealing with artists directly.
Below is my summary of last week’s Microsoft hearing at the CFI in Luxembourg. You can read the entire column here. The hearing has major implications for American businesses that depend on intellectual property protections.
[…]
The European Court of First Instance (CFI) buzzed with energy this week as Microsoft and the European Commission squared off over a damaging 2004 ruling that, along with a fine of 497 million euros (US$613 million), creates a new Microsoft product and exposes the company’s valuable intellectual property. The circus-like hearing holds wide-ranging implications for American businesses.
On the first day, news crews and a gaggle of reporters showed up to watch the attorneys, some in horsehair wigs, discuss whether or not Microsoft abused its market power in the media-player market. Although Microsoft demonstrated that other media players exist and many consumers are using them, the EC continued to insist that Microsoft needed to be reined in.
[…]
Anyone who could describe America’s drug laws as “lax and unenforced,” in a nation where hundreds of thousands of people are arrested every year for minor drug offenses, either doesn’t know what he’s talking about or isn’t a libertarian. And if the drug war is like copyright, doesn’t that mean the libertarian position on copyright is to repeal it?
An excerpt from David’s excellent paper on property rights. He’s got to win the award for most awesome former mailman:
According to Martin Bailey (this volume), the pattern observed by Rose and Ellickson also was common among aboriginal tribes. That is, tribes that practiced agriculture treated the land as private during the growing season, and often treated it as a commons after the crops were in. Hunter-gatherer societies did not practice agriculture, but they too tended to leave the land in the commons during the summer when game was plentiful. It was during the winter, when food was most scarce, that they privatized. The rule among hunter-gatherers is that where group hunting’s advantages are considerable, that factor dominates (Bailey, this volume). But in the winter, small game is relatively more abundant, less migratory, and evenly spread. There was no “feast or famine” pattern of the sort one expects to see with big-game hunting. Rather, families tended to gather enough during the course of the day to get themselves through the day, day after day, with little to spare.
Even though this pattern corroborates my own general thesis, I confess to being a bit surprised. I might have predicted that it would be during the harshest part of the year that families would band together and throw everything into the common pot in order to pull through. Not so. It was when the land was nearest its carrying capacity that they recognized the imperative to privatize.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.