Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Yesterday, the Idaho Senate passed Joint Memorial 3, earlier approved unanimously by the House, to refuse implementation of the REAL ID Act. More info here.
I testified on the bill in the Idaho House’s Transportation and Defense Committee, and participated in a panel discussion at the Idaho statehouse, where some common sense was heard.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been slowly whittling down the tall stack of books I’ve been meaning to read. A lot of them are ponderous tech policy tomes that have been a chore to get through (I still haven’t finished this one), so I was happy to get to Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters. It was given to me for Christmas over a year ago, and I’ve been looking forward to reading it ever since, but it just now bubbled up to the top of the list.
I devoured it in two sittings over the course of about 3 days, and I’m not a particularly fast reader, so that’s saying something. It’s a delightful mix of philosophy, sociology, and hard core geekery. He explains why junior high sucks, why Lisp is the world’s best programming language, why web-based software is going to take over the software world, why geeks tend to be libertarians, how Bayesian spam filters work, why heresies are essential to a free society, and how to make great things.
A judge has dismissed a lawsuit involving a bogus software patent I wrote up last year:
Judge Douglas Woodlock of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in Boston denied a complaint by Skyline Software Systems that the Google Earth mapping software of Google’s Keyhole infringed Skyline patents.
The judge also denied motions from both parties on whether the patents in question were valid, but left the possibility for either party to reassert these issues if they do so before April 20. He canceled a planned trial date set for June.
In his ruling, Woodlock held that Google’s system does not attempt to render views of Earth’s terrain, a key claim of the patent held by Skyline, which is based in Chantilly, Va., and offers its own “fly through” three-dimensional software.
Hat tip: Google Copyright Blog, which doesn’t appear to be officially affiliated with Google, but has some good commentary.
Brad Smith, Microsoft general counsel, 2007: “Protection for software patents and other intellectual property is essential to maintaining the incentives that encourage and underwrite technological breakthroughs. In every industry, patents provide the legal foundation for innovation. The ensuing legal disputes may be messy, but protection is no less necessary, even so.”
Bill Gates, Microsoft CEO, 1991: “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today…A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose.”
It sure would be unfortunate if the giants were able to use software patents to squelch start-ups.
The recent TLF podcast touched on the way that states and state AGs are actively trying to regulate social networking and e-commerce sites. My colleague Steve DelBianco recently testified on this issue before the New Jersey General Assembly, and his testimony is a good read. He writes about three rules for state legislators to keep in mind when attempting to regulate e-commerce:
As a firm believer in the benefits of the Internet, I often feel like that little boy who was asked why he was digging through a huge pile of horse manure and responded with a smile, “Well there must be a pony in here somewhere.”
Lawmakers need to understand that e-commerce, instant communication, and global information sharing are worth digging for. To help them do that I offer a simple three-part formula: consumer education, industry responsibility, and law enforcement.
Rule number one – regulate behavior, not technology.
Rule number two – don’t smother the Internet under a patchwork quilt of conflicting state laws.
Rule number three — watch out for special interest legislation.
Read more here.
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Anyone who wants to know how Washington works should look to an article buried in today’s Communications Daily (sorry, it’s by subscription) on a House Small Business Committee hearing. The committee had brought together representatives from various communications industry segments to talk about the “innovation agenda, ” focusing on the growth of broadband.
The good news: “All witnesses opposed an Internet tax and supported extending the moratorium” on federal taxation. Easy enough. But wait a second: many of the same witnesses also supported extending universal service subsidies to broadband, presumably applying universal service fund fees to broadband access bills (right now they only are imposed on telephone bills). Isn’t that a tax? No, said the Shirley Broomfield, representing rural telephone firms, who would benefit from extended subsidies. It depends on how it’s implemented, said Earl Comstock from the competitive carriers, whose customers already pay the “fee.” Only one witness — Richard Cimerman from the cable industry, whose customers would have to pay the tax/fee — said yes.
So much for the united front against taxation.
Everyone believes that government would be better if there was more transparency – though people’s ideas of “better” can range quite widely. As I’ve noted before, the Internet and other new technologies have a lot to do with making government information more available.
Apropos of this phenomenon – and the impending advent of spring – next week turns out to be “Sunshine Week,” which includes a wide variety of open government activities. Among other things, the Sunlight Foundation, sponsor of the Sunlight Network, is having a panel discussion called “Sunshine in the First Branch: How Transparent is Congress?“
Oh sure, this kind of thing is a little kumbaya, but I’ve been known to hum a few bars of that tune and, again, the benefits of transparency are a matter of (near) pan-ideological agreement. Secrecy is also bad. Let the sun shine in.
And, hey all you coders, Sunlight is offering a prize for the best congressional mashup.
Who doesn’t want Ryanair and its cheap flights (passengers often just pay taxes and fees on sale prices) to offer the same fares domestically in the U.S.? Well, based on current law, our government doesn’t. And as I’ve said before on NPR’s Kojo Nnamdi Show, in an article for CEI’s Monthly Planet, and while moderating a panel discussion, the regulation of international air travel must change.
Unfortunately, cabotage rights that prohibit European airlines like Ryanair from operating on American domestic routes are not on the bargaining table. But a bilateral U.S. – EU “open skies” deal that was provisionally agreed to on March 2 should be approved, even if it’s only, as is said in an Economist article, “baby steps.”
The airline industry has much in common with other network industries such as railroads, electrical power, and telecommunications. The airline industry remains heavily regulated despite partial deregulation with the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act, especially with international travel.
Like all network industries, the air travel sector involves both flows and a grid. The flows are the mobile system elements: the airplanes, the trains, the power, the messages, etc. The grid is the infrastructure over which these flows move: the airports and air traffic control system, the tracks and stations, the wires and cables, the electromagnetic spectrum, and so on. Network efficiency depends critically on the close coordination of grid and flow operating and investment decisions.
Consumers would benefit if governments would get out of the way and allow the market to determine international routes, just as U.S. consumers benefited when the 1978 Act allowed the market to determine the number and frequency of domestic routes.
As promised, here is one of the places where I thought Wikinomics didn’t quite get it right. On page 190, they state:
In its current incarnation, mashups present a thorny problem—they provide pretty poor long-term incentives for innovators, and most lack protection for data owners. To illustrate, it’s worth taking a closer look at housingmaps.
Housingmaps has two key ingredients: a Google Map and the rental listings from craigslist. When Paul Rademacher mashed these services together he created something new—something neither Google nor craigslist has thought of, yet it was a clever and useful application. What did Rademacher do to leverage this popularity? He stepped back from it and took a job at Google.
When asked why he did not develop the tool further, and perhaps even create his own business, he offered two very salient points: 1) He did not own the data that was powering the application, and 2) The barriers to re-creating such an application were low, since his web site contained little in the way of unique intellectual property or user interface design, apart from a little bit of network code.
The first is a reasonable concern, but as I’ll argue below the fold, it’s silly to consider the second a problem.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
