This Thursday, March 22, The Heritage Foundation will be hosting Dr. Irwin Jacobs, the founder of QUALCOMM at its DC digs for a discussion entitled “Not Patently Obvious: An Innovator’s Perspective on Patent Reform. I’ve alway found Jacobs life story to be a fascinating one — starting out as an assistant professor of electrical engineering with some ideas on wireless signals, he ended up developing some of the key technologies behind the cell phone revolution, and founding one of America’s most sucessful firms. He is worried about the direction of patent reform in the Congress, however — fearing that proposed reforms will undercut the incentives for innovators in the future.
Please join us for what should be a fascinating discussion at 10 am Thursday. RSVP here.
Very good piece today by Peter Suderman, managing editor at National Review Online, on Timothy Wu and regulation of wireless. His conclusion:
Over the last two decades, wireless phones have morphed from awkward, brick-sized contraptions with laughably poor reception into slim, sleek fashion accessories with impressive feature sets. Meanwhile, wireless service has gone from novelty to convenience to necessity. Society may not always love the cell-phone industry, but consumers have integrated its products into daily life to a remarkable degree. If these trends are any indication, the wireless industry will continue to adapt to the demands of consumers all on its own — somewhat fitfully and frustratingly for sure — but without any need for government meddling, no matter how well intentioned.
Exactly.
Over the past few days there’s been some lively blogosphere speculation going on regarding Google’s position on net neutrality. A few weeks ago, I noted that Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s top policy guy, had argued against an FCC role in net neutrality, saying that neutrality should be thought of as “an attorney general or FTC problem.” Earlier this week, TLF’s Drew Clark, writing on GigaOm.com, made the case that an even more extensive re-think is going on in Mountain View. Clark pointed out that McLaughlin, in addition to distancing Google from the FCC, also opened the door a crack to charges for quality-of-service guarantees, saying “[t]here is a pragmatic view that it is OK as long as it is done in a non-discriminatory way.”
None of this means Google is about to join the free-market camp (though we’d love to have them). It does put a lot of distance, however, between them and their allies. According to Clark, this has caused “a fair bit of angst” within Google and among those allies.
Clark’s piece spurred an almost immediate rebuttal from Tim Karr of Free Press, one of the leading non-profit groups in the pro-regulation camp. Writing in the Huffington Post, Karr denied that Google was going wobbly. His evidence? Well, he asked them, and they denied it. “Google’s position on Net Neutrality has not changed one bit,” he quotes a Google spokesman as saying.
Well, that certainly settles the matter, doesn’t it? I mean, if Google was shifting its position, it would say so, wouldn’t it? One can just see the statement: “We regret any inconvenience but we now realize what we were saying last year was just plain wrong. Lord knows what we were thinking. Never mind.”
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Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. The shows’s panelists this week are Jerry Brito, Tim Lee, Adam Thierer, and Jim Harper. Topics include,
- Viacom sues YouTube alleging contributory copyright infringement
- Google changes its privacy policy to make search records “more anonymous”
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
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I traveled to Florida with a large dose of optimism and returned a jaded man – all in one day. Public policy work can do this to you – particularly when a bill you testify against gets passed unanimously by the committee that heard your testimony.
The occasion: testifying in Tallahassee on a bill that would regulate online dating websites. (HB 531 – The Internet Predator Awareness Act). It would require websites to disclose whether they perform criminal background checks on their members. It would also require disclosures about how to practice safe online dating and not to put too much faith in the results of criminal background checks.
That’s a lot of disclosures and disclaimers, stuff that most consumers will not read and could care less about – especially because a clear criminal background check is no excuse to let down your guard on common sense precautions (in my testimony I warned that this bill could give consumers a false sense of security).
But there’s a larger theme going on here – the nanny state of government is creeping into e-commerce.
What are the benefits of this bill that the market isn’t providing? If security-conscious consumers want to use a service that provides background checks, they can do so already, and can even perform criminal checks on their own.
We don’t need government regulation to mandate which services a website must provide. Governments should protect us from decisions we can’t make, not from decisions we can make.
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A Federal Communications Commission staffer reports that commissioners are considering a 30% cap on the number of households a single cable operator may serve. Multichannel News notes that the cap would primarily affect one company:
Citing Kagan Research, Comcast recently told the FCC that it serves 26.2 million subscribers, or 27% of the country’s 96.8 million pay TV subscribers. Under a 30% cap, Comcast could, in a few years, find itself refusing service to customers seeking to sign up for its fast-growing voice-video-data triple-play bundle. The 30% cap would also effectively block Comcast from buying a cable company with more than 3 million subscribers.
If cable operators were the only source of video programming, it might make sense to have a rule like this. But, as everyone knows, they aren’t. There are the broadcasters, the Direct Broadcast Satellite providers and now the big telephone companies and the Internet. It’s hard to imagine any one company dominates this media galaxy. But if so, that’s why we have the Antitrust Division.
Intuitively, some people feel if we have more cable TV owners and CEOs, it stands to reason we’ll get more diverse views and programming. In reality, most investors and managers are motivated not by individual political, cultural or artistic agendas, but on serving customers, i.e., providing whatever sells. Others recall that, for whatever reason, back when we had heavy-handed regulation television seemed much more “tasteful” than it does today. But that’s only because society’s values used to be different. It’s impossible to legislate taste and morality.
A 30% cable cap will allow the FCC to extort anything it wants from Comcast, the only cable company with a market share approaching 30%. Because, eventually, Comcast will need to seek a waiver. We don’t know who will be running the FCC when that happens, nor what their political, cultural or artistic agenda may be.
There’s Viacom vs. Gootube in the courts of law.
And here are some of the relevant discussions in Washington, D.C.:
At the Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus’ State of the Net Conference 2007, there was a panel discussion entitled, “User-Generated Content – Can Copyright Tolerate Mixing & Mashing?” Rob Pegoraro of The Washington Post moderated. Panelists were Jim DeLong of the Progress & Freedom Foundation, Pam Samuelson of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology and Steven Starr of Revver.com. Video here. (See if you have a better experience with it than I did.)
And tomorrow, PFF is having an event on Capitol Hill titled “What Goes Up Must Come Down: Copyright and Process in the Age of User-Posted Content.”
This is the age of user-generated content. Let’s hear what you think of these events in the comments.
We’ll be holding the third installment of our wildly successful Alcohol Liberation Front events on Monday, March 19. We’ll be meeting from 5:30-7 PM at Science Club. If you’d like to join us, please drop me an email so we know to look for you.
If you’ve got a Mac with an iSight camera, (like the one that came with my shiny new MacBook) what you’re looking at on the right there is your own face, rendered by Apple’s graphics system to look “painted.” I think that’s awfully damn cool.
Update: I got some reports that this was screwing up PC users, so I’ve moved it below the fold…
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A couple of Google lawyers have announced on the Google ‘blog that the company will be making the data from their server logs “much more anonymous, so that it can no longer be identified with individual users, after 18-24 months.” That’s a big, important change, as Google’s privacy policy has never before pledged to destroy or anonymize data about all of our searches.
Now, there are some interesting details – details that are highlighted by the text I quoted above. “Anonymous” is correctly regarded as an absolute condition. Like pregnancy, anonymity is either there or it’s not. Modifying the word with a relative adjective like “more” is a curious use of language.
Google has a challenge, if they’re going to anonymize data and not destroy it, to make sure that a person’s identity and behavior cannot be reconstructed from it. As AOL’s fiasco with releasing “anonymized” search data showed, clipping off the obvious identifiers won’t do it. As data mining capabilities advance, anonymizing techniques will have to keep ahead of that.
There are interesting things that can be done to synthesize data, making it statistically relevant while factually incoherent. Hopefully, Google will sic some of its finest famously-smarty-pants engineers on the task of making their anonymous data really, really anonymous.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.