By attorney Lars Liebeler, in CNET, a discussion of recent antitrust actions here and abroad, in particular scrutiny of the Novell/Microsoft agreement.
Each generation has its antitrust bogeyman from Standard Oil down to AT&T & IBM. The short-run obsession in policy circles with a single company (when policy properly conceived ought to be anonymous for the best results in the long run) invites gaming the system, and results in exceptions dominating what ought to be the rules to an alarming extent. Principled resistance to this tendency is very weak in the EU, where fines are seized on to feed growing armies of bureaucrats in Brussels and the trend is fueled by anti-Americanism.
Japan has 7.2 million all-fiber broadband subscribers who pay $34 per month and incumbent providers NTT East and NTT West have only a 66% market share. According to Takashi Ebihara, a Senior Director in the Corporate Strategy Department at Japan’s NTT East Corp. and currently a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here in Washington, Japan has the “fastest and least expensive” broadband in the world and non-incumbent CLECs have a “reasonable” market share. Ebihara was speaking at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, and his presentation can be found here. Ebihara said government strategy played a significant role. Local loop unbundling and line sharing led to fierce competition in DSL, which forced the incumbents to move to fiber-to-the premises.
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Julian has some more smart things to say about network neutrality and the Pizza Hut analogy:
Suppose an ISP wants to build out infrastructure to support 100mbps service in an area that doesn’t currently have it. Problem: There are customers who might like that higher speed access for a few purposes, like streaming movies, but not enough who are prepared to pay the premium to upgrade their whole connection, so it’s not cost effective for the ISP to make the investment. One solution might be metering: You let customers pay for the bandwidth they use, paying a bit more for bursts of higher speed needed to access specific sites with a lower flat rate for the majority of the time, when they’re just reading news and checking email. The problem is that consumers seem to have largely rejected metering: People want to pay one rate for their access, and not have to think about their usage level on a day-to-day basis.
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I was on vacation last week when ICANN handed down its latest rejection of the “.xxx” top-level domain (TLD). I just wanted to make two quick points about why I find this decision quite troubling.
First, it’s obvious that some critics of the .xxx TLD oppose the proposal because they think it somehow legitimizes online pornography or will lead to the proliferation of even more cyber-porn. I find this argument bizarre and naive. As John Dvorak makes abundantly clear in his recent PC Magazine column, Internet pornography is not going away and it is almost impossible to imagine how the .xxx TLD could have done anything to make it more accessible. Dvorak rightly asks: “How hard is it to find porn on the Net? Go to any search engine and type porn. Open your e-mail box. Who are these people kidding with this argument?”
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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, Braden Cox, Andrew Grossman, Adam Thierer, and Tim Carney. Topics include,
- the NAB lobbying hard against the Sirius-XM merger
- EMI drops DRM on its songs in the iTunes Music Store
- Verizon changes its wireless broadband terms of service
- the FCC will soon report to Congress on TV violence
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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Earlier this week music label EMI announced that it would sell songs on Apple’s iTunes without digital rights management. Yesterday Microsoft said it would do the same thing for its Zune Marketplace.
So do we have the beginnings of a significant move toward DFM – DRM-Free Music? Is this evidence that the market is working and responding to consumer demand? I think (hope) so.
EMI plans to offer DRM-free music for $1.29, compared to $0.99 for DRM-protected music. That buck 29 will also get you double the bit rate, or 256kbps, on downloaded songs. 256kb/s is still a far cry from the 1,411 kb/s that you get when buying a CD, but it will sound good enough for most listeners except for the audiophiles among us.
It makes sense to pay more for a product if you get more rights to do something with it. But I know that there are those people that might say DRM shouldn’t be around anyways, so consumers are paying more for something they should already have. Ultimately, consumers will decide with their dollars whether to buy a DRM version or a DFM version of their favorite music. Stay tuned….
Net Loss, from the WSJ, April 5, 2007 …
Europe’s old state telecom monopolies have been broken up, only for competition and consumers to face a new threat: re-regulation by Brussels. Nowhere is this prospect more apparent than in the debate over “Net neutrality.” Like the U.S., the EU can either allow the Internet to develop as rapidly and excitingly as possible, or it can freeze progress in its tracks.
Unfortunately, the latter option looks more and more likely. Draft laws are due in July on the EU’s “standardization policy for the information and communication technology sector.” EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding says the goal of the new policy is “to foster content creation and distribution in the multiplatform media business.” That sounds encouraging enough until you view it through the Commission’s promise to “closely monitor attempts to call into question the neutral character of the Internet.”
My friend Tim Carney points out the absurdity of the NAB’s lobbying campaign against the XM-Sirius merger:
The National Association of Broadcasters has paid top dollar for the Carmel Group to produce a paper arguing that XM and Sirius satellite radio should not be allowed to merge, the NY Post is reporting (and Drudge is linking). The crux of their argument is that a joint XM-Sirius will not face competition. This implies that digital radio and terrestrial radio generally do not compete with satellite radio. If the don’t compete, then why is NAB spending so much to block the merger?
Frankly, the fact that NAB is so opposed is the strongest argument I can think of for allowing it.
Also, check out Tim’s excellent article in the Examiner on the NAB’s lobbying campaign.
Mark Blafkin concedes I’m right that the GPL respects the freedom of users to choose whether to use proprietary software alongside free software. But he insists I’m missing the big picture:
This brings us to one fact that Tim got blatantly wrong. Stallman HAS attacked the OpenOffice team for relying on proprietary code in the past. This article from NewsForge chronicles the dispute over OpenOffice’s reliance on Java code and the FSF’s plans to rewrite the code to remove any of those dependencies.
Despite what Tim asserts, Stallman is not content with promoting his goals merely through persuasion and cooperation. The GPL comes complete with the copyright equivalent of land use restrictions that limit what you (and now your customers) can do with that software. It essentially says that if you build a new barn on top of your land (aka GPL Software), you need to share your designs with the entire world. Does that REALLY jive with traditional libertarian beliefs? The GPL is designed to force anyone who uses that software to accept the ideology of the FSF either for moral or pragmatic reasons.
If you look closely, what I said was that Stallman has never “criticized efforts by the Open Office team to allow free software users to use Microsoft Word documents.” Stallman’s criticism of OpenOffice for building atop a proprietary platform makes perfect sense in light of his focus on users’ freedom. Free software built upon proprietary software is going to be subject to any restrictions that apply to the underlying proprietary software. Since Stallman’s focus is on preserving users’ freedom to use software as they choose, this makes perfect sense to me. Stallman objects to integrating free and proprietary software, because it runs the risk of undermining users’ freedoms. But he’s never objected to interoperability between free and proprietary software.
But let’s talk about the big picture. As I’ve said before, libertarianism is not “marketarianism”:
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