Good piece in FT.com today by Tom Hazlett of George Mason University. In the essay, Tom takes stock of what the Microsoft antitrust case did and did not accomplish over the past decade. After pointing out that the case fell short of the mark in terms of injecting Java-based competition into the marketplace as some had hoped, Tom notes:
But the decade has hardly been a bust for competition. It flourishes on margins unimagined by those who were professing to protect its path. Rivalry has come not from Java, but from a resurgent Apple and the open-source Linux. One is a vertically integrated firm with proprietary innovation; the other a geekdom of code-sharers seeking karma and human capital. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is coughing up market share to Mozilla, Netscape and Opera, browsers that ride comfortably on Windows.
But operating systems and browsers turned out to be a side show. The profits of the decade have been stolen by entrepreneurs who saw what was unfolding over a distant horizon. And then traversed that distance in a flash.While the DoJ was filing against Microsoft, two youngsters at Stanford were crawling the web. With a search engine that could catalogue and rank the world’s web sites, matching key words while filtering out mish mash, their start-up quickly entered the language as a verb — a really popular verb. You can Google it.
Meanwhile, Apple has been making its own fortune under the shadow of the beast. It is crushing Microsoft in media players, finding its salvation in the holy i-trinity of Pod, Tunes and Phone. Domination of this digital consumer space was right there for the dreaming.
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I missed them when I was writing my previous post about IPv6, but Ars has done quite a bit of coverage of the IPv6 transition over the last year. Here is an overview of IPv6 done in the usual exhaustive Ars style. And here is a recent story on the federal government’s rush to make IPv6 available on its networks by July… but not actually start using it.
I think the takeaway lesson here is that all manner of large institutions are preparing for the IPv6 transition, but so far nobody seems to be actually pulling the trigger. It’s fairly easy for Microsoft to add an IPv6 stack to Windows XP. It’s much harder for an ISP to stop using IPv4 and start using IPv6. And until a significant number of people have already done so, there will be very few compelling advantages to doing so, because most network traffic will still get routed through a 6to4 tunnel to the old-fashioned IPv4 network. I would love to be proven wrong, because IPv6 has some nifty features (you can read all about them in the article above) but there’s precious little evidence of actual movement in that direction.
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Last week on the Google Public Policy Blog, Peter Greenberger of Google’s Elections and Issue Advocacy Team posted Google’s new guidelines for political advertising on the site. Most of the guidelines seem fairly straightforward and sensible to me since they relate to general principles of fairness and transparency. But sandwiched in between those principles is the following guideline:
No attacks on an individual’s personal life. Stating disagreement with or campaigning against a candidate for public office, a political party, or public administration is generally permissible. However, political ads must not include accusations or attacks relating to an individual’s personal life, nor can they advocate against a protected group. So, “Crime rates are up under Police Commissioner Gordon” is okay, but “Police Commissioner Gordon had an affair” is not.
I understand what Google is trying to do here in terms of making the Net a more civil place to engage in deliberative democracy without all the mud-slinging and name-calling. In one sense, I applaud them for that. On the other hand, the world is not a perfect place and candidates are not perfect people. And, candidates for office are not just like any other citizen in our society. They are people who will be given power over other people. Power over our lives, our liberties and fate of the nation.
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Roy Mark, a reporter with eWeek, was kind enough to call me last week to get some comments for a story he was putting together about the upcoming State of the Union Address and where technology policy fits in.. or rather, doesn’t. “When President Bush delivers his final State of the Union speech Jan. 28, don’t expect to hear much, if any, discussion of technology,” Roy argues in his piece. “In his previous seven addresses to the nation–adding up to almost 34,000 words–the president has never uttered the words “Internet,” “broadband” or “digital.” Wireless? Not a word. Spectrum? Not a single mention. Network neutrality? Forget it.”
Here’s a few sections from Roy’s article that include my comments agreeing with his thesis:
None of this is surprising to Adam Thierer, director of the Center for Digital Media Freedom and a senior fellow at Washington’s Progress & Freedom Foundation. When it comes to tech issues, “This has been an administration that has been largely missing in action,” Thierer told eWEEK. “It obsesses more about analog-era issues, steel over silicon, even as the service and technology sectors are the driving factors in the new economy.”
[…]
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Like Mike, I find this distinction illuminating:
I like to call this the “purpose-driven voluntary sector,” as distinct from (a) the profit-driven voluntary sector, i.e. the private sector, and (b) the purpose-driven coercive sector, i.e., the public sector. Its role is reminiscent of the religious orders in the Middle Ages, groups like the Franciscans and the Dominicans, or the Templars and Hospitallers who fought in the Holy Land. It includes universities, NGOs, churches, the blogosphere, Wikipedia, and so on. Its aims and its loyalties transcend both the self-interest of individuals and the interests of national states. It is a major driver of innovation and progress. It is growing in influence and power.
As Mike notes, there’s also a profit-driven coercive sector centered on K Street.
Libertarianism, properly understood, is concerned with the “voluntary” part, not the “profit” part. When Bill Gates and John Mackey encourage businesses to broaden their focus to encompass motivators other than profit, they’re properly understood not as free-market apostates but as thinkers who are helping to broaden the focus of a free-market movement that is sometimes too myopically focused on the profit-driven segment of the voluntary sector. For-profit companies are crucial to a free society, of course, but so are those parts of civil society that aren’t focused on turning a profit, and the “profit-driven” versus “purpose-driven” distinction is a nice way of highlighting this basic symmetry.
H.R. 5104 is a bill to extend the Protect America Act of 2007 by 30 days. It’s on the Suspension Calendar in the House, scheduled for consideration on Monday (1/28/08).
The Protect America Act, which broadened the government’s powers to eavesdrop on private conversations without court approval, expires Friday. Congress and the President are at loggerheads about how telecommunications surveillance should be administered, and whether telecommunications companies should be immunized from liability for alleged past violations of surveillance law.
Bills considered under “Suspension of the Rules” get limited debate and are not subject to amendment, but a two-thirds vote is required for passage.
So, what should Congress do? And why?
Your vote is probably “Yes” if you think Congress should continue to negotiate with the President while existing surveillance continues.
Your vote is probably “No” if you think Congress should pass a longer-term extension or give the President greater powers. It’s also “No” if you think Congress should refuse further negotiations, either because these surveillance power are not so important, because they’re unconstitutional, or because political blame for collapsed negotiations can be pinned to the President.
But there are other ways to think about this bill. Vote your piece, and let’s hear your reasoning in the comments!
I missed a good opinion piece on REAL ID in the L.A. Times last week. The subhead of “The False Promise of REAL ID” gets its assessment of the recently issued regulations about right: “Homeland Security’s compromises make an ineffective law somewhat less damaging.”
Previewing his Monday State of the Union address, President Bush’s radio address today highlights the economic stimulus package and the push to give telecom companies immunity in the FISA bill.
The other urgent issue before Congress is a matter of national security. Congress needs to provide our intelligence professionals with the tools and flexibility they need to protect America from attack. In August, Congress passed a bill that strengthened our ability to monitor terrorist communications. The problem is that Congress set this law to expire on February 1st. That is next Friday. If this law expires, it will become harder to figure out what our enemies are doing to infiltrate our country, harder for us to uncover terrorist plots, and harder to prevent attacks on the American people.
Congress is now considering a bipartisan bill that will allow our professionals to maintain the vital flow of intelligence on terrorist threats. It would protect the freedoms of Americans, while making sure we do not extend those same protections to terrorists overseas. It would provide liability protection to companies now facing billion-dollar lawsuits because they are believed to have assisted in efforts to defend our Nation following the 9/11 attacks. I call on Congress to pass this legislation quickly. We need to know who our enemies are and what they are plotting. And we cannot afford to wait until after an attack to put the pieces together.
We may learn a lot about American public opinion on terrorism in the next few weeks.
If the Democratic Congress holds the line on immunity in the FISA bill and weathers the partisan attacks that follow, we’ll know that the administration’s terror-pandering has finally worn thin.
If Congress capitulates, we’ll re-learn the basic tenets of Public Choice theory holding that politicians are risk-averse and much more interested in reelection than principled policymaking.
Over at Techdirt, I question whether the long-predicted IPv6 transition will ever actually occur:
A few weeks ago, David Siegel of Global Crossing looked at some high-profile websites and found that none of them have made the switch to IPv6, the supposed replacement for today’s 32-bit Internet addressing scheme. The IPv6 protocols have been finalized for a decade, and major operating systems have supported it for several years, so one would expect Internet-savvy companies like Google and Microsoft to have started running IPv6 versions of their sites. But it appears that so far, nothing of the sort has happened. Indeed, progress toward an IPv6-based Internet appears to be at a virtual standstill. The situation becomes less mysterious when one realizes that the primary rationale for the switch to IPv6 — the exhaustion of the IP address space — is basically bogus. It’s true that if Internet governance authorities continue handing out IP addresses, they’ll eventually run out. But the best solution to this isn’t necessarily a massively disruptive transition to a totally new addressing scheme. It may very well be a lot cheaper to continue working within the constraints of the existing address space. Technologies like NAT allow many users to share a single IP address. And Internet governance bodies can facilitate the creation of a robust market for unused IP addresses, so that those who need additional IP addresses can easily purchase them from someone who has more than they need. For example, Apple, Ford, General Electric, and several other Fortune 500 companies currently control blocks of 16 million IP addresses each. These companies should be given a straightforward way to auction off the unused portions of their blocks for the use of other Internet firms. There would be plenty of IP addresses to go around if firms had a financial incentive to give up unused addresses.
I got a lot of pushback from Techdirt readers, but I’m still not convinced. They pointed out lots of reasons that IPv6 is better than IPv4, which I’m sure it is. But path dependence is a real phenomenon. And none of the reasons they offered (easier routing, not needing NAT, better security) strike me as compelling enough that the median ISP will find it worth the trouble to make the switch. I think everyone may wait for everyone else to go first, and as a result, the transition will never actually happen.
I’ve been busy with other projects, like the panel discussion on privacy I did with fellow TLFer Jim Harper, but I’d like to jump in on what is now an old story. Variety, among many others, reported on June 9th that the EU resolved its qualms with Apple after Jobs and company agreed to standardize pricing policies across Europe.
Apple has been charging consumers in the UK 10% more than the rest of Europe, but Variety failed to mention why this policy was in place. The EU determined that neither Apple nor the recording companies that distribute through iTunes were varying prices in order to take advantage of consumers. Instead, as The Business Times aptly reported, the price differences were attributable to, “copyright laws specific to individual countries.”
So, Apple was pricing differently in different markets because of genuine differences in those markets, not because Steve Jobs secretly hates limeys.
What I found most disturbing about the reporting on this case was this statement from European competition commissioner Neelie Kroes:
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.