Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
This clip from College Humor, 24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot, is hilarious and makes me appreciate the abundance of great new technologies that the last decade has brought us. The video features many recent and familiar, yet shockingly antiquated technologies.
Over at Ars, I’ve got a new post about Bill Gates’s call for “creative capitalism.” I took the opportunity to highlight one of the most interesting recent discussions in libertarian philosophy:
Gates’s arguments are strikingly similar to those of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, a self-described free-market libertarian who has long emphasized that successful businesses must do more than merely maximize profits. In a 2005 debate with economist Milton Friedman and T.J. Rodgers of Cypress Semiconductors, Mackey rejected the the traditional free-market view that a business’s only obligation is to maximize shareholder profits. To the contrary, Mackey argued, businesses have obligations to customers, employees, shareholders, and the broader communities where they reside.
As supporters of capitalism, both Gates and Mackey embrace the arguments for free trade and free markets in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. But both like to cite Adam Smith’s earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which is focused on man’s desire to help his fellow man. They argue that this desire to help others can be at least as powerful a motivator as the drive to increase profits.
I also suggest that Gates take a second look at free software as an excellent example of “creative capitalism” in action. Read the whole thing here.
It’s been called a “virtual privacy time bomb” by a prominent Congressman, something that an FTC commissioner believes should “really trouble all of us” and to which one policy group believes we should have a legal right to examine, correct, and/or delete. What is it?
Answer: Online behavioral marketing data.
And it will continue to be a hot topic for 2008, as the Google – DoubleClick merger progresses, the FTC collects public comment on self-regulatory principles, and New York State bill A09275 (introduced in response to the Facebook controversy) is further considered.
I have a kind of love/hate relationship with online behavioral marketing. Advertising that is better targeted to consumers helps support a lot of Internet web sites that otherwise might charge for their services. And I receive ads targeted to my tastes and preferences (yippee!). But there’s something about it that makes me feel uneasy, something that still doesn’t quite sit so well.
And thanks to my prior sentence, there may be Pepto-Bismol ads popping up on the web site hosting this blog. Indeed, behavioral advertising is the tracking of a consumer’s activities online – including the searches the consumer has conducted, the Web pages visited, and the content viewed – in order to deliver advertising targeted to the individual consumer’s interests. Google is the 1,000 pound gorilla in this space, as it sells its AdSense service to display targeted ads for content and for search results.
Thanks to Google, I am now addicted to the game Rock Band. I don’t own the game, but I do alternate between playing the demo at BestBuy in Pentagon City and playing the demo at the Gamestop across the street in the mall.
How can I prove that Google caused this addiction? Here I am playing Rock Band with Jillian Bandes of Roll Call in Google’s game room.
On a more serious note, I’m looking forward to working with Google on some of the policy issues that we’ll likely confront in the coming year. CEI is of like minds with the monolith of Mountain View on issues like privacy and competition policy. But we also disagree on policies like network neutrality and the best way to liberalize spectrum in the U.S.
Google is a great company that has created an enormous amount of wealth. I hope that their DC offices focus on creating a freer market for them to operate within and that they move away from the standard Washington favor-seeking.
I spend a lot of time griping about actual or potential threats to freedom of speech and expression here in the United States. But, I also feel it’s important for us to occasionally step back and remember how lucky we are to live in a country like the United States that has greater protections for freedom of the press and freedom of individual expression than most other countries of the world. This Washington Post story today serves as a good occasion to do so.
In Afghanistan this week, a young reporter and journalism student by the name of Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, 20, was sentenced to death for speaking his mind. His “crime”? …
His alleged offense was distributing to classmates a report, printed from a Web site, commenting on a Muslim woman’s right to multiple marriages. The article, written in Farsi, which is close to the Dari language spoken in Afghanistan, questioned why men are allowed to have four spouses in Islam while women are denied the same right.
Without a lawyer to represent him, Kambakhsh was hustled Tuesday into a small hearing room where three judges and a prosecutor conducted a five-minute proceeding, according to his older brother. He was then handed a piece of paper saying he had acted against Islam and should be executed, said the brother, Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, who visited him in prison Wednesday night. “There was no defense lawyer, no human rights adviser, no family member, no discussion, nothing,” Ibrahimi, a 26-year-old journalist, said by telephone from Mazar-e Sharif. “They did not let him explain. It was a joke.”
Makes me sick to my stomach. Hopefully, the pressure being put on the Afghan officials by the U.N., Reporters Without Borders, and other groups will reverse this travesty.
Reid castigated the Republicans for not allowing debate and discussion on amendments that would have required reports on the goverment’s secret wiretapping program, re-affirmed that spying could only happen by following wiretap law, and strengthened bans on the government finding loopholes to target Americans for surveillance without getting warrants first.
“We offered an extension of the current law for a month, several months, a year, 18 months,” Reid said. “But the Republican leadership don’t want to extend the program.”
“It is really not fair we be asked to accept hthis without being able to vote on a single amendment,” Reid complained.
Poor guy. It sure would be nice if the Democrats were in the majority so Reid had some control over the legislative calendar.
Before World War II, party lines were the dominant form of phone service, especially in rural areas. People could pick up their telephones and listen in on their neighbors’ conversations.
Until the 1950s, local telephone numbers consisted of an exchange and a 5-digit phone number. A New Yorker might be listed in the phone book as “CHelsea 4-5034”, and someone wanting to call him would dial (once dial service was available—until the 30s phone calls had to be manually connected by a switchboard operator) CH4-5034 (this is apparently where the letters on the phone come from). When the phone company began running out of memorable exchange names and tried to replace it with “all-number calling,” it sparked an intense outcry among urban users, who considered all-numeric calling to be de-humanizing. Under intense pressure, AT&T backed down and allowed existing exchange-name-based phone numbers to stay in the phone books in some urban areas until the 1980s.
Update: So apparently everyone except me already knew all of these things. One person helpfully informed me that “that post makes you sound about 12 years old.” Well, when I’m 80 I’m sure my grandkids will be fascinated to read this post and learn about how things were back in the good old days.
The scene is Central Europe. It’s 1990-something. After a bicycle tour of the Czech Republic’s Bohemian countryside, Jim Harper and his girlfriend have traveled into Hungary and a town called Eger, two hours by train northeast of the capitol.
In a small valley not far out of town, there are dozens of underground wine cellars where vintners store and sell the local wine, Egri Bikaver, also known as “Bull’s Blood.” As the evening winds on and the cellars close, visitors concentrate themselves more and more tightly into the remaining open cellars. The wine and proximity make for good conversation and new friendships.
Late on, this particular evening, as our table edged toward overstaying, one of our group stood up and sang his country’s national anthem. He was Estonian.
It was a very long song. I’d like to say otherwise, but his singing wasn’t all that good. And he was quite overly serious about it. With the song going on so long, and the wine having its full effects, the scene edged toward the comical.
Since that evening, the Bull’s Blood wine and our Estonian friend have provided the touches of mirth and memory that interesting travel will. The Estonian singer has been the subject of some affectionate joking, I’ll admit.
That’s a little bit regrettable, because I now know that there’s more to the story. Watch the trailer here.
The USA Today editorial board published a nasty piece today belittling MySpace.com’s recent efforts to implement more safeguards for its users. Despite the fact that MySpace made over 70 promises to the Attorneys General as part of the agreement–the entire agreement is summarized here–that’s still not good enough for the USA Today’s editorial board, which wants full-blown identity verification before anyone is allowed on a social networking site:
“Even in the absence of a perfect software solution, interim steps are possible. How about using databases of drivers’ licenses to cross-check ages? In more than 20 states, they are public records. The point is, more effective safeguards are needed now, …. MySpace [should be] moving faster to set up age and ID verifications, not just study them.”
Well, where do I begin? I get so frustrated when I see comments like this because it is abundantly clear to me that people don’t think things through when it comes to age verification. As I pointed out in my lengthy PFF report, “Social Networking and Age Verification: Many Hard Questions; No Easy Solutions,” age verification is extremely complicated, and it would be even more complicated in this case because public officials are demanding the age verification of minors as well as adults, which presents a wide array of special challenges and concerns.
What Age Verification Really Is: The Death of Online Anonymity
We need to begin by understanding what age verification really is. By definition, mandatory age verification represents an effort to make online anonymity a crime. In simple terms, citizens would be forced to “show their papers” at the door of every website or else run the risk of being denied access–simply because they do not want to surrender their name or age.
Think about what that means. It’s easy to take the benefits of online anonymity for granted. There are millions of people who comment anonymously on blogs like this one every day, or write anonymous book or product reviews on Amazon.com or eBay, or who just chat with others about various topics under the cloak of anonymity. It is a wonderful thing.
Tim… You should quit reading that crap by John Brooks and read the authoritative history of the issue, you know, the one I wrote for the Cato Journal 14 years ago!…
“Unnatural Monopoly: Critics Moments in the Development of the Bell System Monopoly,” Cato Journal, Vol. 14, No. 2, Fall 1994.
(P.S… I still have all the files I used to prepare that article, so if you need anything that appears in my bibliography, let me know. Most of it is not available online. What are you working on, anyway?)
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
