Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Google has just announced that it is now accepting applications from undergraduate, graduate and professional students for its summer 2009 Google Policy Fellowship. Three think tanks employing TLFers are among the host organizations participating in the program: The Progress & Freedom Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Applications are due by December 12, 2008. The program will run for ten weeks during the summer of 2009 (June-August). Apply today!
Forbes has produced a scintillating special report on the market crash and what comes next. Steve Forbes tells “How Capitalism Will Save Us.” In “Curbing Washington’s Growing Power” economist David Malpass explains the policy mistakes that led here and describes the key threats that could make it worse. Rich Karlgaard compares today’s market to the malaise of the 1970s, but offers hints of optimism bubbling up. And George Gilder, summoning Peter Drucker’s mantra — “Don’t solve problems; pursue opportunities” — previews the technologies that portend a “Coming Creativity Boom” and offers, characteristically, the deepest insights on the nature of capitalism:
Knowledge is about the past; entrepreneurship is about the future. In a crisis the world of expertise pulls the global economy ever deeper into the past, where accountant-economists ruminate on the labyrinthine statistics of leviathan trade gaps, tides of debt and deficits, political bailouts and rebates, regulatory clamps and controls, all propping up the past in the name of progress.
The crucial conflict in every economy, however, goes on. It is not between rich and poor, Main Street and Wall Street, or even government and the private sector. It is between the established system and the new forms of wealth rising up to displace it–all the entrenched knowledge of the past and the insurrections of futuristic enterprise and invention.
The real source of all growth is human creativity and entrepreneurship, which always comes as a surprise to us, especially in the worst of times, as Rich Karlgaard notes. No amount of knowledge about the present can predict the specific profile and provenance of innovation. From the pits of the crash of 2000, when the Internet and the dot.com siege were famously dismissed as a barren “bubble,” came Google (nasdaq: GOOG – news – people ) and MySpace to rise up and take all the chips and establish a new Internet economy. If creativity was not unexpected, governments could plan it and socialism would work. But creativity is intrinsically surprising and the source of all real profit and growth.
You’ll find lots more economic and investing advice, including a report on “What Ben Graham would do.”
The Progress & Freedom Foundation has just launched the new Center for Internet Freedom. CIF offers an alternative to the proliferation of advocacy groups calling for government intervention online by offering timely analyses and critiques of proposals that diminish the vital role of free markets, free speech and property rights. We aim to drive the Internet policy debate in new directions by emphasizing a layered approach of technological innovation, user education, user self-help, industry self-regulation, and the enforcement of existing laws consistent with the First Amendment. Such an approach is a less restrictive—and generally more effective—alternative to increased regulation.
Here are some of the issues I’ll be working on as CIF’s Director in conjunction with my esteemed colleagues Adam Thierer, Adam Marcus, and adjunct fellows:
William Webb, Head of Research and Development at OFCOM, to speak about ‘The Theory, Practice, Politics and Problems of Spectrum Reform’ on November 12ARLINGTON, VA., October 23 – With the transition to digital television in the United States less than four months away, disputes about the airwaves used by broadcasters are raging here and around the globe. A world-class expert will soon weigh in on how one country, the United Kingdom, views the challenges of bringing radio spectrum allocation into the 21st Century.
On Wednesday, November 12, 2008, the Information Economy Project at the George Mason University School 
of Law will host its next Big Ideas About Information Lecture, featuring an address by Dr. William Webb, a top policy maker at OFCOM, the U.K. telecommunications regulator.
OFCOM’s ambitious liberalization strategy, announced in 2004, permits the large majority of valuable frequencies to be used freely by competitive licensees, offering an exciting and informative experiment in public policy. Dr. Webb’s lecture, “The Theory, Practice, Politics and Problems of Spectrum Reform,” will offer a timely progress report for the American audience.
Webb’s lecture will be the sixth in a prestigious series that has included Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith and noted economist David Porter on how FCC license auctions have worked; Martin Cooper, the “father of the cellphone,” on spectrum allocation; Brian Lamb, founder and CEO of C-SPAN, on the policies that enabled the cable network to launch; former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Dennis Patrick, on the decision to abolish the “Fairness Doctrine” in 1987; and University of Minnesota Professor Andrew Odlyzko, on financial bubbles in high-technology industries.
Dr. Webb’s Lecture will review the century-long history of radio spectrum regulation. For almost all of that century, the policy-maker has micro-managed spectrum use, defining services, technologies and business models deployed by wireless operators. The inefficiencies embedded in this approach have triggered calls for liberalization since the pioneering work of economist Ronald Coase in the 1950s.
While efforts to relax administrative control have generally met great political resistance, some substantial progress has been made with the emergence of mobile telephone networks over the past two decades. Policy makers in some nations are now seeking to achieve bolder changes. The regulator in the United Kingdom, OFCOM, has emerged as a leader in this campaign.
After the Labour Government commissioned a landmark 2002 study authored by economist Martin Cave, OFCOM moved aggressively to assist the emergence of property rights in frequencies, the institutional switch enabling market allocation of radio spectrum.
This lecture, delivered by a key OFCOM policy official and a noted spectrum technology expert in his own right, dissects the liberalization process in Great Britain and offers lessons learned. This experience promises great insight for the U.S. and other countries struggling to enact pro-consumer policy reforms.
Over at DrewClark.com, earlier today I reported today that television networks – which in recent years have had a strained relationship with local broadcasters on a variety of fronts – joined with the National Association of Broadcasters in calling for a time out on the politically simmering issue of “white spaces.” Here’s the start of the story, and you can read the full post at DrewClark.com
WASHINGTON, October 23 – The top executives of the four major broadcast networks on Thursday urged the head of the Federal Communications Commission to delay a vote on a politically simmering issue that pits broadcasters against Google and high-tech executives.
In the letter, the CEOs of CBS Corp., NBC Universal and Walt Disney, and the chief operating officer of News Corp., urge that the FCC exercise caution before taking irreparable action with regard to the vacant television channels known as “white spaces.”
Google and the other technology executives, including Microsoft, Motorola, Philips and others, want the FCC to authorize electronic devices that capable of transmitting internet signals over vacant television bands.
The network executives – CBS’s Leslie Moonves, Disney’s Robert Iger, NBC’s Jeffrey Zucker and Peter Chernin of News Corp. – want a time out.
They join their local broadcasting colleagues, as well as manufacturers and users of wireless microphones, like the National Football League and Boadway theater owners, who have been actively lobbying the issue.
[…]
Read the rest of the story at my blog, DrewClark.com – The Politics of Telecom, Media and Technology
You should check it out and figure out which channel you like best.
Then you should donate.
Or buy the music you like.
Or buy a t-shirt.
From the WashingtonWatch.com blog:
Just two weeks after the passage of the bailout bill, and one day after a Treasury Department official declared, “we are committed to transparency and oversight in all aspects of the program,” the Treasury Department began covering up the amount it would pay to New York Mellon Bank to act as a financial agent in the bailout.
Spending $700,000,000,000.00 in taxpayer money is not business as usual. And hiding the terms of government contracts shouldn’t be business as usual anyway.
Want an easy way of keeping up with the TLF? Follow us on Twitter! Each new TLF posting will show up as a Tweet that starts with “TLF Blog: ” followed by the subject line of the blog piece and a link back to the blog entry so you can read the whole piece if you want to. TLFers may also Twitter links to news stories and events that don’t merit a full blog entry. Think of it as TLF-lite!
For PC users, I highly recommend the open source Digsby as a client that can support Twitter, Facebook and just about any instant messaging protocol you might use (except, sadly, Skype).
Online and IT privacy is a ripe issue for President Obama’s or McCain’s administration. It often takes a confluence of concerns and momentum to elevate an issue to the national forefront, and with privacy we have concerns related to targeted ads, ID theft, government snooping, electronic health records, and to be blunt — Google. There will be pressure for policymakers to enact a “comprehensive privacy policy” — but what does that mean?
I heard that question raised last week. Last Friday the Technology Policy Institute held an event that featured Peter Swire, Obama’s privacy/security advisor, and Orson Swindle, McCain’s privacy/security advisor.
Swindle downplayed the notion of “comprehensive” privacy, because the need for privacy is contextual. Sometimes you’ll want more, other times less. If Congress were to enact privacy legislation back in 2000, when concerns over “cookies” were raging, it would have stunted the growth of the Internet and new business models. What we have now isn’t perfect, he stressed, but regulation is even more imperfect.
Swire ducked the question about whether Obama would favor “comprehensive” privacy legislation. Obama has been silent on the issue, he said. He did discuss what he called “market failure” that occurs when new technologies pose new risks. He brought up electronic health records as an example…shouldn’t government help protect people’s medical information?
Swindle said that the FTC is in a perfect position to respond to the privacy challenges posed by new technology. Swire said that the FTC is necessary but not sufficient to get the job done.
My two cents, which I wrote in my recent paper on cyber security: Continue reading →
Congress has very wisely cancelled the National Reconnaissance Office’s proposed Broad Area Space-Based Imagery Collection (BASIC) satellite system. The proposal to build two new imaging satellites at a cost to taxpayers of $1.7 billion would have represented a major break from what is possibly the U.S. government’s most successful effort to promote space commercialization to date: buying the imagery it needs from commercial providers, who can also sell imagery to other buyers.
Five years ago, the idea that Internet users could pull up a satellite image of just about any location on the planet at a whim would have seemed ludicrous. Yet that’s precisely what websites like Google Maps and Microsoft’s Live Search offer today—for free! Desktop applications like Microsoft’s Virtual Earth and Google Earth offer even more advanced geospatial tools—again, for free. But of course this library of incredibly rich imagery didn’t just “fall out of the sky,” as they say. It was collected by a handful of expensive commercial remote sensing satellites whose construction was made possible by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency‘s (Wikipedia) extraordinarily successful “Nextview” program implemented under the Commercial Remote Sensing Policy of 2003. Rather than having the Federal government build its own satellites—and pay for the entire cost of the satatellites—the NGA very wisely chose to buy imagery from commercial providers in two ~$500 million, 4-year contracts with U.S. satellite imagery companies: DigitalGlobe in 2003 and OrbImage (now GeoEye) in 2004.
These long-term purchase agreements essentially made the U.S. Government the “anchor tenant” in a new class of remote sensing satellites, providing the initial funding for both companies to build and operate their satellites. But because the companies sell roughly half of imagery to foreign governments and commercial buyers like Google and Microsoft, these deals have saved U.S taxpayers money for the purchase of imagery for a wide variety of needs, ranging from agricultural monitoring to military intelligence. At the same time, the Nextview contracts have given birth to a vibrant geospatial industry whose immediate benefits should be obvious to anyone who’s ever pulled up a satellite map online and whose macroeconomic impact is potentially enormous.
So why mess with success? Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
