I thought that Thierer was frank when it came to pointing out the self interest of net neutrality proponents, check out Valleywag on the same topic today:
What’s “net neutrality”? As far as we can tell, it’s a bunch of rhetoric that amounts to regulations that affirm Google’s God-given right to avoid giving Internet service providers a cut of advertising revenues.
This comment was inspired by Google VP Vint Cerf’s recent endorsement of Barack Obama for president. Obama has stated that he favors net neutrality regulation and would enshrine into law the likely illegal action of the FCC to stretch their net neutrality “principles” into hard and fast rules.
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Friend of TLF and chief political correspondent for CNET Declan McCullagh has a new column on CBSNews.com called “Other People’s Money.”
Nice name, but we’ll have to see whether his status as a fully decorated part of the mainstream media draws him from principled writing to constant applause for self-appointed experts who want to spend our taxed-away dollars for us.
His freshman effort looks pretty good. “Will U.S. Taxpayers Need a Bailout?” points out the perils of politically directed investments in the banking sector.
Funny stuff:
Precocious Youngster Sells Cookies To Buy Attack Ad
This is, of course, a wildly implausible story. Here in the real world, McCain-Feingold doesn’t allow little girls—or other private citizens—to run television ads criticizing federal candidates in the month before an election. Which, come to think of it, isn’t funny at all.
Slashdot linked to this post purporting to demonstrate that it’s ridiculous to consider the next version of Windows Windows 7. They offer several lists of past releases, all of which have at least 7 elements.
Obviously, the evolution of Windows has been sufficiently tortured that reasonable people can disagree about exactly how many generations there have been. In particular, the parallel development of the 3.1/95/98/ME and NT/2000 lines makes things unusually messy. But I think it’s entirely plausible to say that there have been the following 6 generations of Windows operating systems:
1. Windows
2. Windows 2
3. Windows 3/3.1 (NT 3)
4. Windows 95/98/ME (NT4)
5. Windows XP (Windows 2000)
6. Windows Vista
Windows 98/ME were clearly incremental upgrades of Windows 95. NT3, NT4, and Win2k were business/server operating systems that were released in parallel with the consumer products. It seems pretty reasonable to say that there have been 6 major releases of Windows, and that the one they’re working on now will be the seventh.
Over at Ars Technica I have an article I’m particularly excited about: the second installment of my series on self-driving car technology. In the first installment, I surveyed the current state of technology and addressed some of the technical challenges that stood between us and fully self-driving cars. Today I assume that those technical hurdles can be overcome and speculate about what the world will look like when we get there. Some benefits of self-driving cars are obvious—less time spent behind the wheel and fewer accidents—but the consequences are likely to be much broader than that. Among the most intriguing are much greater use of taxis, more widespread use of smaller, more energy-efficient cars, the virtual elimination of parking lots, and a dramatic transformation of the retail sector. Please check it out.
Meanwhile, over at BloggingHeads, my friend Will Wilkinson interviews my advisor Ed Felten about his work. I haven’t had a chance to watch the whole thing yet, but Will and Ed are two of the smartest and most interesting people I know, so it’s bound to be a great conversation.
Like a lot of people, I was surprised by the choice of Paul Krugman for the Nobel Prize in economics, but upon further reflections I agree with Tyler Cowen and Will Wilkinson that the award is well-deserved even if the timing is unfortunate. Krugman’s now-decade-old column in defense of free trade is my all-time favorite Krugman writing and among my favorite examples of popular writing on economics by any author. Recently Krugman’s columns have gotten a little too partisan and strident for my taste, but contra my esteemed co-blogger, Krugman is indisputably a first-rate economist who has done important theoretical work. There’s just no comparison to generic left-wing pundits.
Earlier this year, I mentioned an outstanding book that John Palfrey of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School co-edited entitled Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering. It’s an excellent resource for anyone studying the methods governments are (unfortunately) using to stifle online expression across the globe. It’s one of the most important technology policy books of the year.
Well, it looks like John Palfrey will have a second title on this year’s “Best Tech Books” list. I’ve just finished his new book with his Berkman Center colleague Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, and it is definitely worthy of your attention. In my book review posted today on the City Journal’s website, I argue that “Palfrey and Gasser’s fine early history of this generation serves as a starting point for any conversation about how to mentor the children of the Web.” It’s a comprehensive and very even-handed discussion about a variety of concerns or Internet pathologies, including: online safety, personal privacy, copyright piracy, offensive content, classroom learning, and much more.
My City Journal review is down below, but in coming weeks I will be posting some additional thoughts about some specific things in the book worthy of more attention (including a few things I disagreed with). Overall, I’d say Born Digital is a close runner-up in the race for “Tech Book of the Year,” closely trailing Jonathan Zittrain’s Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (which I have reviewed multiple times) and Nick Carr’s The Big Switch. But I found far more to agree with in Born Digital than I did in those two books. Highly recommended.
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As if the financial crisis and government bailout isn’t already a bit fishy to some taxpayers, now it’s the subject of a social engineering phishing exploit. The Federal Trade Commission issued a warning that
Phishers (pronounced “fishers’) may send attention-getting emails that look like they’re coming from the financial institution that recently acquired your bank, savings and loan, or mortgage. Their intent is to collect or capture your personal information, like your credit card numbers, bank account information, Social Security number, passwords, or other sensitive information. Their messages may ask you to “update,” “validate,” or “confirm” your account information.
October is Cyber Security Awareness Month and in celebration NetChoice will hold a lunch event at the Russell Senate Building on Thursday, Oct. 16 from Noon – 1:30pm. Panelists include:
- Ken Silva, Chief Technology Officer, VeriSign
- Michael Kaiser, Executive Director, National Cyber Security Alliance
- Steve DelBianco, Executive Director, NetChoice
If interested, let me know and come on by.
According to ABC News:
Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.
It’s a simple formula: Lack of oversight produces abuses. Members of Congress may scurry around and declare outrage, but the responsibility is their own as much as anyone else’s.
A new report from TeleGeography finds that bandwidth prices for backbone transit continue to decline rapidly across the globe. In San Francisco, for instance, the price per mbps of Gigabit Ethernet transit has dropped 38 % in the past 12 months. Developing countries are also enjoying substantial price cuts in 15 to 20% range.
But if the Internet’s core is controlled by an oligopolistic cartel—as Tim Wu argued in a recent New York Times essay—then why does bandwidth keep getting cheaper?
Perhaps it’s because the fourteen or so firms which offer backbone IP transit are competing fiercely to win over business from smaller carriers and enterprises. And as businesses of all sizes demand faster connectivity, more dark fiber is being lit, creating an expansion in network capacity. In DC, for instance, a price war has made high-speed commercial data services much more affordable, with one communications provider offering converged 10mbps full-duplex dedicated Ethernet over copper for less than the market price of four bonded T1 lines.
Why are some providers moving towards data transfer caps if bandwidth prices are dropping ? In part, it’s because backbone transit is not the only usage-variable expense that residential ISPs face. Last-mile bandwidth remains a highly contested resource in many neighborhoods, and the cost per megabit of bringing faster speeds to the doorstep far exceeds the cost of adding more wavelengths to a long-distance fiber optic line. As consumers demand greater speeds, providers are investing heavily in network upgrades—these costs are adding up, and there’s a strong case to be made that heavy users ought to shoulder a larger portion of the burden than light users.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.