Channeling Jonathan Zittrain, Alex Curtis of Public Knowledge continues his incessantranting against Apple and the iPhone for supposedly not being open enough and, therefore, somehow harming consumers and 3rd party developers. In his essay today about the supposed evils of the iPhone App Store, he accuses Apple of an “1984 kind of total control.”
Hmmm, let’s see… Apple creates a great new product that is so insanely sexy and innovative that even Apple-haters like me are forced to admit that it is the most brilliant tech gadget of the decade. Millions of people have flocked to Apple stores, stood in lines so long that you’d think they were giving away free pot and floor bongs inside, and then voluntarily handed over seemingly all their disposable monthly income to get their hands on one of these things.
OK, so how is this like 1984 again? Is evil Steve Jobs forcing the masses to buy this product? Of course not. So it strikes me that we can easily dispense with analogies to a book about coercive, totalitarian government control like 1984.
And if all this anti-iPhone ranting is just about the degree of control that Steve Jobs and Apple exercise over product add-ons then hey, I’ve got an easy answer for you: go get a different phone! Continue reading →
After gaining final approval to rollout FiOS in New York City a few weeks ago, Verizon has come to a preliminary agreement with the District of Columbia to deploy FiOS television service in the nation’s capital. This long-awaited announcement follows nearly a year of negotiation between Verizon and D.C. franchising authorities.
Thanks to its especially onerous franchising regime, the District of Columbia has lagged behind surrounding areas in fiber-optic connectivity. Neighboring communities such as Arlington, Fairfax, and Bethesda have had FiOS for years, and D.C.’s lack of fiber-optic service has long been a sore spot for the city.
D.C. residents can’t celebrate just yet, though. Verizon must overcome one more regulatory hurdle before starting to dig up the streets. The franchise agreement must receive a green-light from both the D.C. city council and the Attorney General. If the New York City episode is any indication, getting politicians to acquiesce will involve expensive demands and forced concessions, resulting in higher prices for everyone.
Adam Laurie and Jeroen van Beek, at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, showed the Business Technology Blog how to capture and change information stored on chips included in new passports from many countries. . . . Laurie showed us his son’s British passport, in which he embedded a chip that displays Osama Bin Laden’s photograph. The passports have a key needed to access the electronic information, but it is taken from information found in the passport like the date of birth. Laurie was able in about four hours to decipher the key and use an RFID scanner to steal the digital information from a passport contained in a sealed envelope.
The State Department implemented the e-passport with no sense of the ends it was trying to achieve. Naturally, the means it chose weren’t well suited.
Though I don’t think you’re going to cost-effectively stop or slow terrorism at the borders, Customs and Border Patrol may be less able to interdict bad people at the borders because of the e-passport misadventure.
Over at Reason’s “Hit and Run” blog, Matt Welch has penned a piece pointing out how it is impossible to make the anti-media activists happy. Welch notes that radical activist groups like Free Press go around demonizing media moguls like Rupert Murdoch because he supposedly symbolizes the fact that will live in an age of media monopolists who puppeteer all our news and entertainment from on high. It’s all 100% B.S., of course, as we have shown hereagain and again.
But even when confronted by the rise of alternative owners and ownership models, the Free Press fanatics show their true colors by saying that won’t work for them either. Walsh notes, for example, that the skake-up of the old Tribune empire and the emergence of Sam Zell as an independent owner of the Trib — and an owner hellbent on downsizing the old empire, no less — should be exactly what Free Press wants: Continue reading →
I was pleased to see Braden’s excellent new paper on the use of self-serving lobbying tactics to limit competition and promote particular business models at the expense of others. As Braden and his co-author point out, some of the most important competition in the software industry has become less about products than about business models. Some software companies sell the software directly, while others give software away as a means of selling hardware, services, or advertising. And in many cases, public policy debates in the software industry are thinly-veiled attempts to give some business models unfair advantages over others.
Braden produced a chart that gives some helpful examples of policies that tilt the economic playing field toward one business model at the expense of the others:
As you can see, software patents promote proprietary software business models at the expense of business models based on giving software away for free (and, it should be said, at the expense of people who want to give software away for free on a non-commercial basis). Similarly, the DMCA promotes proprietary software business models. They neglected to put it on the chart, but the flip-side is obviously true: the DMCA harms free software, commercial and otherwise, by making unauthorized interoperability with DRMed software a crime. Continue reading →
… if I lived in the San Fran area. Gever Tulley’s “Tinkering School” encourages kids to play with pocket knives, power tools, and fire. It also requires that kids take apart various household appliances just to figure out how they work. And, my personal favorite — kids get to drive cars. (Our own Tim Lee will be tickled by the portion of the camp where the kids are encouraged to break the DMCA by learning how to rip and repackage music, although I can’t imagine they really need much encouragement from adults to do that!)
The reason I found this idea for a summer camp so refreshing when I heard about it on NPR this week is because I have spent the better part of the last few months signing endless liability waiver forms for my daughter’s summer camps, including the tennis camp she’s in right now. After all, don’t you know how dangerous flying tennis balls can be!! And my kids like to swim at a local pool that not only has endless waiver forms and rules, but also no high diving boards for fear of liability from scumbag trial lawyers.
We have become a nation of over-protective wusses. As Tulley points out in his great little lecture below on “5 dangerous things you should let your kids do,” we practically wrap our kids in bubble wrap before we send them out the door to play these days — assuming we let them out the door at all. It’s crazy. Our kids need to be experiencing life, the elements, and yes, a little danger. I have already started teaching my kids how to use power tools and they are both under the age of 8. One of my wussy yuppie friends stopped by one day to get something and saw my kids playing with hammers, nails and saws and he thought I was nuts. But it is he who is nuts for shielding his kids to the joys of learning to build something with their own hands (and for denying them the skills to actually do some honest to God manual labor when they get older).
Anyway, enjoy this video. If this guy starts a camp on the East Coast, I am putting my kids on the waiting list.
Portland’s muni wi-fi experiment has failed. [Addittothelist of failures]. According to Broadband Reports, taxpayers are going to be on the line for $60K:
Portland had high hopes of being one of those cities where citywide wireless networks might actually work but those hopes did not pan out. Earlier this summer, Wi-Fi provider MetroFi announced that the company could not afford to continue operating the network there. Attempts to sell it off failed and the network was shut down. That’s not the end of the story, though. In order to launch the network, MetroFi had to set up 600 (arguably unsightly) antennas throughout the city. The company had claimed that these antennas would be removed by the end of July but they remain up; MetroFi says that they still plan to follow through on removing them but city staff members report fears that the company is too strapped for cash to keep their end of this bargain. Estimates for removal are around $90,000; subtracting out a $30,000 bond for removal that was part of the MetroFi contract would still mean that Portland’s taxpayers could pay up to $60,000 to get those antennas taken down.
I’m always interested in stories about the unintended consequences of government regulation, but this story from Valleywag (Via a comment from Richard Bennett) doesn’t make a lot of sense:
The prospect of pay-by-the-bit bandwidth had immediate consequences for BitTorrent’s two main businesses: an online-media store delivered via file sharing, and a content-delivery network which competed with the likes of Akamai and Limelight Networks.
For users who would have to pay bandwidth fees to their ISPs on top of paying the usual charges, BitTorrent’s Torrent Entertainment Network store would soon look uncompetitive with the likes of Apple’s iTunes Store and Microsoft’s Xbox Marketplace — which prompted Best Buy to back out of talks to acquire TEN for $15 million.
As for BitTorrent’s content-delivery network, it was premised on the notion that BitTorrent would negotiate with ISPs to get privileged delivery for their file-sharing packets, while Comcast blocked others. With the FCC forcing Comcast to treat all file-sharing traffic equally, the promise of that business evaporated.
The obvious problem with this is that Apple, Microsoft, Akamai, et al haven’t negotiated privileged bandwidth agreements with ISPs either. If users have to pay their ISPs extra to download a 10 gig HD movie from BitTorrent, they’re going to have to do the same to download HD movies from iTunes or the XBox store. BitTorrent’s big advantage is that they face dramatically lower bandwidth costs on the other side of the pipe, because their users share files with each other rather than everyone getting bandwidth from the server. If bandwidth caps and metering doom BitTorrent, then they doom iTunes and the XBox store too. Somehow, I don’t think we’re about to see the end of video download services.
De Tocqueville is famous for discussing the American way of enlightened self-interest, in which there are mixed elements of private and public goods involved. But when it comes to self-interested lobbying by the tech industry, it’s the words of an American rapper, not a French rapporteur, that I’d like to discuss.
“Innovation!” – “openness” – “jobs” – “choice.” There’s a lot of buzzword hype thrown out by IT companies. Policymakers hear these buzzwords all the time, which are usually connected to how certain regulatory polices can benefit the public interest the most.
So, what does it all mean? Well, a recently released paper of mine tells you absolutely nothing about which IT polices are better than others. That’s right, nada. Zilch. Zippo.
Instead, the paper — Understanding the IT Lobby: An Insider’s Guide — is an explanatory of business models in the Information Technology industry, and the public policies that can help or harm companies over their competitors. It’s not a Scott McClellan tell-all – rather it connects the dots between public policy rhetoric and licensing, service, and ad-based business models.
The gist: the pursuit of one public policy can disadvantage not just one company, but an entire business model. 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. Learn more about TLF →
Channeling Jonathan Zittrain, Alex Curtis of Public Knowledge continues his incessant ranting against Apple and the iPhone for supposedly not being open enough and, therefore, somehow harming consumers and 3rd party developers. In his essay today about the supposed evils of the iPhone App Store, he accuses Apple of an “1984 kind of total control.”
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.