The DC Chapter of Internet Society is being reborn, and holding its first event on Monday, September 14 on “Internet 2020” at the Capitol Visitors Center, 6:30-8pm. The discussion will be moderated by Mike Nelson, the self-described cyber-libertarian who runs Georgetown University and include:
- Leslie Daigle, Chief Internet Technology Officer, Internet Society
- Eric Burger, Chief Technology Officer, Neustar
- Steve Crocker, Internet pioneer and CEO, Shinkuro, Inc.
Should be interesting. Hope to see you TechLiberationistas there!
I really appreciate the venture capitalists (VCs) in Silicon Valley subsidizing my soapbox at Twitter. Seriously, it is an absolutely awesome platform for getting a message out to the masses. But at some point I worry that the gravy train will come to an end and that users will have to start picking up part of the tab. After all, will those VCs continue to subsidize Twitter if it never turns a profit? According to the Wikipedia entry about Twitter:
In total, Twitter has raised over US$57 million from venture capitalists. The exact amounts of funding have not been publicly released. Twitter’s first round of funding was for an undisclosed amount that is rumored to have been between $1 million and $5 million. Its B round of funding in 2008 was for $22 million and its C round of funding in 2009 was for $35 million from Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital along with an undisclosed amount from other investors including Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital. Twitter is backed by Union Square Ventures, Digital Garage, Spark Capital, and Bezos Expeditions.
Again, thank you VCs! But, like them, I do wonder when and how Twitter will bring in some cash. Is there a “freemium” model that could work? Perhaps. “Pro” or corporate accounts have been rumored to be in the works. Getting someone else to pick up the tab that way might bring in enough cash for Twitter to allow the free ride to continue for the rest of us. But what about advertising? It’s been the “mother’s milk” of most online media and platforms for some time now, and Twitter seems perfectly suited to insert a few banner ads or contextual ads here and there. It could be happening sooner than you think. Austin Modine of The Register notes in a new piece, “Twitter ‘Leaves Door Open’ for Targeted Ads,” that: Continue reading →
I vented my frustration earlier today with the FCC’s failure to make comments it receives easily accessible to the public—which means, more than anything, making them full-text searchable. This may seem like Inside Baseball to many, but it’s not. It’s a failure of the democratic process, a waste of taxpayer dollars, and a testimony to the general incompetence of bureaucracies, regardless of who’s running them. It denies the public an easy way to follow what goes on inside Washington, while essentially subsidizing law firms who get to bill clients for having paralegals or junior associates do things that existing web technology makes completely unnecessary—like reading through every comment in a document (at the rate of hundreds of dollars per hour) instead of just looking for keywords in a full-text search.
Later in the day the FCC announced:
- RSS feeds for all news from the agency (1 general feed + 48 issue-specific feeds);
- “FCC Connect” a page for Social Media Sites—so you can follow the FCC on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook; and
- A “crowdsourcing platform” to discuss the administration’s plan to transfer nearly $8 billion from taxpayers to broadband providers.
I’m thrilled about the RSS feeds, which go a long way in letting all Americans know what the FCC does, supposedly in the “public interest.” Still, I can’t help but note that the FCC waited until after a huge discussion about whether RSS is dead to finally start using RSS in a serious way—fully a decade after the birth of the RSS standard. Better late than never, I suppose.
FCC Connect is also good news: once you have an RSS feed, there’s really no reason not to pipe that feed into as many platforms as possible—which is precisely why RSS isn’t dead, even if most people will never use an RSS reader.
But I’m less thrilled about the crowdsourcing platform. Continue reading →
Michael Anderson from Niemanlab.org reports:
In the two months since Ann Arbor became the nation’s newest no-newspaper town, there’s been lots of talk about its status as ground zero for the new ecosystem of Web-native niche outlets. But I wanted to know: In a business that’s always been oiled by routine — midnight press runs, 6 a.m. broadcasts, 11 a.m. news meetings, 6:30 deadlines — how will tomorrow’s hyperlocal news professionals structure their day? So, a few weeks after the Ann Arbor News folded, I spent a morning with its most established successor, the one-year-old, online-only Ann Arbor Chronicle, to get a sense for the future of the newsroom routine.
Anderson’s story paints a vivid picture of entrepreneurship in news delivery, at least on the editorial side of the operation. I’d love to hear more about the business side of the venture. How much revenue are these sites generating per view or per user? How can they increase revenue? Are they experimenting with selling their ad inventory through ad networks that offer personalized (“behaviorally targeted”) ads to increase revenue? What do they think of Google’s new micropayments venture?
ArsTechnica has a great write-up of WashingtonWatch.com’s earmarks project and a top earmark hunter, Andi Osiek.
Back from vacation and digging out, I will be furiously working over the weekend to check the data we collected, flag earmarks that made it into bills, and award the prizes to the top earmark hunters in the contest.
Did you know you can escape the early termination fee in your wireless contract simply by getting someone else to take over the contract? I discovered this little gem recently while reading the Federal Communications Commission’s 2008 report on competition in the wireless industry , released earlier this year (mentioned in paragraph 186, if you’re curious).
Cell phone companies charge early termination fees of up to $200. They charge these fees because they usually sell phones at subsidized prices and then get reimbursed over the life of the contract via the monthly fee. If someone else takes over my contract, the company still gets its money, so they’re OK with the practice of transferring the contract to someone else.
Consumer writers such as David Wood and Patrick at cashmoneylife.com explain how to transfer your contract to someone else. Web sites match up people who want to get out of their contracts with people who want to take over these contracts. Some web sites offer to put parties in touch with each other for free. Others charge $20 — far below the typical early termination fee.
Score another victory for wily entrepreneurs who invented a win-win solution that benefits consumers and wireless phone companies as well. The Federal Communications Commission report cites 2006 and 2007 Wall Street Journal articles on this, so it’s not exactly a secret. (I was unaware of it until now only because my wife and I use 5 year old cell phones, so we’ve been on a month-to-month wireless contract for years and have never had to look for a way around the early termination fee.)
But for the past several years, federal legislators have been pushing wireless companies to prorate their early termination fees, supposedly because consumers have no choice but to pay the fee if they want to get out of a contract before it concludes. In October 2007, I testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportion on a piece of legislation called the “Cell Phone Consumer Empowerment Act.” The bill included a requirement that wireless companies prorate their early termination fees. Apparently to head off the legislation or FCC regulation, the day before the hearing, AT&T announced it would follow Verizon’s lead and prorate its early termination fees; other major carriers followed suit. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), sponsor of the legislation, took credit for the change, thanking AT&T for beginning the fee prorationing on her birthday.
When wireless companies prorate fees, they usually reduce them by $5 per month. Trading my contract, on the other hand, lets me escape the fee altogether. So who got me a better deal — the federal government, or a pack of entrepreneurs I’ve never met?
There is no better security for data than not collecting it in the first place. And when data is no longer needed, the best security for it is to destroy it.
That’s why I was surprised to see a request from the chairman and ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee asking the Transportation Security Administration to preserve data that is scheduled for destruction.
Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) attended and spoke at the first meeting of the DHS Privacy Committee four years ago. I have regarded him as a champion of privacy since then. But he and Rep. Peter King (R-NY) want biometric data collected for the defunct Registered Traveler program preserved on the chance that Registered Traveler is revived. This is an inappropriate request.
Anyone who submits data to the government should recognize the risk that it will be preserved longer than promised and put to new uses. There were merits to the Clear system within Registered Traveler. I wrote about them in my book and testified about them in 2005. One of the serious demerits is that Registered Traveler created stores of biometric data that politicians are now trying to control.
Read Part II here
In February, Congress passed the Obama Administration’s “(Five Year) National Broadband Plan,” part of the so-called “Stimulus.” (As economist Russ Roberts put it, government “stimulus” is “like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end.”) The Plan transfers $7.2 billion from taxpayers to broadband providers in subsides to promote broadband build-out. More than 10,000 comments have been filed on the plan. Once you get past the constitutional nicety of whether Congress has the power to subsidize “internal improvements” like broadband (it doesn’t), you might wonder just how well your money will be spent by all these techno-supplicants for the latest craze in corporate welfare.
The good news is that these comments are available online. Hurray for transparency! The bad news is that… they’re available online—specifically on the FCC’s Electronic Comments Filing System (ECFS). Anyone who’s used the web more recently than 1998 will cringe the first time they try to use ECFS to find anything, as Jerry has noted. Apart from the cumbersome, highly unintuitive interface, the problem is that there’s no way to search the text of comments! You can only search pre-defined fields like like “law firm,” and if you don’t enter a value in precisely the right way, you get nada.
Bill Cline, the Chief of the Reference Information Center for the FCC’s Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau tries hard to put the best face on this farce of e-government, explaining:
Continue reading →
It’s bad enough that America educates the world’s best and brightest, only to send them home for lack of visas. But to drive away immigrants who come to the U.S. and start businesses is just unconscionable. I hope Paul Graham’s idea for a “Founder Visa” takes off: 10,000 / year for founders of companies that are started in the U.S. Brad Feld has a great column on this today, answering questions about how the visa would work.
As the Economist said on the related issue of H1-B visas for skilled foreign workers:
SILICON VALLEY, as the old joke goes, was built on ICs—Indians and Chinese that is, not integrated circuits. As of the last decennial census, in 2000, more than half of all the engineers in the valley were foreign-born, and about half of those were either Indian or Chinese—and since 2000 the ratio of Indians and Chinese is reckoned to have gone up steeply. Understandably, therefore Silicon Valley has strong views on America’s visa regime.
I suspect the demographics for entrepreneurs are similar, especially in Sillicon Valley, which has long been driven largely by “enginpreneurs” rather than MBAs.
What an absurd country we live in: We accept, for better or worse, massive illegal immigration across our porous southern border as a fact of life, but can’t muster the political will to give legal status to the most creative and innovative from around the world drawn to the Land of Opportunity made possible by capitalism. So, being dutiful and law-abiding, these “Talented Tenth” go home to suffer under the dead weight of bureaucracies even more oppressive, incompetent and corrupt than our own. How sad.
[This is part of an ongoing series about “Problems in Public Utility Paradise.”]
According to this recent article by Donald Meyers of the Salt Lake City Tribune, five candidates for mayor of Provo, Utah are falling all over themselves to declare their support for continuing the public utility fiasco that is iProvo, the city’s fiber-to-the-home network. According to Wikipedia, it is the largest municipally-owned Fiber to the Home network in the United States.” Steve Titch of the Reason Foundation, who has been following iProvo for many years, has documented its millions of dollars of losses and risk to taxpayers, saying “iProvo is a dismal financial failure by any standard.” But that isn’t stopping city officials and mayoral candidates from proposing to throw more money at this massive “if-you-build-it-they-will-come” fantasy. “One thing most of the candidates running for mayor agree on: iProvo is too important to fail, even if it means bailing out the company that bought it,” Meyers reports. Here’s the relevant passages from his article, with the key bits of bad info highlighted:
The city sold the troubled fiber-optic network to Broadweave Networks in 2008 in a deal in which Broadweave would take over the payments on the city’s $39.6 million bond. Since November, Broadweave has had the city draw on its $6 million surety deposit to make its bond payments in a bid to build up cash to pay for growth.
In August, Veracity Communications merged with Broadweave, becoming Veracity Networks. The company’s leaders, Drew Peterson and David Moon, have asked the city to restructure the payment schedule to allow the company to cut back on its payments for 18 months while it strengthens its coffers. It later would pay extra money over a seven-year period and reimburse the city with interest. Provo would draw on its Energy Department’s reserves to make up the shortfall in bond payments — $1.4 million.
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.
More on the FCC’s e-Government Transparency Efforts: ECFS, RSS, Social Media & Setting Priorities
by Berin Szoka on September 11, 2009 · 12 comments
I vented my frustration earlier today with the FCC’s failure to make comments it receives easily accessible to the public—which means, more than anything, making them full-text searchable. This may seem like Inside Baseball to many, but it’s not. It’s a failure of the democratic process, a waste of taxpayer dollars, and a testimony to the general incompetence of bureaucracies, regardless of who’s running them. It denies the public an easy way to follow what goes on inside Washington, while essentially subsidizing law firms who get to bill clients for having paralegals or junior associates do things that existing web technology makes completely unnecessary—like reading through every comment in a document (at the rate of hundreds of dollars per hour) instead of just looking for keywords in a full-text search.
Later in the day the FCC announced:
I’m thrilled about the RSS feeds, which go a long way in letting all Americans know what the FCC does, supposedly in the “public interest.” Still, I can’t help but note that the FCC waited until after a huge discussion about whether RSS is dead to finally start using RSS in a serious way—fully a decade after the birth of the RSS standard. Better late than never, I suppose.
FCC Connect is also good news: once you have an RSS feed, there’s really no reason not to pipe that feed into as many platforms as possible—which is precisely why RSS isn’t dead, even if most people will never use an RSS reader.
But I’m less thrilled about the crowdsourcing platform. Continue reading →