October 2009

The Chicken Littles of Broadband

by James Gattuso on October 5, 2009 · 20 comments

Is the Internet in clear and present danger? Yes, say proponents of neutrality regulation of the Internet. In his speech last month calling for FCC neutrality regulations, Chairman Julius Genachowski stopped short of quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes, but did all he could to paint a dire picture of the Internet’s future: “This is not about protecting the Internet against imaginary dangers,” he said. If we wait too long to preserve a free and open Internet, it will be too late.”

The warning evoked a certain sense of deja vu, and for good reason. As Link Hoewing over at Verizon pointed out the other day, proponents of neutrality regulation “have been yelling ‘fire’ in the movie theater ever since 1999,” when they decried the trend toward cable firms providing exclusive ISP service on broadband networks, saying that the move would result in “more price increases and fewer choices for consumers and content providers alike.”

The end has been nigh many times since. In 2003, when a court upheld the FCC’s decision not to regulate broadband as a telecommunications service, Commissioner Michael Copps said “the Internet may be dying,” glumly predicting that if the Commission continued its free-market policies, “we will look back, shake our heads and wonder whatever happened to that open, dynamic and liberating Internet that once we knew.” Continue reading →

20 comments

Lessig: Mysterious, Boring—and LOL Funny!

by Jim Harper on October 5, 2009 · 12 comments

Update: The article is now online. Citizen Tools has collected some responses to it at the end of this post.

Lawrence Lessig has a provocatively titled article in the October 21 issue of The New Republic: “Against Transparency: The Perils of Openness in Government.” (Couldn’t find a link.) As a reader, I found it alternately mysterious, boring, and LOL funny.

I’m a person who notices premises, and Lessig sets up an interesting premise indeed: What he calls the “naked transparency movement”—unvarnished access to government data—“is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system off the cliff.”

Yes, Lessig has “change” and “pushing faith in our political system off the cliff” in opposition. So, the only thing that qualifies as “change” is improving faith in our political system? This pegged my bs detector.

Given the pains Lessig had taken to define the “naked transparency movement” and preemptively critique its effects, I was prepared for a straightforward criticism of public access to raw data. Continue reading →

12 comments

Teen Sexting: Punish or Educate ?

by Berin Szoka on October 5, 2009 · 22 comments

Playboy’s newly released 2009 College Sex Survey found that 49% of college students admitted to “Sexting” (having sent or received sexually explicit messages and pictures via cell phones). A survey conducted a year ago by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com found that 20% of teens (13-19) and 33% young adults (20-26) have “sent/posted nude or seminude pictures or video of themselves.” Together, these two studies give us a sense of just how prevalent sexting is.

Since nude photos of minors under 18 can be considered “child” pornography even if taken and shared voluntarily by the minor, there’s a very real possibility that minors will be prosecuted for common (if inappropriate) interactions with their peers under laws that were intended to prevent adults from exploiting children sexually. This is serious stuff indeed when one considers the dire consequences of being convicted not just of a felony, but a “sex offense.” Depending on state law, “sexters” put on a sex offender registry may spend the rest of their lives on sex registries as social pariahs with difficulty in finding a job, housing, being banned from using “social networking sites,” etc.

The study conducted last year offered some excellent advice for teens, young adults, and their parents. Perhaps we ought to spend more time focused on education than on criminalization. The tips are worth repeating here. First, for teens and kids: “Five Things to Think about Before Pressing Send:” Continue reading →

22 comments

Neutrality for thee, but not for me

by Bret Swanson on October 5, 2009 · 14 comments

In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, I address the once-again raging topic of “net neutrality” regulation of the Web. On September 21, new FCC chair Julius Genachowski proposed more formal neutrality regulations. Then on September 25, AT&T accused Google of violating the very neutrality rules the search company has sought for others. The gist of the complaint was that the new Google Voice service does not connect all phone calls the way other phone companies are required to do. Not an earthshaking matter in itself, but a good example of the perils of neutrality regulation. Continue reading →

14 comments

Wu (2006) is right on Google Books Search

by Jerry Brito on October 4, 2009 · 4 comments

In his latest Slate column, Tim Wu endorses a modified Google Books Search settlement because he fears that without such a deal–through which a giant like Google gets a de facto monopoly–we will never see an online library that includes orphan works and out-of-print books. He writes:

Books in strong demand, whether old (Dracula) or contemporary (Never Let Me Go), are in print and available no matter what happens. … The Google Book Search settlement makes it easier to get books few people want, like the Windows 95 Quick Reference Guide, whose current Amazon sales rank is 7,811,396, or The Wired Nation, which in 1972 predicted a utopian age centered on cable television. These are titles of enormous value for research and that appeal to a certain type of obsessive. Yet they are also unlikely to be worth much money.

And this, I hope, makes clear my point. A delivery system for books that few people want is not a business one builds for financial reasons. Over history, such projects are usually built not by the market but by mad emperors. No bean counter would have approved the Library of Alexandria or the Taj Mahal.

I’m curious how Prof. Wu can square that with what he wrote in his Slate review of Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail in 2006:

The products in the Long Tail are less popular in a mass sense, but still popular in a niche sense. What that means is that some businesses, like Amazon and Google, can make money not just on big hits, but by eating the Long Tail. They can live like a blue whale, growing fat by eating millions of tiny shrimp. …

What are the Long Tail’s limits? As a business model, it matters most 1) where the price of carrying additional inventory approaches zero and 2) where consumers have strong and heterogeneous preferences. When these two conditions are satisfied, a company can radically enlarge its inventory and make money raking in the niche demand. This is the lifeblood of a handful of products and companies, Apple’s iTunes, Netflix, and Google among them, all of which are basically in the business of aggregating content. It doesn’t cost much to add another song to iTunes—having 10,000 songs available costs about the same as having 1 million. Moreover, people’s music preferences are intense—fans of Tchaikovsky aren’t usually into Lordi.

Scanning books is expensive, but not so expensive that we need the government or a regulated utility provider (as Wu suggests) to do it. If a fair use exemption or other workaround was available, I’m sure we’d see more than one competitor jump into the space. Like Prof. Wu understood in 2006, and as Google knows now, there is lots of money to be made in hyper-narrow niches.

Cross-posted from Surprisingly Free. Leave a comment on the original article.

4 comments

Humor: “Social Media Guru” Video

by Adam Thierer on October 4, 2009 · 26 comments

Please pardon its vulgarity, but for those of you out there who are as tired of the b.s. dished out by many self-labeled “social media gurus” as I am, I think you will very much enjoy this bit of humor from freelance journalist Markham Nolan. Too funny.

26 comments

Singularity Summit 09

by Berin Szoka on October 3, 2009 · 9 comments

Is going on this weekend in New York. Check out the program here. I can’t wait to see all the video! Also check out the suggested reading list—in particular, Why Work Toward the Singularity. Here’s a teaser:

Why is the Singularity worth doing? The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence can’t possibly speak for everyone who cares about the Singularity. We can’t even presume to speak for the volunteers and donors of the Singularity Institute. But it seems like a good guess that many supporters of the Singularity have in common a sense of being present at a critical moment in history; of having the chance to win a victory for humanity by making the right choices for the right reasons. Like a spectator at the dawn of human intelligence, trying to answer directly why superintelligence matters chokes on a dozen different simultaneous replies; what matters is the entire future growing out of that beginning.

But it is still possible to be more specific about what kinds of problems we might expect to be solved. Some of the specific answers seem almost disrespectful to the potential bound up in superintelligence; human intelligence is more than an effective way for apes to obtain bananas. Nonetheless, modern-day agriculture is very effective at producing bananas, and if you had advanced nanotechnology at your disposal, energy and matter might be plentiful enough that you could produce a million tons of bananas on a whim. In a sense that’s what nanotechnology is – good-old-fashioned material technology pushed to the limit. This only begs the question of “So what?”, but the Singularity advances on this question as well; if people can become smarter, this moves humanity forward in ways that transcend the faster and easier production of more and more bananas. For one thing, we may become smart enough to answer the question “So what?”

In one sense, asking what specific problems will be solved is like asking Benjamin Franklin in the 1700s to predict electronic circuitry, computers, Artificial Intelligence, and the Singularity on the basis of his experimentation with electricity. Setting an upper bound on the impact of superintelligence is impossible; any given upper bound could turn out to have a simple workaround that we are too young as a civilization, or insufficiently intelligent as a species, to see in advance. We can try to describe lower bounds; if we can see how to solve a problem using more or faster technological intelligence of the kind humans use, then at least that problem is probably solvable for genuinely smarter-than-human intelligence. The problem may not be solved using the particular method we were thinking of, or the problem may be solved as a special case of a more general challenge; but we can still point to the problem and say: “This is part of what’s at stake in the Singularity.”

The rest of the essay is worth reading.

9 comments

Carper: We Trust Our Staff So You Can Trust Us

by Jim Harper on October 3, 2009 · 8 comments

A deep fissure between federal lawmaking practices and the Internet-fueled expectations of the people is just starting to open.

Here’s a fascinating interview with Senator Tom Carper (D-DE), in which he justifies not reading the legislation that he votes on.

He’s right that the bills Congress passes are almost incomprehensible, but he draws the wrong conclusion from it. It’s not OK to pass bills that you can’t read and literally don’t understand.

Congress and the bureaucracy will come to learn a lesson that other parts of our society have learned: The Internet changes things.

Because it is now possible to see legislation before Congress passes it, Americans now expect to see legislation before it passes. And they will come to expect that their representative understand it—in detail.

A machine has grown up in Washington over the past two hundred years where representatives rely on colleagues who rely on staff to write bills. This has not produced a desirable body of federal law, and it is not a process that the public will accept for much longer.

8 comments

What to Think About During the #googlefail

by Jim Harper on October 3, 2009 · 6 comments

Diversifying your investments.

We’ll learn soon enough why product lines across the Googlesphere are down this morning, and Google will grow stronger from learning how to protect against or prevent whatever is happening.

Consider this another reason to be dubious of “cloud” computing, though. If your data was on your own server, you’d be accessing it right now.

Wait – looks like it’s back up! Bye!

6 comments

The Economic Importance of Ad Networks: “Market Makers,” Not Parasites

by Berin Szoka on October 1, 2009 · 7 comments

Middlemen have been criticized as unnecessary for centuries, but as Mike Munger (Chairman of the Duke Political Science department and my undergrad mentor) explains, they are actually “market makers,” rather than parasites (or listen to his appearance on Russ Robert’s excellent EconTalk podcast). Warren Lee explains why ad networks—the middlemen who sell publishers’ (website operators) empty ad inventory to advertisers—serve such a critical role in making “Free!” possible for consumers by sustaining especially the Long Tail of online publishers: Continue reading →

7 comments

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