Don Kellogg, Senior Manager, Research and Insights/Telecom Practice at The Nielsen Company, has a interesting essay up over at the Nielsen Wire about smartphone competition. (“iPhone vs. Android“) It includes some updated quarterly data about the state of the mobile marketplace and, once again, I am just blown away at the continuing degree of operating system (OS)-level competition.
As I have noted here before, this war among Apple, Google, Microsoft, RIM (Blackberry), Palm, Symbian, and others has actually forced me to ask if we have “Too Much Platform Competition” in this arena. App developers must now craft their offerings for so many platforms that it has become a significant developmental hassle and expense. But hey, from a consumer perspective, this is great! (For more details, see Berin’s post on “The Fiercely Competitive Mobile OS & Device Markets.”)
Regardless, it’s still more proof that all the hand-wringing here in Washington about the state of wireless innovation is completely unfounded. It is shocking that we have this many developer platforms in play in the smartphone sector and I am still of the belief that things will eventually shake out to just 3 major OSs. So I don’t expect this degree of competition to last. But that’s OK, we can still have plenty of competition and innovation with fewer OSs.
The Online Safety and Technology Working Group (OSTWG) has just released its final report to Congress entitled, “Youth Safety on a Living Internet.” As I mentioned here last year, this government task force was established by the “Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act,” (part of the ‘‘Broadband Data Improvement Act’,’ Pub. L. No. 110-385) and its mission was to review and evaluate:
- The status of industry efforts to promote online safety through educational efforts, parental control technology, blocking and filtering software, age-appropriate labels for content or other technologies or initiatives designed to promote a safe online environment for children;
- The status of industry efforts to promote online safety among providers of electronic communications services and remote computing services by reporting apparent child pornography, including any obstacles to such reporting;
- The practices of electronic communications service providers and remote computing service providers related to record retention in connection with crimes against children; and,
- The development of technologies to help parents shield their children from inappropriate material on the Internet.
The task force included over 30 experts from academia, industry, advocacy groups, and think tanks. It was my great honor to be a member of OSTWG and to serve as the chair of 1 of the 4 subcommittees. The four subcommittees addressed: data retention, child pornography reporting, educational efforts, and parental controls technologies. I chaired that last subcommittee on parental controls.
Our conclusions will not be surprising to those who have read previous online safety task force reports, which I have summarized in 2009 white paper, “Five Online Safety Task Forces Agree: Education, Empowerment & Self-Regulation Are the Answer.” Generally speaking, we concluded that there is no silver-bullet technical solution to online child safety concerns. Instead – and again in agreement with previous research and task force reports – we have concluded that a diverse toolbox and a “layered approach” must be brought to bear on these problems and concerns. Here’s how we put it in the report:
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Companies often promote consistent and reliable customer experiences. KLM touts itself as “the reliable airline” while Michelin touts its dependability “because so much is riding on your tires.” And now we have Yahoo, who announced that it will be increasing the social networking functionality in Yahoo Mail. Yahoo has the ability to promote consistency in determining user defaults for sharing information.
But social networking is a product much different than most – it is participatory. Passengers can’t fly airplanes and drivers don’t design tire tread, but social networking users control what and with whom they share information.
So what happens when a social networking service changes functionality or adds new features? How does a company be consistent in carrying-over a user’s preference from the prior version to the new one? What assumptions should it make on user privacy preferences for new features?
These considerations matter whenever an online service tries to increase its social networking functionality. Last week, Facebook unveiled new privacy controls, and we blogged that it was a welcome response to clear-up confusion. In the coming weeks Yahoo will change how status updates work in Yahoo Mail. Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch article describes it well:
[C]urrently to see status updates for others in Yahoo Mail, you have to have a mutual follow, meaning both people have agreed to be “friends.” You can then see that user’s Yahoo status updates as well as updates on third party services that they have added to their Yahoo profile as well. In the new version there will no longer be a requirement for a mutual follow. So, like on Twitter, users can follow whomever they choose. This isn’t actually a dramatic change for Yahoo, since users can follow others in this way already on Yahoo Messenger.
Like Google and Facebook before it, Yahoo is adding features to make its service more “social.” And because of the scrutiny over the changes by Google and Facebook, Yahoo seems to be going out of its way to assure users that they can rely and depend on Yahoo. According to the Yahoo Corporate Blog: Continue reading →
As I’ve noted here before, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has an ongoing proceeding asking “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?” The agency has hosted two workshops on the issue and a third is scheduled for June 15th at the National Press Club. Recently, the FTC released a 47-page staff discussion draft entitled “Potential Policy Recommendations to Support the Reinvention of Journalism,” which outlines dozens of proposals that have been set forth in recent years to “save journalism,” “reinvent media,” or support various forms of so-called “public interest programming.” [I’ve embedded the document down below.] Although the FTC makes it very clear on the first page of the discussion draft that it “does not represent final conclusions or recommendations by the Commission or FTC staff [and] it is solely for purposes of discussion,” the document is drawing scrutiny and raising concern since it might foreshadow where the FTC (and Obama Administration) could be heading on this front.
Some of those raising a stink about the FTC draft include: Jeff Jarvis (“FTC Protects Journalism’s Past“); Rob Port (“Federal Government Considering “iPad Tax” To Subsidize Journalism“); Mark Tapscott: “(Will Journalists Wake up in Time to Save Journalism from Obama’s FTC?”); and Andrew Malcolm of the Los Angeles Times (“Obama’s FTC Plan to Reinvent America’s News Media“), who says, “this FTC study is rated R for anyone who thinks the federal government, the object of copious news coverage itself, has no business deciding which sectors of the private media business survive and thrive through its support, subsidies and encouragement with things like tax incentives. Yet that’s what this Obama administration paper is suggesting as another of the ex-community organizer’s galactic reform plans.” Ouch!
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Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) hosted an all-day workshop on “Protecting Kids’ Privacy Online,” which looked into the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA) and challenges posed to its enforcement by new technological developments. The FTC staff did a nice job bringing together and moderating 5 panels worth of participants, all of whom had plenty of interesting things to say about the future of COPPA. But I was more struck by what was not said yesterday. Namely, there was:
- ZERO explanation of the supposed harms of advertising, marketing, and data collection. Advertising-bashing is an old sport here in Washington, so I guess I should not have been surprised to hear several panelists yesterday engaging in teeth-gnashing and hand-wringing about advertising, marketing, and the data collection methods that make it possible. But this grousing just went on and on without any explanation by the critics of the supposed harms that would result from it.
- ZERO appreciation of the benefits of advertising, marketing, and data collection. Not once yesterday — NOT ONCE — did anyone pause to ask what it is that makes all these wonderful online sites, services and content free (or dirt cheap) to consumers. Everyone at this show was guilty of the “manna fallacy” (that all this stuff just falls magically to Earth from the Net Gods above). Well, back here in the real world, something has to pay for all those goodies, and that something is advertising and marketing, which are facilitated by data collection! Or would you like to pay $19.95 a month for each of those currently free sites and services? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
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Professor Crim Pro I ain’t, but it seems to me that anybody who has used a computer can pretty easily grasp the holding of Berghuis v. Thompkins, 560 U.S. __, No. 08-1470 (June 1, 2010) [PDF]. In that opinion, handed down just yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court toggled the default on the Miranda warning. A five-justice majority held that silence will not suffice for citizens who want to invoke Miranda’s protections against self-incrimination; we now must ask for our Constitutional rights. Think of it like a computer program that annoyingly assumes you want unsolicited advice from a chirpy paper clip–except this paper clip throws you in cuffs and tazes you if you talk back.
The Berghuis decision inspires me to offer a new piece of legal armor—this time in the form of a t-shirt:
Click on the picture to buy a shirt, or borrow the text (I’ve uncopyrighted it) to make your own version from scratch. Combine that notice of your Miranda rights with the bumper sticker and magnetic sign I offered earlier, in defense of your rights to record and report what public officials do to you, and you might just dodge some serious legal hurt. Or—who knows?—you might inspire some interesting and important litigation.
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On April 29, I testified before the Senate Commerce Committee’s Consumer Protection Subcommittee on Examining Children’s Privacy: New Technologies and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Today, I filed 23 pages of responses to questions for the Congressional Record from Subcommittee Chairman Mark Pryor (D-AR), touching on many of the concerns and issues Adam Thierer and I developed in our May 2009 paper, COPPA 2.0: The New Battle over Privacy, Age Verification, Online Safety & Free Speech.
At the April hearing, Senators asked whether COPPA could be improved. Today, as in my April oral and written testimony, I again urged lawmakers to “tread carefully” because COPPA, as implemented, basically works. I explained why COPPA’s technological neutrality and flexibility should allow the FTC to keep pace with technological convergence and change without the need for legislative changes. But expanding the statute beyond its limited purposes, especially to cover adolescents under 18, could raise serious constitutional questions about the First Amendment rights of adults as well as older teens and site and service operators, and also have unintended consequences for the health of online content and services without necessarily significantly increasing the online privacy and safety of children.
The Committee’s follow-up questions also inquired about COPPA’s implementation, the subject of today’s FTC Roundtable. I noted that COPPA implementation has gone reasonably well, meeting its primary goal of enhancing parental involvement in children’s online activities, but that implementation has come at a price, since the costs of obtaining verifiable parental consent and otherwise complying with COPPA have, on the one hand, discouraged site and service operators from allowing children on their sites or offering child-oriented content, and, on the other hand, raised costs for child-oriented sites. The FTC could do more to lower compliance costs for website operators, thus allowing achievement of COPPA’s goals at a lower cost for parents and kids in foregone content and services.
Finally, I raised concerns about the FTC’s seeming invitation for changes to the COPPA statute itself. As a general matter, regulatory agencies should not be in the business of re-assessing the adequacy of their own powers, since the natural impulse of all bureaucracy is to grow. Though the agency has done a yeoman’s job of implementing COPPA, ultimately it is the responsibility of Congress, not the FTC, to make decisions about modifying the statute. Continue reading →
Pundits are foaming at the mouth about AT&T’s just-announced end to unlimited data packages for smartphones. Here is Jeff Jarvis calling the move “cynical,” “retrograde,” and “evil.” However, he provides no evidence that this is anything but AT&T facing economic reality. The iPhone was a revolution, and how much data people consume given an awesome device turned out to be much more than AT&T was ready for. Now they’re asking their customers who use the most data to pay more, and this is evil?
Not only is it not evil, it’s incredibly fair. Most people will probably pay less for service. The cheapest of AT&T’s new plans is $15 for 200 MB of data. That’s $15 cheaper than their current $30 for unlimited iPhone use. According to AT&T, 65 percent of their customers use less than 200 MB of data a month. I consider myself a heavy iPhone user, and I just came back from a trip to NYC on which my iPhone was the only device I took with me, and yet with 2 days left in my billing cycle, I’ve used 154 MB of data. So, AT&T’s change will actually be a price-cut for me and the majority of AT&T customers.
Yup, real evil.
Gina Trapani, blogger, author, software developer, and creator of ThinkTank, and Anil Dash, director of Expert Labs and blogging pioneer, talk about Expert Labs, an organization that seeks to improve government by letting policy makers tap into the collective wisdom of the public, and ThinkTank, an open source tool that the White House is using to crowdsource and sort policy ideas, insights, and recommendations offered through social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
Related Readings
Do check out the interview, and consider subscribing to the show on iTunes. Past guests have included James Grimmelman on online harassment and the Google Books case, Michael Geist on ACTA, Tom Hazlett on spectrum reform, and Tyler Cowen on just about everything.
Coming up in next two episodes we’ll have Nick Carr and Clay Shirky discussing their new books. So what are you waiting for? Subscribe!
Last Friday afternoon, as I was leaving my house to en route to the airport with the family for a short vacation, Nicholas Carr’s latest book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, arrived in my mailbox. I grabbed it, jumped in the car, flipped it open during the drive to Dulles Airport (don’t worry, the wife was driving), and began devouring it. I say “devour” because once I started reading it, I didn’t stop. I was wholeheartedly absorbed in the text from start to finish.
I tell you all this not just because Carr’s book is that good, but because according to the thesis he sets forth in The Shallows, fewer and fewer people are likely to be engaged in such contemplative, deep reading activities due to the highly distractive nature of the Internet and digital technologies. “With the exception of alphabets and number systems, the Net may well be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use,” Carr claims. “At the very least, it’s the most powerful that has come along since the book.” (p. 116) The Net and multimedia “strains our cognitive abilities, diminishing our learning and weakening our understanding,” he says. (p. 129) And we have no one to blame for this mess but ourselves:
We want to be interrupted, because each interruption brings us a valuable piece of information… And so we ask the Internet to keep interrupting us, in ever more and different ways. We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and the fragmentation of our thoughts, in return for the wealth of compelling or at least diverting information we receive. Tuning out is not an option many of us would consider. (p. 133-4)
Although, ultimately, Carr doesn’t quite convinced me that “The Web is a technology of forgetfulness” (p. 193), he has made a powerful case that its effects may not be as salubrious as many of us have assumed. 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.