October 2010

One Cheer for Patent Trolls

by on October 11, 2010 · 11 comments

“On the whole, the results certainly seem to suggest that patent trolls with software patents do very much view the system as a lottery ticket, and they’re willing to use really weak patents to try to win that prize. That is not at all what the patent system is designed to do, but it’s how the incentives have been structured — and that seems like a pretty big problem that isn’t solved just by showing how many of these lawsuits fail. The amount of time and resources wasted on those lawsuits, as well as the number of companies who pay up without completing a lawsuit, suggest that there is still a major problem to be dealt with.”

So writes the always-thoughtful Mike Masnick at Techdirt.  He is referring here to a newly-published article by John R. Allison, Joshua Walker and Mark Lemley, released as a Stanford Law and Economics Olin Working Paper.  Mike has written frequently about patent trolls—companies that buy up patents from inventors and then make money by litigating or threatening to litigate against potential infringers—and never with much sympathy. Continue reading →

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Fixated on Data Breach Notification?

by on October 11, 2010 · 0 comments

Well, then, this post (via Adam Shostack) is for you!

“Dissent” goes through the numbers revealed in the first year of data breach reporting under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act regulations. The post gives extremely light treatment to the possibility—indeed, the likelihood—of noncompliance with the regulations due to unawareness of breaches or judgments that reporting is more dangerous than not reporting.

But one also must wonder . . . Why does this matter?

Data breach notification is the grown-up version of the schoolyard taunt: “Your epidermis is showing!” The questions are: What part of the epidermis? And what social or economic consequences does it have?

Of course, these statistics may be interesting and relevant to security professionals, but harm is where the rubber hits the road for consumer protection. (See this interesting colloquy recently on Concurring Opinions.) Some data breaches have some relationship to consumer harm, but gross breach statistics don’t seem to be a window onto harm prevention.

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The Geocentric Theory of Political Media

by on October 11, 2010 · 2 comments

“There’s no question [cable news is] contributing to the splintering of the political system and the means by which people get information about that system,” said Robert Thompson, who runs the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “If there’s no standard base line of fact and reporting, where can the conversation go?”

This, from “Cable News Chatter is Changing the Electoral Landscape,” by Howard Kurtz and Karen Tumulty in today’s Washington Post.

Cable news and, of course, the Internet are definitely splintering the media environment. But there’s a big difference between the political system and the means by which people get information about it. Why on earth should there be a standard base line on which all political conversation must rest?

Speaking of earth, people used to think that the earth was at the center of the universe. Other planets moved erratically with relation to ours, and that was difficult to explain. Now we know that it is the sun at the center of our solar system, and the movements of planets, stars, and galaxies have been rationalized.

Many of us occupy different political and ideological planets, some of which have similar orbits, some very different. Slowly, sometimes, we can align our orbits by inquiring and debating about the nature of humankind, what is good, and the social systems that produce the greatest good for the greatest number.

Finding out that we should have these debates is not a threat to the political system. It’s a threat to the geocentric model of the political system, in which the three major networks provided the “standard base line of fact and reporting.”

The media universe is still not splintered enough, in my opinion. But, increasingly, the conversation will more easily go wherever it is supposed to go, unhindered by the false authority of a small number of news executives.

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Is It Really Practical to Ban All Talking While Driving?

by on October 9, 2010 · 2 comments

Distracted driving is a serious problem. When you’re flying down the road at speed maneuvering a 2-ton piece of machinery, you need to be paying attention to the road to keep yourself, and others around you, safe.  Distractions of any sort can be dangerous and undercut the driver’s ability to stay focused.  And it’s certainly true that digital devices can be among the biggest distractions. But I think we have to ask some practical questions about just how far law can and should go to minimize that distraction.

I raise this issue because, according to this Bloomberg article yesterday, “U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood says he believes motorists are distracted by any use of mobile phones while driving, including hands-free calls, as his department begins research that may lead him to push for a ban.”  Sec. LaHood believes that even hands-free phone conversations are a “cognitive distraction” and should be prohibited.  Also, “his concerns extend to vehicle information and entertainment systems such as Ford Motor Co.’s Sync and General Motors Co.’s OnStar,” which means that almost every conceivable in-vehicle technology could be regulated under LaHood’s scheme.

To be clear, I’m not necessarily opposed to laws addressing talking on phones or texting while driving since those actions can have dangerous consequences. But I’ve always preferred a more generic enforcement strategy when it comes to distracted driving laws.  As I noted in my old 2007 essay, “Banning In-Car Technologies Won’t Work,” to the extent law enforcement needs to be brought into the picture it should be done in a technology-agnostic or activity-agnostic fashion. I went on to argue: Continue reading →

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“Modernizers” vs. “Preservationists”: Another Cut at the Optimist vs. Pessimist Divide

by on October 8, 2010 · 60 comments

As I continue to do research for what will become a chapter-length version of my old essay, “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society,” I am reading or re-reading some old books that have touched upon these debates through the years.  Earlier this week, after an event over at ITIF, my friend Rob Atkinson reminded me that he had discussed some of these issues in his 2004 book, The Past and Future of America’s Economy.  Specifically, in Chapter 6, “The New Economy and Its Discontents,” Rob showed how “American history is rife with resistance to change,” as he recounts some of the heated battles over previous industrial / technological revolutions. I really loved this bit on page 201:

This conflict between stability and progress, security and prosperity, dynamism and stasis, has led to the creation of a major political fault line in American politics. On one side are those who welcome the future and look at the New Economy as largely positive. On the other are those who resist change and see only the risks of new technologies and the New Economy.  As a result, a political divide is emerging between preservationists who want to hold onto the past and modernizers who recognize that new times require new means.

I like those “Preservationists” vs. “Modernizers” descriptors, and I like the fact that Rob also uses the “dynamism and stasis” paradigm, which he borrowed from Virginia Postrel, who contrasted those conflicting worldviews in her 1998 book, The Future and Its Enemies.  As I noted in my essay about “Two Schools of Internet Pessimism,” I think that “dynamist vs. stasis” model — more than anything else I’ve read before or since — best explains the chasm that separates competing schools of thinking about the Internet’s impact on culture, economy, and society. Continue reading →

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Silicon Valley, If You Dance with the Devil, Don’t be Surprised When You Get Burnt

by on October 7, 2010 · 1 comment

I’m always amused when I read stories quoting high-tech company leaders bemoaning the fact that they supposedly don’t get enough respect from Washington legislators or regulators.  The latest example comes from a story in today’s Politico (“D.C. Crowd’s Path to Silicon Valley” by Tony Romm) which begins by noting that, “A trek to Silicon Valley has become a must-do for D.C. lawmakers seeking to stress their business and tech bona fides while developing relationships that could lead to big campaign donations down the road.”  And yet it ends with this ironic bit:

Silicon Valley types typically don’t mind hosting lawmakers, as the trips give businesses out West the chance to put issues and needs on the minds of their regulators. But tech bellwethers sometimes don’t take kindly to lawmakers who treat the valley as an endless ATM. “All too often, people see Silicon Valley as the wallet and set aside the words or wisdom that [it] can provide,” said Carl Guardino, president and CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.

Well, boo-hoo.  If Mr. Guardino and his fellow Silicon Valley travelers don’t like being treated like an ATM, then they should stop behaving like one!  No one makes them give a dime to any politician.  And once you start playing this game, you shouldn’t be surprised by how quickly you’ll become entrenched in the cesspool that is Beltway politics and become less and less focused on actually innovating and serving consumers.

I wish people like this would go back and read “Why Silicon Valley Should Not Normalize Relations with Washington, D.C.” by Cypress Semiconductor President and CEO T.J. Rodgers.  Everything he said 10 years ago has come true.  Continue reading →

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Jamie Boyle & Paul Jones on the Open Internet, Generativity, and Competition

by on October 6, 2010 · 6 comments

Last week, I had the pleasure of discussing net neutrality with James Boyle, a Duke Law Professor and the co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, and Paul Jones, the director of ibiblio, on WUNC’s The State of Things radio program. Our hour-long discussion touched on a number of important tech policy topics, and I highly recommend giving the show a listen (download the MP3 here) if you’re interested in hearing the insights of two very thoughtful scholars and critics of cyber-libertarianism.

I’m a big admirer of Boyle and Jones, who’ve both done a lot of excellent work studying copyright and public domain in the information age. While I don’t share their views on the merits of net neutrality regulation — or, perhaps, of government regulation in general — there’s much common ground between us on many issues, including intellectual property, free speech, and government surveillance.

For folks who don’t want to spend an hour listening to our discussion, I’ve typed up a brief summary of the questions we attempted to tackle in our discussion and the various arguments we raised. My apologies if I’ve mischaracterized any arguments or statements  — if you want to know what was actually said, go listen to the whole interview!

Continue reading →

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Problems in Public Utility Paradise, Part 14: Muni Wi-fi Postmortem

by on October 6, 2010 · 5 comments

Many of the installments of our ongoing ”Problems in Public Utility Paradise” series here at the TLF have discussed the multiple municipal wi-fi failures of the past few years. Six or so years ago, there was quixotic euphoria out there regarding the prospects for muni wi-fi in numerous cities across America — which was egged on by a cabal of utopian public policy advocates and wireless networking firms eager for a bite of a government service contract.  A veritable ‘if-you-build-it-they-will-come’ mentality motivated the movement as any suggestion that the model didn’t have legs was treated as heresy.  Indeed, as I noted here before, when I wrote a white paper back in 2005 entitled “Risky Business: Philadelphia’s Plan for Providing Wi-Fi Service,” and kicked it off with the following question: “Should taxpayers finance government entry into an increasingly competitive, but technologically volatile, business market?,” I received a shocking amount of vitriolic hate mail for such a nerdy subject.  But facts are pesky things and the experiment with muni wi-fi has proven to be even worse than many of us predicted back then.

A new piece by Christopher Mims over at MIT’s Technology Review (“Where’s All the Free Wi-Fi We Were Promised?“) notes that “no technology happens in a vacuum, and where the laws of the land abut the laws of nature, physics will carve your best-laid plans into a heap of sundered limbs every time.” He continues, “the failure of municipal WiFi is an object lesson in the dangers of techno-utopianism. It’s a failure of intuition — the sort of mistake we make when we want something to be right.”  Too true.  Mims was inspired to pen his essay after reading a new paper, “A Postmortem Look at Citywide WiFi“, by Eric M. Fraser, the Executive Director for Research at the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation.  “Almost everyone was fooled by the promise of citywide WiFi,” Fraser notes, because of the promise of a “wireless fantasy land” that would almost magically spread cheap broadband to the masses.  But, for a variety of reasons — most of which are technical in nature — muni wifi failed.  Fraser summarizes as follows: Continue reading →

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Some Thoughts on Rob Atkinson’s Who’s Who in Internet Politics

by on October 5, 2010 · 6 comments

Today it was my pleasure to take part in an Information Technology and Innovation Foundation discussion about Rob Atkinson’s interesting new white paper, “Who’s Who in Internet Politics: A Taxonomy of Information Technology Policy Perspectives .”  [You can find the video of the event here or embeded down below.]  Rob divides the information technology landscape into 8 tribes: cyber-libertarians, social engineers, free marketers, moderates, moral conservatives, old economy regulators, tech companies and trade associations, and bricks-and-mortars. Most of those are fairly self-explanatory, but during my response time, I pushed back on a few of these groupings.

First, I pointed out that there really didn’t seem to much of a difference between “cyber-libertarians” and “free marketers.”  Of course, part of the reason I feel this way is because I believe Rob is improperly equating cyber-libertarianism with Internet exceptionalism.  I’ve pointed out the distinction between the two in this essay with Berin Szoka.  We note that Internet exceptionalists are essentially first cousins to cyber-libertarians in that both groups believe that the Internet has changed culture and history profoundly and is deserving of special care before governments intervene. But cyber-libertarianism, properly understood, is something more than just special treatment for the Net.  It refers to the belief that individuals—acting in whatever capacity they choose (as citizens, consumers, companies, or collectives)—should be at liberty to pursue their own tastes and interests online. Again, please see “Cyber-Libertarianism: The Case for Real Internet Freedom” by Berin and me for more details. Continue reading →

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Facebook Was the ‘Next Google’

by on October 5, 2010 · 6 comments

Since I contributed $10 to the $23 million The Social Network grossed nationally this weekend, I see no reason not to blog some thoughts on the film.

First of all, the movie, which purports to be a history of the founding of Facebook, succeeds wildly as entertainment. As you may have heard by now, the film basically posits that if its founder, Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, had not been dumped by his girlfriend for questioning the academic credibility of her school, Boston University, Facebook may never have existed at all.

Whether or not the film’s facts are straight on this is another matter. Nonetheless, it is not my purpose to comment extensively on either the film or its veracity, other than to recommend it highly as long as you ingest the story and characters with the copious grains of salt.

But some facts the film depicts are undeniable. The most significant for my purposes here is that the idea that became Facebook was germinated in the fall of 2003, just six years ago, and, as a website, was launched on the Harvard campus in February 2004.

Continue reading →

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