In his op-ed today, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg promised further changes to give users better control of privacy settings. It’s a clear signal that Facebook is seeking to meet user privacy preferences while still attracting enough ad revenue to keep the site free for everyone. But will these signals even be heard above all the noise made by Facebook’s critics?
That’s the question posed by my colleague Steve DelBianco at the NetChoice blog:
Radio engineers speak in terms of signal-to-noise ratio when they want to measure usable signals against a background of useless static. There’s been a lot of noise over Facebook recently, driven by a feeding frenzy of technology bloggers and journalists.
Their hyperbole hit a high note when some equated Facebook’s privacy drill to BP’s giant oil spill, while others wrote articles (or op-eds? It’s so hard to tell sometimes) that insult Facebook employees and impugn their motives. Just when you think nothing could rival the noise of Washington’s echo chamber, the technology pundits show us how a real shout-down is supposed to work.
Steve hits hard against the pile-on “feeding frenzy” on Facebook, going so far as to call critics “Chicken Little.” Strong, but also accurate.
While we all support the process of vocal user feedback to improve a product/service, with Facebook there’s more going on. Even Senators with a love for the limelight have jumped on the bandwagon by telling Facebook how to manage a service it gives us for free. Of course, management by Congress is the fastest way to suck innovation and competitiveness out of one of America’s fastest growing industries.
To the extent that productive criticism turns into deafening noise, Facebook’s positive signals will be unfairly distorted.
I’ve been wading through the FCC’s latest Mobile Wireless Competition Report, and articles about it trying to make sense of what the the agency might be up to on this front. It’s hard to get a read on where the agency may be going here. As my PFF colleague Mike Wendy suggested in his post on the FCC’s report, “far from press reports which state the FCC clearly determined the market is not ‘effectively competitive,’ well, that’s wrong. In fact, the FCC fails to make any such determination whatsoever.” Moreover, just flipping through the charts and tables of the 237-page report, one is struck by how dynamic this marketplace is, and how crazy it would be for the FCC to declare it anything other than effectively competitive and highly innovative.
Yet, the FCC and many others seem hung up on industry structure. In particular, there seems to be a lot of hand-wringing about increasing consolidation among the sector’s top players. But the data the FCC reproduces in the report seem to undermine that concern. For example, here’s a snapshot of the “Mobile Market Structure in Selected Countries,” which appears on pg. 197 of the FCC report. It shows how much more consolidated foreign mobile markets are relative to the U.S., which is true of wireline markets too. And you can find much more evidence of how competitive the marketplace is in these two reports.
Leo Laporte claimed today on Twitter that Facebook had censored Texas radio station, KNOI Real Talk 99.7 by banning them from Facebook “for talking about privacy issues and linking to my show and Diaspora [a Facebook competitor]. Since Leo has a twitter audience of 193,884 followers and an even larger number of listeners to his This Week In Tech (TWIT) podcast, this charge of censorship (allegedly involving another station, KRBR, too) will doubtless attract great deal of attention, and helped to lay the groundwork for imposing “neutrality” regulations on social networking sites—namely, Facebook.
Problem is: it’s just another false alarm in a long series of unfounded and/or grossly exaggerated claims. Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes responded:
The pages for KNOI and KRBR were disabled because one of our automated systems for detecting abuse identified improper actions on the account of the individual who also serves as the sole administrator of the Pages. The automated system is designed to keep spammers and potential harassers from abusing Facebook and is triggered when a user sends too many messages or seeks to friend too many people who ignore their requests. In this case, the user sent a large number of friend requests that were rejected. As a result, his account was disabled, and in consequence, the Pages for which he is the sole administrator were also disabled. The suggestion that our automated system has been programmed to censor those who criticize us is absurd.
Absurd, yes, but when the dust has settled, how many people will remember this technical explanation, when the compelling headline is “Facebook Censors Critics!”? There is a strong parallel here to arguments for net neutrality regulations, which always boil down to claims that Internet service providers will abuse their “gatekeeper” or “bottleneck” power to censor speech they don’t like or squelch competitive threats. Here are just a few of the silly anecdotes that are constantly bandied about in these debates as a sort of “string citation” of the need for regulatory intervention: Continue reading →
Since Jonathan Zittrain’s ideas about the “generativity” have permeated the intellectual climate of technology policy almost as thoroughly as those of Larry Lessig, scarcely a month passes without a new Chicken Little shouting about how the digital sky is falling in a major publication. The NYT has had not one, but two such articles in the course of a week: first, Brad Stone’s piece about Google, Sure, It’s Big. But Is That Bad? (his answer? an unequivocal yes! as I noted), followed by Virginia Heffernan’s piece “The Death of the Open Web,” which bemoans the growing popularity of smart phone apps—which she analogizes to “white flight” (a stretched analogy that, I suppose, would make Steve Jobs the digital Bull Connor).
What really ticks me off about these arguments (besides the fact that Apple critics like Zittrain use iPhones themselves without a hint of bourgeois irony) is Heffernan’s suggestion that, “By choosing machines that come to life only when tricked out with apps from the App Store, users of Apple’s radical mobile devices increasingly commit themselves to a more remote and inevitably antagonistic relationship with the Web.” To hear people like Heffernan (and others who have complained about Apple’s policies for its app store) talk, you might think that modern smart phones don’t come with a web browser at all, or that browser software is next to useless, so the fact that browsers can access any content on the web (subject to certain specific technical limitations, such as sites that use Flash) is irrelevant, and users are simply at the mercy of the “gatekeepers” that control access to app stores.
In fact, the iPhone and Android mobile browsers are amazingly agile, generally rendering pages originally designed for desktop reading in a way that makes them very easy to read on the phone—such as by wrapping text into a single column maximized to fit either the landscape or portrait view of the phone, depending on which way it’s pointed. In fact, I do most of my news reading on my Droid, and using its browser rather than through any app—although there are a few good news apps to choose from. In fact, I probably spend about 10 times as much time using my phone’s browser as I spend using all other 3rd party apps (i.e., not counting the phone, e-mail, calendar, camera and map “native” apps). So I can get any content I want using the phone’s browser, I certainly don’t lose any sleep at night over what I can or can’t do in apps I get through the app store. I’d love to see actual statistics on the percent of time that smartphone users spend using their mobile browser, as compared to third-party apps. Do they exist?
But however high that percentage might be, the important thing is that the smartphone browser offers an uncontrolled tool for accessing content, even if apps on that mobile OS do not. Continue reading →
Today’s NYT piece by Brad Stone about Google (Sure, It’s Big. But Is That Bad?) offers a superb example of how to use the rhetorical question in an article headlined to suggest that you might actually be about to write a thoughtful, balanced piece—while actually writing a piece that, while thoughtful and interesting, offers little more than token resistance to your own preconceived judgments. But perhaps I’m being unfair: Perhaps Stone’s editors removed “YES! YES! A THOUSAND TIMES, YES!” from the headline for brevity’s sake?
Anyway, despite its one-sidedness, the piece is fascinating, offering a well-researched summary of the growing cacophony of cries for regulatory intervention against Google, and also a suggestion of where they might lead in crafting a broader regulatory regime for online services beyond just Google. In short, the crusade against Google and the crusade for net neutrality (in which Google has, IMHO unwisely been a major player) are together leading us down in intellectual slippery slope that, as Adam and I have suggested, will result in “High-Tech Mutually Assured Destruction” and the death of Real Internet Freedom.
Ironically, this push for increased government meddling—a veritable “New Deal 2.0″—is all justified by the need to “protect freedom.” But it would hardly be the first time that this had happened. As the great defender of libertyGaret Garrett said of the New Deal 1.0 in his 1938 essay The Revolution Was:
There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.
Google is the “arbiter of every single thing on the Web, and it favors its properties over everyone else’s,” said Mr. Reback, sitting in a Washington cafe with the couple. “What it wants to do is control Internet traffic. Anything that undermines its ability to do that is threatening.”
Move over, ISPs! Search engines are the real threat! Somehow, I feel fairly confident in predicting that this will be among the chief implications of Tim Wu’s new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, to be released in November, which his publisher summarizes as follows: Continue reading →
Faithful readers know of my geeky love of tech policy books [here are my “best of” lists for 2008 & 2009], and the intriguing battle taking place today between Internet optimists and pessimists in particular. One of the things that I noticed when I was putting together my compendium, “The Digital Decade’s Definitive Reading List: Internet & Info-Tech Policy Books of the 2000s,” is that there are up years and down years. For example, there weren’t a lot of big tech policy titles in 2000 or 2005. By contrast, 2001, 2006 and 2008 were monster years. I suppose that’s the case with any genre, of course.
Anyway, I was beginning to think that 2010 was shaping up to be one of those slow years, with Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadgetbeing the only major release so far this year. [See my review of it here.] But there are some very important titles on the way that are worth picking up. I’ve already pre-ordered most of these and am looking forward to reviewing them all soon:
Please let me know others that I may be missing. [Note: Most of the books I’ve been reading this year have more to do with the future of media, the press, journalism, etc. It’s been a big year for books like that. For example, McChesney & Nichols’ The Death and Life of American Journalism; Lee Bollinger’s Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New Century; and Bob Garfield’s The Chaos Scenario. But it’s not clear any of these books belong in the “info-tech policy” genre, although they all have something to say about the impact of the Internet and digital technology on the media and journalism. So, who knows, maybe I will add them to my end of year list.]
Every once an awhile I like to post something about my favorite tech toys, apps, and services to highlight what I think are spectacular innovations in the field. I usually do so at the end of the year, like this. But I there’s no reason to wait for end of the year lists. So here are a few things that are currently making my life better. [Note to pesky FTC before they send the Blog Police to my door… I didn’t get paid for any of these “endorsements”!]
NewsRoom RSS Reader: After months of searching fruitlessly for a decent RSS reader for Android, I finally stumbled upon NewsRoom last month. Wow, what a life-changer. It has become my primary RSS reader largely taking over for Bloglines on my PC (which is an app desperately in need of a makeover). NewsRoom’s slick interface is the most friendly finger-swiping app I’ve ever touched. I can quickly flip (left and right) through headlines for each feed and then easily pull up full text of any particular post with a quick flip of the thumb up. The only downside is the limited number of feeds you can have on the main pages. But that actually helped me go back and sort through my feeds to determine which ones I needed to be reading on a daily basis vs those that I can just monitor every couple days or weekly via my PC. I love this app.
TweetDeck (v.34): I have no idea how the folks at TweetDeck make any money, but they produce one the most spectacular pieces of freeware on the planet. It makes Twittering a real joy by making it a cinch to follow multiple hashtag topics in addition to your primary friends and mentions. And reTweeting is super simple. And version 32 just raises the bar even higher with new features like scheduled Tweets, maps, Buzz and Foresquare integration, and much more. I would gladly pay a few bucks a month for TweetDeck, but this amazing app remains free to the public. Apparently they are booking revenue, but I can’t figure out how. (Seriously, how do they do it?!) Regardless, keep up the great work guys… and hurry up and get the Android version out! I played with TweetDeck for the iPhone and it is outstanding. I’m pretty happy with TwiDroid, but I think I’d prefer TweetDeck for my Droid. Continue reading →
In what might just be the most audacious bureaucratic punt in recent memory, the Federal Communications Commission said yesterday that the U.S. wireless market was so complicated that it was impossible to conclude whether there was effective competition.
This Report does not seek to reach an overly-simplistic yes-or-no conclusion about the overall level of competition in this complex and dynamic ecosystem, comprised of multiple markets. Instead, the Report complies with Congress’s mandate to assess market conditions by providing data on trends in competition and choice over time – an approach that fits best with the role of the FCC as a fact-based, data-driven agency responsible for promoting competition and protecting consumers, and fostering investment and innovation.
Translated from bureau-babble, Genachowski’s statement means, “I’m not going to let the facts get in the way of my aggressive agenda to regulate the entire Internet.” Continue reading →
Mike Wendy and I have just released a new PFF white paper, “The Constructive Alternative to Net Neutrality Regulation and Title II Reclassification Wars.” In it, we discuss the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) misguided effort to pigeonhole the Internet and broadband networks into the regulatory regime of a bygone era. Specifically, the agency’s recent efforts to impose “Net neutrality” regulations on broadband networks, or reclassify them as Title II services under the Communications Act, raises the likelihood of delayed or foregone investment, will discourage innovation at both the core and edge of networks, and increases the likely politicization and bureaucratization of high-technology policy more generally.
We believe there are constructive alternatives to such a destructive regulatory path. The better alternative would be based on (1) a new legislative framework centered on an FTC-like enforcement model of ex post adjudication grounded in antitrust law; (2) increased industry self-regulation, technical collaboration, and alternative dispute resolution mechanisms; and (3) greater reliance on community policing and expert third-party oversight.
For more details, you can read our entire paper down below the fold: Continue reading →
Information scientists will find the paper amateurish and riddled with imperfections. Policy people will find it obscure and dense. That’s what you get when you translate between two languages and cultures.
The goal:
Each piece of the policy making process—the budgets, bills, votes, etc.—should originate as structured data, feeding directly into the information infrastructure that the transparency community creates. A budget should come out not just in paper and PDF versions, but as a data set containing all the meaning that exists in the physical documents.
Make sense? If not, you’ll want to get yourself to where it does.
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 →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.