For those who wonder about the latest craziness coming from California, here is a summary. It’s truly shocking that California policy makers are going after Silicon Valley, since it is one of the reasons the economy hasn’t completely tanked.
Facebook is having a tough month. First, it was revealed that the company hired a PR firm to portray competitor Google in a negative light, and now it is facing an even worse scenario: government regulation.
The Social Networking Privacy Act (SB 242) introduced into the California Senate by Sen. Ellen Corbett, D-San Leandro, would force any social networking site to make new users choose their privacy settings when they register and make the default settings private except for the user’s name and city of residence.
This is a huge challenge to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who has argued that making personal data public is the new “social norm.”
Clearly, the battle over what constitutes the appropriate social norm is up for grabs. According to Corbett, “you shouldn’t have to sign in and give up your personal information before you get to the part where you say ‘please don’t share my personal information.'”
This might sound like common sense at first, but someone should remind the senator that signing up for Facebook is voluntary. No one is required to log in or give up their data.
In addition to its stipulations about privacy settings, the bill would force social networking sites to remove any personally identifying information that a user wants to delete and would allow parents to edit their children’s Facebook profiles.
Suddenly the horror that “Mom’s on Facebook” could mean a lot more than potential embarrassment for kids. For those under 18, it might mean deletion of one’s online identity.
Every year since 1995, the Federal Communications Commission has released a report on the state of competition in the wireless market. Last year’s report was the first not to find the market “effectively competitive.” As a result, expectations are high for the new annual report. How it determines the state of competition in the wireless market could affect regulatory policy and how the Commission looks at proposed mergers.
Tune in here to watch this afternoon’s panel discussion on these issues, brought to you by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University’s Technology Policy Program.
The panel features:
Thomas W. Hazlett, Professor of Law & Economics, George Mason University School of Law
Joshua D. Wright, Associate Professor of Law, George Mason University School of Law
Robert M. Frieden, Professor of Telecommunications & Law, Penn State University
One of my favorite topics lately has been the challenges faced by information control regimes. Jerry Brito and I are writing a big paper on this issue right now. Part of the story we tell is that the sheer scale / volume of modern information flows is becoming so overwhelming that it raises practical questions about just how effective any info control regime can be. [See our recent essays on the topic: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.] As we continue our research, we’ve been attempting to unearth some good metrics / factoids to help tell this story. It’s challenging because there aren’t many consistent data sets depicting online data growth over time and some of the best anecdotes from key digital companies are only released sporadically. Anyway, I’d love to hear from others about good metrics and data sets that we should be examining. In the meantime, here are a few fun facts I’ve unearthed in my research so far. Please let me know if more recent data is available. [Note: Last updated 7/18/11]
Facebook: users submit around 650,000 comments on the 100 million pieces of content served up every minute on its site.[1] People on Facebook install 20 million applications every day.[2]
YouTube: every minute, 48 hours of video were uploaded. According to Peter Kafka of The Wall Street Journal, “That’s up 37 percent in the last six months, and 100 percent in the last year. YouTube says the increase comes in part because it’s easier than ever to upload stuff, and in part because YouTube has started embracing lengthy live streaming sessions. YouTube users are now watching more than 3 billion videos a day. That’s up 50 percent from the last year, which is also a huge leap, though the growth rate has declined a bit: Last year, views doubled from a billion a day to two billion in six months.”[3]
eBay is now the world’s largest online marketplace with more than 90 million active users globally and $60 billion in transactions annually, or $2,000 every second.[4]
Google: 34,000 searches per second(2 million per minute; 121 million per hour; 3 billion per day; 88 billion per month).[5]
Twitter already has 300 million users producing 140 million Tweets a day, which adds up to a billion Tweets every 8 days[6] (@ 1,600 Tweets per second) “On the first day Twitter was made available to the public, 224 tweets were sent. Today, that number of updates are posted at least 10 times a second.”[7]
Apple: more than 10 billion apps have been downloaded from its App Store by customers in over 77 countries.[8]According to Chris Burns of SlashGear, “Currently it appears that another thousand apps are downloaded every 9 seconds in the Android Marketplace while every 3 seconds another 1,000 apps are downloaded in the App Store.”
Yelp: as of July 2011 the site hosted over 18 million user reviews.[9]
Wikipedia: Every six weeks, there are 10 million edits made to Wikipedia.[10]
“Humankind shared 65 exabytes of information in 2007, the equivalent of every person in the world sending out the contents of six newspapers every day.”[11]
Researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, estimate that, in 2008, the world’s 27 million business servers processed 9.57 zettabytes, or 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information. This is “the digital equivalent of a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times a year.” The study also estimated that enterprise server workloads are doubling about every two years, “which means that by 2024 the world’s enterprise servers will annually process the digital equivalent of a stack of books extending more than 4.37 light-years to Alpha Centauri,our closest neighboring star system in the Milky Way Galaxy.”[12]
According to Dave Evans, Cisco’s chief futurist and chief technologist for the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group, about 5 exabytes of unique information were created in 2008. That’s 1 billion DVDs. Fast forward three years and we are creating 1.2 zettabytes, with one zettabyte equal to 1,024 exabytes. “This is the same as every person on Earth tweeting for 100 years, or 125 million years of your favorite one-hour TV show,” says Evans. Our love of high-definition video accounts for much of the increase. By Cisco’s count, 91% of Internet data in 2015 will be video.[13]
[12] Rex Graham, “Business Information Consumption: 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes per Year,” UC San Diego News Center, April 6, 2011, http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/general/04-05BusinessInformation.asp.
Hanno F. Kaiser, a U.S. and EU antitrust lawyer and partner with Latham & Watkins LLP, has just released an important essay on a topic I have devoted much time to here over the years: the debate over the relative advantages of “open” vs. “closed” technological systems and the Lessig-Zittrain-Wu school of thinking about these issues.
Kaiser’s essay is entitled, “Are Closed Systems an Antitrust Problem?” and it appears in the latest edition of Competition Policy International. This essay is not to be missed. Kaiser’s terrific paper helps us better understand and debunk many of the myths and misperceptions that continue to riddle this debate. Here’s Kaiser’s key insight:
At bottom, the bad reputation of closed systems or walled gardens in the “open versus closed” debate is quite undeserved. Walled gardens generally benefit their environments—both in the real world and the digital realm. The primary purpose of a garden wall, after all, is to shelter plants from wind and frost, not to keep intruders out. In the protected space of the garden, flowers can grow that would not otherwise survive in the wild. Walled gardens thus deliberately create a microcosm that is different from the surrounding ecosystem. Therefore, as long as the garden does not take over the entire ecosystem, walled gardens increase, not reduce, overall diversity. From a competition policy perspective, enjoying the fruits of a walled garden is generally not a guilty pleasure.
Therefore, “as a policy matter, ‘open’ is not necessarily better than ‘closed’,” Kaiser argues, and elaborates as follows: Continue reading →
TechFreedom, CEI and ATR’s DigitalLiberty.net just put out the following statement about ECPA reform, something Ryan and I have blogged about here and here. Also check out the larger coalition letter we released in April with seven other leading free market groups and digitalfourthamendment.org.
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WASHINGTON D.C. – Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) today introduced legislation (S. 1011) to reform the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). The law, enacted in 1986, was designed to protect individuals’ privacy by limiting governmental access to electronic data stored or sent using platforms or computers owned by third parties.
“Several lawmakers have proposed sweeping new regulation of how companies collect and use data to fund and improve the online content and services cherished by consumers,” said TechFreedom President Berin Szoka. “The costs to consumers of such regulations could be enormous, yet the harms supposedly justifying new regulations remain largely amorphous. Today, finally, we see a bill that focuses on the one clear harm that seems to underlie most online privacy concerns: law enforcement’s access to personal data without judicial scrutiny. Addressing that very real problem should unite everyone who cares about privacy.”
Sen. Leahy’s proposed legislation would amend ECPA to protect Americans’ private information stored remotely or in the “cloud” from unwarranted search and seizure, and limit unwarranted governmental access to mobile location information. The reforms would implement two of the four consensus principles advocated by the Digital Due Process coalition, a diverse coalition of public interest organizations, free market groups, high-tech companies, and scholars. Continue reading →
On the podcast this week, Joseph Menn, a Financial Times technology reporter and the author of Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down The Internet, discusses cyber crime. Menn says that one of the main challenges of cybersecurity is that the internet was never intended for many of the things it’s used for today, like e-commerce or critical infrastructure management. He talks about the implications of the internet still being in beta form and comments on the recent Sony data breach and other similar cyber attacks. Menn also discusses his book, telling a few anecdotes about the people who go beyond computer screens in pursuit of internet crime lords.
Here’s a quick excerpt from an interesting press release sent out over PR Newswire last week—it sounds like someone is angling for a fat government contract:
EMC® announced the 2011 Data Hero Awards winners and finalists
First annual Data Hero Visionary award goes to Vivek Kundra, the first Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the United States of America
I’m truly honored to be recognized for this 2011 Data Hero visionary award. The modern economy is powered by data and technology. That’s why we strive to find innovative paths to lower government cost, engage citizens and institute radical transparency to bring them closer to their government and to help move us all forward, together.
I really like the way he worked in the bit on “radical transparency.” It’s not as though if you say something enough, it magically changes reality, but that doesn’t stop the flow of awards.
Be on the lookout for an EMC press release involving a massive federal government cloud computing project.
Just a final reminder that it isn’t too late to still register for this Wednesday’s Mercatus Center event on “The State of Wireless Competition” featuring Thomas W. Hazlett, Professor of Law & Economics, George Mason University School of Law; Joshua D. Wright, Assistant Professor of Law, George Mason University School of Law; Robert M. Frieden, Professor of Telecommunications & Law, Penn State University; and Harold Feld, Legal Director, Public Knowledge. These experts will discuss the FCC’s upcoming Wireless Competition Report and the debate:
What does a proper analysis of wireless competition look like?
What should we expect from the FCC’s report this year?
How should the FCC address competition in the future?
Again, the event will take place this Wednesday (May 18) from 4:00 – 5:30 p.m at George Mason University’s Arlington Campus, just ten minutes from downtown Washington. (Founders Hall, Room 111, 3351 N. Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA). A reception will follow.
To RSVP for yourself and your guests, please contact Megan Gandee at 703-993-4967 or mmahan@gmu.edu no later than May 16, 2011. Hope to see some regular TLF readers there!
On Forbes this morning, I have a long meditation on what Protect IP says about the current state of the Internet content wars. Copyright, patent, and trademark are under siege from digital technology, and for now at least are clearly losing the arms race.
The new bill isn’t exactly the nuclear option in the fight between the media industries and everyone else, but it does signal increased desperation. Continue reading →
As a rule of thumb, when I have to spend a given amount of time straightening out a company’s poor service or unscrupulous practices, I’ll spend an equivalent amount of time giving that company some payback. Today’s victim: T-Mobile. Fear the blog post.
A letter from Asurion Warranty Services arrived in my mail today thanking me for signing up for their “Premium Handset Protection Bundle” for T-Mobile phones.
Oh no I didn’t. It costs $5.99 a month for repair and replacement of my newly upgraded phone. That’s pretty much the price of a phone per year for such protections. Bad deal. I haven’t lost or damaged a phone in a decade, and I didn’t agree to get have this charge added to my phone bill.
I am on hold right now, trying to learn just how this got onto my bill. Friendly, helpful T-Mobile customer service people have told me that I should go down to the T-Mobile store where I upgraded in order to straighten this out. No I shouldn’t. T-Mobile should be straightening this out right now over the phone, with an apology and a thank you.
I am done with my 40-minute phone call, in which friendly customer service supervisor Kassidy K. (#1204178) tried to assign me the task Monday of calling the store where I upgraded my phone to get this straightened out. I explained to Kassidy K. that I’ve made the only call I need to—that’s the call we were on. Her next work-day is Wednesday, and I told her I expected to hear from her about this being cleared up.
If I have to make another call, it’s just as likely to be about returning my phone and canceling my service as getting this charge removed from my bill.
You people can argue all you want about top-down—whether the government should allow the AT&T-T-Mobile merger. I’ll do bottom-up—whether T-Mobile should get my business.
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 →
Here’s a quick excerpt from an interesting press release sent out over 
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.