Articles by Adam Thierer 
Senior Fellow in Technology & Innovation at the R Street Institute in Washington, DC. Formerly a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, President of the Progress & Freedom Foundation, Director of Telecommunications Studies at the Cato Institute, and a Fellow in Economic Policy at the Heritage Foundation.
I really appreciate the venture capitalists (VCs) in Silicon Valley subsidizing my soapbox at Twitter. Seriously, it is an absolutely awesome platform for getting a message out to the masses. But at some point I worry that the gravy train will come to an end and that users will have to start picking up part of the tab. After all, will those VCs continue to subsidize Twitter if it never turns a profit? According to the Wikipedia entry about Twitter:
In total, Twitter has raised over US$57 million from venture capitalists. The exact amounts of funding have not been publicly released. Twitter’s first round of funding was for an undisclosed amount that is rumored to have been between $1 million and $5 million. Its B round of funding in 2008 was for $22 million and its C round of funding in 2009 was for $35 million from Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital along with an undisclosed amount from other investors including Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital. Twitter is backed by Union Square Ventures, Digital Garage, Spark Capital, and Bezos Expeditions.
Again, thank you VCs! But, like them, I do wonder when and how Twitter will bring in some cash. Is there a “freemium” model that could work? Perhaps. “Pro” or corporate accounts have been rumored to be in the works. Getting someone else to pick up the tab that way might bring in enough cash for Twitter to allow the free ride to continue for the rest of us. But what about advertising? It’s been the “mother’s milk” of most online media and platforms for some time now, and Twitter seems perfectly suited to insert a few banner ads or contextual ads here and there. It could be happening sooner than you think. Austin Modine of The Register notes in a new piece, “Twitter ‘Leaves Door Open’ for Targeted Ads,” that: Continue reading →
[This is part of an ongoing series about “Problems in Public Utility Paradise.”]
According to this recent article by Donald Meyers of the Salt Lake City Tribune, five candidates for mayor of Provo, Utah are falling all over themselves to declare their support for continuing the public utility fiasco that is iProvo, the city’s fiber-to-the-home network. According to Wikipedia, it is the largest municipally-owned Fiber to the Home network in the United States.” Steve Titch of the Reason Foundation, who has been following iProvo for many years, has documented its millions of dollars of losses and risk to taxpayers, saying “iProvo is a dismal financial failure by any standard.” But that isn’t stopping city officials and mayoral candidates from proposing to throw more money at this massive “if-you-build-it-they-will-come” fantasy. “One thing most of the candidates running for mayor agree on: iProvo is too important to fail, even if it means bailing out the company that bought it,” Meyers reports. Here’s the relevant passages from his article, with the key bits of bad info highlighted:
The city sold the troubled fiber-optic network to Broadweave Networks in 2008 in a deal in which Broadweave would take over the payments on the city’s $39.6 million bond. Since November, Broadweave has had the city draw on its $6 million surety deposit to make its bond payments in a bid to build up cash to pay for growth.
In August, Veracity Communications merged with Broadweave, becoming Veracity Networks. The company’s leaders, Drew Peterson and David Moon, have asked the city to restructure the payment schedule to allow the company to cut back on its payments for 18 months while it strengthens its coffers. It later would pay extra money over a seven-year period and reimburse the city with interest.
Provo would draw on its Energy Department’s reserves to make up the shortfall in bond payments — $1.4 million.
Continue reading →
For some time now here at the TLF, we have been documenting the track record of various government-owned or subsidized utility projects — municipal wi-fi projects, locally-owned telecom ventures, city or state fiber projects, and so on. We’ve attempted to see if the rhetoric matches the reality when it comes to the grandiose promises made about government investment or ownership of communications or broadband networks being our ticket to high-tech paradise.
The results? Well, the record speaks for itself. It’s been one miserable failure after another. And yet the high-tech pork barrel rolls on and taxpayers are all too often stuck picking up the tab.
I just wanted to make everyone aware of the fact that I finally got around to collecting most of our essays on the subject here into an “Ongoing Series” page that will be permanently housed here. (As far as I can tell, we’re up to about 18 or 19 installments). I encourage my TLF contributors to help me contribute entries to the series and I also invite our readers to continue to submit examples of these experiments so we can continue to document their failure. Of course, if there are success stories, we’d like to hear about those too. But that will likely be a much shorter series!
Over at Ars Technica, Matt Lasar does a nice job pointing out how the FCC’s quarterly indecency complaint totals have again been inflated by one group: the Parents Television Council. This is something Lasar has written about before and he’s one of the few journalists who continues to ask sharp questions about the ongoing manipulation of these statistics by PTC. As Lasar notes in his latest piece:
for the first quarter of this year, show the viewers relatively calm at 578 complaints in January, then 505 in February, followed by 179,997 in March? 179,997? Um, did we miss something? Did television really get that much more indecent in March? No worries. In these situations, we know what to do. We go over and check out the Parents Television Council‘s website. And sure enough, there’s a plausible instigator—a PTC viewer action alert crusade against a March 8 episode of the animated comedy show the PTC just loves to hate, Fox TV’s Family Guy.
This “complaint box stuffing” is something I wrote quite a bit about in the past, especially in my 2005 paper, “Examining the FCC’s Complaint-Driven Broadcast Indecency Enforcement Process.” As I pointed out there, “The PTC’s increasingly effective use of computer-generated campaigns against specific TV programs is a leading factor in explaining the large jump in indecency complaints in recent years.” Specifically, as I noted in that paper (as well as a Supreme Court filing with my friends at CDT), the FCC quietly and without major notice made two methodological changes to its tallying of broadcast indecency complaints in 2003 & 2004 that PTC requested: Continue reading →
Today I was invited to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to testify at one of the agency’s Broadband Working Group workshops. This particular workshop was on “Broadband Consumer Context,” which focused on “a range of challenges and opportunities as the internet becomes a focal point for commercial transactions, social networking, and a host of activities pertaining to information gathering and exchange.”
I was asked to address the issue of whether there is a relationship between online safety concerns and broadband uptake. In my testimony, I noted that, in my 15 years of research in this area, I have never unearthed any substantive empirical evidence suggesting a correlation between parental concerns about online activity and overall household broadband uptake. I have seen occasional anecdotal news stories discussing the concerns some parents have had about their kids online that led them to reject online connectivity, but these stories have been exceedingly rare (and I haven’t seen any in recent memory).
I also argued that I did not think it at all surprising that such anecdotes are harder to find, or that empirical evidence on this front seems non-existent. I argued that there were four logical explanations for why parental concerns about online safety haven’t “moved the broadband needle” much in the negative direction:
- Not every home has children present
- Parents use a variety of household media rules to control media & Internet usage
- A vibrant marketplace of parental control technologies exists
- Likely that most parents believe that the benefits of broadband outweigh the potential downsides
For all the details on each of those, read my entire testimony or check out the presentation embedded below that I made to the FCC today. Continue reading →
Interesting piece from Jeff Jarvis about “Google Bigotry,” or his belief that “media people are going after Google’s success for no good reason other than their own jealousy.” Jarvis argues that reporters penning hard-nosed stories about Google are, in reality, just a bunch of envious cry-babies:
newspaper people will use their last drops of ink to complain about Google’s success and try to blame it for their own failures rather than changing their own businesses. .. It’s not just that they dislike the competition – and they do, for it is a new experience for too many of them. If they were smart, they’d use Google to get more audience and make more money but they don’t know how to (or rather, they’d prefer not to change). No, the problem is that Google represents change and a new world they’ve refused to understand.
Well, yes and no. I don’t believe that
every story penned about Google by a mainstream media reporter is rooted in envy, and certainly not the one that Jarvis alludes to as prompting him to pen this piece. Jarvis apparently received an inquiry from a French journalist at Le Monde asking for comment about “an article about Google facing a rising tide of discontent concerning privacy and monopoly.” That doesn’t necessarily sound like an unreasonable journalistic inquiry to me. So, I’m not sure it’s fair to accuse every journalist who calls with a hard-nosed question about privacy and antitrust as being guilty of “Google bigotry.”
That being said,
some journalists are likely feeling a bit miffed about Google’s recent success, thinking it comes at their expense, and, therefore, their envy might be prompting some of them to pen attack stories on the company. I think Jarvis in on stronger ground, however, in asserting that most privacy and antitrust complaints about Google are unfounded, and also based on envy. Indeed, Berin Szoka and I have have been cataloging the complaints that we believe are driven by an irrational form of corporate envy we call “Googlephobia.” And in prior years we saw a similar form of Microsoft-bashing at work that we still have with us today. That’s why I think Jarvis is on to something when he notes that Google-bashing represents a broader sociological phenomenon: Continue reading →
Interesting piece by Farhad Manjoo of Slate today entitled “So Gmail Was Down. Get Over It.” Manjoo notes that Google’s Gmail service went down briefly this week — for an hour and a half — and that led to a lot of people “freaking out” over the downtime. He asks” “Google’s e-mail service works 99.9 percent of time. Why do we freak out during the other 0.1 percent?”
That’s an good question, but I actually didn’t hear all that many people bitching about it this time around. In fact, I am rather surprised
how little I heard about this incident. I think that’s because many of us are gradually growing accustomed to a world in which communications networks and digital devices deliver something less than the holy grail of “five 9s” uptime. That was the standard for telephony and computing in the world I grew up in: 99.999% was the magic number that network engineers aspired to and that many of us in the public generally demanded.
Today, however, we settle for something less. As Manjoo’s piece about Gmail suggests, we’ll settle “three 9s,” as in 99.9% reliability. And sometimes we’ll settle for far less than that. Why is that? I think Robert Capps has part of the answer in his recent
Wired essay, “The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine.” Capps points out the modern Digital Age has seen the “triumph of what might be called Good Enough tech. Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere.” He continues: Continue reading →
Berin has already done a fine job tearing apart this latest effort by 10 activist groups to break the Internet by imposing burdensome regulation or punishing legal liability on Internet operators for the crime of trying to deliver relevant advertising to users that can actually pay for the content and services given away to users for free. To that, I would add my deep disappointment that the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) choose to join this cabal. After all, the other members of the coalition are frequently heard calling for regulation of one variety or another. But EFF always prides itself on supposedly avoiding online regulatory schemes. That’s what makes it so surprising that they chose to jump on this bandwagon for an Internet industrial policy in the name of “protecting privacy.”
EFF’s embrace of regulation is particularly inconsistent given their excellent filing in the FCC’s “Child Safe Viewing Act” proceeding this summer. As I’ve previously noted, this proceeding raises the specter of “convergence-era content regulation” with Congress authorizing the FCC to look into “advanced blocking controls” for “wired, wireless, and Internet” platforms. EFF’s comments rightly stressed dangers of expanded content controls or Internet regulation, and noted the many “less-restrictive means” available to the public that provide compelling alternatives to government regulation: “Blocking technologies are widely available in the market and do not require further government support.” And EFF has been instrumental throughout the years of making the case in courts for applying the less-restrictive means test and strict scrutiny when it comes to government efforts to regulate speech.
Why, then, does EFF take the diametrically opposite position when privacy concerns enter the picture? 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.
