In February, Congress passed the Obama Administration’s “(Five Year) National Broadband Plan,” part of the so-called “Stimulus.” (As economist Russ Roberts put it, government “stimulus” is “like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end.”) The Plan transfers $7.2 billion from taxpayers to broadband providers in subsides to promote broadband build-out. More than 10,000 comments have been filed on the plan. Once you get past the constitutional nicety of whether Congress has the power to subsidize “internal improvements” like broadband (it doesn’t), you might wonder just how well your money will be spent by all these techno-supplicants for the latest craze in corporate welfare.
The good news is that these comments are available online. Hurray for transparency! The bad news is that… they’re available online—specifically on the FCC’s Electronic Comments Filing System (ECFS). Anyone who’s used the web more recently than 1998 will cringe the first time they try to use ECFS to find anything, as Jerry has noted. Apart from the cumbersome, highly unintuitive interface, the problem is that there’s no way to search the text of comments! You can only search pre-defined fields like like “law firm,” and if you don’t enter a value in precisely the right way, you get nada.
Bill Cline, the Chief of the Reference Information Center for the FCC’s Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau tries hard to put the best face on this farce of e-government, explaining: Continue reading →
It’s bad enough that America educates the world’s best and brightest, only to send them home for lack of visas. But to drive away immigrants who come to the U.S. and start businesses is just unconscionable. I hope Paul Graham’s idea for a “Founder Visa” takes off: 10,000 / year for founders of companies that are started in the U.S. Brad Feld has a great column on this today, answering questions about how the visa would work.
As the Economist said on the related issue of H1-B visas for skilled foreign workers:
SILICON VALLEY, as the old joke goes, was built on ICs—Indians and Chinese that is, not integrated circuits. As of the last decennial census, in 2000, more than half of all the engineers in the valley were foreign-born, and about half of those were either Indian or Chinese—and since 2000 the ratio of Indians and Chinese is reckoned to have gone up steeply. Understandably, therefore Silicon Valley has strong views on America’s visa regime.
I suspect the demographics for entrepreneurs are similar, especially in Sillicon Valley, which has long been driven largely by “enginpreneurs” rather than MBAs.
What an absurd country we live in: We accept, for better or worse, massive illegal immigration across our porous southern border as a fact of life, but can’t muster the political will to give legal status to the most creative and innovative from around the world drawn to the Land of Opportunity made possible by capitalism. So, being dutiful and law-abiding, these “Talented Tenth” go home to suffer under the dead weight of bureaucracies even more oppressive, incompetent and corrupt than our own. How sad.
You might have noticed that we’ve added a Tweetmeme button at the top of each TLF post showing how many times each post has been “retweeted” on Twitter. If you like a TLF post, please take a second to retweet it. Retweeting is an easy way to spread the TLF’s message that politicians should keep their hands off the ‘Net and everything else related to technology! Here are three ways you can help us with viral marketing the message of technology freedom:
If you’re already signed into Twitter, clicking the green “retweet” button will take you to Twitter with a retweet ready to go (“RT @techliberation <post title> <tinyurl>”). You just have to click “Update.”
You can make retweeting even easier—just one click!—by connecting your Twitter account with Tweetmeme. Just sign in to Tweetmeme with your Twitter log-in and select “Allow” to enable TweetMeme to automatically send your retweets to your Twitter account.
You can tweet your comments on our posts by logging in with your Twitter account or using a Disqus account (assuming you’ve linked Twitter to your Disqus Profile). Each tweeted comment will count as a retweet of the post.
If you click the gray tweetcount button, you’ll be taken to Tweetmeme statistics about that particular post. One of my posts last week really took off, getting over 150 retweets! You can follow the TLF on twitter here and find links to individual TLF authors’ feeds here.
If you’re not already on Twitter, you can use but Tweet counts as an indicator of which TLF posts are hottest. But what are you waiting for, anyway? You’d better claim your name on Twitter before someone else does! It’s easy to set up an account and free, of course, and you can add followers from your webmail contacts. If nothing else, you can easily pipe your Tweets into Facebook as status updates. If you think Twitter is a stupid fad, Kevin Spacey and David Letterman may agree with you. But what do they really know about technology?
Meetup.com founder Scott Heiferman explains how Meetup is all about “The Pursuit of Community” in the New York Times.
A Meetup is about the simple idea of using the Internet to get people off the Internet. People feel a need to commiserate or get together and talk about what’s important to them. Our biggest categories are moms, small business, health support and fitness.
When we were designing the site, we were wrong about almost everything we thought people would want to use it for. I thought it would be a niche lifestyle venture, perhaps for fan clubs. I had no idea that people would form new types of P.T.A.’s, chambers of commerce or health support groups. And we weren’t thinking that anyone would want to meet about politics, but there are thousands of these Meetups.
People have organized more than 200,000 monthly Meetups in more than 100 countries. There’s nothing more powerful than a community coming together around a purpose. We spend increasingly more time in front of screens. We’re more connected technologically, but we’re less connected physically.
Heiferman’s vision of technology bringing people together in pursuit of shared interests,passions and causes, from the political to the charitable to the trivial, would have delighted Alexis de Tocqueville, whose 1835 classic Democracy in America identified voluntary association as the unique genius of the American character.
Tocqueville concluded that representative democracy had flourished in America, rather than leading to murderous despotism as it had in Tocqueville’s revolutionary France, because, among other things, Americans built a rich civic society interposed between the atomized individual and the state. Rather than suppressing political associations as factions dangerous to the health of the state, Americans embraced political associations (parties and causes), which served as “large free schools, where all the members of the community go to learn the general theory of association.” Americans would apply that art in every other walk of life, from today’s AIDS Walks or PTA meetings to groups of rock climber enthusiasts: “The art of association then becomes… the mother of action, studied and applied by all.” Tocqueville concludes: Continue reading →
WordPress has experienced a major security vulnerability, with a worm making its way around the ‘Net, attacking earlier versions of WordPress. Fortunately, because of the hard work of the WordPress open source community, the current (2.8.4) and most recent (2.8.3) versions are immune. Yet as with any piece of program, some users haven’t upgraded. In the case of WordPress (which we use at the TLF), upgrading can be difficult for sites that rely on plug-ins that aren’t always updated quickly when a new version of WordPress is released.
While my heart goes out to my fellow WordPress bloggers who may have experienced an attack, I’m just glad that, for once, the message isn’t that somehow we need the government to protect us all from cyber-catastrophes, but, instead, a little good-old-fashioned digital self-help! From the WordPress Blog:
WordPress is a community of hundreds of people that read the code every day, audit it, update it, and care enough about keeping your blog safe that we do things like release updates weeks apart from each other even though it makes us look bad, because updating is going to keep your blog safe from the bad guys. I’m not clairvoyant and I can’t predict what schemes spammers, hackers, crackers, and tricksters will come up with with in the future to harm your blog, but I do know for certain that as long as WordPress is around we’ll do everything in our power to make sure the software is safe. We’ve already made upgrading core and plugins a one-click procedure. If we find something broken, we’ll release a fix. Please upgrade, it’s the only way we can help each other.
As with parental controls and privacy, protecting your security online begins at home. Government can help to educate and promote empowerment solutions, and industry certainly has a role to play in both, and communities like WordPress can offer invaluable support, but at the end of the day, only you can protect yourself online!
Sometimes the most revealing conversations about policy issues happen with our loved ones at the breakfast table. Although loyal TLF readers may remember my partner Michael as my “Posterboy for Advertising’s Pro-Consumer Quid Pro Quo,” he doesn’t usually get into the policy issues I cover. But this morning, we fell into a conversation about the bitterly contentious issue of marketing to kids:
Michael: Growing up in South Korea, on a military base, we didn’t have any commercials on television. We had three channels and all they showed was public service announcements.
We moved back to the U.S. when I was nine, and suddenly, during all my favorite cartoons, there were ads for toys. It was exciting—and more than a little bit overwhelming! It wasn’t just that I wanted these toys; it was that felt this incredible sense of urgency: I thought we had to go get the toys right now or they’d be gone!
What did Rousseau call his innocent man, the Noble Savage? That’s what we were: The noble savage, coming into this world of sophisticated toy advertisements.
But it didn’t take long for me to get over this initial bewilderment. My parents explained to me that we didn’t really have to go to the store right away. (They also explained to me that I couldn’t haggle with the staff at Toys ‘R Us the same way I’d haggled with street vendors back in Korea—something that utterly mystified the staff.) After one trip to Toys Toys ‘R Us, I got the toys I wanted most and, over the next few months, realized that they weren’t anywhere near as exciting as I had imagined.
After that, I enjoyed the toy ads on TV, but I lost interest in many of the toys I already had, preferring to create my own toys or play outside.
I explained that advertising of toys to kids has long been the cause celebre of anti-advertising crusaders:
Michael: But kids are acquisitive, too! How are they supposed to know about the latest toys if you can’t advertise to them? And what’s the big deal, anyway? I got used to toy ads and I think most kids would, too. The thing that’s different is incentive programs at stores.
I’ve noted that Google and Microsoft both face what Clayton Christensen famously called the “Innovator’s Dilemma” in trying to handle disruptive innovation in search technology. But noting Microsoft’s innovations in bringing social functionality to search with its “Ping” tools in Bing, I pointed out a few days ago that, “Microsoft, with less to lose and without a huge installed user base to worry about annoying by violating Google’s ‘Prime Directive’ of elegant simplicity, may have an easier time introducing ‘disruptive’ innovations to search than Google.”
The trick will be for Microsoft to find ways of promoting radical innovation from inside, despite the forces of inertia inherent in any large company. One way to do that, as I noted, would be by imitating Google’s “20 percent” program. But a more radical way would be for Microsoft to make Bing a “skunkworks” much like Lockheed Martin’s original “skunkworks,” Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), AT&T’s Bell Labs, GM’s Saturn Motors—or Microsoft’s own XBox. That’s precisely what SEO guru Rand Fishkin (CEO of SEOmoz) suggests Microsoft needs to do to “get serious” in an interview with Affilorama:
I think Google[‘s search market share] could be reduced from like 85% to like 75%, and you could see Microsoft, basically Bing taking over 25%. I don’t think they’ll get more than that. I don’t think they have the ability to do it. Until or unless they are willing do with Bing what they did with Xbox.
So Microsoft had, you know, the game market was well established – Sony competing head to head with Nintendo and other players like Neo Geo coming in and this kind of thing and how is Microsoft going to win this? They didn’t know the first thing about it, you know, they weren’t in this field. So what they did with XBox is they made it a startup. They didn’t even put it on Microsoft campus, they made it a different team of people who were only reporting to Xbox people, they basically built a separate company. The fact that it was owned by Microsoft just means that they get the benefits of the cash and the relationships. That’s extremely powerful. The fact that they’re unwilling to do this with search tells me they’re not serious about it. Right? So you might hear like Steve Balmer and other executives from Microsoft say like “search is very important to us, we’re really serious about it”. I think it’s like “serious to them” and I’m using air quotes here, like serious to them in the same way that Google says “competing with Microsoft Office is serious to us”. It’s just sort of like, “Oh yeah?! You’re going to fight us there, well we’re going to fight you on this front!” Like, serious my ass. I just don’t see it.
If they do serious and spin it out, I’ll be interested – I’ll be very interested if it becomes it’s own startup if it becomes like its own XBox, that kind of thing, that could be exciting – that could be interesting.
I’m pleased to welcome Brooke Oberwetter back to the TLF after 2.5 year stint working for The Man. Make no mistake about it, she’s a hard-core TechLiberationista, having worked as a policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and research assistant at the Cato Institute. She’s now a freelance writer in Washington, DC. (In fact, she lives just down the street from me on the Yuppie Frontier of Shaw!)
Brooke achieved international celebrity as “The Jefferson 1” after she was arrested in a non-violent, silent iPod-toting flashmob celebration of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday at the Jefferson Memorial on April 13, 2008. I was there that night to see the petty tyranny of the State, that Coldest of all Cold Monsters, in action. I can only say that we couldn’t have asked for a better or more articulate martyr for the cause of Liberty. See for yourself what happened:
Polish designer Jacek Utko acknowledged that, in the long-run, nothing can save the newspaper as a print medium, but makes a pretty good case newspapers’ ability to stay afloat while figuring out how to make the transition to digital media depends heavily on shaking up the graphic design and layout of papers.
If nothing else, this should remind us all that innovation and entrepreneurship aren’t just about technical improvements or better business savvy, but aesthetics, too! The art of commercial culture is like the oxygen we breath: all around us but something we scarcely notice.
The Wall Street Journal reports today that student loan borrowing for college “in the 2008-09 academic year grew about 25% over the previous year, to $75.1 billion,” with the average student borrowing $13,172 to pay for college. So it should come as an enormous relief that one Internet start-up, StraighterLine, has essentially made the university fully virtual, offering classes for just $99/month. While this may seem like a boon for students, especially the millions of Americans for whom even community college tuition seems an insurmountable obstacle to climbing up the economic ladder, such “e-Learning” offerings are already, predictably, coming under attack by entrenched interests in “Big Ed” (the professoriat!) as the “media-software–publishing–E-learning-complex.”
In Washington Monthly, Kevin Carey explains why “The next generation of online education could be great for students—and catastrophic for universities.” In a nutshell, the story is the same basic theme of Chris Anderson’s book Free!: digital distribution of information will ultimately drive costs down to zero. Carey shows how universities are essentially facing the same sorts of pressure from disruptive innovation as newspapers—except with more capital costs:
Colleges are caught in the same kind of debt-fueled price spiral that just blew up the real estate market. They’re also in the information business in a time when technology is driving down the cost of selling information to record, destabilizing lows.
In combination, these two trends threaten to shake the foundation of the modern university, in much the same way that other seemingly impregnable institutions have been torn apart. In some ways, the upheaval will be a welcome one. Students will benefit enormously from radically lower prices—particularly people like Solvig who lack disposable income and need higher learning to compete in an ever-more treacherous economy. But these huge changes will also seriously threaten the ability of universities to provide all the things beyond teaching on which society depends: science, culture, the transmission of our civilization from one generation to the next.
Whether this transformation is a good or a bad thing is something of a moot point—it’s coming, and sooner than you think.
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.