I can’t let the week end without calling attention to a Bloomberg article on Republican outrage over the FCC’s cession to Google’s petition for “gaming” the spectrum rules.
At Tuesday’s House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, Molly Peterson reports that:
Rep. John Shimkus (IL) asked whether Google had “duped” the FCC by bidding primarily to trigger the open-access rules. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said the agency wasn’t duped, adding that the rules weren’t designed to prevent any company from bidding. “My goal was to make sure that whoever won the C-block had an open platform,'” Martin, a Republican, told the House telecommunications subcommittee.
The 463 blog smartly caught the irony of a company playing the game too successfully:
The only right thing for Google to do is to begin to shut down it’s overly effective Washington operation. They are clearly operating on a level that is unfair to all those telecom giant DC neophytes.
But here’s the real takeaway. Google’s public policy pitch was a crafty and bold maneuver. By asserting public interests, Google convinced the FCC to skew the spectrum rules to favor Google’s ad-based business model over competitive models that receive revenue from monthly subscriptions or operating networks. Continue reading →
My last post on the ISO standards body vote in favor of OOXML sparked a few comments, so here goes another. While the headlines of Groklaw generally tell only one side of the story, here’s an interesting blog post from Jan van den Beld, the former Secretary General of Ecma International, the standards body that first approved OOXML as a standard.
If you’re like me and think that standards bodies will play an increasingly important role in the future, you want to see a process with integrity, accountability and transparency.
In his post, Jan van den Beld says that groups opposed to ratification are now trying to blame the messenger (standards bodies), in addition to the message (the standard):
They have resorted to making accusations of impropriety on the part of national standards bodies where they were unhappy that their negative views on this issue didn’t carry the day – notably on blogs such as noooxml.org and Groklaw. They would have you believe that no one could possibly favor ratification without being bribed or manipulated. Indeed, it appears that they find it impossible to believe that anyone could possibly disagree with their views, despite the overwhelming number who do in fact disagree with this position. These direct attacks on the integrity or national standards bodies are without merit.
Continue reading →
Monday’s news indicating that ECMA’s Office Open XML (OOXML) standard will be approved has some people crying foul about the whole thing.
In case you haven’t been following things, OOXML is a document format up for approval before the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It’s been a wild and politicized process for what one would think would be a relatively objective task of evaluating a technical standard.
OOXML was developed by Microsoft, so obviously Microsoft has been pushing for its approval. Companies like IBM and Sun, which developed ODF, an existing document format standard, have been lobbying against approval.
Nothing new under the sun, as my colleague Morgan Reed writes on the ACT blog. IBM’s been lobbying for state procurement preferences for ODF for the past few years:
Continue reading →
Earlier this week I testified in Pennsylvania in support of SB 1000, legislation designed to prohibit price and terms of service regulation of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and other IP-enabled products and services.
At the hearing it was clear that most favored the bill. And why not? By not regulating IP-enabled services and VoIP, I testified that it would actively promote consumer welfare and business innovation in Pennsylvania. One study from Micra finds that Pennsylvania residents would save up to $4.8 billion over the next five years.
Yes, yes, all fine and good. But what about access charges, asked Embarq? What about union jobs, cried the CWA? What about consumer protection? What about the children? (OK, nobody said this last one).
The bill will probably pass into law, but the hearing was a microcosm for the greater debate needed for real telecom reform, so we don’t import old-world telecom regs meant for the AT&T monopoly onto today’s more competitive landscape. But in the meantime, we need to deal with entrenched parties that benefit from regulation and old school natural monopoly thinking about the communications marketplace. Creating a regulatory firewall based on technology – which VoIP non-reg bills do – is perhaps the best we can get right now…until we have communications without commissions.
There’s a lot of hoopla surrounding Bain Capital’s buyout of beleaguered 3Com Corporation, due to the fact that one of the buyers is Huawei, a company from China. Or “communist China” (gasp!) according to today’s press release from Rep. McCotter:
News circulated today Bain Capital and communist China’s Huawei plan to resubmit an application seeking U.S. approval for a planned buyout of American 3Com Corporation within the next several weeks. Congressman Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) made the following comments on the possible new merger:
“No business can sufficiently structure such deals to protect America from this stealth assault on America’s national security. It is the solemn duty of the United States government to protect our liberty from all threats; and CFIUS must again do its job and reject this latest threat to our cyber-security.”
It’s nice that members of Congress are looking after our national security, but they don’t have to when it comes to foreign direct investment. We have CIFIUS. And in a paper I co-authored with my colleague Nora von Ingersleben, we assert that when CIFIUS gets politicized, American innovation will suffer.
Continue reading →
There’s a good opinion piece on age verification and social networking websites by CDT’s Leslie Harris on the ABC news site.
Third, can we verify age or identity and still protect privacy? Would personal information about minors have to be submitted and maintained in large databases, or would Internet users have to have an authenticated identification card to go online?
Along with TLF’s very own Adam Thierer, CDT is on the Berkman Center task force setup by the MySpace & Attorneys General joint statement to study online authentication techniques. Intelligent study of the issue is much needed, as age verification is a hot topic in the states.
So far this year we’ve seen age verification bills introduced in Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, and Mississippi (last year also saw Connecticut and North Carolina). These bills would force the sites to age verify its users and obtain parental consent before kids under 18 could register. I’m happy to say that Mississippi’s bill failed to make crossover and is dead, and Georgia’s bill is effectively dead.
Age verification is looked upon as a way to keep our kids safer online, but it’s really an access control device that by itself does nothing to limit opportunities for sexual predators. Politicians should avoid age verification mandates, particularly as we have a panel of experts to study the issue over the next year!
Tennessee has a proposal to create a “Tennessee community conscious Internet provider” seal to be awarded by the consumer affairs division. A bill introduced in the Tennessee General Assembly – HB 2530 – would award a seal to ISPs that:
1) retain IP addresses for 2 years;
2) take down communications that are obscene or harmful to minors;
3) prohibit customers from publishing communications obscene or harmful to minors; and
4) comply and cooperate with law enforcement requests and court orders.
Granted, Tennessee is the “volunteer state”, but if this bill were to pass would ISPs really participate?
Note how the bill links “obscenity” – which is not protected speech under the 1st Amendment – with material harmful to minors – which could be almost anything, most of which would be protected speech.
This is a trend we’re seeing–using child porn and child online safety as a “trojan horse” into regulating the online behavior of everybody through rules on ISPs. Adam Thierer calls it “deputizing the middleman” — an apt phrase for the kinds of policing that ISPs may be doing in the future based on the regulatory and market pressures they’re seeing today.
Hawaii has a bill pending that would make it a felony for ISPs to knowingly fail to report subscribers who acquire, possess, solicit or transmit images of child pornography.
Forget a “seal of approval” – may as well just throw ISPs a badge.
It’s been called a “virtual privacy time bomb” by a prominent Congressman, something that an FTC commissioner believes should “really trouble all of us” and to which one policy group believes we should have a legal right to examine, correct, and/or delete. What is it?
Answer: Online behavioral marketing data.
And it will continue to be a hot topic for 2008, as the Google – DoubleClick merger progresses, the FTC collects public comment on self-regulatory principles, and New York State bill A09275 (introduced in response to the Facebook controversy) is further considered.
I have a kind of love/hate relationship with online behavioral marketing. Advertising that is better targeted to consumers helps support a lot of Internet web sites that otherwise might charge for their services. And I receive ads targeted to my tastes and preferences (yippee!). But there’s something about it that makes me feel uneasy, something that still doesn’t quite sit so well.
And thanks to my prior sentence, there may be Pepto-Bismol ads popping up on the web site hosting this blog. Indeed, behavioral advertising is the tracking of a consumer’s activities online – including the searches the consumer has conducted, the Web pages visited, and the content viewed – in order to deliver advertising targeted to the individual consumer’s interests. Google is the 1,000 pound gorilla in this space, as it sells its AdSense service to display targeted ads for content and for search results.
Continue reading →
Hannah Montana performed in Providence last month, but her wake continues to reverberate in the halls of the Rhode Island General Assembly. Companion bills in the House and Senate would single out online ticket transactions for greater regulation in a state that already has one of the most restrictive ticket scalping laws in the country.
Yesterday I traveled to Providence to testify before the House Corporations Committee on H 7090 and H7091. These bills would add new rules that mostly apply to the online buying and selling of tickets. Essentially I was there to ask: why pick on e-commerce?
Hannah Montana is the Disney Channel sitcom on which Miley Cyrus plays Miley Stewart, an ordinary teenager with secret pop superstar identity. Her father is country singer Billy Ray Cyrus, of “Achy Breaky Heart” fame. And due to the popularity of the live shows, tickets have been hard to come by, producing achy breaky hearts in children across the country and irate parents that call their state legislator and demand action. Upon hearing about $60 tickets selling for $600 on the secondary market, legislators want to blame websites like eBay and StubHub.
But the tickets market is not so simple. Ticket resellers are not to blame for the limited supply of tickets and large demand from consumers. Hannah Montana is really about how tickets are issued, allocated, distributed and sold in the primary market, not how tickets are thereafter resold. And as in all markets, if demand exceeds supply and prices are initially fixed at a relatively low level, a secondary market will develop.
At yesterday’s hearing, some legislators thought that it was StubHub itself that was purchasing large blocks of tickets and then reselling for large sums on its site. The reality of course is that sites like eBay and StubHub are mere exchanges that serve as platform for buyers and sellers to meet and transact.
Continue reading →
Check out this article that describes how the state of Victoria in Australia will be trying out GPS speed monitoring devices that are installed in cars. The GPS technology identifies speed limits on all roads and operates on three levels:
Drivers get an audible warning they are over the limit at level one.
At level two, the device cuts power to the engine to prevent the driver from speeding, but the system can be adjusted or overridden.
At level three, the system cannot be switched off or adjusted and all speeding is cut.
Not sure Americans would ever go for this! And it seems to me that there are sometimes legitimate reasons to go above the posted speed limit (maybe passing a car?), and all of a sudden having the throttle shut down could be dangerous.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.