Articles by Cord Blomquist 
Cord Blomquist spends most of his time pining for the singularity. To pass the time while waiting for this convergence, he serves as the New Media Manager at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Before landing this sweet gig, Cord hocked policy writing for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, toiled in the halls of Congress, and even worked in a crouton factory. In college, Cord spent his hours studying political philosophy and artificial intelligence, resulting in an unhealthy obsession with Lt. Commander Data. All of these activities will, of course, be viewed as laughable when he is ported from this crude meatspace into the nanobot cloud.
On a note related to Jerry’s post on “L’iPhone” I’d like to point out Thomas Hazlett’s “How the ‘walled garden’ promotes innovation” in the September 26 Financial Times. The piece discusses the virtues of closed and controlled technological ecosystems and how the “walled garden” can often be a prosperous and vibrant one. Best paragraph from the piece:
Unbundling phones from networks is suggested as a policy fix in the US. European phones, working with different Sim cards across carriers and borders, are the model. Innovation in the European Union is said to flourish. But the iPhone came first to the US, as did the BlackBerry and advanced broadband networks using CDMA data formats. That is not surprising given that US networks are afforded wide latitude in designing their systems. Licenses in the EU mandate a GSM standard. What is recommended as “open” in fact deprives customers of a most basic cellular choice: technology.
Of course the real closed vs. open debate is whether we want an open economy. Open, that is, to varying business models–rather than one that is closed to any service or product that technophiles might describe with the now-curse-words “proprietary” or “closed source.” The techno-intelligentsia may value the notion of taking a phone from network to network, or being able to install Skype on anything with processor, but it turns out that most people couldn’t care less. Ultimately that’s what matters. The systems that are adopted shouldn’t be chosen by uber-geeks and regulators, but by every-day consumers.
CEI has recently brought on a very productive Research Associate named Alex Nowrasteh who has posted a great piece about the Google/DoubleClick merger and the hearings on Capitol Hill today on CEI’s blog, OpenMarket.org. The merger received a one-two punch from Sen. Herb Kohl Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill), Chairman of the Congressional Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection and by Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wi), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights.
Alex will also be doing some of the research on an upcoming paper focusing on FCC reform.
Minor abuses at the FCC, such as the one mentioned in my last post, warrant at least investigating how the FCC assesses fines, if not looking for ways to reform the FCC’s governance of broadcasting. But when we look at the incredible distortion created by the central planning of broadcast spectrum the case of dramatic and rapid reform becomes very clear.
More specifically, the FCC is now placing caveats on the 700Mhz auction–perverting the one reform, auctions, that have worked to replace bureaucratic preference with market forces. The XM/Sirius Satellite radio merger is also a symptom of the disease of FCC regulation. Satellite spacing requirements, spectrum allocation, and the inability for terrestrial firms to sell their spectrum assets and move skyward are all standing in the way of more competition in satellite markets.
This squandering of a natural resource has inspired many FCC reform projects–the predecessor of all this work is Coase’s “The Federal Communications Commission” from the Journal of Law and Economics (one of the most cited papers of all time), but more recently the FCC itself has released working papers mapping out the road to markets. There have also been broader plans like CEI’s Communications Without Commissions as well as highly informative work coming out of Cato on the stumbling blocks that might be encountered in the process of privatization.
The intellectual work has been done on this issue, but for reform to actually occur, the issue of the FCC and its inefficiency and threat to American competitiveness needs to be pushed to the forefront of the public debate. CEI is working on a paper outlining the litany of abuses that have come out of the FCC and just how much of the communications potential of the United States goes unused because of the lack of markets in spectrum. Others need to join the fight as the XM/Sirius and 700Mhz issues move forward. If the road to reform is obvious and the benefits made known, Congress might act, but not until we force the issue.
Seems as though the FCC can’t get enough fining done within the bounds of its legal fining regime and is now fining arbitrary 3rd parties related to broadcasts. According to Yahoo! News:
The Federal Communications Commission is proposing a $4,000 fine against Comcast Corp. for airing a pitch for a sleep aid without telling viewers that the spot was financed by the maker of the product.
The story goes on to point out that:
The fine, while small, is significant for another reason: It is being assessed against a cable company. Comcast Corp. says cable programming is not covered under the statute cited by the FCC.
This remind me of the Onion story from either years ago that reported “Aging Pope ‘Just Blessing Everything In Sight.‘” It seems that now the FCC is ‘just fining everything in sight’ and spreading its ‘blessings’ just as capriciously.
Playspan dubs itself “The Game Industry’s First Publisher-Sponsored In-Game Commerce Network.” What does that mean? To put it more simply, welcome to Wall Street for World of War Craft.
In the pre-web world, what I like to call “The Before Time,” people’s puny brains used to be limited to thinking of products as physical objects or services to be performed in the physical world. No more! Commerce now extends into the virtual world and is no longer limited to our crude meatspace.
In all seriousness, it’s great that more people are becoming entrepreneurs, even if it is in the weird new business of selling shields, potions, virtual plots of land, or the occasional level 45 cleric. This should serve to remind us that there are markets in everything.
USA Today reports that Municipal Wi-Fi plans across the nation continue to collapse under the pressure of economic reality. Schemes such as those proposed in Chicago and San Francisco simply don’t make good business sense, which is why they have been abandoned.
I don’t think citizens of these would-be wireless utopias should be upset over the loss of their Wi-Fi blanket, however. Most of these arrangements involved giving exclusive access to city rights of way to one company, creating a new generation of Ma’ Bells–a very dystopian vision. Getting in bed with the government is a bad idea for business, especially network industries, because as time goes by they lose their autonomy and become an atrophied public utility. So though Wi-Fi might give consumers more choice, it’s just another bad choice.
Read more in my piece recently published at American.com.
As the US and EU regulators bear down on Google we’re already seeing changes in the marketplace where the Googlers currently have the lead. Yahoo! is catching up to Google with several innovations in its email client. Unlimited Storage, a built in RSS reader (not separate and clunky with a just-added search function), push email for the iPhone, better contacts that syncs with the iPhone, built in SMS, and drag and drop functionality are all unique to Yahoo! mail, at least for the moment. There’s no doubt that GMail will catch-up, but that’s exactly what competition is meant to do, force competitors to improve or perish. Read more about it at LifeHacker.
Hat tip to my colleague Wayne Crews for sending me the link.
Not the freshest news in the world, but I found it interesting when I discovered today that that Ask.com offers a service called AskEraser which allows users to use its service anonymously. That’s right, no longer do you have to be tracked by the Googleplex to search the net–the search isn’t half-bad either for all but the most esoteric topics.
Google has similar privacy features, but it’s a bit harder to use it–and many other search engines–totally anonymously. Obviously Ask.com is adopting a strategy of differentiation, rather than head-on competition, to beat the monolith of Mountain View.
In other search news, I was surprised to learn that AltaVista still exists (who has used this since 1998?) and I was even more surprised to learn that they offer a really cool search tool. Any search can bring up related MP3s if the “MP3/Audio” tab is clicked. It also brings up .ram and .ra files, but who would want to listen to those? This is yet another example of cool things happening in search that help to keep the search market competitive.
Do land line telephones have a future? Yes. . .but not a long one. Cell phones, VOIP, and Device Based Telephony are quickly making copper phone lines an anachronism. Eli Lehrer, a colleague of mine at CEI, discusses how deregulation may help to keep copper online a little longer and urges government to get out of the way of emerging telephony technologies in a new paper entitled “Keeping the Voices Alive.”
I don’t think the government should act in anyway to prop-up the endangered and soon-to-be extinct copper cable phone system, but there is no reason for government to act to hasten its death and squander resources in the process–the exact point Eli makes. Eli also points out the ill effects of E-911 and universal service participation on new voice technologies.
It’s a quick read that makes a very salient point about the transition from copper to fiber and how the static regulatory system has a chance to reform and improve in the face of the dynamic telecommunications market.
Is it even possible for companies to strike exclusive deals when teams of nerds across the country have been at work on hacking the iPhone since it’s release in late June? Engadget declared the Apple/AT&T exclusivity deal dead at noon on Friday, so sorry if this story is a little old, but now that media outlets like Wired, BusinessWeek, and CNN are covering the story, I thought that TLF should also weigh in.
I don’t know if I should view this as good news, bad news, or just another lesson in the folly of trying to lock-out the tech set from something as desirable as the iPhone. Exclusivity deals, from a policy standpoint, are like most any other private, legal arrangement to me–they’re perfectly fine. However, the corporate managers of the world may want to start reconsidering exclusivity arrangements that rely on hack-proof tech. Why? Because no such thing exists.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.