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.

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Google’s Internet “Fast Lane”

by Cord Blomquist on December 15, 2008 · 17 comments

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Google wants a fast lane on the Internet and has claimed that the Mountain View based giant may be moving away from its stance on network neutrality:

Google’s proposed arrangement with network providers, internally called OpenEdge, would place Google servers directly within the network of the service providers, according to documents reviewed by the Journal.

The problem with the Journal piece is that OpenEdge isn’t exactly a neutrality violation, or maybe it is. As Declan McCullagh at CNET has pointed out in his post “Google accused of turning its back on Net neutrality,” figuring out when a neutrality violation has occurred is a little tricky:

The problem with defining Net neutrality so the government can regulate it is a little like the problem of defining obscenity so the government can ban it: You know it when you see it.

Well, Google says that it knows a neutrality violation when it sees one and not surprisingly it doesn’t see one in its own actions. It’s defense essentially boils down to them pointing out that OpenEdge is caching. It’s more of a warehouse than a fast lane. Besides, anyone else can do the same thing, so Google isn’t using any ISP’s “unilateral control over consumers’ broadband connections” to their advantage.

Interestingly, however, the same Google’s Policy Blog entry defends other companies that engage in the same sort of caching, including LimeLight. But LimeLight Networks isn’t just a data warehousing company, they combine caching with real fast lanes.

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Lawrence Lessig and Fighting Corruption

by Cord Blomquist on December 15, 2008 · 17 comments

I’ve been reading some of Larry Lessig’s thoughts on corruption and I’ve drafted a short reaction at OpenMarket.org.

In short, I think that Lessig’s right to say that Washington is corrupt, he’s right that money has an incredible power to corrupt the system, but I think he’s wrong to say that we ought to focus on money.

Why? Because there are other forms of influence that special interests can use to push lawmakers toward the policies they would prefer. Eliminating money from politics is likely an impossible goal but would also do little to stop corruption. Taking away power from government and returning it to individuals seems to me to be the only way we can truly fight corruption. I articulate this all more fully in the post.

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Why Cisco Isn’t Socialist & Who Really Is

by Cord Blomquist on December 4, 2008 · 6 comments

Ellen McGirt is undoubtedly a good business reporter. Her recent cover story for Fast Company “How Cisco’s CEO John Chambers is Turning the Tech Giant Socialist,” is a great piece that shows the many interesting and truly innovative reforms that Chambers has instituted at Cisco.

However, I think McGirt is trying too hard to be clever or just doesn’t understand what socialism really means. Socialism is a political system that uses the force of government to take money from some and give it to others. Cisco is a private enterprise that’s only asking for you to buy their products.

McGirt’s confusion seems to arise from the socialist-sounding rhetoric of CEO John Chambers. He uses what McGirt calls “Collectivist Catchphrases” like “Co-Labor” to describe Cisco’s approach to management. He’s replaced managers (what many consider the avatars of capitalism) with councils and boards; emphasizes information sharing, rather than hoarding; rewards cooperation, rather than back-stabbing ladder-climbing.

But Chambers is no socialist, he’s a capitalist responding to a problem as old as business itself: How do you give those with good information and good ideas, the power to get things done?

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Google Bandwidth Study Proves Very Little

by Cord Blomquist on December 4, 2008 · 24 comments

Precursor LLC released a study that claims to have calculated Google’s total bandwidth use declaring “Google uses 21 times more bandwidth than it pays for.”

The study is an attempt to foil Google’s pursuit of Net Neutrality as a federal policy by claiming that Google is already a kind of free-rider and its policy goals will only allow it to mooch more.

The study estimates the total bandwidth “used” by Google in a circuitous way. It calculates the bandwidth Google-originating data uses while traveling around the web, adds that to bandwidth used by search bots sending data back to Google, then assigns a dollar value to that bandwidth, and then compares that to an estimate of Google’s total outlays for bandwidth (a number which had to estimated as Google does not disclose this number).

The result: Google doesn’t pay for all the bandwidth used by data flowing in and out of its servers.

But this is true for any site on the web!

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Eric Holder and Tech Policy

by Cord Blomquist on December 2, 2008 · 17 comments

Barack Obama will be nominating Eric Holder, former Clinton Administration deputy attorney general, to become the nation’s highest ranking law enforcement official. This has folks like me worried, as Holder has expressed some unsavory views when it comes to keeping our technology free.

For example, Holder has expressed that law enforcement should have privileged access to encryption information, as Declan explains in his post at CNET’s News.com today. Declan and I spoke yesterday evening about this and Declan was kind enough to quote me in his post:

“What he’s saying is that government needs to have some sort of privileged access for encrypted information,” said Cord Blomquist, a policy analyst and communications director at the nonpartisan Competitive Enterprise Institute. “Presumably the justification is that terrorists are communicating through encrypted messages and we want to listen in. Giving government privileged access to that is not only an attack on privacy, it’s an attack on free speech itself.”

As if this threat to freedom of expression wasn’t bad enough, Holder has also come out in favor of mandatory data retention for ISPs and other tech companies and he’s stated that he believes the Supreme Court should look favorably upon some government censorship of the Internet.

All of these positions might lead one to believe that Holder favors the 1984 approach to law enforcement. Rather than following the due process called for by the Constitution and only pursuing those suspected of a crime, or obtaining a search warrant, or doing real law enforcement work, this school of thought favors labeling us all as suspects.

Yet, Holder has opposed the illegal NSA-sponsored wire-tapping program and the current implementation of the PATRIOT Act. But much of this could be explained away as a matter of political expediency. Both programs were creations of the Bush Administration, and Obama is about change, after all.

Law enforcement is important, in fact, it’s one of the primary reasons we have a government in the first place. Unfortunately, Eric Holder favors several policies that would use technology to violate the rights of all citizens, rather than investigating and prosecuting only those who break the law. This is the reason we have written Constitutions.

Of course, this new administration is also about hope, and we have some reason to hope that Holder will be better than Ashcroft or Gonzales at upholding the Constitution. But, as Jim Harper of the Cato Institute (and my fellow TLF blogger) said in the same piece by Declan, “What you get in an attorney general is an attorney general, and that’s someone who is going to work to increase the power of law enforcement.”

Well put Harper.

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Jerry Yang: Bad at Business or Politics?

by Cord Blomquist on November 18, 2008 · 26 comments

Yahoo! has seen better days, but it’s still a profitable company with a market cap of $16 billion, something that many tech companies that began in the 1990s can’t say (mainly because they no longer exist). Even though Yahoo! continues to be a profitable company, it is no longer viewed as an innovator, which is hurting its stock value immensely. It’s also hard to say exactly what Yahoo! does, even its employees and executives can’t figure out what the company is all about.

All of this added up to yesterday’s resignation of Jerry Yang.

Yang’s tenure at the helm began when he stepped in for Terry Semel in June 2007. Since that time Yang, one of the co-founders of Yahoo!, has been seen as the man who couldn’t do anything right. He passed up an offer from Microsoft to buy Yahoo! for $33 dollars a share, claiming the company was worth $37.

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DOJ Denies Yahoo! Hundreds of Millions in Revenue

by Cord Blomquist on November 5, 2008 · 5 comments

The Google Policy Blog announced today that the proposed advertising deal between Google and Yahoo! will no longer be pursued. The DOJ has thrown up too many roadblocks and both companies have decided it’s better to move on than to try to convince regulators to change their minds.

Google seemed to go out of its way to calm regulators and other advertisers who they anticipated would be concerned by the deal given Google’s perceived market power. The policy blog notes that:

Both companies agreed to delay implementation of the agreement to give regulators the chance to review it. While this wasn’t legally necessary, we thought it was the right thing to do because Google and Yahoo! have been successful in online advertising and we realized that any cooperation between us would attract attention.

Of course, this preemptive step didn’t help to stop competitors from running to Washington regulators to ask for the deal to be crushed. Instead, it seems to have helped them deny Yahoo! crucial ad revenue. The Policy Blog notes that the deal “Would have allowed Yahoo! (and its existing publisher partners) to show more relevant ads for queries that currently generate few or no advertisements.”

This is probably the best point to be made in all of this. Yahoo! knows it’s not going to be a leader in search anytime soon, but it’s a leader in many content areas. Its Yahoo! Mail service alone has over a quarter of a billion users, dwarfing Google Gmail.

Transitioning to a content-focused company is probably the best move for Yahoo!, a move that will be much harder without the ability to monetize its more esoteric content as well as search queries.

Once again, in trying to maintain some conception of what competition has been, antitrust regulators have prevented the competition of the future from forming as quickly as might have.

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ACLU, EFF, and AU’s CSM take on TV News, YouTube

by Cord Blomquist on October 22, 2008

A swarm of acronyms descended on other acronyms on Monday. The ACLU, EFF, and AU’s Center for Social Media (CSM) wrote an open letter (PDF) to CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and other acronymed networks asking that each of them think twice before sending takedown notices to YouTube for what they see to be fair use content concerning the election. The letter notes that:

Not only are such notices contrary to the law, but they also threaten to silence an exciting new source of political expression.

TechDirt seemed to miss the point by reacting to the letter with this statement in a recent story:

If the law is the problem, fix the law — don’t ask everyone else to play by different rules. That just sweeps the problems of the law under the rug, where they’ll get a lot less attention.

But the trifecta of concerned acronyms aren’t asking for TV networks to play by a different set of rules, or even to restrain themselves from excercising their legal right to file a takedown for infringement, they’re asking for the networks to follow the letter of the law and recognize blatant cases of fair use. This seems fair and totally reasonable.

What I take issue with and what seems to be asking a lot in terms of legality, is the coalition’s second letter sent on Monday (PDF), this one addressed to YouTube. It asks YouTube for two things:

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Valleywag Hates on Net Neutrality & Vint Cerf

by Cord Blomquist on October 16, 2008 · 13 comments

I thought that Thierer was frank when it came to pointing out the self interest of net neutrality proponents, check out Valleywag on the same topic today:

What’s “net neutrality”? As far as we can tell, it’s a bunch of rhetoric that amounts to regulations that affirm Google’s God-given right to avoid giving Internet service providers a cut of advertising revenues.

This comment was inspired by Google VP Vint Cerf’s recent endorsement of Barack Obama for president. Obama has stated that he favors net neutrality regulation and would enshrine into law the likely illegal action of the FCC to stretch their net neutrality “principles” into hard and fast rules.

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Hank Paulson’s Phishing Scheme

by Cord Blomquist on October 8, 2008 · 19 comments

From ACU’s new issue of Battleline. ACU board member Joe Morris contributes an email from our new economic Czar:

My Dear American Friend
Issue 117 – October 8, 2008
MY DEAR AMERICAN FRIEND:

I AM NEEDING TO ASK YOU TO SUPPORT AN URGENT SECRET BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP WITH A TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF GREAT MAGNITUDE.

I AM MINISTRY OF THE TREASURY OF THE REPUBLIC OF AMERICA. MY COUNTRY HAS HAD CRISIS THAT HAS CAUSED NEED FOR LARGE TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF 700 BILLION OF YOUR DOLLARS ( US). IF YOU WOULD ASSIST ME IN THIS TRANSFER IT WOULD BE MOST PROFITABLE TO YOU.

I AM WORKING WITH HIGHLY REPUTABLE MR. PHIL GRAM, LOBBYIST FOR UBS, WHO WILL BE MY REPLACEMENT AS MINISTRY OF THE TREASURY IN JANUARY IF MY POLITICAL PARTY WINS UPCOMING ELECTION, WHICH WE CERTAINLY WILL BECAUSE WE ARE IN CONTROLING OF THE HIGHEST SUPREME COURT. YOU MAY REMEMBER HIM AS A SENATOR AS LEADER OF THE AMERICAN BANKING DEREGULATION MOVEMENT IN THE 1990S.

I AM ALSO WORKING WITH HIGHLY REPUTABLE MR. BARNEY FRANK, MEMBER OF CONGRESS FROM PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF MASSACHUSETTS, WHO WILL BE MY REPLACEMENT AS MINISTRY OF THE TREASURY IN JANUARY IF OTHER POLITICAL PARTY, LED BY MR. BARACK OBAMA, WIN UPCOMING ELECTION, WHICH HE CERTAINLY WILL BECAUSE HE IS IN CONTROLLING OF VOTING IN ILLINOIS, OHIO, FLORIDA, AND MANY OTHER STATES. MR. BARNEY FRANK IS VERY KNOWLEDGEABLE ABOUT FINANCIAL TRANSACTIONS OF ALL KINDS, FROM WHOREHOUSE ADMINISTRATION TO HOME LOAN BUSINESS, AND FAITHFULLY TEACHES PRECEPTS OF MR. BARACK OBAMA (“FROM TINY A.C.O.R.N. GROWS GIANT FORECLOSURE OAK!”).