Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Lately the good folks at Bureaucrash have really been giving us a lot of cool tech related podcasts. Last week they brought us an interview with Cory Doctorow. This week a guide to online privacy. Topics include:
Listen to it at Bureaucrash.com.
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: def. monopoly
Exclusive possession of a market by a supplier of a product or service for which there is no substitute. In the absence of competition, the supplier usually restricts output and increases price in order to maximize profits.
How does this possibly apply to Google? Google hasn’t decreased output, prices have not skyrocketed, and clearly there are plenty of substitutes. Yet groups like the Association of National Advertisers are attacking Google, claiming Google has a monopoly because it “controls” 90% of search.
Okay. Google gets the lion’s share of search engine traffic. But controlling search doesn’t amount to controlling online advertising, not by a long shot.
We haven’t seen prices go up because the time people spend on search engines every day is minimal, amounting to only a handful of minutes. Google has successfully turned these few minutes a day into a machine that generates billions of dollars a year. Yet despite its powerful position in the search market, competition from outside of search is forcing Google to keep its rates low.
“Buzz Out Loud,” one of my favorite podcasts, disappoints me from time to time, specifically when the good folks at CNET decide to bash broadband companies and call them “jerks” and “evil.”
So goes Episode 809 of Buzz Out Loud. Molly Wood, Jason Howell, and guest host Don Reisinger declare AT&T’s decision to throttle U-Verse (as reported by Ars-Technica) to be just another dumb thing that stupid broadband companies do.
One of their reasons for saying so is that AT&T’s U-Verse is fiber, but that’s not true. U-Verse uses fiber to feed VRADs, or Video Ready Access Devices, that take that fiber and feed its signal out over legacy copper wires, in a sort of DSL adapted-to-video hybrid.
When you get the facts wrong, your analysis is bound to be bad.
None other than Sci-Fi author, civil libertarian, blogger, activist, and TLF commenter Cory Doctorow drops in at the Bureaucrash Podcrash (that’s a podcast for “crashers”) to discuss his new book Little Brother.
Austin Grossman’s review of the book for the New York Times remarks:
An entertaining thriller and a thoughtful polemic on Internet-era civil rights, “Little Brother” is also a practical handbook of digital self-defense. Marcus’s guided tour through RFID cloners, cryptography and Bayesian math is one of the book’s principal delights. He spreads his message through a secure network engineered out of Xbox gaming consoles, to a tech-savvy youth underground (we are now post-nerd, I learned — hipsters and social networking experts have replaced the unwashed coders of yore).
We at TLF may disagree with Mr. Doctorow on a number of policy issues, but I must admit that he’s a talented writer. I bought Cory’s Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, a collection of short stories, at Capital Books here in DC and read it cover to cover by the end of that weekend. A great read available free in digital form at Cory’s Craphound.
Yes, this is my second question mark-festooned post of the day, but it’s another title that calls for being phrased as a question, because it’s so unbelievable that anyone said it.
Turns out, a McCain adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, was struggling to prove that McCain has what it takes to tackle our economic woes. And here I thought it was the communists, not American war heroes, who believe in managing the economy. Anyway, Holtz-Eakin reached for anything to prove McCain’s credentials and pointed to the Senator’s service on the Commerce Committee.
This line from a story at CNN.com provides the real kicker:
Pressed to provide an example of what McCain had accomplished on that committee, Holtz-Eakin said the senator did not have jurisdiction over financial markets, then he held up his Blackberry, telling reporters: “He did this.”
That’s right everyone, Al Gore may have created the Internet, but John McCain created the Blackberry.
The Washington Post reports today on a trend that I thought we all knew about, but one I’m glad the mainstream media is finally realizing. It turns out that people who play video games are not just virginal teenage boys with acne problems. No, even 20-something, attractive women play video games.
The Post’s Mike Musgrove reports on the mother and daughters of the Burguieres family of Bethesda, Maryland. Of course in good journalist fashion Musgrove uses the Burguiereses to illustrate a larger point, he even points to the relevant stats:
It used to be that this all-woman crew wouldn’t fit the standard image of the video game consumer. But the perception of gamers as being mostly young guys isn’t so true anymore. Women and girls make up 40 percent of the gamer population, according to the Entertainment Software Association.
The most interesting point brought up in the article on this demographic trend—one that most gamers realize has been happening for quite some time—is Musgrove’s observation that women once were not naturally accepted members of the gaming community. It’s a great point, but one that can be extended to tech community in general.
To follow-up on my post from this morning I should note that Google Chrome immediately asks you which search engine you’d like to use upon installing, conveniently providing users with a chance to use something other than their default search engine and dodging potential complaints about the browser from Microsoft.
Speaking of Redmond, Ballmer and Co. may need to fear Chrome not as a browser, but as a new computing platform. Michael Arrington writes on this at TechCrunch in a post which gets right to the heart of the matter. Check out “Meet Chrome, Google’s Windows Killer” in which Arrington shows us how Chrome combined with Gears makes for a platform that can allows OS to fade into the background.
I for one am skeptical that we’re anywhere near cloud computing being practical for anything other than the lightest of tasks. Google Docs simply doesn’t compare to Office, but I don’t think it’s trying to as many will claim. I use the service, along with several other “cloud” computing programs, but I use them in addition to my local apps, not as a substitute for them. See John C. Dvorak for more reasons why cloud applications stink.
Google is entering the browser wars today (if any such war still exists) with the launch of Chrome, its new web browser. I’m glad to see more competition in browsers as I think—and I hope everyone else agrees with me—that Firefox is the only real game in town. I know that Internet Explorer is more popular, but that seems to only be because it is shipping with every Windows PC and because many enterprise web applications require IE’s non-standard browser. Firefox is preferred browser for anyone who works with the web regularly and has bothered to compare browsers.
One implication of this foray by Mountain View into the browser arena is that—should Chrome be at all successful—they will soon be accused of using their supposed search monopoly to squeeze out competition from IE and Firefox. That is assuming that anything in Chrome favors Google’s search, like making it the default search engine for the browser, which I’m sure it will be.
It’s funny to think that Microsoft, the poster-child from antitrust suits, could be the one launching such a suit. Just a few short years ago we saw Microsoft scoffing at the very notion of antitrust or monopoly power, arguing that it in no way used its market share to its own advantage. Now we see Redmond lashing out against Google as a monopolist. At a recent conference I had the unpleasant experience of watching a panel on online advertising devolve into a fight between the Microsoft and Google reps over whether Google was a search and advertising monopolist.
Declan McCullagh has a great write-up on presumptive Democratic VP nominee Joe Biden over at CNET. Some highlights:
Check out the post to read more about Biden’s spotty record on tech policy.
William Kennard, Obama for President Telecommunications Adviser, describes the FCC’s jurisdiction in the Comcast case as “murky” today on C-SPAN’s “The Communicators.” Kennard went on to say that enshrining net neutrality into law would be necessary to clear up this authority issue.
This is a guy who knows what he’s talking about. As a former chairman and general counsel for the FCC, he knows just as well as anyone else where the commission’s authority begins and ends.
Many folks involved in the tech policy world don’t agree with the bloggers here at TLF, who oppose network neutrality regulation. But, I’m sure everyone in the tech community would agree that we should maintain the rule of law and stop the abuse and unlawful expansion of government power—something Kennard seems to believe is happening at the FCC.
It seems as though Kevin Martin needs to hit the books and start looking into the legality of his own actions. I hope the good folks at Comcast do the same. With any luck, we’ll soon be seeing both parties in court.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
