Articles by Ryan Radia 
Ryan is associate director of technology studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, where his work focuses on adapting law and policy to the unique challenges of the information age. His research areas include privacy, IP telecommunications, competition policy, and media regulation.
As TLF readers may already have noticed, Alex Harris, a law student at Stanford and Adjunct Analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has joined us as a contributor to TLF.
Alex, who was a Google Policy Fellow at CEI this past summer, has done a lot of top-notch blogging over on OpenMarket.org. He also wrote a very interesting essay that appeared in The American Spectator recently which argued against the reimposition the Fairness Doctrine. Alex’s writing focuses on issues ranging from civil liberties to intellectual property reform to competition policy. Alex is also the man behind the hilarious “Liberty Lolcats” series.
I’m sure Alex will be a great addition to TLF—in fact, his first TLF post ever (discussing shrinkwrap contracts) generated heated discussion and was linked to by Reason Hit & Run (more on this issue from Tim Lee here).
Over at OpenMarket.org, Wayne Crews has a good post arguing against Obama’s plan to appoint a “Technology Czar“:
Industries–and mere concepts like “technology”–do not need czars in Washington. Such enterprise needs to operate apart from this city. Indeed, even supposedly “deregulatory” Republicans were not reluctant to regulate the Internet. Bush favored federal privacy regulation, but never pushed it. His adminstration was also happy to target porn and “spam.” Legislation favored by the Republicans ran the gamut from gambling to cable regulation to media ownership. Right now, many firms in Washington are poised to push for federal privacy legislation to, as they say, pre-empt the states and get rid of the “patchwork” of privacy legislation with which they must deal. But the risk is merely trading 50 regulators for 51.
(Read the rest of the post here)
We already have plenty of regulators in Washington. Instead of appointing yet another messiah-like figure to solve our nation’s technological woes, the best thing for the technology industry would be a massive downsizing of the federal government’s role in regulating telecom companies, dictating privacy policies, and deciding what broadcasters can air.
Should U.S. businesses involved in Internet commerce do business in nations governed by oppressive regimes? This is a question that many libertarians—including some of us on TLF—have grappled with for some time.
Now Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft have signed on to a set of principles for conducting business in countries that disregard human rights. Today’s Wall Street Journal reports:
Under the new principles, which were crafted over two years, the technology titans promise to protect the personal information of their users wherever they do business and to “narrowly interpret and implement government demands that compromise privacy,” according to the code.
It’s welcome news for defenders of liberty that U.S. Web giants plan to play hardball with foreign governments who would use information gleaned from Internet firms to violate their citizens’ human rights. Several troubling reports have surfac
ed in the past few years about American companies abetting egregious actions by oppressive governments. In January, Indian police beat a man whose arrest stemmed from Google’s cooperation with the Indian government. And in 2005, Yahoo gave information to the Chinese government that led to the arrest of a journalist accused of giving out state secrets (the case was later overturned).
Continue reading →
Major speed enhancements are rumored to be coming soon from Comcast, which has been spending serious cash to upgrade its network to the DOCSIS 3.0 standard. Customers in many markets who now pay $42.95 a month for 6mbps/1mbps service will be upgraded to 12/2 — a doubling of both upstream and downstream speeds — with no corresponding price increase. This follows Comcast’s pattern of enhancing speeds without hiking prices. And the price point of the standard tier has remained unchanged in nominal terms for several years, so when you factor in inflation, it’s fair to say Comcast has actually been dropping prices.
It’s amazing to consider how broadband speeds have evolved in a relatively short perio
d of time. Comcast’s highest tier was a mere 4mbps/384kbps just four years ago, when DSL speeds typically topped out at 3/768. For consumers who live in a competitive ISP market, DSL now offers 20/1, Fiber offers 30/5, and Cable will soon offer 22/5. All of these tiers are priced under $100 per month.
Though we may not be amidst a “price war” among ISPs per se, as Mike Masnick recently argued, there is simply no denying that price per megabit is declining rapidly. This is all thanks to competition, of course, which has pushed providers to invest in newer technologies that allow for faster broadband connectivity.
Market skeptics will assuredly respond to my optimism by pointing out that so long as Comcast sticks with its 250GB monthly usage cap, consumers are really just getting the same service with shinier packaging. Yet that fact hardly means we should scoff at Comcast’s new performance tiers.
As I’ve discussed on several occasions, I churn through a lot of file transfers each month, so I’m all for Comcast raising its cap (or, alternatively, implementing reasonable overage fees). But even with Comcast’s fairly generous limits, who isn’t ecstatic about being able to download any file in half as much time as before? Caps will surely evolve over time as demand for 1080p content delivered over the Internet grows, but for now, speed is a bigger concern than usage for most consumers.
A new report from TeleGeography finds that bandwidth prices for backbone transit continue to decline rapidly across the globe. In San Francisco, for instance, the price per mbps of Gigabit Ethernet transit has dropped 38 % in the past 12 months. Developing countries are also enjoying substantial price cuts in 15 to 20% range.
But if the Internet’s core is controlled by an oligopolistic cartel—as Tim Wu argued in a recent New York Times essay—then why does bandwidth keep getting cheaper?
Perhaps it’s because the fourteen or so firms which offer backbone IP transit are competing fiercely to win over business from smaller carriers and enterprises. And as businesses of all sizes demand faster connectivity, more dark fiber is being lit, creating an expansion in network capacity. In DC, for instance, a price war has made high-speed commercial data services much more affordable, with one communications provider offering converged 10mbps full-duplex dedicated Ethernet over copper for less than the market price of four bonded T1 lines.
Why are some providers moving towards data transfer caps if bandwidth prices are dropping ? In part, it’s because backbone transit is not the only usage-variable expense that residential ISPs face. Last-mile bandwidth remains a highly contested resource in many neighborhoods, and the cost per megabit of bringing faster speeds to the doorstep far exceeds the cost of adding more wavelengths to a long-distance fiber optic line. As consumers demand greater speeds, providers are investing heavily in network upgrades—these costs are adding up, and there’s a strong case to be made that heavy users ought to shoulder a larger portion of the burden than light users.
In response to Adam and Berin’s excellent introduction to their Googlephobia series, invaluable TLF commenter Richard Bennett succinctly sums up the rap on Google.
There’s no denying that Google has the capacity to do some pretty heinous things with all the sensitive data stored on its servers. But the relevant question isn’t whether Google could do evil, but whether it realistically will. What incentive is there for Google to do anything but keep private data as secure as humanly possible? Sure, Google could earn a nice chunk of change if it were to sell user search queries to the highest bidder. But why would Google put its entire business on the line for a comparatively insignificant short-term gain?
A major privacy breach is Google’s nightmare scenario. If anything happened to cause users to lose trust in Google, they’d go someplace else for email and search. Advertisers would follow suit, causing Google’s stock price to plummet. Google might never be able to recover from a severe privacy fiasco. Obviously, Google is well aware of its vulnerabilities on privacy, which is why Google has incredibly strong safeguards to ensure that sensitive data can’t be uncovered by a rogue product manager with an itchy trigger finger.
Then there’s the liability issue. The multi-billion dollar lawsuits that would ensue were Google to suffer a data breach or an internal leak would deal a serious financial blow to the company, especially because Google’s privacy policy is more than just a comforting statement—it’s legally binding.
Continue reading →
Over on Techdirt, Mike Masnick discusses an interesting new survey that highlights the sharp disconnect between how much we claim privacy matters to us and how far we’re willing to go to safeguard it. America Online polled 1,000 users in the United Kingdom, and the results further reinforce what other recent studies have suggested:
The study found 84% of users say they carefully guard their info online — but when tested, 89% of people actually did give away info in the same exact survey.
The AOL survey brings to mind security guru Bruce Schneier’s insightful quip on privacy from back in 2001:
If McDonald’s in the United States would give away a free hamburger for a DNA sample they would be handing out free lunches around the clock. So people care about their privacy, but they don’t care to pay for it.
When presented with the option of sacrificing a bit of privacy for something of value, like a chocolate bar or a free gift certificate, many users are surprisingly willing to dole out data to third parties for commercial use. And the value of personal details to marketers is massive. As social networking sites and ad-serving networks amass ever greater knowledge of our hobbies, political views, and even our favorite music, these sites are getting better at mining data to tailor ads with pinpoint precision, commanding high click rates while sustaining server farms and original content publishers.
Continue reading →
After gaining final approval to rollout FiOS in New York City a few weeks ago, Verizon has come to a preliminary agreement with the District of Columbia to deploy FiOS television service in the nation’s capital. This long-awaited announcement follows nearly a year of negotiation between Verizon and D.C. franchising authorities.
Thanks to its especially onerous franchising regime, the District of Columbia has lagged behind surrounding areas in fiber-optic connectivity. Neighboring communities such as Arlington, Fairfax, and Bethesda have had FiOS for years, and D.C.’s lack of fiber-optic service has long been a sore spot for the city.
D.C. residents can’t celebrate just yet, though. Verizon must overcome one more regulatory hurdle before starting to dig up the streets. The franchise agreement must receive a green-light from both the D.C. city council and the Attorney General. If the New York City episode is any indication, getting politicians to acquiesce will involve expensive demands and forced concessions, resulting in higher prices for everyone.
Continue reading →
Just as the 505-day XM Sirius antitrust saga comes to a bittersweet end, reports have resurfaced that a new satellite merger may be in the works. Dish Network is floating the idea of merging with competitor DirecTV. Dish Network and DirecTV, the two largest satellite television providers in the U.S., tried to merge back in 2001. Antitrust officials ultimately blocked that merger, concluding that it would hurt competition in television programming. Naturally, a renewed merger attempt would likely encounter similar obstacles, according to industry observers.
This time around, though, the deal may have a better shot of surviving regulatory scrutiny, buoyed by the approval of the XM-Sirius merger. Compared to 2001, competition among video providers is thriving, and there are more alternatives to satellite television than ever before. Many consumers can now choose from a multitude of terrestrial television providers—phone companies are rapidly rolling out IPTV-based video services like FiOS TV and U-Verse, and cable overbuilders like RCN are gaining momentum in densely populated areas.
In addition, a growing number of viewers are shunning traditional television services entirely, turning to a la carte substitutes like the iTunes episode store, Netflix, and Xbox Live Marketplace. With an $8.99 per month subscription to Netflix, it’s possible to stream instantly a video library eclipsing that available on cable or satellite TV. Ad-supported video websites like Hulu and Comedy Central, which offer hundreds of archived TV shows on the Web for free, may soon render the television channel obsolete.
Dish Network’s talk of a potential merger comes on the heels of the company’s first ever quarterly loss of subscribers, and that may just be the tip of an iceberg. Until recently, television subscribers were largely content with watching programs on a predefined schedule, but on-demand services are changing that. As viewers come to expect the ability to watch any show anytime, without bothering to record it in advance, the lack of bidirectionality inherent in Direct-Broadcast Satellite is a glaring deficiency that cable and telecom firms will exploit at every juncture. Unless satellite providers can negotiate arrangements with broadband carriers, or succeed in building wireless networks with newly acquired spectrum, Dish and DirecTV face a bleak future, especially if they are unable to trim costs and enhance content choice.
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.