Articles by Sonia Arrison 
Sonia Arrison is an author and policy analyst who has studied
the impact of new technologies on society for more than a decade. A Senior Fellow at the California-based Pacific Research Institute (PRI) and a columnist for TechNewsWorld, she is author of two previous books (Western Visions and Digital Dialog) as well as numerous PRI studies on technology issues. A frequent media contributor and guest, her work has appeared in many publications including CBS MarketWatch, CNN, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. She was also the host of a radio show called "digital dialogue" on the Voice America network and has been a repeat guest on National Public Radio and CNN's Headline News.
The FCC’s call for comments on net neutrality ended on Friday and, as Wired News reports, over 11,000 individuals had something to say on the issue. As much as I like the idea of people getting involved in politics, the NN issue has brought out the sad, herd-like, mentality of a lot of people who simply want to vent against what they see as “the fabulously wealthy and the corporate world” (see Wired piece).
Net neutrality is a non-issue that became a big issue BECAUSE some fabulously wealthy corporations (think Google and Ebay here) wanted everyone to get into a tizzy so they had better bargaining chips for broadband prices for themselves. Indeed, the nature of the net neutrality debate was recently revealed when a bill to establish net neutrality principles was defeated in Maine. After the defeat, supporters of net neutrality claimed a victory simply because the legislature agreed to a non-binding resolution to study the issue. Claiming success when the reality is actually defeat smacks of the kind of tactics corrupt dictatorships resort to in their last days. Perhaps this is a sign that the net neutrality militia is about to go belly-up.
Google’s mapping service just introduced a new feature called “Street View,” offering detailed photos of addresses in San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami. While the company might not be breaking any privacy laws, the service raises concerns that need to be addressed.
The photographs are not live and were taken from a device with multiple cameras attached to a car that drove down each available street. The problem for some is that the cameras took photos of people not expecting to be photographed and broadcast across the Net. There are photos of women sunbathing at Stanford University, a man caught urinating in San Bruno, Calif., and a very clear picture of a woman’s thong underwear as she was getting into her truck.
Google argues that the photos are “no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street.” That’s true if you can see the image for a few minutes and then it disappears, or if it is a random photo from a camera phone posted online. However, that’s not how it works.
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Read more here.
Those who care about free speech should consider why government taxes are higher on communications than on other goods and services. This new study by The Heartland Institute and the Beacon Hill Institute is eye opening.
Here’s a paragraph from the study:
According to the Tax Foundation, the national average retail sales tax rate (combining local, county, and state sales taxes, weighted by personal income) is 6.61 percent. Taxes and fees on cable TV and telephone subscribers average 13.52 percent, twice as high. In other words, telephone calls and cable services are taxed at two times the rate as clothing, sporting goods, and other household products.
Here’s a column I wrote recently on the connection between the two.
Anaheim Mayor Curt Pringle today announced a citywide wireless service coverage initiative to ensure all major cellular phone companies are able to provide full coverage through Anaheim’s 50 square miles. This is in contrast to other cities like San Francisco and Philadelphia that prefer to stifle competoition by only granting city-wide access to a small number of providers like Earthlink or Google.
“It’s only fitting that the United States’ largest municipal Wi-Fi city would have complete and total coverage for all wireless devices, including cellular telephones,” said Mayor Pringle. “For 150 years in Anaheim, we have championed creativity, innovation and imagination – the same ideals that technology companies embody.”
Good for them. It’s time for leaders in other cities to do the same.
Advances in biotechnology are moving incredibly fast these days and many scientists agree it will soon be possible for most humans to live past 100 years. What’s not being discussed yet is how society is going to manage that longevity revolution. I’m writing a book on this topic now, and here is a link to my op-ed in the LA Times today discussing the issue.
The Pacific Research Institute just published a paper I coauthored on Municipal networks. The study, titled “Wi-Fi Waste: The Disaster of Municipal Communications Networks” reviewed 52 city-run telecom networks that compete in the cable, broadband, and telephone markets. The amount of deception and anti-competitive activity that we found in our sample was appalling and a solid reason why proposed new Muni WiFi systems should be opposed.
Brian Emmett, a self-described space buff (who has even attended space camp) won a trip to space in an Oracle competition, but he won’t be able to take the ride. That’s because the government counts contest winnings as income, and the tax on the ride would be about $25,000–a huge chuck of money that the average person (including Emmett) cannot afford to pay.
In an interview with CNN, Emmett said, “There was definitely a period of mourning. I was totally crestfallen. Everything you had hoped for as a kid sort of evaporates in front of you.”
This is a sad story that should be recalled not only in the lead-up to tax season. We should be asking what precisely the government planned to do with that $25,000. Social security is broken, the health care system is a mess, and the education system is failing miserably. It’s time for citizens to demand that government become less wasteful and more accountable.
Shopping is normally good for the economy, but not when the shoppers are net neutrality advocates looking for friendly deals on a regulatory forum. Policy makers in Michigan, their current target, should tell pro-regulatory activists to go home, with good reason.
Those who support net neutrality legislation frame themselves as proponents of the Net, but in reality their recommendations would have an anti-Internet effect. The worry is that network providers like AT&T or Comcast will start charging some Web sites more than others. It is true that network providers would like to charge high-traffic Web sites for their larger usage of the network, but it remains unclear why that would be wrong or unfair.
Voip.com, an Internet phone provider, is one of the corporations calling for government intervention. Without government oversight, it argues, “consumer-friendly applications like VoIP, online gaming, and streaming homegrown video would likely be squeezed out by the larger corporations that can afford to pay for unfettered service.”
It’s obvious that Voip.com is simply trying to avoid the risk of paying more for their network use, but the thing Voip.com’s executives have missed is that the Net is getting crowded. If network operators can’t recoup their costs for the higher bandwidth use, then the network will slow down for everyone and services like VoIP, online gaming, and streaming video won’t work so well anymore.
Read more here.
I almost choked on my morning coffee when I saw the headline last week that Novell and Microsoft announced a deal to make their software work together. As someone who once employed VMware to use Word on a machine running Linux OS, I have to say that I was both surprised and thrilled. And, as someone who closely followed the Microsoft antitrust cases in both the US and Europe, I was astounded. I wish I could call Judge Jackson right now and ask him why he thinks these two competitors who once looked to be arch enemies are now joining forces (Novell accused MS of antitrust violations and sued over WordPerfect). But of course Jackson didn’t think Microsoft had any competitors, so perhaps he wouldn’t really understand the question.
The fact that Microsoft and Novell are now teaming up to provide consumers with something they have been clamoring for (interoperability) is proof that the marketplace can deliver benefits to consumers without government help even if the two competitors have a bad history.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.