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.
For years, Microsoft has come under heavy fire for not making its systems secure enough. Now, with the upcoming release of its new operating system (OS), Windows Vista, the company is being unfairly attacked by self-interested competitors for adding more security to protect consumers.
Back in 2002, when Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates announced that the company would be making security a priority, the computing industry responded with a collective, “Finally.” Thomas Greene, writing for the Register, reported at the time that “Bill finally admits that the company has wrongly emphasized whistles and bells over security, and decrees that this shall change.” He went on to say, “Hallelujah. He’s finally arrived on the same page as the rest of the computing world.”
Greene’s analysis would have been more accurate if he had written, “the rest of the computing world except for those who will lose business when consumers’ computing lives become more secure.” But Greene wrote long before McAfee decided to place a full-page advertisement in the Financial Times predicting doom and gloom if Microsoft is allowed to make its own product more secure.
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Read more here.
This week, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen announced that his mouse brain-mapping project has finally been completed. This major undertaking arrives in tandem with other advances in medical technologies that will soon force political leaders to face difficult policy questions.
Mapping a mouse’s brain is significant not only because mice share 90 percent of their genes with humans, but also because mapping is the first step towards the goal of reverse engineering. Computer science uses reverse engineering to understand how a device or program works, usually with the goal of copying and improving the technology.
Researchers interested in extending human longevity, such as Ray Kurzweil, believe that reverse-engineering the brain can lead to great advances, not only in understanding how to repair the human body, but also in the field of artificial intelligence. This potential is exciting, and it challenges many of our current practices and beliefs. Consider, for instance, a procedure being tested to wake up patients that many doctors consider brain dead.
Using electrical stimulation of the brain, a type of human “reboot,” scientists have discovered that it is sometimes possible to wake people in deep comas. Dr. Edwin Cooper, an American orthopedic surgeon, has had some encouraging success with his technique, including awakening from a coma Candice Ivey, a woman doctors wanted to terminate by pulling her feeding tube.
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On Tuesday, government officials in India rejected an offer to participate in a much-hyped project to distribute laptops costing US$100 each to the world’s impoverished children. A closer look reveals this scheme to be little more than open source evangelism in the Third World.
The laptop project is part of the One Laptop per Child initiative, an ambitious nonprofit effort endorsed by the United Nations to “revolutionize” education by providing every child on the planet with access to a computer. OLPC backers assume there is a universal need for every child to have a laptop, which they view as the gateway to a rosy future.
Read more here.
The European Commission has taken a break from trying to re-design Microsoft’s software just long enough to get excited about DVDs. According to this report, “European Commission antitrust officials are probing the licensing strategies of two rival new generation DVD developers, HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc.” Given that competition is fierce among rival DVD developers, one wonders how exactly Eurocrats think their help is needed in creating competition.
At least it’s not all bad news coming from Europe. A small ray of hope for America’s tech industry arrived this week when the French Constitutional Council declared major aspects of France’s iPod law unconstitutional. Apparently, not all property rights have disappeared from the continent.
Last week, European Commission (EC) regulators fined Microsoft 280.5 million euros (US$356 million), adding to the 497 million euros ($630.7 million) the company has already been forced to pay.
Noncompliance with a mandate to disclose technology documents is the official reason for the fine, yet the deadline for such compliance has not yet passed. This bizarre situation should serve as a warning to anyone thinking of doing business in Europe, and it should make the Europeans seriously question the legitimacy of their so-called “competition” policy.
In March 2004, the EC ruled that in addition to paying the record 497 million euro fine, Microsoft had to sell a copy of Windows without Media Player software and hand over the specifics of its Windows server technology to rivals. Both these mandates were meant to correct Microsoft’s supposedly harmful market power.
Of course, that supposition is highly suspicious, and the directives are currently under appeal at the European Court of First Instance. Take, for example, the idea of offering consumers a product with less functionality.
Read more here.
EU regulators today fined Microsoft 280.5 million Euros ($357 million USD) for supposedly not complying with their demands. Of course, the regulator’s demands are currently in the appeals process and the Commission dragged their heels in making their demands clear, but still, they argue that it’s Microsoft’s fault. That seems pretty unfair, and prompted MS’s General Counsel to say, rather diplomatically (imagine if Steve Jobs were in this position!), that “the real issue here is not about compliance, it’s about clarity.” Apparently, Microsoft has over 300 employees working around the clock to satisfy the EU bureaucrats who seem to know little about the tech industry (see my pervious posts on this, especially those about the product the Eurocrats designed that no one wanted to buy). What a mess.
As Congress draws closer to passing significant telecommunications reforms, it’s clear that a larger issue serves as a backdrop to the hot topics of net neutrality, cable franchise reform, and municipal WiFi. That is, will the Internet be treated like telecommunications, or the other way around?
New technologies have caused a convergence in the communications sector so that the phone company can also be the cable company and vice versa. Indeed, an Internet company can also provide cable and phone services. EBay bought Skype, an Internet phone company that offers free calling, Microsoft is moving into the IPTV space, and Google offers voice services integrated with features like instant messaging.
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Today, the WSJ reported that Adobe is threatening an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft in Europe because Adobe doesn’t want Microsoft to use PDF in MS Office. So why is Adobe going to Europe?
They are both American companies, so it might seem pretty strange. That is, until you realize that the Europeans are much more sympathetic to such claims and seem to love to sick it to Microsoft and the Americans who run it. If Adobe really does complain in Europe, that will be a VERY obvious case of forum shopping. This is an unfortunate development for consumers and technology entrepreneurs.
Specifically, Adobe asked Microsoft to remove new PDF functions from Microsoft Office and to charge users for the service if it can be downloaded. Adobe gives the software away for free, and Apple and Open Office along with about 1800 companies, have already implemented the specs. So why can’t Microsoft do it? The argument that their bigness requires different rules just doesn’t hold. Microsoft is NOT a monopoly and is facing huge threats on a number of fronts such as from Google and Yahoo. Anyone who doesn’t realize that needs to wake up and smell the coffee.
Remember the last time MS faced antitrust charges here in the US? Charges of predatory pricing and tying were used and predictions that Internet Explorer (IE) would dominate forever abounded. Only a few short years later, IE has lost ground, being replaced by browsers like Mozilla, Safari, and Opera, and a bunch of others.
Government should not pick winners and losers in the marketplace and Adobe, who once welcomed Microsoft’s entry into the PDF space, would be better off spending its time innovating rather than litigating.
Below is my summary of last week’s Microsoft hearing at the CFI in Luxembourg. You can read the entire column here. The hearing has major implications for American businesses that depend on intellectual property protections.
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The European Court of First Instance (CFI) buzzed with energy this week as Microsoft and the European Commission squared off over a damaging 2004 ruling that, along with a fine of 497 million euros (US$613 million), creates a new Microsoft product and exposes the company’s valuable intellectual property. The circus-like hearing holds wide-ranging implications for American businesses.
On the first day, news crews and a gaggle of reporters showed up to watch the attorneys, some in horsehair wigs, discuss whether or not Microsoft abused its market power in the media-player market. Although Microsoft demonstrated that other media players exist and many consumers are using them, the EC continued to insist that Microsoft needed to be reined in.
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It’s day 4 of the Microsoft European hearing and today the Judges asked some really great questions about interoperability. Judge Cooke, whose Irish accent comes and goes, really cut through the blather on both sides of the argument and got to the core of the issue. The basic issue is that in 2000, Microsoft figured out how to create a distributed computing cluster that would work really well with thousands of computers (in the Court proceedings everyone is calling this the “blue bubble” because it is a cluster of computers that can only talk with other computers using “identical logic” and Microsoft outlined it in a graph colored blue). This is in contrast to other vendors like Sun Microsystems that can only offer a solution using four computers and Novell that can only do it with 150. Microsoft’s competitors would really like to be able to see and copy Microsoft’s patented invention, as they have failed to find the secrets through reverse engineering. The European Commission in 2004 was convinced that servers made by companies such as Sun Microsystems and IBM have trouble “interoperating” with Microsoft servers because Microsoft is not sharing the essential language needed to talk between computers. This sounds like a convincing argument, but it’s not an accurate representation of the issue and completely ignores third-party products that already exist to facilitate server discussion. Indeed, as the Court heard, most of the complaining companies brag in marketing materials that their servers can interoperate with Microsoft.
So, what is really going on? As Microsoft’s attorneys and other American representatives told the Court, the intellectual property that Microsoft’s rivals are trying to get their hands on does not act like a language, but rather like DNA. That would give Microsoft’s rivals the ability, not to talk with them, but to clone them–a dangerous development that would be costly in terms of profits for Microsoft and for the future of any company that relies on intellectual property for its livelihood.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.