Delegates and other assorted hangers-on are gathering in Tunis this week for tomorrow’s start of the UN’s “World Summit on the Information Society.” Given the topic, one would expect a fairly free flow of information surrounding the event–for appearance sake, if nothing else. Not so. Reports are that Tunisian authorities broke up a meeting on press freedom, beat up a French journalist, and blocked access inside the country to a website of a side event called the “Citizen Summit on the Information Society.”
Certainly an odd way to begin a summit on the information society. If this is what happens when a government is on its best behavior, what happens when nobody is watching? No wonder there’s so much opposition to plans–to be debated at the summit–to “globalize” governance of the Internet.
The Tunis summit, by the way, will be the subject of a Heritage policy forum on Thursday, November 17 at 10 am. Speakers include Sen. Norm Coleman, Rep. John Doolittle, Heritage China expert John Tkacik and fellow TLF blogger Adam Thiere. If you are in DC, stop by. If not, you can catch it on the web. Details here.
On October 25 the DOJ and FTC are jointly holding a workshop on competition policy and the real estate industry. A topic that the workshop will consider is one that I have written about a few times in the past: state laws that restrict competition among buyers’ and sellers’ brokers. Licensing laws that aim to protect consumers have had the ulterior motive of discriminating against online web-based companies that enable the real estate transaction without the need for traditional real estate agents. New York is one such state with onerous licensing laws. A few months ago I filed comments in a rulemaking aimed at updating the law. Unfortunately, the NY Department of State still does not get it. One example from my comments:
the NPRM requires actual or electronic signatures. However, businesses and consumers communicate their desire to form a relationship in a multitude of ways. For communications over the Internet, consumers almost always show their assent to contractual terms by clicking “I Accept” or other similar language evidencing agreement. The AIV rules must recognize that a binding contract is formed when this online assent occurs. Indeed, courts of law routinely uphold these “clickwrap” agreements to be legally binding agreements.
One company that has been on the frontlines in New York is mlx.com. The owner, LaLa Wang, has a great blog about the politics of real estate and law called askLaLa.
Minimum service laws are also protectionist measures aimed to hurt online competitors. The Michigan state legislature has proposed legislation to limit competition in real estate by forcing new requirements on low-cost, online brokers.
Let’s hope there’s something good that comes out of this workshop (there will be if I have a say in it, as I hope to be selected as a panelist).
It’s amazing that small companies can compete in today’s regulatory climate. We all know about the way that Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak created the first Apple computer in the Jobs family garage . Such small business success (now a big corporation of course) happens despite the disproportionate regulatory burden they share compared to their larger competitors. A study released last week by the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration shows that small firms bear the largest per employee burden.
According to the study, firms with fewer than 20 employees annually spend $7,647 per employee to comply with federal regulations, compared with the $5,282 spent by firms with more than 500 employees. Thus small business faces a 45 percent greater burden than their larger business counterparts.
This is to be expected. The regulatory overhead required for attorneys, accountants, and HR to interpret and implement federal regulation is enormous. The fixed costs of regulatory compliance become increasingly dispersed with each employee hired. Even with employment law carveouts for companies under 50 or so employees, the burden of overall compliance is high.
Businesses with less than 500 employees generate 60 to 80 percent of net new jobs annually over the last decade. Many of these are in the tech industry. Here on the Tech Liberation Front, we often focus on tech-related regulatory burdens on the tech and telecom industries. As the SBA study shows, the burden is also tax, environmental, workplace and general economic-related laws.
[cross-posted from the PFF Blog]
Well it seems that the eBay acquisition of Skype is the hot high-tech issue du jour on the PFF blog, so let me add just a few thoughts to what Kyle and Ray have already said. Specifically, I want to pick up right where Ray left off when he ended his essay wondering what ramifications this alliance might have for the debate over ‘net neutrality’ regulation.
But first, let me just say that I can immediately think of a few ways that this deal will benefit consumers. In fact, as an avid eBay-er who has moved his last 4 cars on the site, I can give you a perfect real-world application. When I am selling or looking to buy a car on eBay, I often trade quick e-mails with others to get or send info about the vehicle. But I sometimes think it would be a heck of lot easier to just pick up the phone and call the person to get the job done. Few people, however, want to put their cell or home phone on the site. But what if eBay offered a secure way for buyers and sellers to make auction-specific phone calls? Now that would be very, very cool. With Skype, eBay can now make that happen. For example, I’m about to sell a BMW that I bought on eBay four years ago. As part of that auction, I would love to be able to provide an VoIP phone number just for this specific auction that bidders could use to contact me for more detailed information about the vehicle. That way, when I get a call on that Skype phone number, I know it’s about the specific car I have for sale, not anything else. And when that auction ends, that specific phone number could disappear or perhaps I would use it for a future auction.
Anyway, that’s just one potentially interesting way that eBay might be able to use Skype to augment its already wonderful auction services. I’m sure they will find many other innovative ways to use the service.
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The Wall Street Journal today reports on France’s efforts to create a competitor to Google. As described in an earlier post, France’s ever-vigilent culture wardens see Google as a threat. Specifically they find galling (pun intended) Google’s initiative to scan millions of books from US and UK libraries into its database. This, says French President Chirac, presents “immense danger” of “cultural standardization.” France has managed to get the EU on its side in fighting the threat, with some $77 million committed to an EU book-scanning project, and $46 million toward other projects, including development of a EuroGoogle. All this despite the fact that Google seems perfectly willing to scan European volumes as part of its own project.
Strangely enough, despite the concerns of the French government, the French themselves seem unperturbed by Google–it has a higher share of the search engine market (66%) in France than it does in America (47%). No doubt French websurfers are busy Googling the address of their nearest McDonald’s.
Some Virginia officials want to reform telecom taxes. Good idea. To get that much-needed job done they are considering “leveling the playing field” by imposing the exact same tax on all new forms of communications and information services. Bad idea.
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Forget paying for Iraq. Apparently, Congress is still worried about paying for that pesky Spanish-American War in 1898. In a report released last week, the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation suggested that the current three percent federal excise tax on telecommunications–originally imposed as a way of paying for the Spanish-American War–be expanded to all communications services to end user, including Internet access, VOIP services, and the telecom portion of cable and satellite telephone service.
The JCT proposal is, thankfully, only an “option” for taxation listed among many other options, and doesn’t necessarily mean Congress is going for the idea. Still, its telling that repealing this senseless tax was not listed as an option. Seems we need to keep an eye on this “anti-tax” Congress.
The L.A. Times has an interesting report today arguing that runaway spyware and other Internet pests are driving people away from the Internet. Many web users, it says, are hanging up their mice in frustration over unwanted intruders on their home computers. The problem is real–the LAT cites a survey finding that 31 percent of surfers are buying less online than before due to security issues.
Importantly, and maybe surprisingly, the Times doesn’t hold out much hope that proposed legislation floating around Congress will do much good. They are right–for reasons I’ve argued elsewhere.
The ultimate solution to this problem is in fact already coming from the private sector–where every entity with a stake in cyberspace seems to be coming up with anti-spyware tools. (See Jim Harper’s post on this if you don’t believe me.) While not perfect by any means, these tools are still new, and are getting better. While “spyware kills Internet” makes good newspaper copy, such reports of the death of cyberspace are highly exaggerated.
Those readers who know me could tell you I’m a calm, gentle sort. I’m fond of gardening, meditation, and fish tanks. But this one has got me mad. I speak of the German court ruling that professional ebay sellers must allow returns. Pile taxes on my phone bills or regulate television programming or some other old-school tech if you absolutely cannot help yourselves, but don’t mess with my bargain hunting! Ebay is the triumphant, splendid return of caveat emptor and for all the occasional disappointment (fabric interfacing that smelled!) has saved me hundreds of dollars (my most recent triumph being waterproof Teva hiking shoes). When I’m having a bad day, I sometimes just go and read my feedback to cheer up.
The FCC’s universal service fund finds itself, not unsurprisingly, increasingly embroiled in accounting troubles, from fraud to difficulty complying with accounting rules requiring it to have monies in hand before paying them out. Not to mention consumers irate about the growth of the line items on their bills.
This pit is potentially bottomless. In a nutshell, “Everyone wants to take out of the pool, especially if they pay into it, and anyone who doesn’t stake a claim will lose out to more aggressive competitors.” I quote IPI‘s recent telecom guide for state legislators, which I helped author.
Years ago, I saw the economic justification for universal service set out in the form of an equation. In English, it went something like this: The network is more valuable to everyone if absolutely everyone is on it. So we impose a tax to avoid the cost of some being excluded from the network. It all sounds very precise, put that way. But consider that no one knows the amount of the cost we are supposedly avoiding by this tax & spend scheme! And the amount we are coughing up to avoid it is apparently limitless! At the same time that technologies from the Internet to wireless are finally bringing transmission costs down. It is sad, that we cannot give the market a chance to work in rural areas as it has worked elsewhere.
-Solveig
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.