I’ll take Solveig’s recent post about a fishing cat as permission to throw out something having almost no connection to tech policy once in a while.
I just watched on my TiVo – there’s my tech angle! – the Newshour debate between Norman Podhoretz and Fareed Zakaria regarding Iran’s efforts to join the nuclear club. I was enthralled by the stark differences of opinion, and the evidence each brought to his side. This is serious business, more serious than I had thought – if the opinions of the one I think is wrong have any traction.
Update: My Cato Institute colleague Justin Logan was inspired to comment on the debate in The American Prospect.
Has anyone actually found anything on the FCC’s website? If so, they should consider themselves lucky. Fcc.gov has long been a source of frustration for me as I constantly find myself going in cybercircles looking for the simplest of documents or information. Apparently, I’m not alone in my frustration — Mike Marcus — a former FCC staffer — recently ranted about the site in his blog. Calling the it the “nation’s communications policy attic” he dissects the problems with the website, ranging from the lack of a usable search engine to the endless clutter. Anyone who has tried to extract information from the site — god forbid without already knowing by heart the magic docket number of the specific proceeding they are interested in — will find themselves nodding in agreement.
How ironic that the nation’s communications policy agency — whom many want to take responsibility for regulating the Internet — cannot itself communicate on the web.
Kudos to Marcus for bringing this up. When he was with the FCC, Marcus (with whom I had the opportunity to work) was among the rarest of breeds — a professional bureaucrat who fought against bureaucracy. He apparently hasn’t changed now that he’s in the private sector.
(Hat tip to Jerry Brito for pointing me to Marcus’ piece.)
If you we’re offered a pill that would cure a disease that afflicted you or a family member or friend, but the pill wasn’t researched or manufactured in the
U.S., would you still take it? Of course you would. Similarly, when it comes to foreign direct investment, we shouldn’t care whether the money comes from a company based in Canada, Japan, or…China.
A Dubai Ports-like
brouhaha could well be brewing in the IT industry, involving 3Com and
an IT company from China. In September, Boston-based Bain Capital
announced that it had entered into an agreement to purchase 3Com Corporation,
a U.S. seller of network and security products. The purchase would
include a limited financial stake for 3Com’s largest customer, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., a private China-based technology company.
Money and capital act a lot like people…they go to where they’re most welcome, and stay where they’re rewarded. This was one of the messages I tried to convey when speaking yesterday at the Heartland Institute‘s Emerging Issues Forum in Chicago.
To make money more welcome in the U.S., but to still be able to review foreign investments for legitimate national security concerns, we have a review process called CFIUS. You don’t have to say "gesundheit" after saying CIFIUS, and don’t be confused by the STD with a similar sounding name. CIFIUS stands for the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. President Reagan established this review process to provide a predictable, nonpartisan and depoliticized process. Unfortunately, as Dubai Ports shows, these things can and do get political.
But our country needs foreign money.
Continue reading →
One never knows what to expect from the Consumer Electronics Association’s Gary Shapiro. Last spring, he was caught pointing out that the digital TV emperor wasn’t wearing much (“not everyone really wants free over-the-air broadcasting in their home.”)
Now comes word that he’s challenging a news emperor, CNN’s Lou Dobbs, to a debate on protectionism. “The facts are indisputable—without international trade, our nation would not have the greatest economy in the world,” said Shapiro in a CEA news release. “If we accept messages of fear without acknowledging the facts, we will adopt a defeatist approach that will only hurt our economy and the innovative businesses and talented workers that would otherwise bring more jobs and opportunities to Americans than ever before.”
It’s a publicity stunt of course, but a good one. CEA — which earlier this month launched a new free-trade initiative — has fixed its sights on an important issue. And a Shapiro-Dobbs face-off would be great entertainment to boot. Perhaps not Joe Frazier-Muhammad Ali, but — for policy wonks — pretty close.
No word on whether the debate would be on CNN or ESPN.
Stay tuned.
I mean, some kind of feline, obviously, but what kind? Some kind of wildcat? Something crossed with a domestic? T’ain’t no pixie-bob.
http://www.diesel.pp.net.ua/news/2007-02-15-104
This isn’t about tech policy, but since it’s something I’ve spent a ton of time on in recent months, I thought some TLF readers might be interested in my new study on eminent domain abuse in Missouri. Also be sure to check out my spin-off article in the American that focuses on the ways that urban redevelopment projects harm small businesses and poor people.
In a previous essay, I critiqued Andrew Keen’s thesis that our culture was better off in the age of scarcity than it is in today’s world of media and cultural abundance. In this essay, I want to make a few comments about his latest anti-Web 2.0 rant regarding how, in addition to destroying art and culture, the age of abundance and “amateur” content creation is going to result in the death of advertising.
In an AdWeek guest editorial this week, Keen argues that:
Web 2.0 is, in truth, the very worst piece of news for the advertising industry since the birth of mass media. In the short term, the Web 2.0 hysteria marks the end of the golden age of advertising; in the long term, it might even mark the end of advertising itself.
[…]
[F]or the advertiser, media content is indeed losing its value, a value historically derived from its scarcity. This devaluation of media isn’t hard to quantify: It can be measured everywhere, in falling CPM and the failure of social networks to develop viable business models. No new technology—neither the false dawn of mobile, nor the holy grail of personalized, targeted advertising—is going to save the advertising business now. No, the truth is that advertising can only be saved if we can re-create media scarcity. That means less user-generated content and more professionally created information and entertainment, less technology and more creativity. The advertising community desperately needs more gatekeepers, more professional creative authorities, more so-called media “elites” who will curate, filter and organize content. That’s the way to re-establish the value of the message. It’s the one commercial antidote to Web 2.0’s radically destructive cultural democracy.
Oh my, where to begin…
Continue reading →
Andrew Keen is the web’s favorite whipping boy these days, and in some ways he has it coming. His latest book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, is an anti-all-things-Web 2.0 screed. Keen lambastes “Internet democracy” (specifically the Wiki model of collaborative creation) and decries the rising tide of user-generated everything. When you get right down to it, Keen’s view of the world is unapologetically techno-conservative and culturally elitist. He’s angry that there are fewer intermediaries minding the culture. As a result, he argues, “professional” media (by which he means to say “better” media) is giving way to “amateur” media (which he regards as synonymous with, well… crap).
Unsurprisingly, the blogosphere has fought back with a vengeance and called Keen every nasty name in the book. But the best and most level-headed critique of Keen’s work is still this old essay by the ever-insightful Clay Shirky. Clay’s response rightly concedes that Keen in correct in pointing out that some important things have been lost with the rise of the Internet. There certainly are fewer intermediaries filtering our culture for us, and that will sound like a great thing to many of us. But it’s important to realize that some of those mediating forces serve a valuable role. Editors, for example, play an important, but often overlooked, role in terms of improving the quality of great deal of media content of all varieties (journalism, books, movies, music, etc). The blogosphere is becoming an editor-free zone, and at times it really shows. There are times when some particularly insulting things are said or silly mistakes are made that probably would have been corrected had a good editor been responsible for overseeing the final product.
On the other hand, the unfiltered Web 2.0 experience is wonderfully refreshing. Sometimes it’s nice to see what the uninhibited exchange of ideas results in. Regardless, the bottom line is that the editing profession (broadly defined) is changing because of the Internet. That is undeniable. And other mediating forces or institutions are seeing their power or relative importance in the cultural creation process diminished as the Internet-spawned disintermediation continues unabated.
Will that create short term problems? Undeniably. But Keen thinks these developments are contributing to a sort of cultural catastrophe and that we are collectively much worse off because of this disintermediation and empowerment of the “amateur.” This goes much too far in my opinion.
Continue reading →
First it was those clown-ass oversized jackie-o glasses. Then it was carrying around a miniature dog, paralyzed with fear (and shame). Now the latest fashion trend is to name a law after yourself.
C|Net star reporter and self-styled “iconoclast” Declan McCullagh has established himself a law – following right on the heels of . . . hmmm, how shall I put this . . . MOI.
McCullagh’s law is:
As the certainty that legislation violates the U.S. Constitution increases, so does the probability of predictions that severe harm or death will come to Americans if the proposal is not swiftly enacted.
Nicely put. Has a Godwin-y quality to it, but is certainly distinct. I like it.
Let’s have it, people. Name your law! But only one a piece!
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
