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Radley Balko has nominated me to head the Transportation Security Agency. It’s a kind compliment. His column this week has some good ideas in it, too.

Fellow nominee Bruce Schneier doesn’t want the job. Of Bruce’s refusal, Radley says:

[I]t sorta’ reminds me of what a retired police chief once told me about how he staffed his SWAT team. He said he’d ask for volunteers, then disqualify every officer who raised his hand. He added, “The guys who want the job are the last ones who should have it.”

That leaves John Mueller, whose excellent 2004 Regulation magazine article “A False Sense of Insecurity?” has stood the test of time. His insight into the strategic logic of terrorism will eventually turn around our country’s maladjusted approach to securing against terrorism.

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Yahoo! has seen better days, but it’s still a profitable company with a market cap of $16 billion, something that many tech companies that began in the 1990s can’t say (mainly because they no longer exist).  Even though Yahoo! continues to be a profitable company, it is no longer viewed as an innovator, which is hurting its stock value immensely.  It’s also hard to say exactly what Yahoo! does, even its employees and executives can’t figure out what the company is all about.

All of this added up to yesterday’s resignation of Jerry Yang.

Yang’s tenure at the helm began when he stepped in for Terry Semel in June 2007.  Since that time Yang, one of the co-founders of Yahoo!, has been seen as the man who couldn’t do anything right.  He passed up an offer from Microsoft to buy Yahoo! for $33 dollars a share, claiming the company was worth $37.

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Tomorrow evening, I’ll be participating in an IQ2US debate arguing against the proposition that “Google violates its ‘don’t be evil’ motto.” The venue is Caspary Auditorium at The Rockefeller University, 1230 York Avenue at 66th Street, in New York City.

Jeff Jarvis, Esther Dyson and I will be debating Harry Lewis of Harvard, Randall Picker of the University of Chicago Law School, and Siva Vaidhyanathan from the University of Virginia. Jarvis’ blog post on the subject has gotten some interesting discussion.

As with any company, one can complain about the details of how Google does business. I think I call it like I see it with respect to Google, having derided their gaming of the regulatory system in the 700 MHz auction and lauding their generally good corporate citizenship on privacy.

You have to drain the word “evil” of meaning to apply it to Google. But even in the casual, slightly anti-corporate sense that the founders probably meant it, Google isn’t evil.

Though publishers and holders of copyrights protest (often from ignorance of the modern media landscape), Google makes their material more available, more useful, and more profitable.

Owners of trademarks may object, but Google AdWords brings new products and better prices to consumers.

Surely Google should avoid censorship on behalf of the Chinese government, but exiting China would abandon the Chinese people to government-approved information sources only.

Google Earth, Maps, Street View, and basic search challenge privacy, but Google has made itself a model corporate citizen by working to educate users, by making its products transparent, and by openly resisting government subpoenas.

Some say Google’s search monopoly makes it the most powerful company on earth, but it’s always one misstep (and one click) away from handing its customer base to a challenger.

Disruptive technologies and businesses always make life uncomfortable for the old guard. These complainers should be ignored. Google earns a rightful profit as it makes people around the world more aware, educated, and informed. Evil? Hardly.

Discuss.

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ZDnet ran a story last week citing how security guru Bruce Schneier slams the US-VISIT program, which collects biometrics from people entering the country, saying that it has “zero benefit.”

I respect and like Bruce – he will be a participant in a major counterterrorism strategy conference we are having at the Cato Institute in January – but I have to voice my disagreement with him on this score. My belief is that border biometrics have an extremely small benefit – a benefit that rounds to zero, and one that is more than cancelled out by the costs. But not zero.

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OK, in fairness, this image is of the statue outside the Federal Trade Commission, not the Justice Department. But it’s always perplexed me – the image of a man restraining/abusing a horse.

The name of the statue is “Man Controlling Trade.” Why doesn’t he get on and ride?

The same thing one must ask about the Justice Department’s successful campaign to thwart the Google-Yahoo! deal. As Cord has noted, allowing these two companies to enjoy the benefits they perceived from combining their resources would have made them both better off and acted as a spur to others, competition that would have produced new innovation for consumers to enjoy. But the dead hand of government power has won out.

The Justice Department’s two-step on the grave of the deal gets it precisely wrong both in terms of defining the relevant market and in terms of the effect on competition and innovation.

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The Google Policy Blog announced today that the proposed advertising deal between Google and Yahoo! will no longer be pursued.  The DOJ has thrown up too many roadblocks and both companies have decided it’s better to move on than to try to convince regulators to change their minds.

Google seemed to go out of its way to calm regulators and other advertisers who they anticipated would be concerned by the deal given Google’s perceived market power.  The policy blog notes that:

Both companies agreed to delay implementation of the agreement to give regulators the chance to review it. While this wasn’t legally necessary, we thought it was the right thing to do because Google and Yahoo! have been successful in online advertising and we realized that any cooperation between us would attract attention.

Of course, this preemptive step didn’t help to stop competitors from running to Washington regulators to ask for the deal to be crushed.  Instead, it seems to have helped them deny Yahoo! crucial ad revenue.  The Policy Blog notes that the deal “Would have allowed Yahoo! (and its existing publisher partners) to show more relevant ads for queries that currently generate few or no advertisements.”

This is probably the best point to be made in all of this.  Yahoo! knows it’s not going to be a leader in search anytime soon, but it’s a leader in many content areas.  Its Yahoo! Mail service alone has over a quarter of a billion users, dwarfing Google Gmail.

Transitioning to a content-focused company is probably the best move for Yahoo!, a move that will be much harder without the ability to monetize its more esoteric content as well as search queries.

Once again, in trying to maintain some conception of what competition has been, antitrust regulators have prevented the competition of the future from forming as quickly as might have.

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Here’s a more interesting election than the one being held today. But I still wouldn’t vote for either of the candidates!

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