Are small businesses empowered or encumbered by online advertisements? That was the gist of today’s hearing of the House Small Business Committee on Internet ads.
Rep. Charlie Gonzalez ran the hearing (you can watch it here on YouTube) and started off with how a book called “The Search” by John Battel inspired him to learn more about online ads. He introduced the concept of the microbusiness, which he credited to the MicroEnterprise Journal.
4 of the 5 witnesses were businessmen, so there was an apparent disconnect when Rep. Gonzalez asked the more difficult public policy questions: how do trademark protections affect search ads? Should Congress be concerned about Google/Yahoo? Or a potential Microsoft/Yahoo deal?
What
was surprising is the amount of love that gushed toward gigantic Google from these small business persons. But Richard Lent of AgencyNet, a consulting firm, tempered his comments by saying that the op-out rights of consumers, making sure minors aren’t inappropriately targeted, phishing, and instituting limits on data retention were all important.
Charter communications officially announced plans to back-off its deal with NebuAd to monitor the traffic of subscribers for ad-delivery purposes. Yet the witnesses liked the ability to better target potential customers. But as a Washington Post article describes, Rick – creator of list to block ads called EasyList — doesn’t like it! His disdain for ads is a common consumer feeling that Internet ads still must overcome.
MIT’s Technology Review has a great review of a new biography of Georges Doriot (Wikipedia) by Businessweek Editor Spencer E. Ante entitled,
Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital. Born in France, Doriot fought in World War I, then studied at Harvard Business School, served as director of the U.S. military’s Military Planning Division during World War II as a brigadier general, and in 1946 launched American Research and Development Corporation (ARD) as the first publicly owned venture capital firm.
Doriot’s legacy looms large today, even if his name is new to most:
Contemporaneously with ARD’s watershed investment in [Digital Equipment Corporation], others began walking the trails Doriot had blazed: Arthur Rock (a student of Doriot’s in the Harvard class of 1951) backed the departure of the “Traitorous Eight” from Shockley Semiconductor to form Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957, then funded Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore when they left Fairchild to found Intel; Laurance Rockefeller formed Venrock, which has since backed more than 400 companies, including Intel and Apple; Don Valentine formed Sequoia Capital, which would invest in Atari, Apple, Oracle, Cisco, Google, and YouTube.
Doriot himself would likely have felt at home among today’s embattled and outnumbered regulation-skeptics in the technology policy community:
he opposed both the dirigiste political economy of his native France and the tax hikes and anticompetitive laws enacted in the United States under the New Deal. Such regulations, he maintained, arrogated to bureaucrats the function of the markets; their worst feature was that they let government lend money to failing businesses. Ante notes that a former colleague of Doriot’s, James F. Morgan, recalled him as “the most schizophrenic Frenchman I’ve ever met”–devoted to his original land’s wine, cuisine, and language even as “the French capacity to make very simple things complicated drove him nuts.”
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Astronaut Candidate, Johnson Space Center/International Space Station:
NASA, the world’s leader in space and aeronautics is always seeking outstanding scientists, engineers, and other talented professionals to carry forward the great discovery process that its mission demands. Creativity. Ambition. Teamwork. A sense of daring. And a probing mind. That’s what it takes to join NASA, one of the best places to work in the Federal Government.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has a need for Astronaut Candidates to support the International Space Station (ISS) Program.
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Mike Masick over on Techdirt yesterday decried the “amount of misinformation flying around” on the retention marketing issue. Unfortunately, however, his attempt to clear things up actually added to the airborne debris.
Specifically, Mike claims that I erred the other day in writing that the question at hand was whether Verizon can contact customers who have agreed to switch telephone service providers, and ask them not to switch. That, he says, is incorrect. Saying that “no one” is saying that telcos can’t try to convince customers not to switch, he claims the issue is instead whether Verizon can delay making the change while it trys to take them out of it:
What the FCC has said is that Verizon cannot abuse its position to block the switch while it tries to convince customers not to switch. That’s what Verizon is doing. When it gets the request from the cable companies to switch, it basically goes into procrastinate mode, even though it’s required to process the switch. It codes the switch request as a “conflict” which gives it extra time to resolve the “conflict” before obeying the switch request.
Masick is simply wrong. The FCC’s order, released Monday, explains clearly that a conflict code is entered only after Verizon is successful at convincing a customer not to change carriers. There’s no claim that, or even a reference to, Verizon improperly delaying any pending switch requests (although the cable industry is certainly pushing for telcos to be required to make switches more quickly).
What the FCC
did say was that the information contained in the switch request (i.e., that the customer wants to change), is “proprietary,” and that — to quote Commissioner McDowell: “marketing efforts [based on that information] cannot take place during the window of time when a customer’s phone number is being switched”.
Bottom line: I stand by my original post.
Larry Lessig is so respectful to his ideological opponents:
The press conference brought together some unlikely allies. “This is the first time in our history that we have tried to build fundamental infrastructure on the basis of a Neanderthal philosophy,” announced Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, “which is that we don’t need government to do it.” Seated next to Lessig was David All, founder of the Republican fundraising site Slatecard—and normally a proponent of that “Neanderthal” philosophy. All later argued for wider broadband access as a means of fostering the next generation of tech entrepreneurs.
Tell us what you really think, Prof. Lessig.
MAPLight.org has compiled some numbers seeking to correlate changes in voting on telecom immunity with contributions from telecom providers.
When I saw the announcement of Google’s “Internet for Everyone” campaign on their Public Policy Blog, I have to admit, my BS detector started to rise.
“Ubiquitous and open broadband access for every American [should be] a priority in the next administration,” they say.
How about now, Google, and
you?
You could have bought the spectrum that you encumbered with “open” rules in the 700 MHz auction, but you didn’t. Now you’re sitting back saying the government should do it for you.
Who would gain from the next administration making broadband “a priority”? Google, of course.
Then I clicked over to the site and saw the evil kid alone at the computer in the living room. Is that a parent drinking wine in the kitchen? Really, I couldn’t help myself.
The campaign “stands for” access, choice, openness, and innovation. What about fair play? Peace? Ending world hunger? A platitude in every pot and a bromide on every CRT.
Really, it’s a bunch of pap that Google will use in Washington, D.C. to insulate itself from competition and drive wealth to its owners. Seeking profit is what compaines like Google are supposed to do –
but not using the nation’s public policies.
Update: Julian Sanchez nails it with: “All this may have a whiff of ‘and a pony’ about it . . . .”
Ars reports on an important case down in Florida:
The defense against the obscenity charges will focus, in part, on the suggestion that interest in group sex fails the community standards test. Google search trends will be used to demonstrate that, except for brief periods near Thanksgiving, searches for “orgy” consistently outrank attempts to find information about “apple pie” in Florida . The rest of the year, orgy searches are closer in frequency to what might be expected to be a common activity in Florida, “surfing.” An astute reader at Slashdot also recognized that, among Floridian Internet users, “boobs” has built and then expanded a lead over surfing during the past three years.
Personally, I find the legal concept of “obscenity,” and the notion that obscenity rules could pass First Amendment muster, to be baffling. I can’t imagine what “compelling state interest” could trump the plain language of the First Amendment to allow the censorship of sexually explicit content consumed by adults in the privacy of the home.
Couch potatoes of America, have no fear… Your friendly neighborhood super-regulators are about to swoop in and save you from the scourge of loud TV ads and “illegal” product placements! As we all learned in our high school Civics 101 classes, this is why the American Revolution was fought: We Americans have an unambiguous constitutional birthright to be free of the tyranny of “excessive loudness” during commercial breaks and pesky product promos during our favorite network dramas. (Seriously, it’s right there in the footnotes to the Bill of Rights; you probably just missed it before.)
Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) has the first problem covered. She and her House colleague Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) are proposing H.R. 6209, the “Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act.” (Oh, isn’t that so cute! The “C.A.L.M. Act”! How very, very witty.) The CALM Act would address “volume manipulation” in TV ads by making sure that TV ads are not “excessively noisy or strident.” (Strident! We Americans hate “strident” ads.) The bill would empower regulators at the Federal Communications Commission to take steps to ensure that “such advertisements shall not be presented at modulation levels substantially higher than the program material that such advertisements accompany; and, the average maximum loudness of such advertisements shall not be substantially higher than the average maximum loudness of the program material that such advertisements accompany.”
Clearly, this is valuable use of our regulators’ time. I look forward to the day when I can visit the FCC and see my tax dollars at work as teams of bureaucrats closely monitor each episode of “Desperate Housewives” and “Swingtown” in search of such malicious volume manipulation during the commercial breaks. (Incidentally, where is the form I need to fill out to get that job? Heck, I’ll take minimum wage pay to do this all day long.)
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The Wikipedia entry on the 1992 Copyright Renewal Act is pathetic, and needs to be improved. I don’t know enough about it to add very much content, but I bet there are a few copyright nerds reading TLF who could help out!
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.