Last Call for Summer 2011 Internship Applications through Google & Koch Fellowships!

by on January 20, 2011 · 0 comments

The deadline for the Google Policy Fellowship is Friday, January 21 (at midnight PST). My new think tank, TechFreedom, just launched yesterday, is participating (as The Progress & Freedom Foundation, my former think tank, did for the last two years)—as are the Competitive Enterprise Institute (home to the TLF’s Ryan Radia, Wayne Crews & Alex Harris) and Cato Institute (Jim Harper & Julian Sanchez).

The deadline for the Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow Program, run by the Institute for Humane Studies, is Monday January 31. TechFreedom, CEI and Cato are all participating, as are the Pacific Research Institute (Sonia Arrison), the Reason Foundation (Steve Titch) and the Washington Policy Center (Carl Gipson). Descriptions are available here (just select “technology” on the right). Also participating, for the first time, is the Space Frontier Foundation, on whose board I sit and for which I served as Chairman in 2008-2009.

If you look through each of our recent posts, you’ll get a pretty good idea of the diverse array issues we all cover, and who focuses on what. There’s certainly no shortage of interesting technology policy work to be done!

Both programs run 10 weeks and offer stipends. The Koch Program (which I participated in) is specifically geared towards those interested in free market ideas, and includes an excellent retreat, ongoing series of lectures, and group research project. As a “Koch-head” myself (class of 2000), I can attest to the quality of the program and the value of the alumni network. The Google program is in its fourth year and is already developing a valuable alumni network of its own.

Of course, most of our think tanks would probably be happy to have extra help around, so if you’re interested in an internship during the school year or over the summer, don’t hesitate to reach out to one of us. We may not necessarily be able to pay you but, hey, no one ever went into the think tank world to get rich!

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Google “Spy-Fi” Privacy Regulation: An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind

by on January 7, 2011 · 4 comments

Here at TLF, our privacy discussions often center around such concepts as expectations of privacy, notice and choice, opt-in/out, and the like. These are all important and legitimate of course, but the privacy issue that seems to make news more than any other is Google Spy-Fi, and the defiant attitude Google has against governments. And this has me worried.

Not that I think governments necessarily need to regulate privacy, or that Google’s data collection from unsecured hotspots was even illegal. I’m thinking much more practically. People are concerned about privacy, governments are investigating Google to see what data it really collected, and Google seems to be cherry-picking the kinds of information it provides to different authorities. And in this defiant game of chicken, it’s the rest of the industry that’s the bacon – and I’m afraid we’re all slowly being fried.

There’s an old adage among practitioners of non-violent resistance that “an eye for an eye” retaliation leaves everyone blind. With yesterday’s news that authorities raided Google’s Korean office and found massive amounts of personal data, I’m wondering when—not if—bad behavior from the industry leader will result in a black eye for all online companies.

Korea’s National Police Agency claims to have found hundreds of thousands of emails, instant messages and other personal data” on Google’s hard drives. This is the latest finding similar to a string of other countries like Germany, Canada, Germany, France and the UK.

If it were all just foreign, that would be one thing. Continue reading →

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Correcting Herb Kohl (& Kayak & Bing Travel) on Google/ITA

by on December 2, 2010 · 1 comment

Today comes news that Senator Kohl has sent a letter to the DOJ urging “careful review” of the proposed Google/ITA merger. Underlying his concerns (or rather the “concerns raised by a number of industry participants and consumer advocates that I believe warrant careful review”) is this:

Many of ITA’s customers believe that access to ITA’s technology is critical to competition in online air travel search because it cannot be matched by other players in the travel search industry. They claim that ITA’s superior access to information and superior technology enables it to provide faster and better results to consumers. As a result, some of these industry participants and independent experts fear that the current high level of competition among online travel agents and metasearch providers could be undermined if Google were to acquire ITA and start its own OTA or metasearch service. If this were to happen, they argue, consumers would lose the benefits of a robustly competitive online air travel market.

For several reasons, these complaints are without merit and a challenge to the Google/ITA merger would be premature at best—and a costly mistake at worst. Continue reading →

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The EU tightens the noose around Google

by on December 1, 2010 · 2 comments

[Cross-posted at Truth on the Market]

Here we go again.  The European Commission is after Google more formally than a few months ago (but not yet having issued a Statement of Objections).

For background on the single-firm antitrust issues surrounding Google I modestly recommend my paper with Josh Wright, Google and the Limits of Antitrust: The Case Against the Antitrust Case Against Google (forthcoming soon in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, by the way).

According to one article on the investigation (from Ars Technica):

The allegations of anticompetitive behavior come as Google has acquired a large array of online services in the last couple of years. Since the company holds around three-quarters of the online search and online advertising markets, it is relatively easy to leverage that dominance to promote its other services over the competition.

(As a not-so-irrelevant aside, I would just point out that I found that article by running a search on Google and clicking on the first item to come up.  Somehow I imagine that a real manipulative monopolist Google would do a better job of white-washing the coverage if its ability to tinker with its search results is so complete.)

More to the point, these sorts of leveraging of dominance claims are premature at best and most likely woefully off-base.  As I noted in commenting on the Google/Ad-Mob merger investigation and similar claims from such antitrust luminaries as Herb Kohl:

If mobile application advertising competes with other forms of advertising offered by Google, then it represents a small fraction of a larger market and this transaction is competitively insignificant.  Moreover, acknowledging that mobile advertising competes with online search advertising does more to expand the size of the relevant market beyond the narrow boundaries it is usually claimed to occupy than it does to increase Google’s share of the combined market (although critics would doubtless argue that the relevant market is still “too concentrated”).  If it is a different market, on the other hand, then critics need to make clear how Google’s “dominance” in the “PC-based search advertising market” actually affects the prospects for competition in this one.  Merely using the words “leverage” and “dominance” to describe the transaction is hardly sufficient.  To the extent that this is just a breathless way of saying Google wants to build its business in a growing market that offers economies of scale and/or scope with its existing business, it’s identifying a feature and not a bug.  If instead it’s meant to refer to some sort of anticompetitive tying or “cross-subsidy” (see below), the claim is speculative and unsupported.

The EU press release promotes a version of the “leveraged dominance” story by suggesting that

The Commission will investigate whether Google has abused a dominant market position in online search by allegedly lowering the ranking of unpaid search results of competing services which are specialised in providing users with specific online content such as price comparisons (so-called vertical search services) and by according preferential placement to the results of its own vertical search services in order to shut out competing services.

The biggest problem I see with these claims is that, well, they make no sense. Continue reading →

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Facebook Was the ‘Next Google’

by on October 5, 2010 · 6 comments

Since I contributed $10 to the $23 million The Social Network grossed nationally this weekend, I see no reason not to blog some thoughts on the film.

First of all, the movie, which purports to be a history of the founding of Facebook, succeeds wildly as entertainment. As you may have heard by now, the film basically posits that if its founder, Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, had not been dumped by his girlfriend for questioning the academic credibility of her school, Boston University, Facebook may never have existed at all.

Whether or not the film’s facts are straight on this is another matter. Nonetheless, it is not my purpose to comment extensively on either the film or its veracity, other than to recommend it highly as long as you ingest the story and characters with the copious grains of salt.

But some facts the film depicts are undeniable. The most significant for my purposes here is that the idea that became Facebook was germinated in the fall of 2003, just six years ago, and, as a website, was launched on the Harvard campus in February 2004.

Continue reading →

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What’s Good for Google is Good for the Net

by on August 16, 2010 · 1 comment

I thought I’d add a little addendum to my post below.  I just think it’s cute how Google demanding a neutral wired Internet and a non-neutral wireless Internet totally serves its self-interest.

A neutral wired net was fine for them because edge-caching, private back-hauls, and other workarounds were available to them.  They look like selfless champions of Internet ideals, but are meanwhile using every instrument at their disposal to gain an edge on the competition (as well they should, being a for-profit company).

Then this whole wireless craze comes along and the wireless Net doesn’t lend itself to those sorts of workarounds, so they need a new strategy.  Prioritizing packets is the only way for Google to gain an edge in this space, so they have to “compromise” their “principled” position on neutrality.

Funny how that worked out, huh?

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Google’s Schmidt on Targeted Ads, Monetization & the Future of News

by on August 14, 2010 · 0 comments

Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins has a terrific, wide-ranging interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt in today’s paper that is well worth reading. One thing worth highlighting is Schmidt’s comments on the “economic disaster that is the American newspaper.”  He argues that, “The only way the problem [of insufficient revenue for news gathering] is going to be solved is by increasing monetization, and the only way I know of to increase monetization is through targeted ads.”

Absolutely correct. It’s a point that Berin Szoka, Ken Ferree and I tried to make in PFF’s mega-filing in the FCC’s “Future of Media” proceeding in early May, and Berin and I stressed it in even more detail in our piece on”Chairman Leibowitz’s Disconnect on Privacy Regulation & the Future of News.” The key takeaway: If Washington goes to war against advertising — and targeted advertising in particular — then there will be no future for private news. As we stated there:

The reason for the indispensability of advertising is simple: Information (including news and other forms of “content”) has “public good” characteristics that make it is very difficult (and occasionally impossible) for information-publishers to recoup their investments.  Simply put, they quite literally lack pricing power: Whatever they charge, someone else will charge less for a close substitute, inevitably leading to “free” distribution of the content, even though the content is anything but free to produce.  Advertising is the one business model that has traditionally saved the day by rewarding publishers for attracting the attention of an audience.

Thus an attack on advertising is an attack on media / news itself. And yet Washington is currently engaged in an all-out assault on advertising, marketing, and data collection efforts / business models.

Incidentally, Google recently submitted comments with the Federal Trade Commission in reaction to its Staff Discussion Draft about the future of journalism and laid out their views on many of these issues. More importantly, as summarized on pg. 30 (of the pdf) of this Newspaper Association of America filing to the FTC, Google has proposed an interesting monetization model that utilizes Google Search, Google Checkout and DoubleClick ad server, “to build a premium content system for newspapers.”  Worth checking out.  Kudos to Google for taking these steps and to Schmidt for again stressing the importance of targeted advertising for the future of media.

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Deconstructing the Google-Verizon Framework

by on August 10, 2010 · 14 comments

I’ve just published a long analysis for CNET of the proposed legislative framework presented yesterday by Google and Verizon.

The proposal has generated howls of anguish from the usual suspects (see quotes appearing in Cecilia Kang, “Silicon Valley criticizes Google-Verizon accord” in The Washington Post; Matthew Lasar’s “Google-Verizon NN Pact Riddled with Loopholes” on Ars Technica and Marguerite Reardon’s “Net neutrality crusaders slam Verizon, Google” at CNET for a sampling of the vitriol).

But after going through the framework and comparing it more-or-less line for line with what the FCC proposed back in October, I found there were very few significant differences.  Surprisingly, much of the outrage being unleashed against the framework relates to provisions and features that are identical to the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), which of course many of those yelling the loudest ardently support.

Continue reading →

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NYT “Room for Debate” on Verizon-Google

by on August 9, 2010 · 3 comments

The nice folks at the New York Times “Room for Debate” feature asked me and a group of bright lights to discuss the Verizon-Google agreement on network neutrality regulation, as it stood at various points in the day.

Read the comments of Tim Wu, Lawrence Lessig, David Gelernter, Ed Felten, Jonathan Zittrain, and myself. Much of my comment owes credit to Tim Lee’s excellent paper “The Durable Internet.”

We’re all over the place, folks . . .

Update: Late addition: Gigi Sohn.

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Net Neutrality, Verizon and Google: A Separate Peace?

by on August 5, 2010 · 4 comments

The buzz in telecom policy circles this morning is the word that Verizon and Google are close to an agreement that will allow the search giant to purchase from Verizon a faster tier for delivery of its bandwidth heavy services, notably YouTube, its video-sharing site.

If the two companies reach an agreement, it could be a death blow to the entire “non-discriminatory” idea behind network neutrality: that no service provider should be give favored treatment to any service or application. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has made it a mission to get the “non-discrimination” principle encoded into law, to the point of calling for reclassification of broadband ISPs as regulated telecommunications carriers.

If Verizon sets up tiered pricing for Google applications, the non-discrimination genie is out of the bottle for good. It would be a direct “I dare you” challenge to the FCC to block it.  Armageddon indeed. Adding to the significance is that Google itself is party to the deal. Until today at least, Google has been the loudest company behind the call for a non-discrimination rule, even as one-time allies have fallen away (the latest being Amazon.com).

Continue reading →

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