Think again. Go2Web2.0 bills itself as “The Complete Web 2.0 Directory,” and I believe it after spending a couple of hours there tonight. [Make sure to use the “Select Tag” bar at the top of the page to narrow your searches.] Insanely cool, but I’m already cursing it because I have just found about 2 dozen new ways to burn time I don’t have. Too many damn choices!
Earlier this week I testified in Pennsylvania in support of SB 1000, legislation designed to prohibit price and terms of service regulation of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and other IP-enabled products and services.
At the hearing it was clear that most favored the bill. And why not? By not regulating IP-enabled services and VoIP, I testified that it would actively promote consumer welfare and business innovation in Pennsylvania. One study from Micra finds that Pennsylvania residents would save up to $4.8 billion over the next five years.
Yes, yes, all fine and good. But what about access charges, asked Embarq? What about union jobs, cried the CWA? What about consumer protection? What about the children? (OK, nobody said this last one).
The bill will probably pass into law, but the hearing was a microcosm for the greater debate needed for real telecom reform, so we don’t import old-world telecom regs meant for the AT&T monopoly onto today’s more competitive landscape. But in the meantime, we need to deal with entrenched parties that benefit from regulation and old school natural monopoly thinking about the communications marketplace. Creating a regulatory firewall based on technology – which VoIP non-reg bills do – is perhaps the best we can get right now…until we have communications without commissions.
I don’t think I’m currently in a position to apply for it, but this sounds really interesting:
Our platform team is responsible for the core software technologies that cut across all of our products and power the site. Internships are available for talented software engineers who are proficient in PHP, C++ or Java, and have experience and interest in working in LAMP environments. What change or new feature that could be completed as a 3 month project with a small team of fellow interns would you undertake to improve NYTimes.com? Please submit your resume and a brief response (200 words or less) to the question above to nytimes2008internship@gmail.com.
I’ve been known to beat up on “old media” outlets and their tendency to resist technological change, but I’ve actually been pretty impressed of late by the nimbleness of the largest newspapers. The Post has long been a leader in the use of the web, and lately the New York Times and (to a lesser extent) the Wall Street Journal have also shown increasing web savvy.
One example is Open, a blog that discusses the use of open source technologies at the Times. It’s a sporadically-updated blog that gives a glimpse at the technology underlying one of the world’s most prominent media platforms.
Prohibit competition? It seems hard to believe, but according to a report today in Communications Daily, that’s exactly what a New Hampshire Senate committee has voted to do. A bill — SB-386 — approved by the Energy, Environment and Economic Development Committee would largely ban incumbent telephone companies with more than 25,000 lines from competing in the territory of telephone companies with less than 25,000 lines.
The bill is almost commendable for its anti-competitive candor. For the past generation, there has been a consensus in the telecom policy world in favor of competition. It has uniformly, and justifiably, been considered a positive good. Debates have largely been over how to further competition, not whether it should be furthered. Even those trying to stifle competition have struggled to frame their positions in pro-competitive terms.
Not so the New Hampshire Senate. In the blunt Granite State tradition, there’s little fiddle-faddling in this bill. The message is clear: Competing with small phone companies is bad. Don’t do it.
Never mind whether competition might be good for those companies’ customers. Or whether Fairpoint Communications — which will be the biggest phone company in New Hampshire once its purchase of Verizon’s assets is completed — is itself a “little guy”. Or whether things like this led Verizon to sell to Fairpoint to start with.
New Hampshire’s straightforward talk is refreshing. But Granite State consumers may find the actual policy rather stale and stifling.
Is increasing use of video likely to cause Internet delays? The New York Times today floats the theory that it might be.
But at least the article generously quotes a leading skeptic: Andrew Odlyzko, a Professor of Mathematics and Director of the Digital Technology Center and the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute at the University of Minnesota.
[Odlyzko] estimates that digital traffic on the global network is growing about 50 percent a year, in line with a recent analysis by Cisco Systems, the big network equipment maker. That sounds like a daunting rate of growth. Yet the technology for handling Internet traffic is advancing at an impressive pace as well. The router computers for relaying data get faster, fiber optic transmission gets better and software for juggling data packets gets smarter. “The 50 percent growth is high. It’s huge, but it basically corresponds to the improvements that technology is giving us,” said Professor Odlyzko, a former AT&T Labs researcher. Demand is not likely to overwhelm the Internet, he said.
Odlyzko will be in Arlington, Va., next Tuesday, March 18, giving a “Big Ideas About Information” lecture at the Information Economy Project at the George Mason University School of Law.
Back in 1999, when everyone was saying that the Internet was doubling every three months, or 1500 percent annual growth, Odlyzko was the voice of reason: the Internet was only growing at 100 percent per year.
In his “Big Ideas about Information” lecture next Tuesday, Professor Odlyzko will compare the Internet bubble of the turn of the century with the British Railway Mania of the 1840s, the greatest technology mania in history – up until the Dot.com bubble. In both cases, clear evidence indicated that financial instruments would crash.
The event, at 4 p.m., is the latest in a series sponsored by IEP, which is directed by Professor Tom Hazlett. (I serve as Assistant Director of the project.) Can’t make it to Arlington, Va., for the “Big Ideas” lecture? Join us remotely, by Webcast, or over the phone, at TalkShoe.
Google’s dominant status in search and online advertising is not long for this world. Depending on your definition of “long.”
A comment on Valleywag from a disgruntled ex-employee is probably typical of what happens when an organization gets big. Now, of course, Google isn’t all the way dysfunctional – far from it – but big organizations get slow, and this is some evidence that the process is underway.
For my own part, I’m a fan of Google and a user of AdSense on WashingtonWatch.com, but I haven’t run any AdWords ads in months. It’s too complicated for a person like me, who has a lot of competing demands on his time, to run a campaign that I’m confident can be cost-effective. There’s room for a fresh, clean alternative to AdWords, and it’ll be interesting to see who comes up with it.
For those transfixed by the Google juggernaut, remember: This too shall pass.
A site for community review of police officers called RateMyCop.com gets the benefit of the “Streisand effect” today. For a period of time, it was shut down by its web registrar, GoDaddy.com, most likely because of law enforcement complaints about being subject to public oversight.
(The “Streisand effect” is the phenomenon where an attempt to censor or remove information from the Internet backfires, causing it to be more widely publicized. The term refers to a 2003 incident in which Barbra Streisand sued a photographer and Web site in an attempt to have an aerial photo of her house removed from a publicly available collection of 12,000 California coastline photographs. The lawsuit made the photo very popular.)
Go ahead, fellow bloggers, and extend the Streisand effect in this case by writing a little bit about RateMyCop.com yourselves.
At his Iconoclast blog, Declan McCullagh has a very good write-up of the broad sweep of NSA surveillance and the resurrection of the Total Information Awareness program in new guise.
Mike makes the essential point about the H1-B visa fight: the job market isn’t a zero-sum game. Granting more visas doesn’t mean fewer jobs for Americans, except possibly in the very short run. More skilled workers make companies more successful, creating new jobs. Moreover, some immigrants go on to start companies of their own, which wind up employing more Americans.
But I think Mike was too kind to this article purporting to debunk the notion that there’s a shortage of skilled IT workers. On one level, it’s just a totally nonsensical issue. The demand for workers is a curve, not a point. At a salary of $80,000/year, some number of IT workers would be hired. You’d see significantly fewer hired if the average salary were $100,000, and significantly more at $60,000/year. So the question isn’t whether there is “a skill shortage.” The question is what effects restricting the supply of IT workers will have on wages and on the growth of the technology industry. Most likely the answers are that restricting immigration of IT workers means that native IT workers will enjoy modestly higher wages at the expense of a somewhat smaller and less productive technology industry. This is good for IT workers, of course, which is why there’s considerable sympathy for it among the Slashdot crowd. But it’s not good for much of anyone else, and like most forms of protectionism, I don’t have a lot of sympathy. IT workers are already among the best-compensated professions around, and I see no reason that truck drivers and school teachers should pay higher prices or enjoy fewer high-tech products in order to prop up the wages of workers who already get paid twice as much as them.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
