I can’t help but notice how debased the Google-DoubleClick merger discussion has become.
It started this morning when I read on Scott Cleland’s blog that C|Net journalist Declan McCullagh failed to reveal that his wife worked at Google in publishing his great article exposing Commerce Committee Joe Barton’s selective interest in privacy and merger issues.
So selective is Barton’s interest in privacy that he favored the USA-PATRIOT Act and the REAL ID Act. Now there’s a privacy hawk for you.
Now I discover that the Electronic Privacy Information Center has petitioned to have FTC Chairman Deborah Majoras recuse herself from any review of the merger because of her and her husband’s relationships with a law firm that represents DoubleClick.
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Matt Lasar has put together a very entertaining article illustrating how “Faux Celebrity FCC Filings [are] on the Rise.” What he’s referring to is the fact that just about anyone can file comments with the FCC, even fake celebrities or dead historical figures.
The whole process has become a complete joke. Some of my research on the FCC’s indecency complaint process has illustrated how one group–the Parents Television Council (PTC)–has essentially been able to stuff the complaint ballot box at the FCC by filing endless strings of computer-generated complaints from its website. The PTC then fires off letters to the FCC and Congress that essentially say, “Look! Millions of Americans out outraged by the content on TV and are clamoring for regulation!” In turn, that nonsense gets included in the congressional record when legislation is introduced, and politicians claim “the American people have spoken” and are overwhelming in favor of regulation.
It’s all nonsense, of course, because the vast majority of those “complaints” were just the same PTC form letter. But the same games are at work in the debates over media ownership policy and Net neutrality regulation. Jerry Brito and Jerry Ellig have shown that, in the FCC’s Net neutrality proceeding, “Close to 10,000 comments were submitted to the FCC, yet all but 143 were what the FCC calls “brief text comments,” many of which were form letters generated at the behest of advocacy groups.” The same thing is at work in the media ownership debate. A couple of radical anti-media activist groups stuff the ballot box with computer-generated complaints. And the Washington Post recently ran a piece raising questions about how the public filing process is potentially being abused in the XM-Sirius merger fight.
But Matt Laser documents how truly absurd this process has become when the likes of Paris Hilton, Donald Trump, Joseph Stalin, and even Jesus Christ end up submitting “comments” for the “public record.” Here’s some of the highlights from Lasar’s writeup:
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According to this AP story, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee…
has expressed concern in a letter to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey that the Justice Department may “rush through” an approval of Sirius Satellite Radio Inc.’s $5 billion purchase of its rival XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. [Conyers] also said he was “dismayed to learn” that Thomas O. Barnett, the head of the department’s antitrust division, may approve the deal “over the objections of department staff.” The Judiciary Committee oversees antitrust issues. Rep. Steve Cabot, an Ohio Republican, also signed the letter. The two members said they haven’t yet taken a position on the transaction, but urged Mukasey to “preserve your ability to personally participate in the department’s deliberations.”
Only in Washington would it be considered “rushed” to take a year to review a proposal. Absurd.
Via the 463, a great tech policy publication, National Journal’s Tech Daily, will be shutting down.
This is a loss, but it also represents progress. TechDaily was a subscription service that was quite expensive – more than a thousand dollars per year. (It won’t matter now if I reveal this to any TechDaily reporters, right? . . .) I long ago switched to TechLawJournal, coming in at $250 a year for reporting that serves my needs well. (TLJ reporter David Carney is a machine, people!) And, of course, there are dozens of resources that are completely free.
So, sayonara, TechDaily, and thank you.
TechCrunch reports that Jackass 2.5 will debut online, for free.
Sure this is an important development in the evolution of entertainment business models to accommodate modern communications, but I’m just as excited because it’s such an advance for our culture!
Dudes! Jackass 2.5!
Bravo for Larry Downes of ZD Net who has a smart new column out today entitled “Save Internet Freedom–from Regulation.” Downes is referring to the ominous threat posed to the future of the Internet by the Net neutrality bill that Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) is likely to introduce shortly. Downes points out that:
The Internet has thrived in large part because it has managed to sidestep a barrage of efforts to regulate it, including laws to ban indecent material, levy sales tax on e-commerce, require Web sites to provide “zoning” tags, and to criminalize spam, file sharing, and spyware. Some of these laws have been overturned by the courts; some died before being passed; and the rest–well, the rest are effectively ignored, thanks to the Internet’s remarkable ability (so far) to treat regulation as a network failure and reroute around the problem.
Exactly right. Why then, Downes asks next, “do the same civil-liberties groups that recognize the value of keeping the government out of Internet content want to open a loophole large enough to drive several Mack trucks through?” GREAT question, and one that we’ve been asking on this site for many years.
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Lessig and Lemley also introduce an argument that seems to me to be fundamentally in tension with their broader end-to-end thesis:
One should not think of ISPs as providing a fixed and immutable set of services. Right now ISPs typically provide customer support, as well as an IP address that channels the customer’s data. Competition among ISPs focuses on access speed, as well as some competition for content. AOL, for example, is both an access provider and content provider. Mindspring, on the other hand, simply provides access. In the future, however, ISPs are potential vertical competitors to access providers who could provide competitive packages of content, or differently optimized caching servers, or different mixes of customer support, or advanced Internet services. This ISP competition would provide a constant pressure on access providers to optimize access.
I don’t agree with this, and indeed, I don’t think Lessig himself agrees with this any longer, although that may be a consequence of today’s less-competitive ISP marketplace. But it seems to me that the end-to-end principle
does imply that we should “think of ISPs as providing a fixed and immutable set of services”: namely, moving bits from point A to point B without doing much else. While there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with an ISP offering other services besides that, the division of labor would seem to suggest that it’s generally going to work better for ISPs to offer basic service and third parties to provide caching, content, or “advanced Internet services.”
And indeed, that’s what has happened. Akamai, for example, was in its infancy when L&L were writing their paper. In the last seven years the company has thrived, despite the trend toward vertically integrated residential ISPs. By the same token, ISPs still provide their customers with email and web services, but it’s become far more common for users to bring their own email access and find third parties (including Flickr, Blogger, and YouTube) to host their web content. Even DNS, long considered core functionality of an ISP, is increasingly being offered by third parties.
Most dramatically, with AOL’s transition to being just another web portal, the business model of ISP-as-content-provider has completely collapsed. Hardly anyone now believes that it makes sense for your ISP to be a major provider of Internet content. ISPs should be competing on the basis of their ability to bring the cornucopia of content already on the web to you as efficiently as possible, not on their ability to provide an inevitably meager quantity of exclusive content on top of basic Internet access.
This probably wasn’t as obvious in 2000 as it is today. I haven’t seen Lessig or Lemley specifically address the point, but given Lessig’s enthusiastic embrace of network neutrality regulation (which is based on the implicit premise that ISPs
shouldn’t be more than a “dumb pipe”), I would bet he’d concede that value-added ISPs aren’t as promising a concept as they appeared a decade ago.
Way back in 2000, Larry Lessig and Mark Lemley wrote The End of End-to-End: Preserving the Architecture of the Internet in the Broadband Era. It’s interesting because it underscores how rapidly the broadband debate has evolved in this decade. At the time Lemley and Lessig were writing, the big issue was whether cable companies would be required to unbundle their cable Internet service the same way phone companies were required to unbundle their DSL service. Since then, of course, the FCC has no only declined to unbundle cable lines, but has abandoned unbundling of DSL lines as well.
Lessig and Lemley were on the other side of this issue, warning that allowing cable companies to offer only integrated cable Internet service threatened to undermine the end-to-end principle of the Internet:
The consequence of this bundling will be that there will be no effective competition among ISPs serving residential broadband cable. The range of services available to broadband cable users will be determined by the “captive” ISPs owned by each local cable company. These captive ISPs will control the kind of use that customers might make of their broadband access. They will determine whether, for example, full length streaming video is permitted (it is presently not); they will determine whether customers might resell broadband services (as they presently may not); it will determine whether broadband customers might become providers of web content (as they presently may
The third has clearly happened, although it’s not clear to me that that’s a great loss, since third-party web hosting is an extremely competitive market. There’s no obvious reason for people to run servers out of their homes and some good reasons for them not to. The second has happened in theory, but not really in practice. I have a wireless access point connected to my cable modem despite the fact that my terms of service most likely requires that I only connect a single computer. Charter hasn’t given me a hard time about it. So what your ISP requires in theory and what they enforce in practice can be very different questions.
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Rep. John D. Dingell (D-MI), the House Energy & Commerce committee chairman, is complaining that the FCC isn’t fair, open or transparent. Exasperated political partisans frequently complain about process out of frustration when there is insufficient popular support for their point of view to prevail on the merits. That’s what’s happening here.
Overlooking the many unfortunate attempts lately to re-regulate the cable industry and a few other lapses, the FCC has been extraordinarily successful in terms of removing unnecessary regulation, and Martin deserves much of the credit. In the telecom space, network operators Verizon and AT&T are investing billions upgrading their networks to provide competitive video services as a result of the fact the Bush FCC allowed the Regional Bell Operating Companies into the long-distance market, deregulated last-mile fiber facilities, put DSL and cable modem services on the same deregulatory footing and prohibited cable franchising authorities from unreasonably refusing to award competitive franchises for the provision of cable services. As AT&T and Verizon attempt to capture video market share, the cable operators are ramping up their investment in competitive voice services.
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My employer, the Cato Institute, believes that the promotion of the classical liberal ideals of liberty, free markets and peace is an essential effort.
Accordingly, today Cato is launching six innovative foreign-language Web sites. These new sites will publish in Chinese, Portuguese, French, Persian, Kurdish, and for African audiences in English and Swahili. These join three other highly-successful sites in Spanish, Arabic and Russian.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.