Last night, Declan McCullagh of CNet posted two tweets related to the concerns already percolating in the privacy community about a new Apple and Android app called “Color,” which allows those who use it to take photos and videos and instantaneously share them with other people within a 150-ft radius to create group photo/video albums. In other words, this new app marries photography, social networking, and geo-location. And because the app’s default setting is to share every photo and video you snap openly with the world, Declan wonders “How long will it take for the #privacy fundamentalists to object to Color.com’s iOS/Android apps?” After all, he says facetiously, “Remember: market choices can’t be trusted!”  He then reminds us that there’s really nothing new under the privacy policy sun and that we’ve seen this debate unfold before, such as when Google released its GMail service to the world back in 2004.

Indeed, for me, this debate has a “Groundhog Day” sort of feel to it.  I feel like I’ve been fighting the same fight with many privacy fundamentalists for the past decade. The cycle goes something like this:

• an innovative new information-sharing / social networking technology appears on the scene.
• the technology encourages more information production / sharing and defaults to sharing as the norm (but usually with opt-out capabilities or privacy settings of some sort built in).
• importantly, the technology in question is almost always free to consumers.
• immediately, a vociferous crowd of privacy fundamentalists lament the announcement and calls for the technology or service to be rolled-back or even regulated by the government. At a minimum, major design changes (usually an opt-in privacy default) are requested.  These advocates usually ignore or downplay the inherent quid pro quo involved in the deal, i.e., you share some info and tolerate some ads to get the free goodies.
• most privacy-agnostic people (like me!) usually yawn, sit back and enjoy the new free goodies, and wonder what all the fuss is about. In other words, over time (and usually fairly quickly), social norms adjust to the new technologies and modes of sharing.

In this regard, my favorite case study of this process in action is the one that Declan already mentioned: Gmail. It’s easy to forget now, but back in 2004 there was quite a hullabaloo over the introduction of Gmail. Indeed, the privacy fundamentalists wanted it stopped cold. Letters started flying from privacy groups, sent first directly to Google itself (31 groups signed this letter asking the company to roll back the service), and then to the attorney general of California requesting an investigation following an immediate suspension of the service.  Those signing that particular letter (Chris Jay Hoofnagle of EPIC, Beth Givens of  Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, and Pam Dixon of the World Privacy Forum) also warned of civil and criminal penalties and private rights of action.

It was at about that time that, well, I blew my top. After seeing some traffic on Declan’s old “Politech” listserv about this, and fearing that action might be forthcoming by government officials aimed at restricting this new technology, I fired off this response to the Gmail-haters on April 30, 2004:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: RE: [Politech] EPIC letter compares Gmail to FBI's Carnivore,
Total Information Awareness [priv]
Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2004 09:16:54 -0400
From: Adam Thierer 
To: Declan McCullagh 

Oh brother, I can't take this lunacy from the privacy absolutists anymore:

(1) What part of VOLUNTARY is it that these privacy fundamentalists do
not understand? How many times and in how many ways must it be said: YOU
DO NOT HAVE TO SIGN UP FOR THIS FREE SERVICE!

(2) Second, these privacy absolutists persistently attempt to equate
private sector privacy concerns and government privacy violations. There
is a world of difference between the two and it basically comes down to
the fact that governments hold guns to our heads and coercively force us
to do certain things against our will. That is the real Big Brother
problem. Google, by contrast, isn't holding a gun to anyone's head and
forcing them to sign up.

(3) If you're concerned about how government might co-opt this service
for its own nefarious ends, that is not a Google problem, that is a Big
Government problem. Let's work together to properly limit the
surveillance powers of government instead of shutting down any new
private service or technology that we feel the feds might have to chance
to abuse.

(4) Final point about these privacy fanatics: Do they not believe in
freedom of contract? Do I or do I not have a right to contract with a
company to exchange certain forms of personal information for a the
right to free e-mail access and storage? Can I not VOLUNTARILY agree to
such a deal? If not, then I fear that there are a heck of lot of things
in this world that these people would make illegal in the name of
"protecting privacy."

Do they believe that companies like Google will - - out of the goodness
of their hearts - - just hand over free e-mail services and massive
storage capacity to everyone without anything in exchange? There is no
free lunch in this world but Google is giving us about the closest thing
to it. And yet, the privacy fanatics want to reject that offer on the
behalf over everyone in society. Well guess what EPIC... you don't speak
for me and a lot of other people in this world who will be more than
happy to cut this deal with Google. So do us a favor and don't ask the
government to shut down a service just because you don't like it.
Privacy is a subjective condition and your value preferences are not
representative of everyone else's values in our diverse nation. Stop
trying to coercively force your values and choices on others. We can
decide these things on our own, thank you very much.

It turns out that I didn’t really have as much to fear as I thought when I fired off that angry email. Most people immediately embraced the new Gmail service.  And why wouldn’t they? It was an amazing innovation at just the right price — free!  Don’t forget that, at that time, Yahoo! mail (the leading webmail provider) offered customers less than 10 megabytes of email storage. By contrast, Gmail offered users an astounding gigabyte of storage that would grow steadily over time.  Rather than charging some users for more storage or special features, Google paid for the service by showing advertisements next to each email “contextually” targeted to keywords in that email — a far more profitable form of advertising than “dumb banner” ads previously used by other webmail providers. That raised some privacy concerns, but it also offered users the ultimate email free lunch.  And they ate it up.

Today, 190 million+ people around the world use Gmail and the service continues to evolve to meet the needs of users.  While I’m not a fan of Gmail’s spartan user interface and lack of other useful features found in other services (like Outlook loaded up with Xobni), there’s no doubt that Gmail has been a terrific boon to consumers. But we should not so easily forget that some people wanted to preemptively kill it by imposing the equivalent of what I have called a “Privacy Precautionary Principle” and stopping innovation before they had given it their blessing.

Again, as I noted in my 2004 rant above, many privacy fundamentalist too often forget that privacy is a highly subjective and ever-changing condition. As Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis noted in their excellent recent book, Blown to Bits:

The meaning of privacy has changed, and we do not have a good way of describing it. It is not the right to be left alone, because not even the most extreme measures will disconnect our digital selves from the rest of the world. It is not the right to keep our private information to ourselves, because the billions of atomic factoids don’t any more lend themselves into binary classification, private or public. (p. 68)

This struggle to conceptualize privacy and then protect it is going to continue and become quite a heated debate at times. I want to be clear, however, that while I do not share the values of those in the privacy fundamentalist camp, I do understand and appreciate that there are some people who are hyper-sensitive about this issue and I’m fine with them pressuring companies to change their privacy policies or, better yet, encouraging them to offer more tools that will allow users to better manage their own privacy.  I think Microsoft, Facebook,Yahoo! and Google (among many others) have made some amazing strides in this regard and some of the credit must go to the hard-core privacy advocates for pushing them to offer more flexible privacy-enhancing tools and settings for those who demand them.

But let’s be clear about another thing: This should be an evolutionary, experimental process. Educating and empowering consumers to handle their personal privacy settings is a wonderful thing. On the other hand, making those decisions for consumers preemptively, as some privacy advocates often seem to want to do, is an entirely different matter. A Privacy Precautionary Principle mentality — as we saw in display in the early spat over Gmail — would have resulted in hundreds of millions of people being denied an amazingly innovative new service based on largely on phantom fears and conjectural “harms.”  It is better to let these things play out in the information marketplace and see what the ongoing interaction of consumers and companies yields in terms of new innovation and new privacy settings / norms.  Those new settings and norms may not always be to the liking of some privacy fundamentalists, or even to privacy agnostics like me, but that experimental, evolutionary, organic process remains the right way to go if we value both progress and liberty.

Update 3/29: I somehow completely spaced-out and forgot about this terrific old 2004 essay by Tim O’Reilly on “The Fuss About Gmail and Privacy: Nine Reasons Why It’s Bogus.”  Go back and read it. Great stuff.  This Business Insider article brought it back to my attention.

CNet‘s Declan McCullagh has a great piece about the politics of actually implementing the ECPA reform principles announced today by the Digital Due Process Coalition, which PFF, CEI and Net Coalition all proudly signed on to along with a number of other think tanks, advocacy groups, and leading tech companies.  Ryan and I explained earlier today how these proposals would Protect Americans’ Privacy by Restoring Constitutional Limits to Government.

As I note at the end of the article:

“This is an opportunity for President Obama to show that he understands President Reagan’s central lesson: ‘Government is not the solution to our problem—government is the problem,'” says Berin Szoka, an attorney at the Progress and Freedom Foundation. “These proposals offer a sensible, long-overdue way of protecting us from the real Big Brother, our government, without crippling law enforcement or the private companies that keep giving us all wonderful new content and services, mostly for free.”

This is a point Adam Thierer and I have made repeatedly in the debate over how to deal with concerns about online privacy. Check out our/my key pieces on this point:

• Online Advertising & User Privacy: Principles to Guide the Debate
• Privacy Trade-Offs: PFF Comments on December 7 FTC Privacy Workshop
• Targeted Online Advertising: What’s the Harm & Where Are We Heading?
• Chairman Leibowitz’s Disconnect on Privacy Regulation & the Future of News
• My comments on FCC’s Privacy Inquiry for National Broadband Plan

If you have a mobile phone, that’s the upshot of an argument being put forward by the government in a case being argued before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals tomorrow. The case is called In the Matter of the Application of the United States of America For An Order Directing A Provider of Electronic Communication Service To Disclose Records to the Government.

Declan McCullagh reports:

In that case, the Obama administration has argued that Americans enjoy no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their—or at least their cell phones’—whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that “a customer’s Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records” that show where a mobile device placed and received calls.

The government can maintain this position because of the retrograde “third party doctrine.” That doctrine arose from a pair of cases in the early 1970s in which the Supreme Court found no Fourth Amendment problems when the government required service providers to maintain records about their customers, and later required those service providers to hand the records over to the government.

I wrote about these cases, and the courts’ misunderstanding of privacy since 1967’s Katz decision, in an American University Law Review article titled “Reforming Fourth Amendment Privacy Doctrine“:

These holdings were never right, but they grow more wrong with each step forward in modern, connected living. Incredibly deep reservoirs of information are constantly collected by third-party service providers today. Cellular telephone networks pinpoint customers’ locations throughout the day through the movement of their phones. Internet service providers maintain copies of huge swaths of the information that crosses their networks, tied to customer identifiers. Search engines maintain logs of searches that can be correlated to specific computers and usually the individuals that use them. Payment systems record each instance of commerce, and the time and place it occurred. The totality of these records are very, very revealing of people’s lives. They are a window onto each individual’s spiritual nature, feelings, and intellect. They reflect each American’s beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and sensations. They ought to be protected, as they are the modern iteration of our “papers and effects.”

This is a case to watch, as it will help determine whether or not your digital life is an open book to government investigators.

I’ve posted another response in the Cato Unbound online debate over the impact of Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace upon the book’s 10th anniversary.  You will recall that I went fairly hard on Prof. Lessig in my essay, “Code, Pessimism, and the Illusion of ‘Perfect Control,’” and Lessig responded with a counter-punch that went after me for it.  I respond in a new essay about “Our Conflict of Cyber-Visions.” In the piece, I address Lessig’s assertion that I just didn’t understand the central teachings of Code, as well as his reluctance to accept the “cyber-collectivism” label that I affixed to his book and life’s work.  Again, please hop over to Cato Unbound for my complete response.

But one thing from the essay that I thought worth reproducing here is my effort to better define the key principles that separate the cyber-libertarian and cyber-collectivist schools of thinking.  I argue that it comes down to this:

The cyber-libertarian believes that “code failures” are ultimately better addressed by voluntary, spontaneous, bottom-up, marketplace responses than by coerced, top-down, governmental solutions. Moreover, the decisive advantage of the market-driven approach to correcting code failure comes down to the rapidity and nimbleness of those response(s).

Of course, another key difference relates to how quickly one jumps to the conclusion that “code failures” are actually occurring at all. I argue:

What concerns me about the way Prof. Lessig approaches these issues in Code and in his subsequent work is that he is far too quick to declare the debate over by labeling short-term code hiccups as sky-is-falling market failures. The end result of such myopic techno-pessimism is the inevitable call for governments to intervene and “do something” to correct supposed code failures.  The cyber-libertarian instead counsels patience. Let’s give those other forces — alternative platforms, new innovators, social norms, public pressure, etc. — a chance to work some magic. Evolution happens, if you let it. Moreover, if you are always running around crying “market failure!” and calling in the code cops, it creates perverse marketplace incentives by discouraging efforts to innovate or “route around” bad code or code failure. We don’t want the whole world sitting around waiting for government to regulate the mousetrap to improve it or even give everyone better access to it; we should want the world to be innovating to create better mousetraps! To reiterate a key point I already stressed in my original essay: One need not believe that the markets in code are “perfectly competitive” to accept that they are “competitive enough” — or at least, better than regulatory alternatives.

Anyway, please head over to the Cato site to read the whole thing and let me know what you think.  If nothing else, I’m sure that Seth Finkelstein will have something incredibly nasty to say about me!  And I will wear his scorn as a badge of honor.

The week-long Cato Unbound online debate about the 10th anniversary of Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace continues today with Prof. Lessig’s response to Declan McCullagh’s opening essay, “What Larry Didn’t Get,” Jonathan Zittrain’s follow-up essay, and my essay on, “Code, Pessimism, and the Illusion of ‘Perfect Control.’”  Needless to say, Prof. Lessig isn’t too happy with my response. You should jump over to the Cato site to read the entire thing, but here are a couple of excerpts and my response.

To my suggestion that there is a qualitative difference between law and code, Prof. Lessig says:

I’ve argued that things aren’t quite a simple as some libertarians would suggest. That there’s not just bad law. There’s bad code. That we don’t need to worry just about Mussolini. We also need to worry about DRM or the code AT&T deploys to help the government spy upon users. That public threats to liberty can be complemented by private threats to liberty. And that the libertarian must be focused on both.  […] Of course, law is law. Who could be oblivious to that? And who would need a book to explain it?  But the fact that “law is law” does not imply that it has a “much greater impact in shaping markets and human behavior.” Sometimes it does — especially when that “law” is delivered by a B1 bomber. But ask the RIAA whether it is law or code that is having a “greater impact in shaping markets” for music. Or ask the makers of Second Life whether the citizens of that space find themselves more constrained by the commercial code of their geo-jurisdiction or by the fact that the software code of Second Life doesn’t permit you simply to walk away (so to speak) with another person’s scepter. Whether and when law is more effective than code is an empirical matter — something to be studied, and considered, not dismissed by banalities spruced up with italics.

Well, I beg the professor’s pardon for excessive use of italics.  [I won’t ask for an apology for misspelling my last name in his piece!] Regardless, it’s obvious that we’ll just never see eye-to-eye on the crucial distinction between law and code. Again, as I stated in my essay: “With code, escape is possible. Law, by contrast, tends to lock in and limit; spontaneous evolution is supplanted by the stagnation of top-down, one-size-fits-all regulatory schemes.”

Lessig largely dismisses much of this with that last line above, suggesting that we just need to keep studying the matter to determine the right mix of what works best.  To be clear, while I’m all for studying the impact of law vs. code as “an empirical matter,” that in turn begs the question of how we define effectiveness or success. I suspect that the professor and I would have a “values clash” over some rather important first principles in that regard.  This is, of course, a conflict of visions that we see throughout the history of philosophy; a conflict between those who put the individual and the individual’s rights at the core of any ethical political system versus those who would place the rights of “the community,” “the public” or some other amorphous grouping(s) at the center of everything.  It’s a classic libertarian vs. communitarian / collectivist debate.

Lessig, however, makes it clear in his response that he doesn’t take kindly to being called a cyber-collectivist, even accusing me of “red-baiting” by using the term.  But the collectivism of which I speak is a more generic type; not the hard-edged Marxist brand of collectivism of modern times.   What separates Lessig’s brand of cyber-collectivism from the cyber-libertarianism that I espouse is a general preference for who calls the shots most of the time.  Quite obviously, I place an enormous amount of faith in largely unfettered markets in code to generally advance the values of individual liberty, freedom of speech, and economic innovation more often than rule by politics and public officials will.  Prof. Lessig is obviously far more enamored with the potential of the state and politics to play a beneficial role in shaping things.

Thus, even though Prof. Lessig rejects the association, Declan McCullagh was right to point to the distant influence of Plato on Code and much of Lessig’s other work.  (And there’s a bit of Rousseauian influence there, too.)  In any event, if Prof. Lessig takes offense at this label and wants to call his approach something other than cyber-collectivism, than by all means be my guest; invent a new term and I’ll use it.  But to me, as a student of political philosophy, I see his philosophy as just another variant of collectivism and just don’t know what else to call it.  This isn’t “red-baiting;” it’s simply an exercise in philosophical classification.

To some extent, Prof.  Lessig undercuts my arguments here in concluding his essay by asking that we “focus on a large number of difficult questions that remain… about how to preserve the liberty of society and the Net against the ever-expanding harm caused by the captured corruption that we call democratic government.”  Hey, now that sounds like something a true libertarian might say! (Except that we would have likely used the phrase “preserve the liberty of the individual” instead of “society”!) Regardless, Lessig is at least willing to admit that there may be some problems in paradise for Platonist thinking or Rousseauian romanticism.

Alas, for reasons articulated quite nicely here by Tim Lee in the past, “Lessig clearly understands what it takes to catch the interest of conservative- and libertarian-minded readers, and he’s not above spinning his arguments to maximize their appeal to the people he’s addressing.” For the libertarian, there is only one fool-proof solution to the problem of government corruption: You shrink the Leviathan. From what I’ve seen of Lessig’s proposals so far to address corruption, however, he’s not really willing to have that conversation. It’s all about the old “getting money out of politics” and “kill all the lobbyists” approach. Unfortunately, as Tim notes:

The problem isn’t that there’s a discrete list of corrupt practices that we can identify and prohibit. The problem is that if politicians are willing to be corrupted, and special interests are willing to spend resources to corrupt them, they’ll find ways to get it done. You can certainly reduce the effect on the margin — by banning overt bribery, for example — but once you’ve banned the really obvious categories of back-scratching, it becomes more and more difficult to make any further progress. What’s going on in Washington is disgusting, to be sure, but it’s not new or unique to the United States. And I think fixing it is going to be a lot more challenging than Lessig imagines.

I couldn’t agree more.  Nonetheless, I eagerly await more details from Prof. Lessig regarding his new effort to address corruption in our political system, however he defines it.  He may set forth some reform proposals that we libertarians find quite sensible and ultimately endorse.  But if “reform” instead comes in the form of layers of additional campaign finance regulations, well then, I think we’ll find ourselves disagreeing once again. Because many of those so-called reforms are simply free-speech violating restrictions on the rights of both individuals to petition their government.

But to conclude this exchange on a good note, let me just say that — at least in theory — I wholeheartedly endorse Lawrence Lessig’s call to protect “the Net against the ever-expanding harm caused by the captured corruption that we call democratic government.”   And I hope someday he will be more open to the notion that limits on the power of the state are the ultimate key to accomplishing that goal.

The Cato Unbound online debate about the 10th anniversary of Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace continues today with my response to Declan McCullagh’s opening essay, “What Larry Didn’t Get,” as well as Jonathan Zittrain’s follow-up.

In my response, “Code, Pessimism, and the Illusion of ‘Perfect Control,'” I begin by arguing that:

The problem with peddling tales of a pending techno-apocalypse is that, at some point, you may have to account for your prophecies — or false prophecies as the case may be. Hence, the problem for Lawrence Lessig ten years after the publication of his seminal book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.

I go on to argue that:

Lessig’s lugubrious predictions proved largely unwarranted. Code has not become the great regulator of markets or enslaver of man; it has been a liberator of both. Indeed, the story of the past digital decade has been the exact opposite of the one Lessig envisioned in Code.

After providing several examples of just how wrong Lessig’s predictions were, I then ask:

[W]hy have Lessig’s predictions proven so off the mark? Lessig failed to appreciate that markets are evolutionary and dynamic, and when those markets are built upon code, the pace and nature of change becomes unrelenting and utterly unpredictable. With the exception of some of the problems identified above, a largely unfettered cyberspace has left digital denizens better off in terms of the information they can access as well as the goods and services from which they can choose. Oh, and did I mention it’s all pretty much free-of-charge? Say what you want about our cyber-existence, but you can’t argue with the price!

I am forced to admit, however, that Lessig’s book has had enormous impact of the field of cyberlaw and digital technology policy:

This brings me to what I believe is the most important impact of Code: the philosophical movement it has spawned. As Declan noted in his opening essay, Code “offered a burgeoning protest movement [a] unifying theme and philosophy” in that it was both a polemic against cyber-libertarianism and a sort of call-to-arms for cyber-collectivism. It gave this movement its central operating principle: Code and cyberspace can be bent to the will of the collective, and it often must be if we are to avoid any number of impending disasters brought on by those nefarious (or just plain incompetent) folks in corporate America. Led by a gifted, prolific set of disciples such as Jonathan Zittrain and Tim Wu, as well as increasingly influential activist groups such as Public Knowledge and Free Press, Lessig’s cyber-collectivists continue to preach skepticism regarding markets and property rights, and a general openness to — and frequent embrace of — government solutions to digital-era dilemmas. […]  Prof. Lessig and his movement are winning the battle of ideas on the cyber-front today. We have Code to thank — or blame — for that.

Please head over to the Cato Unbound website to read the entire thing.  Prof. Lessig’s response is scheduled to be posted on Monday.

As I mentioned on Monday,  the folks over at Cato Unbound have put together an online debate about the impact of Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace as it turns 10 this year.

The opening essay from Declan McCullagh, “What Larry Didn’t Get,” took Lessig to task for favoring rule by “technocratic philosopher kings” over the spontaneous invisible hand of code.   In Round 2 of the debate, Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain comes to Lessig’s defense and suggests that the gap between Lessig and libertarians is not as wide as Declan suggests:

The debate between Larry and the libertarians is more subtle. Larry says: I’m with you on the aim — I want to maintain a free Internet, defined roughly as one in which bits can move between people without much scrutiny by the authorities or gatekeeping by private entities. Code’s argument was and is that this state of freedom isn’t self-perpetuating. Sooner or later government will wake up to the possibilities of regulation through code, and where it makes sense to regulate that way, we might give way — especially if it forestalls broader interventions.

Run over to Cato Unbound to read the rest.  My response will be going up next (on Friday) and then Prof. Lessig’s will be up next Monday.

Declan McCullagh, CNET News’ chief political correspondent, does a nice job debunking the privacy fears about Google Flu Trends that a couple of pro-regulatory privacy advocates have set forth. Flu Trends is a very cool application that uses search terms as an indicator of possible upticks in flu-related illnesses in various regions of the U.S.  Of course, it didn’t take long for some Chicken Littles to rain on the parade with their irrational fears about data privacy. As Declan notes, however, there is no personally identifiable information being collected or shared here. It’s just search term analysis. Moreover, if these privacy-sensitive advocates are really that paranoid about it, they should just just Tor or another anonymizer to cloak their searches instead of calling in the regulators to suffocate another technology while its still in the cradle.

Anyway, make sure to read Declan’s excellent piece.

Friend of TLF and chief political correspondent for CNET Declan McCullagh has a new column on CBSNews.com called “Other People’s Money.”

Nice name, but we’ll have to see whether his status as a fully decorated part of the mainstream media draws him from principled writing to constant applause for self-appointed experts who want to spend our taxed-away dollars for us.

His freshman effort looks pretty good. “Will U.S. Taxpayers Need a Bailout?” points out the perils of politically directed investments in the banking sector.

Declan McCullagh has done some great reporting this morning on an ITU plan to trace the source of all Internet communications. Meaning: no more anonymous speech online.

The U.S. National Security Agency is also participating in the “IP Traceback” drafting group, named Q6/17, which is meeting next week in Geneva to work on the traceback proposal. Members of Q6/17 have declined to release key documents, and meetings are closed to the public.

Read the whole thing.

It’s particularly interesting to note the role of VeriSign in developing this surveillance capability for the ‘net. McCullagh quotes Tony Rutkowski of VeriSign stepping up to defend the plan. Rutkowski published a summary of the plan in May.

Great reporting by McCullagh. Not a great thing for VeriSign to be doing.

C|Net’s Charles Cooper reports today that Department of Justice trustbusters are considering a comprehensive antitrust attack on Google.

Sources who have provided testimony to the government say a departmental debate revolves around whether antitrust regulators should challenge Google’s proposed revenue-sharing deal with Yahoo, or go for the whole enchilada–and haul Google into court on broader charges related to its dominance in search advertising.

C|Net’s Declan McCullagh speculated earlier this week about how Google would fare under an Obama administration:

[Obama’s] technology campaign platform pledges to “reinvigorate antitrust enforcement” and “step up review of merger activity.” He complained to the American Antitrust Institute that “the current administration has what may be the weakest record of antitrust enforcement of any administration in the last half century.” If the Bush administration’s current antitrust probe of Google, coupled with this week’s apparent threat of a federal lawsuit, amounts to a “weak” record, imagine what antitrust true believers in an Obama administration might do. (A three-way split of Google into search, applications, and display ads, anyone?)

I’m not sure whether structural separation is on Google’s near-term horizon, but Washington, D.C.’s parasite economy will make its move.

Here’s a good article by Declan McCullagh on New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s outrageous vendetta against Usenet. The article is good not only because yours truly is quoted.

I’ve been looking, and haven’t found a single advocate from the left or critic of Comcast’s network management practices that has said a word of support for Comcast on this subject. This is where Internet freedom is really in peril – and nothing?