“With a few notable exceptions, the tech industry seems unwilling to regulate itself. I will introduce legislation that will require Internet companies to take reasonable steps to protect human rights, or face civil and criminal liability.” – Senator Dick Durbin, as reported by the Washington Post. 
We hear you, Sen. Durbin. The practices of many nations toward free speech and political dissidents are terribly wrong. But we respectfully and strongly disagree with your statements at yesterday’s Senate Judiciary hearing on global Internet freedom and the rule of law.
The growth of IT companies throughout the world has been an enormous boon to free speech and human rights. Although these technologies present new challenges, particularly when taken together with widely varying laws, they are doing far more good than harm, everywhere that they are deployed.
But if you attended the hearing and knew nothing about the Internet, you’d think that American online companies doing business in China and elsewhere were pure evil – as if they were the ones with the power to not comply with – or change — the criminal laws of other nations.
In particular, Facebook and Twitter were called out for not joining the Global Network Initiative (GNI). The product of more than two years of study and development by companies and public interest groups, the Initiative offers a set of guiding principles for global IT companies doing business in an increasingly global environment.
But while the GNI exposes online companies to new scrutiny, it doesn’t provide any protection from aggressive governments. And at a price tag of $200,000, the GNI isn’t cheap. How effective will it be, really, at changing the practices of totalitarian nations? Continue reading →
Today’s The Wall Street Journal Europe published an editorial that Alberto Mingardi of Istituto Bruno Leoni and I penned about the competition complaints brought against Google in Europe.
If policy makers set the terms in a primitive year like 2010, nobody will have to respond to Google.
By WAYNE CREWS AND ALBERTO MINGARDI
Google isn’t a monopoly now, but the more it tries to become one, the better it will be for us all. Competition works in this way: Capitalist enterprises strive to gain in profits and market share. In turn, competitors are forced to respond by trying to improve their offerings. Innovation is the healthy output of this competitive game. The European Commission, while pondering complaints against the Internet search giant, might consider this point.
Google has been challenged by a German, a British, and a French Web site, for its dominant position in the market for Web search and online advertisement. The U.S. search engine is said to be imposing difficult terms and conditions on competitors and partners, who are now calling regulators into action. Google’s search algorithm is accused of being “biased” by business partners and competing publishers alike. 
Before resorting to the old commandments of antitrust, we should consider that the Internet world is still largely impervious and unknown to anybody—including regulators. We are in terra incognita, and nobody knows the likely evolution of the market. But one thing is for sure: Online search can’t evolve properly if it’s improperly regulated—no matter the stage of evolution.
Continue reading →
Last July, Adam Thierer and I argued in a Forbes.com piece that the Microsoft/Yahoo! search partnership should be cause for “celebration among as a good thing for consumers. By providing a strong competitor with a combined 28% market share, the deal should also be a source of relief at Google, which has come under increasing attack for its supposed market dominance.” Today, 205 days later, the companies have finally announced that EU and US antitrust regulators have approved their deal.
So… how does a delay of nearly seven months help consumers? Wouldn’t we be better off if the two companies had been able to start working together immediately to develop a stronger search engine competitor without this “Mother, May I?” routine?
Last year, I described how Microsoft’s delayed entry into search advertising put them at a serious disadvantage in competing with Google. (The company dithered over buying search ad startup Overture and ultimately decided to build its own system—which proved a serious miscalculation.) I’ll just reiterate what we said about the Yahoo!/Microsoft deal when it was first announced.
Yahoo!/Microsoft pact is just the latest pairing of Web 1.0 titans struggling to reinvent themselves and compete with Google, a titan that still thinks of itself as a start-up. All three companies will struggle to meet new challenges as search evolves toward the social(reflecting what your friends like), the semantic (reflecting the precise, rather than presumed, meanings of Web content), the personalized (reflecting your own preferences) and the interactive (including user-generated comments or reviews)…. Continue reading →
If a tree falls in the forest, who cares who hears it?
But when we “publish,” “speak” or “share” online, we often do care who hears it. While millions of users eagerly share huge amounts of information about themselves and their activities by posting status updates, photos, videos, events, etc., nearly everyone would rather limit
some of their sharing to a select circle of contacts. For some users (and in some situations), that circle might be quite small, while it could be very large or unlimited for other users or situations. How public is too public when it comes to what we share about ourselves? Personalizing our audience is something we each have to decide for ourselves depending on the circumstances—what I would call “publication privacy.” (It’s a potentially ambiguous term, I’ll grant you, since “publication” still doesn’t obviously refer to user-generated content in everyone’s mind, but I think it’s more clear than “Sharing Privacy,” since “publication” is a subset of the information we “share” about ourselves.)
For all the talk about the “Death of Privacy“—be that good, bad, or simply inevitable—publication privacy is thriving. Twitter, most famously, offers users only the binary choice of either locking down their entire feed (so that you have to approve requests to “follow” you) or making it public to everyone on the service. But just in the last two months, we’ve seen a sea change in the ability of users to manage their publication privacy.
Facebook’s Publication Controls
First, in December, Facebook began offering users the ability to control access to each and every piece of content they share—like so:
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Yesterday fellow TLFers Jim Harper and Berin Szoka joined me for an episode of the Surprisingly Free Conversations podcast in which we discussed the buzz around Google Buzz. You can listen to it here. You might also want to check out our other recent episodes, which include:
Check them all out and subscribe at the podcast page.
I’m a big fan of CNET’s “Buzz Out Loud” podcast and often enjoy co-host Molly Wood’s occasional “Molly Rant” but I’m disappointed to see her jumping on the Google-bashing bandwagon with her latest rant: “Google Buzz: Privacy nightmare.” Instead of appreciating the “privacy by design” features of Buzz, she seems to be rushing to privacy paternalism—just as I feared many would when I blogged about the Buzz launch.
Molly’s primary complaint, repeated several times, is that “you automatically follow everyone in your Gmail contact list, and that information is publicly available in your profile, by default, to everyone who visits your profile.” Actually, while Buzz
does automatically follow some users your contact list, it does so only for the ones you chat with most using Gmail (which I believe means only other Gmail users). After that, Buzz simply tells you when other users follow you, and makes it easy to follow them.
So what’s the big deal? Molly’s concern, shared by a number of other bloggers, is that, before a user can start Buzzing, they have to set up Google Profile (another Google product launched last August, which typically appears on the bottom of the first page of Google search results for that name) and the default setting for Google profiles is to “Display the list of people I’m following and people following me.” In this respect, your Google Profile is a lot like your Facebook profile, except that users can decide to hide their followers/followees on their Google profile. (On Facebook, that information is part of the limited bucket of “publicly available information” and can’t be hidden by the user from their profile, but users can opt-out of having their profile accessible at all through search engines or Facebook search.)
There are essentially three ways of dealing with this concern about inadvertent sharing of sensitive contacts: Continue reading →
It’s been a busy week in the Googlesphere. Google made headlines earlier this week when it aired a televised ad for the first time in the company’s history, and again yesterday when it unveiled Buzz, its new social networking platform. Today, Google announced bold plans to build an experimental fiber-to-the-home broadband network that’s slated to eventually deliver a whopping gigabit per second of Internet connectivity to 500,000 U.S. homes.
Google’s ambitious broadband announcement comes as welcome news for anybody who pines for greater broadband competition and, more broadly, infrastructure wealth creation in America. To date, Google has dabbled in broadband in the form of metro Wi-Fi, but hasn’t embarked on anything of this scale. Laying fiber to residences is not cheap or easy, as Verizon has learned the hard way, and Google will undoubtedly have to devote some serious resources to this experiment if it is to realize its lofty goals.
It’s important to remember, however, that Google is first and foremost a content company, not an infrastructure company. Google’s generally awesome products, from search to video to email, attract masses of loyal users. In turn, advertisers flock to Google, spending billions in hopes of reaching its gigantic, precisely-targetable audience. This business model enables Google to invest in developing a steady stream of free services, like Google Voice, Google Apps, and Google Maps Navigation.
So it won’t be too surprising if Google’s broadband experiment doesn’t initially generate enough revenue to cover its costs. In fact, I’m skeptical that Google even anticipates its network will ever become a profit center. Rather, chances are Google won’t be at all concerned if its broadband service doesn’t break even as long as it bolsters the Google brand and spurs larger telecom companies to get more aggressive in upgrading their broadband speeds (which, indirectly, benefits Google).
Google’s broadband agenda is great news for consumers, of course. Who can complain if Google is willing to invest in building a fiber-to-the-home broadband network and is willing to charge below-cost prices? Not me!
Continue reading →
By Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer
We learned from The Wall Street Journal yesterday that “Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski gets a little peeved when people suggests that he wants to regulate the Internet.” He told a group of Journal reporters and editors today that: “I don’t see any circumstances where we’d take steps to regulate the Internet itself,” and “I’ve been clear repeatedly that we’re not going to regulate the Internet.”
We’re thankful to hear Chairman Julius Genachowski to make that promise. We’ll certainly hold him to it. But you will pardon us if we remain skeptical (and, in advance, if you hear a constant stream of “I told you so” from us in the months and years to come). If the Chairman is “peeved” at the suggestion that the FCC might be angling to extend its reach to include the Internet and new media platforms and content, perhaps he should start taking a closer look at what his own agency is doing—and think about the precedents he’s setting for future Chairmen who might not share his professed commitment not to regulate the ‘net. Allow us to cite just a few examples:
Net Neutrality Notice of Proposed Rulemaking
We’re certainly aware of the argument that the FCC’s proposed net neutrality regime is not tantamount to Internet regulation—but we just don’t buy it. Not for one minute.
First, Chairman Genachowski seems to believe that “the Internet” is entirely distinct from the physical infrastructure that brings “cyberspace” to our homes, offices and mobile devices. The WSJ notes, “when pressed, [Genachowski] admitted he was referring to regulating Internet content rather than regulating Internet lines.” OK, so let’s just make sure we have this straight: The FCC is going to enshrine in law the principle that “gatekeepers” that control the “bottleneck” of broadband service can only be checked by having the government enforce “neutrality” principles in the same basic model of “common carrier” regulation that once applied to canals, railroads, the telegraph and telephone. But when it comes to accusations of “gatekeeper” power at the content/services/applications “layers” of the Internet, the FCC is just going to step back and let markets sort things out? Sorry, we’re just not buying it. Continue reading →
In case you missed it, the world stopped moving today to witness the birth of another Google product: the much-ballyhooed “Twitter-Killer,” Buzz, which offers much of the functionality of Twitter in a more Facebook-like setting (plus location data) built directly into Gmail. CNET’s Larry Magid started the #GoogSoc (“Google Social”) hashtag for the event, kicking off a discussion about Twitter’s newest competitor on Twitter itself—and he was the first one up to the mic with a question for Google Founder Sergey Brin and his team after their presentation. Larry asked about privacy concerns raised by Buzz and Brin responded, as Larry puts it:
that there are privacy controls built-into both the web and mobile Buzz applications but, by default, much of your information is public. For example, if you don’t specify that a Buzz should only be seen by your friends, it’s made available to everyone and indexed by the Google search engine. Like Facebook, Buzz gives you the ability to create lists so you can have a separate Buzz group for your drinking buddies and another one for people at work. However,as with all privacy tools, the key is how you use them. My concern is that some people might forget to use the privacy tools and send the wrong information to the wrong people.
There are also controls on whether your geo-location is disclosed but, again,
i
t’s up to the user to be careful on how they use them. Imagine sending a post out to your significant other that you’re stuck at work only to accidentally reveal that you’re actually located in a romantic restaurant down the street from the office?
I’m glad that Larry is raising these concern as someone who has done yeoman’s work in educating Internet users, especially kids, about how to “Connect Safely” online (the name of his advocacy group). The fact that companies like Google know they’ll get questions like Larry’s is hugely important in keeping them on their toes to continually plan for “privacy by design.”
But I do worry that those with a political axe to grind will take these same questions and twist them into arguments for regulation based on the idea that if
some people forget to use a tool or just don’t get care as much about protecting their privacy as some self-appointed “privacy advocates” think they should, the government—led by Platonic philosopher kings who know what’s best for us all—should step in to protect us all from our own forgetfulness, carefulness or plain ol’ apathy. After all, consumers are basically mindless sheep and if the government doesn’t look after them, the digital wolves will devour them whole! Continue reading →
The Federal district court handling the Authors Guild’s suit against Google over Google Books has scheduled a hearing on for February 18, 2010 in New York City (after several postponements). The parties, their supporters and the Department of Justice will all get to speak. Twenty-six outside groups will each get five minutes to speak about the deal—21 against and 5 in favor. (If the numbers seem off-balance, note that France is on the “con” side, and if the statist-stasist-centralist-protectionist French are against something tech-related, how bad an idea could it really be?)
Although the settlement is highly arcane, how this issue is resolved will probably do as much, for better or worse, to shape our digital future in the years to come as any tech policy issue currently under discussion. (I’d say only net neutrality, privacy regulation and media socialization would fall into the same tier of such fork-in-the-road decision-points.)
So
of course this profoundly important public hearing is going to be livecasted, right? Unfortunately, I don’t think so. Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.