As we’ve noted here before, there are many ways to follow the TLF.  [Did you notice those cool icons over on the upper right-hand side of the page?]  But we wanted to make sure that our readers were aware of our Twitter feed, in particular, as well as the individual feeds of some of our contributors.  So, in case you are interested, here ya go!

• TLF main feed:  http://twitter.com/TechLiberation
• Jerry Brito: http://twitter.com/jerrybrito
• Cord Blomquist: http://twitter.com/cordblomquist
• PJ Doland: http://twitter.com/pjdoland
• Adam Thierer: http://twitter.com/AdamThierer
• Berin Szoka: http://twitter.com/BerinSzoka
• Braden Cox: http://twitter.com/BradenCox
• Wayne Crews: http://twitter.com/wayne_crews
• Sonia Arrison: http://twitter.com/SoniaArrison
• Hance Haney: http://twitter.com/hance_haney
• Bret Swanson: http://twitter.com/JBSay

Five years ago today the Technology Liberation Front (the “TLF”) got underway with this post.  The idea for the TLF came about after I asked some tech policy wonks whether it was worth put together a blog dedicated to covering Internet-related issues from a cyber-libertarian perspective.  The model I had in mind was a “Volokh Conspiracy for Tech Issues,” if you will. I wanted to bring together a collection of sharp, liberty-loving wonks (most of whom worked in the think tank world) to talk about their research on this front and to give them a place to post their views on breaking tech policy developments.  It was to be a sort of central clearinghouse for libertarian-oriented tech policy analysis and advocacy.

At first, Tim Lee and I debated whether it even made sense to have that sort of narrow focus, but I think the passage of time and the rise of plenty of competition on this front shows that it was worthwhile.  And I’ve been very pleased with the tag-team effort of all our TLF contributors and the way—without anyone planning it, in true libertarian fashion—we’ve sort of developed a nice division of labor on various tech policy issues.

Perhaps a few stats are in order on this occasion to mark our progress 5 years in. The best indication of our success is the fact that our Pagerank (Google’s logarithmic scale of website importance based on links to that site) has reached 7/10—the same score shared by the Volokh Conspiracy (our model), as well as Techmeme (the leading tech news aggregator), the Cato Institute, CDT, etc. (For comparison: ArsTechnica and EFF are 8s.) Unfortunately, we’ve only been using Google Analytics for three of the past five years, so it’s impossible to get a authoritative accounting of traffic growth since Day 1. But here are few markers:

• 4,450+ posts
• 29,000+ comments
• 2,698 RSS subscribers
• 15,763 unique visitors per month
• 1,000,000 pageviews since Nov. 2006 when we started using Google Analytics
• Besides organic search and direct links, we get the bulk of our traffic from other tech-oriented sites (in order of hits) TechDirt, Freedom to Tinker, Ars Technica, GamePolitics.com, TechMeme, Slate, etc., and aggregators such as reddit, Fark, and StumbleUpon

So, what’s our #1 post of all-time? That would be Jim Harper’s “Where to Get Your Fake ID,” proving that if you play Google search terms wisely, you can build a link goldmine!  18,200+ pageviews and counting!  (Harper… You finally have something to list on your resume that lots of people have read!)  Sometimes silly posts like that can net a lot of traffic. For example, another top 5 TLF post was my piece on “The Most Powerful Computer Ever,” which has netted over 7,700 pageviews.  It was just an old magazine ad that Wayne Crews had found years ago and sent me a copy of.

In case you’re interested, some of our other most popular TLF posts include:

• My post “Grouping Recent Net Books: Internet Optimists vs. Pessimists” (6,631 views)
• Jim Harper’s “Social Hack on Gmail Users” (3,756 views)
• My rant on “Video Games & Moral Panic” (3,408 views)
• Berin Szoka’s look at “The Right Way to Allow Cell Phone Jammers” (3,322 views)
• Tim Lee’s piece on the tech community & civil liberties: “Pissing on Their Graves” (2,828 views)
• Harper’s “ID Checks are About Control, Not Security” (2,870) and his look at “Border Biometrics” (2,402 views)
• Cord Blomquist’s “Sirius XM Bankruptcy: Thank Washington for the Delay” (2,069 views)
• Alex Harris’s look at the “Best and Worst Supreme Court Decisions” (1,714 views)
• My book review of  “Zittrain’s Future of the Internet” (1,689 views)

I want to thank all my TLF blogging colleagues for their contributions over the past 5 years. As I noted in that very first post here back in 2004, “this blog is not a one-man show.”  Almost all of us here have our own personal or organizational blogs, but when we come together here on the TLF, it helps us show the world that there is another vision for ordering the affairs of cyberspace beside the command-and-control, hands-all-over-the-Net mentality that dominates today: real Internet freedom!

There are a couple of people who deserve special thanks for what they have done for the TLF:

PJ Doland has not only generously hosted our site all these years and donated endless hours of his time to keeping it running through waves of spam attacks, but he also designed our unique TLF banner. His use of Soviet-style art for libertarian purposes is the perfect compliment to our “Liberation Front” theme.  PJ also provided that awesome TLF tagline: “The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.” (It’s a B.F. Skinner quote, incidentally).

Jerry Brito has also been enormously helpful with the back office stuff, including getting our podcast off the ground. He is also is responsible for the wonderful site redesign and improvements that were just rolled out recently. And Jerry has been extremely patient with all the TLF bloggers through the years as he taught us the basics about how to be more effective bloggers.

Tim Lee has been the TLF’s most prolific and popular blogger and, as I noted recently when he announced his departure from the TLF, it is not an overstatement to say that for many of the TLF’s five years the rest of us here have simply been riding on his coat tails. We were just lucky to be along for the ride as he made the TLF more visible to the tech policy world. He brought us a significant portion of the audience and respect that we have to today and I cannot thank him enough for that.

Berin Szoka, my colleague at PFF, came on board just over a year ago but since then has become a prolific force on the TLF and helped spawn several new “ongoing series” features such as the Privacy Solutions Series, “Googlephobia,” and Cutting the Video Cord.  Berin is also helping with the back-office stuff and trying to help me get the podcast going again regularly.

Our Readers! Seriously, we thank each and every one of you who has taken the time to visit our site, read our rants, and leave comments (even the shitty ones!)  We really appreciate it. We know there are countless other blogs out there to occupy your time and we’re honored that you’d give ours even a few minutes of your day. If you’re in D.C. today, we hope you’ll join us for our celebratory happy hour tonight!

Here’s to another 5 great years of technology freedom!  If you haven’t already done so, please subscribe to our blog feed, podcast feed (iTunes), Twitter and Facebook page.

Cheers,

Adam Thierer

P.S. I’m feeling a bit sentimental as I think back and realize all the things that didn’t exist even just 5 years ago: Twitter, the iPhone, FiOS, Facebook, Pandora, Chrome, the PS3 + Wii + 360, YouTube, Hulu, etc…   Just imagine how exciting the next 5 years will be!

As you might have noticed, we’re giving the TLF a facelift as we approach our five-year anniversary on August 14. Our own Jerry Brito is leading the charge, with Cord Blomquist and PJ Doland providing backup vocals. Thanks, guys!

We’re still ironing out bugs and experimenting with widgets, but we’d welcome your feedback as we work things out. Please feel free to share your thoughts on the new design or features by posting comments here, or to email me at bszoka pff.org.

Party on, Wayne!

In episode #44 of “Tech Policy Weekly,” Berin Szoka and Adam Thierer engage in a debate with Internet security expert Chris Soghoian, who is a student fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He is also a Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University’s School of Informatics.

Chris is an up-and-coming star in the field of cyberlaw and technology policy as he has quickly made a name for himself in debates over privacy policy, data security, and government surveillance.  He straddles the line between academic and activist, and the role he often plays in many tech policy debates is somewhat akin to what Ralph Nader has done in many other fields through the years. Except, in this case, instead of “Unsafe at Any Speed” it’s more like “Unsafe at Any Setting,” since Chris is often raising a stink about what he regards as unjust or unreasonable privacy or security settings that various online websites or service providers use.

On the show, Chris talks about two of his recent crusades to get certain online providers to change their default settings to improve user security or privacy: (1) His effort this week to get major email providers—and Google in particular—to change their default security settings on their email offerings; and (2) his earlier crusade to create permanent opt-out cookies to stop behavioral advertising by advertising networks.

There are several ways to listen to today’s TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. (And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!)

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Finally, here’s some relevant links that were mentioned during today’s show:

• Chris Soghoian’s webpage + his Harvard Berkman Center page
• Chris’s blog (“Slight Paranoia”)
• Chris’s “TACO” (Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out) plug-in for Firefox (and description of it on his home page)
• Chris’s “Caught in the Cloud” paper (+ a video of him presenting it at Harvard)
• The letter from 38 cybersecurity researchers that Chris sent to Google
• Berin Szoka’s response to Chris’s “Caught in the Cloud” paper
• Berin’s discussion of the issue of preserving user choice through permanent opt-out cookies

This is just a quick reminder to both faithful and fair-weather readers that there are many ways to keep up with what we’re saying here at the Technology Liberation Front, including:

(1) RSS

Subscribe in a Reader

(2) Twitter

(3) Facebook

(4) Daily email alert

(5) Podcast

… Or just make the TLF your browser’s welcome page!  What better way to start each day? Finally, as always, we appreciate your support, attention, tolerance of our rants.

I was reading this Sun Magazine interview with the always-interesting Nick Carr and I liked what he had to say here about the public’s inconsistent views on privacy:

If you ask people whether they’re concerned about the ability of the government or corporations to gather information about them online, they’ll say yes. But if you look at how they behave online, they don’t display much fear of exposing themselves. What that says about people — and it’s true for most of us — is that we will readily forgo our privacy in exchange for convenient and useful services, particularly if they’re free. That’s a trade-off you make all the time on the Internet. Even if people were more conscious of how this information might be exploited, I doubt most would change their behavior.

This reminds me of the classic “hamburgers for DNA” quip from security expert Bruce Schneier who once famously noted that:

If McDonalds in the United States would give away a free hamburger for an DNA sample they would be handing out free lunches around the clock. So people care about their privacy, but they don’t care to pay for it. In the United States we have frequent shopper cards, which will track down people’s purchases for a 5 cents discount on a can of tuna fish. I don’t think you can convince the public to care about it.

The key point here, as Berin Szoka and I noted in our recent paper on targeted online advertising, consumers vary widely in their attitudes towards the inherently nebulous concept of privacy. As our TLF colleague Jim Harper has demonstrated:

Privacy is a state of affairs or condition having to do with the amount of personal information about individuals that is known to others. People maintain privacy by controlling who receives information about them and on what terms. Privacy is the subjective condition that people experience when they have power to control information about themselves and when they exercise that power consistent with their interests and values. […] An important conclusion flows from the observation that privacy is a subjective condition: government regulation in the name of privacy is based only on politicians’ and bureaucrats’ guesses about what ‘privacy’ should look like.

In a nutshell, ask anyone if they care about their privacy and almost 100% of them will say, yes, absolutely. But then ask them about what they do both online and offline on a daily basis and most of them will reveal a very different set of preferences or values when it comes to what “protecting privacy” would mean in practice. That’s because privacy is, as Harper notes, a highly subjective condition, and that’s true even in a micro sense. We’re constantly making privacy trade-offs on the fly. Every time we enter a contest, sign up for a shopper discount card, enter absurd amounts of personal info on social networking sites, and so on, we are making privacy trade-offs. Sometimes we think them through carefully; other times we don’t. But most of the time people will trade away their supposed “privacy rights” in for even the most trivial things. A Big Mac, 5 cents off a can of tuna fish, or whatever else.

On this episode “Tech Policy Weekly,” Technology Liberation Front contributors Ryan Radia and Berin Szoka join me for a discussion of the flare-up over Facebook’s recent changes to the data retention provisions of its Terms of Use agreement and whether there are any serious privacy issues in play here—or if this is all much ado about nothing. [Ryan blogged about it here, and I did here.]

Earlier this month, Facebook announced changes to the way it handled or retained user data on its site after a user quits Facebook, raising questions about who actually owns that data and whether any privacy issues were raised by the company’s new policy. Following some intense scrutiny in the blogosphere, Facebook decided this week to revert to their old terms of service until they figured out a new approach to data management and ownership.

You can begin listening by downloading the MP3 file here or by just clicking the play button below.  Or subscribe to our Podcast ( iTunes, other).

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I’m delighted to welcome to the TLF my colleague Adam Marcus, Research Fellow & Senior Technologist at The Progress & Freedom Foundation.  Adam’s already written a few posts here on the TLF about edge caching and cloud computing—cross-posted over the last few months by Adam Thierer and me.  He also appeared on TechPolicy Weekly 38 to discuss  “The Google Kerfuffle — Edge Caching & Net Neutrality.”

Adam (a/k/a “Marcus”) brings an exceptional technological sophistication to bear on policy issues.  He’s already been a real asset to our work at PFF as a sort of “technical ombudsman,” helping us delve into the nitty-gritty details behind the debates.  I hope he’ll play somewhat the same role here on the TLF:  keeping us honest and checking our facts.  

But he’s not just another geek:  With a J.D. from Santa Clara University and an MA in Communications, Culture & Technology from Georgetown University, Adam has lots to say about the legal and policy issues covered by the TLF.

I hope you all enjoy getting to know him—whether through the blog or in person at our semi-regular Alcohol Liberation Fronts—as much as I have.

First, let me just thank all the TLF readers who actively participate by commenting on the site.  We really value your participation in this community built on a shared interest in technology policy!

Readers who visit the site will notice two new badges at the top righthand corner of the site for the TLF’s Twitter and Facebook pages.  Please take a moment to follow us on Twitter and to become a fan of our Facebook page—and to “share” that page with your friends on Facebook.  Of course, we also have RSS feeds for the blog and the Tech Policy Weekly podcast (RSS or iTunes), which should again become more “weekly” this year.

I’d love to hear any ideas any TLF readers might have about how to increase the site’s readership or upgrade its functionality.  With the TLF’s five year anniversary coming up this August, we’re looking for ways to make the most of the blog as a tool for “keeping the politicans’ hands off the ‘net and everything else related to technology.”

Two quick tech tips for using the site.  First, regarding Disqus (“Discuss”), our Comment Management System:  If you haven’t already done so, don’t forget to “claim” comments made with your email address.  As Disqus explains, this will help ensure that no one else posts a comment under your name (something only someone as dastardly as, say, Jim Harper might do):

If you’ve made a comment on a blog using Disqus, you automatically have a profile. To claim the comments and profile, verify your identity by clicking “Claim” on the profile. Once the profile is claimed, no one else will be able to use that profile or email address to comment aside from you.

Second, Adam and I often post PDFs in our posts using the nifty iPaper viewer provided by Scribd (for example here).  Because it’s Flash, this tool allows you to see a PDF embedded on a page without having to download it or wait for the whole document to load.  A few of our crochetier TLF colleagues have complained that the Flash viewer is too small to read easily.  The simple solution is to click the rectangle-in rectangle button at the top right corner of the Scribd viewer, which will instantly expand the viewer to full-screen.  If clicked again, the viewer will revert to its original size.  This feature doesn’t seem to be as self-explanatory as the folks at Scribd assume.  

Again, thanks for reading and for your feedback!

In several of our previous podcasts (see episodes 34, 35,and 37), we’ve discussed what we’ve called the “Comcast Kerfuffle,” which was the controversy surrounding the steps Comcast took to manage BitTorrent traffic on its networks. Critics called it a violation of Net neutrality principles while Comcast and others called it sensible network management.

This week we saw a new kerfuffle of sorts develop over the revelation in a Monday front-page Wall Street Journal story that Google had approached major cable and phone companies and supposedly proposed to create a fast lane for its own content. What exactly is it that Google is proposing, and does it mean – as the Wall Street Journal and some others have suggested – that Google is somehow going back on their support for Net neutrality principles and regulation? More importantly, what does it all mean for the future of the Internet, network management, and consumers. That’s what we discussed on the TLF’s latest “Tech Policy Weekly” podcast.

Today’s 30-minute discussion featured two of our regular contributors at the TLF, who both wrote about this issue multiple times this week. Cord Blomquist of the Competitive Enterprise Institute wrote about the issue here and here, and Bret Swanson of the Progress & Freedom Foundation wrote about it here and here.  To help us wade through some of the more technical networking issues in play, we were also joined on the podcast by Richard Bennett, a computer scientist and network engineer guru who blogs at Broadband Politics as well as Circle ID and he also pens occasional columns for The Register.  Also appearing on the show was Adam Marcus, Research Fellow & Senior Technologist at PFF, who wrote a “nuts and bolts” essay full of excellent technical background on edge caching and net neutrality.

You can download the MP3 file here, or use the online player below to start listening to the show right now.

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As TLF readers may know, I took over in July as Chairman of the Board of the Space Frontier Foundation.  As I explained in my recent interview on The Space Show, SFF has been the leading citizens’ advocacy group for space commercialization since 1988.  Dedicated to promoting Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill‘s vision of space settlement, as described in his 1976 masterpiece The High Frontier, the Foundation has always argued that “space is a place, not a program.”

We sent out the following press release on October 28, calling for a major transformation of the U.S. government’s space program by which the U.S. government would buy commercial transportation to the International Space Station.  We’ll have more to say about this in the coming weeks.

Space Frontier Foundation Finds Funding Source for COTS-D

The Space Frontier Foundation today called upon Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain to invest the $2 billion in new funds they have promised to NASA for reducing the “Gap” in U.S. human spaceflight (after the Space Shuttle is retired in 2010) to spur innovation and competition in America.

Foundation Chairman Berin Szoka said “It’s time that our national leaders give American entrepreneurs a shot at closing this gap. Let’s take the two billion dollars in the candidates’ plans and fund up to five winners of COTS-D.”

The NASA Authorization Act of 2008, recently signed into law by the President, directs NASA to “issue a notice of intent [by mid-April 2009] … to enter into a funded, competitively awarded Space Act Agreement with two or more commercial entities’ for transporting humans to the ISS”-the “Capability D” of NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program (or COTS-D for short). But that directive is not yet funded.

Szoka continued, “Let’s have an American competition in space – to create good jobs, fuel innovation, and close the gap more quickly. With private funds matching government’s investment, we can dramatically leverage the $2 billion to produce breakthroughs in a new American industry – commercial orbital human spaceflight.”

By investing in several different approaches, the government will win no matter who wins this new race, and also benefit from the resulting price competition.

Many American companies, including Boeing, PlanetSpace, SpaceDev, SpaceX, and t/Space have each previously submitted credible COTS-D proposals to NASA. Each of these firms has reached the semi-finals of one of the previous NASA COTS competitions. Increasing funding for COTS by $2 billion would allow NASA to fund all five of these promising companies’ proposals with COTS agreements, and in so doing, build redundancy into the human spaceflight capability available to NASA and other customers.

“It’s popular in Washington to use ‘The Gap’ to cynically justify continued funding of an expensive jobs program,” concluded the Foundation’s co-founder, Bob Werb. “We’re using ‘The Gap’ to advocate a policy that will bridge a gap that matters much more: the chasm between a dying government Human spaceflight monopoly and an emerging, free and competitive marketplace that can open the space frontier to everyone.”

The Federal Circuit significantly limited the patentability of software and business methods today.  Mike Masnick at TechDirt summarizes the holding of the case as follows:

the court has said that there’s a two-pronged test to determine whether a software of business method process patent is valid: (1) it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or (2) it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing. In other words, pure software or business method patents that are neither tied to a specific machine nor change something into a different state are not patentable.

I’m sure several of my TLF colleagues will have a great deal to say about this.   Tim Lee has already written about this on Ars Technica:

The Bilski decision, then, is a clear signal that the pendulum has begun to swing back toward tighter limits on software and business patents. However, it remains to be seen how far the court will go in this direction. Bilski was a relatively easy case. The applicant made little effort to hide the fact that he was seeking to patent a mental process, something the Supreme Court has clearly said is not allowed. Therefore, the Federal Circuit’s rejection of this patent doesn’t tell us how it will rule when confronted with software or business method patents that are tied more directly to a physical machine or a transformation of matter. And indeed, the Federal Circuit reiterated that some software and business method patents are valid, so we are unlikely to return to the near-prohibition on such patents that prevailed until the early 1980s.

Thoughts?

Debates about online privacy often seem to assume relatively homogeneous privacy preferences among Internet users.  But the reality is that users vary widely, with many people demonstrating that they just don’t care who sees what they do, post or say online.   Attitudes vary from application to application, of course, but that’s precisely the point:  While many reflexively talk about the “importance of privacy” as if a monolith of users held a single opinion, no clear consensus exists for all users, all applications and all situations.  

If a picture is worth a thousand words, this picture makes the point brilliantly—showing:

locations where [Flickr] users are more likely to post their photos as “public,” which is the default setting, in green. Places where Flickr users are more likely to put privacy controls on their photos show up in red.

Of course, geography is just one dimension across which users may vary in their attitudes about privacy, but the map makes the basic point about variation very well.  Seeing what users actually do in real life says a lot more about their preferences than merely polling them about what they think they care about in the abstract—as my colleagues Solveig Singleton and Jim Harper argued brilliantly in their 2001 paper With A Grain of Salt: What Consumer Privacy Surveys Don’t Tell Us (SSRN).

Google has just announced that it is now accepting applications from undergraduate, graduate and professional students for its summer 2009 Google Policy Fellowship.  Three think tanks employing TLFers are among the host organizations participating in the program: The Progress & Freedom Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. 

Applications are due by December 12, 2008.  The program will run for ten weeks during the summer of 2009 (June-August). Apply today!

The Progress & Freedom Foundation has just launched the new Center for Internet Freedom.  CIF offers an alternative to the proliferation of advocacy groups calling for government intervention online by offering timely analyses and critiques of proposals that diminish the vital role of free markets, free speech and property rights.  We aim to drive the Internet policy debate in new directions by emphasizing a layered approach of technological innovation, user education, user self-help, industry self-regulation, and the enforcement of existing laws consistent with the First Amendment.  Such an approach is a less restrictive—and generally more effective—alternative to increased regulation.  

Here are some of the issues I’ll be working on as CIF’s Director in conjunction with my esteemed colleagues Adam Thierer, Adam Marcus, and adjunct fellows: 

• Defending online advertising as the lifeblood of online content & services, especially in the “Long Tail”;
• Emphasizing market solutions to problems of privacy protection, especially regarding the use of cookies and packet inspection data;
• Protecting online speech and expression both in the U.S. and abroad;
• Defending Section 230 immunity for Internet intermediaries;
• Opposing online taxation and legal barriers to e-commerce and digital payments, especially at the state and local levels; and
• Ensuring that Internet governance remains transparent and accountable without hampering the evolution of the Internet.

Want an easy way of keeping up with the TLF?  Follow us on Twitter!  Each new TLF posting will show up as a Tweet that starts with “TLF Blog: ” followed by the subject line of the blog piece and a link back to the blog entry so you can read the whole piece if you want to.  TLFers may also Twitter links to news stories and events that don’t merit a full blog entry.  Think of it as TLF-lite!

For PC users, I highly recommend the open source Digsby as a client that can support Twitter, Facebook and just about any instant messaging protocol you might use (except, sadly, Skype).

Congress has very wisely cancelled the National Reconnaissance Office’s proposed Broad Area Space-Based Imagery Collection (BASIC) satellite system. The proposal to build two new imaging satellites at a cost to taxpayers of $1.7 billion would have represented a major break from what is possibly the U.S. government’s most successful effort to promote space commercialization to date: buying the imagery it needs from commercial providers, who can also sell imagery to other buyers.

Five years ago, the idea that Internet users could pull up a satellite image of just about any location on the planet at a whim would have seemed ludicrous. Yet that’s precisely what websites like Google Maps and Microsoft’s Live Search offer today—for free! Desktop applications like Microsoft’s Virtual Earth and Google Earth offer even more advanced geospatial tools—again, for free. But of course this library of incredibly rich imagery didn’t just “fall out of the sky,” as they say. It was collected by a handful of expensive commercial remote sensing satellites whose construction was made possible by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency‘s (Wikipedia) extraordinarily successful “Nextview” program implemented under the Commercial Remote Sensing Policy of 2003.  Rather than having the Federal government build its own satellites—and pay for the entire cost of the satatellites—the NGA very wisely chose to buy imagery from commercial providers in two ~$500 million, 4-year contracts with U.S. satellite imagery companies:  DigitalGlobe in 2003 and OrbImage (now GeoEye) in 2004.  

These long-term purchase agreements essentially made the U.S. Government the “anchor tenant” in a new class of remote sensing satellites, providing the initial funding for both companies to build and operate their satellites. But because the companies sell roughly half of imagery to foreign governments and commercial buyers like Google and Microsoft, these deals have saved U.S taxpayers money for the purchase of imagery for a wide variety of needs, ranging from agricultural monitoring to military intelligence. At the same time, the Nextview contracts have given birth to a vibrant geospatial industry whose immediate benefits should be obvious to anyone who’s ever pulled up a satellite map online and whose macroeconomic impact is potentially enormous. 

So why mess with success?  If the U.S. Government thinks it needs more satellite imagery, why not simply award another long-term purchase agreement to a commercial provider? Besides reducing the burden on the taxpayers, continuing the NextView approach would support the construction of a new generation of commercial satellites like GeoEye-1, which was launched just last month, and DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-1, launched last year.  Rather than rolling back NextView in favor of building its own systems, the U.S. Government should be looking for other space services it can buy on a commercial basis as a way of building industries rather than programs, ranging from sending crew & cargo to the International Space Station to communications and navigation services for NASA’s planned Return to the Moon.

Rather than giving up on the NextView approach in the area where it has already produced spectacular results, the U.S. government should be looking for other areas in which to apply the NextView model by buying space services from commercial providers.

Full disclosure: I was proud to handle FCC matters for GeoEye while practicing law at Latham & Watkins LLP. I currently have no greater personal interest in their success than should any American who wants to see the private sector succeed where the government has failed in opening up the space frontier to all mankind.

By Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer as part of an ongoing series

With Google celebrating its 10th anniversary this week, many panicky pundits are using the occasion to claim that Google has become the Great “Satan” of the Internet.  Nick Carr wonders what the future holds for “The OmniGoogle.” The normally level-headed Mike Malone worries that Google is “turning into Big Brother.”  And Washington Post’s Rob Dubbin says that he can’t escape Google’s “tentacles,” even for just 24 hours.  Meanwhile, speculation abounds that the Justice Department is preparing a major antitrust lawsuit against Google concerning its advertising partnership with Yahoo! or perhaps even a broader suit concerning Google’s “dominance” of online advertising generally.

Carr quotes Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s now-famous 2003 interview:

I think people tend to exaggerate Google’s significance in both directions.  Some say Google is God.  Others say Google is Satan.  But if they think Google is too powerful, remember that with search engines, unlike other companies, all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine. People come to Google because they choose to.  We don’t trick them.

In the last five years, Google has become far more than just a search engine.  As Google’s suite of suite of complementary products continues to grow, so too does the specter of Google as an all-knowing and therefore all-powerful economic colossus.  Yet Google isn’t even close to being the sort of nefarious monopolist out to destroy user privacy at every turn, as some seem to imply—if not exclaim.  Indeed, in our view, the Net is overall a far better place because of the existence of Google and the many free services it provides consumers.

Our point is not that Google should be immune from criticism.  Indeed, healthy criticism of corporate actions plays a vital role in the free market by disciplining corporate policies and behavior—often thus providing an effective alternative to government regulation.  This is particularly important in the area of consumer privacy protection, as demonstrated by Google’s quick response to public concern about its Chrome EULA.

We hold no brief for Google and our aim is not to be Google apologists.  In fact, we’ve had more than a few run-ins with Google on many important policy issues in the past ( e.g., on net neutrality, spectrum policy, and the need for “baseline Federal privacy legislation”) and will likely continue to do so in the future.  We are always willing to engage serious, rational discussions about other policy issues involving Google, such as concerns about its alleged market power, but it seems to us that the hysteria about Google’s supposed dominance of the Internet is clouding rational discussion of the policy issues raised by Google, its innovations and its success.  Indeed, the creeping paranoia about all things Google-related that is most evident throughout the blogosphere (but that reaches far beyond it) has produced an environment that resembles nothing so much as a lynch mob:  Angry, short-tempered, out for corporate blood, and unwilling to engage in reasoned discussion.

The specter of Google’s market power driving—and confusing—so many of today’s Internet policy debates is reminiscent of the previous generation of conspiracy theories about how Microsoft, like the Borg (perhaps sci-fi’s scariest villains), would assimilate all in its path—forever controlling the digital revolution.  We don’t want Google to become the victim of the same regulatory & antitrust ordeal that Microsoft has endured over the past decade, with the kind of hysterical claims of Chicken Little-ism that drove a ten-year crusade against Microsoft.  Short-sighted, heavy-handed government intervention can cripple a creative company while doing little to actually benefit consumers because regulators cannot keep pace with technological change—perhaps the only constant fact in the every-changing digital world.

Of course, like all temporal things, Microsoft’s seemingly permanent “monopoly” has faded, and the bulk of the criticism it once faced has shifted focus to Google.  Microsoft continues to be the subject of many unfair attacks because of its success (a/k/a “dominance”) in the OS, office product, and browser markets.  Other companies have experienced similar attacks on a smaller scale:  Facebook and the once-angelic Apple have both been subject to increasing criticism for their success in certain sectors of the digital economy, customer complaints about openness ( e.g., “locked” devices or portability of social networking data) and privacy policies.  The hysteria surrounding Google is not unique in kind, yet it is clear that the mantle of “Great (digital) Satan” has clearly passed from Microsoft to Google.

Thus, we have decided to start a new series of essays on “Googlephobia” (a term that seems to have taken off in the spring of 2005, when the French government seriously proposed creating its own alternative to the Google search engine).  We’ve already penned a few essays on the topic here (as have a number of our TLF colleagues) and, therefore, our next installment in the series will be #5—in which we will outline the many competitors to Google’s many products.

But here are a few of our past essays on the topic, which clearly belong on the list even though they weren’t part of a series at the time:

• Market Forces At Work: The PR Backlash Against Google Chrome’s EULA, by Berin Szoka, September 4, 2008.
• “Cry [Censorship] and Let Slip the Dogs of [Regulation]!” – A Lesson in the Dangers of Googlephobia, by Berin Szoka, July 14, 2008.
• Google, California’s Privacy Policy Law & Our Sci-Fi Future, by Berin Szoka, June 4, 2008
• Is Google Evil? The Never-Ending Search for High-Tech Villainy, by Adam Thierer, June 30, 2005.

And here’s an oldie on the same topic:

• “Google as a Public Utility? No Results in This Search for Monopoly,” by Adam Thierer and Wayne Crews, November 14, 2003.

A number of TLF readers seem to have leapt to certain conclusions concerning political ads shown on the site.  Most recently, Garrett Dumas responded to Sonia’s post Obama vs McCain: Who deserves the tech vote? (which generally sides with McCain) as follows:

Perhaps you think this because there is a John McCain banner on your site? The “tech vote” is a non issue as it is not up to the president or his cabinet to determine the future of technology. It is market driven and whoever controls the market, controls the direction.

Garrett’s understandable confusion merits a brief explanation.  The only “banner” ad on the site chosen by us is the “Crispy on the Outside” blog ad at the top right.  The ads below that are placed there by Google’s “AdSense” program, which automatically decides which ads to place on a page based on how much advertisers have bid for keyword combinations that appear on that page.  TLF readers will see a mix of political ads on our site until election day from both campaigns and a variety of other groups targeting keywords that appear on our blog.  For example, I currently see the following ads on our blog:

Hello, and welcome to the Technology Liberation Front blog. Does the world really need another blog, you might ask? Well, yes, on this issue the world most certainly does need another blog because there’s not another one like this out there.

Do you remember when politicians would run around saying government should keep its “Hands off the Net”? It was nice rhetoric while it lasted but, ultimately, it was a hollow promise. Today the government has its hands all over the Internet. It’s difficult to name an area where lawmakers and regulators are not currently promulgating or considering rules and regulations for the high-technology and communications sectors.

This is why this site is needed. We aim to report on, and hopefully help to reverse, this dangerous trend of over-regulation of the Internet, communications, media and high-technology in general. We will not hide our love of liberty on this site and we will take every opportunity to castigate those who call for expanding the reach of government into these fields.

Second, this will be what you might call a full-service technology policy blog. While there are other technology blogs out there, those dealing with public policy often seem to be focused on just a few core issues. In particular, copyright law dominates the discussion on many blogs these days. While that’s understandable given the increasing intersection of copyright law and technology policy, one wonders why other sites haven’t popped up to cover a broader array of topics in our exploding universe of high technology pubic policy issues, including: First Amendment & free speech concerns; regulation of e-commerce markets and online services; privacy regulation; SPAM; spectrum management policy and wireless issues; broadcast television and radio regulation; media ownership / concentration concerns; traditional telecom regulatory policy; broadband Internet deployment policy; cable regulation; VoIP issues; network regulation and open access mandates; Internet taxation; online gambling; cyber-surveillance issues; and the role of the Federal Communications Commission and other regulatory agencies in the Information Age. And that just scratches the surface of what we’ll be covering here.

Third, this blog is not a one-man show. We have brought together several of the brightest and most provocative minds in the field of technology public policy today to compile and comment on the important developments of the day. This will help us keep the site fresh, entertaining and informative.

We hope you enjoy the site and will pass word on to friends who might also be interested in these issues. We also hope you will be willing to provide feedback on our entries and please let us know how we can improve the site to make it more useful and consumer-friendly.

Viva la (Technology) Revolution!