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.” Continue reading →
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).
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? Continue reading →
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. Continue reading →
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: Continue reading →
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!
Google has just 
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.