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Our Dynamic Internet Marketplace

by on April 24, 2009 · 5 comments

Here’s a terrific piece by Harry McCracken over at Technologizer asking “Whatever Happened to the Top 15 Web Properties of April, 1999?”  McCracken goes through the hottest web properties of April 1999 and asks, “How many of 1999’s Web giants remain gigantic today — assuming they still exist at all?”  Instead of reproducing his entire list here, I’ll just encourage you to go over to Technologizer and check it out for yourself, especially because McCracken also compares the old list to today’s top 15 Web properties.  Anyway, here’s the key takeaway from his piece:

to summarize, four of April 1999’s top Web properties remain in the top fifteen (plus AltaVista, Excite, and GeoCities, which are extant and part of top-10 properties). Four more are in the top 50, or are part of properties that are. Two exist but have fallen out of the top 50. And two (Xoom and Snap) no longer exist. Bottom line: If you were one of the Web’s biggest properties a decade ago, chances are high that you remain in business in some form in 2009… but you probably aren’t still a giant.

In other words, it’s a dynamic marketplace with a lot of churn and creative destruction. Sure, some big dogs from the late 90s remain (Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, and CNet). But they have all been humbled to some extent.  Moreover, lots and lots of other players were driven from the top ranks or disappeared altogether. (GeoCities, Lycos, Excite, AltaVista, Xoom, Snap).  And there have been new technologies, platforms, and players that have come out of nowhere in a very short time to become the household names of 2009 (Google, Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia).  But, as McCracken points out, it’s anyone’s guess which of today’s top Web properties will still be booming in 2019.   Anyway, I encourage you to check out McCracken’s very interesting essay, and if you find this sort of restrospective piece interesting, you might also want to check out my essay from earlier this year, “10 Years Ago Today… Thinking About Technological Progress“.

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Just How Far the Internet Has Come Since 1996

by on February 24, 2009 · 28 comments

A classic piece here by Farhad Manjoo of Slate about how “the Internet of 1996 is almost unrecognizable compared with what we have today.”  It’s a fun look back at just how far the Internet has come over the past 13 years.  I love this passage:

We all know that the Internet has changed radically since the ’90s, but there’s something dizzying about going back to look at how people spent their time 13 years ago. Sifting through old Web pages today is a bit like playing video games from the 1970s; the fun is in considering how awesome people thought they were, despite all that was missing. In 1996, just 20 million American adults had access to the Internet, about as many as subscribe to satellite radio today. The dot-com boom had already begun on Wall Street– Netscape went public in 1995 — but what’s striking about the old Web is how unsure everyone seemed to be about what the new medium was for. Small innovations drove us wild: Look at those animated dancing cats! Hey, you can get the weather right from your computer! In an article ranking the best sites of ’96, Time gushed that Amazon.com let you search for books “by author, subject or title” and “read reviews written by other Amazon readers and even write your own.” Whoopee. The very fact that Time had to publish a list of top sites suggests lots of people were mystified by the Web. What was this place? What should you do here? Time recommended that in addition to buying books from Amazon, “cybernauts” should read Salon, search for recipes on Epicurious, visit the Library of Congress, and play the Kevin Bacon game.

God, do you remember those days?  I sure do.  I penned a piece last month about the amazing technological progress we have witnessed over the past decade.

Meanwhile, we have a whole town full of clowns here in DC looking to regulate the Internet and digital technology for one reason or another.  All these would-be regulators need to step back and appreciate just how well markets have been working and why regulation would be a disaster for technological progress. Viva la (Technology) Revolution!

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Nuts & Bolts: Everything You Wanted To Know About Cookies But Were Afraid To Ask

by on January 27, 2009 · 16 comments

As a means of introducing myself to TLF readers, this is an article that I wrote for the PFF blog in September that has not been previously mentioned on the TLF. Most of my other PFF blog posts have been cross-posted by Adam Thierer or Berin Szoka, but I’ve taken ownership of those posts so they appear on my TLF author page.

This is the first in a series of articles that will focus directly on technology instead of technology policy. With an average age of 57, most members of Congress were at least 30 when the IBM PC was introduced in 1981. So it is not surprising that lawmakers have difficulty with cutting-edge technology. The goal of this series is to provide a solid technical foundation for the policy debates that new technologies often trigger. No prior knowledge of the technologies involved is assumed, but no insult to the reader’s intelligence is intended.

This article focuses on cookies–not the cookies you eat, but the cookies associated with browsing the World Wide Web. There has been public concern over the privacy implications of cookies since they were first developed. But to understand them , you must know a bit of history.

According to Tim Berners Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, “[g]etting people to put data on the Web often was a question of getting them to change perspective, from thinking of the user’s access to it not as interaction with, say, an online library system, but as navigation th[r]ough a set of virtual pages in some abstract space. In this concept, users could bookmark any place and return to it, and could make links into any place from another document. This would give a feeling of persistence, of an ongoing existence, to each page.”[1. Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving The Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web. p. 37. Harper Business (2000).] The Web has changed quite a bit since the early 1990s.

Today, websites are much more dynamic and interactive, with every page being customized for each user. Such customization could include automatically selecting the appropriate language for the user based on where they’re located, displaying only content that has been added since the last time the user visited the site, remembering a user who wants to stay logged into a site from a particular computer, or keeping track of items in a virtual shopping cart. These features are simply not possible without the ability for a website to distinguish one user from another and to remember a user as they navigate from one page to another. Today, in the Web 2.0 era, instead of Web pages having persistence (as Berners-Lee described), we have dynamic pages and “user-persistence.”

This paper describes the various methods websites can use to enable user-persistence and how this affects user privacy. But the first thing the reader must realize is that the Web was not initially designed to be interactive; indeed, as the quote above shows, the goal was the exact opposite. Yet interactivity is critical to many of the things we all take for granted about web content and services today.

Continue reading →

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“Will Obama Have A Computer?” Seriously?

by on January 24, 2009 · 17 comments

I can’t believe we’re actually asking whether Obama—the candidate who promised to bring the Federal government (and perhaps everyone else) into the Web 2.0 era whether they like it or not—will have a “personal computer.”

The “webiness” of Obama’s predecessors is just embarrassing:   

Clinton famously sent only two e-mails while he was president, one to test whether he could push the “send” button and one to John Glenn, sent while the former Ohio senator was aboard the space shuttle… During his presidency, George W. Bush didn’t have a personal log-in to the White House Internet server, nor did he have a personal whitehouse.gov e-mail address. (He gave up his private e-mail account, G94B@aol.com, just before his first inauguration.) When he did go online, there were some things he couldn’t access. During Bush’s tenure, the White House’s IT department blocked sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and most of MySpace. The ability to comment on blogs was blocked, as was certain content that was deemed offensive. According to David Almacy, who served as Bush’s director for Internet and e-communications from 2005-07, only two people had access to the iTunes store during that period: Almacy, who had to upload speeches to the site, and the president’s personal aide, so that he could download songs for Bush’s iPod.

Pipes and tubes, pipes and tubes, my friends…  

If Obama decides not to implement whatever legal or technical changes would be required for him to do something so simple as having a computer on his desk, I suppose we’ll know that he’s not really all that interested—at least on a personal level—in all his rhetoric about the power of the Internet to make government more transparent and accountable.  Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.

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M2Z Reborn: Censored, but Free, Broadband is Now Kevin Martin’s Top Priority

by on December 1, 2008 · 11 comments

Back in June, Adam Thierer and I denounced (PDF) Kevin Martin’s plans to create broadband utility to provide censored (and very slow) broadband for free to all Americans.  The WSJ reports that this scheme is now at the top of Martin’s December agenda:

The proposal to allow a no-smut, free wireless Internet service is part of a proposal to auction off a chunk of airwaves. The winning bidder would be required to set aside a quarter of the airwaves for a free Internet service. The winner could establish a paid service that would have a fast wireless Internet connection. The free service could be slower and would be required to filter out pornography and other material not suitable for children. The FCC’s proposal mirrors a plan offered by M2Z Networks Inc., a start-up backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner John Doerr.

Adam’s August follow-up piece is also well worth reading.  

One could speculate as to how big an impact this service would really have.  Having just spent two weeks “wardriving” around Paris, Abu Dhabi and Dubai (looking for open wi-fi hotspots to try to get Internet access on my otherwise non-functional smart phone), I could certainly imagine scenarios in which some people might well use even a slow wireless service at least as a supplement to another provider–if their devices supported it.  But however useful the service might be to some people, and whether any company would actually want to build such a system in the first place if they have to give away such service, I think it’s a safe bet that if this is actually implemented, it will represent a victory for government censorship over content some people don’t like.

If this idea is still alive and kicking when the Obama administration has security escort Martin out of FCC headquarters in January–to hearty applause from nearly all quarters in Washington, no doubt–it will be interesting to see which impulse prevails on the Left, both within the new Administration and in the policy community.  Will the defenders of free expression triumph over those who see ensuring free broadband as a social justice issue?  Or will those on the Left who usually joining us in opposing censorship simply remain silent as the government extends the architecture of censoring the “public airways” onto the Net (where the underlying rationale of traditional broadcast regulation–that parents are powerless–does not apply)?  

Hope springs eternal.

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Obama’s Entrepreneurial Lesson

by on November 7, 2008 · 7 comments

See my take on the election and the prospects for capitalism in today’s Wall Street Journal:

If Barack Obama ran for president by calling for a heavier hand of government, he also won by running one of the most entrepreneurial campaigns in history. Will he now grasp the lesson his campaign offers as he crafts policies aimed at reigniting the national economy? Amid a recession, two wars, and a global financial crisis, will he come to see that unleashing the entrepreneur is the best way to raise the revenue he needs for his lofty priorities?

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PFF Launches Center for Internet Freedom

by on October 24, 2008 · 12 comments

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.

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