Even as the issue of privacy continues to confound much brighter people than me, the related problem of securing the Internet has also been getting a great deal of attention. This is in part due to the widely-reported announcement from Google that its servers and the Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents had been hacked, leading the company to threaten to leave China altogether if its government continues to censor search results.
I published the first of two pieces on CNET today about interesting and even encouraging developments in Washington over Internet policy. (See “New Year, New Policy Push for Universal Broadband")
In short, I believe that over the past year the Obama administration has come to see Internet products and services among the best hopes for economic recovery and continued competitiveness for U.S. businesses. At least as a matter of policy, this is the first administration to see digital life as a source of competitive advantage.
An interesting tempest in a teapot has emerged this week following some overblown rhetoric by and in response to celebrity causemeister Bono. There’s a deeper lesson to the incident, however, one with important implications for the net neutrality debate.
The copyright war just isn’t dramatic enough to warrant a good novel, let alone a big movie deal.
Consider a few recent stories from the on-going battle between content owners and consumers:
* In October, sources reported to CNET’s Greg Sandoval that part of the document exchange between Viacom and YouTube in the on-going $1.1 billion infringement case revealed evidence that YouTube management knew about rampant uploading of copyrighted film and TV clips. Worse, the source indicated that there was also evidence that YouTube employees were among those uploading unauthorized material. (A YouTube spokesman responded that Sandoval’s characterizations were “wrong, misleading, or lack important context.”)
My op-ed today in The Hill (see “The Winter of Our Content,”) argues against those who want to derail the merger of Comcast and NBC Universal. I don’t know enough to say whether the deal makes good business sense—that’s for the companies’ shareholders to decide in any case. But I do know that every media or communications merger of the last twenty years has been resisted for the same reason—that the combined entity will both have and exercise excessive market power to the detriment of consumers.
That argument has turned out to be wrong every time. It will be here as well.
I write today on CNET News.com (see "FTC's new strategy: kick 'em when they're down") that the FTC’s decision yesterday to attack Intel seems oddly-timed.
Regular readers of this blog will recall that only a month ago, I wrote that Intel’s settlement of long-standing disputes with rival AMD (see "The Intel/AMD Settlement: Watch What Happens")) was likely to mean the end of government-sponsored litigation against Intel, or at least a toning down of the rhetoric. I was, clearly, wrong.
I write today on CNET about several recent privacy gaffes and missteps, notably the damp squib that was Facebook's new privacy policy and tools.
I have some sympathy for social networking sites that, in order to become profitable businesses, must make use of the user data that is, in essence, the only asset these businesses have. Well, that and the goodwill of their users, which is sorely tested by the clumsy processes by which changes to user agreements and terms of services are made. What I don't sympathize with, in other words, is bad PR.
Initial reports of the FTC's privacy and technology conference, which began today, suggest that the speakers are leaning heavily toward the apocalyptic.
The real privacy paradox isn't between user "attitudes" in poorly-designed surveys and user behavior that contradicts them, but between the coalition of security companies, legal scholars and journalists who see a paradox and the rest of the world, who see something much more subtle and ambiguous.
The debate over net neutrality is rapidly devolving into a war of the words--increasingly, words that take the form of hyperbole. Case in point: as reported last week by the Washington Post’s Cecilia Kang, White House Deputy Technology Officer Andrew McLaughlin told attendees at a recent conference that the Obama administration is committed not only to neutrality but to global free speech, and that indeed, neutrality “underlies free speech on the Web.” The two are “intrinsically linked,” according to McLaughlin, because without neutrality, there is the possibility of censorship.
“If it bothers you that the China government does it, it should bother you when your cable company does it,” McLaughlin was quoted as saying.
I've spent all day on what I thought would be a short blog post. The MPAA wants a waiver from the FCC rule that prohibits disabling analog interfaces on the back of your TV. That sounds dangerous, but it turns out the problem is a lot more complicated than I wanted it to be!
