Stanford Center for Internet and Society

An article in Sunday's New York Times by Chris Nicholson brings home an important lesson about digital life under The Law of Disruption. When social contracts are formed, the medium is often the message.

The story involves the Second Life virtual environment. A couple met and married online through the site, and with virtual currency called Lindens, purchased and furnished an island retreat. After the husband died in real life, the wife could not continue to make maintenance payments on the island. Linden Labs, which runs Second Life, erased all of their shared digital possessions.

If you can’t beat ‘em, sue ‘em.

Earlier this week, Nokia filed suit in the U.S. to force Apple to pay royalties on Nokia patents involving cell phone technology, patents the company claims Apple is infringing with its iPhone.

As I write in The Laws of Disruption, for better or for worse (mostly for worse) litigation has become a strategic tool in the strategy arsenal of companies trying to slow down, distract, or simply stop competitors who are eating into their market share. Litigation can be a relatively inexpensive way to put a thumb on the scales of competition. (Emphasis on “relatively.”)

More at: http://larrydownes.com/nokia-v-iphone-business-as-usual-alas/

My analysis of the FCC’s proposed neutrality rules appears this morning on CNET.

No surprise, I think the FCC’s plan is a bad idea, and I think, more to the point, that the FCC is the wrong organization to be “saving” the open Internet. Among other crimes, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, the FCC is the same regulator who has ramped up the penalties and frequency of fines for “indecent” content over the airwaves.

The FCC is also the organization that has tried repeatedly to push through, at the behest of the media industries, the notorious “broadcast flag,” which would force electronics and software companies to limit the legal use of broadcast content.

For more, see http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10385865-94.html?tag=mncol

Julia Angwin’s column in The Wall Street Journal argues that identity theft is nothing but a “fear campaign.”

Not exactly.

I also have some strong words about the overuse and abuse of the term “identity theft” in The Laws of Disruption, and have written elsewhere in this blog on the subject. But I don’t think the problem is, as Angwin writes, merely a linguistic construct “designed to get us to buy expensive services that we don’t need.”

For more, see: http://larrydownes.com/identity-theft-not-dead-yet/

The Federal Trade Commission has announced plans to regulate the behavior of bloggers. Unfortunately, not their terrible grammar, short attention spans or inexplicably short fuses.

Instead, the FTC announced updates to its 1980 policy regarding endorsements and testimonials, first developed to reign in the use of celebrity endorsers with no real connection or experience with products they claimed to use and adore.

The proposed changes require bloggers who recommend products or services to disclose when they have a “material connection” to the provider—that is, that they were paid to write positive reviews or given freebies to encourage them to do so. (The FTC, of course, is limited to activities in the U.S.)

For more, see http://larrydownes.com/ftc-to-bloggers-drop-that-sample/

The fallout continues from FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s promise to initiate new rulemaking to implement Net Neutrality principles promised by candidate Obama during the campaign.

The bottom line: what proponents wish with all their hearts was a simple matter of mom and apple pie (“play fair, work hard, and get ahead” as Craiglist’s Craig Newmark explains it) is in fact a fight for leverage among powerful interests in the communications, software, and media industries. Net neutrality, if nothing else, is turning out to be a complex technical problem—technical in both the engineering and regulatory sense.

For the gory details, see:

http://larrydownes.com/net-neutrality-debate-the-mistake-that-keeps-on-g...

Sources cited by The New York Times indicate the U.S. Justice Department has once again opened an antitrust investigation against IBM.

Remember IBM?

The new investigation concerns allegations that the company has refused to license mainframe software products to third parties. A refusal to license isn’t necessarily an illegal form of competition, but may be if coupled with other anticompetitive practices.

IBM has come under the gun from anticompetition regulators throughout its history.

Ironically, the case that it won did the most damage. In 1983, the government dropped an investigation that started in 1969. But by then IBM had already made significant and possibly life-altering modifications to its operations. See:

http://larrydownes.com/not-again-ibm-back-in-antitrust-crosshairs/

“Patriotism,” as Samuel Johnson famously said, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” In that sense, perhaps the USA PATRIOT Act is appropriately named after all.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, most people (though not everyone) agreed that the government should be given additional investigative powers to reduce the risk of more terrorist attacks. The fact that perfectly good intelligence was already available and ignored before 9/11 was considered water under the bridge. The attacks signaled a new era in national defense.

Electronic communications bore the brunt of government complaints that the enemy had outpaced the government in an information arms race, and not surprisingly some of the most contentious features of the PATRIOT Act involved provisions to expand government powers of surveillance, information collection, and secrecy:

http://larrydownes.com/the-patriot-act-last-refuge-of-scoundrels/

In 1998, all hell broke loose as the U.S. government considered how to govern the network it had created. That fight has now ended, with a whimper:

http://larrydownes.com/the-end-of-the-american-internet/

No one would seriously disagree with my observation that the patent system has become the single greatest obstacle to innovation faced by entrepreneurs and established companies alike.

Which is ironic, because the only reason the system exists at all is to encourage innovation.

In the U.S., patents have been around since 1790. Many would argue that the existence of this powerful but short-lived monopoly protection (originally only 14 years) given to inventors of novel and useful technology was crucial in America’s transformation from an agricultural to industrial economy.

Unfortunately, in the transformation from industrial to information economy, the system is showing both its age and the poor fit of many of the baubles and ornaments hung on it over the years by Congress and the courts. As I write in Law Eight of The Laws of Disruption, the unique economic properties of information call for a very different kind of incentive system, one that current information law doesn’t provide.

For more, see http://larrydownes.com/horsemen-of-the-patent-apocalypse/