With the Cybersecurity Act on hold for now, it seems like a slow news week, so a quick one tonight.
We’re in a spectrum crunch, and as long as the Obama administration is restricting spectrum allocation, including the critical secondary spectrum market that firms like Verizon and AT&T are trying to operate in, it’s not going to get better. The Obama FCC claims to get it, but it’s not there yet.
Also, some have praised the Universal Service Fund reform the Obama FCC pushed through but Continue reading »
It’s easy to see why there’s sudden, strong opposition to the Marketplace Fairness Act, as yet another Republican governor, Terry Branstad, backs the bill.
I again state my opposition to the lousy language backing the bill, including “fairness” and “loophole”. Yes, that language is being driven by marketplace losers, but both sides of this debate are ponying up cash.
I favor the bill on its merits, not because of who’s spending. I’m not even used to seeing Republicans equating business backing of a bill with the bill’s wrongness. Democrats? Yes, but not Republicans. I don’t think it should be a factor at all. I want to save the sales tax from becoming obsolete, and from having to be replaced by “progressive” taxation, as it probably will, since as people shift from local to national and global, firms not called Amazon still aren’t going to have distribution in every state.
Limited government does not mean no government, particularly at the state level. The money’s got to come from somewhere. Either we shore up the sales tax or we raise other taxes, all else being equal.
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With that business out of the way, back to Tech at Night. I for one am glad that Jon Kyl and Sheldon Whitehouse are having trouble coming up with a compromise. The Lieberman-Collins bill favored by Harry Reid and Barack Obama is terrible and just an awful, huge power grab. We’re better off waiting to see if we get a Republican Senate next time to pass something along the lines of CISPA or SECURE IT, than passing bad bill in compromise.
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When I read the President’s Executive Order Accelerating Broadband Infrastructure Deployment, I’m reminded of the scene in Spaceballs when Dark Helmet tells the crew of Spaceball One “What are you preparing? You’re always preparing. Just go!”
For the Obama administration to spend a year preparing whether or not to address a list of reforms, instead of just doing them, suggests to me the administration simply isn’t serious about getting government out of the way.
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Privacy? You want privacy in the digital age? Start by repealing campaign finance laws before you wag your socialist finger at the private sector.
Al Qaeda also denied 9/11 involvement at first, but we knew the truth. Also, how can Anonymous deny involvement in an attack when they claim to be unorganized? It’s these slipups that let us know the truth about them: they’re an organized online terror and crime group.
To paraphraze the fictionalized Wyatt Earp: “I see a Guy Fawkes mask, I kill the man wearing it.”
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It’s funny how certain names come up again and again in this space. There are just certain Republicans who are becoming solid Tech leaders. Marsha Blackburn is one of them, pushing to force Barack Obama to take a stand against the Chinese online.
Again, a Republican governor comes out for the sales tax compact, this time Governor Christie. The Marketplace Fairness Act I still say needs firm, explicit protections against a national sales tax added onto the state harmonized sales taxes, but the principle is reasonable.
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Quick hits night. Enjoy!
Google beats Oracle on the matter of patent infringement in the big Java/Android case. So the only question left is how the copyright matters will be resolved.
New York legislators want to censor the Internet? Come on guys, come on.
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The FCC and the radicals are at war with the secondary spectrum market. Gigi Sohn even tried to make the point at the Less Government debate that license holders don’t own spectrum. That’s true. They own the licenses. That’s where property rights come in.
So it’s disappointing to see Democrats still piling on against Verizon even as the push begins to go after Dish. As an aside, to Koch-funded groups ever get called “public interest groups” the way Soros-funded groups do?
Marco Rubio does not want the UN regulating the Internet. Good on him.
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Earlier we covered Microsoft’s new Pirate Pay, which I said sounded like a DoS attack against copyright infringers. Others agree and say it may be illegal, which is true. Sure enough, Pirate Bay is under DDoS attack. Has Pirate Pay gone rogue? Cybersecurity and copyright, all in one issue.
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Well, here we are. The reason CISPA was getting all the attention was allegedly that it was coming to a vote first. Well, now Lieberman-Collins is next to a vote, as Democrats scramble to find a way to make cloture. Where’s the outrage? I’ll tell you where it is: non-existent, because CISPA opposition was solely designed to give cover for Lieberman-Collins.
We do need the private sector to have more information, though. Internet attacks aren’t going away.
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