It’s amazing to me that at this point we’re still pretending there’s a phone monopoly. Competition exists. Yes, it’s obvious that nobody has a monopoly on phone service anymore. The assumption that there’s a monopoly is detached from the reality of the modern market. People routinely go without landlines these days, and there’s even competition for those!
Hello again. Having been traveling from Wednesday to Friday for my employer, I did my best to get this out Friday night, but I crashed about a third of the way into my backlog of links. Then over the weekend my email server died. So, we catch up with Tech at Night on Monday!
We’ll start with the International Telecommunications Union. Reports came out that ITU anti-liberty proposals were backing off, but the effort is going in the wrong direction. A big chunk of the Anglosphere is against it, including the Obama administration.
The President is getting credit for this position from industry and House Republicans, but consider this: if the ITU’s secretary general didn’t see the Obama opposition coming then just how muted were Obama’s efforts to fix the treaty to begin with? This is a failure of the President to lead internationally.
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They told me that if I voted for Mitt Romney, that corporations with ties to the President would offshore billions of dollars to avoid paying taxes! Did Obama and Schmidt even feel guilty as Obama said one thing, while working with Google who was doing the opposite?
Because remember: as I’ve been saying all along, The global Internet regulations the ITU is threatening are in the spirit of the Obama- and Schmidt-backed Internet regulations we’ve seen the last four years!
And let’s be clear: the Obama administration isn’t done regulating now that the second term is coming.
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Gotta love it: I go to take a nap before Tech at Night but… oops, somebody forgot to press the Start button on that 2 hour timer. So, suddenly it’s Tech at Saturday Morning!
So yeah, we’ll start with a story that actually got me mad: the ongoing story of that now-famous RSC paper on copyright. There are conflicting reports out there, but most I’m seeing suggest there’s a real change going on at RSC, the same way there’s been a purge of a certain wing of the party elsewhere in the House.
I’m disappointed by all of this. If the RSC is going to oppose copyright reform the same way most of us oppose anarchic anti-copyright views, then the RSC is aligning itself with the most extreme perpetual-copyright views held by groups like MPAA. If there is to be no compromise, then I cannot work with them either, since my views have been declared to be in opposition to RSC.
Purges have consequences. It’s time we stopped pretending RSC is anything but an organ of the RSC establishment now. They’re clearly not speaking for the conservative reform wing of the GOP, as they once did long ago.
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It’s funny how the same House Judiciary Committee that took up SOPA is now taking up IRFA, opposed by a growing list of groups including Taxpayers Protection Alliance, ATR, CAGW, and ACU. SOPA of course would have grown government in the name of strengthening copyright. IRFA makes government meddle more in a way that weakens copyright. And not in a good way, either: IRFA would not encourage innovation or content creation. It just favors Internet broadcasters over everyone else.
Also yeah, the RSC paper on Copyright that I backed before it was wrongly pulled, it is not a statement against property rights nor is it against copyright at all. If the side favoring ever-lengthening copyright cannot argue honestly with us, and has to mischaracterize those of us who favor an approach to copyright that balances the interests involved, then that to me suggests a deficiency in their position.
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So you may have heard that the Republican Study Committee pulled the copyright piece I spoke highly of over the weekend. I don’t have anything to say about this just yet. I’m going to reexamine the piece, to see if it had issues I didn’t notice in my quick read over the weekend. I’m also going to try to figure out just what’s happened. Then I’ll have more to say.
Copyright is ramping up, though. Darrell Issa is getting frisky against DMCA, and is going to push legislation. I don’t know if I support such a bill. The DMCA has issues, but for the most part it was a solid compromise that has served us well. It must not be changed lightly.
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Hey everyone. Sorry for not doing this Friday night. I was a bit out of it. So, we’re doing this Saturday night.
Some people just don’t learn, though. Google is still defending Net Neutrality incredibly enough. So are Facebook and Netflix, by the way (shameless plug for Amazon Prime streaming alternative).
Of course, there’s a problem here: Google’s PAC splits evenly D/R in donations, but The people of Google lean so far left they gave $737k to Obama, versus $31k to Romney. Think about that. Mo wonder they’re still trying to feed a beast of regulation that may try to break it up.
If anything does in Bay area innovators, it’ll be their slavish devotion to big-government Democrats.
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Rough week, huh? Me too. I’ll make this quick, since the overriding story here is we’re going to have a rough four years fighting Obama regulators.
Though we’re lucky out of touch Susan Crawford isn’t on FCC.
We begin to see the full scope of the corrupt deal going on in New Zealand: Seems that the (German) Kim Dotcom bought escape from the authorities by promising free Intertubes for New Zealanders, even as he plans a new copyright infringement service.
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It’s technically Tuesday morning on the east coast, not Monday night, as I write this. So, happy Election Day. Remember to Vote. Vote, and get five friends and family members to vote.
So, let’s remember that the Obama administration is still pushing its scheme to solve cybersecurity by expanding government. Now, experts in the field are scoffing at the word ‘solve’ there, but think about it: They’re telling us that we’ll have a ‘Cyber Pearl Harbor” if we don’t pass their bill/accept their Executive Order. That implies that with the bill, the danger is gone. So they’re entirely unrealistic about this.
Meanwhile, what are they actually doing with their current tools? The Russians are on the move, Anonymous still has functioning elements. At least Canada may be seeing a way forward.
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Surprise:Obama’s cybersecurity plans don’t actually fix anything, they just expand government. And yet the administration shamelessly attempts to use the crisis of storm Sandy to try to achieve this end.
At this point the administration’s cybersecurity efforts are as delusional and straw-grasping as its global warming efforts. Though what’s sad is that unlike global warming, there actually is a kernel of truth there that we as a nation could be acting on, but Obama is distracting us with his attempts to expand government.
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