Sorry for the lack of Tech on Friday. I was sick and doing my best to sleep it off. I’m at about 95% now, so let’s catch up.
How do I know privacy regulation and legislation are bad ideas? Nobody actually cares. Sure, they talk like they care, but until people start taking proactive steps and act like they’re taking it seriously, I know it’s just talk. Just like how everyone says they hate Congress, but love their own representation.
So yeah, if you’re moaning about Google on your Blogger site, and emailing to your friends about it from your Gmail account, and using Google Maps to get directions to your privacy rally… I don’t take you seriously.
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New Zealand continues to let fugitive Kim Dotcom waddle free as his successor to Megaupload has launched. The US shut down his previous service, hosting files for law breakers, and now New Zealand is letting him start over with a new service. I look forward to people using it to infringe on New Zealand copyrights, and to distribute tools for stealing from New Zealanders.
It’s amazing how detached from reality left-wing tech policy gets. Connectivity is better and faster than ever thanks to the 4G wireless revolution, as Media Freedom points out. I guess that’s why when firms like Comcast try to expand access even further, they have to try to talk it down.
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Remember when they told you Net Neutrality was needed? Remember when we said it was really about favoring online firms over telecoms? Told you so, told you so, told you so. Netflix now blocking select ISPs, trying to use market power in order to bully their way to sweetheart bandwidth deals, knowing ISPs can’t fight back under Net Neut regs, aka the Open Internet order.
PS Told you so.
It remains ridiculous that the Aaron Swarz suicide continues be politicized to the point that we’re putting innocent prosecutors under pressure, pressure that defies cross-examination due to the death of the key witness.
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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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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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Good news, everyone! Kay Bailey Hutchison and Senate Republicans were able to help defeat the Lieberman-Collins Cybersecurity Act once again.
Bad news, everyone! We lost the Presidential election, so President Obama is almost sure to try to defy the Congress, which won’t even pass the idea through one house, let alone both to make it a law. He’s going to try to implement this through executive order!
Meanwhile it falls to the Congress to investigate actual foreign threats in the digital theater.
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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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Regulation must keep up with the needs of modernization. That’s a point new FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai came to RedState to make, particularly with respect to the Internet transformation going on in telecommunications. As the world “goes IP,” and puts everything on the Internet, regulators must adapt. Make sure to read it. Ajit Pai would have a particularly important role as a reformist regulator should Mitt Romney win.
Regulation today just doesn’t make much sense sometimes, a point Broadband for America makes. The point about ‘edge’ vs ‘core’ of the Internet is important. The firm that sits between you and Google is as important to you as Google. They’re all pieces of the puzzle.
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Remember when AT&T tried to get T-Mobile’s spectrum in order to give Verizon some more competition? And how Sprint opposed that because it would heighten competition? Well now it’s turnabout. SoftBank is attempting to buy a majority of Sprint, which will in turn take a majority of Clearwire. That will give Softbank control of a large amount of US Spectrum. So AT&T wants regulatory review. Heh.
To be clear, I think it’s a good thing that firms are doing what they can to get spectrum and compete, even if I laugh at the revenge attempt going on here. In fact I think it would have been very interesting to see Softbank/Sprint/Clearwire vs AT&T/T-Mobile vs Verizon. But we’ll see what shakes out in the end.
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Remember the Google Wi-Spy Street View scandal? A seemingly-harmless survey of the country turned into a massive snooping operation, and the FTC smacked them for over 20 million dollars. Well, not only is FCC now wasting money with a survey of Internet speeds, but it turns out that the FCC program runs the risk of warrantless snooping of its own!
We need strong, reformist regulators to be appointed in the next administration to stop stuff like this.
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