With Friends Like Google…
A tip for the politicians of the future who want to address the markets for information and influence: don’t forget to buy your Google Ad Words or you’ll never get elected.
Is it Time to Reboot Internet Policy?
None of the proposals for ISP regulation or platform regulation currently in the mix are very good. If the Internet is good for anything, it’s a great disruptor. Is is too much to ask it to disrupt its own policy frameworks toward the goal of producing more of the good and less of the bad?
reCAPTCHA: I’m Not a Robot But I’m Not Sure About You
Google is not a charitable enterprise, and essentially all of its income is made by monetizing personal information.
ICYMI: Remarks at Annual Phoenix Center Rooftop Policy Roundtable – Is Privacy Policy the Next Mattress Tag?
What we don’t need is something akin to the government’s mattress tag requirements – a bewildering agreement users blindly accept without understanding its purpose.
Emotion Threatens Reason in Tech Policy
Enjoying the benefits of ICT and the Information Age requires us to adopt new models of regulation that are fit for the task. For this to happen, we’ll need to stop demonizing every new invention for the sake of eyeballs, audience, and ad revenues.
Net Neutrality Lawmaking May Be Near
Finding sponsors to carry the bill may be troublesome before the mid-term, but a legitimate work product will be useful whenever Congress is of a mind to consider legislating. We may actually be closer to legitimate, regular Congressional action on Internet regulation than we’ve been since the summer of 2010.
Europe’s Piracy Dilemma
Their problem in the long tail of pirates, scammers, and amateurs who impose costs on the platform but don’t generate revenue. That’s a business model issue that should concern Alphabet. It’s not an excuse for making artists pay for YouTube’s content-related costs out of their own pockets to support piracy.
Don’t Ask Zuckerberg about Shadow Profiles
At a minimum, Facebook needs to reorganize the company in such a way that a single CEO can exercise effective control over its major pieces. An Alphabet-like reshuffling with a new level of management would at least signal seriousness about improvement.
Tim Berners-Lee is Depressed about the Web
The web’s greatest shortcoming, as well the greatest shortcoming of the Internet before the web, is the absence of tools for commerce in the plumbing. The web needs to provide each user with a persistent identity – or more, and they don’t need to be real – and a dance card for all the permissions we’ve given for data collectors to record our activities.
Big Picture Issues with EFF Letter
As I pointed out in the last post, the Engineers Letter EFF filed with the FCC in the Internet Freedom docket is riddled with errors. It attacks the Commission’s understanding…