“I spend so much time in Washington now because of the work that I’ve been doing, I deal with all these people who make assertions without fact,” he said. Policy people “will hand me some report that they wrote or they’ll make some assertion, and I’ll say, ‘Well, is that true?’ — and they can’t prove it.”
Perhaps that could change some day, he suggested. Technology could help.
With Google’s vast power for capturing and remembering data, Schmidt painted a picture in which technology could help quantify and verify the assertions made in policy documents. “Government is highly measurable, most of it,” he said. “We can actually see how many people got this shot or read this report or so forth. A government — a transparent government — should be able to [measure] that.”
He’s absolutely right, of course. Policy has a number of sacred cows because it’s a political process, and the last thing Congress ever does is follow-up on the measures it enacts to see whether they produce the desired results. So I challenge my colleagues in the think tank business to support assertions with evidence, and to cite longitudinal studies when they exist. This is the road to good policy.
I’m presenting a report on the Mobile Internet at the ITIF Global Command Center in Washington bright and early Tuesday morhing:
The Internet is changing. In a few short years, Internet use will come predominately from mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets rather than traditional PCs using fixed broadband. A fully mobile broadband Internet offers exciting opportunities for innovation in networks, devices, and applications with enormous benefits for the economy and society.
The shift from a wire-centric Internet to a mobile one has profound implications for technology, policy, and applications. A new report by ITIF Research Fellow Richard Bennett explains how mobile networks are changing as they become part of the Internet, the implications mobile networking has for public policy, and how policymakers can facilitate the transition to mobile broadband.
Join us for the presentation of the report and a panel discussion among leading representatives of diverse viewpoints on Internet policy.
Date: Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Time: 9:00am- 10:30am
Location: 1101 K Street Suite 610A Washington, DC 20005
Presenter
Richard Bennett
Research Fellow, The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
Respondents
Harold Feld
Legal Director, Public Knowledge
Morgan Reed
Executive Director, Association for Competitive Technology
Barbara Esbin
Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Communications and Competition Policy, PFF
I went to the FTC’s second privacy workshop yesterday in Berkeley, and found it a generally interesting and worthwhile event, although it did exhibit some of the familiar patterns. Privacy, like net neutrality, isn’t as much a coherent issue as a grab-bag of grievances about a number of loosely connected concerns. Privacy is even more diverse and more incoherent than NN, which is after all driven by the desire to preserve traditional features of the Internet. Privacy seeks to change Internet tradition, which has never had any meaningful privacy but has simply created a sufficiently strong illusion of anonymity to make some people think there’s privacy on the net.
So what you have in privacy is two major issues of totally different character: (1) the capture of fleeting personal information by various services; and (2) the building of databases of personal activity and the subsequent analysis, use, and sale of the information they contain. These issues have to be resolved against the background of the Internet’s defective security architecture and tradition of people using handles instead of real names. When people feel anonymous, they misbehave, which is why there’s no much theft and generally churlish behavior on the net.
Congress is looking into these issues as well, and toward that end has held several hearings. I’m attaching testimony I delivered at one of these last Spring for your enjoyment. It holds up pretty well.
The FCC should proceed with caution in conducting its inquiry into Open Internet rules, according to comments filed by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation today. All the evidence suggests that the Internet is thriving: network operators are investing and new applications, devices, services, and content are emerging at a dizzying rate. While there is a need to clarify the confused state of Internet regulation in the United States, there’s no compelling public interest for the FCC to adopt a stringent new regulatory framework. The Commission would do well to follow the example of fellow regulators in Canada and Europe who have recently concluded that the most sensible course for national regulators is to emphasize disclosure of terms of service and oversight of business and technical practices.
ITIF rejects the argument that the FCC lacks jurisdiction to regulate the Internet, but urges the Commission to carefully consider the evidence before enacting new regulations on Internet access services. The Internet is a complex “virtual network” designed to serve a variety of needs, and as such it does not readily lend itself to traditional telecom regulatory models. The Internet requires regulators to take a fresh approach. The first step for the Commission is to conduct a fair and probing analysis about how the Internet works today.
ITIF applauds the Commission for committing to an open process and feels that careful examination will lead to the conclusion that the Internet is fundamentally healthy.
The big issues here are that we’re not done with network engineering, nor are we done with developing the business models that make the most of network investments. So the companies who develop the insides of the Internet need to continue cooperating with the people who develop the outsides. The Verizon/Google, Comcast/BitTorrent and AT&T/Apple partnerships are instructive.
OK, this has nothing much to do with broadband, but it’s certainly politics. CNN has called the Massachusetts Senate race for Scott Brown. Curt Schilling hasn’t made any comment on the outcome yet.
I asked the net neutrality question toward the end, and applauded the Chairman for the way he’s transformed the FCC. Genachowski brought some of his best staffers with him, and it was nice to meet and greet and share ideas. You have to admire anyone who can make such deep changes to a rather hidebound federal agency as quickly as Genachowski and staff have done.
The long-awaited video of the FCC’s December 10 workshop Review and Discussion of Broadband Deployment Research is finally on-line. This workshop featured discussions of Yochai Benkler’s controversial Berkman Center report on unbundled DSL and Bob Atkinson’s report on current broadband investment dynamics in the US. As the FCC put it:
As part of the Commission’s development of the National Broadband Plan, the Commission has requested two independent studies. The Commission asked Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society to conduct an expert review of existing literature and studies about broadband deployment and usage throughout the world. The Columbia Institute for Tele-Information (“CITI”), based at the Columbia Business School in New York, conducted an independent outside expert review of projected deployment of new and upgraded broadband networks.
Benkler’s report was very politely decimated by Tom Hazlett, an actual economist who knows a thing or two about how Benkler cooked the books, intentionally or by bungling, and the relevant comparisons for the US. One of the many problems with Benkler’s report is that he didn’t do what the FCC asked him to do, which was to simply review the literature on international policies. Instead, he and his Berkman colleagues tried to aggregate all the data into a giant meta-study. Benkler violated the FCC’s “no original research” rule, which should have been familiar to Benkler given his fascination with Wikipedia.
Mr. Levin also dismissed criticisms last week from public interest groups unhappy the plan may not propose some ideas for encouraging competition, such as rules that would require Internet providers to share their lines with competitors.
“I find their criticism not very productive,” Mr. Levin said Monday.
FCC officials have been considering the ideas, some of which were laid out in a FCC-commissioned report by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
The report suggests that other countries have faster, cheaper broadband because they adopted open access, line-sharing rules years ago. But FCC officials appear to have backed away from the open access idea in recent weeks.
“The Berkman (study) did a fantastic job of pointing out what’s going on around the world,” Mr. Levin said. “There are certain things where what’s going on in other countries really isn’t germane for where we go from here.
Thursday’s edition of The Communicators on C-Span featured MPAA CEO Dan Glickman and Washington Internet Daily editor Greg Piper talking about digital piracy. There’s a segment beginning 9 minutes in on the recent ITIF report on stopping piracy.
It’s very good to see people paying attention to the financial side of piracy.
It is time for the U.S. government to take global theft of U.S. intellectual property, especially digital content, much more seriously. A new ITIF report finds that the U.S. government can and should do more to support industry efforts to reduce digital piracy, a growing problem that threatens not only the robust production of digital content, but U.S. jobs. While there are no “silver bullets” to reducing digital piracy, there are a number of “lead bullets” that can and should be implemented. Specifically, ITIF calls on the federal government to not preclude those impacted by digital piracy, including copyright holders and ISPs, from taking steps, including implementing technical controls like digital fingerprinting, to reduce piracy. In addition, industry and government should consider bold steps to limit the revenue streams of those profiting from piracy by encouraging ISPs, search engines, ad networks and credit card companies to block piracy websites and refuse to do business with them. These options should be part of a broad dialogue that engages all stakeholders, including government, content owners, website operators, technology developers, and ISPs and other intermediaries, on how to improve the global response to piracy. Toward that end, this report recommends that policymakers:
And here’s the video of the launch event:
One point that comes across better from the live event than from the paper is that piracy isn’t simply something that takes place between close personal friends, it’s a business that profits from the unauthorized sale of other people’s material. Whatever your views on Internet privacy and intellectual property rights may be, I think we can all agree that the business of piracy is wrong.
RSS Feed
Twitter
March 14th, 2010 
Richard Bennett 
