Energy and Commerce Subcommittee Hearing on “Behavioral Advertising: Industry Practices and Consumers’ Expectations”

Energy and Commerce Subcommittee Hearing on “Behavioral Advertising: Industry Practices and Consumers’ Expectations”
Publications
June 16, 2009

The Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet and the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection will hold a joint hearing titled, “Behavioral Advertising: Industry Practices and Consumers’ Expectations” on Thursday, June 18, 2009, in 2123 Rayburn House Office Building. The hearing will examine the potential privacy implications of behavioral advertising.

INVITED WITNESSES:

* Jeffrey Chester, Executive Director, Center for Digital Democracy
* Scott Cleland, President, Precursor LLC
* Charles D. Curran, Executive Director, Network Advertising Initiative
* Christopher M. Kelly, Chief Privacy Officer, Facebook
* Edward W. Felten, Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs, Princeton University
* Anne Toth, Vice President of Policy, Head of Privacy, Yahoo! Inc.
* Nicole Wong, Deputy General Counsel, Google Inc.

WHEN: 10:00 a.m. on Thursday, June 18

WHERE: 2123 Rayburn House Office Building

—
This is the second in a series of hearings on the subject of behavioral advertising. I’ll predict that the Democrats will praise Google, the Republicans will criticize them, and nobody will pay much notice to Yahoo.

I only know four of the six personally, I need to get out more.

But the settlement would also create a class that includes millions of people who will never come forward. For the majority of books — considered “orphan” works — no one will claim ownership. The author may have died; the publisher might have gone out of business or doesn’t respond to inquiries; the original contract has disappeared.

Google would get an explicit, perpetual license to scan and sell access to these in-copyright but out-of-print orphans, which make up an estimated 50 to 70 percent of books published after 1923. No other provider of digital books would enjoy the same legal protection. The settlement also creates a Book Rights Registry that, in conjunction with Google, would set prices for all commercial terms associated with digital books.

For the archivist who makes money by advertising and resale, orphan works are uniquely convenient: not only do you not have to obtain permission to republish, you also don’t have to share revenues with anyone. Taken together, those facts certainly don’t motivate digital book sellers to expend any effort to find the authors or their heirs.

Now imagine how this would change if someone developed a tool for searching the Internet. Surely the information is out there on most published authors, their heirs, and their whereabouts, so as long as someone is diligent enough to sift through it, evaluate it, and interpret it, they can be found. I wonder how long it will be until a bright young pair of graduate students in the computer science program of a major university set themselves to solve the problem of Internet search.

Not to be sarcastic or anything.

The Federal Trade Commission has begun an inquiry into whether the close ties between the boards of two of technology’s most prominent companies, Apple and Google, amount to a violation of antitrust laws, according to several people briefed on the inquiry.

I doubt this will go very far, as the interlocking directors (Eric Schmidt and former Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson,) will simply resign before any enforcement action is imminent, but it does raise some interesting questions about the market for mobile phone operating systems, currently split between Apple, Google, Microsoft, Palm, and a few others. These systems are rife with limitations, each of which could be considered a network neutrality violation when viewed in just the right way.

I imagine Apple itself might wish to give Dr. Schmidt his walking papers before he becomes an anti-trust problem, which he actually isn’t at this point. The FTC’s interest in this obscure situation is probably a signal that the Administration wants to be viewed as an anti-trust hawk without doing anything substantial.

But this is what the law calls an “occasion of sin.” Dear me.

Last night I took the short trip up to Mountain View to see Jeff Jarvis’s talk about his book What Would Google Do? The audience, about 25 people more or less, was a lot less impressed with Google than Jeff is, and it occurred to me that Google really is vulnerable on the search front. I can imagine a much more effective search methodology than the one Google employs, but getting the venture capital to build a rival infrastructure isn’t going to happen.

I told Jeff (an old friend of the blog who’s driven a lot of traffic this way over the years) that what he likes about Google isn’t Google as much as it’s inherent qualities of the Internet. He more or less knows that, but the packaging of open networks, distributed computing, and free expression is easier when you concretize it, and that’s what his book does. I read it as a sequel to Cluetrain.