Amazon

Jonathan Zittrain's NYTimes Op-ed today, "Lost in the Clouds" ironically captured three of my big concerns/themes about the Internet and its natural outgrowth -- cloud computing.

• I recommend this op-ed because it pulls together a whole host of converging Internet issues that others generally treat separately.
• The problem with writing about these issues separately is that much of the richness of how these inter-related issues interact -- is lost.  

  Zittrain: "The cloud, however, comes with real dangers."

  • I agree. That has been much of the point of my 13 part series since the first of the year:
    • "The Open Internet's Growing Security Problem"

  Zittrain: "Worse, data stored online has less privacy protection both in practice and under the law."

Amazon's decision to seize e-copies of George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty Four" and "Animal Farm" from Kindle users after Amazon had sold and already delivered the e-books to customers -- drips with irony. 

• For those who have missed the widespread uproar over Amazon's actions see NYTimes or Google "Amazon 1984." 

Irony #1: Fans of George Orwell's political satire know that Animal Farm is all about animals who originally profess equality for all the farm animals, but once in power become corrupt and establish rules that make those in power much more equal than others. 

"All our information is being sucked into the cloud. Privacy is over." That was the bold declaration of Attorney Steve Masur at DCIA's P2P Media Summit per Washington Internet Daily.

• Wow. As stark an assessment that that is, what really disturbs me is the thought process and tech ethic that underlies this view.
• Mr. Masur is not alone, he is part of a growing publicacy mentality/movement that looks at privacy as:
  • A neandrethal expectation in the Internet Age,
  • Buzz-kill for Internet innovators, and
  • Road-kill for the cloud-computing bus speeding down the information super-highway.

My pushback here is the blind worship of technology or tech-determinism.

• I define tech-determinism to be:
  • if technology or innovation can do it, it must be good; and
  • if something stands in the way of technology and innovation, like privacy, it is in the way and should be terminated. 

Did it ever occur to the tech determinists that if there is no privacy in the cloud, many won't go there?

• Most users appreciate that technology should work for them, they don't work for technology.

Privacy isn't over. 

"eBay Retreats in Web Retailing," the WSJ top story today, suggests some Internet competition may be devolving. 

What does it mean that eBay has decided to retreat from competing in web retailing against Amazon and other online retailers of new goods, in order to focus on:

• Selling secondary-market/used goods, and
• Brokering overstocked, clearance, or out-of-season goods? 

First, it is a stark reminder of the Internet's unbeatable network effects where the strong tend to get stronger and the weak tend to get weaker.

Amazon's support for net neutrality is becoming blatantly hypocritical, given that it is bundling its Kindle e-book reader network in a way that Amazon argues should be illegal for its broadband competitors.

• The WSJ reports that Amazon now intends to bundle its Kindle e-book reader with exclusive content from leading author Stephen King.   

Don't get me wrong, I strongly defend Amazon's free-market freedoms to bundle its Kindle e-book reader with exclusive content -- it's the American free enterprise system at work.

Kudos to Johna Till Johnson of Network World whose post "What is an ISP?" in the New York Times Bits blog, cuts to the quick of why net neutrality is so problematic to apply in the real world.

Not only can net neutrality supporters not define it, it is equally problematic defining who it applies to -- a point I have been making for a long time.  

The post explains how net neutrality would not allow Amazon's Kindle reading service... oops!

Just when the DOJ is investigating if the Google-Yahoo ad partnership is anti-competitive, eBay bursts onto the antitrust stage with "investigate us too!" acquisitions of Bill Me Later and more classified ad businesses. (See NYT article  and post, and WSJ article for excellent background.)

Why are the eBay acquisitions relevant to the Google-Yahoo investigation? 

First, they spotlight how dominant and incestuously interdependent the primary Internet players are.

There was a major tectonic shift in the Internet privacy debate today at the Senate Commerce Committee hearing on Internet privacy. 

Invited to speak at the ITIF forum on ITIF's white paper: "It's Time to End the Broadband Policy Wars" -- I so strongly disagreed with the framing bias of that white paper and the broadband policy debate in general that I decided I needed to counter it by writing my own white paper:

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  Don’t be Fooled by the National Broadband Policy “Straw Man”

   

  Exposing Three Hidden Policy Biases of Broadband Policy Proponents

The abstract of my six page paper is below: