June, 2009

Kudos to Saul Hansell for his post at the NY Times Bits Blog which ably spotlights the growing clash between those who publicly advocate for more privacy on the web and those who behind-the-scenes are opposed to more privacy on the web. 

• From Hansell's post: "...There is a split, he told the conference, between the typical view of privacy among technology experts and the emerging view of people brought up in the social networking, Web 2.0 world.
• “The Web 2.0 movement is opposed to the privacy movement,” he said. Traditionally, privacy advocates have pushed for a policy of “data minimization,” he argued. ....
• The new ideology revolves around what Mr. Swire called “data empowerment.”

This privacy-publicacy tension that I have been writing about for months -- is obviously very real indeed. 

I filed comments today on the FCC's Notice of Inquiry on the FCC's National Broadband Plan, which is required to be delivered to Congress by February 2010.

• I made three main points about the National Broadband Plan; it should:
  • Build upon America's strong foundation of success in developing facilities-based broadband competition in the vast majority of the U.S.;
  • Factor in the latest data which indicates the U.S. is not falling behind in broadband or economic competitiveness; and
  • Elevate cybersecurity as a national priority per the President's recent cybersecurity review.

My two-page comments, with links to several of my research pieces, can be found here.

The press release about my comments can be found here.

The President's Cybersecurity announcement 5-29 was a game changer for the Internet. For the first time the U.S. Government officially declared the lack of cybersecurity as the Internet's biggest problem.

Increasingly the "underground currency" of the Internet is private data.

• Private information is valuable to many Internet businesses, because in the absence of a system where consumers can assert ownership of and control over their privacy, privacy can be taken from them for free and profited from with little to no obligation to, or compensation due, to the affected user/consumer.  
• In effect, the increasing practice of commercializing privacy by publicacy businesses increasingly creates new risks for consumers in return for little to no protection or reward.

Why are private data a de facto "underground currency" on the Internet? Well, most consumers are unaware that they are not in control of their private information. For example, a Consumer Reports 9-25-08 consumer survey found:

A scan of the major comments just delivered to the FCC on the National Broadband Plan (which is due to Congress February 2010), spotlighted the big broadband policy "fork-in-the-road" decision that the FCC now has before it.

This is an introduction and background for my new multi-part research series on diagnosing the root causes of the Financial Crisis.

In another example of how many have overstated that the U.S. is falling behind the world in broadband, the OECD ranks the U.S. #1 in broadband Internet access to schools, with 97% of all American primary and secondary schools having broadband Internet access per the latest OECD data.

• A tip of the hat to Rob Atkinson of ITIF for publicly surfacing this interesting  factoid at Randy May's Free State Foundation forum last Friday on "Broadband Nation: Where does the U.S. really rank in the broadband rankings?"

This data suggests that lack of broadband access may not a major reason why American students test lower than students in many OECD countries.

For more data and studies on why the U.S. is not falling behind the world on broadband click here.

With all due respect to Mr. John Bogle, legendary founder of Vanguard and de facto leader of the American index fund movement that now manages ~$1.5 trillion, I must respectfully challenge, on the merits, Mr. Bogle's, and others, ongoing mischaracterization of indexing as "investing."

In some of the worst sophistry I have seen in a long time, several pro-regulation groups, who obviously oppose competition policy for communications, petitioned the FCC with a classic straw man argument that essentially asserts that because wireless competition is imperfect, its "demonstrably uncompetitive" "and "produces active and ongoing consumer harms."