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. 

Big kudos to George Ford and Larry Spiwak of the Phoenix Center for their innovative breakthrough in devising a rigorous "Broadband Adoption Index" to replace current highly-deficient international broadband comparison methods. 

• Last Wednesday, I attended the presentation of their paper before a largely government audience in Washington and came away very impressed with their clarity of thought and the vastly greater utility of their approach over existing comparative mechanisms.

First, George Ford drove home the point that the much-touted OECD broadband penetration ranking was fatally flawed, in that even if the U.S. reached perfect 100% penetration the U.S. could remain in about 15th place.

"It’s not our fault that Google has a ridiculously easy way to get access to accounts via their password recovery question" said Michael Arrington of TechCrunch in a post defending his publishing of secret Twitter corporate information that was stolen from Twitter by "Hacker Croll" via Google's password system. See New York Times story.

Only last week I wrote a post "Why Security is Google's Achille's Heel."

My overall security thesis is simple.

Pat Brogan of USTelecom and Evan Leo of Kellog Huber have produced an outstanding new report on special access that is the single best and most up-to-date survey and analysis of publicly available information on the status of competition in the special access market. 

At core, Congress has asked the FCC to recommend to Congress HOW "to ensure that all people of the United States have access to broadband capability." Arguably the FCC's main "fork-in-the-road" decision in developing its National Broadband Plan is whether to recommend to Congress to:

• Re-affirm the current competition vision/law/precedent for broadband policy and build upon the strong foundation and momentum of facilities-based competition in the marketplace? or
• Design the more Government-centered broadband ecosystem policy recommended most prominently by FreePress/Open Internet Coalition members, and re-build the common carrier regulation regime of the twentieth century?  

What engine of choice will the FCC recommend to Congress: 

• Competitive forces and private investment? or
• Government forces and taxpayer money?

In other words, will the FCC:

Additional new evidence continues to spotlight the Open Internet's growing security problem, and underscore why President Obama effectively declared the lack of cybersecurity as the Internet's biggest problem in his cybersecurity address May 29th. 

• The growing catalogue of evidence from mainstream and official sources is getting harder and harder to ignore.

The supreme irony of the special access* issue is that competitors, who want to avoid investing in next generation broadband access facilities, are demanding that the FCC... (whose top priority is a National Broadband Plan to encourage the rapid build-out of modern broadband facilities to all Americans) ...regulate copper access prices in a way that surely would discourage investment in the exact next generation facilities that the FCC wants to get built.

• * "Special access" is basically the business-to-business leasing market of the copper wire connections that link many buildings and cell towers to the Internet backbone at DS1 (1.5 Mbs) and DS3 (44.7 Mbs) speeds.
• Bronze is 90% copper and 10% tin.

Scott Wallsten of the Technology Policy Institute issued an informative and insightful report on the many international broadband measures out there; I recommend reading it if you are interested in the subject. 

I particularly liked the new data on how broadband is used that shows that the U.S. has the highest:

• Digital share of recorded music sales of surveyed OECD nations;
• Sales of online films; and 
• Online TV and video revenue per head. 

I liked these new measures because they begin to expand this discussion to how broadband is used and how people benefit from broadband rather than just a sterile and not very useful debate over broadband penetration.

• Broadband is a means not an end. 
• What it enables is what is important.  

Scott's report does a very good job at showing the vast richness of different ways international broadband comparisons can be made. It adds a lot of value to the ongoing debate over where the U.S. stands internationally on broadband.  

What do the Administration's new "NOFA" guidelines, which implement the $7.2b broadband stimulus package, tell us about the trajectory for broadband and net neutrality policy going forward? 

• If one listened to just the public comments of net neutrality proponents one would miss a lot of important substance and clues about where broadband and net neutrality policy may be going, given that these new grant guidelines/conditions are the first major official broadband guidance stemming from the new Congress and the new Administration.

What do we know now that we didn't know before the release of the NOFA guidelines?

I. The Administration implicitly rejected extreme net neutrality.

The grant conditions strongly rejected the extreme net neutrality position of the tech elitists: (FreePress, Save the Internet and the Open Internet Coalition) that any bit interference is de facto discrimination.  The Administration substantially limited what could possibly constitute Internet discrimination by substantially expanding the number of exceptions to the FCC's Broadband Policy Statement as it applies to these broadband grants.

Google's launch of a new PC operating system on the heels of its announcement ending the "beta" phase for its popular gmail, Calendar, Docs and Talk applications, is happening in the midst of a new era where cyber-security has been made a new national priority and internet security breaches are increasingly serious and commonplace.

• All this naturally puts a spotlight on Google's approach to security, because Google is becoming increasingly central to so many people's Internet experience.

An examination of Google's own public representation of its corporate philosophy and design principles shows security/safety is simply not a priority for Google. In many respects, security is viewed as a hinderance to, or a drag on, Google's over-riding goal of speed-efficiency.

In Google's philosophy statement, "Ten things Google has found to be true" there is no mention of the importance of security/safety to Google or Google's users.

#3 point on the philosophy list says: "Fast is better than slow:"