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The Tangled Web by Kenneth Corbin (bio)

Reading between the lines

July 24, 2008, 6:22 PM

Who says Net neutrality is a partisan issue?

Well, everyone who knows what the issue is about, I would suggest.

And the lefties are crowing about it again today, with word that a blogger has helped secure statements of support for Net neutrality from each of the 13 Democrats challenging an incumbent Republican for a Senate seat this fall.

Matt Stoller, who blogs on the site OpenLeft.com, said he began his effort in mid-June. The goal was to elicit a policy statement from each of the Democratic challengers in support of Net neutrality, and today, he announced that he had succeeded. They're all on board, at least the 13 with at least $500,000 in their war chest.

Throughout the process, Stoller has kept a running tally of how much money each of the candidates has accepted in the form of campaign contributions from the cable and telecom industries.

Not surprisingly, a zero sits next to most of the candidates' names.

If Net neutrality is up your alley, Stoller is fighting the good fight. Grass-roots and all, it's a perfect match for the rhetoric of the larger groups that have been agitating for a "free and open" Internet that will keep the playing field level for all parties, large and small. What a story it would be for the lowliest blogger slay the two-headed lobbying dragon of the cable and phone companies.

Stoller's campaign drew predictable praise from some of the larger groups that have been championing the issue, such as Free Press and MoveOn.org.

To proponents of congressional action on the issue, a handful of Democrats announcing support is swell, but they are a long way from carrying the day on the floor of Congress.

Previous attempts at Net neutrality legislation have fallen well short of the mark, with votes falling largely on party lines. At present, there is one bill that takes up the issue in the Senate, and two in the House. None is likely to see any significant movement before the election-shortened session ends.

The Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to take up the issue in an official manner next Friday, when it meets to consider a draft order introduced by Republican Chairman Kevin Martin calling for a censure of Comcast for blocking traffic to the peer-to-peer sit BitTorrent. If the two Democratic commissioners side with Martin, as is expected, the order will have a majority, and the FCC will have taken its toughest stand to date on Net neutrality. Martin's not looking to slap any fines on Comcast; instead it would impose some onerous reporting and monitoring requirements that the cable giant would no doubt abhor.

Should that come to pass, Free Press et al will no doubt declare another victory. But that victory will be a battle, not a war. Even with the expected gains the Democrats will make in the legislature in November, some folks are going to have to cross the aisle if anything's going to happen with this issue.

It's a little curious to me how an issue that draws support from a set of groups as diverse as the Writers' Guild and the Christian Coalition could remain so narrowly partisan.

An aide to Maine's Olympia Snowe, the lone Republican sponsor of the Senate's Net neutrality bill, once told me, "It's a shame it's got to be such a partisan issue. It's too bad, but that's just the way it is."

Posted by Kenneth Corbin at 6:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1) | Share

July 24, 2008, 4:56 PM

A wide open forum for political debate

By now, we've gotten accustomed to hearing from presidential candidates' surrogates who make the rounds on the talking-head television circuit, taking questions from a host or sparring with a representative from the opposing camp.

Well, the Internet has thrown its doors wide open as a forum for the campaigns to engage each other in debate.

Opposing Views, a very young startup devoted to bringing experts who disagree together in debate on high-profile issues, entered the party today. The site, born only in late May with a modest $1.25 million in Series A financing, has pitted economic advisers from the McCain and Obama camp in a debate "Who has the best plan for America's economy?"

The format is accessible enough -- the debate topic's page displays one column of posts by each surrogate. There's not a lot of back and forth, and a lot of the talking points are (predictably) taken from the policy sections of the candidates' Web sites, but it's a neat idea.

The sparring that does take place comes in the form of objections -- when one participant takes issue with his opponent's comment, he can flag that post with an objection and register the complaint.

Opposing Views launched with experts to weigh in on more than 100 topics, so on the site you might find a debate on the death penalty (district attorney vs. Amnesty International), the existence of God (a rabbi vs. the group American Atheists) or global warming (Sierra Club vs. National Center for Policy Analysis, a conservative think tank).

The debate-by-proxy on Opposing Views picks up on the spirit of a recent effort by microblogging site Twitter, which hosted its own debate between the candidates' representatives in June.

In the political arena, the CNN/YouTube debates deserve the credit for getting a lot of this going. Even in the familiar format of each candidate standing at a podium answering questions in an allotted period of time, the participatory feeling of bringing candidates closer to the voters was significant. Sure that interaction was heavier on the symbolism than the substance, and the answers tended to glide along talking points, but still -- it was a milestone of sorts, if for nothing else than for the legitimacy the debates conferred on YouTube.

Posted by Kenneth Corbin at 4:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

July 17, 2008, 6:06 PM

Barking for a treat on Capitol Hill

Reporters like to hear people talk in colorful, highly quotable catch phrases -- it makes for snappy copy.

And savvy media folks know it, too. Jeff Chester at the Center for Digital Democracy has made an art form out of it. It's kind of like search engine optimization, only instead of trying to make a Web site more visible to Google, these folks are preening for the press.

But there's a line. Too often people are heard barking from the fringes, serving up punchy one liners confident that it will likely land them some ink, even if it's a weird diversion from the topic under discussion. Contrarian-minded reporters will often reject this yapping out of hand, refusing to kowtow to a noisy minority.

Game the ranking system, and Google will ban you.

In this case, Google was the target. It was shameless, and frankly a little nonsensical, but by gum, this one was too good not to share.

So I concede, and offer this, what you might call a clothespin blog.

This morning, the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet held a hearing examining just how much broadband service providers know about what their subscribers are doing on the Internet. The nominal topic was deep-packet inspection, but the predominant focus was NebuAd, the startup ad company that pays ISPs to collect their subscribers' Internet activities in order to serve targeted ads.

So while much of the hearing saw the representatives and several of the witnesses beating up on NebuAd's program -- and NebuAd's CEO Bob Dykes defending his company -- the best line of the day had nothing to do with NebuAd or its controversial program. It went to Scott Cleland, president of the consultancy Precursor, and Chairman of NetCompetition.org, a coalition of Internet service providers that advocates on policy matters such as Net neutrality (against, in case you were wondering).

While ISPs fund NetCompetition, Cleland offered the disclaimer that the thoughts he expressed at the hearing were his own. Foremost among those thoughts was a criticism of the fundamental premise of the hearing: Don't single out ISPs, particularly when the worst privacy offender in the world (Google) is snooping into people's medical, financial and every other kind of information out there with impunity. Thanks to Gmail and Google Chat it knows what you're saying. Thanks to Google checkout it knows what you buy. With the coming Gphone, it will know ... exactly ... where ... you ... are.

"This is truly Orwellian Big Brother stuff -- Google's not the government, but all the information that Google collects is on Google's servers," Cleland said.

"Google's market power over private information is corrupting Google," he continued. "Information is power. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Just as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover went mad with power, whither shall go Google, Cleland assured the representatives. "That's why I call it J. Edgar Google."

Indeed.

Posted by Kenneth Corbin at 6:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

July 15, 2008, 5:32 PM

Courts at odds on eBay's role in policing fakes

What a difference a venue makes.

Just a week after a French court socked eBay with a $63.2 million bill for abetting the sale of counterfeit Louis Vuitton goods, the e-commerce giant emerged victorious from a very similar case in Manhattan brought by luxury jeweler Tiffany & Co.

Turns out, U.S. law is on its side on this one. Judge Richard Sullivan of the Federal District Court in Manhattan concluded that eBay had responded promptly to Tiffany's requests to shut down individual sellers, but that it was not responsible for policing its entire marketplace.

"In determining whether eBay is liable, the standard is not whether eBay could reasonably anticipate possible infringement, but rather whether eBay continued to supply its services to sellers when it knew or had reason to know of infringement by those sellers," Sullivan wrote.

"The result of the application of this legal standard is that Tiffany must ultimately bear the burden of protecting its trademark."

That is in marked contrast to the ruling in the French court, which held that eBay needs to proactively police the millions of listing on its site to keep on the sunny side of the law. A German court offered a similar opinion in a case involving Rolex in April.

eBay, then, could be faced with the unhappy prospect of implementing different authenticity controls in different markets if the European rulings hold up. In a finger-wagging statement responding to last week's ruling, eBay promised an appeal.

So the laws of the United States and France appear at odds. It happens. But after promising to issue a ruling "quite quickly" and then deliberating for eight months, did Sullivan really have choose Bastille Day to issue his decision?

Posted by Kenneth Corbin at 5:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

July 14, 2008, 10:06 AM

With Icahn's final nominees, war for Yahoo enters endgame

Life isn't getting any easier for Yahoo, as billionaire investor Carl Icahn is stepping up his campaign to take control of the company. This morning Icahn filed definitive proxy materials with the Securities and Exchange Commission, stating that he would put up nine directors in an attempt to replace the entirety of Yahoo's incumbent board at the company's annual meeting Aug. 1.

In the accompanying letter, Icahn appealed to Yahoo shareholders for support. In it he claimed that he had managed to revive negotiations with Microsoft to buy Yahoo's search business, and had even secured a guarantee of minimum revenue, but that Yahoo had yet again squandered the opportunity and then issued a disingenuous corporate communique.

"Over the years I have attempted to make changes at many companies but I have yet to see a company distort, omit and twist events and facts in the manner that Yahoo has done in their press release issued Saturday night," Icahn wrote.

Over the past two weeks, Icahn has been in frequent talks with Microsoft in an attempt to engineer a transaction where Microsoft would buy Yahoo's search business and infuse the company with a multi-billion dollar equity investment.

Last week, Microsoft announced its opinion that it could no longer negotiate with Yahoo's current board, suggesting that it would be amenable to reviving talks about a full or partial acquisition of Yahoo if Icahn succeeded in overturning the company's management.

Backed into a corner, Yahoo rejected the latest offer for its search business claiming that it would have a destabilizing effect throughout a lengthy regulatory review and preclude a sale of the entire company. Yahoo claimed that it was better off with its ad deal with Google, and lashed back at the "opportunistic alliance" of Icahn and Microsoft.

"After negotiating among themselves without the involvement of Yahoo, Carl Icahn and Microsoft presented us with a 'take it or leave it' proposal under which we would be required to restructure the company, hand over to Microsoft Yahoo's valuable search business and to Carl Icahn the rest of the company, giving us less than 24 hours to respond," Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock said. "It is ludicrous to think that our board could accept such a proposal. While this type of erratic and unpredictable behavior is consistent with what we have come to expect from Microsoft, we will not be bludgeoned into a transaction that is not in the best interests of our stockholders."

Posted by Kenneth Corbin at 10:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

July 11, 2008, 2:42 PM

Microsoft's sly dig at Google on Capitol Hill

Sometimes we find opportunities in strange corners.

Earlier this week, I was in Washington covering a Senate hearing looking into the privacy implications of behaviorally targeted ads on the Internet. And, as with most of the discussions on that issue, we got a lot of what we expected -- privacy advocates called for muscular legislation, free-market advocates championed the free market, and the industry folks touted the strength of their internal privacy controls and asserted with some adamancy that it is in their business interest to maintain the trust of their customers.

Two of those industry folks were Mike Hintze, associate general counsel for Microsoft, and Jane Horvath, Google's senior privacy counsel. To be sure, the companies they represented are fierce rivals, but their attorneys had a lot to agree on when it came to the hearing: they have similar policies regarding their server logs; both advocate a baseline federal privacy policy; and both only want it to be a general law, not one with unique requirements for online advertising.

But Microsoft, which occasionally draws an Ahab comparison for the fanatical zeal with which it pursues Google, managed to get a shot in at the great white whale even in this unlikely setting.

Throughout the hearing, senators repeatedly expressed the opinion that consumers simply don't know that much about what goes on behind the scenes with online advertising. Since they don't know much about the system, how can privacy ever become a high consumer priority. But with greater education, consumers would care about privacy more, and then companies would try to use their privacy controls to their competitive advantage, each claiming they were more protective of consumers' data than the others.

That was all he needed.

"We definitely see a nexus between competition and privacy, in that if there does become a dominant player in the online advertising space, that means there is a single company that is collecting more data," Hintze said. "It could become the case where a single company has a nearly complete picture of online behavior."

He left the company unnamed, but in light of Microsoft's repeated assertions that the online-ad market needs a viable competitor to Google, he didn't need to say it.

Horvath said nothing.

This comes as the Justice Department is undertaking a review of Google's ad deal with Yahoo, following the collapse of Microsoft's efforts to buy the company. Knowing that the deal, if consummated, would do nothing but make Google stronger and make it a more distant third, Microsoft is not a big fan of the arrangement.

Such was the glimpse into the logic that Microsoft no doubt hopes to impart on its old friends at the DoJ: A vote of no-action on Google-Yahoo doesn't just hurt the online-ad market, it hurt Americans. You decide.

Posted by Kenneth Corbin at 2:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

July 10, 2008, 5:39 PM

iPhone app mania

Anyone who concerns themselves with shiny gadgets knows that the iPhone is a phenomenon.

Whether it lives up to the hype or not, the thing has simply been the coolest phone on the block since its showy unveiling last January. Then came the madness late last June when it hit stores, a three-day drudge where professional line standers earned a month's rent waiting outside the Manhattan Apple store to shop as surrogates for wealthy patrons in the grip of a techno-lust that steamrolled any notion of financial temperance. Lunacy.

And all of a sudden, it became this crazy status symbol. Like a gleaming set of chromed-out spinners that you could wear on your hip. And talk through. And use to access the Web. And take videos. And on, and on ...

Leaving aside the minor dustup regarding Apple's decision to lop one-third of the price off a mere two months after its street date (massaged slightly by Steve Jobs' mea culpa and a promise of store credit for early adopters), it's been a resounding success.

iPhone3G_appstore.JPGSo fast-forward to the present. The 3G version (Tagline: Twice as fast. Half the price.) hits stores tomorrow, and with it comes the official iPhone App Store, where a set of pre-screened apps will be available for download, many of them for free.

The media blitz has been inescapable. The Apple faithful devour the news coverage of the company with a voracious appetite, and the folks whose applications will become available with the App Store are loath to miss out on the opportunity.

So, like remoras, they have set forth a barrage of press releases and PR folks in the hope of getting caught up in the fervor that seems to greet just about everything that Apple does these days.

And boy does it work -- this very publication has devoted two full stories today to a couple of the notable iPhone apps -- those of MySpace and Oracle. Of course, the Apple phenomenon is a pretty handy one for the media folks, too -- the more a story gets read, the better our business is, no?

They say a rising tide lifts all boats. Indeed.

But on this great day, MySpace and Oracle will not be alone in basking in the resplendent glow of an iPhone that you can customize.

Presented with a smart salute to opportunistic public relations, here is a roll-call of some of the first ones that have crossed our radar:

AOL's got three of them: AIM, AOL Radio and Truveo, the video search engine. All are free, and continue what AOL describes as a renewed embrace of Apple's development platforms.

For the business-minded, Salesforce.com is bringing its CRM and Force.com applications to bear on the iPhone in what should continue the device's entry into the enterprise. Salesforce pitches the applications to sales reps who could use them to interact with clients and manage their accounts through its hosted services while on the go.

AT&T's YellowPages.com's got a free one designed to aid in the discovery of local events and businesses based on their popularity among other iPhone users.

TripAdvisor's Local Picks is a similar (also free) offering, layering local reviews on top of the iPhone's location-based capabilities to generate restaurant recommendations.

Loopt, also a natural fit for the iPhone's location technology, is offering its social-mapping feature as a free download, so you'll "you'll never be lonely, bored or hungry again!" CEO Sam Altman promises.

Chimps Ahoy.JPGAnd finally, there's a wonderful looking game from a company called Griptonite Games available for download for (what seems) a modest $9.99. It's called Chimps Ahoy!, and I think I'll let the press release describe the premise:

"Thieving Ninjas have stolen all of the Chimps' bananas, so they must join up with the Pirates, working their way up through the ranks to finally confront the Ninjas and reclaim what is rightfully theirs. ... Players take control of two chimps on either side of the screen and are tasked with bouncing coconuts between the two to break gems, pick-up power-ups and knock out enemies."

Had to leave off on the Chimps Ahoy! because I think it's very funny, and, like all God-fearing red-bloods, I think the world would be a friendlier place if non-human simians had more to do with it.

But the App Store is expected to be stocked with something on the order of 500 applications, so we're only scratching the surface here. I encourage you to leave comments regarding those that we simply need to know about, or warning us against those that we're better off avoiding. Come on -- you love this stuff!

Posted by Kenneth Corbin at 5:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

June 24, 2008, 7:11 PM

What would a national tech policy look like?

The intersection of policy and technology is getting to be a crowded place. Lawmakers and regulators are weighing in with increasing frequency on issues like patent reform, spectrum allocation, Net neutrality and behavioral targeting and consumer privacy.

Just today, a group of industry and advocacy groups announced a united coalition that plans to agitate for a national broadband policy that would work to create affordable, high-speed Internet access for the entire country.

Details are sketchy.

One thing that's clear -- the more steam any such effort gathers, the more vigorous the opposition from Internet service providers will be.

Here at the Personal Democracy Forum conference, there were no ISPs to be found. It was a meeting of the like-minded, a crowd with no love for the cable and telecoms.

So just what role should the government play in the evolution of the Internet? A common answer is to create a cabinet-level position overseeing technology. A technology czar -- sort of like the chief technology officers employed by nearly all of the Fortune 500 companies.

Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist and a co-creator of the TCP/IP protocols that make the Internet run, took issue with that idea, calling it a "top-down solution."

"Top-down is not really the DNA of the Internet. It's bottom-up," Cerf said.

Alec Ross, an adviser to Barack Obama and co-founder of the nonprofit One Economy, clarified that a government office would not simply be a "box that you would check off."

"A CTO isn't an end unto itself," he said.

After declaring that he would abolish the FCC, Cerf spoke vaguely of a reordering of incentives to bring cable and telecoms on board with some of the tech industry's priorities, like Net neutrality and how to deploy broadband access to rural America.

"I would not mandate a particular technology. I think that would be counter-productive," Cerf said. Fiber works great in apartment buildings, but some radio-based access might be the answer for the currently underserved rural areas, Cerf said.

"It seems to me that what we need is something that will provide the right incentives to the resulting networking is something that multiple parties can produce."

As to exactly what form that will take, Cerf wasn't entirely sure.

And given everything else that's going to dominate the election debate (Iraq, the economy, healthcare, globalization), Ross pragmatically (and a little glumly) reminded us that technology will be pushed to the back burner this fall as one of those "things that are important but not urgent."

Posted by Kenneth Corbin at 7:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1) | Share