Silicon Valley Watcher - reporting on the business of technology and media

Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford university law professor, claims that the US government has prepared a type of Patriot Act that is in place and ready for Congress should a major security event occur, a 9-11 type event. And just like the Patriot Act contains all sorts of new restrictions, there is concern that this I-Patriot Act will have many restrictions and laws that may limit the way the Internet is used.

This is from Fortune Brainstorm conference "2018: Life on the Net." It was moderated by Quincy Smith, CEO of CBS Interactive. On the podium was Lawrence Lessig, professor of Law at Stanford Law School, Joichi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons and Chairman of Six Apart Japan, and Philip Rosedale, founder and chairman of Linden Lab, (Second Life.)

The full video has been featured on Boing Boing. Lawrence Lessig on the coming "i-Patriot Act" - Boing Boing

I pulled out a three minute extract from the full video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=on4DPpN7GwQ

This is the relevant section where Mr Lessig talks about having dinner with Richard Clark, the government Counter terrorism Czar.

Lessig: "I had dinner once with Richard Clark at the table and I said 'is there an equivalent to the Patriot Act -- an iPatriot Act -- just sitting waiting for some substantial event just waiting for them to come have the excuse for radically changing the way the Internet works?' And he said, 'Of course there is' -- and I swear this is what he said, and quote -- 'and Vint Cerf is not going to like it very much.'"

Transcript courtesy of Boing Boing.

The full video is here:

Vint Cerf, father of the Internet and chief Internet evangelist for Google.

I interviewed Mr Cerf at the Fortune Brainstorm conference in Half Moon Bay. He often speaks about net neutrality. In this interview he says that companies such as Verizon misquoted him in full page adverts in major newspapers.

He says the Telcos are acting like little kids in a tantrum. "I'm not going to build this system unless you give me three scoops of ice cream and a pony. My reaction to this is quite negative. It's harmful to the national interest to behave in this way."

Mr Cerf wants a split in the way broadband providers operate so that they are not allowed to interfere with any applications on the Internet and that the carriers charge themselvesl, from an acconting point of view, how much bandwidth they use.

He says that carriers should be provided with incentives to make them behave differently or there should be an incentive for competitors to come into the market that can effectively compete with them and to take away their monopoly position.

Here is the 3.45 minute interview, my apologies for the lighting but the audio is very interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-dLq3uIJos

Vint Cerf, who is widely regarded as the 'father of the Internet' for his contribution to the original TCP/IP specification, has lashed out at carriers accusing them of behaving like young children throwing tantrums. In an especially strongly worded attack, Cerf called for structural separation between the wholesale and retail broadband arms of carriers among other changes.

In a brief interview with SiliconValleyWatcher, Cerf said carriers were effectively saying "I'm not going to build this system unless you give me three scoops of ice cream and a pony", and provided a laundry list of changes in the regulatory environment that he'd like to see to improve the situation. These include:

The reintroduction of common carrier status;

Structural or accounting separation, with a requirement that carriers wholesale broadband at the same prices that they charge themselves; and

No interference with other providers' applications (ie, net neutrality).

The current behaviour of carriers is harmful to the national interest, he said - an observation that wouldn't only apply to the US.

"[Deregulation] is crap, especially where you have a set of incumbents," he said. Instead, we "need a set of rules that makes sense."

Consequently, carriers need to be given incentives to behave differently or (Cerf's emphasis) incentives should be provided for competitors to compete with incumbents.

"In places where there is strong regulatory control, it seems to be working," he said.
You need to keep in mind that Cerf is a vice president at Google (a strong proponent of network neutrality), but there's no reason to assume that his opinions are not genuinely held.
We can't help feeling Cerf could just as easily be talking about Telstra as the US carriers that were the subject of his onslaught.
Currently an argument is raging between incumbent dominant carrier Telstra and other smaller players, with regulator the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission sandwiched in between. Telstra, a front-runner to build a national broadband FTTH network, is pressing to have the market dregulated so it is not forced to sell competitors bandwidth at regulated wholesale prices.

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I know they mean well, but tech execs are really bad at lobbying Washington.

Earlier, I wrote about the tech policy agenda unveiled by top US tech executives, all members of the Technet organization. [Please see ZDNet: Tech giants reveal their agenda.]

A short time later, I took another look at the news release to re-read the vague wording in much of Technet's 2008 Innovation Policy Agenda.

Take a look at the number one policy issue:

Green Technologies Initiative: Promote and highlight new technologies and innovation as a critical part of the solution to national security, economic competitiveness and global energy and environmental challenges and encourage a national commitment for investment in and adoption of innovative green technologies...

The vague wording appears pandering rather than a leading Green initiative.

Technet's second, third, and fourth most important issues are:

Education and 21st Century Workforce: Develop initiatives to improve science and math education, and increase the number of Americans attaining degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics through new programs and resources that strengthen our public schools.

Immigration Reform: Promote comprehensive highly skilled immigration reform including an increase in the H-1B visa cap and reforms to the employment-based green card process to ensure the U.S. has a highly skilled workforce.

Basic Research: Support strong national investments in research and development through increased federal funding for basic research and a permanent R&D tax credit.

All worthy issues and vaguely expressed in a very familiar way.

I would say that the last four items on Technet's Policy Agenda are far more immediately important than the others:

Patent Litigation Reform: Advance proposals with the goal of ending abusive lawsuits brought by plaintiffs using patents as a means of obtaining settlements from legitimate technology businesses.

Trade and Public Diplomacy: Work closely with national policymakers to enact trade agreements that strengthen our companies through expanded market access overseas. Our members increasingly rely on international markets for growth and we will work to support legislative efforts to enter those markets as well as agreements that guard and protect intellectual property. TechNet will also support public diplomacy initiatives, expanded trade as well as dialogue with policymakers regarding key issues including China policy.

Broadband and Internet Policy: Provide strong support for the growth and vitality of the Internet and accelerated broadband deployment by advocating for consumer access to Internet content and services and a permanent Internet tax moratorium.

Sarbanes-Oxley Rational Relief: Work to reduce the Sarbanes-Oxley Act’s compliance burdens and impacts on small companies, while maintaining the integrity of the Act’s corporate governance goals. This will reduce unnecessary costs and mitigate unintended consequences of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that are impacting innovation.

I constantly hear about those four issues from tech execs. Yet they are buried at the end of a long news release filled with salutations and other important quotes:

"

Senator Patrick Leahy represents a true visionary when it comes to leadership on innovation and technology issues in the United States Senate," said John Chambers, Cisco Chairman and CEO and co-founder of TechNet. "We are so pleased to honor his stellar service as Chairman of the Judiciary Committee and steadfast leadership on issues ranging from preserving intellectual property, promoting green technology, improving our education system and clearly seeing how cutting edge discovery grows our economy and improves our way of life."

. . .

"It is in our nation’s long-term strategic interest to maintain a robust system that effectively balances the need to facilitate new idea generation and reward innovators," said Art Coviello, Co-Chair of TechNet New England and President of RSA, The Security Division of EMC. . .

. . .

“Representative Chris Cannon has been an outstanding champion of the technology industry, as demonstrated by his tireless and successful efforts of enhancing cyber crime laws, championing intellectual property protections, supporting high skilled immigration reform and modernizing the nation’s patent laws,” said David Thompson, group president, Symantec IT and Services Group...

My suggestion would be to drop the cliche quotes, and then republish the policy agenda in reverse order.

It was a cold night in San Francisco but plenty of people made it out to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's 17th birthday party at 111 Minna. Here is a 3 minute walk through the event, see if you can spot co-founder John Perry Barlow. Scott Beale from Laughing Squid is in the intro.

Donate to help EFF continue its work:

EFF Protects Free Speech Rights for New Jersey Blogger

Friday Court Fight Over Blogger's Free Speech Rights

EFF Applauds Senator Reid's Decision to Delay Surveillance Bill Until January

....More Press Releases

EFF's Deep Links Blog:

Get Out Your Webcams and Speak Out Against Telecom Immunity

Troubling "Digital Theft Prevention" Requirements Remain in Higher Education Bill

Scrutinizing Comcast's Apologists

Become a Member with a monthly donation

Technorati Tags: EFF, EFF, JohnPerryBarlow, Laughingsquid

Comcast's blocking of large file transfers is just the tip of the iceberg. And it is only a matter of time before other cable and telco companies will follow suit.

This is the start of a battle for bandwidth that has been caused by enormous amounts of digital media hitting the Internet and the private networks of the cable and telco companies. It is a battle that nearly all Silicon Valley companies are unprepared for and won't be able to win.

Comcast and the others can legitimately limit third party services because they have a contract with their customers to deliver a slew of digital services from digital phone calls, digital music, and high definition TV. They don't have a contract to deliver the digital services of others.

How long before they kill the video stars? For example, YouTube relies on file uploads up to 100 MB in size, other video hosting platforms take larger files.

How long before they kill most of the Web 2.0 companies? They all seek to share files and information between groups, including video and audio. FaceBook, for example, lets users upload 300 MB video files.

What about new services such as Fabrik's Ultimate Backup Service, which offers unlimited backups for $5 a month. Will Fabrik and others be able to build such businesses?

Why should they provide quality access to digital services (YouTube, BitTorrent, etc) if they don't have a contractual obligation? Access to those services comes second or third to their own services and those of partners.

Corporate Luddites

The cable and telco companies are the most powerful Luddite organizations in the US. They hold a duopoly control over the lines that connect consumers with digital services.

The cable and telco companies are slow in bringing in new technologies, and their wireless operations turn off many technologies, such as wi-fi in cell phones. They have slowed technological progress in the US in so many ways. For example, We have some of the lowest adoption rates and the slowest broadband in the world. We have a huge digital divide.

They will protect themselves from technologies that would disrupt them in the same way early 19th century English Luddites broke industrial machines to save their livelihoods.

The English dealt with their anti-technologists in this way: "Machine breaking" (industrial sabotage) was made a capital crime." (Wikipedia.)

No such luck here. These Luddites have the government on their side, they have among the strongest lobbying groups in Washington, built up over a period of more than 100 years.

The cable and telco companies are anti-competitive and their actions will make sure that the US becomes uncompetitive.

Technorati Tags: Fabrik, corporate luddites, startups

Thursday morning I rushed across to the East Bay to catch TechNet's Innovation Summit at UC Berkeley--but I should have lingered longer in bed.

The morning session featured Charlie Rose moderating a conversation between John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems; John Chen, CEO of Sybase; and Laura Tyson, Professor Haas Business and Public Policy Group at UC Berkeley. The subject: Charting a National Innovation Policy for the Next Decade.

It was tremendously dull because there was nothing new said. And Charlie Rose's ability to throw softball questions, while making them sound insightful and important, added further layers of misery.

They said the same things I've been hearing them, and their ilk say for the past few years. Not enough H1b visas; education is very important; not enough engineers being produced in the US; not enough math being taught in US schools; government needs to fund research; government need to stay out of technology choices, overseas governments are jumping ahead of US by making technology choices; etc.

At the mid-morning break I ran into a lot of people I knew from various Silicon Valley companies, and also other journalists. I complained about the lack of content.

I said I'm tired of hearing John Chambers say that our school system is broken. Why does he boast of installing a cutting edge network in the new local baseball stadium, Cisco should be boasting of doing that in our local schools.

Our Silicon Valley leaders constantly complain about education yet allow their local schools to become basket cases. They should be showcases.

Silicon Valley cannot go around saying to the world "We are inventing the future here," when its local communities are struggling and unable to cope with the present.

If Silicon Valley's technologies are so incredibly powerful and game changing let's see them applied in our own communities first, especially our schools. Wouldn't that be an amazing example to the world? Wouldn't that be an amazing project for John Chambers, one of our top business leaders and visionaries? I bet he could do anything he sets his mind to, instead of giving up on the schools by saying the system is broken and cannot be fixed.

Sucks less

Everybody I spoke with agreed with my complaints about the content, saying they were surprised that this venue couldn't produce anything new. However, one of my colleagues at a large newspaper, jumped into the discussion saying he strongly disagreed with what I was saying.

"This event is slightly less useless than the one they had at Stanford (university) a while back, that one was was totally useless." Great compliment, I said. So, this one sucks less than the other one, which totally sucked.

One former exec of one of Silicon Valley's largest companies said "it seemed like 1997 warmed over again."

Discouraged by the quality of the first half of the summit, I skipped the second panel of the morning: Charlie Rose throwing softballs on Green Technologies with John Doerr, uberVC; Jonathan Swartz CEO of Sun; John Melo, CEO of Amyris Biotechnologies and Larry Brilliant, head of Google.org. I would have liked to have seen Mr Brilliant [btw, brilliant name although it must have been tough growing up with it.]

TechNet's mission statement:

To serve as the voice and advocate of the innovation economy by uniting CEOs and Senior Executives with leading policy makers in a bipartisan effort to sustain and advance America's global leadership in technology and innovation.

Clearly, with content such as this Innovation Summit, TechNet has chosen an extremely challenging approach to fulfilling its mission statement.

Technorati Tags: TechNet

There was a low turnout at the Silicon Valley Tech Policy Summit in San Jose that was attributed to six inches of snow  in Washington D.C. which grounded travelers.

But that doesn't explain why there weren't lots of Silicon Valley execs at the two day conference. Or rather, it shows that Silicon Valley's traditional lack of interest in politics continues, despite numerous reasons why such ignorance can be damaging.

Star power such as Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal and other top editors from the Financial Times, Time, Forbes, BusinessWeek, Newsweek and even blog publisher Om Malik -- couldn't draw much of a local crowd.

I popped in on Tuesday and caught a few panels.

The Future of the Internet panel moderated by Declan McCullagh, News.com was lackluster with Jim Dempsey, policy director, Center for Democracy and Technology, Lauren Gelman, Assoc. Director of Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, and Andrew McLaughlin, head of global public policy and senior counsel at Google.

There was a lot of talk but little was said. I complained about it to Sean Garrett, one of the founders of  463 Communications, helping tech companies to "navigate the intersection of technology, public policy and government."

He said that much of the talk was in a type of "code" that is understandable by those that deal with Washington politics.

"For example, one person at my table was surprised at what the Google guy had to say. And often, it is not what they say, but what the don't say," he explained.

It was good to catch up with Mr Garrett, he always brings insightful perspectives into the tech policy process. He works closely with big Silicon Valley companies such as Cisco, Sun Microsystems and Verisign. And he is a blogger too, writing The 463: Inside Tech Policy blog. 

He said that it was interesting that the older technology companies lobbied politicians in the old way, with face to face meetings, etc. There was no one using the social networking technologies. "There is an opportunity for a hybrid approach," he said, but no one is doing it, at least not yet.

Additional Info:

Tech Policy Summit is an invitation-only executive conference that brings together prominent leaders from the private and public sectors to examine critical policy issues affecting technology innovation and adoption in Silicon Valley and beyond.

Link to: Tech Policy Summit                  Tech Policy Summit blog

The 463: Inside Tech Policy blog

Silicon Valley should fight laws controlling innovation, says veteran valley entrepreneur

Laws could limit Silicon Valley innovation

Kara Swisher moderated Policy 2.0: Social Media and Government Regulation. This panel had many of the leading poster boys of "Web 2.0 and social media."

Jonathan Abrams, the former Friendster CEO, was there. He is now CEO of Socializr, which is in private beta and which he described as a cross between Friendster and Evite. Also on stage: Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg; Reid Hoffman, president of LinkedIn; and David Sifry, CEO of Technorati.

Ms Swisher kept the conversation rolling and interesting but there was absolutely zero discussion of government regulation and social media!

It became an apt illustration of how little interest there is in government policy among tech companies coming from a top Silicon Valley journalist and the stars of the Web 2.0 movement.

With the topic dismissed, the panel discussed other subjects. Ms Swisher gave Mr Adelson a withering look when she pointed out that Digg profited from posting copyrighted material and was "feeding off of other people's content."  Mr Adelson noted that not a single copyright holder had ever complained about being featured on Digg.

Identity on the Internet was discussed, and Mr Hoffman said  LinkedIn offered a way for others to discover sanctioned information about their identities.

The panel talked a lot about new media and old media. David Sifry of Technorati was very impressive, he came out with some excellent insights, sharing a lot of the points I've made many times about media and blogging. He talked abut how the blogs need big media and vice versa, it is not one versus the other but both together.

I was heartened to see that Mr Sifry raised an issue I've been warning about for nearly two years: as old media's business fortunes decline who will pay for quality journalism?

(I often explain it this way: what happens if the old media dies before the new media learns to walk? We need quality media because media is how society "thinks" it is how it decides how to tackle tough problems, and we have lots of them.)

Mr Sifry noted that the economic models for big media are being torn apart. "What is the future for news? That's the real question, it is essential to democracy."

He even mentioned a favorite example of mine, Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times, saying that online revenues couldn't pay for a fraction of operating costs. For example, the Baghdad bureau costs over $1m/year to operate.

Walt Mossberg spoke up from the audience, stating to the panel that the Web 2.0 generation didn't like to read--especially long, complex articles about important subjects.

Mr Adelson said that his experience was that teenagers were reading a lot more, and tackling long, complex articles because of their Digg involvement.

...

Please see:

Additional Info:

What happens if the old media dies too soon? The urgent need for solid online news media business models

Posted by Tom Foremski on November 14, 2005

Two years ago I became a journalist blogger . . . and discovered a terrible thing

It was about two years ago that I started "blogging." I had left the Financial Times in early June and took the summer off, I spent most of it chatting to people about my plans.

Posted by Tom Foremski on September 27, 2006

Cherry picking advertising and not paying for the journalism

Google can sell advertising for much less because it doesn't have to pay for any journalism. Newspapers, TV and radio sell advertising so that they can pay for the journalism.

Posted by Tom Foremski on May 17, 2006  

Elizabeth Corcoran, an editor at Forbes, moderated Developing Top Talent: Education, Immigration, and Innovation Leadership. She did a fine, spirited job trying to enliven the panel members: Phil Bond, head of the Information Technology Association of America. Dr. AnnaLee Saxenian, Dean, UC Berkeley's school of Information, and Rosen Sharma, CEO of Solidcore Systems.

She eventually succeeded in her mission and there were some interesting points made. Mr Sharma said that the work visa process to bring in a foreign worker is too long, at least 3 months to arrange for an interview when it used to be done the same day.

He said that even if the visa process were opened up, it is not clear that the US could attract the world's top talent. He said China, for example, was hiring "hordes" of top medical practitioners to staff its medical universities.

Mr Bond complained that tech companies no longer had the same glamerous appeal they once had among politicians. And that the tech sector voice was too fragmented, it was split among too many associations.

He added that the tech industry wasn't able to bring attention to the positive aspects outsourcing, that it actually does create jobs here.

Ms. Saxenian said that tech companies lost a lot of their glamour after the dotcom bust. And that tech companies have never spent enough money contributing to political campaigns.

"The politicians like to say that the tech companies have deep pockets and short arms," she said.

. . .

Please also see:

 Low turnout for Silicon Valley Tech Policy Summit - do tech companies care about policy?

Link to: Tech Policy Summit                  Tech Policy Summit blog