Public policy and privacy
Public policy issues such as privacy, technology industry economic development, education to support technology workers, and so on. Privacy in particular, whether or not strictly tied to public policy.
Scatterchat and Tor vs. The Great Firewall of China
Hacktivismo has just released Scatterchat, an IM tool intended to beat repressive regimes’ firewalls. Unlike other anonymizer types of tools that use Chinese repression mainly as a marketing hook, Scattershot seems to truly be focused on its stated goal. I haven’t figured out whether it does much clever other than leverage Tor, an anonymous network established by the Electronic Freedom Foundation to try to beat traffic analysis. This all sounds like a perfect example of what I’ve been calling for — technological creativity directed at beating technological repression.
Universal surveillance of vehicle movements
- Last December, Bruce Schneier documented the UK’s near-term intention to track the movement of every vehicle in the whole country, mile-by-mile. He further reported that there are (longer-term, of course) plans or hopes to track people’s personal movements, via face recognition and the like.
- Forrester Research apparently now reports (I found out via Ian Turvill) that pay-as-you-drive insurance in Europe is on the rise. This is a clever idea, for a variety of reasons, but it requires tracking almost every choice a driver makes.
- Meanwhile, cruder movement tracking is provided by electronic toll payment, something that is bound to skyrocket due to time savings, to pollution/congestion benefits, and eventually also to the benefits of time-of-day pricing, which can further reduce traffic congestion.
This is scary stuff. And we’re not going to wind up stopping it, even if we try. We can only hope to blunt its ill effects, by adopting new laws and legal principles that prevent misuse of data the government has already collected.
Unlocking fiscal from technical architecture
Martin Geddes of Telepocalypse is kind enough to call Tariff Rebate Passthrough “the first new idea I’ve seen in a long time on the stale network neutrality debate.” He goes on to express concern about the practicality of the idea, but hopefully I addressed that somewhat in subsequent posts. While there certainly are major systems to build, which I acknowledge, I don’t see why it’s worse than what would be needed if the telcos’ preferred bill successfully makes it through Congress.
| Categories: Net neutrality, Public policy and privacy | Leave a Comment |
So THAT’S why Andrew Orlowski still has a job
Good things can come from the oddest sources, like mushrooms from a guano cave. And thus an amusing and worthwhile article has appeared under Andrew Orlowski‘s byline. It’s over-the-top, of course, but hey — it IS an Orlowski piece, after all.
His basic thesis is that political bloggers feel so driven to just write that they eventually lose touch with logic, and that this plays in to the general paranoid theme in political discourse. (For some reason, he identifies paranoia uniquely with Americans, but let’s overlook that piece of silliness.) In particular, he thinks the pro-net-neutrality arguments are extremist, even as he correctly points out that the bill being rammed through Congress in their despite is horrifically anti-competitive.
| Categories: Net neutrality, Public policy and privacy | 1 Comment |
Simple legislative language for Tariff Rebate Passthrough
One of the best features of Tariff Rebate Passthrough is that, even with pricing flexibility, it can be implemented using simple legislative language. There only have to be three stipulations:
- Pricing of internet services to consumers will be based wholly on technical characteristics such as volume and quality of service, and not on the identity of the information provider, the content of the information, or the equipment (hardware or software) used by the consumer to consume it. (Actually, the telecom providers may yelp at the “hardware” clause.)
- Pricing of “last-mile” delivery to information providers will be based on those same factors only, and be in the form of standard per-byte tariffs only. Pricing will not discriminate in any way among information providers, nor among types of application.
- Telecom service vendors can’t charge two parties for delivering the same byte.
I think that’s it. Maybe I’m missing something – I’m surely no regulatory lawyer – but those three provisions seem to incorporate the essence, and the benefits, of Tariff Rebate Passthrough.
| Categories: Net neutrality, Public policy and privacy | 1 Comment |
Tariff Rebate Passthrough – achieving pricing flexibility
I’ve thought more about the one weakness so far in the Tariff Rebate Passthrough plan – pricing flexibility. Contrary to what I implied a few hours ago, I now believe that Tariff Rebate Passthrough (TRP) is fully compatible with the kinds of service pricing flexibility providers and consumers are used to or would want. To see that, let’s consider the basic kinds of telecom service pricing:
| Categories: Net neutrality, Public policy and privacy | 2 Comments |
How Tariff Rebate Passthrough would work
Dave Siegel posted a challenge to my Tariff Rebate Passthrough net neutrality proposal, claiming that technical implementation would be unduly burdensome, and also touching on the fact that consumers generally prefer flat-rate to metered pricing. I think the best response would be to spell out, in a little more detail, how it would work. Along the way, I think I can answer Dave’s (and anybody else’s) concerns. Read more
| Categories: Net neutrality, Public policy and privacy | 5 Comments |
Why I feel qualified to pontificate about public policy
Maybe I should explain why I feel motivated and qualified to hold forth at such length about public policy issues such as net neutrality, free-world privacy, authoritarian censorship, economic development, and so on.
If you’re reading here, you’re probably familiar with my software industry credentials — top-ranked stock analyst, top-tier product analyst, sometime entrepreneur, etc. If not, there’s always my official bio. But I also have some non-trivial public policy and economics chops. I spent two years at the Kennedy School of Government after getting my Ph.D. Then, turning down an assistant professorship at the Kellogg School of Management as well as research jobs at RAND and IDA, I went to Wall Street — which is, if one chooses to make it such, one heck of a further education in economics. And then in the mid/late 90s, Linda and I actually got active in the internet services market, analyzing, consulting, etc. Indeed, we even (re)wrote a few speeches for Steve Case of AOL, including some Congressional testimony.
Bottom line: Yes, I actually have some idea what I’m talking about. 
| Categories: About this blog, Economic development, Net neutrality, Online and mobile services, Privacy, censorship, and freedom | Leave a Comment |
Great debate on net neutrality
The Save the Internet folks report on a wonderful net neutrality debate. And what they have to say is totally compatible with my Tariff Rebate Passthrough proposal.
Key points:
- Prioritizing one KIND of application, like telemedicine or video downloads, over others is OK.
- Charging for that prioritization is OK.
- Favoring one PROVIDER of the SAME kind of application over another — e.g., Mayo Clinic vs. Johns Hopkins in telemedicine, or Google vs. Yahoo in search — is NOT OK.
Technorati Tags: net neutrality
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Dave Kellogg on Paris as Silicon Valley
Dave Kellogg has a long, interesting post based on his own experiences with the attempts to make Paris into a Silicon Valley (at Business Objects, of course). He comes out very negatively. Reasons include:
1. Worker culture — people don’t have the same entrepreneurial, hard-working drive in France as they do in the US. Based on what I know of Business Objects and also of Dave’s tenure there, my gut reaction is to say this is 2/3 justified, 1/3 Dave just being Dave.
2. A lack of specific skillsets. Also, a lack of connection to the most important market, the US. I agree completely, except that these considerations apply more strongly to well-established industries than they do to truly new ones.
3. A wealth tax that drives rich people, including previously successful entrepreneurs, out of France. Ouch.
| Categories: Economic development, Public policy and privacy | 1 Comment |