I'm just back from a sweltering week in Washington, DC, convinced that those of us who care about protecting consumers' online privacy have reason for optimism. There is growing interest in creating a "Do Not Track Me" list and mechanism to implement it.
If Verizon and Google were trying to show support for net neutrality, they sure dropped the ball today. On a conference call with media just a couple hours ago, Verizon CEO, Ivan Seidenberg began explaining how companies might want to use a different network to send information. He took offense when Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land termed it "alternative internet," but his further explanation did little to counter the naming. Here is Mr. Seidenberg's further discussion of the "alternative internet" after questioning from Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch:
I just got off a media conference call with Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg.
They announced a new policy recommendation that would kill the Internet as we know it, if implemented by FCC Chair Julius Genokowski and other policy makers.
The old "wireline" Internet that will be irrelevant in a few years? We propose a "new, enforceable prohibition against discriminatory practices" on that.
New "wireless services" (aka the entire future of the Internet)? No equivalent nondiscrimination rules for that, but we'll "create enforceable transparency rules." That way, as Americans lose access to the free and open Internet, they can visibly watch it go away.
Just in case "wireless services" doesn't encompass the entire future of the Internet, a new class of "new services" is envisioned, which Schmidt and Seidenberg actively differentiated from "the public Internet." Basically, through private contracting, big corporations could deal directly with the Verizons and AT&Ts of the world to create the next YouTube, maybe dangle it without discrimination to the public just long enough for us to be hooked, and then discriminate like hell over it. But don't worry, the FCC will "monitor the development of these services."
Google, a company that I've long admired and currently hold thousands of dollars of stock in, just "went evil."
This letter was launched last week by 5 groups that use the Internet to organize millions of Americans around issues, and are now using the Internet to save the Internet itself -- Free Press, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, MoveOn, Credo Action, and ColorOfChange.
Why did Google cut this absurd deal, one that dramatically hurts its credibility in the online space?
Plus... Breaking Up In The Digital Age... What's The Connection?
In which Adam Smith and Jane Austen both take their bows
The moment I heard about the Google/Verizon deal, I thought of Google's supposed ethic: "Don't be evil".
Ooops!
Such is virtually always the fate of marketplace enterprises. The market rewards virtue... up to a point. But it rewards vice far beyond the limits of virtue, though not indefinitely, as the recent financial crisis revealed. And when the market fails, that's when the libertarians duck out for a quick one.
Remember Net Zero? Remember when it was free? And they ran those ads where they pretended to be
defending freedom against Big Brother?
Then the business model failed.
Ooops!
Dating back several centuries, liberalism is is connected to the market, but surprisingly few people seem to realize why. It's not because the market is good, but because it holds the potential to turn even our more selfish desires toward more useful ends. This is Mandeville's Fable of the Bees:
The Fable of The Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits is a book by Bernard Mandeville, consisting of the poem The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves turn'd Honest and prose discussion of it. The poem was published in 1705 and the book first appeared in 1714.[1] The poem elucidates many key principles of economic thought, including division of labor and the invisible hand, seventy years before Adam Smith (indeed, John Maynard Keynes argues Smith was probably referencing Mandeville[2]). It also describes the paradox of thrift centuries before Keynes, and may been seen as part of the school of underconsumption.
At the time, however, it was considered scandalous. Keynes reports in his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, that it was "convicted as a nuisance by the grand jury of Middlesex in 1723, which stands out in the history of the moral sciences for its scandalous reputation. Only one man is recorded as having spoken a good word for it, namely Dr. Johnson, who declared that it did not puzzle him, but 'opened his eyes into real life very much'."[3]
In the Dictionary of National Biography, Leslie Stephen describes it as follows:
Mandeville gave great offense by this book, in which a cynical system of morality was made attractive by ingenious paradoxes. ... His doctrine that prosperity was increased by expenditure rather than by saving fell in with many current economic fallacies not yet extinct. Assuming with the ascetics that human desires were essentially evil and therefore produced "private vices" and assuming with the common view that wealth was a "public benefit", he easily showed that all civilization implied the development of vicious propensities....
Keynes observes that this is a precursor to his theory of effective demand. He notes that the book describes the paradox of thrift-showing that a community that forsakes luxury for savings achieves neither.
But, of course, the fact that the market can turn private vices into public virtues doesn't mean that it only and invariably does so. Nor does it mean that this obviates any need for straight up public virtue--as should be exceeding clear from Adam Smith's second most famous book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which develops the Scottish Enlightenment's theory of benevolence, pioneered by Francis Hutcheson, but which Smith put on a more empirical foundation (following the lead of the most famous Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, David Hume).
What do Australia, Brazil, India, the United States and Britain have in common? This week, Google named each of these nations among the list of countries that most often contact it with requests for content removal and user data. Google's disclosure is a bold step towards quantifying this trend. Whether it leads to greater protection of user privacy and free expression on the Internet will depend on the policies that guide the companies' responses to these government requests. But for now this move should prompt other companies to consider how to be more transparent about the censorship restrictions they face.
CRUSH - Bringing you the latest in social media news in four minutes or less. Become a fan onFacebookand get your daily crush atwww.commonsensenms.com
Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that the massive lines outside the Apple store have been for the much anticipated, release of the iPad. With over 450,000 sold, it appears that having the iPad will be as commonplace as the iPod. But while there are already 3,000 iPad-specific apps available, there is one thing noticeably absent - Adobe Flash. Apple has banned flash from any of its iPhone and iPad apps, instead choosing only programs developed in HTML5.
Another media mogul Apple is taking a bite out of? Google. Apple is challenging Google's online advertising dominance with the introduction of the iAd platform, which allows advertisers to develop interactive ads within another application. Although Apple CEO Steve Jobs has concluded it won't be able to compete with Google's search advertising, he is hoping Apple can become the leader in the mobile advertising sphere.
The war on climate change is heating up as the NRDC Action Fund rolled out its new media campaign to one-by-one get the 68 Senators who are not actively pushing for comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation to get in the game. And Senators, if you think they aren't serious, just look at the recent activity towards target number one, Scott Brown of Massachusetts...
While the NRDC Action Fund works on the Senate, fifteen-year old Parker Liautaud is showing his commitment to the environment by skiing to the North Pole. His expedition, funded by none other than General Electric, is in hopes of becoming the first person to check in at the North Pole on Foursquare, which will earn him the coveted "Last Degree" badge.
Freedom of speech has been not only a liberty our country holds with pride, but also the source of controversy when it comes to media. Most recently, the forces for a free and open internet have been dealt a blow by the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C., taking away the FCC's power to move forward in it's plans to get more Americans connected to a faster and cheaper internet, and potentially allowing Internet service providers to block internet content they don't like. Luckily this future isn't set in stone, and a majority vote of FCC commissioners could give the power needed to both protect consumers and close America's digital divide. Go to savetheinternet.com to lend your support to this important cause.
The latest news from Twitter is bringing applause from the business community, as the site's plans for a huge redesign shows a greater emphasis on data. Hopefully this will allow better insight into solving the riddle that has plagued many of us, Tweet R-O-I.
And the quest to solve new media riddles brings us to the CRUSH of the Week, where we highlight a number of individuals who are moving up in the world after making the leap from old to new media. Proving once again that the future where new media rules the day, well, is now.
A student at an American university Googles "Tiananmen Square" from her dorm room. Among the hundreds of hits that will surface are photographs and reports stemming from the 1989 protest that followed the death of Chinese pro-democracy official Hu Yaobang. Scrolling down, she will learn that Chinese troops killed hundreds of protesters who were gathered in Tiananmen Square to voice their support for democracy and call for an end to government corruption.
A quick digest of the week's social media news with a side of fun? You're welcome. Introducing CRUSH, the weekly web-show that takes the news on the social media newsladder and crushes it down to reveal the gems.
In this weeks' edition, we discuss the coincidence of Google releasing Buzz at about the same time they struck a deal with the NSA to share info. No relationship - just like Glenn Beck getting a show on Fox the day before Obama was inaugurated.
Facebook, meanwhile made changes to its privacy settings allowing users more control of what info is shared. That won't help people who choose to share their info though. With the growth of location sharing, there is a new website that points out a nagging issue with letting people know where you are all the time.
On the political side of thigs, this past week marked the one year anniversary of the signing of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Organizing for America released this video to mark the occasion, and the House Committee on Education and Labor realeased a great video as well. This is not the first time the Ed and Labor committee has turned to creative webvideos to spread a message, and we hope it will not be the last.
Sarah Palin was asked what she thought the biggest threat to America is, and when her supporters shouted 'Obama' she felt the need to clarify that they had said it, not she. She didn't correct them though. If Mrs. Palin cared about 'those little facty things' she and her supporters might want to thumb through the Quadrennial Defense Review, which catalougues the various security threats to the nation as determined by, well, the people who spend their careers assessing threats to our nation.
Finally, this is from Ben Whitehair on Facebook, and it is hilarious:
5 steps to an AWESOME day: Step 1: Go to google maps... www.google.com/maps Step 2: Search for 39 Rugdeveien, Bergen, Hordaland, Norge Step 3: Zoom in until you get to street view Step 4: Look to the left of the truck and see two men in scooba gear Step 5: Click to make the truck go down the road and watch the men chase the truck....
As seen in the chart below, that's been making the rounds, the stimulus is working. The Obama Administration, using numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is touting that the number of jobs lost is lessening.
This is great news, of course, but we must ensure that new jobs are equitably distributed. That's why it's discouraging to hear that five Silicon Valley companies successfully fought a Freedom of Information request for gender and race information on their employees.
Apple, Applied Materials, Google, Oracle, and Yahoo succeeded in rebuking the request from the San Jose Mercury News with the argument that "commercial harm" would be done and business strategy would be revealed to competitors.
This week, the Chinese government announced that China's economy had expanded by a stronger-than-anticipated 10.7 percent in the last quarter of 2009 and that it had grown 8.7 percent for the entire year. This news, however, was not greeted with relief but with the skepticism that has typically met such news emanating from China in recent years. The Wall Street Journal ran a story on its front page with the headline "China Seeks to Tame Boom, Stirs Growth Fears."
I have a story today that comes from my predilection to "self-syndicate", meaning that I post my stories far and wide, in the same way a newspaper columnist is syndicated nationally-or beyond.
After I post, I know others will also post my stories to their sites, a topic that was itself the subject of a recent conversation.
To keep track of it all, I use the Google...but I recently wondered if that's actually the most effective tool for the job-or not-so as an experiment I recently challenged several search engines to go out and seek the same search term.
We find out today...and the results are, indeed, interesting.
With a slew of major companies reporting earnings so far, it's clear that expectations were severely skewed to the negative. Once again, Wall Street analysts overshot - this time to the downside. The substantial margin expansion reported by Intel; the higher-than-anticipated profitability of IBM; and the blow-out quarters of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan all stand in contrast to sentiment just a few weeks ago, which was grim and getting grimmer. So what happened?
First, the robust results of some of the banks so far is the result of trading revenue and changes in accounting rules rather than a sudden improvement in losses from bad loans. Still, income is income, and the more they generate, the easier it will be to absorb those losses from consumer, commercial and business loans that will continue to go sour for some time.
Building a new foundation requires a lot of heavy machinery. Bulldozers to clear the land, extractors to dig the foundation, concrete-mixers to pour the cement and trucks to haul the raw materials. So perhaps it's appropriate that Jim Owens, the CEO of Caterpillar will be at the White House tomorrow for the first meeting of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB). The group includes some of America’s leading thinkers, business executives, and academics, including the CEOs of GE, UBS, and Google. (full list here)
The Board was created by President Obama in February to provide an outside-the-Beltway perspective on how we can recover from the financial crisis and build a new foundation for the American economy. "New Foundation" is emerging as the catch-all phrase to describe Obama's domestic policy agenda, similar to FDR's "New Deal" or Johnson's "Great Society" as a recent New York Times article points out. It's a good term, capturing both the shaky and unsustainable foundation of our past economic growth and framing out the kind of economy we need to build for the long-term. We are well past the time for patchwork solutions. We must rebuild and we must rebuild the right way.
A lot of nonprofits are still just starting their outreach on the web. When someone from these groups needs a quick, short answer on where best to simply get started, I invariably direct them to Google for Non-Profits.
Launched approximately a year ago, Google opened up a one-stop shop featuring an array of tools. Beginners will have heard of many of the tools (e.g. YouTube) but the site serves as a reminder that these tools can be harnessed for nonprofit communications and advocacy.
The site is also replete with tutorials on how to use each of Google services. Some of the highlights are:
I've been thinking about the comments I received to my Google and Facebook posts, as well as some related posts and articles (the article's worth reading, btw) by other people from the last few days. I want to make one more point about this privacy stuff, and then move on for a while
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and trucks to haul the raw materials. So perhaps it's appropriate that