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.
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 | 6 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
| Categories: Net neutrality, Public policy and privacy | Leave a Comment |
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 |
The false dichotomy of net neutrality, and the Tariff Rebate Passthrough solution
The hot technology-related public policy issue right now (at least in the US) is of course net neutrality. Here’s my take on it:
Both sides are being too extreme, and are painting a false dichotomy. But the proponents of net neutrality are much closer to being right than the laissez-faire telecom industry advocates. The principle that should guide net neutrality policy is Tariff Rebate Passthrough. What that means is:
- Telecom providers should be allowed to charge for superior QOS (Quality of Service).
- Information providers should be allowed to subsidize those charges for consumers, e.g. as part of a general subscription, or to induce them to view advertising.
- Telecom providers should not be free to cut their own deals with information providers. They should simply pass the QOS tariff rebates through to consumers on the information providers’ behalf.
| Categories: Net neutrality, Public policy and privacy | 6 Comments |
Layer 7 stateful deep packet inspection — the privacy threat is more serious than we thought
I’ve been reading up on net neutrality, and was just hit by an unhappy realization.
The technology that’s kicked off the whole debate is Layer 7 stateful deep packet inspection. This a feature of telecom equipment, originally found only in high-end firewalls, but now evidently found throughout Cisco’s (and surely also its competitors’) product lines. In IP telecom without this feature, the equipment just sees packets of data, and perhaps header information, but can’t look at the data’s content. However, when you’re looking at Layer 7, the equipment is looking at what the application sees. Everything is visible — every record, every word. And if Cisco’s marketing materials are to be believed, all that technology exists today.
The dangers this presents in terms of privacy and censorship, whether in the basically free countries or the basically authoritarian ones, should be obvious. Fighting for freedom is more urgent than we previously realized.
Outsourcing differences by country
Stan Gibson asserts a significant cultural difference in Russan vs. Indian outsourcing. Basically, he characterizes the Indians as compliant servants, while the Russians are argumentative team members, although one quote acknowledges there are exceptions in both countries. Based on this, it appears that some companies are happier doing serious product development in Russia than in India.
At best, he greatly overstates the case. Much more product development has been done by Indian outsourcers than Russian ones, going all the way back to Release 1 of Microsoft Visual Basic. Even so, it’s a distinction worth thinking about if you’re trying to kickstart an outsourcing business (or considering using an outsourcer) in a less-commonly-used outsourcing country.
| Categories: Economic development | Leave a Comment |
How to protect our freedoms, strengthen developing economies, and make money
My Computerworld column finally came out this month, pointing back here. Only there were typos and omissions in the URLs. Also, a couple of the key notes here were incorrectly published in draft form, and got reedited. So let me summarize again, and reiterate the internal links.
1. There’s a whole section on privacy, censorship, and freedom, both domestic and abroad. You can also find a link to it in the left sidebar.
2. I proposed two modes of hands-on involvement in fighting authoritarian-government censorship and repression. One is to immediately adopt the quick-and-dirty tactics of http://www.irrepressible.info, by adding a little code to your websites. (I’ve done that already on four sites.) The other is to help me theorize about a badly needed next-generation improvement on those.
3. There’s a whole section on technology-related economic development (again, also accessible from the left sidebar), most of it added recently in connection with my preparations for or ruminations after TechLeb. The most actionable private-sector idea in the lot is probably this one.
Please help. Everybody can.
| Categories: Economic development, Privacy, censorship, and freedom, Public policy and privacy | 3 Comments |
http://irrepressible.info in practice
Four days ago, I posted advocating putting code from irrepressible.info onto your site. The goal is to fight censorship by spreading censored text across as many web pages as follows. And as you can see from the green/yellow box in the upper left of this page, I followed my own advice.
Well, here’s my very preliminary report:
1. It looks ugly, and has a pair of mandatory outgong links to Amnesty International and irrepressible.info.
2. Since I picked a small size, there isn’t much text, and even so it’s hard to read.
3. Disappointingly, what little text there is doesn’t seem to change very often beyond a fixed rotating set of snippets.
4. I can’t detect a performance impact on my sites.
Well, there’s a lot more to do, but it’s at least a start.
Terrorism prevention in practice
The following comes from a family friend, Mike Grant, who happens to work for an IT vendor, Trilogy. He’s your typical white, American-accented, personable, well-mannered, well-organized, highly intelligent, highly articulate mid-20s Johns Hopkins graduate. Read more