Regular readers know I’ve been hard on Google for wrongdoings, and think Google got off way too easy for the Safari spy hack, and for the WiSpy situation, but some of these attacks right now are silly. Youtube is a user-generated content service. As such, Google doesn’t produce what’s on there, and can only take things down if they’re breaking the law to be posted. The fact that some grandstanding Attorneys General are trying to bully Google into censoring the service, is the real troubling issue here.
This is completely different from the Adsense situation, where it was shown that people at Google were seeing sites for illegal drugs and approving them for ad revenue It’s not even comparable, and people are hoping you don’t realize that. Stop making me defend Google here!
Further, if it’s “coercive” for Google to put conditions on the inclusion of Youtube on a television, including a) correctly implementing Internet standards and b) giving it prominent placement, then trademark rights themselves are coercive, people. Again, quit making me defend these guys. Get better complaints.
Like advertising services. People are acting outraged that AT&T is going to sell aggregated, anonymized data, but this is the sort of thing Google has been doing for years, and look at all the people still using Gmail.
Continue reading »
More proof people don’t care about privacy: Google announces a service is ending, and the competitor I use to prepare Tech at Night becomes flooded to the point of unusability Wednesday night. People just don’t care what Google is doing.
The Street View WiSpy scandal didn’t scare people off, even as Texas hits Google for those offenses. Glass excites them. The shift toward human biases doesn’t raise questions. People love Google’s services, and privacy doesn’t enter into the equation. So keep regulation out.
Make sure you catch my recent RedState post on Aaron Swartz, and how the blame casting against his prosecutor is not only unfair, it’s wrong.
Continue reading »
A lot of conservatives seem to be getting behind a Hatch-Rubio bill to increase immigration for skilled individuals. No wonder Harry Reid wants to block it for partisan reasons. Have to put politics over anything else. Can’t let Republicans do a good thing.
Though I think the Senate priorities are pretty messed up. Jay Rockefeller is talking about workforce standards in the context of cybersecurity legislation. Talk about using any excuse to grow government. At least guys like John Thune recognize the need for the government and private business to work together against foreign Internet threats.
I mean, we can’t rely solely on NSA doing its best to do the right thing on its own.
Continue reading »
So Republicans checked up on the Broadband Stimulus, yet another pork barrel spending project by the President, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid: Surprise! It was a wasteful failure, like the rest of the jobless stimulus.
IP reform: I’m not optimistic of copyright reform soon, though it is a populist thing the TEA party could do against Hollywood and the joint efforts of big government and big business. But implementing loser pays against only patent trolls would be nice. But don’t forget that trademarks are completely out of hand, too.
Continue reading »
Ah, Free Press. One of my early favorite tech topics at RedState. One of the more visible George Soros-funded fronts, along with Public Knowledge. I have to say my early hits have been somewhat successful too, when Free Press completely gave up on Save the Internet as a fake left-right thing, instead fully integrating it with the Free Press extremist brand. Remember when they could fool solid groups like Gun Owners of America with their dishonest rhetoric?
I mean, they do still have language up that says “Organizations as diverse as the Christian Coalition for America, Moveon.org, the ACLU and the American Library Association have joined in support of Net Neutrality.” But, what? MoveOn, ACLU, and ALA are ‘diverse?’ Get real. Christian Coalition is the only right-wing fig leaf they have left, and Christian Coalition isn’t exactly known as a small-government group, nor a tech policy leader. Come on. I won, they lost. Net Neutrality was exposed as a single-party, left-wing effort, like so many others of the extremist Obama regulators. Time to… Move On.
Continue reading »
Sorry for the lack of Tech on Friday. I was sick and doing my best to sleep it off. I’m at about 95% now, so let’s catch up.
How do I know privacy regulation and legislation are bad ideas? Nobody actually cares. Sure, they talk like they care, but until people start taking proactive steps and act like they’re taking it seriously, I know it’s just talk. Just like how everyone says they hate Congress, but love their own representation.
So yeah, if you’re moaning about Google on your Blogger site, and emailing to your friends about it from your Gmail account, and using Google Maps to get directions to your privacy rally… I don’t take you seriously.
Continue reading »
Good news, everyone! Kay Bailey Hutchison and Senate Republicans were able to help defeat the Lieberman-Collins Cybersecurity Act once again.
Bad news, everyone! We lost the Presidential election, so President Obama is almost sure to try to defy the Congress, which won’t even pass the idea through one house, let alone both to make it a law. He’s going to try to implement this through executive order!
Meanwhile it falls to the Congress to investigate actual foreign threats in the digital theater.
Continue reading »
Long week, so long I forgot to post this Friday night. Oops. Well, better late than never.
The race for the IP revolution is on. The benefits of a modern phone system are still getting explored, even as we see AT&T go first in this direction, but of course naturally the forces of regulation oppose innovation.
Continue reading »
Rough week, huh? Me too. I’ll make this quick, since the overriding story here is we’re going to have a rough four years fighting Obama regulators.
Though we’re lucky out of touch Susan Crawford isn’t on FCC.
We begin to see the full scope of the corrupt deal going on in New Zealand: Seems that the (German) Kim Dotcom bought escape from the authorities by promising free Intertubes for New Zealanders, even as he plans a new copyright infringement service.
Continue reading »
Remember when AT&T tried to get T-Mobile’s spectrum in order to give Verizon some more competition? And how Sprint opposed that because it would heighten competition? Well now it’s turnabout. SoftBank is attempting to buy a majority of Sprint, which will in turn take a majority of Clearwire. That will give Softbank control of a large amount of US Spectrum. So AT&T wants regulatory review. Heh.
To be clear, I think it’s a good thing that firms are doing what they can to get spectrum and compete, even if I laugh at the revenge attempt going on here. In fact I think it would have been very interesting to see Softbank/Sprint/Clearwire vs AT&T/T-Mobile vs Verizon. But we’ll see what shakes out in the end.
Continue reading »