Telecom & Technology: All Articles and Books

Can Technology Save Intellectual Property Without Crippling Our Culture?

adminn — Thu, 01 May 2008 21:16:00 -0400

The easy knock on Tarleton Gillespie's Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture is that it seems dated. In walking the reader through the many issues and arguments of digital copyright, Gillespie focuses on three seminal attempts at Digital Rights Management -- the Recording Industry Association of America's failed Secure Digital Music Initiative, moviemakers' somewhat more successful efforts to lock down DVDs, and the major television networks' push to require "broadcast flags" on digital television signals. All three battles, while important, were waged years ago; more recent, equally relevant examples are touched on briefly or not at… more

The Music Industry's Extortion Scheme

Ron Tang — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 11:40:00 -0400

What would you do if a bully -- let's call him "Joey Giggles" -- kept snatching your ice-cream cone? OK, now what if Joey Giggles then told you, "If you pay me five bucks a month, I'll stop snatching your ice cream." Depending on how much you hate getting beaten up, and how much you love ice-cream cones, you might decide that caving in is the way to go. This is what's called a protection racket. It's also potentially the new model for how we'll buy and listen to music.

Let's back up for a second. Four companies (Universal Music Group,… more

Municipal Wireless Success Demands Public Involvement, Experts Say

Ron Tang — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:00:00 -0400

Most media have it wrong. Municipal wireless networks across the United States didn't stumble in 2007 -- high-profile cities where deals fell apart, such as Chicago, San Francisco and Houston, were not going to finance, own or operate their respective networks. These weren't municipal networks at all. The business model that faltered in 2007 was the "private corporate franchise" model based on the deal that Philadelphia and EarthLink agreed to in 2006. It was, in fact, the free market that failed last year -- not governments in their traditional role as the builders and maintainers of critical infrastructure.

How we… more

Broadcast to Broadband

Ron Tang — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Although much public attention has focused on the US digital TV transition -- and the resulting reallocation of analog TV channels by auction to wireless carriers -- the US Federal Communications Commission will decide how to reallocate an even larger swath of prime TV band spectrum this year: the unused “white space” between occupied DTV channels. This reallocation of unused spectrum from broadcasting to broadband permits unlicensed access for both fixed and mobile applications.

In 2002, the FCC’s Spectrum Policy Task Force recommended that spectrum efficiency and innovation could be enhanced by reallocating unused and underutilized spectrum for both flexible-use… more

What Can Microsoft Offer Yahoo?

Ron Tang — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

You'd be hard-pressed to find many things to which Peter Drucker was as openly hostile as the hostile takeover.

In his book The New Realities, he went so far as to call the gobbling up of companies in this fashion "the most serious assault on management in its history -- a far more serious assault than any mounted by Marxists."

Mind you, he made these comments in 1989, when all too many real-life Gordon Gekkos were commanding center stage. What rankled Drucker was the tendency of these corporate raiders to quickly dismantle the enterprises they'd just gotten their hands on,… more

Wikia's People-Powered Engine

Ron Tang — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

As I sat down to work on this column, I couldn't help but feel as if I should be lending my voice to the "Wikia Search stinks" chorus. After all, the Internet search engine, rolled out this month by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, didn't seem to be doing much to enhance the standing of my organization, the Drucker Institute.

When I typed our name into the search field, I got reasonably close: The top result that popped up was the Web site for our affiliate, the Peter F. Drucker & Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management. But our own site… more

Internet Era Questions for Individual Clients

Ron Tang — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The Internet has become ubiquitous for much of the population, but your clients may not be aware that their Web activities could produce tax liabilities and some may change in their individual tax status (for example, to sole proprietor). As a practitioner, you need to remind your clients to ensure that all of their Internet-related income is reported and that they are compliant with all relevant taxes. This article provides a set of questions to aid in this endeavor.

Why Ask?

Internet applications, from shopping to investing to game playing, continue to grow in size and variety. About 70 percent of individuals… more

The New Network Neutrality: Criteria for Internet Freedom

Ron Tang — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The past year witnessed an event unprecedented in modern U.S. telecommunications history. A relatively obscure telecommunications policy debate spilled outside the rarefied airs of Congressional Committees and the Federal Communications Commission’s eighth floor to rage across the Blogosphere, major newspapers, YouTube and episodes of The Daily Show. This contentious discussion centers on an issue known as “network neutrality,” defined broadly as the non-discriminatory interconnectedness among data communication networks that allows users to access the content, and run the services, applications, and devices of their choice. Timothy Wu coined the term “network neutrality” in his seminal 2003 work, “Network Neutrality, Broadband… more

Nowhere -- and No Way -- to Hide

Articles — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 16:06:00 -0500

Privacy doesn't mean anonymity. Think about that for a bit -- and get used to it.

Or if you don't like it, get a plan. But it had better be a good one.

On Oct. 23, Donald Kerr, deputy director of the Office of National Intelligence, outlined the new order of things: "Too often, privacy has been equated with anonymity; and it's an idea that is deeply rooted in American culture." Well, yes, the Bill of Rights, for instance, includes protections against "search," as well as "seizure." But that was then. As Kerr put it, "In our interconnected and wireless world, anonymity… more

Google: A Druckerian Ideal?

Articles — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:15:00 -0400

Google turned out quite a dazzling display of data recently when it released its third-quarter results: Profit jumped 46%. Revenue soared 57%. The company’s shares shot up $6.14, to more than $639 each, on the news. But it’s another set of figures that most impresses me: 17, $0, and 20%.

These refer, respectively, to the number of cafés at Google’s Mountain View (Calif.) campus; what it charges employees for all the meals and snacks eaten there; and the amount of time it encourages its engineers to carve out each week to tackle company-related projects that interest them personally but aren’t… more

After Sputnik We Aimed High, Now Our Aims Are Low

Articles — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 13:59:00 -0400

Fifty years ago today, the Soviet Union stunned the world by orbiting a space satellite, Sputnik.

In 1957, Americans felt that we might lose the Cold War if the Russians could gain the "high frontier" of outer space. Fortunately, our political system rose to the challenge, providing the world with a lesson in the power of good leadership and mobilization in a free society.

Unfortunately, we are seeing little of that "can do" spirit today. And these techno-failures are hurting us here on Earth, to say nothing of the lost horizon of American leadership in space.

Back then, the 34th president was determined… more

Trust Your Instincts?

adminn — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 14:30:00 -0400

In the raging pop culture battle between James Bond and Jason Bourne, I’m going to have to side with the latter. Not because Bond is "an imperialist and a misogynist" -- as "Bourne" actor Matt Damon has charged -- but because, debonair as he is, Bond is a hero of a different era, one in which we believed in the power of technology to do good. Sure, he had a way with people, particularly women, but the success of his exploits often relied on gadgetry that Q supplied back at headquarters, like the blue X-ray glasses in "The World Is… more

Let's Say Goodbye to the Internet Tax Moratorium

adminn — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 10:48:00 -0400

In 1998, Congress enacted the Internet Tax Freedom Act to help the Internet grow.

Congress generously used state and local government tax bases for this assistance rather than federal funds. The act imposed a three-year moratorium on state and local taxes on Internet access and multiple or discriminatory taxes on e-commerce.

Taxes already in existence on Oct. 1, 1998, were allowed to continue. Congress extended the generosity of state and local governments twice more by renewing the moratorium, which now expires Nov. 1.

With the upcoming expiration, Congress must again… more

1,100 Reasons to Hang Up

Articles — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 10:08:00 -0400

Anybody who knows anything about business, whether a Fortune 500 CEO or a kid with a corner lemonade stand, can recite the mantra: The customer is always right. So what was Sprint Nextel Corp. thinking when it told 1,100 or so wireless subscribers that it was dumping them for chronically complaining to the company’s customer-service department?

The news, which broke this week, hasn’t exactly helped Sprint’s image. ABC’s Good Morning America ran the story under a banner that proclaimed: "You Must Be Kidding!" One consumer watchdog called the company’s action "absolutely outrageous."

But, in fact, Sprint’s move was not only reasonable, it… more

E-Mail and Prozac

adminn — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:23:00 -0400

I have a theory: the more e-mail there is, the more Prozac there will be, and the more Prozac there is, the more e-mail there will be. Maybe I should explain.

Twenty millenniums ago, communication was simple. Utterances were usefully accompanied by nonverbal cues: tone of voice, facial expression, nudging your fellow hunter-gatherer in the ribs upon reaching a punch line.

Twenty years ago, communication was still pretty simple. Much of it was by phone -- no nudging, true, but intonation could help distinguish, say, wry irony from bitter resentment. Plus, when you asked a question, the answer came in… more

The New Open Society

Articles — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 04:48:00 -0500

Internet utopianism can seem so 1998. The future was silicon in the late Clinton years, when government was flatlining in petty scandal and technology stocks seemed to rise exponentially. Not only was anything possible: If you believed the mavens of Wired magazine and assorted other cyber-prophets, pretty much anything was inevitable. Soon, they assured us, people would spend more time in virtual communities than in "meatspace." Politics would be transformed by the universal pamphleteering of Netizens. Oh, and some of us would go all the way and upload our consciousness into mainframes to live forever as data. The new world… more

New Television, Old Politics

Articles — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 02:27:00 -0500

When the definitive history of the 20th century is written, America’s transition to digital TV (DTV) may come to be viewed as the classic illustration of what can go wrong with a high tech industrial policy. For more than 20 years this transition has been taking place. It has already been the subject of half a dozen books and countless popular articles, let alone thousands of pages of Congressional Testimony and tens of thousands of pages of FCC comments. Hernan Galperin, an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communications, University of Southern California, brings this story into the 21st… more

Reluctant Radicals

Articles — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 11:55:00 -0400

It is conventional wisdom that the new democratic activists of the "netroots" are strong on political tactics but don’t have much to contribute to the war of ideas. Matt Bai, writing in The New York Times Magazine, charged disparagingly that "leaders of the netroots... will tell you that Big Ideas are overrated."

This isn’t entirely fair, but let’s take the point: The better-known lefty blogs are indeed weighted toward the tactical. They argue that the liberal establishment of think tanks and advocacy groups is built on the assumption that the government wants to do good and is open to their expertise,… more

The Laptop Crusade

Articles — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 14:19:27 -0400

Yves Béhar sits at a wide worktable on the lofted second floor of fuseproject, his San Francisco design studio, surrounded by windows and whiteboards and nearly a dozen foam laptops. He is tall and tan, with a surfer’s mess of curls and the quiet, easy manner of someone who just woke up from a nap. “There are two types of projects,” he says. “There are the stylist projects -- the ones you sign with your signature. Then there are the ones that are going to be difficult.” He looks at his pile of discarded ideas, none of them much alike,… more

The Best Minds Money Can Buy

adminn — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 19:09:00 -0400

Most of us place enormous faith in our universities. We trust that they are autonomous, independent institutions committed to education, scholarship, academic freedom and the production of knowledge free from the influence of special interest groups. Right?

Wrong. In the last 25 years, the United States has given birth to a market-model university, one where professors increasingly work "for hire." Just last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that a major academic study -- which found that antidepressants were safe and effective for pregnant women -- was tainted by undisclosed conflicts of interest.

Apparently, although the study itself was financed… more