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Phil Bond, currently the under secretary for commerce for technology at the Department of Commerce, is leaving his post to join Monster Worldwide as SVP of government relations. Monster Worldwide owns the big online recruiting firm and blimp operator Monster.com.
Bond was considered by many to be the most visible and active tech policy leader in the Bush Administration.
The full press release is here.
When there is work to be done bashing unbelievable senatorial statements about the Internet or continuing to throw logs on the Silicon Valley vs. Hollywood fire, it's easy to forget that much of tech policy is about creating an environment so the industry can sell more stuff (and selling more stuff equals more jobs and more room for innovation and so on).
One smart, tangible way to sell more stuff is to open the market to Central America. That's what the currently debated CAFTA is all about. The San Jose Mercury News has more on who is for it and who isn't...
CIO magazine says we need one in an extensive piece.
CIO suggests the Czar should:
The piece lists the competitiveness threats that the U.S. if facing in the global market -- particulary from China, the defragmentation of tech policy management in the federal goverment and provides a useful look back and past efforts where the the government and industry worked together to combat competive threats (tech policy existed prior to 1995, after all).
Also, the story provides some interesting factoids from a survey of CIOs...
It's evident that public policies impacting Internet companies are
growing exponentially in scale and impact every year. How are two
Internet leaders responding? A look at Google and Yahoo!....
Last year, around the time of the Gmail privacy imbroglio, Google made its first full-time government affairs hire by naming Andrew McLaughlin its Senior Policy Counsel. Andrew is an Internet Policy deep thinker who played a key role in getting ICANN off the ground and through its critical formative first few years. That job and his role as a senior fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society translate into a lot of good contacts in the (often self-proclaimed, but nevertheless important) "Internet Community". Andrew's Harvard J.D. and Yale B.A. also nicely fit the Google hiring profile. Andrew is based in NYC, but travels fairly extensively.
Around the beginning of the new year, Google grabbed...
While in Australia, Vint Cerf (ICANN chairman, MCI technologist and a father of the Internet) says that Hollywood has been wispering sweet nothings about utilizing BitTorrent to distribute movies.
From CNET Australia:
"I know personally for a fact that various members of the movie industry are really getting interested in how to use the Internet--even BitTorrent--as a...method for distributing content. I've spoken with several movie producers in the last month."
"(The entertainment industry) are only just now starting to come to honest grips with the possibilities of using the Internet."
And, I know that while working with TechNet we often get questions why the group is pushing greater broadband speeds to spur innovation. Answer: Australian pub "The Age" quotes Cerf saying:
"With BitTorrent and a gigabit internet connection - not yet here, but it will come - you could download an hour of digital TV in 15 seconds."
It's not hard to imagine what else you can do with that power.
And, one of the most amazing, but least mentioned Interenet factoids, Cerf said that:
BitTorrent now accounted for more than half of all traffic on the internet, more than double the volume of January 2004.
The transcript of the MGM v. Grokster Supreme Court oral arguments are available. Dowload the pdf here...Download MGMvGrokster.pdf
Or puruse some highlights below. It's very interesting stuff -- even if you aren't a policy wonk....
-----
JUSTICE KENNEDY (speaking to the RIAA’s lawyer): It's not clear -- it's
not clear to me from your brief, focusing on the contributory aspect of
it, not -- and not the inducement part of it it's not clear to me from
your brief what your test is. What do we tell the trier of fact, that
if there is a substantial part of the use which is noninfringement, any
part?
MR. VERRILLI: Here's what I -- here's where I think the test
JUSTICE KENNEDY: Leaving aside the inducement.
MR. VERRILLI: Right. Here's what I -- here's what we think the test is
on the -- what we'll call the Sony aspect of the case, that it's --
the question here is -- Sony poses to us -- is really a touchstone
kind of question, not a numerical kind of question. The question under
Sony is whether this is a business that is substantially unrelated to
infringement. In other words, are they building their business on
supporting legitimate activity, or, instead, are they building their
business supporting infringing activity?...
Globally respected NYT superbrain Tom Friedman has a new book out called "The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century." It's required reading for anyone who cares about innovation and America's standing in the new, global economy. The book shows real examples of how India, China and others have taken advantage of the massive spending during the Internet boom on networking, software and devices to "flatten" the world (or level the playing field.) One brief excerpt:
... therein lies a tale of technology and geoeconomics that is fundamentally reshaping our lives -- much, much more quickly than many people realize. It all happened while we were sleeping, or rather while we were focused on 9/11, the dot-com bust and Enron -- which even prompted some to wonder whether globalization was over. Actually, just the opposite was true, which is why it's time to wake up and prepare ourselves for this flat world, because others already are, and there is no time to waste.
More than anything, Friedman's book is a call to action. Now. No really. NOW.
A David Kirkpatrick Fortune intervew with John Chambers expounds...
Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers wants the U.S. to launch a moon-shot-scale effort to revamp our educational system. He told me this earlier this week... how the U.S. could lose its competitive edge if we don't do more to encourage young Americans to study engineering and science. Chambers had asked to weigh in after reading the columns. “We have to be realistic,” he says. “We’re losing the battle.”
This is why Chambers and other TechNet members are calling for policy makers to adopt its Innovation Policy Agenda. But, the group is also very open to new, innovative ideas. One comes from former House Speaker (and future Presidential candidate?) Newt Gingrich....
The LA Times reports today on the interesting position that the equally interesting start-up Grouper finds itself in. Essentially Grouper allows its members to join shared-affinity groups of no more than 30 people. In these groups, you could share, say, videos of family members with distant relatives. Or, you could stream (not upload/download) the best micro-tech beats from Riga with others into that particular genre. And, so on. It's more friend-to-friend than peer-to-peer.
These semantics don't seem to impress some in the entertainment industry. Says a big music publisher in the Times' piece:
"I'm not so sure that I see a big distinction between this and, say, Grokster because you're at 30 people. Where are you going to draw the line at what constitutes unlicensed use of copyrighted music?"
A Grouper founder counters:
"We try to limit the opportunities for people to use our technology in ways that might put us in legal hot water."
The Times' continues/concludes....
Some college students thought they had found nirvana thanks the high-powered, super-fast "Internet2" network on college campuses (LA Times: "Users connect to each other through Internet2, an accelerated version
of the Internet that reaches more than 300 universities, government
agencies and other institutions".) After all, according to the Associated Press, you could download "The Matrix" in 30 seconds (Keanu says: "whoa").
Much of this file sharing is enabled by a company called i2Hub. The Washington Post says about i2Hub in a Wednesday story...
