June 2010

[Commentary] Apple long ago shed the image of precocious upstart. Now that its technology sets the pace for consumer gadgets, habits of secrecy and control are prompting competitors, collaborators and government to start ejecting toys from prams. There is, however, an important difference between self-interested business decisions and anti-competitive abuse of power. An early lead in an emergent market for apps is no monopoly. The iPhone is not even the most popular smartphone, let alone dominant in mobile phones generally. Apple can and should do what it likes with its own products, leaving consumers to decide if they like the outcome - and take the risk, as happened to Apple in the 1990s, that they end up coalescing around someone else's products. Indeed, the presence of a competitive market is what prompted authorities to approve Google's $750m purchase of Admob in the first place. Furthermore, given the privacy debates prompted by Facebook and Google's use of data, a backlash seems likely when the public notices advertisers tracking their mobile habits. Controlling that process is an exercise in brand protection for a maker of highly personal and personalized hardware. Apple could be less secretive about its plans and intentions, but there is no need to make it play nice.

In the wake of a series of privacy missteps by Google, Facebook and other companies, a growing chorus on Capitol Hill is calling for major online privacy legislation and Silicon Valley companies are girding for the battle.

Washington politicians say they are increasingly concerned about how Silicon Valley's treatment of personal data could infringe on constituents' online privacy. Even as Congress begins to debate a controversial bill intended to update online privacy rules, a constant drip of headlines this spring about privacy problems affecting Google, Facebook and, now, Apple, has caused several congressional committees, the Obama administration, and members of Congress from both political parties to home in on the issue. "While privacy concerns have ebbed and flowed, I think it is fair to say that they are at an all-time high now," said Jim Dempsey, vice president for public policy for the Center for Democracy & Technology.

[Commentary] Do you think you have seen that gull before? You don't suppose the TV news folks are recycling oily birds from the Exxon Valdez disaster, do you? Or that they have video files bulging with stock pathetic pelicans, glum inky crabs and sad-sack oysters?

Coverage of the BP oil spill has certainly reached marathon status, the kind of thing still likely to lead on the evening newscasts -- so likely that the networks risk evoking "oh not that again" reactions from viewers. It's an unhappy fact of TV news life: the bigger the story's significance, the longer it rules the newscasts -- and the greater the danger the public will tune out. To keep the story interesting -- and thus fertilizing to the Nielsens -- TV news turns it into another story, or several other stories, with the gulf spill reduced to background, the same way pictures of oil-covered water become mere backdrops to the shocked correspondents who speak feverishly in the foreground.

The National Broadband Plan relegates rural areas to "second class" broadband capacity and widens the so-called digital divide, a bipartisan group of 22 senators charged in a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski.

Among those who signed last week's letter were Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Herb Kohl (D-WI), Max Baucus (D-MT), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and John Barrasso (R-WY). It follows a similar House effort last month in which a bipartisan group of 42 members expressed opposition to parts of the National Broadband Plan, the FCC's decade-long agenda for getting everyone in the U.S. online and boosting broadband speeds across the country. Both letters charged that the agency is not ambitious enough with its broadband goals for rural America, especially in comparison with its targets for cities.