September 2012

[Commentary] In July, Craigslist sued 3Taps, a company that took Craigslist listings and made them accessible to third-party developers to make useful add-ons (like Padmapper, a site that plotted apartment listings on maps). Craigslist threw a bevy of complaints at these companies, including that they infringed Craigslist's copyrights in the listings—an odd claim, since most of those bare-bones listings aren't copyrightable in the first place, and because any copyrights would belong to the authors of the posts, and not Craigslist. Now 3Taps has filed a countersuit, alleging that Craigslist is violating antitrust laws. This fresh batch of press got me to take a look at Craigslist's terms of use again, and I found something odd—Craigslist appears to be trying to leverage its terms of use into potential copyright lawsuits.

This is the story of Facebook’s rapidly unfolding plan to take over the world, or at least the world wide web.

It’s a tale that’s been hiding in plain sight for years, and it begins with an explanation of how Facebook has reached almost a billion users. It continues with a roadmap for how the seeds of Facebook’s future growth – to two billion and beyond – have already been planted. In both cases, what matters is emerging markets in Asia, Africa, and Latin America: the striving, proto-middle class “next billion” whose first impression of the internet is often that it seems to consist entirely of a site called Facebook. By the end of this year, there will be more mobile phones on earth than people, and 73% of those phones will be something other than smartphones. Most of these phones have no data plan associated with them, and if they are capable of browsing the web at all, it’s through a protocol all but abandoned years ago in developed countries, known as WAP, which can only access websites specially tailored to it. By 2008, Facebook executives realized that one way to maintain its meteoric growth was to make it easy and free to access Facebook on devices like these, devices that in no way resembled the desktop computer for which it had originally been developed. And that’s where our story begins.

[Commentary] The Guardian’s David Leigh puts forward the idea that Government legislation should be passed for every British internet service provider to levy an annual £24 tax on their subscribers, which would then be distributed “to ‘news providers’ according to their share of UK online readership.” I have a number of issues with this proposal. Fundamentally this appears to be an older industry asking HM Government and The State to help it survive because a new industry has come along and is making it very hard for them to continue doing what they’ve always done. Some publications have made that transition in the UK and are turning a profit on their websites. Others have not been as successful, such as The Guardian. What if people do not want to have their money subsidize titles like the Daily Mail or The Sun? This wouldn’t be the same situation as the universal TV license fee which supports the BBC and involves strict regulation through the BBC Charter to cover a public service remit. Opting out of watching TV and not paying the license fee is a choice many make in the UK. Supporting a single older industry through a flat Internet tax leaves no room for an opt out. If newspapers get their cut, when will the music industry get theirs? Will book retailers demand a slice as well because the infrastructure of the internet is helping Amazon more than it helps Waterstones?

A judge has ordered the arrest of the president of Google's operations in Brazil for failure to remove You Tube videos that attacked a mayoral candidate. The order to arrest Fabio Jose Silva Coelho was issued by Judge Flavio Peren of Mato Grosso do Sul state. It was prompted by two videos containing disparaging remarks against Alcides Bernal who is running for mayor of the city of Campo Grande.