Policy, 2013.
Regulation 2.0, trust & safety, net neutrality, the law catching up
- Yahoo! User First Conference: Winning on Trust
“It is trust, more than money, that makes the world go round.” — Joseph Stiglitz, In No One We Trust The week before last, I visited Yahoo! to give the keynote talk at their User First conference, which brought together big companies (Google, Facebook, etc), startups (big ones like USV portfolio com...
- The Regulation 2.0 challenge
Last night, I had the pleasure of joining Meetup.com GC David Pashman‘s NYU Law class on Internet and Business Law for Technology Companies as a guest speaker. Over the course of the past semester, David’s students have played the role of internet company General Counsel, working on a variety of le...
- Playing Hardball
It seems like everywhere I look right now, people are playing hardball. I.e., taking tough / extreme positions and sticking to them ferociously. The showdown in congress over the budget and Obamacare is one case. The republicans have shown that they are willing to take it to the wall, and the Dems ...
- T-Corps and the Community IPO
Janelle Orsi has an article in Shareable that should be of interest for anyone following the “sharing economy” (or “peer economy”, or whatever you want to call it). It tackles one of the most difficult and interesting problems facing sharing economy platforms: the relationship (technically speaking,...
- Chromecast, Net Neutrality and the Rise of New Gatekeepers
For the past few weeks, I’ve been enjoying starting to use my new Chromecast. For those who don’t know, Chromecast is Google’s new internet-video-to-tv device — plug it in, then stream web content from any device to your TV. The Chromecast experience has been eye opening, and it perfectly illustrat...
- Why It’s Expensive to be Poor (And Why It Shouldn’t Be)
I spent the day yesterday at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in DC, at an event discussing mobile payments and related innovations and regulatory issues. Naturally, this is a big issue, with the huge rush to mobile everything, the continued expansion of software-powered web businesses, and ...
- PDF NYC: Powered By Us: Architecting Policy for a Connected World
Yesterday I gave a talk at this year’s Personal Democracy Forum. For those who don’t know it, PDF is a great event, and is now in its 10th year of bringing together the community of folks working at the intersection of tech, politics, and civics. You can see all the talks from yesterday (and today...
- History’s Best Innovation Death-Knell Quotes
I am working on my presentation for this week’s Personal Democracy Forum, which is looking to be a great event. My talk is entitled: “Powered by Us: Architecting Policy for a Connected World”, and I’m going to be talking about the policy implications of peer networks on the web. We can think of “th...
- Schumer Taking a Whack at Patent Trolls
Today I’ve got a post up on the USV blog about Senator Chuck Schumer’s Patent Quality Improvement Act, and the problem of software patents and patent trolls in general. The PQIA would make it easier and cheaper to defend against frivolous patent infringement suits. This isn’t everything we need to ...
- Antilockdown
Matthew Yglesias has a good piece up this morning on the immigration debate in the wake of the Boston bombings. He points out that historically, as we’ve tightened our border lockdown, we’ve not decreased illegal immigration, we’ve just made the coyote industry more lucrative. In my favorite line...
- Leading with Policy: Uber’s Ridesharing Strategy
Over the weekend, Christina pointed me to Uber’s new policy white paper on ridesharing. In a nutshell, Uber has decided to compete (with Lyft, Sidecar and others) in the ridesharing space, and will use a framework for deciding how and where to do that, based on the perceived regulatory friendliness...
- Google Fiber and Competition
It’s been pretty awesome to watch the roll out of Google Fiber. For those who haven’t been following, Google is piloting a program to deliver gigabit internet service (symmetrical — equal speeds for uploads and download), starting with Kansas City and coming soon to Austin, TX. This is important and...
- Fixing the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is a law that intends to protect computer systems from intruders and criminals. For those that haven’t been following, this is also the law that Aaron Swartz was prosecuted under for downloading too many academic papers at MIT. Right now, Congress is considering up...
- The Freedom to Tinker
One of my favorite advocates for “open innovation” is Ed Felten. Today, Ed has a post up that looks at some of the positive recent developments in the “freedom to tinker” movement — from advances in cell phone unlocking, to the response to Aaron Swartz’ passing, to the Kiartsaeng case (which affirms...
- Connected Governance
This week saw the publication of two very thoughtful articles on the impact that networks are having on society, and what that means for the future of governance. The first was Catherine Bracy and Jim Pugh’s What’s Progressive About ‘Peer Progressives’? and the second was Om Malik’s Uber, Data Darw...
- We Heart WiFi
Today at SXSW, we are launching a Wi-Fi network + advocacy campaign called We Heart WiFi. Fred and Albert both have posts up about it this morning. Over the coming weekend, folks at SXSW will be able to hop on to one of our free “Super Wi-Fi” hotspots. The “super” part is that each of… Continue re...
- Wanted: A Dashboard for Internet Citizenship
One thing I’ve wanted for a long time now is a dashboard that helps me track the wide array of tech policy issues I follow. One place where I could check, every morning, to get a sense of what issues are trending & developing, what longer-term issues are brewing, what specific milestones are approac...
- NYC Taxis and Regulation 2.0
This week, the NYC’s black car association (limos and car services) filed suit to block the e-hail pilot that was set to begin today. The argument is that there has traditionally been a formal divide in NYC between taxis you hail on the street (yellow cabs) and cars you reserve in advance (black ca...
- Design, Policy and Infrastructure for Great Experiences
I consider myself an accidental policy person. In other words: I didn’t set out to study and understand how our policy decisions impact the world we live in. Rather, I came at it from the perspective of design and experience (both real world and virtual) and ended up backing into the policy implica...
- Grokking Spectrum
One of the more important, more contentious, and more complicated tech policy issues is radio spectrum allocation. It’s an issue I don’t have a lot of background experience in but have been learning a lot about lately. It’s a hot topic right now because the FCC is about to hold incentive auctions to...