As our readers may know, I took over in July as Chairman of the Board of the Space Frontier Foundation. As I explained in my recent interview on The Space Show, SFF has been the leading citizens' advocacy group for space commercialization since 1988. Dedicated to promoting Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill's vision of space settlement, as described in his 1976 masterpiece The High Frontier, the Foundation has always argued that "space is a place, not a program."

We sent out the following press release on October 28, calling for a major transformation of the U.S. government's space program by which the U.S. government would buy commercial transportation to the International Space Station. We'll have more to say about this in the coming weeks.

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Space Frontier Foundation Finds Funding Source for COTS-D

The Space Frontier Foundation today called upon Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain to invest the $2 billion in new funds they have promised to NASA for reducing the "Gap" in U.S. human spaceflight (after the Space Shuttle is retired in 2010) to spur innovation and competition in America.

Foundation Chairman Berin Szoka said "It's time that our national leaders give American entrepreneurs a shot at closing this gap. Let's take the two billion dollars in the candidates' plans and fund up to five winners of COTS-D."

The NASA Authorization Act of 2008, recently signed into law by the President, directs NASA to "issue a notice of intent [by mid-April 2009] ... to enter into a funded, competitively awarded Space Act Agreement with two or more commercial entities' for transporting humans to the ISS"-the "Capability D" of NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program (or COTS-D for short). But that directive is not yet funded.

Szoka continued, "Let's have an American competition in space - to create good jobs, fuel innovation, and close the gap more quickly. With private funds matching government's investment, we can dramatically leverage the $2 billion to produce breakthroughs in a new American industry - commercial orbital human spaceflight."

Somewhere between Nick Carr's "Typology of Network Strategies" and Chris Anderson's "Four Kinds of Free" is the secret to understanding our new economy:

Carr's "Typology of Network Strategies":

1. Network effect


2. Data mining


3. Digital sharecropping, or "user-generated content"


4. Complements


5. Two-sided markets


6. Economies of scale, economies of scope, and experience

Anderson's "Four Kinds of Free":

1. Direct cross-subsidy (get one thing free, pay for another)


2. Ad-supported (third-party subsidizes second party)


3. "Freemium" (a few people subsidize everyone else)


4. "Gift economy" (people give away things for non-monetary rewards)

Of course, both Carr and Anderson are building on theories and business models previously articulated by many others. A few that come to mind:

• Carl Shapiro & Hal Varian, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (1999)


• Stan Liebowitz, Re-thinking the Network Economy (2002)


• Jeffrey H. Rohlfs, Bandwagon Effects in High-Technology Industries (2001)


• Oz Shy, The Economics of Network Industries (2001)


• Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (2006)

Debates about online privacy often seem to assume relatively homogeneous privacy preferences among Internet users. But the reality is that users vary widely, with many people demonstrating that they just don't care who sees what they do, post or say online. Attitudes vary from application to application, of course, but that's precisely the point: While many reflexively talk about the "importance of privacy" as if a monolith of users held a single opinion, no clear consensus exists for all users, all applications and all situations.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, this picture makes the point brilliantly--showing:

locations where [Flickr] users are more likely to post their photos as "public," which is the default setting, in green. Places where Flickr users are more likely to put privacy controls on their photos show up in red.

Of course, geography is just one dimension across which users may vary in their attitudes about privacy, but the map makes the basic point about variation very well. Seeing what users actually do in real life says a lot more about their preferences than merely polling them about what they think they care about in the abstract--as my colleagues TLF Solveig Singleton and Jim Harper argued brilliantly in their 2001 paper With A Grain of Salt: What Consumer Privacy Surveys Don't Tell Us (SSRN).

I just finished reading through The Economist's new 14-page special report on cloud computing, "Let It Rise" in which Ludwig Siegele provides an outstanding overview of cloud computing and why it is so important:

The rise of the cloud is more than just another platform shift that gets geeks excited. It will undoubtedly transform the information technology (IT) industry, but it will also profoundly change the way people work and companies operate. It will allow digital technology to penetrate every nook and cranny of the economy and of society, creating some tricky political problems along the way.

Even if you are very familiar with cloud computing, I recommend you take a look at the article. Anyway, while I was reading it, I was unsurprised to come across some comments from Nicholas Carr, whose new book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, is essentially an early history of cloud computing and an investigation into its effects on our economy, culture, and society. And that also reminded me that, even though I have mentioned Carr's book here several times since it was released earlier this year, I have failed to give it a dedicated review. And it certain deserves one because "The Big Switch" is easily one of the most important technology policy books of 2008.

Coincident with the news of a few days ago that Microsoft is embracing the Web even for its longtime PC-centric OS and apps, The Economist has a big special report on "cloud computing," including articles on:

- "The Evolution of Data Centres"
- "Software as a Service"
- "Connecting to the Cloud"
- "The Economics of the Cloud"
- The Effect on Business; and
- "Computers without Borders"

I'm fond of quoting Diane Mermigas, editor-at-large at MediaPost, who is one of the finest media market watchers in the journalism business today. Her latest MediaPost column offers another sobering look at the radical changing sweeping through the media marketplace today. In that article, she notes that even though we are in an era of Big Government bailouts for financial institutions and (possibly) auto makers, old media operators will be left to to fend for themselves, and many will likely die off as a result:

What we do know is there will be no federally funded bail for media, Internet, entertainment and advertising. Big media by definition is not nimble and innovative enough to simply dump what's not working, modify what can be saved, and grow what works. There isn't much that big media companies can bank on or reliably forecast moving into 2009. They are hamstrung between deteriorating traditional costs and revenues and evolving digital business models that do not offset the losses, generating less than 10% of their overall incomes. Big media isn't just being ravaged by recession; it is being sacked by a technological transformation of enormous proportions.

I discussed a lot of the forces behind the current media meltdown in my recent PFF special report, "Media Metrics: The True State of America's Marketplace." As I noted there, this Schumpeterian "creative destruction" we are witnessing today is a normal (but gut-wrenching) part of any major technological transformation, and it need not be addressed with government subsides or interference. However, the problem for many traditional media providers is, as I noted in my special report:

there's a lot of regulating still going on as well. America's media marketplace remains subject to a wide variety of regulations... These regulations limit the ability of media operators to respond to the rapidly changing market environment. If all market players were equally hobbled by regulation, perhaps this issue would be less problematic. But these rules are applied in a remarkably arbitrary fashion, with some sectors and firms (over-the-air broadcasters, in particular) being singled out for harsher regulatory treatment than others.

Some will say, "Just let 'em die. We don't need those old media providers anyway." If that's your position, so be it, but I would hope that others (especially public policymakers) would understand the radical unfairness of not giving those players a fighting chance at survival by eliminating the archaic regulations that bind their hands as the seek to reinvent themselves.

[For additional discussion, see my essay from earlier this week, "Remember Newspapers?"]

GamePolitics.com reports that there are strong signs the protracted legal battle over video game regulation in California might soon be headed to the Supreme Court. The ongoing battle deals with a California law passed in October 2005 (A.B.1179), which would have blocked the sale of "violent" video games to those under 18 and required labels on all games. Offending retailers could have been fined for failure to comply with the law.

The law was immediately challenged by the Video Software Dealers Association and the Entertainment Software Association. In August of last year, a district court decision in the case of Video Software Dealers Association v. Schwarzenegger [decision here] enforced a permanent injunction against the law. And today in Sacramento, a 3-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held a hearing in to hear additional arguments about the law. The San Jose Mercury News reports that judges seemed skeptical about the State's effort to overturn the lower court ruling and get the law enforced:

While the 9th Circuit judges did lend some support to the state, they were generally skeptical the law can survive. "What you are asking us to do is go where no one has gone before,'' Judge Consuelo Callahan said to the state's lawyer. "Admittedly, they are disgusting. But aren't you just trying to be the thought police?''

The judges also realize that every other state or circuit court that has considered the constitutionality of similar video games laws has found them unconstitutional. As I noted in my piece last year on the California law, the current legal score is "Gamers 11, Censors 0." If the Ninth Circuit does keep the injunction in place and California appeals the law up to the Supreme Court as some predict, we could be in for a historic First Amendemt case, and the first to deal with video game speech. Stay tuned!

Google has announced that it is now accepting applications from undergraduate, graduate and professional students for its summer 2009 Google Policy Fellowship. Applicants can request placement at a number of DC think tanks, including PFF.

Applications are due by December 12, 2008. The program will run for ten weeks during the summer of 2009 (June-August) and pay a $7,000 stiped. Apply today!

At first glance, it seems to me that this big settlement announced today between Google and the book publishers regarding Google Book Search sounds a lot like an ASCAP model for online book transactions. Specifically, of the key provisions of the agreement, it's this last one about the Book Rights Registry that makes me think of ASCAP:

Compensation to Authors and Publishers and Control Over Access to Their Works - Distributing payments earned from online access provided by Google and, prospectively, from similar programs that may be established by other providers, through a newly created independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry that will also locate rightsholders, collect and maintain accurate rightsholder information, and provide a way for rightsholders to request inclusion in or exclusion from the project.

That's basically what ASCAP does today, and I think this sounds like a pretty good plan for books going forward. But I also find myself wondering: Could this be the beginning of a move toward a more comprehensive online collective licensing system for other types of content as everything moves online. For example, could this model work for music? EFF has argued it could. And some in the music industry appear to be moving in that direction. (Talk about your strange bedfellows... EFF and the RIAA potentially on the same side of an issue!)

Of course, you'd need to get a lot more companies than just Google to play ball to make it work for music -- specifically, you'd need all the ISPs on board. For books, by contrast, the reason today's deal will likely work is because Google has been the only online operator with the scale and interest in putting the entire contents of so many books online. But all music is already online and much video is heading online, too. So, I think it would be much, much more challenging to make collective licensing work for music and video the way it appears it might work for books. (We'd probably need compulsory licensing instead, which I am no fan of). The key to these voluntary collective licensing systems is large, trusted intermediaries that can clear a massive volume of transactions. Google can do that for books as today's deal makes clear. It will be interesting to see if others suggest that music and video can and should work the same way. I'm skeptical, and I'm also a bit hung up on some fairness issues about how it would work, which I might touch upon in a future essay.

But I'm no copyright expert so I'd be interested in hearing what my colleagues and others think.

If you're here in D.C. next Thursday, you might want to drop by the New America Foundation to watch Jonathan Zittrain and me go at it about his important new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Our debate will take place on Thursday, November 6th from 3:30 - 5:00 p.m. at New America Foundation headquarters (1630 Connecticut Ave, NW, 7th Floor). My old friend (but frequent intellectual sparring partner) Michael Calabrese will also be speaking. Michael is the Director of New America's "Wireless Future Program" and one of the all-around nicest guys in the world of tech policy. You can RSVP for the event here.

I've been quite critical of the thesis that Jonathan sets forth in his book, and I have discussed my reservations in a lengthy book review and a series of follow-up essays here and elsewhere. (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). We've also debated his book on the an NPR-Boston affiliate station if you care to hear a preview of our debate next week. That show is online here.

I encourage you to join us for what promises to be a very interesting discussion. As I pointed out in my original review of his book, if you have never had the chance to hear Jonathan speak, you're in for a real treat. He is, bar none, the most entertaining tech policy wonk in the world.

Again, RSVP here.