Over at Digital Society, Jim DeLong's Filesharing in Underdeveloped Nations: Let's Take from the Poor and Give to the Rich does a fine job of ripping apart the latest round of nonsense from the economically challenged blog TechDirt. I won't spoil the fun, but suffice it to say that Jim shreds TechDirt "arguments" with casual ease.

Jim's piece also highlights a fundamental problem with TechDirt's childish, copyright-hating worldview: TechDirt brews its venom from an ugly blend of hubris and cowardice.

In the National Law Journal, Dan Brenner's piece, Apps decision: no big deal, provides a thoughtful debunking of the hype that surrounded this summer's decision by the Librarian of Congress to exempt the "jailbreaking" of iPhones from the anti-circumvention provisions of 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a). I tried to make similar points back when the ruling was first issued, but I think that Brenner has better explained the underlying issues.

I've long been a fan of Danny Sullivan, who edits Search Engine Land, and probably knows more about search engines than anyone outside the companies that actually run them. But my respect for his wit, eloquence and perspective  has reached new heights with his latest piece:  The New York Times Algorithm & Why It Needs Government Regulation, a lampoon of the NYT's foolish call for search neutrality in an editorial yesterday, turning the Times' arguments right back at them, and pointing out the hypocrisy by which the established press often tries to deny First Amendment protection to newcomers to the speech business. Danny's post is truly a masterpiece of satire, worthy of Jonathan Swift. But one section deserves special attention:

I've been covering the search space closely for nearly 15 years, from before Google itself even existed, so I have seen these types of claims far longer and examined them in far more depth than what went into that New York Times editorial.

My guess is that the editorial staff (the staff that writes the newspaper's editorials, which are opinion pieces, which is confusing when the newspaper also has an editorial staff that writes "editorial" stories elsewhere that are supposed to be unbiased) spent about an hour or so discussing recent Google news, then someone was probably assigned to write the editorial and invested all of about three hours on it.

That's not much time or care for a major and well-respected newspaper (in many quarters) to decide the government should evaluate "fairness" when it comes to making editorial judgments in search results, be they from Google or any other search engine.

And where are the clowns?
Quick, send in the clowns…
Don't bother—they're here.
—Judy Collins/Stephen Sondheim, Send in the Clowns

Recently, Nate Anderson of Ars Technica published File-sharing has weakened copyright—and helped society. This story's title summarizes the thesis of a "new" paper by those Grokster-loving, Free-Culture-Movement Professors, Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Coleman Strumpf (collectively, "OGS"). Their "new" paper is entitled File-Sharing and Copyright. Fortunately, their non-sequitur thesis does not follow from their clown-car collection of factual, legal, economic, and historical errors that poses as "scholarship."

Indeed, I just published a blog post and a longer paper to show that those who listen to the likes of Oberholzer-Gee merely end up accusing the Government Accountability Office of decades of wrongdoing by celebrating the "positive economic effects" of criminal racketeering. The blog post is entitled, Why Copyright Industry Costs-of-Piracy Studies Correctly Ignore the "Positive Economic Effects of Criminal Racketeering; the paper is entitled, Punk'd: GAO Celebrates the "Positive Economic Effects of Counterfeiting and Other Criminal Racketeering.

Said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski on May 6th, "The [Comcast] opinion therefore creates a serious problem that must be solved so that the Commission can implement important, commonsense broadband policies..."

I'll say. It's a problem, alright. Yet the chutzpah of the ensuing NOI process - in particular, the FCC asking whether its Net Neutrality workaround to reclassify the transmission element of broadband as a Title II service is worth doing / can be done - doesn't make it any better.

PFF has just published the transcript for an event we hosted last month asking "What Should the Next Communications Act Look Like?" The event featured (in order of appearance) Link Hoewing of Verizon, Walter McCormick of US Telecom, Peter Pitsch of Intel, Barbara Esbin, Ray Gifford of Wilkinson, Barker, Knauer, and Michael Calabrese of the New America Foundation. It was a terrific discussion and it couldn't have been more timely in light of recent regulatory developments at the FCC. The folks at NextGenWeb were kind enough to make a video of the event and post it online along with a writeup, so I've included that video along with the event transcript down below the fold.

Don Kellogg, Senior Manager, Research and Insights/Telecom Practice at The Nielsen Company, has a interesting essay up over at the Nielsen Wire about smartphone competition. ("iPhone vs. Android") It includes some updated quarterly data about the state of the mobile marketplace and, once again, I am just blown away at the continuing degree of operating system (OS)-level competition.

As I have noted here before, this war among Apple, Google, Microsoft, RIM (Blackberry), Palm, Symbian, and others has actually forced me to ask if we have "Too Much Platform Competition" in this arena. App developers must now craft their offerings for so many platforms that it has become a significant developmental hassle and expense. But hey, from a consumer perspective, this is great! (For more details, see Berin's post on "The Fiercely Competitive Mobile OS & Device Markets.")

Regardless, it's still more proof that all the hand-wringing here in Washington about the state of wireless innovation is completely unfounded. It is shocking that we have this many developer platforms in play in the smartphone sector and I am still of the belief that things will eventually shake out to just 3 major OSs. So I don't expect this degree of competition to last. But that's OK, we can still have plenty of competition and innovation with fewer OSs.

Just the other day, leaders from the House and Senate said they planned on updating the Communications Act. Maybe they've finally started listening to us - we proposed doing this back in 2005, with PFF's Digital Age Communications Act (DACA). Or, perhaps the FCC's so-called "Third Way" doesn't look like the "no-brainer" that the agency spun in its press releases. Well, whatever their intentions may be, it certainly couldn't arrive at a better time.

The framing is all important, of course. Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge (ostensibly one of the groups "writing" the next Act) says Americans shouldn't worry about the FCC's "Third Way." In his view - "The government is not taking over the Internet. What the government is doing is engaging in traditional consumer protection, traditional regulation of a telecommunications service that will get people to the Internet." PK seems happy with this model - whether done at the FCC, or at Congress' hands.

Hmmm...Getting people to the Internet? Traditional, simple stuff. Sort of like strolling to the store, or peddling to the park. Or, like in childhood, making a call from tin cans and string - which is what'll result if PK and their ilk have their way.

Leo Laporte claimed yesterday on Twitter that Facebook had censored Texas radio station, KNOI Real Talk 99.7 by banning them from Facebook "for talking about privacy issues and linking to my show and Diaspora [a Facebook competitor]. Since Leo has a twitter audience of 193,884 followers and an even larger number of listeners to his This Week In Tech (TWIT) podcast, this charge of censorship (allegedly involving another station, KRBR, too) will doubtless attract great deal of attention, and helped to lay the groundwork for imposing "neutrality" regulations on social networking sites--namely, Facebook.

Problem is: it's just another false alarm in a long series of unfounded and/or grossly exaggerated claims. Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes responded:

The pages for KNOI and KRBR were disabled because one of our automated systems for detecting abuse identified improper actions on the account of the individual who also serves as the sole administrator of the Pages. The automated system is designed to keep spammers and potential harassers from abusing Facebook and is triggered when a user sends too many messages or seeks to friend too many people who ignore their requests. In this case, the user sent a large number of friend requests that were rejected. As a result, his account was disabled, and in consequence, the Pages for which he is the sole administrator were also disabled. The suggestion that our automated system has been programmed to censor those who criticize us is absurd.

Today's NYT piece by Brad Stone about Google (Sure, It's Big. But Is That Bad?) offers a superb example of how to use the rhetorical question in an article headlined to suggest that you might actually be about to write a thoughtful, balanced piece--while actually writing a piece that, while thoughtful and interesting, offers little more than token resistance to your own preconceived judgments. But perhaps I'm being unfair: Perhaps Stone's editors removed "YES! YES! A THOUSAND TIMES, YES!" from the headline for brevity's sake?

Anyway, despite its one-sidedness, the piece is fascinating, offering a well-researched summary of the growing cacophony of cries for regulatory intervention against Google, and also a suggestion of where they might lead in crafting a broader regulatory regime for online services beyond just Google. In short, the crusade against Google and the crusade for net neutrality (in which Google has, IMHO unwisely been a major player) are together leading us down in intellectual slippery slope that, as Adam and I have suggested, will result in "High-Tech Mutually Assured Destruction" and the death of Real Internet Freedom.

Ironically, this push for increased government meddling--a veritable "New Deal 2.0"--is all justified by the need to "protect freedom." But it would hardly be the first time that this had happened. As the great defender of liberty Garet Garrett said of the New Deal 1.0 in his 1938 essay The Revolution Was:

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.

Google is the "arbiter of every single thing on the Web, and it favors its properties over everyone else's," said Mr. Reback, sitting in a Washington cafe with the couple. "What it wants to do is control Internet traffic. Anything that undermines its ability to do that is threatening."