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Google Goes to Washington
DIY News writes "Google has hired a lobbyist in Washington D.C. to influence the nation's laws governing the Internet, telecommunications and copyrights. Google sees a presence in Washington as a necessity as government becomes more involved in the Net's development. Among its efforts, the government has worked to shield private U.S. companies from demands by the United Nations and other countries for multilateral control of the Net."
Google.gov coming to a website near you!
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
Maybe they can get some of the outdated and impractical copyright laws changed. I imagine they've probably got enough dirt on every member of Congress to get things done.
Is there nothing they can't do?
I'm sorry, but every time I read "X Goes to Washington" all I can think of is an electic pencil sharpener. That must have hurt.
Google googles google. Google is not just a search engine. Google features many excellent services such as Google Mail, Google Froogol, Google Maps, Google Woogle, Google Choogle and Google McNoogle. Google is implementing a new alternative to Paypal. Google is building their own internet to replace the existing one. Google is releasing a new office suite. Google is releasing their own brand of Linux. Googley woogley woo!
A progressive company with fairly reasonable takes on copyright and employment that isn't going to be lobbying from a position of entitlement-because-we've-always-made-money-the-sa me-way? They'll be so lonely... Nobody will want to get drunk on the steps of the Capitol with them except the Kennedy's.
Quite frankly, I'm surprised a company with that kind of revenue stream DIDN'T have a lobbyist in washington.
I will now redundantly add my name to the end of my post. You know, in case you forgot me or something.
So this week is google good or evil.... I can never keep up.....
Google sucks, but at least they suck less than others and I think their lobbyists are probably less evil than others.
Ok, so this week they appear to be 'Not Evil' in America and edging towards 'Evil' everywhere else.
Can't let no dirty furr'iners get their hands on the Internets after all.
Kevin
Maybe the government is in search of ET.
Mimes are evil, I hate them.
I didn't see this mentioned in the article at all. Please somebody show me where that is stated. Is the submitter just making this up out of his ass? And anyway, what the fuck does it have to do with google
And besides, that statement makes absolutely no fucking sense whatsover. How in God's Green Earth can the US government shield US companies in the DNS fight? They're no involved.
The submitter is obviously trolling to instigate yet another US vs. the world fight since US-bashing is so popular on slashdot. It's such a poor and transparent ploy.
Granted they haven't done anything yet. But simply by buying governments, they make it so that in order not to be evil, their politics have to agree with mine, which means they won't agree with someone else. And why would they agree with me? Hiring lobyists is clearly the kind of thing they had to do to placate shareholders, who only care about money and would see nothing wrong if Google elected a president to do nothing but take money from poor people and give it to Google. It seems like because of this effect, it's really hard for a publicly traded company to stay "Non-Evil" (tm) for long.
Humanists in America just appointed a new lobbyist to represent
athiest biews in Washington. I heard these days everyone is trying to buy power
in DC because the currency is rising rapidly. Providing the salary apropriate for an
experienced political fixer plus the enormous
costs of travel and expenses make it no trivial matter. To be in this game you need big funding.
The sad thing is this is a sign that government over there is no longer representative. Companies,
campaign groups and NGOs in the USA all have to stump up lots of cash if they want a voice. It really
looks like a system of 'paid for government' from here. Google may well acheive many of their
aims but the fact remains, it is not democracy or even feintly representative government.
Question is:
How can I have a share on this?
In many countries this is illegal for obvious reasons.
The article title is misleading. Google has had lobbyists on tap in Washington for quite awhile. Google is is also a member of trade groups (e.g. - NetCoalition) which do a substantial amount of lobbying on behalf of the search/tech/ad/etc industries. They're opening an actual government relations office now - a big step up from hiring a few lobbyists who split their time with other clients.
Senate lobbying disclosures here.
House lobbying disclosures here.
see my above rundown of the google stories in the last week. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=164702&cid=137 46380
:( [ i like BSD :P ], time to give them there own section indeed i think.
They get more news than BSD
XML - A clever joke would be here if
I know, I know. It's been mentioned before, but I thinking it's important not to forget:
With Google's pervasiveness into cataloging the web and email, what are the chances that law enforcement would ask for your records to investigate you without telling you why and banning you from telling anyone else about it? News search.
What are the chances law enforcement would commandeer Google in the interest of "fighting terrorism"?
Just think about it, that's all.
Google goes to Washington
10/06/2005 07:09:00 AM
Posted by Andrew McLaughlin, Senior Policy Counsel
It seems that policymaking and regulatory activity in Washington, D.C. affect Google and our users more every day. It's important to be involved - to participate in the policy process and contribute to the debates that inform it. So we've opened up a shop there. The first member of our Washington team is Alan Davidson, a veteran thinker and advocate for issues we care about.
Our mission in Washington boils down to this: Defend the Internet as a free and open platform for information, communication and innovation. OK, that sounds a little high and mighty, so let me break it down into something a bit wonkier with a sampling of the U.S. policy issues we're working on:
Net neutrality. As voice, video, and data rapidly converge, Congress is rewriting U.S. telecommunications laws and deregulating broadband connectivity, which is largely a good thing. But in a country where most citizens have only one or two viable broadband options, there are real dangers for the Internet: Should network operators be able to block their customers from reaching competing websites and services (such as Internet voice calls and video-on-demand)? Should they be able to speed up their own sites and services, while degrading those offered by competitors? Should an innovator with a new online service or application be forced to get permission from each broadband cable and DSL provider before rolling it out? Or, if that's not blunt enough for you, what's better: [a] Centralized control by network operators, or [b] free user choice on the decentralized, open, and astoundingly successful end-to-end Internet? (Hint: It's not [a].)
Copyrights and fair use. Google believes in protecting copyrights while maintaining strong, viable fair use rights in this new digital age. We support efforts by the U.S. Copyright Office to facilitate the use of orphan works (works whose rights-holders can't be found), while fully respecting the interests of creators. We applauded the Supreme Court's carefully calibrated decision in the Grokster case, but worked to defeat legislation that would have created new forms of liability for neutral technologies and services like Google.
Intermediary liability. As a search engine, Google crawls the Internet, gathering information everywhere we can find it. We're a neutral tool that allows users to find information posted by others - like a continuously updated table of contents for the Internet. Not surprisingly, we don't believe the Internet works well if intermediaries and ISPs are held liable for things created by others but made searchable through us. That's why Google will continue to oppose efforts to force us to block or limit lawful speech; instead, we focus on providing users the information, tools, and features (such as SafeSearch) they need to protect themselves online.
This is just a taste. We're also engaged in policy debates over privacy and spyware, trademark dilution, patent law reform, voice-over-Internet-protocol (VOIP) regulation, and more. The Internet policy world is fluid, so our priorities will surely morph over time. And, of course, Google is a global company. In a future post, we'll introduce you to some of the policy issues we're confronting outside the U.S.
I can't find it in TFA so was it included by the DIY News or CowboyNeal?
Anyway, does the author mean to say Google would rather not be protected by the Washington government of the day?
Personally I find commercial interests should be banned to get involved in politics at any level, in a democracy they don't have voting rights so it's none of their business.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
"Google sees a presence in Washington as a necessity as government becomes more involved in the Net's development." So.... google goes and lobbies to further involve the government in the Net's development - thereby lending even more weight and leverage to the very phenomena that caused them to hire some weasel out of washington in the first place - brilliant. Don't feed the Government. It only encourages them.
As a side note for non-US citizens: in America corruption has been legalized in the form of campaign contributions. To get elected, politicians must spend vast sums of money on TV advertising. The airwaves that get TV to the masses nominally belong to "the people" but are sold off to major corporations such as GE for a pittance. The corportations then create programming that desperately pursues a mass audience (i.e. quality is not enough, as in the case of Firefly, cancelled before even finishing it's 1st season). The corporations then sell that mass audience back to the politicians in the form of short adverts. The adverts are extremely expensive but the experience of the past half century has consistently shown that the frequency of adverts has a vital role in winning office.
This is great for the corporations because, far more importantly than the revenue that they earn from this exploding advertising spend, it means that no politician has a realistic chance of getting into power unless he is getting lots of corporate campaign contributions (corporate contributions dwarf personal) and, therefore, no representative of the people will ever be able to truly work in the people's interests. Both of the main American parties are equally dependent on this system and, therefore, the only real differences that can exist between them are presentational.
The problem with Microsoft was that they got big so quickly that they didn't have time to take the hint and assume their role in this particular circle of corruption. One of the first things they did when the Clinton administration turned on them was to hire the most expensive lobbyists they could find and start spraying contributions in all directions., guaranteeing that next adminstration, Republican or Democrat, would step down the legal attack.
Google is making sure that they don't make the same mistake.
Yeah OK Microsoft is the Evil empire, but remember the Evil Empire brought you Home PC's Free Internet browsers, Human Friendly Operating systems etc.. and yeah they don't stick to Standards, but again they mostly do the standard and more as most of the little tricks that MS put in are then adopted by Open Source Developers etc.... But now its a different time and its Google time, google Free this, free that but not free of advertisements. Also remember that most Services on the T'Internet start free to gain the customer base. Lets see where google goes before we start proclaiming Google is good and MS is bad. don't get me wrong, I don't support MS i have just been the the business long enough to remember what it was like before Windows.
http://luckyredfish.com
I'm in the Army currently, and my office computer has access to a bunch of Department of Defense internal networks that suposedly has all the data I could ever want. The problem is it's poorly indexed. So, if I need a particular obscure form or technical manual, it can be near impossible to find. What scares me is that I can often go to Google and find the data I want (or at least a link to a secure server with the data).
google.gov may seem silly to those in the private sector... but if Google did index private government and military sites, and allowed access only to authorized individuals, I wouldn't complain. Heck, I'd be happy at my new efficiency.
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
Buy your congressman today !
The Dutch will inherit the earth. If not, we'll settle for a bit of ocean. Beta delenda est!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Among its efforts, the government has worked to shield private U.S. companies from demands by the United Nations and other countries for multilateral control of the Net."
Says who, and why?
It seems to me that a multilateral (global) control of the dns servers could only be a good thing for global companies.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Not a huge deal people... Yes, lobbyists can be bad... I don't know who is looked up to more... pimps, used car salesmen, crack dealers, or lobbyists... ... but... eff also has lobbyists, there has to be some linux centered lobbyists around d.c... it is a sad fact that money buys power and our congress is cheap.. I am surprised though it took this long to get google to have a three person office inside the beltway...
I just hope they can stop some of the insane things that other lobbyist try to put through.. like flags on digital tv content... bad congresscritter bad... sit in a corner in timeout for two minutes.
How many years will it take before Google becomes so ubiquitous that it will replace Microsoft as everybody's object of hate?
Or will it become the good big boy on the block?
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
"Net neutrality. As voice, video, and data rapidly converge, Congress is rewriting U.S. telecommunications laws and deregulating broadband connectivity, which is largely a good thing. But in a country where most citizens have only one or two viable broadband options, there are real dangers for the Internet: Should network operators be able to block their customers from reaching competing websites and services (such as Internet voice calls and video-on-demand)? Should they be able to speed up their own sites and services, while degrading those offered by competitors? Should an innovator with a new online service or application be forced to get permission from each broadband cable and DSL provider before rolling it out? Or, if that's not blunt enough for you, what's better: [a] Centralized control by network operators, or [b] free user choice on the decentralized, open, and astoundingly successful end-to-end Internet? (Hint: It's not [a].)"
Therefore all lobbyists are mimes.
Companies, by definition, exist if they make money. As they get larger, and loose their monopoly posistion(derived eithr from patents or superior technology that is hard to copy) and become more subject to market and regulatory forces, all companies that start good become just another company; that is, it is easier to make money by buying some congressman then by coming up with new products. IT is easier to dump toxic waste into the river in the third world then act responsibly; these things just happen
Its like a fundamental law of nature.
today, Google may be a nice place run by nice guys, but eventually they will become like apple with its not fixing broken ipods, if not worse.
Of course in a institution that size, there will always be a few pockets of innovation and niceness, but overall, googles days as a friend of the hacker and innovator are almost over.
but this " Among its efforts, the government has worked to shield private U.S. companies from demands by the United Nations and other countries for multilateral control of the Net." seems to be written as if it were a good thing. I think the idea of the U.S. or any particular government controlling the intenet is scary, and defies the very spirit of the web.
This is a very good constructive initiative. The price of book in paper includes cost to bind a book, cost of paper, printing, and then loyalty of copyright. In the age of the Internet almost limitless proliferation of copyrighted materials can be done, the price of book should exclude other than loyalty of copyright. I hope the price of knowledge's going to be much cheaper than the price of book in paper. Welcome.
Ancient Greek Philosophers -18c Enlightenment Thinkers -Slashdotters
A Mime is a terrible thing to waste.
Does he get to lobby for whatever he wants one day a week?
The ______ Agenda
Let's see, his name is Wesley Mouch? :)
The Tlog - a technology blog
"the government has worked to shield private U.S. companies from demands by the United Nations and other countries for multilateral control of the Net."
...
Of course, screw the rest of the world, the U.S. governement wants TOTAL control of the net.
Now you can just imagine how this sort of thing makes the rest of the world simply LOVE the USA
I think you can safely call the French a paragon of free speech! After all where do you think those ideals came from? Some people forget quickly:
French Revolution
Looking to the United States Declaration of Independence for a model, on August 26, 1789, the Assembly published the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Like the U.S. Declaration, it comprised a statement of principles rather than a constitution with legal effect.
Causes of the French Revolution include the following:
# Bad economical situation, partly because of France's involvement and aid in the American Revolution.
# Resentment of seigneurialism by peasants, wage-earners, and, to a lesser extent, the bourgeoisie
# Resentment at noble privilege and dominance in public life by the ambitious professional classes.
# Influence of the American Revolution.
We invented it, we control it, it's ours. We just let you use some of it. If you don't like it, setup your own root servers and see how we care.
and one day, google campus turned out into 01... and everyone didn't noticed, because it wasn't displayed at google earth.
Hats off to the submitted for the "Most Misleading Summary" award of the week.
The Internet was not just a US project. The US invented some parts - and others in cooperation with Western nations. But then again I imagine China, Russia and Africa did NOT contribute :)
Remember that the most significant part, the Web, was invented by a European researcher at CERN in Europe. I know the Internet is more than the Web - however tell that to your congressman.
"Among its efforts, the government has worked to shield private U.S. companies from demands by the United Nations and other countries for multilateral control of the Net." I see no evidence of this been a charitable act by the US Government or in the interests of American business. The US Government is clearly acting in this colonial manner in order to retain its power. It is acting in its interests which are not necessarily the same as the interests of US citizens, US business, or the people of the Free World (tm). The rest of the world is concerned that the internet could be used as a tool of US foreign policy (in addition to current military, economic, and diplomatic tools). In addition US domestic policy on matters as diverse as (but not limited to) Intellectual Property, Digital Rights, and sexual morality may influence decisions. I'm not sure how the Google story is linked to propoganda on the "US Government versus World over the Internet" story. Personally I think the American people may benefit from the Internet becoming less of a political football and more of a shared global resource.
"He loved Big Brother"
Ahh, great to see our great nation's "democratic" process at work. If only I was rich enough to afford my own lobbyist, then I could get that bit extra say in government also.
Hang on that doesn't sound like the democracy they talked about in school!
And when we say
Among its efforts, the government has worked to shield private U.S. companies from demands by the United Nations and other countries for multilateral control of the Net."
we mean, of course that U.S politicians have worked to maintain their unilateral control of an international infrastructure
isn't it?
or insightful?
or interesting?
Since Google had not been involved in the earlier stages of the debate on that European software patent directive, they didn't want to publicly state their position on that controversial issue. However, Patricia was in close contact with the FFII, a non-governmental organization that opposes software patents, as well as some companies that were at least somewhat critical of software patents.
It seems that Google mostly lobbied for a far-reaching interoperability privilege. That's important to them so they can, for instance, perform certain operations on PDF files as part of their search services. Some people said that Google was also critical of the idea to legalize software patents in Europe, and that may have been the case, but none of the MEPs who I asked was able to confirm that Google took a critical position on software patents (I didn't ask that question to many politicians, so the fact that no one confirmed it may not mean much).
Google has easily replaced Microsoft as the most powerful computer company in the world and we are now seeing them flex that power. There are two ways in a vacuum to look at this:
1. Google is looking after the people by using their force for good and making sure the bad government and other corporations are kept in check.
2. Google has moved to the dark side and are in bed with big government and big business.
Of course we do not live in a vacuum and the reality is probably that Google really has to protect it's position now. As we have all seen over the last 30 years in this industry just becuase you are number one now does not mean you will be tomorrow and the big owners of Google of course recognize that and are going to make sure they are being spoken for when anti-trust, monopoly and copyrights are being talked about in the back rooms of Washington
Among its efforts, the government has worked to shield private U.S. companies from demands by the United Nations and other countries for multilateral control of the Net.
And then you proceed to bitch about how the world hates you. Scary.
Google plans to hire Mr. GW Bush to influence the laws governing the entire US and its allies. Bourses reacted sharply with a steep increase in Google's share price. The other rumor is that google might also hire Mr.@#$&%&*, who currently is President of all Martian creatures.
End of bulletin
With the kind of ubiquitous social presence that google commands, I wish they'd play harder at this game. I wouldn't be averse to them flat-out buying a whole panel of asshat politicians if it means we could shift the balance of power toward open communication and information pooling. I see Google as an important step towards knowledge-driven society (think Star Trek, minus the clingy outfits). They do things in broad, evolutionary strokes, and they often turn the industry around by breaking patterns and offering a fresh look at the building blocks of information exchange.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Interesting, because it seems to me that the only thing the U.S. government is "shielding" from the international community is its own power. It also seems to me that if instead of demanding government control over the root servers and touching off this spat with the EU/UN, the Administration had just handed control of the DNS servers over to ICANN like it originally promised, U.S. companies would be the primary beneficiaries. ICANN is certainly an entity with problems, but right now it is nothing if not an industry body.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
"Shield"? You make it sound like somethiing positive. Frankly, the idea that Mr. WMD-in-Iraq, God-told-me-to-do-it has the power to shut down the Internet anytime he chooses anywhere he chooses is not a happy one. This is a simple and brutal power grab, and in the long run, it will lead to the Internet breaking apart because other countries -- even the allies we have left -- will not suffer a heavy-handed bully to have a stranglehold over such an important part of their economy. Can't say I blame them, honestly. Google and the other companies are of course happy with this setup, because this way, they only have to bribe one set of politicians.
as government becomes more involved in the Net's development
Waitasecond. The AKAImBatman troll swore up and down that UN involvement was unnecessary because USA government involvement was essentially nil. He wouldn't lie to us, would he? If he was lying, how come he's at +5, Insightful right now?
The lobbyists always had the biggest houses in the neighborhood. And the only houses with two dishwashers in the kitchen.
Andrew McLaughlin held a similar role at ICANN during the period in which ICANN eviserated public representation in internet governance. Based on that background there is not a lot of reason to place a lot of faith in Google's pretty words or believe in any tooth fairy stories that Google has a deep commitment to internet users.
That's right, the technology industry needs more lobbyists. Why is it that all the media companies are well organized (RIAA, MPAA) and regularly buy politicians to pass laws in their favor, but the technology industry as a whole, which has a MUCH larger revenue stream than entertainment, is less involved in politics?
I think seeing a high profile tech company send someone to Washington is a good thing.
But here's an idea: instead of bowing down and kissing the entertainment industry's asses (*cough*Microsoft DRM, Apple FairPlay, Trusted Computing, DVD CSS*cough*), why don't the technology companies collectively form a TIAA (Technology Industry Association of America), with the goal of passing laws that favor Fair Use rights for consumers, their customers. The argument will be that the restrictive DRM crap being pushed by the entertainment **AA's will make their products less useful, and therefore it needs to go away. Also, the engineering hours spent implementing that crap is time and money better spent elsewhere. It benefits no one except greedy entertainment empires that think they have a God-given right to set prices at whatever they wish, stifle innovation if it doesn't favor their existing business models, and control everything the American people watch, hear, read, etc. If music tracks get down to $.50 or less per song do you REALLY think anyone's going to bother pirating, even if Apple dumps all its DRM from its sold files? It would hardly be worth the time.
Politicians will follow the money. Hollywood and the record labels would likely respond by trying even harder to buy politicians. Fine, let them play that game. Looking at the revenue streams of the two industries, I think I know who's going to win. The entertainment companies will choose to take part in an arms race and, like the Soviets, will spend themselves into bankruptcy by trying to keep up with a competitor that simply has more resources than they do.
So much for "do no evil"
That Google isnt cool anymore? They are acting like any other mega-corporation.
Or does it take something else to de-cool them?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
> Nobody will want to get drunk on the steps of the Capitol with them except the Kennedy's.
On the contrary, quite a few people will want to. For the same reason Orren Boyle got drunk with Wesley Mouch.
You say this like it's a good thing....
I think it's entirely reasonable for other countries to want to control their own top-level domains and know that the root server's won't suddenly "forget" them at the request of the Pentagon.
The 3-letter domains should have been abandoned a long time ago, or at least placed below ".us" in the domain hierarchy. Organizations outside of the US would migrate to their own country's domain quickly enough.
Has ./ set a robot to post each blog entry of Google's official blog on Slashdot, albeit with a delay of 48 hrs?
./ headline - "Google launches Feed Reader"! No kiddin', visit reader.google.com
Here I give tomorrow's
We have not done so, have expressed zero intentions of ever doing so, and are simply not interested in doing so.
You're only focusing on one facet of a large issue, and in doing so you are missing the point. Its not about control of the internet, or control of what colour shoes you wear, or control at all. Its just the rest of the world throwing a spanner in the works of what they see as an increasingly belligerent and terrifyingly detached from reality America. The motions being taken by non-US governments to mess with the US are increasing across the board, because they are very worried about the religious right wing and its influence on the chief executive officer of US-corp, who by coincidence has his chubby pink finger on an awful lot of nuclear weapons.
Thats still myopic and short term, however. Zooming out a bit, the situation the world finds itself in at this time has been seen before, its not new. Two large and powerful nations struggle, and finally one collapses into utter defeat. The victor is left with a superbly trained, massive, and extremely aggressive army. What are you going to do with your milion trained killers, fire them? Perhaps they can find gainful employment at the local walmart... Oh yes, and lets not forget that the US economy has been on a war footing for quite some time. One might almost say they are dependant on it by now.
The result, uniformly throughout history, has been an empire, all the way from Rome vs Carthage to today. Except today things are a little different, because serious empire building has a few problems riding along with it, the main one of which is a nuclear holocaust. So instead, the US has been battling with third world states and generally kicking over the tables of anyone to weak too defend themselves, in an effort to keep its armed forces occupied.
What you are seeing now is the backlash, the forced reduction of US influence and power worldwide by those with equal power, if not so much influence. I mean, think about it; if the EU really wanted to, they could set up their own Domain Name Servers and mandate that all EU states use them as authoritative. Thats easy, and easily done. So why aren't they doing it? That's not what they are trying to achieve. They are trying to publicly and diplomatically drag the US through the mud, poke the tiger with impunity, and express their displeasure with both the leadership of the only world superpower and the clowns that elected him.
Its helpful to see the big picture.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
While capitalism is predisposed to breaking down into monopoly states, sometimes it works. If Google works to break Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop, lobbies for fair use rights to index and playback arbitrary content, fights the kinds of software patents that have been weilded against it, Google could both do a lot of good while looking out for its own self-interest.
One of the nice things about the 'net is that nobody has figured out a way to get a solid monopoly lock. People aren't tied to your hardware, or software, or anything. The only thing Google could hold over you to stay would be Gmail and other data that you submit to them, but that wouldn't preclude you from shopping at Amazon.com. The fact that Google is doing so well despite the default search engine on all windows installs being MSN should show you how much power the consumer has in this area.
I'm willing to risk it. Google has shown remarkable desire to do no evil, and is one of the only major forces in tech, or for that matter corporate America, who believes that. We need the help.
The ______ Agenda
gov puts internet in publics hands.... pubic uses internet... gov starts to take back internet from the people
(yes i know i suck at spelling fell free to correct my grammar and/or spellin i dont care, im still not going to change
MS brought integration to the computing world, if anything. They taught the UNIX world the importance of that idea, to be able to have a (more-or-less) seamless workflow. And MS was the first wave in computer commoditization.
You can say that the main reason corporations have put some much weight behind open standards and open source is because without joining forcing, all these competing companies would eventually be assimilated by MS.
Having a huge, common enemy sure taught the IT market how to work together. Thanks, MS, for being evil.
Now, would you promptly die off?
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
Democracy doesn't end when you cast your vote, it begins. Voting for a candidate only puts a person in power who is likely to agree with your views...you still have to interact with them and convince them to actually enact laws and regulations to codify and protect your views. That process is what lobbyists are professionals at.
If I got arrested I would get a lawyer--a reactive approach to professional legal respresentation. Lobbying is a proactive approach to professional legal representation--to help make sure the law is advantageous to me from its inception.
I've got lobbyists representing my views on the environment and public resources right now--that's what my membership in the Sierra Club and American Whitewater buys me. And that's why I write and send in letters and/or send them extra money when an issue I care about reaches a critical point. Sure if they succeed it will be at the expense of someone else--companies who want to drill for oil or dump pollutants wherever they want. I'm ok with that.
Some folks seem to think that all lobbying and lobbyists are evil. Not true--lobbying is an essential part of our system of government. Even representatives are in office for 2 years between elections...do you think everyone should just sit on their hands for those 2 years and wait to see what they do?
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
No, Bush has never threatened to shut down the Internet. But, and this is all other countries care about, he could.
Let's assume for the moment that you are the president of France or the chancellor of Germany, two highly industrialized countries with whom our recent relations have been, er, somewhat strained. Would you want a vital part of your commercial infrastructure to be in a different country's hands? No. No matter how benevolent they might (or might not be) at the moment, you don't want somebody else to be able to pull the plug.
That was fine when the Internet was considered an oversized research project or a toy for university students. Now, it is big business, and other countries will not want the U.S. -- or any other single country for that matter -- to have control over that any more than they would turn over their banking system.
Which brings me to my next point:
Who's more likely to tamper with the nameservers (or the backbone), the US, China, Cuba, Iran?
Nice objective selection you picked. How about Denmark, Sweden and Switzland? Most other countries would trust them far more than they would the U.S., I'm afraid. Want to hazard a guess why that might be?
But that is not the choice here. The idea is to build the Internet base so that no one single country can bring it down, neither the U.S. nor China nor Cuba nor Iran. Is is either that or watch the Internet fragment because people don't want to be dependent on U.S. goodwill. Or the goodwill of China. Or the goodwill of Denmark, for that matter. The Internet will either become independent of any single country or it will cease to exist as we know it. And the longer the U.S. plays power games about this, the more likely fragmentation because because the others just are not going to wait.
And a generally pretty good record on free speech.
Yeah, we Americans were really ahead on human rights, no competition in sight at all anywhere in the world. Unfortunately, that was 200 years ago.
You might want to read up on the fact that an American journalist was just sent to jail for protecting her sources, a right considered so fundamental in terms of free speech and a free press in other democracies that it has them stunned. We could go on about the question of rights -- heard of this place called Guantanamo Bay? Everybody thinks this is just a fine symbol of the U.S.'s respect for human rights -- but my point is: The U.S. likes to consider itself the freest country on Earth. And in some things, this is still true, for instance free speech when it comes to pornography. In others, well, you might notice that human rights activists aren't really impressed with our record anymore. This is not the 19th Century, the Europeans are not a bunch of kingdoms and fascist dictatorships anymore (thanks in no small part to the U.S., of course), and the bar has been raised accordingly. And in lots of areas, that leaves us wanting. Privacy, for example, we simply flunk from a European point of view. Which takes us right back to the Internet.
Yes, the U.S. is better than average, far better. But for a lot of other countries, that isn't good enough. And, not to put too fine a point on it, it shouldn't be good enough for us Americans either. If you are happy with us having "a generally pretty good record" on free speech instead of the best one on the planet, you might want to think about what the people who wrote the Bill of Rights were trying to tell you.
The real vote in democracy is a stock purchase, and Google now has more votes than Microsoft. Google wants open standards, universal and free net access, and to make the operating system layer transparent. For those reasons, they have my vote. If they turn evil, then I'll "vote" for the next tech company that reflects values I agree with.
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
Yeah, so we analyze and save indefinitely every piece of information that flows through us, and yes, we're getting intimately involved in more and more everyday things. And yeah, now we're lobbying the government.
But trust us! We're not evil!
We even say we're not evil!
Apropos of nothing, the dirty little secret is that Google was created with government money (NSF Abstract #9411306), through the National Science Foundation's Digital Library Initiative, with funding from DARPA and NASA. The Stanford group received $4.5 million in funding. Of course, that's not the story that's widely bandied about on the web or Google's website; it's more dramatic to say that it was founded in a dorm room.
Futhermore, because Stanford is supposedly a "non-profit" organization, it typically didn't used to grant patents with non-exclusive licenses. But Google was treated differently and managed to obtain an exclusive license for graduate student Larry Page's patent. Stanford President John Hennessey received 65,000 shares of Google (worth about $20 million) in order to join their board of directors. Coincidence? It's not like Hennessey needs it; he founded MIPS (whose intellectual propery is found in game consoles from the Nintendo 64 to the PlayStation series) and serves on its board of directors, and gets royalties from his textbooks. Plus he earns over $500,000 in annual salary from Stanford as its president. Quid pro quo? Hennessy is snickering all the way to the bank.
As a non-profit organization, Stanford can avoid paying a lot of taxes and other financial obligations that burden other companies . As a result, Stanford has a lot of money to throw around -- it recently bought eight empty private buildings in Redwood City, planning to use them for administrative office space, and last summer struck a deal with a hotel management company to open up a hotel on Stanford property near Sand Hill Road.
It's not the first time people have benefited from the system in an underhanded way. Deborah Gage wrote in a June 8, 2004, article about how Stanford has wasted almost a hundred-million dollars in buying software from a company that employs Stanford professors http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1609179,00.as p
There's nothing like a little bit of conflict of interest to snag lucrative contracts. Sitting on a board of directors will get you at least $30,000 per year, if not more. Everybody wins -- the professors sitting on the board of directors win because they get the money for sitting, Oracle wins because they snag the contract, programmers in India win because they get money to do the work.
Everybody wins, except for undergraduate students who subsidize this activity with their tuition. See http://www.epinions.com/content_73675148932. Many issues raised in that article are verified by in the May 19, 2004, issue of the weekly Stanford Report, writt
Among its efforts, the government has worked to shield private U.S. companies from demands by the United Nations and other countries for multilateral control of the Net.
The rest of the world will have to make a new worldwide net to prevent one country from dominating it - interesting...
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
careful, Google, whom you align with in DC, to gain "lobby support" in the Congress-- people who become elected into that body politic, who might not have before, gradually find themselves (unknowingly, perhaps) like "drunken sailors in a liquor cabinet" when it comes to governmental policies-- they are ADDICTED to money, which drives each of their special interests, which of course determines lawmaking these days (if you think they are there to act "for the common good", don't kid yourself)-- look for the politicians who are "stealth candidates" to align themselves with such huge bags of money like Google appears to be, currently-- such as Hillary's plans for 2008!
I downloaded and installed Google Earth. It's wicked cool.
http://earth.google.com/
You can zoom in and see the Sydney Opera House clearly in the Sydney Harbor then zoom out and zoom back on say the Eiffel tower in Paris. Or even your own house.
What's interesting if you go to maps.google.com and look at and zoom in on say the White House and the Capitol Bldg. The roof of the White House is blanked out. And if you look at the Capitol Bldg. It's pixellated. I thought for grins to see how Google Earth does it. I zoomed in on both and saw the roofs of both buildings very clearly. Google Earth is an application you have to install on your desktop and you allow it to send 'anonymous' statistics to improve the program. Don't play with it if you are paranoid.
The tem, "congresscritters" makes it sound like they are cute, fuzzy animals. They are not. "congressjerks" would probably be more appropriate.