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08 Feb 2012 by Dave.
Earlier this week I attended the @pictfor meeting advertised as about “Search Neutrality”. It had entered my radar when Alec Muffett who had been invited to speak, announced his attendance on twitter and his Computer World blog, “The Google Dialogues : Search Neutrality”. The speakers were Alec, and Shivaun Raff, the CEO of Foundem and Mark Margaretten, Professor at U. of Bedford. Foundem is one of the complaintants to the EU provoking an EU monopoly investigation into Google. This is covered in the Guardian, on the 20th November, in an article called “Google search investigation sparked by complaint from British site”.
Shivaun argued that Google manipulates its sort order to benefit its own alternative properties, particularly the price comparison sites. (Foundem is a vertical price comparison site.) They argue that over 90% of European search is fulfilled by Google, and that when Google chose to discriminate against them, their traffic fell off to a business breaking trickle.
Alec and Mark took a similar line to each other, Google is one click away from failure, relevance including sort order is subject to competitive pressure & no-one has a right to a place in a search engine’s sort order. Alec in his blog post points at James Grimelmann’s article,“Some Skepticism about Search Neutrality” who makes similar points, although Grimmelmann argues that vertical search sites are rarely useful or usable. Margaretten dealt with this less judgmentally by pointing out that Google also prefers sites with original content, which is why aggregator sites do less well. He reinforced the point that there are good reasons to devalue vertical search sites, although Foundem can prove that they were specifically penalised. Grimmelman distinguishes between regulating for “Search Neutrality” which he opposes and anti-trust law which he argues is different and has its own theory and practice. The meeting missed this dichotomy between monopoly regulation and search neutrality.
Shivaun Raff was backed up by a spokesperson from Streetmap, who provided some evidence that Google had manipulated their sort order when they launched Google maps in order to better compete with the established players. I hope that they have made a submission to the Commission. The talk in the bar after was that streetmap lost out due to Google Maps technical superiority particularly features such as navigation, user generated content, personal customisation and world wide coverage; however even if this is true it doesn’t necessarily mean that the allegation of malicious action is unjustified.
I’ll be interested to see if the Commission come to consider Google to be a monopoly. It dominates in search, and its maps and mail are wildly popular but it’s definitely second choice for microblogging (g+) where it’s outgunned by twitter and facebook, identity assurance where Google Profile trails behind twitter and facebook, picture blogging (Yahoo), bookmarks (delicious and reddit) and blogging (wordpress). It’s interesting to consider this in the light of some changes made by google to their user experience over the last couple of months where they are staring to build walls around their services to make it harder to share one’s data with other companies services. For instance, they have wrecked Google Reader for me since I can now only share news via Google+, there is now no open XML feed for these. I’ll explore this in another post soon.
Posted in economics, google, monopoly, digital economy, europe, business, internet, politics | 1 Comment »
02 Feb 2012 by Dave.
And on to the EU’s attempt to implement strong copyright enforcement. I’ll return to the UK in the next week or so, but the European Commission signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) a couple of days ago. This proposed trade treaty has been negotiated in secret amongst a group of governments from the developed world. The US agenda was to strengthen international enforcement of intellectual property laws, and the original European agenda was similar, but orientated more around the protection of a number of geographic brands, such as champagne or cheddar. The Open Rights Group talks, on their blog, about the secrecy and how we have came to this point.
La Quadrature Du Net, a french based digtal liberty campaign, argue in their blog posting, that ACTA will have a chilling effect on ISP and Search providers forcing them to police their users and inhibit their business. LQDN say,
“By putting legal and monetary pressure on Internet service providers (in a most subtler way than in previous versions of the text), ACTA will give the music and movie industries a weapon to force them to police their networks and users themselves. Such a private police and justice of the Net is incompatible with democratic imperatives and represent a real threat for fundamental freedoms.”
It also proposes increasing criminal sanctions for commercial scale infringement. This is definitely not the same as commercial activity and it also reinserts the criminalisation on aiding and abetting which industrial content have been trying to criminalise for the last five years, and seems to weaken all the national copyright exclusions. The treaty has self maintenance clauses, which have no citizenship accountability. It’s been negotiated and written by bureaucrats and lobbyists and having got (some of) the law they want they don’t want any pesky elected politicians looking to change and update it; they see that as their prerogative.
La Quadrature Du Net have published a call to arms for Europe’s citizens to campaign to have the treaty rejected by the European Parliament. (They also have a campaign Wiki here.)
To further understand what’s happening, check out this article, entitled “Why the EU will repent ACTA at their leisure” published on a blog called Br0ken Teleph0n3, which was pointed out to me by Glyn Moody. In it, the author, Ian Grant, makes some startling predictions illustrating the weakness of the treaty for Europe’s citizens.
We seem to be on the path to agree a treaty in the economic interests of US entertainment and industrial software companies, where Europe’s competitors will not, and we give up many fundamental freedoms for the privildge.
I shall be writing to my MEPs this evening. I suggest you look at some of these links and think about this as well.
Posted in culture, copyright, news, acta, digital economy, uk, politics, business, internet, europe, technology | No Comments »
23 Jan 2012 by admin.
While Labour turning it’s back on Keynes is a bigger story, the coalition’s attempt to act as ‘responsible capitalists’ is easier to write about.
A coalition government appointed commission reports that executive pay is out of control (really?) and that there should be trade union and/or workers representatives on board pay committees, and that shareholder votes on pay should be binding. (You mean they’re not!) However the government decides that allowing workers to vote on the bosses pay would be ‘tokenism’. Hardly! Shareholders can sell up, Trade Unionists might actually fuck things up! Since Labour introduced the shareholder advisory vote in 2003, only 18 companies have rejected board pay agreements. Assuming that, its FTSE 250, over 9 years, that’s under 1% of company AGM’s have rejected a pay committee recommendation. Shareholders that think a company is badly run, sell up, they do not hang on for the AGM and vote against the pay board recommendation, they don’t even hang on and replace the board. They sell up; that’s what Equity Liquidity means.
This’ll make a huge difference. Not!
In case you hadn’t noticed, there was a banking crisis four years ago, and in the UK two failing banks were nationalised and a third was merged with a successful bank to prove the old adage, “What happens when you hit a duck with a failing bank?”, “You get two dead ducks!”. Despite, that anyone saving with Nat. West., Halifax, Northern Rock and the Royal Bank of Scotland, or whose savings banks and pension funds had been lent to them should be bloody grateful to Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and the Labour Government; they saved the UK banking system and everyone’s savings! Despite the catastrophe, no one has been prosecuted, no-one’s in gaol and all the current government is talking about is taking Fred “the Shred” Goodwin’s knighthood away from him. I bet he’s worried about that. Ed Balls took Sharon Shoesmith’s pension from her; not that I approve of that really, but allowing the government to focus on the Fred’s gong is taking the piss. Who’s going to gaol?
The coalition’s campaign for responsible capitalism is all camouflage.
And while I don’t really believe there can be a responsible capitalism, the right are running scared of Ed Miliband who first reminded us of the idea that the corporate private sector was ripping us off; it’s just a surprise that people needed reminding.
No government with the Tories in it are going to help.
Posted in economics, business, politics | No Comments »
10 Feb 2011 by Dave.
It seems that my announcement that I have adopted a Blackberry and in doing so abandoned my Android based HTC aroused some interest. On the one hand you have an open source based operating system, java based apps, produced by an agile company that does no evil, on the other hand you have the epitome of the corporate suit’s pocket billiard cue rest. (Although I am informed that it’s IM app is the chat carrier of choice for today’s yoof!).
This is my work’s phone and the Blackberry has a better pan-European tariff plan; I need to travel to Paris for the next month or so. The company instructs android and IOS users to turn off the data services when abroad and I can’t be doing with that.
The blackberry also passes the Bob Appleyard test, “Does it make phone calls?” Yes it does.
I have been told I need to learn how to use two hands now I have “Grown Up”.
One disappointment, was when I first went to use the BB as a modem, and it asks to install the desktop manager from the CD that is distributed with the phone. Unfortunately, this is just an internet URL so if you’re not connected you’re stuffed.
Dur! I want to connect!….
You can’t unless you’re connected!
Anyway, once I got that installed, it was quite easy, but not as easy as using Android for this task. On the other hand, the Outlook integration is very good, and I like the Twitter app and the screen is a good size. I am sure Orange Wednesday is availble and lets hope the London Transport apps are too. (WRT to the screen size comments, I have a Blackberry Torch which is replacing an HTC Hero 2, which I plan to re-use on my personal number, if it doesn’t cost me too much.)
Posted in gadget, blackberry, smartphone, business, technology | No Comments »
16 Jan 2011 by Dave.
Home! Back from the Citihub World Conference, which was this year held in Chamonix, France.
Posted in citihub, travel, business | No Comments »
03 Jan 2011 by Dave.
Yahoo had a web site, e-mail and photo sharing. It didn’t have micro-blogging, nor was it able to leverage the market- and mind-share of Facebook’s initial applications publishers.
It was self-obssessed and under takeover threat, but it had great brand value, and most people would accept that it is run be people that will take customer privacy more seriously; their business model treats their users as customers, not commodity (eyeballs).
Yahoo is not a secret garden either, which should make it more attractive, you can use it to share with non-yahooers. Is it just that the deal, “Your privacy in exchange for e-mail and micro-blogging”, is worth it? Admittedly, it’s initial growth was driven by teenager adoption, but why take up with Facebook and not Yahoo?
Yahoo was almost there. Interesting how close you can be and miss!
Posted in facebook, yahoo, internet, business | 2 Comments »