Alan Davidson: Is Google Like Gas or Like Steel?

Bruce D. Brown and Alan B. Davidson, The New York Times, January 4, 2013

AFTER a two-year investigation, the Federal Trade Commission concluded this week that Google’s search practices did not violate antitrust law. Those who wanted to see an epic battle like the one the government fought with Microsoft in the 1990s were sorely disappointed. But the analogy to the browser war of the Web’s early days was never the right one. It failed to capture the dangers free speech would have faced if regulators had agreed with Google’s critics.

The theories that many critics advanced — that search must be “neutral” because it is akin to a public utility, or that computer-generated search results are not speech and therefore not protected under the First Amendment — would have undermined free press principles across the Internet. That the F.T.C. decision permits Google to continue to use its judgment in analyzing search requests and presenting pertinent results is a victory for online expression and is consistent with First Amendment law since the 1940s.

Seven decades ago, a lawsuit against The Associated Press applied antitrust rules to the media and was resolved in a way that ultimately protected First Amendment interests. This case was always a better parallel than Microsoft to the F.T.C. investigation of Google. Like Google today, The A.P. had extraordinary influence. Then as now there were questions about whether something more than common antitrust law should govern companies that play such an important role in the delivery of information to the public.

Back then, the Justice Department alleged that A.P. bylaws allowed its member papers to impede local competitors by denying them access to The A.P.’s expansive news network. A trial court agreed but applied a theory far broader than routine antitrust law. It held that news was not an “ordinary” product like “steel” governed solely by antitrust, but rather something more “vital” because it was “clothed with a public interest.”

In other words, the trial court wanted to treat the mass media like a public utility, which carried considerable consequences. For example, while it would be illegal under antitrust law for a large steel company to conspire with competitors to fix prices, that company has no obligation to sell to every carmaker that wants steel. A public utility, on the other hand, has to serve everyone in the marketplace equally. Applying that standard to The A.P. would have opened the door to far broader regulation and could, in theory, have meant something as absurd as requiring newspapers to cover every press release or publish every letter to the editor.

When the case reached the Supreme Court in 1945, the modern understanding of the First Amendment, with its insistence on an independent news media, had yet to take shape. So it was with great significance that — even though The A.P. lost its appeal and had to allow more access to its services — the court steered entirely clear of the public-utility model. It looked instead to standard antitrust law in finding The A.P.’s conduct to be a classic restraint on trade.

The court went further in setting down a marker that to this day restrains government regulation of the media. Justice Hugo L. Black, who would become a leading champion of the First Amendment, wrote that nothing in the ruling could “compel A.P. or its members to permit publication of anything which their ‘reason’ tells them should not be published.”

This began a historic run in which the court transformed the media into an institution with the autonomy to serve as a check on government power. The First Amendment as we know it would look very different if public utility obligations had been forced onto the press that day.

If The A.P. was concerned about a regulator in every newsroom, Google was concerned about a regulator in every algorithm.

Advocates of aggressive action against Google saw the computer algorithms behind search as a utility that should be heavily regulated like the gas or electricity that flows into our homes. But search engines need to make choices about what results are most relevant to a query, just as a news editor must decide which stories deserve to be on the front page. Requiring “search neutrality” would have placed the government in the business of policing the speech of the Internet’s information providers. To quote Justice Black, it would have made search engines publish those results “which their ‘reason’ tells them should not be published.”
Others argued that the F.T.C. did not need to be guided by First Amendment concerns at all because search results are created by computers, not by human beings. Yet computers “speak” in many ways today. Lawmakers could have used F.T.C. precedent against Google to regulate the content of Amazon’s book recommendations, the locations on Bing’s maps, the news stories that trend on Facebook and Twitter, and many other online expressions of social and political importance.

The F.T.C. resisted these harmful theories, and as a result speakers all over the Internet won. But that doesn’t mean Google is exempt from regulation. The First Amendment is not a grant of immunity for any business, and antitrust scrutiny does not end where editorial judgment begins. But the A.P. case shows that antitrust laws can be enforced while protecting the right of a free press to print what it chooses and nothing more.

This makes regulation of the media difficult. But regulating speech should not be easy, like regulating a public utility, but hard, as the F.T.C. has correctly found.

Bruce D. Brown is the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and a lecturer at the University of Virginia Law School. Alan B. Davidson is a visiting scholar at M.I.T.’s Technology and Policy Program and a former director of public policy for the Americas at Google.

Tim Wu n NYT on Peer Economy: Apps to Regulate Apps

Tim Wu, The New York Times, December 19, 2012

NOBODY ever said that big cities make for easy living. The apps of the moment, Uber and Airbnb, try to mitigate matters by letting you book a car ride or rent someone’s apartment using your smartphone or computer. They are beloved by those contemplating scarce taxis or $500 hotel rooms. But they’re considerably less popular among city regulators, whose reactions recall Ned Ludd’s response to the automated loom.

Last month, Uber was effectively outlawed by Vancouver, British Columbia (by setting a minimum fare so high it discouraged users), and there are proposals to ban it in New York and other cities. Airbnb is already illegal in cities like San Francisco and New York, where unpredictable enforcement can result in enormous fines for its users.

To be fair, the cities think they’re protecting consumers, and the apps, particularly Airbnb, do raise some real concerns. You might be less of an Airbnb fan if your neighbor ran a hostel for the world’s misbehaving youth. As for Uber, its rates aren’t governed by city agencies, and it raised them in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in New York City — which critics labeled price gouging.

Yet many of the complaints are anecdotal, and too many have the odor of industry protectionism. Banning Airbnb helps hotels more than homeowners; banning Uber helps taxi companies more than passengers. Boston, in one egregious example, tried to ban Uber simply because it used GPS to measure fares, instead of an old-fashioned meter. (The ban was later reversed.)

Regulators can do their job and protect consumers against harm without being so heavy-handed. The current approach recalls Prohibition: total bans that are widely violated, with semi-random enforcement and huge fines for unlucky individuals (one Airbnb host in New York recently faced more than $40,000 in potential penalties, before the case was dismissed). It’s a clumsy approach that turns ordinary citizens into scofflaws.
This isn’t to say that the apps should have some kind of special legal immunity. It’s just that there are much smarter and more effective ways to protect consumers against potential harms. The trick is using the same techniques of real-time information access that the apps employ.

Here’s how it might work for Airbnb. Cities could require the company to provide co-op boards and landlords, at their request, with an app that listed any advertised rentals at their addresses. That way, instead of one uniform rule for the city, landlords and boards could decide for themselves how they wanted to handle Airbnb rentals. They could take a laissez-faire approach, or ban tenants from advertising on Airbnb entirely — in which case the app would help them detect and fine any violators. Others might choose to include Airbnb guidelines in rental contracts, take a part of the proceeds or limit usage to certain levels. Over all, getting better information about how Airbnb is actually being used would yield better solutions for all.

Another info-access app could help cities regulate Uber’s rates, if they really were afraid of price gouging. Regulators could simply require Uber to disclose the prices it charged and where its cars were going. If cities wanted to ban rate hikes during emergencies, they could watch to see that the law was obeyed.

This kind of precise, data-driven regulation could protect consumers while also protecting their right to pay for a valuable service. No one can deny that these apps are responding to real demands and helping cities become easier to live in and visit. There are also basic rights at stake. Using Uber to hire a car is basically an exercise in freedom to contract. Taking away the right to rent out your room diminishes the value of your property and drives up costs for visitors.

Change isn’t always pretty, but a healthy city is one where old systems — even the hallowed taxi medallion — stand to be challenged by the winds of creative destruction. Uber and Airbnb are just the first examples of a wave of services trying to match willing buyers and sellers in unexpected ways. That’s why it is so important that regulators get this right, lest they discourage those who are trying to follow their lead. The challenge for regulators is to simultaneously allow change while protecting us from the worst effects of it. It is, in short, a time to think carefully, rather than banning first and asking questions later.

Tim Wu, a professor of law at Columbia, is the author of “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.”

McKinsey Anthology: Government Designed for New Times

To explore the approaches that governments around the world are taking to common problems, this anthology convenes political leaders and civil servants, economists and policy experts, generalists and specialists.

McKinsey Anthology, 2012
               
Contents
        Transforming government
·       Tony Blair—Leading transformation in the 21st century
·       François-Daniel Migeon—Interview: Transforming government in France
·       Frank-Jürgen Weise—Behind the German jobs miracle
·       Tim Brown—Quick take: Designing a tech-enabled government
·       Michael Fullan—Transforming schools an entire system at a time
·       Todd Park—Interview: Unleashing government's 'innovation mojo'
·       Diana Farrell—Government designed for new times
        Innovating government services
·       James Fishkin—What the people think when they're really thinking
·       Nandan Nilekani—Interview: For every citizen, an identity
·       Matthew Taylor—Citizens: The untapped resource
·       Susan Zielinski—The new mobility
·       Peter Shergold—A social contract for government
·       Wim Elfrink—The smart-city solution
·       Karan Bhatia—Quick take: Building the world's infrastructure
·       Salman Khan—Teaching for the new millennium
·       Xie Chengxiang—Interview: Home for the urban poor
·       Elena Berkowitz and Blaise Warren—Quick take: How Estonia became E-stonia    

        Building new competencies
·       Douglas Holtz-Eakin—Fiscal management fix: Simple math—and a very big stick
·       Coen Teulings—Why politicans prefer austerity to long-term fiscal reform
·       Lu Mai—The urbanization solution
·       Göran Persson—How to tame a budget crisis
·       Peter Ho—Coping with complexity
·       Mohamed Ibrahim—Better data, better policy making    
        Understanding government in new times
·       Daron Acemoglu—The servant state
·       Parag Khanna—The rise of hybrid governance
·       Neil deGrasse Tyson—Why exploration matters—and why the government should pay  
        for it
·       Ray O. Johnson—Quick take: The research imperative
·       Hernando de Soto—Interview: Building a nation of owners
·       Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels—A middle way for governance       

Brookings: How to Maintain a Competitive Internet

This paper is being released in conjunction with a Center for Technology Innovation event on October 10, 2012.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Internet has become an essential vehicle for communications, electronic commerce, and entrepreneurship. A McKinsey report found that the Internet provided 21 percent of the GDP growth over the past five years in 13 different countries. As enumerated by the Boston Consulting Group, the Internet currently generates 4.1 percent of Gross Domestic Product; in some countries, the percentage is double that.  By 2016, analysts estimate that the digital economy will comprise $4.2 trillion among G-20 nations, up from $2.3 trillion in 2010.  

The Web offers several features that drive its usefulness for consumers and businesses:  interconnectivity, openness, scalability, and efficiency. Interconnectivity is important because the Internet links users across the globe.  Americans can order goods from shops in Europe or Asia, and vice versa. The openness and growth possibilities allow entrepreneurs to scale up quickly. And since it offers these benefits in a ubiquitous manner, it is a remarkably efficient vehicle for communications and service delivery.

To protect these virtues, a number of academic experts and business leaders have concluded that the government should be cautious about applying competition law to the Internet market.  They argue we should have a “hands-off” competition policy given the rapidly changing nature of digital technology, the complexity of networked industries, the slow pace of government decision-making, the lack of substantive knowledge on the part of regulators, and the globalization of service delivery. 

In this paper, we argue that robust competition policy, including the application of law and enforcement, are vital to ensure the continuing benefits of Internet communications and commerce. Competition is good for consumers, and we need to protect against threats to open competition in Internet markets in order to maintain its beneficial features.  It is important to have antitrust enforcement and fair, transparent, and non-discriminatory market behavior to gain the full benefits of the Internet. We need public policies that promote consumer choice and encourage innovation without stifling competition.
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Here Comes the Data Economy

New companies are creating services using government data on health care, education, and more.

Alexander B. Howard, Slate, September 10, 2012

We're living in the exabyte age, where the actions of billions of humans using the Web and their mobile devices are creating massive amounts of big data to collect, store, analyze, and put to work.

If big data is a strategic resource, as has been suggested, then many national and state governments have public reserves that can be tapped for the public good in this young century's version of the industrial revolution. Given that the United States economy is still coming out of the worst recession and financial shock since the Great Depression, supporting civic and tech entrepreneurs enjoys political support from both sides of the aisle.

Entrepreneurs, big and small, are mashing up data from the rapidly expanding collection of sources and building new businesses on it or improve their existing services, like Zillow or Google Maps or Consumer Reports or Bloomberg Government. In a time when job creation is critical, using public sector information to create jobs isn’t an aim to dismiss lightly, although the terms and conditions under which such activity occurs must be clear to all actors involved, to avoid the creation of new monopolies based upon artificial scarcity.

My publisher, long-time open source and open government advocate Tim O'Reilly, has asked how government can act as a platform to enable people inside and outside government to innovate on top of it. One answer is certainly releasing open data. In that context, open data and application programming interfaces, more commonly known as APIs, increasingly look like fundamental infrastructure for digital government in the 21st century.

There's good reason to think that open data could have an overall effect on the economy akin to open source and small business. Gartner, the IT research analysis firm, recently highlighted how open data creates value in the public and private sector.

You may not realize it, but services you use on a daily basis have been built upon data released by the government. Weather data collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association has an annual estimated economic value of $10 billion, according to U.S. Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel and U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park. NOAA data sets are used by Weather.com, Weather Underground, and the Weather Channel—and the nation's farmers consult these forecasts to manage both their crops and the risks of loss. VanRoekel and Park estimate the annual economic value of the data from the U.S. global positioning system at some $90 billion. From companies like TomTom or Garmin to dashboard GPS systems to smartphones and associated location-based applications, GPS data sets are baked into an expanding number of services and products.

Now, as Park seeks to scale open data across the federal government, we’re on the verge of the next generation of services driven by open data, which will involve everything from energy to health care to consumer finance to transit sectors. The challenge is that the cities and federal agencies that hold vast amounts of data may not always understand the value of the information they hold or how to create or sustain businesses using it. That's where open innovation in the public sector and the dynamism of entrepreneurs will play an important role in making the people's data more useful to the people.

BrightScope is a notable example of what dogged persistence can create. The California startup made a profitable business using government data to help the American people understand the fees associated with their 401(k)s. Last May, BrightScope went further, launching financial adviser pages based on open government data from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the largest independent securities regulator in the United States. Previously, financial adviser profiles could only be found through exact queries at an obscure URL on the regulators' websites. Now, information that citizens care about—the records of financial advisers in their geographic region—is available where they're looking for it: in search engine results.

Just as labor and regulatory data fuels BrightScope's business, there's an expanding number of startups that are tapping into other data released so-called “smart disclosure” initiatives. Smart disclosure is when a private company or government agency provides a person with periodic access to his or her own data in open formats that enable them to easily put the information to use. Startups like Billshrink.com and Hello Wallet are already using a combination of private sector and public sector data to enhance consumer finance decisions. The success of such consumer finance startups suggests an important lesson: The most successful apps and services will combine government, industry, and user-generated data.

The key open data story to watch in the federal government, however, centers on health care. McKinsey and Associates estimates the annual economic value of big, open liquid health data at about $350 billion annually. The explosion of mHealth apps are just the beginning of the disruption in health care from open health data. The effort to revolutionize the health care industry by making health data as useful as weather data is still in its infancy—but the early results are promising. iTriage, which was acquired by Aetna, is enabling people to make better mobile health care decisions where and when they need to do so. It uses a combination of government and private sector data to evaluable symptoms or conditions and point users to nearby medical care. Another startup, Castlight, is analyzing health care data to empower patients, acting like Kayak.com for those who want more transparency about costs. In May, Castlight completed a $100 million round of financing.

But for these sorts of initiatives to take off, entrepreneurs and regulators will have to work together to get contextual consent right and inform patients about the reuse of their data. Transparency is crucial to building a health data commons and thriving startup ecosytem based upon it.

If that balance can be struck, there's considerable potential for entrepreneurs to create better civic interfaces for many digital services. If open government data have helped build new tools, open data disclosed by private companies could create even more value for citizens. But currently, few businesses release anonymized data in an open, usable format. It will soon be time for the government to step in, convene stakeholders, and answer some key questions: How can we create uniform standards that will allow entrepreneurs and developers to innovate? When should data be licensed? Most of the big data releases we have seen come from finance, with bank records or stock trades. But there are significant opportunities to help both entrepreneurs and empowered consumers in health care, energy, education, and telecommunications, to name just a few.

Just as the glowing blue dot on the maps in our smartphone screens revolutionized how we navigate the world, similar "blue dots" could emerge for health care, finance, energy, and any product or service that is regulated or cataloged by government and industry. First, however, they'll need to open the data.

Also in the Future Tense package on government and open data: why Yelp and the government should share data; what a burger mob tells us about the future of democracy; and how Mexico is using open data to move beyond its authoritarian past.

The dark side of data (Jeff Jonas)

In a world of big, open data, "privacy by design" will become even more important.

Mike Lourdes  O'Reilly Radar, July 23, 2012

A few weeks ago, Tom Slee published “Seeing Like a Geek,” a thoughtful article on the dark side of open data. He starts with the story of a Dalit community in India, whose land was transferred to a group of higher cast Mudaliars through bureaucratic manipulation under the guise of standardizing and digitizing property records. While this sounds like a good idea, it gave a wealthier, more powerful group a chance to erase older, traditional records that hadn’t been properly codified. One effect of passing laws requiring standardized, digital data is to marginalize all data that can’t be standardized or digitized, and to marginalize the people who don’t control the process of standardization.

That’s a serious problem. It’s sad to see oppression and property theft riding in under the guise of transparency and openness. But the issue isn’t open data, but how data is used.

Jesus said “the poor are with you always” not because the poor aren’t a legitimate area of concern (only an American fundamentalist would say that), but because they’re an intractable problem that won’t go away. The poor are going to be the victims of any changes in technology; it isn’t surprisingly that the wealthy in India used data to marginalize the land holdings of the poor. In a similar vein, when Europeans came to North America, I imagine they told the natives “So, you got a deed to all this land?,” a narrative that’s still being played out with indigenous people around the world.

The issue is how data is used. If the wealthy can manipulate legislators to wipe out generations of records and folk knowledge as “inaccurate,” then there’s a problem. A group like DataKind could go in and figure out a way to codify that older generation of knowledge. 

Then at least, if that isn’t acceptable to the government, it would be clear that the problem lies in political manipulation, not in the data itself. And note that a government could wipe out generations of “inaccurate records” without any requirement that the new records be open. In years past the monied classes would have just taken what they wanted, with the government’s support. The availability of open data gives a plausible pretext, but it’s certainly not a prerequisite (nor should it be blamed) for manipulation by the 0.1%.

One can see the opposite happening, too: the recent legislation in North Carolina that you can’t use data that shows sea level rise. Open data may be the only possible resource against forces that are interested in suppressing science. What we’re seeing here is a full-scale retreat from data and what it can teach us: an attempt to push the furniture against the door to prevent the data from getting in and changing the way we act.

The digital publishing landscape

Slee is on shakier ground when he claims that the digitization of books has allowed Amazon to undermine publishers and booksellers. Yes, there’s technological upheaval, and that necessarily drives changes in business models. Business models change; if they didn’t, we’d still have the Pony Express and stagecoaches. O’Reilly Media is thriving, in part because we have a viable digital publishing strategy; publishers without a viable digital strategy are failing.

But what about booksellers? The demise of the local bookstore has, in my observation, as much to do with Barnes & Noble superstores (and the now-defunct Borders), as with Amazon, and it played out long before the rise of ebooks.

I live in a town in southern Connecticut, roughly a half-hour’s drive from the two nearest B&N outlets. Guilford and Madison, the town immediately to the east, both have thriving independent bookstores. One has a coffeeshop, stages many, many author events (roughly one a day), and runs many other innovative programs (birthday parties, book-of-the-month services, even ebook sales). The other is just a small local bookstore with a good collection and knowledgeable staff. The town to the west lost its bookstore several years ago, possibly before Amazon even existed. Long before the Internet became a factor, it had reduced itself to cheap gift items and soft porn magazines. So: data may threaten middlemen, though it’s
not at all clear to me that middlemen can’t respond competitively. Or that they are really threatened by “data”, as opposed to large centralized competitors.

There are also countervailing benefits. With ebooks, access is democratized. Anyone, anywhere has access to what used to be available only in limited, mostly privileged locations. At O’Reilly, we now sell ebooks in countries we were never able to reach in print. Our print sales overseas never exceeded 30% of our sales; for ebooks, overseas represents more than half the total, with customers as far away as Azerbaijan.

Slee also points to the music labels as an industry that has been marginalized by open data.  I really refuse to listen whining about all the money that the music labels are losing. We’ve had too many years of crap product generated by marketing people who only care about finding the next Justin Bieber to take the “creative industry” and its sycophants seriously.

Privacy by design

Data inevitably brings privacy issues into play. As Slee points out,(and as Jeff Jonas has before him), apparently insignificant pieces of data can be put together to form a surprisingly accurate picture of who you are, a picture that can be sold. It’s useless to pretend that there won’t be increased surveillance in any forseeable future, or that there won’t be an increase in targeted advertising (which is, technically, much the same thing).

We can bemoan that shift, celebrate it, or try to subvert it, but we can’t pretend that it isn’t happening. We shouldn’t even pretend that it’s new, or that it has anything to do with openness. What is a credit bureau if not an organization that buys and sells data about your financial history, with no pretense of openness?

Jonas’s concept of “privacy by design” is an important attempt to address privacy
issues in big data. Jonas envisions a day when “I have more privacy features than you” is a marketing advantage. It’s certainly a claim I’d like to see Facebook make.

Absent a solution like Jonas’, data is going to be collected, bought, sold, and used for marketing and other purposes, whether it is “open” or not. I do not think we can get to Jonas’s world, where privacy is something consumers demand, without going through a stage where data is open and public. It’s too easy to live with the illusion of privacy that thrives in a closed world.

I agree that the notion that “open data” is an unalloyed public good is mistaken, and Tom Slee has done a good job of pointing that out. It underscores the importance of of a still-nascent ethical consensus about how to use data, along with the importance of data watchdogs, DataKind, and other organizations devoted to the public good. (I don’t understand why he argues that Apple and Amazon “undermine community activism”; that seems wrong, particularly in the light of Apple’s re-joining the EPEAT green certification system for their products after a net-driven consumer protest.) Data collection is going to happen whether we like it or not, and whether it’s open or not. I am convinced that private data is a public bad, and I’m less afraid of data that’s open. That doesn’t make it necessarily a good; that depends on how the data is used, and the people who are using.

TechAmerica Foundation Announces Leadership for "Big Data" Commission

SmartData Collective, May 30, 2012

Will Lead Group of 22 Industry Experts and Academics 

WASHINGTON, DC, May 30, 2012 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- The TechAmerica Foundation announced today that some of the foremost thinkers in "Big Data" will lead a commission of 22 experts and academics to examine the issue and provide guidance on how to leverage "Big Data" to address the most pressing issues facing government as well as drive U.S. innovation and competitiveness. 

Chairing the commission will be Steve Mills, Senior Vice President and Group Executive at IBM and Steve Lucas, Global Executive Vice President and General Manager, Database & Technology at SAP. Serving as vice chairs of the commission are Teresa Carlson, Vice President Global Public Sector, Amazon Web Services and Bill Perlowitz, Chief Technology Officer, Science, Technology and Engineering Group, Wyle. 

"The problem today is not gathering data, but rather making intelligent actionable decisions based on the volume, velocity and variety of data we are receiving. I am excited about launching this Commission and hope that we can leverage the best and brightest industry, academic and government minds to determine how to use big data to drive innovation, efficiencies and effectiveness in the public sector," said Jennifer Kerber, President of the TechAmerica Foundation. 

Big Data is a hot topic for the technology community and is becoming a focal point for government with the Administration recently announcing a $200 Million Big Data Research and Development Initiative. 

"We are entering a new era of computing where information is growing at a record pace. The winners and losers will be those who can innovate faster based on strategic insights drawn from the variety and velocity of new forms of big data being generated every day," said Steve Mills. "By gaining deeper insights into this vast new natural resource, the opportunities to accelerate the pace of discovery in science and engineering and develop information-intensive curriculum is unlimited. 

"The world's data is doubling every 18 months, presenting government and industry with new opportunities to transform information into insight," said Steve Lucas. "New database technologies and applications, coupled with real time analysis of big data, will help business and government run better and ultimately improve the well-being of customers and citizens. By bringing private sector innovation to the public sector, the Big Data Commission will help leaders address some of the biggest questions facing government today." 

The Commission expects to also take up such issues as: what capabilities are required to succeed? How do you use Big Data to make intelligent decisions? How will agencies effectively govern and secure huge volumes of information, while protecting privacy and civil liberties? And perhaps most importantly, how do we use big data to transform how the government delivers services? 

"The federal government is under increasing pressure to innovate and do more with less," said Teresa Carlson. "The U.S federal government has been among the most forward leaning in taking advantage of the benefits of the cloud and Big Data. We're pleased to be a part of TechAmerica Foundation's Commission to further advance the work the federal government is doing on behalf of U.S citizens." 

"Big Data has the potential to increase efficiency, improve the speed and accuracy of decisions, forecast the future, identify savings, increase transparency, create jobs, and provide insight into our agencies and citizenry; this is a hugely disruptive force occurring during challenging economic times. To transform hindsight to insight and remain competitive, we must immediately address the technical, cultural, organizational, and policy challenges data poses and embrace the relentless increase in available data," said Bill Perlowitz. 

The commission membership is made up of leading experts on big data and represent both industry and academia -- the full list of members can be found here. 

To learn more about the TechAmerica Foundation's Big Data Commission: http://www.techamericafoundation.org/big-data-commission

 

About TechAmerica Foundation TechAmerica Foundation educates industry executives, policy makers and opinion leaders on the promise of technological innovation to advance prosperity, security and the general welfare. Launched in 1981, the Foundation is a 501c(3) non-profit, non-partisan affiliate of TechAmerica, which is the leading voice and resource for the U.S. technology industry. The Foundation disseminates award-winning industry, policy and market research covering topics such as U.S. competitiveness in a global economy, innovation in government, and other areas of national interest. It also organizes conferences and seminars to explore pertinent issues with government and industry representatives and to share the Foundation's findings. Learn more about TechAmerica Foundation at www.techamericafoundation.org .

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Sergey Brin: Web freedom facing greatest threat ever

Series: Battle for the internet

Exclusive: Threats range from governments trying to control citizens to the rise of Facebook and Apple-style 'walled gardens'

Ian Katz  guardian.co.uk,  April 15, 2012 

 

The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

In an interview with the Guardian, Brin warned there were "very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world". "I am more worried than I have been in the past," he said. "It's scary."

The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry's attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of "restrictive" walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.

The 38-year-old billionaire, whose family fled antisemitism in the Soviet Union, was widely regarded as having been the driving force behind Google's partial pullout from China in 2010 over concerns about censorship and cyber-attacks. He said five years ago he did not believe China or any country could effectively restrict the internet for long, but now says he has been proven wrong. "I thought there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle, but now it seems in certain areas the genie has been put back in the bottle," he said.

He said he was most concerned by the efforts of countries such as China, Saudi Arabia and Iran to censor and restrict use of the internet, but warned that the rise of Facebook and Apple, which have their own proprietary platforms and control access to their users, risked stifling innovation and balkanising the web.

"There's a lot to be lost," he said. "For example, all the information in apps – that data is not crawlable by web crawlers. You can't search it."

Brin's criticism of Facebook is likely to be controversial, with the social network approaching an estimated $100bn (£64bn) flotation. Google's upstart rival has seen explosive growth: it has signed up half of Americans with computer access and more than 800 million members worldwide.

Brin said he and co-founder Larry Page would not have been able to create Google if the internet was dominated by Facebook. "You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive," he said. "The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation."

He criticised Facebook for not making it easy for users to switch their data to other services. "Facebook has been sucking down Gmail contacts for many years," he said.

Brin's comments come on the first day of a week-long Guardian investigation of the intensifying battle for control of the internet being fought across the globe between governments, companies, military strategists, activists and hackers.

From the attempts made by Hollywood to push through legislation allowing pirate websites to be shut down, to the British government's plans to monitor social media and web use, the ethos of openness championed by the pioneers of the internet and worldwide web is being challenged on a number of fronts.

In China, which now has more internet users than any other country, the government recently introduced new "real identity" rules in a bid to tame the boisterous microblogging scene. In Russia, there are powerful calls to rein in a blogosphere blamed for fomenting a wave of anti-Vladimir Putin protests. It has been reported that Iran is planning to introduce a sealed "national internet" from this summer.

Ricken Patel, co-founder of Avaaz, the 14 million-strong online activist network which has been providing communication equipment and training to Syrian activists, echoed Brin's warning: "We've seen a massive attack on the freedom of the web. Governments are realising the power of this medium to organise people and they are trying to clamp down across the world, not just in places like China and North Korea; we're seeing bills in the United States, in Italy, all across the world."

Writing in the Guardian on Monday, outspoken Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei says the Chinese government's attempts to control the internet will ultimately be doomed to failure. "In the long run," he says, "they must understand it's not possible for them to control the internet unless they shut it off – and they can't live with the consequences of that."

Amid mounting concern over the militarisation of the internet and claims – denied by Beijing – that China has mounted numerous cyber-attacks on US military and corporate targets, he said it would be hugely difficult for any government to defend its online "territory".

"If you compare the internet to the physical world, there really aren't any walls between countries," he said. "If Canada wanted to send tanks into the US there is nothing stopping them and it's the same on the internet. It's hopeless to try to control the internet."

He reserved his harshest words for the entertainment industry, which he said was "shooting itself in the foot, or maybe worse than in the foot" by lobbying for legislation to block sites offering pirate material.

He said the Sopa and Pipa bills championed by the film and music industries would have led to the US using the same technology and approach it criticised China and Iran for using. The entertainment industry failed to appreciate people would continue to download pirated content as long as it was easier to acquire and use than legitimately obtained material, he said.

"I haven't tried it for many years but when you go on a pirate website, you choose what you like; it downloads to the device of your choice and it will just work – and then when you have to jump through all these hoops [to buy legitimate content], the walls created are disincentives for people to buy," he said.

Brin acknowledged that some people were anxious about the amount of their data that was now in the reach of US authorities because it sits on Google's servers. He said the company was periodically forced to hand over data and sometimes prevented by legal restrictions from even notifying users that it had done so.

He said: "We push back a lot; we are able to turn down a lot of these requests. We do everything possible to protect the data. If we could wave a magic wand and not be subject to US law, that would be great. If we could be in some magical jurisdiction that everyone in the world trusted, that would be great … We're doing it as well as can be done."

White House: Big Data is a Big Deal

Tom Kalil, The White House,  March 29, 2012

Editor's Note:  Watch the live webcast today at 2pm ET of the Big Data Research and Development event at http://live.science360.gov/bigdata/]

Today, the Obama Administration is announcing the “Big Data Research and Development Initiative.”  By improving our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data, the initiative promises to help accelerate the pace of discovery in science and engineering, strengthen our national security, and transform teaching and learning.

To launch the initiative, six Federal departments and agencies will announce more than $200 million in new commitments that, together, promise to greatly improve the tools and techniques needed to access, organize, and glean discoveries from huge volumes of digital data. Learn more about ongoing Federal government programs that address the challenges of, and tap the opportunities afforded by, the big data revolution in our Big Data Fact Sheet.

We also want to challenge industry, research universities, and non-profits to join with the Administration to make the most of the opportunities created by Big Data.  Clearly, the government can’t do this on its own.  We need what the President calls an “all hands on deck” effort. 

Some companies are already sponsoring Big Data-related competitions, and providing funding for university research.  Universities are beginning to create new courses—and entire courses of study—to prepare the next generation of “data scientists.”  Organizations like Data Without Borders are helping non-profits by providing pro bono data collection, analysis, and visualization.  OSTP would be very interested in supporting the creation of a forum to highlight new public-private partnerships related to Big Data.

Tom Kalil is Deputy Director for Policy at OSTP