Technology Futures

I'm not even going to bother including a link, as the Web is full of commentary on this sad state of affairs, whereby the NC Senate has voted to hand future economic development and jobs growth in the state over to a handful of private sector telecom incumbents. If the bill passes, these incumbents will decide where businesses can locate in North Carolina and where people can work.

You might think, "Too bad for North Carolina," but if the bill gets through the legislature and the governor signs it, expect a full out, nationwide assault on broadband, state by state. It's not too early to start educating your local legislators on the importance of this issue.

And as I have noted in previous blog articles, this is not about "free markets" versus "government control." It's about state legislators being bought and paid for by crony capitalists. What communities want is free markets, and the incumbents are furiously trying to protect their grossly inadequate de facto monopolies.

I have waited a bit to write about the hoo-ha surrounding the accusation that Apple and Google were tracking user locations via GPS information stored in iPhones and Android phones. I suspected there was more to the story than was being cited in the news. And I was right. Apple has released a Q&A that explains what is going on, and it is indeed benign. Note that this applies only to Apple--I have not seen a similar statement from Google, although it is likely to appear soon.

Apple collects the location of WiFi hotspots and cell towers near an iPhone user so that applications that want to do things like tag photos taken with the cameraphone can work quickly, as opposed to having to wait as much as a minute or two to get data from a GPS satellite. There is a file that is transmitted to Apple, but data is encrypted and anonymized so that individual user cannot be identified. It is true that if you take that file from your iPhone, you could develop a rough map of where you have been, but only the owner of the phone or someone who knows the owner of the phone would be able to say, "Okay, I know where you have been." Apple cannot do the same thing because of the anonymity.

Having said that, the existence of the file on your phone could be used by law enforcement and/or become the subject of a sub poena and that data could be used to incriminate you rightly or wrongly in some legal proceeding. Apple intends to provide an update for the iPhone that will give users more control over this data. And that's the right thing to do.

Here is another excellent piece from The Daily Yonder about the sad state of rural broadband. The article has a short, well illustrated analysis of the gap between rural broadband speeds and the rest of the country, taken from new data released by the federal government. Here is a summary of the very bad news:

• Rural residents are twice as likely to have much slower "little broadband" speeds than the rest of the U.S.
• Rural residents are ten times more likely to have no choice of providers than those in urban areas.

From an economic development perspective, this is a slow motion catastrophe, as young people will leave rural areas without adequate broadband, and entrepreneurs and the self-employed will NOT move to rural areas with inadequate "little broadband."

Meanwhile, legislators in North Carolina are throwing their rural constituents under the bus of broadband crony capitalism, with incumbents determined to protect their monopoly position in the marketplace at all costs.

The usually excellent Stop the Cap! has a report on the truly awful anti-broadband bill making its way through the North Carolina legislature, but they lost me when they started blaming "free markets" as the problem. Uh, no, the problem is crony capitalism, where the incumbents spread campaign donations liberally to representatives of both parties, to obtain the best laws money can buy. That's not free markets.

When Stop the Cap! indicts "free markets" as the problem, the incumbents win, because that's the line the incumbents use to confuse the issue. Most incumbent telecom providers are, in fact, utterly opposed to free markets, because they lose their de facto monopoly status in a free market.

This distinction is absolutely critical to winning the debate. Community broadband efforts are going to lose every time if the community broadband pitch is "we don't like free markets." Community broadband is all about free markets and competition, real competition, of the kind we see in open access projects like Utopia with seventeen (17) providers on the network--that's an open market, and that's what communities want and need.

The proper response to "It's important to let the free market prevail..." in a discussion about telecom is to agree. "Yes, we agree completely. We fully support free markets. We want buyers of telecom services to be able to buy from a wide variety of telecom providers, not just one or two acting as a local cartel."

The "free markets" argument is a red herring. Community broadband advocates need to vigorously applaud free markets, then point out where they don't exist.