News that employers are requiring job applicants and employees to provide their Facebook passwords made headlines across the publishing spectrum. It also drew rapid responses from Congress and from Facebook itself. Both made immediate moves to check the practice. But even before the uproar, the dangers should have been clear to anyone tempted to resort to such practices. Doing so wouldn't just invite bad publicity. It would also bring huge legal and social risks.
Continue reading "Why Refusing Facebook Password Requests Is the Only Responsible Choice " »
Former Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd tried to make the best of the setback that the SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy bills he was pushing suffered last Friday. A statement by Dodd, who is now CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), praised unnamed "leaders in Washington" for purportedly standing with Americans whose livelihoods foreign criminals were threatening through online theft of intellectual property. Dodd also professed hopes for a "sincere discussion" about how to protect millions of American jobs threatened by piracy.
Continue reading "Dodd's SOPA/PIPA Setback Highlights Politics/Technology Disconnect" »
The central argument in the current
network neutrality debate is whether there should be laws or regulations
forcing Internet service providers (ISPs) to treat all traffic equally – in
practical terms, it means not delaying or degrading the performance of services
that compete with the ISPs' own services. There are actually two parts to this
argument. One is the question of whether ISPs should treat all traffic equally.
The other is whether the government should be telling ISPs how to run their
networks, a complex task requiring enormous understanding of subtle technical
and commercial issues. Network neutrality proponents focus on the first
argument, ISPs on the second.
Focusing on the combined argument -- whether the government should actually mandate network neutrality -- is
in fact a formula for frustration. It almost guarantees that the debate get
bogged down in ideological battles. It also ensures that every technical advance necessitates a
redefinition of what should and shouldn't be allowed. But there's a much
simpler solution that would ultimately work better: to require the separation of the
ISPs' transport and services functions.
Continue reading "A Simple Solution to the Network Neutrality Problem" »
The ongoing drought in financial
exits is a huge drag on Silicon Valley. Even if entrepreneurs manage to build a
company, they and their investors have a hard time getting any money out of it.
Opportunities for going public currently range from rare to nonexistent. The
other main route to financial liquidity, acquisition, is also not reliable enough to
count on.
Such conditions make it hard to
build a company in the first place. Investors hesitate to fund it, and
potential employees hesitate to leave more-secure jobs to take a chance on a
startup. But some participants in a panel
at the recent AlwaysOn
& STVP Summit at Stanford argued that secondary markets provide an
answer. Such markets in essence function as private stock markets as an
alternative to public ones.
Continue reading "Can Private Stock Markets Save Silicon Valley? " »
