Earlier we covered Microsoft’s new Pirate Pay, which I said sounded like a DoS attack against copyright infringers. Others agree and say it may be illegal, which is true. Sure enough, Pirate Bay is under DDoS attack. Has Pirate Pay gone rogue? Cybersecurity and copyright, all in one issue.
This week Less Government hosted a debate on tech issues in DC, and it got feisty at times. I found it fascinating though. Gigi Sohn and Andrew Schwartzman (Thomas Gideon was detained and missed much of the fun) on the left were constantly talking about how they don’t favor big government, they support only minimalist regulation to preserve a competitive, free market, and all that good stuff. They went to great lengths to sound centrist. I believe they also revealed a strategy of fighting one issue at a time, separately, whether the individual arguments conflict or not. This lets them advance the ball any way they can.
Seton Motley, Phil Kerpen, and Andrew Moylan were less conciliatory. They were aggressively vocal about a small government perspective, and in particular Kerpen was a beast on offense against Net Neutrality. This kind of passion and insistence on core principles may make it tougher to sever fights to build winning single-issue coalitions, but it keeps us consistent. I think we need to be mindful of the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. We could never build a coalition like Save the Internet, as the radicals did for Net Neutrality.
But Net Neutrality is still technically in effect, and will be unless and until the courts throw out the Open Internet order. As long as it’s there, it’s worth making strong arguments against it, such as Richard Bennett’s. It’s also worth noting that content-based services like Dish’s ad skipping could be considered non-neutral and illegal innovation if applied to the Internet.
Remember the ACTA treaty, negotiated in secret that threatened to be a global SOPA? Well, some appear to be say ing that the Trans-Pacific Partnership has similar provisions, or at least threatens to. So Darrell Issa is publishing key portions of the treaty for public scrutiny. Interesting.
Ron Wyden, like me and early opponent of SOPA and Protect IP, has come out against the Lieberman-Collins cybersecurity bill favored by the President. And, credit where it’s due: so has Al Franken, though both do so on privacy grounds, not power-grab grounds. But, referencing the above discussion of single-issue coalitions, I’m not going to complain, and instead will question whether a Democrat bill can pass when it’s losing both tech centrist Ron Wyden and reliable lefty Al Franken. Seriously: Obama has lost Franken on this issue. Wow.
On the Republican side, I sounded the alarm that Jon Kyl and Roy Blunt may be trying to form a Gang of Four to undermine the John McCain-led Republican team against Lieberman-Collins, and instead push a ‘compromise.’ That meeting has been put off to allow McCain and co. to attend and presumably to pitch the virtues of the SECURE IT alternative bill. I’m glad.
House Republicans question whether LightSquared was a victim of FCC’s troublesome, opaque practices as Chuck Grassley has moved on from LightSquared as his target to Google. This is remarkable. I remember when I’d make pro-LightSquared comments and get dogpiled by people insisting LS was the new Solyndra. Now, there seems to be a chance on this issue, to recognize how disappointing it is that LightSquared can’t add its technological distinctiveness to our own national 4G market, and raise the bar of competition.
I join these calls for spectrum to be freed up. Especially as FCC goes out of its way to destroy the secondary market for spectrum, in all its forms, we need a way for spectrum to be allocated to firms for faster, newer wireless technologies.
Google’s defeat in the Java/Android case goes to the damages phase, despite claims that Google didn’t really lose yet. I’m honestly shocked at how much defense Google gets even from the right, when nobody denies that Google lifted heavily from Java, and even hired former Java people to clone it for Android’s virtual machine technology.
Jenni LeCompte is Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs at the Treasury Department. 
On Monday, when the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia smacked down the Obama NLRB’s new “ambush” election procedures, the court made clear that the union-controlled labor board overstepped its bounds by imposing its new rules without a proper quorum (as required under a U.S. Supreme Court case).
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