Saturday, June 25, 2005

Down to the Wire

Thomas Bleha
From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2005

“In the first three years of the Bush administration, the United States dropped from 4th to 13th place in global rankings of broadband Internet usage. Today, most U.S. homes can access only "basic" broadband, among the slowest, most expensive, and least reliable in the developed world, and the United States has fallen even further behind in mobile-phone-based Internet access. The lag is arguably the result of the Bush administration's failure to make a priority of developing these networks. In fact, the United States is the only industrialized state without an explicit national policy for promoting broadband.

It did not have to be this way. Until recently, the United States led the world in Internet development. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency conceived of and then funded the Internet. In the 1980s, the National Science Foundation partially underwrote the university and college networks -- and the high-speed lines supporting them -- that extended the Internet across the nation. After the World Wide Web and mouse-driven browsers were developed in the early 1990s, the Internet was ready to take off. President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore showed the way by promoting the Internet's commercialization, the National Infrastructure Initiative, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and remarkable e-commerce, e-government, and e-education programs. The private sector did the work, but the government offered a clear vision and strong leadership that created a competitive playing field for early broadband providers. Even though these policies had their share of detractors -- who claimed that excessive hype was used to sell wasteful projects and even blamed the Clinton administration for the dot-com bust -- they kept the United States in the forefront of Internet innovation and deployment through the 1990s.

Things changed when the Bush administration took over in 2001 and set new priorities for the country: tax cuts, missile defense, and, months later, the war on terrorism. In the administration's first three years, President George W. Bush mentioned broadband just twice and only in passing. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) showed little interest in opening home telephone lines to outside competitors to drive down broadband prices and increase demand.

When the United States dropped the Internet leadership baton, Japan picked it up. In 2001, Japan was well behind the United States in the broadband race. But thanks to top-level political leadership and ambitious goals, it soon began to move ahead. By May 2003, a higher percentage of homes in Japan than in the United States had broadband, and Japan had moved well beyond the basic connections still in use in the United States. Today, nearly all Japanese have access to "high-speed" broadband, with an average connection speed 16 times faster than in the United States -- for only about $22 a month. Even faster "ultra-high-speed" broadband, which runs through fiber-optic cable, is scheduled to be available throughout the country for $30 to $40 a month by the end of 2005. And that is to say nothing of Internet access through mobile phones, an area in which Japan is even further ahead of the United States.

It is now clear that Japan and its neighbors will lead the charge in high-speed broadband over the next several years. South Korea already has the world's greatest percentage of broadband users, and last year the absolute number of broadband users in urban China surpassed that in the United States. These countries' progress will have serious economic implications. By dislodging the United States from the lead it commanded not so long ago, Japan and its neighbors have positioned themselves to be the first states to reap the benefits of the broadband era: economic growth, increased productivity, technological innovation, and an improved quality of life.…”

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050501faessay84311/thomas-bleha/down-to-the-wire.html

Friday, June 24, 2005

The red herring of data protection | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

by Eric Norlin
"Set aside for a moment the debate about why, all of a sudden, we're hearing about all of this. Instead, focus on the reasons behind the data loss: physical tapes lost in transit, hackers, malicious insiders, bad network security practices. Notice that the reasons behind the loss are all over the map. We're told the solution is better network security, better encryption, better corporate safeguards, and better 'data protection.' Of course, all of these 'solutions' are a bit specious, as they're always accompanied by the corporate lawyer caveat, 'we cannot guarantee that this won't happen again.'

All of this will ultimately result in some bloated piece of federal legislation around 'data privacy and protection' that will impose new restrictions on corporate security practices and result in a wave of new spending on IT solutions to help solve that problem. But will we have solved it, really? "

I don't think so.

In the end, this "data loss" problem isn't really about data loss, data protection or data safeguarding at all. That, my friends, is a red herring. The real question to be asked is: Why do all of these corporations need to store all of this personal data in the first place? Why does my credit card company need to store my social security number? Why does Amazon need to store my credit card number? Why shouldn't every company store only what I tell them they can store? And why shouldn't the data that they store be as little as they possibly need to conduct business?

Assuming that there's even a smidgen of validity in my line of questioning, the next question becomes how — how do we go about making the possibility behind these questions a reality?

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/index.php?p=1529&tag=nl.e540