Posts from United States

I have written before about open spectrum and the need for a new spectrum policy in the US. Spectrum policy is back in the news because the federal government is soon going to make a bunch of decisions about spectrum that is coming back from the broadcast TV operators.

Our policy for the past thirty years has been to sell the spectrum to the highest bidder and let the goverment pocket the money. This is short term thinking of the worst kind. The incumbent duopolist carriers are always the ones who can afford to pay the most money for the spectrum and they have no incentive to innovate on what they do with the spectrum. So it goes mostly underutilized while the demand for wireless broadband increases exponentially.

All you have to do is look at the massive innovation and performance curves in the rare unlicensed bands (wifi and bluetooth) to see that an open spectrum approach with captialist style competition will create the fastest performance improvements over time.

The President appointed an advisory committee to study our spectrum policy and make some recommendations. That committee reported last year that making more spectrum unlicensed would be the best policy.

The report's authors cited a European study:

freeing 400 megahertz of radio spectrum to be shared using new technologies would be equivalent to an economic financial stimulus of 800 billion euros

This points out the most pernicious aspect of our current spectrum policy. And that is that the spectrum being auctioned off is being priced based on its current value not its potential value that can only be unlocked by the kind of permissionless innovation we see in the unlicensed spectrum. So we not only are we giving the incumbent duopolist carriers more control over our spectrum but we are also selling it at a fraction of what it could be and should be worth.

We need a new spectrum policy in this country and we need it now.

Related articles

FCC will crack open unlicensed spectrum to speed up wireless Internet

Hey FCC: Time to Expand Unlicensed Spectrum!

It's Not Super WiFi, but It's Still Important: The Debate Over 'Unlicensed Spectrum'

Can the FCC Create Public "Super WiFi Networks"?

FCC to Free New Chunk of Unlicensed Wi-Fi Spectrum – Largest Block Made Available Since 2003

FCC plans to free up spectrum, boost Wi-Fi speeds

The President announced yesterday that he was in favor of a Startup Visa. Hallelujah.

That led me to go back in time.

The first time I posted about #startupvisa on AVC was September 23, 2009.

The first time Brad Feld posted about #startupvisa was September 10, 2009.

The first time Paul Graham posted about #startupvisa was April 2009.

It's a shame that it takes almost four years before a good idea gets the President's support. And its a greater shame that there are many in Congress who will still vote against this idea.

I do believe we may have reached peak employment, as discussed in the comments here recently, and as my partner Albert has been discussing on his blog over the past several months. Any serious and intellectually honest jobs agenda must deal with that reality.

But I also believe stagnating wages here in the US vs escalating wages around the world presents an opportunity for the US that we are not, as yet, doing much with. This was in the WSJ today (or maybe yesterday):

While wage costs in the U.S. have been about flat in recent years, they have been rising 20% a year in China, a trend Mr. McNamara expects to continue for at least five years. He said labor costs for Flextronics rose about 30% last year in Malaysia and 40% in Indonesia.

The WSJ post was about high tech manufacturing but I think the same is true of outsourcing of back office, customer support, and programming jobs to India and elsewhere.

There are parts of the industrialized midwest, like Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo, where you have well educated workforces stuck in regions where housing prices have declined for more than a decade and wages have declined as well, where jobless rates are at catastrophic levels. A house that would cost $500,000 in the NY metro area can be had for less than $100,000 in these regions.

This is both a problem and an opportunity. It is time to bring these jobs back that we have moved elsewhere. Although I have not done any sort of analysis here, I would be shocked if one could not make a strong cost based economic argument to do so.

I am certain that there are plenty of reasons why it is not happening, or happening at scale. Clearly there are a bunch of one time costs, for facilities, for job training, for other stuff. And then there are the regulatory burdens that we in the US throw at our job creators. Again, from the WSJ post:

The difference in labor costs is narrowing and local officials in America have been giving more financial incentives to companies setting up plants in the U.S., Mike McNamara, chief executive of Flextronics, said in an interview Friday. Mr. McNamara said he could even imagine some smartphones being made in the U.S. eventually. But he cautioned that the return of manufacturing to the U.S. is likely to be a "slow and evolving process" rather than a flood. Many obstacles remain, including relatively high U.S. taxes, health-care expenses and regulatory costs, he said.

If jobs is our number one economic issue in the US (I believe it is), then policy makers at the federal, state, and local levels need to be all over this stuff. We can reverse the outsourcing & offshoring trends of the past thirty years. The era of gloabal wage arbitrage is over or will soon be over. But we need to make a bunch of smart investments and we need to make them now.

Whomever came up with the term fiscal cliff to describe the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the simultaneous sequester of across the board spending cuts did not do us any favors. I honestly had hoped we would get both. But that was never going to happen once it was framed as driving over a cliff. Who wants to do that?

Instead we got some small deal that essentially raises taxes on the highest earners and a kick the can approach on everything else. We are going to address our ridiculously high deficit in a series of crisis driven deadlines instead of the rational way, which is to sit down and hammer out a "grand bargain."

I do agree that cutting spending in some sort of brain dead across the board sequester is not ideal. And I also believe that phasing in our bad tasting but necessary fiscal medicine is better for the ecomony and so therefore a more prudent policy.

But here is the deal. We are spending way too much money in our federal goverment and we aren't bringing in enough revenue. The original grand bargain between Boehner and Obama which would have cut spending by $4.5 trillion over ten years and raised about half of that in new revenues over the same time period was the right idea. That would have gotten our annual deficit down to sub $500bn which still seems like a huge amount to me.

Now we are going to do the thing that every CEO tries to avoid, and that is death by a thousand cuts. It is demoralizing to everyone and painful to watch. And because our political system is so polarized and politicized, I can't imagine we will ever get to the $750bn in annual deficit reduction we will need to get our fiscal house in order.

I know that many in this community will point the finger at Obama and cite his ongoing lack of leadership (and his instinct to play politics) on this issue. I think that criticism is fair. But to some degree Obama is being driven to this place by an even worse behavior by the tea party wing of the Republican party who made a silly pledge to avoid raising taxes and now has to live up to it. The elder Bush (who I sure hope is feeling better) made a stupid pledge like that and lost out on a deserved second term as a result. When will the right wing of our government stop making taxes their third rail? And when will the left wing of our government understand that entitlements are a cancer growing inside this country that must be addressed now?

At times like this, I see the value in dictatorships (at least benevolent ones) and parliamentary systems. We need leadership that can address the issue head on and make the hard but necessary decisions to get our fiscal house in order. And we don't have that in this country. In either party. It sucks.

Related articles

What You Need to Know About the Fiscal Cliff Before You Go to Your New Year's Party

President Obama is Responsible for Our Fiscal Mess

Dems' Mystifying New Fiscal Cliff Strategy

What Is the "Fiscal Cliff"?

The Fiscal Cliff Losers: Conservatives, the Tea Party, and the GOP

The 'cliff' deal may not much cut the deficit. Does it matter?

Regular readers of this blog know of my great admiration and appreciation for the work of our NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg. One of Bloomberg's signature issues has been gun safety. When you ask Mike about this issue, he tells you that after a few visits to the wives and children of NYC police officers who have been shot and killed on their job, you get pretty worked up about this issue. And worked up he is.

Bloomberg and many of the urban mayors around the country have created the Demand A Plan organization to fight for gun safety. It is currently the leading gun safety group in the US.

Many leaders in the Internet/tech industry have been working with Demand A Plan over the past few days to kick off a large and sustained social media and regular media campaign to pressure our leaders to do something about the gun safety problem in our country. I have been involved in this effort and I support its goals completely.

Here are a few things that are launching today:

1) A full page ad in the New York Times which I have signed personally

2) A viral social media campaign at the Demand A Plan website

3) Change your twitter avatar (I changed mine)

I will update this post with additional efforts that launch today. Like the PIPA/SOPA efforts last year, this effort is diverse, distributed, chaotic, and hopefully effective and powerful. I am not aware of everything that is going on right now. There is a lot of activity out there. But I will try to stay on top of it today and keep you all up to date as well.

In addition to our Mayor, I would like to thank Ken Lerer, Ron Conway, and Eric Hippeau for their excellent leadership of the tech sector's work on this issue in the past few days.

Folks in the AVC community are well aware of my passion and energy for bringing programming education and curriculum into our classrooms, both at the K12 and Higher Education levels. I feel like good things are starting to happen but we need to do so much more. We are not aligning the needs of the 21st century workforce with the skills we are teaching in our classrooms and that is a big mistake.

Congress has endorsed the week containing December 9th as Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek) to recognize the critical role of computing in today’s society and the imperative to bolster computer science education at all levels. I am involved in some local efforts in NYC around CSEdWeek and I would like to highlight it to all of you because it is coming up.

The CSEdWeek website has resources for all the key consituents in this effort. Look for the box on the website that looks like this:

You can also sign the pledge for CSEdWeek. I just did that.

But most importantly, you can celebrate CSEdWeek in your school, your community, your company, and anywhere else you think it is relevant. This is at its core a movement by regular people trying to stimulate change in our education systems and help them make needed changes.

My partner Albert posted yesterday about what he is doing in his kids' school. It is efforts like that, which many of you have also taken on, that will bring the change we need. And that is what CSEdWeek is all about.

Related articles

Please pledge for CSEdWeek 2012 – whenever your event occurs

Are You Ready for Computer Science Education Week?

Our President gave an important speech yesterday at the UN. It was a speech about speech. Free speech. This is a topic that gets me going. I have been investing in the tools of self expression and free speech for close to twenty years now. I know how powerful they are and I also know that they can be used by haters and trouble makers just as easily as they can be used for good.

Here at AVC, I have tried to cultivate a forum where all opinions are welcome. Even those that are hateful or hurtful to me. I let them stand. Where everyone can judge them and opine on them. The President said this at the UN and I wholeheartedly agree with it:

As president of our country, and commander in chief of our military, I accept that people are going to call me awful things every day,” Mr. Obama said. “And I will defend their right to do so.

And he went on to say this:

the strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression, it is more speech — the voices of tolerance that rally against bigotry and blasphemy, and lift up the values of understanding and mutual respect.

These are important values to state, to live by, and to protect. I applaud the President for expressing his beliefs on this subject. If we can export anything to the parts of the world that are just beginning their relationship with democracy, it is these ideas and the tools that make self expression possible. We must do this.

The "net native" generation can be and should be an important political force. These young people grew up with the Internet and they understand how to leverage it in all aspects of their lives. And they understand the importance of protecting the Internet and the concept of Internet Freedom.

But we have to make sure they are registered to vote and that they do indeed go out and vote. That's where The Internet Votes comes in. Over the next week, the folks at Fight For The Future and Personal Democracy Media will be rolling out a series of tools that encourage everyone, but particularly the net natives, to register to vote and then in turn to get out and vote. This effort is non-partisan. There is nothing in this campaign that has anything to do with who you should vote for and why. It's all about voter activation.

The first of these tools, a voter registration widget, is available now (in beta). I am running it on the right sidebar of AVC, under the ad unit. You can get it for your blog here. Please feel free to use it as much as possible so the folks can fix the bugs and get it ready for prime time next week.

As more of these tools launch, I will blog about them, use them, and encourage all of you to do the same. Those who understand the power of the open internet, use it in their lives, and value it as a positive force for society must vote and make their voices heard if they want our elected officials to value these principles as well.

The US Senate plans to vote on their version of a cybersecurity bill this coming week. This is the Senate's response to the CISPA bill in the House.

I have yet to hear a compelling reason why we need Cybersecurity legislation and am of the opinion that the perfect answer here is no legislation. However, I am also of the opinion that perfect is often the enemy of the good. And there may be a decent piece of legislation coming out of the Senate this week if, and this is a big if, the Franken and Wyden Amendments are added to the Senate's bill.

The Franken Amendment strikes section 701 from the Senate's bill. Section 701 provides companies with the explicit right to monitor private user communications and engage in countermeasures.

The Wyden Amendment require law enforcement officials to procure a warrant before obtaining location data from a person's cell phone, laptop or other gadgets.

This all may be much ado over nothing as I've been told that the House is not going to pass the Senate's bill and the Senate is not going to pass CISPA. So we may end up with nothing anyway. Which would be fine with me.

But, like PIPA/SOPA, my fear is we are ultimately going to get some legislation on this issue. And so figuring out how to get decent legislation instead of awful legislation seems to be a good idea. Adding the Franken and Wyden Amendments to the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 is one way to achieve that.

There will be a bunch of places you can go to let your elected officials know how you feel about these bills. But most of them will launch tomorrow. As of today, this is the best place online to let yourself be heard on the cybersecurity bill. I will update this post tomorrow as more online advocacy unfolds.