Bayosphere

It’s January 1, 2001, in Nara, Japan. The New Year is the most important holiday here.

Wherever you are, welcome to the new millennium. It has finally arrived despite the hoo-rah last year.

Predictions for the New Year

Here, with tongue only half in cheek, are my predictions for 2001.

For the past two days I’ve been attempting to make a donation to a charity using its Web site. I’ve been repeatedly frustrated, and the way it’s happened is a lesson.

The charity in question is called the Heifer Project, which helps families around the world become self-sufficient. The idea is to give people a source of food, not a temporary supply of food. Several relatives asked me to donate there in lieu of giving them gifts this holiday season, and I gladly complied. At least I tried.

Yesterday was the first attempt. I filled out several screens of forms, putting in my credit card number and an amount. When I clicked the button to make the transaction happen, I got an error message. I tried again. Same message.

I knew I had plenty of available credit for this donation, and called the credit-card company’s help desk to see what was going on. They told me that, indeed, they had blocked the transaction temporarily, as it was a large one, because they wanted to ensure that I had intended to make it. Fraud prevention, they said.

Well, okay, I guess. I like the idea that the credit-card folks are flagging suspicious deals. Please allow this transaction to proceed, I told them. They said fine, just try again.

So I plugged in all the information again. The Heifer Project was having none of it. Apparently — I’m still not sure of this — the system created cookies on my computer that showed I’d already made a transaction. I got a different error message, saying this session was already completed. Huh?

I called the Heifer Project’s toll-free number, and sat on hold for ten minutes before hanging up. Ultimately I decided to try one more time today.

Bzzzzttt. Another error message, just like the first one. I called the credit-card company, and was told that the computers were down, so no one could help me.

Later today, I got ahold of someone at the charity’s toll-free line. She told me she couldn’t check the computers to see if my donation had been accepted. She had a good reason — there had been an ice storm in Little Rock, where the project is based, and the power was out.

If this had been a routine charitable donation I would have quit by now. I made a promise, however. And I will keep it, even if I have to write and mail an old-fashioned check.

Which is what I eventually did…

If you’re in a donating mood, I’d like to make two particular recommendations:

Electronic Frontier Foundation: This is one of the only organizations in the world taking the side of average people in the war over “intellectual property” — a war that the entertainment and software industries intend to win no matter how thoroughly they stomp out some of the values and traditions that made this nation great. The EFF is defending your rights.

Electronic Privacy Information Center: EPIC, also a nonprofit organization, has also been at the front lines of some key battles in recent years. It has done some of the finest work in exposing governmental and corporate intrusions on our private lives. Most recently it used the Freedom of Information Act to reveal the FBI’s increasingly brazen attacks on fundamental liberties in the digital age, notably its Carnivore software that can make our online lives increasingly insecure from snooping.

A Sordid Holiday Tale

Wall Street Journal: Companies quietly use mergers, spinoffs to cut worker benefits. Mergers often lead to more visible forms of pain for employees, such as layoffs and plant closings. But when it comes to benefit cuts, workers and retirees often don’t even realize they are happening because the language of pension and medical plans can be arcane and some companies tend to shroud benefit reductions in euphemism.

“Euphemism” is another word for deception, which is what these companies do to their employees in the process of ripping them off.

General Electric is a great company in many ways. But its willingness — no, eagerness — to cheat longtime employees is disgusting.

You have to wonder where the lawyers and accountants parked their consciences as they stretched the boundaries of decency in search of an almighty buck for their bosses. The ethics codes of the professional classes seem to have no application here.

The contents of this post have not been recovered from the archives yet.

It’s an annual exercise in my business — looking back at the highlights (and lowlights) of the previous 12 months. I indulged, as usual.

More in my Sunday column.

John Ashcroft was governor of Missouri when I lived there for a time during the 1980s. He was a classic right-wing zealot, and he hasn’t changed a bit since he went to Washington as one of the state’s U.S. senators. Now he’s George W. Bush’s nominee for attorney general.

The press is falling for Bush’s deceptive marketing of his appointees. Naming social moderates like Christine Todd Whitman to run the Environmental Protection Agency and Colin Powell as Secretary of State means nothing when it comes to making social policy. Bush expects Whitman to undermine the environmental enforcement that has taken place during the past eight years. He knows Powell is a hard-liner on military issues. That is why they were chosen.

Ashcroft will work to undermine abortion rights. He has an unbelievably bad record on civil rights and civil liberties. Just what Bush wants, no doubt, but just what America does not need.

So much for compassionate conservatism. So much for being a unifier, not a divider.

ISPs and Spammers

Ed Foster (Infowordl): UUNet seems to be biggest spam haven. “This isn’t a case of not knowing they’re doing it — UUNet has now made a policy decision that it will continue to host and hence profit from the supply of spam services,” Linford says.

Wall Street Journal: United may face antitrust hurdles. The merger, which would make UAL Corp.’s United the world’s largest air carrier by far, also faces rising political opposition fueled in part by consumer complaints about high air fares and poor service. A congressional investigation to be released Wednesday found that the deal would reduce or eliminate competition in 290 U.S. markets, in which 16 million passengers traveled in 1999.

As an all-too-frequent customer of United, and victim of the airline’s poisonous labor relations on domestic flights earlier this year, I can’t imagine a worse thing for the flying public than this merger. It would quickly cause the remaining large airlines to merge, leaving us with three mega-carriers that would be able to treat their customers with even more disdain than they do today.

The airlines point out that they’ve been in a money-losing business until recently. But they’ve made up for it with incredibly fare hikes in the past several years. They’ve adopted computer reservations methods that squeeze the most revenue out of their seats — far more efficiently than ever before. They are not hurting anymore.

Now they want to have this cozy oligopoly. They shouldn’t get it. We’ve seen the results of oligopoly in other areas, and consumers are the ones who lose.

I used to write about the airlines when I was a reporter in Detroit. Even the best one have nasty management, with the possible exception of Southwest Airlines, which keeps defying the rules in wonderful ways. They have carved up landing slots at the major airports in ways that give individual carriers vast dominance locally. Anyone who thinks it’s more than a remote shot in the dark to launch a competing airline is not aware of the anticompetitive tactics the major airlines use when an upstart dares to give it a try.

The nation needs more than three major airlines. It’s a simple as that. The federal and state antitrust people need to stop this merger. Period.

Property Values, Up Forever?

Mercury News: Bay Area median home price reaches record high. A predicted slowdown in Bay Area home sales and home prices did not materialize in November, as the median price reached another record high and the number of homes sold was well up compared to November of 1999.

Housing prices are a trailing economic indicator, based on wealth and perceived wealth and prospects for the future. When Silicon Valley and the Bay Area return to rationality, it’s going to be very, very ugly for the people who bought at the top of this insane market.

Mercury News: Plans for low-power radio dealt a blow. Since January, when the FCC first launched the low-power radio program, about 300 schools, churches, clubs and other groups in California and thousands more nationally expressed interest in starting new local stations. Yet, the FCC put the program on hold as it faced political pressure from several members of Congress to kill the plan.

The broadcasting lobby, once again, has rolled over Congress and the public interest.

A few years ago, the nation’s television broadcasters extracted one of the most outrageous deals in history. They got Congress to award them new spectrum — worth $50 billion to $70 billion, by reasonable estimates — in return for some vague promises that they’re already breaking. Never mind that the airwaves were public property. What the broadcasters wanted, they got.

The Federal Communications Commission wanted to open up pieces of the radio spectrum for low-power stations. But the existing broadcasters, increasingly part of massive chains without the least interest in the communities they “serve,” loathe the idea of competition from stations that actually care about their back yard. The threat, you see, was that people would actually get a choice instead of the consistent marketing-driven pablum on today’s airwaves.

So the commercial broadcasters — with National Public Radio’s support, I’m disappointed to discover — launched a campaign of disinformation and speculation. Even though the FCC had done plenty of testing, the broadcasters insisted there would be interference on existing stations. This was a fig leaf for powerful members of Congress to block the low-power initiative.

President Clinton should be ashamed of himself. He surely knows better, but has once again been untrue to his early promises.

I don’t expect shame from the broadcasters or their congressional puppets. But if a lame-duck Democratic president can’t find the courage to do the right thing, what hope will there be under the Republicans, who stand up for big corporations against the small as a matter of course? None.

What can low-power radio advocates do at this point? I don’t know. The grassroots got squashed this time. They’ll have to start over, and try to convince a new Congress.

The Internet may be the radio station of last resort for people who genuinely care about communities. You have to believe the broadcasters are looking hard already for a way to stop even that phenomenon.

The real culprit, once again, is the legal bribery we call campaign financing. Maybe we’ll see some real action on it in the next Congress, though the opponents hold the strings. Until campaign finance reform arrives, the public interest will remain little more than a quaint notion.

Meanwhile, low-power radio languishes. This is a sad day for the republic.

Monopolist Knows One When He Sees One

ZDNet: Microsoft calls on FCC to examine AIM. Bill Gates personally phoned the FCC chairman and commissioners last week to lobby for an investigation of AOL’s dominance over instant messaging.

Gates is absolutely right. He’s also a raging hypocrite. What else is new?

America Online’s dominance of instant messaging is just as profound as Microsoft’s control of the market for PC operating systems. Both companies have used their dominance to shut out genuine competition, and to leverage their power elsewhere.

What AOL is assembling via its instant messaging system is nothing short of a new communications network in which it not only owns the center but the phone book, too. The value of this is incalcuable. And a system of this sort should be open to other players.

If the FCC doesn’t have the courage to force AOL to be more open in its messaging, allowing other IM clients to interoperate with its own, then the Justice Department should begin preparing a new antitrust case.

It’s been quite a year, and over the next several weeks I’ll be discussing the technology-related events of 2000.

First up is a look at the debacle in tech stocks since last spring: “The technology boom has been called the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet. Maybe so, but that’s not the whole story. As the events of 2000 have shown, it’s also been the greatest legal con game of all time.”

Read more here.

Gordon Bell sends along a link that fits in well with my theme. It’s called the Internet Wasteland.

Caveat Emptor, Part 14,405

Ed Foster (Infoworld): From the majors to the minors, manufacturers shirk their warranties. I’ve never been sure what hardware manufacturers mean by the phrase “limited warranty,” but one thing that seems unlimited is the range of excuses they use for denying customers warranty service.

SuperOpenDirectory

What is SuperOpenDirectory? The coolest thing about it is that if you change your directory, our “inclusion” will change to reflect it, within an hour of your changes. So, while this is just a start, it’s designed to grow, like a weed!

Dave Farber posted a link to my Friday column about George W. Bush and prospects for the new administration to his (Farber’s) Interesting People mail list. It prompted several thoughtful responses. Read them here.

I’ve gotten more messages than I can count on today’s column regarding economic and tech prospects for the upcoming Bush presidency. Here’s some of the mail.

Your comments welcome, as always.