Bayosphere

J.D. Lasica: Weblogs: A New Source of News. Blogs will supplement, not supplant, traditional media.

Comments

Wall Street Journal: New FTC chief is expected to name regulatory skeptic to consumer post. J. Howard Beales III, an academic whose studies have been used by a tobacco company and other large consumer-goods makers to fight federal regulations, could assume the post as early as next week, a government official said.

Once again, President Bush is showing his contempt for coalition politics — and a flat-out return to the days of the Reagan administration despite the lack of mandate.

Reagan and his band of zealots appointed into every major antitrust and consumer protection office people whose jobs were, essentially, to refuse to enforce the law, or at least to enforce the law as little as possible. The new head of the Federal Trade Commission, Timothy Muris, is a hardline advocate of letting business do its thing no matter what the cost to competition and consumers.

Now Muris, plainly with the approval of the Bush people, is putting someone into the top consumer-protection job who doesn’t believe in the mission. If consumers want protection, these people say, consumers can protect themselves.

If the balance were even — if individual consumers genuinely had any leverage against the giant corporations that increasingly run our lives — that argument would make sense. The reality, of course, is that Big Business has the upper hand in almost every contact you and I have with these companies.

Bill Clinton was, contrary to the bleatings of the anti-regulation crowd, no friend of consumers. He routinely took the side of the big companies except in a few highly publicized cases such as the Microsoft antitrust case, where the company’s anticompetitive behavior became too brazen to ignore.

For at least the next three and a half years, if people like Beale ascend to these kinds of jobs, don’t look for any federal help at all. If you get ripped off or otherwise cheated, don’t bother to call the cops. It’s your problem.

Comments

Via Dave, Woody’s Watch has an excellent review of Office XP. Bottom line on the software, from this and other reviews, seems to be: Either it’s not that great an upgrade from Office 2000, or it’s not ready for prime time.

Oops: Thanks to an alert reader at Microsoft’s public relations firm. He noticed I’d originally headlined this item “Windows XP” — which is inarguably not ready, since it hasn’t been released yet — instead of the correct “Office XP” (about which there is a debate).

Once I get my home system operating properly again (major disaster after installing Windows 2000 Service Pack 2), I’ll be giving Office XP a workout myself.

Comments

It would be helpful if the main players in California’s energy crunch would at least tell the truth. Doesn’t happen, because they’re politicians.

More in Wednesday column.

Comments

Clay Shirky: Hailstorm: Open Web Services Controlled by Microsoft. In decentralizing their control over the client, Microsoft seeks to gain control over a much larger set of functions, for a much larger group of devices, than they have now. The functions that HailStorm centralizes are in many ways more significant than the functions it decentralizes.

See also: Soap InterOpera, from XML Magazine (edited by my brother, Steve).

Comments

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and some public-spirited lawyers have won a big victory on behalf of people who want to speak their minds without fear of unfair retribution. Thanks in part to EFF’s intervention, Medinex Systems dropped a suit against message board posters who’d written unfriendly things about the company.

Representing the John Does was Farella, Braun and Martel, a San Francisco law firm. Kudos to the firm and the EFF.

Comments

Lots of friendly and unfriendly remarks about my column recommending a crash national program to install fiber to virtually every home. It turns out, Ray Ozzie tells me, that Japan may be doing what I

Lots of excellent mail and other feedback is coming in about my column last week speculating about the value of a corporate death penalty.

Several folks have noted an error in the column. I’m incorrect to say that more minorities than whites are put to death in America. I should have said that black and brown people are disproportionately charged with offenses carrying the death penalty, and hold a disproportionate share of the beds on the nation’s death rows.

Ah, say people who favor killing people in our names, that’s only because minority populations are more likely to commit capital crimes. See, for example, Dudley Sharp’s Pro & Con: The Death Penalty in Black and White, in which he says concerns about racism are “spurious.”

He seems sincere, but the evidence I’ve seen suggests he’s horribly wrong. See the ACLU’s Capital Punishment is Unfair. Also, from the Death Penalty Information Center, The Death Penalty in Black & White: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Decides.

More to the main point of the column, some other folks pointed out that corporations can have their charters revoked, but I don’t think that’s an equivalent. A simple revocation isn’t an appropriate punishment for the kind of misbehavior that might warrant such an extreme penalty.

It would be the data-highway inverse of the federal interstate road system — a taxpayer-funded project to put in place the fabled “last mile” of broadband connectivity. There’s no way private industry will ever do it in a timely way, barring the rise or maintenance of corrosive monopolies. This is something we all should do, for all of us.

More in Sunday column.

Comments

Amnesty International, which has done more for human rights than almost any other organization on the globe, turned 40 years old yesterday. For decades, Amnesty has stood up to dictators and putative democracies, demanding that prisoners of conscience be freed.

What a proud legacy. May Amnesty International celebrate many more anniversaries.

Comments