September 2010

Free speech stands front and center in the Supreme Court term beginning next week, in a pair of cases testing the First Amendment's reach in the digital age.

On Oct. 6, the justices will weigh whether the First Amendment protects a Kansas church's campaign to publicize its beliefs by picketing military funerals with vulgar placards and insulting fallen soldiers' survivors in online screeds. A month later , the court is to consider whether states can bar minors from buying violent videogames, on the theory that these games cause damage to developing minds and this outweighs young people's constitutional rights.

Both cases add digital twists to constitutional doctrine. The church's Internet posting potentially exposes the entire world to its hurtful attack, while the videogame laws single out computer role-playing as uniquely dangerous to children while leaving violent music, films, comic books and other media unrestricted.

The Roberts Court's record on free-speech cases makes it hard to predict the outcome. It voted 8-1 earlier this year to strike down a federal law that banned depictions of animal cruelty, finding the ban too broad. At the same time, it curtailed First Amendment rights for minors in 2007, ruling that school officials could suppress a student placard that referred to marijuana.

When it comes to video cord-cutting, TV executives are moving out of the denial stage. They are now claiming it is someone else's problem.

Consider comments at last week's Goldman Sachs media conference on the issue, which involves consumers ditching cable-TV subscriptions in favor of cheaper Web TV options. Verizon Communications Chief Executive Ivan Seidenberg candidly warned that just as cord-cutting devastated the traditional landline phone business, as customers went mobile, it would hit video. Verizon is in the video business through its FiOS network. But Mr. Seidenberg said that given FiOS's high capacity and ability to offer extras like 3-D, "we will be OK," whereas it "is going to be a pretty big issue for cable." Meanwhile, Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt, insisted, "I feel pretty good about us," given that cable operators' broadband infrastructure is needed for Web access. "This is more focused on the entertainment business than on us," he added. But John Martin, finance chief of entertainment company Time Warner, insisted that "our type of company should benefit" if viewers cut the cord en masse. The reality is all companies are threatened to some degree. After all, right now, nearly 97% of households with TVs subscribe either to cable, satellite or phone company-delivered video service, Nielsen estimates, with subscription proceeds effectively being split between providers and entertainment companies.

Technology executives and law enforcement officials are clashing over a nearly 25-year-old law that protects Internet users' private information. Some of the world's largest technology companies, including Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., are pushing for changes to the law — written before the World Wide Web existed — saying it makes it too easy for government investigators to gain access to their customers' Web-based e-mail and documents.

That, the companies say, is bad for the bottom line. Many consumers and businesses are finding it easier and cheaper to entrust the storage of their e-mail and documents to Web companies such as Google that can store vast amounts of data in the so-called cloud — networks of remote computer centers filled with thousands of high-speed servers. But the cloud's wealth of personal data has also attracted law enforcement officials eager to tap into the information to catch and prosecute criminals. They say Congress should be wary about diminishing their powers to investigate crimes in a fast-changing digital landscape where evidence can disappear overseas — or into oblivion — in an instant. The debate over the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act escalated Sept 23 in a hearing before a House Judiciary subcommittee — the latest in a series of hearings aimed at updating the law to encourage the growth of online business while striking a balance between effective law enforcement and users' right to digital privacy.

When Google filed its incorporation papers 12 years ago, the company that would grow to a $24 billion-a-year business consisted of three Stanford computer science graduate students, all in their mid-20s. But even back in September 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google's co-founders, and Craig Silverstein, Google's first employee, had a clear idea how they would carefully pick their hires, choosing people compatible with the culture they planned to create. As Google marks its 12th birthday this month, the tightknit, idealistic culture forged by its founders remains one of the company's foundational strengths. Many key players in its top management date to its earliest days, veterans of 100-hour work weeks and parking-lot roller-hockey games, who shared a vision of a company that could change the world. But just as those former 20-somethings are now looking at 40, with spouses, kids and other middle-age responsibilities, so too have their views of business matured. With the growth in Google's reach and power, their idealism is now forced to vie with coldblooded calculation, observers say. The result is a company navigating the conflicts that come with age, balancing commitment with pragmatism as it evaluates what success really means.