June 2011

The tech community has begun to marshal its forces against the Protect IP Act, a bill aimed at shutting down rogue websites. Some 50 venture capitalists fired off a letter to members of Congress in which they charge that the act, which has already been approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee, would "chill investment in the Internet, throttle innovation, and hurt American competitiveness."

"The bill is ripe for abuse, as it allows rights holders to require third parties to block access and take away revenue sources for online services, with limited oversight and due process," wrote Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures, which has funded Internet companies such as Twitter, Foursquare, Boxee, Kickstarter, Clickable, and Zynga. His letter was signed by 53 other venture capitalists representing 40 firms, including AOL Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and EDventure Holdings.

The Motion Picture Association of America is striking back, hard, against the venture capitalists and their letter. "We can’t keep being asked to choose between technology and creativity, and we can’t stand by as criminals profit from the hard work of the millions of American men and women of the creative and entertainment industry," Michael O'Leary, the MPAA's executive vice president for government affairs, said in a statement. "This is a smart, narrowly-crafted bill whose purpose is stopping theft, not slowing innovation. All we’re asking is that the innovators play by the rules.”

In a recent blog post, Google Fellow Amit Singhal — the head of Google’s core ranking team — began the company's response to an antitrust inquiry from the Federal Trade Commission.

He reiterates several times that “using Google is a choice,” and says the company tries hard to be as competitive as possible by doing a number of things (the obvious implication being that some competitors don’t), including:

1. Provide the most relevant answers as quickly as possible. Singhal says Google is “always trying to figure out new ways to answer even more complicated questions” and advertisements “offer useful information, too.”
2. Label advertisements clearly. Google “always distinguishes advertisements from our organic search results,” the blog post says, and will “continue to be transparent about what is an ad and what isn't.”
3. Be transparent. Singhal says Google shares “more information about how our rankings work than any other search engine.”
4. Loyalty, not lock-in. The Google post says the company believes “you control your data, so we have a team of engineers whose only goal is to help you take your information with you.” (This one is probably aimed at Facebook and its refusal to let you download your contact info.)

It’s been more than a decade since the large construction of fiber networks crisscrossing the world in response to the first web boom, and since then, the Internet has grown to become interwoven with every aspect of our daily lives. Billions now have a web connection, from either a mobile phone or a fiber to the home connection, if not both. Now the fiber boom is back, but the next generation network isn't just more fiber; it’s an entirely new type of network that fits what we now expect the web to do: Be smarter and be everywhere we are.

To do that, Allied Fiber is building a new kind of fiber network that combines not just network materials, but also data centers, to bring connectivity at competitive places over more and more of the country. Within the next three weeks, Allied Fiber will order its fiber cable, and six months later, the network will begin taking traffic. The premise is radical in that founder Hunter Newby has envisioned a way to bring terabyte connections across a certain swath of America by building out a new type of infrastructure, and leasing it out to other providers.

For many online shoppers, Amazon is their starting point for researching products they want to buy -- and Amazon’s customer reviews, in particular, play a key role in those purchasing decisions. But there is some new evidence suggesting that Amazon’s customer reviewers—particularly the top 1,000 reviewers—do not always make independent decisions about which books and other products they write about.

According to a new Cornell study that we previewed last week, the reviewers in many cases acknowledge that in order to maintain their high rankings and continue to receive free products (one of the perks of being a top reviewer), they have to make surprisingly calculated decisions about what to review and what to say about those products. The author of the study, Cornell professor Trevor Pinch, says the fundamental problem is that people reading the reviews probably naturally assume that the Amazon reviewers are regular shoppers just like them—when, in fact, their relationship to the products they review can be a little more complicated. “The issue of the ‘customers’ not really being customers needs to be addressed,” says Pinch, who surveyed 166 of Amazon’s top 1,000 reviewers for his study.