December 2011

[Commentary] Location-based apps have gotten a lot of attention but they still seem to have a tougher time cracking the mainstream. I’ve been thinking about how these services can accelerate their growth. One of the most intriguing possibilities is the emergence of more voice-enabled artificial intelligence assistants like Apple’s Siri.

A lot of apps could make use of Siri or similar technology as a shortcut for all kinds of actions, letting people speak naturally to accomplish tasks that might be harder to access using touch input. But I think location-based services specifically could benefit most from Siri and whatever equivalents Google or Microsoft put together on their mobile platforms. We’re already seeing some of that promise in action with voice-activated navigation services, and Siri can already pull up nearby restaurants using Yelp. But there’s a lot more that can be done.

Engineer and congressional Republican firebrand Darrell Issa is leveraging his supporters' collective outrage against a contentious anti-piracy bill, SOPA, to showcase his new experimental crowdsourcing legislative platform. "Project Madison" invites the legions of angry technology firms and policy wonks to construct their own version of an alternative anti-piracy bill on a new online platform.

Project Madison is just one of a handful of ideas bubbling in Issa's laboratory of open government: Over the last six months, he's launched an interactive subcommittee livestream, published a new form of online polling, and sponsored a bill to make government spending trackable. To be clear, his experiments often serve to advance a brazen political agenda. And Rep Issa (R-CA) could be seen as an unlikely champion of transparency. And digital democracy has had a difficult time gaining traction. And yet Issa publicly pledges to open the halls of Congress, at least some of them, to America's netizens.

[Commentary] 2012 will be a boon for TV stations. Bill Wheatley suggests they set up ‘Windfall tithing’ operations, pumping 10 percent of their bounty into solid election-year reporting to counter some of the misleading and even false commercials they will be running.

It’s no secret that, while some stations do a good job covering elections (the six Post-Newsweek stations, for example, recently announced a vigorous 2012 political-coverage plan), many stations do not. Part of this stems from a belief by numerous news directors that politics and government are boring, that viewers are just not interested. This notion has consequences: A study by USC’s Annenberg School revealed that, over 14 randomly selected days in 2009, Los Angeles television stations devoted an average of only 22 seconds to coverage of local government news in each half-hour newscast; crime received an average of seven times more play. Despite such embarrassments, getting stations to underwrite more and better election coverage will be a big challenge. Some general managers will assert that their stations are entitled to have a really good year financially to help make up for the relatively weak years they experienced during the Great Recession; others can be expected to echo the claim that the public lacks a passion for politics. They – and we – shouldn’t forget that in 2008 a record 132 million of our fellow citizens cared enough about the future of the country and their local communities to go to the polls and cast their ballots. This year, as then, persuading the electorate to vote in a particular way will be the mission of political ads. TV stations should have a mission, too: to make sure that viewers have the information they need to make smart choices on Election Day. Windfall tithing can help accomplish that. By embracing it, stations have a chance to do good in 2012, while still doing very well.

[Bill Wheatley is a former executive vice-president of NBC News and a onetime news director at WBZ-TV, Boston]

Two bills now pending in Congress -- the PROTECT IP Act of 2011 (Protect IP) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House -- represent the latest legislative attempts to address a serious global problem: large-scale online copyright and trademark infringement. Although the bills differ in certain respects, they share an underlying approach and an enforcement philosophy that pose grave constitutional problems and that could have potentially disastrous consequences for the stability and security of the Internet’s addressing system, for the principle of interconnectivity that has helped drive the Internet’s extraordinary growth, and for free expression.

To begin with, the bills represent an unprecedented, legally sanctioned assault on the Internet’s critical technical infrastructure. Based upon nothing more than an application by a federal prosecutor alleging that a foreign website is “dedicated to infringing activities,” Protect IP authorizes courts to order all U.S. Internet service providers, domain name registries, domain name registrars, and operators of domain name servers -- a category that includes hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses, colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, and the like -- to take steps to prevent the offending site’s domain name from translating to the correct Internet protocol address. These orders can be issued even when the domains in question are located outside of the United States and registered in top-level domains (e.g., .fr, .de, or .jp) whose operators are themselves located outside the United States; indeed, some of the bills’ remedial provisions are directed solely at such domains. Directing the remedial power of the courts towards the Internet’s core technical infrastructure in this sledgehammer fashion has impact far beyond intellectual property rights enforcement -- it threatens the fundamental principle of interconnectivity that is at the very heart of the Internet.