August 2012

Technology innovation in the United States will be driven by corporate tax reform and reduced regulation, according to a panel of prominent Republicans at a Republican National Convention event hosted by Bloomberg and Google.

The panel was convened to discuss how government might create policies to encourage investment in high-technology and Internet companies — one of the few areas of growth among startups in recent years, according to a Bloomberg analysis that was briefly presented at the event. However, as is often the case when talking about technology with backers of GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, the conversation kept returning to overall tax and economic policy. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of American Action Forum, called for an end to the taxation of repatriated capital by U.S.-based multinationals and a lowering of the overall tax burdens on U.S. corporations.

At 30 seconds a spot, and sometimes 60, it would take more than six months to watch all 526,633 presidential election ads that have run on television since the general election began in earnest in early April.

It breaks down to roughly one spot promoting President Barack Obama or attacking Republican challenger Mitt Romney for every spot taking the opposite stance for the Nov. 6 election, according to data compiled by New York-based Kantar Media’s CMAG, which tracks ads on national network, national cable and local broadcast stations. Of the 526,104 presidential ads supplied by groups that paid for at least 200 such commercials to run from April 10, when Romney effectively clinched his party’s nomination, to Aug. 20, the last day for which data are available, 264,542 came from campaigns or groups that favor Romney and 261,562 came from pro- Obama organizations. That’s a partisan breakdown of 50.3 percent Republican to 49.7 percent Democratic. While the cumulative total points to partisan parity, it hasn’t been like that for long stretches of the campaign.

Many governments have invested heavily in packet inspection and related technologies, which allow them to build a picture of what passes through their networks and what comes in from beyond their borders. The tools secure networks from attack -- and help keep tabs on citizens.

Narus, a subsidiary of Boeing, supplies “cyber analytics” to a customer base largely made up of government agencies and network carriers. Neil Harrington, the company’s director of product management for cyber analytics, said that his company’s “enterprise” customers -- agencies of the US government and large telecommunications companies -- are ”more interested in what's going on inside their networks” for security reasons. But some of Narus’ other customers, like Middle Eastern governments that own their nations’ connections to the global Internet or control the companies that provide them, “are more interested in what people are doing on Facebook and Twitter.” Surveillance perfected? Not quite, because DPI imposes its own costs. While deep packet inspection systems can be set to watch for specific patterns or triggers within network traffic, each specific condition they watch for requires more computing power—and generates far more data. So much data can be collected that the DPI systems may not be able to process it all in real time, and pulling off mass surveillance has often required nation-state budgets. Not anymore. Thanks in part to tech developed to power giant Web search engines like Google’s—analytics and storage systems that generally get stuck with the label "big data"—"big surveillance" is now within reach even of organizations like the Olympics.

As U.S. District Judge Denise Cote prepares to issue a verdict on the Department of Justice’s proposed e-book pricing settlement with three publishers, she has granted two parties that oppose the settlement — the Authors Guild and attorney and licensing expert Bob Kohn — permission to weigh in as amici curiae, or “friends of the court.” Judge Cote previously granted Barnes & Noble and the American Booksellers Association, which also oppose the settlement, permission to file an amicus brief. Judge Cote has now decided to accept the entirety of a brief that the Authors Guild proposed on August 15. However, she is limiting Kohn’s submission to five pages. He had submitted a 55-page brief and will have to file a new, five-page one by September 4 in order for it to be accepted by the Court.