March 2013

[Commentary] Compare, for a moment, the Internet industry’s outrage against potential government censorship, as they see it, with the seeming indifference to government surveillance. In 2012, major Web sites staged a massive global protest against a law that would have given the government new powers to shut down sites associated with piracy. Yet, as Congress considers sweeping new surveillance procedures over popular Internet companies, those same digital activists are largely silent. It begs the question, does this younger, tech-savvy generation care more about innovation than civil liberties?

The “Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act” would give the government broad new powers to collect personal data from telecommunication and social network companies, often without warrant. Provisions in CISPA give legal immunity to companies, including those in social media and search, for sharing information with authorities and also helps them combat malicious hackers. So, unlike the power to shut down Web sites, intrusive surveillance doesn’t represent an existential threat to the Web. Civil liberty groups, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), are predictably outraged over both the law and industry’s acquiescence. Given CISPA’s legal benefits to private companies such as Google and Facebook, it’s easier to see why the corporate pillars of the Internet haven’t jumped on the outrage bandwagon. However, it’s not as clear why other major Internet players, such as Craigslist or Wikipedia, who participated in SOPA protests aren’t being as vocal now. The Internet community will only rise up when they feel threatened. Their inaction is sending the message, whether intended or not, that privacy is not a priority.

For years, online search has trained us to speak its odd and stilted language. Type a demand for information. Isolate the keywords. Start from scratch with every query. Use quotation marks to specify a phrase. It’s enough of a foreign language that some people call it “Searchese.”

One thing binding together much of the work Google and other companies are doing around search these days is that they’re making it more natural and conversational. Conversational search is search that tries to understand context, that makes educated guesses, that takes voice input, that parses homonyms and adapts to mobile environments, and that understands the same user across multiple devices. While on the surface, making search conversational sounds like an interface problem — just figure out an easier way for people to access the same underlying information — in reality, it cuts deep into artificial intelligence and the world outside of computers.

The main question we’ve got to ask about Google Fiber: How does Google expect its relatively small Kansas City installation to spark a big shift in American broadband? And the answer is: It won’t say.

A week after I returned from Kansas City, I drove to Google’s headquarters to chat with Kevin Lo, general manager for Google Access, the division that houses Fiber. Lo spoke at length about why, out of more than a thousand contending cities, Google chose Kansas City for Fiber and why it settled on gigabit speeds for the launch. He was also happy to speculate about what people will do with Fiber lines once they’re up and running all over the Kansas and Missouri sides of Kansas City. (Google says it will complete its initial rollout by the fall.) But Lo was cagey about the big question: How will Google turn Fiber into a big deal?

But it’s easy to speculate about Google’s potential path from Kansas City to the rest of the country. The first approach is direct -- if gigabit lines turn out to be popular and profitable for Google in Kansas City, it could move to launch them in other American cities. Because it had loads of applicant cities the first time -- many of which promised to cut through local bureaucracies and give Google the green light to install its own infrastructure -- the company would have an easy time setting up shop in a second city, and then on and on. Then there’s a second, indirect approach. Call it the Chrome model. When Google launched its lightning-fast Web browser in 2008, it did so with two goals. The first was to turn people on to Chrome. The second was to inspire competitors to develop and release speedier browsers. Chrome sparked a new round of innovation in browsers, and today all browser makers gush about their speed.

AT&T, the largest U.S. phone company, is exploring the sale of assets such as its wireless towers, a move that would give it more of a financial cushion.

The evaluation process is still early and no deals are imminent, said Brad Burns, a spokesman for Dallas-based AT&T. The review spans the entire business, he said. “In all cases, our decisions are driven by what’s right for the company and for our shareowners, so in that sense, nothing’s off the table,” Burns said. AT&T’s remarks follow speculation by analysts that the company is working on unloading some of its assets, especially its wireless towers. Finding a buyer for the towers could raise about $5 billion in cash, based on the value of similar transactions by T-Mobile USA and other companies, estimates Jonathan Atkin, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets LLC. In these transactions, the carrier typically leases back antenna space from the buyer so that its network isn’t affected. “AT&T is actively considering the monetization of its tower assets in a similar fashion to several of its peers in the wireless industry,” Atkin said.