October 2013

[Commentary] For the first time in history, a president has had to stand in the Rose Garden to apologize for a broken Web site.

But HealthCare.gov is only the latest episode in a string of information technology debacles by the federal government. So why is it that the technology available to President Barack Obama as president doesn’t compare to the technology he used to win an election? Much of the problem has to do with the way the government buys things. The President should use the power of the White House to end all large information technology purchases, and instead give his administration’s accomplished technologists the ability to work with agencies to make the right decisions, increase adoption of modern, incremental software development practices, like a popular one called Agile, already used in the private sector, and work with the Small Business Administration and the General Services Administration to make it easy for small businesses to contract with the government. Large federal information technology purchases have to end. Any methodology with a 94 percent chance of failure or delay, which costs taxpayers billions of dollars, doesn’t belong in a 21st-century government.

[Clay Johnson, a former Presidential Innovation Fellow and lead programmer for Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign, is the chief executive officer of the Department of Better Technology, a nonprofit that develops technology for governments. Harper Reed is the former chief technology officer of Obama for America.]

The TV industry, like much of corporate America, chases youth. That pursuit has a major impact on programming.

It helps explain why a low-rated show such as NBC's "Community" can keep going (and going, and going ...) while older-skewing shows are usually toast. Even if they have more total viewers. Most TV networks are chasing viewers in the "demo," or the demographic ages 18 to 49 as measured by Nielsen. But how and why did that happen? And is that even rational? The first question is easier to answer. During the early years of commercial TV, Nielsen estimated total audiences. It sounds ridiculous in our tech-savvy world, but back then Nielsen's measurements depended largely on written diaries that members of each household in the survey were obligated to fill out. That's how we know, for example, that 73-million people watched The Beatles on Ed Sullivan's show in February 1964. It's also why network TV aimed for mass audiences and maintained conventions such as a "family hour," when parents and kids could sit down together to watch shows. This led critics to charge that executives were programming a "lowest common denominator" medium — a "vast wasteland," in the timeless phrase of former FCC chief Newton Minow — that weeded out minority views and tastes. But it was how TV worked for 40 years.

But when Nielsen introduced "people meters" in 1987, that all changed. These meters allowed for more precise measurement of viewing — and also for speedy and detailed breakdowns by age and gender. Marketers loved this data. The ad industry believed young adults were the most valuable market segment by far. Even though older adults usually had greater net worths, young people went out more and spent more money on movies and beer. Also, people under 40 were believed to be more susceptible to ad pitches and hence more likely to change brands or to try something totally new. The effect on TV programming was dramatic.

As a diplomatic row rages between the United States and Europe over spying accusations, state-backed Deutsche Telekom wants German communications companies to cooperate to shield local internet traffic from foreign intelligence services. Yet the nascent effort, which took on new urgency after Germany said that it had evidence that Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone had been monitored, faces an uphill battle if it is to be more than a marketing gimmick.

It would not work when Germans surf on websites hosted on servers abroad, such as social network Facebook or search engine Google, according to interviews with six telecom and internet experts. Deutsche Telekom could also have trouble getting rival broadband groups on board because they are wary of sharing network information. More fundamentally, the initiative runs counter to how the Internet works today -- global traffic is passed from network to network under free or paid-for agreements with no thought for national borders.

A public backlash against reported US surveillance activities in France, Germany, and Italy could lead to tough new laws that put American technology companies in the tough spot of being forced to defy either US authorities or the European Union.

The revelations have revived EU legislation that would force companies such as Facebook, Yahoo, or Google to get approval from European officials before handing over data on European residents to US law enforcement -- or face enormous fines. If enacted, there could be sticky situations where “a US company would be faced with a valid request for data by US authorities and the EU is saying they can’t supply it,” says Christopher Wolf, a global privacy law expert at Hogan Lovells in Washington. But Wolf and others accuse EU nations of political grandstanding, saying they, too, are conducting mass surveillance -- and it’s far from clear any new restrictions aimed at US firms would greatly improve Europeans’ privacy.