June 2014

[Commentary] It’s a little more than a year since Google launched Blink, a custom engine used by Chrome to turn HTML and CSS code into what you see on your screen.

Before that, Chrome was powered by a tweaked version of WebKit, the Apple-led open source engine used by Safari.

But developers and browser makers alike say cross-browser development is actually less painful than it’s ever been, thanks to efforts by browser providers to keep the tools as functionally compatible and compliant with published standards as possible.

“I think that browser compatibility is actually way ahead of what it used to be," says Rey Bango. "If you look at the most modern versions of browsers, things are coming off really nicely." Far from creating silos or havoc, this move by Google shows how "competition" in the technology sector can be a much more nuanced concept than usually thought.

On the web, businesses, distribution networks, and services operate across so many layers of abstraction that practically no game is zero sum. A competitive marketplace keeps individual browser makers from rolling out major features that aren’t supported by their rivals, since developers won’t make much use of a feature that only works in one browser.

Defining the scope of a problem is the first step toward solving it. Yet when it comes to the persistent lack of diversity in their work forces, Silicon Valley companies are quick with excuses and slow -- very slow -- to disclose even the barest data about the problem, even though they have been collecting and reporting the information to the federal government for decades.

Yahoo became one of the few companies to share basic demographic information on the diversity of its work force. Globally, about 37 percent of the Internet company’s more than 12,000 workers are women, and just 23 percent of the senior managers are women, Yahoo wrote. (The company declined to give a gender breakdown for the United States.)

Yahoo, which is one of the few tech companies run by a woman, Marissa Mayer, also provided data on the ethnicity of its United States work force, saying that 50 percent of its workers are white, 39 percent Asian, 4 percent Hispanic, 2 percent black and 4 percent undisclosed or more than one race. Asians make up 57 percent of Yahoo’s tech workers, compared with the 35 percent of the tech work force that is white. Yet when it came to leading technology teams, nearly four out of five of the bosses were white and less than a fifth were Asian.

Whites also dominated the nontechnical management jobs, although to a lesser extent. Yahoo’s disclosure, which came without commentary on causes or solutions, came in response to Google’s disclosure of its own diversity data at the end of May, which prompted some self-reflection at other Silicon Valley firms.

The House Judiciary Committee has approved a bill that would make permanent the moratorium on Internet access taxes and multiple discriminatory online taxes.

The vote was 30 to 4 on the Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act (HR 3086), and followed the defeat of an amendment proposed by ranking member John Conyers (D-MI), that would have simply extended the moratorium another four years, and removed a provision eliminating the grandfathered taxes of seven states who had those access taxes in place before the 1998 passage of the initial moratorium.

Several Democrats argued that a permanent ban was favoring the broadband sector, was a violation of states' rights, and did not allow Congress the flexibility to review the ban periodically to see if it was still necessarily, given that it was passed when the Internet was a fledgling. They also pointed out that removing the grandfather clause could mean hundreds of millions of lost revenues in those seven states -- including over $300 million in Texas alone -- which would mean states would turn elsewhere for the money, impacting other sectors.

Bill backers countered that the grandfather clause had been a way to give those states time to transition to other sources of revenue, and they had had 16 years to do so. Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), argued that the Internet’s ubiquity was even more reason to insure that an ISP tax did not threaten its continued growth and prosperity.

[Commentary] For operators with copper assets in the access network, there are two primary reasons for G.fast within FTTdp (the Broadband Forum’s ‘fibre to the distribution point’ architecture, which extends fibre to distribution points very close to the customer premises).

Firstly, it allows them to get to market more quickly with viable offerings able to compete, in ‘value-for-money’ terms, with end-to-end fibre (FTTH, fibre to the home) and the next update of the DOCSIS-based connections that offer high-speed Internet access over cable (coaxial or hybrid fibre/coaxial cable), a medium originally designed to deliver TV and sound programs to a mass audience.

Secondly, speed to market is coupled with a lower cost of deployment, making use of existing telephone wiring.

The cost of extending fibre to an individual customer premises can be prohibitive in variety of scenarios, such as in an apartment block with thick walls already wired with legacy copper, where FTTH deployment would be slow and expensive.

[Johnson is Chief Executive of UK based analyst house Point Topic]