Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Wireless Competition Rumble! Watch Me Take It To The Free Marketeers Where They Live — With Snacks to Follow!

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Ho fellow policy wonks and spectrum geeks! Come watch me and occasional blog buddy (over at PK blog) Rob Frieden take on Arch Free Marketeers Thomas Hazlett and Joshua Wright at an epic, no holds barred, steel cage death match on competition in the wireless world. The Event, “The FCC’s Wireless Competition Report: A Preview” aka “The Wireless Competition Arlington Free-For-All” (because admission is free), will take place next Wednesday, May 18, 4-5:30 p.m., at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University (official announcement with all the info here).

More outrageously exaggerated prose describing the event below!

UPDATE: I initially had this down as being in Fairfax, rather than Arlington, because the GMU main campus is in Fairfax and I misread the event announcement (it is at 3351 N. Fairfax Drive in Arlington). My bad.

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Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Why Does the US Trade Representative Keeps Trying To Piss Off Our Trading Partners?

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Everyone talks about promoting our exports and hooking in to the emerging economies as the means of leveraging our economic blahs. With Americans consumers still considered the walking dead, and likely to remain so for some time, anyone hoping for job growth and overall improvement in the American economy recognizes that we need to get other countries to buy our stuff.

Unfortunately, someone seems determined to piss off our potential trade partners. Worse, that “someone” is the office of U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), the folks in charge of getting trade agreements negotiated and boosting trade. If that seems odd, take a look at the most recent Special 301 Report (aka “the IP Naughty List”) released by the USTR at the end of April. Pretty much everyone we want to trade with is on either the “naughty” or “very naughty” list. True, some countries, such as Russia and China, appear genuinely naughty — in the sense that massive wholesale counterfeiting and infringement appears to be going on while the governments appear relatively uninterested in enforcement. But a large number of other countries — Canada, Israel and Brazil, to name a few — appear on the list because they failed to modify their laws to suit the demands of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry and the U.S. entertainment industry.

My colleague at Public Knowledge Rashmi Rangnath, has written up a general summary of what USTR got wrong (again!). I want to focus here on how this fits into a creeping systemic problem with USTR’s approach.  While the U.S. remains a strong market, we no longer rule the roost. The time when we could simply dictate to other countries what we expected of them and could force them to amend their constitutions, sell off vital natural resources, and dance for our amusement as a condition of getting access to our markets are pretty much over. You would think after holding up ACTA for three years trying to get other countries to adopt the MPAA’s wish list and then finally being forced to cave at the end would have impressed this point on the good folks at USTR, if not on the utterly uneducable lobbyists that make up the vanguard the IP Mafia. Alas, to judge by the USTR’s conduct here, USTR still lives in a fantasy-land where it can snap its fingers and the world hastens to do our IPR bidding. Anyone hoping for a more sensible approach in the negotiations around the Transpacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) should prepare for disappointment, which is bad news for all those businesses hoping for a trade deal with some of the world’s fastest growing economies.

More below . . .

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My Thoughts Exactly:
Cage Match! Late to his Own Funeral!

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So today’s my day in the Blog Tour De Force Cage, and I overslept! Oy! What a way to start one’s mixed martial arts career! So, without further ado, here’s a big hello and best wishes to my esteemed opponent Kimberly Kinrade and her poignant story, poem, dream collection about a love gone violently off the rails, Bits of You & Pieces of Me.

Blog Tour de Force Cage Match

Hope I don't get my lights punched out

Representing me in the ring is my Acts of the Apostles, a nanopunk biopunk cypberpunk thriller in the “Neal Stephenson meets Flannery O’Connor and Michael Crichton and Joseph Conrad” tradition, or as Hemos said on Sashdot oh so many years ago, “What Tom Clancy would write if he were smart”.

I’ll update this post as the day goes on, after coffee, but I think I’ had better get this up on my site soon, lest I lose this match by default!

Everybody who comments here today gets a free ebook version of Acts. Be sure to leave me an email addy. One lucky reader gets ebook versions of all three of my books, and a signed, printed copy of any one of my titles. More anon! Let the pummeling commence resume.

UPDATE 4/21: My day in the cage is over. I’m grateful for all the love in the comments. It was quite a showing of support. Alas, I did get my ass pretty roundly & soundly kicked by new Champeen Kimberly, but all in all I’m happy with the turnout. I’ll be sending out coupons today to people who posted yesterday. You can redeem them for a free ebook version of Acts of the Apostles from Smashwords.com in the ebook format of your choice. Free ebook giveaway is now over; if you missed out feel free to buy a copy. They’re cheap!

My Thoughts Exactly:
How the NAACP Saved America

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Cover of the book "Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement"

Read this book

Patricia Sullivan’s history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is a book every American should read. My review below the fold.

I was born in 1952. I grew up on a small farm in New Jersey. My parents and three brothers and three sisters and I resided on the second floor of a small farmhouse; my paternal grandfather, an immigrant from Finland, and grandmother, an immigrant from Ireland, lived on the first floor.

One night in 1964 I was watching television with my grandfather, and as I recall — the details are a bit foggy — we stayed up until way past midnight, watching the debate and vote on the floor of the Senate about the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

My grandfather’s invitation, in his heavy Finnish accent, went something like this. “You stay up and watch this, Yonny. Now we gonna see if the United States is full of beans or not.” When the bill passed, he said something like, “Well, OK. I guess not full of beans.”

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My Thoughts Exactly:
He wakes up, only to jump into deadly cage!

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Blog Tour de Force Cage Match

Hope I don't get my lights punched out

For a bunch of reasons, most of them bogus, I haven’t been around this here blog too much lately–as all 7 of my regular readers know.  Please expect some more posting soon, but meanwhile, just wanted to give you a heads up about a so-called cage match that I’ll be jousting in next week.

It’s a simple contest: on each of  five days in a row starting Monday, a pair of authors will put up blog posts on their own sites about the cage match. Whichever of the two authors gets the most comments on their blog wins that day’s match. On the sixth day, the two highest vote getters go against each other in a championship. Every visitor who makes a relevant comment wins a free ebook from that site. One grand prize winner will get a Kindle preloaded with 12 ebooks.

My match with be on Wednesday, April 20th, where I’ll be going against Kimberly Kinrade, whose debut work of fiction, “Bits of You & Pieces of Me“, is a kaleidoscopic collection of stories, poems and fragments informed by a deep emotional melange of loss, betrayal and hope. Anybody with a heart will relate to it.

Most of the other writers taking part in this promotion are using an amped-up Mohamad Ali -type patter talking about how they’re going to win their competition. That’s fun enough, but not really my style. I do hope you’ll stop by Tuesday Wednesday and leave a comment; I’d appreciate it. If you comment you’ll get a coupon for a free ebook, and some lucky person will get one of my signed (paper) books & copies of all three of my ebooks. Check out the BlogTourdeForce website for more on the other books and authors. Hope to see you Wednesday.

UPDATE: in an earlier draft I said my cage match bout on April 20th would be on Tuesday. But it’s Wednesday. One of these days I’m going to learn to read a calendar. Really.

Tales of the Sausage Factory:
White House Makes Intelligent Case For Incentive Auctions.

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Yesterday I attended the White House event on incentive auctions. It was probably the most sensible public event on the pro-incentive auction side I’ve attended to date. I have had several discussions with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) staff that persuade me that, if Congress gave the FCC generic authority to do voluntary incentive auctions (subject to limitations to protect broadcasters – including low-power broadcasters – that want to stay in the broadcasting business), they could design a pretty good auction that would get more spectrum out for both licensed and unlicensed broadband access. Unfortunately, just about every public discussion on incentive auctions tends to focus on either a few simplistic talking points (more spectrum=good!) or, worse, has been about trying to persuade members of Congress that spectrum auctions are magical money trees that let you solve the deficit problem without raising taxes (just look at how the 2008 700 MHz auction completely eliminated the federal deficit).

So a pro-incentive auction event that does not make me grit my teeth or put me to sleep is worth celebrating.

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Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Here In Boston for National Conference on Media Reform

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Once again, I am out at Free Press’ amazing and movement changing National Conference on Media Reform (hashtag #NCMR11). You can check out the program here. For those interested, I am on a panel on spectrum (what else) on Friday at 9 a.m., and a panel on Phone Justice (where I will talk about USF, among other things) on Saturday at 9 a.m. (how did I get tagged as a ‘morning person’?) In addition, check out the Public Knowledge table for info on what my employer is doing and our projects (in the intellectual property area as well as in the media/telecom area).

For those who can’t make it, I will try to blog from time to time. I’ll also be tweeting from harold.feld.

But hopefully, I’ll see a lot of you there.
Stay tuned . . . .

Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Why Chairman Genachowski Should Appoint Commissioner Baker To Chair The Spectrum Task Force

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Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski has a spectrum politics problem problem. On the one hand, he learned from last year’s D Block battle that he needs to stay aggressively on message to sell his spectrum reforms.  His every speech on spectrum therefore reads like a campaign speech for incentive auctions. ‘We have a looming spectrum crisis, we need bold action, Congress must act now to pass incentive auctions.’ But, as Genachowski has discovered, this approach can have unintended consequences. Recently, Commissioner Robert McDowell reported that this focus on incentive auctions created uncertainty in Silicon Valley over the FCC’s commitment to the TV white spaces (TVWS). This follows earlier concerns from Senator Snowe (R-ME) and others that the Chairman’s exclusive public focus on incentive auctions invariably means giving short shrift to other, equally important spectrum reforms identified in the National Broadband Plan.

 

Genachowski moved quickly to reaffirm that support for TVWS remains strong and that TVWS is a big part of the FCC’s  spectrum for broadband initiative. Further, the inclusion of several spectrum items for the next open FCC meeting shows that Genachowski remains committed to broad spectrum reform. But these incidents underscore Genachowski’s difficult dilemma. How can he campaign to push through incentive auctions on the one hand, while making sure that other aspects of the spectrum reform agenda receive the prominence and attention they need to move forward? The fact that anyone could doubt the FCC’s continuing commitment to developing the TVWS despite its broad bipartisan support and support from the Obama Administration spectrum team underscores how little it takes to undermine confidence even in reforms already accomplished.

Commissioner Meredith Baker may hold the solution to Chairman Genachowski’s spectrum politics dilemma.  Genachowski should appoint Commissioner Baker chair of the reconstituted Spectrum Task Force. At the moment, the Spectrum Task Force is co-chaired by Julie Knapp (Chief of the Office of Engineering and Technology) and Ruth Milkman  (Chief of the Wireless Bureau). In an ideal world, having two such extraordinarily qualified experts and Bureau Chiefs heading the Spectrum Task Force would be enough to show that Genachowski is not neglecting spectrum reform outside incentive auctions. But in status-conscious Washington DC, the sad truth is that only a Commissioner can give the Spectrum Task Force the “star power” it needs to reassure everyone that serious work continues along multiple fronts.

More below . . . .

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Neutrino:
Babysitter

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Babysitter, a short story by Cheeseburger Brown; illustration by the author

The invasion of Cassiopeia was age-inappropriate for the child: that much was clear.

All the worst words in the dictionary were being acted out live, and that violated the Standard with respect to age-appropriate subject matter. The child was present, which made the Standard paramount. On the other hand, duty was paramount.

The soldier was of the highest quality. No expense had been spared in his manufacture or maintenance. He was beautiful, too. He was as much a parade piece as a tool. Never the less, considering two things to be simultaneously paramount upset him.

The child bleated, “Where’s my mom?”

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Neutrino:
Two-Fisted Tales of Spam Fighting

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Over the past few weeks, we’ve been flooded with spam comments—up to 100 per day.  While 100% of it is caught by WordPress’s more-or-less standard Akismet anti-spam plugin, it still ends up in a spam queue that I have to go through and clean on a daily basis.

Most blog maintainers probably just clear their spam queue and move on. Not me, though. Spammers annoy the hell out of me the same way many home owners get pissed at someone tossing beer bottles or candy wrappers into their yard. Yeah, it takes a few seconds to clean up, but the fact that you have to do so because of someone else’s assholery really gets under your skin. If I had an easy avenue to do so, I’d file complaints about these tools to the hosting services hosting the sites they are flogging. The ones I do bother tracking down are, unlike your average penis-pill and “russian girls waiting scam date you” site, seem to actually be hosted in the US or some other place that might be responsive to spam complaints. If someone is looking for a coding project for a WordPress plugin, make one that will let you send off a report of comment spam to the site’s ISP.

Anyhow, I set out to make it as hard as possible for spammers to dump their trash in our back yard. And apparently, for the moment, I seem to have won. It’s still early, but our spam queue has been clean for the last two days. Hopefully there’s no collateral damage (err… more so that there was already, see after the jump). If you see anything weird on the site, post a comment or send a message via the comment form (especially if I managed to break commenting).

How I managed my (Pyhrric?) victory after the jump.

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