My paper for this year's Communications Policy and Research Forum is titled Competition Policy for the Digital Economy. One factor that motivated the topic is how so much of new economy business consists of very distorted market structures with single very large firms and certainly nothing like the many small firms of competition theory.
Google is now having its turn in the spotlight, as the New York Times reported today (repeated in the AFR) on a forthcoming Senate hearing.
The Senate hearing is political. The real action is occurring in an FTC anti-trust investigation launched in June.
The issues Google faces are multitudinous. Of course, each and every acquisition has raised competition issues. More recently the concern is whether their Search product favours Google's own products over others (I guess without showing them as ads like happens to others) and the suggestion that content on other sites gets "scraped" into Google sites.
I believe there are big anti-trust issues here but that, just as with the Microsoft case, the investigation and resolution will be long and intractable. The bad news as ZDnet reported is the impediment the overhang could create for other IT development.
I happen to believe we need a new approach to competition policy that has a different array of analytic tools and remedies than currently applies.
Novae Meridianae Demetae Dexter delenda est
Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Monday, July 04, 2011
Capital I Innovation and the Capital I Internet
The kimmicblog has been running a series on innovation and at the urging of its author I took a gander at Part 1 of an interview with Vint Cerf "father of the Internet".
Cerf at the urging of his interlocutor draws a distinction between little i and big I innovation that I'd see as the delineation between development and innovation, (or between normal science and revolutionary science in a more Kuhnian philosophical way).
A similar distinction can be drawn between little i internet (meaning the protocols) and big I Internet (meaning the genuinely interconnected network of networks that supports end-to-end applications rather than those intermediated by "carriers"). The former is just a different way of connecting, the latter is what transforms societies. And in a way Vint admits he invented the former, not the latter.
I was a little surprised to see his comments about the OECD Information Economy meeting;
If anyone had suggested to me in 1983 that in 2011 there would be a meeting of 50 or so countries in the OECD, for two days talking about the internet economy, concerns about intellectual property, crime on the net and so on… I would have scratched my head and said, this thing is for the military, and the research community.
Given (as noted previously) that "convergence" was an issue from 1972/3 on, I'm a bit stunned that the comment isn't the reverse. Why has it taken till 2011 to get the policy processes to catch up?
The bit I was drawn to was Cerf's comment on AT&T where he said;
AT&T, as a very successful monopoly, had an enormous amount of resources, which they put into AT&T Bell labs. Bell Labs was absolutely one of the most innovative places anywhere in the world. Nobel prizes have come out of there, the transistor came out of there. There’s no doubt in my mind that something was lost when AT&T was broken up.
Alcatel-Lucent as the current owners of Bell Labs would probably have something to say about that. However, it is true that on August 28, 2008, Alcatel-Lucent announced it was pulling out of basic science, material physics, and semiconductor research, and it will instead focus on more immediately marketable areas including networking, high-speed electronics, wireless networks, nanotechnology and software. An interesting fact about Bell Labs was the extent they also invested in actual research in economics, not just technology.
But there is part of the story - the glory days of Bell Labs really were about research not development.
To be more succinct - capital I innovation or Research isn't as "goal directed" as is little i innovation or development.
In a couple of posts on Innovation Economics recently I've questioned the notion of big firms as innovative. Is AT&T and example to prove the case otherwise?
The interesting thing about the innovation at Bell Labs was how much it looked like standard public sector research, and notably all the spillovers. They didn't try to turn the transistor into the money stream of the Qualcom patents - or the absurdity of a $4.5B price for Nortel patents to a weird alliance of Apple, EMC, Ericsson and Research In Motion.
It is actually sort of coll that Google made so much fun of the auction. I suspect what they were really up to was disrupting the carefully worked out models of other bidders that would have been applying assumptions of rationality to Google's bids. The choice of numbers that have other meanings rather than merely random actually helps with the randomness.
Enough for now - I look forward to Part 2.
Novae Meridianae Demetae Dexter delenda est
Cerf at the urging of his interlocutor draws a distinction between little i and big I innovation that I'd see as the delineation between development and innovation, (or between normal science and revolutionary science in a more Kuhnian philosophical way).
A similar distinction can be drawn between little i internet (meaning the protocols) and big I Internet (meaning the genuinely interconnected network of networks that supports end-to-end applications rather than those intermediated by "carriers"). The former is just a different way of connecting, the latter is what transforms societies. And in a way Vint admits he invented the former, not the latter.
I was a little surprised to see his comments about the OECD Information Economy meeting;
If anyone had suggested to me in 1983 that in 2011 there would be a meeting of 50 or so countries in the OECD, for two days talking about the internet economy, concerns about intellectual property, crime on the net and so on… I would have scratched my head and said, this thing is for the military, and the research community.
Given (as noted previously) that "convergence" was an issue from 1972/3 on, I'm a bit stunned that the comment isn't the reverse. Why has it taken till 2011 to get the policy processes to catch up?
The bit I was drawn to was Cerf's comment on AT&T where he said;
AT&T, as a very successful monopoly, had an enormous amount of resources, which they put into AT&T Bell labs. Bell Labs was absolutely one of the most innovative places anywhere in the world. Nobel prizes have come out of there, the transistor came out of there. There’s no doubt in my mind that something was lost when AT&T was broken up.
Alcatel-Lucent as the current owners of Bell Labs would probably have something to say about that. However, it is true that on August 28, 2008, Alcatel-Lucent announced it was pulling out of basic science, material physics, and semiconductor research, and it will instead focus on more immediately marketable areas including networking, high-speed electronics, wireless networks, nanotechnology and software. An interesting fact about Bell Labs was the extent they also invested in actual research in economics, not just technology.
But there is part of the story - the glory days of Bell Labs really were about research not development.
To be more succinct - capital I innovation or Research isn't as "goal directed" as is little i innovation or development.
In a couple of posts on Innovation Economics recently I've questioned the notion of big firms as innovative. Is AT&T and example to prove the case otherwise?
The interesting thing about the innovation at Bell Labs was how much it looked like standard public sector research, and notably all the spillovers. They didn't try to turn the transistor into the money stream of the Qualcom patents - or the absurdity of a $4.5B price for Nortel patents to a weird alliance of Apple, EMC, Ericsson and Research In Motion.
It is actually sort of coll that Google made so much fun of the auction. I suspect what they were really up to was disrupting the carefully worked out models of other bidders that would have been applying assumptions of rationality to Google's bids. The choice of numbers that have other meanings rather than merely random actually helps with the randomness.
Enough for now - I look forward to Part 2.
Novae Meridianae Demetae Dexter delenda est
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
I missed it
The wonders of having a unique identifier like "David Havyatt" is that Google Alerts finds you stuff about you.
Like this blog post about two AFR letters included scanned pages (probably breaching copyright) - the first page included a letter of mine that I thought the AFR hadn't used.
The letter was published 28 Feb and reads;
Your editorial highlights Australia’s recent productivity decline and reaches for the old grab bag of reducing business costs and enhancing supply-side responsiveness. (‘Productivity lift needed now’ AFR 24 Feb).
You manage to completely miss the recommendation of the Siemens report that “productivity improvements through the adoption of technology and innovation will alleviate this pressure”. The Grattan Institute also noted “slippage in Australia’s take-up of productivity-enhancing technologies.”
The Australian Financial Review’s response to the innovation challenge has been opinion pieces over recent weeks criticising the key infrastructure project identified to facilitate technology adoption and promote innovation, the National Broadband Network.
Senator Stephen Conroy has perhaps been too busy responding to the idiocy of the idea that a wireless or hybrid-fibre coaxial (HFC) solution could be a viable alternative to prosecute his other role as the Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on Digital Productivity.
It is time the Financial Review dragged itself out of the 1980s and 90s agenda and confronted the twenty-first century.
Novae Meridianae Demetae Dexter delenda est
Like this blog post about two AFR letters included scanned pages (probably breaching copyright) - the first page included a letter of mine that I thought the AFR hadn't used.
The letter was published 28 Feb and reads;
Your editorial highlights Australia’s recent productivity decline and reaches for the old grab bag of reducing business costs and enhancing supply-side responsiveness. (‘Productivity lift needed now’ AFR 24 Feb).
You manage to completely miss the recommendation of the Siemens report that “productivity improvements through the adoption of technology and innovation will alleviate this pressure”. The Grattan Institute also noted “slippage in Australia’s take-up of productivity-enhancing technologies.”
The Australian Financial Review’s response to the innovation challenge has been opinion pieces over recent weeks criticising the key infrastructure project identified to facilitate technology adoption and promote innovation, the National Broadband Network.
Senator Stephen Conroy has perhaps been too busy responding to the idiocy of the idea that a wireless or hybrid-fibre coaxial (HFC) solution could be a viable alternative to prosecute his other role as the Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on Digital Productivity.
It is time the Financial Review dragged itself out of the 1980s and 90s agenda and confronted the twenty-first century.
Novae Meridianae Demetae Dexter delenda est
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