Net Neutrality

http://www.freepress.net/files/nn_fact_v_fiction_final.pdf

Here’s a pro “net neutrality” piece.  I’m really annoyed by this debate and the lack of intelligence on both sides.  On the telco side, you have idiots like Ted Stevens and Ed Whitacre (former CEO of AT&T) saying we deserve to get paid for our pipes.  Those are the pipes that us consumers and the web sites we visit already pay for.

On the other side, you have people ignoring the rational concept of prioritizing traffic based on the stuff that needs to get there.  Has anyone heard a voice of reason here?

I think what a lot of this is really about is the lack of competition in the telco space.  It’s a capital intensive business and thus it’s hard to offer a lot of options to people.  If it were so easy and cheap to lay cable everywhere, we’d have 5 pairs of cable outside our houses with companies lobbying us to go with them.   Nonetheless, whenever there are fewer options, consumers feel they don’t have the ability to punish their telco/internet provider for doing crazy stuff.  This is a legitimate fear and it happens.  People wouldn’t have such legitimate fears about the idiots @ AT&T/Verizon/etc. regulating traffic if they could punish them for that behavior in the marketplace, but a lot of them can’t.

Thoughts? 

Exiting Spaces and Openness

I was thinking the other day that it’s important for a business to be open about when it’s exiting a line of business.  There is nothing automatically wrong with a company abandoning its commitment to a market.  As long as the communication with the employees is open and honest and the company makes an explicit decision, this can be OK.  This seems to fit nicely with Jack Welch’s “fix, sell, or close” strategy.

Negotiating Tactics

From Tim Harford’s Logic of Life

Schelling’s strategy was right from the negotiator’s textbook: make a specific and (apparently) unambiguous commitment.  That was what President Kennedy had done when facing Khrushchev over Berlin.  Rather than saying something vague such as ‘we will take the steps necessary to defend our interests’, he made an unambiguous statement.  Four days after reading Schelling’s analysis of the problem, he announced on television, ‘We have given our word that an attack upon that city will be regarded as an attack upon as all.’  That public commitment made it hard for Kennedy to ignore any attack, and thus dissuaded Khrushchev from making one.

Reminders of Gandhi

I recently rediscovered this quote:

A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.

A Positive Balance

George Will writes on Ted Kennedy here.  I hope one day I have a “positive balance.”

Academic Economists/First Amendment

I like the first part of what Posner is saying here but not the 2nd part:

A good piece by George Will on eminent domain here:

Israel

Friedman has a decent article up here.

Toilets and Nationalism

Throughout my travels in Europe, I’ve always taken notice of toilet brands (Don’t ask me why I notice things like that).  It’s occurred to me that almost every country uses their national toilet company.  I’ve never really seen international toilet usage in any of my travels.

Perhaps toilets are not a fungible commodity?

Iran/Laws

I heard an interesting quote the other day from Robin Wright of the Post.  She said if you want to know what Persian pride is like, take a Texan and add 5,000 years of history.  I think that brings it home for a lot of us.

I also was thinking about the old John Marshall line that the US is a “government of laws and not men.”  I think that’s partially true, but not tenable over the long term obviously.  It’s very similar to the old Churchill quote that we shape our cities and thereafter they shape us.

Capitalism

Decent excerpt:

“Capitalism messed up,” the British tycoon Martin Sorrell wrote recently, “or, to be more precise, capitalists did.” Actually, that’s not true. Finance screwed up, or to be more precise, financiers did. In June 2007, when the financial crisis began, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, IBM, Nike, Wal-Mart and Microsoft were all running their companies with strong balance sheets and sensible business models. Major American corporations were highly profitable, and they were spending prudently, holding on to cash to build a cushion for a downturn. For that reason, many of them have been able to weather the storm remarkably well. Finance and anything finance-related—like real estate—is another story.