Articles about Public Policy

Despite making huge sums of money in the United Kingdom, many of the major tech companies based there pay surprisingly little tax. Exactly how little has only just started to come to light, thanks to investigations by several national newspapers.

The latest company to be exposed for paying a pittance in UK tax is eBay which, according to the Sunday Times newspaper, paid just £1.2m in 2010, despite its UK subsidiaries generating sales of close to £800m, and making an estimated profit of £181m.

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I’ve been away. We had a death in the family (my brother-in-law) which turned me into a single parent for a few days -- a paralyzing experience for an old man with three small boys and two large dogs. You never know how much your spouse does until it all falls for awhile on your shoulders. I am both humbled and a bit more wrinkled for the experience.

While I was being a domestic god a reader passed to me this blog post by John Miano, a former software developer, founder of The Programmers Guild, now turned lawyer who works on immigrant worker issues as a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) a supposedly nonpartisan think tank in Washington, DC. I don’t know Miano and frankly I hadn’t known about the CIS, but he writes boldly about H-1B visa abuses and I found that very interesting.

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You’ll no doubt be familiar with The Innocence of Muslims, the controversial film that has angered Muslims across the Middle East, sparking riots and leading to several deaths.

It’s unlikely you’ll have actually watched it, although the more curious among you may have caught some of it on YouTube, where the film is still freely available -- provided, of course, you’re not reading this in one of the countries where Google has blocked it, specifically Libya, Egypt, India, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Russia recently banned the film, too, which unsurprisingly also is not available to watch in Iran, Pakistan, or Afghanistan, where they’ve chosen to go a step further and block YouTube entirely.

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First in a series. Thirty years ago, when I worked for a time in Saudi Arabia, I saw a public execution. I didn’t attend an execution, I didn’t witness an execution, I just happened to be there. There was in the center of this town a square and in the square were gathered hundreds of people. I worked in a building next to the square and looked out the window to see what caused all the noise. At that moment a prisoner was brought forward, his arms bound behind him. He was dragged up the steps to a platform and there fell to his knees.

Another man, whom I quickly came to understand was the executioner, climbed to the platform with the prisoner and poked him in the side with a long curved sword. The prisoner involuntarily jerked up just as the sword slashed down and just like that there was a head rolling off the platform, the body falling dead like a sack of flour. The crowd roared. Beginning to end it took less than a minute.

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Trustbusters and other regulators still have their eyes on Google, which in response has maintained high lobbying presence in Washington. Is that effort paying off?

This week is surprisingly chock full of happenings -- good or bad, you be the judge -- for Google in the areas of lobbying and antitrust. Governments changed their positions on antitrust, rivals combined efforts and Google shifted strategy. All-in-all, it must be busy at the Washington, DC offices.

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Let’s everybody beat up on YouTube for not pulling that offensive anti-Muslim video that is infuriating people around the world. No, wait. As disturbing as this story is let’s instead take a moment to try and figure what’s really happening and why YouTube and its parent Google are behaving this way.

It’s easy to blame Google’s algorithmic obsession for this mess, but I don’t think that’s at work here at all. Yes, Google is very good (which means very bad in this case) at blaming one algorithm or another for pissing-off users. Google customer support is, in a word, terrible for this very reason, and it often seems like they don’t even care. But this case is different, because it has less to do with algorithms than it has to do with intellectual property laws.

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Jurisprudence demands that US District Judge Lucy Koh right a terrible miscarriage of justice occurring in her courtroom. The Apple-Samsung patent dispute is nothing but a mock trial. The jury ignored key instructions, failed to complete a crucial checklist, made egregious errors on the final verdict form and reached a verdict after 21 hours of deliberations. The foreman misunderstood one of the concepts fundamental to the case -- prior art -- leading the jury astray. Then there is Judge Koh, who prevented Samsung from presenting key evidence or witnesses that could have made its defense and case against Apple more credible.

Apple claims that Samsung copying iOS device designs and patents causes irreparable harm. But the greater injustice is against the South Korean manufacturer, which is branded a copycat and thief -- all while the victim of terrible misreporting by analysts, bloggers, journalists and other writers. Samsung suffers irreparable harm here, not Apple. Judge Koh let this travesty occur on her watch. She should be ashamed and do what this malfeasance demands: Set aside the verdict. Best scenario: She should deny all claims by both parties, and let them sort it all out on appeal. Acceptable: Order a new trial. She let the case get out of control. Time is long past to reel it in.

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In case you haven't already noticed, it's the quadrennial presidential election season in the United States; the time when the two dominant political parties state their goals and methods of attaining them, and work to put their chosen party leader into the office of President of the United States.

At the Republican National Convention this week, the Republican party both nominated Mitt Romney as its candidate for president, and outlined its platform, its "statement of who we are and what we believe."

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New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly unvield a new partnership with the Microsoft Corporation. Working together, New York Police Department and Microsoft developed a crime prevention and counterterrorism information analysis platform they call Domain Awareness System. When fully deployed, the new system will provide NYPD investigators and analysts a comprehensive view of potential threats and criminal activity. DAS will help aggregate and analyze public safety data in real time.

DAS takes tips, emergency response calls, and other live incident and safety reports and automatically ties them to richer amounts of information. A network of smart CCTV cameras, license plate readers, speed cameras, and pre-existing cross-agency database information is filtered to relate to those incidents and tips that match. Law enforcement can then develop live real-time incident reports that can be transmitted to police in the field.

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This week, the Green Electronics Council announced that Apple will no longer submit any of its products to EPEAT, the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool, for environmental rating, removing all of its products from the standardized green ratings system used by all US federal agencies.

Naturally, the subject of Apple rejecting compliance with anyone would generate a lot of discussion. However, there are some major pieces of information that get lost in the shuffle of news and the rush toward instant partisanship and polarization to sell a story. Below, we'll look at some of the basics of the story without dipping too far into the horribly overplayed "Apple vs. The World" trope that populates the Web.

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Word of advice to cloud service providers: Don't get caught with your hand in the cookie jar. The Wall Street Journal reports that Google and the US Federal Trade Commission will soon announce a $22.5 million settlement. Google bypassed privacy settings on Apple’s Safari web browser, a practice later stopped, after being contacted by the Journal nearly six months ago.

Independent researchers found that of the top 100 websites, 22 installed the tracking code on a desktop computer, while on 23 sites code was successfully installed on the iPhone. Safari blocks such cookie tracking by default. At the time, Google claimed that the user tracking did not have any negative side-effects on its users, but that's hard to measure. Surely, advertisers benefited from the practice.

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June 2nd marked the return shots fired by telecommunications juggernaut Verizon against the Federal Communications Commission for fines the FCC leveled on them in regards to network neutrality. In a legal brief filed in Washington DC at the United States Court Of Appeals, Verizon and regional cell phone provider MetroPCS formally appealed.

Verizon claims that the FCC forcing them to keep all data traffic equal priority is unconstitutional -- that equal priority of data is an affront to carrier's freedom of speech.

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Over the weekend, I got to thinking more about the role of the Federal Communications Commission.

You see, last week, the Supreme Court, in an eight-to-zero ruling, struck down fines that the FCC had issued to Fox Television and ABC Broadcasting. The judges found violations of “fleeting” indecency standards by Fox and ABC to be void. However, the Court sidestepped the broadcasters' protest of First Amendment rights, ruling on the matter as an issue of basic fairness and due process of the FCC fines as 5th and 14th amendment breaches instead.

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Google's fifth "Transparency Report" shows that the emperors of the world wear no clothes. The search and information giant started releasing the data two years ago, offering a small peek into the bombardment of user information requests that world governments make -- everything from non-copyrighted YouTube video take-downs, to search result link removals, to, most alarmingly, private citizen emails and information.

But what is most alarming about these requests? Many are not even for serious matters of national security. Most are down right requests to silence, censor, track, and or monitor dissident internal political groups and political opponents. In some, it is the outright censorship of non-violent organizations, ideas, or even the requested silence of whistle-blowers pointing out corruption. Google's own policy analyst, Dorothy Chou, sees a disturbing trending rise, particularly from "Western democracies not typically associated with censorship".

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My recent series of columns on troubles at IBM brought me many sad stories from customers burned by Big Blue. I could write column after column just on that, but it wouldn’t be any fun so I haven’t. Only now a truly teachable lesson has emerged from a couple of these horror tales and it has to do with US IT labor economics and immigration policy. In short the IT service sector has been shoveling a lot of horseshit about H1B visas.

The story about H1B visas is simple. H1B’s are given for foreign workers to fill US positions that can’t be filled with qualified US citizens or by permanent US residents who hold green cards. H1Bs came into existence because there weren’t enough green cards and now we’re told there aren’t enough H1B’s, either. So there’s a move right now in Washington to increase the H1B limit above the current level of approximately 65,000 because we are told the alternative is IT paralysis without more foreign workers.

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