NOTE:  Sent from Amtrak, somewhere in darkest Connecticut. A little quirky, but not a bad connection, considering.

Content & Copyright

• New TeeVee, The Pirate Bay Forced Offline, Trading Continues (May 17): Despite an injunction, “The Openbittorrent tracker, the preferred choice of many Pirate Bay users, is currently showing 3 million torrents for 31 million simultaneous users despite the Bay’s website being unavailable.” Via GigaOm (proprietary), which also has an article on The Quest to Monetize File Sharing (April 22).
• MIT Technology Review, Technology Review’s Strategy for Paid Editorial and Subscriptions – What we’ll charge for, and why (May 17). See also How to Save Media (May 04, 2009). Editor Jason Pontin describes his strategy.
• PaidContent, Newsweek Sale Book: First Bids Due By June 2; Complete Financials (May 20): Want to buy a magazine?
• Bnet, Book publishers fear threat of digital piracy (May 20): The latest Dan Brown novel spawned 70 illicit websites before publication, and 1000 within a week afterwards.  “The only way to fight piracy is to publish digital content across as many formats as possible, through as many channels, at a fair price. If we go for exclusive or proprietary formats, we’re completely screwed.”

The Net

• Instapundit discusses George Gilder’s 1992 book Life After Television, plus “In the latest issue of Videomaker magazine, video producer D. Eric Franks takes Gilder’s thesis to the next level:  ‘TV is Dead,’ adding ‘Everything you grew up with in terms of mass multimedia is dead; it just doesn’t know it yet.’”
• Last Thursday was a very busy day at the FCC:

FCC, Order & Notice on Utility Poles (May 20): “[To] make broadband more affordable and available by speeding and reducing the costs of access to an essential piece of infrastructure: utility poles.”

FCC, NPRM on the E-Rate (May 20): More subsidies for schools and libraries.

FCC,  Report & Order on Telephone Number Portability (May 20):  “This Order completes the task of facilitating prompt transfers by standardizing the data to be exchanged when transferring a customer’s telephone number between two wireline providers; a wireline and wireless provider; or an interconnected Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) provider and any other service provider.

FCC, Annual Report and Analysis of Competitive Market Conditions With Respect to Mobile Wireless, Including Commercial Mobile Services (Fourteenth Report) (May 20): Key trends:

· Innovation in and around devices and applications: Handset manufacturers have introduced a growing number of new smartphones — 67 in 2008 and 2009 — that provide mobile Internet access and other data services, and provide many of the functionalities of personal computers.

· Transition to a data-centric market: Data traffic has grown significantly, with the increased adoption of smartphones and data consumption per device.

· Role of spectrum for mobile broadband: Especially as mobile wireless broadband usage grows, access to spectrum becomes increasingly important for competition. While many wireless service providers have access to significant amounts of mobile spectrum, most of the spectrum below 1 GHz, in both the cellular band and the 700 MHz band, is not widely held.

· Maturation of the mobile voice segment: As of the end of 2008, 90 percent of Americans had a mobile wireless device.

· Continued industry concentration: There appears to be increasing concentration in the mobile wireless market. One widely-used measure of industry concentration indicates that concentration has increased 32 percent since 2003 and 6.5 percent in 2008.

· Robust capital investment but declining relative to industry size: Providers continue to invest significant capital in networks, despite the recent economic downturn. One source reports capital investment at around $25 billion in both 2005 and 2008, while another shows that capital investment declined from around $25 billion to around $20 billion during the same period. Because industry revenue has continued to grow, both sources show that capital investment has declined as a percentage of industry revenue over the same period (from 20 percent to 14 percent).

• Phoenix Center, The Broadband Adoption Index: Improving Measurements and Comparisons of Broadband Deployment and Adoption; also – CNET News, The FCC’s disingenuous ‘third way’ on broadband (May 19).
• ZDNet, Microsoft sues over ‘click laundering’ fraud (May 24): From the MSFT press release – “Through various means, including malware programs, fraudsters are able to trick innocent Internet users into visiting websites where they unknowingly click on advertisements. Click launderers also can further disguise the origin of those invalid clicks by using scripts and other methods to alter information that is sent to the ad platform.”

Digital Commerce

• International Center for Law & Economics, The Law and Economics of Interchange Fees and Credit Card Markets (Dec. 8-9, 2009): A blog symposium. (And see the forthcoming seminar, under Events below.)

Health Care, Medical, Genetics, Agriculture

• Enterprise Florida, Defining the Future of Health Care: Personalized Medicine & Tissue Regeneration at the Forefront(2010): White paper by the economic development agency for Florida, designed to urge life sciences companies to locate there. “The future of health care depends on an expanding knowledge base of basic biological science,
• Fortune, Monsanto’s Seeds of Discord (May 11):  Discussion of the IP battles over Roundup. “More than 80% of the soybeans and cotton harvested in this country now have at least one patented Monsanto gene in them, as does more than 70% of the field corn.”
• See the American article, below under Innovation.

Competition

• See the Monsanto story, under Health Care, Medical, Genetics, Agriculture. The Antitrust Division is involved.

Innovation

• AEI, The Battle Over Free Enterprise (May 18): Video of AEI President Arthur Brookes previewing his forthcoming book. Theme: “America faces a new culture war . . . a struggle between the traditional American culture of free enterprise and the current drifts toward a European-style social democracy.” Even those who love social democracy do not claim that high levels of innovation are among its virtues.
• City Journal, The Silicon Lining (Spring): Guy Sorman looks at Silicon Valley, for half a century “the undisputed cradle of high-tech and communications innovation,” the recipient of a third all venture capital invested in new business in the U.S.  Will it continue? Who knows – SV retains the advantage powerful network effects and inertia; but it steadily outsources increasing shares of manufacturing, the state treats it as a cash cow, and other parts of the world think they too can create innovation centers. It may be that the manufacturers to which SV outsources can integrate up the value chain. As they say, prediction is difficult, especially about the future.
• Hong Kong Polytechnic Univ., Inaugural Creative Capitalism Forum (May 10):  “Over 19 top Asia entrepreneurs, economists and industry leaders joined together to exchange views on the concept of ‘Creative Capitalism’ and to explore new business models to drive sustainable development in Asia. More than 400 participants from key stakeholder groups, including government, business, non-profit, academia and the media attended.”
• Microsoft CEO Summit, Steve Ballmer Keynotes on Seizing the Opportunity of the Cloud (May 19).
• The American, Solving an Innovator’s Dilemma (May 20):  Roger Bate examines “innovative licensing agreements between Western and Indian drug companies [that] are leading to sustainable profits and increased access to quality medicines.”

Events

• Connected Planet & USTelecom Ass’n, Building a Better Internet (June 22; DC): “a one-day event for service providers, diving deep into: Consumer expectations for the Internet/Domestic and International efforts to expand broadband/Ways of creating a more efficient Internet for delivering a broad range of current and new services to consumers and businesses.”
• Hong Kong Polytechnic & Lingan Univ.,  2^nd Asian Competition Policy Workshop (June 17-18; Hong Kong).
• Mercatus Center & International Center for Law and Economics, The Economics and Regulation of Credit Card Interchange Fees (June 9; DC):  “This conference will bring together legal and economic experts . . . with the policy community to distill the academic literature and to discuss the implications of this literature for the ongoing legislative and policy debates surrounding the regulation of interchange fees and credit card markets more broadly.”

[The explanation of the title Firehose is here.