PolicyBlog

In “Why Doesn’t Washington Understand the Internet?” (Washington Post, Sunday, January 22, 2012), Rebecca MacKinnon documents how often legislation fails to effectively address problems involving or supposedly caused by the Internet and how often Congress considers or enacts policy solutions that are rapidly outmoded by the continuing innovation that is at the heart of the Internet’s success. The question she asks in her piece is a fair one - but it is also fair to note, as even many who helped... Read More

An article by Joshua Topolsky in the Washington Post (“Software — Not Hardware — Is the Star of the Show”) raises some interesting points about the intersection of devices and software.   My sense he is both right and wrong – and he misses a key part in all of this - the networks.   It clearly is true that hardware is less center stage than it used to be but I think this more about the “old” hardware meaning desk top PCs and even increasingly lap tops.   Those well-established devices are far... Read More

I don’t know who said, “It can be dangerous to make predictions . . . especially about the future,” but I suspect that if I did a search I’d find it was Yogi Berra.  Making predictions aren't always what they are cracked up to be, in part because too often they involve simply identifying technologies or uses that are growing today and “predicting” that they will grow larger in the future. I even tried my hand at this earlier this year when I offered some prognostications about future technology... Read More

Monday of this week was the 150th anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental telegraph.  It is hard now to understand how significant this event was.  Until the telegraph came in to being, it was impossible for messages to be relayed to people who were long distances apart any faster than the speed of a horse.  Yes, there were earlier devices to transmit communications over long distances that allowed messages to be sent through the air via visible signs such as flags, fire pots or... Read More

I asked a member of my staff, Matthew Schwartz, to write a blog post on the anniversary of the printing of the first Gutenberg Bible, and to offer his perspectives on it. His thoughts are below.   The words you are reading right now did not exist just a few moments ago. The time from their inception as a few electrical signals in my brain to their current reality as words on your computer, possibly hundreds or thousands of miles away, can be measured in mere hours (and that’s only because it... Read More

Cecelia Kang has an interesting piece in the Post today (“A Nation Outnumbered by Gadgets”, Washington Post, October 12, 2011) that highlights a couple of intriguing trends in the communications technology space: the fact that the number of mobile devices in use has exceeded the total number of Americans and the fact that Americans have up to two dozen digital devices in their homes that connect to the Internet. These are significant trends but I think Cecelia is overlooking some deeper trends... Read More

I don’t know Steve Jobs and reading through the many Twitter comments and blog posts it is not easy to add to the accolades he so richly deserves.  But in considering his contribution to society and the tech industry, I think three points are worth comment regarding his life.  Having spent 25 years in the Internet tech space – starting in the late 70’s, early 80’s with Commodore PET, TRS-80 and Timex computers (yes, Timex made computers) – Mr. Jobs’s contributions to the development of the... Read More

Every time a device connects to the Internet, it gets its own unique “Internet Protocol” address. The current system, IPv4, has been around since the early 1980s, and provides for about 4.3 billion addresses. By the early 1990s, however, it became clear that the available addresses would someday be depleted, and so a new addressing system, IPv6, was created. IPv6 has a capacity of 3.4 x 10^38 addresses. That’s a hard number to visualize, but think of it this way: It’s far more than all the... Read More

A few days ago, I posted on Twitter an entry about the origins of the smiley emoticon. I asked a member of my staff, Matthew Schwartz, to write a blog post on the anniversary of this event, and to offer his perspectives on it. His thoughts are below.  ================================================================= Twenty-nine years ago this week, a computer scientist at Carnegie Melon University invented something that changed the online landscape forever. His tools? A keyboard and a healthy... Read More