Continuations

Over the holiday several events happened that illustrate that we are facing a clear and present danger to the freedom of the Internet. It started with the US government seizing a bunch of domains that were accused of participating in copyright infringement. The action and its aftermath illustrate two important points. First, despite seeking more powers under the awful COICA, the government is already asserting the legality of controlling DNS and seizing domain names. Second, several of the af...

Yesterday (Wednesday, January 18), has a good chance as being remembered as the day that the Internet first truly showed its political clout in the US. So far we have largely pointed at events abroad when discussing the Internet’s potential to shift power. Web sites and services large and small (including Continuations) either forcefully alerted their users to the problems with SOPA/PIPA or blacked themselves out entirely. At the 12th hour even Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg took a (by now very s...

This is the week for “revisited” blog posts. Today: bitcoin. In my first post about bitcoin I expressed my concern that we may be experiencing a speculative bubble that might ultimately destroy the currency’s usefulness. Since that post, which was just last week, the $/bitcoin rate has gone from $8 to $26! That’s already above the target estimate for the currency that I heard from one entrepreneur working on a bitcoin related business. I ran across another link recently suggesting that were b...

It is easy to dismiss Rick Santorum’s promised war on pornography as more moralizing from a candidate who apparently questions the separation of church and state. But it exposes an important fault line in thinking about the Internet when seen in conjunction with Nick Kristof’s call in this Sunday’s New York Times for Backpage to stop carrying adult classifieds. At issue here is what constitutes an effective approach to the regulation of content and commerce on the Internet and is closely rela...

Today at noon I am giving a talk to the Japan Business Network in New York – an informal get together organized by my brother-in-law, Charles Danziger. The topic is the fundamental transformation of industries that the Internet will bring about. I am planning to use the following outline. Some background on Union Square Ventures - about $300 million under management across two funds - invest exclusively in the Internet - based in New York but national mandate (and some international investmen...

I am very excited to be preparing for a talk at the Turing Festival in Edinburgh (last week of August). The subject, not surprisingly, will be “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet - how the Internet will transform business, government and society." I love that Vint Cerf used "You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” as his 5 word acceptance speech for the Webby Awards. To me it perfectly captures where we are with the Internet today and could be the unofficial motto for Union Square Ventures. Part of what I am doi...

I have argued in the past that we need an Internet Bill of Rights. If anyone doubted that, then they should look at what has been happening at and around the eG8 summit. There have been many great tweets from people there and around the world. The two that summarize the situation best for me are first Jeff Jarvis tweeting thatAt # eG8, government acts as if it should protect us from the internet. Instead, the internet needs protection from government.And then this wonderful response by Scott ...

The proposed PROTECT IP act is an improvement on COICA, but still makes the wrong trade-offs between protecting copyright holders and defending the integrity of the Internet. There are several major modifications from the COICA draft. The key ones are first that only the DOJ can initiate procedures against foreign web sites that would result in exclusion of these sites from DNS and second that for domestic websites the only type of injunctive relief available is financial (no advertising supp...

I woke up this morning thinking that I should write a post on privacy, having read Fred’s post and danah boyd’s two posts over the weekend and Charlie’s post this morning. Then I realized, I should probably check what I have written about privacy here before, since it seems to be a recurring topic. So I re-read my own post from March of 2009 and concluded that my thinking hasn’t changed enough since to warrant a new post. The key quote is this:I believe what we are seeing is the transition fr...

We live in a time of amazing transformation. Nowhere has this been more apparent recently than in Tunisia and Egypt where people are fighting against entrenched regimes and for democracy. In both places the Internet has played a critical role as an organizing, information and documentation tool. So it is not surprising that authorities in Egypt have taken steps to cut off the people there from all modern forms of communication and especially the Internet. It couldn’t be any clearer that the I...