Continuations

Here we are again in 2019 debating speech online and specifically the case of Facebook. Zuckerberg speaks at Georgetown trying to invoke the civil rights movement and to draw a sharp distinction to China. Warren quickly fires back on Twitter. Pundits everywhere weigh in. And yet hardly anyone gets to the heart of the matter: power. And those who are mostly stuck in industrial age thinking recommending a traditional antitrust approach to limiting power. Here are the two big traps people appear...

Recently I did an opening interview for the On Demand Conference here in New York. As part of the conversation we discussed intermediary liability for platforms and I suggested that complete transparency was a good trade for intermediary liability. Someone from the audience became quite upset and asked, “so you mean Uber should have no liability for a rape by one of their drivers?” I was reminded of that moment when I read the medium post about “Living and Dying on Airbnb.” So let me explain ...

In my talk at Techconomy Detroit I proposed two policy measures for dealing with the transition to the information age: a basic income guarantee (universal basic income) and what I then called the right to an API Key. At the wonderful TEDxNewYork I was given an opportunity to expand on both of these ideas and I am now calling the second on “the right to be represented by a bot.” Here is the video:

Here is the transcript of my talk about a Basic Income Guarantee and the Right to be Represented by a BOT from TEDxNewYork. All of our economic theory, all of our business practice, all of our public policy, they were all developed during an era of scarcity. Scarcity means that when you want more of something, there’s an additional cost to be paid. And that was always true for physical products but it’s no longer true for digital information. That extra view of the funny cat video on YouTube,...

Yesterday, Techmeme was ablaze with posts about sharing on Facebook’s Open Graph. A CNet post by Molly Wood with the title “How Facebook is ruining sharing” appears to have kicked it all off. In it she argues that the automated (“frictionless”) sharing via Open Graph apps results in a lot more noise rather than signal. Marshall Kirkpartrick at RWW holds the same view in a piece titled “Why Facebook’s Seamless Sharing is Wrong”. Robert Scoble – not that surprisingly – is more optimistic about ...

There has been a renewed interest in the impact that digital technology is having on the boundaries of the firm. In particular there is a sense that networks operating on top of platforms are competing effectively with traditional firms. Examples include AirBnB as competing with hotels without owning any real estate, Uber with transportation companies without owning and cars, LendingClub with banks without having a balance sheet, Upwork (formerly ELance/ODesk) a systems contractor without emp...