eBook Market Gets More Crowded... But... Still Many Limitations

from the it's-a-start dept

As lots of tech sites are reporting (and as was leaked not too long ago), Barnes & Noble has released its own ebook reader, clearly designed to compete with the Kindle. The good news is that it takes aim at some of Kindle's weaknesses, such as by supporting more open offerings, like ePub, and also by allowing you to "lend" books to others. But the lending is pretty limited. You can only lend a book once, and then only for two weeks, after which the lent book disappears. It's nice that you'll be able to buy books from other retailers and use them on the Nook, but the limitations still seem pretty serious. Still, more competition is good, and even a slight step towards a more open solution is a step in the right direction. Next up: we just need someone else (perhaps not tied to a bookstore) to offer an even more open device.

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Palm Finally Realizes It Needs To Help, Not Hinder Developers

from the back-to-its-roots dept

We've been getting on Palm lately for the widespread mistakes the company made in building out a strong developer community. Despite having had strong developer communities in the past, with the Pre, it seemed like Palm decided to simply copy everything (even all the bad things!) that Apple did with the iPhone app store. It was a terrible case of iPhone cargo cultism, that seemed to assume that if they just copied the iPhone's every move with developers, things would be just like the iPhone. Now that that's backfired, it looks like the company has come to its senses. It's brought in some Mozilla developers and opened things up wide. It's done away with the fee for developers. It's openly allowing people to offer their apps directly to Palm users without having to go through an insane and arbitrary approval process. And, the new folks promise this is just the beginning of a much more open offering. It's about time. This is the sort of thing that Palm should have done before it launched.

In the meantime... there are still other problems showing up, including odd complaints about hidden limits on how many apps you can get through the Pre app store, without any clear response from Palm. So, for every step forward...?

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US Opens Up All Sorts Of Gov't Documents

from the this-is-good-news dept

While we've been disappointed by some moves by the Obama administration (on copyright, federal shield law, civil liberties, warrantless wiretapping, etc.), one area where the administration has made really big strides is on opening up formerly locked up gov't information. The latest is that the Government Printing Office and the Office of the Federal Register have just opened up the "Official Journals of Government" -- a document that used to cost a mere $17,000/year and is now available for free, online -- and made the Federal Register (basically the list of what the federal gov't is doing every day) XML enabled, so that anyone can do cool stuff with it. Ed Felten's team at Princeton has already created FedThread, which let you not only search the Register, but also annotate and create customized feeds. This is really great...

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Google Helps People Get Their Data Out Of Google

from the the-antithesis-of-evil? dept

Too many companies these days are focused on ways to keep you locked-in somehow or another, so it's quite refreshing to find out that Google is now officially announcing its Data Liberation Front, which does exactly the opposite: systematically helping you to get your data out of Google's services so that it can be used elsewhere. Apparently the group has been working on this for a while, but has only just now been publicly "announced." It's difficult to think of too many other companies that would do the same thing. Of course, it's easy to think of independent or competing companies that might do this -- but we usually hear about the original company suing anyone who tries to free up data. Good move by Google to offer the service itself.

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Is Apple Suggesting That The DMCA Prevents Terrorism?

from the yeah,-that's-believable dept

The EFF is trying to get a DMCA exemption from the Library of Congress for people who jailbreak their iPhones (if history is any indication, this won't happen -- the Library of Congress never seems to care about consumer rights). However, Apple's response to the Library of Congress, suggesting that open or jailbroken iPhones could be used by terrorists to bring down cell towers is both preposterous and totally unrelated to the issue at hand. First it's preposterous, as there are plenty of "open" devices out there already, and there has yet to be a single report of anyone taking down a cell tower with their mobile phone.

But, much more to the point: the point of copyright is not to protect us from terrorists taking down cell towers. If we, as a country, are relying on the DMCA to protect us from terrorists who don't want us making phone calls, we've got bigger problems. Even if it were true that terrorists could take down cell towers with an open mobile phone, does anyone actually think they'd shy away from doing so because it violated the DMCA? It's not like that's going to make much of a difference at all. It's entirely meaningless to the question of whether or not legal buyers of a mobile device should have the right to place whatever legal software they want on the device.

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From Closed To Open: iPhone App Developer Skepticism Highlights Platform Trajectory

from the closed-vs.-open dept

I've been getting into some interesting discussions with people lately concerning open vs. closed platforms -- especially in light of the supposed "success" of Apple's iPhone app store, which is a very closed platform. And the point that I've tried to make is that you have to understand the trajectories of these things over time. At any given time, it's never difficult to find a closed platform that is successful. In fact, I'd argue that if you are reshaping a market, often it helps to have a closed platform initially to drive that market in a useful direction -- though, this can really only be accomplished by someone visionary (Steve Jobs certainly counts). The question is how does this play out long term. And the answer is that you can't stay closed too long, or open solutions will catch up and surpass you. We've seen this pattern multiples times (closed AOL --> open internet?).

Where this gets trickier is that the open solutions are almost always substandard to the closed solutions initially. In some ways, this is by design. The closed solution is often much cleaner and slicker, and so it gets a lot of the initial use. But, overtime, the limitations of the closed solutions become increasingly clear, and as people bump up against those limits, frustrations increase, and more and more effort is put towards making the open solutions better -- even to the point that eventually they exceed the closed solution. It's a messy process, but the point where momentum shifts is often a subtle one, and the proprietors of the closed solution usually don't recognize it's a problem until way too late.

I believe that's the case with the App Store. The iPhone itself did an amazing job pushing the state of the mobile phone/portable computer market forward. There are some people who like to mock it as nothing special, but that's unfair. The device itself was a huge leap forward in demonstrating what a phone could be, and many others are just starting to grasp what this means more than two years after the original was introduced. That said, we're seeing more and more evidence concerning frustrations on the limits imposed by Apple's closed system, such as the arbitrary rejections of apps.

James points us to a worthwhile post from an iPhone developer, noting how the process is getting to the point where it's less and less worth it to develop for that platform. You have to put in a ton of work, and then you have to wait for quite a while just to get the app approved (or rejected), and the whole process is quite arbitrary. With that in mind, developers have a lot less certainty, and it shows a growing interest in other platforms.

To date, admittedly, such alternatives really haven't been very good. There are other app stores (some more open than others), but none has really been able to build up much traction yet on other devices. But there's a huge opportunity here if someone else can make this happen (or, if there were a way to standardize across some of the competitors) and start doing a better job serving both developers and consumers. The closed solution helps define the initial market -- but the open solution almost always wins in the long run.

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The Fear Of Freeloaders Overblown In Both Proprietary And Open Arenas

from the stop-worrying dept

I remember reading a while ago how if you look at the extremists in diametrically opposed political parties, they tend to have a lot more similarities rather than differences. It seems that may be happening in the proprietary and open source worlds as well. We've discussed how silly it is for companies and individuals trying to understand "free" business models to worry about freeloaders. The fact is, yes, some people will get stuff for free and not contribute anything back. In fact, it may be a lot of people. But if the end result is that you are actually making more money overall from those who aren't freeloaders, who really cares? In some cases all those "freeloaders" are actually giving back in other ways, such as by amplifying and promoting your message for you, and bringing in new potential customers that wouldn't have known about you otherwise.

For the most part, I assumed this was an issue for those with "proprietary" content/software. But, suddenly it's an issue that's getting attention in the "open source" world, with supporters of open source complaining about "freeloaders" who use open source software, but don't contribute back. This is silly. As Joel West points out, the whole point of open source software is that it can be used for any purpose. So, just as proprietary content creators shouldn't worry about freeloaders and focus on those who actually do contribute, the same is true for open source developers. Sure, some will freeload, but don't worry about them. Let them do what they want, and focus on providing more value for those who do contribute. In the end, the overall benefit will be much greater.

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Norway Drops Complaint Against Apple Now That Apple Dropped DRM In iTunes

from the no-problem-with-movies-then? dept

We never quite understood Norway's legal attack on Apple for its use of DRM in iTunes. Sure, using DRM was annoying and bad, but users had the choice to buy from iTunes or not, and it didn't make any sense for a government to get involved. That said, it's nice to see the government now drop the complaints after Apple announced it was dropping DRM on music files in iTunes. Still, if Norway is so upset about DRM, why isn't it still pissed off about Apple using DRM in many other areas?

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Turns Out Verizon Wireless' Open Pledge Has Meant Almost Nothing

from the open-in-name-only dept

Over the past few years, mobile operators began to get annoyed at being called "soviet ministries" for their preference towards being extremely closed off with high garden walls. So, they suddenly started to claim they were throwing their doors wide open. Verizon Wireless kicked it off in 2007, by declaring a plan to open its network. It got a ton of press attention (especially from Verizon Wireless, who had been more closed than others). However, when the details finally came out, there was little to get excited about.

And, indeed, Broadband Reports checks in and notes that for all of the hype surrounding Verizon Wireless' declaration of openness it's meant a whole lot of nothingness in terms of actual products and services. In fact, Verizon's own phones and phone service remain pretty closed. Effectively, Verizon Wireless got a PR coup by suggesting they might possibly allow more open devices on the network -- should there actually be any businesses that wanted to offer that. It did work to stop criticisms and threats of regulatory interference, but it hasn't resulted in much in the way of actual openness.

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Warner Music: Where's The Conversation?

from the let's-talk dept

Last week, we broke the story about a presentation being given to various universities about a music "tax" plan. The plan presented wasn't any different from what Jim Griffin (who was hired by Warner to pitch exactly this plan earlier this year) has talked about in the past -- but Warner Music Group was quick to contact us and distance itself from the presentation -- despite the title of the presentation announcing that this was Warner Music Group's plan, and two full slides of "comments from WMG," with one of those slides suggesting people contact Griffin at WMG for more info.

This week, a bunch of news organizations reported on the story -- with some, such as the the Chronicle of Higher Education, just repeating what was already known, while a few added to the story. Wired discovered that the planned name of the organization that would handle the "distribution" of funds would be Choruss. It also found out that EMI and Sony BMG have already signed onto the plan, along with Warner, which initiated it. Universal Music is the major label that's still holding out. Apparently independent labels are able to join up, as well, but the terms aren't at all clear yet.

Portfolio stepped up with its own discussion of the topic, highlighting a key point that I made to the Warner Music rep who called me: this conversation should be public. My conversation with Warner Music was off-the-record at their request, but I tried to defend posting the presentation by noting that this information should be discussed among all the stakeholders, rather than settled in a backroom deal like so many efforts by the recording industry. Otherwise, the parties that are left out of the discussion (generally, consumers) are going to get screwed.

In Jim Griffin's response to my post, he complained that: "At this early stage, many ideas may be discussed and discarded, but efforts to prematurely label or criticize the process only hinder achievement of constructive solutions." I would say back, that, at this early stage, if ideas are being discussed and discarded, why not bring everyone here into the conversation, so that we don't feel like the fix has been put on us after the "finished product" is finally announced from high atop RIAA-mountain? We're more than willing to help, right here on Techdirt.

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Don't Announce You're Open When You Just Blocked Someone Out

from the just-a-suggestion dept

Earlier this week, Salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff bashed Microsoft and its new cloud computing initiative, suggesting that it was unfriendly to partners: "They hate everybody and we love everybody, and that's pretty much the difference. We even love Microsoft. ... This is our core strategy, love." While we tend to agree that Microsoft's strategy leaves much to be desired, that doesn't mean that Salesforce's strategy is really all that much better. In response to Benioff's claims that they "love everyone," the CEO of Zoho suggests a less lovey-dovey version of Salesforce.com, noting that Zoho was all set to launch products on Salesforce's own cloud computing platform, Force (formerly AppExchange), when suddenly Salesforce.com blocked Zoho -- mainly because Zoho offers a competing CRM system.

Just a reminder that it's easy to say you're open -- but if you're not really open, someone's going to call you on it.

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Norway To Move Forward In Trying To Force Apple To Open Up iTunes

from the this-ought-to-be-interesting dept

What began as a minor squabble over the terms of service that went with iTunes in Norway quickly blew up into a bigger deal, with Norway blasting Apple for locking songs bought via iTunes only to the iPod via FairPlay DRM. While we can understand the frustration that some might have about this, it is still a user's choice to buy from iTunes, knowing that the music won't work with other digital music players. It's why I don't buy music from iTunes, for example. And these days, we're seeing more open competitors hit the market, such as Amazon's MP3 store. Thus, Apples use of DRM hardly seems like a reason for the government to force the company to open up.

However, that's exactly what's happening with Norway, as the government is moving forward with a case against Apple that might force the company to either open up FairPlay or shut down iTunes in Norway. If the latter is the end result, it's difficult to see how anyone actually benefits. If Apple wants to limit its own market, that's Apple's decision. It doesn't make sense for Norway to get involved.

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Thomson Reuters Sues George Mason University For Making Its Software Output More Useful

from the how-dare-they! dept

A bunch of folks have been submitting the news that financial information giant Thomson Reuters is suing George Mason University for the high crime of releasing some software that can convert the output of Thomson Reuters own EndNote software into a more open format. EndNote is software for creating bibliographies, from a variety of different databases. The George Mason software, Zotero, does the same thing -- but also will take documents saved in EndNote's proprietary format and save it in its own open format. In normal times, under normal laws, this shouldn't be a problem. Reverse engineering is considered a perfectly legitimate practice in most cases -- and, in fact, is considered an important part of the competitive market in driving innovation. But, thanks to the DMCA, when it comes to software, this type of behavior can be blocked within a license agreement. This is one of the worst parts of the DMCA, in that it's clearly not about protecting copyrighted material, but about preventing any sort of competition in the market place.

If Thomson Reuters execs actually thought about this, they would realize that Zotero actually makes EndNote more valuable by making the output more valuable. As long as Thomson Reuters is willing to keep adding more and better features, then it should have nothing to worry about from Zotero, who only enhances the value of EndNote's output. Instead, Thomson Reuters is using the old claim of felony interference with a business model to shut down a university-produced open competitor. Thomson Reuters' claims make this quite clear, in saying that Zotero is "destroying the EndNote customer base." Back here, in the real world, most people call that competition and think it's a good thing, rather than against the law.

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There They Go Again: Movie Industry Takes Yet Another Shot At DRM

from the wasting-time,-money-and-energy dept

It seems that every few years the entertainment industry thinks that if it can just create a better new form of DRM, all its business model problems will be solved. Usually, it talks about how DRM will somehow enable new business models, when all it really does is remove value from content, shrinking a market, annoying legitimate customers -- all while doing absolutely nothing to slow down unauthorized downloading. It's a huge waste of time, money and energy, but the entertainment industry still doesn't realize it. Because here we go again. The movie industry is working on yet another DRM standard, which it insists will be much better than everything before, because it will be more open and interoperable. But, the problem is that it will never be as open or interoperable as no DRM. Until the industry recognizes that, it will continue to throw away more money and more time when it could actually be focusing on improving its business.

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Opening Up Your Entire Writing Process Isn't Such A Ridiculous Idea

from the not-that-everyone-has-to-do-it... dept

Last week, when we wrote about how author Stephenie Meyer seemed to be overreacting to the leak of her latest manuscript, one of our regular critical commenters (an IP lawyer, who fully supports the IP system) posted a mocking comment pretending to mimic us by saying that maybe she should have opened up her whole writing process and put it up as a wiki. Of course, we never suggested any such thing, we merely pointed out that once the reality of the leak had happened, there were good and bad ways to react to it, and she chose a bad way, that punished her biggest fans.

However, it's worth noting that the more wide open process of creativity isn't necessarily worth mocking either. In fact, Boing Boing points out that Wired Magazine has opened up its storyboarding process for a feature for the next issue, so that people can follow the process of building the story. The mocking commenter-type folks would insist that this would somehow hurt the magazine and the writer by somehow "revealing" the process too soon, but the reality is that it's likely to help build more interest in the story by better connecting with fans who will feel a bigger connection to the story by seeing the whole process, rather than just the finished product.

Of course, this isn't to say that everyone has to embrace such an open process, but that it's not such a ridiculous process, no matter how much it may offend the sensibilities (or billing ability) of an IP attorney.

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Opening Amazon's Walled Garden Could Prove Tricky

from the wireless-worries dept

Mike Arrington offers some unsolicited advice to Amazon about how to expand the market for the Kindle. In a nutshell, he thinks Amazon should aggressively license the Kindle hardware specs to third parties, and allow authorized vendors to use the Kindle brand. Amazon would require licensees to use the Kindle store, and would share the associated revenues. There's a lot to be said for a plan like this. The key to long-run dominance of many high-tech industries is to be the platform around which other firms build their products. Amazon's got a solid product with a fair amount of buzz at the moment, but that could easily evaporate if another company comes along with a more compelling product. Getting a lot of third-party vendors to build products around the Kindle ecosystem could help establish it as the standard e-book platform.

The difficulty with opening up the platform is that the Kindle business model—particularly the wireless aspect—depends on limiting the Kindle's functionality. Amazon is able to offer free cellular access for the life of the product in part because it controls the applications that will run on it, and can therefore guarantee to cell carriers that users won't start running bandwidth-hogging applications on it. And Amazon is willing to pick up customers' bandwidth bills in part because it charges premium prices for content, some of which is available for free off the open Internet. So if Amazon licensed the Kindle name to third parties, it would have two choices. It could tell the vendors they're on their own in terms of negotiating their own wireless plans, which would be a headache for the vendors. Or, if Amazon wants to bring third parties in under its own wireless umbrella, it will presumably need to impose some draconian restrictions on the functionality of the Kindle clones. And how many vendors are going to want to sell Kindle clones that have all the same limitations as the original?

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Is Google's Proprietary Tech Stack Destroying Its Acquisitions?

from the not-invented-at-Google-syndrome dept

While Google has bought plenty of small startups, almost none of those deals have amounted to very much. It almost seems like most of the startups disappear into Google forever. There are a few exceptions such as YouTube and (maybe) Writely. But the list of startups that have simply languished or died is much longer. TechCrunchIT is running an interesting post that suggests one of the key reasons: Google's proprietary tech stack. While Google is a big open source supporter for lower level infrastructure, once you get above that -- it's very much a strong believer in doing everything its own way. I've heard from friends at Google about the difficulty they've had learning to deal with Google's tech stack -- and certainly have heard how it's slowed down the progress of some Google acquisitions while they learn how to "transition."

In fact, some have pointed out that this is one of the side benefits to Google's AppEngine offering. Since it exposes some of Google's tech stack to folks for them to develop and run their applications, it will make it much easier to integrate them into Google at a later date. So, for startups whose strategy is to get acquired by Google (and, I should note, if you start with that strategy, you're probably going to fail), it may make sense to develop on AppEngine just because you're already signaling to Google that the integration costs are significantly lower.

Still, this highlights one of the major downsides to Google's belief that it can do everything much better than everyone else by starting from scratch: in doing so, it actually makes it much harder to capitalize on synergies from many acquisition targets. Yes, there are reasons to go against the "standard" way of doing things, but there are significant costs as well.

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Why Zittrain's Techno-Pessimism Is Unwarranted

from the no-worries dept

Ars Technica reviews Jonathan Zittrain's new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Zittrain is by all accounts a smart guy and an engaging speaker, and it sounds like his book makes a lot of worthwhile points about the importance of open, "generative" technologies. But I just can't get worked up about Zittrain's warnings that the dominance of open systems is a fragile, temporary thing. It seems to me that there's a basic tension at the heart of Zittrain's argument. On the one hand, he argues (correctly in my view) that open platforms are better for innovation because of their lower barriers to entry. On the other hand, he wants us to believe that despite that inherent advantage, open technologies are on the brink of being eclipsed by closed platforms like the iPhone.

I think this misses a couple of important points. In the first place, I think Zittrain draws the wrong lessons from history. Zittrain himself notes that until the 1990s, the world was full of proprietary networking technologies and computing platforms that had big advantages over open technologies like TCP/IP, Unix, and the mostly-open PC platform. Open technologies had a few advantages of their own -- most notably government support of TCP/IP -- but open platforms were definitely the underdogs in many respects. And then, of course, the open platforms utterly destroyed the closed ones. Almost everyone now uses TCP/IP, while AOL is now little more than a mediocre website. Virtually all desktops and laptops -- including Macs and a lot of Unix workstations -- now largely share a common architecture. And almost every operating system not made by Microsoft is built on some versian of Unix.

Zittrain would have us regard all of this as some kind of fluke or lucky break, that the whole thing could come crashing down at any minute. But I think it's evidence that better technologies tend to win out in the marketplace. TCP/IP beat out AOL and other proprietary services precisely because open architectures enable more innovation. And once an open architecture comes to dominate a given market, it becomes harder, not easier for a proprietary product to displace it, because network effects create tremendous intertia on behalf of established open standards. I'm hard pressed to come up with any examples of a well-established open standard getting displaced by a closed one. Rather, what tends to happen is that new, proprietary technologies tend to get built on top of open ones. The top layers of the iPhone software stack may be closed, but it's built on TCP/IP, HTTP, and a host of other open standards.

It doesn't, therefore, make sense to view the iPhone as a threat to "generativity." The iPhone itself may not be "generative," but it's built on the same open standards as more open devices. That means that growing the iPhone market is a net positive for openness overall. True, people who buy an actual iPhone aren't getting the full advantage of generativity, but they are helping to further entrench TCP/IP and the web, platforms on which other more generative technologies can thrive alongside the iPhone. Moreover, if Zittrain is right that open platforms promote more innovation, which I think he is, then we should expect the same thing to happen at the top of the stack as happened at lower layers of the stack: over time, open mobile platforms like Android should enjoy more innovation than closed platforms like the iPhone, and the former should gradually displace the latter. Consumers tend to choose more open platforms over time not because consumers care about "generativity," per se, but because they want the phone with the best software, and open platforms tend to get the best software over time. And smart companies will tend to open up their platforms over time, lest competitors leapfrog them with a more open product. Indeed, as Mike pointed out a few days ago, that's already happening with Nokia's decision to open source its Symbian operating system.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Nokia's Open Sourcing Of Symbian Shows How Closed Markets Become Open

from the fear-not dept

Originally I wasn't going to write about Nokia's decision to purchase the rest of Symbian and then open source the code, but a few people have written in to ask about our take, and the more I think about it, the more interesting it becomes. There's certainly been a palpable fear lately among some that things like the locked-down iPhone represent a dangerous "future" to be avoided.

But that doesn't seem to have much historical support. New markets often are driven initially by locked down and proprietary solutions, but openness tends to prevail in the long run. The reason many markets start out with closed and proprietary solutions is that you need a comprehensive enough solution to address the market, and it's often difficult to do that in an ad hoc manner. A proprietary solution gives control to one person or a small group of people who can easily drive the project to where it needs to be to drive adoption. However, in the long run, more open solutions then win out, because competitors realize that the real game is being a platform, which is more important than being the comprehensive supplier. And the way to become a platform is to sign up as many developers as possible, and free them to make your platform much more valuable. That's much easier to do in an open or open source environment.

This is why we're seeing this particular decision to open up Symbian, and also explains Google's open approach with its Android offering. It also explains why Apple's iPhone, which was totally closed at the beginning, has been slowly opening up to try to combat the rise of more open competitors.

Finally, this move by Nokia is a recognition of the economics of infinite goods. Just as IBM helped massively boost its services business by betting big on Linux, Nokia recognizes that freeing up Symbian helps turn it into a services company as well. Freeing up that infinite good (the software) helps generate more demand for the scarce "services" provided by the company. There may be some stumbles along the way, but on the whole this is exactly the type of bet the company needs to be making. And, at the same time, it shows that there's little to fear concerning a future world of "closed" systems a la the iPhone. Every such closed system is merely an opportunity and an invitation for competitors to become more open.

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Open Does Not Mean Communal

from the kill-this-myth dept

I hesitate to post anything that involves Scott Cleland, a telecom "analyst" who has a bit of a reputation for, well, perhaps stretching the truth in order to make a point that supports the big telcos who pay him to be a public advocate. However, with InfoWorld positioning him as a legitimate critic of the FCC's open spectrum rules and hearing him make statements like: "Everybody throws the word 'open' around and says open is wonderful. But 'open' means communal. It means not owned," it seems a response is necessary. This is an old trick used by those who can't actually come up with a reason why "open" systems are bad. So they fall back on the false claim that open means communist, and that's bad.

There are just a few problems with this statement, with the big one being that it's completely wrong. First of all, "open" hardly means communal or communist. In fact, it often means exactly the opposite. It means creating a platform or a standard on which multiple parties can compete, as capitalists, rather than locking people out via a government-granted monopoly. Also, the smear that "open means not owned," is used to suggest that open systems are somehow antithetical to property rights. Again, this is hogwash. First of all, when discussing spectrum, we're never talking about property that is owned anyway -- merely a bit of the air that is licensed. Spectrum is, by it's very nature, the property of everyone. That's not a "communist" idea -- it's a factual one. The various spectrum auctions aren't about owning property, they're about getting a license from the FCC to be able to do something with the spectrum that is already around us.

What Cleland is really arguing for is the idea that it's better to have government-granted monopolies limited to a few big providers (mostly the ones who back his firm), rather than a more level playing field that creates real competition in a real market. For him to suggest that an "open" system is somehow less capitalistic than one that involves a gov't agency granting monopoly rights is simply laughable.

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