The Do No Call law is a huge success.  Over 190 million phone numbers are registered (including mine).  That is truly impressive given it is opt-in.  The law has been expanded a couple times since it was introduced, making registrations perpetual (originally they were for five years) and extending it to cellular and VOIP numbers.  The popularity has spurred other consumer-friendly regulation, in particular an FTC ban on robocalls by telemarkers as of September 2009:

“[A]n amendment making explicit a prohibition in the TSR on telemarketing calls that deliver prerecorded messages without a consumer’s express written agreement to receive such calls. This amendment also requires that all prerecorded telemarketing calls provide specified opt-out mechanisms so that consumers can opt out of future calls.  The amendment is necessary because the reasonable consumer would consider prerecorded telemarketing messages to be coercive or abusive of such consumer’s right to privacy.”

The problem is the original Do Not Call law has a loophole for charities, political organizations and telephone surveyors (arguably just favored subcontractors of the politicians).  They can still call you without restriction.  Charities don’t bother me as they’re generally sensitive about not pissing off potential donors.  The problem is the politicians who have embraced robocalls in a huge way.  My pre-dawn robocall was political.  We were getting several a day in the run-up to the last election.

Given I’ve said I don’t want to be called and our government is already on the record that a “reasonable consumer would consider prerecorded telemarketing messages to be coercive or abusive”, how about we close the loophole and make political organizations subject to both the Do Not Call act and the ban on robocalls?  I am happy to allow political calls by a live person and the lonely or bored are welcome to opt-in for robocalls.

Unsolicited calls from anyone are annoying and all the more so when you’ve already signed up for the Do Not Call registry.  It is reprehensible but not surprising that the political class has exempted themselves from laws they apply to everyone else.  You’d hope in this time of intense focus on creating jobs, politicians will feel the heat for replacing humans with a machine.  Never mind that many of these calls are outsourced to other states (they often have a 202 area code) or perhaps even other countries (gasp!).

I see three options:

1. Amend the law – we need a politician to show some political courage and get this done at the Federal or state level.  I’m not holding my breath but grandstanders looking for a popular issue could do far worse.
2. Bypass the politicians – banning robocalls by politicians would make a great referendum at the state level.  All those calls for you to vote against would be the best advertising for the ban.
3. Retaliate in kind – I could imagine a new service that lets you sic your own robodialer on the people who were nice enough to target you.  Surely the irritation could motivate some small transaction fee.  You could choose from a standard set of (long-winded) messages or record your own.

“IBM is fully entitled to enforce its intellectual property rights and protect the investments we have made in our technologies. Competition and intellectual property laws are complementary and designed to promote competition and innovation, and IBM fully supports these policies. But IBM will not allow the fruits of its innovation and investment to be pirated by its competition through baseless allegations.”

Not to endorse Senator Shakedown’s grandstanding, but I do think Apple’s reality distortion field has worn off and everyone knows it except Apple.  Dave Winer nails it.  Companies are always the last to internalize they’re not the plucky little upstart any more and public expectations have changed.

Our runner-up in inanity emanating today is the New York Times’ apparently un-ironic call for the government to manage Google’s search algorithm.  Fortunately, this has been comprehensively addressed by Danny Sullivan.

A good start but we still need:

• The add-on to be distributed through the various browsers’ integrated add-on catalogs and not just buried on the Google site.
• Google needs to provide the add-on for other browsers as well.  At minimum, they need to support all the browsers they put on stage for marketing purposes (e.g. Opera)
• Google should build it into Chrome and turn it on by default (note that Chrome still has a bunch of other privacy issues)
• We need a similar add-on for opting out of AdSense which has a comparable tracking ability.

Cognitive Surplus starts with a potent historical parallel and an astonishing data point.  Early 18th century England had a “Gin Craze” as the population tried to anesthetize themselves against dramatic social changes accompanying the industrial revolution.  Shirky asserts television has played the same role over the last 50 years, absorbing the vast preponderance of free time in the developed world: “The sitcom has been our gin, an infinitely expandable response to the crisis of social transformation”.  He takes a little time to catalog television’s pernicious effects, and makes the point along the way that the asymmetric dynamic between broadcasters and passive audiences of the 20th century media was an anomaly that isn’t going to be reinstated on the Internet any time soon.

The astonishing data point arises from a television producer’s reaction to his relating the story of Wikipedia: “Where do people find the time?”  The impolitic answer of course is Wikipedia’s creators aren’t watching television.  Shirky estimates that Wikipedia is the result of on the order of 100 million hours of work by a vast number of participants.  This seems staggering until he puts it in context: Americans watch 200 billion hours of television every year and “we spend roughly a hundred million hours every weekend just watching commercials.”  That tees up the book: there is a vast collective cognitive surplus available to be harnessed if we can just turn off the television.  What happens when billions of couch potatoes begin to participate, create and share collectively?

The bulk of the book is an exploration of why and how people engage in social production.  In short, he says, it is means, motive and opportunity (just like the common criminal).  He offers a bunch of examples, though open source and Wikipedia remain by far the most powerful and impactful, as well as a variety of psychological research that helps explain personal and public motivations.

There are some suggestions for how to bootstrap and manage services that harvest cognitive surplus, but mostly the book culminates in a desperate plea for “As Much Chaos As We Can Stand” experimentation.  We must keep entrenched interests from squashing new efforts, but also not listen too much to the crazy innovators as they really have no idea what the real impact of their efforts will be.

Here Comes Everybody is a little more actionable for practitioners, while Cognitive Surplus is more of a manifesto (and we love a good manifesto), but well worth the read for insight on the future of media and the new social production model that lies beyond the market or government diktat.

My prescription remains Microzilla.

I’ll put just new posts out on Twitter via @platformonomics while @charlesfitz will  continue to be broader and more eclectic/cryptic.

So where are the Windows-based tablets to go toe-to-toe with iPad?  Lets survey the OEMs:

• OEM #1 HP just plunked down $1.2 billion for Palm and are saying they will use it for “multiple connected devices”.  Concurrent rumors of HP killing the Windows-based Slate tablet that Steve Ballmer waved around at CES may be premature, but no one has more experience with Windows touchscreen devices than HP.  They don’t seem on board.
• OEM #2 Dell appears exclusively committed to Android for tablets.
• Taiwan Inc. (aka Acer and ASUS) is strangely silent, although there are many rumors they are doing ARM/Android smartbooks.
• Lenovo (who ironically I think build the world’s best keyboard) has a weird hybrid notebook with a removable tablet where the notebook runs Windows but the tablet runs Linux.
• French consumer electronics powerhouse (?) Archos actually has a Windows 7 tablet, but they bury it on their site relative to the Android-powered tablets (they do atone slightly and prominently recommend Windows 7 on the page with the Android devices!).
• Intel, who normally play a key role in helping OEMs get to market, seems to be busy downplaying tablets and spending their time with 20th century mobile (and rubber boot) powerhouse Nokia on the MeToo, er, MeeGo operating system (the Wikipedia entry is worth a read).  Atom seems to be getting smoked by ARM for anything below the netbook.

Tablets are not exactly a new form factor for Microsoft, so what is the problem?  No dedicated multi-touch shell? (Microsoft is shipping a Touch Pack of accessories).  A lack of hardware reference designs?  Battery life challenges? (is it time to dig out the HAL documentation and port big Windows to ARM?)  Secret patent threats from Apple?  OEMs waiting for OneNote 2010 with touch support to ship?  Microsoft playing hardball on royalties (i.e. above netbook levels) while Android is free and offering search TAC kickbacks? (the OEMs not surprisingly like this model where they get paid to use an OS).  Did Courier got shot because it was scaring off OEMs who assumed Microsoft was going to build its own hardware a la Xbox or Zune?

Whatever the case, having no essentially presence in the hottest category de jour despite investing in this space for years has to be a big disappointment in Redmond, especially when they could have beaten Apple to market.  Android and its economic model is a real and strategic threat to the Windows franchise and the tablet door appears to be wide open.  What has happened to Microsoft’s once lauded, once-feared OEM organization?

I wrote a little about this when the iPad was announced:

The Dumb Pipe

Even though it was greeted with derision, Apple’s deal with AT&T for 3G data service is significant.  No doubt part of a broader negotiation between the two companies, the iPad data plans set a bar for other operators to meet or beat on price, quota and lack of contractual commitment.  AT&T, along with other operators around the world, end up more removed from the customer and one step closer to being not just a dumb pipe, but an invisible dumb pipe.  It will be interesting to see the terms and conditions and to what degree AT&T gets brand awareness.

I now surmise that AT&T got:

• To keep iPhone exclusivity in the US for some unknown period of time.  AT&T really doesn’t have a choice here as iPhone is a huge driver for their wireless business and they risk losing millions of customers the day iPhone is available from other US operators.  So they want to string out exclusivity and do what they can to enhance their network in the meantime.  The Wall Street guys continue to speculate on what it would mean for AT&T and Verizon if AT&T lost exclusivity.
• The opportunity to spend billions to bolster their network with Apple generously applauding AT&T’s big investments.  AT&T offset this expenditure on their balance sheet with a sly hint that Apple shares some of the blame for the iPhone’s bad network experience.
• The “right” to offer iPad users free use of AT&T’s Wi-Fi to mitigate the hit on their network.  AT&T continues to state that they believe iPad is mostly a home/Wifi device, but I have seen a bunch of them on airplanes (but then there are people who live on planes…).

Meanwhile, Apple got (in addition to the last two points above):

• No changes to iPhone “all you can eat” data plans (AT&T would love to charge for usage – I have heard iPhones are driving over 65% of all wireless data traffic in the US)
• Sweet pricing and terms for iPad 3G service that sets a great precedent for other operators in the US and beyond (could their resistance to these terms be contributing to the slip in international availability?), including
  • A choice of a low price plan ($14.99) and an unlimited plan ($29.99) that really is unlimited (“unlimited” usually means limited in the Orwellian doublespeak used to describe most mobile data plans).  UPDATE: the bandwidth may be unlimited, but it seems there is traffic shaping of streams going on.  AT&T is implying Apple is to blame.  Some of this may just require app updates and/or the v4.0 OS.
  • No contract  – you can cancel at any time
  • On-the-fly provisioning from the device
  • No AT&T branding in the experience?  Could it become non-exclusive at some point and let you choose from multiple operators in the future?  UPDATE: Looks like there is a token AT&T logo on a the billing page.
  • No word on whether AT&T is sharing service revenue back with Apple.  My guess is not.
• Coincidently, the VOIP over 3G restrictions in the App Store disappeared about the same time.  Given you still have to buy a voice plan with an iPhone, this doesn’t help much (yet), but it presumably also applies to the iPad.

Guy Kawasaki once likened competing with Microsoft to putting your head in a vise.  That may be a more apt description of competing with his alma mater Apple today.  And based on the AT&T negotiations, it may be even worse to be an Apple partner. 

Apple and to a lesser extent Google really are doing a phenomenal job changing the dynamics of the telecom industry – for the better.  For all the (valid) complaints about Apple’s heavy-handed control, it is still an improvement over the operator-controlled world of yore.  The only downside of all this is operators around the world are pissed off as their dumb pipe nightmare comes to pass and in the absence of being able to get the better of Apple, they’re taking it out on other companies.

Reaction however fell short of Soviet-era universal acclaim:

But some people in the affected regions believe Medvedev should have been doing something else with his time.

An online petition opposing the Samara region’s change gathered nearly 13,000 signatures.

…

“In the winter, darkness will come almost at lunchtime, which isn’t convenient and is psychologically quite hard,” the petition said.

Immediately prior to ordering their relocation to the Siberian worker’s paradise of Gulaggrad, Medvedev rebuked the ungrateful kulaks of Samara for standing in the way of Russia’s 21st century global information infrastructure ambitions:

But Medvedev said the change would help some far-flung regions have more efficient communications with the central authorities, ease travel and even improve the country’s international position.

“It’s possible that this could also aid the strengthening of Russia’s position as a link in the global information infrastructure,” he said at a meeting this month with ministers and regional leaders.

And Medvedev, without explicitly mentioning the fact economic dynamo and fellow BRIC nation China has but one time zone, is considering further decisive action if increased agricultural production quotas are not met:

Medvedev has suggested that the number of Russia’s time zones could eventually be reduced to just five.

He has also told government experts to study whether to continue the practice of shifting summer to winter time and back every year.

Somewhere, Thomas Friedman is no doubt furiously scribbling yet another sequel to The World is Flat extolling geopolitical origami and the fourth dimension applications of Mad magazine fold-ins.

Pravda has nothing to say on the matter.