Policy by the Numbers

Family Caregiving: A huge and neglected challenge

2012-02-28T12:51:00.002-08:00

We are a nation of caregivers. Every day over 44 million adults serve as unpaid caregivers to ailing or disabled relatives or friends, and annually 65 million do so—yet this form of work often goes uncompensated and is largely invisible. Unsurprisingly, inadequate awareness of the issues leads to inadequate policies and solutions.

Caregiving takes a huge toll on the economy. About 17% of full and part-time employees are also caregivers (in fact 73% of all caregivers are employed at another job). Businesses lose $34 billion/year in productivity from employees being distracted, cutting back hours, or leaving the workforce. Caregivers forsake income: their total estimated lost wages, pension and Social Security benefits is nearly $3 trillion.

Caregivers and care recipients span all demographics, but they are primarily women (66%) and ages 35-64 (64%). Of the 65 million adult caregivers, 4 million care for children, 49 million care for adults, and 13 million care for both adults and children.

Caregiving can be highly demanding. It involves far more than healthcare-in-the-home; it is about helping with life: activities of health and wellness (medications, therapies, exercise, tracking of symptoms, appointments, etc.); basic living (bathing, grooming, toileting, dressing, eating, etc.); basic chores (cooking, cleaning, shopping, money management, etc.) as well as social engagement and emotional support.

On average, caregivers spend 20 hours per week; a third average 47 hours per week. And it can go on for many years: on average 4.6 years, while 15% have been providing care for over 10 years. Unsurprisingly, the non-economic impact — physical and mental health deterioration of caregivers and the fraying of family relationships — is significant.

Demographic and economic realities are increasing need for (and demands on) family caregivers. People are living longer, and there are fewer offspring to handle their care. Paid home care workers are not filling the need. While the projected demand for such workers for 2008-18 is 50%, the growth of the 25-54 age female population (the main labor pool from which these workers are drawn) is only 2%. Low pay (barely above minimum wage) and low status of home care workers spurs high turnover, further aggravating the situation. Outsourcing is not an option, as few caregiving tasks can be performed remotely. Healthcare trends — cutbacks due to government and employer cost cutting, shorter hospital stays, and more home-care technologies — intensify the family caregiving burden.

Policy makers, technologists and entrepreneurs must appreciate the prevalence, toll and context of caregiving in order to address this growing crisis. Caregiving is not a simple one-to-one relationship, but usually involves networks of relatives and friends. It is not only a healthcare issue, but also about managing life. And it is not just a brief crisis requiring heroic actions, but an overwhelming (and seemingly unending) series of wide-ranging, mundane tasks with minimal (if any) compensation.

Caregivers step up to help friends and family in need; similarly, we must step up to provide support and solutions to help shoulder the burden of care. Much can be done; I suggest a couple of starting points. Design caregiver-support policies such that they acknowledge the primacy of the family in caregiving. Recognize that caregiving is about life and not just health, by reducing requirements for presence or approval of healthcare professionals. Develop tools and services that make management and coordination of daily caregiving easier, that are designed for long-term use, and are sufficiently flexible to accommodate un-foreseeable changes in specific care tasks. A brighter future is possible, if we can come together to create tools, systems and policies to accommodate the changing nature of how we take care of ourselves and others throughout life.

For more information:

Rajiv Mehta is a consultant and entrepreneur focused on technologies for personal and family health, and a co-organizer of the Quantified Self.

The Innovation Nation versus the Warfare-Welfare State

2012-02-27T14:50:00.001-08:00

We like to think of ourselves as an innovation nation but our government is a warfare-welfare state. To build an economy for the 21st century we need to increase the rate of innovation and to do that we need to put innovation at the center of our national vision. Innovation, however, is not a priority of our massive federal government. Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. federal budget, $2.2 trillion annually, is spent on just the four biggest warfare and welfare programs, Medicaid, Medicare, Defense and Social Security. In contrast the National Institutes of Health, which funds medical research, spends $31 billion annually, and the National Science Foundation spends just $7 billion.

Putting innovation at the center of the national vision is not simply about spending more, it’s about how we approach all problems.

Our ancestors were bold and industrious–they built a significant portion of our energy and road infrastructure more than half a century ago. It would be almost impossible to build that system today. Could we build the Hoover Dam today? We have the technology but do we have the will? Unfortunately, we cannot rely on the infrastructure of our past to travel to our future. Airports, an electricity smart grid that doesn’t throw millions into the dark every few years, ubiquitous Wi-Fi — these are among the important infrastructures of the 21st century, and they are caught in the regulatory thicket.

Alex Tabarrok is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a blogger at Marginal Revolution. This post draws on his recent e-book from TED books, Launching the Innovation Renaissance and an article he wrote for The Atlantic.

Citizen science tackles the galaxy

2012-02-24T12:34:00.000-08:00

In many parts of science, we're not constrained by what data we can get, we're constrained by what we can do with the data we have. Citizen science is a very powerful way of solving that problem.

— Chris Lintott, Time, July 11, 2011

Between the Elsevier boycott and the Bipartisan Federal Research Public Access Act working its way through Congress, there is plenty of talk about the need for openness in research. However, the results from Zooniverse.org, the suite of citizen science projects that I run with collaborators in the U.K., U.S. and around the world, show that access to data and information is only the beginning of what’s needed.

Take the recent discovery of a likely planet candidate around one of the 150,000 stars monitored by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. Volunteers at planethunters.org sorting through public data returned by the spacecraft are able to discover previously unnoticed transits—the wink of a star as a planet passes in front of it. While the data is available for download from the Kepler archive, our interface allows hundreds of thousands of volunteers with no technical expertise to participate in cutting-edge science.

This sort of experience removes the biggest barrier to participation and engagement: the misguided belief that nothing useful can be done by the amateur, that Science with a capital S is best left to Scientists in ivory laboratories. Once that barrier is broken down, volunteers are often motivated to do much more than just click on a website. Within 24 hours of launching GalaxyZoo.org (the original Zooniverse project), the site was receiving 70,000 classifications an hour. The project received more than 50 million classifications during its first year, from almost 150,000 people. The planet candidate I mentioned above was discovered and even modeled by volunteers long before the science team got to it.

Over at GalaxyZoo, we’ve been following up on the Green Pea galaxies. These enigmatic systems, which owe their name to their small, round and green appearance in images scoured by volunteers and drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, were identified, catalogued and classified by a group of volunteers. They have turned out to be the most efficient factories of stars in the local universe. They now form the focus of much professional study, the results of which are reported to their eager discoverers via papers placed on the freely accessible arXiv.org repository.

Examples like these abound, but even with access to scientific journals, many of the volunteers who tracked down the Peas would never have considered trawling the literature. Their discovery—made possible by the Galaxy Zoo interface and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey team’s decision to be open not only with their data but will the tools required to make sense of it—gave them the incentive and the motivation to dig much deeper than they would otherwise have done.

This deeper exploration is enabled by a radical openness, marked by a commitment to enabling access to data at a level which is meaningful for the audience. It’s more expensive, more difficult and frankly more hassle than simply campaigning for the removal of payrolls, but it’s just as important. Luckily, sustained effort can bring remarkable rewards—just ask the more than 500,000 registered Zooniverse volunteers.

Chris Lintott is the chair of the Citizen Science Alliance which runs the citizen science projects at zooniverse.org.

Jack and Jill the Innovator, Episode 6

2012-02-17T14:36:00.000-08:00

Next up in our Jack and Jill the Innovator video series, which puts a spotlight on a diverse array of innovators and gives them an opportunity to tell their stories: an interview between Jennifer Muhawi and Phesto Dee, two musicians building their careers online.

Both have been professional musicians for over a decade. Since Phesto has been using the web for years and Jennifer recently started building her social media strategy, we thought it’d be interesting for Jennifer to interview Phesto and learn about his successes. The interview was conducted on Google+ and recorded with Camtasia.

The discussion tracks some of the key themes of the Future of Music Coalition’s Artist Revenue Streams project (which we wrote about recently). Phesto has used the Internet to reach his audience, build a brand and make money. That said, as with any technology, there are also new challenges. In Jennifer’s case, she points out that she now has an abundance of options to reach her fans directly, and it can be hard to know which one is best for her. But artists are adapting to the medium, and the ones that do are reaping increasing rewards, both personal and financial. As Phesto says, interacting with fans can be hard work—but it’s fun, too.

posted by Derek Slater, Policy Manager at Google

Broadband Competition: Same As It Ever Was

2012-02-16T13:15:00.000-08:00

Cross-posted from Andrew Crain's blog

Editor’s note: Andrew Crain is a telcom lawyer and scholar in residence at the Interdisciplinary Telecom Program at the University of Colorado. Because this blog explores examples of how data can drive decision making and improve the quality of our policies, this cross-post is especially fitting.

Yesterday, I talked about the 60 percent of Americans who have a choice between two broadband providers with the capacity to handle any services they might use. The picture isn’t as rosy for the other 40 percent. Most of them (30 percent of U.S. households) will also have access to broadband at speeds that can now handle any services currently available, but only from the cable company. The remaining 10 percent will not have access to these enhanced speeds from anyone.

Before we go further, we should recognize that this situation does not represent a sea change in the competitive landscape. While it is true that cable broadband is now several times faster than the fiber-to-the-node service from telecoms (100 to 25 mbps), cable modem service has always been 3 or 4 times faster than telecom broadband:

The real difference is that the telecom speeds are now sufficient to handle any services customers use. That wasn’t true in the past, when the speed differences had a real-world impact. In the ‘90s, cable customers could download music in a reasonable time and watch YouTube videos, while many DSL customers could not. A few years later, cable broadband customers could watch TV shows on Hulu, while many DSL customers could not. More recently, the same was true for HD videos and movies. Now, for 60 percent of Americans, both cable and broadband services are more than adequate for streaming HD movies.

And the fact that a large percentage of Americans can only get the top speeds from one provider isn’t new. In the early days of broadband, most households had access to service from only one provider (usually the cable provider). As speeds increased, many households had the choice of only cable service that could handle streaming video, while telecom broadband was well below 1 mbps.

The cable companies used this speed advantage in the marketplace, and in the past they had a larger share of broadband customers than they do now. The most recent statistics from the FCC are as of the end of 2010, when 56.3 percent (43.3 of 76.9 million) of broadband connections were via cable modems. That number has been increasing in the last few years, but cable’s percent of total broadband consumer connections still is not as high as it was in the 90s, when they had nearly two-thirds of the market.

Cable companies are again increasing market share, but it will be several years before they reach the levels they had in the ’90s. The FCC year-end 2010 report showed that the cable companies added 2.4 million broadband customers that year, while telecom companies added only 1 million. In other words, the cable companies gained 70% of the net broadband residential adds. The cable companies did even better last year. According to the Leichtman Research Group, the cable companies gained 67% of the new broadband wireline customers in the first quarter, 77% in the second quarter, and 83% in the third quarter. That sounds like a lot, but the focus on net adds is deceptive, because as broadband penetration has increased, the number of net adds has started to decline.

Why is this significant? Because the fact that net adds have decelerated means that if the cable companies gain a large percentage of net adds, their share of total broadband residential connections will grow slowly. Assuming that net adds level out at the 2010 level of 3.5 million per year, and the cable companies’ rate of gain increases to 90% of new customers, their share of residential customers will increase to 62.6% in five years.

That would be a significant gain, but the cable share of the wireline broadband market would still be lower than it was in the ‘90s. Even that number is likely overstated. It is more likely that net adds will continue to decline, which is only natural as the number of households with broadband increases to 70, 80 and 90 percent. Based upon current trends, the cable companies will probably add a couple of points to their percentage of total fixed broadband connections over the next half-decade.

It is possible that a fundamental change in the market is underway, and the 2011 net add numbers indicate that cable’s rate of gain is accelerating. But a fundamental change in market structure will not happen unless the telecom companies start loosing a significant number of customers. Whether that will happen is yet to be seen.

The fact that the competitive level of the broadband market hasn’t changed does not answer the ultimate question: is this level of competition good enough? And is is good enough for the 30 percent of Americans who have only one choice of very high speed broadband?

Posted by Andrew Crain

Artist revenue streams: Measuring musicians’ money

2012-02-15T13:19:00.000-08:00

Despite the notion that in many ways the digital age has been detrimental to singers and songwriters, the truth is that more musicians are creating more music and distributing it in more ways than ever before. There are also more opportunities to make money, but how precisely are artists taking advantage of them? There are traditional metrics to measure the state of the music industry, like number of albums sold or number of spins on the radio, but they’re ill-suited for the digital age. They don’t help us understand whether emerging digital technologies are helping artists take home more money.

The Future of Music Coalition’s (FMC) latest research project, Artist Revenue Streams, begins to tackle this challenge by exploring the ways that new technologies, like digital music stores and streaming services, impact US-based musicians’ careers and changed musicians’ earning capacities over time. They plan to release a dozen white papers that explore the specific outcomes from the data they collected via surveys, interviews and financial snapshots.

As in any business and as always in the arts, musicians face challenges in making a profit. At the same time, the report counts 40 different revenue streams that artists can harness, and artists can tailor these to fit their own work. Of the 5,000 artists surveyed by FMC, 42% earned all of their personal annual income from music. The breakdown of this data will ultimately allow artists to assess the value of both traditional and digital technologies and services that contribute to total income for musicians. As both new and established artists plot their course for taking advantage of the increase in digital revenues, understanding which slice of the pie to invest time, energy and money into is an important, strategic move.

For example, the first round of FMC’s data explores the changing relationship between artists, brands and earnings, making it clear that musicians’ decisions about a wide range of factors, from merchandising deals to corporate support, have an impact on their artistic reputation with fans, brands and funders.
Policymakers can learn a lot from this data, too. Artists and entrepreneurs are creating fantastic new content, products and services online, and existing copyright laws both support and encourage this creativity by protecting artists from infringement and helping them secure fair compensation for their work. The Artist Revenue Streams project specifically has cross-genre and geographic layers of data that enables policymakers to see where laws and the market are already working well—as well as where targeted, narrowly-tailored solutions can help support artists.

You can read more about the FMC project here, stay tuned for more findings.

Posted by Brittany Smith, Policy Associate at Google

San Francisco bicycle count shows enormous growth in ridership

2012-02-14T14:58:00.000-08:00

Last week, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) released its much-anticipated 2011 City Bicycle Count Report. Among the data contained in the 22-page document is one overarching finding: San Francisco is experiencing a bicycling boom. Just how big of a boom? A dramatic 71% increase in the number of people biking in the last five years.

The city of San Francisco began conducting annual citywide bicycle counts in 2006 to measure bicycle ridership trends, evaluate the efficiency of the current bicycle network and influence future bicycle infrastructure planning. Each year, the SFMTA sets up manual bicycle counting stations at 23 locations around San Francisco, counting bicycles that pass through the area over a two-hour stretch of time. They then compare the counts from year to year. The results, in the SFMTA’s own words, have been “impressive.”

The 2011 report [PDF] showed that 22 of the 23 count stations, the numbers of riders increased in 2011. The count station at Market and 11th Streets, a major thoroughfare for downtown bicycle commuters, showed a 43% increase since last year, and a 115% increase since 2006. Market Street has a protected bike lane in this area, and bicycling advocates at the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition attribute much of the increase in ridership at this count station to this separated bikeway.

Perhaps the most telling statistic is the increase of bicycle counts at locations with new bicycle infrastructure added this year. In 2011, more than 17 miles of bike lanes were added to San Francisco streets, including 2.5 miles of buffered bikeways. Bicycle count locations with new bike lanes showed an especially large increase in ridership. For example, Townsend Street had bike lanes striped in 2011 and showed a 54% increase in counts.

In addition to the positive findings, the Bicycle Count Report also shows that San Francisco has a long way to go before reaching the city’s official goal of 20% of trips by bicycle by 2020. The 2011 report shows that 3.5% of San Francisco trips are done by bicycle, higher than the national average, but still not there.

In order to move us closer to ridership goals and invite more people to bike, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition has developed an ambitious vision for San Francisco of 100 miles of safe, comfortable and inviting crosstown bikeways called Connecting the City. The campaign’s website uses videos, interactive maps, computer-generated visual mock-ups, and illustrated schematics to help riders and policymakers imagine the potential benefits of each route.

What’s next for San Francisco biking? Mayor Edwin Lee has called San Francisco a national leader in biking, and the report says, “the SFMTA is committed to growing bicycle ridership, providing new infrastructure, and improving the safety of bicycling in San Francisco.” The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition is working hard to help the city use this valuable data to begin immediately implementing the policy strategies that will increase bicycling even more dramatically in the years to come.

Posted by Kristin Smith, Communications Director at San Francisco Bicycle Coalition

Maps, Meth and the Lord’s Resistance Army

2012-02-10T17:32:00.000-08:00

Maps have evolved in some pretty amazing ways, from the night sky maps carved onto cave walls in Lascaux, to modern day collaborative maps built by millions of citizen cartographers around the world. Using maps, we can look at how the world around us has changed. We can also use maps to govern more effectively, save lives or just find the cheapest beer.

But what makes maps really exciting isn’t what they can tell us about our past or present, but what they could potentially tell us about our future, both good and bad.

A recent Fast Company piece entitled, “Google Maps Help Predict Meth Labs Before They Open” touches on this idea. In his 2009 book, Geography and the Drug Addiction, Dr. Max Lu took three years of data around meth lab seizures and used it to show the likely spread of those meth labs in the future.

Thousands of miles away, predictive analysis was being used by GeoEye to map political conflict and refugees in central Africa. Using the AnthroMapper and Signature Analyst tools, GeoEye’s analysts were able to identify the pattern of both the Lord’s Resistance Army and related refugee populations.

Overlapping geospatial models for LRA and refugees (image courtesy of GeoEye)

They then used statistical models to represent the geospatial “signature” of this activity and identified regions where new conflict was more likely to occur in the future. Combining this model with population density statistics helped NGOs, local governments and the military focus their resources.

Populations at higher risk (images courtesy of GeoEye)

Given these two examples of predictive mapping in fighting crime and political violence, I’d like to pose this question to all of you: what else can we predict using maps, and how can maps help us make better decisions?

If we’re able to map out historical deforestation using satellite imagery, shouldn’t we be able to map future deforestation as well? Using that same satellite imagery, shouldn’t we be able to combine those deforestation maps with historical flood data to predict the next food shortage?

Maps are powerful tools that, combined with the right data, can help us make better public policy decisions. It’s also why policy makers must protect and encourage geospatial technology. From climate science to fighting crime, the possibilities are endless. I’d like to think predicting the future is a good place to start.

Posted by Charlie Hale, Geo Policy Analyst at Google

Life and death in subspace

2012-02-01T10:05:00.000-08:00

Matthew Butcher’s hockey teammates started a memorial fund for him a week after he was murdered. Some of these friends had known him for as many as twelve years. Few had ever met him in person.

These friends all played an online video game called Subspace. The game came out in 1997—making it one of the earliest massively multiplayer online games—and it has a simple premise: fly around in 2D spaceships shooting at each other. Even though the game was commercially abandoned shortly after its release, devoted users reverse engineered it and released an open source version so they could keep playing and add security improvements.

The game’s genius is that users can reinvent it—they can set up their own gaming servers with a unique map and altered settings. One of these user-generated versions attempts to emulate hockey: users “check” each other by shooting their guns and control a fiery ball inside a hockey rink.

The Realistic Subspace Hockey League (RSHL), where players form teams and try to win a coveted trophy, just wrapped up its 18th season. They keep stats, and even make their own editions of Sportscenter.
More importantly, they chat. The last time I checked in on the RSHL was about seven years ago. I found familiar names from my playing days like Matthew (or white_0men, as he was known in-game), as well as many, many new players. In fact, most of the current players only picked up the game relatively recently, well after it was commercially abandoned.

When I asked them why they still played, they all said roughly the same thing—they liked talking to each other, meeting people who were older and younger, who had different jobs, lived in different places. Some players come to the Zone just to watch others play and catch up with friends. (In fact, when I played, my dial-up connection was so bad that sometimes all I could do was chat.)

Nearly two years ago, I got an email that brought me back to Center Ice, the website hub where the hockey players congregate. white_0men was killed during a robbery at his business in Los Angeles, and his friends were alerting all players, past and present, about the donation fund for his family and a memorial message thread (now hundreds of messages long).

Center Ice may be an anomaly, though that seems unlikely today, when hundreds of millions of people participate in online games like World of Warcraft and virtual worlds like Second Life. Certainly, many are casual gamers or only form loose connections with most of the people they meet each day, just as you don’t necessarily invite the clerk at your corner store over to dinner at your home. But, given the mass scale of gaming today, even if only a small percentage participate in communities like Center Ice, that is still significant in absolute numbers.

The composition of these communities likely looks quite different than the stereotype of the pimply faced male gamer. Forty-two percent of all video game players in the U.S. are women, and 40 year-old moms are the most frequent players of Farmville. There are multi-billion dollar economies in virtual goods that are bought and sold for use within such games.

Just like in the physical world, public policy is only one way to shape behavior in these online communities—code, markets and norms can be much more important. If you’re interested in learning more about how this particular community is composed, shaped and regulated, you can read more about about life in Subspace based on interviews with its players here.

posted by Derek Slater, Policy Manager at Google

Big data for economic development

2012-01-31T10:44:00.000-08:00

Will mobile phones transform the lives of the world’s poor? Pick up a recent issue of The Economist and it seems like a fait accompli. With over 90% of the developing world now receiving coverage, and the advent of innovative applications like telemedicine, ICT-based agricultural extensions and Mobile Money (a form of phone-based electronic currency akin to PayPal), mobile phones have the potential to provide a game-changing platform for international development.

Yet for all the hype, we know little about whether and how mobile phones will have a lasting impact. Countries with high rates of mobile phone penetration tend to be better off in a number of ways, but figuring out what caused what is no simple matter.

This is where “Big Data” can make a difference.

In a recent paper I wrote with Nathan Eagle and Marcel Fafchamps, we found patterns in ten terabytes of Rwandan mobile phone use data that help illuminate the role of mobile phones in Rwanda’s economy. Focusing on the micro-level behavior of individuals captured in the data enabled us to avoid many of the common pitfalls of making causal inferences based on trends in macroeconomic indicators.

We first noticed that after major shocks like earthquakes and natural disasters, individuals in Rwanda sent a significant volume of “Mobile Money” to the people affected. In the below video, you can see how dramatically the Lake Kivu earthquake affected patterns of mobile phone traffic in the country:

Using econometric models, we quantified this response. Following the 2008 earthquake, a total of $85 was sent to the earthquake victims over the mobile phone network. Because of increased adoption over the past few years, we estimate that roughly $30,000 would be sent in response to an earthquake today. In a small country where most people earn only a few dollars a day, this is a sizable amount of money.

Perhaps more importantly, when we analyze the dynamics of the social network captured in the billions of phone calls and transfers, we find that the pattern of activity is most consistent with a model of risk sharing—i.e., John helps Jane when Jane is in trouble because he expects Jane to reciprocate in John’s time of need. In places like Rwanda, where banks are rare and people tend to have limiting savings, such risk sharing makes a major difference in insuring individuals against income volatility and protecting against the “poverty traps” that prevent people from moving out of poverty.

This is good news for advocates of expanding of mobile networks and services in developing countries. To the extent that Mobile Money facilitates risk sharing, results indicate that the technology can be a positive force for economic development.

However, not everything is positive. We observe that it is chiefly wealthy mobile phone owners, and the ones with the strongest social networks, who receive the lion’s share of the risk-sharing transfers. Taken together, these results indicate that the mobile network can improve the welfare of some but, absent intervention, the benefits may not reach those with the greatest need.

Josh Blumenstock is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley’s School of Information.

Transit transparency: Open data in action

2012-01-27T15:02:00.000-08:00

A much talked about innovation in public policy recently has been the push to achieve greater transparency and accountability through open government strategies, where the public has access to government information and can participate in co-producing public services. At the Transparency Policy Project we have been investigating the dynamics behind one of the most successful implementations of open government: the disclosure of data by transit agencies in the United States. In just a few years, a rich community has developed around this data, with visionary champions for disclosure inside transit agencies collaborating with eager software developers to deliver multiple ways for riders to access real-time information about transit.

Transit agencies have long used intelligent systems for scheduling and monitoring the location of their vehicles. However, this real-time information had previously been available only to engineers inside agencies, leaving riders with printed timetables and maps that, at best, represent the stated intentions of a complex system that can be disturbed by traffic, weather, personnel issues and even riders themselves.

Recognizing the need for access to this information on-the-go and in digital format, Bibiana McHugh of Portland’s TriMet agency worked with Google in 2006 to integrate timetable data into Google Maps, eventually becoming Google Transit. McHugh went further, publicly releasing TriMet’s operations data: first the static timetables, and eventually real-time, dynamic data feeds of vehicle locations and arrival predictions. Local programmers have responded with great ingenuity, building 44 different consumer-facing applications for the TriMet system, at no cost to the agency.

Other transit agencies have adopted this open data approach with varying outcomes. The most successful agencies work closely with local programmers to understand which data is in demand, troubleshoot and improve the quality of the data feeds. Programmers also make the link between end users and transit agencies by filtering up comments from app users. This iterative feedback loop relies on a champion within the agency to build strong relationships with the local developer community. Of the five transit agencies we studied, Portland’s TriMet and Boston’s MBTA exemplify this approach and have generated the highest ratio of apps per transit rider (see table). Meanwhile, the most reluctant agency to adopt open data, Washington DC’s WMATA, only had 11 apps serving its customers in 2011.

Table: Transit Apps and Ridership by City

The number of apps built by independent developers is important, indicating the variety of options riders have in selecting which interfaces (mobile, desktop, map-based, text, audio) and platforms best fit their needs to access transit information. As we learned from our research on what makes transparency effective, simply providing information is not enough. Format and content matter, and should address the needs of a targeted audience. What we have seen in our study of transit transparency is that local programmers have been the critical intermediaries, taking raw data and generating a variety of information tools that transit agencies could not have imagined on their own. For other open government initiatives to spark this level of innovation and public benefit, they must identify their audience of information intermediaries and foster those relationships.

Posted by Francisca Rojas, research director at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Transparency Policy Project

To grow the Internet economy, focus on small businesses

2012-01-27T06:33:00.000-08:00

Over the past year and a half Google has invested significant resources in studying the impact of the Internet on economies around the world, the highlights of which are illustrated at www.valueoftheweb.com.

But we didn't have any insight into the Internet's impact on less developed economies. For example, how does the Internet’s impact on the economy in Turkey or Mexico compare with its impact in France? McKinsey & Company recently analyzed the economic impact of the Internet in 30 “aspiring” countries with both the scale and dynamism to be significant global players in the near future.

Roughly half the world’s Internet users are in aspiring countries according to McKinsey. But 64% of the people in these countries aren’t even online yet! That means there is enormous opportunity to increase Internet penetration in these markets, and in fact, penetration has been growing at 25% per year for the past five years. This growth potential is not limited to users, either—143,000 Internet-related businesses are created every year in these countries.

What should policymakers in these countries do to support the growth of the Internet economy? First and foremost, focus on getting small businesses online. 1.9 million jobs are already associated with the Internet in aspiring countries, but it’s astounding how quickly job growth occurs in comparison to more developed markets. Whereas in European countries we see 2.4 jobs created per job lost, this statistic jumps to 3.2 jobs created per job lost in the SME sector in aspiring countries. In a survey of SMEs across eight aspiring countries, McKinsey found that those spending the most on Web technologies have grown nine times as fast as those spending the least over the past three years.

A few minor policy changes would make it easier to get SMEs online in aspiring countries. First, governments should take steps to reduce the cost of doing business online. It cost $143 to register a domain in Malaysia, compared to $24 in the United States. In Nigeria, it takes 31 days to start a business, compared with seven days in Egypt. Making it more affordable for small businesses and entrepreneurs to get started and online quickly will have an immediate impact. Second, we need to encourage the development of human capital and improve access to financial capital. Digital literacy is low in countries like Morocco and Hungary, while Argentina lags behind its peers in access to loans and venture capital—barriers that lead to fewer people starting businesses online. Finally, access to the Internet in general needs to be more affordable and open. The baseline cost of access to the Internet in Turkey is almost twice the Central and Western European average, while half of Mexicans surveyed cite the cost of access and hardware as the primary barrier to getting online.

It’s clear that the Internet is quickly becoming a critical part of growing the economy for both developed or aspiring countries. Adopting the right policies to facilitate innovation should be top of mind for anyone considering Internet regulation.

posted by Betsy Masiello, Policy Manager at Google

Meeting the challenge of our growing urban population

2012-01-24T12:43:00.000-08:00

Urban populations are currently increasing by more than one million people every week, and will continue to do so every week until 2050. Figuring out how to meet the needs of this massive influx of people is a major challenge of our time. Physicist Geoffrey West argues that cities are networks of people, and that scaling such a network requires analyzing universal mathematical frameworks that demonstrate how networks of life generally scale. Check out his fascinating TED talk, where he explains the formulas in plain-speak:

West observes that as organisms double in size, they only need 75 percent more energy to be sustained, so the pace of life decreases as animals get bigger, meaning there is an economy of scale. Meanwhile, as cities double, the pace of life increases. As a community, people produce 15 percent more income, crime, patents, AIDS cases and so-on, irrespective of differences in location or culture.

If biology says that we’re multiplying more quickly than we can scale, how do we prevent system overload?

The answer is some innovative discovery, like the steam engine or the Internet, that transforms our way of life. Each time we approach a collapse, some major innovation saves the day, resetting how our networks function. The catch, West says, is that as cities grow more quickly, innovation must accelerate. For policymakers, this means that fostering innovation isn’t just about getting ahead—it’s about survival.

Even with continuous innovations that keep urban populations going, West asks how we might avoid a “heart attack” after forcibly accelerating on a continual basis for an extended period of time. Futurist Paul Saffo writes that we often focus on the inflection point of an “S” curve—when the innovation takes off—rather than on the “inevitable precursors” that facilitate environments for world-changing events. Maybe if governments studied these instances and developed innovation-inducing policies accordingly, we’d be able trump the laws of biology for good.

Let us know what you think in the comments. Can West’s observation plausibly explain how we’ve transitioned from feudalism to capitalism or from an industrial to information society?

posted by Dorothy Chou, Senior Policy Analyst at Google

Adventures and Challenges in Big Data

2012-01-20T09:36:00.000-08:00

It’s been around four decades since I began working with the nascent Internet on the first ARPANET site, located at UCLA. Since then, it’s been remarkable how our capacity to store data has grown exponentially. Every day, we’re filling up our phones, cloud-based services and personal hard drives with enormous amounts of data from Internet activities, medical research, climate analysis, sensor arrays and so much more. And now, the rapid development of new data analysis techniques, visualization tools and other related systems have the potential to address enormously important real world issues and problems.

Yet increasingly, we face a crucial quandary.

Talk is everywhere about the concept of "Big Data" potentials in an array of contexts, ranging from Web businesses to global warming researchers and beyond. But the collection, storage, and analysis of data interplays directly with many important privacy, social and increasingly political aspects of our cultures. Lucid consideration of legitimate concerns in these areas is now all too frequently being hijacked by a lack of understanding and by our increasingly toxic, polarized political environment.

The underlying areas of concern are often indeed legitimate, including matters like data anonymization, tracking, personal choice and others. But rather than approaching each such issue with a logical, levelheaded analysis of costs and benefits, of appropriate trade offs and responsible compromises, we instead are frequently faced with "my way or the highway" demands of the same flavor that have driven so many other aspects of our political systems into paralysis.

In the hope of encouraging a rational approach toward this entire spectrum of related issues, I'm very pleased to announce DWEL—the Data Wisdom Explorers League—founded in association with Google, which is providing funding support for this effort.

The goal of DWEL is to serve as a global resource for discussions, educational outreach and a range of other relevant services in this essential sphere. Our efforts will focus on helping us all move toward the best possible uses of data in responsible manners for solving problems, providing services and improving our lives and planet.

Through the analysis of data we can gain knowledge, and from knowledge we may achieve wisdom. And wisdom, after all, is one of the more important goals to which we can aspire!

No matter where you are, regardless of how you may feel about any of these matters today, I hope you'll visit the DWEL website at www.dwel.org and consider joining one or more of the DWEL announcement and discussion mailing lists, as we begin this endeavor together.

posted by Lauren Weinstein, Co-Founder, People For Internet Responsibility

Figuring out how much the Web is worth

2012-01-20T06:14:00.000-08:00

Today we’re launching a website called Value of the Web to collect research that sheds new light on how the Internet affects our world. It’s available in English, French, German, Russian and Spanish and currently features studies that focus on 17 different regions, the value of cloud computing in Europe and the value of search around the world. While we can’t use industrial metrics to fully capture the Web’s contributions to our information society, as my teammate Jonathan pointed out, these reports are the best existing efforts to quantify the Internet’s contributions to the economy and society thus far.

The value that is calculated in the reports ranges from the GDP contribution of the firms who provide the essential hardware and software to power the Internet, to jobs that are created due to the low cost of IT for small businesses enabled by cloud computing.

With two billion people online today and another five billion set to join them in the next 20 years, studies predict that the Internet’s contributions will be large, increasing and distributed across sectors and people in the global economy. For example, McKinsey found that Internet search, in its broadest form, accounts for $780 billion in value across the globe each year. And only 4% of that total goes to search companies—the rest goes to consumers and corporations who harness search in order to improve the way they find and use information every day.

In some cases, the reports show the enormous potential of getting more businesses online if governments take steps to encourage commercial use of the Internet or increasing access to broadband.

In other cases, the findings project exponential growth for economies that are already engaging in e-commerce online. The Boston Consulting Group predicts that by 2015, at least 10% of the British economy will be Internet-based. Universal broadband access and creating new business models that capture consumer surplus could increase the value added by the Internet by roughly £43 billion, which is just less than half what the British government spends on education today. If similar measures are adopted by the Japanese government, small businesses alone will contribute an additional ￥5 trillion to the Japanese economy in the next five years—not to mention the ripple effects.

We hope the site will become a central repository for insight derived from new measurements and data that move toward a more complete understanding of the Web’s impact. In order to fully harness the power of this medium, we need to start using these numbers to illuminate policy decisions and light a pathway for innovation.

We’ll continue developing the site by adding more improvements over time, including more languages and content. Check back frequently for updates or choose to subscribe for alerts via email.

posted by Dorothy Chou, Senior Policy Analyst at Google

Jack and Jill the Innovator, Episode 5

2012-01-19T13:01:00.000-08:00

This week, we introduced our Jack and Jill the Innovator video series -- which puts a spotlight on innovators of all shapes and sizes and gives them an opportunity to tell their stories—from start-ups building cool new gadgets to moms and dads using the cloud for more efficient carpools.

Our next episode features Malcolm Collins, who among other things, works at Neurosky, a company that makes “brainwave sensors for everybody.”

You can also see more of Neurosky’s devices in action in this CNet article, “Robotic cat ears for humans, an ears-on test.”

Posted by Derek Slater, Policy Manager at Google

Our Internet

2012-01-18T09:18:00.000-08:00

Engine Advocacy—the leading advocacy group for small businesses and other innovators that build on the Web—posted a video highlighting the dangers of two U.S. bills currently making their way through congress: the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). The video looks at these bills from the perspective of everyday innovators, "Jack and Jill the innovators” as we've come to call them.

SOPA and PIPA would censor the web and impose burdensome regulations on American businesses. A study in 2009 found that 3.1 million Americans are employed thanks to the interactive Internet ecosystem, the very same ecosystem whose fundamental structure would radically change if this legislation passes.

Around 7,000 sites are on strike today, and millions of people have already reached out to Congress through phone calls, letters and petitions asking them to rethink SOPA and PIPA. We hope you will too: google.com/takeaction.

Posted by Brittany Smith, Policy Associate at Google

Jack and Jill the Innovator, Episode 4

2012-01-17T17:02:00.000-08:00

Public policy should be about putting numbers in action—combining the best data and insights to forge policies that help our communities grow and change together. As a citizen, the number that matters most is you. Democracies are governed by the people, and it’s their votes, their values and their hopes that should determine what policies get implemented.

That’s why we want to start sharing this new video series on Policy by the Numbers; the first three episodes uploaded to our YouTube channel. We want to help innovators of all shapes and sizes tell their stories—from start-ups building cool new gadgets to moms and dads using the cloud for more efficient carpools. It’s about their biggest hopes, deepest fears, greatest successes, most troublesome failures—everything.

To do that, we’re asking a diverse array of people the same set of questions about their lives and sharing their responses on YouTube so that everyone can get to know your neighborhood “Jack and Jill the Innovator.” We hope that sharing these stories will inspire people to think big, be optimistic about the future, and consider the huge variety of ways to drive decentralized, bottom-up innovation. In order to foster data-driven, pro-innovation public policy that embraces the future, we need to build understanding by telling stories just like these.

We’re starting off our blog series close to home with Danny Kim, the founder of LitMotors.

Full disclosure: After I met with Danny and spent time learning about him and his business, I decided to make a small investment in his company.

Posted by Derek Slater, Policy Manager at Google

Realizing the promise of e-commerce for SMEs

2012-01-13T11:01:00.000-08:00

Several years ago, Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz suggested that land reform was the single most important thing governments could do to confront global poverty. He noted that democratizing the means of production was the path historically taken by every country that had climbed out of poverty, including those in Western Europe and East Asia. In the same way that land was the means of production of the past, knowledge will be the means of production of the future.

When e-commerce began in the mid-1990s, development experts swooned at its prospects of “leveling the playing field for the little guy.” Even Bill Gates gushed about the promise of “friction free capitalism” enabling small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to bypass the long chain of middlemen that take the lion's share of income.

But the truth was: even SMEs that managed to build a catalog discovered that buyers had difficulty finding it among the billions of websites on the Internet. And even if they did, they wouldn’t trust it. So besides the technical difficulties, SMEs also found it hard to establish visibility, credibility and trust.

Recently, the following dramatic technical advances have changed everything:

Major corporations now offer powerful "cloud computing" services.

A proliferation of low cost devices ranging from mobile phones to netbooks to tablets has greatly expanded the hardware choices for accessing the Internet.

Social networking services demonstrated how to leverage the power of trust.

My organization, OpenEntry.com, built an e-commerce platform offering free catalogs operating on Google’s cloud computing technology, serving more than 2,400 SME users in 44 countries. Catalogs can be built with a smartphone and instructions are in 57 languages. It also enables any business network to aggregate all the catalogs of their members—even those built with other systems—into a branded “network market” to generate visibility, credibility and trust.

Because of companies and organizations like ours, young entrepreneurs of modest means who traditionally would not be able to find jobs can exercise their skills and excel. For example, women who face cultural restrictions around their public activities can help local SMEs create their catalogs from product images sent to them electronically. And location isn’t a factor -- the United Nations Development Program documented OpenEntry’s role in generating 3,918 jobs for youth and artisan women in Nepal. With the huge volume of demand created by the estimated 100 million SMEs that will take their businesses online in the next ten years, the scope is now open for self-taught entrepreneurs to emulate Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell and Mark Zuckerberg, none of whom finished college.

Past history demonstrates that international trade has boosted the development of nations that escaped poverty. Current history confirms that a country’s growth is directly related to its adoption of information and communication technologies. And future history will substantiate how democratizing the confluence of global trade and the Internet will help alleviate poverty and speed the general development of national and global economies.

posted by Daniel Salcedo, founder and CEO of OpenEntry.com

Music metadata in the Commons

2012-01-11T17:29:00.000-08:00

In 2010, I began a year-long mixed-methods study of MusicBrainz, a community music metadatabase with companion open source software that cleans up the metadata on digital music files. Studies have been conducted on various aspects of commons-based, peer-produced projects, notably free and open source software and Wikipedia. But MusicBrainz is unique: MusicBrainz contributors play the role of information scientists for this data commons, working as digital librarians, standards-setters and catalogers of music.

Understanding what drives people to voluntarily curate and contribute to a data commons benefits our overall understanding of how these commons work. If we find common characteristics among a few successful data communities, we can inform the design of data commons for other domains so that they are more likely to thrive. What follows is a snapshot of some of the more interesting findings. Full report with methodology is here, and a quick presentation deck is available here.

The importance of open source
MusicBrainz editors believe that information resources and music metadata should be free (see table). In interviews, they discussed openness as a “philosophy,” and knowing that they are building a bigger and better project useful to others works as an intrinsic motivation.

One editor describes the process of using and adding data as a “virtuous circle.” He contributes to a variety of peer-produced projects, including Wikipedia, and called himself “selfish” when asked why he contributes to open source projects. He said, “I think people who really value things will want to ensure they continue. And there are two ways you can do it. One, you can use your wallet. The other one is, if it's an option, you can contribute and make it a better thing.” Another editor echoed that sentiment: “I get to benefit from MusicBrainz and this is somewhat of my payback to the community.”

Discovery through Contribution
Several of the editors I spoke with told me stories about having discovered an artist or a collaboration in the process of interacting with the data, whether by browsing or editing data. One of my hypotheses was that because of the patterns of exposure, editors who have discovered an artist through MusicBrainz are likely to have entered on average more edits—spending more time with the database—than those who have not.

To test this, I compared the means of those who answered “Yes” and those who answered “No” against the log of the number of edits entered. Results, shown above, support the hypothesis that those who have discovered an artist through MusicBrainz have made more edits on average than those who have not. Engaging with the data benefits contributors beyond just providing accurate music metadata.

Where are the women?

My sample was overwhelmingly male, and follow-up interviews indicated that most of the editors active in communication channels are male. This gender disparity is not unique to MusicBrainz. This NetworkWorld article cites several sources that showed lower female participation in F/OSS projects and in Wikipedia. This is definitely an area to explore further.

by Jess Hemerly, Senior Policy Analyst at Google

Better data for a better Internet

2012-01-10T10:27:00.000-08:00

Summary; Full article published in December, 2011 issue of Science

When people took to the streets across the U.K. last summer, the Prime Minister suggested restricting access to the Internet to limit protestors’ ability to organize. The resulting debate complemented speculation on the effects of social media in the Arab Spring and the widespread critique of President Mubarak’s decision to shut off the Internet and mobile phone systems in Egypt.

Decisions about when and how to regulate activities online have a profound societal impact. Debates underlying such decisions touch upon fundamental problems related to economics, free expression and privacy. Their outcomes will influence the structure of the Internet, how data can flow across it and who will pay to build and maintain it. Most striking about these debates are the paucity of data available to guide policy and the extent to which policymakers ignore the good data we do have.

The best approach is neither to make ill-informed decisions based on too little data nor to avoid state regulation simply because of the absence of decent data. Instead, we should begin a concerted push for highly reliable and publicly available forms of measurement of the Internet and how we use it. Better data would not only help the state meet its regulatory obligations, but also improve self-regulation by private sector players and empower individuals to make better decisions. In the meantime, we as researchers need to work harder to translate the data we have into terms that can directly inform policymakers.

First, we need to know more about the architecture of the network and how it is changing. For example, is the Web becoming more or less centralized over time? How much are unrelated content and services converging to common hosting within a comparative handful of cloud providers? Second, we need to know more about how information flows or stutters across the network. Where are there blockages? From what sources do they arise? And third, we need to know more about human practices in these digitally mediated environments.

We need to commit to systematic, longitudinal studies of how digitally mediated communications are changing behavior everywhere across the networked world, such as disclosure of personally identifiable information. For example, debates in the U.S. over amending the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which is intended to protect children under 13 from privacy risks, is poorly informed. We have not figured out if children are actually better off as a result of COPPA or even how to start gathering data to answer that question. Studies by the Pew Internet and American Life project and ethnographic work pioneered by danah boyd get too little attention in policy discussions about digital education and child safety, resulting in both over- and under-regulation. But through long-term studies, our findings can be translated into better policymaking and consumer-facing technology design.

The open and responsive nature of a new class of engaged research projects will help policymakers in government and corporate settings remain nimble and make better decisions in the fast-moving world of digital technology.

posted by John Palfrey and Jonathan Zittrain

John Palfrey is the Henry N. Ess Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School and a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Jonathan Zittrain is a Professor of Law and Computer Science at Harvard University, and a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Google Ngram and “Information Privacy”

2012-01-09T16:28:00.000-08:00

Google NGram is a database that permits statistical analysis of the frequency of use of specific words and phrases in books. The database draws on nearly 5.2 million books from a period between 1500 and 2000 A.D. that have been digitized by the the Google Library Project. With use of the web-based NGram Viewer, it is then possible to create a graphical year-by-year representation of how often a phrase has been used in books.

In our recent work, The PII Problem, we drew on the NGram viewer to gain a sense of peaks and valleys in policymakers’ attention to “information privacy” from 1950 to 2000.

In this article, we find that this graphic analysis of references to “information privacy” largely correlates with our sense of the development of this area of law. Early use of the term was driven by concern about mainframe computers and their ability to change how data could be organized, accessed and searched.

How did this story then develop during the latter part of the 1970s? After a decline in interest in privacy after enactment of the Privacy Act of 1974, a renewed societal focus in the United States about information privacy began in the early 1980s. Part of this attention was driven, in turn, by the arrival of George Orwell’s titular year, 1984. A flurry of media reports and articles marked this occasion with an analysis of new threats to privacy.

Perhaps most importantly, however, cable operators’ collection of personal information at this time created the same kinds of issues that the Internet would later raise. Even as early as the 1980s, observers noted that coaxial cable technology would permit a user not only to receive information, as broadcast television had allowed, but also to respond to information on the screen and make programming choices. New privacy threats were anticipated as a consequence of the resulting detailed profiles about individual cable consumers, and the use of the term “information privacy” began to rise again.

From the 1990s on, the continuing use of the attention to “information privacy” reflected society’s growing concern with privacy in the PC and then Internet era.

Other topics and techniques can be identified for drawing on Google NGram’s potential as a legal research tool. Legal scholars might draw up a list of core terms in information privacy law, and other legal fields, such as copyright law and constitutional law. The data can be used to explore a variety of questions: How did the use of these core terms develop over time? Did certain legal terms come to supplant others? Can comparisons of the relative frequency of the use of various terms reveal something about the development of legal concepts in a given substantive or doctrinal area? Using Google NGram data, scholars can seek answers to these questions in order to inform current research and fuel new areas of academic inquiry.

Posted by Paul M. Schwartz & Daniel J. Solove

Paul M. Schwartz is a Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law and a Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology.

Daniel Solove is the John Marshall Harlan Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School. He is also a Senior Policy Advisor to the law firm of Hogan Lovells.

The Need for Technical Expertise in Government

2012-01-06T10:00:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year, Senators Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Me.) introduced bipartisan legislation that would strengthen the technical expertise of the Federal Communications Commission. The bill, known as the “FCC Technical Expertise Capacity Heightening Act,” would permit each of the Commissioners’ offices to hire technology advisors to assist with the myriad engineering challenges confronting the FCC, whether it be spectrum reallocation, broadband deployment, or network neutrality. As Senator Snowe stated, "At a time when citizens are demanding more effective and efficient government, this legislation will ensure the FCC is sufficiently equipped, both legally and technically, to craft sound policy.”

This is a brilliant move. While the FCC’s Bureaus each have many extremely smart and talented engineers on staff, some with the prized combination of an engineering degree and a JD, the Commissioners have traditionally relied upon the advice of legal advisors for almost all policy matters. As bright and talented as these advisors may be, most, if not all, lack formal technical training. As the Senators stated when introducing this legislation, such a technology knowledge gap, "if left unaddressed, could continue to hamper American innovation and competitiveness."

It is imperative that Chairman, the Commissioners, and the FCC in general have access to accurate, reliable, and objective technical advice and information. Industry lawyers and lobbyists oftentimes bring in their own engineers and technical staff to persuade the Commission to adopt a certain policy or take a particular action. The Commissioners must have the ability to thoughtfully engage in technical debates and be able to separate engineering facts from engineering opinions.

However, the proposed legislation does not go far enough. It should be broadened to cover not only the FCC, but other Federal government bodies as well. According to data collected in March 2010, there are nearly 85,000 engineers, in various capacities, employed by the Federal government, with the majority classified as general engineers and most working for the Department of Defense. This is a relatively small percentage of the 2.65 million people working for the government, yet their technical and operational expertise is increasingly important as technology becomes an even more influential part of our society.

The Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice and its Antitrust Division, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and similarly situated organizations should also be permitted to hire more technical experts with engineering and computer science degrees. They, too, need to have solid advice as they address novel and complex challenges arising daily in the Internet ecosystem. Moreover, the Legislative Branch itself should hire more young men and women with technical expertise to staff important committees that have jurisdiction over telecommunications and the Internet.

There is no time in the history of American society when technology has been as important as it is today. More technical knowledge about spectrum usage, Internet infrastructure, broadband, and how digital communications systems work would certainly lead to better public policy. No doubt, a well-informed government is absolutely vital for innovation, competitiveness, and democracy.
Posted by Ben Golant

The Internet and news plurality

2012-01-05T10:44:00.000-08:00

Countries around the world have rules to ensure media plurality — the diverse ownership of news outlets so that no one owner can have undue influence over political discourse. Debates over the details of such rules are ongoing: the U.K. is looking at tightening its rules, while conversely, the U.S. might loosen its regulation.

With very few exceptions, current plurality rules have focused narrowly on traditional media – newspapers, TV and radio. As people shift their news consumption online, this looks increasingly outdated – not because online news providers need regulation, but because assessing plurality purely by looking at offline media is to miss the huge contribution made by the diversity of online news. In both the U.S. and the U.K., for example, people are more likely to get their news online than through radio broadcasts or printed newspapers (though TV remains ahead of all other media). And half of the people online in Italy say the Internet is their main source of news. In this new landscape, assessing plurality purely by looking at offline media means missing the huge contribution made by the diversity of online news.

One particularly important factor is that people are more “promiscuous” online, meaning they are much more likely to get news from a range of providers, thereby reducing the influence of any one media owner. For instance, in the U.K. the typical newspaper reader goes through 1.26 newspapers, but those getting news online visit 3.46 news sites. The reasons are obvious enough. Online news is generally free (so, unlike newspapers, there’s no cost to getting a second opinion), social media and news consolidators such as Google News link to sources that a consumer might not default to, and so on. As such, the Internet has been a powerful force for plurality of consumption.

The Internet also gives consumers access to new sources of news, including:

Publications that are found exclusively online, such as Yahoo! News and Huffington Post;

Blogs;

Foreign news;

Trade journals or other niche publications;

and “crowd-sourced” news via social media.

In aggregate, these new online sources provide an experience that is far more diverse and rich than what’s available offline. Consider the following (derived from Doubleclick Ad Planner):

Yahoo News is a top 10 news site in 14 out of 30 countries with the largest online populations;

All 10 countries with the largest online populations have at least one online-only publication among their top 3 news sites;

and approximately 40% of visitors to websites of U.K. newspapers such as the Guardian and the Daily Mail are located outside the country.

The data suggests that the Internet is making a substantial and growing contribution to news plurality, bringing new news sources to consumers and encouraging more diverse consumption of both new and preexisting sources. Those making plurality policy should take these encouraging developments into account.

posted by Robert Kenny, Founder of Communications Chambers, a growing association of leading experts in the fields of telecommunications, media and technology

From Mixtape to Playlist

2011-12-22T14:59:00.000-08:00

Ten years ago, consolidation in the U.S. music radio market was seen as a threat to creativity. Today, media markets are increasingly more fragmented, vibrant, and competitive than ever before, in ways that were unpredictable just a few years ago.

Recently, Billboard Magazine published an article about “the best ways for emerging [music] acts to get the word out.” Number 1 is being the featured free single on iTunes. YouTube is #2. Pitchfork - an online music magazine that just twelve years ago was a tiny operation in Minneapolis - is #3. Traditional radio airplay doesn’t even make the top 10, except for the “free listen of the week” on National Public Radio’s website.

This article reflects a broader shift in the way music is produced, distributed, marketed, and consumed:

Technology is empowering artists: Data suggests that more music is being commercially released than ever before, and quality appears to be as strong as ever. That’s partly a function of technology lowering the barriers to creativity. More than half the price of a physical CD went to covering the cost of physically making and distributing it. Today, artists are manufacturing entire albums on an iPad, and releasing them directly to music fans online.

Technology is empowering fans: Fans are flocking to online platforms that allow them to customize their listening experience. Between 2006 and 2009, overall music purchases increased by 50% in the U.S., and global digital music sales revenue has grown to over five billion dollars, a 1000% increase over the last six years. It’s true that total sales revenue is down, but that’s largely a result of fans shifting from buying $15 albums to buying individual songs for 99 cents. Today, most consumers are buying or streaming songs a la carte to customize their own experience (and there’s a bigger pool of money than one might think).

Fans are becoming tastemakers via social media: Music is social -- between 1999 and 2009 concert-ticket sales in America tripled, from $1.5 billion to $4.6 billion. Research by GartnerG2 predicted that in 2010 at least 25% of sales would be attributable to features like fan-to-fan recommendations.

But this isn’t a complete shift. Even though the roles of traditional record labels and radio stations are dramatically changing, they continue to play an important role in the ecosystem as they are adapt and thrive on the Internet.

What can be done to clear the way for the next great online music service? Alongside smart enforcement, music rightsholders and start-up innovators are keen to fix licensing. The music industry is leaving hundreds of millions of dollars on the table due to inefficient licensing, and a recent survey of investors found that decreasing the cost and complexity would expand the pool of investors in digital content services by 83%.

In other words: if music and tech work together to accelerate the shift to new music services that give artists and consumers what they want, then everyone wins.

posted by Derek Slater, Policy Manager at Google