The feddies were out in force. The FTC Chairman, Deborah Majoras, a political appointee who doesn’t look all that republican, sent a video. Her subordinate, Lydia Parnes (Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, and a bureaucrat who will be here after the Republicans have been tarred and feathered and such) spoke next, setting the stage for an industry discussion of “consumers” in the third person plural.
Not all of the people in attendance still hang on to the notion that it’s about consumers and retailers, but enough of them do that this is the way the discussion will be framed. I haven’t heard anything about the role of the IETF, or the RFC process, or what government regulation to the end of “consumer protection” might do to the orderly evolution of a well designed Internet.
Jeff Chester pointed out that we are all potential victims of Social Network eavesdropping. He raised a warning flag about the dangers of the Google/DoubleClick merger. He spoke up for personal privacy as we expect him to do, and he was far more convincing in his concerns than J. Trevor Hughes, the Executive Director of the trade association for cookie monsters, the National Advertising Initiative. Jeff’s book, Digital Destiny, contains a more complete discussion of these concerns. Bill Moyers recommends it.
Over the next day and a half we’ll get a lot of information about the right to privacy versus the benefits of tracking online behavior. One way to sort it out is to think of it as the populists versus the corporations.
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