The call for the Federal Trade Commission to investigate, however, is a positive sign for people who care about privacy and innovation.  While the FCC is notorious for seeking to employ powers it does not statutorily possess, the FTC has a long record of judicious use of its power.  Regulation of some sort is inevitable in the privacy arena.  Best it be a one-stop shop at the FTC.

Facebook is also probably telling the truth when it says that has not stored or used this information.

The fact remains, what can be done, will be done.  The current privacy paradigm is simply not sustainable.

Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum is justifiably upset by a Google bomb that links searches for his name to something too disgusting to repeat here.  In demanding that Google take it down, however, Santorum does not seem to understand that all the responsibility—and liability—rests with the webmaster, not the search engine—in a law that passed when he was a member of the Senate.  (Anybody out there know how Senator Santorum voted on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act?)

Santorum, however, does strike at a point.

“I suspect if something was up there like that about Joe Biden, they’d get rid of it,” he said.  In fact, something was ‘up there’ about First Lady Michelle Obama, a truly offensive image.  Google did act against one site carrying that image, citing malware concerns, and placed an ad explaining its stance.  Technology companies will need to remain utterly consistent in how they apply these rules—and clear to the public how they operate.  Politicians need to understand the need to play by the rules they themselves have passed.

To learn more about the impact of Section 230 on Google bombs, check out my book, Digital Assassination.

If so, then you are invited to submit your resume for our Communications Associate position.  We are a small D.C. strategic communications firm, founded by Republicans.  We craft communications for major corporations and foundations and develop broad campaigns in support of their objectives.

We are looking for a skilled researcher who can use tools like Lexis-Nexis and be proficient with Excel and PowerPoint.  A demonstrable knowledge of social media is a big plus.  Responsibilities will include research, list building, event planning, social media outreach and occasional administrative work.  Salary is commensurate with experience.  Position to start immediately.

Please submit your resume to whwgjobs@gmail.com.

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Following DC were:

2. Atlanta

3. Denver

4. Minneapolis

5. Seattle

While some may have thought Seattle – often considered the Internet technology capital – would have earned the top slot, experts conclude that politics played an important role in the ranking.  No, Washington didn’t lobby for the title; but, Twitter is being used increasingly as a political tool, for advocacy and in GOTV efforts during election cycles.

Part of the research also included analysis of sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. Researchers collected the number of people making use of these social media tools per capita in each state’s most populated cities.

Bartlett Cleland, Director of the Texas-based Institute for Policy Innovation wrote this week about how countries like Venezuela are reassured by the FCC’s recent regulations, which they can now use to justify greater controls over their own communications systems.

Just days before the FCC made its ruling, the Venezuelan Parliament changed its laws in order to give President Hugo Chavez the power to regulate Internet content by implementing heavy regulations on Venezuelan-based service providers.  Specifically the country’s ISPs are now required to block broad categories of material that, for instance, “fosters unrest among the citizenship or disturb[s] public order,” and “refuses to recognize the government’s authority.”

In other words, the Venezuelan government has found a way of regulating all content. As Cleland concludes, “Venezuela needed little provocation for its continued oppression, especially from the U.S.” Nevertheless, Chavez can relax “knowing that the U.S. has joined Venezuela in the company of governments who regulate the Internet.”

While Kahn spent more than 60 years teaching economics at Cornell University, he will probably be best remembered for his years during President Carter’s administration, when he served as chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board and presided over the deregulation of the airline industry. His work was monumental, setting the stage for the era of deregulation during the Reagan years. In one fell swoop, Kahn helped dismantle a heavily regulated industry, allowing airlines to determine both where they could fly and how much they could charge.

Kahn told NPR in 1986, competition’s biggest effect was “empowering the consumer,” a sentiment that fueled his long crusade against comprehensive regulation. He ultimately expanded beyond the airline industry to public utilities, and in the past decade, he was deeply involved with the deregulation of the telecommunications industry, which he viewed as a nearly parallel situation to the airline industry in the 1970s.

It was in this capacity that many of us at the White House Writers Group had an opportunity to work with Kahn. The WHWG, which has consulted to the Washington and General Counsel’s offices at Verizon since 2001, relied on Kahn’s expertise on several occasions for conferences and congressional testimony regarding telecommunications deregulation.

In his 2003 work, Lessons from Deregulation: Telecommunications and Airlines after the Crunch, Kahn defends deregulation of the telecommunications industry, in part, by showing how the airlines have benefited in the years since deregulation. While he believed unburdening the telecommunications industry would be more complex and take more time than with the airlines, he never doubted that open competition rather than comprehensive regulation would yield positive results for both industries.

Apart from his tremendous contribution to economics policy, Kahn’s commitment to the English language made him singular among Washington administrators.  As the New York Times describes it, Kahn maintained a “longstanding revulsion to bureaucratic language.” In fact, he told staffers, try to write “in a straight-forward quasi-conversational, humane prose – as though you were talking to or communicating with real people.”

That’s something all of us at the WHWG will remember.