Tom Abate

Tom Abate covers the technology sector for GlobalPost. Abate has covered Silicon Valley as a newspaper reporter since 1992, but his experience with high-tech goes back to the mid-1980s when he...

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Tom Abate's Notebook:

September 30, 2009 10:41 ET

ICANN reaches new governance agreement

The non-profit group that helps hold the internet together by overseeing the domain name system has faced the diplomatic problem of loosening, without severing, its ties to the United States.

In a previous dispatch GlobalPost explained how the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was renegotiating one of two agreements that created its unique role and structure a little over a decade ago as the U.S. was privatizing and internationalizing the network that it had begun as a military research project.

When ICANN announced a new governance agreement today it included a statement of support from Viviane Reding, the European Union commissioner for information society and media, who had been among those calling for a greater international involvement in the group's activities.

But the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders fears the new agreement could give other governments a bigger role in ICANN, something which it opposes.

So the controversy may continue.

June 12, 2009 09:44 ET | Updated: June 12, 2009 09:46 ET

French "three strikes" law unconstitutional

France's Constitutional Council has struck down the most onerous provision of a new law meant to combat digital copyright violations by ruling that the government cannot cut off Internet service after a person is accused of three illegal downloads. The ruling weakens a law
pushed by President Nicholas Sarkozy that had stirred controversy throughout Europe. The Council, France's final constitutional authority, agreed with critics inside and outside
the country that it was unconstitutional to impose a penalty without a trial.

January 20, 2009 15:34 ET

Watching Obama from the outskirts of Silicon Valley

I took off today to celebrate my wife's birthday which coincides with the inauguration of Barack Obama. We watched together this morning in one of the tiny cities around San Francisco Bay that is remarkable for only one fact. In the early 1970s, San Leandro was known as one of the most racially divided cities in America. But times change. After the 2000 Census it was reported that San Leandro now has some of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in California.

Thus we sat in a little microcosm of the America that elected Barak Hussein Obama as the 44th president of the United States — a patchwork quilt of a nation that was reflected in the audience who gathered in a kitschy little sportsbar that normally features athletic events.

Instead about 200 persons of all races, many wearing Obama or Michelle t-shirts, watched the parade of dignitaries and and the vast sea of citizen onlookers, and listened with moist eyes as man in whom a nation has invested its hopes pledged to lead not just America but to extend a hand to the world.

Our youngest child sat with us. AnaSofia is five and she tolerated the event with a childish impatience that we soothed with treats from the breakfast buffet. We wondered whether she would remember this day because it is for her that Obama asked America to rediscover the virtues of its Founders and the courage of those who built on their imperfect foundation.

I am hopeful. Obama's symbolism in swearing his oath of office on Abraham Lincoln's Bible set the tone for his inaugural speech. He urged the nation to turn away from the bullying and swaggering that has, occasionally masqueraded as its destiny. Instead, hsked his fellow citizens, as he has throughout his campaign, to rediscover the mission that Lincoln defined when he called America "the last best hope of Earth."

 

 

January 2, 2009 09:39 ET

The Accidental Technology Journalist

In the 1980s I owned a typesetting business. I designed newsletters, produced the text for books and prepared all sorts of material for printing. But soon desktop publishing  enabled my former clients to point, click and drag their own graphic designs. So I adapted. A lifelong fascination with the written word led me to journalism school and, ultimately, to a daily newspaper in San Francisco. I started in 1992, covering science and technology. Silicon Valley became my beat. Ever since, I have followed technology's twists and turns. 

A few years after I took over the tech beat, a German-born executive named Michael Spindler was running Apple Computer. This was back when Steve Jobs had been ousted and before his return.  In a speech about the triumph of desktop publishing, Spindler boasted about the dramatic decline in the number of typesetting businesses. I remember smiling and thinking, "Yes, and mine was one of them!".

That experience reinforced my conviction that technology is the engine of change. Take the World Wide Web. In perhaps 15 years it has transformed everything from shopping to entertainment to news. In the late 1990s I read excerpts from "The Information Age," a three-volume treatise by Spanish-born sociologist Manuel Castells. It described a society organized around networks and predicted all sorts of consequences arising from these connections, everything from outsourcing to the resurgence of tribalism.  I found his thinking hard to swallow at the time. In retrospect his insights were amazingly prescient.

So I continue to watch technology expand into new areas, looking for the winners and losers and trying to look ahead to the eventual outcomes. I don't view technology as necessarily good or bad. It is simply inexorable. We had better pay attention. Because ready or not it keeps coming.