ICANN reaches new governance agreement

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:41:35 +0000

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.

French "three strikes" law unconstitutional

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:46:42 +0000

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

Watching Obama from the outskirts of Silicon Valley

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:34:13 +0000

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.

The Accidental Technology Journalist

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 14:39:28 +0000

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.