ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

The vast majority of the US citizenry found Jerry Brown’s 1992 plan for a 13% flat tax plus a value-added tax of 13% regressive, hair-brained, and idiotic. If the citizenry had been better informed, it would have realized that Brown’s plan eliminated loopholes, raised corporate taxes, and greatly simplified the tax system. Maybe it’s been long enough for this to come around again and get picked up by the progressives even though Brown currently distances himself from his plan. That may change with the shocking revelation from the Tax Policy Center—a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution—that 47% of US households will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009.

Internet

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled 3-0 in finding that the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) does not have the authority to require network neutrality. In 2008, the FCC sanctioned Comcast for throttling certain internet traffic. Comcast, the US’s largest broadband internet service provider, appealed the FCC requirement. Broadband services are categorized separately from other telecommunications services, and the FCC has only “ancillary authority” over broadband. The DC Court of Appeals ruling found that the FCC’s network neutrality requirement was not “reasonably ancillary to the ... effective performance of its statutorily mandated responsibilities.” President Obama an FCC Chair Julius Genachowski both support network neutrality so the simple fix is to reclassify broadband as a “communications service” (as it should have been anyway) under the Communications Act. Dan Gillmor writes that net neutrality has always been up to the legislative branch, but wonders whether our lawmakers will do their jobs.

Law

The British Parliament has approved the Digital Economy bill, a measure that would disconnect the internet connections of copyright infringers at the behest of the entertainment cartel who argue they suffer enormous losses from illegal copying in the internet. Like France’s law, the UK law employs a “graduated response system” that disconnects the accounts of users who continue to infringe copyrights after ignoring warning letters.

The UK law was passed without much debate and in the face of public outrage.

Cory Doctorow reports that Stephen Timms, the UK’s minister for digital britain and the mastermind behind the Digital Economy bill, thinks an IP address is an “intellectual property address.” Timms told Parliament “the measures were a ‘proportionate’ and ‘appropriate’ method of tackling online piracy,” according to a Reuters report.

Publishing

Paul Michelman, executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, slams his publishing industry peers for thinking Apple’s iPad will save their antiquated business models. “The magazine apps on your iPad seemingly represent no significant thought on how to serve the reader; they are about serving the business model,” emphasizes Michelman.

The Nikkei, Japan’s largest business newspaper, has decided to place its web content behind a paywall. Nothing new there. But the publication also instituted a new policy requiring a written application in order to link to its articles or home page. Hiroko Tabuchi, writing for the New York Times, reports that the Nikkei link application requires applicants to “spell out their reasons for linking to the site.”

Dan Gillmor raises some very disturbing questions about the relationship between Apple and corporate media entities including the New York Times. Whenever the New York Times appears at an Apple media event—and on Apple’s home page—does the Times pay for this product placement, Gillmor asks, noting that “the Times is becoming more of a business partner with a company it covers incessantly.”

Technology

Danny O’Brien makes a case for the simple step Apple could take to immediately make the iPad an open device: “Here’s how to end this pain. Imagine an iPad. It’s the same iPad, built by Jobs and Ives and the rest of Apple in absolute secrecy, beholden to no-one, built on proprietary MacOS and unicorns and last Xerox Silmaril’s gleaming. It has the same Apple App store, same SDK, same no filing system, same no multitasking, same whatever. Only buried deep in the Settings, buried under “Battery Percentage,” “Factory Reset,” there’s an option that says “Allow Third-Party Applications.” Its default is not to allow that. But you can flip it to say “yes.”

AT&T has a new scam: Purchase a miniature cell tower from it, connect it to your router, and enjoy either some or better cell reception. But wait, let’s think this through. AT&T wants you to use your broadband connectivity to improve its cellular network. And it wants you to pay for the privilege.

Nicholas Carr writes that those who haven’t been swept up in the rapture that is the iPad are merely luddites, “grumbling like granddads,” ranting against progress. Carr is articulate, but wrong. The walled garden closedness that is the iPad can in no way be seen as “progress.”

Apple takes its control-freakery one more giant step forward, forbidding developers from converting software first written for another platform. Arrogant much? John Gruber explains the situation as unlike Microsoft’s “Windows everywhere,” Apple’s approach is “everywhere good.” To do this Apple has to “establish the Cocoa Touch APIs and the App Store as a de facto standard for mobile apps—huge share of both developers and users,” writes Gruber. The path of least resistance to this is to preclude someone else building a de facto platform on top of Cocoa Touch. That’s precisely why Flash isn’t on the iPad—not because it’s a pig and crashes, but because it presents friction for Apple in establishing Cocoa Touch as the de facto standard. While this is certainly understandable—who really wants crappy Flash apps anyway—it certainly doesn’t help Apple’s corporate psychosis. And hey, all you iPadders: Remember there’s a browser on that device.

User experience

Usability studies consistently show that web users view information “above the fold” more than information that requires vertical scrolling. Jacob Nielsen publishes his latest finding: “Web users spend 69% of their time viewing the left half of the page and 30% viewing the right half.” The sweet spot, according to Nielsen’s data—recording the amount of time users spent on fixations within a 100-pixel stripe—appears to be 300-500 pixels from the left edge. Nielsen’s findings are unsurprising. Nielsen used a 1024x768 monitor for his study and found that users spent only 1% of their time viewing information that resided horizontally, past the “fold.” Nielsen suggests keeping navigation all the way to the left because that’s where users expect (or have been trained) to find it.

Web developers have been waiting a very long time for the CSS3 multi-column layout module. It’s still not quite ready for prime time, but take a look at Roy Ho’s demo from last October. It’s breathtaking, and not a single float to be found.

The @font-face construct in CSS3 allows real, actual TrueType and OpenType fonts to be used on the web. The problem remains that the best type foundries have universally rejected the idea of licensing their type for use on the web. For now. That’s probably going to change thanks to the efforts of folks like Garrick Van Buren’s kernest.com and Caroline Hadilaksono’s and Micah Rich’s League of Movable Type. Slowly, ever so slowly, we’re getting typefaces we can actually use on the web. Are you a typographer? Consider using the Open Font License. Meanwhile, take a look at Alex Giron’s astounding CSS3 transforms and @font-face experiment.