Ok, so yesterday I (even before Drudge!) found out about the New York judge who decided that "Friending" someone on MySpace was a violation of an Order of Protection.
Because I'm such a darn nice guy, I'll quote the judge again, because I do think his ruling makes sense from the point of view of a guy who sits on a bench, hears cases, and reads law books.
Both MarkZ and BillG share a major mistake: as their companies attracted more attention through various PR gaffes, they didn't make earnest efforts to get their stories out in Washington. They figured the product was enough.
Facebook has already suffered through the disaster of a user revolt after the News Feed some time ago, the MoveOn.org inspired retooling of Beacon, and even worse, the recent NYT article about Facebook keeping your data "forever" after you try and delete your account, Do they have any real professionals telling their side and speaking the right language? No. They hire smart people, but they're California Smart, not DC Smart. So far, they've been lucky that no cute white girls have gone missing after using Facebook.
Microsoft had a great streak. They launched Windows 95 and got the whole world excited about computing. Then came the Browser Wars, during which they actually destroyed an entire company in the space of a few short years and reduced their two competitors in Operating System technology to obscurity through anticompetitive practices, and eventually got antitrust actions against them in the U.S. and the EU, one of which was ended by the Florida recount since the original judge was thrown off the case and the Bush DOJ settled for pretty much nothing. The EU one is ongoing and MS keeps losing appeals.
How did that happen? Well, despite news reports, consumer complaints, and all sorts of bad press, Microsoft had virtually no Washington presence for the longest time. Now they have one of the best lobbying operations in DC, as well as many in state capitals (see the ongoing ODF controversies in Massachusetts, etc).
Facebook (at this writing) has zero registered outside lobbyists, and their Washington presence is limited to a guy whose job it is to get political candidates to put their pages on there. Yet, they're constantly the subject of bad press. They faced a user revolt when they introduced the "news feed" feature last year. Recently, their Beacon feature was forced to be modified after MoveOn.org got a petition together, and the New York Times reported only days ago on how hard it is to get them to get rid of your data after you delete your account.
Zuckerberg, their "boy genius" CEO is profiled in the press as your typical start-up guy living on a mattress despite his estimate net worth of several billion since the company is privately held, and according to his own words during an awkward, stilted 60 Minutes appearance, will probably remain private at least 2008. While more "charismatic" (I use the term loosely) than BillG (who many have speculated suffers from a mild form of Asperger's Syndrome), they both share the trait of being completely tone-deaf when it comes to the way us "beltway insiders" look at technology companies we see as either violating the law, or just acting irresponsibly when there isn't a law to break.
Legislation, like nature, abhors a vacuum. If there is a perceived problem (think "predators on MySpace") than Congress, or the FCC, or the FTC, or whoever thinks they should do something, will do it, without thought to the unintended consequences that their action will trigger. Take child pornography laws, for instance. Everyone agrees that child porn is harmful, and abuse of children is abhorrent and reprehensible. On the other hand, these same laws force prosecutors to charge teenagers who forward drunk cellphone camera pictures around the internet under the same statutes that they prosecute those who hoard videos and photos documenting child abuse.
Of course, many "legislative initiatives" are fueled by media driven hysteria, which leads to bad hearings, (see Josh Green's take on the Roger Clemens hearings) driven by the sole desire to humiliate those who the Congress have done wrong, which in the worst instances can lead to the reactionary writing of bad laws sold with good PR, which of course invoke the law of unintended consequences.
Back to the New York judge and the unprecedented (but not unreasonable, which is simply my personal opinion as I Am Not A Lawyer) case of "Friending" as violating an Order of Protection. In the press, the general public, and in technical circles, people love to talk about the differences between Facebook and MySpace, but mostly in terms of things like demographics, social network organization, openness to development and user interface. They're forgetting something.
MySpace has already been brought on bended knees before the authorities to avoid regulation. They've adopted policy after policy (however useless), issued press release after press release, and had their News Corporation execs appear with all sorts of law enforcement types who crowed gleefully as MySpace "purged itself of registered sex offenders," as if you could really do that.
Facebook, like its' interface, is clean. It has been spared the wild hysterics of local television news. It has not been featured on "To Catch a Predator" and it is not part of a major media conglomerate which like Roger Clemens, lawmakers would love to publicly humiliate. While they are still private, and while the boyish, not-quite-Rupert-Murdochian Zuckerberg is still the face of the company, they still have a chance to head off being known as the next boogeyman. They're a Google, not a Microsoft. People still believe they're a good company, with a smart young kid running things who makes innocent mistakes. They can have a goal of connecting communities and bringing people together, and they can have a great motto like Google's "Don't be evil."
There are other cautionary tales. YouTube didn't think to partner with any content providers, or do anything to make themselves look like a useful and beneficial service for the general public as it gained popularity, and instead it got hit with a gigantic lawsuit over Copyright Infringement as soon as it got bought by Google. A few letters to Big Media, and a good PR blitz with say, videos of missing children or putting short Public Service Announcements before random popular videos, and they could have saved themselves a ton of grief by casting themselves as the "good guys" instead of the "cool kids."
They should remember, however, that even Google was slammed by the late, great Congressman Tom Lantos just a year before his tragic death for contributing to censorship and vicariously aiding human rights abuses in China. Lantos, who survived the brutality of the Nazi Holocaust, had this to say to the group of executives from Google, Yahoo, Cisco and Microsoft:
Do these kinds of things now before the sharks start to circle. Make them a real part of your business plan. You should want to be a "safe" online business as much as you'd want to be a "green business." You want the news cycles on your side, so there is no temptation for the media to make mountains of molehills, and even if some emmy-starved reporter wants to be the next Chris Hansen and finds some nutjob using your service for an isolated misdeed in some tangential way that he can exploit, even if of all the social networks on all the tubes on all the internets, some reporter saw some psycho walk into yours, the people in charge can realize that the one bad apple doesn't mean they have to chop down the tree.
Hey New Media, I'm talking to you! How about you talk to me.
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Because I'm such a darn nice guy, I'll quote the judge again, because I do think his ruling makes sense from the point of view of a guy who sits on a bench, hears cases, and reads law books.
"Those friends thou hast and their adoption tried, Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel," the judge wrote, adding: "But not when an order of protection prohibits someone from communicating with another."I am so very excited to go to SXSW Interactive next month. One of the reasons is that a keynote is being given by Mark Zuckerberg, the "boy genius" behind Facebook. I've written before about why I think people overvalue Zuckerberg and underestimate the massive exposure his company has to all sorts of Governmental actions, hearings, investigations, and whatnot. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook in 2008 is Bill Gates and Microsoft circa 1998.
"While it is true," he also wrote, "that the person who receives the 'friend request' could simply deny the request to become 'friends,' that request was still a contact and 'no contact' was allowed by the order of the protection."
Both MarkZ and BillG share a major mistake: as their companies attracted more attention through various PR gaffes, they didn't make earnest efforts to get their stories out in Washington. They figured the product was enough.
Facebook has already suffered through the disaster of a user revolt after the News Feed some time ago, the MoveOn.org inspired retooling of Beacon, and even worse, the recent NYT article about Facebook keeping your data "forever" after you try and delete your account, Do they have any real professionals telling their side and speaking the right language? No. They hire smart people, but they're California Smart, not DC Smart. So far, they've been lucky that no cute white girls have gone missing after using Facebook.
Microsoft had a great streak. They launched Windows 95 and got the whole world excited about computing. Then came the Browser Wars, during which they actually destroyed an entire company in the space of a few short years and reduced their two competitors in Operating System technology to obscurity through anticompetitive practices, and eventually got antitrust actions against them in the U.S. and the EU, one of which was ended by the Florida recount since the original judge was thrown off the case and the Bush DOJ settled for pretty much nothing. The EU one is ongoing and MS keeps losing appeals.
How did that happen? Well, despite news reports, consumer complaints, and all sorts of bad press, Microsoft had virtually no Washington presence for the longest time. Now they have one of the best lobbying operations in DC, as well as many in state capitals (see the ongoing ODF controversies in Massachusetts, etc).
Facebook (at this writing) has zero registered outside lobbyists, and their Washington presence is limited to a guy whose job it is to get political candidates to put their pages on there. Yet, they're constantly the subject of bad press. They faced a user revolt when they introduced the "news feed" feature last year. Recently, their Beacon feature was forced to be modified after MoveOn.org got a petition together, and the New York Times reported only days ago on how hard it is to get them to get rid of your data after you delete your account.
Zuckerberg, their "boy genius" CEO is profiled in the press as your typical start-up guy living on a mattress despite his estimate net worth of several billion since the company is privately held, and according to his own words during an awkward, stilted 60 Minutes appearance, will probably remain private at least 2008. While more "charismatic" (I use the term loosely) than BillG (who many have speculated suffers from a mild form of Asperger's Syndrome), they both share the trait of being completely tone-deaf when it comes to the way us "beltway insiders" look at technology companies we see as either violating the law, or just acting irresponsibly when there isn't a law to break.
Legislation, like nature, abhors a vacuum. If there is a perceived problem (think "predators on MySpace") than Congress, or the FCC, or the FTC, or whoever thinks they should do something, will do it, without thought to the unintended consequences that their action will trigger. Take child pornography laws, for instance. Everyone agrees that child porn is harmful, and abuse of children is abhorrent and reprehensible. On the other hand, these same laws force prosecutors to charge teenagers who forward drunk cellphone camera pictures around the internet under the same statutes that they prosecute those who hoard videos and photos documenting child abuse.
Of course, many "legislative initiatives" are fueled by media driven hysteria, which leads to bad hearings, (see Josh Green's take on the Roger Clemens hearings) driven by the sole desire to humiliate those who the Congress have done wrong, which in the worst instances can lead to the reactionary writing of bad laws sold with good PR, which of course invoke the law of unintended consequences.
Back to the New York judge and the unprecedented (but not unreasonable, which is simply my personal opinion as I Am Not A Lawyer) case of "Friending" as violating an Order of Protection. In the press, the general public, and in technical circles, people love to talk about the differences between Facebook and MySpace, but mostly in terms of things like demographics, social network organization, openness to development and user interface. They're forgetting something.
MySpace has already been brought on bended knees before the authorities to avoid regulation. They've adopted policy after policy (however useless), issued press release after press release, and had their News Corporation execs appear with all sorts of law enforcement types who crowed gleefully as MySpace "purged itself of registered sex offenders," as if you could really do that.
Facebook, like its' interface, is clean. It has been spared the wild hysterics of local television news. It has not been featured on "To Catch a Predator" and it is not part of a major media conglomerate which like Roger Clemens, lawmakers would love to publicly humiliate. While they are still private, and while the boyish, not-quite-Rupert-Murdochian Zuckerberg is still the face of the company, they still have a chance to head off being known as the next boogeyman. They're a Google, not a Microsoft. People still believe they're a good company, with a smart young kid running things who makes innocent mistakes. They can have a goal of connecting communities and bringing people together, and they can have a great motto like Google's "Don't be evil."
There are other cautionary tales. YouTube didn't think to partner with any content providers, or do anything to make themselves look like a useful and beneficial service for the general public as it gained popularity, and instead it got hit with a gigantic lawsuit over Copyright Infringement as soon as it got bought by Google. A few letters to Big Media, and a good PR blitz with say, videos of missing children or putting short Public Service Announcements before random popular videos, and they could have saved themselves a ton of grief by casting themselves as the "good guys" instead of the "cool kids."
They should remember, however, that even Google was slammed by the late, great Congressman Tom Lantos just a year before his tragic death for contributing to censorship and vicariously aiding human rights abuses in China. Lantos, who survived the brutality of the Nazi Holocaust, had this to say to the group of executives from Google, Yahoo, Cisco and Microsoft:
The trick to avoiding the "gotcha" game in Washington is to get your story out before the other guy, and to always make sure you have a record of 100 good things to counter every bad thing. If you're a social networking startup, you're in danger. Join a coalition. Get your own efforts started. Think of ways to use your technology to partner with existing groups to do good. Think Red Cross, Salvation Army, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Hire someone who knows how to get the right people in and around Congress to know about the good things you are doing. There's even a Family Online Safety Initiative. Why haven't you joined it?"Your abhorrent actions in China are a disgrace...I simply don't understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night."
Do these kinds of things now before the sharks start to circle. Make them a real part of your business plan. You should want to be a "safe" online business as much as you'd want to be a "green business." You want the news cycles on your side, so there is no temptation for the media to make mountains of molehills, and even if some emmy-starved reporter wants to be the next Chris Hansen and finds some nutjob using your service for an isolated misdeed in some tangential way that he can exploit, even if of all the social networks on all the tubes on all the internets, some reporter saw some psycho walk into yours, the people in charge can realize that the one bad apple doesn't mean they have to chop down the tree.
Hey New Media, I'm talking to you! How about you talk to me.
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