The Economist (March 5)
“Every second three more Indians experience the internet for the first time. By 2030 more than 1 billion of them will be online.” Smart phone usage is soaring. And “no battle for the online future of India is more intense than the one now being waged in e-commerce.”While this is a “local battle for customers,” it is “also a battle for the future” that will likely prove “a better template for the e-commerce battle in other emerging markets.”
Tags: Customers, E-commerce, Emerging markets, Future, India, Intense, Internet, Online, Smart phone
Washington Post (December 19)
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have been exchanging compliments. They clearly have a lot in common. “Much as Mr. Putin has muzzled free expression in the media, marginalized political opponents and scrapped contested elections, Mr. Trump has blithely endorsed shutting down parts of the Internet, praised President Franklin D. Roosevelt for interning Japanese Americans during World War II and openly contemplated registering Muslims in America.”
Tags: Elections, Free expression, Internet, Internment, Japanese Americans, Media, Muslims, Political opponents, Putin, Roosevelt, Russia, Trump, U.S.
USA Today (July 30)
“The Chinese government certainly likes to control things. It keeps its currency artificially low to promote exports. It meddles heavily in real estate prices. And it is obsessed with controlling information on the Internet. But nothing has been as jarring to American sensibilities as its recent efforts to prop up stock prices.”
Tags: China, Currency, Exports, Government, Internet, Real estate, Stock prices, U.S.
USA Today (February 9)
“The Internet has produced some of history’s most innovative, agile and disruptive companies…. But the Internet has long been in danger of being co-opted by its least competitive and innovative part: its service providers.” Verizon, Comcast and other ISPs have been trying to “get a cut of the action” by forcing content providers to pay for access. “It’s great news that the Federal Communications Commission, after years of delay, is set to stop this from happening” with the adoption of net neutrality rules.
Tags: Agile, Competitive, Danger, Disruptive, FCC, Innovative, Internet, ISPs, Net neutrality
Wall Street Journal (August 13)
Some Internet connections have been disrupted this week and more bumps are expected. “The situation echoes—if faintly—the hubbub over the feared Y2K computer glitch in the late 1990s, when experts warned that systems could fail because their dating functions hadn’t been designed to handle the turn of the century.” The total number of Internet paths through the global web has grown to approximately 500,000, exceeding the number some old network routers can accommodate. “More websites and broadband firms are likely to feel the pinch in coming days as they hit the seemingly arbitrary limit,” necessitating the upgrade or replacement of older routers.
Tags: Broadband, Connections, Disrupt, Internet, Paths, Replacement, Routers, Upgrade, Websites, Y2K
Wall Street Journal (March 24)
The Obama administration announced plans “to give up U.S. control of the Internet to a still-to-be-determined collection of governments and international groups.” It’s hard to imagine this creating a better governing body. “It’s easy to imagine a new Internet oversight body operating like the United Nations, with repressive governments taking turns silencing critics. China could get its wish to remove FreeTibet.org from the Internet as an affront to its sovereignty. Russia could force Twitter to remove posts by Ukrainian-Americans criticizing Vladimir Putin.” Congress should override President Obama’s decision.
Tags: China, Congress, Critics, Governing body, Icann, Internet, Obama, Putin, Russia, Sovereignty, Tibet, Twitter, U.S., Ukraine, UN
Wall Street Journal (August 7)
“The most striking fact about the recently announced sale of the Boston Globe and Washington Post is their low prices…. The prices reflect the decline of newspapers as a business in the Internet age, which is the kind of creative destruction millions of Americans have experienced. Disruption is the price a capitalist economy pays for innovation, and the news business is merely the latest example.” The new owners should be welcomed as they provide “an opportunity for new ideas and perhaps a turnaround.”
Tags: Boston Globe, Capitalism, Creative destruction, Decline, Disruption, Ideas, Innovation, Internet, Newspapers, Opportunity, Owners, Prices, Turnaround, Washington Post
New York Times (May 29)
SoftBank’s takeover of the mobile phone provider Sprint could benefit U.S. consumers. SoftBank “was largely responsible for making high-speed Internet affordable to consumers in the early 2000s by offering faster service and at prices that were less than half of N.T.T.’s rates. A few years later, it used a similar low-price strategy in the wireless business. If it competes aggressively in the United States, SoftBank could help shake up the highly concentrated American industry.”
Tags: Consumers, Internet, N.T.T., Phones, Prices, Service, SoftBank, Sprint, Takeover, U.S., Wireless
Financial Times (May 14, 2013)
In the UK, the state-owned Royal Mail may be taken public this fall in line with legislation passed in 2011. In marked contrast to the U.S. Postal Service, which is hemorrhaging money, the Royal Mail’s “fortunes have been improving as a result of modernisation and the boom in internet-related packet deliveries,” leading observers to value it at £2bn-£3bn.
Tags: Boom, Internet, IPO, Legislation, Royal Mail, UK, USPS
The Economist (October 20)
“A big market crash happened 25 years ago this week. The wrong lessons were taken from Black Monday. ” One important lesson went unheeded as both the Internet and real estate bubbles inflated. “Any extended period of rapidly rising prices is an indication of a bubble—and that sadly there is no painless way to clean up the mess after the bubble pops.”
Tags: Black Monday, Bubbles, Internet, Real estate
