Public Policy
Hacking Society
Today we are excited to bring together a group of thinkers and doers to USV to discuss how networks are transforming our society and economy, and what this means for the future of innovation, competition, regulation and policy advocacy. We are calling the event Hacking Society, which is, of course, ambitiously broad. What we mean by that is the way in which networks — i.e., groups of people connected directly to one another via the Internet — are finding new ways to work together, make things and solve problems. As this happens — and it's happening across all sectors of life, from entertainment,...
ContinueInnovation in Education
Today, President Obama will visit TechBoston Academy together with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Melinda Gates. The President is likely to renew his call for more innovation in education, with initiatives such as the creation of a federal education research funding effort to be called ARPA-ED (modeled after DARPA). At Union Square Ventures, we too are excited about the potential for innovation in education and have been for some time, dating back to our "Hacking Education" session two years ago. Since then, we have continued to learn about how the Internet is disrupting traditional media and have met with...
ContinueA Threat to Startups
We believe that Google and Verizon's proposed policy principles to preserve an open Internet came out of a good faith effort to bring some clarity to the market for Internet applications and access. But we fear that this agreement is a compromise that does not serve the next great startup enterprise well. Google, eBay, Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare are just a few of the thousands of companies that flourished on the Internet, precisely because there were no gatekeepers and no toll takers. That market architecture is the result of the original layered architecture of the Internet. With the move from...
ContinueOpen Spectrum is Good Policy
Fred wrote a post earlier this week advocating for more "open spectrum". Fred argues in his post that freeing up more open spectrum will have a much larger impact than spending $7.2B in stimulus money to run wires to rural constituents. He also references our friend Tom Evslin who has been thinking and writing about telecom policy for 30 years. I'd like to flesh out the argument here and at the risk of coming off as a total fanboy, link to a couple of Tom's other posts here and here on the subject of spectrum policy. The first question to...
ContinueInternet for Everyone
This morning Union Square Ventures endorsed an initiative called Internet for Everyone. This group does not sponsor specific policies or legislation. Rather, it hopes to build broad popular support for a few basic principles, that hopefully will guide policy choices over the next few years. Internet for Everyone's principles are: Access: We agree that every home and business in America must have access to a high-speed, world class communications infrastructure. Choice: We agree that every consumer must enjoy real choice of high-speed Internet providers to achieve lower prices and higher speeds. Openness: We agree that every Internet user should have...
ContinueThrough the Looking Glass into the Net Neutrality Debate
There is this wonderful Alice in Wonderland quality to the current Net Neutrality debate. Listening to the rhetoric, one s to feel that up is, in fact, down and down is up. The innovative high growth applications companies like Amazon, Ebay, and Google are are asking the government to impose a regulatory regime on the net to ensure that no application is discriminated against and the stodgier infrastructure companies like Verizon and TIme Warner Cable are asking the government to stay out of way and let the free market decide how access to their pipes is priced. This mind bending...
ContinueDo Patents Encourage or Stifle Innovation?
At our recent Union Square Sessions event, we discussed three primary topics relating to public policy and innovation; net neutrality, copyrights, and patents. In this post, I'll try to summarize the patent discussion and highlight some of the most interesting points that were made. If you'd like to read the transcript of the entire patent discussion, it's available on our wiki for download here. I started out the conversation referencing recent blog posts made by Brad Feld and me where we both asked the question - are patents helping or hurting innovation? DSC_0846 Originally uploaded by USV. Irwin...
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