The editors of the Wall Street Journal remark on the Digital Markets Act:

Ask not why Europe doesn’t regulate digital companies more. Ask why Europe doesn’t have more of its own digital companies to regulate. That is the question Brussels should have considered as it prepared the new tech regulations the European Commission unveiled Tuesday.

The European Union’s bureaucratic arm is nothing if not ambitious. The proposals would create new mechanisms for regulating content such as violence or hate speech. They would formalize rules for relationships between platform companies and third-party software developers that the commission previously tried to impose via antitrust cases. They’d require new transparency about proprietary business practices such as ad targeting. And the commission wants to impose draconian penalties for violations, including fines of 10% of annual global revenue or the ability to break up tech giants.

The rules don’t explicitly say they’re aimed at U.S. companies. But the proposals are crafted narrowly enough that, wouldn’t you know, mostly very large American companies would fall under their purview. Not many social-media platforms reach at least 10% of the EU’s 450 million consumers, which is the threshold for some of the strictest new rules.

We have no special brief for American tech companies, and our parent company’s executives have tangled with firms such as Google over their sometimes casual approach to intellectual property. The U.S. companies can lobby as they wish in Brussels, and they will. Expect the EU’s new proposals to become law, if they ever do, only after years of wrangling.

Someone should ask, however, why European competitors haven’t emerged to the American behemoths. The commission and its boosters claim this is what the new regulations will do, by creating a “level playing field” for local tech entrepreneurs. But rules such as the commission’s proposal usually do the opposite.

I believe I can answer that question. A lot of it is marketing. Another factor is U. S. standards.

There are quite a few great European software products. SAP leaps to mind. It has considerable market penetration in the U. S. but not as much as Microsoft or Google do. Why not? I think the answer is that the European and American corporate markets are extremely different. The U. S. has a relative handful of enormous companies and an incredibly vast number of small to medium companies. A lot of the European software companies have enterprise customers as their marketing universe and aren’t particularly well-suited to companies with under $200 million per year gross revenue which here in the U. S. is most of them.

And then there’s the issue of standards. I’ll give you an example. Here in the State of Illinois we have a department called Central Management Services. It’s responsible for everything from janitorial services in state facilities to its rental and lease agreements to managing the state’s computer and network infrastructure. Not only is Illinois’s CMS a Microsoft shop, it’s a Microsoft shop firmly rooted in the 1990s. Basically, no software that isn’t Microsoft can be installed on any state computer from mainframe to desktop. CMS doesn’t like letting software and support contracts to anybody but Microsoft. That makes it darned hard for any other company to get a foothold in the state. I suspect Illinois isn’t alone in that regard.

Finally, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon haven’t always been behemoths. Once upon a time they were all small startups. EU regulations make it a lot harder for small startups to become behemoths than U. S. laws and the U. S. market used to. If the computer market in the U. S. were the same in the 1970s as it is now, Microsoft would still be a virtually unknown startup in Seattle (and Seattle would be mostly notable as the home of Boeing). Nowadays, of course, U. S. laws and practices have caught up and it’s harder for a small startup to become a behemoth than it used to be here. That’s why so many small startups in the digital space have a business model that includes being acquired by one of the majors.

Speaking of privacy, it looks as though Microsoft will be embroiled in the investigation of the recent massive security breach I mentioned the other day. Consider this Reuters report:

The breach presents a major challenge to the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden as officials investigate what information was stolen and try to ascertain what it will be used for. It is not uncommon for large scale cyber investigations to take months or years to complete.

“This is a much bigger story than one single agency,” said one of the people familiar with the matter. “This is a huge cyber espionage campaign targeting the U.S. government and its interests.”

Hackers broke into the NTIA’s office software, Microsoft’s Office 365. Staff emails at the agency were monitored by the hackers for months, sources said.

A Microsoft spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did a spokesman for the Treasury Department.

I found this detail reported by Microsoft particularly troubling:

Once in the network, the intruder then uses the administrative permissions acquired through the on-premises compromise to gain access to the organization’s global administrator account and/or trusted SAML token signing certificate. This enables the actor to forge SAML tokens that impersonate any of the organization’s existing users and accounts, including highly privileged accounts.

While I recognize that a protocol like SAML (Security Authorization Markup Language) makes things a lot more convenient for users, it also inherently opens up security risks. That’s something I pointed out more than 20 years ago about Microsoft itself. Software monoculture especially in operating systems increases risks. Such a monoculture reduces the opportunity costs for prospective hackers while the vast reach of today’s data increases the rewards.

I agree with the editors of the Washington Post that the U. S. needs an updated privacy law:

Individual rights to control, access and delete data seem to be a given in any forthcoming law, as are some form of limits on collection and processing. Those limits are perhaps the most important part of the package. Congress must ask companies to look out for their consumers rather than continuing to ask consumers to look out for themselves, ideally by imposing duties of loyalty and care based on reasonable expectations. What’s required of a business should be proportionate to the size of the business and the scope of its data collection. These matters and more may be devilish in their details, but broadly lawmakers seem primed to concur.

I’ve already expressed myself on this subject numerous times. I think that federal privacy regulations should render the business models of Facebook, Google, and numerous others, all of which depend on a sort of visual stalking, unworkable.

To some degree the federal government’s antitrust actions against Facebook may be a case of too little, too late. However, it also may be the case that the European Union will carry our water for us. The “gatekeeper” provisions in their Digital Markets Act may have much of the same effect. I’ll be interested in seeing how or perhaps whether they enforce them against TikTok.

Here’s something to think about in the news about the Department of Homeland Security getting hacked by Russian hackers using a trojan horse embedded in SolarWinds software. If DHS can’t protect itself, how the heck is it going to protect us?

In her Washington Post column this morning Leana S. Wen followed the trail I had blazed, giving her thoughts on what we should expect as people start being inoculated with the Pfizer vaccine. I found her observations pretty superficial compared with mine although she did note that Pfizer had been blowing smoke about overestimated the number of doses it would be able to provide this month. I don’t expect that to be the last miscalculation in this process. There’s good money to be made from overestimations and nothing to be gained from underestimations other than realistic appraisals of the situation that might allow policymakers to make prudent decisions.

Other things she projects are

• Excitement
• Hiccups
• Unexpected side effects
• Heated disagreements

She concludes:

Vaccine authorization is the beginning of the end of the pandemic, but the end itself is a long way away. As we celebrate the incredible scientific achievement, we must also recognize that the road ahead is filled with new challenges, which must be met with patience, vigilance and grace if as many lives as possible are to be saved.

an understatement if anything. There are so many unknowns including unknown unknowns at this point that we shouldn’t be too confident that we’re the “beginning of the end”.

Yesterday the Electoral College elected Joe Biden President-Elect of the United States. I congratulate him.

Following his election President-Elect Biden gave a 15 minutes speech, much of it criticizing his predecessor. I found the following passage the most important:

You know, in this battle for the soul of America, democracy prevailed. We the people voted, faith in our institutions held, the integrity of our elections remains intact. And now it’s time to turn the page as we’ve done throughout our history, to unite, to heal. As I said in this campaign, I will be president for all Americans. I’ll work just as hard for those of who you didn’t vote for me as I will for those who did. There’s urgent work in front of us. Getting this pandemic under control and getting the nation vaccinated against this virus, delivering immediate economic help so badly needed by so many Americans who are hurting today, and then building our economy back better than it ever was.

Earlier in the speech he mentioned that he had received more votes for president than any candidate in history. One thing he neglected to mention was that Donald Trump received more votes than any candidate in history other than Joe Biden. The simplest conclusion to draw from that is that there is a substantial difference of opinion about the country and its course today.

If any hypothesis can be made from candidate Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate or the several cabinet picks the now president-elect has made since the election, it is that he is doubling down on the identity politics that has become so great a part of the fabric of today’s Democratic Party. That is one of the things about which there is a profound difference of opinion.

It should also be observed that of the Democratic presidential candidates who actually received delegates to date only Pete Buttigieg has been appointed to a cabinet position.

It will be interesting to see if the ideas in the passage quoted above are more than empty words.

I fear that the next several years will be very fraught for the country. The reasons for this include the refusal of Trump supporters to accept their candidate’s defeat as well as things that are within Mr. Biden’s control and those that aren’t. Some of the latter are attendant on the president-elect’s age. Those that are within his control are the choices he will make.

I agree with this idea, expressed by Matt Casale, expressed in a piece at The Hill:

We should not rebuild the same old infrastructure, the same old way. When spending on infrastructure, we need to make sure that the projects we fund are more than “shovel ready;” they must also be “shovel worthy.” The projects that we choose to invest in should be ones that are going to make American lives better. We should not invest in outdated infrastructure that is going to exacerbate the problems from air and water pollution to global warming that we are actively trying to solve.

If only there were some metric for determining what people need, want, and are willing to pay for!

Unfortunately, Mr. Casale’s list largely consists of the usual suspects:

We should invest in clean energy infrastructure by expanding tax credits for wind, solar and energy storage projects and by providing grants to help communities reduce energy use and deploy clean energy projects. We should not subsidize new fossil fuel infrastructure.

We should expand and electrify public transportation, beginning by immediately providing at least $32 billion in emergency operating support for transit in the wake of COVID-19-related budget shortfalls. We should repair our nation’s crumbling roads and bridges. We should not, however, build new highway lanes that end up leading to more traffic and cars on the road.

I largely agree with this priority:

We should invest in clean water infrastructure that limits the flow of polluted runoff into our bodies of waters. We should replace lead service lines to protect Americans — particularly children — from the damaging lifelong health impacts caused by lead exposure.

My preferences would be that, rather than building or even improving roads and bridges, the following should be priorities:

• Improving the electrical grid to make it more efficient, capable of carrying greater loads, and more resilient. This is something that will never be done by the private sector.
• As noted I tend to agree with all of his “clean water infrastructure” proposals.
• I would add a more general improvement of the sanitary sewer systems. The complication of this is that it would be the responsibility of state and local governments. Do New York, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, etc. really need to expand anything?
• We genuinely need an organized structure for decommissioning cities and it’s something no city will ever do on its own.
• We should stop subsidizing all forms of energy production. Let them rise or fall on their own.

My ideas have so many problems it’s hard to know where to start. They won’t maximize the number of jobs or the payoffs to political contributors. They’re exciting to practically nobody—there aren’t any catchy slogans promoting any of them. I’m pretty confident none of them will make it into anybody’s infrastructure plan.

I found this piece by Micah L. Siffry at The American Prospect, “Why Did Obama Forget Who Brought Him to the Dance?” interesting and informative but, sadly, uninsightful:

I’ve recently spent a good chunk of time engrossed in reading A Promised Land, the first volume of President Barack Obama’s memoirs. After four years of the most impulsive and unstable president of my lifetime, hearing Obama’s calm and judicious voice in my head was like having a long, comforting talk with an old friend. His retelling of the challenges of his first two and a half years, from the global financial crisis and the passage of Obamacare to the Democrats’ midterm collapse in 2010 and the successful operation to kill Osama bin Laden in May 2011, is full of revealing details and discerning insight.

But there’s a strange lacuna in A Promised Land, a missing thread that I kept looking for but never found. That thread is his popular base. To win his improbable bid for the presidency in 2008, Obama built his own powerful political army to beat Hillary Clinton, who had been building political support with her husband, President Bill Clinton, for decades. At its height, at the end of the 2008 election, Obama’s campaign had 13 million email addresses (20 percent of his vote total). Almost four million people had donated to him. Two million Obama supporters had created an account on My.BarackObama.com, the campaign’s social networking platform, which they used to organize 200,000 local events. Seventy thousand people used MyBO to create their own fundraising pages, which raised $30 million for his campaign.

But as is by now well known, once Obama entered office, he abandoned this army and staked his presidency on the inside-the-Beltway strategies of his first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. It’s never been clear to me that Obama had to drop this ball.

He concludes:

But after his election as president, the grassroots disappears from Obama’s story. The amnesia starts the night of his inauguration, when he attended ten formal balls with first lady Michelle Obama, but only the first one, where he was serenaded by Beyoncé, and later one for members of the armed forces, make it into his memoir. The Obama for America staff ball, which was attended by 10,000 staff and where Obama reportedly spoke for 17 minutes, is gone from his memory. White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, who managed the White House’s relationships with Democratic advocacy organizations, gets barely a mention for his role in the health care reform fight. The organizers who took him to victory in the Iowa caucus, who he says he “would still do anything for,” are nowhere in the rest of the book, even as one of them, Mitch Stewart, would come to run Organizing for America at the DNC.

I don’t know why Obama forgot his base, though here are some theories. First, he was a captive of the White House bubble, and no one in his intimate circle or among his top advisers spoke for the base.

What, other than a confirmation that Rahm Emanuel has no political future, does he mean?

IMO there’s a simple explanation that seems to elude him but was obvious to me from the start. Obama is, was, and has been about Obama.

To some degree that’s an occupational hazard of being president. As Alice Roosevelt said about her father, Teddy:

He wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every christening.

Has it escaped anyone that is true of the incumbent to the n^th degree? But I believe that Barack Obama’s self-created (and published) legend is that, despite the enormous handicap of a sub-Saharan African and absentee father, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps to become a best-selling author, elected official, and, ultimately, president of the United States. There isn’t much room in that narrative to dance with who brung you.

I both agree and disagree with Paul Begala’s observations about the diversity of Joe Biden’s cabinet picks, expressed in this CNN op-ed. I agree with his conclusion:

An all-white, all-male Cabinet is, I hope, in the dustbin of history. I also hope that an all-liberal or all-conservative Cabinet is as well. America’s diversity is in many ways our country’s greatest challenge. With these picks, Joe Biden is reminding us it is also our greatest strength.

I suspect that he and I differ on the nature of the diversity for political appointees. Sadly, “diversity” seems to have become an autoantonym. I agree with him that opening the field of potential appointees to the full range of people with the knowledge and experience to handle the various jobs without reference to gender, religion, or race broadens the pool.

The one thing that leapt out at me from his op-ed and with which I am not sure I am in full agreement is the following statement:

Liberals who extol diversity make what I believe is an inarguable point when they note that we are products of our lived experience. As a white male I have never known the pain of prejudice.

If that’s true, Mr. Begala should thank his lucky stars that he has not. Despite being a white male, I have since my earliest years. Not only have I experienced bigotry against me due to my faith from a very early age, I have experienced bigotry throughout my career, first because I was too young and now, not only because I am too old, but because I am a white American.

In addition, yes, experience is a teacher but the wise man learns not merely from his own experience but from the experiences of others. I have seen bigotry against blacks, against Jews, and other forms of bigotry for as long as I can recall. I consider it a canard to believe that the only way one can understand pain is to experience it. You can understand it, too, through seeing others experience it. At least you can if you have any degree of empathy.

I found this grimly amusing:

I hope he extends that to people who come at politics and policy from a different perspective.

In the last election we learned that nearly half of American voters “come at politics and politics from a different perspective” from any of the appointees that Mr. Biden has named to date. Moving forward I don’t expect that to change.