The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update

Issues in the News

1. TECHNOLOGY

Verizon and YouTube near a deal to bring web videos to cell phones.

“The pace of technological development is so fast right now that a service like YouTube, which provides minimal video quality in a smallish window and essentially serves as an ongoing, web version of America’s Funniest Home Videos, isn’t going to be the king of web video for long. Services that provide HD over broadband, offer fully downloadable material that can be stored on a hard drive—these are services that have yet to take off, but with upgrades in of broadband bandwidth, more people are going to become interested in them.”

2. INTERNET

Reporters Without Borders declares 13 countries, including China, to be “enemies of the Internet.”

“…the recent attack by human-rights activists and some legislators on U.S. technology firms like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo isn’t just misguided— it’s a direct threat to the spread of freedom. Ban-happy Chinese censors, not U.S. companies, should be the target of the activists’ ire.”

3. BUSINESS

Vice President Cheney expresses doubts about the corporate accounting regulations known as Sarbanes-Oxley.

“The Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance act is one of the biggest expansions of government regulation in 70 years—and businesses say it’s more costly and complicated than ever imagined. Defenders counter that the 2002 law is still needed to protect the public from corporate abuses. Yet recent news has made it harder to argue that Sarbanes-Oxley, hastily passed in response to corporate scandals at Enron and WorldCom, has benefited the ‘little guy.’”