My Own Pirate Radio

A few days ago I mentioned Arizona trying to stop Zillow from providing zestimates within their state.

Here’s an update from John Cook’s venture blog:

UPDATE 4/24/07: The bill, including the amendment in support of Zillow, was defeated today by a vote of 32-22 in the Arizona House of Representatives. A spokesman for the Arizona house said that the bill was defeated because it dealt with increasing fees, though he said it was likely that sponsors would re-introduce the legislation along with the amendment related to Zillow.

By the way, John Cook is worth reading if you’re into tracking US ventures, especially on the west coast. He works for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and blogs regularly on entrepreneurial happenings.

In the US, the Communications Decency Act says it’s the person who created the content. In Canada, as far as I know, that question hasn’t been settled conclusively yet. There is now a lawsuit underway that should shed more light on it. From the Globe and Mail:

The hosts of the speed-of-light world of Internet blogs and interactive websites that publish anonymous commentary should be forced to pay when reputations are damaged, says a former Green Party staff member who is suing three such sites.

Google, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and openpolitics.ca, a Canadian political website based in Toronto, are being sued in Vancouver in a libel case that could change the way Internet opinion is monitored and published.

This case is critical to track for anybody who is thinking about hosting user-generated content on a Canadian-based website. Which would be just about anyone doing a Web 2.0 service.

Arizona is trying to stop Zillow from providing “zestimates” — their algorithm-based home valuation estimates — on the grounds that Zillow isn’t a licensed appraiser in the state.

That’s just plain silly. Zillow is, so far at least, a benevolent information provider, not a company people need to be protected from. And its estimates are just that: estimates. They should be taken with a grain of salt, just like all other analysis that tries to predict market behavior.

Jon Udell did a blog post and an InfoWorld article this week on Amazon’s new S3 storage service. At the end of his blog post he comments, “With a service like S3, we could all agree to use Amazon’s politically neutral object store. With the right wrappers, we could even continue to use our own preferred applications.” And he muses further, in his InfoWorld piece:

I’d like to find out whether metering infrastructure services in this way will prove technically and economically viable. When we talk about a grid of Web services, we like to compare it to the power grid, but the analogy is deeply flawed in at least one way. My electric bill isn’t itemized. I don’t know what it costs me to run each of my appliances, or how long it will take to amortize the cost of replacements. Lacking this feedback, we make poor individual decisions that, collectively, add up to a tragic misallocation of resources.

Neat thought. It reminds me, though, of a little nightmare I’ve nursed for years: what will happen when we come to rely heavily on chunks of “public utility” computing infrastructure? If such services become truly essential to our daily lives, will governments decide to treat them as Essential Services, and regulate them? Think electricity, roads, water, Plain Old Telephone Service, 911. Read the rest of this entry »