Daily Archives: September 6, 2015

Run, Lessig, Run

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My OpEd piece about Larry Lessig’s bid for the Democratic nomination:

Intellectually, he is always seeking ways to turn the adversary’s strengths against him. His first idea was to harness the Citizens United judgment to create a new “super PAC” (a type of political action committee) – Mayday.US – that would support politicians who campaigned against corporate interests. The PAC raised nearly $11m in 2014, but its plan of electing candidates friendly to campaign-finance reform turned out to be, at best, an honourable failure.

Last month, Lessig came up with a new idea: that he would seek the Democratic nomination for the 2016 presidential election if he could raise $1m by tomorrow. He added an original twist. If nominated, he would run on a single, overriding issue: getting a single bill – the Citizen Equality Act – through Congress. And if he were elected, once that was done, he would resign, enabling the vice president to become the next president.

Sounds daft? Sure. The probability of a Lessig presidency is lower than that of a Trump one. But it’s another neat hack. And as a way of raising the profile of the key issue in American politics, it has a touch of genius. We could use that kind of thinking over here. Run, Lessig, run.

Read on.

UPDATE He passed the $1m mark.

Two cheers for Google?

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This morning’s Observer column:

You know the problem: you’re on a train and suddenly realise you need some information that is available on the net. So you pull out your smartphone and type a web address into the search box. The server responds, the page you want begins to load and then suddenly there’s a big box obscuring the content. The box tells you that you’d be much better off downloading the company’s app. Inducements include the possibility that you might get a better rate by booking via the app than via the boring old website. Sometimes the “close” button that will enable you to get rid of this intrusion is obvious, but sometimes it’s hard to find on a small screen. In the meantime, the train has just gone into a tunnel and you’ve lost your internet connection.

Welcome to the world of “app-install interstitials”. They are, IMHO, a pain in the butt. On the scale of web annoyances, they rate just below pop-up ads and those display ads placed by companies that covertly monitor your browsing. But now it transpires that Google doesn’t like these interstitials either and has announced that henceforth it will be downgrading in its search results any mobile-oriented web pages that produce interstitials…

Read on.