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ASPEN, Colo.--Microsoft lashed out at Google's YouTube video-sharing site on Tuesday, saying its own Soapbox is far more responsible and doesn't take advantage of "loopholes" in copyright law.

Thomas Rubin, Microsoft's associate general counsel for copyright, said that unlike YouTube, Microsoft's Soapbox video-sharing site is designed to work in concert with copyright holders and that it represents an effort to be a good corporate citizen. Soapbox uses Audible Magic fingerprinting technology.

In a swipe at Google, which has been sued by Viacom over the presence of numerous copyrighted videos on YouTube, Rubin said at the Progress & Freedom Foundation's Aspen Summit that Microsoft "could have looked for potential loopholes in the DMCA or the fair-use provisions of the Copyright Act...but it would have done nothing to address the significant and legitimate concerns of the content industry." (The DMCA is, of course, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which sets rules for Web site liability.)

"Before a video is uploaded to the site, before it gets posted, there is a fingerprint taken of the file that identifies what that file is, and it's checked against the database that the content industry has created and populated (to tell) whether the uploaded file is infringing," Rubin said. "If it is, we don't allow it to go up. It's that simple."

If current court precedents are any indication, Google may not be legally required by the DMCA to implement pre-emptive filtering techniques. A takedown procedure based on reports of infringing videos may be sufficient. But a Google attorney has said in the Viacom case that some kind of YouTube filtering will be in place by September.

"It's important to point it out because it really should serve as a model for all in the content and technology industries," Rubin said.

Alan Davidson, a Google representative in Washington, responded by saying "Google has valued" its relationship with "hundreds of content creators."

Microsoft has long been more copyright-friendly than Web-centric companies, as evidenced by its support for stronger copyright laws, artificial limits placed on its Zune media player and the remarkable steps it took to embed digital rights management (DRM) for "premium content" into Windows Vista (even to the extent of limiting usability).

One reason why Microsoft is more copyright-friendly than Google, of course, is that it makes nearly all of its revenue not from online advertising but by selling copyrighted software. Google doesn't.

ASPEN, Colo.--Unhappy with your broadband connection? You're not focusing enough on the positives, telecommunications companies and a member of the Federal Communications Commission suggested on Monday.

Tom Tauke, Verizon's executive vice president for public affairs, policy and communications, said the United States has seen a "tremendous deployment of broadband and wireless" in a remarkably short time. Verizon subscribers sent 10 billion (yes, billion) text messages in June, up tenfold from 17 months earlier, he said.

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell

"Just a few years ago we were talking about trying to get DSL services and cable modem services to 20 or 25 percent of the country," Tauke said during a panel discussion at this year's Aspen Summit organized by the Progress and Freedom Foundation. "Now we have 51 percent of the households in this country, who not only have access to--but have purchased--broadband services."

Joseph Waz, a Comcast vice president and public policy counsel, said that "by the end of this year, Comcast will be America's fourth largest telephone company"--and by the end of next year, it'll be the third largest.

Commissioner Robert McDowell, part of the FCC's Republican majority, was equally enthusiastic. "We have more competition among differing platforms than any country in the world," he said, with cable modem service, for instance, available to something like 92 percent of Americans. (McDowell included the by-now obligatory language, of course, saying there's room for improvement as well.)

So, why would these three senior Washington telecom types be piling it on so deep?

The answer is simple. The audience at this conference has a fair share of congressional staffers on key committees who will be key to writing the next big telecom bill. One last year died without a vote in the Senate, but just about everyone wants some legislative fixes (the Bells want deregulation, Google and its allies would be delighted to see some Net neutrality rules, and so on) so eventually some version will resurface.

The Verizon-Comcast-McDowell initiative, in other words, is simply an effort to look ahead a few months or years. It's preemptive politicking.

Comcast's Waz rattled off a list of eight bad regulatory ideas that he hopes won't be in any eventual legislation, including forcing his company to pay overly high taxes into the universal service fund, subjecting the cable industry to more regulations than telecos, and prohibiting cable operators from investing in exclusive programming. He said he liked PFF's proposed Digital Age Communications Act.

For his part, Verizon's Tauke probably summed up the deregulatory philosophy the best: "Government must ensure it doesn't stop market forces from functioning."

ASPEN, Colo.--It may seem that there's another Internet bubble afoot, given companies like Shelfari.com--"show off your books!"--receiving venture capital funding.

But an eminent Harvard economist says it's not true. "The IT boom is not coming back," Dale Jorgenson, a Harvard university professor, said on Monday. "On the other hand we're not in the midst of another dot-com crash."

Jorgenson, who gave a morning presentation at this year's Aspen Summit organized by the Progress and Freedom Foundation, displayed a series of graphs showing that while hardware prices have fallen (measured either by computer prices or component prices) in the last few decades, software prices have remained constant when adjusted for inflation.

But back to the crash. Jorgenson said that in the late 1990s, the IT industry has contributed an outside share of productivity gains. Now, he said, it's more evenly distributed: "The character of innovation in the U.S. economy has shifted drastically. It's shifted from IT production, which predominated in the boom, to the successful utilization of IT."

ASPEN, Colo.--It must be a bit irksome being an antitrust regulator in the United States when your European counterparts are (a) more likely to interfere with the private sector and (b) look disdainfully at federal agencies as wishy-washy.

Which is probably why William Kovacic, one of the Federal Trade Commission's five members, spent nearly an hour on Monday defending the American approach as reasoned and no less thorough than that of its cross-Atlantic counterparts. There is a "tendency on the part of our European colleagues to dismiss the U.S. experience," he said.

FTC Commissioner William Kovacic

(Credit: George Washington University)

(It should be noted at this point that the FTC is in the midst of deciding whether or not to approve Google's planned acquisition of DoubleClick. The FTC tried unsuccessfully to obtain an injunction blocking the Whole Foods-Wild Oats merger, which a federal judge denied this week. And the Federal Communications Commission is currently reviewing the XM-Sirius merger.)

U.S. antitrust thinking has been inspired, Kovacic said, not only by the so-called Chicago School of law and economics but also the Harvard school of thought led by luminaries like the late professor Phil Areeda. "To really understand the DNA of modern competition law you have to look at the mutually reinforcing strands of both schools," Kovacic said.

Kovacic, who was speaking over lunch at this year's Aspen Summit organized by the Progress and Freedom Foundation, noted the FTC was more active now in antitrust cases than at any point since the 1970s.

Kovacic seemed noticeably more enthusiastic about antitrust enforcement than he was a decade ago when I audited his antitrust law class at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. nearly a decade ago. (He's on leave from his teaching gig.)

For instance, Ed Black, the head of the Computer and Communications Industry Association and an undeniable fan of aggressive antitrust enforcement, asked whether it's a good idea for federal agencies to have a "little more involvement upfront in a regulatory approach because remedial antitrust action later on is too late."

Kovacic agreed, saying "a sensible comeptition policy involves both tools." He added that, when it comes to the courts, "our views resonate when we can point to a base of knowledge...that we thought through the issue in question."

I wonder, though, if some of his former colleagues at George Mason University and elsewhere in academia would be as complimentary about the efforts of even well-meaning bureaucrats.