a political activist. self-publishing is part of the political activist process. so i would encourage those out there if you're passionate about it, you got to go for it yourself. you can't wait. >> what's a political activist in your view? >> i think it's someone who stays in involved on current events and stays on top of daily events. i talk loud enough for people to hear and bring them in. they can disagree, that's fine. there's a book called "the slobbering love affair." i read the book. >> bernard goldberg. >> it's about two or three chapters of my book. it's that big. you got to tell the whole story. i talk about how the media loved obama one day and the next day, no. you got to tell both sides to bernard goldberg, you did a great job on your book but there's much more to tell than just the part where the media loves him. the american people loved him. i don't know so much if the media loved him. i mean, i think barack obama would argue that there's certain

members of the media that love him. i don't agree with that. >> what do do you when you're not publishing books? >> i write screen plays here. you know, i live here in los angeles. my girlfriend, cathy, is someone who's very supportiveverything i want to do and she's been someone who has really pushed me forward. she was a big part -- i would say part of the self-publishing process is having someone to support you in terms of emotionally and, you know, push you and keep you going. that's a very important thing. d soetweeny writing screen plays and now doing a book and hopefully doing a lot of talking on talk shows about my book, i'm very passionate about this book, that's my life. and i love it. >> and if somebody is interested in purchasing your book, where can they find it? >> right now they can get it at amazon.com and quite a few people are getting it right there. a local story love, diesel, a bookstore, is a great store. it's probably going to be in book soup and those are local

bookstores. nationally, i haven't been able to get it into any but i think it's going to change. >> michael jason overstreet, 71 days: the media assault on obama. a self-published book. >> here's a look at some upcoming book fairs and festivals overhe next few months.

>> please let us know about book fairs and festivals in your area and we'll add them to your list. email us. scott rosenberg cofounder of salon.com write about the pioneers of blogging. the opera plaza in san francisco hosted this event. it's about a half hour. [applause] >> thank you. so as you heard, my book tells the story of blogging. where did this thing come from? who are the people whoreated it? and what are their stories se n

sevseve seven -- thanks. so who are the people who started blogging? what were their stories? it's a kind of contemporary history. and the common reaction i get from a lot of people when they hear is that is history, blogging, how can that be? it's so knew. but, in fact, blogs are 10 years old that name. and websites that were like blogging were around a lot longer than that. so there's plenty of history. a lot of stories. tales of what happens when people get the chance to say everything they want to in public. i think these stories have a lot to teach us as we move more and more of our lives online. the culture of silicon valley, the tech industry and the web tends to have a very short memory and even though the story of how blogging began is a

recent one, it's not that well-known. i've watched a lot of it myself first hnd and i thought it would be good to get it down while it's still fresh. so a decade ago, i was a technology editor at salon.com. and my job was to find one story a day to edit, we edit it, we'd illustrate it with a certain amount of loving care. i found a certain amount of websites that i that i'd tn to through the rest of my day. every time i returned to them they had something new. these sites didn't put a lot of time and effort into each story. in fact, they didn't really even publish stories. they posted items. some of these sites were produced by professionals. others were amateurs or one man shows. they all shared a couple of traits. they linked a lot. they weren't afraid the way so many news sites are of sending you away 'cause they figured you'd be back.

even more important, they didn't have a lead story or a top story. each time they posted something new, it went to the top of the page. now, i was an editor. i spent lots of time in meetings that were held expressly to decide what goes at the top of the page. and here, these sites were saying you don't need to do that. so this was a little distressing, a little hurtful even to me. yet, i kept coming back to these sites. they worked. and in 1998, people began calling these sites web blogs. a year later it got shortened to blogs. today there are millions of them around the globe. close to a million new posts every day. what the early bloggers discovered was a way of organizing writing that s native to the web. it made such sense that it took off. it wasn't an import from print or broadcasting. and it wasn' discovered by people like me who had arrived on the web with their heads full

of notions from print and broadcasting. it was discovered by outsiders who fell in love with the web and what it could do. i tell some of their stories. in the first part of the book i tell the tales of stories of many members of the blogging world but each story have a bit of a tragic dimension. none of them get exactly what they're seeking from their blogs. in the second part of the book i tell how blogging scaled up from a few dozen people to millions. and in the final section, i look at what the rise of blogging meant -- it has meant and continues to mean for our culture, for journalism and the future. so if i can ask for a show of hands how many of you here read blogs? okay. and how many of you have ever written a blog? great. thank you. when i ask this question, y

probably had to ask yourself another question, right? what is a blog? there isn't that much agreement on that question. the usual definition it's a personal website where the news stuff goes on top with a lot of links to other sites. that definition is pretty useful. it's pretty neutral. it describes a form. but for many of us the word "blogging" has come to describe a movement and the movement is all about getting people to speak for themselves people deciding for themselves what to write and what to read. today, there are political bloggers, personal bloggers, econo bloggers and mommy bloggers, blogger who are trying to build businesses and bloggers who are trying to make art. bloggers of every stripe. it's impossible to tell all their stories. in writing s everything, i had to choose just a few. i looked for the stories of people who understood what was happening way before i did. i looked for stories that hadn't

already been told. and i looked for stories that might have something to teach us. i begin with a guy named justin hall. he was a 19-year-old college student who started his went in january, 1994. and at that point, the website was actually mostly filled with academic research. hall looke at it and thought, hey, i can build a site and it can be all about me. he also started linking to other sites he found that he liked that were cool or weird. so right there you have the two foundations of blogging autobiography and nks. hall was sort of the original over-schairer. he knew no boundaries. he really did say everything, including detailed accounts of his love life and sometimes nude pictures of himself. a decade later, he fell in love with a woman who td him basically forget it. it's me or the blog. well, hall made the sensible

choice. let them read a brief passage of the book about the impact that hall had. there's an endearing habit justin hall has of shoving you aside, dow at your computer and reconfigurin everything for your own good. changing your default settings, arranging your desktop using helpful features you didn't know about. in a sense, hall changed the defaults of the web itself. in its formative stages, he turned it into an arena for youthful self-exposure. he put on a defiantly outrageous show, attracted a following and demonstrated how easy it was to do both. he took a medium that had been conceived as a repository for scholarship and scaled it down to personal size, then he took his confessions and intimacies and blasted them out to the whole world. the web was what made all this possible. but justin hall made it the norm, the expected, the default.

so anotherioneerho shaped blogging as we know it today was david whiner. whiner was a sofare developer who started an email newsletter in 1994 because he felt the tech industry press did a lousy job. he felt the rise of the internet meant the participants in the industry didn't have to depend on these trade publications to tell their own stories. they could do it themselves. they were the people formerly known as sources. he went on to create one of the earlier and most influential blogs called scripting news. he foresaw auture where millions of people would have their own websites. he was mocked by dismissive journalists and the millionf sites would help make the internet a more civil space. he saw a blog as the unedited voice of a pers. your blog was a space where no one could tell you to shut up.

and once we gave everyone such a space maybe people would fight less and communicate better. alas, we're still waiting for that to happen. so blogging started with people like justin hall and dave weiner, outsiders with a passion of this new form and new space. once they got it started, it began to spread rapidly and say everything. i tried to sort of follow a spark that started among software developers as so much on the web does and then spread to upstart journalists, political writers and concerned citizens. thenut into the business world and popular culte and beyond. i tell the storyf evan williams and meg, the founders of the company that create blogger 10 years ago. blogger was the software that really first brought blogging out of the tech ghetto and onto a wider stage beginning in 1999. it was a sort of a side-project. a tool that they used to

communicate with each other. they'd post little notes and ideas and links of other ideas on the web and they thought if we make this public it might be fun and help our business. that turned out to be right. then they thought maybe we should create a tool that makes it easy for anyone to do the same thing. and that was a very good idea. from that point forward, the people in stories say everything spread out much more widely. i write about a young reporter named josh marshall who started blogging about the 2000 recount and it became a test bed for using a blog for invegaittive blogging. and how blogging found a home like microsoft where individual bloggers stepped forward to put a human fe on a giant corporation. i tell the story of how nick denton and h gawker sites invented the idea of professional blogging, which was again kind of an oxymoron a

contradiction in terms. they took something that had been driven by love and passion and turned it into more of a cut-throat sweatshopyort of thing. and i compare that to the success of another blog you might have heard of called boing boing, a labor of love that turned into a lucrative business without losing its voice. then there's the story of heather armstrong of deuce.com. she became known in 2002 for losing her job as a web developer because she had indiscreetly posted catty comments about her coworkers. later, she wrote, my advice to you is, not so stupid. afterwards she started blogging about being a mom. she's a funny writer and her blog became very popular. when she faced a severe post partum depression depression she found suort among her readers that helpe her recover. i hope the book can tell these

stories than i can in the few minutes here so i'm not going to retell them at length. instead, what i want to do in the next few minutes and then we can take somequestions is give you my version of a top 10 list about blogging. now, it's not a top 10 list of blogs because that would be different for each of us here. it's a list of the top 10 myths about blogging and i have some audiovisual aids as well. special effects. so prepare yourself. okay. here we go. myth number 10, blogging isn't journalism. this point has been argued ad nauseam. but the controversy can b boiled down to fewer syllables than a haiku. some are doing blogging and some are doing journalism. is that hard? myth number 9, blogs will kill

journalism or blogs will replace journalism. bloggers actually never say or i shouldn't say never because there's millions of bloggers rarely say either of these things. they do criticize the media loudly and persistently and sometimes rudely. but that's not why the media business is melting down. if newspapers vanished can blogs fill the void? of course, not. but they'll provide us with a lot of experiments to help us figure out what's next. myth number 8. there is a blogosphere. in fact, there are lots of blogospheres. the political bloggers think they are the ogosphere. the tech bloggers think they are the blogosphere and so then. really, the blogosphere is whoever you read. all other generalizations, i think, are suspect. myth number 7, the first

blogger. there was no first blogger. it's a pointless exercise to try to name one. it's like asking who was the first novelist or playwright or poet. these are all forms that evolved. so did blogging. myth number 6, bloggers are nar cysts. of course you can find them on the well but to blog well you have to learn to link well. blogging is a social convivial pursuit. they link to each other and they have conversations with each other. if all you do is stair at your own naval, you're not going to get very far. myth number 5, bloggers can't be trusted. the argument is you can't trust blogs because they're anonymous or they're amateurish or they don't have editors. really, though, trust just works differently online than in the traditional media. with a newspaper or magazine or broadcast outlet, reputation is

the byproduct of an institution. on the web your reputation is a product of who links to you and what they say about you. myth number 4, there are too many blogs. okay, this is one you hear a lot, right? there are millions of blogs. what a nightmare! but wait a second, i don't think it's a nightmare. i think it's great. who says anyone needs to keep up? i choose blogs to read the same way choose a small number of books to read from the thousands that are released each year or i choose to see a small number of movies from the hundreds or the thousands that are released each year. why should blogs beny different? myth number 3, blogging is dead. yes, at the same time we have some people complaining that there are too many blogs to read. others are telling us that blogging is finished.

it's like that old yogi berra ne, nobody goes there anymore. it's too clouded. some say it's too chiefly from highly prominent technology blogs. they started blogs earlier in this decade and now they're red of blogging. there's nothing wrong with that. blogs have a natural life cycle. it starts with a certain energy and when that runs out, so does the blog. fine, but no one should project their own burnout onto the rest of the world. myth number 2, blogging is trivial. this word "trivial" attached itself to blogs very early on. but today, blogs are where the substantive action is in all the debates that matter in our society. healthcare reform, the real estate and banking meltdown, global warming. indeed, the debate about the future of journalism. the blogs that cover these issues are the best ways to understand them. blogs are our new public sphere.

and there's nothing trivial with that. okay. we're up to the big one, number one, the number one myth about blogging, most blogs stink. it's amazing how often you hear this one. we've all seen blogs that are silly o dumb or just sloppily thrown together. but we should also recognize that most blogs that have any staying power are the product of someone's passion. we should be careful about treating that passion with anger. and people who dare to write in public even when their work is rough or unpolished. they're learning. and we are too. maybe we're worrying all of this online speech will somehow crowd out the speech that we want to hear but the online world doest work that way. it's not like broadcast or print where there's a limited capacity for messages. my blog doesn't crowd out yours. there's room for everyone. so that's the end of the top 10 list but you know, sometimes

it's really good to go to 11. so in closing, i want to talk personally about another kind of misunderstanding or myth that's pretty widespread. the idea that sooner or later one day the web is going to calm down, grow up, put on a suit and stop being so bunktious. a lot of people thought it would be a new era of self-expression and i did too. but it didn't live up to it at first it wasn't until blogging became popular that we could see what that era really looked like. and we started calling it lots of things. web 2.0, user-generated content, the culture and it describes the same thing. the fact that we now have a medium that invites broad participation. that offers us the chance to create it together and add pieces of ourselves.

blogging was the first nd in some ways still the most significant form tha our contributions to the web have taken. it's proded us with a wealth of information and a lot of pleasure, too. when i started covering the web in the '90s, the conventional wisdom was the web was starting out as the wild west but sooner or later it would calm down, the pros, the people from hollywood and new york who dominated the old media world would move in and take over and all the little people could go home. well, this always struck me as a pretty cynical view. i looked around at the web and saw this generous, lively outpouring of human creativynd people were doing out of a sense of fun. i didn't want it to end. but i w a critic by training and a skeptic by inclination and i kept questioning my enthusiasm. i worried that the cynics were probably right. we'll lose this battle, i thought because losing these sorts of battles seemed inevitable and we'd been losing

them all my life but it's a decade later now and we haven't lost. the web is still open. we keep finding new ways to incorporate contributions from individuals and groups and the business is that think the web can and should be tamed into some sort of variation of the television broadcast model keep failing to make that happen. so as i wrote "say everything" i was ready to leave my old defeatism behind. i called the last chapter of the book, twilight of the cynics 'cause i wanted to say after 15 years that we now have the evidence to declare definitively that the web is not and is never going to be like broadcast tv. unless somebody messes with the laws and principles that have shaped today's internet, the web is alws going to be something that we build together. blogs were the first building blocks in that project and they're still among the most useful. so thank you for coming out. i should mention that the book's

websites sayeverything and i'm on twitter as scott ross and i'd be happy to take any questions that you have. [applause] >> thank you. [inaudible] >> isn't there -- two different realms there, the realms where you're making money and then the social realm, it's not necessarily oriented toward making money. you'd see your continued development, lack of monopolistic impulse in that area. but in areas where the efforts to make money you do see the corporate development take over. >> yeah, there's definitely a division between the commercial web, the web on which people are still trying to figure out how to make money sometime

successfully, sometimes not and the web that is created by people who are just following their passion. what's importa to me is that the second group is still free to do what they want. and whatever happens on the commercial side isn't restricting or confining that in any way. part of it, you know, is really just about people's sense of the significance of what they're doing. there's one -- there's a critic named nick karr who's written a lot about the web who says today's web is like the early days of ham radio, amateur radio, and that eventually we'll get to a point where the amateurs will give up. will be the way radio developed and, you know, we'll -- you know, the web will professionalize. and i don't see that happening because, you know, to get a ham radio license, you still have to learn morse code. it was kind of learning html in the early days of the web and to

write a blog today, you don't really need to know much bond english and if you're in anoer country, you know, whatever your language is. there's no barrier. there's nothing preventing you from doing what you want to do, whether the people who are developing the comrcial side of the web end up sort of figuring things out in their realm or not. thank you. [inaudible] >> how is it different than a blog? >> so if you want -- discussion boards, which actually predate blogging. they predate the web. there were discussion boards back to the '80s. one of them was called the well in the bay area i was a member of for a long time. and a discussion board is also at this point pretty easy to set up. there's software that you can get that's free. it sometimes takes a little work

to set up. but it shouldn't cost a lot of money. the big difference is that a discussion board is a group environment. and it's actually -- it could be the best -- it might be the best choice for a business that wants to allow customers toyou know, discuss its products or talk directly to it. but what people sometimes feel frustrated in discussion groups because it's easy for one person to disrupt. you know, if you've ever been in an online discussion or mail list there's people called trolls or people who get hung up on one thing or they're nasty to other people and it's an environment that's pretty easy to disrupt. you know, one of the things about blogs, people can post commts that are disruptive or nasty but it's your blog. you can delete those comments. you got that power. and so blogging puts a little

more of the weight on the side of the individual who's speaking and that has had some interesting value over time. [inaudible] >> yeah. >> where people have to sign up where -- so you can keep out people who don't blog ther where do you get a discussion with or where do you buy it? >> so where would you find a discussion board that people would have to register for? i couldn't tell you -- yeah, i couldn't tell you offhand, but if you go to google and look for discussion board or sometimes it's called forum or bulletin board software, i think you'll get a million alternatives. it's a pretty well developed industry. thanks. [inaudible] >> of writing what they want and the freedom of not being read by

somebody because they can't find out and, you know, figuring out what to read or how to find people or how to market your blog. what's the mechanism for, you know, a, finding readers or, b, if you're a reader finding the blog you want to look at? >> yeah, there's a saying out there now which is rders are much more scarce than writers today. and in some areas and some ways that's true. so the two parts to the question. let them start with in some ways the easie one. how to find blogs that you want to read. it's kind of like any kind of network in which if you find one blogger that you like and maybe that might be a friend or a coworker or someone you happen to stumble on through clicking on a link, that odd that person may have lots of links and you'll gradually, you know, kind

of make your way to things that are -- that matter to you. often, blogs cluster around specific topic areas, so if you're really interested in economics and you find one great economics blog, that's going to open the door for you. but that's true in almost every area today i think you'll find. finding readers, which is another way of saying marketing your blog really depends what your goals are. if you're trying to make money with a blog, there is today a hugely developed subculture of consultants and search engine optimumition experts and who will post endlessly on the website and they'll try to upsell you to get their services. i find a lot of that, you know, kind of not all that helpful. ultimately, if you have something to say that's unique

and you say it steadily over time 'cause blogging is something where persistence pays off and you begin to communicate with other bloggers who are writing about stuff that you're writing about and you lk to them, the moment you link they mean they're going to notice your writing 'cause they're goin see your link in your blogs, that's the way bloggers find other bloggers and they will begin linking to you if you're contributing something. and you may not ultimately develop enough of a following to support a business, but you will develop a following and your reputation will be enhanced and it's something that there's no magic formula. people look for shortcuts. they want to know how can i make my google rank, you kn, increase. and the best way to make your google rank increase is to write really good things that other people are linking to. yes. >> does it work algorithmly too in terms of the search creating

a blog? >> so i missed the beginning. >> if i'm writing a blog and people are searching and i've got some great titles and so forth, is it an algorithm that -- or being any of those that will -- >> so the way the search engine works, the search engines, generally, the basic way that google works and pretty much all search engines, they rank on the number of people who are linking into you and the ranks of those people who are linking into you. it kind of folds back on itself in a mathematical way that is beyond me but it wor really well. [iudible] >> in the tweet world, blogging increasing, decreasing or -- >> so how twitter affects blogging. does everybody know what twitter is? it's a new web-based communication tool that limits

you to 140 characters in each message and you pick people to follow twitter and you can see their messages and they can see yours. twitter interestingly, one of the founders of the company is evan william who is the founder of blogger and in some ways some people call twitter a microblogging tool 'cause it's very similar to blogging except you're limited to 140 characters. and the impact that's having on blogging really is that if you like to -- if your blogging tends to be really short messages, if it's very casual, if you're telling people as the joke used to be or the complaint used to be what you had for lunch, then you're probably going to be doing that on twitter today. it's more fun. it's easier to do. and it just kind of makes sense there of doing -- having all the sort of machineryf alog just to tell people what you had for lunch makes less sense today. but what i think that's doing to blogs is it's making me more

substantive. they are becoming more the place that we understand w put our ideas. our longer thoughts, our greater kind of efforts. anyone else? wellthanyou so much for coming out. i really appreciate it. thanks. [applause] . >> scott rosenberg is cofounder of salon.com and author of "dreaming code." to find out more visit sayeverything.com. >> business week legal affairs lindle hemle stein talks about "the king of vodka: the story of pyotr smirnov" she talks about the rise of vka. it's 35 minutes.

>> i'm just thrilled to be here at keplers. i love this bookstore. it's a wonderful institution. so the "the king of vodka," i get asked more than anything else why i wrote this book. and it's actually a really good question particularly for people who know me well. the research that was required for this book was absolutely immense. and it was mostly in early 19th and 20th century archives in russia. i live here and i don't speak a word of russia that was my first problem. secondly, the book really follows the story of russia itself in 19th and early 20th century russiarom the war to emancipation to industrialization to all of the labor strife, the fall of the czars and, of course, the russian revolution. and i've never studied russian

history. another problem for me. and as you probably figured out, by now if you've tasted some of the moss key mules coming in and this is about a man who made vodka and i'm not much of a drinker. the question why would i write this book is a very good one. and the answer simply is, it was just too amazing of a story to ignore. when i was the legal affairs editor for business week magazine if 1996, a man came to see me. and he brought with him a long white scroll that he unrolled on a conference room table and it turned out to be a smirnov family tree going back to the 700s and he began to tell me the story of this family who began as serfs can which were the lowest of the lows in russia. and peter smirnov, our hero in the story here, was born a serf,

completely uneducated, had absolutely no connections of any kind, grew up in a very rural village and yet by the end of his life, managed to become one of t most successful and prominent merchants in all of russia. he was one of the wealthiest men in russia when he died and having been born a serf he ended his life being granted honorary nobility which was a huge deal at the time. it just did nohappen. so as this man kind of told me the bare bones of the story, i felt like this was something i had to find more out about. and he had actually come to see me to tell me about how smirnov's descendants, some of them were suing in court in different places in the world try to get their trade marks back and after communism fe, they were trying to get them back. so i wrote the story for business week. and and i was fascinated and

followed the story but for a while really didn't do a whole lot with it. i moved out here. i became the silicon valley bureau chief. i was covering ebay and yahoo! i wrote a book called seabiscuit. it's a great story about an underdog horse who comes from nothing and win it all and it's -- so it's a wonderful sort of unexpected surprise story, but what it also is, it's a great lesson in history. i mean, you learn about how jockeys lived, you learn about the history of horse racing. you learn about all kinds of things above and beyond the story itself. and when i read that book, a light bulb went off in my head and i said that's what i want to do with smirnov. so that's kind of how i got started on all of this. i would like to read a very

short passage for you from the book that i think will demonstrate to you what a surprising life thisan had and why i couldn't get him out of my head. the smell of mud and w stone hung in the air. moscow had been in the mst of an unusually warm spell. it was already late november. yet dand lions and daisies were poking out of the earthurtured by a balmy drizzle. the few flakes of snow that had fallen had quickly vanish leaving cobblestones glistening on the ground. as the days wore on, it seemed like winter might never come. but it did finally. as december 1898 arrived, a chill snuck up on moscow like an invading army, snow began to fall before day break and continued without interruption. soon, a thick coat of white buried the city. within a day, temperatures dropped another 15 degrees leaving russia's then second

largest city in its more typical seasonal state. gray and frigid. little else was typal that december day particularly at the corner of just past the cast iron idge, a pathway that led directly to the red square at the kremlin. crowds had flowed into this neighborhood known aa hub for moscow's flourishing merchant class. wealthy businessmen arrive with their elegant wives important government officials and religious leaders left other important issues to make an appearance and workers and peasants came in droves leading to st. john the baptist church. the crush was so dense that movement became almost impossible. horse-drawn trams were forced to stop running as long lines of carriages surrounded the block and all eyes turned toward a

majestic chairot with rich silver brocade. it was parked before the grandest residence on the block, a three-story high mansion that was attestment tthe architectural beauty cropping up all over russia and the deacon from st. john baptist church emerged. a group carrying a coffin carrying a breathe with natural flowers fell after him and a choir came out followed by a dozen workers. each carried a pillow with sacred medals and honors earned by the deceased during an exaordinary life. other church elders and dignitaries followed next. at last a coffin emerged draped in fabric made of golden brocade and raspberry velvet. it was theecond day of december and this elegant tribute was not for a czar or a high ranking minister or a military chief. the man inside the long box was pyotr smirnov, arguably the most

famous vodka maker in the world. so most of the informationrom that passage came from the newspapers that covered smirnov's funeral. and when i read about that, i don't kn about you but i was amazed they made such a fuss out of a vodka maker so i really made it my vision to find out why and i think you'll find it hopefully as fascinating as i did. one of the things about smirnov was that he was really an extraordinary marketer. when he began making his vodka in the 1860s, there were literally thousands of vodka makers in russi and at the time there were no protections for brands and it wasn't lely that u were going to advertise 'cause most people were illiterate and you couldn't make fancy labels and smirnov didn't have the money anyway.

what he did know and his customer. he had been a serf himself and he knew what kinds of things people responded to. so ver very early on in his career as a vodka maker, smirnov went to a place in moscow called the market. and it was one of the smelliest, grimiest most disgusting places in all of moscow. people would serve -- or try to sell rotten food there and they would keep it warm by actually sitting on the pots that the food in. that's how they kept warm and kept the food warm. one of the journalists at the time called it a moving rotten pit. so you can imagine what this place w like but smirnov went there because people also came there to get day labor. and he rounded up 15 men and he brought them back to his vodka factory. he sat them down at a long table. he gave them food. he gave them vodka. and then he slapped three rubles

in front of each man. and he said here's what i want you do. i want you to fan out in moscow and go to the pubs. i want you to walk into the pubs and i want you to demand smirnov vodka and when the waiter tells you they've never heard of smirnov vodka, let me get you make a scene so everybody hears you say, how could you possibly not have this extraordinary vodka. this is the best vodka that's being made anywhere. you must serve it. and called the manager in and make sure everybody hears you. then leave and go to the next pub and repeat the scene all over again. so these men did that and as the story goes, within literally days, orders for smirnov vodka were flowi in. but smirnov was smart. he wasn't done. he called the men back to his factory and he said, okay, moscow isgood. but russia is a big country. i want you to get on the trains and i want you to get off at

every single stop. and i want you to do the same thing there. and literally within an extraordinarily short period of time smirnov was the top producers in all of russia. however, he was doing very well with the masses, people who came from backgrounds like his. but he really, really longed to be accepted by the aristocracy. he wanted more than anything else really to be the czar's purveyor. and they were not hanging out at the pubs in moscow and in the countryside. these people were at, you know, tony restaurants and very great clubs. so he had to figure out somethg else. and what smirnov did was actually also quite brilliant. he started first to enter competitions, international competitions outside of russia so he went to vienna and he went to paris and he went to philadelphia and chicago. and he entered his liquors in these competitions and he started to rack up some awards. and there was nothing that

russians like better at the time is for western europeans to acknowledge that one of theirs was actually doing something worthwhile. so that was the first way he got some attention for himself. he racked up these awards but what he also did was to sho himself to be not just agreed greedy businessman. in russia at the time, as you cawell imagine, merchants were not consided honorary folks. there was a sense throughout society that you could not be a successful businessman unless you were corrupt and you were taking advantage of the people and you were doing all kinds of things that were not -- appropriate. so in order to make themselves, i guess -- some people had said to atone for their sin of wealth, merchants gave a lot of their money away. they were big philanthropists. so smirnov, being a very smart

philanthropist, he didn' give his money away to any charity. he went out to sought the charities that the czar favored and had aristocrats on their boards so he was very, very smart in making these connections with the leaders in russia at the time. so by the time 1886 came around and smirnov applied to be the czar's purveyor, he became the czar's purveyor and this was a very, very big thing. the czar had purveyors for everything. steinway provided the czars with pianos and singer provided the sewing machine and there was a royal leech man. you could literally name anything and the czar had a purr vaer. but smirnov was the czar's vodka purveyor and this was a very, very big deal. so what happens to smirnov, though, that he gets to be so

good at what he does is that he almost becomes a lightning rod for alcohol in russia. so alcoholism still today a problem in russia then as well a problem in russia. and smirnov, being so prominent by then becomes somebody who gets associated with the drinkingroblem. people began to write about him. people you may have heard of, for example, anton chekhov, the wonderful playwright wrote a column in his early years and he called smirnov by name and other vodka makers peddlers of satan's blood. so he didn't mince words at all. another critic was tolstoy, and tolstoy, i didn't know this, but i did get to learn this -- he was a very promint temperance advocate in russia. and he devoted much of his writing and much of his talng and much of his energy to the sobriety movement.

in fact, there's a great story about tolstoy calling people together in his village, putting a sheet of paper down on a big picnic table, it's basically a document telling all the men i want you to sign the document. the document basically said i'm going to give up drinking. i'm going to give up smoking, i'm going to give up all these terrible vices because tolstoy really believed that it deadend your conscience and it made russian people do things they wouldn't otherwise do and that's why russia wasn't more productive and successful. so he got all these people to sign this and thene actually had a ditch dug and he made people come with their flasks and their little tobacco pouches and anything else they could possibly temp they want and they had to throw it in the ditch. of course, this did not work but it was a good effort. it was a good attempt and tolstoy kept up his rants about the alcohol problem for years.

in fact, i found out that he was one of the people who designed the -- what would have been the very first alcohol warning labels, and it was like a skull and crossbones and it just said poison. but it never happened but tolstoy was effective in raisi the profile of the alcohol problem in russia. and as a result, the czar at the end of the 19th century instituted a vodka monopoly. decided the government was better suited to taking care of the vodka economy than individuals. and that was a huge blow as you can well imagine to smirnov's business although not -- not fatal. they did some other things that allowed them to stay afloat. he sold wines. he sold cognacs and they told vinegar and were able to stay afloat but smirnov's sons were not smirnov. they inherited the business. and they had issues of their own. they had grown up very

privileged. there was nothing they didn't get. they had wonderful educations. they were exposed to all of the finer things in life. and they kind of liked it that way. smirnov's oldest son was probably the most like smirnov himself and he predominantly led the business until his death in 1910 but the other brothers had issues. one brother fought alcoholism all his life and was really never interested in the business. another brother was much more interested in the theater and horse racing and sold his rights in the business. another brother was kind of a rebel, and he actually did the unthinkable. he invested about a million dollars in a liberal-leaning newspaper that had a jew for an editor. so that was -- that was a really bad thing to do. for the smirnovs at the time. so the sons really struggled and, of course, then the russian revolution happens and everything in russia was nationalized. all private businesses were nationalized and the smirnov

suffered like a lot of people did at the time, you know, losing really everything. one of smirnov's sons, vladimir was put into a bolshevik prison. he was sentenced to death because he was a capitalist. and he was lined up actually on a wall five different times with the fire squad right in front of him. and they would say, ready, aim and then they would break out in laughter. this was psychological torture. they d this five times and miraculously and truly the only reason why the smirnov brand survives today is because the prison that vladimir was in was liberated. so he was able in 1919 to flee russia. he went to western europe and tried to re-tablishhe brand, not particularly successfully but he did -- he d try and ended up licensing the brand to a russian emgray who was living in the united states . in 1984 smirnov was the first

vodka that was produced and sold in the united states. it was not a success. it was a disaster. the united states was pretty much of a beer-drinking, whiskyoving nation and we weren't so excited about this vodka thing so for years, this man struggled until he ended up selling the brand again to a company you might have heard of hublin known for a-1 steak sauce and nothing really happened until after world war ii. and after world war ii, john martin who was the ceo of this company decided, you kno we have to do something with this vodka. we have to get rid of it so he got together with his friend who was the owner of the cock and bull in l.a. which was a l.a. watering hole at the time and the owner had ginger beer and he needed to get rid of this ginger beer. so they decided l's get our

drink together. i don't know who tasted the moscow mule before you sat down but they invented the moscow mule and that was a commission of ginger beer, lime juice, and smirnov vodka. and it was incredibly successful. in part because john martin borrowed some of smirnov's old tricks. heookne of the ver first polaroid cameras and he went into the bars in l.a. and he took one picture of the bartender making the moscow mule and heave it to the bartender. he took a second picture and he walked to the next bar and he said, hey, yr competition is making this great drink. it's called the moscow mule, everybody is drinking it. why aren't you making it. and pretty soon the moscow mule became a extremely popular drink in the united states and smirnov took off in the united states and i find it amazing -- smirnov is born in 1831. he died in 1898. and tay smirnov is the

best-selling spirit in the world, the number one brand, the most valuable spirits brand in the world. it's ubiquitous. it's james bond's vodka of choice for god's sake. how much better does it gets than that? so the story -- it kind of -- it's a amazing story. it has relevance to today. i mean, we know the product. there's things happening in russia that are reminiscent that's happening in the book that i hope you will buy. i hope you will like it and i will be delighted to answer any questions that you might have. and i've been told they wod like to you come and ask questions in the microphone. so thank you very much. [applause] >> all right. have the smirnov family seen the book and if they have, what are their feelings about it? >> well, i don't actually know. i don't know if they've seen it.

the book has not been translated into russn. it's going to be in portuguese. it's going to be hungarian and some other languages and it's not going to be in russian. and the descendents that i met with when i went to russia only spoke russian. so we are workingn potentially seeing if we can get them the book and seeing what they would think -- to be honest, they were not particularly enthusiastic about my project. at the time i started this, the lawsuit was still going on. and when i went to russia and met with smirnov's great granddaughter, no matter what i said, i could not convince her that i was an independent journalist pursuing a story that i found fascinating. she assumed that i had been hired by the company tha owns the smirnov brand now and i was writing a book to help them win the lawsuit. just an idea of an independent

journalist it just didn't work. and to be fear, diagio wasn't excited talking to me. so we spent a lot of time in the archives. >> do you think that the smirnov vodka today tastes anything like his smirnov vodka or do you have any clue as to what that would have been like. >> well, you know, i had -- i've been asked that question a lot. and as i said, i'm not a big drinker and it' a little bit hard for me to tell. initially, it's my understanding that they were making smirnov dka the way they had always made it. there were some 300 recipes that survived the revolution and was ken to western europe. but when i put the question to diagio, they -- they didn't really make it qui clear. so i'm actually not sure. some of the recipes, though, some of the flavored vodkas and things smirnov definitely made

during his time. he was -- he actuall would have done really well in the current world because he was a fanatic about fresh and local and natural. he used to have herbs and fruits carted in from the countryde i mean, literally wagon loads of them brought to his factory in moscow and that's how he infused his vodkas. he never used essences or artificial flavors or any kind. those were only introduced later. >> can you talk about the language barrier you probably had notpeaking russian and how you got into the archives and how you found people got the information that you were looking to translate into english? >> well, i was very, very, very lucky 'cause i found the world's most wonderful woman to be my researcher and translator and she really stayed with me the whole time. she's a russian living in moscow and she was extraordinary.

she was really -- i could not have done this without her and i did find that i needed -- i really -- not only for the languagessues but for the cultural issues, too, as an american, it was tough going into some of these archives and explaini what i wanted to do and getting over some of the prejudices of my being an american and she didn't, obviously, have any of that problem. so i relied on her hugely. i mean, i was also fortunate in that there's a smirnov vodka archive if you can believe it at harvard university. so i got access to hundreds of documents there. and thankfully most of them were already translated so it was already kind of a really, really lucky break for me and there's some stuff at columbia universi as well and i got some things out at berkeley so i was able to do some of the research here which really helped but it was my researcher in moscow. i had a real vision for what i wanted to do with this book. so i was able to funnel questions to her and then she

would really go out into the countryside and deal with -- [inaudible] >> ah, how did i find her? there is actually a woman in san francisco who is a friend of a friend, who's here, and i talked to her about -- she deals a lot with the russian community here and knewmmigrants to the area, and she actually knew the woman who turned out to be my researcher from her efforts. and she put me in touch with this woman not because she thought i would be my researcher but had connections to someone with my researcher and when we met in moscow and talked she was excited -- as excited about the story as i was and agreed to quit her current job and work with me as a researcher. so it was really so lucky. ..

>> so that diagio not only know imports its smirnoff into russia, but all of the liquors that it makes. and the family was not a part of that settlement. the family still is not involved in making, in making the vodka or in any aspect of the business.

there -- i'm sorry, the second part of your question was what? >> [inaible] >> okay. yeah, it's actually fascinating. so among the other things, it was sort of multipronged as most litigation is, but vladimir, the son that had escaped russia and licensed the brand did not have a right to do that because he had already sold his shares to the business to his brother which he had done before the revolution. but that brother died, two of the other brothers died and one of them, because he still lived in russia, couldn't revive the brand. but their claim is that it was wrongly sold in the first place and that he didn't have a right to do it, therefore, it should revert back to the family. they also claimed consumer deception, false advertising becae they felt like people assumed smirnoff was still the russian smirnoff and, in fact, hadn't been made in russia for many decades.

so it had a lot of aspects to it. and they ended up changing the label somewhat and some other things to clarify that point. >> linda himelsteven is the former bureau chief for "newsweek". keepler's books in menlo park, california, hosted the event. for more information visit keeplers.com. >> now booktv will break for the c-span program, "the communicators." booktv will resume its holiday weekend in half an hour. >> this week on "the communicators," three reporters will discuss significant technology and telecommunications issues inhe upcoming session of congress and at the federal communications commission. >> host: well, with the fcc fully staffed with five

commissioners and congress coming back in, we thought we'd take this opportunity on "the communicators" to look at some of the telecommunications policy that might be looked at by t fcc and by the congress. we're joined by three working reporters, kim hart of the hill, fawn johnson of dow jones, and andrew noyes of congressdaily. kim hart, what is the main legislative item or the main regulatory item on the fcc's agenda in your view? >> guest: well, i guess mr. the fcc's perspective they're splitting the time between a couple of things. the main piece of their time is being spent on broadband stimulus orhe national broadband plan they're putting together that is due in february. so right now i think they're finishing up thiseek, i think. about 23 or so workshops pulling in industry players, anyone who ha anything to say about broadband and the state of that

service in the u.s. and how it can be made better and expanded to more eople. so that' a big focus of theirs. and i would say another one is really drilling into the wireless industry and trying to get a better sense of the state of competition there. who the main players are, what kind of information that they make available to consumers, and what the commission can do to make that a more consumer-friendly industry. >> host: let's start a little bit with the broadband poly. fawn johnson, do you see a broadband national policy coming this fall, and where does the stimulus fit into what they're working on? >> guest: that's a good question because the actual plan is due after a big chunk of the stimulus money for broadband funds have been spent. and we all know that thas probably not the timeline that anybody in this space would have wanted, but that's how congress set it. so we've got the fcc looking at big picture ideas, how do you get all of the people in the

industry to start building out to places that they might not already do? how do you make that a sustainable, profit-building experience for them through soft ideas? then you've got the commerce department and usda who are chard with about $7 billion of grant money actually going through applications from, you know, small and large organizations saying, you know, i want to build a wi-fi system in one particular community and trying to figure out who to give that money to. it's happening on dual tracks, i think the idea is that the stimulus money's supposed to be a short-term hit to get broadband to a few more places that might not have been there. fcc is looking really long term, decades down the road, and they're also, i think, trying to change how people think about internet and make it be more like electricity and less like some service that you would, you know, pay for and it's nice, but you don't necessarily need it.

i think that's their goal. how they get there is going to be interesting to watch. we're not really sure yet. >> host: do you think an activist fcc in the next two months? >> guest: activist in the -- >> host: in the broadband area. >> guest: they're all collecting data right n. >> host: what does that mean? >> guest: that's a good question. [laughter] we don't really know. they're asking a lot of questions. we are told that in the next couple months, in the fall things are going to start to get a little more activist per se which, i think what that means is they're going to start making some decisions about what we need to know and where we need to push. so, for example, if you're going to talk about just what is the definition of a high-speed inrnet access line, you know, then we're going to start to make some decisions, you know? is something, you know, your typical ds lurk connection good enough or not? and that's going to start to, there's going to be a little

push/pull there, and they're going to make some decisions, but that hasn't happened yet. >> guest: yeah, and i think if they don't start to take the answers that they're getting and take the comments that they're getting from industry players and even consumers and actually start to use those to make some decisions or start floating some ideas about what they possibly might do, the commission might start to take a little bit of heat from the public interest groups who he been saying -- the commission has been saying and julius genachowski especially has been saying that he wants it to be a very da-driven agency. every decision they me cannot be made until they have sufficient information and numbers to back up their decisions. and their ideas and what they're pushing out. but they've spent a lot of time on that recently, and pretty much most of their action so far has basically been asking for information and saying we're opening this up for comment. please let us know what you think. so if they don't start in the

next few months taking some of that and actually doing something witht or showing the public and these public interest groups and consumer advocates that they're doing something with it that is worthwhile and pushing towards their larr agenda, they might start to get some friction from that as well. >> host: andrew noyes, what about congress? how much oversight of the stimulus money and broadband policy are you seeing? >> guest: i think that congress spent quite a bit of time on, you know, laying out the logistics, and now they're kind of waiting to see what happens from the fcc. i would imagine that the senate commerce committee and others are probably also waiting, like we are, to see a lot of the data. i think we'll know more after february once the report is due to congress. i also wanted to touch on the wireless competition issue because that's another thing that congress has been pushing very hard about. senator cole who heads the antitrust bcommittee within the senate judiciary comttee

had pushed very hard for the fcc to look into this and, of course, that along with broadband kind of the two topics that genachowski's taken right out of the gate. a third topic that a lot of people may be wondering about is net neutrality, keeping the internet open and that sort of thing. it was something that president obama mentioned a few times on the campaign. he mentioned it again back when he unveiled the big cybersecurity report. and that's another issue that they will -- >> host: and we're going to come back to that. anything else to be said about broadband before we move on? anything else to add? then let's move on to the wireless issue that you brought up and that you brought up also. both the chairman, julius genachowski, and the senior republican, i guess, robert mcdowell both spoke about wireless policy recently. want to show you a little bit of that and then get your reaction. >> the item that the notice is

called wireless competition repo is it does go beyond what cmrs has understood to be narrowly to look more broadly at all of the elements that effect what we understand to be the global marketplace. it's an important step in the process of laying a solid foundation for predictable, fax-based competition policy in the wireless sector, a process that will continue with other competition reports that the agency is responsible for preparing. competition is, of course, important for many reasons including that it producds low prices and high quality for consumers. competitn is also the mother of invention which makes it especially important in a fast-changing marketplace like communications. today's competition notice is an essential companion, therefore, to the innovation and investment notice that we discussed earlier and vice versa. >> the commission's long

standing policy to allow competitive market forces rather than command and control regulations to foster the development of and investment in wireless networks and services has led to remarkable advances. thus, i hope that we will proceed with care, mindful that any future action we consider should aim to attract more private investment capital rather than deter it. >> host: andrew noyes, what were they talking about? >> guest: well, they were talking about what simply could, i guess, be characterized as the whether or not to, whether or not government needs to eventually step in and see how competitive that space is. me folks would argue that companies like at&t and verizon have a strangle hold on the market. some of the smaller players in that space have argued that for some time. so right now as they're doing

with the broadband plan, the fcc is compiling a lot of data, and that process really began at the meeting you just showed. so they're looking at that. and at the same time the republicans are saying, now, let's not be hasty, let's not intervene too much because, look, the mobile marketplace is thriving right now, and that's as a result of us taking more of a light touch. >> guest: well, and one thing that's important to remember in all of this is that wireless is getting a lot of attention in part because it's considered absolutely critical to the broadband plan, especially in those rural areas where i don't see, you know, fiber being connected to every home, you know, out in rural montana. and so it's become -- you find essentially two different industry sectors kind of coming together. and in the internet there's a tradition that with a lot of advocacy behind it towards keeping it open. in the wireless space, they

haven'had that kind of regulation, and so now the commissions, i mean, they're just starting to ask questions about where should we let the market forces ride through, and where do we need to poke a little bit and make sure everybody has access? >> guest: and also asking questions about where, what parts of the country don't have meaningful competition or really pele don't have the kind of access to wireless tha they do in other parts of the country, so that's also a leg of their probe. >> guest: and the one thing that commissioner mcdowell also said at that meeting was that, you know, look at how successful e wireless industry has been over the past decade. look at how much it's grown year over yearver year which you don't see often in an economy like this. and one of the things that he argued and it was echoed by new commissioner meredith at well baker, also republican, said one of the reasons it has thrived like it has done is because it

has been left to market forces, you know, it has been left to the companies and the consumers to make those decisions and take more of the kind of internet approach and work the way it needs to wk. but on the other side of that coin there is the argument that andrew menoned, you know, there isn't -- not all pple in all cities or towns of this country have access to four carriers or five carriers. >> guest: even one. >> guest: right. >> guest: some of them. >> guest: and i think another teresting point, something that will kind of be woven into this larger examination at the fcc is the work thathey have begun looking into a particular instance that involves apple and apple and their popular ipod device, at&t and goggle. so there were some claims that apple had rejected a google application for the iphone, and they basically requested,

requested some responses from the companies to really get @n idea of what's going on in that space. i think that that investigation on a very micro level could shed some light on how this commission plans to proceed in the big picture. >> guest: right, right. and that was mainly zeroing in on these exclusive contracts or partnerships that a carrier can have with a hand seth maker which is pretty common. sprint has it with the pre , and the most well known one is with at&t ask the iphone. does that kind ofn exclusive agreement hurt competition and reduce choice for consumers not just in the handsets, but the applications they can get on those handsets? >> guest: it's interesting, though, because i think they're being real careful on that one because, obviously, once you start talking about the iphone, people freak out, you know? >> host: why? >> guest: well, at&t has as far

as we can tell, it's a multiyear exclusive agreement with apple to market the iphone. they won't actually tell you how long it is. it's not illegal, but it's unusual. most agreements last less than a year, and the idea is they can shar the risk between the developer and the carrier. and i think the iphone is sort of the poster child for what's either right or wrong about these exclusive agreements. and apple and a, the can, the d at&t, they have to beat back the forces, but they do it differently. at&t told the fcc, we don't really have any choice. this is apple's decision. but at the same time they're the carrier, they're in partnership with them, and they need to be -- they're going to be regulated the same that anyone else is should the commission actually decide to do something. but they haven't really made any decisions yet. at this point they're just kind of poking. and they've made it very clear

it's not an official investigation or formal review, they're just asking questions. >> host: and, andrew noyes, senator cole poked at this issue, too, didn't he? >> guest: he certainly did. he had a high-profile heang before they adjourned for the summer where he brought some of the stakeholders to the table and really tried to figure out from his perspective what the state of competition is. he was very critical of companies like at&t and verizon and, as i sd, really pushed the fcc to take action. >> host: and has this, could this lead to the demise of this agreement? is there any sign? >> guest: i actually, recently some of the analysts have been suggesting tha the agreement is going to go away without any sort of regulation. i'm going to make a guess that the agency actuall wts to do

something, that's kindf a low-hanging fruit item to jusp -- it is true that consumers, real consumerses -- not lobbyists -- actually complain about n being able to get an iphone if they have some carrier that isn't at&t. it's especlly true in rural areas, so in an agency that starts off with a consumer bent, that's not actually -- that's a relevant question to ask, and it's not that hard to fix. how they do it is probably going to be the focus of a lot of flurry of activity, but there may be some logic to sing, look, you know, all of you out in the marketplace do what you need to in order to create these new handsets, but don't have an endless exclusive agreement. you know, make it be some amount of time, a year or two years. i don't know that that's what they're going to do. they certainly haven't told me that, but if i was just reading what they say about consumers, that's a top complaint. i get e-mails from readers who

complain it, i'm sure the fcc gets their share of comments. >> host: kim hart? >> guest: yeah, the haven been explicit on wha they plan on doing in this area, and it is a pretty easy fix and a low-hanging fruit for them to go right off the bat and say, okay, we're going to decide this isn't something we condone. but i haven't seen any indication of what they plan on doing now. i think, you know, after the meeting it was asked, you know, what do you plan on doing now that you have the responses from apple and at&t and bag google? and cirman genachowski said, wellthe responses wervery interesting, but that's about as far as i'm going to go on that. host: andrew, do you foresee congre taking action on that? >> guest: they could. i think senator kohl and others are waiting to see where the fcc ges on this. he did issue a reaction when the letters from the companies were due to the fcc.

he and the staff are watching this very carefully as are members of the house. so i think it's to be continued at this point. >> host: you also introduced the topic of net neutrality, network management. what kind of legislative or regulatory action do you foresee, if any? >> guest: well, right before august recess representative markey and eshoo introduced their net neutrality bill which mirrored similar proposals that we'd seen in the past. they kind of wanted to get that out there, kind of lay down that marker. from the fcc stand point, they obviously as we've been discussing are preoccupied with all of the deadlines and work on the broadband plan and wireless competition, but on capitol hill i think we can expect to see a lot more in this space. senator dorgan into deuced the senate's net neutrality bill last time around, i would imagine he'll probably reintroduce, and i guess a wd

card that some have questioned is representative boucher who chairs the communication subcommittee on energy and commerce. he was out in front on this last congress. this time he's not an original co-sponsor of the markey-eshoo bill. a lot of the stakeholders that support net neutrality have said, you know, boucher's been clear on his position in the past, so we expect him to be a prominent player, but people are scratching their heads about why he's not on the front lines. a lot of other folks have said he's got a lot of other issues on his plate. >> host: are you seeing a flurry of lobbying activity both for and against thearkey-eshoo bill, and simply put, what's the marker that it lays down? >> guest: well, to answer your first question, no, i haven't seen a flurry of activity. i don't know if you all have se this yet. because of the other priorities that are out there. but i would imagine that the longer the fcc sys silent on

this issue the more we're going to see from the lobbyists. and s-- >> guest: right. and all the fcc has really said is reinstated the fact that it is a pro-net neutrality agency at this point. >> guest: we haven't seen any statement, i don't think, from commissioner clyburn or from commissioner baker. >> guest: you're right. that has only -- >> guest: we don't really know where they stand. >> guest: you're right. >> guest: and the other thing to mention, i think, is that when julius genachowski was asked about this at his confirmation hearing, his answer was very careful. i don't think i even heard the term open in his response. he talked a lot about competition and innovation, but we actually, i mean, i think he made some statements to you, kim, in one of your interviews, i'm very solidly for net neutrality, but we haven't

gotten any indication about what he means about that, and the definition has evolved such that at this point we almost need a new term, i think, to really b able to debate it fairly. >> guest: and som of this is going to be held in limbo until the court decision comes down on comcast, the comcast lawsuit in which comcast took action against the fcc saying that the fcc did not have the authority or jurisdiction to tell them how they can manage their network. and so that is now locked in court, and i'm not even sure when that decision is expected out. i haven't heard -- >> guest: well, they just had to file their preliminary papers -- >> guest: probably not this year. >> guest: not this year. >> guestright. so there may not be a whole lot of action or even lobbying activity until that decision becomes -- >> guest: genachowski has also said he's keeping an eye on that case, so that's important, and his general counsel are kind of figuring out how they need to

proceed or if they should proceed in any way. >> host: well, speaking of comcast and court dates, there recently was a court decision regarding comcast and media ownership. fawn johnson, what was that, and what's the net result? >> guest: well, itas a big win for comcast, not a huge surprise. but the court struck down a rule that had been actually put in place by genachowski's former, his pdecessor, kevin martin, with the help of a couple of democrats that would cap the subscribership that any single cable operator has at 30 percent of the market. and the court in a pretty strongly-worded opinion struck the whole thing down, they tossed it out which is unusual for even for this court here. and so now there's no cap. the practical effect of that is that comcast, if they wanted to,

could more easily go in and buy a small cable operator like, i don't know, cox or cablevision or something like that. there's no other cable operator that even comes close to that kind of market share. but in the broader perspective it speaks a lot to the, the ability of the commission to go forth and try and actually regulate competition. you know, the court said that the decision had been made, that they were arbitrary and capricious in making this decision, that they ignored the court's previous instruction to look at other markets, and they were pretty harsh about it. so if anything i would say that, you know, and i would expect nothing less of chaman genachowski, that they're going to be careful as they go forward and try and -- they want new players in the market, but doing something as sort of blunt as just saying here's your cap and you can't go above this, that may not fly anymore.

i don't know. >> guest: and that court ce, i mean, that decision may not be the end of the story. i know that after that came out, some of the stakeholders that oppose that said that they're going to go to congress, and they're going to push for legislation. >> guest: right. well, yeah -- >> guest: but we don't know. >> host: fawn johnson, what else is on the fcc's agenda in the coming months? >> guest: well, we've touched on probably the biggest things they're dealing with, but i think, you know, as you pointed in your clip, genachowski has teed up, you know, there's going to be other competition inquirieshat they're making, so wireless isn't the beginning. they're going to be looking at the cable iustry and probably expand that out to some of the others. then they're engaged in some other, i would call them sort of behind-the-scenes type activities. they've got a big fcc reform staff that's set up to try and change the agencies. the last time they did this it

actually resulted in some legislative changes. they're just at the beginning of that, but the person who actually led the effort the last time around is doing it this time. her name is mary beth richard, she's general counsel or something for one of the commissioner. the other thing they're doing is not vy sexy but could have some far-reaching implications is they're doing a top to bottom review of their data that they have of the industry, and they are, they're looking to see what they don't have and then how, what they might need to answer some critical questions like is there competition in this particular space? some of the, some of the preliminary, you know, just statements from officials even at the beginning are that the data they have aren't very good, it's not compiled very well, it's old, it's cartered across -- satterred across different industries. it's an open question that they're going to decide they

need to compel data from the industry. some of it's sensitiving, pricing, they're not easily given up. so those are, i think those are long-term. i doubt we're going to see any real action on either of those things within the next year, but it's worth keeping an eye on becausthey could eventually come around and say, you know, we need of the day that on all your subscribers or all your prices or something, you know, so that we can decide where we need to go in and tweak the market a little bit. >> host: speaking of data, andrew noyes, a new bill has been introduced by senators rockefeller and i believe snowe regarding the internet and presidential powers. what does that do? >> guest: well, that's the most controversial part of the bill, but the bill that senators rockefeller and snowe introduced earlier in the year is a very broad cyber security bill. they introduced it before the