On Wednesday May 2 from 1:00pm - 4:30pm at the Georgia Tech Global Learning Center in Technology Square senior White House officials are hosting a forum. The objective of the forum is to meet with entrepreneurs and hear directly from them on ideas and suggestions for reducing barriers and improving regulations to build a more supportive environment for entrepreneurship and innovation. In short they want to learn how to encourage business growth.
Officials attending the event include Deputy Administrator of the US Small Business Administration Marie Johns, Associate Administrator of Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Michael Fitzpatrick,Deputy Director of the US Patent and Trademark Office Teresa Rae, Senior Economist at the Council of Economic Advisors Ronnie Chatterji.
On Monday the White House announced the Startup America Partnership. Startup America is a White House initiative to celebrate, inspire, and accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship throughout America. Below is a nice video of Austan Goolsbee the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers explaining the program.
About the only criticism I have about the program is the expression "valley of death." I live in startup land. I have never ever heard anyone say "valley of death." Regardless the four main points Mr. Goolsbee makes are that Startup America will:
Expand access to capital for startups;
Identify and remove unnecessary regulations that are barriers to startups;
Startup America is the capstone of a sea change that has been taking place. For years and years governmental economic development efforts have mostly focused on big companies. Then last year, at least in Atlanta, something started to happen. It seemed like all of a sudden people realized that startups create jobs. Lots of groups starting turning their attention to startups. Why this happened I am not sure. But I am very encouraged that the White House understands the importance of entrepreneurship and startups in expanding the economy and creating jobs. I am also very encouraged that Startup America is getting the right people and organizations involved.
As part of the Start America kickoff 27 public and private commitments were announced. As far as I can tell there is no entity from Georgia involved. There should be. The state of Georgia needs to leverage the Startup America program with it's own economic development funding. It needs to get the right people and organizations involved. It needs to tap into existing startup support expertise (such as ATDC one of the world's top ten incubators). Doing so will help Georgia technology startups succeed, create jobs, and give Georgia an opportunity to reestablish itself as a technology leader.
Today is a pretty important day for the Internet. FCC Chairman Julius Geneachoski has asked for his organization to adopt rules to protect the open Internet. Net neutrality rules. The draft rules that Geneachoski is proposing have not been seen in public but I do believe something needs to be done.
The reason why I believe this is pretty simple. Internet access has evolved to a duopoly in most markets. You have a choice of getting access from either your cable or telco provider. That's generally it. And the reason why is due to earlier decisions around "open access" that essentially stifled access provider competition. The arguments made then are essentially those being made by those opposing net neutrality today. Net neutrality will inhibit capital investment, deter innovation, and raise the duopolists operating costs which will in turn raise prices.
Hogwash. What it will do is protect the interests of the duopolists allowing them to limit competition and charge more for less service. Evidence of this can be seen in the market for Internet access itself. People in the United States pay much more on a megabit basis for Internet access than those in other countries. At the same time we have much slower access available by a factor of at least five.
A policy needs to be put in place that both encourages innovation for all companies regardless of their position of network ownership while at the same time encourages further investment in faster and more affordable Internet access. I believe it is possible to create such a policy and do so in a way that takes advantage of the architectural underpinnings of the Internet. But first a little background.
The architecture of the Internet was created back in the 1970s by DARPA. What DARPA created was a framework of computer network protocols called the TCP/IP model. The TCP/IP model is also known as the Internet Protocol Suite. Both of these models are comprised of four layers. The layers from top to bottom are referred to as application, transport, Internet, and link. The net neutrality issue that we are facing today essentially has to do with the changing nature of the application layer and how it effects those layers underneath it.
With that out of the way here is what I believe to be an obviously brilliant approach. In a paper entitled "Network Neutrality: What a Non-Discrimination Rule Should Look Like", Barbara Van Schewick director of The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School proposes that "legislators and regulators should enact a non-discrimination rule that bans all application-specific discrimination, but allows all application-agnostic discrimination." This approach would ban the practice of "like treatment" where network providers have to treat all traffic the same. It would enable network providers to treat classes at the application layer differently as long as they treat all the specific applications in the application class the same.
Bravo. This non-discrimination approach seems to be a smart way to continue the innovativeness that we are seeing from new companies at the application layer while protecting the interests of the more entrenched network providers and maintaining the integrity of the core architecture of the Internet.
Given the wording of Georgia amendment one there was never any question in my mind that it would pass. But some of the statements made in the Jobs of Tomorrow funded robo-call sent me a little over the top and set VoteNoOn1 in motion. When I do something I like to measure. It's interesting to see exactly what impact the effort had.
Let's start here at FoG. As the below graph shows, traffic skyrocketed. Up 480% week over week. New visitors were up over 21% to 81% of site traffic. That equates to over 3,200 people that had never been to FoG visiting the site and reading vote no content.
What was driving this traffic? Google. FoG was (and remains) a top search engine result page (SERP) on at least 30 terms. Here are the top ten that drove the most traffic:
georgia amendment 1
georgia amendment one
amendment 1 georgia
amendment one georgia
georgia amendments 2010
vote no amendment one georgia
2010 georgia amendments comparison
who should i vote for in georgia 2010
amendment 1 georgia
how to vote on georgia amendments
The activity quickly moved from FoG to social networks. An avatar and Facebook page were put together in short order. The Facebook page garnered nearly 1,300 active users in less than a week.
On Twitter hashtag VoteNoOn1 became a bit of a rallying cry. A nice Twibbon was made. The Friday morning after my initial article the term starting trending in Atlanta. According to Socialytics before all was said and done vote no had been tweeted 983 times by 303 distinct people. And while at times it sounded a bit like an echo chamber the VoteNoOn1 effort made over 225,000 impressions and reached over 160,000 unique individuals.
All this is great stuff but the creme de la creme emerged from one of the team on Sunday before the election, "Biggest impact we could have now would be to get someone to call in to Neil Boortz's show tomorrow and get access to his audience." The game was on. A bunch of people made it their business to achieve this goal.
The day before the election I estimated that amendment one would pass with 73% yes votes. The tally ended up being 68% yes. I'll take that 5% difference and further estimate that VoteNoOn1 swung 120,000 voters to the no side. Not bad for a unstructured group of less than 20 people working for four days. This small quick effort has been referred to as "a large Vote No campaign."
Not too long ago John Yates and Morris, Manning & Martin launched MMM Tech Law. It's nice and they have a quickly growing MMM Tech Law LinkedIn group with over 1,200 members to go along with it. The group is a who's who of the Atlanta tech scene.
It seems that there is an issue with amendment one not including an effective date. While MMM makes it clear that the alert is not legal advice it is also clear they feel companies need to wait before creating new more restrictive non-compete agreements.
While not universally loved Robert Scoble is world renown. He is an influential social media author and technology journalist.
It is what the technology world thinks about Georgia. It thinks Georgia is anti-worker. It thinks Georgia's smart technologists are going to leave for greener pastures. It thinks we are backwards.
And it will continue to do so as long as we act that way. It's literally embarrassing. 1a, 2.
Over the past six days FoG has become a bit political. I typically try to avoid such topics here but I believe Georgia amendment one is worthy of discussion by voters. I believe this for three reasons.
Third it is important to stand up for what you believe in regardless of who believes otherwise or your chance of success.
Over the past six days the Georgia startup technology community has demonstrated its energy, passion, and strength. The effort has grown from a couple of guys exchanging direct messages one night to reaching tens of thousands of people online, creating an on-air conversation and endorsement by a major radio personality, and reaching an untold number of people in one on one conversations. Amazing work done during extra hours for free by some of the greatest startup people in the world.
Today I am going to go to the polls and vote. I am going to vote no on amendment one. If you are one of the 50,000 Georgians that have graced the pages of FoG I trust you will do your research and come to the same conclusion as me. If you are one of the subset of people whom I have met or communicated with I hope that you can use that experience to aid in your decision process.
Regardless of how you vote, vote. It is important that you pay attention. It's important that those in office know that you are paying attention.
For those of you that do not agree with me on this matter I respect the polite manner in which you have put up with the subject of amendment one over the past six days. For those of you that are more interested in entrepreneurship, technology startups, and growing companies that create jobs, regular FoG programming will return soon.
Yesterday Brett Grayson of Jobs of Tomorrow stopped by FoG and commented on my Georgia Amendment One article. In his comment Brett stated that the purpose of the amendment was to protect businesses. I asked him for clarification on some other questions and Brett was kind enough to take the time to respond to me via email. He asked that I not publish his responses. While I would prefer to publish his response I will honor his request. For you the questions remain unanswered. Here they are, hanging like a chad.
1. How does amendment one help protect workers rights?
2. How will amendment one make it so that I will not be forced to sign an overreaching non-compete?
3. How will amendment one create economic growth?
4. Can you provide examples of jobs or companies that have left the state due to the the current business environment specifically around the state of our labor laws?
5. If the business environment is so bad why are large companies such as NCR, and Newell relocating here?
6. Why was the wording on the ballot changed to obscure what the voters will be deciding on this Tuesday?
“Shall the Constitution of Georgia be amended so as to make Georgia more economically competitive by authorizing legislation to uphold reasonable competitive agreements?”
HR 178 was the resolution that placed this amendment on the ballot. HB 173 is the enabling legislation for this amendment, which passed both chambers in 2010.
This amendment authorizes the enforcement of “non-compete” clauses in employment contracts of private business, relying on statutory legislation, which means that the Official Code of Georgia Annotated (O.C.G.A.) can be changed anytime the legislature is in session by a simple majority with no input by voters. This amendment would stifle growth of the economy by providing a barrier to entry to smaller, more agile firms wishing to compete in the marketplace, should they choose to employ those previously employed by a firm in that industry. While employment contracts can be an important part of an employer-employee relationship, they should not be used to punish those who seek to grow the market outside the established firms.
By stifling the growth afforded by the free market, this amendment does the opposite of its stated intention, as it protects the interests of big business, at the expense of small business growth.
The Libertarian Party of Georgia opposes this amendment and encourages a “No” vote.
Force of Good is licensed under a Creative Commons License. You are free to share, remix, and share alike with attribution.
DISCLAIMER
The opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone (with the exception of comments by others of course). They do not represent the opinion or position of any other person or entity. All postings adhere to my personal values.
