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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Enron, WorldCom, United; the war between Hollywood and Silicon Valley; a droopy stock market; and more, more, more spam. 2002 was not a whole lot of fun in the world of business and technology.
Dec 20, 2002 | Anyone remember Enron?
The wheels fell off of so many highflying corporations in 2002 that it's already almost hard to remember that back at the beginning of the year, the shocking business story grabbing everyone's attention was a Texas-sized tale of corruption, greed, and pure idiocy known by the name of Enron. Now, as the year closes, and Ken Lay's pride and joy has been joined at the bankruptcy trough by the likes of United Airlines, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen and scores of other companies, Enron's adventures have grown moldy. Committee investigations toil on, but the flag bearer for deregulated chicanery has fallen from the headlines.
The ongoing economic woes in the United States can be traced to many factors -- the fallout of Sept. 11, mismanagement by Bush's now completely departed economic team, and the still painful hangover from the go-go '90s. But when we look back on the big stories of 2002, Enron's travails should be the story that astute economy watchers hang on to. Business cycles come and go, but structural changes wrought by dedicated lobbying and ideologically motivated administrations can do permanent damage. Enron's rise and fall, more than any other company, exposed for everyone to see what happens when government purposefully looks the other way, and greed is allowed to fully flower. Enron was not an aberration, and not an exception. It was the natural consequence of years of deregulation and special-interest lobbying on the part of politically well-connected corporations. Everyone plays this game, of course, but Enron was the best at it (although, ultimately, one could argue that it was also the worst.)
As for the technology half of the technology and business equation, 2002 turned out to be still another year in which Silicon Valley laid low, waiting for a comeback that never quite seemed ready to materialize. Sure, the Internet kept growing, or at least everybody connected to it saw their spam load continue to surge, and sure, computers continued to get cheaper and faster and capable of more neat things, but overall, to the probable consternation of science fiction writers everywhere, 2002 confirmed yet again that so far, the 21st century isn't quite yet a futurist amusement park. Forget about the jetpacks we were all supposed to have by now -- instead, everyone's worrying about whether it's legal to copy an episode of "Seinfeld" onto a DVD!
Read on for a summary of some of the year's top stories.
The year in copyright
Napster finally died in 2002, but the file-trading phenomenon it sparked continued unabated on other peer-to-peer networks. In response, the entertainment industry went a bit nutty with its anti-piracy efforts. It cajoled some members of the U.S. House into introducing one bill requiring electronics manufacturers to embed copy protection in their devices, and another allowing copyright owners to hack into copyright-infringing trading networks. Mercifully, neither effort got very far -- but there's always next Congress.
The recording industry also hinted that it may start suing individual file traders, and it stepped up pressure on colleges and universities to go after song-swapping students. Like much else the music industry does, those moves caused it more than a little embarrassment, and the industry now seems hated by everyone -- consumers as well as artists. (To the labels' credit, though, they do seem to be slowly changing their ways. By year's end, they had licensed music to many subscription-based, legitimate song-downloading services -- though none offered the illegal services' range.)
There were some bright spots for the foes of out-of-control copyright law. In October, Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig argued for the repeal of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act at the Supreme Court; justices are expected to issue a decision in 2003. And on Tuesday, Elcomsoft, the Russian software firm that was the first criminal defendant prosecuted under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, was acquitted of any wrongdoing.
Spam, I am
This year, American Online won the largest judgment ever against a spammer -- $7 million. And even now-Senator-elect Elizabeth Dole caught flak in court for her unsolicited e-mail solicitations to North Carolina voters during her Senate campaign.
If you feel like you're getting more exciting news about septic tanks and hot bestiality pics in your inbox than ever before, that's because you are. One anti-spam software company, Brightmail, reported that 40 percent of all e-mail received by its customers was spam as of November 2002, while that same figure was just 8 percent in September 2001.
The spam onslaught has grown so massive and irritating that some netwags on Slashdot found a novel way to fight back. One industry-scale sized spammer was furious when he started receiving huge amounts of unsolicited junk mail, thanks to some anti-spam vigilantes. Of course, he's now threatening to sue.
If there's any upside to the ever-increasing spam onslaught, it's for the anti-spam software and technology companies. This year, such software, like the free SpamAssassin, became a necessary feature of many corporate e-mail accounts. But automatically labeling messages that are likely spam caused concern among free-speech advocates, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, since so-called "false-positives" often catch innocuous messages, such as Evites and e-mail newsletters, in the spam net as well.
