On 12/1/2006, the Patent Office issued a restriction requirement. A restriction requirement requires the applicant to select one invention for one patent, and, if he wishes to pursue other inventions, to pay additional application fees for processing those inventions. On 12/12/2006, Mr. Ohman elected to pursue Group I, which was the design using the phrase LIVESTRONG.

Mr. Ohman responded to yesterday’s posting, expressing concerns as to the accuracy of its content. In an email message to me, he said that his design patent was amended because the USPTO simply asked him to choose one design of the three he originally filed, that he was not “forced” to amend his claims, and that the Patent Office did not refuse anything. See Yesterday’s Posting. He also stated that he felt the information in yesterday’s posting to be defamatory and libel. It was certainly not the intent of the posting to cause any hurt feelings. But, the discussion of the prosecution of Mr. Ohman’s patent-in-suit is factually accurate. To make the record on this site clear and complete, I’ve prepared the following summary of the prosecution history of the design patent that Mr. Ohman asserted in his lawsuit against the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

The entire prosecution history can be viewed by those interested in the details on the PTO website. USPTO Public Pair Portal. The record shows that on 2/21/2007, the Patent Office did reject the then-pending claim to a pet collar with the LIVESTRONG marking, citing to evidence of LAF’s prior use of the design on its web-site. The record also shows that in response to this rejection, the applicant cancelled two figures and renumberd one so as to claim the BARKSTRONG marking instead of the LIVESTRONG marking.

On 5/21/2007, in response to the rejection by the Patent Office, the applicant submitted an amendment, in which he cancelled the LIVESTRONG and PURRSTRONG drawings from the application, and changed “FIG. 2″ for BARKSTRONG to “FIG. 1.” The applicant’s stated reason for this change was that “[t]he Office Action objected to the specification, claim, and drawings due to informalities.” See Response at 5. The response made no mention of the pending 103 rejection.

The only patent that Mr. Ohlman’s complaint alleges has been infringed is United States Design Patent No. D556,389. Mr. Ohman filed the original application that gave rise to this patent on July 6, 2005. The application number was 29/233,646. In the application, he tried to obtain claims to pet collars with three different marks: Fig. 1 – LIVESTRONG; Fig. 2 – BARKSTRONG; and Fig. 3 PURRSTRONG.

The claim to the BARKSTRONG design was then allowed. On 10/2/2007, before the patent issued, Mr. Ohman appears to have filed two continuing applications, numbered 29/292,189 and 29/292,189.

(Credit:
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office)

On 2/21/2007, the Patent Office issued a rejection to the claim. Page 3 of the rejection states “[t]he claim is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103(a) as being unpatentable over the “LIVESTRONG” logo depicted on the Lance Armstrong Foundation website as of May 6, 2004.

Remarks Made in Election of Fig. 1

In his comment to yesterday’s post, Mr. Ohman notes that there is “no mention or claim of the divisional patent (LIVESTRONG) in this suit.” Technically, that statement is true. The only patent asserted in the lawsuit Mr. Ohman filed against the Lance Armstrong Foundation is the one claiming the “BARKSTRONG” design. The two continuing applications filed on 10/2/2007, presumably one of which is the divisional application referred to by Mr. Ohman, have not issued as patents and are not currently available to the public. However, Mr. Ohman’s reference to a “divisional patent (LIVESTRONG)” implies that he is presently seeking to obtain a design patent for the “LIVESTRONG” design. Because no such patent has issued, there is of course no such patent at issue in Mr. Ohman’s current lawsuit.

Welcome to hands-on Friday! Today I went hands-on with my HDTV — the Panasonic TH-50PZ77u. You’ll notice that the title screen adds a ‘0′ at the end of the name. Whoops!

Even better news: you can now subscribe to this show. Just add it up right here!

Automattic (the creators of WordPress) has created a microblogging service, but it’s not for everyone–and that’s the point.

Skip WordPress' powerful blogging front-end and check out Prologue, a simplified microblogging front-end that lets you write small posts by yourself or with a group of others.

It’s called Prologue, and it’s a new theme for WordPress.com users and blogs running off hosted WordPress installs. The goal of the theme is to let anyone setup a microblog, either for themselves or as a group–both public and private. Users can post short, to-the-point messages to their blog without having to go through WordPress’ primary interface. It’s essentially doing what Twitter can’t, which is letting people create their own private groups and tag their posts for sorting later on.

Besides its privacy and tag controls, the real power of Prologue is that any WordPress user can adopt it on top of their current blog. It’s also got a leg up on the competition by letting other users comment on a Prologue post like they would a normal blog post, complete with conversation threading and a permalink in case you feel like sharing that conversation or single comment with someone else. Sounds an awful lot like a forum to me, but considering Automattic is aiming this at “small groups” it’s nice to directly reply to someone without an @username that they have to fish out later on.

In an introductory blog post, WordPress creator and former CNET’er Matt Mullenweg noted that “many” Automattic employees were already using Twitter, but wanted something with a little more versatility and with more privacy controls, which led to the creation of Prologue. The one thing that’s still missing is a first party mobile front end. Despite the strong efforts from many third party developers to create their own, there still isn’t a simple way to get it done unless you’ve got your own hosted blog with the right plug-ins, something competitor Movable Type has been a little more proactive about.

Regardless of your choice of analogy, the auto industry is facing the kind of technology-based competition it hasn’t seen in years.

(Credit:
Phoenix Motorcars)

That may sound like bravado coming from a designer of flashy cars. But when you look at the race to deliver a breakthrough battery-driven car, the field is thick with newcomers.

“This is probably something that has not been seen since we moved from the horse to the engine,” said Henrik Fisker, the CEO of Fisker Automotive, which is designing a luxury hybrid electric car, the Karma.

Project Better Place, started by ex-SAP executive Shai Agassi, is planning to test a battery-swapping program in Israel, Denmark, and perhaps San Francisco. It now has a prototype of its car, which will be built by Renault.

Lam said consumers are also getting more savvy about green claims from automakers. He said a hybrid with a big 6-liter engine, like the one Lexus is making, is “a joke, an oxymoron.”

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

On one point, they agreed: consumers will have more options to kick, or at least cut down on, their gas habit. But beyond that, their views differed on which technology–all-electric, plug-in hybrids, or hybrid electric–would succeed.

“We’re putting the pressure on the bigger boys,” said Albert Lam, CEO of Detroit Electric, which plans to make electric cars and buses in 2009. “We are the ‘Dells’ of the industry–the smaller boys that have a tremendous opportunity to validate the industry and to be the next big thing.”

In the next few years, a variety of battery technologies will be put through the paces to see which chemistry will be safe, have a long life, and can be recycled.

Click on the photo to see a gallery of electric cars of all shapes under development.

And in this game, start-ups claim to have the upper hand on the incumbents.

To fleet owners, replacing trucks with rechargeable electric vehicles could simply be a question of saving money in the face of rising fossil fuel prices. They can also potentially benefit from government incentives for cleaner transportation, such as California’s zero-emissions vehicle plan.

Phoenix Motorcars, by contrast, is making an all-electric truck and car, as is another supplier, Miles Electric. To get around the range limitation, Phoenix Motorcars is designing its vehicles, based on an Altairnano lithium titanate battery, for use in fleets where the use and range are known.

But for many consumers at this point, it’s more of a lifestyle statement, argued Fisker. Buying a luxury hybrid electric car is like buying Apple’s iPhone when it first came out. Buyers of some of the first consumer-oriented electric cars will be technology early adopters, eager to be part of the future, he said.

Premium green
Apart from all the technical and business challenges remains the question of customer demand.

Fisker’s $80,000 Karma, expected for release at the end of next year, will have a custom-designed lithium ion battery that can go 50 miles. That’s a range that covers what most people drive in a day. To ensure a longer range, the car will include a four-cylinder internal combustion gasoline engine that charges the battery.

Click on the photo to see a photo gallery of electric cars at the 2008 New York Auto Show.

“It’s difficult to move to plug-in hybrids and make economic sense…You have to have a conventional drive train and a battery,” said Elliot. “When you’re talking about going down-market, you really have to pick a horse.”

The incumbent automakers are not sitting still, either. Nissan this week said that it will offer an all-electric car in 2010. GM’s Chevy Volt is supposed to come out in 2010, while the other incumbents are pursuing different paths to better mileage.

The best known is perhaps Tesla Motors, which just began producing the Roadster sports car with a starting price of about $100,000. But there are several others, offering up different designs and business models to give the internal combustion engine a run for the money.

“We’re seeing a movement where people are demanding a product which is not there. People want a green car,” he said. “I think what we are going to see are people are going to take that risk because there is no other alternative.”

Parallel to technical development in batteries, new companies are trying to innovate with new business models.

But, having both a battery and gasoline engine in one car raises costs, say advocates of all-electric cars. Fisker and Tesla have gone after the luxury market first, catering to environmentally oriented customers willing to pay for the latest technology.

Pick a horse
The diversity of approaches reflects the challenges that current battery technology pose.

Depending on who you talk to, electric
cars pack the disruptive force of either Dell PCs or the
Apple iPhone.

At a panel of three young car companies–Detroit Electric, Fisker Automotive, and Phoenix Motorcars–at a clean-tech investor conference last week, executives laid out some of the business opportunities and technical hurdles to cleaner cars.

“It’s a fallacy to say that everyone is going to jump off of oil onto batteries. Then we’ll just have a shortage of lithium and the prices will go up,” said Daniel Elliot, president and CEO of Phoenix Motorcars. “What’s really going on is a fracturing of fuels.”

Meanwhile, Think Global is making an all-electric town car, called the Think City, which can top out at 65 mph and go 110 miles on a single charge. Rather than try to compete with a typical sedan, it’s aimed at urbanites who want a smaller, fuel-efficient car, perhaps used as a second car. It plans to bring the Think City to the U.S. and is exploring business models where consumers can swap out batteries.

“We suddenly have an open field where current carmakers don’t know about batteries, or software, or designing these vehicles,” he said, adding that incumbent companies are still four or five years away from mass-producing plug-in electric cars.

(Credit:
Charles Cooper/CNET News.com)

But despite Chertoff’s repeated commitment to doing the right thing – including a call to arms inviting Silicon Valley’s best and brightest technologists to come to Washington to work on cyber-security – I wonder how many industry skeptics he’ll win over. Until recently, DHS couldn’t get a cyber-security director to stay in what essentially was a figure-head job much longer than a year. Off-the-record interviews with people familiar with the goings-on there have described the situation to me as a bureaucratic mess.

If the statistics are accurate, rank-and-file computer users are far from internalizing the security mantra. What’s more, the findings suggest it will be quite some time before most people treat computer security as more than an afterthought. In the meantime, of course, Thompson didn’t preclude the possibility of a terror or state-based organization launching a big cyber attack. But he believes the more likely danger to the nation’s infrastructure will emanate from a different quarter.

Symantec CEO John Thompson

• 65% of the new code being released into the market is malicious

• The education sector accounted for 24 percent of data breaches that could lead to identity theft.

(He’s got a point. Symantec’s report found that bank accounts are the most commonly advertised item for sale on underground economy servers, accounting for 22 percent of all activity tracked.)

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who also presented a keynote on Tuesday, offered litte indication Washington was about to ride to the rescue. In remarks during his prepared speech and subsequent press conference, Chertoff offered a dutiful recitation of what he described as the President’s interest in shoring up the nation’s digital security.

After listening to Symantec’s John Thompson’s morning keynote, I later kidded him about purposely scaring the hell out of people. He was a good sport about my joshing but pointed out that the information security landscape is increasingly punctuated by cases of data theft. He backed that up by reciting a litany of worrisome stats from his company’s latest Internet security threat report. Truth be told, it makes for grim reading.

(Credit:
Charles Cooper/CNET News.com)

• The U.S. was the top country of attack origin in the second half of 2007

Among the report’s highlights:

Six years ago, Osama bin Laden represented the nightmare scenario for the computer security establishment. But more immediate cyberdangers lurk on the horizon. Experts attending the RSA conference that began here today say it’s you–Mr. & Mrs. Computer User–who keep goofing up.

In the end, however, money talks and you-know-what walks. The feds only have a $115 million budget to work with. Chertoff’s department has requested $192 million for the new fiscal year but that’s still doing it on the cheap. By comparison, we spend $720 million in Iraq each day.

• Government was the top sector for identities exposed, accounting for 60 percent of the total

“The threat landscape has changed,” he said. “When people used to talk about the “Big One,” they were thinking about that in the context of an attack on the infrastructure itself. That’s still possible but less probable today because attackers have shifted to the information itself. They’re much more stealth-like. Before, they wanted to become obnoxiously visible. Now they don’t. They want to quietly penetrate defenses so they can sell what they steal in what’s become a growing underground economy.”

SAN FRANCISCO–It turns out al-Qaida’s leader and his cohorts aren’t the biggest threat to our cybersecurity. You are.

• The United States had the most bot-infected computers worldwide

DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff

• Theft or computer loss resulted in the most data breaches that could lead to identity theft

In fact, they contend, the future of cybersecurity hinges less on a latter-day version of spy-versus-spy against shadowy terror groups than on a more serious effort to instill best practices. Listening to their heeding was something akin to the scene in the movie Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray repeatedly wakes up to the same morning.

Security gurus have long urged the business world to turn network security into part of the corporate DNA. The message is not fully getting through. And now we’re seeing the predictable results.

“Even giving an adversary one bite at the apple before we’ve figured out the meta data or (digital) signature is one bite too many,” he said.

(Credit:
Charles Cooper/CNET News.com)

In years past, Thompson and other computer security executives have pushed the idea of making cyber-security as familiar to most people as the fire prevention campaign underwritten by the government in the 1960s and 1970s. Considering the amount of money Uncle Sam is spending on cyber-security these days, that’s a pipedream.

Give Chertoff credit for being candid about where DHS has come up short. He said the government needs to reduce its (literally) thousands of network access points to around 50. At the same time, Chertoff wants his department to faster detect and analyze computer anomalies. A big part of that will involve a revamp of U.S. CERT’s early warning system

DHS finally staffed up by putting in Greg Garcia, a former official with the Information Technology Association of America trade organization, as assistant secretary for cybersecurity and telecommunications. More recently, Rod Beckstrom, an author and entrepreneur best-known for starting business collaboration software maker Twiki.net, was in charge of directing a national cybersecurity center that operates inside DHS.

Schumann demonstrated that film copies could be made and moved to a thumb drive. Schumann told the judge, however, that RealDVD’s copy protections would limit any copy of the film to play on a maximum of five devices licensed presumably by a RealDVD owner. RealNetworks has long argued that the encryption technology it uses to protect digital copies made by RealDVD is superior to what’s found on DVDs.

Updated at 12:56 p.m. PDT to clarify MPAA’s arguments.

U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel resumed hearing testimony in the legal dispute between the largest movie studios and Real. The Motion Picture Association of America claimed in a lawsuit filed last fall that the company’s RealDVD software, which enables people to copy DVDs and store them to a hard drive, violates copyright law. Patel halted sales of RealDVD last fall.

Robert Schumann, an expert on securing DVDs who was called to testify by the MPAA, told Patel that RealDVD introduces a set of copy protection schemes for the copies made by RealDVD. The software’s copy controls can be altered or removed all together from Real’s servers in the form of a software update. Schumann told Patel that those limits could easily be removed all together by buy removing just one line of code.

There is no reason for Real to do such a thing. Schumann was responding to questions from Rohit Singla, an MPAA attorney, who asked Schumann about hypothetical situations apparently to illustrate that Real had, without authorization, assumed the responsibility of protecting the film industry’s content and that posed certain risks to Hollywood.

Real attorneys tried to stop the line of questioning and raised an objection, arguing that discussing what RealDVD could do was irrelevant and asked the judge to stick to with RealDVD’s current capabilities. But Patel wanted to hear the testimony and overruled the objection.

First, Schumann testified that an unlimited number of film copies can be made from a single DVD using RealDVD.

Singla then asked what it would take for Real to enable copies to play on millions of different devices or any device. Schumann said the change would require “essentially removing one line of code.” Such a scenario, regardless of how unlikely, could result in the distribution of an unlimited number of unauthorized film copies.

The MPAA continues to drum the idea that RealDVD is a piracy threat. Throughout the dispute, Patel has been most animated when discussing copyright issues and unauthorized copies. When she ruled to keep a temporary restraining order in place in October, she worried that RealDVD could lead to mass copying saying “it’s impossible to bring back copies once they’re out in the market.”

Schumann was the first person to testify in Tuesday’s hearing and has not yet had a chance to respond. The first witness expected to testify for Real, sometimes later in the afternoon, will be the company’s outspoken CEO, Rob Glaser.

The question of whether RealDVD is a security threat to the film industry remains at issue, though it’s generally recognized that there is a glut of software available online that enables anyone to make unauthorized copies of DVDs. The question that appears to have the most relevance to the case is whether RealDVD circumvents the encryption technology found on DVDs. A circumvention would violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Note: I’ll be filing updates throughout the hearing.

Singla asked Schumann how easy would it be for Real to change the limit on the number of computers licensed to play a film. Could Real, for example, issue a software update that could raise the limit from five to 50 computers or to remove the limits completely? Schumann said the changes would be simple.

The focus on the micropreneur, he argues, is “understandably appealing, but thinking that everyone is, and should be, an entrepreneur leads us to underrate the virtues of larger businesses and of the income that a steady job can provide.” Indeed, the number of SMEs is disproportionately lower than the number of one-person shops in developing economies, which is precisely the problem to be grappled with. “Businesses that can generate jobs for others are the best hope of any country trying to put a serious dent in its poverty rate,” Surowiecki contends, while microfinance “rarely generates new jobs for others.”

As if it needed any further proof: These days, the most disruptive innovations are “invisible” and take place in the world of “financial innovation.”

In an article in this week’s New Yorker, James Surowiecki (”The Wisdom of Crowds”) scrutinizes the effectiveness of microloans in bolstering the economies of developing countries. He posits that the hype around micro-finance neglects the small-to-medium sized enterprises (SMEs), the “missing middle” that is vital for a stable economy: “This isn’t because microloans don’t work; it’s because of how they work,” so Surowiecki.

Because of these shortcomings, the so-called “commercialization” in microfinance aims at creating a new style of microfinance that raises funds from the financial market and operates sustainably on its profits. Furthermore, philanthropic organizations have begun recognizing and filling the market gap between micro-finance and traditional, bank-led SME finance: Google.org, The Soros Economic Development Fund, and the Omidyar Network have announced that they are partnering to create a new $17 million SME investment company for India to create job opportunities and spur greater economic participation for a larger segment of the population.

In other words, the Twhirl client won’t have to ping the Identi.ca servers to get updates; instead, updates will be sent directly to the Twhirl client. This makes nanoblog conversations more live–you can have a back-and-forth without hovering over the “update” button. It also means that your Twhirl client doesn’t have to be hitting the Identi.ca servers every few minutes for updates, which reduces the load profile on the service, theoretically at least.

Twitter does support the XMPP standard for sending out the “fire hose” of its content, but it’s not open. Only four sites right now get the feed: Summize, which Twitter bought, Twittervision, FriendFeed, and Zappos (yes, the shoe company).

Read to end of story for the download link and instructions.

Related:
How I got burned by Twitter’s API, and how to fix it.
Which way will Twitter go? by Dave Winer.

The next update of Twhirl will get support for yet another nanoblogging service, Identi.ca, and on that platform Twhirl will feature a communication method that Twitter users have been asking for: push updates.

How to
To get the version of Twhirl that supports Identi.ca, grab this download. Log in to the Identi.ca site, go to the IM tab and enter in your Gtalk ID. Also check the “Send me notices through Jabber/Gtalk…” box in Preferences. In Twhirl, go to the configuration panel for Identi.ca, go to the Network tab, and in the “XMPP Settings” box, enter your Gtalk ID and password, and “talk.google.com” in the server field. You’ll know it’s working if you see a little lightbulb icon in the lower-right of the Identi.ca panel light up.

The two-step requires users have two logins: One for Identi.ca, and one for Gtalk, and that they enter them into both Identi.ca and Twhirl.

The new version of Twhirl will probably be announced Monday, Seesmic CEO Loic LeMeur told me.

In practice, the push capability of Identi.ca is more complex. Identi.ca doesn’t do the pushing itself. Instead, Identi.ca sends its updates to Google Talk, a Jabber-based IM platform that supports the open XMPP standard for instant messaging; and it’s those XMPP messages that get pushed out to the Twhirl desktop clients installed on users’ computers.

It’s unknown when (or even if) Twitter will open up a push interface or unlock its XMPP support, or how Twitter and Twhirl will work together to make setup easier than it is for Identi.ca.

Identi.ca, by the way, is cool because it’s open-source. But other than that I find little reason to use the service: it doesn’t have Twitter’s user network nor newbie Plurk’s user interface innovation. Seeing Identi.ca updates pushed to Twhirl just raises the obvious question: When will we get this feature on Twitter?

You need both an Identi.ca and a GTalk ID to get the push feature to work.

The latest version of Twhirl gets push nanoblog entries from Identi.ca.

Kevin Bankston, an EFF staff attorney, says his group will continue to pursue its lawsuit. “We’ll be challenging the constitutionality of this law,” he said. “We think it unconstitutionally violates separation of powers and due process… We are going to be challenging this immunity as unconstitutional.”

It’s not yet clear what this means for the lawsuits against telecommunications companies, including one that the Electronic Frontier Foundation brought against AT&T that is currently before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

Senators voted 69 to 28 for the bill, which would rewrite federal wiretap laws by granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies as long as the government claims the request was “lawful” and authorized by the president.

Sen. Hillary Clinton voted against it. Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, wasn’t present for the vote but has repeatedly stressed his support for the measure (including in our voters’ guide published earlier this year).

Opponents of the bill said it would allow Bush to cover up illegal warrantless wiretapping. “If Congress short-circuits these lawsuits, we will have lost a prime opportunity to finally achieve accountability for these years of law-breaking,” said Sen. Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat who is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “That’s why the administration has been fighting so hard for this immunity.”

Wednesday’s vote followed a last-minute effort by liberal and libertarian activists to convince enough Democrats to kill or modify the bill. DailyKos called the bill “a pardon to Bush”; some activists created a Wiki to hone their message; a Salon columnist dubbed the bill a “coverup of surveillance crimes.”

The Democratic-controlled Senate handed President Bush a major political victory on Wednesday by voting to derail lawsuits against telecommunications companies that unlawfully opened their networks to the National Security Agency.

The first is that the company provided assistance “in connection with an intelligence activity” authorized by the president between September 11, 2001 and January 17, 2007, when the wiretap program was altered to include more judicial oversight. The second condition involves a company that received a “written request” from the U.S. Justice Department saying the activity was lawful and authorized by the president. (AT&T has suggested once, and twice, that such a paper trail exists.)

Earlier, by a 32-66 vote, the Senate rejected an amendment that would have removed the portion of the legislation offering retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that engaged in illegal activities. The U.S. House of Representatives already approved the underlying legislation last month.

Under Sec. 802 of the Senate bill, which amends the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, no lawsuit may proceed against any “electronic communication service provider” if either one of two conditions is met.

(Disclosure: Declan McCullagh is married to a Google employee.)

Another demanded information about filtering out cross-side scripting attacks from search results. The letter asks for a response by June 6.

It would be one thing if Barton were a principled privacy advocate who was also assailing Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and so on. But he’s not.

In fact, Barton has a long history of embracing more, not less, surveillance. Bills he voted for include the Real ID Act, the Patriot Act, and a proposal to expand Internet surveillance performed without a court order. He opposed a proposal to disclose federal agencies’ data mining to Congress. (Rep. Ron Paul, a true privacy advocate, voted opposite Barton on each of those bills.)

If anyone had any remaining doubts that Rep. Joe Barton has it in for Google, fresh evidence arrived in the mail Wednesday.

The Texas Republican sent a letter to Google on Wednesday with 15 interrogatories, mostly demanding answers about how it will merge its operations and procedures with DoubleClick. As an example, one interrogatory says “please identify the data that will be merged, including, but not limited to, cookie data.”

The last is more worrying, at least from someone who was until recently the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which writes telecommunications law. The explanation is that Barton is eager to closely regulate the data collection and use practices of Internet companies — but is willing to overlook far more worrisome data collection practices when they’re done by the Feds. So much for the traditional conservative idea of a federal government limited in its powers and dedicated to protecting individual rights.

And this is coming from a politician who boasts in his official bio that he, Barton, was the “founding co-chairman of the Congressional Privacy Caucus.”

Two more explanations for Barton’s animus come to mind. One dates back to the Net neutrality wars from three years ago, when he was hoping to rewrite telecommunications laws and Google assailed his proposal as too heavy-handed. Barton opposed extensive Net neutrality regulations and has received millions from like-minded telecommunications companies; Google was on the other side. Google’s penchant for hiring Democrats probably hasn’t endeared it either.