Over at Ars Technica, Matt Lasar does a nice job pointing out how the FCC’s quarterly indecency complaint totals have again been inflated by one group: the Parents Television Council. This is something Lasar has written about before and he’s one of the few journalists who continues to ask sharp questions about the ongoing manipulation of these statistics by PTC. As Lasar notes in his latest piece:
for the first quarter of this year, show the viewers relatively calm at 578 complaints in January, then 505 in February, followed by 179,997 in March? 179,997? Um, did we miss something? Did television really get that much more indecent in March? No worries. In these situations, we know what to do. We go over and check out the Parents Television Council‘s website. And sure enough, there’s a plausible instigator—a PTC viewer action alert crusade against a March 8 episode of the animated comedy show the PTC just loves to hate, Fox TV’s Family Guy.
This “complaint box stuffing” is something I wrote quite a bit about in the past, especially in my 2005 paper, “Examining the FCC’s Complaint-Driven Broadcast Indecency Enforcement Process.” As I pointed out there, “The PTC’s increasingly effective use of computer-generated campaigns against specific TV programs is a leading factor in explaining the large jump in indecency complaints in recent years.” Specifically, as I noted in that paper (as well as a Supreme Court filing with my friends at CDT), the FCC quietly and without major notice made two methodological changes to its tallying of broadcast indecency complaints in 2003 & 2004 that PTC requested: Continue reading →
California has asked the Supreme Court to review a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision holding that a California video game statute was unconstitutional. [Game Politics.com has complete coverage, and there’s more over at Ars and USA Today’s Game Hunters blog.]
Brief background: In late February, the Ninth Circuit upheld an August 2007 ruling by a California district court decision in the case of
Video Software Dealers Association v. Schwarzenegger [decision here], which struck down a California law, passed in October 2005 (A.B.1179), which would have blocked the sale of “violent” video games to those under 18 and required labels on all games. Offending retailers could have been fined for failure to comply with the law. After being challenged by the Video Software Dealers Association and the Entertainment Software Association and, the district court blocked the law arguing that it violated both the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the federal Constitution.
California’s decision to appeal the law up to the Supreme Court [petition is here] sets up a potential historic First Amendment decision (if they Court agrees to take the case, that is). California is asking the Court to consider two questions:
1. Does the First Amendment bar a state from restricting the sale of violent video games to minors?
2. If the First Amendment applies to violent video games that are sold to minors, and the standard of review is strict scrutiny, under Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. v. F.C.C., 512 U.S. 622, 666 (1994), is the state required to demonstrate a direct causal link between violent video games and physical and psychological harm to minors before the state can prohibit the sale of the games to minors?
California is essentially asking the Supreme Court to engage in a constitutional revolution and upset a century’s worth of First Amendment jurisprudence.
Continue reading →
And so begins another fight over data retention. As Declan summarizes:
Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that would require all Internet providers and operators of millions of Wi-Fi access points, even hotels, local coffee shops, and home users, to keep records about users for two years to aid police investigations. The legislation, which echoes a measure proposed by one of their Democratic colleagues three years ago, would impose unprecedented data retention requirements on a broad swath of Internet access providers and is certain to draw fire from businesses and privacy advocates. […] Two bills have been introduced so far — S.436 in the Senate and H.R.1076 in the House. Each of the companion bills is titled “Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today’s Youth Act,” or Internet Safety Act.
Julian also has coverage over at Ars and quotes CDT’s Greg Nojeim who says the data retention language is “invasive, risky, unnecessary, and likely to be ineffective.” I think that’s generally correct. Moreover, I find it ironic that at a time when so many in Congress seemingly want online providers to collect and retain LESS data about users, this bill proposes that ISPs be required to collect and retain MORE data. One wonders how those two legislative priorities will be reconciled!!
Don’t get me wrong. It’s good that Congress is taking steps to address the scourge of child pornography — especially with stiffer sentences for offenders and greater resources for law enforcement officials. Extensive data retention mandates, however, would be unlikely to help much given the ease with which bad guys will likely circumvent those requirements using alternative access points or proxies. Finally, retention mandates pose a threat to the privacy of average law-abiding citizens and impose expensive burdens of online intermediaries.
We’ve had more to say about data retention here at the TLF over the years. Here’s a few things to read: Continue reading →
Matt Lasar of Ars
tells us not to worry about the Fairness Doctrine being revived, only to go on and cite several lawmakers who have said they’d like to revive it. Meanwhile, over at the American Spectator, somebody called “The Prowler” seems to have all sorts of unnamed sources on the Hill telling him the Fairness Doctrine will be revived any day now.
Who knows what to believe. But let’s keep our eye on the real issue here. The danger is not that the Fairness Doctrine gets back on the books in the same form; it’s that versions of it sneak in through the back door via other regulatory initiatives. As Cord Blomquist pointed out here last April, “localism is the new Fairness Doctrine.” There are a lot of people are running around Washington today insisting that government must intervene in the marketplace to “save media localism” and “strengthen the public interest obligations” of local TV and radio broadcasters. There’s been an FCC proceeding open on this issue for some time, and everything about it reeks of the Fairness Doctrine in drag.
This effort is being spearheaded by the media reformistas whose short-term goal is to reinvigorate the amorphous “public interest standard” such that the FCC has open-ended powers to regulate everything under the sun going forward. That’s why a key part of the “localism” battle is their effort to breathe new life into “ascertainment rules,” which used to be more formal and required broadcasters to strictly report everything they aired and did in their communities. There’s lots of talk of ensuring more “accountability” from broadcasters regarding how they serve their local communities, and there’s even rumblings of “local community boards” who will sit as mini-free speech Star Chambers and pass judgment on whether local media outlets are doing their job. Again, it’s all just the Fairness Doctrine by another name. Continue reading →
Here’s some good background and analysis from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) about the history and constitutional issues surrounding the Fairness Doctrine. (Matt Lasar has a summary of it over at Ars). The report, authored by CRS legislative attorney Kathleen Ann Ruane, does a nice job of outlining why, given heightened Supreme Court scrutiny of speech controls since the Red Lion days, the Fairness Doctrine would face serious constitutional scrutiny is it was re-instituted today:
It is possible that, in light of the proliferation of different types of media outlets since Red Lion, the Supreme Court will abandon the scarcity rationale for applying a lower standard of scrutiny to restrictions on broadcasters’ speech. If the scarcity rationale is abandoned, the Court will likely begin to apply strict scrutiny to broadcaster speech restrictions like the Fairness Doctrine. Because the Supreme Court has struck down regulations similar to the Fairness Doctrine when applied to other types of media, it seems unlikely that the Fairness Doctrine would survive review under strict scrutiny.
[…]
Assuming that the Supreme Court would continue to apply intermediate scrutiny to government restrictions on broadcasters’ speech, the Court would then need to decide whether the Fairness Doctrine withstands such scrutiny. The Court may choose to uphold
Red Lion and the Fairness Doctrine under the principle of stare decisis, which requires courts to adhere to precedent. The Court also may choose to analyze a newly established Fairness Doctrine in light of evidence regarding its effects on speech that has developed since the Red Lion decision. To do so, it would have to answer two questions: (1) whether the Fairness Doctrine advances a substantial government interest, and (2) whether the doctrine is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest.
But it most certainly would not pass muster is applied to cable or satellite:
Continue reading →
Over at Ars, Ryan Paul has an appropriately sharp-tongued response to the Mozilla Foundation’s troubling move to become a cheerleader for the European Commission’s ongoing antitrust efforts against Microsoft. Apparently Mozilla will assist the EC’s investigation “by offering expertise about the browser market.”
Paul focuses on what’s wrong with this in both a micro and macro sense. He rightly points out that the potential remedies here do not bode well for the future of this sector, since regulatory tinkering with high-tech product standards is bound to end badly and create a terrible precedent for future interventions. “It’s hard to find a rational argument in favor of mandatory standards enforcement,” Paul says. “It would be punitive and unhelpful to the advancement of the web.” Moreover, Paul notes that things have never looked better on the browser front:
Claims that Microsoft’s monopoly status has eliminated competition in the browser market sound hollow in the face of the profoundly vibrant browser market that exists today. The record-setting launch of Firefox 3 added up to over 8 million downloads in the first 24 hours alone. Firefox’s global market share continues to climb every month and the browser has grabbed almost 30 percent of the European market.
And let’s not forget about those two little companies called Google and Apple who have competing products in the field! They’re making serious inroads in the browser wars. Moreover, Microsoft is struggling to hold on to whatever “dominance” they have left in their core market: OS. As Paul concludes:
To the observant tech enthusiast, all signs seem to indicate that Microsoft’s monopoly is on its way out. The Redmond giant is in no danger of annihilation, but it’s definitely not positioned to dictate terms to the rest of the industry anymore.
But what is perhaps most shocking about Mozilla’s call for intervention is the way that Mozilla Foundation chairperson Mitchell Baker minimizes the importance of not just Firefox, but the entire open source movement, when justifying EC intervention in this marketplace.
Continue reading →
Over at Ars, Matt Lasar has a piece about the need for better FCC indecency complaint statistics. He has been monitoring the wild fluctuations in indecency complaint tallies in recent years and wonders:
whether the agency’s indecency/obscenity statistics reflect spontaneous viewer response to the level of erotic/linguistic friskiness on TV or solely on the power of coordinated campaigns launched by groups like the Parents Television Council.
Indeed, PTC is the primary culprit. As I noted in my big 2005 PFF report “Examining the FCC’s Complaint-Driven Broadcast Indecency Enforcement Process”, “The PTC’s increasingly effective use of computer-generated campaigns against specific TV programs is a leading factor in explaining the large jump in indecency complaints in recent years.” The PTC has even taken credit for it themselves, as I noted in the paper.
How did the FCC’s indecency process get so screwy, and how did the PTC come to influence it so greatly? As I noted in that paper (as well as a Supreme Court filing with my friends at CDT), in recent years the FCC has quietly and without major notice made two methodological changes to its tallying of broadcast indecency complaints, both changes urged upon the FCC by a single advocacy group — the PTC — targeting broadcast indecency:
Continue reading →
When people ask me why I do what I do for a living — and, more specifically, why I focus all my attention on digital media and technology policy — I often respond by showing them the new gadgets or software I am playing with at any given time. I just love digital technology. I am swimming in a sea of digital gadgets, consumer electronics, online applications, computing software, video games, and all sorts of cyber-stuff.
Anyway, even though this is a technology
policy blog, I sometimes highlight new digital toys or applications that have changed my life for the better. As the year winds down, therefore, I thought I would share with you five technologies that improved my life and productivity in 2008. I’d also love to hear from all of you about the technologies that you fell in love with this year in case I might have missed them. Here’s my list:
#1) Naturally Speaking 10:
Thanks to Nate Anderson’s outstanding review over at Ars Technica, I finally made the plunge and bought Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 earlier this month. Wow, what a life-changer. I had played around with an earlier version of this market-leading speech recognition technology and found it somewhat clunky and unreliable. But Ver. 10, has ironed out almost all the old problems and become an incredibly sophisticated piece of software in the process. I love the way I can use simple voice commands to navigate menus in Microsoft Word and in Firefox. Perhaps best of all, I can dictate random rants into a pocket recording device and then upload them to Naturally Speaking (via a USB connection) and have them instantly transcribed. I’m even composing blog entries like this using it! Only problem is inserting HTML code; that’s still a hassle. Also, I find that switching from one input device to another definitely affects the quality of the transcription. Once you “train” Naturally Speaking using one device, it makes sense to stick with it. It’s not just the quality of the microphone; it’s also the proximity to your mouth that makes a difference. Regardless, this is one great product and, best of all, it’s should help save my rapidly-aging hands from becoming prematurely arthritic! All those years of video games and keyboards have taken their toll.
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.