The Cut-and-Paste Splinternet

by Wayne Crews on March 8, 2010 · Comments

The way Ben Kunz puts it in a new Business Week article, “Each device contains its own widening universe of services and applications, many delivered via the Internet. They are designed to keep you wedded to a particular company’s ecosystem and set of products.”

I like Ben’s article a lot because it recognizes that “walling off” and a “widening universe” are not mutually exclusive. If only policymakers and regulators acknowledged that. They must know it, but admitting it means acknowledging their limited relevance to consumer well-being and a need to step aside. So they feign ignorance.

Many claim to worry about the rise of proprietary services (I, as you can probably tell, often doubt their sincerity) but I’ve always regarded a “Splinternet” as a good thing that means more, not less, communications wealth. I first wrote about this in Forbes in 2000 when everyone was fighting over spam, privacy, content regulation, porn and marketing to kids.

Increasing wealth means a copy-and-paste world for content across networks, and it means businesses will benefit from presence across many of tomorrow’s networks, generating more value for future generations of consumers and investors. We won’t likely talk of an “Internet” with a capital-“I” and a reverent tremble the way we do now, because what matters is not the Internet as it happens to look right now, but underlying Internet technology that can just as easily erupt everywhere else, too.

Meanwhile, new application, device and content competition within and across networks disciplines the market process and “regulates” things far better than the FCC can. Yet the FCC’s very function is to administer or artificially direct proprietary business models, which it must continue to attempt to do (and as it pleads for assistance in doing in the net neutrality rulemaking) if it is going to remain relevant. I described the urgency of stopping the agency’s campaign recently in “Splinternets and cyberspaces vs. net neutrality,” and also in the January 2010 comments to the FCC on net neutrality.

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Comments Posted in: Broadband & Neutrality Regulation, Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Internet Governance & ICANN, Telecom & Cable Regulation

Will the Government Be the New King of All Media?

by Jim Harper on May 15, 2009 · Comments

Howard Stern swore off free broadcast radio in 2004 in part because of federally mandated decency rules. The self-annointed “king of all media” may have stepped off the throne in doing so. Them’s the breaks in the competitive media marketplace, contorted as it is by government speech controls.

Some would argue that a new king of all media is seeking the mantle of power now that the Obama administration is ensconced and friendly majorities hold the House and Senate. The new pretender is the federal government.

And some would argue that the Free Press “Changing Media Summit” held yesterday here in Washington laid the groundwork for a new federal takeover of media and communications.

That person is not me. But I am concerned by the enthusiasm of many groups in Washington to “improve” media (by their reckoning) with government intervention.

Free Press issued a report yesterday entitled Dismantling Digital Deregulation. Even the title is a lot to swallow – Have communications and media been deregulated in any meaningful sense? (The title itself prioritizes alliteration over logic – evidence of what may come within.)

Opening the conference, Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press harkened to Thomas Jefferson – well and good – but public subsidies for printers and a government-run postal system model his hopes for U.S. government policies to come.

It’s helpful to note what policies found their way into Jefferson’s constitution as absolutes and what were merely permissive. The absolute is found in Amendment I: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . . .”

Among the permissive is the Article I power “to establish Post Offices and post Roads.” There’s no mandate to do it and the scope and extent of any law is subject to Congress’ discretion, just like the power to create patents and copyrights which immediately follows.

I won’t label Free Press and all their efforts a collectivist plot and dismiss it as such – there are some issues on which we probably have common cause – but a crisper expression of “dismantling deregulation” is “re-regulation.”

It’s a very friendly environment for a government takeover of modern-day printing presses: Internet service providers, cable companies, phone companies, broadcasters, and so on.

Comments Posted in: Antitrust & Competition Policy, Broadband & Neutrality Regulation, First Amendment, Free Speech & Online Child Safety, Media Regulation, Telecom & Cable Regulation

Just How Inefficient is Communications Regulation? The USF Case Study

by Adam Thierer on December 4, 2008 · Comments

One of the reasons that so many of us here take issue with proposals to expand regulation of communications, broadband, and media markets is because we have studied the horrendous inefficiencies of economic regulation in practice. We oppose regulatory proposals not because of a “blind faith” in free markets, but because we understand that even when markets stumble they correct themselves quicker and more efficiently than regulatory systems do. One can profess the supposed theoretical benefits of enlightened “public interest” regulation all they want, but the facts are the facts. And the facts do not support the proposition that government regulation generally enhances consumer welfare.

In that regard, Tim Lee’s new Net neutrality report for Cato does a nice job of surveying some of the past unintended consequences of regulation. Also, even though it is now 10 years old, I highly recommend “Economic Deregulation and Customer Choice” by Jerry Ellig and Robert Crandall. It’s an outstanding overview of why economic regulation of various industries failed consumers so miserably in the past.

But if you want even more shocking proof of how horrendously inefficient communications regulation can be in practice, then you must read my PFF colleague Barbara Esbin’s two essays this week on the Universal Service Fund (USF): “The High Cost of USF Support,” and “More FCC Support Fund Follies.” In these two essays, Esbin walks the reader through various grim reports and statistics that have been released recently documenting the failures of the USF.

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Comments Posted in: Broadband & Neutrality Regulation, Tech Pork, Telecom & Cable Regulation

Whither the Social Contract?

by Solveig Singleton on November 5, 2008 · Comments

Geese are flying overhead. Leaves are orange. The election is over. A historic moment. And I will be optimistic, and hope that although the economics of the moment seems to be a return to things past… to the 1930s, it will turn out to be otherwise, for a good bit is known now that was not known then, whatever one’s ideology. Continue reading →

Comments Posted in: Inside the Beltway (Politics)

Well, Isn’t This Cheery

by Solveig Singleton on October 9, 2008 · Comments

Peter Ferrara, offering us a taste of the dismal science for the American Spectator in reviewing a recent book’s economic predictions for an Obama Presidency (but what about civil liberties?). Hey, maybe they’ll send out more economic stimulus checks! We used ours this year to pay down a tax bill. It’s like the circle of life. (Other references to the Lion King will be swiftly and severely dealt with).

Comments Posted in: Inside the Beltway (Politics), What We're Reading

“A Manifesto for Media Freedom” — my new book with Brian Anderson

by Adam Thierer on October 1, 2008 · Comments

Manifesto for Media Freedom book coverI’m pleased to announce the publication of A Manifesto for Media Freedom, which I co-authored with Brian C. Anderson of the Manhattan Institute. Brian serves as editor of Manhattan Institute’s excellent City Journal and he is the author of best-selling books like South Park Conservatives and Democratic Capitalism and Its Discontents.

In this little manifesto, we highlight one of the central ironies of the Information Age.  Namely, that despite “the breathtaking abundance of new and old media outlets for obtaining news, information, and entertainment…”

many people hate this profusion, and never more than when it involves political speech. The current media market, they charge, doesn’t represent true diversity, or isn’t fair, or is subject to manipulation by a small and shrinking group of media barons. They want the government to regulate it into better shape, which just happens to be a shape that benefits them. Doing so… would be a disaster, a kind of soft or not-so-soft tyranny that would wipe out whole sectors of media, curtailing free speech and impoverishing our democracy.

In other words, instead of celebrating the unprecedented cornucopia of media choices at our collective disposal, many policymakers and media critics are calling for just as much media regulation as ever. We itemize these threats in our chapters and they include: efforts to revive the “Fairness Doctrine”, media ownership regulations, “localism” requirements, Net neutrality mandates, a la carte regulations, cable and satellite censorship, video game censorship, regulation of social networking sites, campaign finance-related speech restrictions, and so on.

In each case, we advance a pro-freedom paradigm to counter the advocates of media control. What do we mean by the “media freedom” that we advocate as the alternative to these new regulatory crusades? Here’s how we put it in the book:

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Comments Posted in: First Amendment, Free Speech & Online Child Safety, Media Regulation, What We're Reading