[This essay originally appeared on the AIER blog on May 28, 2019. The USA TODAY also ran a shorter version of this essay as a letter to the editor on June 2, 2019.]

In a hotly-worded USA Today op-ed last week, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) railed against social media sites Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. He argued that, “social media wastes our time and resources,” and is “a field of little productive value” that have only “given us an addiction economy.” Sen. Hawley refers to these sites as “parasites” and blames them for a litany of social problems (including an unproven link to increased suicide), leading him to declare that, “we’d be better off if Facebook disappeared.”

As far as moral panics go, Sen. Hawley’s will go down as one for the ages. Politicians have always castigated new technologies, media platforms, and content for supposedly corrupting the youth of their generation. But Sen. Hawley’s inflammatory rhetoric and proposals are something we haven’t seen in quite some time.

He sounds like those fire-breathing politicians and pundits of the past century who vociferously protested everything from comic books to cable television, the waltz to the Walkman, and rock-and-roll to rap music. In order to save the youth of America, many past critics said, we must destroy the media or media platforms they are supposedly addicted to. That is exactly what Sen. Hawley would have us do to today’s leading media platforms because, in his opinion, they “do our country more harm than good.”

We have to hope that Sen. Hawley is no more successful than past critics and politicians who wanted to take these choices away from the public. Paternalistic politicians should not be dictating content choices for the rest of us or destroying technologies and platforms that millions of people benefit from.

Addiction Panics: We’ve Been Here Before

Ironically, Sen. Hawley isn’t even right about what the youth of America are apparently obsessed with. Most kids view Facebook and Twitter as places where old people hang out. My teenage kids laugh when I ask them about those sites. Pew Research polling finds that many younger users are increasingly deleting Facebook (if they used it at all) or flocking to other platforms, such as Snapchat or YouTube.

But shouldn’t we be concerned with kids overusing social media more generally? Yes, of course we should—but that’s no reason to call for their outright elimination, as Sen. Hawley recommends. Such rhetoric is particularly concerning at a time when critics are proposing a “break up” of tech companies. Sen. Hawley sits on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights. It is likely he and others will employ these arguments to fan the flames of regulatory intervention or antitrust action against at least Facebook.

Forcing social media sites to “disappear” or be broken up is one of the worst ways to deal with these concerns. It is always wise to mentor our youth and teach them how to achieve a balanced media diet. Many youths—and many adults—are probably overusing certain technologies (smartphones, in particular) and over-consuming some types of media. For those truly suffering from addiction, it is worth considering targeted strategies to address that problem. However, that is not what antitrust law is meant to address.

Moreover, concerns about addiction and distraction have popped up repeatedly during past moral panics and we should take such claims with a big grain of salt. Sociologist Frank Furedi has documented how, “inattention has served as a sublimated focus for apprehensions about moral authority” going back to at least the early 1700s. With each new form of media or means of communication, the older generation taps into the same “kids-these-days!” fears about how the younger generation has apparently lost the ability to concentrate or reason effectively.

For example, in the past century, critics said the same thing about radio and television broadcasting, comparing them to tobacco in terms of addiction and suggesting that media companies were “manipulating” us into listening or watching. Rock-and-roll and rap music got the same treatment, and similar panics about video games are still with us today.

Strangely, many elites, politicians, and parents forget that they, too, were once kids and that their generation was probably also considered hopelessly lost in the “vast wasteland” of whatever the popular technology or content of the day was. The Pessimists Archive podcast has documented dozens of examples of this reoccurring phenomenon. Each generation makes it through the panic du jour, only to turn around and start lambasting newer media or technologies that they worry might be rotting their kids to the core. While these panics come and go, the real danger is that they sometimes result in concrete policy actions that censor content or eliminate choices that the public enjoys. Such regulatory actions can also discourage the emergence of new choices.

Missed Opportunity, or Marvelous Achievement?

Sen. Hawley makes another audacious assertion in his essay when he suggests that social media has not provided any real benefit to American workers or consumers. He says the rise of the Digital Economy has “encouraged a generation of our brightest engineers to enter a field of little productive value,” which he regards as “an opportunity missed for the nation.”

This is an astonishing statement, made more troubling by Hawley’s claim that all these digital innovators could have done far more good by choosing other professions. “What marvels might these bright minds have produced,” Hawley asks, “had they been oriented toward the common good?”

Why is it that Sen. Hawley gets to decide which professions are in “the common good”? This logic is insulting to all those who make a living in these sectors, but there is a deeper hubris in Sen. Hawley’s argument that social media does not serve “the common good.” Had some benevolent philosopher kings in Washington stopped the digital economy from developing over the past quarter century, would all those tech workers really have chosen more noble-minded and worthwhile professions? Could he or others in Congress really have had the foresight to steer us in a better direction?

In reality, U.S. tech companies produce high-quality jobs and affordable, collaborative communications platforms that are popular across the globe. In response to Sen. Hawley’s screed, the Internet Association, which represents America’s leading digital technology companies, noted that, in Sen. Hawley’s home state of Missouri alone, the Internet supports 63,000 jobs at 3,400 companies and contributed $17 billion in GDP to the state’s economy. Presumably, Sen. Hawley would not want to see those benefits “disappear” along with the social media sites that helped give rise to them.

But the Internet and social media have an equally profound impact on the entire U.S. economy, adding over 9,000 jobs and nearly 570 businesses to each metropolitan statistical area. The Digital Economy is a great American success story that is the envy of the world, not something to be lamented and disparaged as Sen. Hawley has.

For someone who believes that Facebook is a “drug” and a “parasite,” it is curious how active Sen. Hawley is on Facebook, as well as on Twitter. If he really believes that “we’d be better off if Facebook disappeared,” then he should lead by example and get off the sites. But that is a decision he will have to make for himself. He should not, however, make it for the rest of us.

Sherwin Siy, Vice President of Legal Affairs at Public Knowledge, discusses emerging issues in digital copyright policy. He addresses the Department of Commerce’s recent green paper on digital copyright, including the need to reform copyright laws in light of new technologies. This podcast also covers the DMCA, online streaming, piracy, cell phone unlocking, fair use recognition, digital ownership, and what we’ve learned about copyright policy from the SOPA debate.

Download

Related Links

• Sherwin Siy, Public Knowledge
• What the DMCA cell phone unlock ban means to you, Reardon
• Why The Library Of Congress Has A Lock On Your Phone, Henn

By Geoffrey Manne and Berin Szoka

Everyone loves to hate record labels. For years, copyright-bashers have ranted about the “Big Labels” trying to thwart new models for distributing music in terms that would make JFK assassination conspiracy theorists blush. Now they’ve turned their sites on the pending merger between Universal Music Group and EMI, insisting the deal would be bad for consumers. There’s even a Senate Antitrust Subcommittee hearing tomorrow, led by Senator Herb “Big is Bad” Kohl.

But this is a merger users of Spotify, Apple’s iTunes and the wide range of other digital services ought to love. UMG has done more than any other label to support the growth of such services, cutting licensing deals with hundreds of distribution outlets—often well before other labels. Piracy has been a significant concern for the industry, and UMG seems to recognize that only “easy” can compete with “free.” The company has embraced the reality that music distribution paradigms are changing rapidly to keep up with consumer demand. So why are groups like Public Knowledge opposing the merger?

Critics contend that the merger will elevate UMG’s already substantial market share and “give it the power to distort or even determine the fate of digital distribution models.” For these critics, the only record labels that matter are the four majors, and four is simply better than three. But this assessment hews to the outmoded, “big is bad” structural analysis that has been consistently demolished by economists since the 1970s. Instead, the relevant touchstone for all merger analysis is whether the merger would give the merged firm a new incentive and ability to engage in anticompetitive conduct. But there’s nothing UMG can do with EMI’s catalogue under its control that it can’t do now. If anything, UMG’s ownership of EMI should accelerate the availability of digitally distributed music.

To see why this is so, consider what digital distributors—whether of the pay-as-you-go, iTunes type, or the all-you-can-eat, Spotify type—most want: Access to as much music as possible on terms on par with those of other distribution channels. For the all-you-can-eat distributors this is a sine qua non: their business models depend on being able to distribute as close as possible to all the music every potential customer could want. But given UMG’s current catalogue, it already has the ability, if it wanted to exercise it, to extract monopoly profits from these distributors, as they simply can’t offer a viable product without UMG’s catalogue.

The merger with EMI—the smallest of the four major labels, with a US market share of around 9%—does nothing to increase UMG’s incentive or ability to extract monopoly rents. UMG’s ability to raise prices on Lady Gaga’s music is hardly affected by the fact that it might also own Lady Antebellum’s music, anymore than its current ownership of Ladyhawke’s music does. But, regardless, UMG has viewed digital distribution as a friend, not a foe.

Even on their own, structural terms, the critics’ analysis is flawed. The argument against the merger is based largely on the notion that the critical, relevant antitrust market comprises album sales by the four major labels. But this makes no sense.

In fact, UMG currently distributes only about 30% of the music consumed in the US, and because, like all the majors, it distributes some music over which it has no ownership rights (including no ability to set prices), it owns only 24% of music purchased in the US. EMI’s share of distribution, as we noted, is around 9%, and it has experienced significant turmoil in recent years. Meanwhile, the independent labels that some critics seek to exclude from the market (and which, ironically, probably distribute the bulk of the music they listen to) sell 30% of the records sold in the US today and do so digitally largely through a single distributor, Merlin—essentially a fifth major record label. This is far beyond trivial.

What matters for antitrust market definition is substitutability: If customers would purchase eight singles off an album in response to an increase in the 12-track album price, singles and albums are surely in the same market. Ditto consumption of singles and entire albums through streaming services in lieu of outright purchase—and it’s clear that this mode of distribution is increasingly popular. There is no principled defense of an album-only market, nor one that excludes independent labels or streaming services. And once you appreciate these market dynamics, the concerns over this merger disappear.

The reality is closer to this: EMI is effectively a failing firm. Its current owner (Citigroup) inherited the company when its previous owner defaulted, and it promptly put it up for auction. Warner and UMG both bid on EMI and UMG won. Now Warner leads the effort to stymie the deal, deploying a time-tested strategy of trying to accomplish by regulation what it couldn’t manage through genuine competition.

Everyone loves to hate record labels. For years, copyright-bashers have ranted about the “Big Labels” trying to thwart new models for distributing music in terms that would make JFK assassination conspiracy theorists blush. Now they’ve turned their sites on the pending merger between Universal Music Group and EMI, insisting the deal would be bad for consumers. There’s even a Senate Antitrust Subcommittee hearing tomorrow, led by Senator Herb “Big is Bad” Kohl.

But this is a merger users of Spotify, Apple’s iTunes and the wide range of other digital services ought to love. UMG has done more than any other label to support the growth of such services, cutting licensing deals with hundreds of distribution outlets—often well before other labels. Piracy has been a significant concern for the industry, and UMG seems to recognize that only “easy” can compete with “free.” The company has embraced the reality that music distribution paradigms are changing rapidly to keep up with consumer demand. So why are groups like Public Knowledge opposing the merger?

Critics worry that a larger UMG will stifle innovative distribution services. While that’s theoretically possible, UMG’s past practice and the industry’s changing dynamics—including the significant increase in buyer power from large retailers like Apple, Amazon and Wal-Mart—suggest the concern is speculative, at best. Albums are simply not the dominant marketing vehicles they once were for most artists, and, increasingly, consumers are content to “rent” their music through streaming and other online services rather than own it outright.

A slightly larger UMG poses no threat to the evolving distribution of music. In fact, UMG has increasingly championed digital distribution as it has grown in size. UMG’s history with digital distribution should please anyone concerned about the deal: it has been both aggressive and progressive in the digital space. UMG is often the first to license its catalogue to new services and it has financially supported the creation of some of the largest of these services. When online giant Slacker Radio added a subscription service to its Web radio offering, UMG not only licensed its catalogue for the new service but also renegotiated (and lowered) its terms for Slacker’s webcasting license in order to ease Slacker’s move into subscription services. And UMG was instrumental in getting Muve—the second largest subscription music service in the US today—off the ground. Again—the industry’s best defense against “free” is “easy,” and that doesn’t change for UMG if it gains another few percentage points of market share.

To paraphrase Timbuk 3 (from an album originally released on the famed I.R.S. label): Music’s future is so bright, it’s gotta wear shades. Music has never been cheaper, easier to access, more widely distributed, nor available in more forms and formats. And the digital distribution of music—significantly facilitated by UMG—shows no signs of slowing down. What has slowed down, thanks largely to these advances in digital and online distribution, is music piracy. Anyone looking for an explanation why UMG has been so progressive in its support for innovation in music distribution need look no further than that fact. This merger does nothing to change UMG’s critical incentives to continue to support digital distribution of its catalogue: fighting piracy and effectively distributing its music.

[Cross posted at Forbes.com]

In their 2006 Cato Policy Analysis, Amateur-to-Amateur: The Rise of a New Creative Culture, Gregory Lastowka and Dan Hunter wrote about how the functions that make up the creative cycle—creation, selection, production, dissemination, promotion, sale, and use of expressive content—are undergoing revolutionary decentralization and disintermediation.

The only thing professional in the clip below was the writing of the song. It deserves its credit, but the performance itself, production of the video, its selection, dissemination, and promotion (Twitter users, YouTube) are all amateur or amateur supported by a professionally managed, ad-supported platform.

Watch it a second time to take in the reactions of the girl sitting in front of the map. If you like, compare it with the tacky, overproduced, and flat “professional” video.

This is amateur entertainment that rivals any professional production, in part because it’s amateur. Assuming this performer dedicates himself further to his craft, he can rival or surpass anything put out by yesterday’s professionals.

(And, yes, I’m waiting to learn that I’ve been duped by some clever marketing scheme, but I hope this is real.)

Over at TechDirt, Mike Masnick has an interesting post asking “Why Did Apple Approve Spotify?” which builds on an AdAge column asking a similar question: “Did Apple Sacrifice ITunes With Latest Apps?”  As the title of that AdAge piece suggests, some folks are wondering if Apple shot itself in the foot by approving Spotify, a music streaming app that some regard as a potential iTunes killer.  I don’t really have any comment on the business angle here, rather, I wanted to just comment on Mike’s suggestion that one possible explanation for Apple’s approval of the app is that:

As we noted when the app was approved, Apple appears to be somewhat gunshy, following the FCC inquiry into why it “blocked” Google Voice on the iPhone (and, yes, Apple still insists it didn’t actually block the app, but Google says otherwise). Given the scrutiny, Apple probably realized that it was in for some serious political trouble if it blocked an app like Spotify, which would have received a lot of press attention. Oddly, the AdAge article doesn’t mention this at all.

Indeed, it is odd that AdAge didn’t bother mentioning that fact.  But what I find doubly odd here is that nobody is even blinking an eye at the prospect of such political meddling with — or even possible FCC regulation of — Apple, iTunes, or music streaming market in general!  Seriously, have we gotten to the point now in our Bold New World of Neutrality Regulation that innovative high-tech companies must live in fear of constant regulatory intervention even when they completely lack any statutory authority to play these games?  Moreover, does anyone think that the a bunch of Beltway bureaucrats can micro-manage music and high-tech application markets and give us more options than we have today?

I know the prospect of such meddling makes some academics and regulatory activists groups happy, but I can’t see how this ends well for consumers or high-tech markets more generally.  Regardless, for those of you who laugh when we suggest that the slippery slope of regulation is real, consider this case to be Exhibit A.  Or perhaps it’s Exhibit B since the Google Voice spat with Apple was already moving the FCC in the direction of becoming a device regulator and applying “handset neutrality” principles that have no basis in law.  It’s your anything-goes government at work.

The latest edition (Version 4.0) of my PFF special report on “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods” is now up.  For those not familiar with the report, it explores the market for parental control tools, rating schemes, education and media literacy efforts, and various other tools, methods, and initiatives aimed at promoting online child safety.  After evaluating that state of this market, I conclude: “There has never been a time in our nation’s history when parents have had more tools and methods at their disposal to help them decide what constitutes acceptable media content in their homes and in the lives of their children.”  Moreover, I believe that the parental controls and content management tools cataloged in the report represent a better, less restrictive alternative to government regulation.

Version 4.0 of the report is now over 250 pages long (up from 200 pages in Version 3.0) and it contains almost 70 exhibits (up from 50), 725 references (up from roughly 500), and numerous updates in all five sections of the book. Major updates have been made to the Internet, social networking, and mobile media sections, reflecting the growing importance of those sectors and issues. Other new sections or appendices have also been added to the report, including:

• a new section examining how many households really need parental control tools;
• a new appendix on the downsides of mandatory parental controls and restrictive default settings;
• a new section on the dangers of “deputizing the online middleman” solution as an approach to solving child safety concerns;
• a new appendix reviewing the findings of 5 past online safety task forces;
• … and much more.

I issue major updates once a year and 1 or 2 minor tweaks during the course of the year to reflect the evolution of the parental control and online child safety marketplace and debate. The report is available free-of-charge on the PFF website, and the previous editions of the report are housed there too in case you want to see how it has evolved over the past couple of years. For those interested in taking a quick look at the report, I have embedded it down below the fold as a Scribd file. Finally, as is always the case, I encourage readers to send me updates and suggestions for how to improve the report and I will incorporate them into future versions.

I’ve just had a new article published by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in which I make the case against “techno-panics,” which refers to public and political crusades against the use of new media or technologies by the young. The article is entitled “Parents, Kids & Policymakers in the Digital Age: Safeguarding Against ‘Techno-Panics‘” and it appears in the July 2009 Inside ALEC newsletter.  This is something I have spent a lot of time writing about here in recent years (See 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and I finally got around to putting it altogether in a concise essay here.  I have pasted the full text below. [And I just want to send a shout-out to my friend Anne Collier of Net Family News.org, whose work on this topic has been very influential on my thinking.]

“Parents, Kids & Policymakers in the Digital Age: Safeguarding Against ‘Techno-Panics‘” by Adam Thierer

A cursory review of the history of media and communications technologies reveals a reoccurring cycle of “techno-panics” — public and political crusades against the use of new media or technologies by the young.  From the waltz to rock-and-roll to rap music, from movies to comic books to video games, from radio and television to the Internet and social networking websites, every new media format or technology has spawned a fresh debate about the potential negative effects they might have on kids.

Inevitably, fueled by media sensationalism and various activist groups, these social and cultural debates quickly become political debates. Indeed, each of the media technologies or outlets mentioned above was either regulated or threatened with regulation at some point in its history. And the cycle continues today. During recent sessions of Congress, countless hearings were held and bills introduced on a wide variety of media and content-related issues. These proposals dealt with broadcast television and radio programming, cable and satellite television content, video games, the Internet, social networking sites, and much more.  State policymakers, especially state Attorneys General (AGs), have also joined in such crusades on occasion.  The recent push by AGs for mandatory age verification for all social networking sites is merely the latest example.

What is perhaps most ironic about these techno-panics is how quickly yesterday’s boogeyman becomes tomorrow’s accepted medium, even as the new villains replace old ones.  For example, the children of the 1950s and 60s were told that Elvis’s hip shakes and the rock-and-roll revolution would make them all the tools of the devil. They grew up fine and became parents themselves, but then promptly began demonizing rap music and video games in the ‘80s and ‘90s.  And now those aging Pac Man-era parents are worried sick about their kids being abducted by predators lurking on MySpace and Facebook. We shouldn’t be surprised if, a decade or two from now, today’s Internet generation will be decrying the dangers of virtual reality.

These techno-panics are almost always disproportionate to the real risk posed by new media and technology, which typically do not have the corrupting influence on youth that older generations fear.  Parents and public policymakers alike need to remember they were once kids, too, and managed to live through many of the same fears and concerns about media and popular culture. As the late University of North Carolina journalism professor Margaret A. Blanchard once noted: “[P]arents and grandparents who lead the efforts to cleanse today’s society seem to forget that they survived alleged attacks on their morals by different media when they were children. Each generation’s adults either lose faith in the ability of their young people to do the same or they become convinced that the dangers facing the new generation are much more substantial than the ones they faced as children.” And Thomas Hine, author of The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager, argues that: “We seem to have moved, without skipping a beat, from blaming our parents for the ills of society to blaming our children. We want them to embody virtues we only rarely practice. We want them to eschew habits we’ve never managed to break.”

The better response by both parents and policymakers is a measured and balanced approach to children’s exposure to media content and online interactions.  All-or-nothing extremes are never going to work.  In particular, techno-panics are hopelessly counter-productive. “Fear, in many cases, is leading to overreaction, which in turn could give rise to greater problems as young people take detours around the roadblocks we think we are erecting,” argue John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, authors of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. What parents, educators, and policymakers need to understand, they argue, “is that the traditional values and common sense that have served them well in the past will be relevant in this new world, too.”

Most simply, we need to be willing to talk to our kids about the new technologies and cultural developments that shape their generation. When we as parents (or policymakers) do not fully comprehend or appreciate the new-fangled gadget in our kids’ pocket—or whatever they are playing, watching, or listening to on it—instead of engaging in demagoguery and driving a wedge between us and them, we should instead invite them to have a conversation with us about it.  Ask three simple questions to get that conversation started: “What is this new thing all about?”  “Tell me how you use it.”  “Why is it important to you?”  Once you’ve got them talking to you, good ‘ol fashion common sense and timeless parenting principles should kick in. “Do you understand why too much of this might be bad for you?” “Will you please come talk to me if you don’t understand something you’ve seen or heard?” And so on.

In sum, it’s about parental responsibility and rational, measured responses. The “techno-panic” mentality, by contrast, creates distrust and distance between our kids and us. As Anne Collier of Net Family News notes, techno-panics “cause fear, which interferes with parent-child communication, which in turn puts kids at greater risk.”

Parents and policymakers need to engage kids in an ongoing conversation about the technologies du jour—even when we don’t fully understand or appreciate them.

————— [printable Scribd version follows] —————

“Against Techno-Panics” by Adam Thierer, PFF (July 2009 – Inside ALEC) http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=17392730&access_key=key-2gdkqylyeu5h376buyyi&page=1&version=1&viewMode=

Check out “Magic Flute: Primal Find Sings of Music’s Mystery” in yesterday’s WSJ. The article describes the development of music as a central part of what Jacob Bronowski called the “Ascent of Man“:

“I believe that before we evolved language, our communication was more musical than it is now,” says cognitive archaeologist Steven Mithen at the University of Reading in England, author of “The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body.” Unlike Darwin, Dr. Mithen is convinced that music was crucial to human survival. “Using music to express emotion or build a sense of group belonging would have been essential to the function of human society, especially before language evolved prior to modern humans.” The discovery of the world’s oldest musical instrument—a 35,000-year-old flute made from a wing bone—highlights a prehistoric moment when the mind learned to soar on flights of melody and rhythm. Researchers announced last week in Nature that they had unearthed the flute from the Ice Age rubbish of cave bear bones, reindeer horn and stone tools discarded in a cavern called Hohle Fels near Ulm, Germany. No one knows the melodies that were played in this primordial concert hall, which sheltered the humans who first settled Europe. The delicate wind instrument, though, offers evidence of how music pervaded daily life eons before iTunes, satellite radio and Muzak. …the ability to create musical instruments reflects a profound mental awakening that gave these early humans a crucial edge over the more primitive Neanderthal people who lived in the same epoch. “The expansion of modern humans hinged in part on new ways of storing symbolic information that seemed to confer an advantage on these people in competition with Neanderthals,” Dr. Conard says. To Dr. Patel, music-making was a conscious innovation, like the invention of writing or the control of fire. “It is something that we humans invented that then transformed human life,” he says. “It has a profound impact on how individual humans experience the world, by connecting us through space and time to other minds.”

If even something as central to our daily lives as music is, in fact the result of technological innovation over time and if technology can, as with music, change the way we think, communicate and build communities, I can’t help but wonder:  What will our descendants think thousands of years from now as they look back on the rise of today’s web and social networking technologies? If nothing else, this sense of perspective should make us better appreciate how important the development of communications media really is to the future of the human species.

Impossible as it is to predict how that staggeringly complex process will unfold— e.g., will Google make us smarter or stupider?—I’ll just humbly suggest that, rather than try to tinker with the future course of the species by trying to fine-tune public policy today to produce the “right” outcome, we would do better to follow the same principle that has guided the medical profession for 24 centuries: First, Do No Harm. In other words, if we don’t know what the effects of regulatory intervention in new media will be in the long-term, we’d be better off to leave well enough alone.

As I am getting ready to watch the Super Bowl tonight on my amazing 100-inch screen via a Sanyo high-def projector that only cost me $1,600 bucks on eBay, I started thinking back about how much things have evolved (technologically-speaking) over just the past decade. I thought to myself, what sort of technology did I have at my disposal exactly 10 years ago today, on February 1st, 1999?  Here’s the miserable snapshot I came up with:

• 10 years ago today, I did not own a high-definition television set, as they were too expensive (I bought my first one from Sears on an installment plan a few months later. It was a boxy 42-inch, 4×3 monstrosity that rolled around on the floor on casters and it took up half the room). Moreover, only a few HDTV signals could be picked up locally and none were yet available from my cable or satellite provider.
• 10 years ago today, the biggest television in my house was a 32-inch 4×3 ProScan analog set, which I thought was massive. (Of course, it was in terms of weight. It was over 125 lbs).
• 10 years ago today, I was still using a dial-up, 56k narrowband Internet connection even though I lived in downtown Washington, DC just 6 blocks from our nation’s Capitol.
• 10 years ago today, my computer was a Compaq laptop that weighed more than my dog, had barely any storage or RAM, and had a screen that was only slightly brighter than an Etch-A-Sketch.
• 10 years ago today, I was still occasionally using an old CompuServe e-mail address that had nine digits in it. (But at least I wasn’t one of the 20 million or so people paying $20 bucks per month to graze around inside AOL’s walled garden!)
• 10 years ago today, I was still backing up files on 3 1/2 inch floppy disks. I had boxes full of those things. (And, sadly, I still had 5 1/4 inch floppies in my possession that I was saving “just in case” I ever needed those old files. Pathetic!)

• 10 years ago today, I did not own an i-Pod, or any other sort of portable digital MP3 player. I was still hauling a box of CDs around with me everywhere I went and playing them on a bulky portable CD player that skipped whenever I bumped it.  And I was still years away from downloading my first song or album online.
• 10 years ago today, I was still occasionally listening to cassette tapes in my car.
• 10 years ago today, I was still using a crummy analog cell phone that had ZERO options outside of just calling people (and I had to manually type in every single contact on the numeric keypad. But hey, that old StarTac sure looked cool at the time!)
• 10 years ago today, I was still driving to my local video store to rent movies, and some of them were on VHS tapes.
• 10 years ago today, I had never downloaded or watched a movie or TV show on my computer.
• 10 years ago today, I was still playing video games on my old PlayStation (as in PlayStation ONE) and was lusting for a Sega DreamCast. And the idea of online gaming was still a distant dream.
• 10 years ago today, I was still using a camera that required film, which I had to always drop off at the local pharmacy to be developed. And I was still over a year away from buying my first digital camera (and camcorder) that could transfer files to my computer.
• 10 years ago today, I had not yet made my first eBay transaction.
• 10 years ago today, I had never done any online banking, or any other monetary transactions online for that matter.
• 10 years ago today, I had not yet conducted my first Google search. I was still using AltaVista for almost all my searches.
• 10 years ago today, I did not have a blog, an RSS feed, a Twitter feed, any social networking accounts, Gmail, GMaps, Google News, Flickr, Firefox, Netflix, Wikipedia, satellite radio, or any of the other endless assortment of digital services I rely on today.

My God, think about how much our world has evolved in just 10 years!!  I love capitalism.

The Isle of Man may soon implement a “blanket license” whereby Manx broadband users could download as much music as they like in exchange for paying a “fee” (also known as a “tax,” since this would be non-optional) to their ISP that would supposedly be as low as $1.38/month.  The Manx proposal sounds a lot like how SoundExchange administers a blanket license in the U.S. for web-casting of copyrighted music:

the money collected by the Internet providers would be sent to a special agency that would distribute the proceeds to the copyright owners, including the record labels and music publishers. They would receive payments based on how often their music was downloaded or streamed over the Internet, as they now do in many countries when it is performed live or on the radio.

As Adam Thierer has noted,  Larry Lessig has endorsed at least a voluntary version of this idea, but Adam has raised a number of tough questions:

How do we determine who should get paid what under a blanket licensing system for the Net? What formula shall we use to determine why one artists gets more than another? After all, counting downloads won’t be simple, and it can be gamed. Lessig says that “there are plenty of ways that we might tag and trace particular uses of copyrighted material.” (p. 272)  Really? If that was the case today, then we would have a fully functioning copyright clearance and compensation system in place already. But “tagging and tracing” is easier said than done. The fact is, the same complexities we face trying to enforce such tagging and tracing systems under the present copyright system would be present in any compulsory licensing system…. There are many thorny questions about the fairness of imposing a blanket fee on all online users even if they don’t listen to any music, or those who would be offended at the prospect of being forced to pay for certain types of music (think of grandmas paying for gangsta rap). On the opposite end of the equation, there’s the question of fairness to artists who may not want to surrender the rights to their musical creations at government-set terms and rates. Finally, what about other types of media creators and distributors? If we’re going to have a blanket fee for online music, why not movies, television content, video games, and everything else?

For further reading, check out “What’s Wrong with ISP Music Licensing” by copyright gurus Chris Castle and Amy Mitchell and this 2004 Cato study by Robert Merges.  Not being a copyright expert, I don’t really have anything more to add on this issue.  But I look forward to hearing what our readers—and my co-bloggers—think.