A group of regulatory advocates that includes Free Press, Media Access Project and the New America Foundation, have fired off a letter to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requesting action against the nation’s #5 mobile provider, MetroPCS.  These regulatory groups claim that “new service plans being offered by mobile provider MetroPCS block and discriminate against Internet content, applications and websites.” Wired’s Ryan Singel summarizes what the fight is about:

At issue are new, tiered 4G data plans from the nation’s fifth largest mobile carrier, which specializes in pay-as-you-go mobile-phone service. The new plans offer “unlimited web usage” for all three tiers, which cost $40, $50 and $60 a month. But MetroPCS’s terms exclude video sites other than YouTube from “unlimited web usage,” and block the use of internet-telephony services such as Skype and Tango.  The terms of service also make it very unclear whether users would be allowed to use online-radio services such as Pandora.

The parties petitioning the FCC for regulatory intervention claim that “MetroPCS appears to be in violation of the Commission’s recently adopted open Internet rules” even though they note that “these rules have not yet taken effect.”

There are four things I find interesting about this hullabaloo:

(1) The ink isn’t even dry on the FCC’s Net neutrality order and yet it already has the inside-the-Beltway lobbying machine humming.  We’re just a few weeks into the FCC’s new “light touch” Net neutrality regulatory regime and yet we’re already seeing pleadings like this one.  If this foreshadows what the future holds, it’s a troubling sign of things to come.  If the agency’s new regulatory regime sticks, I think it’s safe to say that such requests for market meddling will only increase as time goes on and the Internet will quickly be wrapped in innovation-stifling red tape.  Meanwhile, countless lawyers and lobbyists around the Beltway are licking their chops in anticipation of the lobbying and litigation bonanza that awaits.

(2) Choice is largely irrelevant to the pro-regulation Net neutrality crowd.  It seemingly doesn’t matter to these regulatory advocates that they and other consumers are free to shop around for alternative mobile plans.  In the field of competition policy, the ability to exercise such choice is typically the end of the story and no further discussion / intervention is considered warranted. These advocates, however, seemingly want control over all terms of service for all market competitors, even for the distant #5 players in the field.  I mean, for God’s sake, we are talking about MetroPCS here!  Does anyone seriously believe that there’s just no escaping their evil clutches?

And apparently we can look forward to more of this sort of across-the-board, damn-the-consequences market meddling thanks to what Randy May of the Free State Foundation refers to as “Infamous No. 78” of the FCC’s Net neutrality order. That provision of the order essentially says that the FCC can dispense with the notion that a showing of actual monopoly power and actual consumer harm should be the litmus tests for regulatory intervention. Instead, May notes:

by disclaiming reliance only on anticompetitive injury and consumer harm (generally present only when an Internet provider possesses market power), the Commission leaves itself largely at sea in enforcing its rules. By “at sea,” I mean, of course, that the Commission, as it acknowledges, is leaving itself with nearly unbridled discretion in deciding which Internet provider practices will be permitted and which will not.

Welcome to our brave new world of ‘anything goes’ Internet regulation.

(3) For Net neutrality proponents, “fairness” always trumps competition / innovation, regardless of the costs.  The people who work at these organizations are, no doubt, well-meaning in their pleadings for regulation. They really think they can make communications and broadband market outcomes more “fair” through the application of Net neutrality regulations and other rules.

But regulation is not costless.  Micromanaging markets can lead to less innovation, less investment, and less consumer choice. It can also dampen price competition. After all, while the regulatory advocates want us to get hot and bothered about the terms of service in this particular case, we should not forget the fact that, with this latest move, MetroPCS is attempting to inject more competition, new innovation, and lower prices into the mobile marketplace.  To reiterate, the company is offering a $40 per month entry level price plan for a new 4G LTE service bundle.  Most people would call this innovation. But Free Press, Media Access Project and New America Foundation want us to believe it is a massive anti-consumer scandal. What an astonishing bit of hubris.

Moreover, let’s imagine that these regulatory advocates get their way and the FCC preemptively denies this innovative move, or that the agency micro-manages the terms of the offering. Those regulatory groups would like us to believe that MetroPCS can absorb the cost of such meddling and that everything will be just fine and dandy.  Back in the real world, however, if you ask just about any serious investment analyst or market expert who monitors mobile markets what they think, most of them would first convey their shock that MetroPCS has even been able to last as long as they have given the cut-throat competition in this arena. Then they’ll tell you that the sort of price and service competition that MetroPCS is pursuing here could kill them. Finally they’d tell you that an increased regulatory burden on the company at this time is could very well result in one less competitor in the long run.

So, while the regulatory advocates will shower us with talk of how they are looking out for our best interests to ensure carriers play “fair,” from a consumer perspective, an additional competitor and more price competition is likely of more importance than a perfectly “neutral” mobile service offering.

(4) Net neutrality regulatory proponents seemingly have very little faith in “openness” prospering organically, even though it has. As I’ve noted before, no one disagrees that the Internet’s openness is what made it great, or that consumers benefit from the free flow of traffic and applications over broadband networks.  But the regulatory advocates assume that only sweeping controls on broadband networks will make that a reality. The fact is, the Internet has never been more “open” than it is today. There’s a simple reason for that: It’s what most people demand. It’s also smart business.  No company ever got rich in this space by blocking traffic.

Having said all that, it may be the case that not everyone cares as much about perfect openness as others do. [See my essay from last year on the many flavors of “openness” and how defining the term is challenging.] As noted above, many consumers would be happier with cheaper price plans and more varied service options. (I bet that is particularly true of many MetroPCS customers since the company seems to target that market niche).  And guess what technophiles… not everyone out there is dying to have Skype or Pandora at their fingertips.  Personally, I couldn’t live with out either of those services and would never own a smartphone or calling plan that disallowed them for any reason.  But I am not so arrogant as to assume that everyone else has the same values as me or that I should make this trade-off for the rest of the world.  If some consumers want to trade functionality off against an affordable entry-level 4G plan, who is to say they should not have that option?  Apparently Free Press, Media Access Project and New America Foundation, that’s who.

I sincerely hope it was a Washington Post editor, and not New America Foundation president Steve Coll, who picked the title for his editorial today, “Why Fox News Should Help Fund NPR.”  After all, Coll certainly must be smart enough to know that there is no law or regulation on the books today that gives the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) or any other agency the ability to force private media providers to fund their public media competitors.  Moreover, it takes a lot of chutzpah to try to spin NPR’s recent Juan Williams fiasco into an excuse for private media providers like Fox News to fund NPR, but, shockingly, that’s exactly what Coll does. “The Williams imbroglio is teachable, but its lessons actually point in the opposite direction: America’s public media system, including NPR, requires more funding, not less.”  Hmm… that’s not exactly the lesson most of the rest of the world took away from this episode!

Coll first argues it makes sense for private media funds to be transferred to NPR becuase “In this time of niche publications and cable networks that thrive on ideological anger, we should be seeking to strengthen NPR’s role as a convener of the public square, a demagogue-free zone where all political and social groups — including conservatives and others opposed to federal funding of public media — should be welcome on equal terms.”  This is indicative of the all-too-common “progressive” impulse to force media upon us that we don’t want or even find offensive.  To be clear, I am not one of those people who finds NPR to be a hopelessly biased bastion of Leftist thinking.  While I think it’s clear to everyone that many of NPR’s stories and reporters do lean that direction, I also think there’s some outstanding reporting to be found there.  But if Steve Coll and his colleagues at the New America Foundation want to see NPR get more funding, they should do the same thing I do:  Open up their wallets and make the voluntary choice to fund it. To force everyone else to do so is despicable.

Second, Coll wants to pretend he’s doing private media providers a favor by forcing them to fund NPR.  “Continuing to force profit-seeking licensees to tack public interest work onto their commercial enterprises is a fool’s errand. It would be far more rational to let commercial enterprises respond to market incentives as they see fit, while leaving the construction of public interest journalism to organizations and leaders who want to do nothing else – among them, NPR.”

How arrogant. Coll is basically saying there’s no other good news out there besides what’s on NPR.  Perhaps he’s just not listening to anything else?  Moreover, to suggest that private media providers should welcome the opportunity to fund their public media competitors because that will take a burden off their shoulders is absurd.  That’s not Steve Coll’s decision to make and it certainly shouldn’t be the government’s either. Whether he feels his preferred mix of views is accurately represented elsewhere is utterly irrelevant.  That does not justify forcing those other media providers to fund the one outlet he feels does provide the right mix.

Astonishingly, Coll never addresses the fundamental unfairness of his proposal to private providers.  After all, in case he didn’t notice, many private media operators are fighting for their lives right now in the hyper-competitive modern media marketplace.  Coll not only ignores that but he then somehow rationalizes what would, in essence, be a new discriminatory media tax that would undercut private media operations at a time when they can ill afford it.  This raises fundamental fairness issues. Not only has public broadcasting and non-commercial media been siphoning off more and more market share from private news media in recent years, but, by placing such a tax on private media to fund its competitors, Coll’s proposal would essentially put private operators in double jeopardy.  It’s hard to see how that’s in “the public interest.”  It’s like the government signing the death warrant for private media.

Elsewhere, I’ve written much more about how such discriminatory private media taxes are seriously misguided.  See, for example, this paper I wrote on what’s wrong with using broadcast spectrum fees as a slush fund for public media.  Also, similar discriminatory tax and regulatory schemes are critiqued in this 79-page filing that my former colleagues Berin Szoka, Ken Ferree, and I submitted to the FCC as part of its “Future of Media” proceeding.

Needless to say, their won’t be much of a “future of media” — at least for private media providers — if Congress took Steve Coll’s advice and imposed this massive media income redistribution scheme on the market.  Again, fund your own media.  Make your own choices.  Don’t try to impose your choices on others.

Tim Wu: Not Looking Happy about Being So Wrong

Three years ago this month, Columbia University Law School professor Tim Wu released a controversial white paper in conjunction with the New America Foundation entitled, “Wireless Net Neutrality: Cellular Carterfone and Consumer Choice in Mobile Broadband.” It contained a litany of accusations regarding supposed corporate shenanigans in the mobile marketplace, including: intentional crippling of features and functionality; refusal to allow 3rd party attachments or intentional curtailment of a market for 3rd party application developers; and various concerns about “discrimination” of one sort or another.

Here at the TLF, we responded quite forcefully. I think every one of us piled on this study in one way or another. (ex: Hance, Jerry, James, Tim Lee, me x 2, + a podcast).  I called his proposal “a declaration of surrender” since Prof. Wu was essential calling the game early and raising the white flag on mobile competition. Further, I argued he was essentially asking for “the forced commoditization of cellular networks” which “would necessitate at return to the rate-of-return regulatory methods of the past.”  Others were a bit more kind to him, but we were all pretty skeptical of his gloomy claims. However, each of us here also argued that the wireless market (especially the applications side of the market) was still developing and that we’d have to check back in a few years to see how well the hands-off approach worked out.

Well, thankfully, we now know for certain that Tim Wu’s was much too lugubrious in his outlook and far too quick to call for regulatory intervention to solve a non-crisis. On the occasion of the 3rd anniversary of the release of Prof. Wu’s paper, CTIA-The Wireless Association filed a short paper with the FCC taking stock of just how far the mobile marketplace has come in just three short years. The results are really quite remarkable, as CTIA’s letter notes:

Contrary to the professor’s view of how the ecosystem would evolve, in the absence of regulation, every element of the wireless ecosystem has expanded. Today, the fact that there are over six hundred devices in the U.S. offering hundreds of different capabilities for consumers, over 170,000 applications, more open networks with open developer initiatives and software development kits, the sale of phones through numerous online and retail outlets, multiple operating systems, and the launch of the newest and most innovative handsets first in the United States demonstrates that the mobile wireless ecosystem continues to evolve to serve customers, contrary to Professor Wu’s arguments.

The filing goes on to examine each of the complaints Prof. Wu had articulated and then discusses current marketplace realities. Here’s the summary:

• Professor Wu asserted that carriers had a “near lock” on the retailing of mobile devices that, presumably, would only be altered through regulatory intervention. Today, consumers can purchase handsets from carriers, directly from manufacturers, through brick-and-mortar retail chains, via Internet discounters, and through a healthy secondary market. For example, Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, TigerDirect.com, Amazon.com, LetsTalk.com, Apple, Nokia, Google, Motorola and many others all sell handsets directly to consumers. The recent Best Buy catalog alone lists over a hundred wireless devices for sale. • Professor Wu argued that the U.S. market had only “a small fraction of the phones available [elsewhere],” implying that carriers restricted the diversity of handsets. Today, the U.S. market has over 630 devices manufactured by 33 different companies, including the BlackBerry® Tour 9630, Samsung Omnia, HTC TouchPro, Motorola Droid, Apple  iPhone 3GS, Motorola Karma QA1, BlackBerry® Bold, Motorola Cliq, myTouch 3G, G1, BlackBerry® Pearl Flip, HTC Touch Pro2, Palm Pre, HTC Hero, Samsung Instinct S30, Cricket TXTM8, Motorola Evoke QA4, Samsung JetSet, Motorola Hint, Samsung Finesse, Samsung Messager, LG Tritan, Samsung TwoStep, and the LG Rhythm. Of note, almost every one of the phones listed above was first launched in the United States. • Professor Wu painted a picture of a “stalled” application market where developers were unable to create applications for mobile devices. Today, a vibrant “apps” market exists where over 170,000 applications are available for popular operating systems, and where developers as young as age 9 can navigate the approval process to become highly successful. At least seven different companies, none of whom are affiliated with wireless carriers, market the overwhelming majority of these applications. • Professor Wu criticized carriers’ control over handset design. Today, all major carriers, and most of the other carriers in the country, have extensive open network development platforms for devices and software. Intra-industry groups have developed the Open Handset Alliance (which has created the Android operating system), and several other operating systems have moved to an open platform. Additionally, as discussed above, numerous handset manufacturers are selling directly to consumers. • Professor Wu stated that the “oligopoly” in handset sales resulted in a market where consumer-friendly capabilities, such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and picture distribution, were “crippled.” Today, all of these capabilities, and hundreds more that reflect a broad array of consumer desires, are available to U.S. consumers. With the wealth of options, consumers can make buying decisions based on a range of factors. This is exactly the market that consumers want, and regulators should encourage.

Now, I’m sure some folks will say, “hey, we can’t trust industry to report on this stuff,” but these are facts, folks. CTIA hasn’t made anything up here. If anything, I think they’ve actually gone too easy on Tim and underplayed just how revolutionary the changes we’ve seen over the last 3 years have been.

That’s especially the case on the operating system front.  This war among Apple, Google, Microsoft, RIM (Blackberry), Palm, Symbian, and others has actually forced me to ask if we have, “Too Much Platform Competition” in this arena. App developers must now craft their offerings for so many platforms that it has become a significant developmental hassle and expense. But hey, from a consumer perspective, this is great! And it shocking how vibrant that OS-level competition continues to be. (For more details, see Berin’s post on “The Fiercely Competitive Mobile OS & Device Markets.”)

And then there’s the applications market. As I have noted in my essays repeatedly hammering Jonathan Zittrain’s equally dismal view of the digital world, today’s market for 3rd party mobile applications would have been virtually unfathomable just a few years ago. Can you even remember 2005 when we had none of those apps at our disposal? Today, by contrast, Apple’s App Store alone has over 100,000 apps in 20 different categories (available in 77 countries) to choose from. Android and Windows Mobile apps are also exploding. Frankly, I get exhausted trying to filter through the thousands and thousands of apps in the Android marketplace I now have to choose from. Again, we had zip, zero, zilch, nadda, N-O-T-H-I-N-G to choose from just a few years ago.  Folks, that is called progress—insane, amazing, beautiful, miraculous progress!

The following GigaOm chart was intended to show average app prices but also includes total app figures for each of the five leading mobile operating systems:

So, will Tim Wu come out and admit that his pessimism was unwarranted? Somehow I doubt it. But allow me to offer him a way to save face: I remember debating Tim about these issues in New York a few years back and he told me that he really didn’t want to see the feds jump in and start aggressively regulating most high-tech markets. Instead, he just wanted to shake things up and put the fear of God in the hearts of private operators so they would change their ways for the better in an effort to avoid the sledgehammer of federal regulation. (Tim, if you are reading this and have forgetting that conversation, it was at that FOSI dinner in New York where we were also debating who was a bigger Dungeons & Dragons nerd back in our childhood. I think you at least had the better of me in that debate!)

So, to save face here, Tim should declare victory and go home.  He should tell the world he single-handled revolutionized the wireless world with his vociferous agitation for a comprehensive federal regulatory regime for mobile and that it has blessed us one of the great capitalist success stories of our time.

Thank you Professor Wu for making the world a better place!

This afternoon at the New America Foundation, Jonathan Zittrain and I engaged in a spirited debate about his provocative new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. As always, Jonathan gave an us an interesting and highly entertaining show, and it was a great honor for me to be given the opportunity to provide some feedback about his book. I’ve been quite critical of the thesis that Jonathan sets forth in his book, and I have discussed my reservations in a lengthy book review and a series of follow-up essays here and elsewhere. (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

Jonathan opens with about 45 minutes of remarks and I come into the conversation around the 49 mark of the video. Michael Calabrese of NAF also has some comments about Jonathan’s book after I speak and then there is some interaction with the audience.

If you’re here in D.C. next Thursday, you might want to drop by the New America Foundation to watch Jonathan Zittrain and me go at it about his important new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.  Our debate will take place on Thursday, November 6th from 3:30 – 5:00 p.m. at New America Foundation headquarters (1630 Connecticut Ave, NW, 7th Floor).  My old friend (but frequent intellectual sparring partner) Michael Calabrese will also be speaking.  Michael is the Director of New America’s “Wireless Future Program” and one of the all-around nicest guys in the world of tech policy.  You can RSVP for the event here.

I’ve been quite critical of the thesis that Jonathan sets forth in his book, and I have discussed my reservations in a lengthy book review and a series of follow-up essays here and elsewhere. (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). We’ve also debated his book on the an NPR-Boston affiliate station if you care to hear a preview of our debate next week.  That show is online here.

I encourage you to join us for what promises to be a very interesting discussion.  As I pointed out in my original review of his book, if you have never had the chance to hear Jonathan speak, you’re in for a real treat.  He is, bar none, the most entertaining tech policy wonk in the world.

Again, RSVP here.

Over at DrewClark.com, earlier today I reported today that television networks – which in recent years have had a strained relationship with local broadcasters on a variety of fronts – joined with the National Association of Broadcasters in calling for a time out on the politically simmering issue of “white spaces.” Here’s the start of the story, and you can read the full post at DrewClark.com

WASHINGTON, October 23 – The top executives of the four major broadcast networks on Thursday urged the head of the Federal Communications Commission to delay a vote on a politically simmering issue that pits broadcasters against Google and high-tech executives.

In the letter, the CEOs of CBS Corp., NBC Universal and Walt Disney, and the chief operating officer of News Corp., urge that the FCC exercise caution before taking irreparable action with regard to the vacant television channels known as “white spaces.”

Google and the other technology executives, including Microsoft, Motorola, Philips and others, want the FCC to authorize electronic devices that capable of transmitting internet signals over vacant television bands.

The network executives – CBS’s Leslie Moonves, Disney’s Robert Iger, NBC’s Jeffrey Zucker and Peter Chernin of News Corp. – want a time out.

They join their local broadcasting colleagues, as well as manufacturers and users of wireless microphones, like the National Football League and Boadway theater owners, who have been actively lobbying the issue.

[…]

Read the rest of the story at my blog, DrewClark.com – The Politics of Telecom, Media and Technology

I’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:

For media consumers, it’s the freedom to consume whatever information or entertainment we want from whatever sources we choose, without government restricting our choices. For media creators and distributors, it’s the freedom to structure their business affairs as they wish in seeking to offer the public an expanding array of media options, for both news and entertainment. And for both consumers and creators,media freedom is being able to speak one’s mind without restraint and without the threat of FCC or FEC bureaucrats telling us what is “fair.”

It doesn’t seem like much to ask until you realize how many people in Washington and academia today are calling for these various flavors of media regulation.  Of course, it doesn’t help that media-bashing has always been a bipartisan sport.  Indeed, depsite the fact that most of these efforts are lead by the Left, our book highlights how some folks on the Right are still guilty of joining some of these misguided regulatory crusades.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain, for example, has sponsored “a la carte” mandates for cable and satellite operators and sponsored the draconian campaign finance law that will forever bear his name, McCain-Feingold. He has also proposed a follow-up law: McCain-Feingold II. Although it did not pass, McCain’s measure would have required broadcasters to run 12 hours of “candidate-centered and issue-centered programming” in the six weeks prior to primary and general elections — without giving broadcasters any control over those 12 hours (half of which would have had to run during prime time). The bill would have created a voucher system for the purchase of airtime for political advertisements, financed by an annual spectrum-use fee on all broadcast license holders. In sum, the legislation would have forced broadcast stations to pay a tax to the federal government that would in turn finance a pool of funds that politicians could turn around and spend to run ads on those very stations!

Others on the Right have favored the Fairness Doctrine in the past, and more recently, some have joined the Net neutrality effort. And many conservatives have long been in favor of various forms of media censorship.

That being said, the most serious threats to media freedom today arise from the Left and our book serves primarily as a response to the many Leftist efforts to regulate media today. As we argue in the introduction:

The left seems certain that a media problem ails our society; it just can’t decide what that problem is. Some contend that real media choices are as limited or biased as ever, while others argue that our democracy is imperiled by too many media choices, making it hard to share common thoughts or feelings. What unites these two types of critics is their elitist presumption that they know what’s best for the rest of us. They would love to rewrite regulations to tilt the media in the direction they prefer; and if they are allowed to do so, what is shaping up to be America’s Golden Age of media could come to a sudden end.

The Left’s obsession with reinstating the Fairness Doctrine is particularly telling in this regard. [You can read our history of the Fairness Doctrine here] But, as we go on to note:

Some liberals suggest that even a new Fairness Doctrine wouldn’t be enough to correct a “structural imbalance” in the media marketplace. They want tightened ownership regulations, mandates ensuring “greater local accountability” over radio and TV broadcasters, and a significant ramping up of subsidies for public radio and TV stations. One leading leftist proposal would even force private broadcasters to fund public broadcasters! These proposals expose the left’s true goal: to regulate private media outlets comprehensively and drive out those owners who dare to offer right-leaning alternatives.

This movement is being driven by a wide variety of Left-leaning think tanks and advocacy groups, especially Free Press, Media Access Project, and the New America Foundation. These organizations will likely have a strong voice in an Obama administration regarding media law and Internet policy issues. And we fear that means that new regulatory shackles will be placed on the media and free speech as a result. That’s why we penned this manifesto at this time. As we conclude in our book:

Motivated by the naked desire for political control, a reactionary fear of the new, or genuine if misguided views on equality and fairness in the media, [these liberal media activists] threaten to enact regulations that will strangle or at least cripple this social development before it can begin to reach its potential. Those on the right are not free from these impulses, either. But they, as the prime beneficiaries of media abundance — of all the conservative and libertarian talk shows and websites that would suffer in a media landscape remade by the Democratic Party and liberal activists — should embrace, defend, and expand the freedom that made it possible.

Anyway, if you care about free speech and media freedom, I do you hope you will consider giving the book a look. The main page for our book is here. And you can find it on Amazon here.