Anupam Chander, Director of the California International Law Center and Martin Luther King, Jr. Hall Research Scholar at the UC Davis School of Law, discusses his recent paper with co-author Uyen P. Lee titled The Free Speech Foundations of Cyberlaw. Chander addresses how the first amendment promotes innovation on the Internet; how limitations to free speech vary between the US and Europe; the role of online intermediaries in promoting and protecting the first amendment; the Communications Decency Act; technology, piracy, and copyright protection; and the tension between privacy and free speech.

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Related Links

• The Free Speech Foundations of CyberLaw, Chander, Lee
• The Electronic Silk Road: How the Web Binds the World Together in Commerce, Amazon
• Rules of the Digital Age: PW Talks with Anupam Chander, Publishers Weekly
• Securing Privacy in the Internet Age, Amazon

Andrew Orlowski of The Register (U.K.) recently posted a very interesting essay making the case for treating online copyright and privacy as essentially the same problem in need of the same solution: increased property rights. In his essay (“‘Don’t break the internet’: How an idiot’s slogan stole your privacy“), he argues that, “The absence of permissions on our personal data and the absence of permissions on digital copyright objects are two sides of the same coin. Economically and legally they’re an absence of property rights – and an insistence on preserving the internet as a childlike, utopian world, where nobody owns anything, or ever turns a request down. But as we’ve seen, you can build things like libraries with permissions too – and create new markets.” He argues that “no matter what law you pass, it won’t work unless there’s ownership attached to data, and you, as the individual, are the ultimate owner. From the basis of ownership, we can then agree what kind of rights are associated with the data – eg, the right to exclude people from it, the right to sell it or exchange it – and then build a permission-based world on top of that.”

And so, he concludes, we should set aside concerns about Internet regulation and information control and get down to the business of engineering solutions that would help us property-tize both intangible creations and intangible facts about ourselves to better shield our intellectual creations and our privacy in the information age. He builds on the thoughts of Mark Bide, a tech consultant:

For Bide, privacy and content markets are just a technical challenges that need to be addressed intelligently.”You can take two views,” he told me. “One is that every piece of information flowing around a network is a good thing, and we should know everything about everybody, and have no constraints on access to it all.” People who believe this, he added, tend to be inflexible – there is no half-way house. “The alternative view is that we can take the technology to make privacy and intellectual property work on the network. The function of copyright is to allow creators and people who invest in creation to define how it can be used. That’s the purpose of it. “So which way do we want to do it?” he asks. “Do we want to throw up our hands and do nothing? The workings of a civilised society need both privacy and creator’s rights.”  But this a new way of thinking about things: it will be met with cognitive dissonance. Copyright activists who fight property rights on the internet and have never seen a copyright law they like, generally do like their privacy. They want to preserve it, and will support laws that do. But to succeed, they’ll need to argue for stronger property rights. They have yet to realise that their opponents in the copyright wars have been arguing for those too, for years. Both sides of the copyright “fight” actually need the same thing. This is odd, I said to Bide. How can he account for this irony? “Ah,” says Bide. “Privacy and copyright are two things nobody cares about unless it’s their own privacy, and their own copyright.”

These are important insights that get at a fundamental truth that all too many people ignore today: At root, most information control efforts are related and solutions for one problem can often be used to address others. But there’s another insight that Orlowski ignores: Whether we are discussing copyright, privacy, online speech and child safety, or cybersecurity, all these efforts to control the free flow of digitized bits over decentralized global networks will be increasingly complex, costly, and riddled with myriad unintended consequences. Importantly, that is true whether you seek to control information flows through top-down administrative regulation or by assigning and enforcing property rights in intellectual creations or private information.

Let me elaborate a bit (and I apologize for the rambling mess of rant that follows).

Parallels in Debates over Copyright & Privacy Protection

In several essays here over the past few years I have attempted to draw parallels between the battles over protecting digital copyright and online privacy, as well as battle over online safety/speech and cybersecurity. Here are a few of those essays in case you’re interested in seeing the evolution of my thinking about this:

• When It Comes to Information Control, Everybody Has a Pet Issue & Everyone Will Be Disappointed
• And so the IP & Porn Wars Give Way to the Privacy & Cybersecurity Wars
• SOPA & Selective Memory about a Technologically Incompetent Congress
• Privacy as an Information Control Regime: The Challenges Ahead
• Isn’t “Do Not Track” Just a “Broadcast Flag” Mandate for Privacy?

In those essays I have argued that a combination of selective morality and wishful thinking are at work in the information policy world these days. In essence, people hate Internet regulation… until they love it! Here’s how I summarized that fact during the debate over SOPA:

… conservatives rush out and breathlessly denounce each and every effort to impose Net neutrality regulation because of the danger of empowering an already over-zealous bunch of bumbling bureaucrats at the FCC. (And I agree with them.) Yet, with their next breath many conservatives praise SOPA even though it also empowers government to muck with the inner workings of the Internet. Some of those conservatives are also turning a blind eye to the growing appetite of the defense/security community to meddle with the Net’s architecture in the name of avoiding any number of non-catastrophes. Meanwhile, the liberals decry SOPA and want it stopped at all costs. There’s never been a copyright protection measure they liked, of course, but each time one pops up we hear them claim that our analog era Congress is not well-positioned to be designing industrial policy schemes for the Internet. (And I generally agree with them.) But most liberals do a complete 180 whenever online privacy or Net neutrality regulations are the subject of congressional inquiry. Suddenly, the cyber-oafs in Congress are considered veritable technocratic philosopher kings who we should trust to guard our cyber-freedoms to lead us to the digital promised land.

Again, it’s both selective morality and wishful thinking. It’s selective morality in that some folks think certain values are sacrosanct and deserving of a “by-any-means-necessary” enforcement attitude, yet they are often just as likely to denounce similar information control efforts when it comes to issues or values they don’t give a damn about.  And it is wishful thinking in that you can’t run around insisting that “information wants to be free” in some contexts but then express outrage when something that you want to bottle up turns out to “just want to be free” as well!

But the important takeaway here is that, consistent with what Orlowski argues, I believe that online copyright and privacy are essentially the same problem: It’s an information control problem.

Potential Costs of Control

Once you start thinking about Internet policy debates as a single issue — namely, information control — you can begin to investigate the potential costs of control in a somewhat more objective fashion. Of course, challenging issues remain:

1. Which method of control should we choose? On one hand, there are many varieties of administrative regulation, technical infrastructure controls, and device mandates. On the other hand, there are property rights and liability / tort schemes. And there are many hybrid enforcement models, such as increasingly popular “co-regulation” models, government standard-setting, and “nudging” of system defaults. Each method will entail different costs and trade-offs.
2. What metric(s) should we use when attempting to determine whether the benefits of control exceed the costs? Ask any advocate of information control about whether the costs might exceed the benefits of regulation for their pet issue and they will typically suggest that either (a) there are no costs or that (b) the benefits dwarf any costs that may exist. But all too often the benefits they identify are extremely subjective and amorphous in character (“privacy,” “safety,” and “security” are hard to quantify, after all) while the costs are very real and increasingly substantial.

In my view, these practical questions are increasingly the most interesting issues to explore in the field of cyberlaw and digital economics. We can debate the normative or ethical considerations until we’re all blue in the face and ready to rip each other’s heads off, but I am less and less interested in such squabbles. Instead, I keep coming back to the question of how we’ll go about controlling info flows and how much effort and resources it makes sense to expend in pursuit of each of the values identified above. Some of the specific considerations I find myself asking in every paper I write these days include:

(A) Will the proposed form of information control tie us up in the courts forever, lead to increasingly onerous and unworkable liability norms, and end up yielding outrageous litigation costs?

(B) Will the proposed form of information control require a significant increase in regulatory bureaucracy? How many levels of government will need to be involved in the proposed enforcement scheme? How many new offices and officials will need to be empowered in the hope of achieving some measure of control?

(C) What are the alternatives to the proposed form of information control? Are there less costly or less restrictive means of addressing the concern in question? For example, education and empowerment effort are often an effective way to address many online safety and digital privacy concerns. Can we use those methods in conjunction with social norms, public pressure, self-regulation, informal contracting, and other methods to address these and other concerns?

For me, the costs associated with the A & B are increasing so rapidly that I almost always default to C as the better approach. Importantly, although A & B will be less onerous or costly when the solution is of the increased property-ization variety than of the administrative regulation variety, that does not mean property rights-based solutions for information are costless. Indeed, I increasingly find myself concluding that C solutions are more cost-effective even compared to increased property rights.

Practical Advice Once You Accept the Increasing Costs & Complications of Control

At this point, readers may be thinking: “Wait a minute, this dude is just some kooky libertarian who doesn’t want any form of information control, so he’s just trying to rationalize anarchy here.” No, I’m not. I certainly favor less control across the board than most people, but I also understand that there are times, at the margin, when some forms of “control” are necessary. But my views on the wisdom of control are heavily influenced by the costs of control. The costs of control — broadly defined — are a key factor in every cost-benefit analysis I do related to the wisdom of Net regulation and information control methods — even when one of those methods is increased “property-ization.” And because I have come to believe that those costs are going up and that most information control efforts will not work well in practice, I have boiled down my advice on this front to two simple principles:

1. Choose your info control battles wisely. Figure out where the most serious harms or threats lie and then target the info control solution accordingly and forget about the rest. For example, in child safety debates, that would mean going after child porn rings but leaving run-of-the-mill adult porn alone entirely. In copyright, it would mean nailing the largest commercial mass piracy sites but accepting a certain amount of casual sharing. In the field of personal info, it means singling out health and financial information and data for special protections and likely giving up on most other forms of info control. And so on. In essence, these are where the greatest potential harms lie that most people would consider intolerable. As you move further away from such issues, the case for control becomes harder and harder and the costs will almost certainly exceed the benefits.
2. Have a good backup plan in mind when those info control plans fail anyway. That backup plan should generally be based on education, empowerment, coping strategies, and resiliency. Again, these are the “C” solutions mentioned above. [I developed this model more robustly in the second half of this recent paper.] This approach won’t be perfect but it will likely be what you’ll end up relying on anyway, so you better start thinking about plowing more resources into this alternative approach even while you’re trying to devise info control mechanisms.

Let me just say a brief word to my market-oriented friends who are dismayed by my inclusion of property rights in the mix of “information control” efforts. I’m a big believer in the importance of property rights in many contexts, but context does matter. More specifically, physicality matters. It is easy to create property rights in tangible goods and almost always right to do so. Property rights in intangible ideas and creations raise special issues, however. Because ideas are non-rivalrous and have public good qualities, it makes property-ization more complicated and less effective. Property rights in facts can also come into conflict with other values and more well-established rights, especially freedom of speech and expression.

On the privacy front, Eugene Volokh made this point in his famous 2000 law review article, “Freedom of Speech, Information Privacy, and the Troubling Implications of a Right to Stop People from Speaking About You,” when he noted that, “The difficulty[with] the right to information privacy — the right to control other people’s communication of personally identifiable information about you — is a right to have the government stop people from speaking about you. And the First Amendment (which is already our basic code of “fair information practices”) generally bars the government from “control[ling the communication] of information,” either by direct regulation or through the authorization of private lawsuits.” That doesn’t mean free speech values should always trump privacy values, but denying this tension is just plain silly. If you want to propertytize all personal information, then you better be prepared to explain how that plays out in practice. How far are you prepared to go to ban the dissemination of facts? Would you place prior restraint on the press to accomplish it? Would you ban a historian from writing a biographies that reveal intimate facts about the subject? Would you shut down all the online sites and services that rely on a certain amount of personal information to fuel their free offerings?

Likewise, copyright law was far more effective in the analog age when we were still pressing music on vinyl and plastic. As soon as digitization become widespread, it was pretty much game over for traditional copyright law and now we are off and running with all sorts of convoluted and increasingly costly regulatory regimes. It’s not that I don’t want these some of these schemes to work — I’ve been a long-time copyright defender — but, again, the practicality of control simply must be considered here. I am not will to “pay any price, bear any burden” in defense of protecting intellectual property rights even as I remain outraged by the staggering amount of free-riding at work every single second of the day on the Internet. So, adopting the framework I outlined about, we might try targeted solutions to go after the biggest of those freeloaders — commercial mass piracy hubs — but we should generally avoid the sort of ham-handed technical control methods we saw in SOPA and other fights, like the broadcast flag battle among others. But, generally speaking, property rights just aren’t going to work as well in this space going forward. I’ve come to believe that the best hope lies in massive consolidation of content and conduit. In other words, pipe and device owners need to buy out all the content-creating industries and just embed a small fee in their monthly services to cross-subsidize content. This is essentially a private collective licensing solution and it is not unprecedented. Nor is it perfect. It will be very leaky. Plenty of piracy will still take place. But it will probably offer creators a better chance of finding a sustainable revenue stream than the current system does. The old copyright system that served them and us so well is dying and they had better start thinking of alternatives like this. Of course, antitrust law may never allow it, so I could be wasting my breath here. (Just look at all the grief that antitrust officials both here and abroad are giving Apple and eBook sellers for working together even though that it probably the best scheme devised in recent memory to sustain publishing in an age of mass piracy. Policymakers should be encouraging more of that sort of thing, not punishing it.)

An Uncertain Future

So, to wrap up… I can imagine a future in which both heavy-handed, top-down info control efforts and property / liability solutions are failing almost universally because of the ubiquitous, instantaneous, quicksilver-like flow of information across decentralized digital networks. Some utopians will argue that such a world will be better in every way than the one we live in today. I do not share such hyper-optimism. While I believe that, on balance, the free flow if information generally benefits society, I also understand how it creates enormous angst and intractable challenges for many. It’s a world in which copyright is a hollow shell of its former self that offers creators very little protection for their expressive works. And it’s a world in which personal privacy is harder to safeguard with each passing day because no matter how hard we try to property-tize facts about ourselves, that enforcement model simply breaks down at some point or becomes socially and economically intolerable. As with copyright, efforts to property-tize personal information will lose the battle against data sharing. As computer scientist Ben Adida argued in his essay, “(Your) Information Wants to be Free,” “unfortunately, information replication doesn’t discriminate: your personal data, credit cards and medical problems alike, also want to be free. Keeping it secret is really, really hard.”

Indeed, and it is growing harder by the day. Contrary to what Orlowski suggests, therefore, this isn’t a simple engineering problem. I wish it were as easy as he suggests to build “permissions-based markets” because they could have real benefits for individuals and society. But it is most certainly not that simple. It is far more costly and complicated than ever to devise workable information control schemes on one hand and “permissions-based” property rights schemes on the other. In some cases, I might still be willing to try the latter, but unlike Orlowski, I just don’t place much faith in the success of the endeavor.

When it comes to information control, everybody has a pet issue and everyone will be disappointed when law can’t resolve it. I was reminded of this truism while reading a provocative blog post yesterday by computer scientist Ben Adida entitled “(Your) Information Wants to be Free.” Adida’s essay touches upon an issue I have been writing about here a lot lately: the complexity of information control — especially in the context of individual privacy. [See my essays on “Privacy as an Information Control Regime: The Challenges Ahead,” “And so the IP & Porn Wars Give Way to the Privacy & Cybersecurity Wars,” and this recent FTC filing.]

In his essay, Adida observes that:

In 1984, Stewart Brand famously said that information wants to be free. John Perry Barlow reiterated it in the early 90s, and added “Information Replicates into the Cracks of Possibility.” When this idea was applied to online music sharing, it was cool in a “fight the man!” kind of way. Unfortunately, information replication doesn’t discriminate: your personal data, credit cards and medical problems alike, also want to be free. Keeping it secret is really, really hard.

Quite right. We’ve been debating the complexities of information control in the Internet policy arena for the last 20 years and I think we can all now safely conclude that information control is hugely challenging regardless of the sort of information in question. As I’ll note below, that doesn’t mean control is impossible, but the relative difficulty of slowing or stopping information flows of all varieties has increased exponentially in recent years.

But Adida’s more interesting point is the one about the selective morality at play in debates over information control. That is, people generally expect or favor information freedom in some arenas, but then get pretty upset when they can’t crack down on information flows elsewhere. Indeed, some people can get downright religious about the whole “information-wants-to-be-free” thing in some cases and then, without missing a beat, turn around and talk like information totalitarians in the next breath.

I discussed this in relation to the privacy debates in my essays referenced above. I’ve noted how some “cyber-progressives” (or whatever you prefer to call tech thinkers and advocates on the Left) have been practically giddy with delight at the sight of copyright owners scrambling to find methods to protect their content from widespread distribution over distributed digital networks. Just about every information control effort attempted in the copyright arena — whether we are talking about efforts like DRM  & paywalls or even suing end-users — has failed to provide the degree of protection desired. The “darknet” critique remains fairly cogent. It doesn’t mean I’m excusing copyright piracy as a normative matter; it’s just to say that the cyber-progressives were certainly on to something as an empirical matter when they detailed the deficiencies of various IP control efforts.

But here’s the interesting question: Why shouldn’t we believe that the exact same critique applies to privacy and personal information flows? Again, it’s not to say that, as a normative matter, privacy isn’t important. And data security certainly is. It’s just to say that, as an empirical matter, information control in this context is going to be every bit as difficult as information control in the copyright context. Yet, the same crowd of cyber-progressives who were all for information freedom in the copyright context are now hoping to crack down on personal information flows in the name of protecting privacy.

And it is not going to work.

Nor will it work well for those who are looking to crack down on the flow of bits that contain porn or violent content.

Nor will it work well for those “cyber-conservatives” who are looking to crack down on the flow of bits that contain state secrets or online gambling.

Nor will it work well for those who want to curb what they regard as “harassing” speech, “hate speech,” or defamatory comments.

And so on. And so on.

I will be accused of being too much of a technological determinist, but I think there’s a lot of evidence suggesting that at least “soft determinism” is the order of the day. In a brilliant and highly provocative new paper, ” Hasta La Vista Privacy, or How Technology Terminated Privacy,”  Konstantinos K. Stylianou of the University of Pennsylvania Law School discusses varieties of technological determinism as it pertains to information control and notes:

In-between the two extremes (technology as the defining factor of change and technology as a mere tangent of change) and in a multitude of combinations falls the so called soft determinism; that is, variations of the combined effect of technology on one hand and human choices and actions on the other. (p. 46)

Unfortunately, Stylianou notes, “The scope of soft determinism is unfortunately so broad that is loses all normative value. Encapsulated in the axiom ‘human beings do make their world, but they are also made by it,’ soft determinism is reduced to the self-evident.”  Nonetheless, he argues, “a compromise can be reached by mixing soft and hard determinism in a blend that reserves for technology the predominant role only in limited cases,” since he believes “there are indeed technologies so disruptive by their very nature they cause a certain change regardless of other factors.” (p. 46) He concludes his essay by noting:

it seems reasonable to infer that the thrust behind technological progress is so powerful that it is almost impossible for traditional legislation to catch up. While designing flexible rules may be of help, it also appears that technology has already advanced to the degree that is is able to bypass or manipulate legislation. As a result, the cat-and-mouse chase game between the law and technology will probably always tip in favor of technology. It may thus be a wise choice for the law to stop underestimating the dynamics of technology, and instead adapt to embrace it. (p. 54)

That pretty much sums up where I’m at on most information control issues and explains why I sound so fatalistic at times, even if I do believe that law can have an impact at the margins. Such “soft determinism” will be hard for some to swallow. Many will simply refuse to accept it, especially when they hear statements like those Stylianou makes in the context of privacy, such as: “the advancement of digital technology is ineluctably bound to have a destructive impact on privacy” (p. 47), or “technology has made it indeed so easy to collect personal data that in many cases they have lost their individual value, and instead function merely as statistical or ancillary data” (p. 51), or “What technological determinism teaches us so far is that people will always react negatively to more intrusive technology, but in the end they will probably succumb.” (p. 54)

One might cynically view this simply as a more eloquent restatement of Scott McNealy’s famous quip: “privacy is dead, get over it.”  While that’s an a bit of overstatement, it’s nonetheless true that privacy is under enormous strain because of modern digital developments (summarized in Exhibit 3 below). But, again, everything is under enormous strain. Perhaps, therefore, we need a reformulation of McNealy’s quip: “Information control is dead, get over it.”

Anyway, going forward, we need a framework to think about information control efforts. I’ve been working with my Mercatus Center colleague Jerry Brito to develop just that in a forthcoming paper (current running title: “The Trouble with Information Control.”)  To begin, we simplify matters by dividing information control efforts into four big buckets, as shown in Exhibit 1 below. ( Note: With Jerry Brito’s help, I have reworked these categories since first outlining them here):

Exhibit 1: RATIONALES FOR INFORMATION CONTROL

(1) Censorship / Speech Control

• politically unpopular speech
• porn
• violent content
• hate speech
• cyberbullying

(2) Privacy

• defamation
• reputation

(3) Copyright & Trademark Protection

(4) Security

• state secrets
• national security
• law enforcement
• cybersecurity
• online gambling

Next, we can consider various legal responses to these objects of information control, as detailed in Exhibit 2:

Exhibit 2: LEGAL & REGULATORY RESPONSES / APPROACHES TO INFORMATION CONTROL

• Intermediary deputization / secondary liability
• Individual prosecutions / fines
• Controls on speech / expression
• Controls on monetary flows
• Other Regulation
• Taxation / fines
• Agency enforcement / adjudication

Finally, we need to consider how efforts to control information today are greatly complicated by problems or phenomena that are unique to the Internet or the Information Age, as outlined in Exhibit 3:

Exhibit 3: INFORMATION CONTROL CONSIDERATIONS / COMPLICATIONS

• Media & Technological Convergence
• Decentralized, Distributed Networking
• Unprecedented Scale of Networked Communications
• Explosion of the Overall Volume of Information
• Unprecedented Individual Information Sharing Through User-Generation of Content and Self-Revelation of Data

In this upcoming paper, Jerry and I will provide case studies based on many of the issues outlined in Exhibit 1 and show how the information control methods shown in Exhibit 2 typically fail to slow or restrict information flows because of the factors outlined in Exhibit 3. Assuming we can prove our thesis — that soft determinism is the order of the day and information control efforts of all varieties are increasingly difficult (and often completely futile) — I fully expect that we will make just about everybody unhappy with us!

However, I want to conclude by noting that just because I am somewhat fatalistic or deterministic about the likely failure of most information control proposals or mechanisms, it doesn’t mean I am willing to just throw my hands in the air and say there’s absolutely nothing that can be done to address some of the concerns listed in Exhibit 1.  In my work on how to address online child safety issues, I tried to develop what I call a “3-E Solution” to address these concerns.  In my paper with Jerry, I’m hoping to use this as a framework for how to deal with all information control concerns going forward:

1. Education: Get more information out about the issue / concern.
2. Empowerment: Give consumers more and better tools to act on that information.
3. (Selective) Enforcement: Have law step in at the margins when it’s appropriate and cost-efficient, and only after education and empowerment fail.

Of course, how much stress we place on each component of this toolbox will depend on the issue. I’ve already suggested that the last “E” of enforcement will be largely ineffective, especially when outright prohibition of particular information flows is the objective. But enforcement could be more effective in other contexts, such as holding companies accountable for the promises they make to consumers, by policing industry self-regulatory schemes, or by demanding more transparency / disclosure. Those enforcement practices have helped in the child safety and privacy contexts. In other contexts, the severity of the harm in question may be so severe — ex: child pornography — that we would bypass the education and empowerment steps altogether and go to much greater lengths to make the enforcement option work. Even then, we should keep our expectations in check and avoid a rush to extreme solutions.

There’s much more to be explored here. Stay tuned.

I posted a rant here over the weekend about those who were engaging in what I believed was excessive whining about Apple’s moves to restrict pornographic content in the Apple Apps Store. (see: “Apple’s App Store, Porn & ‘Censorship‘”) It received a surprising number of comments and featured a back and forth between me and our old TLF blogging colleague Tim Lee. Tim has continued the discussion over on his personal blog and argued that:

[T]he key thing to focus on isn’t the abstract question of whether porn on iPhones is good or bad. The key thing to recognize is how fundamentally broken the process itself is. “Overtly sexual content” is a concept that seems clear in the abstract but gets leaky once you have to actually classify tens of thousands of applications. Apple is going to make mistakes, and when they do hapless developers are going to find their apps blocked, often with little explanation or recourse. Also, Apple is going to change its mind periodically, and when they do the affected developers are going to find their hard-earned apps rendered worthless overnight. This is no way to run a technology platform. It’s unfair to developers and it doesn’t scale. And this is precisely why it would be better for everyone if Apple could come up with an application distribution scheme that didn’t require so much central planning.

I followed up with a comment over there, but just thought I would repost it here, in which I argue that Tim is underestimating how difficult this task of defining acceptable content is and that he is also downplaying Apple’s legitimate editorial discretion to establish standards for the community platform they provide. I’m also uncomfortable with Tim’s constant use of “central planning” rhetoric to describe almost any private, proprietary model of institutional governance or platform development he doesn’t seem to agree with, but I have not elaborated on that point here. Anyway, here’s how I responded over on his blog:

So, when you say “Apple could come up with an application distribution scheme that didn’t require so much central planning,” what exactly does that mean? Apple already has Terms of Service, but there are ALWAYS going to be things in ANY terms of service that are fuzzy. “Security,” “stability,” “safety,” etc.. these are not exercises in exact science. So what would you have Apple do in this case?

How about this: “Penetration-based sexual images, videos, and applications shall not be allowed in the Apple Apps Store.” That seems like a pretty easy rule and fairly unambiguous. But everything after hard-core porn gets more and more difficult to define. What about an app that is just completely naked women pole-dancing? It’s not hard-core porn, but I bet Apple would want to keep it off their platform. Writing a rule that covers that but not a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition app might be challenging.

The point here is that (a) crafting terms of service for acceptable content/conduct on media/communications platforms is always difficult, but (b) Apple and others should have the editorial discretion to do so. If customers don’t like it, they can (and do) complain vociferously. And sometimes companies change their editorial approach in response to such complaints. Other times, however, they will be under just as much pressure from other forces to to the exact opposite.

So, when you say: “The key thing to recognize is how fundamentally broken the process itself is,” you seem to fail to appreciate how this process is pretty damn challenging for any platform developer. The only way this becomes “easy” is if the platform owner just takes any and all content people throw at them. Libertarian-minded people like the two of us probably wouldn’t mind that. But the community of interests that Apple serves is broad and diverse. They are in the same boat as a traditional newspaper editor or broadcaster who was trying to juggle a lot of interests at once and inevitably making some folks unhappy in the process. But that doesn’t mean the process is “broken”; it just means it is difficult.

Apple should be more transparent about what they do and do not allow in the Apps Store and strive for brighter line rules. But even as they do, some folks will still complain. And, luckily, there’s always another place to go for service.

Last year, my PFF colleague Adam Thierer asked whether State AGs + NCMEC = The Net’s New Regulators? Adam noted that NCMEC, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a private non-profit organization, was playing a law enforcement role in regulating child pornography—but without any clear mechanisms for ensuring its accountability and effectiveness. Adam’s point wasn’t just that transparency is a good thing, but that when it comes to a cause as important as protecting children from exploitation, it’s vital to ensuring that we’re that we’re actually doing a good job at it!

Yesterday, Emmanuel Lazaridis commented on that post:

Given the increasing regulatory and investigative powers of the NCMEC, it is no longer clear whether or not the [Freedom of Information Act] applies to NCMEC records. We are about to find out. I am right now bringing a case against the NCMEC in federal court for access to records under the FOIA and, failing that, for discovery under 28 U.S.C. § 1782(a).

Mr. Lazaridis’s complaint in the D.C. District Court claims that Lazaridis (a Greek national) has been unfairly deemed a fugitive from U.S. justice for having taken his daughter to Greece over the objections of the girl’s American mother, Lazaridis’s ex-wife. NCMEC got involved by placing the girl on their MissingKids.com registry of abducted children. Lazaridis wants the court to recognize his custody, deem him not to be a fugitive, and to order NCMEC to turn over all their records on the girl.

This is, of course, just one side of the story (and such cases are usually so complicated as to be indecipherable to outsiders). But even if Lazaridis’s case were wholly without merit, his basic argument would be a sound one: Why shouldn’t NCMEC, in exercising any of its essentially governmental functions, be subject to the same accountability requirements through FOIA as the FBI would be?

When the issue is the Lazaridis family’s trans-Atlantic custody battle, it may seem easy to ignore this question. But when NCMEC is essentially making policy regarding filtering Internet content, blacklisting websites, turning over user logs to law enforcement, or “cleaning up” Craigslist, the question of NCMEC’s accountability under FOIA cannot be avoided as a critical decision about the future of Internet governance.

On heels of Adam’s piece last year, controversialist Chris Soghoian suggested one answer: Given its status as a sacred cow, we cannot expect any politician pay heed to calls to overhaul NCMEC or subject it to oversight. However, what we can do, is call for the nationalization of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Think of it this way: We have a drug czar, a war czar, a copyright czar, and will likely have a cybersecurity czar and car czar under the next administration. Why not throw a child porn czar into the mix? Nationalize NCMEC, make all of its workers federal employees, with good health care and job security, and perhaps even expand its budget–after all, it does good work, right? NCMEC’s job is simply too important to be entrusted to a nonprofit group–such a task can only be performed by a fully trained and funded law enforcement agency (one, which conveniently enough, is subject to the Freedom of Information Act, congressional oversight, and constitutional requirements for due process.)

Despite my differences with Chris, he’s often right and may be here, too. He’s certainly right that Congress is unlikely to address the problem of NCMEC’s accountability given the sensitivity of the issue of child protection.

But, fortunately, we live in a republic, not a pure democracy: Our third branch of government, the courts, exists to enforce the rule of law; being somewhat insulated from political pressure, the courts provide a final check on the authority even of the almighty NCMEC. So while Chris’s nationalization proposal might well be the ideal solution, it hasn’t happened yet—nine months later to the day, and it’s probably not high on the Obama administration’s list of czarist reforms.

But simply by ordering NCMEC to comply with FOIA, the Lazaridis court could, with the stroke of a pen, bring accountability to NCMEC’s law enforcement functions. The legal question is simple: Does NCMEC qualify as an “agency,” which FOIA defines as an “authority of the Government of the United States?”

If so, NCMEC must not only respond to requests for certain of its “records,” but it must also follow a rule-making process akin to that required of federal agencies when they make policy decisions, offering the public appropriate notice and the opportunity to comment on proposed regulations—instead of, say, threatening Internet companies behind closed doors (sometimes the same companies that later make generous donations to NCMEC) or cutting deals with state attorneys general.

It turns out that this is not a new issue. Federal courts have had to decide whether a number of quasi-governmental entities qualify as “agencies” over the years, especially given the trend towards privatization over the last three decades. Some organizations, like the Smithsonian Institution, have decided to comply with FOIA even though courts have held that they’re not required to do so. NCMEC could have allayed all these concerns years ago by doing the same thing, but absent a change in management at the organization, it seems only a court order will force the organization to open its “black box” of decision-making to public inquiry.

In a number of other circumstances, courts have required nominally private organizations to comply with the federal FOIA or its state equivalents. A thorough (if dated) treatment of this issue can be found in the 1999 law review article, Privatization and the Freedom of Information Act: An Analysis of Public Access to Private Entities Under Federal Law by Craig Feiser, Florida’s deputy solicitor general and an adjunct at FSU Law. Feiser explains:

When Congress amended FOIA in 1974, it added section 552(f)(1) and broadened the definition of “agency” to include entities not explicitly mentioned under the APA, but which “perform governmental functions and control information of interest to the public.”

In deciding whether a private organization qualifies as an agency subject to FOIA, courts have considered two factors.

One factor asks whether the entity has substantial independent authority in performing a function of the government, making it the functional equivalent of the government. The other factor asks whether the government substantially controls the entity’s day-to-day operations or organizational framework. In using either factor, the court is essentially asking to what degree the entity is performing a government function. In one case, the government is pulling nearly all of the strings; in the other case, the entity is making decisions independently for the government.

Financially, NCMEC is largely a creature of government: 70% of NCMEC’s $42 million budget in 2007 came from the government. But as Feiser notes, funding does not always mean control. Government control over NCMEC’s internal decisions is unclear. Indeed, the very lack of government control over an organization essentially regulating the Internet and imposing criminal sanctions that could follow convicted “sex offenders” for life would by itself be an enormous problem.

But given what NCMEC actually does, it obviously qualifies as an “agency” subject to FOIA under the “functional equivalence factor,” which as Feiser explains,

basically represents the opposite situation from the control factor. Here, the entity is functioning independently, but making decisions for the government, as opposed to having its decisions made by the government. In effect, it is the functional equivalent of the federal government, and, therefore, it should be an “agency” under the FOIA.

I’ll be watching the Lazaridis case closely, hoping that the court sees NCMEC for what it is: a private organization tasked with implementing not just any government function, but the enforcement of laws against the most vulnerable victims in society. Absent such a recognition, NCMEC will continue to grow into an unaccountable regulator for the Internet.

Today, the only public oversight of NCMEC required by law is the requirement that NCMEC (like any non-profit with federal tax-exempt 501(c)(3) non-profit status) file a Form 990 each year disclosing basic information about its finances. That report does not list NCMEC’s donors, because donors have a First Amendment right to remain anonymous, but a more transparent organization would, like my own think tank, at least identify its major donors. The 2006 and 2007 Form 990s do reveal a few interesting things, though, about what NCMEC does with its budget (70% of which comes from the taxpayer):

• NCMEC’s CEO, Ernie Allen, was paid $359,191 plus $411,636 in benefits in 2006 (PDF p. 46) and $409,821 plus $426,540 in benefits in 2007 (PDF p. 19), for a total of $1.6 million in two years (roughly $800,000/year);
• Not counting Allen, NCMEC spent $778,564 on its top five highest-paid employees in 2006 ($155,713/employee), and $875,657 in 2007 ($175,131/employee) (PDF p. 10 in both);
• 31% of NCMEC’s 2006 revenues and 35% of its 2007 revenues went to salaries (PDF pp. 1 & 2 in both); and
• NCMEC had 104 employees paid over $50,000 in 2006 (PDF p. 10) and 116 in 2007 (PDF p. 10).

I’d be reluctant to suggest that anyone at NCMEC was more interested in money than in protecting children, but if given the choice, we’d all prefer to do well while doing good. So if Allen were smart, he’d realize that a court order subjecting NCMEC to FOIA might be the best of all possible worlds: Requiring real accountability would neutralize calls for nationalizing NCMEC, allowing the organization to continue operating as a non-profit that can pay quite a bit better than the Federal civil service. Even the Senior Executive Service, for agency heads, maxes out at a measly $177,000/year.

Of course, if NCMEC’s records and decisions to regulate the Internet were subject to FOIA, the organization might not be able to… “convince” the Internet companies it essentially regulates to write large checks to NCMEC. But even this tax-hating libertarian would be hard-pressed to argue against funding the enforcement of laws against child pornography, abduction and exploitation with taxpayer dollars.

As the grandson of an FBI agent, whose framed credentials hang in a place of pride in my office (stamped “RETIRED” after his 25 years of loyal service), I can’t help but wonder how many more agents the FBI could employ to combat child porn with an extra $1.6 million/year in funding (the salary of Allen and NCMEC’s top-five highest paid employees). It seems that FBI agents today make roughly $48,000-87,000/year. Let’s call it an average of $67,500 and throw in 20% for overhead. That works out to $81,000/year—or:

• 20 new agents for what NCMEC is paying its top six employees; or
• 368 new agents for the $29.82 million NCMEC received in government support in 2007.

I’m sure the solution is far more complicated than simply hiring more FBI agents, and that NCMEC does much good work in the service of a noble cause. But until NCMEC is either nationalized as a direct arm of law enforcement or made significantly more accountable as a private organization, we won’t really have any way of knowing whether the money being spent on NCMEC is being spent in the most effective manner possible to deal with the problems of child pornography, abduction and exploitation. We also won’t know whether draconian alternatives to direct enforcement ( e.g., hiring more FBI agents) like network-level filtering mandates are truly necessary, despite their unintended consequences for the free speech and privacy rights of law-abiding Internet users.

Ben Edelman of the Harvard Business School has just released an interesting new study in the Journal of Economic Perspectives entitled, “Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?”  Using data he obtained from a top-10 seller of adult entertainment, Edelman examined adult website subscriptions on the zip code level and found that conservatives seem to be every bit as interested in pornography as liberals. In fact, “Subscriptions [to adult entertainment sites] are slightly more prevalent in states that have enacted conservative legislation on sexuality” and “subscriptions are also more prevalent in states where surveys indicate conservative positions on religion, gender roles, and sexuality.”  He also finds that:

In states where more people agree that “Even today miracles are performed by the power of God” and “I never doubt the existence of God,” there are more subscriptions to this service.  Subscriptions are also more prevalent in states where more people agree that “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage” and “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior.”

On the whole, these adult entertainment subscription patterns show a remarkable consistency: all but eleven states have between two and three subscribers to this service per thousand broadband households, and all but four have between 1.5 and 3.5. With interest in online adult entertainment relatively constant across regions, there’s little sign of a major divide.

But it’s not just Internet porn where we see this trend at work.  As I noted in my law review article, “Why Regulate Broadcasting?” we’ve seen a similar trend at work with television. When you look at some of the TV shows that conservatives and religious groups gripe most about, you might be surprised to know that it is conservatives who make those shows as popular as they are!

As Bill Carter of the New York Times reported in a 2004 article, “Many Who Voted for ‘Values’ Still Like Their Television Sin,” Nielsen ratings data shows that in many Republican-leaning “red state” markets, such programs garner higher ratings than in many Democratic-leaning “blue states.” For example, in the counties that constitute the greater Atlanta television market, ABC’s dramatic comedy “Desperate Housewives” was the top-rated show even though nearly 58 percent of voters in those counties voted for President Bush.  Similarly, in the traditionally conservative Salt Lake City market, where President Bush captured over 72 percent of the vote, the top four shows were “C.S.I.,” “C.S.I. Miami,” “E.R.,” and “Desperate Housewives.”

Likewise, in a 2004 column about “The Great Indecency Hoax,”  NY Times columnist Frank Rich noted that the same trend holds in conservative Oklahoma City, where “Desperate Housewives” is more popular than it is in Los Angeles, as well as Kansas City where the show is bigger than it is in New York City.  Rich quoted sociologist Herbert Gans who explained the phenomenon as follows: “For some people it’s a case of ‘I am moral therefore I can watch the most immoral show.'”

Such findings call into question the logic of traditional “community standards”-based regulatory efforts. Indeed, it is unclear how lawmakers can determine the relevant “community standard” for purposes of speech and content regulation when some of the most conservative communities in America are downloading as much porn as Edelman’s study finds, or when conservatives are watching smutty TV in greater numbers than liberals do.

The better approach, as I’ve argued here before, is to replace “community standards” with “household standards.”  That is, it would be optimal if public policy decisions regarding content took into account the extraordinary diversity of citizen / household tastes and left the ultimate decision about acceptable programming to them.  That’s especially the case in light of the fact that less than 32% of U.S. households have any children in them, and those homes that do have children have plenty of tools and methods at their disposal to control objectionable content. Let’s empower parents to make decisions for themselves and their families so that Uncle Sam doesn’t need to play the role of national nanny for all of us.

• Edelman’s mention of porn consumption in Utah reminded me of this passage from Jeff Rosen’s 2004 essay on “The End of Obscenity” (which I discussed in greater detail here):

  three years ago, when a local video retailer in Utah was prosecuted for peddling hard-core pornography, he successfully argued that his products were consistent with what his neighbors were watching on pay-per-view: in an age of nationally distributed hotel pornography, there was little difference between the consumption habits of hotel guests in Salt Lake City or Las Vegas. Pornography is everywhere, suggesting that there is no national consensus against it and no vast disparity from one locale to another.

  Seems that those Utah residents are a horny bunch!  Maybe their new motto should be, “What happens in Utah, stays in Utah.”

Chairman Mao–er… Martin–has canceled (WSJ) the FCC’s December 18 meeting, when the Commission was set to vote on Martin’s proposal to rig an auction to give away a valuable piece of spectrum (“AWS-3”) to M2Z networks.  In exchange for a sweetheart deal on the spectrum, the company would have been required to use a quarter of it to provide a free (but very slow) wireless broadband service.  Martin had initially proposed to require that the service be made porn-free, but eventually suggested that users over 18 would be able to opt-out of network-level filtering.

Two weeks ago, when it became clear that Martin would attempt to ram this proposal through while he still could, I asked how the ascendant Left would respond:

Will the defenders of free expression triumph over those who see ensuring free broadband as a social justice issue?  Or will those on the Left who usually joining us in opposing censorship simply remain silent as the government extends the architecture of censoring the “public airways” onto the Net (where the underlying rationale of traditional broadcast regulation–that parents are powerless–does not apply)?

I’m glad to see that the deathblow to this unconstitutional proposal did indeed come from the political Left–specifically, from Sen. John Rockefeller, (D-W.Va.) and Rep. Henry Waxman, (D-Calif.), who will be responsible for overseeing the FCC in the new Congress.  (The Bush administration had already opposed the proposal, as with so many of Martin’s abuses, had failed to stop it.)

With President-elect Obama having declared that, “Here in the country that invented the Internet, every child should have the chance to get online,” it seems almost certain that the Administration will press ahead with some kind of universal broadband proposal of its own.  But what would such a proposal look like?  If it’s another public broadband utility, would it include network-level filtration like Martin’s proposal?  If so, will the Democratic opponents of government censorship stick by their principles and fight that, too?

I suspect we may find that what’s constitutional is politically impossible (unfiltered free Internet) and what’s politically possible (filtered free Internet) is unconstitutional.

As a constitutional matter, the courts have rejected network-level filtering mandates because user-installed filtering tools are a “‘less restrictive” alternative.   In comments filed on this proposal in July, a broad coalition of free speech groups (including my PFF colleague Adam Thierer) explained why Martin’s proposal violated the First Amendment–and why even allowing users to opt-out of the required filtering would not make the proposal constitutional:

First, … [the] filtering mandate is so sweeping in its scope that it would violate the rights of older minors to receive content to which they have a constitutional right to access (but which arguably might be “harmful” to a five-year old).  Second, the stigma of having to sign up for a central, nationwide list of – effectively – “people who want access to adult content” would be a chilling and unconstitutional burden on adults’ right to access lawful content.  Under the First Amendment, the government cannot force people to “sign up” in order to receive lawful speech…  This is especially true because of the broad sweep of content blocked by [the proposal] and the availability of highly effective and less restrictive alternatives in the form of client-side filtering tools. Third and finally, wholly apart from the constitutional rights of those accessing the Internet through the AWS-3 network, the proposed filtering mandate would also violate the constitutional rights of speakers and content providers on the Internet who want to speak to the broadest audience possible.  It would be flatly unconstitutional for the government to select and anoint one, or even a limited number of, filtering “blacklists” of content that must be blocked – even if a private party (the AWS-3 licensee) does the selection under an FCC mandate.  Unless the filtering “blacklist” only contained sites that had been adjudicated to be illegal for minors (on a nationwide basis, presumably), the filtering mandate would be precisely the sort of unconstitutional prior restraint squarely rejected by the Supreme Court in Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan.

But as a political matter, it may turn out that this kind of free broadband proposal just won’t fly without network-level filtering requirements (and an opt-out)–however unconstitutional that might be.  While the courts and any reasonable person might recognize that client-side filtering (installed by users) offers  parents highly effective controls over what their children can access, the truly Puritanical element in America probably won’t care–at least on the level of political rhetoric.  One can easily imagine the opposition from “social conservatives” to the idea of using the public airwaves to make “smut” available to minors.  Coming from the Obama Administration, such a proposal could easily be lampooned as a “Porn Bailout.”   Republicans–who so often seem to prefer fighting the “culture wars” over trying to promote something as arcane as, say, constitutionally limited government–might try to cast any public broadband utility without network-level filtering as a “liberal” plot to corrupt America’s children (think Jocelyn Elders’ endorsement of masturbation as Surgeon General).  After all, why should I have to pay for your porn–let alone your kid’s porn?

Even if Obama and Congressional Democrats have the votes to override such opposition, would they have the political nerve (or think it worth the political capital) to ram through a free broadband scheme that relies on parents to do their own filtering–and that could thus be attacked (however unfairly) as making porn available to kids?  Or would they conclude (probably correctly) that existing broadband subsidies could be significantly expanded without facing such a strong political push to impose filtering mandates as a condition of public support–and choose this “safer” course?  The problem, of course, is that unless broadband is completely free, some people still wouldn’t pay for it and even if it were free, others still wouldn’t use it.

Or perhaps Kevin Martin could continue his crusade to free the world from content he (and the traditionalist Republican base he’s been cultivating) finds objectionable by insisting that subsidies should only go to broadband providers that offer censored Internet packages (essentially opt-in for filtering).  This is, of course, essentially what he has done throughout his time as Chairman in his relentless “war on cable”–looking for every opportunity to coerce cable providers into “voluntary” agreements to provide cable programming on an a la carte basis.  What better way for Martin to revive his political career?  Though Martin’s native North Carolina is trending Democratic, its socially “conservative” voters might hail well Martin’s ostentatious commitment to “protecting the children.”

I was about post something more regarding why Kevin Martin’s AWS-3 spectrum filtering plan will fail, but I can’t say it any better than Steve Schultze does here:

Martin also recently leaked the fact that he is proposing that adults can verify their identity to avoid the porn filter initially mandated for all users of of the no-fee service. I helped author some comments to the FCC explaining why this filter was a bad idea, so an opt-out mechanism could theoretically be a good development… if age verification were viable, and if you thought that adults were eager to identify themselves as possible porn-lovers, and if we assumed that all adults had credit cards. In short, filtering is not a great option even with those caveats.

Exactly. Also, don’t forget about that little thing called the First Amendment! This plan would almost certainly be challenged on 1A grounds. (Also, here’s a filing I signed on to that critiques the filtering plan).

Back in June, Adam Thierer and I denounced (PDF) Kevin Martin’s plans to create broadband utility to provide censored (and very slow) broadband for free to all Americans.  The WSJ reports that this scheme is now at the top of Martin’s December agenda:

The proposal to allow a no-smut, free wireless Internet service is part of a proposal to auction off a chunk of airwaves. The winning bidder would be required to set aside a quarter of the airwaves for a free Internet service. The winner could establish a paid service that would have a fast wireless Internet connection. The free service could be slower and would be required to filter out pornography and other material not suitable for children. The FCC’s proposal mirrors a plan offered by M2Z Networks Inc., a start-up backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner John Doerr.

Adam’s August follow-up piece is also well worth reading.  

One could speculate as to how big an impact this service would really have.  Having just spent two weeks “wardriving” around Paris, Abu Dhabi and Dubai (looking for open wi-fi hotspots to try to get Internet access on my otherwise non-functional smart phone), I could certainly imagine scenarios in which some people might well use even a slow wireless service at least as a supplement to another provider–if their devices supported it.  But however useful the service might be to some people, and whether any company would actually want to build such a system in the first place if they have to give away such service, I think it’s a safe bet that if this is actually implemented, it will represent a victory for government censorship over content some people don’t like.

If this idea is still alive and kicking when the Obama administration has security escort Martin out of FCC headquarters in January–to hearty applause from nearly all quarters in Washington, no doubt–it will be interesting to see which impulse prevails on the Left, both within the new Administration and in the policy community.  Will the defenders of free expression triumph over those who see ensuring free broadband as a social justice issue?  Or will those on the Left who usually joining us in opposing censorship simply remain silent as the government extends the architecture of censoring the “public airways” onto the Net (where the underlying rationale of traditional broadcast regulation–that parents are powerless–does not apply)?  

Hope springs eternal.

In-flight Internet access is finally starting to be rolled out by some carriers, and as they do so the inevitable question of what to do about objectionable material is already being debated. Surprisingly, many airlines have decided to not filter in-flight Internet access but instead rely on “peer pressure and the presence of flight attendants,” according to Tim Maxwell, Vice President of Marketing for Aircell, the company providing American’s broadband service.

But others are wondering if that’ll be enough. I share that concern. I can only imagine how ugly things will get on a flight once somebody starts streaming porn from their aisle seat. Flight attendants are going to become “fight” attendants once that happens. And you better believe that somebody in Congress is already cooking up legislation with some snappy title like “The Family Friendly Flights Act” to impose a regulatory solution. (Oh wait, a bill with that title was already introduced last year!! I wrote about it here. But that bill was just for violent movies, not Net access. So expect another measure soon mandating in-flight Net censorship).

Before things get ugly and bills start flying up on the Hill, the airlines need to think about crafting some constructive solutions to this problem. Here are three possibilities: (1) Offer privacy screens: Airlines could allow unfettered in-flight Net access but also offer those surfing the Net complementary screen privacy filters. If needed, flight attendants could require those screens be used if a certain surfer is prompting complaints from other passengers because of what they are viewing on their laptops.

(2) Seating stipulations: Airlines could offer the back third of planes be “Net-free” and encourage parents with kids to sit back there, or vice-versa (Net surfers sit in back, kids further up).

(3) “Family-friendly” flights: Airlines could stipulate that Net access will be prohibited or tightly filtered during certain flights. That way parents with kids or other sensitive travelers could make sure to book those flights. (I made a similar proposal for cell phones on planes before.)

If airlines don’t adopt plans like this now, they will be in for some serious grief later on. All it is going to take a handful of disrespectful jerks loading up their favorite porn sites in the cabin of plane to set off a firestorm of controversy from travelers, flight attendants, and then lawmakers.