On July 27th, The Progress & Freedom Foundation hosted a Capitol Hill panel discussion entitled “Online Child Safety, Privacy, and Free Speech: An Overview of Challenges in Congress & the States.” The event featured remarks from:
- Parry Aftab, Executive Director, WiredSafety.org
- Todd Haiken, Senior Manager of Policy, Common Sense Media
- Jim Halpert, Partner, DLA Piper
- Berin Szoka, Senior Fellow, The Progress & Freedom Foundation
We’ve just released the transcript of the event, which I have also pasted down below the fold in a Scribd document reader. Also, the audio for this event can be heard by clicking below:
Download mp3
Here is the full event description: Continue reading →
Adam Thierer & I have just released a detailed examination (PDF) of brewing efforts to expand the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 to cover adolescents and potentially all social networking sites—an approach we call “COPPA 2.0.”
As Adam explained on Larry Magid’s CNET podcast, COPPA mandates certain online privacy protections for children under 13, most importantly that websites obtain the “verifiable consent” of a child’s parent before collecting personal information about that child or giving that child access to interactive functionality that might allow the child to share their personal information with others. The law was intended primarily to “enhance parental involvement in a child’s online activities” as a means of protecting the online privacy and safety of children.
Yet advocates of expanding COPPA—or “COPPA 2.0″—see COPPA’s verifiable parental consent framework as a means for imposing broad regulatory mandates in the name of online child safety and concerns about social networking, cyber-harassment,
etc. Two COPPA 2.0 bills are currently pending in New Jersey and Illinois. The accelerated review of COPPA to be conducted by the FTC next year (five years ahead of schedule) is likely to bring to Washington serious talk of expanding COPPA—even though Congress clearly rejected covering adolescents age 13-16 when COPPA was first proposed back in 1998.
We’ll discuss some of the key points of our paper in a series of blog posts, but here are the top nine reasons for rejecting COPPA 2.0, in that such an approach would:
- Burden the free speech rights of adults by imposing age verification mandates on many sites used by adults, thus restricting anonymous speech and essentially converging—in terms of practical consequences—with the unconstitutional Children’s Online Protection Act (COPA), another 1998 law sometimes confused with COPPA;
- Burden the free speech rights of adolescents to speak freely on—or gather information from—legal and socially beneficial websites;
- Hamper routine and socially beneficial communication between adolescents and adults;
- Reduce, rather than enhance, the privacy of adolescents, parents and other adults because of the massive volume of personal information that would have to be collected about users for authentication purposes (likely including credit card data);
Continue reading →
As TLF readers may know, I took over in July as Chairman of the Board of the Space Frontier Foundation. As I explained in my recent interview on The Space Show, SFF has been the leading citizens’ advocacy group for space commercialization since 1988. Dedicated to promoting Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill‘s vision of space settlement, as described in his 1976 masterpiece The High Frontier, the Foundation has always argued that “space is a place, not a program.”
We sent out the following press release on October 28, calling for a major transformation of the U.S. government’s space program by which the U.S. government would buy commercial transportation to the International Space Station. We’ll have more to say about this in the coming weeks.
Space Frontier Foundation Finds Funding Source for COTS-D
The Space Frontier Foundation today called upon Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain to invest the $2 billion in new funds they have promised to NASA for reducing the “Gap” in U.S. human spaceflight (after the Space Shuttle is retired in 2010) to spur innovation and competition in America.
Foundation Chairman Berin Szoka said “It’s time that our national leaders give American entrepreneurs a shot at closing this gap. Let’s take the two billion dollars in the candidates’ plans and fund up to five winners of COTS-D.”
The NASA Authorization Act of 2008, recently signed into law by the President, directs NASA to “issue a notice of intent [by mid-April 2009] … to enter into a funded, competitively awarded Space Act Agreement with two or more commercial entities’ for transporting humans to the ISS”-the “Capability D” of NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program (or COTS-D for short). But that directive is not yet funded.
Szoka continued, “Let’s have an American competition in space – to create good jobs, fuel innovation, and close the gap more quickly. With private funds matching government’s investment, we can dramatically leverage the $2 billion to produce breakthroughs in a new American industry – commercial orbital human spaceflight.” Continue reading →
The Federal Circuit significantly limited the patentability of software and business methods today. Mike Masnick at TechDirt summarizes the holding of the case as follows:
the court has said that there’s a two-pronged test to determine whether a software of business method process patent is valid: (1) it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or (2) it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing. In other words, pure software or business method patents that are neither tied to a specific machine nor change something into a different state are not patentable.
I’m sure several of my TLF colleagues will have a great deal to say about this. Tim Lee has already written about this on Ars Technica:
The Bilski decision, then, is a clear signal that the pendulum has begun to swing back toward tighter limits on software and business patents. However, it remains to be seen how far the court will go in this direction. Bilski was a relatively easy case. The applicant made little effort to hide the fact that he was seeking to patent a mental process, something the Supreme Court has clearly said is not allowed. Therefore, the Federal Circuit’s rejection of this patent doesn’t tell us how it will rule when confronted with software or business method patents that are tied more directly to a physical machine or a transformation of matter. And indeed, the Federal Circuit reiterated that some software and business method patents are valid, so we are unlikely to return to the near-prohibition on such patents that prevailed until the early 1980s.
Thoughts?
Debates about online privacy often seem to assume relatively homogeneous privacy preferences among Internet users. But the reality is that users vary widely, with many people demonstrating that they just don’t care who sees what they do, post or say online. Attitudes vary from application to application, of course, but that’s precisely the point: While many reflexively talk about the “importance of privacy” as if a monolith of users held a single opinion, no clear consensus exists for all users, all applications and all situations.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, this picture makes the point brilliantly—showing:
locations where [Flickr] users are more likely to post their photos as “public,” which is the default setting, in green. Places where Flickr users are more likely to put privacy controls on their photos show up in red.
Of course, geography is just one dimension across which users may vary in their attitudes about privacy, but the map makes the basic point about variation very well. Seeing what users
actually do in real life says a lot more about their preferences than merely polling them about what they think they care about in the abstract—as my colleagues Solveig Singleton and Jim Harper argued brilliantly in their 2001 paper With A Grain of Salt: What Consumer Privacy Surveys Don’t Tell Us (SSRN).
The Progress & Freedom Foundation has just launched the new Center for Internet Freedom. CIF offers an alternative to the proliferation of advocacy groups calling for government intervention online by offering timely analyses and critiques of proposals that diminish the vital role of free markets, free speech and property rights. We aim to drive the Internet policy debate in new directions by emphasizing a layered approach of technological innovation, user education, user self-help, industry self-regulation, and the enforcement of existing laws consistent with the First Amendment. Such an approach is a less restrictive—and generally more effective—alternative to increased regulation.
Here are some of the issues I’ll be working on as CIF’s Director in conjunction with my esteemed colleagues Adam Thierer, Adam Marcus, and adjunct fellows:
- Defending online advertising as the lifeblood of online content & services, especially in the “Long Tail”;
- Emphasizing market solutions to problems of privacy protection, especially regarding the use of cookies and packet inspection data;
- Protecting online speech and expression both in the U.S. and abroad;
- Defending Section 230 immunity for Internet intermediaries;
- Opposing online taxation and legal barriers to e-commerce and digital payments, especially at the state and local levels; and
- Ensuring that Internet governance remains transparent and accountable without hampering the evolution of the Internet.
Congress has very wisely cancelled the National Reconnaissance Office’s proposed Broad Area Space-Based Imagery Collection (BASIC) satellite system. The proposal to build two new imaging satellites at a cost to taxpayers of $1.7 billion would have represented a major break from what is possibly the U.S. government’s most successful effort to promote space commercialization to date: buying the imagery it needs from commercial providers, who can also sell imagery to other buyers.
Five years ago, the idea that Internet users could pull up a satellite image of just about any location on the planet at a whim would have seemed ludicrous. Yet that’s precisely what websites like Google Maps and Microsoft’s Live Search offer today—for free! Desktop applications like Microsoft’s Virtual Earth and Google Earth offer even more advanced geospatial tools—again, for free. But of course this library of incredibly rich imagery didn’t just “fall out of the sky,” as they say. It was collected by a handful of expensive commercial remote sensing satellites whose construction was made possible by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency‘s (Wikipedia) extraordinarily successful “Nextview” program implemented under the Commercial Remote Sensing Policy of 2003. Rather than having the Federal government build its own satellites—and pay for the entire cost of the satatellites—the NGA very wisely chose to buy imagery from commercial providers in two ~$500 million, 4-year contracts with U.S. satellite imagery companies: DigitalGlobe in 2003 and OrbImage (now GeoEye) in 2004.
These long-term purchase agreements essentially made the U.S. Government the “anchor tenant” in a new class of remote sensing satellites, providing the initial funding for both companies to build and operate their satellites. But because the companies sell roughly half of imagery to foreign governments and commercial buyers like Google and Microsoft, these deals have saved U.S taxpayers money for the purchase of imagery for a wide variety of needs, ranging from agricultural monitoring to military intelligence. At the same time, the Nextview contracts have given birth to a vibrant geospatial industry whose immediate benefits should be obvious to anyone who’s ever pulled up a satellite map online and whose macroeconomic impact is potentially enormous.
So why mess with success? Continue reading →
By Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer
Progress Snapshot 4.19 (PDF)
Since the fall of 2008, a debate has raged in Washington over “targeted online advertising,” an ominous-sounding shorthand for the customization of Internet ads to match the interests of users. Not only are these ads more relevant and therefore less annoying to Internet users than untargeted ads, they are more cost-effective to advertisers and more profitable to websites that sell ad space. While such “smarter” online advertising scares some—prompting comparisons to a corporate “Big Brother” spying on Internet users—it is also expected to fuel the rapid growth of Internet advertising revenues from $21.7 billion in 2007 to $50.3 billion in 2011-an annual growth rate of more than 24%. Since this growing revenue stream ultimately funds the free content and services that Internet users increasingly take for granted, policymakers should think very carefully about what’s really best for consumers before rushing to regulate an industry that has thrived for over a decade under a layered approach that combines technological “self-help” by privacy-wary consumers, consumer education, industry self-regulation, existing state privacy tort laws, and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) enforcement of corporate privacy policies.
In an upcoming PFF
Special Report, we will address the many technical, economic, and legal aspects of this complicated policy issue-especially the possibility that regulation may unintentionally thwart market responses to the growing phenomenon of users blocking online ads.
We will also issue a three-part challenge to those who call for regulation of online advertising practices:
- Identify the harm or market failure that requires government intervention.
- Prove that there is no less restrictive alternative to regulation.
- Explain how the benefits of regulation outweigh its costs.
Continue reading →
Google has just 
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