If only our would-be “Net Nannies” in Congress, the FCC, FTC, state capitols and, of course, Brussels were more like the Park Service! The WSJ reports on “Why there are so few guardrails at the Grand Canyon:”
Sunday a crowd gathered in Acadia National Park, on Mount Desert Island along the Maine coast, to watch the surf, roaring with energy from an offshore hurricane, smash against the shore. A towering wave crashed over some onlookers, dragging half a dozen into the ocean. A 7-year-old girl drowned. Soon it was asked why officials had let the crowd get so near waters so dangerous. “The Park Service’s goal is to get people out into the park,” Acadia Chief Ranger Stuart West told Maine Public Broadcasting. “And we don’t want to take that opportunity away from the public.”
It’s a measure of how coddled we’ve become that Mr. West’s simple and reasonable statement seems almost shocking. But the Park Service, with its emphasis on protecting the lands in its care, has developed a refreshingly laissez-faire attitude toward protecting visitors….
It seems that those who frequent the outdoors have an aversion to nanny-statism, which allows the Park Service to take a grown-up attitude toward its visitors: “Their safety is their responsibility,” says Ron Terry, Zion’s public information officer. “We couldn’t possibly put railings up everywhere. It wouldn’t be feasible, nor would we want to.”
Amen! If only we took the same approach to the online environment: educate users about the risks (real or subjective) to their privacy, safety or delicate sensibilities and empower them to the maximum extent possible to make decisions for themselves—or for parents to decide which “perilous canyon trails” to let their kids go down. The wonderful, unique thing about the online environment is that each user’s experience can be customized: Technological filters tools allow parents to create “guardrails” just for their kids (e.g., blacklists of sites inappropriate for kids), without needing to have a guardrail installed for all users (e.g., COPA).
The parallels continue when one considers the human tendency to mis-perceive risks, which creates “technopanics” in Internet policy just as it creates panics about the various health risks of the great outdoors: Continue reading →
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 →
Statue at FTC Headquarters: “Man Controlling Trade” (We’re rooting for the horse!)
Adam Thierer and I have just released a new PFF paper entitled “Targeted Online Advertising: What’s the Harm & Where Are We Heading?” (PDF) about the FTC’s new “Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising.” Adam lampooned some of the attitudes at play in this debate in a great rant yesterday.
But we give the FTC credit for resisting calls to abandon self-regulation, and for its thoughtful consideration of the danger in stifling advertising-the economic engine that has supported a flowering of creative expression and innovation online content and services. That said, we continue to have our doubts about the FTC’s approach, however-well intentioned:
- Where is this approach heading? Will a good faith effort to suggest best practices eventually morph into outright government regulation of the online advertising marketplace?
- What, concretely, is the harm we’re trying to address? We have asked this question several times before and have yet to see a compelling answer.
- What will creeping “co-regulation” mean for the future of “free” Internet services? Is the mother’s milk of the Internet-advertising-about to be choked off by onerous privacy mandates?
We stand at an important crossroads in the debate over the online marketplace and the future of a “free and open” Internet. Many of those who celebrate that goal focus on concepts like “net neutrality” at the distribution layer, but what really keeps the Internet so “free and open” is the economic engine of online advertising at the applications and content layers. If misguided government regulation chokes off the Internet’s growth or evolution, we would be killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.
The dangers of regulation to the health of the Internet are real, but the ease with which government could disrupt the economic motor of the Internet (advertising) is not widely understood-and therein lies the true danger in this debate. The advocates of regulation pay lip service to the importance of advertising in funding online content and services but don’t seem to understand that this quid pro quo is a fragile one: Tipping the balance, even slightly, could have major consequences for continued online creativity and innovation.
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.