Say Goodnight Gracie: Burns and Allen Concede–Senator Tubes Loses Chairmanship

by on November 9, 2006

With this afternoon’s concessions of defeat by Senator George Allen and Conrad Burns, the GOP’s loss of the Senate is official. Tech policy played little role in this political earthquake, despite much early rhetoric by neutrality regulation supporters that it would be a big part of the debate. Yet, ironically, the final two dominoes to fall were both members of the Senate Commerce Committee, and key players in tech policy debates. Allen in particular will be missed by free-market supporters, as well as the tech industry (he ranked number one in the Senate on tech policy in a recent CNET survey.) Burns, a longtime communications subcommittee chair, had a more mixed record. He was an early supporter of telecom reform, but in recent years seemed to focus more on protecting rural state perks.

The headline news, however, is the change at the top of the committee. Senator Ted Stevens–who was made famous by Jon Stewart and YouTube for describing the Internet as a “series of tubes”–is out.

Supporters of markets will shed few tears over Steven’s ejection from the chairman’s seat. The champion of Alaska’s “bridge to nowhere,” proponent of a $3 billion scheme to subsidize television, and author of a telecom bill with $5.2 billion more in subsidies, he hardly represented Adam Smith’s values. We are tempted, in fact, to crack a smile.

But not too big a smile. While Stevens may be out, he is replaced by Daniel Inouye of Hawaii. Although of different parties, Stevens and Inouye always had a close working relationship–Stevens, in fact, always referred to Inouye as his “co-chairman.” While Stevens would be hard to beat in the pork department, Inouye is no shirker (its a fair bet he can take credit for the special rules for “states comprised entirely of islands” in this year’s telecom legislation).

This isn’t to say there aren’t differences. Stevens, for instance, was somewhat opposed to neutrality regulation, while Inouye somewhat supportive. But in many other areas, it’ll be hard to spot a difference. In fact, on many issues–such as telecom subsidies–Inouye could be more successful at getting Stevens’ agenda adopted than Stevens was.

As I suggested earlier, settle in for a few interesting years.

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Democratic “Innovation Agenda” Smells Like Pork, Tastes Like Regulation

by on November 9, 2006

I’m getting a lot of calls from reporters this week asking about what the Democratic takeover means for technology policy issues and First Amendment matters. My answer on both counts: Not much.

On the free speech front, the results of this election will probably have very little effect. Democrats and Republicans are now birds of a feather on these matters. Democrats used to be considered the party of the First Amendment, but I have a hard time finding any defenders of the First Amendment left in that party. I spend as much time dealing with new speech regulations from Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman as I do any Republican in Congress. Thus, I suspect that, despite the shift in power, Congress will continue pushing for more media and Internet regulation just as they have been for the past 10 years. It’s a never-ending cycle and the only competition left between the two parties is the race to see who can regulate faster and more extensively than the other.

On the communications and broadband regulatory front the differences may be a bit more pronounced between the parties, but not too much so. To try to get a better feel for what Democratic rule might bring us I thought I’d take a look at a few items in the “Innovation Agenda” they produced before the election. (It can be found online here and here is the PDF).

From what I see it here, it sounds like the Democrats believe that spending a lot of taxpayer dollars on federal pork projects is the best way to improve America’s technological competitiveness.

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Real Problems for REAL ID in NH

by on November 9, 2006 · 2 comments

Jim Harper persists in posting hist best stuff over at that other blog instead of here. Yesterday, he noted that one of the big losers in New Hampshire’s state legislative races was the REAL ID Act:

Jeb Bradley was one of “several Washington officials . . . urging state senators to support Real ID” when the state legislature was considering a bill to reject it. He was defeated by Carol Shea-Porter, a surprise victor who enjoyed little help from national Democrats. Here’s Shea-Porter speaking at an anti-REAL-ID rally.

Representing the Second District, Charlie Bass was an original co-sponsor of the REAL ID Act, and he touted that fact on his Web site. His replacement is Paul Hodes. Hodes is not a full-throated critic of REAL ID, but he did tell AP, “I do not favor creating a new central federal database using the permanent images of these documents. . . . A piece of paper is not the solution to securing our borders from terrorism. We need to better coordinate our existing law enforcement databases and watch lists.”

The Republican leadership of the state senate gutted and killed New Hampshire’s bill to reject REAL ID earlier this year. In a debate Monday, Republican Senate President Ted Gatsas said “There’s no question REAL ID makes sense.” Ted Gatsas will no longer be Senate President. Democrats took control of the New Hampshire State Senate for only the second time since 1911. Gatsas’ re-election bid was too close to call overnight, but it now appears he narrowly beat back his Democratic opponent.

As to REAL ID opponents, Governor John Lynch was re-elected. Voters gave control of the New Hampshire Executive Council (an additional legislative body that would have to approve the acceptance of federal funds for implementing REAL ID) to Democrats for good measure.

I don’t really understand why opposition to REAL ID would be considered a Democratic issue. Aren’t the Republicans supposed to be the party of federalism?

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Dingell in the Middle

by on November 9, 2006

The once and future chairman of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, John Dingell, recently supported strong net neutrality regulation (to prevent “private taxation of the Internet”) and opposed cable franchise reform. Now he has warned the FCC that it ought to postpone consideration of the AT&T-BellSouth merger until next year. These positions suggest Dingell believes there are benefits of regulation.

Perhaps he does. Yet, this is the same man who forcefully advocated deregulation when Congress debated the Telecommunications Act of 1996. During the floor debate on Aug. 2, 1995, Dingell noted:

… the rates of AT&T, MCI, and Sprint fly in perfect formation. They fly like the formation of the nuts and bolts in an aircraft, all tied together by invisible forces, which has led to a situation where they all make money and nobody gets into that because of the behavior of Judge Green and his law clerks and a gaggle of Justice Department lawyers and three floors of AT&T lawyers, who have been foreclosing the participation of any other person in or outside of the telecommunications industry.

Regulation, although meant to benefit consumers, was exploited by the regualted entities to maintain higher prices even though computers and fiber optics were driving down the cost of providing service.

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Microsoft, Novell, and Software Patents

by on November 9, 2006 · 6 comments

Via Luis, here’s a good analysis of the ominous aspect of the Microsoft-Novell deal:

This is not a religious argument about open source, it’s a matter of respect for a community that works together, and the wishes of creators. If I write something and put it under the GPL, then I want it under the GPL where all of us working on it can use it. I don’t want it to be made proprietary, for someone else’s benefit, due to some shady deal and legal technicality. Commercial yes (and encouraged), proprietary no.

In Novell’s world, if I write something and GPL it, Novell will try to convince customers to buy support from Novell instead of from me (the original author) because of some nebulous, unspecified, almost-certainly-bullshit “IP issues” hinted at by Microsoft and legitimized by Novell for the price of $348 million.

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Pogue on Zune

by on November 9, 2006 · 8 comments

Reader Steve R. points out David Pogue’s scathing review of the Zune:

PlaysForSure bombed. All of them put together stole only market-share crumbs from Apple. The interaction among player, software and store was balky and complex–something of a drawback when the system is called PlaysForSure.

“Yahoo might change the address of its D.R.M. server, and we can’t control that,” said Scott Erickson, a Zune product manager. (Never mind what a D.R.M. server is; the point is that Microsoft blames its partners for the technical glitches.)

Is Microsoft admitting, then, that PlaysForSure was a dud? All Mr. Erickson will say is, “PlaysForSure works for some people, but it’s not as easy as the Zune.”

So now Microsoft is starting over. Never mind all the poor slobs who bought big PlaysForSure music collections. Never mind the PlaysForSure companies who now find themselves competing with their former leader. Their reward for buying into Microsoft’s original vision? A great big “So long, suckas!”

And he doesn’t much care for the WiFi sharing feature:

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Spam Wars: A New Hope

by on November 9, 2006 · 4 comments

PJ, our webmaster, has installed the Akismet comment spam filter, which appears to have largely solved our spam problem. Which is a good thing, because we got about 1000 spam comments in the last 24 hours. Before, a couple hundred per day were getting through. So far today, it’s been catching all of them.

The downside is that it seems to occasionally catch a legitimate comment. I can’t actually blame the software. I mean, commenters like “Jim Harper” sure sound sketchy–it’s no wonder the filters were confused. But if your comment gets caught in the filter, please let me know by emailing tlee -at- showmeinstitute.org and I’ll see if I can fish it out of the spam folder for you.

Also, this is a good time to mention that our web hosting is generously provided by PJ Doland Web Design, which is also responsible for the site design. (The content is entirely our fault) PJ is fanatical about things like standards compliance, clean designs, open source software, and reliability, so please check him out next time you’ve got a web design or web programming project.

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E-Voting 2006: Not a Disaster

by on November 8, 2006 · 0 comments

CNN has a round-up of voting problems with yesterday’s elections. There seem to be a lot of problems like this:

The New Jersey Republican Committee said Republican voters filed four affidavits saying that they weren’t able to vote for Republican Senate candidate Tom Kean because the Sequoia voting machines they were using were already programmed to vote for Democrat Bob Menendez, according to NJRC Counsel Mark Sheridan. Michelle Schaffer at Sequoia told CNN, “We have been in close communication with the New Jersey attorney general’s office, and we are not aware of any issues that are problematic nor have they raised any to ask us about. “

As tempting as it is, I think it would be a mistake for critics of e-voting to highlight these sorts of problems in their arguments against paperless voting machines. They’re closely analogous to, say, the butterfly ballot debacle from 2000. Human error is inevitable in any election. And it’s a big country, so even if there are dozens of reports of scattered e-voting problems in particular precincts, that probably just reflects the fact that e-voting is new, so both people and the news media are more likely to report e-voting related problems.

What makes e-voting uniquely bad is two things: first, they’re brittle. Paper ballots are not subject to problems like software bugs, power outages, incorrect equipment setup, etc. Under almost any circumstances, it’s still possible for a voter to mark his or her ballot and go on his way. In contrast, with e-voting, the voter’s got to wait around until the machine is fixed, and the poll workers most likely won’t know how to fix it. If the downtime is significant, a lot of voters will get frustrated and leave the polling place. So the system is much less resilient to unexpected problems. We saw several of this kind of problem in Ohio, Indiana, Delaware, and elsewhere.

Secondly, and far more importantly, in precincts without voter-verified paper trails, we can’t be confident that the vote totals represented the actual votes that were cast in each precinct. I haven’t seen any evidence that foul play of this kind occurred. My guess is that none did. But if an election were stolen by hackers, we wouldn’t necessarily find out about it, because there’s no way to audit the result in precincts without paper trails.

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Hack the Vote

by on November 8, 2006 · 6 comments

Jim Lippard notes that HBO’s “Hacking the Vote” special is available for viewing on Google Video here. I haven’t had time to watch it yet, but if Diebold hates it, it must have some merit.

On an unrelated note, am I blind, or does Google video still not have an “embed this video” feature? That seems to have been one of the most important factors in YouTube’s rise to prominence, and it can’t possibly be a difficult feature to clone. Why hasn’t Google implemented it yet?

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Big John Is Back: Dingell Warns FCC on Merger

by on November 8, 2006

John Dingell wasted no time in reasserting his authority over the FCC today. One day after the election that put the Democrats back in charge of the House after 12 years, DIngell–who is expected to take back his old reins as Commerce Committee Chairman–sent a message to the FCC that it should hold off on approving the BellSouth-AT&T merger until next year.

“I think it would be in their interest” said the incoming chairman, adding it “would be in the interest of the [Commerce] Committee” and “in the broad public interest”.

Dingell said that delay was needed to make sure the Department of Justice was “doing its responsibility” and that FCC was ensuring the public interest was served.

Never mind that the merger has already been pending eight months, and has been approved by DOJ and 18 state commissions already. FCC approval in fact was expected last week, until it was pulled from the FCC agenda at the last minute. Dingell would now like the transaction to stew for a few more months. Although later today he backed off the statement a bit, denying he had asked for a postponement, the message was clear, saying he wanted the Commission to avoid “ill will” in dealing with the Commerce Committee.

The whole thing evokes a sense of deja vu. In his long tenure as committee chairman before 1994, Dingell was famous for vigorously asserting authority over the FCC. Of course, Dingell was far from the only chairman to do so. Quaint theories that the FCC is an “independent agency” aside, the Commission has long been considered a “creature of Congress” by members from both parties. But no chairman protected that particular turf more jeolously than Dingell. He brought it almost to the level of an art form.

No one doubts, of course, that agencies are ultimately accountable to lawmakers. But there is something disturbing about the “creature of Congress” theory, especially when the decisions in question is a quasi-judicial one such as a merger approval. Certainly, there would be howls of protest if Congress asked the Justice Department to delay its legal process in a particular case. But the FCC’s processes are apparently fair game.

Don’t expect the Commission to buck Big John on this one. But it provides yet another reason to re-examine the FCC’s status an an “independent” agency, and how that works in practice.

Meanwhile, settle in for an interesting few years.

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