The FCC’s localism report has attracted massive controversy as to whether it was inappropriately scotched by the FCC. By contrast, there has been remarkably little attention on its substance. “Do Local Owners Deliver More Localism?: Some Evidence From Local Broadcast News,” was written in 2004, apparently by FCC staffers Peter Alexander and Keith Brown. Using a 1998 database from the University of Delaware, the authors looked at how the ownership of television stations affects the amount of news they deliver. The headline finding was that stations that are locally-owned have some 5.5 minutes more of local news on their half-hour news programs, and over 3 minutes more of local on-location news. Because of this finding–which points to a possible downside to national chains of TV stations– the FCC allegedly killed the study.
But, as Matthew Laser–an author and former Pacifica Radio reporter–argued today, the report is actually much more complicated than the headlines suggest. He points out that several aspects of this study undercut the advocates of strict ownership limits. The study found that television stations that also own a radio station in the same market provide more news than those without such cross-ownership. It also found that television station/newspaper cross-ownership was not found to be a significant factor in the amount of local news provided.
Perhaps most striking, the report concedes that more local news may not always be a good thing. “For example,” it suggests, “if the local [television] owners also develops real estate locally, they may cover the local zoning board in a way that favors the owners’s real estate interests.”
In fact, the report does not address perhaps the biggest question: do viewers actually want more local content? This issue is addressed only in a footnote of the study, which simply states that “non-local content may be more appealing to viewers than local content.”
In this regard, the study tracks much of the current debate: policymakers determine what content is preferred, with only occasional nods to whether consumers object. Its a topsy-turvy analysis: instead of defining success, consumer preferences are seen as potential obstacles to it. This really is more complicated than it seems.
It’s no Watergate, but the FCC is still roiling over charges made that it deep-sixed a staff study on media ownership because it didn’t like the results. The allegations–and the study–surfaced last week at a hearing on Chairman Kevin Martin’s reappointment. Sent anonymously to Sen. Barbara Boxer, the paper was reportedly written in 2004 by two commission staffers and found that locally-owned television stations aired more local news that those owned by national chains. According to former Media Bureau attorney Adam Candeub, unspecified higher-ups at the agency were appalled at the results because they undercut ongoing efforts to reform media ownership laws. As a result, Candeub said, every copy of the report was ordered destroyed. “The whole project was dropped, “end of discussion, he said.
Kevin Martin–who was a commissioner, but not chair, of the FCC at the time–was apparently blindsided by the claims. He stated that he had never heard of the study, but pledged to look into the matter. He also had the study–or at least a PDF of the copy provided by Boxer–put on the commission’s website. (Bizarrely, this copy–even as posted by the FCC–has the authors names blacked out).
The mini-scandal–perhaps it should be called Papergate–was widely reported in the press, and has led to a barrage of criticism in the blogosphere and a stream of press releases from pro-media regulation advocacy groups (Typical was a headline used by the advocacy group Free Press: “FCC Buried Evidence to Protect Friends in Big Media“.)
The reaction was understandable–the image of FCC officials ordering all traces of a study destroyed, Carthage-like, just because they don’t like the results is a disturbing one. But is the real story that simple? I’m skeptical, for several reasons. Anyone who has worked at the FCC knows that the place leaks like an Italian warship. Its simply is hard to believe that such a step would remain a secret for two years, especially given the intense outside interest in the broadcast ownership debate. That’s not to say that studies are not quietly set aside–that happens all the time. But–as described–the end of this study was anything but quiet, and it’s hard to see the noise not reaching outside the FCC’s building.
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The Washington Stock Exchange (WSX) has successfully launched! Because it uses market processes to predict electoral and legislative events, WSX promises to make political news more accurate and fun. Soon, reporters might routinely sprinkle their stories with statements like, “Traders on the Washington Stock Exchange still predict that Republicans will hold onto to the House, but the odds just got longer.” As an alternative to polls or talking heads, WSX offers the virtues of blogospheric decentralization plus hard numbers.
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So I’m having a party this evening, and while poking around the web, I discovered this tidbit: if you’ve got Airport Express, you can now play your music to multiple speakers. That means I can plug my laptop into the speakers into my bedroom, plug a second set of speakers into the Airport Express in my living room, and have perfectly synchronized music playing to both speakers simultaneously, filling the whole apartment with music.
The equipment needed to do this cost a grand total of about $200. Ten years ago, I’d guess the equipment required to do this would have cost thousands of dollars. Thirty years ago, home consumers probably couldn’t have gotten equivalent functionality at any price. The best you could have done would be to run wires through your ceiling, and even then, you would have been limited to playing records or casette tapes.
All of which is an excuse to link to my friend Will Wilkinson’s great article about inequality. Will points out that while monetary inequality is increasing, what we should be really worried about is material inequality–and by almost any measure, this has been rapidly decreasing. My $200 iTunes/Airport music setup has features that would have cost thousands of dollars a decade ago. In this sense, technological progress is the greatest egalitarian force the world has ever known. Although the financial gap between the rich and poor is growing, the gap in the material quality of life between rich and poor is shrinking, as more and more luxuries once available only to the rich become widely affordable to everyone.
Will puts all this much better than I can, so go read his article.
Update: I’ve got another story along the same vein: I’ve been to several weddings recently, and all of them have dispensed with DJs, using their iPods as electronic DJs. None of them has regretted it. Indeed, in at least one respect, the iPod is better: you get to decide exactly what’s on the playlist. No worrying about whether the DJ has good music taste, or whether your guests will request bad music. One more distinction between more-expensive and less-expensive weddings has been obliterated by technology.
Every week, I look at a software patent that’s been in the news. You can see previous installments in the series here. This week our patent comes via Ars, which reported on Thursday that a company called Paltalk has sued Microsoft over allegations that its XBox Live gaming platform violates two of Paltalk’s patents.
We’ll consider the older of the two patents, which you can see here. It covers a “server-group messaging system for interactive applications.” In a nutshell, this “invention” coordinates the transmission of packets among video game players in precisely the same way that mailing list software coordinates the transmission of an email to multiple email addresses.
The patent describes a variety of functions of this “invention.” For example, it offers the ability to aggregate messages from several different sources and send them out bundled together as a single message. This is precisely analogous to what mailing lists do with their “daily digest” feature. It also includes protocols for creating groups and adding and removing computers from groups. There are, again, precise analogues to these functions in ordinary mailing list software.
Mailing list software existed years before this patent was filed in 1998. The only difference between this invention and mailing list software is that the type of message they send is different (emails versus realtime gaming notifications), and the time horizons involved are different (minutes or hours versus seconds). But neither of those difficulties really changes the technical design principles involved. This is an obvious patent.
This is a recurring problem with software patents: often someone takes a well known software design, apply it in a new context, and declare it a new, patentable invention. But although the result may look superficially different, under the hood the software is very similar. The power of computer programming comes from the ability to use a small number of well-understood software techniques to solve a wide variety of problems. We’d think it absurd to patent the idea of using a hammer on a new kind of nail. It’s no less absurd to patent the idea of using a well-known software technique in a new domain.
This week Microsoft released details about Zune, Microsoft’s purported iPod killer. Techdirt is reporting that Zune won’t be compatible with Microsoft’s previous digital rights management technology, which, ironically enough, was branded “Plays for Sure.” Microsoft’s marketing folks might want to look into changing that. In addition, nothing seems to have come of rumors that Microsoft would “buy out” iTunes users by giving them copies of the songs they’d previously purchased at the iTunes store. Which is really peculiar, given that it would have been a big win for both the labels and Microsoft.
I doubt Steve Jobs is losing over sleep over this.
OK, this will be the last voting machine post for the week, but I couldn’t help plugging Avi Rubin’s new blog, which was pointed out to me by Mike Masnick. In particular, Rubin has a chilling account of his experiences as an election judge. He describes how two of the machines didn’t have the right security tags, and so they were set aside. However, later in the day, facing high turnout, they got a call from the elections board telling them to put those machines back into service. And there’s more:
Throughout the early part of the day, there was a Diebold representative at our precinct. When I was setting up the poll books, he came over to “help”, and I ended up explaining to him why I had to hook the ethernet cables into a hub instead of directly into all the machines (not to mention the fact that there were not enough ports on the machines to do it that way). The next few times we had problems, the judges would call him over, and then he called me over to help. After a while, I asked him how long he had been working for Diebold because he didn’t seem to know anything about the equipment, and he said, “one day.” I said, “You mean they hired you yesterday?” And he replied, “yes, I had 6 hours of training yesterday. It was 80 people and 2 instructors, and none of us really knew what was going on.” I asked him how this was possible, and he replied, “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but it’s all money. They are too cheap to do this right. They should have a real tech person in each precinct, but that costs too much, so they go out and hire a bunch of contractors the day before the election, and they think that they can train us, but it’s too compressed.” Around 4 pm, he came and told me that he wasn’t doing any good there, and that he was too frustrated, and that he was going home. We didn’t see him again.
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The New York Times today has an excellent article on the incredible shrinking audience for broadcast radio. Increasingly, the Times points out, Americans are tuning out their AM and FM stations and going elsewhere for music and news–to satellite radio, the Internet, their iPods and more.
More than 9 of 10 Americans do still listen to broadcast radio each week, but they are listening less. Americans aged 12-24 in fact listen to broadcast radio as startling 15 percent less than they did only seven years ago. “We’ve lost the hipness battle,” one executive is quoted as saying, along with a fair amount of stock value. The major radio firms are fighting back in a number of ways–but many are also selling stations.
The trend has obvious implications for the FCC–which has just launched an inquiry into, among other things, its radio ownership limits. For some time, the radio ownership debate has been focused on the dominant position of Clear Channel Communications, which is routinely trotted out as example number one of a Media Monopolist (oddly, since it holds only some 10 percent of licenses nationally). But dominance in broadcast radio today isn’t what is used to be. After all, what’s the point of being a monopolist when there’s so much competition? It simply may not matter how many AM or FM stations someone owns when their customers can so easily listen elsewhere.
Luis Villa urges Red Hat to join the voting machine industry. He suggests that the open source model would be a good fit for voting machine development:
Security- As Ed Felten demonstrated spectacularly yesterday, the current generation of electronic voting machines are painfully insecure. Go watch the video. Open souce security auditing can do much better than that. (Diebold’s defense, by the way, is that Felten should have asked them for more information. That would not be a problem in an open source context.)
Cost- Governments are fairly price sensitive, especially in low-profile areas like voting. Open source is traditionally very cost competitive, and in this particular case, the closed-source systems have to license components like WinCE, so they are definitely at a disadvantage.
Pre-existing community- Corporate-sponsored open source work does best when it works in hand with existing bodies of volunteers and expertise. Such groups already exist in open source voting; open voting consortium is the first hit on google but I believe there are others as well.
Political motivation: one of the most tried and true ways to motivate open source contributors is to give them a bad guy. Voting fraud is replete with bad guys on all sides; if a project got enough backing (i.e., RH) to make it look like it might get actually used in an actual election, people would come out of the woodwork to audit and patch it.
And he points out that Red Hat is one of the few open source companies with a track record of building complex, mission-critical hardware-software systems.
I find this argument pretty compelling. I still think the best solution would be not to use computerized voting machines at all, but if we must have them, it’s hard to beat open source for security, transparency, and affordability.
On Wednesday, I was in New York City attending another installment of the Internet Content Rating Association’s (ICRA) outstanding ongoing series of summits on child protection & freedom of expression in a our new information age. As with previous ICRA events in Washington, Sunnyvale, CA, and Brussels, the focus of the New York roundtable discussion was: What steps can we take to shield children from potentially objectionable Internet or media content without repressing freedom of speech / expression? In particular, the role of private, self-regulation (labeling, rating, filtering, educating, etc) was discussed and debated in detail.
In addition to being the focus of much of my ongoing research at PFF, you might also recall that I wrote about a major summit on similar issues that took part in this June in Washington, D.C., which featured Senator Hillary Clinton among other distinguished speakers. And the Congressional Internet Caucus has an upcoming series of Capitol Hill panel discussions on these issues and just released a compilation of short white papers summarizing what various groups are doing about online child safety issues. So this continues to be a hot topic.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.