For your protection

by on June 20, 2006

The Washington Post reports today that “Virginia’s public and private colleges and universities soon will be required to submit the names and Social Security numbers of tens of thousands of students they accept each year to state police for cross-checking against sexual offender registries.” The law, recently signed by Gov. Tim Kaine, is aimed at tracking sex offenders. It “also requires Department of Motor Vehicles officials to turn over personal information to police any time a Virginian applies for a license or change of address.”

“I’ve got two kids in college right now,” said Kenneth W. Stolle (R-Virginia Beach), the bill’s chief sponsor in the state Senate. “You’re going to have a . . . hard time explaining to me why my daughter is living next door to a sexual offender. My guess is every parent out there would have the same expectation that I do.”

Since it doesn’t take more than a stolen laptop to put 2.2 million identities in jeopardy, and since one person’s Social Security number can be used fraudulently by up to 80 different people, I’m not sure I want my information spread any wider than it already has to be. And it’s not clear to me why I, an innocent (I assure you) private citizen is forced to get a background check before I can enroll in a private institution, which may otherwise not care about my background. If your daughter is living next to a ex-offender, it’s because that’s life. What’s next? Legislating safety scissors and circles of paper?

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Dan Rather Leaves CBS. Nation Yawns.

by on June 20, 2006

This morning, CBS announced it had reached a final agreement with Dan Rather terminating his contract and his 44-year relationship with that network. When reports of the impending break-up came of few days ago, the public reaction was surprise. Not surprise that he was leaving, but surprise that he was still around at all. It seems that since he left the anchor’s chair, Rather fell victim to forgotten-but-not-gone syndrome. Although still part of the 60 Minutes CBS team, his output was slight, with fewer shows airing than any other anchor there.

It wasn’t the ending Rather wanted. As I wrote two years ago, Rather aspired to Walter Cronkite status. Cronkite, Rather’s predecessor at CBS, was a national icon, a kindly figure who the nation looked up to. Rather never achieved that status. Not only was he a bit too eccentric, and openly ideological –but the role of broadcast anchor itself became more and more irrelevant during Rather’s tenure.

Rather’s final downfall was swift, being caught reporting as news–then defending beyond all reason–clearly forged documents pertaining to George Bush. There was no good excuse for his behavior–either he was actively involved in a fraud, or (perhaps even more damning given his self-image as a crack journalist) he failed as a reporter. As Rather himself might have put it, he was beaten like a rented mule. CBS, after a decent interval, gently pushed him out of Cronkites’ chair.

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Yahoo and the Pirate Bay

by on June 19, 2006 · 2 comments

A couple of weeks ago, Andrew noted that the usual suspects didn’t have a whole lot to say about the Pirate Bay shutdown. I don’t know anything about Swedish law, so I have no idea if their legal claims are plausible. But it seems at least possible that they are, and I I think the implications of that would be interesting.

A few years back most Americans ridiculed France for trying to tell Yahoo, and American company, not to make Nazi memorabilia available to their citizens. We said–correctly, I think–that France doesn’t have any jurisdiction over American web sites hosted in the United States, and that a French court certainly couldn’t override our First Amendment. Although sadly, Yahoo! ultimately buckled under pressure and banned Nazi memorabilia.

I hope the parallel to the Pirate Bay case is obvious. Now, I do think that in some cases we have a right to expect that other countries respect our copyright law. Russia’s AllOfMP3.com, for example, is plainly making their money by flouting American (and other Western nations’) copyright laws.

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Free Lunches

by on June 19, 2006

The Wall Street Journal has a write up of Craigslist, the online classified site that is steadily taking over the world. The author seems bewildered by the Craigslist phenomenon, seeming to think there must be some kind of trick or hidden agenda at work:

“The Internet at large, and free classifieds in particular–and even beyond that, Craigslist free classifieds in particular–certainly pose challenges to the newspaper industry as far as being able to raise their profitability over time.” Many in newspaper publishing would consider that an understatement. But Mr. Buckmaster is sanguine: “The demise of the newspaper has been overstated.” Phew. I expel a nervous chuckle of relief. In Mr. Buckmaster’s view, newspapers would be better off being a little more Craigslist-like: Go private, eschew Wall Street’s demands for continually “goosing profitability” and give your readers what they want. Much trouble in the world comes, in Mr. Buckmaster’s view, from losing sight of that essential goal.

After we’ve retired back to the living room for coffee, Mr. Buckmaster allows that the world is perhaps not quite that simple. When asked whether there’s a Craigslist model that other companies could emulate, the unflappable Mr. Buckmaster, his eyes once more fixed firmly on the horizon out the window, waxes lyrical for a moment: “It’s unrealistic to say, but–imagine our entire U.S. workforce deployed in units of 20. Each unit of 20 is running a business that tens of millions of people are getting enormous amounts of value out of each month. What kind of world would that be?”

Before I have time to object, Mr. Buckmaster comes back to our world. “Now, there’s something wrong in the reasoning there,” he admits. “You can’t run a steel company in the same way that you run an Internet company”–more points for understatement. “But still, it’s a nice kind of fantasy that there are more and more businesses where huge amounts of value can flow to the user for free. I like the idea, just as an end-user, of there being as many businesses like that as possible.” As an end-user, I suppose I do, too. But there are no free lunches, even if Craigslist–and the meal Mr. Buckmaster and Ms. Best provided for me–sometimes seem to come close.

The oft-repeated (especially by libertarians) view that there’s no such thing as a free lunch is actually nonsense. Civilization abounds in free lunches. Social cooperation produces immense surpluses that have allowed us to become as wealthy as we are. Craigslist is just an extreme example of this phenomenon, because it allows social cooperation on a much greater scale at radically reduced cost. Craigslist creates an enormous amount of surplus value (that is, the benefits to users vastly exceed the infrastructure costs of providing the service). For whatever reason, Craigslist itself has chosen to appropriate only a small portion of that value, leaving the vast majority to its users.

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Phone Taxes in Congressional Telecom Bills?

by on June 19, 2006

The LA Times ran a good story today on how the House telecom bill–thanks to a last-minute amendment–may raise the price of Internet phone calls. The provision reaffirms state authority to require voice-over-Internet providers to pay into universal service funds and to pay access fees to wireline carriers. In so doing, the bill apparently overturns an FCC decision two years ago preempting the states from such matters.

The cost could be significant. According to the article, the additional subsidy payments could increase VoIP bills some 7 percent. Summarizing the reaction of the VoIP community, Jeff Pulver said of the move: “It got me to the point of absolute depression.”

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The Rights of Apes

by on June 19, 2006 · 2 comments

Following a report concluding that research on primates such as monkeys will continue to yield benefits into the future, Spain considers extending “human rights” to apes. Experimentation on apes is restricted in England and New Zealand.

This is very interesting stuff for classical liberal and libertarian rights theorists. On the one hand,

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Yglesias on Media Concentration

by on June 19, 2006

Matt Yglesias channels Adam Thierer:

the media’s become less concentrated. They’re up to six giants from just four–General Electric, Disney, Time Warner, CBS (which I believe is the successor to Westinghouse), plus new entrants Fox, and Viacom. So that’s six.

Six is a reasonably small number, but compared to what? What do the top six American car companies control? Oh, right, there are only two. And only two operating system makers. And so on and so forth. The tendency in any field would be for the top six firms to control a large portion of the aggregate.

What’s more, the curious thing about these six media monopolists is that between them they control zero of America’s most-influential newspapers. Nobody, I hope, will deny that The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal are important elements of the media. And yet, they’re owned by three separate companies, each of them apart from the Big Six. Beyond the Big Six electronic media companies and the Big Three newspapers, there’s also Gannett which owns the high-circulation USA Today along with a boatload of smaller newspapers. And then there’s Tribune Media with The LA Times, The Chicago Tribune, and other papers.

He notes that PBS and NPR offer credible alternatives to the mainstream media. And on top of all that, the Internet is rapidly expanding peoples’ access to the world’s media sources. And it’s easy to multiply these examples. Matt doesn’t mention C-SPAN, the Economist, political magazines like The New Republic, The Nation, The American Prospect and Reason, or radio talk shows–yet these too are all ways for viewers to get access to news and information.

In short, there’s more news and information available, from more different perspectives, in more different formats, than any one person could hope to consume–even if you live in the middle of nowhere. The reason that the Big Six have the market share they do, I suspect, is the same reason that Coke and Pepsi command the lion’s share of the beverage market: they cater toward mainstream tastes and so manage to meet the needs of the vast majority of ordinary viewers. For all the bitching that ordinary voters do about the mainstream media, most of them continue to watch it, despite the availability of many, many alternatives.

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Bailey on Inconvenient Truths

by on June 18, 2006 · 12 comments

Reason‘s Ron Bailey has an interesting review of Al Gore’s new movie:

Gore has won the global warming debate–the world is warming as a consequence of human activity, chiefly the loading up of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. Yet he feels that he must exaggerate the dangers by propounding implausible scenarios in which sea levels rise 20 feet by 2100. He pretends that the science is settled with regard to the effect of global warming on hurricanes. And he pushes a scientifically tenuous connection between the spread of diseases and global warming. These are little inconvenient truths that cut against his belief that global warming constitutes a climate emergency. On balance Gore gets it more right than wrong on the science (we’ll leave the policy stuff to another time), but he undercuts his message by becoming the opposite of a global warming denier. He’s a global warming exaggerator.

As he points out, the folks who denied the existence of global warming will have a credibility problems when it comes to the policy question about what, if anything, should be done to reverse the trend.

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Even Hypothetical Software Patents are Bad

by on June 17, 2006 · 10 comments

Daniel Markham takes me to task for being one of those “software patents are destroying the world!” types:

Imagine for a minute that I just got off a time machine from the year 5600. I know how to make truly intelligent machines, so I sit down and write a patent on how to make computer intelligence. Now at the heart of my patent will be arrays, indexes, memory cores–all of the usual computer stuff. It’s all just ones and zeros, folks. But obviously my patent has tremendous value to society.

This is a silly example, but since it IS possible to make an example where software patents make sense, the question isn’t whether they are useful or not, the question is how to tell the difference. That’s a big point that a lot of folks miss. Get rid of the bath water, keep the baby.

This is a silly example for a number of reasons, and not just the obvious ones. In the first place, it’s unlikely that somebody’s going to sit down at his computer and come up with a single breakthrough that makes computers instantly intelligent. More likely, there will be a long series of incremental improvements. Each advancement will give its creator a short-term advantage in the marketplace before another firm comes up with another incremental improvement that puts it ahead. This process of incremental improvement and imitation is the way the software industry has worked for decades.

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Sloppiness in TNR

by on June 16, 2006 · 22 comments

The New Republic seems to believe that the lack of network neutrality will somehow lead to the end of the blogosphere:

[The Internet] is where Americans can not only search for the best deal on a new digital camera, but also debate the country’s future. Unlike the telephone, it is a medium in which thousands, even millions, of people can participate in the same discussion at the same time. Unlike television, it is interactive. But it can’t function optimally if content is prioritized or filtered by telecom companies. Allowing companies to levy a toll on information providers is not just a blow to consumer choice–it’s a blow to democracy.

Andrew Kantor of USA Today (who reader Raphy points out recently had a change of heart on the issue) has a column that nicely rebuts this kind of silliness:

I’ve read quotes from bloggers saying their content wouldn’t be delivered as quickly as that from, say, USA TODAY–thus depriving people of information that isn’t from the mainstream media. And people speak of the “little guy” not being able to compete with monster corporations with monster bandwidth.

But that makes no sense. Small information providers like bloggers don’t connect directly to the Internet; they buy space on hosting sites, either maintaining their own or on a shared blogging site (e.g., Blogger.com). It’s those hosts that buy the bandwidth, and they often tout their connection speeds.

Think about it: Google owns Blogger. Do you think Blogger users are going to be deprived of bandwidth for lack of funds?

And Jim Lippard points out that TNR repeats the falsehood that network neutrality rules always applied to the Internet before the evil Bush administration stopped enforcing them.

I’m ordinarily a big fan of the New Republic‘s articles. It’s sad to see them repeating bogus MoveOn talking points.

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