Jerry Brito said it all yesterday, in his excellent post on the Cyren Call plan to reallocate 30 Mhz of spectrum to public safety, instead of auctioning it as has long been planned. His conclusion is exactly right: Public safety needs spectrum reform, not more spectrum.
Earlier this week, I beat that same drum in a paper released by Heritage called “Cyren Call and Siren Calls,” pointing out that recent rule changes by the FCC may provide public safety users many of the claimed benefits of the Cyren Call plan, with no additional spectrum allocation. My conclusion:
“The FCC’s decision is not a cure-all for the problems of public safety communications. But it is an important step, not least because it shows that reform does not necessarily require massive new resources. The most important reforms are those that allow existing resources to be used in smarter and more effective ways. As is often the case, better does not have to mean more.”
I know that it has become a bit passe to talk about personal responsibility these days. Ours is a “it takes a village to raise a child” world. We’re told that we have to look out for each other in this big village to ensure that no one becomes the village idiot. And so we get laws like this new one from New York that would ban the use of electronic devices such as iPods, BlackBerrys and cell phones while crossing streets in major cities.
According to CNet’s description of the soon-to-be-released bill, “The bill would effectively make it illegal to use any kind of portable electronic device–a music or video player, cell phone, smart phone, gaming device, etc.–while crossing the street in cities such as New York, Albany and Buffalo. Offenders would be slapped with a $100 fine and a criminal court summons. Joggers and bicyclists would have to limit their iPod use to city parks in which no street crossing would be involved.” Apparently the sponsor of the bill became concerned after a 23-year-old Brooklyn man walked into the path of a city bus while listening to his iPod.
That certainly is a tragic story–and I hate to sound cold-hearted about this–but is the problem here the iPod or the guy simply failing to look both ways before he crossed a busy street? Personally, when I’m walking the busy streets of Washington, DC, I am usually listening to my MP3 player and reading a newspaper or magazine at the same time. When I look around, plenty of people around me are doing the same thing. But there’s no epidemic of deaths from us all stumbling into oncoming traffic while in a zombie-like trance from listening to music or reading papers.
Moral of the story: Most of us know how to walk and chew gum at the same time. For the handful of those who don’t I suppose you could make a Darwinian argument: Banning portable media devices on streets isn’t going to stop that crowd from doing stupid things that put their lives in danger anyway.
When I was growing up, my parents Harper’s subscription seemed to go on in perpetuity. Occasionally it would have an article of interest to me; I remember one short story in particular, about a chap who became a mouse when he meditated, and decided to stay that way. But for the most part it was all dense grown-up stuff, like choral music and art history.
I never grew in to an appreciation of Harper’s, I’m afraid. I comment on a recent essay here.
Marc Hauser’s new book is Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong. A review notes:
Marc Hauser’s groundbreaking book advances a new theory of moral judgment, synthesizing a great deal of work in neuroscience, psychology, and ethology, as well as the author’s own recent experimental work. Hauser aims to demonstrate that morality is innate in the way that language is innate
In response to my post on network prioritization on Tuesday, Christopher Anderson left a thoughtful comment that represents a common, but in my opinion mistaken, perspective on the network discrimination question:
It’s great for a researcher building a next generation network to simply recommend adding capacity. This has been the LAN model for a long time in private internal networks and LANs with Ethernet have grown in orders of magnitude. This is how Ethernet beat out ATM in the LAN 10 years ago or so. Now that those very same LANs are deploying VOIP they wish for some ATM features such as proritization. And now they add that prioritization (‘e’ tagging for example) to deploy VOIP more often than they upgrade the whole thing to 10G.
There are however business concerns in the real world. Business concerns such as resource scarcity and profit. In a ISP business model, users are charged for service. If usage goes up, but subscriptions do not (e.g. average user consumes more bandwidth) there is financial motivation to prioritize or shape the network, not to add capacity and sacrifice profit with higher outlays of capital, as long as the ‘quality’ or ‘satisfaction’ as observed by the consumer does not suffer.
Anderson is presenting a dichotomy between what we might call the frugal option of using prioritization schemes to make more efficient use of the bandwidth we’ve got and the profligate option of simply building more capacity when we run out of the bandwidth we’ve got. The former is supposed to be the cheap, hard-headed, capitalist way of doing things, while the latter is the sort of thing that works fine in the lab, but is too wasteful to work in the real world.
Ahead of tomorrow’s Senate Commerce Committee hearing on public safety communications, the Consumer Electronics Association released a report (PDF) it commissioned from Criterion Economics analyzing the Cyren Call plan. The report concludes that the Cyren Call plan would upturn Congress’s carefully crafted DTV transition scheme. It also calls into question whether the private sector would build a more expensive broadband network than it would otherwise have to in order to meet the more rigorous needs of public safety.
Like I said, the study was commissioned by a special interest and it should be read in that light. (And by all means, read it yourself and make up your own mind.) However, the study does outline some basic facts that support something I’ve been saying for a long time: public safety communications does not need more spectrum, what it needs is spectrum reform. Here’s a sampling from the report:
Ed Felten has a great analysis of Steve Jobs’ DRM essay:
[Jobs’s] real scorn is for outcome (2), where Apple licenses its DRM technology to other companies. It’s easy to see why this is the worst outcome for Apple–the company loses its ability to lock in customers, but everybody still has to put up with the cost and hassle of using DRM.
What the letter really does, in typical Jobsian fashion, is frame the debate. It does this in two respects. First, it sets up a choice between two alternatives: stay the course, or get rid of DRM entirely. Second, it points the finger at the major record companies as the ones making the choice.
This is both a clever PR move and a proactive defense against European antitrust scrutiny. Mandatory licensing is a typical antitrust remedy in situations like this, so Apple wants to take licensing off the table as an option. Most of all, Apple wants to deflect the blame for the current situation onto the record companies. Steve Jobs is a genius at this sort of thing, and it looks like he will succeed again.
Meanwhile, over at the Wall Street Journal is a great example of the point Felten made last week about the way the labels have framed the DRM debate. The Journal‘s coverage of Jobs’s essay has the sub-headline “Apple Chief Now Favors Making Downloads Of Songs Freely Tradable.” If you didn’t read the article carefully, you might get the impression that he’s advocating overturning the Grokster decision. But no, Jobs is simply saying that we should abandon DRM, an anti-copying technology that doesn’t actually do very much to prevent copying.
Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of talk in Washington again about regulating the Internet and online content. A proposal demanding extensive data retention requirements was reintroduced yesterday in the House. And the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), which would ban social networking sites in schools in libraries, was reintroduced in the Senate (S. 49) in mid-January. Additional regulatory proposals are certain to follow, including the inevitable bills on mandatory website labeling and age verification that seem to get floated every session.
Beyond the many First Amendment and privacy-related concerns these legislative efforts raise, it’s important to realize that they aren’t even necessary. There are plenty of ways for parents to handle this job themselves thanks the many excellent tools that industry and others have put at their disposal.
For example, just this week a coalition of companies and associations have launched “Project Online Safety” (www.projectonlinesafety.com) to highlight the many excellent steps they are taking to empower parents to protect their children online.
Turner Broadcasting is paying Boston $2 million to compensate them for the costs of Boston having idiotic public officials. Although of course they have to emphasize publicly how sorry they are for the incidient, I wouldn’t be surprised if the company is privately thrilled with the outcome. Adult Swim’s target audience is precisely the sort of people who will be amused rather than appalled by the incident. And the national news coverage they received brought the show to the attention of millions of people (including me) who otherwise never would have heard of the show. It will be very interesting to see if they get a ratings spike as a result.
And via Radley, here’s a video of the perpetrators making the media look silly:
The news story above says their case hasn’t been dismissed yet, but I expect (hope?) that will happen soon.
Every week, I look at a software patent that’s been in the news. You can see previous installments in the series here. There haven’t been any major patent controversies this week, so our patent of the week comes from last November. VoiceSignal Technologies has sued Nuance Communications over its voice patent. I’ll discuss the patent below the fold.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.