Today, the Well Connected Project of the Center for Public Integrity is excited to launch an issue portal jointly with Congresspedia. This issue portal is a wiki, like Wikipedia, creating a collection of articles on telecom, media and technology policy, in a single location. Anyone can read, write and edit these articles.
This issue portal builds on the great telecom and technology reporting done by the members of the Well Connected Project staff. This venture into collaborative journalism is a first for our project. It adds a new element to our investigative journalism endeavor. First of all, we have the Media Tracker, a free database of more than five million records that tells you who owns the media where you live by typing in you ZIP code. If we win our lawsuit against the FCC, we’ll also include company-specific broadband information in the Media Tracker.
Second, our blog features dozens of quick-turnaround stories on the hottest topics in telecom and media policy. Recent stories have broken news on the battle over 700 Megahertz, on the lobbying over the proposed XM-Sirius satellite radio merger, and also over copyright controls on electronic devices. We also do investigative reports – like this one about Sam Zell, the new owner of Tribune Co. – that build on the data that is freely available in Media Tracker.
Now, with the addition of this Congresspedia wiki, our project aims to incorporate citizen-journalism on key public policy issues near and dear to the blogosphere. These are issues like Broadband availability, Digital copyright, Digital television, Regulating media content, and Spectrum are at the core of what techies care about in Washington. We hope you will add others articles, too. In fact, I’ve already started my own wish list: articles about Patent overhaul legislation, Media ownership, the Universal Service Fund, and Video franchising. Our reporters can summarize these issues and debates, but so can you.
Take a crack at them!
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Everything in the digital world moves fast, but this has to be a record. Apple’s new iPhone has gone from cool new innovation to a new form of slavery in less than two weeks. Just released on June 29, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) seems to consider it already a “must-have” — complaining yesterday about restrictions placed by Apple and AT&T on its availability. Speaking yesterday at a Commerce Committee hearing, he lambasted the fact that the iPhone is only available with AT&T service, as well as the $175 early termination fee on its 2-year contract.
The iPhone is like the Hotel California, he said — “you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
Some critics go even farther. On CNBC’s “On the Money” show last night, I debated the issue with Gary Goodman, of Customersatisfaction.com, who (and I’m not making this up) argued that “what we have here today is the equivalent of consumer slavery.”
Slavery? I’ve heard people say they are slaves to their cellphone, but are they slaves to their provider because they signed a contract? Is there perhaps a Thirteenth Amendment problem here that should be examined?
The idea is of course ludricrous. If this is slavery, it is a strangely popular kind.
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Every once in a while I connect with my inner geek and read through Slashdot. I often see some interesting arguments by people that understand technical issues. However, this comment, made in response to news that Apple purchased the rights to the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS), provoked me:
The real lesson here is that the idea that the developers should pool their copyrights into one person is flawed. That person can then cash out. The get all the profits for everyone else’s work. The other developers lose out on both getting a piece of the pie if they would have wanted that, and they lose out in the moral sense in that if they didn’t want their code to suddenly become part of a closed source project, they have no say in it anymore.
It seems to me that nothing wrong occurred when Apple purchased this code. CUPS, which is used for printing by many Linux distributions and in the Mac OS X, was an open source project created by Michael Sweet. Sweet presumably owned the copyright to the code, so the code was legally his to sell. Sweet should be rewarded for his labor — throw him a buck or two in the tip cup!
But wait…what about the other developers that contributed code to CUPS? Or — forget the tip cup, did Sweet profit from the entire give-a-penny, take-a-penny tray? Have no fear, as CUPS will continue to be an open-source project under a GPL2/LGPL2 license. So there’s no downside and no moral turpitude — developers that chose to contribute code will still see that code available as free software, and can take and add to it as they wish.
What seems to burn the Slashdot commenter is the fact that there’s an upside. Someone actually made money! It’s a shame that when a technology creator/owner like Sweet gets his reward, and doesn’t infringe on the rights of others to do so, he still draws fire. Oh well, in a world where people often materialistically prize money above all, there are also those who wrongly lust over other people’s money.
My letter to the Washington Post regarding Michael Gerson’s “Where the Avatars Roam,” which appeared in the Post last week:
Michael Gerson’s July 6 piece “Where the Avatars Roam” shows that his understanding of libertarianism isn’t nearly as deep as his understanding of online games.
Mr. Gerson describes Second Life as “large-scale experiment in libertarianism,” citing the game’s lack of community structure and long-term consequences. He describes this “libertarian” world as one in which there is not human nature, only human choices.
This doesn’t describe a libertarian world, but one of fantasy. Libertarianism, as envisioned by the founding fathers or Friedrich Hayek, is predicated on an understanding of the world that’s very different from Second Life. Common sense agrees with this libertarian understanding–the world is one of consequences, community institutions are vital to human life, and human beings have an innate nature that we should harness, not deny.
True, libertarians believe in the idea of spontaneous order, but Mr. Gerson treats this idea unfairly. Libertarianism holds that society is not the product of uncoordinated human choice, but of human choice coordinated by the institutions of liberty. Rule of law, private property, and a robust civil society together create rules within which markets operate to ensure the greatest possible outcomes, both for individuals and for society as a whole.
Denying human nature and basic economics is the forte of the modern left, not libertarians. Perhaps Second Life would be a good testing ground for the left’s pet theories–they may work better there. As for libertarians, we’ll stick to the real thing.
Fresh on the heels of Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s (D-W.Va.) show trial hearing about “violent TV” in the Senate Commerce Committee two weeks ago, Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) has just announced he would be proposing two new amendments that would seriously roll back the clock on broadcast industry regulation. According to a report in today’s Broadcasting & Cable,
“Brownback, a member of the Senate Appropriations committee, said Tuesday that he will offer two amendments to a general government appropriations bill Thursday, July 12, one that would “continue support for the FCC to fine broadcasters who air indecent, profane, or obscene content,” and another that would “fine broadcasters for airing excessively violent content during the hours when children are most likely to be in the audience.”
Before getting into the substance of these measures, a word about the process. I find it more than a little troubling that Senator Brownback is attempting to legislate on sensitive constitutional matters like this through the appropriations process. It seems to me that any measure that cuts to the core of an industry’s First Amendment rights should not be snuck into a bloated spending measure in order to get it passed. But hey, who cares about the Constitution… this is about “protecting children”! Right? Well, actually, it wouldn’t do that either.
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My colleague Scott Wallsten, PFF’s Director of Communications Policy Studies, filed comments at the FCC this week regarding the proposed merger of satellite radio providers XM and Sirius. Scott points out what many of the merger critics have failed to appreciate:
[C]ompanies like these are platforms in two-sided markets that must find ways to attract subscribers and content. Both subscribers and content providers can choose among a variety of platforms. Moreover, the platforms themselves are dynamic in that they could potentially carry any digital information, not just the particular services they currently offer.
In short, a merger analysis of competing platforms that considers only a single component in this complex market is likely to reach an incorrect conclusion. In the case of the XM-Sirius merger, officials should consider not only subscribers, but also content providers, competing platforms, platforms that are potential competitors, and services the platforms in question may provide in the future that they do not today.
This seems like the most obvious thing in the world to me, and yet I have been shocked to see how many people are opposing this merger using the narrow-minded logic that XM and Sirius operate in a solitary market, free of external pressures and threats. It’s absolute lunacy to me. Frankly, as I argued in this lengthy essay I penned on the topic the night the merger was announced, I just don’t see how both these firms can survive in the long run unless they merge. The competitive pressures are just far too intense with all the competition for our ears these days.
Anyway, read Scott’s filing for an even better analysis.
Google wants the Federal Communications Commisison to make net neutrality a licensing requirement in the Upper 700 MHz spectrum band – “(1) open applications, (2) open devices, (3) open services, and (4) open access.” According to media reports, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is circulating draft rules which would impose such a requirement (see: this, this and this).
What’s Martin’s agenda? I suspect he thinks he’s come up with a brilliant strategic maneuver – give Google the chance to acquire a nationwide broadband wireless footprint on the cheap and maybe the company will give up funding the advocates of net neutrality regulation. AOL ended its support for open access the minute it merged with Time Warner, didn’t it?
But as we learned from the 1996 Telecommunications Act, procompetition policy is tricky and unpredictable. That debacle proved Thomas Sowell’s observation that a self-equilibrating system like the market economy means a reduced role for intellectuals and politicians. Unfortunately, as Sowell added in an interview with Jason Riley, “even today many still haven’t accepted that their superior wisdom might be superfluous, if not damaging.” Nowhere is this more true than in communications policy.
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Companies that hire PR firms to lead their outreach efforts in Washington are making an implicit confession: They have a PR problem. So it is with Verax ‘Identity Fusion Center.’
I learned about the company when a representative of theirs from Dutko Worldwide called me requesting a meeting with one of their executives. I get these requests from time to time, and I’m open to anyone making the case for their technology or business model.
From the looks of things, Verax has a difficult case to make.
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Over at Ars, Ken, Jacqui, and Clint have written their magnum opus on the iPhone. On page 9 (yes, the review is more than 10 pages long), we get an interesting tidbit about the visual voicemail feature:
Visual voicemail is a new feature introduced by AT&T and Apple with the iPhone that currently only “works” over AT&T’s network. Instead of requiring the user to dial up the carrier’s voicemail number and listen to his or her voicemails in the order that they were received, visual voicemail lists each message out in visual format on the iPhone, almost like e-mail. It displays who the voicemail is from (and if it doesn’t recognize the number, it will analyze the area code and tell you what geographical area it’s from, which is helpful), and the user can tap whichever one in the list that he or she wants, no matter its position in the list. When the voicemail is playing, the user can pause it, scrub back and forth in the message, or skip.
The way it works is actually not as magical as AT&T might like you to believe, although the technology is still AT&T-specific. The iPhone actually downloads sound clips of the voicemail messages off of AT&T’s server, presumably over EDGE, and stores them in temporary files on the iPhone’s flash storage. This allows the iPhone user to select messages to listen to out of order, because all he or she is doing is listening to an audio file. This is also what enables the user to scrub with the touchscreen and listen to different parts of the message. It’s a nifty bit of technology, but really only required AT&T’s voicemail servers to tell the iPhone when to download a new message, and then the iPhone takes care of the rest. In our tests, visual voicemail worked as advertised, and we had no trouble with it. It is, however, a feature that we would be more than willing to sacrifice if we had the opportunity to use an unlocked iPhone on another network. That said, Ken believes that this is a very significant development in the world of voicemail, and he hopes and prays that this becomes standard everywhere.
This is a question we’ve discussed several times here: how much special support is required on the network side to make visual voicemail work? The answer seems to be “some, but not as much as you might think.” That is, the network does have to notify the phone of when new messages are available, provide them for download to the phone, and accept status change notifications from the phone when the user has listened to or deleted them. But there doesn’t need to be tight integration between the phone and the network when the user is actually listening to the messages.
Come to think of it, another advantage this approach presumably has is that you shouldn’t have to be connected to the network to listen to your voicemail messages. Once they’re downloaded to your phone, you should be able to listen to them anywhere, even if you’re in a location that doesn’t get good reception.
Federal Computer Week reports on the anemic funding for REAL ID in the Department of Homeland Security appropriations bills that spend money on DHS for fiscal year 2008, which begins October 1st. This is a reflection of the lacking enthusiasm for a national ID in Congress (as in the Administration, which also underfunded REAL ID in its budget).
The House bill has only $50 million in it for REAL ID, and the Senate bill has no money at all. But the Information Technology Association of America is on the case.
That’s not much, but at least it’s a start, said Jennifer Kerber, senior director of homeland security programs at the Information Technology Association of America, whose members are high-tech companies. Many states look at Real ID as an unfunded mandate from the federal government, which could undermine the program, she added.
“If the federal government doesn’t come up with funding, then some states will not implement Real ID,” Kerber said. “We’ve already seen some cases where [state departments of motor vehicles] have asked for money to improve their processes, but the state legislatures have turned them down because they don’t see anything coming from the feds.”
Without doubt, Jennifer and her colleagues are up on Capitol Hill warning of this awful fate. ITAA issued a shabby “white paper” in May arguing for full funding of REAL ID and saying that it would “enhance” privacy. Embarassing.
It’s unfortunate to see an otherwise solid trade association acting as a government supplicant and working to undermine freedom, supposedly on behalf of the information technology industry.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.