One of the things I find most interesting about calls to regulate “excessively violent” content on television, in movies, or in video games is the way critics make massive leaps of logic and draw outrageous conclusions based on myopic, anecdotal reasoning. I was reminded of that again today when reading through an interview with Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va), one of the most vociferous critics of all sorts of media content and a long-time proponent of regulation to censor such violent content in particular (however it is defined). (I have written about his past regulatory proposals here and here).
Here’s what he recently told the editorial board of The Register-Herald of West Virginia:
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The outcome of yesterday’s hearing on an online dating bill
is succinctly captured by this AP news article headline: New Jersey concedes Internet dating plan,
yet pushes it anyway.
What? Legislators pass a bill through committee that they know is flawed?
Yes, if they think the sponsor will work to amend it. And The Internet Dating Safety Act (A-4304), the bill I testified against in Trenton yesterday, definitely needs to be fixed.
It’s not that anybody is against online dating safety. We just think that this bill, in its present form, will not create a safer environment for dating site users.
Here’s why. The bill has one particular serious flaw: it has the effect
(if not the intention) of promoting a flawed, unreliable, and incomplete
criminal screening method as a way to increase online dating safety.
Legislators should run away from any bill that promotes criminal screenings.
Intuitively, a criminal screening would sound like a good
idea. Who can be against more information about a potential date, especially
when it’s their criminal record? But if the information is no good, we have a
garbage-in, garbage-out situation that has the unintended consequence of
providing users of online dating sites with a false sense of security. Indeed,
criminal screenings are:
- Incomplete – criminal screenings can create false
negatives when criminal records don’t appear or may not include felony arrests
that were plead down to misdemeanors; and
- Not Inclusive – many counties don’t even report their
criminal records to a publicly accessible central database. For instance, in Illinois only 4 out of
102 counties report to a centralized database accessible to companies that
perform background screenings. Do we know what the database reporting situation
is in New Jersey?
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I want join James Gattuso in recommending that you read FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell’s outstanding speech on media policy issues that he delivered at a Media Institute event yesterday. I just want to highlight two of the myths he debunked in his speech, (myths which I had discussed in my 2005 book Media Myths: Making Sense of the Debate over Media Ownership):
Myth #1: The public has not been given a chance to be heard. As McDowell points out, no issue has been more thoroughly studied in the history of the FCC:
In my 17 years of being in and around the FCC, I can’t think of any issue that has been examined more thoroughly. I can’t remember any proceeding where the Commission has solicited as much comment and given the American people as much opportunity to be heard. If anyone knows of an FCC proceeding where there has been more opportunity for debate over an 11-year period, please let me know.
That’s exactly right, but the anti-media zealots like to propagate the myth that the public has somehow been frozen out of the process, or that important constituencies have not been heard from during these debates. It’s nonsense.
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Well, it won’t happen, but it would be a Good Thing nonetheless. Case in point: Commissioner McDowell took on the current chairman’s plans for regulation of the cable industry in remarks before the Media Institute yesterday, saying:
“I have a lot of questions that need answering. 
Why is the FCC suddenly changing its evidentiary standard and methodology just for this one industry? How will this abrupt and radical departure affect other analyses and proceedings? Doesn’t this shift weaken arguments for updating the cross ownership ban? Does our proposed change affect our analysis of the proposed XM-Sirius merger? How do we reconcile decades of data showing more convergence and more competition among more delivery platforms with this sudden reversal? I am searching for credible answers to these and many other questions—thus far to no avail.”
He also defended the FCC’s moves to reform media ownership, ridiculing the idea that after 11 years of deliberation, it is rushing to judgment on this issue.
Good stuff.
Here’s the whole speech.
Chairman Kevin Martin’s attempt to assert broad – and virtually unlimited — powers over cable television has sparked a real imbroglio over at the FCC. The key question: has the cable industry reached the magic 70 percent penetration rate required to trigger new regulatory powers? Martin says yes, apparently using numbers from Warren Communications (the owner of Communications Daily). Warren Communications itself, however, has said its data shows no such thing. Fellow GOP commissioners Robert McDowell and Deborah Tate – apparently feeling a bit betrayed by Martin — on Thursday took the unusual step of writing directly to Warren Publishing for “any and all information” regarding the data.
Warren hasn’t responded yet, but that hasn’t stopped a handful of regulation supporters from weighing in in defense of the FCC’s attempted power grab. Among them: Free Press, the Media Access Project, Consumers Union, the Consumer Federation of America, AT&T…
Whoa! What’s AT&T doing in this motley group?
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Last week, the big news inside the Beltway was how FCC Chairman Kevin Martin was stepping up what many have labeled his “war on cable” by proposing still more regulations for the cable sector. Craig Moffett, a senior analyst with Sanford Bernstein & Co, summarizes the economic regs currently being proposed: “Over the past year, the Chairman has adopted an almost uniformly anti-cable stance on issues ranging from set-top boxes (CableCards), digital must carry requirements, cable ownership caps, video franchising rules, and the abrogation of exclusive service contracts with [apartment owners].” And in a short PFF paper last week, I also outlined the content / speech regulations that the Martin FCC has proposed for cable (as well as satellite and telco) operators.
As Jon Hemingway’s cover story in this week’s Broadcasting & Cable magazine points out, the FCC’s war on cable appears to now be having an impact in the stock market. Investors are turning against cable operators fearing that the regulatory reign of terror at the FCC will limit cable’s ability to respond to rising competitive threats. Here’s a summary of the bad news from the B&C story:
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EarthLink appears to be getting out of the muni wi-fi business for good. The company is at least is abandoning the major Philadelphia experiment it was in charge of. According to today’s press release:
“After thorough review and analysis of our municipal wireless business we have decided that making significant further investments in this business could be inconsistent with our objective of maximizing shareholder value,” said Rolla P. Huff, EarthLink president and CEO. “Accordingly, at this time, we are considering our strategic alternatives with respect to this business,” Huff added. EarthLink will seek to work closely with the municipalities in which it has operations as it considers these alternatives. The net book value of the assets attributable to EarthLink’s municipal wireless business is approximately $40 million.
A few years ago, many folks were telling us that muni wi-fi was like manna from heaven; the ultimate free lunch that would give us a broadband nirvana. As some of us predicted–reality often proves more complicated. Indeed, one lesson from this experiment is that demand counts. There was always a bit of “if-you-build-it-they-will-come” reasoning behind the Philly deal and other muni wi-fi proposals. But you can’t build a network without a customer base, and recent news reports indicated that demand was lacking.
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Larry Lessig recently emailed several helpful tips for my book-in-progress, Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good. He suggested, for instance, that I post on the book’s home page a brief summary of its theme. I came up with this:
Two views monopolize the ongoing debate over copyright policy. One view denigrates all restraints on copyrighted information, whether they arise from statutory law, common law, or technological tools. The other view equates copyrights to tangible property, concluding that they merit a broad panoply of legal protections. Left-wingers tend to favor the former position; right-wingers the latter.
I here offer a third view of copyright. I largely agree with my friends on the left that copyright represents not so much a form of property as it does a policy device designed to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” (as the Constitution puts it). I thus call copyright a form of intellectual privilege.
Like my friends on the right, however, I hold our common law rights in very high regard. Hence my complaint against copyright: it violates the rights we would otherwise enjoy at common law to peaceably enjoy the free use our throats, pens, and presses. That is not to say that copyright is per se unjustified. We can excuse facial violations of our common law rights, such as the takings effectuated by taxation or the restraints imposed by antitrust law, as the costs of obtaining a greater good. But it does mean that copyright qualifies, at best, as a necessary evil.
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In Jerry’s post “Is Comcast discriminating against BitTorrent?” he points out the following about Comcast’s acceptable use policy:
In its acceptable use policy,1 Comcast reserves the right to take any measures it deems necessary to deal with subscribers who use too much bandwidth (although how much is too much is not clearly defined). But if the AP is right, this is targeting a specific application, not specific users.
Jerry is right that targeting specific users would be well outside of Comcast’s acceptable use policy when it comes to bandwidth hogging, however, Comcast can target and block individual users who are running servers, whether they be for email, websites, or file-sharing. Their acceptable use policy also includes:
Prohibited uses include, but are not limited to, using the Service, Customer Equipment, or the Comcast Equipment to:
followed by:
xiv. run programs, equipment, or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises LAN (Local Area Network), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited services and servers include, but are not limited to, e-mail, Web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and servers;
The policy later says in relation to prohibited activities such as this that:
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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.