Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. The shows’s panelists this week are Jerry Brito, Tim Lee, Adam Thierer, and Braden Cox. Topics include,
- Top Wikipedia editor “Essjay” is revealed as a fraud
- States are pushing age verification mandates for social networking sitesl
- Do first responders really need more spectrum?
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Anyone who wants to know how Washington works should look to an article buried in today’s Communications Daily (sorry, it’s by subscription) on a House Small Business Committee hearing. The committee had brought together representatives from various communications industry segments to talk about the “innovation agenda, ” focusing on the growth of broadband.
The good news: “All witnesses opposed an Internet tax and supported extending the moratorium” on federal taxation. Easy enough. But wait a second: many of the same witnesses also supported extending universal service subsidies to broadband, presumably applying universal service fund fees to broadband access bills (right now they only are imposed on telephone bills). Isn’t that a tax? No, said the Shirley Broomfield, representing rural telephone firms, who would benefit from extended subsidies. It depends on how it’s implemented, said Earl Comstock from the competitive carriers, whose customers already pay the “fee.” Only one witness — Richard Cimerman from the cable industry, whose customers would have to pay the tax/fee — said yes.
So much for the united front against taxation.
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Everyone believes that government would be better if there was more transparency – though people’s ideas of “better” can range quite widely. As I’ve noted before, the Internet and other new technologies have a lot to do with making government information more available.
Apropos of this phenomenon – and the impending advent of spring – next week turns out to be “Sunshine Week,” which includes a wide variety of open government activities. Among other things, the Sunlight Foundation, sponsor of the Sunlight Network, is having a panel discussion called “Sunshine in the First Branch: How Transparent is Congress?“
Oh sure, this kind of thing is a little kumbaya, but I’ve been known to hum a few bars of that tune and, again, the benefits of transparency are a matter of (near) pan-ideological agreement. Secrecy is also bad. Let the sun shine in.
And, hey all you coders, Sunlight is offering a prize for the best congressional mashup.
Who doesn’t want Ryanair and its cheap flights (passengers often just pay taxes and fees on sale prices) to offer the same fares domestically in the U.S.? Well, based on current law, our government doesn’t. And as I’ve said before on NPR’s Kojo Nnamdi Show, in an article for CEI’s Monthly Planet, and while moderating a panel discussion, the regulation of international air travel must change.
Unfortunately, cabotage rights that prohibit European airlines like Ryanair from operating on American domestic routes are not on the bargaining table. But a bilateral U.S. – EU “open skies” deal that was provisionally agreed to on March 2 should be approved, even if it’s only, as is said in an Economist article, “baby steps.”
The airline industry has much in common with other network industries such as railroads, electrical power, and telecommunications. The airline industry remains heavily regulated despite partial deregulation with the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act, especially with international travel.
Like all network industries, the air travel sector involves both flows and a grid. The flows are the mobile system elements: the airplanes, the trains, the power, the messages, etc. The grid is the infrastructure over which these flows move: the airports and air traffic control system, the tracks and stations, the wires and cables, the electromagnetic spectrum, and so on. Network efficiency depends critically on the close coordination of grid and flow operating and investment decisions.
Consumers would benefit if governments would get out of the way and allow the market to determine international routes, just as U.S. consumers benefited when the 1978 Act allowed the market to determine the number and frequency of domestic routes.
As promised, here is one of the places where I thought Wikinomics didn’t quite get it right. On page 190, they state:
In its current incarnation, mashups present a thorny problem—they provide pretty poor long-term incentives for innovators, and most lack protection for data owners. To illustrate, it’s worth taking a closer look at housingmaps.
Housingmaps has two key ingredients: a Google Map and the rental listings from craigslist. When Paul Rademacher mashed these services together he created something new—something neither Google nor craigslist has thought of, yet it was a clever and useful application. What did Rademacher do to leverage this popularity? He stepped back from it and took a job at Google.
When asked why he did not develop the tool further, and perhaps even create his own business, he offered two very salient points: 1) He did not own the data that was powering the application, and 2) The barriers to re-creating such an application were low, since his web site contained little in the way of unique intellectual property or user interface design, apart from a little bit of network code.
The first is a reasonable concern, but as I’ll argue below the fold, it’s silly to consider the second a problem.
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WASHINGTON, March 7, 2007 – The country’s two satellite television companies have joined forces with four major technology companies and a wireless company to promote the auction of frequencies currently used by television broadcasters.
In a March 5 meeting at the Federal Communications Commission with FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, the tech companies – Google, Intel, Skype and Yahoo! – joined with Access Spectrum to promote their “Coalition for 4G in America.”
The engagement of Internet giants like Google and Yahoo!, which traditionally have not lobbied the FCC, suggests considerable interest by the technology industry in the upcoming auction, which is set to begin no later than January 28, 2008. In 2006, Congress fixed February 19, 2009, as the end-date for analog television, freeing a wide swath of radio-frequencies for use by new technologies.
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Last Friday, France’s Constitutional Court approved a law cracking down on violence — well, at least documenting it. According to IDG News Service, the new law “criminalized the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists.”
The law was — apparently — spurred by disturbing stories of people being assaulted randomly solely for the purpose of recording it for entertainment value (a practice known as “happy slapping.”) But the legislation’s reach goes far beyond that — broadly criminalizing the filming of violence by eyewitnesses.
In an unfortunate irony, the decision approving the law was published on the anniversary of the amateur videotaping of the beating of Rodney King by LAPD officers in 1991. Unless the cameraman were a professional journalist, such recording would now be illegal in the French Republic. The penalty, according to IDG: up to five years in prison, “potentially a harsher sentence than that for the committing the violent act” itself.
It gets worse. Since professional journalists are exempted from the ban, the government has “proposed a certification system for Web sites, blog hosters, mobile-phone operators and Internet service providers, identifying them as government-approved sources of information if they adhere to certain rules.”
No word yet on the criteria to be used to get France’s approval to report news.
(Thanks to Declan McCullough for the heads up on this.)
It was a symphony of togetherness at a recent ICANN symposium at the University of the Pacific School of Law. One presenter titled his paper on Internet governance after the Beatles song "We Can Work It Out." And when commenting on a paper about "enhanced cooperation," I paraphrased the Stephen Stills song – if you can’t be with the ICANN you love, then love the ICANN you’re with. And most agreed. The takeaway from the conference was that we should work within ICANN’s current institutional
framework for better management of the domain name system (DNS), but at the same time ensure that the U.S. (or any) government treat ICANN as an
independent, private-sector entity.
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My friend Seba, who DJs around here in D.C. from time to time, had some interesting insights on the music scene, and the relationship between copyright and new music, which I brought up in my recent “Amen Brother” post:
You know, I was thinking more about this and I’m not sure it’s totally correct to say the current legal framework for IP as it applies to sampling stifles creativity. I am in total agreement that it’s overly restrictive . . . and, as that YouTube vid pointed out, it’s kind of ass-backwards: How does a series of seminal beats that were so widely sampled — and thus arguably in the public domain — become the intellectual property of a company that creates beats for musicians to use in new works?
What I want to say is that this legal framework creates a barrier, but not at the level of creativity. Rather, the barrier exists at the level of commercial release. Here’s an example:
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Arguing in favor of telecom regulation, some people say that telephone networks are owned by the public, which was forced to pay for them as captive ratepayers. The upshot is that telecom firms therefore shouldn’t be able to restrict competitors from using their wires.
As my colleague and co-blogger James Gattuso has explained in some detail, this historical analysis is deeply flawed. Today’s networks are “overwhelmingly the product of recent private investment,” concludes Gattuso.
But for those seeking more proof that private investment in building network capacity continues to be robust, today’s Wall Street Journal covers Verizon’s hugely expensive effort to bring super-high-bandwidth fiber into the home.
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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.