And neither did Julian.
Just when you think the debate over media ownership regulation in this country can’t get any more absurd, along comes this letter from FCC Commissioner Michael Copps arguing that Rupert Murdoch’s deal for the Wall Street Journal should be blocked to somehow save the nation (especially those poor New Yorkers) from an evil media monopoly. “It will create a single company with enormous influence over politics, art and culture across the nation and especially in the New York metropolitan area.”
PUH-LEASE! How can someone make such an argument with a straight face? Rupert Murdoch is going to control “the politics, art and culture” of the nation with the WSJ?? Come on, get serious. The Journal isn’t exactly the standard-bearer when it comes to setting artistic or cultural trends for the nation. And the argument that Murdoch is somehow going to control “the politics, art and culture” of the New York area with the Journal is even more absurd. Is there really any shortage of inputs in the New York area when it comes to those things? Are the artsy-fartsy liberals of NYC suddenly going to wake up one day, start reading the Journal, and completely change their lifestyles? Please.
Anyway, I wrote a much longer essay for the City Journal back in August predicting all this “Chicken Little” nonsense would be coming. As I said then:
Over at Ars, I have a new article pointing out that there’s probably an inverse relationship between the number of people on the government’s various terrorist-suspect lists (the GAO just reported that there are now 750,000 people on the largest “watch” list) and the effectiveness of those lists. There can’t be anywhere close to three-quarters of a million terrorists in the world, so all a list that size accomplishes is to dilute law enforcement and intelligence resources and ensure that the real terrorists won’t get the required scrutiny.
I also argue that while there’s a pretty good argument for an international watch list, it’s awfully hard to justify using such a list domestically:
If government officials have concrete evidence that an American person is engaged in terrorist-related activities, then the government should be doing a lot more than putting that individual on a no-fly list. They should be actively investigating the individual, tapping his phone, reading his email, monitoring his financial transactions, and generally gathering the evidence required to either clear his name, deport him, or arrest him.
If, on the other hand, the government doesn’t have enough evidence of terrorist ties to justify starting an investigation against an individual, then it’s unreasonable, not to mention a waste of law enforcement resources, to ban him from flying on airplanes or subject him to heightened scrutiny every time he goes to an airport. The sheer number of people on the selectee list and the high rate of false positives may be one reason that screeners do a legendarily bad job finding simulated weapons in security tests. The resources now spent on screening tens of thousands of selectees—most of whom turn out to be false positives—would be far better spent on additional FBI agents to do in-depth investigations of people with actual terrorist ties.
This argument is, of course, cribbed from my colleague Jim Harper’s excellent book on ID cards and privacy.
Regulations.gov, the federal government’s centralized regulatory docketing system that I look at in my new transparency paper, recently won an award from Government Computer News for “combining vision and IT innovations with an attention to detail and a willingness to collaborate.” The result of that award-winning combination, however, is not impressing everyone. A few days later the Congressional Research Service issued a report that catalogs the site’s shortcomings.1 (Another great dissection of Regulations.gov was performed by BNA and reported that “Cornell students studying human-computer interaction, when asked to evaluate the E-Rulemaking Web site’s public interface in early 2006, rated it ‘absolutely horrific[.]'”)
What’s striking to me is how what many believe is an unsatisfactory product is hailed as a success. Despite the hard work that many civil servants no doubt expended trying to make Regulations.gov a useful site, one has to admit it is confusing and difficult to use. Increased traffic is often cited by OMB in reports to Congress (PDF) as a measure of success. Increased web traffic was also mentioned in the GCN story about the award.
Looking at traffic, however, is tallying output, not outcomes; measuring activity, not results. One could conceivably build a website so unnavigable that it results in the number of “web hits” quadrupling because users have such a hard time finding what they need or because they have to click through many links before getting to what they want. Also, a total traffic number is difficult to judge. Are 150 million “hits” a good thing? Relative to what? Who knows.
Instead, what I’d like to know is whether Regulations.gov is making it easier for citizens to find and comment on regulatory proceedings. I see from the site’s “What’s New” section (I’d link to it but I can’t because the site uses 1990s-style frames technology2) that they conduct a regular “customer satisfaction survey.” I’d like to see those results published on the web. That sounds to me like a much better measurement of the site’s effectiveness.
One question that has been repeatedly raised in regards the the Comcast-BitTorrent affair is why wasn’t Comcast more open about what it was doing? Comcast’s response — supported by Richard Bennett in our recent podcast — is that more transparency would make it too easy to bypass the system. They say this is a cat-and-mouse game with bandwidth hogs (to mix zoological metaphors), and announcing what techniques are being used would simply give away the game.
That got me thinking. Since the Associated Press broke the story last week, the proverbial feline is pretty clearly out of the bag. Is word spreading on a bypass? A quick search on Google, with the phrase “how to bypass Comcast” indicates the answer is a resounding “yes,” with no less than 34,700 results. I’m not a technical expert, so I can’t say the bypasses work (and I freely admit I didn’t read all 34,700), but that’s still a lot of mice.
Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean Comcast was right to keep its practices so hush-hush. Even if Comcast wasn’t under legal duties to reveal more, more transparency would certainly have precluded much of this week’s consumer outrage. Still, if the Google results are any gauge, the cat-and-mouse game does seem very real.
I’m a little slow on the draw, but I did a Cato Daily Podcast [MP3] on the wiretapping debate on Monday. Incidentally, as you can see here, Cato’s Daily Podcast is an excellent source for in-depth commentary on a wide range of public policy issues. I listen to it on my way to work and find it invaluable for keeping up with public policy debates outside of tech policy.
I want to comment on Adam Thierer’s recent paper, “Unplugging Plug-and-Play Regulation,” which makes several excellent points. Adam briefly summarized his thesis (i.e., there is no need for government “assist” in private standard-setting) here a couple days ago and generated a couple comments.
The cable industry and consumer electronics manufacturers are touting competing standards initiatives. The pros and cons of each approach, from a technology perspective, are somewhat bewildering to a non-engineer like myself. But there appears to be one clear difference that matters a lot. Adam points out that under the initiative sponsored by the consumer electronics industry,
the FCC would be empowered to play a more active role in establishing interoperability standards for cable platforms in the future. [It’s] a detailed regulatory blueprint that specifies the technical requirements, testing procedures, and licensing policies for next-generation digital cable devices and applications.
Why would ongoing assistance be required from the FCC, which mainly consists of lawyers?
My colleague Scott Wallsten, PFF’s Director of Communications Policy Studies, has just released an excellent short essay on one of my favorite pet issues: Metered pricing as a solution to broadband congestion / traffic management issues. This is very relevant right now, of course, because of the Comcast kerfuffle regarding how the company have gone about managing BitTorrent traffic.
In his essay, entitled “Managing the Network? Rethink Prices, not Net Neutrality,” Scott points out that:
Comcast should have been more forthcoming in its response and should be more transparent about its actions. Even so, Comcast isn’t the culprit and net neutrality regulations aren’t the answer. Instead, network congestion problems caused by some people’s excessive use are a direct and predictable result of the all-you-can-eat pricing that nearly every ISP charges for broadband service.
We know that this kind of pricing gives people little incentive to pay attention to how much of the service they use. People whose electricity is included in their rent rather than metered, for example, may as well leave the lights on all day and keep their homes frigid in the summer and toasty in the winter. To be sure, some people conserve simply because they care about the environment, but most won’t since they don’t see any savings from using energy more efficiently.
It is often complicated to determine prices in network industries that have high fixed costs and low marginal costs–like broadband. As long as the cost of sending an extra bit down the pipe is close to nothing, a flat rate for unlimited use is probably efficient. In that case, the operator must cover the fixed cost of the infrastructure, but it might not be worthwhile to monitor usage. If usage costs begin to increase, however, flat rate pricing may become inefficient.
If you we’re offered a pill that would cure a disease that afflicted you or a family member or friend, but the pill wasn’t researched or manufactured in the
U.S., would you still take it? Of course you would. Similarly, when it comes to foreign direct investment, we shouldn’t care whether the money comes from a company based in Canada, Japan, or…China.
A Dubai Ports-like
brouhaha could well be brewing in the IT industry, involving 3Com and
an IT company from China. In September, Boston-based Bain Capital
announced that it had entered into an agreement to purchase 3Com Corporation,
a U.S. seller of network and security products. The purchase would
include a limited financial stake for 3Com’s largest customer, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., a private China-based technology company.
Money and capital act a lot like people…they go to where they’re most welcome, and stay where they’re rewarded. This was one of the messages I tried to convey when speaking yesterday at the Heartland Institute‘s Emerging Issues Forum in Chicago.
To make money more welcome in the U.S., but to still be able to review foreign investments for legitimate national security concerns, we have a review process called CFIUS. You don’t have to say "gesundheit" after saying CIFIUS, and don’t be confused by the STD with a similar sounding name. CIFIUS stands for the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. President Reagan established this review process to provide a predictable, nonpartisan and depoliticized process. Unfortunately, as Dubai Ports shows, these things can and do get political.
But our country needs foreign money.
Nine U.S. Senators wrote to the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Appropriations Committee this week asking them to protect $50 million allocated to the REAL ID Act in the Department of Homeland Security appropritations bill. This is a clear indication of their support for requiring Americans to carry a national ID card.
Here are the Senators’ names, with links to their home and contact pages:
Robert Casey (D-PA) (contact)
John Cornyn (R-TX) (contact)
Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) (contact)
Chuck Grassley (R-IA) (contact)
John Kyl (R-AZ) (contact)
Pat Roberts (R-KS) (contact)
Charles Schumer (D-NY) (contact)
George Voinovich (R-OH) (contact)
John Warner (R-VA) (contact)
I’ve written a book, and yesterday testified in Michigan, about why having a national ID would be a bad idea.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.