Legislation has been proposed in the House of Representatives that would regulate “violent entertainment” shown during airline flights. Rep. Heath Shuler (D-NC) and several co-sponsors argue that a “Family Friendly Flights Act” is needed to protect kids from such fare while they are flying. In my latest editorial for the City Journal, I point out why it would be a mistake to empower federal regulators to become “Long-Range Censors” and show that many voluntary alternatives exist. Read on…
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Long-Range Censors
We don’t need government regulations on in-flight programming.
by Adam Thierer
City Journal
October 3, 2007
Any parent who travels regularly with young children knows that fidgety kids and long, cramped airline flights are a bad mix. And when the kids start pulling each other’s hair or running up and down the aisle, a good movie or TV program can serve as the perfect sedative. But not all in-flight shows are okay for kids. When airlines show programming with violent content on the overhead screens—a bloody gunfight, say, or King Kong ripping apart a dinosaur’s jaws—it can terrify children, and disturb mom and dad.
Some in Congress are suggesting that new regulation is the answer. Democratic representative Heath Shuler of North Carolina, along with several cosponsors, recently introduced the Family Friendly Flights Act, which demands that airlines create “child safe viewing areas”: no publicly viewable TV screens would air violent programming within ten rows of the designated zones. The act defines “violent programming” as any movie originally rated PG-13 or above, or any television show rated PG-V or PG-14-V or above. In other words, the pre-edited versions of films or TV shows that studios produce especially for the airlines would still face a ban, based on their original ratings.
Despite the best intentions behind it, such regulation is unwarranted. Enforcement of the FFFA would spawn a needless and expensive regulatory apparatus, and given the ambiguity surrounding what constitutes “violent programming,” constitutional challenges would certainly follow, too.
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Does my draft paper, Outgrowing Copyright: The Effect of Market Size on Copyright Policy [PDF] commit economic heresy? At several points, at least, it appears to stray from what you might hear in Econ 101. Consider the following excerpt (footnotes omitted), in which I argue that demand for copyrighted goods follows a binary function: Consumers typically demand one copy, or no copy, but not fractions of copies.
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The New York Times editorializes today about “The Verizon Warning,” which refers to the incident last week involving Verizon blocking text messages from NARAL, an abortion rights organization. Verizon quickly admitted they had made a mistake and changed its policy. As my TLF blogging colleague Tim Lee pointed out, “the market worked: Verizon’s decision sparked a consumer outcry, which in turn caused Verizon to re-consider its decision within barely 24 hours of its coming to public attention. This is hardly a good example of the need for greater regulation.”
Indeed. But that didn’t stop some regulatory activists from using the incident as their latest rallying cry for Net neutrality mandates. But the New York Times actually goes much further in today’s editorial suggesting that Verizon’s mistake constitutes “textbook censorship.” The Times goes on to say that, “Any government that tried it would be rightly labeled authoritarian. The First Amendment prohibits the United States government from anything approaching that sort of restriction.”
Whoa. The Times apparently needs a First Amendment 101 lesson. While it is certainly true that any government action restricting speech in this fashion would constitute a violation of the First Amendment rights of the citizenry, what Verizon did in this case is not on par with that. When government censors, it censors in a sweeping and coercive fashion; it prohibits (at least in theory) the public from seeing or hearing everything it disapproves of, and it punishes those who evade such restrictions with fines, penalties, or even jail time. Not so for Verizon or any other private carrier.
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Congress gave itself 6 months to reconsider the dreadful Protect America Act, a careless recent amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Word is that they want to come up with something before they recess for the year.
The ACLU has a campaign underway called The FISA Flood of 2007, inviting Congress to control warrantless wiretapping. It’s a meritorious idea, controlling warrantless wiretapping, don’t you think? If you’re uncertain, take it from me: It is. It’s up to you, of course, but if you want to see the campaign do so here.
Congratulations are in order to David Robinson, who has left his previous gig at the American Enterprise Institute to take a position in Ed Felten’s new IT Policy Center. David’s a smart guy, and he joins a group that has done some of the most innovative work in tech policy, so expect big things from them in the future. Today he’s got a post up at Freedom to Tinker comparing today’s network neutrality debate to the Western Union telegraph monopoly. Here’s a quote from Paul Starr’s The Creation of the Media:
[W]ithin the United States, Western Union continued to dominate the telegraph industry after its triumph in 1866 but faced two constraints that limited its ability to exploit its market power. First, the postal telegraph movement created a political environment that was, to some extent, a functional substitute for government regulation. Britain’s nationalization of the telegraph was widely discussed in America. Worried that the US government might follow suit, Western Union’s leaders at various times extended service or held rates in check to keep public opposition within manageable levels. (Concern about the postal telegraph movement also led the company to provide members of Congress with free telegraph service — in effect, making the private telegraph a post office for officeholders.) Public opinion was critical in confining Western Union to its core business. In 1866 and again in 1881, the company was on the verge of trying to muscle the Associated Press aside and take over the wire service business itself when it drew back, apparently out of concern that it could lose the battle over nationalization by alienating the most influential newspapers in the country. Western Union did, however, move into the distribution of commercial news and in 1871 acquired majority control of Gold and Stock, a pioneering financial information company that developed the stock ticker.
This is, of course, the position Felten has staked out in the network neutrality debate: that actually passing regulations is likely to have negative consequences, but that Congress and the FCC can use the threat of regulation to prevent the telcos from mis-behaving too egregiously. I’m personally not entirely comfortable with this approach because I think we should be wary of letting government officials to govern by threat rather than explicit regulation. But so far, that’s the strategy we’ve been following by default, and it appears to be working pretty well.
I’ve been busy posting a lot of stuff elsewhere in the last week; here are some pointers to some of what I’ve been writing at Techdirt and Cato@Liberty lately:
I offer some lessons from the Romney campaign’s commercial mash-up contest.
I note that Wall Street analysts are starting to criticize the recording industry’s lawyer-happy strategy.
I criticize the goofy idea of government subsidies for declining newspapers.
I critique Thomas Hazlet’s column on the iPhone
I point out that selling laptops to foreign governments in batches of a million isn’t likely to produce an innovative product.
I plan to continue posting a significant amount of stuff here on TLF, but if you’re interested in tech policy and libertarianism, you really should be subscribed to Techdirt and Cato@Liberty as well.
This is a welcome line of inquiry.
Tom puzzles out the Petraeus Report’s recommendation for a more active military presence in cyberspace:
I first heard this on the radio, and it seemed a little weird to me. Not because I doubt the existence of insurgent-run websites filled with flash video of roadside bombs, LOLcatted stills from A Mighty Heart and comment threads filled with “INSURGENCY FTW!!”, “ANBAR SUX0Rz” and unflattering analogizing of Sunni Islam to the Playstation 3. I’m sure those sites are out there. I can even believe that they serve a significant recruiting function for people who do genuinely bad, genuinely non-virtual things.
But it was a bit odd to hear a military commander say that, in addition to the attention we’re paying to people getting shot and blown up, we also need to spend more time dicking around on the internet, presumably countering the nasty internet trouble made by our enemies. For one thing, suppressing online content does not have a particularly storied history. Given that, it seems like the intelligence value of these sites would probably outweigh the utility to be gained by shutting them down. DMCAing the Mahdi Army’s MySpace page would just shut down a marginal source of propaganda. Why bother? It’d be far better to just quietly keep an eye on their top 8 (who is this shady “CamGirl69” character, anyway?).
In a follow-up post, he answers his own question:
In response to my last post a much-better-informed little birdy sent me a transcript of a Homeland Security Committee hearing about online Islamic extremism. It was an interesting read, and I may say something else about it later. But for now, here’s the part that was most immediately striking:
“In an effort to raise its visibility and recruit new members… an Iraqi insurgent group held a website design contest open to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. And what was the prize given to the winner of that contest? The opportunity to launch a rocket attack against American forces in Iraq with just the click of the mouse from the winner’s computer.”
It’s inhuman and morally outrageous, yes. But man, that’s a pretty good idea for an online contest. If you could just tone down the evil you might really have something there.
If you thought this post was going to be about Microsoft, you’re wrong. Now that the Redmond firm has been smacked down by EU regulators, other companies await a similar fate. The latest target is Qualcomm, who competitors say is charging too much in royalty fees for next-generation mobile phone chips. This is a very bad sign for continuing intellectual property development as it sends a message to technologists that you don’t really get to own what you create. EU regulators apparently think they should be the ones to decide what companies can charge for their goods. This is a fine state of affairs in the short term for competitors, but it doesn’t go over well with investors or for anyone who is hoping for greater innovation in the long run.
It’s hard to believe that Slashdot is turning 10 this month. Slashdot has been a fixture of the tech blogosphere since I started reading tech news online in 1998. I just barely missed getting a 4-digit Slashdot ID, and I wasted enough time reading Slashdot during college that I was one of the approximately 400 people selected to be a moderator during the site’s first experiment with mass comment moderation.
The site is now far larger and more influential in absolute terms, but I feel like it’s grown steadily less influential in relative terms, as the rest of the tech blogosphere has grown even faster. I also think it’s aged quite well, probably because Rob Malda has been at the helm since the beginning. (You’ve got to be a pretty devoted to a website to propose to your girlfriend on it.) Probably the biggest improvement to the site was when they stopped running Jon Katz’s clueless long-winded screeds. Since he left, Slashdot seems to have realized that political commentary isn’t really their strong suit and stuck to their core competence of tech news.
I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that Slashdot was the first tech news blog, which makes this the 10-year anniversary of the tech blogosphere.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.