January 2008
Hannah Montana performed in Providence last month, but her wake continues to reverberate in the halls of the Rhode Island General Assembly. Companion bills in the House and Senate would single out online ticket transactions for greater regulation in a state that already has one of the most restrictive ticket scalping laws in the country.
Yesterday I traveled to Providence to testify before the House Corporations Committee on H 7090 and H7091. These bills would add new rules that mostly apply to the online buying and selling of tickets. Essentially I was there to ask: why pick on e-commerce?
Hannah Montana is the Disney Channel sitcom on which Miley Cyrus plays Miley Stewart, an ordinary teenager with secret pop superstar identity. Her father is country singer Billy Ray Cyrus, of “Achy Breaky Heart” fame. And due to the popularity of the live shows, tickets have been hard to come by, producing achy breaky hearts in children across the country and irate parents that call their state legislator and demand action. Upon hearing about $60 tickets selling for $600 on the secondary market, legislators want to blame websites like eBay and StubHub.
But the tickets market is not so simple. Ticket resellers are not to blame for the limited supply of tickets and large demand from consumers. Hannah Montana is really about how tickets are issued, allocated, distributed and sold in the primary market, not how tickets are thereafter resold. And as in all markets, if demand exceeds supply and prices are initially fixed at a relatively low level, a secondary market will develop.
At yesterday’s hearing, some legislators thought that it was StubHub itself that was purchasing large blocks of tickets and then reselling for large sums on its site. The reality of course is that sites like eBay and StubHub are mere exchanges that serve as platform for buyers and sellers to meet and transact.
Incidentally, I think I might have to try this next time I fly. Chris says that not only does the TSA rarely give him a lot of trouble, but often it actually gets him through the line faster, because they stick him in a special (shorter) trouble-makers’ line. Or if you don’t feel like explicitly asserting your rights, you can just state that you forgot to bring your ID.
“Neoconservative libertarianism” is an oxymoron. And if you find it shocking that some rich entrepreneurs are libertarians, you need to get out more.
.. would free shipping for books be illegal! According to this IHT story, the French impose limits on price discounts for books in the form of restrictions on free shipping on book purchases. Amazon is apparently fighting the law. Good for them. Here’s the beginning of the story…
The online retailer Amazon.com said Monday that it would pay €1,000 a day in fines, rather than comply with a court ruling upholding French limits on price discounts for books. The company decided to pay the daily fine worth $1,500 rather than eliminate its offer of free shipping on book purchases, said Xavier Garambois, director of Amazon’s French subsidiary.
“We are determined to follow every avenue available to us to overturn this law,” Garambois said. The company appealed the ruling Friday. Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of the company, based in Seattle, was equally defiant in a weekend e-mail message to French customers. “As unbelievable as it appears, the free delivery of Amazon.fr is threatened,” he wrote in the French-language note. “France would be the only country in the world where the free delivery practiced by Amazon would be declared illegal,” the Bezos e-mail concluded, inviting consumers to sign an online petition. By Monday evening, more than 120,000 people had clicked in favor of maintaining free delivery.
[For some other silly French Internet proposals, see this recent essay by Jerry and this old piece by James.]
I’m at Princeton’s cloud computing workshop. One of the most interesting people I’ve met here is Chris Soghoian, creator of the legendary TSA boarding pass generator and author of a CNet blog on privacy and security issues. Somehow until now his blog had not yet made its way into my feed reader, but that oversight has been corrected.
One of the conference speakers is the founder of wesabe, a fascinating site for managing your finances. As Luis notes, they seem to be a company that takes security and user autonomy seriously.
This morning in New York City, social networking website operator MySpace.com announced a major joint effort with 49 state Attorneys General aimed at better protecting children online. (Coverage at CNet, NYT and Forbes). At a joint press conference, MySpace and the AGs unveiled a “Joint Statement on Key Principles of Social Networking Safety” involving expanded online safety tools, improved education efforts, and law enforcement cooperation. They also agreed to create an industry-wide Internet Safety Technical Task Force to study online safety tools, including a review of online identity authentication technology.
Generally speaking, the agreement is step forward for online safety. Indeed, many of the principles in the agreement could form a potential model “code of conduct” that other social networking sites could adopt. In a report I authored for the Progress & Freedom Foundation in August 2006, I argued that it was vital for companies and trade associations to take steps such as this to avoid the specter of government regulation or censorship:
All companies doing business online… must show policymakers and the general public that they are serious about addressing [online safety] concerns. If companies and trade associations do not step up to the plate and meet this challenge soon—and in a collective fashion—calls will only grow louder for increased government regulation of online speech and activities. What is needed is a voluntary code of conduct for companies doing business online. This code of conduct, or set of industry “best practices,” would be based on a straight-forward set of principles and policies that could be universally adopted by [a] wide variety of operators…
In particular, this code of conduct proposal called for companies to make specific pledges regarding improved online safety tools, expanded education / media literacy efforts, and ongoing assistance to law enforcement regarding investigations of online crimes.
At his press conference announcing the REAL ID Act last week, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said:
We are not going to have a national database. REAL ID does not require that states start to collect additional information from applicants that they have not already created. We are not going to wind up making this information available willy-nilly. In fact, the steps we are taking under REAL ID will enhance and protect privacy rather than degrade and impair privacy.
[A]mong the things we’re doing under REAL ID is requiring that state motor vehicle agencies have in place background checks and security plans for their databases at – in terms of the motor vehicle information. Traditionally, again and again we have seen corruption at motor vehicle agencies leading to people improperly disseminating personal information. These security plans and these background checks will actually minimize the risk that employees will improperly take that information and disseminate it.
Meanwhile, Section 508 of the Court Security Improvement Act of 2007, signed into law by President Bush last week, allows federal judges and Supreme Court Justices to withhold their addresses from the REAL ID database system, giving the addresses of their courts instead.
The federal judiciary evidently doesn’t trust Secretary Chertoff’s assurances.
Musings on Nick Carr’s latest book, from Jim Delong. Pertinent to various Google controversies.
I earlier suggested that the upcoming Heritage event on the REAL ID Act was a “must miss” because it featured only national ID proponents.
Since then, I have been turned on to Digimarc lobbyist Janice Kephart’s YouTube page. It’s a must see. Here’s a taste:
She also has a MySpace page. The entertainment value of the Heritage event has risen.
Update: The video I originally selected has been taken down. I’ve inserted another.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.