Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Confirming my suspicions about its involvement, here’s an AP story reporting that Beaverton, OR-based Digimarc spent $350,000 lobbying for the REAL ID Act. Direct lobbying is only a small part of the PR and outreach efforts that go into a public policy effort.
Previously, I noted that Digimarc lost money in 2007. A wounded animal is the most dangerous. I think that may apply to this corporation, which is now clearly a direct enemy of Americans’ freedom.
Steve Bellovin points out a silly proposal to require licenses for Geiger counters. Like Bellovin, I’m at a loss as to why anyone would think this was a good idea. The police department says the legislation would “prevent false alarms and unnecessary public concern,” but it’s not clear either that false alarms are a major problem, or that this registration requirement would prevent them. Strangely enough, the article doesn’t cite a single example in which “false alarms” created serious problems for anybody.
A couple of other problems with the legislation spring to mind. First, it’s likely to be totally unenforceable. Geiger counters are widely available for a few hundred dollars. Any New Yorker who wants one will have little trouble going to New Jersey and buying one.
Second, I got to play around with a Geiger counter in my high school physics class. Does this legislation have an exception for instructional use? If not, this seems like a serious burden on education for now good reason.
Hillary Clinton is my friend. On MySpace, that is. If I were going to vote for the first candidate that responded to my social networking “friend” request, it would be her. Of course, that’s a silly idea, but with all the hoopla over politicians using new technologies, one might ask: How has Web 2.0 changed the political process?
Web 2.0 generally refers to the explosion of services like social networking sites, wikis, blogs, podcasts, RSS (really simple syndication) feeds and so on. These are the technologies that have helped make the Internet even more interactive and content-rich than it was in the first place and, in this election cycle, these technologies are key.
Social news site, Digg, just announced a partnership with CBS for political coverage and also hosts its own candidates pages. MySpace held its own presidential primary the day before the Iowa caucuses (Barack Obama and Ron Paul won). Facebook cosponsored the Republican and Democratic debates with ABC and also publishes its own polling data. The candidates are embracing these technologies as well.
Sen. Barack Obama used professional networking site LinkedIn to ask “How can the next president better help small business and entrepreneurs thrive?” and at a recent speech, Hillary Clinton suggested that America “have a government blogging team.” On the Republican side, Ron Paul has raised millions by harnessing the open nature of the Net, and Rudy Giuliani’s strange behavior when he interrupted his NRA speech to answer a cell phone call from his wife was viewed more than 20,000 times on YouTube.
Clearly, American citizens no longer need to rely on mainstream media for their political data. They can now get it from numerous services all over the Web and respond just as quickly so others can see their opinion. Interactive politics is here, but is more data making things better?
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Read more here.
In less than a decade, Google has grown from a Ph.D. research project to be the indispensable tool of the information economy. With the objective of making all information instantly and universally accessible, Google now controls the principal index to the internet and the email traffic of millions, while adding new features such as maps replete with street-level photos cataloging the non-virtual world.
How should governments around the world treat this data? Is it a great new resource for national security and law enforcement, or should we protect it from the prying eyes of bureaucrats? Should private companies be reigned in by regulation, or will government action only serve to undermine the modicum of privacy we maintain in the information age?
On January 16th Americas Future Foundation (AFF) will be hosting a roundtable to discuss these and other questions.
The panelists:
The event will take place at the Fund for American Studies, 1706 New Hampshire Avenue, NW, near Dupont Circle. Drinks at 6:30; Roundtable begins at 7:00. Roundtables are free for AFF members, $5 for non-members. So join today! Please RSVP to Cindy Cerquitella at cindy@americasfuture.org.
Hopefully we’ll see some TLF fanboys at the event!
Today, the Department of Homeland Security issued final regulations implementing the REAL ID Act, our moribund national ID law which several states have already refused to implement.
The regulations, in two parts, can be found here and here.
I will have more to say after examining them, but the House Committee on Homeland Security’s Chairman has already registered his preliminary objections. Cost issues, the difficulty of implementing this national ID, and privacy issues concern Chairman Thompson, who notes that DHS has spent close to $300 million on programs that have been discontinued because of failure to adhere to privacy laws and regulations.
REAL ID is, of course, a wasteful affront to privacy whether or not DHS follows all the rules. The Department is not in a position to correct the errors in this fundamentally misguided policy.
A couple of corporations or trade associations have started blogs about technology policy that are worth checking out. Here’s a partially list of some of the ones I follow in my Bloglines account. I’m interested in hearing from readers about others that should be added to the list. Perhaps we should add a new section to our blogroll to help readers keep tabs on corporate tech blogs like these.
Google – Google Public Policy Blog
Cisco – Cisco High Tech Policy Blog
Cable (NCTA) – Cable Tech Talk
Verizon – Verizon Policy Blog
“Cable-TV Industry Girds for New Threats.” That’s the title of an article today from Ben Charny of the Wall Street Journal, who is reporting on what he’s seeing at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and how it is upending the traditional TV market:
“[A]s evidenced this week by the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas… thanks to the Internet becoming a bigger distributor of entertainment, and new gadgets and other developments that make it easier to show the Internet’s content on TVs. … As the Internet becomes a larger provider of video, and technology makers ease the flow of that content to television sets, it threatens the cable and satellite industries. Currently, the number of subscriber dropouts remains relatively small, according to cable and satellite operators, but anecdotal evidence suggests those affected by a souring U.S. economy are more inclined to keep their less-expensive Internet services than their cable-TV subscriptions.
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin was out at the show this week, too. Hopefully he was watching and listening so his outrageous regulatory “war on cable” can finally come to an end.
I just realized that I forgot to blog last month about the release of the Family Online Safety Institute’s (FOSI) “State of Online Safety Report 2008.” As Stephen Balkam, CEO of FOSI, notes in the preface, the report is “[an] attempt to take an international snap shot of the incredibly diverse and innovative attempts to keep kids safe online, while also respecting free expression.” It features chapters on 9 different countries, including the US, the UK, Australia, Germany, Mexico, Canada, Austria, Netherlands, and Belgium.
Each chapter was authored by an online safety expert from those countries. Stephen Balkam was kind enough to invite me to submit the chapter on the state of affairs in the United States and it is included as Chapter 1 in the report. My contribution is based largely on material pulled from my big PFF report, Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods.
FOSI hopes to improve and expand the report in coming years to give analysts, policymakers, the press, and other interested parties an in-depth feel for the state of play in many other countries. But it already serves as a uniquely importantly resource for those who want a snapshot of online safety efforts internationally. Here’s more of what Stephen had to say in the preface of the report about the current state of global online safety efforts:
For someone who’s portrayed as an economic reformer that understands, for example, why a 35-hour workweek is a disastrous idea, French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s newly announce plan to tax Internet connections to subsidize television is quite shocking. From the IHT:
But France, like other countries around the world, is struggling to find ways to keep cultural industries, like video and music, afloat at a time when their traditional audiences are waning.
Sarkozy, proposing “a real cultural revolution” and stressing twice that his proposal was “unprecedented,” said: “I want us to profoundly review the requirements of public television and to consider a complete elimination of advertising on public channels.”
Instead, he said, those channels “could be financed by a tax on advertising revenues of private broadcasters and an infinitesimal tax on the revenues of new means of communication like Internet access or mobile telephony.”
Do I really have to spell out how this not only props up an antiquated technology that people seem not to want, but simultaneously stifles innovation of the technology that people do want? You know, maybe we should tax digital cameras to subsidize Kodak’s film technology.
I also disagreed with this part of Yoo’s argument:
The Internet has historically been regarded as a “pull” technology in which end users specified the exact content that they wished to see. The explosion of content on the World Wide Web has increasingly given the Internet the characteristics of a “push” technology in which end users rely on intermediaries to aggregate content into regular e-mail bulletins. Even search engine technologies have begun to exhibit forms of editorial discretion as they begin to compete on the quality of their search methodologies.
Mandating content nondiscrimination would represent an ill-advised interference with the exercise of editorial discretion that is playing an increasingly important role on the Internet. Editors perform numerous functions, including guaranteeing quality and ensuring that customers receive an appropriate mix of material. For example, consider the situation that would result if a publication such as Sports Illustrated could not exercise editorial control over its pages. One particular issue of the magazine might consist solely of articles on one sport without any coverage of other sports, and there would be no way to guarantee the quality of the writing…
The same principles apply to the Internet as it moves away from person-to-person communications to media content. This shift argues in favor of allowing telecommunications networks to exercise editorial control. Indeed, anyone con- fronting the avalanche of content available on the Internet can attest to the benefits provided by editorial filters. This transition also weakens the case for network neutrality.
I think this misfires on several levels. The first is that he’s mischaracterizing what advocates of network neutrality regulations are trying to accomplish. I don’t know of any prominent advocates of regulation who think the regulations should apply to Google’s search engine, much less Sports Illustrated’s home page. Of course editorial discretion is important in a world of increasing information.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
