Everybody loves to blame the media for the woes of the world. Is your candidate losing? Blame the media. Is the war in Iraq not going the way you want? Blame the media. Is the economy slowing down and heading into recession? Blame the media.
Indeed, one of the entertaining things about being a media policy analyst is that you get to hear various media critics say the most outlandish things about the role of media in our society. And that’s not just the case for news; it’s even truer for culture and entertainment, of course. There’s never been a shortage of self-appointed culture cops in our society who want to tell us that they–or at least some benevolent ruling class acting on their behalf–are in the best position to dictate standards of decency and quality entertainment. And sometimes the antics of such critics are as entertaining as they are outrageous.
Take this recent press released by Concerned Women for America entitled, “Oh, Be Careful Little Eyes What You See: The Influx of Broadcast Indecency.” So desperate are they to expand the scope of government regulation over media that they’ve now resorted to equating broadcasters to murderers and thieves: “If we allow the networks to set the standards of public decency, isn’t that like allowing the criminal to decide what’s illegal?”
Seems a bit over-the-top to me, but let’s try to answer that question by answering another question CWA sets forth in their press release: “Who decides the standards by which we protect our children and ourselves from indecent broadcasts over the public airwaves?”
That is an excellent question, and one that I have devoted much of my life’s work to answering. What CWA is implying in that question is that if the government does not set “standards” to protect society from “indecent broadcasts,” then society will essentially descend into a nihilistic moral abyss. Only by empowering regulators to police “the public airwaves” can we restore and defend moral order.
This assertion is incorrect on multiple counts. I could focus on the constitutional challenges associated with defining “indecent” and “moral” content in a pluralistic society such as ours. Or I could focus on the practical considerations of regulating broadcasters uniquely in our multi-media, multi-platform world. But I would rather focus on that “Who Decides?” question set forth by CWA in their essay, because that’s what is really at the center of all these debates. And here’s the way I counter that logic in my book on “Parental Controls & Online Child Protection”:
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I have an editorial appearing on CNet News today about “New Mexico’s video game nanny tax.” Quick background: The New Mexico legislature has introduced a new tax measure that would force consumers to pay a 1 percent excise tax on purchases of video games, gaming consoles, and TVs. The revenue generated from the game and TV tax would be used to fund a new state educational effort aimed at getting kids out of the house more. True to the aim of the measure, they have even given the bill the creative title, “The Leave No Child Inside Act.” In my editorial, I argue that:
legislators shouldn’t be using the tax code to play the role of nanny for our kids. It is the responsibility and right of parents to determine how their kids are raised. Many of us would agree that more outdoor time is a laudable goal. But should the government be using the tax code to accomplish that objective?
I point out that the proposal raises serious fairness questions that makes a constitutional challenge likely since older court cases dealing with other media have also made it clear that public-policy makers are forbidden from using the power to tax in an effort to discriminate against speech or expression that they disfavor. Moreover, on the fairness point:
Why just blame video games for kids not getting enough time outdoors? How about a tax on social-networking Web sites or instant messaging? Many kids are spending almost as much time online right now as they do playing video games. And what about other types of non-digital games that might keep kids indoors? My daughter spends a lot of time playing Sudoku puzzles, for example. Perhaps we should tax Sudoku books, chess boards, and even arts and crafts! After all, the goal here is to do whatever it takes to get kids outside, right? Or is it really just to get kids to stop playing video games?
Read the entire piece here if you are interested.
Threats can work wonders. A few months ago I tried to bargain Charter into giving me a better deal on my cable service. They jerked me around and successfully made the process unpleasant enough that I decided it wasn’t worth the bother. Recently, I got an offer from AT&T for $15/month Internet access. I don’t really want their slow, “Your World Delivered to the NSA” Internet access, but it gave me a good excuse to call Charter and tell them I wanted to cancel my service. Boy did that work wonders. No longer did I have to go through some ridiculous Internet sign-up process to get a cheaper deal. They knocked $20 off of my bill right on the phone.
So if you’re not getting a “special” price from your cable provider, call and tell them you want to cancel; tell them your phone company is offering you a lower price. Most likely they’ll offer you a discount to keep you as a customer. And if they don’t, you can always call back the next day and tell them you changed your mind.
In response to the contention that incandescent light bulbs aren’t inefficient in the winter, when you’re heating your house anyway, commenter David over at Yglesias’s blog asks:
Have you done the cost benefit analysis on that? My hunch is that your heater is far more efficient at heating your place and that the ratio of electricity to heat that your bulb is producing is highly inefficient. Do you have studies that say differently?
It’s been a while since I took physics, but I’m pretty sure that the conservation of energy suggests this is a non-sensical question. If all the energy is being converted into either heat or light, and both heat and light are desired, then it’s incoherent to talk about the heat-producing efficiency of the bulb, since there’s nowhere else for the energy to go.
On the broader point, Matt gets it exactly right: it’s absurd for Congress to decide no one has a legitimate reason to use a less efficient light bulb. There are 300 million people in the country, surely at least a few of us have legitimate uses for incandescents. The right way to deal with the problem is to ensure that the electricity is being priced appropriately (perhaps increasing taxes on generators if there’s evidence that they’re imposing uncompensated environmental harms) and then let consumers decide for themselves how much energy they want to “waste.” Surely in a country where people are allowed to set their thermostats to 80 in the winter and 60 in the summer, they should have the option to spend their hard-earned money on slightly more-expensive but aesthetically more pleasing light if they want to.
From Mr. Deity, on ideology:
It’s the worst. Are you kidding me? Look at all the great evils. They’re all ideologically drive. You’ve got the crusades, the Holocaust, Communism, no third-party apps on the iPhone. Never, never surrender yourself to an idea, my friend, never.
The iPod is a marvelously well-designed product. But one of the things about it that really irritates me is the way it handles podcasts. If I’m halfway through listening to one, and I plug the iPod in to download new ones, it will remove the half-listened-to podcast from the iPod. This is so obviously the wrong behavior, and should be so easy to fix, that I find it amazing that no one at Apple has done so. It’s a shame that iTunes isn’t an open source project, because this seems like the sort of thing a competent hacker could find and fix in a weekend if she had access to the source code.
Relatedly, if iTunes finds and downloads a new podcast while an iPod is plugged in, why does it require me to manually push the “sync” button in order to get the podcast onto the iPod. It appears that I could leave the iPod plugged in for hours and it wouldn’t perform the appropriate sync until I either manually tell it to or unplug the iPod and plug it back in. This is another thing that really should be trivial to add.
As luck would have it, I’ve got two new pieces out today on two very different privacy debates. First, in the latest issue of TechKnowledge, which is based on my Computing in the Cloud talk, I argue that privacy policy should be focused on empowering consumers to make their own decisions about privacy tradeoffs, rather than having government bureaucrats decide which information companies should collect and how it can be used. I discuss three cases—cookies, GMail, and Facebook’s newsfeed—where initial privacy concerns turned out to be overblown, and one—Beacon—where they weren’t.
Second, in a new piece for Reason, I chide Democrats for capitulating on civil liberties. I point out that Congress wasn’t always so spineless:
Bush’s predecessor was also an ardent supporter of increased wiretapping authority. For example, on July 29, 1996, Bill Clinton unveiled a proposal to expand government surveillance by permitting the use of “roving wiretaps.” The nation was still reeling from terrorist attacks on the Atlanta Olympics and American barracks in Saudi Arabia, and many suspected that the explosion of TWA Flight 800 was also the work of terrorists. Clinton argued that these tragedies highlighted the need for legislative changes, and he pressed Congress to act before its August recess.
But Congress had a bipartisan tradition of its own to defend. As they had done since Watergate, Congressional leaders raised concerns about civil liberties. Then-Speaker Newt Gingrich said he was willing to consider changes to the law, but vowed to do so “in a methodical way that preserves our freedoms.” Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott vowed that Congress would not “rush to a final judgment” before going on vacation. In the end, the 104th Congress finished its term without giving President Clinton the wiretapping authority he sought.
It’s a little depressing that Harry Reid is less concerned with civil liberties than Trent Lott was a decade ago.
Two sharply contrasting views dominate the debate over copyright policy. On the one hand—the left one, we might say—copyrights represent mere policy tools, no better in principle than any other legal mechanism and, indeed, more modern, rationally planned, and democratically chosen that anything the common law can offer. On the other hand—the right hand, we might say—copyrights represent property rights no less than real estate or moveable goods do. On that view, copyrights deserve strict enforcement and our solemn respect.
[My draft book, Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good, presents] copyright policy on a third hand. So grasped, copyright represents nothing better than a clumsy attempt to correct an alleged market failure. Common law rights, implemented by technological advances, social networks, and growing wealth, increasingly suffice to stimulate the production of original expressive works. Increasingly, we find that we do not need copyright. To that extent, it does us little good and much harm to remain imprisoned within the confines of the Copyright Act. Even if they wanted to, federal lawmakers could not put copyright policy into a delicate balance; they face powerful incentives to not even try. Better we should cast aside copyright’s statutory privileges and rely on the common law to promote the public good.
Many people—well-informed, intelligent, and sincere people—will doubtless disagree with this third view of copyright policy. Many will have good reasons for doing so, too. Some, though, will have perhaps been mislead by their reliance on an older, less flexible understanding of copyright—what we might call a circuit-switched model. In fact, however, we can best understand copyright policy, and much else, by following the example set by packet-switched networks.
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The Washington Post has a story today on the slow pace of progress in airport security technology. We would see faster development of better, more consumer-friendly security technology if the airlines were entirely responsible for it. Here’s a glimpse of what I said about this in an written debate hosted by Reason magazine a few years ago:
Airlines should be given clear responsibility for their own security and clear liability should they fail. Under these conditions, airlines would provide security, along with the best mix of privacy, savings, and convenience, in the best possible way. Because of federal involvement, air transportation is likely less safe today than it would be if responsibility were unequivocally with the airlines.