The always provocative Mark Cuban has an interesting post on his blog today. He writes:
There is a dirty little secret in the cable industry. Its being kept secret not by the cable distributors, but by the big cable networks. End this practice and the United States goes from being 3rd world by international broadband standards, to top of the charts and exemplary. …
What is the dirty little secret ?
That your cable company still delivers basic cable networks in analog. Why is this such an important issue ? Because each of those cable networks takes up 6mhz. That translates into about 38mbs per second. Thats 38mbs PER NETWORK. …
If we want to truly change the course of broadband in this country, the solution is simple. Just as we had an analog shutdown date for over the air TV signals, we need the same resolution for analog delivered cable networks.
Obviously this would entail a government mandate to an industry, which we’re all biased against. If it really were so easy, I would expect to see the cable industry make the move on its own—if nothing else to respond to FIOS. But all that aside, my question to the cable-savvy folks I know read this blog is this: how true is Cuban’s claim? How much “spectrum in a tube” is really potentially available? How difficult would it be to make a digital transition in cable?
I have just released a new PFF white paper on “The Perils of Mandatory Parental Controls and Restrictive Defaults.” It points out the dangers of government mandating that parental controls be defaulted to their most restrictive position. I’ve gone ahead and just pasted the entire text below (but without the footnotes):
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During ongoing debates about parental controls, ratings, and online child safety, there have occasionally been rumblings about the possibility of requiring that media, computing and communications devices: (1) be shipped to market with parental controls embedded, and possibly, (2) those controls being defaulted to their most restrictive position, forcing users to opt out of the controls later if they wanted to consume media rated above a certain threshold.
Imagine, for example, a law requiring that every television, TV set-top box, and video game console be shipped with on-board screening technologies that were set to block any content rated above “G” for movies, “TV-Y” for television, or “E” for video games, which are the most restrictive rating designations for each type of media. Similarly, all personal computers or portable media devices sold to the public could be forced to have filters embedded that were set to block all “objectionable” content, however defined.
If “default” requirements such as this were mandated by law, parents would be forced to opt out of the restrictions by granting their children selective permission to media content or online services. In theory, this might help limit underage access to objectionable media or online content. Such a mandate might be viewed as less intrusive than direct government censorship and, therefore, less likely to run afoul of the constitution.
For these reasons, such a proposal would likely have great appeal among some policymakers, “family” groups, child safety advocates, and parents. But mandating parental controls and restrictive defaults is a dangerous and elitist idea that must be rejected because it will have many unintended consequences and not likely achieve the goal of better protecting our kids. Continue reading →
I’m teaching my 6-year old daughter how to read right now. It’s slow going; she’s struggling. So, I’ve been trying a variety of techniques and approaches. One strategy that seems to be working is what we call “the newspaper game.” Each night before she goes to bed, we practice with word cards and a dry erase board. We drill though about 20-25 words at a time; I help her sound them out and then she writes them on the board. The following morning, when I bring in the morning newspapers, I ask her to search through the headlines in the Washington Post for words we might have practiced the night before. She is very excited when she recognizes one, and that helps reinforce what she has learned. We have been doing this a lot lately and she now even rushes out some mornings to get the papers for me so we can do this together. (I’m hoping it instills within her a love of fine journalism, too!)
Anyway, this morning she picked up the Washington Post and—not seeing any words she recognized on A1—flipped the page and spotted the word “Out” on pg. A3. She was very happy because that was one of the “O” words we had practiced a few nights before. So I walked over to praise her and to look at the article she was examining in a search for other familiar words. The full title of the article was: “The D.C. Madam Case, All Sordid Out.” Yikes!
Now this is a serious article, written by one of the most respected (and prolific) journalists in America today, Dana Milbank. But Milbank’s description of the trial about the now infamous Beltway prostitution ring is not exactly the sort of stuff you want to have your 6-year old reading at the breakfast table before she goes off to school. Milbank’s article includes several references to various types of sexual encounters and even some talk about how some of the hookers were “inducing orgasms” for clients. Here’s one particularly steamy passage from the article: Continue reading →
I’ve finally made up my mind on the grad school issue: I’ll be going to Princeton this fall. I’ll be studying with Ed Felten at Princeton’s new Center for IT Policy, which I expect will be a leading center for tech policy research in the coming years.
One of best things about the center is that under the able stewardship of David Robinson, they’ve put together an amazing series of lectures, lunch discussions, and conferences on a wide spectrum of public policy issues, ranging from hard-core computer security to patent and copyright issues. None of the other schools I looked at have anything quite like it. And of course, the Center has already produced several ground-breaking pieces of original research, which we’ve covered extensively here at TLF.
They’re opening a new building this fall and as I understand it are actively looking for more people to get involved in the center. It’s designed to accommodate people with a variety of backgrounds, both technical and policy-oriented, so if you’re a regular reader of this blog and you’re thinking about going to grad school, Princeton should be on your list. Likewise, they’ve called for visiting scholars, so if you work in tech policy and would like to spend a year in New Jersey, you should get in touch with them. I’ll be there for the next five years or so.
Thank God the FCC is there for us. Today, our benevolant regulatory knights imposed over $6 million in fines, mostly on various consumer electronics retailers, in the name of “protecting consumers from unknowingly buying televisions that will not allow consumers to enjoy the full benefits of the digital transition.”
We can all rest easier tonight knowing that the FCC is policing the aisles of Sears and WalMart looking for non-compliant television sets.
The Federal Communications Commission is facing another deadline at the end of this month to accept or reject a petition for regulatory forbearance. The petition would relieve AT&T of several unnecessary, burdensome and anticompetitive accounting requirements.
The accounting rules at issue were designed to restrain telephone prices when AT&T was a monopoly entitled to recover its costs plus a reasonable profit. Rate-of-return or cost-plus regulation, as it was known, was a complete failure. It gave companies like AT&T an incentive to inflate, misallocate and manipulate costs. The companies responded, according to critics, by gold-plating their operations.
AT&T hasn’t been subject to rate-of-return regulation at the FCC or in any of the states in which it operates for 10 years. And no one is proposing to bring it back.
The FCC and the states now merely set maximum prices AT&T can charge (“price caps”), which is why the rules cited in the petition are no longer necessary. The data derived from the legacy accounting procedures simply isn’t used anymore to regulate revenue or set prices.
My friend Jonathan Dingel has more on the Columbian trade agreement. He quotes Bernard Gordon on the proliferation of non-trade-related provisions in “free trade” agreements:
These cases highlight the problems of incorporating non-trade issues into trade agreements. Labor and environmental standards began the practice, but no clear end-points now exist. That recalls Jagdish Bhagwati’s famous warning that “the spaghetti bowl effect” (by which he meant overlapping rules of origin) would make FTAs hopelessly complex and impossible to administer. Today we would add the “Christmas Tree Effect,” the term used in Congress for the many items, each individually attractive though unrelated to a bill’s main purpose, that are added to satisfy special interests. Similar baubles and ornaments characterize today’s world of proliferating FTAs, and will be sought by powerful negotiating partners. Along with the profoundly dangerous capacity of FTAs to revive a world of blocs, they are among the best reasons to maintain instead the global trade system.
I should note that there’s a lively debate among free traders about the relative merits of bilateral versus global trade agreements. My esteemed colleague Dan Griswold has argued that under the right conditions, bilateral agreements can help jump-start broader liberalizations. But I think both sides should be able to agree that loading these agreements up with terms that have no detectable connection to trade is a bad idea.
The Administrative Law Review at American University will hold a pretty interesting symposium next Friday on media regulation and the legacy of Red Lion v. FCC. Don’t let their horrendous program design scare you (PDF), they have some top notch speakers scheduled, including Cass Sunstein. Check out TLF’s Red Lion coverage over the years here.
This is just a test post to see if our new spiffy site has a problem with embedded videos. By the way, we have a new spiffy site. Thanks much to PJ Doland for his help getting it up. That’s what she said.
Mike is completely right. It’s absurd that we let so few highly skilled workers into the US. I don’t really have anything to add to his excellent points, but I was amused by some of the comments in that post. First a good example of the kinds of problems the low H1-B cap creates:
My wife and I are highly skilled British workers (me in IT and my Wife in Microbiology). We chose to emigrate to Australia over the US because of this short-sighted, protectionist attitude. Australia has a points system that allows anyone in if they meet the point’s target, dependant on their profession. The points awarded to each industry and profession is varied according to the economic demand. Trying to plan a move to the States wasn’t worth the hassle of waiting for a ‘lottery’ visa application.
I now earn more than many Australians because they have jobs that need done and not enough people to do them. This is partly to a fast growing economy (no recession here) and an aging population where people are retiring.
And this guy gets the award for the biggest non-sequitur of the discussion:
Why is the tech industry so special? In every other industry, a lack of skilled workers results in companies paying HIGHER SALARIES to draw those skilled workers in. That causes people to flood schools seeking education for those areas so that they can graduate and fill the industry needs, eventually resulting in a somewhat lower salary overall, because the demand and supply are more even. THAT is capitalism. THAT is how it has always been.
But somehow when it comes to the tech industry, the answer isn’t related to supply and demand. When it comes to the tech industry, they artificially bend supply and demand to the corporate side’s favor by importing extra supply.
The guy above who says that he moved to AUS instead of the US because of our “protectionism” (what the hell are you talking about? the problem is a LACK of protectionism) has some deeply flawed logic. If he moved to the US, he wouldn’t keep that fantastic salary he’s getting in AUS right now, because he would be competing with the flood of imported labor.
I hope I don’t have to point out the numerous illogical aspects of this argument. But one of the things I find striking about this is the implicit xenophobia on display. Because of course, the British guy is probably white and speaks impeccable English, so he’s obviously not part of the problem. It’s those other people, that menacing “flood of imported labor” that we need to be worried about. It’s apparently lost on him that Indian, Chinese, and Korean workers are human beings who need to support their families just as much as British people do.
A final point to be made is that the tech sector isn’t special. For decades, we’ve been dealing with job losses in the manufacturing sector. Wages have been depressed somewhat by both free trade agreements and high levels of immigration, legal and otherwise. Economists have pointed out, correctly, that these changes benefit consumers by allowing companies to produce better products at lower prices. Precisely the same argument applies to the tech sector, and it’s disappointing to see my fellow geeks stoop to demagoguery and thinly disguised xenophobia when it comes to facing competition in their own industry.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The always provocative Mark Cuban has an interesting post on his blog today. He writes:
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.