While the Wall Street Journal has noted one disturbing aspect of Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CN)’s sprawling mortgage industry bailout bill (HR 3221) –the required fingerprinting of mortgage loan “originators”–Sen. Dodd and his Republican colleague Richard Shelby (R-AL) last week introduced an even more disturbing amendment (Subtitle B of S.AMDT.4983) that would require the nation’s payment systems to track, aggregate, and report information on nearly every electronic transaction to the federal government,” as reported by FreedomWorks (and noted briefly by the WSJ).
Specifically, online payment systems such as eBay’s Paypal, Amazon, and Google Checkout (along with banks and credit card networks such as Visa, MasterCard and Discover) would be required to report,
(1) the name, address, and [Taxpayer Identification Number] of each participating payee to whom one or more payments in settlement of reportable transactions are made, and
(2) the gross amount of the reportable transactions with respect to each such participating payee.
This requirement would produce, starting in 2011, a detailed record of information about every “participating payee”–i.e., anyone receiving at least 200 online payments in a year worth at least $10,000 in total. This record would include entries for not only most online merchants but also the “long tail” of small sellers through sites like eBay who eke out more than $10,000 in revenue (not profit) as well as those who collect donations online, as many non-profits, blogs and other user-supported sites do. Such granular data collection becomes particularly troubling when one considers that, individual payees would be identified by social security number, as would sole proprietors of small businesses who use their own social security number instead of obtaining a separate Employer Identification Number. Continue reading →
The TLF crowd will converge upon the MCCXXIII Club at 1223 Connecticut Ave in Washington DC from 6-9:30 this Wednesday, June 25 for Alcohol Liberation Front 5.1. Why are we having an ALF event so soon after our last one? And why is only minor build (.1)?
Because we’re crashing blogger and celebrity geek Robert Scoble‘s mini-convention/happy hour for the DC tech community. We’ve been promised an open bar of some sort, though details are still sketchy. Of the turn-out at April’s “TECH Cocktail” is any indication, this could be very well-attended and fun event.
RSVP now on EventBrite (and check out the Facebook event page) and be sure to wear your best capitalist flair. We’ll hope to see you there as we spread the gospel of Technology Freedom to our fellow geeks.
The subject of tiered access to high-speed internet services has been much in the news, with the announcements by Time Warner Cable, and also Cox Communications, that they would roll out tiered services.Well, the news out of NXTcomm08, the telecommunications industry conference last week in Las Vegas, only seems to underscore the prospect that greater control by network providers is on the horizon. According to a survey by Tellabs and research firm IDC, telecommunications professionals are split down the middle on whether increasing bandwidth demands are likely to “break” the Internet.
According to the survey, half of respondents said bandwidth demands would “break” the Internet.
Of greater interest, in my opinion:
Of the 80% who identified a way to deal with internet congestion, 32% think providers address spikes in traffic by prioritizing via packet inspection, while 24% believe that spikes are better handled by charging more for excess bandwidth.
My friend Chris Parente blogged about this development on Saturday, and he was kind enough to ask for my reaction. This is what I said:
Whether or not new bandwidth demands on the Internet cause carriers to offer tiered pricing or to throttle particular applications or protocols, independent monitoring will be crucial. The core purpose of BroadbandCensus.com is to provide bandwidth consumers, both individuals and businesses, with a place to find local information about broadband availability, competition, speeds, prices and quality of service.
URL: http://broadbandcensus.com/blog/?p=49
Targeted by Chairman Kevin Martin’s apparent war on cable, the cable industry has had a tough time at the FCC of late. Being a cable lobbyist at the FCC today is like being a Communist in the State Department in the 1950s. One can just imagine the question: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a user of coaxial technology?”
That said, the cable folks don’t always lose. Just this Friday, they won one – handing a defeat to Martin. The problem is that its one they really should have lost.
The question at hand (addressed ably by Berin Szoka on Friday, and by Adam Thierer earlier) is whether telephone companies should be able to contact customers who have requested that their phone numbers be switched over to a competitor, and try to convince them not to switch. Several cable firms filed a complaint against Verizon over the practice early this year. The practice is anti-competitive, they said, pointing out that Verizon was able to ply customers with “price incentives and gift cards” to convince them not to switch.
In April, the FCC staff said it would side with the telcos on this one. But on Friday the commission voted 4-1 – with Chairman Martin the only ‘no’ vote – to ban the practice.
That is unfortunate. Far from being a threat to competition, being able to fight to keep your customers – and even to ply them with a few incentives – is at the heart of it. The practice is common in other highly competitive industries – just try letting a magazine subscription expire. In fact, as Verizon’s Tom Tauke argues, cable firms have long engaged in similar activity to keep customers from moving to telco video service. Why should it now be wrong for telcos to do the same thing for telephone services?
I don’t say this often, but Chairman Martin was right on this one. Not because cable should lose, but because consumers would win.
Larry Lessig is a great writer and a brilliant legal scholar, but my goodness does he have bad political instincts:
I can’t begin to understand why in a war where soldiers go to jail for breaking the law, the US Congress is so keen to make sure telecom companies don’t have to fight a law suit about violating civil rights. Obama doesn’t support that immunity. He promises to get it removed. But he has signaled agreement with the compromise, which I assume means he will not filibuster immunity as he had indicated before he would. I wish he had decided differently.
But the key thing we need to keep in focus is what the objective here is. This is a hugely complex chess game. (Or I’m assuming it’s complex, since how else can you explain losing twice (ok once) to this President.) The objective of this chess game is to keep focus on the issues that show America why your candidate should win. Keeping focus (in this media environment, at least) is an insanely difficult task. But one tool in that game is picking the fights that resonate in ways that keep focus on the issues that show America why your candidate should win.
That doesn’t mean you (as a candidate) should change what you would do as President. Or change what you would fight for. But it does me that we (as strong supporters of a candidate) need to chill out a bit for about five months.
We (and I think that means all of us) can’t afford to lose this election. When we win, we will have elected a President who will deliver policy initiatives I remain certain will make us proud. If he doesn’t, then loud and clear opposition is our duty.
If “our” goal is to elect a Democrat president, then Lessig’s advice is spot on. If, on the other hand, “our” goal is to use politics as a way to improve public policy, Lessig’s advice couldn’t be worse. Continue reading →
Barack Obama is supporting the FISA bill. That pretty much seals it: Russ Feingold and Chris Dodd may filibuster, but we already know that there are enough Democrats willing to break ranks to reach cloture, and with the party’s figurehead on board, none of them are likely to switch sides. Obama says he’s going to try to strip out the immunity provision, but this is obviously so much political theater. If he were serious about doing that he’d be saying he planned to oppose the “compromise” until the immunity provision got stripped out. The fact that he’s committing himself to support the overall bill whether or not it comes with immunity is proof that he doesn’t really care about getting rid of immunity. And why would he? A few angry liberals may decide not to give to his campaign, but he’s already got a lopsided fundraising advantage over John McCain, and in the long run he probably wants to stay on the good side of a powerful lobby that could prove useful to him once he’s in the Oval Office. Same goes for Steny Hoyer: Obama will need his support when it comes time to nationalize the health care system, so why risk alienating Hoyer just to make Glenn Greenwald happy?
I’ve talked plenty about why this deal was bad policy on this blog, and you can get more from Julian if you’re interested, but at this point I’m more interested in the politics of the deal, since it turns out that’s all that mattered. It’s important to remember that when you’re in the majority, you control the calendar and so hardly anything goes to the House floor unless you want it to. Nancy Pelosi could have continued to keep the FISA issue bottled up in committee for the remainder of this Congress. Hell, Harry Reid could still refuse to take up the House legislation, although he has made it clear that he won’t. So despite Reid’s protestations to the contrary, he supports this deal.
Why? Not only have Hoyer, Reid, and company sold out our civil liberties, but they’ve angered their core supporters as well. Glen Greenwald has a gem of a poll showing that while Congress is wildly unpopular with everyone, the nominally Democratic Congress is currently polling substantially worse among Democrats than among Republicans. And that was before this FISA “compromise” was announced. This kind of spinelessness is likely to depress donor and volunteer enthusiasm come the fall.
But I think the even worse problem, from Obama, Reid, and Pelosi’s perspective, is that this means the return of the narrative of Democratic weakness on national security issues. As I wrote back in March, the Democratic Congress got some of its best press this Spring in the wake of its successful showdown with the White House:
Continue reading →
A friend points out this MP3 featuring a Andrew Rasiej of the Personal Democracy Forum and Allison Fine of Demos appearing on WNYC radio. They’re the authors of this book about the future of democracy.
Rasiej and Fine mention Internet voting as the wave of the future. They then took three or four calls, all of which consisted of cogent arguments for why Internet-based or electronic voting is a disaster in the making. One pointed out that it will be too complicated to make sure your vote is complicated. Another contended out that Internet-based voting disenfranchises poor people. When Fine responded that poor people could vote with their cell phones, a third caller pointed out that this would undermine the secret ballot.
Fine and Rasiej, obviously exasperated, conceded that, yes, current voting technologies had some kinks. But they insisted that once those kinks get worked out, we’ll all be able to choose our next president on our cell phones.
Fine and Rasiej struck me as irritatingly airheaded. If current e-voting technologies are deeply flawed (which they are) it’s irresponsible to be writing book chapters and giving radio interviews disparaging paper ballots as outdated. And it’s especially irritating that their support for e-voting seems to be entirely based on a gee-whiz sense that paper is old-fashioned and boring while touch-screen machines are new and exciting. This is not a serious argument, and if that’s all you have to say on the subject, you should leave scarce radio time to people who know what they’re talking about.
Incidentally, the book in question is an edited collection featuring a bunch of really great writers, including Clay Shirky, Yochai Benkler, and Brad Templeton. So I’m sure there’s some great stuff in there, even if the chapter on e-voting isn’t so good.
Verizon’s Tom Tauke and NCTA’s Kyle McSlarrow take to fisticuffs in their comments (well worth reading and remarkably… candid) on the Verizon Policy Blog after Tom asked “Will Cable and FCC Thwart Consumer Choice?” In case you missed it, Verizon has been feuding with cable providers before the FCC about Verizon’s practice of calling customers who ask to cancel their telephone service and offering them incentives to stay with Verizon rather than switch to a cable VoIP service.
Adam Thierer very capably addressed this subject several months ago:
there are two issues here: (1) Is Verizon technically violating any existing FCC regulations; and (2) do those rules make any sense?
I’ll leave it to the legal beagles to sort out the answer to question #1. From my perspective, the more important question is, regardless of what the regs say, what’s the impact of all this is on consumers and competition? On that point, it’s hard for me to see how those old number portability regulations make sense if they limit the ability of incumbents to play hard-ball in an attempt to retain customers. After all, that’s what we should want more of in the marketplace: good ol’ fashion head-to-head, facilities-based competition….
Bottom line: the FCC should be careful about regulating customer inducements by incumbents whether those offers happen before or after the porting process. The better approach would be to make sure that the incumbents can offer whatever inducements they want but then also make sure that rivals have a clear opportunity to respond and beat the offer.
Amen!
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.