From the acclaimed “. . . and a pony” series at WashingtonWatch.com.
August 2008
This morning’s Drudge Report features the stories everyone is talking about today, with reports on U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps winning another couple of gold medals, the latest on the Russia-Georgia war, and — of course — FCC commissioner Robert McDowell on threat of the Fairness Doctrine and net neutrality regulation.
Well, maybe the first two stories are getting a bit more attention, but McDowell’s remarks — made at The Heritage Foundation yesterday after a blogger’s briefing — is getting a surprising amount of coverage in the blogsphere and trade press.
The remarks were originally reported in a story on the Business and Media Institute website, in response to a question about prospects for a Fairness Doctrine revival. McDowell responded that it the issue hadn’t been raised at the FCC, but went on to state that there is a danger of similar rules put into place under a different name. A spot-on analysis, as we’ve argued many times before. (see video here.)
He then went on to say that the Fairness Doctrine “will be intertwined with the net neutrality debate” (net neutrality was the primary focus of his remarks at the Heritage briefing). Referring to concerns of regulation supporters — including what he called “a few isolated conservatives” that large corporations will censor their content, he said the “bigger concern should be if you have government dictating content policy.”
Most of the coverage of McDowell’s remarks interpreted McDowell as saying that the Fairness Doctrine itself might be extended to blogs (i.e, the Drudge headline: “Return of ‘Fairness Doctrine’ Could Control Web Content…”). Such a direct extension of the old broadcast-only fairness rules is unlikely though. Instead, McDowell I think was raising the danger that net neutrality regulation could be the source of such web content controls.
Lately I’ve been writing about potentially historic upcoming First Amendment case of FCC v. Fox Television Stations. The Supreme Court will hear the case on Tuesday, November 4th. All the briefs in the case are in and can be found on the ABA website here. But I’ve pasted the links for all of them below as well. In coming days and weeks I might be highlighting some of the comments from the briefs. [The docket number for the case is 07-582]. The amicus brief I filed with my friends at CDT can be found here, and I wrote about it last week here on the TLF.
The FCC v. Fox case is the indecency case involving the FCC’s new policy for “fleeting expletives.” I wrote about the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision here. The full decision is here. The FCC v. Fox case could become the most important First Amendment-related Supreme Court case since FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, which just turned 30 years old last month. Anyway, here are all the briefs in the case, starting with the merit briefs by the lead parties:
In 1998, the Internet was “green” with an influx of venture capital money. A decade later, green on the ‘Net is rapidly being identified with benefits to the environment. Due to high gas prices, there are a number of reports documenting increased use of the Internet for teleconferencing and telecommuting. I used these two as examples of activities we shouldn’t discourage when arguing in favor of extending the Internet access tax moratorium.
Now there’s a new tax on the horizon – digital downloads. Today’s CNET news article describes how states have recently passed laws taxing downloaded content from the Internet, and quotes my colleague Steve DelBianco: “A digital download is the greenest way to buy music, movies, and software, since it requires no driving to the store, no delivery vans, and no plastics or packaging.”
Indeed, Telefonica, Spain’s largest telecom provider, has a report that discusses the climate benefits of ICT. It’s based on another report published in 2003 from Digital Europe, a project funded by the European Union. The findings:
Resource comparative (minerals, fossil fuels, etc) used to access 56 minutes of music:
Physical retail: 1.56 Kg [3.4 lb]
Online Shopping: 1.31 Kg [2.9 lb]
Digital distribution (without subsequent burning): 0.60Kg [1.3 lb]
Digital distribution (burning on to a CD): 0.67 Kg [1.5 lb]
So download and be green, despite that tax regulators are green with envy about collecting taxes from digital downloads.
Catherine Holahan of Business Week points out that consumer and children’s advocacy groups are looking to expand their efforts to regulate fatty and sugary food advertising in the name of “protecting the children”:
Having successfully lobbied the government to place limits on junk food ads on TV, they now target marketing to kids via the Web. “While there are some rules for TV, there are no rules when you move online,” says Patti Miller, vice-president of children’s advocacy group Children Now and a member of the Federal Communications Commission’s Task Force on Media & Childhood Obesity. “We don’t want to reduce junk food advertising to kids [on TV] and then find that it has just moved to another platform.”
And so another classic case study in regulatory creep is born and the Net gets a little more regulated in the process as Uncle Sam becomes our Super Nanny. What’s that you say? Parents should take more responsibility for what their kids watch and eat? Silly you. Don’t you know that it takes a village to raise a village idiot? Or something like that.
I used to get endless grief from pro-regulatory media activists here in DC when I put forward the argument in days past that Google was a media company and a major player in the battle for eyes, ears and ad dollars in America’s media marketplace. Increasingly, however, more people are coming around to seeing that point, even the crusty old media giants themselves.
In a smart essay over at the Freedom to Tinker blog, David Robinson takes the New York Times to task for an article today again wondering, “Is Google a Media Company?” As David rightly argues:
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Channeling Jonathan Zittrain, Alex Curtis of Public Knowledge continues his incessant ranting against Apple and the iPhone for supposedly not being open enough and, therefore, somehow harming consumers and 3rd party developers. In his essay today about the supposed evils of the iPhone App Store, he accuses Apple of an “1984 kind of total control.”
Hmmm, let’s see… Apple creates a great new product that is so insanely sexy and innovative that even Apple-haters like me are forced to admit that it is the most brilliant tech gadget of the decade. Millions of people have flocked to Apple stores, stood in lines so long that you’d think they were giving away free pot and floor bongs inside, and then voluntarily handed over seemingly all their disposable monthly income to get their hands on one of these things.
OK, so how is this like 1984 again? Is evil Steve Jobs forcing the masses to buy this product? Of course not. So it strikes me that we can easily dispense with analogies to a book about coercive, totalitarian government control like 1984.
And if all this anti-iPhone ranting is just about the degree of control that Steve Jobs and Apple exercise over product add-ons then hey, I’ve got an easy answer for you: go get a different phone!
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After gaining final approval to rollout FiOS in New York City a few weeks ago, Verizon has come to a preliminary agreement with the District of Columbia to deploy FiOS television service in the nation’s capital. This long-awaited announcement follows nearly a year of negotiation between Verizon and D.C. franchising authorities.
Thanks to its especially onerous franchising regime, the District of Columbia has lagged behind surrounding areas in fiber-optic connectivity. Neighboring communities such as Arlington, Fairfax, and Bethesda have had FiOS for years, and D.C.’s lack of fiber-optic service has long been a sore spot for the city.
D.C. residents can’t celebrate just yet, though. Verizon must overcome one more regulatory hurdle before starting to dig up the streets. The franchise agreement must receive a green-light from both the D.C. city council and the Attorney General. If the New York City episode is any indication, getting politicians to acquiesce will involve expensive demands and forced concessions, resulting in higher prices for everyone.
Sometimes, items come across my desk(top) that are almost too obvious to make note of, but it’s probably worthwhile to highlight the e-passport.
Adam Laurie and Jeroen van Beek, at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, showed the Business Technology Blog how to capture and change information stored on chips included in new passports from many countries. . . . Laurie showed us his son’s British passport, in which he embedded a chip that displays Osama Bin Laden’s photograph. The passports have a key needed to access the electronic information, but it is taken from information found in the passport like the date of birth. Laurie was able in about four hours to decipher the key and use an RFID scanner to steal the digital information from a passport contained in a sealed envelope.
The State Department implemented the e-passport with no sense of the ends it was trying to achieve. Naturally, the means it chose weren’t well suited.
Though I don’t think you’re going to cost-effectively stop or slow terrorism at the borders, Customs and Border Patrol may be less able to interdict bad people at the borders because of the e-passport misadventure.
Over at Reason’s “Hit and Run” blog, Matt Welch has penned a piece pointing out how it is impossible to make the anti-media activists happy. Welch notes that radical activist groups like Free Press go around demonizing media moguls like Rupert Murdoch because he supposedly symbolizes the fact that will live in an age of media monopolists who puppeteer all our news and entertainment from on high. It’s all 100% B.S., of course, as we have shown here again and again.
But even when confronted by the rise of alternative owners and ownership models, the Free Press fanatics show their true colors by saying that won’t work for them either. Walsh notes, for example, that the skake-up of the old Tribune empire and the emergence of Sam Zell as an independent owner of the Trib — and an owner hellbent on downsizing the old empire, no less — should be exactly what Free Press wants:
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.