Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
The strange bedfellows in the Accountability Now PAC are organizing a money bomb for August 8th, and are asking bloggers to post things like this:
If you were outraged by the FISA “compromise” that immunized law-breaking on the part of telecommunications companies – and if your outrage lasts – you might want to join in the fun.
In my July essay on “Understanding The True Cost of Video Game Censorship Efforts,” I pointed out how outrageous it was that politicians continue to burn money on fruitless regulatory measures that are destined to be struck down as unconstitutional. I argued that the nearly $2 million in legal fees and expenses recovered by the video game industry after winning its legal cases against various governments could have been spent much better by public policy makers:
That $2 million in recovered legal fees could have been plowed into educational efforts to help explain to parents how to use the excellent voluntary ratings systems or console-based parental control tools that are at their disposal. Moreover, that $2 million in recovered industry legal fees does not account for the resources that state and local officials put into these regulatory efforts. So, we are talking about a much greater deadweight loss for society and taxpayers.
Well, that opportunity cost / deadweight loss grew even higher today when the state of California reimbursed the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) $282,794 for attorney’s fees after losing a recent legal battle in the case Video Software Dealers Association v. Schwarzenegger. The ESA sent out a press release about the case today that dramatically points out the opportunity cost of such regulation:
The ESA noted that this payment comes at an especially troubling time for the state, calling to mind other pressing budgetary and legislative priorities and issues, including:
* California is currently facing a $15-billion budget gap
* More than 10,000 California state employees were laid off last week in light of the budget crisis
* Governor Schwarzenegger is seeking to cut wages for nearly 200,000 state employees
* The state already cut 10 percent to its Medicaid reimbursement rate and deferred payments to vendors“Caregivers are not well-served by court battles and legal fees. Rather, they would have been far better off if state officials worked together with our industry to raise awareness about video game ratings and the parental controls available on all new game consoles — both of which help ensure that the games children play are parent-approved.”
Indeed. And yet, the video game censorship bandwagon rolls on. Will it never end?
There’s been a lot of FUD floating around about the MPAA’s plan to offer new release films for cable subscribers to watch at home on pay-per-view channels. Currently, movies come out on DVD about four months after their theatrical release, and are typically available on pay-per-view a month or two thereafter. As box office receipts have waned, Hollywood has warmed to the idea of letting consumers watch movies at home just a few weeks after being released in theaters.
Due to piracy concerns, new movies would be subject to an extra layer of copy protection. The movie studios want to use a technology called Selectable Output Control (SOC) to prevent new release films from being viewed on analog outputs. SOC makes it possible to seal the “analog hole” by disabling all unprotected paths.
Consumers are willing to pay to watch new movies at home, and content producers are willing to transmit them, but government is standing in the way. FCC regulations forbid multi-channel video programming distributors from activating SOC, but firms may apply for a waiver from these rules if they can demonstrate that consumers stand to benefit. The MPAA has applied for a waiver, arguing that “These new Services are exactly the type of ‘new business models’ that the Commission contemplated when it adopted the encoding rules.”
Under Section 304 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the FCC is tasked with “assuring commercial consumer availability of equipment used to access services provided by multichannel video programming distributors.” FCC regulations, therefore, mandate that all video transmitted on cable TV must be viewable on all outputs, including legacy analog connectors like RCA and S-Video. In a 2003 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, the FCC stated that, “we are concerned that selectable output control would harm those ‘early adopters’ whose DTV equipment only has component analog inputs for high definition display, placing these consumers at risk of being completely shut off from the high-definition content they expect to receive.”
But it’s expected that early adopters will sometimes encounter technical hurdles. Why should Selective Output Control be any different? Just as HD-DVD players are effectively obsolete, and K56flex modems are no longer supported by most dial-up ISPs, people who bought HDTVs several years ago prior to the adoption of HDCP might have to live without the ability to watch new release movies at home.
This interesting post on The 463 reminds us that the opening of society in China may not lead to a blossoming of freedom and tolerance, but to a nationalist frenzy like we saw in the Balkans after the fall of communism there.
I don’t know whether the Chinese people have separate ethnic identities that would lead them to fight each other, or whether China as a whole would turn against the world (and especially the United States) in a fit of nationalist anger. Anyone?
If it’s not already happening, I can certainly see Chinese party officials whipping up nationalism seeking to hold power on the cheap.
Something to think about when you go to decide whether tech companies should engage with China. I still think they should, but soberly, and not so much like a neocon expecting to be met with flowers in Iraq.
Very useful chart over on the Verizon policy blog put together by Link Hoewing and Larry Plumb. Link uses it illustrate the changes we have seen over the past three decades in terms of Internet access platforms and speeds. It’s too small to read here, so make sure to go there to see it more clearly and also see Link’s interesting discussion.
Early one morning, the Civil War crashed into my bedroom. A loud popping noise crackled just outside our window . . . I went to the window and saw men in gray uniforms firing muskets on the road in front of our house.
These men in grey uniforms weren’t soldiers, not even actors playing soldiers—these men were reenactors. They had found their way into the front yard of writer Tony Horwitz, inspiring him to write the bestselling Confederates in Attic.
For a new generation of civil war buffs there’s a way to reenact without the smell of bacon grease, gunpowder, and coffee grounds hanging in the air. Buffs old and young have many things in common—namely, abundant free time and obsessive attention to detail—but the younger breed prefers keyboards to Colt revolvers.
Sid Meier’s Gettysburg, released in 1997, marked a significant step toward satisfying generation X reenactors, but it still didn’t quite scratch the itch. More recent releases, like the History Channel’s cleverly named History Channel: Civil War was decried by gamers as boring while buffs were annoyed at its inaccuracy.
Because of all of this, a new community was born—or at least a sub-community.
Since the early days of video games, hobbyists have modified commercial video games—creating their own specialized versions with unique attributes and themes. “Modding,” as it’s often called, naturally appeals to the meticulous nature of the reenactor. Obsessions with detail and historical accuracy can now be expressed not only in recreating clothing and weaponry, but entire battlefield landscapes.
Electronic Arts’ Battlefield 1942 has been reworked to produce Battlefield 1861. Microsoft’s Rise of Nations as well as its Age of Empires series have also been re-worked to produce incredibly detailed Civil War games. Some of these efforts are the result of one lonely man’s hobby, but more often they are the result of a team of a dozen or more developers coordinating their efforts using online forums and email lists.
This kind of community of obsessive hobbyists is part of the reason why I don’t believe the PC gaming industry is anywhere near its death. There is such a huge amount of dark data out there—data that exists, but that hasn’t been aggregated into a useful form just yet. Much of the PC gaming community is non-commercial, unmeasured, but likely terrifically huge.
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Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Net, has a very thoughtful post up on the Google Public Policy Blog today asking “What’s a Reasonable Approach for Managing Broadband Networks?” He runs through a variety of theoretical approaches to network load management. There’s much there to ponder, but I just wanted to comment briefly on the very last thing he says in the piece:
Over the past few months, I have been talking with engineers at Comcast about some of these network management issues. I’ve been pleased so far with the tone and substance of these conversations, which have helped me to better understand the underlying motivation and rationale for the network management decisions facing Comcast, and the unique characteristics of cable broadband architecture. And as we said a few weeks ago, their commitment to a protocol-agnostic approach to network management is a step in the right direction.
I found this of great interest because for the last few months I have been wondering: (a) why isn’t there more of that sort of inter- and intra-industry dialogue going on, and (b) what could be done to encourage more of it? With the exception of those folks at the extreme fringe of the Net neutrality movement, most rational people involved in this debate accept the fact that there will be legitimate network management issues that industry must deal with from time to time. So, how can we get people in industry — from all quarters of it — to sit down at a negotiating table and hammer things out voluntarily before calling in the regulators to impose ham-handed, inflexible solutions? What we are talking about here is the need for a technical dispute resolution process that doesn’t involve the FCC.
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There are apparently people who believe that it’s some kind of technological Faux pas to type a website’s URL into the search bar. As Joe Weisenthal points out, this is completely nonsense. There are a number of good reasons to use the search bar even if you have a pretty good idea of a site’s URL.
Beyond the specific reasons Joe gives, there’s a more fundamental issue of cognitive economy. URLs have to be exact, and so remembering them takes a non-trivial amount of cognitive effort. If I want to remember the Institute for Humane Studies website, I have to remember that it’s theIHS, and that it’s a .org rather than a .com or a .net. But if I type “IHS” into Google, the Institute for Humane Studies is the third search term. If I type something a little more descriptive, like humane studies, it comes up as the first result. Search terms don’t have to be exact, and so they tend to be much easier to remember: type something in the general vicinity of what you’re looking for, and Google will find it for you.
The point isn’t that I couldn’t remember theihs.org. Rather, it’s that remembering the URLs of all the websites you visit is a waste of cognitive energy in exactly the same way that it would be a waste to remember IP addresses rather than domain names. Technically speaking, the IP address lookup would be faster, but the difference is so trivial that it’s swamped by the fact that the human brain isn’t as good at remembering 32-bit numbers as it is at remembering well-chosen domain names. By the same token, even if the search bar isn’t the “right” place to put URLs, it will, in practice and on average, be the quickest way for actual human beings to get to the sites they’re looking for.
This is an example of a general attitudinal problem that’s distressingly common among geeks. Geeks have an tendency to over-value lower-level layers of the technology stacks based on the misguided belief that higher-level technologies are unnecessarily wasteful. Many geeks’ preference for text over graphics, command lines over GUIs, text editors over word processors, and so forth seems to too often be motivated by this kind of false economy. (To be clear I’m not claiming that there aren’t good reasons for preferring command lines, text editors, etc, just that this particular reason is bogus.) What they miss is that human time and attention is almost always more scarce than the trivial amount of computing power they’re conserving by using the less complex technology. The 2 seconds it takes me to remember a website’s URL is worth a lot more than the tenth of a second that it takes Google to respond to a search query.
Anyone interested in the long-running debate over how to balance online privacy with anonymity and free speech, whether Section 230‘s broad immunity for Internet intermediaries should be revised, and whether we need new privacy legislation must read the important and enthralling NYT Magazine piece “The Trolls Among Us” by Mattathias Schwartz about the very real problem of Internet “trolls“–a term dating to the 1980s and defined as “someone who intentionally disrupts online communities.”
While all trolls “do it for the lulz” (“for kicks” in Web-speak) they range from the merely puckish to the truly “malwebolent.” For some, trolling is essentially senseless web-harassment or “violence” (e.g., griefers), while for others it is intended to make a narrow point or even as part of a broader movement. These purposeful trolls might be thought of as the Yippies of the Internet, whose generally harmless anti-war counter-cutural antics in the late 1960s were the subject of the star-crossed Vice President Spiro T. Agnew‘s witticism:
And if the hippies and the yippies and the disrupters of the systems that Washington and Lincoln as presidents brought forth in this country will shut up and work within our free system of government, I will lower my voice.
But the more extreme of these “disrupters of systems” might also be compared to the plainly terroristic Weathermen or even the more familiar Al-Qaeda. While Schwartz himself does not explicitly draw such comparisons, the scenario he paints of human cruelty is truly nightmarish: After reading his article before heading to bed last night, I myself had Kafka-esque dreams about complete strangers invading my own privacy for no intelligible reason. So I can certainly appreciate how terrifying Schwartz’s story will be to many readers, especially those less familiar with the Internet or simply less comfortable with the increasing readiness of so many younger Internet users to broadcast their lives online.
But Schwartz leaves unanswered two important questions. The first question he does not ask: Just how widespread is trolling? However real and tragic for its victims, without having some sense of the scale of the problem, it is difficult to answer the second question Schwartz raises but, wisely, does not presume to answer: What should be done about it? The policy implications of Schwartz’s article might be summed up as follows: Do we need new laws or should we focus on some combination of enforcing existing laws, user education and technological solutions? While Schwartz focuses on trolling, the same questions can be asked about other forms of malwebolence–best exemplified by the high-profile online defamation Autoadmit.com case, which demonstrates the effectiveness of existing legal tools to deal with such problems.
Before leaving for its August recess last week, Congress saw the introduction of its 10,000th bill. Meanwhile, not a single one of the twelve annual bills that direct the government’s spending priorities in 2009 has passed the Senate and only one has passed the House. Congress is neglecting its basic responsibility to manage the federal government, and is instead churning out new legislation about everything under the sun.
What does Congress occupy itself with? A commemorative postage stamp on the subject of inflammatory bowel disease. Improbable claims of health care for all Americans. And, of course, bringing home pork. Read about it on the WashingtonWatch.com blog.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
