Consensus FCC Reforms for the Next President

by on September 10, 2008 · 3 comments

I’ve had the opportunity to be involved in the planning and organization of several conferences this fall, including one exciting event, entitled “Consensus FCC Reforms and the Communications Agenda,” which I have organized in my capacity as Assistant Director of the Information Economy Project at George Mason University. Consensus FCC Reforms

You can read more details about the event at the Information Economy Project web site, but the basic gist is that, in spite of controversies swirling over issues such as Network Neutrality, media ownership and universal service, some policy observers believe that a range of reforms may attract bi-partisan consensus.  These opportunities may be more likely to be realized if identified prior to the November 2008 election.

We’ve been fortunate enough to have a stellar cast of participants, including two former chairmen of the Federal Communications Commission – William Kennard, who served under President Clinton, and Michael Powell, who served under President George W. Bush. Theyll be speaking about substantive issues for consensus, and their discussion will be moderated by Amy Schatz, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

But we’ll also be talking about procedural issues — questions of agency structure, rules, and the day-by-day practices and operations to do much to impact the telecom polity. That panel, which features chief staffers for almost all of the recent FCC chairmen, will be moderated by me.

Here’s the full program:.

8:30 a.m.         Welcome by Thomas W. Hazlett, Professor of Law and Economics, GMU

Panel I:           Improving Procedures at the Federal Communications Commission
8:40 a.m.
Peter Pitsch, chief of staff to Dennis Patrick, FCC Chairman, 1987-1989
Robert Pepper*, former chief, Office of Plans and Policy, FCC, 1989-2005
Ken Robinson, senior legal advisor to Al Sikes, FCC Chairman, 1989-1993
Blair Levin, chief of staff to Reed Hundt, FCC Chairman, 1993-1997
Kathy Brown, chief of staff to William Kennard, FCC Chairman, 1998-2001

Moderator: Drew Clark, Assistant Director, Information Economy Project

Panel II:          A Cross-Partisan Agenda for Telecommunications Policy Reforms
9:45 a.m.
William Kennard, Chairman, FCC, 1997-2001
Michael Powell, Chairman, FCC, 2001-2005

Moderator: Amy Schatz, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

When: Tuesday, September 16, 2008, 8:30 a.m. – 11 a.m.
Where: National Press Club, 529 14th St. NW, 13th Floor, Washington, DC

Admission is free, but seating is limited. See IEP Web page: http://iep.gmu.edu.
To reserve your spot, please email Drew Clark: iep.gmu@gmail.com.

About the Information Economy Project:
The Information Economy Project at George Mason University sits at the intersection of academic research and public policy, producing peer-reviewed scholarly research, as well as hosting conferences and lectures with prominent thinkers in the Information Economy. The project brings the discipline of law and economics to telecommunications  policy. More information about the project is available at http://iep.gmu.edu.

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The Candidates’ Actual Legislative Priorities

by on September 10, 2008 · 2 comments

Over on the WashingtonWatch.com blog, I’ve recently concluded a review of each of the presidential candidates’ actual legislative work during the current Congress. It’s a window onto their priorities that has the advantage of being actual data, not just what they say about themselves.

Here are the posts for Senator Obama and Senator McCain, And here’s the one for Senator Biden.

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“‘Local’ is just one set of ripples on the lake of information”

by on September 9, 2008 · 10 comments

Over on the Poynter Online blog, Amy Gahran has a very smart piece on some of the confusion surrounding debates about “media localism.” In her essay asking “How Important is Local, Really?”, she challenges some of the assumptions underlying the Knight Foundation’s new Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.

I particularly like her line about how, “in many senses, ‘local’ is just one set of ripples on the lake of information — especially when it comes to ‘news.’ And for many people, it’s not even the biggest or most important set of ripples.” That is exactly right. Today, local choices are just a few more choices along the seemingly endless continuum of media choices. It’s foolish to assume that “media localism” in a geographic sense is as important now as it was in the past for the reasons Gahran makes clear in her essay:

I’m glad that the Knight Foundation is asking basic questions about what kinds of information people need support community and democracy. However, I question the Commission’s strong focus on geographically defined local communities. It seems to me that with the way the media landscape has been evolving, geographically defined local communities are becoming steadily less crucial from an information perspective. I suspect that defining communities by other kinds of commonalities (age, economic status/class, interests, social circles, etc.) would be far more relevant to more people — although more complex to define.

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Dead Air Walking: Prisoners Face Loss of TV After Digital Transition

by on September 8, 2008 · 10 comments

Haven’t they been punished enough?  Inmates in our nation’s prisons may find themselves without over-the-air television next February, unless Congress acts to fill a gap in the subsidy program for TV converter boxes.  That’s right: according to a story run last week by Associated Press, “the upcoming switch to digital television is presenting a challenge to prison officials who want to make sure prison TVs are up and running. When broadcasters make the switch in February, televisions that aren’t hooked up to cable, satellite or a converter box will be reduced to static”.

The reason?   Under the converter box subsidy program established by Congress, prisons are not eligible for the $40 subsidy for the converter boxes needed to let old televisions pick up broadcast signals after next February.  That means — unless prison officials somehow find $40 elsewhere — or unless their penal institution has a cable or satellite subscription — incarcerated murderers and thieves will be forced to watch static.

Honest to god.  I’m not making this up.  This was an actual news story.  The AP story went on to explain that “[w]hile TV might seem like an undeserved luxury for inmates, both prison officials and prisoners said the tube provides a sense of normalcy.”

Oh, now I understand.  “Normalcy.”  I didn’t understand that prison is supposed to provide a sense of normalcy.

Excuse me while I sit in stunned silence for a moment.

One interesting side note.   I found the AP story on the website of WYFF in Greenville, SC, which — perhaps not surprisingly — is an over-the-air TV station.  Go figure.

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Privacy Solutions (Part 2): Adblock Plus

by on September 8, 2008 · 16 comments

By Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka

The goal of our “Privacy Solution Series,” as we noted in the first installment, is to detail the many “technologies of evasion” (i.e., user-empowerment or user “self-help” tools) that allow web surfers to better protect their privacy online—and especially to defeat tracking for online behavioral advertising purposes.  These tools and methods form an important part of a layered approach that, in our view, provides an effective alternative to government-mandated regulation of online privacy.

In this second installment in this series, we will highlight Adblock Plus (ABP), a free downloadable extension for the Firefox web browser (as well as for the Flock browser, though we focus on the Firefox version here).

Adblock Plus

Purpose: The primary purpose of Adblock Plus is to block online ads from being downloaded and displayed on a user’s screen as they browse the Web.  In a broad sense, this functionality might be considered a “privacy” tool by those who consider it an intrusion upon, or violation of, their “privacy” to be “subjected” to seeing advertisements as they browse the web.  But if one thinks of privacy in terms of what others know about you, Adblocking is not so much about “privacy” as about user annoyance (measured in terms of distracting images cluttering webpages or simply in terms of long download times for webpages).  In this sense, ABP may not qualify as a “technology of evasion,” strictly speaking.  But, as explained below the fold, ABP does allow its users to “evade” some forms of online tracking by blocking the receipt of some, but not all, tracking cookies.

Cost: Like almost all other Firefox add-ons, both the ABP extensions and the filter subscriptions on which it relies (as described below) are free.

Popularity / Adoption: While there are a wide variety of ad-blocking tools available, Adblock Plus is far and away the leader.  ABP has proven enormously popular since its release in November 2005 as the successor to Adblock, which was first developed in 2002 and reached over 10,000,000 downloads before being abandoned by its developer and even today garners nearly 40,000 downloads a week.  This history of Adblock provides further details.

ABP was named one the 100 best products of 2007 by PC World magazine and is now the #1 most downloaded add-on for Firefox with over 500,000 weekly downloads, up significantly for just a few months.  In a blog post last month, ABP creator Wladimir Palant estimated that “no more than 5% of Firefox users have Adblock Plus installed,” but that percentage is bound to grow larger as more people discover Adblock.  As one indicator of ABP’s popularity, the number of Google searches for “Adblock” has nearly eclipsed the number of searches for “identity theft,” which seems like a far more serious concern than having to look at web ads. Continue reading →

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Software and a Digression

by on September 8, 2008 · 4 comments

My recent comments on a developers experiment in combatting software piracy, posted here.

And an absolutely brilliant adventure in free speech marital event planning, here (OT).

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Aliens Love Firefox Too!

by on September 7, 2008 · 16 comments

Crop circles prove it!

Firefox crop circles

(Note: For the record, I do not believe extraterrestrials are visiting Earth).

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Grouping Recent Net Books: Internet Optimists vs. Pessimists

by on September 6, 2008 · 47 comments

[Note: I updated this discussion and chart in a subsequent essay. See: “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society.”]

A number of very interesting books have been released over the past year or two which debate how the Internet is reshaping our culture and the economy. I’ve reviewed a couple of them here but I have been waiting to compile a sort of mega-book review once I found a sensible way to conceptually group them together. I’m not going to have time to cover each of them here in the detail they deserve, but I think I have at least found a sensible way to categorize them. For lack of better descriptors, I’ve divided these books and thinkers into two camps: “Internet optimists” versus “Internet Pessimists.” Here’s a list of some of the individuals and books (or other articles and blogs) that I believe epitomize these two camps of thinking:

Adherents & Their Books / Writings

Internet Optimists

Internet Pessimists

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks

Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur

Chris Anderson, The Long Tail and “Free!”

Lee Siegel, Against the Machine

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

Nick Carr, The Big Switch

Cass Sunstein, Infotopia

Cass Sunstein, Republic.com

Don Tapscott, Wikinomics

Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited

Kevin Kelly & Wired mag in general

Alex Iskold, “The Danger of Free”

Mike Masnick & TechDirt blog

Mark Cuban

And here’s a rough sketch of the major beliefs or key themes that separate these two schools of thinking about the impact of the Internet on our culture and economy:

Beliefs / Themes

Internet Optimists

Internet Pessimists

Culture / Social

Net is Participatory

Net is Polarizing

Net yields Personalization

Net yields Fragmentation

a “Global village”

Balkanization

Heterogeneity / Diversity of Thought

Homogeneity / Close-mindedness

Net breeds pro-democratic tendencies

Net breeds anti-democratic tendencies

Tool of liberation & empowerment

Tool of frequent misuse & abuse

Economics / Business

Benefits of “free” (“Free” = future of media / business)

Costs of “free” (“Free” = end of media / business)

Increasing importance of “Gift economy”

Continuing importance of property rights, profits, firms

“Wiki” model = wisdom of crowds; power of collective intelligence

“Wiki” model = stupidity of crowds; errors of collective intelligence

Mass collaboration

Individual effort

So, what to make of this intellectual war? Who’s got the story right?

Continue reading →

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Free Press: Internet Too Important to Tie Up in Legal Limbo

by on September 5, 2008 · 10 comments

Communications Daily (subscription) reported today on the avalanche of lawsuits being filed challenging the FCC’s Comcast “net neutrality” order.   Four were filed this week in four different U.S. appeals circuits — the lucky court that will actually decide the case will be decided by lottery.

The story quotes Ben Scott of Free Press, the energizer rabbit of pro-regulation media groups, decrying Comcast’s appeal.  “The Internet is too important to let Comcast tie it up in legal limbo,’ he says.  “Congress should act now to pass Net Neutrality laws that clear up any uncertainty once and for all.”

Huh?  On what planet, exactly, is Free Press based?  Put aside for the moment the question of whether Comcast is responsible for the legal chaos that has ensued from the FCC’s decision to regulate the way it manages Internet traffic.   Strangely enough, when Free Press petitioned the Commission to get involved, I didn’t hear them decrying the “legal limbo” it would cause.

But even more jaw-dropping is the idea that Congress could “clear up any uncertainty” by adopting its own Internet regulations.   The mind boggles.   The last major congressional foray into communications policy was the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which spawned over half a decade of litigation.  There are still children of telecom lawyers going to college off the fees generated by that one.

And that legislation was a relative piece of chocolate cake compared to the torte of net neutrality.   Proponents of mandated neutrality — which Commissioner Robert McDowell has likened to a regulatory Rorschach test — can’t even agree on what it is.  Lord know how long it would take the courts to sort it out — if ever they are able to.

Free Press is right, of course, to worry about the endless litigation which will — and already is — being caused by FCC Internet regulation.   Rather than even more rules from Congress, however,  the solution is for the FCC to reverse course on the regulation it unwisely imposed last month.

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Privacy Solutions (Part 1): Introduction

by on September 5, 2008 · 10 comments

By Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka

Whatever ordinary Americans actually think about online privacy, it remains a hot topic inside the Beltway. While much of that amorphous concern focuses on government surveillance and government access to information about web users, many in Washington have focused on targeted online advertising by private companies as a dire threat to Americans’ privacy — and called for prophylactic government regulation of an industry that is expected to more than double in size to $50.3 billion in 2011 from $21.7 billion last year.

In 1998, when targeted advertising was in its infancy, the FTC proposed four principles as the basis for self-regulation of online data collection: notice, choice, access & security. In 2000, the Commission declared that too few online advertisers adhered to these principles and therefore recommended that Congress mandate their application in legislation that would allow the FTC to issue binding regulations. Subsequent legislative proposals (indexed by CDT by Congress here along with other privacy bills) have languished in Congress ever since. During this time self-regulation of data collection (e.g., the National Advertising Initiative) has matured, the industry has flourished without any clear harm to users and the FTC has returned to its original support for self-regulation over legislation or regulatory mandates.

But over the last year, the advocates of regulation have succeeded in painting a nightmarish picture of all-invasive snooping by online advertisers using more sophisticated techniques of collecting data for targeted advertising. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has responded cautiously by proposing voluntary self-regulatory guidelines intended to address these concerns, because the agency recognizes that this growing revenue stream is funding the explosion of “free” (to the user) online content and services that so many Americans now take for granted, and that more sophisticated targeting produces ads that are more relevant to consumers (and therefore also more profitable to advertisers).

Continue reading →

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