Having covered free speech and media policy issues for many years now, one of the arguments I hear a lot is that we moderns have an unnatural fascination with murder, mayhem, and violence as well as gossip and celebrities. Social critics and proponents of media content regulation often wax nostalgic about the supposed “good ol’ days” when all we thought and talked about was enlightened and enriching topics.
It’s all complete nonsense. Anyone who has seriously studied our nation’s history — or, for that matter, the history of any country or civilization — knows that we humans have always been fascinated by the morbid and tales of debauchery, especially when those tales involve public officials or celebrities.
I was reminded of this again today when reading two articles in the Washington Post.
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Declan McCullagh has a great write-up on presumptive Democratic VP nominee Joe Biden over at CNET. Some highlights:
- Biden was one of only four Senators invited to a champagne reception with Jack Valenti for his work on the DMCA
- Surveillance legislation by Biden inspired Phil Zimmermann to write PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), an encryption program
- Biden wrote an early precursor to the USA PATRIOT Act
- Posting the anarchist cookbook online is now a felony thanks to Biden, resulting in a single conviction of a 20 year-old webmaster
- Biden proposed spending $1 billion so cops could police P2P networks
Check out the post to read more about Biden’s spotty record on tech policy.
Just to chime on Berin’s post two other things that readers ought to know: the ad revenue we generate is trivial—on the order of dozens of dollars per month—and none of us get a dime of it as individuals. Rather, the money gets plowed into shared expenses for the site, such as advertising and promotional materials, hosting costs, etc. Sonia won’t get a dime of the advertising revenue generated by the McCain ads on this site, so whatever her reasons for praising his tech agenda, the lure of dozens of dollars of McCain payola from this site wasn’t among them.
William Kennard, Obama for President Telecommunications Adviser, describes the FCC’s jurisdiction in the Comcast case as “murky” today on C-SPAN’s “The Communicators.” Kennard went on to say that enshrining net neutrality into law would be necessary to clear up this authority issue.
This is a guy who knows what he’s talking about. As a former chairman and general counsel for the FCC, he knows just as well as anyone else where the commission’s authority begins and ends.
Many folks involved in the tech policy world don’t agree with the bloggers here at TLF, who oppose network neutrality regulation. But, I’m sure everyone in the tech community would agree that we should maintain the rule of law and stop the abuse and unlawful expansion of government power—something Kennard seems to believe is happening at the FCC.
It seems as though Kevin Martin needs to hit the books and start looking into the legality of his own actions. I hope the good folks at Comcast do the same. With any luck, we’ll soon be seeing both parties in court.
A number of TLF readers seem to have leapt to certain conclusions concerning political ads shown on the site. Most recently, Garrett Dumas responded to Sonia’s post Obama vs McCain: Who deserves the tech vote? (which generally sides with McCain) as follows:
Perhaps you think this because there is a John McCain banner on your site? The “tech vote” is a non issue as it is not up to the president or his cabinet to determine the future of technology. It is market driven and whoever controls the market, controls the direction.
Garrett’s understandable confusion merits a brief explanation. The only “banner” ad on the site chosen by us is the “Crispy on the Outside” blog ad at the top right. The ads below that are placed there by Google’s “AdSense” program, which automatically decides which ads to place on a page based on how much advertisers have bid for keyword combinations that appear on that page. TLF readers will see a mix of political ads on our site until election day from both campaigns and a variety of other groups targeting keywords that appear on our blog. For example, I currently see the following ads on our blog: Continue reading →
On Wednesday, the FCC released the decision (PDF, text) it adopted back on August 1 holding that Comcast had violated the FCC’s 2005 net neutrality principles (PDF, text) by “blocking” peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic on its network using the popular program BitTorrent. Paragraphs 3-11 lay out the FCC’s (still-disputed) finding of facts.
Commissioner McDowell‘s Scaliaesquely scathing dissent (PDF pp 61-67) provides an accessible summary of the order and should be required reading for everyone on all sides of the issue. Despite having been provided with the final version of the order only the night before its release, McDowell distills the order into six key points, rejecting the Commission’s reasoning on all but one point (jurisdiction):
- Was a complaint properly brought against Comcast under FCC rules? No, FCC rules allow the kind of complaint brought against Comcast to be brought only against common carriers, which cable modem operators are not.
- Does the FCC have jurisdiction over Internet network management? Yes, under the Supreme Court’s 2005 Brand X decision.
- Does the FCC have rules governing Internet network management to enforce? No, “the Commission did not intend for the [2005] Internet Policy Statement to serve as enforceable rules but, rather, as a statement of general policy guidelines,” nor can the Commission “adjudicate this matter solely pursuant to ancillary authority.”
- What standard of review should apply? No, even assuming this case had been properly brought under enforceable rules, the Commission applied what amounts to a “strict scrutiny” standard–something unprecedented for reviewing private, rather than governmental, action.
- Was the evidence sufficient to justify the Commission’s decision? No, the “FCC does not know what Comcast did or did not do” and should have “conduct[ed] its own factual investigation” rather than relying on “apparently unsigned declarations of three individuals representing the complainant’s view, some press reports, and the conflicting declaration of a Comcast employee.” The evidence did not suggest any discriminatory motive behind Comcast’s network management techniques
- Is the decision in the public interest? No. “By depriving engineers of the freedom to manage these surges of information flow by having to treat all traffic equally as the result of today’s order, the Information Superhighway could quickly become the Information Parking Lot.” Comcast had already resolved its dispute with BitTorrent through outside arbitration. The FCC should “allow the longstanding and time-tested collaborative Internet governance groups [already working to establish processes for resolving such disputes] to continue to produce the fine work they have successfully put forth for years.”
One of the frustrating things about telecom debates is participants’ tendency to play fast and loose with the numbers. This tendency exists on both sides, but I think it’s more pronounced for the pro-regulatory side. Consider, for example, Susan Crawford’s post from last week on John McCain’s tech agenda:
First, here’s the fact: We don’t have a functioning “free market” in online access. John McCain thinks we do. That kind of magical thinking takes real practice.
Instead, we’ve got four or so enormous companies that control most of the country’s access, and they’re probably delighted that McCain is promising not to regulate them.
I can’t think of any plausible way of defining the broadband market that gives you four as the number of major firms. We have three major telephone companies and (depending on where you draw the line) somewhere between four and eight major cable companies. And that, of course, is focusing exclusively on high-speed residential service. T-Mobile and Sprint provide lower-speed wireless Internet access, and there are a number of companies that provide access to business customers.
Maybe that’s just nitpicking about the numbers, but her qualitative view of the marketplace is just as distorted:
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Nine months after Barack Obama, John McCain has unveiled his own technology plan for America. At last, both candidates can be graded for their long-term friendliness to the tech sector. You can read my analysis here, but the upshot is that Obama has multiple weaknesses, particularly when it comes to taxes, property rights, labor and government waste that harms America’s tech sector. McCain’s weakness is the transparency issue, but overall he looks better positioned than Obama on issues that matter most to innovators in the tech community.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.