The AeA and the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) are merging to become the Technology Association of America.
ITAA gobbled up – er, merged with – the Government Electronics and Information Technology Association and the Cyber Security Industry Alliance earlier in the year.
Now, as to the new name: Are they really going to cover all technology? Farm technology? Construction technology? Mining? Watercraft? Plastics? Dental surgery? They seem to have moved from a name (ITAA) too narrow to include the electronics work of AeA to a name that is too broad.
And here’s the important question: . . . What URL? The Texas Apartment Association has the obvious one.
Go, domain speculators! Go!
A report prepared by the staff of the House Energy & Commerce Committee is critical of FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s leadership. Among the findings: “There are instances in which the Chairman manipulated, withheld, or suppressed data, reports, and information … in an apparent attempt to enable the Commission to regulate cable television companies.”
The report mentions that Martin’s actions “have certainly undermined the integrity of the staff. Moreover, it was done with the purpose affecting Congressional decision-making…”
Shocking.
Oh, and the report notes that there is some friction between Martin and some or all of his four fellow commissioners. The report concludes that Martin’s management style is “heavy-handed, opaque, and non-collegial,” and that his leadership has led to “distrust, suspicion, and turmoil among the five current Commissioners.”
Martin said in a statement he has merely sought to “enhance choice and competition in the market for video services.”
I completely disagree with Martin’s policy agenda when it comes to the cable industry.
And I would certainly like to see integrity and collegiality at the FCC.
But my first glance at the report reminded me of a former FCC chairman during the Clinton administration who had the audacity to try to enhance choice and competition in the market for telephone services. His name was Reed E. Hundt. And his telephone policy agenda was as bad as Martin’s cable policy agenda. Continue reading →
I attended the Federal Trade Commission hearing about the state of intellectual property on Friday, and wrote a piece about the event, “With US Patent Overhaul Dead, Agencies Ponder Changes As Industry Debates Role Of ‘Trolls’.”
The piece appeared in ip-watch.org, the excellent Geneva-based publication run by my friend and former colleague William New. Those of you who aren’t familiar yet with ip-watch.org should definitely begin following it: it’s a must-read for practitioners, advocates and activists concerned about all forms of intellectual property.
The NY Times reports today that towns in Connecticut are shuttering their websites because they’re finding it too costly to comply with a new state transparency law that requires towns with websites to “post minutes from public meetings on the site within seven days of the meeting and must give residents at least 24 hours notice of special meetings through the site.” Seems a bit drastic to me. The story explains:
“We decided we couldn’t do what was required right away,” said Frank J. Chiaramonte, first selectman of Harwinton. “So we shut down our site.”
In many small towns, volunteers run the Web sites. Asking the volunteers to type up the minutes of a meeting and to then also put the minutes online,all within seven days, is too much to ask, Mr. Chiaramonte said.
“Some commissions still do minutes in longhand,” he added.
Here’s a tip that may or may not help towns comply with the law: record the public meeting with a cheap MP3 recorder and upload the file to the site. Boom. Instant transparency. Want to get a little fancier? Shoot the MP3 to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and for a few dollars have the audio transcribed or turned into minutes. Or set up a wiki and let citizens do it.
Like I said, these suggestions might not produce official minutes needed to comply with the law, but it’s the kind of measure I’d like to see instead of shuttering whole sites. One other thing, with storage and recording equipment so cheap, there’s no reason why every public meeting in the country, from the federal government to school boards, shouldn’t be online within a day or two. Enough excuses, folks.
Ken Ferree and I just filed an amicus brief with the D.C. Circuit in what could be among the most important First Amendment cases involving economic regulation in years: Comcast’s challenge to the FCC’s cap on the maximum size of a cable operator’s nationwide subscriber-audience. While few may feel righteous indignation at limitations targeted at large corporations such as Comcast or Time Warner, the larger principle at stake here is deeply important: Will the First Amendment provide a meaningful check on what USC law professor Chris Yoo has called “architectural censorship” (i.e., so-called “structural” regulations that “have the unintended consequence of reducing the quantity, quality, and diversity of media content”).
In a nutshell, we argue that that:
- The provisions of the 1992 Cable Act authorizing the FCC to impose a “cable cap” are outdated in world of media abundance and vibrant platform competition.
- Because cable is no longer the unique “bottleneck” or “gatekeeper” that it was in 1992, these statutory provisions (not just the FCC’s 30% rule) must be subject to strict scrutiny under the First Amendment as a limitation on free speech.
- Because there are “less restrictive means” of ensuring cable operators do not impede the flow of video programming to consumers, the court should strike down these provisions.
- Even if the court upholds the statute, it should nonetheless strike down the cap issued by the FCC in December 2007 (30% of all Multichannel Video Programming (MVPD) subscribers as based on an outdated model of the video marketplace.
I encourage you to read our brief (below). I’ve provided a summary below, along with some additional commentary we just couldn’t cover under our 3500 word limit.
Strict Scrutiny. Yoo’s article Architectural Censorship and the FCC is essential reading for anyone who believes that government regulations on the size and shape of the “soapbox” can have huge effects on speech itself. Yoo argues that the First Amendment should check this kind of regulation–however “content-neutral” it might seem–under “strict scrutiny”, which requires that the government show that a regulation is the “least restrictive means” available for advancing a “compelling government interest.” But Yoo ultimately concludes (pp. 713-718, PDF pp. 45-50) that, under existing precedent, most “architectural censorship will be effectively insulated from meaningful judicial review.” Continue reading →
It’s been a big year for tech policy books. Several important titles were released in 2008 that offer interesting perspectives about the future of the Internet and the impact digital technologies are having on our lives, culture, and economy. Back in September, I compared some of the most popular technology policy books of the past five years and tried to group them into two camps: “Internet optimists” vs. “Internet pessimists.” That post generated a great deal of discussion and I plan on expanding it into a longer article soon. In this post, however, I will merely list what I regard as the most important technology policy books of the past year.
What qualifies as an “important” tech policy book? Basically, it’s a title that many people in this field are currently discussing and that we will likely be talking about for many years to come. I want to make it clear, however, that merely because a book appears on this list it does not necessarily mean I agree with everything said in it. In fact, I found much with which to disagree in my picks for the two most important books of 2008, as well as many of the other books on the list. [Moreover, after reading all these books, I am more convinced than ever that libertarians are badly losing the intellectual battle of ideas over Internet issues and digital technology policy. There’s just very few people defending a “Hands-Off-the-Net” approach anymore. But that’s a subject for another day!]
Another caveat: Narrowly focused titles lose a few points on my list. For example, as was the case in past years, a number of important IP-related books have come out this year. If a book deals exclusively with copyright or patent issues, it does not exactly qualify as the same sort of “tech policy book” as other titles found on this list since it is a narrow exploration of just one set of issues that have a bearing on digital technology policy. The same could be said of a book that deals exclusively with privacy policy, like Solove’s Understanding Privacy. It’s an important book with implications for the future of tech policy, but I demoted it a bit because of its narrow focus.
With those caveats in mind, here are my Top 10 Most Important Tech Policy Books of 2008 (and please let me know about your picks for book of the year):
Continue reading →
George Will’s weekly Washington Post column focuses on the Fairness Doctrine and calls out those on the Left who would support its reinstatement:
Because liberals have been even less successful in competing with conservatives on talk radio than Detroit has been in competing with its rivals, liberals are seeking intellectual protectionism in the form of regulations that suppress ideological rivals. If liberals advertise their illiberalism by reimposing the fairness doctrine, the Supreme Court might revisit its 1969 ruling that the fairness doctrine is constitutional. The court probably would dismay reactionary liberals by reversing that decision on the ground that the world has changed vastly, pertinently and for the better.
Mr. Will was kind enough to cite my new book with Brian Anderson, A Manifesto for Media Freedom [more info here] on the explosion of media outlets and options since the Supreme Court’s disastrous 1969 Red Lion decision, which blessed the Fairness Doctrine. Some of those stats: today there are about 14,000 radio stations, twice as many as in 1969; 18.9 million subscribers to satellite radio, up 17 percent in 12 months; and that 86 percent of households with either cable or satellite television receive an average of 102 of the 500 available channels.
No need to be putting the “Unfairness Doctrine” back on the books with unprecedented abundance like that.
The memo from John Podesta articulating the transition’s “‘Seat at the Table’ Transparency Policy” is redacted. Redactions are kind of a red flag to transparency fiends, but they’re probably appropriate (a name, an email address).
The overall “Seat at the Table” program is a decent step forward. You can get a look at the documents submitted to the transition, search them (somewhat clumsily – and not more often than once every 15 seconds), and comment on them.
So carry on transparently, Change.gov!
The 3rd meeting of the United Nation’s Internet Governance Forum (IGF) met this week in Hyderabad, India. One of the concerning takeaways is the increased posturing by governments to assert greater control over the Internet.
For the uninitiated, the IGF is an outgrowth of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), and is meant to be a multi-stakeholder “talk shop” on public policy issues related to the development and governance of the Internet. It’s the forum for governments and social policy agendas, whereas ICANN is meant to be a technical body for coordinating the Internet’s naming system.
The U.S. had advocated for a minimal role for the United Nations and IGF, while many governments want to assert more control then they possess at ICANN. A compromise was struck at the final WSIS meeting in Tunis – “Enhanced Cooperation” – in order to defer choosing between existing or new mechanisms.
As my colleague Steve DelBianco describes it, it’s sort of like the way he handled his teenage son when he nagged him about getting a new car to drive: work on ‘Enhanced Transportation’ instead.
Steve and NetChoice work to avoid a new mechanism for Internet Governance that’s designed by, and for, governments. Instead, preferring on Enhanced Cooperation within existing mechanisms.
Yet there’s danger on the horizon. My colleague Mark Blafkin reports in this blog post that at the Hyderabad meeting, politicians were spouting populist rhetoric about returning control of the Internet to “the people.”
Everton Lucero, the Brazilian representative to ICANN’s Government Advisory Council (GAC) delivered a beautiful speech filled with inspiring rhetoric about returning Internet Governance back to the concept of “We the People” and taking the power out of the hands of the “nobles and landlords.” Unfortunately, that is all it was: a beautiful speech that ignored reality in an attempt to grab the power to control the Internet and censor content. Brazil’s government has shown an increasing distaste for Freedom of Speech, especially on the Internet. The government had a recent documentary exposing some of the most egregious efforts at political censorship of the press pulled from local television.
Continue reading →
First, Jim Harper would kill me if I didn’t begin this post by mentioning that I’ll be speaking at a Cato Institute lunch panel entitled, “Just Give Us the Data! Prospects for Putting Government Information to Revolutionary New Uses,” on Wednesday, Dec. 10, along with Ed Felten of Princeton and Gary Bass of OMB Watch. RSVP here. That said, I want to talk about CTOs.
A while back I engaged in a debate about whether Barack Obama’s promise to appoint a national chief technology office should be feared. I think the question turns on whether this person will be CTO of the United States or CTO of the U.S. Federal Government. While I personally believe the former should be feared, the latter should be welcomed.
The good news is that in all of Obama’s pronouncement’s on the matter the position has always been described as having a brief to open the government by employing online tools. Here’s how the position is described in Obama’s campaign position paper on technology:
Bring Government into the 21st Century: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will use technology to reform government and improve the exchange of information between the federal government and citizens while ensuring the security of our networks. Obama and Biden believe in the American people and in their intelligence, expertise, and ability and willingness to give and to give back to make government work better. Obama will appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices.
To me this sounds more like a Chief Transparency Officer, and that’s a good thing. Most federal government websites are terrible relative to the state of the art. Any effort to make them as useful or informative as the barackobama.com website should be welcomed. We can see the beginning of this transformation at the new change.gov site for the Obama transition team.
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.