To: Hon. David Patterson, Governor, State of New York
From: Adam Thierer, life-long gamer and Senior Fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation
Date: July 17, 2008
Re: That video game bill (A. 11717/ S. 6401) you have been asked to sign
_______________________________
Dear Gov. Patterson:
I write today to ask a few questions about a measure that is currently sitting on your desk awaiting your signature. The measure (A. 11717/ S. 6401), which recently passed through the New York legislature, proposes a new regulatory regime for video games. It would include greater state-based oversight of video game labels and console controls as well as an advisory board to monitor the industry.
As a life-long gamer—and now the parent of two young gamers—this is a subject I care deeply about. I also come at this topic from an academic perspective as someone who analyzes the intersection of child safety concerns and free speech issues surrounding various types of media and communications technologies. I am the author of a frequently-updated book, Parental Controls & Online Child Safety: A Survey of Tools & Methods, which provides a comprehensive look at the many tools and methods on the market today that can help parents deal with concerns about objectionable media content.
But mostly I write you today from the perspective of someone who just enjoys games. Actually, let me clarify that: I am utterly infatuated with video games. Gaming has been a life-long passion of mine and something I have enjoyed with friends and family since I owned my very first PONG and Atari 2600 systems in the 1970s. Since then, I have owned virtually every major video game console sold in the United States. Even today, as I approach 40 years of age, I find myself sitting down many nights to enjoy games with my son and daughter on the Xbox 360 and Sony PS3 consoles that we have in our home.
Like millions of other Americans, gaming is now fully integrated into the fabric of my life and the lives of my children. It has become one of the most enjoyable media experiences for my generation and the generation of kids that we are raising. And, although I am certain that the New York legislature had the best of intentions in mind when passing this bill, I believe I speak for a great number of those other American gamers when I say that the measure on your desk is somewhat of an insult to our intelligence. Let me explain by raising a few questions about this bill, which I will argue is unnecessary, unworkable, and unconstitutional:
Continue reading →
I wanted to update readers on the micro-scandal surrounding the Progress & Freedom Foundation’s “Issues & Publications” database. As I noted on Monday, Google’s search engine automatically flagged that database as the victim of a malware attack: some unknown third party (probably as part of a large-scale attack on SQL databases that did not target us in particular) had taken advantage of a vulnerability in the PFF database to insert malcious scripts capable of infecting users’ computers. Google immediately and automatically flagged that database (and the PDF files within it) as potentially dangerous and shared that information through its Safe Browsing API with the StopBadware.org project, a “neighborhood watch” group that flags potentially dangerous sites.
I attempted to correct the impression of some readers that Google was deliberately censoring the PFF site because of our disagreements on the sensitive issue of net neutrality. Matt Cutts, a Google engineer, has explained this far better than I ever could.
I’m pleased to inform readers that Stopbadware.org removed our database from their blacklist yesterday: Continue reading →
My colleague Will Wilkinson has a great commentary on Marketplace where he points out that more H1-B visas means less inequality:
Increases in wage inequality over the past few decades is primarily a story of the supply and demand of skilled labor together with the effects of technological innovation. Wage increases tend to track improvements in the productivity of labor and gains in productivity tend to be driven by innovations that help workers do more in less time. But in recent decades, technical innovation has increased the productivity of more highly-educated workers faster than it has for less-educated workers. These growing inequalities in productivity have helped create growing inequalities in wages.
But that’s not the whole story. The American system of higher education produces skilled workers too slowly to keep up with the demand. This scarcity in the supply bids up the wages of the well-educated even more, further widening the wage gap. If we raised visa quotas on skilled labor, that would help bring supply in line with demand and reduce the wage gap between more and less skilled workers.
These days, almost everybody but their beneficiaries think agricultural subsidies are a lousy idea. They benefit a few already relatively wealthy American farmers and agribusiness firms to the detriment of poor farmers around the world. But H-1B visa restrictions are subsidies that benefit relatively rich domestic workers over their poorer foreign peers, and so it turns out many of us liberal-minded college grads are enjoying our own protectionist boost.
In this case, it seems the moral outrage is… well, we seem to be keeping it to ourselves.
Will is spot on. And he’s greeted with a cacophony of condemnation from commenters who either don’t seem to have grokked Will’s basic argument, or who make nakedly self-serving arguments of the form: I have an advanced degree, and I don’t make as much money as I’d like, therefore we need to keep the brown people out to push up my wages. This has the virtue of candor, if nothing else, but normally when people advocate positions that benefit themselves at the expense of people less fortunate than themselves, they at least have the decency to pretend that’s not what they’re doing.
What virtually all of the commenters seem to be missing is that the costs of protectionism for high-skilled Americans falls not only on immigrants who are unable to make better lives for themselves, but also on less-skilled Americans who are forced to pay higher prices for goods and services produced by high-skilled workers. That I take to be Will’s point, and hardly any of the commenters seem to have even taken note of it, much less offered a coherent response.
Of course, this isn’t terribly surprising. People are rarely rational when their own self-interest is involved. No matter how wealthy or successful you are—and the people who are effected by H1-B increases are overwhelmingly among the better-compensated workers in the wealthiest country on Earth—it’s always possible to feel beleaguered. By world and historical standards, a software engineer making $80,000 a year is obscenely wealthy. Yet apparently many such workers feel it a grave imposition to be asked to compete on a level playing field with foreign-born workers, few of whom grew up with the privileges and luxuries that most middle-class Americans enjoy as a birthright.
I’m reading yet another book about eavesdropping, Diffie and Landau’s Privacy on the Line, which covers privacy and surveillance debates from a crypto-focused standpoint. This is not surprising given that one of the co-authors, Whitfield Diffie, is one of the most famous names in cryptography research.
One of the cases it discusses, which I didn’t previously know about, is Phil Karn’s challenge to the Clinton administration’s silly export-control restrictions on cryptography software. The government required a license before cryptographic software could be exported. Karn applied for, and recieved, a license to export Bruce Schneier’s famous Applied Cryptography, a textbook on cryptography that included the source code to many important cryptographic algorithms. The government ruled, reasonably enough, that books were protected by the First Amendment and he could export Schneier’s tome.
Karn then typed the source code to one of the crypto algorithms printed in Schneier’s book, saved it on a floppy disk, and applied for permission to export that. This time the answer was different: the floppy disk was a “munition,” and could not be sent out of the country. Karn sued, and the case dragged out in federal courts through 2000, when the Clinton administration finally relented and stopped trying to control the export of cryptography software.
Continue reading →
My favorite anti-Google gadfly Scott Cleland has a post up entitled “Debunking the Google-Yahoo Antitrust Myths” in which he purports to debunk some erroneous thinking about the Google-Yahoo! deal.
Where Scott often furnishes the world with interesting ideas in an over-the-top way, here I think he’s gotten it wrong.
He walks through a series of purported “myths” about the antitrust implications of Google-Yahoo!, which got a hearing in the Senate this week. I want to walk through just a couple of them because I think he’s framing the relevant market wrongly.
Continue reading →
Over at Ars Technica, I review Bessen and Meurer’s Patent Failure. It’s a fantastic book that has had a big effect on my recent thinking about patent issues. Check it out.
The following commentary appears in the current issue of Opastco Advocate, a monthly newsletter published by the Organization for the Promotion and Advancement of Small Telecommunications Companies. Reprinted by permission.
Most Americans who have high-speed Internet can’t imagine life without broadband. How could you connect to the Internet of today without it? In today’s world, broadband is as basic as running water and electricity. And yet the U.S. is falling behind globally. As a technology reporter, I’ve been writing about the battles over broadband and the Internet for nearly a decade in Washington. Yet there is one fact about which nearly everyone seems to be in agreement: if America wants better broadband, America needs better broadband data.
That’s why I’ve recently started a new venture to collect this broadband data, and to make this data freely available for all on the Web, at http://BroadbandCensus.com.
The information and news that is available for free at BroadbandCensus.com is more important now than ever before. The FCC has just made important changes to how it will collect data from carriers. The agency may make even more significant changes in the near future. Public and private sector groups of all stripes are demanding, ever more loudly, that government take steps toward a national broadband policy. That cannot be done without solid information about broadband. Finally, many large carriers are beginning to implement plans to meter out bandwidth in tiers and with usage caps. This marketplace development makes the mission of an independent monitoring Website like BroadbandCensus.com even more critical.
Continue reading →
As Cord noted here a week ago, a letter from Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Mass.) suggesting changes to Congress’s rules governing how members may post videos to the Internet stirred a firestorm of commentary that culminated in a letter from Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a New York Times article, an NPR story, and a petition effort from the Sunlight Foundation that can be found at www.LetOurCongressTweet.com. The fact that this brouhaha sparked so much activity is a sign of how important this topic is, and now that the dust has settled a bit we can look at the issue more calmly.
Despite suggestions to the contrary during the initial frenzy, the fact is that the proposed amendments would affect only video and not Twitter or blogging. Also, the proposal, which limits pretty severely where House members may post video, is actually a loosening of current rules. It’s understandable why some folks who are sensitive about online transparency pounced on this like they did, but it’s important to get the facts straight.
That said, it’s an absolute embarrassment that current House rules restrict how representatives link to outside websites. For example, I’ve talked to staff who say that while they would like to link to their member’s constantly updated voting record on GovTrack.us or the Washington Post’s Congress Votes Database, they won’t for fear of violating House rules. (The Open House Project’s report on member web-use restrictions explains in detail how the rules that govern the web and email are based on regulations developed for snail mail.)
To me, what should be the issue is the rationale for the regulations. For example, the rules proposed by Rep. Capuano would allow members to post video to outside hosting services so long as “the official content [is] not be posted on a website or page where it may appear with commercial or political information[.]” The reason seems to be that commercial or political messages anywhere in the vicinity of the official video clip would taint the “dignity, propriety, and decorum of the House.” Capuano explains in a follow-up statement:
Apparently the Republicans spreading these lies would rather operate without rules and open the House to commercialism. Maybe they don’t care if an official video appears next to a political advertisement for Barack Obama or John McCain, creating the appearance of an endorsement. And I guess they don’t care if constituents clicking on their videos will be treated to commercials for anything you can imagine, from the latest Hollywood blockbuster to Viagra. Certainly, advertisements are a reality in today’s world and most people can distinguish. However, it is also a reality that Members of Congress who use taxpayer money to communicate with constituents should be held to the highest possible standard of independence — and the appearance of independence.
Continue reading →
Faithful readers will recall that, several months ago, I penned a 7-part “Media Metrics” series that took a hard look at the health of the media marketplace. Today, the Progress & Freedom Foundation is releasing a greatly expanded version of these essays that I have put together with my PFF colleague Grant Eskelsen. In this 100-page special report, “Media Metrics: The True State of the Modern Media Marketplace,” we begin by noting that heated debates about the state of the media marketplace continue to rage in Washington, and opinions seem to range from grim to outright apocalyptic. As we note on pg. 1:
Many people—including a large number of legislators and regulators—argue that America’s media marketplace is in a miserable state. Some claim that citizens lack choice in media outlets and that options are just as scarce as ever. Others believe that media “localism” is dead or that many groups or niches go underserved because of a lack of true “diversity” in media. Others argue that the market is hopelessly over-concentrated in the hands of a few evil media barons who are hell-bent on force-feeding us corporate propaganda. And still others say that the quality of news and entertainment in our society has deteriorated because of a combination of all of the above. It all sounds quite troubling, but is any of it true?
After taking an objective look at the true state of America’s media marketplace, we conclude that such pessimism is unwarranted. Indeed, a careful review of the facts reveals that—contrary to what those media critics suggest—we have more media choice, more media competition, and more media diversity than ever before. Indeed, to the extent there was ever a “golden age” of media in America, we are living in it today. The media sky has never been brighter and it is getting brighter with each passing year.
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.