July 2009

“PointSmart. ClickSafe.” Online Safety Task Force Report Released

by on July 8, 2009 · 13 comments

Point Smart Click Safe report coverA major new online child safety task report by the “Point Smart. Click Safe.” Blue Ribbon Working Group has just been released. First, some background. In June 2007, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), the principal trade association of the cable industry in the United States, announced “Cable Puts You in Control: PointSmart. ClickSafe.” a new campaign by its members to offer parents assistance in keeping their children safe online.   As part of the initiative, the NCTA hosted a major online child safety summit and also announced the formation of the “Point Smart. Click Safe. Blue Ribbon Working Group” in partnership with the Internet KeepSafe Coalition (iKeepSafe) and Common Sense Media. These three organizations, along with the cable industry’s “Cable in the Classroom” program, agreed to bring together a collection of online safety experts from many disciplines to study these issues and develop a set of “best practice” recommendations that could be implemented across the Internet industry. [Disclosure: It was my pleasure to serve as a member of this blue ribbon working group.]

Today, the “Point Smart. Click Safe.” working group produced its final report and concluded that:

Ensuring children’s online safety is a difficult and complex task that calls for input from and action by a wide variety of stakeholders. There is no “silver bullet”—no single technology or approach that has proved effective. Rather, what is required is:

  • A combination of different technologies,
  • Continuing digital literacy education for parents, educators, and children, and
  • Active participation by all concerned companies, groups and individuals.

Similarly, a singular focus on safety is insufficient. Children must learn to minimize risks but also learn appropriate and ethical behaviors in this digital world. In addition, they need an understanding of media literacy, in order to be able to think critically about the content they consume and increasingly create. Therefore, best practices must be part of a larger effort to provide an entertaining, educational, and safe experience for children.

Compared to previous online child safety task forces, which I will discuss in a subsequent post, the major contribution of this task force was its focus on detailed industry best practices that various online providers could adopt to help parents, policymakers, and law enforcement better keep kids safe online. As the working group’s final report noted:

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Biting the handsets that connect the world

by on July 8, 2009 · 17 comments

US Wireless Bandwidth per capita 2000-08Over the July 4 weekend, relatives and friends kept asking me: Which mobile phone should I buy? There are so many choices.

I told them I love my iPhone, but all kinds of new devices from BlackBerries and Samsungs to Palm’s new Pre make strong showings, and the less well-known HTC, one of the biggest innovators of the last couple years, is churning out cool phones across the price-point and capability spectrum. Several days before, on Wednesday, July 1, I had made a mid-afternoon stop at the local Apple store. It was packed. A short line formed at the entrance where a salesperson was taking names on a clipboard. After 15 minutes of browsing, it was my turn to talk to a salesman, and I asked: “Why is the store so crowded? Some special event?”

“Nope,” he answered. “This is pretty normal for a Wednesday afternoon, especially since the iPhone 3G S release.”

So, to set the scene: The retail stores of Apple Inc., a company not even in the mobile phone business two short years ago, are jammed with people craving iPhones and other networked computing devices. And competing choices from a dozen other major mobile device companies are proliferating and leapfrogging each other technologically so fast as to give consumers headaches. Continue reading →

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Tennessee Enacts Flawed Cyberharassment Law

by on July 7, 2009

The painful issue of cyberbullying has recently taken center stage in the ongoing debate about online child safety. Last week I wrote about Lori Drew’s acquittal on charges related to Megan Meier’s tragic suicide, suggesting that the judge in the case was right to overturn her conviction on a very expansive reading of the federal anti-hacking statute. While I think that decision was necessary on legal grounds, it’s sure to add “fuel to the fire” of calls for “action” in Congress.  Thus, I emphasized that observers of the case need to separate their understandable outrage from the from the questions of (1) whether that statute was properly applied and (2) how the law should treat such cases in the future.

On the second question, Adam and I recently released a major entitled, “Cyberbullying Legislation: Why Education is Preferable to Regulation.”  We distinguish among:

  1. Cyberbullying: kid-on-kid abuse online
  2. Cyberharassment generally: people of all ages using the Internet to harass each other
  3. Adult-on-kid cyberharassment: For example, Lori Drew’s alleged (but still unclear) role in the Megan Meier case

In a nutshell, we argue that education is the better approach to cyberbullying (Problem #1)—an approach taken by a bill introduced in the Senate by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and in the House by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) .  We go on to argue that, while it would be difficult to create criminal sanctions for cyberharassment generally (Problem #2) without infringing free speech and due process rights, it might be possible to craft laws narrowly tailored to cyberharassment of kids by adults (Problem #3). Continue reading →

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Like the Terminator, Video Game Censorship Efforts Just Won’t Die

by on July 7, 2009 · 3 comments

Terminator

He Wants to Terminate Your First Amendment Rights

Robert Corn-Revere, a partner with the law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine and one of America’s greatest living defenders of the First Amendment, has a new essay up on the Media Institute website entitled “The Terminator Cometh.” Corn-Revere takes on the former Terminator himself, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who along with other Calif. lawmakers, has asked the Supreme Court to review a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision holding that a California video game statute was unconstitutional. (More background in my previous post here). California’s decision to appeal the law up to the Supreme Court [petition is here] sets up a potential historic First Amendment decision (if they Court agrees to take the case, that is). Corn-Revere points out why this case is so important:

In seeking review, California is asking the Supreme Court to reverse 60 years of First Amendment jurisprudence and to hold that “excessively violent” material — whatever that may be –“deserves no constitutional protection.” It is also asking the Court to relieve government from actually having to demonstrate the purported harmfulness of speech it seeks to regulate, but instead to defer to “reasonable inferences” and “legislative judgments.”

BCR

The John Connor of Your First Amendment Freedoms

In other words, Corn-Revere notes, “the state is asking the Court simply to lower the bar so that protected speech may be regulated based on legislative whim.” He continues:

Thus, like the Terminator, no matter how many times you kill it, the government drive that motivates these laws keeps on going and going until it achieves its programmed goal. If California is successful, it will open the door to regulate not just video games, but a wide range of speech that is currently protected under the First Amendment.

Corn-Revere is right. The ramifications of this case could be profound. As I pointed out in my previous essay on this case:

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Three Cheers for Information Abundance!

by on July 6, 2009 · 24 comments

In April 2008, L. Gordon Crovitz, the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, launched his “Information Age” column with a brilliant piece entitled “Optimism and the Digital World” (which Adam lauded here). Crovitz noted the problem of “information overload,” then creeping into the public consciousness, but was unabashed in his optimism:

My own bias is that as information becomes more accessible, individuals gain choice, control and freedom. Established institutions – governments, large companies and special-interest groups – need to work harder to justify their authority. As information and knowledge spread, financial and human capital become more global and more competitive. The uncertainties and dislocations from new technology can be wrenching, but genies don’t go back into bottles.

The First Law of Technology says that “with every change in technology that affects consumer behavior, we always overestimate the impact in the short term, but then underestimate the full impact over the long term.”

Crovitz picks up where he left off in today’s column: “Information Overload? Relax:  We survived copy machines. We’ll survive Twitter.”

Our era in the information age is a transition period of learning how to navigate information abundance. Rather than pitch our BlackBerrys and iPhones into the sea, imagine the benefits once we have figured out how to manage the chaos of endless data and routine multitasking, a process that will help refine our judgment about information and refocus our attention on what’s truly important….

Humans adapt, so we’ll learn how to live with information overabundance. Young people growing up multitasking are already less anxious about using technology and may well cope better than those of us in older generations. They have no choice but to get more sophisticated at separating the important from the unimportant and the authoritative from the unreliable, even while sampling from among many new kinds of information tools…

Young people will cope first as we all evolve to become more sophisticated, less anxious users of information.

Crovitz also notes, with approval, GMU economist Tyler Cowen’s new book, “Create Your Own Economy,” which Cord blogged about here. I recently heard Cowen talk about the book and thoroughly enjoyed the talk.

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Thank God the Euro-crats are Saving Us from a Browser “Monopoly”

by on July 5, 2009 · 9 comments

Really, what would we do without European antitrust regulators protecting us from the evils of browser innovation? If Microsoft was allowed to actually bundle its Internet Explorer browser alongside its operating system we might actually do something really crazy… like perhaps try it! After all, the latest browser stats make it pretty clear most of us have a choice and that fewer and fewer of us rely on IE. As Erick Schonfeld noted on Tech Crunch today:

The new browser wars on on. More than a decade after Microsoft killed off Netscape with Internet Explorer, competition in the browser market has never been stronger. Just last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5, which has now been downloaded nearly 14 million times. Earlier in June, Apple released Safari 4. In March, Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer 8, and Google came out with a speedier beta of its Chrome browser. Some early data is coming in showing relative market share and how fast people are upgrading. If you look at the chart above from Statcounter, it indicates that since March Internet Explorer has lost 11.4 percent market share to other browsers. [..] Where did that go? It went to Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. Nearly 5 percent of that, or about half, went to Firefox 3.0, which currently has 27.6 percent market share. That doesn’t count last week’s upgrade.

08-09 browser stats

Alas, as I pointed out in my essay a few weeks ago (“European Regulators Think Consumers Too Stupid to Know How to Download a Different Browser“), some Euro-crats still seem to believe that changing browsers requires great detective skills to unearth alternatives.  It’s just pure poppycock and yet another sad example of how antitrust law is usually hopelessly behind the times and has absolutely nothing to do with protecting consumers or fostering innovation.

Now, please excuse me while I get back to surfing the Net via Firefox and Chrome (and Opera on my mobile phone). My God, how did I ever find these browser alternatives!

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WashingtonWatch.com Blog, Year 2

by on July 5, 2009 · 5 comments

The WashingtonWatch.com blog is entering its second year.

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Twitter Goes Ad-Supported, Surprising No One

by on July 5, 2009 · 5 comments

ReadWriteWeb notes that, after much speculation as to how Twitter would find a business model to support its burgeoning social network, the red-hot start-up is now, finally, showing ads. This anti-climax is almost like Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of the not-so-subtly-named QUEEN, finally revealing that he was gay in 1989:  Everybody saw it coming but wondered what took so long!

The flamboyant Mercury waited until AIDS had nearly finished him to admit the obvious (and, sadly, died shortly thereafter). For Twitter, though, embracing advertising is not the end but the beginning. Twitter’s growing popularity has meant little to the company other than increased costs. But now advertising will let Twitter “monetize” its success, while empowering users to “vote” for Twitter without having to pay a cent for the service.

I suspect that Twitter has waited till now to start showing ads—and that venture capital investors were willing to fund Twitter during this stage—because it seemed to make sense to “build critical mass” first, before trying to monetize viewership.  This has been, in principle, Facebook’s strategy, too, as I’ve discussed.

By following in the footsteps of so many other ad-supported titans of the Internet—from Yahoo! to Google and everyone in between—Twitter may finally have started to grow up. The next step in its evolution will be allowing advertisers to target ads to users based on their Tweets, which will increase the profitability of ads on the site. After that, Twitter will face pressure to offer advertisers more sophisticated forms of targeting, such as targeting ads to users based on their browsing “behavior” (other sites they’ve looked at). Just imagine the outcry!

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Music as Technology, Innovation & Part of Human Evolution

by on July 3, 2009 · 5 comments

Check out “Magic Flute: Primal Find Sings of Music’s Mystery” in yesterday’s WSJ. The article describes the development of music as a central part of what Jacob Bronowski called the “Ascent of Man“:

“I believe that before we evolved language, our communication was more musical than it is now,” says cognitive archaeologist Steven Mithen at the University of Reading in England, author of “The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body.” Unlike Darwin, Dr. Mithen is convinced that music was crucial to human survival. “Using music to express emotion or build a sense of group belonging would have been essential to the function of human society, especially before language evolved prior to modern humans.”

The discovery of the world’s oldest musical instrument—a 35,000-year-old flute made from a wing bone—highlights a prehistoric moment when the mind learned to soar on flights of melody and rhythm.

Researchers announced last week in Nature that they had unearthed the flute from the Ice Age rubbish of cave bear bones, reindeer horn and stone tools discarded in a cavern called Hohle Fels near Ulm, Germany. No one knows the melodies that were played in this primordial concert hall, which sheltered the humans who first settled Europe. The delicate wind instrument, though, offers evidence of how music pervaded daily life eons before iTunes, satellite radio and Muzak.

…the ability to create musical instruments reflects a profound mental awakening that gave these early humans a crucial edge over the more primitive Neanderthal people who lived in the same epoch. “The expansion of modern humans hinged in part on new ways of storing symbolic information that seemed to confer an advantage on these people in competition with Neanderthals,” Dr. Conard says.

To Dr. Patel, music-making was a conscious innovation, like the invention of writing or the control of fire. “It is something that we humans invented that then transformed human life,” he says. “It has a profound impact on how individual humans experience the world, by connecting us through space and time to other minds.”

If even something as central to our daily lives as music is, in fact the result of technological innovation over time and if technology can, as with music, change the way we think, communicate and build communities, I can’t help but wonder:  What will our descendants think thousands of years from now as they look back on the rise of today’s web and social networking technologies? If nothing else, this sense of perspective should make us better appreciate how important the development of communications media really is to the future of the human species.

Impossible as it is to predict how that staggeringly complex process will unfold—e.g., will Google make us smarter or stupider?—I’ll just humbly suggest that, rather than try to tinker with the future course of the species by trying to fine-tune public policy today to produce the “right” outcome, we would do better to follow the same principle that has guided the medical profession for 24 centuries: First, Do No Harm. In other words, if we don’t know what the effects of regulatory intervention in new media will be in the long-term, we’d be better off to leave well enough alone.

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Alcohol Liberation Front 9: July 14 at Science Club

by on July 3, 2009 · 2 comments

Come join us for one of our semi-regular happy hours as we celebrate the Digital Revolution (while also denouncing the scourge of centralizing, totalitarian Digital Jacobinism).

All those interested in technology, the freedom of technology and technologies of freedom are welcome.  We’ll be at the Science Club at 1136 19th St NW, Washington DC from 5:30-8 pm.

RSVP on Facebook today!

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