September 2009

For some time now here at the TLF, we have been documenting the track record of various government-owned or subsidized utility projects — municipal wi-fi projects, locally-owned telecom ventures, city or state fiber projects, and so on.  We’ve attempted to see if the rhetoric matches the reality when it comes to the grandiose promises made about government investment or ownership of communications or broadband networks being our ticket to high-tech paradise.

The results?  Well, the record speaks for itself.  It’s been one miserable failure after another.  And yet the high-tech pork barrel rolls on and taxpayers are all too often stuck picking up the tab.

I just wanted to make everyone aware of the fact that I finally got around to collecting most of our essays on the subject here into an “Ongoing Series” page that will be permanently housed here.  (As far as I can tell, we’re up to about 18 or 19 installments).  I encourage my TLF contributors to help me contribute entries to the series and I also invite our readers to continue to submit examples of these experiments so we can continue to document their failure.  Of course, if there are success stories, we’d like to hear about those too.  But that will likely be a much shorter series!

Over at Ars Technica, Matt Lasar does a nice job pointing out how the FCC’s quarterly indecency complaint totals have again been inflated by one group: the Parents Television Council. This is something Lasar has written about before and he’s one of the few journalists who continues to ask sharp questions about the ongoing manipulation of these statistics by PTC. As Lasar notes in his latest piece:

for the first quarter of this year, show the viewers relatively calm at 578 complaints in January, then 505 in February, followed by 179,997 in March? 179,997? Um, did we miss something? Did television really get that much more indecent in March? No worries. In these situations, we know what to do. We go over and check out the Parents Television Council‘s website. And sure enough, there’s a plausible instigator—a PTC viewer action alert crusade against a March 8 episode of the animated comedy show the PTC just loves to hate, Fox TV’s Family Guy.

This “complaint box stuffing” is something I wrote quite a bit about in the past, especially in my 2005 paper, “Examining the FCC’s Complaint-Driven Broadcast Indecency Enforcement Process.” As I pointed out there, “The PTC’s increasingly effective use of computer-generated campaigns against specific TV programs is a leading factor in explaining the large jump in indecency complaints in recent years.” Specifically, as I noted in that paper (as well as a Supreme Court filing with my friends at CDT), the FCC quietly and without major notice made two methodological changes to its tallying of broadcast indecency complaints in 2003 & 2004 that PTC  requested: Continue reading →

Today I was invited to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to testify at one of the agency’s Broadband Working Group workshops. This particular workshop was on “Broadband Consumer Context,” which focused on “a range of challenges and opportunities as the internet becomes a focal point for commercial transactions, social networking, and a host of activities pertaining to information gathering and exchange.”

I was asked to address the issue of whether there is a relationship between online safety concerns and broadband uptake. In my testimony, I noted that, in my 15 years of research in this area, I have never unearthed any substantive empirical evidence suggesting a correlation between parental concerns about online activity and overall household broadband uptake. I have seen occasional anecdotal news stories discussing the concerns some parents have had about their kids online that led them to reject online connectivity, but these stories have been exceedingly rare (and I haven’t seen any in recent memory).

I also argued that I did not think it at all surprising that such anecdotes are harder to find, or that empirical evidence on this front seems non-existent. I argued that there were four logical explanations for why parental concerns about online safety haven’t “moved the broadband needle” much in the negative direction:

  1. Not every home has children present
  2. Parents use a variety of household media rules to control media & Internet usage
  3. A vibrant marketplace of parental control technologies exists
  4. Likely that most parents believe that the benefits of broadband outweigh the potential downsides

For all the details on each of those, read my entire testimony or check out the presentation embedded below that I made to the FCC today. Continue reading →

My PFF colleagues Berin Szoka and Adam Thierer have written many times about the quid pro quo by which advertising supports free online content and services: somebody must pay for all the supposedly “free” content on the Internet. There is no free lunch!

Here are two two recent examples I came across of the quid pro quo being made very apparent to users.

Hulu error message

Hulu. Traditionally, broadcast media has been a “two-sided” market: Broadcasters give away content to attract audiences, and broadcasters “sell” that audience to advertisers. The same is true for Internet video. But watching Hulu over the weekend, I noticed something interesting: Adblock Plus blocked the occasional Hulu ad but every time it did so, I was treated to 30 seconds of a black screen (instead of the normal 15 second ad) showing a message from Hulu reminding me that “Hulu’s advertising partners allow [them] to provide a free viewing experience” and suggesting that I “Confirm all ad-blocking software has been fully disabled.”

Although I use AdBlock on many newspaper websites (because I just can’t focus on the articles with flashing ads next to the text), I would much rather watch a 15-second ad than wait 30 seconds for my show to resume. I think most users would feel the same way. We get annoyed by TV ads because they take up so much of our time. If Wikipedia is to be believed, there’s now an average of 9 minutes of advertisements per half-hour of television. That’s double the amount of advertising that was shown in the 1960s.

But online services such as Hulu show an average of just 37 seconds of advertising per episode. Amazingly, some shows garner ad rates 2-3 times higher than on prime-time television. Why might ad rates for online shows be higher? Because:

Continue reading →

You might have noticed that we’ve added a Tweetmeme button at the top of each TLF post showing how many times each post has been “retweeted” on Twitter. If you like a TLF post, please take a second to retweet it. Retweeting is an easy way to spread the TLF’s message that politicians should keep their hands off the ‘Net and everything else related to technology! Here are three ways you can help us with viral marketing the message of technology freedom:

  1. If you’re already signed into Twitter, clicking the green “retweet” button will take you to Twitter with a retweet ready to go (“RT @techliberation <post title> <tinyurl>”). You just have to click “Update.”
  2. You can make retweeting even easier—just one click!—by connecting your Twitter account with Tweetmeme. Just sign in to Tweetmeme with your Twitter log-in and select “Allow” to enable TweetMeme to automatically send your retweets to your Twitter account.
  3. You can tweet your comments on our posts by logging in with your Twitter account or using a Disqus account (assuming you’ve linked Twitter to your Disqus Profile). Each tweeted comment will count as a retweet of the post.

If you click the gray tweetcount button, you’ll be taken to Tweetmeme statistics about that particular post. One of my posts last week really took off, getting over 150 retweets! You can follow the TLF on twitter here and find links to individual TLF authors’ feeds here.

If you’re not already on Twitter, you can use but Tweet counts as an indicator of which TLF posts are hottest. But what are you waiting for, anyway? You’d better claim your name on Twitter before someone else does! It’s easy to set up an account and free, of course, and you can add followers from your webmail contacts. If nothing else, you can easily pipe your Tweets into Facebook as status updates. If you think Twitter is a stupid fad, Kevin Spacey and David Letterman may agree with you. But what do they really know about technology?

Interesting piece from Jeff Jarvis about “Google Bigotry,” or his belief that “media people are going after Google’s success for no good reason other than their own jealousy.”  Jarvis argues that reporters penning hard-nosed stories about Google are, in reality, just a bunch of envious cry-babies:

newspaper people will use their last drops of ink to complain about Google’s success and try to blame it for their own failures rather than changing their own businesses. ..  It’s not just that they dislike the competition – and they do, for it is a new experience for too many of them. If they were smart, they’d use Google to get more audience and make more money but they don’t know how to (or rather, they’d prefer not to change). No, the problem is that Google represents change and a new world they’ve refused to understand.

Well, yes and no.  I don’t believe that every story penned about Google by a mainstream media reporter is rooted in envy, and certainly not the one that Jarvis alludes to as prompting him to pen this piece.  Jarvis apparently received an inquiry from a French journalist at Le Monde asking for comment about “an article about Google facing a rising tide of discontent concerning privacy and monopoly.”  That doesn’t necessarily sound like an unreasonable journalistic inquiry to me. So, I’m not sure it’s fair to accuse every journalist who calls with a hard-nosed question about privacy and antitrust as being guilty of “Google bigotry.”

That being said, some journalists are likely feeling a bit miffed about Google’s recent success, thinking it comes at their expense, and, therefore, their envy might be prompting some of them to pen attack stories on the company.  I think Jarvis in on stronger ground, however, in asserting that most privacy and antitrust complaints about Google are unfounded, and also based on envy. Indeed, Berin Szoka and I have have been cataloging the complaints that we believe are driven by an irrational form of corporate envy we call “Googlephobia.”  And in prior years we saw a similar form of Microsoft-bashing at work that we still have with us today. That’s why I think Jarvis is on to something when he notes that Google-bashing represents a broader sociological phenomenon: Continue reading →

Meetup.com founder Scott Heiferman explains how Meetup is all about “The Pursuit of Community” in the New York Times.

A Meetup is about the simple idea of using the Internet to get people off the Internet. People feel a need to commiserate or get together and talk about what’s important to them. Our biggest categories are moms, small business, health support and fitness.

When we were designing the site, we were wrong about almost everything we thought people would want to use it for. I thought it would be a niche lifestyle venture, perhaps for fan clubs. I had no idea that people would form new types of P.T.A.’s, chambers of commerce or health support groups. And we weren’t thinking that anyone would want to meet about politics, but there are thousands of these Meetups.

People have organized more than 200,000 monthly Meetups in more than 100 countries. There’s nothing more powerful than a community coming together around a purpose. We spend increasingly more time in front of screens. We’re more connected technologically, but we’re less connected physically.

Heiferman’s vision of technology bringing people together in pursuit of shared interests,passions and causes, from the political to the charitable to the trivial, would have delighted Alexis de Tocqueville, whose 1835 classic Democracy in America identified voluntary association as the unique genius of the American character.

Tocqueville concluded that representative democracy had flourished in America, rather than leading to murderous despotism as it had in Tocqueville’s revolutionary France, because, among other things, Americans built a rich civic society interposed between the atomized individual and the state. Rather than suppressing political associations as factions dangerous to the health of the state, Americans embraced political associations (parties and causes), which served as “large free schools, where all the members of the community go to learn the general theory of association.” Americans would apply that art in every other walk of life, from today’s AIDS Walks or PTA meetings to groups of rock climber enthusiasts: “The art of association then becomes… the mother of action, studied and applied by all.” Tocqueville concludes: Continue reading →

I wish my local school would use this answering machine message. Too many whiney parents these days, always expecting their school or someone else to raise their kids for them.

[Hat tip: Lenore Skenazy at Free-Range Kids blog]

WordPress has experienced a major security vulnerability, with a worm making its way around the ‘Net, attacking earlier versions of WordPress. Fortunately, because of the hard work of the WordPress open source community, the current (2.8.4) and most recent (2.8.3) versions are immune. Yet as with any piece of program, some users haven’t upgraded.  In the case of WordPress (which we use at the TLF), upgrading can be difficult for sites that rely on plug-ins that aren’t always updated quickly when a new version of WordPress is released.

While my heart goes out to my fellow WordPress bloggers who may have experienced an attack, I’m just glad that, for once, the message isn’t that somehow we need the government to protect us all from cyber-catastrophes, but, instead, a little good-old-fashioned digital self-help!  From the WordPress Blog:

WordPress is a community of hundreds of people that read the code every day, audit it, update it, and care enough about keeping your blog safe that we do things like release updates weeks apart from each other even though it makes us look bad, because updating is going to keep your blog safe from the bad guys. I’m not clairvoyant and I can’t predict what schemes spammers, hackers, crackers, and tricksters will come up with with in the future to harm your blog, but I do know for certain that as long as WordPress is around we’ll do everything in our power to make sure the software is safe. We’ve already made upgrading core and plugins a one-click procedure. If we find something broken, we’ll release a fix. Please upgrade, it’s the only way we can help each other.

As with parental controls and privacy, protecting your security online begins at home. Government can help to educate and promote empowerment solutions, and industry certainly has a role to play in both, and communities like WordPress can offer invaluable support, but at the end of the day, only you can protect yourself online!

GI JoeSometimes the most revealing conversations about policy issues happen with our loved ones at the breakfast table. Although loyal TLF readers may remember my partner Michael as my “Posterboy for Advertising’s Pro-Consumer Quid Pro Quo,” he doesn’t usually get into the policy issues I cover.  But this morning, we fell into a conversation about the bitterly contentious issue of marketing to kids:

Michael: Growing up in South Korea, on a military base, we didn’t have any commercials on television. We had three channels and all they showed was public service announcements.

Sounds like paradise for anti-advertising zealots like Jeff Chester and the media reformistas who want to re-create the old media scarcity in the name of “media democracy“! Anyway:

We moved back to the U.S. when I was nine, and suddenly, during all my favorite cartoons, there were ads for toys. It was exciting—and more than a little bit overwhelming! It wasn’t just that I wanted these toys; it was that felt this incredible sense of urgency: I thought we had to go get the toys right now or they’d be gone!

What did Rousseau call his innocent man, the Noble Savage? That’s what we were: The noble savage, coming into this world of sophisticated toy advertisements.

But it didn’t take long for me to get over this initial bewilderment. My parents explained to me that we didn’t really have to go to the store right away. (They also explained to me that I couldn’t haggle with the staff at Toys ‘R Us the same way I’d haggled with street vendors back in Korea—something that utterly mystified the staff.) After one trip to Toys Toys ‘R Us, I got the toys I wanted most and, over the next few months, realized that they weren’t anywhere near as exciting as I had imagined.

After that, I enjoyed the toy ads on TV, but I lost interest in many of the toys I already had, preferring to create my own toys or play outside.

I explained that advertising of toys to kids has long been the cause celebre of anti-advertising crusaders:

Michael: But kids are acquisitive, too! How are they supposed to know about the latest toys if you can’t advertise to them? And what’s the big deal, anyway? I got used to toy ads and I think most kids would, too. The thing that’s different is incentive programs at stores.

Continue reading →