Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
The Comcast-NBC deal has the traditional media world all atwitter—well, better call it aflutter. “Atwitter” is losing its old media connotations.
So the New York Times rounded up a foursome of advocates to air their views, among them Adam Thierer and yours truly.
Huzzahs and rotten fruit in the comments, please.
(And you can see from comparing our posts which of us believes in economy in the use of words.)
Today, Jim Harper and I took on Andy Schwartzman of Media Access Projects and Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge in this New York Times online debate about, “Should Consumers Fear the Comcast Deal?” Like other media critics, Schwartzman and Sohn adopt the gloom and doom tone that many worrywarts use when discussing the deal. Andy Schwartzman says “Comcast’s proposed acquisition of NBC Universal poses a genuine threat to free expression and diversity of speech in our democratic society.” And Gigi Sohn predicts that “With all that programming under its control, Comcast will have every incentive to take its shows off of the Internet and force consumers to buy a cable subscription to get online access to that programming.”
But as Jim Harper and I point out, we’ve heard such Chicken Little horror stories before. Whether it was AOL-Time Warner, News Corp-DirecTV, Sirius-XM, or whatever else, the story is always that a veritable media apocalypse awaits if the deals aren’t blocked. But it just ain’t so. As I note in my response:
Back in the real world, the sky never fell — except on the merging companies! Just two years after the deal was announced, AOL-Time Warner had lost over $100 billion and Time Warner has now spun off AOL entirely. The News Corp.-DirecTV marriage ended in divorce after just three years. And Sirius-XM flirted with bankruptcy earlier this year as listeners continue to flock to other audio options. The moral of the story: markets worked. Shareholders abandoned bad deals, new niche markets developed, and innovative digital technologies continue to revolutionize media.
And as Harper notes in response to silly claims about restricting access to content or communications, “Comcast-NBC can no more impinge on communications among Internet users than AOL-Time Warner did.” Which is to say, not at all. They would be doomed if they tried to play such games. You can’t make money or retain viewers or customers by cutting off access to content or conduit. Finally, “the genuine threat to free expression and diversity of speech” is not Comcast-NBC, as Schwartman suggests, but a government big enough to crush media companies and control media platforms as if they were their playthings.
For more details about the actual historical record, check out my recent PFF white paper: “A Brief History of Media Merger Hysteria: From AOL-Time Warner to Comcast-NBC.”
The New York Times has a great summary of yesterday’s Exploring Privacy workshop at the FTC, where Adam and I made the case that restrictive, preemptive privacy regulations affecting online advertising is likely to harm, not help, consumers. Check out Adam’s excellent summary here. Adotas notes:
… the highlight was the third panel, when Jeff Chester, executive director for the Center for Digital Democracy and an outspoken online privacy advocate, and Berin Szoka, director of the Center for Internet Freedom at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, got into a 10-minute tete-a-tete on the importance of targeting in advertising as well as journalism.
[Jeff] Chester railed against targeting in general and called for a “citizen friendly” system while Szoka the importance of targeted advertising in funding high-cost content. Szoka argued that for users to access certain content at no cost, there is a trade-off in giving up certain types of data.
Jeff and I will be “taking our show on the road” Wednesday morning with a four-way debate moderated by Rob Atkinson of ITIF, also including Howard Beales and Ari Schwartz, as well as the FTC’s Peder McGee. Given the energy level in our discussion at the FTC, this more focused panel promises to be a great discussion of how to maximize the many competing values of consumers—or, more precisely (from my perspective, anyway), how to educate and empower users to make those decisions for themselves.
So don’t miss it if you can attend (1101 K Street, Suite 610, Washington, DC), and be sure to watch the live-streaming if you can’t!
The White House announces its open government plans today, live at 11:00 am Eastern, on Whitehouse.gov.
But what about the president’s promise to run his own White House more transparently? In a post on Cato@Liberty this morning, I look into a new development on the Sunlight Before Signing promise, which he has violated more than 100 times since taking office.
At some point earlier this year, the White House began posting links on Whitehouse.gov to bills that were heading its direction, a half-measure the White House told the New York Times it would take.
I failed to notice the existence of these pages, but I think it is forgivable error. There is no uniform structure to them, and there is no link I can discover on Whitehouse.gov that would bring anyone to them.
Based on my spot-checking, they haven’t been crawled by any search engine, so the only way a person could find them is by searching on Whitehouse.gov for phrases on the yet unseen pages or by searching the House or Senate bill numbers of bills that you know to look for because they have already passed into law.
This doesn’t fulfill the spirit of the Sunlight Before Signing pledge. It doesn’t give the public an opportunity to review final bills and comment before the president signs them. I doubt if a single one of the people who cheered when President Obama made his Sunlight Before Signing pledge has visited one of these pages and commented to the president as he told them they would be able to do.
There are further curiosities: The pages themselves are undated, but their “posted” dates, which appear in search results, are sometimes well beyond the date on which they became law. A Whitehouse.gov search for H.R. 2131, which became Public Law 111-70 on October 9th, shows that it was posted for comment on October 23rd.
Is the White House posting bills for review after they’ve become law, trying to make it look like they’re providing some measure of sunlight?
Today, Berin Szoka and I both testified at the first of three Federal Trade Commission workshops on “Exploring Privacy.” Today’s all-day event featured five panel discussions, and remarks by FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour, and David C. Vladeck, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. Our TLF co-blogging colleague Jim Harper also testified on the first panel of the day on “Benefits and Risks of Collecting, Using, and Retaining Consumer Data.” I was on the second panel of the day on “Consumer Expectations and Disclosures.” And Berin was on the third panel on “Online Behavioral Advertising.” The fourth panel was on “Information Brokers” and the fifth panel was on “Exploring Existing Regulatory Frameworks.” On my panel, we discussed the usefulness of privacy polls and surveys. I attempted to make a few simple points when asked for my opinions:
As I noted in my recent paper, “A Brief History of Media Merger Hysteria: From AOL-Time Warner to Comcast-NBC,” every time a media merger is proposed we hear all sorts of silly Chicken Little predictions of impending doom. Among the more entertaining claims we hear are conspiracy theories about supposed nefarious schemes to take over the media universe and control our minds, predictions of the death of journalism or democracy, or just good ol’ fashion screw-the-consumer price hikes. But, as I showed in my paper, those predictions have always proven to be bunk once the historical record is in–which usually only takes a few years. While most media mergers do end in misery–it’s for the merging firms and their shareholders, not the public. Unforeseen technological innovations and expanding media marketplace options typically doom most media mergers, while the viewing and listening public enjoys the fruits of continued marketplace evolution.
But the critics never acknowledge any of this. And, sadly, history repeats. The media worrywarts just keep mouthing the same lines and conveniently avoid any reference to their past predictions. No one bothers looking back and trying to match up those past predictions with present day facts. I’m out to change that. I am going to attempt to keep a running inventory all the Chicken Little predictions about the Comcast-NBC Universal deal so that, a few years from now, we can look back and see how well those predictions match up with reality. I suspect that, as was true of those earlier case studies, reality will look quite different than the rhetoric we are hearing today.
To kick things off, here are some rather outlandish comments from someone who should know better — Dan Gillmor, author of the excellent 2006 book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, which I have cited quite favorably in much of my own work through the years. But when it comes to the Comcast-NBCU deal, Gillmor has gone off the deep end in an essay entitled, “Comcast-NBC: The Road Toward Control Over What We Create.” He argues:
A Comcast-NBC combination is brazenly anti-competitve and anti-democratic. It would give one company far too much ownership over not just professionally produced media but also the ways media consumers can receive it.
Worse, if approved, it could mark the tipping point in Big Media’s push to take control over the Internet itself. That’s where we need to focus our attention.
But wait, there’s more… Continue reading →
If you’re interested in supporting the cause of free markets and entrepreneurship in space, now is your chance! The Space Frontier Foundation (on whose board I sit) is wrapping up their annual fund-raising drive today (12/4) with a 1:1 donation matching program. More about the Foundation follows below in a letter from our Chairman, Bob Werb. If you are interested in supporting foundations work, today is the day to make whatever (tax-deductible) donation you can. Otherwise, you can follow the Foundation or get our NewSpace News feed on Twitter.
Bidding has begun on Comcast’s acquisition of a majority stake in NBC Universal. No, not the bidding between GE and Comcast over the terms of the sale. That was the comparatively easy part. The real bidding is over at the FCC, as various interests work to get concessions and pledges from Comcast as a condition of FCC approval of the deal. The jostling may put post-Thanksgiving Black Friday sales to shame. Everything from more kid’s shows to broadband open access mandates are potentially on the table.
And that’s if the sale is approved by the FCC at all. Groups such as Free Press called for its rejection as soon as it was announced. Commissioner Michael Copps underscored the alpine nature of the approval process, stating bluntly that the deal “faces a very steep climb with me.”
Amidst the din, however, one question has been drowned out: Why is the FCC involved in this at all? Continue reading →
If you follow privacy policy, you won’t want to miss these two great events.
First, on Monday (12/7), the Federal Trade Commission will be holding the first of three “Exploring Privacy” roundtables at its conference center (601 New Jersey Avenue, NW). This all-day event (agenda) will include five panel discussions, and remarks by FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour, and David C. Vladeck, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. The lineups for all five panels look excellent. The FTC deserves great credit for trying hard to represent the broad spectrum of expert opinion on this profoundly important issue. PFF President Adam Thierer will be on on the Consumer Expectations and Disclosures panel (11:00?12:15), I will be on the Online Behavioral Advertising panel (1:30?2:45 p.m.), and the Cato Institute’s Jim Harper will be on the Benefits and Risks of Collecting, Using, and Retaining Consumer Data panel (9:15?10:45 a.m.). For those who cannot attend in person, event will be webcasted, and I will be live-tweeting key highlights (except for my own panel, of course).
Here are the comments submitted to the Roundtable. The second Roundtable will take place January 28, 2010 in Berkeley, CA with a third to follow in Washington in the spring.
Second, on Wednesday (12/9), Rob Atkinson of The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation will be moderating a debate about targeted online advertising at ITIF (1101 K Street, Washington, DC 20005, Suite 610). Rob is probably the single most thoughtful observer of this debate, and he’s put together a terrific panel that includes my sparring partner Jeff Chester, Howard Beales (whose excellent economic work I have cited heavily in my own writings about the benefits of one advertising), the FTC’s Peder Magee (one of the key organizers of the Exploring Privacy roundtable series, and also an exceptionally thoughtful and fair observer) and, if we’re lucky, CDT’s Ari Schwartz (a staunch defender of P3P).
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
