January 2010

Virtual World Safety: Some Good Parenting Tips

by Adam Thierer on January 11, 2010 · 1 comment

Connect Safely, which is great parenting and online child safety resource run by my friends Anne Collier and Larry Magid, has just released some excellent “Virtual World Safety Tips for Parents of Teens.” Tons of good advice in there worth checking out, especially the thing I always focus on in all my online safety work—talk to your kids!! Here’s Anne and Larry on that point:

Talk with your teens about the virtual worlds they use – ask them to show you around. See what their avatars look like and what screen names they’ve chosen to represent themselves. What do their profiles and the appearance of their avatars say about them? Try to hold back snap judgments (long-term guidance usually works better than control if the goal is learning rather than short-term compliance – see this). Are their virtual-world profiles linked to social-network ones, and how much do those linked-up profiles together reveal about them – too much? Are their in-world friends mostly friends they know in real life? If not, do they know that they can’t really know who people are online unless they know them offline?

It’s about getting a dialogue going with your kids. That is so absolutely essential and it would help head off about 90% of the problems that develop online today with kids. Kids need mentoring, whether its in meatspace or cyberspace. But make sure to read all the Connect Safely tips. They are excellent.

Incidentally, I talked about some of these issues when I did a virtual guest lecture in Second Life last October hosted by Metanomics. The show was called “Live Free and Prosper: Government’s Place in Virtual Worlds and On-line Communities,” and I posted all the video clips here. I also encourage those of you interested in these issues to check out these recent TLF guest posts by Joshua Fairfield an Associate Professor of Law at Washington & Lee University School of Law. He recently posted and interesting essay entitled, “Virtual Paternalism” as well as a summary and discussion of the recent “FTC Report on Kids and Virtual Worlds.” Worth reading.

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AOL-Time Warner Merger at 10: Lessons for Today

by Adam Thierer on January 11, 2010 · 4 comments

“It was then, and is now, the largest merger in American business history,” notes Tim Arango of the New York Times about the AOL-Time Warner mega-merger, which happen ten years this month. And yet, as he points out in his essay, “How the AOL-Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong,” things didn’t end up going so well for this marriage:

The trail of despair in subsequent years included countless job losses, the decimation of retirement accounts, investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department, and countless executive upheavals. Today, the combined values of the companies, which have been separated, is about one-seventh of their worth on the day of the merger.

To call the transaction the worst in history, as it is now taught in business schools, does not begin to tell the story of how some of the brightest minds in technology and media collaborated to produce a deal now regarded by many as a colossal mistake.

Arango goes on to interview several of the principals involved in the deal to get their take on why things unfolded so miserably and, ultimately, came to an end this year. I highly recommend the essay because it should serve as a cautionary tale to those worrywarts who are constantly predicting that the sky is going to fall if we allow a truly free media marketplace–including freedom for firms to structure themselves as they wish. Reality usually plays out quite differently. As I argued in my recent paper, “A Brief History of Media Merger Hysteria: From AOL-Time Warner to Comcast-NBC,”

The point here is not that media mergers are inherently good or always make sense. Indeed.. mergers sometimes prove to be huge blunders. But the hysteria sometimes heard before media mergers are consummated rarely bears any relationship to reality once the deals move forward. Media markets are extremely dynamic and prone to disruptive change and technological leap-frogging. Mergers are often one response to that turbulence… Given how difficult it is to predict the future course of events in this chaotic sector, humility—not hubris—is the sensible disposition when it comes to media merger policy.

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Should We Allow Internet in Cars?

by Adam Thierer on January 7, 2010 · 14 comments

I was on CNBC today live from the floor of the CES show in Vegas debating the question of whether allowing Internet access in cars and other in-vehicle digital technologies was a good idea. I was up against Nicholas Ashford, an MIT technology & law professor. In-vehicle communications and entertainment technologies are a major theme of this year’s show, especially with Ford’s announcement of some very cool new technologies.

I argued that education, not regulation, was the answer. We should educate drivers about safe and sensible use of in-vehicle technologies. We should also encourage the technology providers to continue to give us more voice-activated tools so we can interact with these technologies safely. Ford’s new systems, for example, have some very impressive voice-activated features. Finally, our law enforcement officials should continue to enforce “distracted driver” laws that penalize drivers who are a threat to others for any reason. That is the better approach compared to trying to ban these technologies.

You can find the video of the debate here.

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Summary of Tech Policy Summit Panel 3 at CES: The Future of Copyright

by Adam Thierer on January 7, 2010 · 1 comment

As I mentioned, I’m out in Vegas attending the Tech Policy Summit at CES today and tomorrow and trying to blog about some of what’s going on. Here’s my summary of panel#1 on broadband policy and panel #2 on spectrum policy. The third panel was on the future of copyright and content creation. The session was moderated by Declan McCullagh, Sr. Correspondent, CBSNews.com and Contributor, CNET News. The panelists included:

Jim Griffin, President, Choruss LLC and Advisor to Warner Music Group
Fred von Lohmann, Senior Staff Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Gigi Sohn, Co-founder and President, Public Knowledge
Hank Shocklee, Creative Director and CEO Music Producer, Founder of Public Enemy and President, Shocklee Entertainment
Michael Robertson, Founder, MP3.com
Dave Allen, Co-founder and President, Pampelmoose and Co-founder, Fight

I have briefly summarized some of what each speaker said down below:
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Summary of Tech Policy Summit Panel 2 at CES: The Spectrum Grab & Innovation

by Adam Thierer on January 7, 2010 · 2 comments

The second panel was entitled “The Spectrum Grab and Innovation” and was moderated by Rob Pegoraro of The Washington Post. The panelists were:

Dean Brenner, VP of Government Affairs, Qualcomm
Michael Calabrese, VP, Wireless Future Program, New America Foundation
David Donovan, President, Association for Maximum Service Television (MSTV)
Joan Marsh, VP, Federal Regulatory Affairs, AT&T
Craig Moffett, VP and Senior Analyst, Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.
Janice Obuchowski, Founder and President, Freedom Technologies

I have summarized some of what the panelists had to say down below.

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Summary of Tech Policy Summit Panel 1 at CES: Future of Broadband

by Adam Thierer on January 7, 2010 · 3 comments

I’m attending the Tech Policy Summit at CES in Las Vegas today and tomorrow. Lots of good discussions. The focus of the first panel, which was entitled, “Making Nationwide Deployment and Adoption of Broadband a Reality,” was what we should expect from the National Broadband Plan. This is particularly timely as the FCC just announced today it would be delaying the rollout of the plan.

This TPS session was moderated by technology journalist Steve Wildstrom. The panelists were:

Susan Crawford, Professor of Law and Professor of Information, University of Michigan
Neil Fried, Senior Telecommunications Counsel, U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce
Anna Gomez, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information, NTIA
Karen Jackson, Deputy Secretary of Technology, Commonwealth of Virginia
Carlos Kirjner, Senior Advisor to the Chairman, FCC
Andrew McLaughlin, Deputy CTO, Internet Policy, OSTP

Below is my summary of what each of the panelists had to say.

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Mississippi leads the nation …

by Jerry Ellig on January 6, 2010 · 2 comments

… in receiving support from the Federal Communications Commission’s Universal Service Fund.

In case you missed it, on December 31 the Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service issued its 2009 Universal Service Monitoring Report. This 568 page report compiles a massive number of statistics on the Federal Communications Commission’s $7.6 billion Universal Service Fund. This fund subsidizes phone service in high-cost areas, phone subscriptions for low-income households, Internet service for schools and libraries, and Internet connections for rural health care facilities. About 60 percent of the money — $4.4 billion — goes to “high cost” (usually rural) phone companies.

U Service fun facts 2009

The money comes from the universal service charge on your wired, wireline, or VOIP phone bill. (That’s why the phone companies put the FCC’s phone number on the bill, so you can call the FCC if you have questions about this charge. Isn’t that thoughtful!)

Virtually every table in the Monitoring Report is fascinating. But check out some of the statistics to the right, which came from Table 1.12. After substracting the universal service charges paid by its citizens, Mississippi received the highest net amount from the Universal Service Fund — $258 million. Alaska, Puerto Rico, Kansas, and Oklahoma round out the top five net recipients.

Some states are net payers. Florida paid $304 million more into the Universal Service Fund than its phone companies, low-income consumers, schools, libraries, and rural health facilities received back. Not surprisingly, other big, high-income states with large urban areas are also big net payers.

Some states receive close to what they pay in. Although Texas is a big Universal Service Fund recipient ($511 million in 2008), Texas telephone customers also pay a lot into the fund ($508 million in 2008). Thus, Texas received a net $3 million from the Universal Service Fund. Other states close to breakeven are Arizona, Missouri, Oregon, and South Carolina.

For 2008, I counted 22 states that are net recipients of $15 million or more, and 23 states that are net payers of $23 million or more.

And you thought you had fun on New Year’s Eve!

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Is This What Market Failure Looks Like?

by Steven Titch on January 5, 2010 · 12 comments

As the annual Winter Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is set to convene in Las Vegas tomorrow, it will be interesting to see the temper of the policy climate. On the federal and state policy level, the hostility towards every facet of the high-tech sector has done nothing but grow. Not too long ago, politicians were extolling America’s high-tech leadership as the its primary vehicle for continued global economic leadership. Now it seems the entire tech sector, from semiconductors to wireless phones to TV is under attack from the White House, to Congress to state-level bureaucrats.

Just this week, as Adam reported, the left-leaning Free Press has inexplicably gone on the offensive against the idea of pushing TV to wireless devices. Such activists are no doubt emboldened by the example of the current administration, which has launched an antitrust campaign against Intel (just as the European Union was all but surrendering its own), and continues to press for antitrust action against Google before, as antitrust chief Christine Varney has freely admitted, it is “too late”— that is, the speed of technology change undermines the government’s case, as it did in in the Clinton era Microsoft suit over browser bundling.

Add to this the California Energy Commission’s ban on big screen TVs, the FCC’s push for sweeping new Internet regulations under the guise of “network neutrality,”and the Internet, in general, being blamed for everything from the decline of newspapers to postal rate increases to weight gain in teenage girls (for more, type “Internet blamed for” into the search engine of your choice), and one might expect the mood at the show, at least in the policy sessions to be dour. Even if I am watching from afar (Adam will descend into the CES maelstrom on our behalf), I await to see if this will be the case.

The Left has been drumbeating about high-tech market failure for more than 10 years (plus ça change: see this rebuttal paper from 2001). The big difference is that today’s Washington technocrats have bought in, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Berin provided some solid data on mobile OS competition earlier today. Here’s some more data courtesy of Digital Society as to the growth of applications and revenues in this alleged stagnant, failing sector:

– Number of e-mails sent per day in 2000: 12 billion
– Number of e-mails sent per day in 2009: 247 billion
– Revenues from mobile data services in the first half of 2000: $105 million
– Revenues from mobile data services in the first half of 2009: $19.5 billion
– Number of text messages sent in the U.S. per day in June 2000: 400,000
– Number of text messages sent in the U.S. per day in June 2009: 4.5 billion
– Number of pages indexed by Google in 2000: 1 billion
– Number of pages indexed by Google in 2008: 1 trillion
– Amount of hard-disk space $300 could buy in 2000: 20 to 30 gigabytes
– Amount of hard-disk space $300 could buy in 2009: 2,000 gigabytes (2 terabytes)

Metrics such as these are the best weapon against attempts at regulation, especially from an administration keen to find a “market failure” rationale wherever it looks. High-tech consumer electronics remains a bright spot in what has been a down economy. It is best left on its own to thrive.

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TPS’ Guide to Tech Policy at 2010 CES Show

by Adam Thierer on January 5, 2010 · 0 comments

Yo, tech policy geeks attending CES this week… The Tech Policy Summit team has put together a terrific “Guide to Tech Policy at 2010 CES.” [PDF here] Very handy for tech policy wonks! I hope to see some of you at some of these sessions and keynote addresses.

As I mentioned a few days ago, Tech Policy Summit has put together a terrific mini-summit with outstanding panels and speakers. I’ll be hanging out at their sessions most of time out there. If you see me, come chat. We’ll plan a spontaneous happy hour or late-night drinking session!

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Crowdsourcing & Community Policing Are Better Than Government Censorship

by Adam Thierer on January 5, 2010 · 4 comments

Over at Mashable, Ben Parr has a post (“Facebook Turns to the Crowd to Eradicate Offensive Content“) expressing surprise that Facebook has a crowdsourcing / community policing solution to deal with objectionable content:

Did you know that Facebook has a crack team of employees whose mission is to deal with offensive content and user complaints? Their ranks number in the hundreds. But while most websites have people on staff to deal with porn and violence, none of them have 350 million users to manage… Now the world’s largest social network found a way to deal with this shortage of manpower, though. Facebook has begun testing a new feature called the Facebook Community Council [currently invite-only]. According to a guest post on the Boing Boing blog by one of the council’s members, its goal is to purge Facebook of nudity, drugs, violence, and spam.

The Facebook Community Council is actually a Facebook app and tool for evaluating content for various offenses… The app’s tagging system allows council members to tag content with one of eight phrases: Spam, Acceptable, Not English, Skip, Nudity, Drugs, Attacking, and Violence. If enough council members tag a piece of content with the same tag, action is taken, often a takedown.

What Facebook is doing here is nothing all that new. Many other social networking sites or platforms such MySpace, Ning, and many others, do much the same. Video hosting sites like YouTube do as well. [See my summary of YouTube’s efforts down below]**

No doubt, some will be quick to decry “private censorship” with moves by social networking sites, video hosting sites, and others to flag and remove objectionable content within their communities, but such critics need to understand that:
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