In light of the discussion draft of privacy legislation recently released by Chairman Rick Boucher (our comments here and here), PFF is holding a special “Nuts & Bolts” luncheon briefing on the technical underpinnings of the ongoing privacy policy debate on Monday, May 24, 2010, 12-2 p.m. in 2123 Rayburn House Office Building.
Our panel of distinguished experts will provide an overview of the technical mechanics of online advertising and associated concerns about data collection, and discuss challenges and opportunities for empowering privacy-sensitive consumers to manage their online privacy without breaking the advertising business model that sustains most Internet content and services. I’ll moderate a terrific panel:
Ari Schwartz, Vice President & Chief Operating Officer, Center for Democracy & Technology
Shane Wiley, Senior Director, Privacy & Data Governance, Yahoo!
To Register: Space is limited, so an RSVP is required to attend. Please register online here. Event questions should be addressed to Adam Marcus at amarcus@pff.org. Media inquiries should be directed to Mike Wendy at mwendy@pff.org.
Adam Thierer & I offered our initial thoughts upon first reading the discussion draft of the privacy bill introduced by Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA) & Cliff Stearns (R-FL). In PFF’s latest TechCast, I sat down to discuss the bill and my concerns about it with PFF’s VP for Communications, Mike Wendy:
Stay tuned for more from us on this. PFF plans to file written comments, as solicited by the bill’s authors, by June 4. For more on this, check out our comments to the FTC last December on these issues.
Subscribe now to PFF’s TechCast podcast (generally 5-8 minutes) by RSS or through iTunes!
I have a lot of respect for danah boyd and have had the pleasure to interact with her when we both served on the Harvard online child safety task force, and at other times. She’s a very gifted social media researcher. But there are three big problems with her argument that Facebook should be treated as a “utility” and regulated as such. (See: “Facebook is a Utility; Utilities Get Regulated.”)
What a Utility Is, and Isn’t
First, and most obviously, the term “utility” has a fairly well-understood meaning in economic literature and Facebook does not possess the same qualities:
A utility is usually something thought to be an “essential facility” in that the service or network in question is highly unique and possess few (or no) good alternatives. (Regulators typically require “non-discriminatory access” for that reason.)
The service in question is also typically regarded as being something approximating a “life-essential” service, like water or electricity. (Regulators typically require all to be served in a fairly uniform fashion for that reason.)
The service is also something that typically entails significant fixed costs and that requires us to pay good money to use. (Regulators typically impose price regulation for fear of “gouging” for that reason.)
Google has just announced that it is ending web-only sales of its unsubsidized Nexus One smartphone. The company had hoped to created a very different kind of business model for mobile phone retailing, but it just didn’t work and so they are ending the experiment.
There are a couple of reasons that it probably didn’t work, but the one thing that just about everyone is pointing back to is the difficulty of acclimating Americans to the actual cost of an unsubsidized handset. Over at Ars Technica, Peter Bright points out:
A one-off payment of $529 is hard to stomach. In many countries, we’re not accustomed to paying so much for mobile phones, as normally their true cost is hidden—we pay less up front and commit to paying a monthly fee for 12-24 months. Only those brave souls who were willing to stump up for the early termination fee would get any idea of the true cost of their handset. In a world of subsidized handsets, then, the Nexus one felt very expensive. It’s true that SIM-only contracts are cheaper than with-handset ones, but the difference rarely feels significant enough to justify buying a full-price phone—much better to pay a little bit more each month and avoid the up-front cost. Even if you do the math and work out that the Google way is cheaper, there’s still the unpleasant prospect of spending so much at once.
We’ve added a couple of new speakers to next Thursday’s PFF event on “Can Government Help Save the Press?” Again, the event will take place on Thursday, May 20, 2010 from 9 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. in the International Gateway Room, Mezzanine Level of the Ronald Reagan Building on 1300 Pennsylvania Ave, N.W. here in DC. This event will examine the FCC’s “Future of Media” proceeding and debate what role the government should play (if any) in sustaining struggling media enterprises, “saving journalism,” or promoting more “public media” or “public interest” content. [PFF filed comments in the proceeding and here’s a list of other “major” comments that were filed.]
Our May 20th event will feature a keynote address by Ellen P. Goodman, who is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the FCC and is assisting the FCC’s Future of Media team. After Ellen Goodman brings us up to speed with where the FCC’s Future of Media process stands, we’ll hear from a diverse panel of experts that includes:
Charlie Firestone – Executive Director, Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program
Kurt Wimmer – Partner, Covington & Burling (who represents broadcasters among others)
Andrew Jay Schwartzman – Senior Vice President and Policy Director, Media Access Project
Craig L. Parshall – Senior Vice President and General Counsel, National Religious Broadcasters
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released it’s latest report on “Wireless Substitution: Early Release of Estimates From the National Health Interview Survey.” For many years, this CDC report has shown a steady rise in “cord-cutting” with a gradual rise in the number of wireless-only homes. But we’ve now reached an important milestone of sorts with fully one-quarter of all U.S. homes now in the wireless-only camp. According to CDC:
One of every four American homes (24.5%) had only wireless telephones (also known as cellular telephones, cell phones, or mobile phones) during the last half of 2009—an increase of 1.8 percentage points since the first half of 2009. In addition, one of every seven American homes (14.9%) had a landline yet received all or almost all calls on wireless telephones.
Pretty stunning when you think about the fact that just a decade ago few of us even carried phones around in our pockets or purses. Despite what all the worry-warts and wanna-be regulators in Washington say, this is one hell of a dynamic marketplace.
The UK’s Daily Mailreports that Phil Bissett, a 62 year old former gravedigger, transformed a steel casket into a street-legal single-seat automobile that does 100 mph, using the engine from his daughter’s 1972 VW. He acquired the casket — you guessed it — on ebay.
Now here’s where it gets interesting. The casket originally cost 1500 British pounds. He got it for just 98 pounds — about $146 at today’s exchange rate. That’s 93 percent off! The article doesn’t say how much he paid for the assorted spare parts from other vehicles needed to turn the casket into an automobile, nor does it explain what his daughter is doing for transportation now that the engine from her car powers his deathmobile. Still, it’s a nice-looking little sports car, and I’ll bet it cost less and is more reliable than that fine piece of British automotive engineering I used to own, an MG Midget.
Bissett told the reporter, “I’ve learned never to go on the internet when you’ve had a drink. My friend said I’d never be able to turn it into a car but I knew I could.”
This must be what the wonks mean when they say the Internet is an “enabling technology.”
(Be sure to check out the Daily Mail link above to see the cool photos!)
My dear friend, fellow space/IT/priavcy/communications lawyer and now PFF Adjunct Fellow Jim Dunstan just published this PFF paper, which I thought I’d share with you (PDF)
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The FCC’s Title II “Lite” (as a Lead Balloon!) & the Looming Broadband Tax
by James E. Dunstan, PFF Adjunct Fellow, Progress Snapshot 6.9
FCC Chairman Genachowski has set forth his vision—a “Third Way”[1]—for overcoming the D.C. Circuit’s recent decision in the Comcast case concluding that the FCC lacked jurisdiction for sanctioning Comcast for allegedly blocking subscribers using peer-to-peer software or otherwise throttling bandwidth to heavy users.[2] The Court concluded that the FCC’s “ancillary jurisdiction” under Title I of the Communications Act was insufficient authority to step in and regulate Comcast’s broadband services. Since then, all of the Washington telecommunications intelligentsia has speculated at the FCC’s next move. Now we have it.
Chairman Genachowski’s “Third Way” is a form of Title II “lite,” where the FCC will reverse its prior decisions dating back decades that declare the Internet and broadband connections “information services,” and instead bifurcate the Internet into two segments: the “Internet” itself, and the “connections to” the Internet. Under the “Third Way,” the FCC would continue to treat the “Internet” itself (whatever that actually means) as an “information service” (Title I) but declare all connections to the Internet to be “telecommunications services” (Title II).[3] Armed with a ten-page memo from his General Counsel,[4] the Chairman argues that this policy reversal is on sound legal ground and will instantly reverse the “problem” caused by the Comcast decision.
Setting aside the fundamental question of who caused this “problem” (a Federal Court of Appeals concluded that it was the FCC who violated the Communications Act, not Comcast), the Chairman’s “Third Way” may turn out to be a third rail, with the real potential for destroying the Internet as we know it. Continue reading →
A bill introduced in the Senate yesterday would require Congress to bring earmarks out of the shadows, producing earmark data in a format that the public can easily use.
S. 3335 calls for a “unified and searchable database on a public website for congressional earmarks.” This is something President Obama called for in his 2010 State of the Union speech, though we haven’t heard much more from him about it since then.
The bill was introduced by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), and is currently cosponsored by Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA), Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), and Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO). Its House counterpart is H.R. 5258 (Cassidy R-LA), which also has bipartisan support.
Importantly the bill is not just about a web site. The bill would enable the public to “programmatically search and access all data in a serialized machine readable format via a web-services application programming interface.” That gobbledegook means that people could access the data for themselves, slicing and dicing it to learn whatever they want or to display it however they want.
In their 2006 Cato Policy Analysis, Amateur-to-Amateur: The Rise of a New Creative Culture, Gregory Lastowka and Dan Hunter wrote about how the functions that make up the creative cycle—creation, selection, production, dissemination, promotion, sale, and use of expressive content—are undergoing revolutionary decentralization and disintermediation.
The only thing professional in the clip below was the writing of the song. It deserves its credit, but the performance itself, production of the video, its selection, dissemination, and promotion (Twitter users, YouTube) are all amateur or amateur supported by a professionally managed, ad-supported platform.
Watch it a second time to take in the reactions of the girl sitting in front of the map. If you like, compare it with the tacky, overproduced, and flat “professional” video.
This is amateur entertainment that rivals any professional production, in part because it’s amateur. Assuming this performer dedicates himself further to his craft, he can rival or surpass anything put out by yesterday’s professionals.
(And, yes, I’m waiting to learn that I’ve been duped by some clever marketing scheme, but I hope this is real.)
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.