Today I testified at a hearing by Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley on commercial sexual exploitation and the Internet. When I first learned about it, I feared the worst: time to demonize the Internet. After all, the hearing announcement openly targeted Craigslist and websites generally. But this was not the case at all—as we heard, NGOs, law enforcement, and industry all have roles to play.
Instead of Internet-bashing, the hearing was a constructive dialogue. We learned why children are forced into prostitution and how classified ads on the Internet can promote this illegal activity. I was there to learn how we can help.
Commercial sexual exploitation is big business. Over 100,000 women are in the illegal sex trade. Often these women are actually teenage girls, vulnerable and with no place to go. Their lives are run by pimps, they cater to “johns,” and their lives are a living hell – except that these women become so desensitized that they eventually have no life at all.
These child prostitutes show up in advertisements for “escort services” or “adult services.” Traditionally, these ads were in the yellow pages. Now they exist on the Internet, and these listings can often be graphic. But it’s hard to tell whether these ads involve women against their will or underage girls. That’s why there are folks who would like to see all these ads disappear. And they’ll blame Internet classifieds—indeed, one witness called sites like Craigslist and Backpage “electronic pimps.”
Unfortunately, there are those that think it is better to force the shut down of the adult services section of these sites. But as we heard from danah boyd of Microsoft and a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center, merely shutting down the listed supply of adult services is superficial. Continue reading →
When the only tool you have is a hammer, as the old cliché goes, everything looks like a nail.
Net neutrality, as I first wrote in 2006, is a complicated issue at the accident-prone intersection of technology and policy. But some of its most determined—one might say desperate—proponents are increasingly anxious to simplify the problem into political slogans with no melody and sound bites with no nutritional value. Even as—perhaps precisely because—a “win-win-win” compromise seems imminent, the rhetorical excess is being amplified. The feedback is deafening.
In one of the most bizarre efforts yet to make everything be about net neutrality, Public Knowledge issued several statements this week “condemning” Fox’s decision to prohibit access to its online programming from Cablevision internet users. In doing so, the organization claims, Fox has committed “the grossest violations of the open Internet committed by a U.S. company.”
This despite the fact that the open Internet rules (pick whatever version you like) apply only to Internet access providers. Indeed, the rules are understood principally as a protection for content providers. You know, like Fox. Continue reading →
I’d like to draw your attention to a recently released [GAO](https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://energycommerce.house.gov/Press_111/20101012/GAO.Report.Broadband.2010.pdf) report analyzing the challenge of implementing the 200+ recommendations included in the FCC’s Broadband Plan and comparing the U.S. to broadband efforts in other countries. Turns out things are not as dire as the FCC and the Administration would have us believe. Some highlights:
– Broadband internet is available to 95 percent of American households. This is comparable to other developed nations despite the U.S.’s larger geographic size and population.
– “[T]he United States has more subscribers than any other OECD country—81 million, or more than twice as many as Japan, which has 31 million, the second highest number of subscribers.”
– The U.S. broadband adoption rate is 26.4 subscriber lines per 100 inhabitants, which is higher than the 23.3 average for developed countries.
So we have more subscribers than any other developed nation by more than double, and almost all households have access to broadband. I know it’s not fashionable to say, but it looks like we’re doing pretty damn well.
This might explain the results of a Pew Internet and American Life [survey](http://pewresearch.org/databank/dailynumber/?NumberID=1071) released last month that found that “A majority of Americans (53%) do not believe that increasing the availability of affordable high-speed internet connections should be a federal government priority.” Interestingly, Americans who do not use the Internet are the least interested in seeing government spending on broadband—presumably for them. “Fully 45% of non-users say the government should not attempt to make affordable broadband available to everyone, just 5% say access should be a top priority.” Continue reading →
On the podcast this week, Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired magazine, a former editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, and one of the most compelling thinkers about technology today, talks about his new book, What Technology Wants. Make no mistake: the singularity is near. Kelly discusses the technium–a broad term that encompasses all of technology and culture–and its characteristics, including its autonomy and sense of bias, its interdependency, and how it evolves and self-replicates. He also talks about humans as the first domesticated animals; extropy and rising order; the inevitability of humans and complex technologies; the Amish as technology testers, selecters, and slow-adopters; the sentient technium; and technology as wilderness.
The WSJ ran a front page, above-the-fold headline screaming that Facebook has had a privacy breach. But as Steve DelBianco discusses over at the NetChoice blog, today’s WSJ “breach” is all smoke and no fire.
The WSJ is saying that some of Facebook’s applications are accidentally sharing the public username on my Facebook page, in violation of the company’s privacy policy. This story was nothing like a breach where my credit card numbers or sensitive personal information was leaked or hacked. A closer look at the issue indicates that there is far more smoke than fire in the WSJ piece.
Moreover, the WSJ should step-back from using tabloid-style headings to attract eyeballs (and advertising revenue) to their research and writing. The breathless headline is clearly meant to feed the privacy beast that is increasingly in danger of doing far more harm than good.
While details are still forthcoming, it appears that the issue at hand involves external actions between application developers and advertising companies. Facebook has stepped-up and is holding third parties accountable to existing privacy requirements.
Today’s hot topic is that thousands of Cablevision customers in New York were faced with blacked out News Corp. channels, including Fox, when the two companies were not able to come to an agreement on fees. As a result, Cablevision did not carry the Giants-Lions game and may not carry the next game against the Cowboys. Glee on Tuesday is certainly threatened, and I feel for Cablevision because I wouldn’t wish a spurned Glee fan’s wrath on anyone.
The beautiful thing about this event is that the FCC has put out a Consumer Advisory enumerating all the various choices available to consumers. They can switch to a different pay service, and the FCC counts five: “AT&T, DIRECTV, DISH Network, RCN (limited areas of Brooklyn), and Verizon FIOS.” They can also tune in via over-the-air (rabbit ears) broadcast.
This hasn’t stopped Congress or “consumer advocates” from going apoplectic over American’s god-given right to the Simpsons. And, since it seems News Corp. cut access to Fox shows on Hulu.com and Fox.com for Cablevision internet service subscribers, they fear this is terrible violation of net neutrality.
Let’s put aside for a moment whether it’s a net neutrality violation or not since it’s difficult to tell what that means. (Notice that in this case is not big telecom carriers blocking access to content they don’t like, it’s a content provider blocking an ISP.) What exactly is the problem here?
Given that the FCC has helpfully pointed out all the options available to Consumers, there’s little chance that a consumer who wants to get Fox content won’t be able to do so. If Cablevision and News Corp. don’t come to an agreement, and Cablevision doesn’t carry Fox, consumers who value Fox will switch to a different service. The same goes for Internet service. The important issue here is not a universal human right to content or a net neutrality principle, but choice.
As long as there is market competition and consumer choice, we don’t need the FCC or Ed Markey to ensure that the we’ll get the Giants and the Cowboys in HD and Glee on Fox.com.
Late last month, the National Research Council released a book entitled “Biometric Recognition: Challenges and Opportunities” that exposes the many difficulties with biometric identification systems. Popular culture has portrayed biometrics as nearly infallible, but it’s just not so, the report emphasizes. Especially at scale, biometrics will encounter a lot of challenges, from engineering problems to social and legal considerations.
“[N]o biometric characteristic, including DNA, is known to be capable of reliably correct individualization over the size of the world’s population,” the report says. (page 30) As with analog, in-person identification, biometrics produces a probabilistic identification (or exclusion), but not a certain one. Many biometrics change with time. Due to injury, illness, and other causes, a significant number of people do not have biometric characteristics like fingerprints and irises, requiring special accommodation.
At the scale often imagined for biometric systems, even a small number of false positives or false negatives (referred to in the report as false matches and false nonmatches) will produce considerable difficulties. “[F]alse alarms may consume large amounts of resources in situations where very few impostors exist in the system’s target population.” (page 45)
Consider a system that produces a false negative, excluding someone from access to a building, one time in a thousand. If there aren’t impostors attempting to defeat the biometric system on a regular basis, the managers of the system will quickly come to assume that the system is always mistaken when it produces a “nonmatch” and they will habituate to overruling the biometric system, rendering it impotent.
Context is everything. Biometric systems have to be engineered for particular usages, keeping the interests of the users and operators in mind, then tested and reviewed thoroughly to see if they are serving the purpose for which they’re intended. The report debunks the “magic wand” capability that has been imputed to biometrics: “[S]tating that a system is a biometric system or uses ‘biometrics’ does not provide much information about what the system is for or how difficult it is to successfully implement.” (page 60) Continue reading →
Next week marks another “National Freedom of Speech Week” and each year I use this occasion as an opportunity to recall how lucky we are to live in a country that respects freedom of speech and freedom of the press. I wrote up a longer essay on this back in 2006 explaining why I am so passionate about freedom of speech and why I am so thankful to live in this country. For me, it comes down to is this: In a free society different people will always have different values and tolerance levels when it comes to speech and media content. It would be a grave mistake, therefore, for government to impose the will of some on all. To protect the First Amendment and our heritage of freedom of speech and expression from government encroachment, editorial discretion over content should always remain housed in private, not public, hands.
However, there will always be those who respond by arguing that speech regulation is important because “it’s for the children.” But raising children, and determining what they watch or listen to, is a quintessential parental responsibility. Personally, I think the most important thing I can do for my children is to preserve our nation’s free speech heritage and fight for their rights to enjoy the full benefits of the First Amendment when they become adults. Until then, I will focus on raising my children as best I can. And if because of the existence of the First Amendment they see or hear things I find troubling, offensive or rude, then I will sit down with them and talk to them in the most open, understanding and loving fashion I can about the realities of the world around them. But I don’t want anyone else doing that job for me. And in America, generally speaking, they can’t. That’s worth celebrating.
And then there’s George. He alone makes freedom of speech worth celebrating:
One of the old saws we hear from those who wish to impose more stringent regulations on advertising or product placement is that “it’s for the children.” That is, critics such at the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and other organzations fear that, because children’s brains are less developed or they have not yet learned to differentiate commercial appeals from other types of information flows, kids may be more susceptible to persuasive commercial messaging. I think there’s some truth to that, but I also believe that (a) kids aren’t quite the sheep we make them out to be, (b) the potential “harm” here is not as great as the critics make it out to be and (c) parental supervision should be the primary the solution to the problem.
But let’s ask a different question entirely: Are we willing to forgo additional, and potentially more diverse, forms of children’s programming simply because we want to keep commercial messaging or product placement away from kids? Consider the case study of The Hub, recently featured in The New York Times:
With imports of European cartoons, a smattering of Hasbro ads and a rerun of the movie “Garfield,” Hasbro and Discovery Communications unveiled a new television brand for children on Sunday, called The Hub. Over time, the two companies hope to prove that there is room for a fourth player alongside Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel and the Cartoon Network, the three heavyweights of children’s TV, said David M. Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery Communications. […]
If you want another prime example of how self-serving Washington interests often seek to wield the stick of Big Government to their advantage, look no further than the effort the FCC is currently undertaking to extend its “CableCARD” set-top box industrial policy. The regulatory shenanigans here got started 14 years ago with Section 629 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which included authority for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to meddle in the video equipment marketplace. The FCC used that authority to impose a variety rules on the cable TV industry, such as CableCARD mandates, in the name of expanding device competition and consumer choice. Those regulations haven’t done much other than impose added costs on consumers for very little corresponding benefit. And whatever growth we’ve seen in the market for video devices and services has been more organic and unplanned, and it has come from unexpected quarters (think of Apple and Google’s TV efforts, and television distribution via video game platforms). Nonetheless, the FCC plowed forward today with additional layers of red tape in the hope of extending the CableCARD regulatory regime.
The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) has long served as the prime cheerleader for this high-tech industrial policy since it would hobble video providers and benefit some of CEA’s members in the process. Indeed, to read through the CEA’s filings on this matter through the years, one is led to believe that CEA views cable systems as a sort of essential facility to which access must be granted in the name of preserving innovation by consumer electronics companies. With the CableCARD mandates, therefore, CEA is asking the FCC to impose a light form of common carrier regulation on the cable industry becuase that would help their interests in the end, regardless of what it meant for innovation at the core of networks.
Now, don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of self-serving people and organizations around Washington. Let’s face it, screwing over your competitors with regulation is what makes the “parasite economy” inside the Beltway tick! But what I find so interesting about this case study is how CEA has vociferously opposed (quite rightly, in my opinion) so many other high-tech industrial policies — the V-Chip, the so-called “broadcast flag,” HDTV tuner mandates, proposals to embed FM tuners in cell phones, and so on — and yet they wholeheartedly endorse the CableCARD industrial policy because the consumer electronics industry would benefit from this particular industrial policy. Sadly, it’s just another example of what Milton Friedman once called the “Business Community’s Suicidal Impulse”: the persistent propensity to persecute one’s competitors using regulation or the threat thereof.
Nobody said capitalists were consistent, folks. It’s capitalism for me, but not for thee.
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.