Sen. Klobuchar Stirs Up Facebook Child Safety Technopanic

by on July 15, 2010 · 5 comments

Sen. Amy Klobuchar just released a letter to Facebook demanding the site require “a prominent safety button or link on the profile pages of users under the age of 18″—akin to the so-called “panic button” app launched earlier this week by the UK’s Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre (CEOP). She doesn’t seem to realize that this app is available to all Facebook users, not just those in the UK. But her focus on empowerment tools and education is admirable, and it’s certainly a fair question to ask what sites like Facebook and MySpace are doing in these areas.

Unfortunately, Klobuchar’s letter also engages in blatant fear-mongering:

Recent research has shown that one in four American teenagers have been victims of a cyber predator.  And when teens experience abusive behavior online, only ten percent discuss it with their parents and even fewer report the misconduct to law enforcement.  It’s clear that teenagers need to know how to respond to a cyber attack and I believe we need stronger reporting mechanisms to keep our kids safe.

Klobuchar doesn’t actually cite anything, so it’s not clear what research she’s relying on. The 25% statistic is particularly incendiary, suggesting a nationwide cyber-predation crisis—perhaps leading the public to believe 8 or 9 million teens have been lured into sexual encounters offline. Perhaps the Senator considers every cyber-bully a cyber predator—which might get to the 25% number. But there are two serious problem with that moral equivalence.

First, to equate child predation with peer bullying is to engage in a dangerous game of defining deviancy down. Predation and bullying are radically different things. The first (sexual abuse) is a clear and heinous crime that can lead to long-term psychological damage. The second might be a crime in certain circumstances, but generally not.  And it is even less likely to be a crime when it occurs among young peers, which research shows constitutes the vast majority of cases. As Adam Thierer and I noted in our Congressional testimony last year, there are legitimate concerns about cyberbullying, but it’s something best dealt with by parents and schools rather than prosecutors (like Klobuchar in her pre-Senate career).

Second, a series of official taskforces have concluded that the cyberpredator technopanic is vastly overblown. Continue reading →

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Catherine White on the Noisy Idiot Dilemma

by on July 15, 2010 · 0 comments

This week on the podcast, Catherine White, graduate student at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, where she is researching productive participatory discussion, talks about her thesis on the Noisy Idiot Dilemma.  White explains the dilemma — how to foster productive online conversation when certain speakers exhibit noisy, unproductive, or unhelpful behavior — and discusses her research on various online forums, weblog comments, effects of humor, anonymity, and empathy online, and characteristics of elastic, oily conversation.

Related Readings

Do check out the interview, and consider subscribing to the show on iTunes. Past guests have included Clay Shirky on cognitive surplus, Nick Carr on what the internet is doing to our brains, Gina Trapani and Anil Dash on crowdsourcing, James Grimmelman on online harassment and the Google Books case, Michael Geist on ACTA, Tom Hazlett on spectrum reform, and Tyler Cowen on just about everything.

So what are you waiting for? Subscribe!

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Google’s Lobby Shop Creates Need for Itself

by on July 14, 2010 · 1 comment

“Live by the sword, die by the sword.”

“Play with fire and you might get burned.”

Those are lines that sprung to my mind as I read this FT article noting how Google’s support for ‘net neutrality regulation has transmogrified into a push for “search neutrality.” Such regulation would be aimed directly at Google’s heart throat nuts business model.

(I was the first to discuss “search neutrality” here on TLF. Ignore Adam’s comment.)

But sloganeering is cheap. Let’s take a minute to try and understand why things like this happen to companies like Google.

First, I think, most executives—certainly executives in tech companies—don’t understand Washington at all. They have a gauzy impression that good people work for the betterment of public policy here.

Actually, that’s true. Just about everyone is good. And everyone is working for the betterment of public policy as they see it. The thing is, everybody sees the betterment of public policy as turning it to their own interests. Washington, D.C. is a war of all against all—each trying to grab the most stuff—using politics instead of clubs, knives, and guns.

Next, I think it’s important to recognize the incentives of the people who advise tech executives. They are people with families and mortgages. They want to have and keep a job. So what do they do? They encourage involvement in public policy. The public policy advisor who says “steer clear of Washington” may be giving better advice, but his consulting contract is small and its term is short.

The government relations/lobbying shop in a company like Google is part of a larger business, yes, but it is a small bureaucracy within the business. It doesn’t produce anything subject to competitive pricing, so (accounting practices notwithstanding) there is little way to measure its value. The fallback measure is activity—the more things happening, the more ‘valuable’ the lobbying shop. (Surprise me, Google, so famous for measurement, testing, and rigor in product development. Have you got a way to measure the true value produced by your lobbying shop, law department, accounting group, etc.?)

You see how the dynamics quickly get perverse. A public policy advisor or lobbyist makes him- or herself ‘valuable’ by getting the client into trouble.

Google is not in trouble. The FT story is premature, and it’s overstatement to say that Google has been “hoisted by its own petard.”

But imagine a controlled experiment in which another Google in a parallel universe didn’t draw attention to itself in Washington, D.C., didn’t push for conditions in the 700 MHz spectrum auction, didn’t advocate for ‘net neutrality regulation, and so on. That Google might not have created—or might have delayed—the need for a permanent lobbying/government relations cost center.

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Is a Massive Taxpayer-Funded Propaganda Machine Really a Good Idea?

by on July 14, 2010 · 6 comments

Earlier this year, while I was preparing this mega-filing to the Federal Communications Commission in its “Future of Media” proceeding, I read Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-open: A Free Press for a New Century, by Lee C. Bollinger, who is the president of Columbia University.  I had planned on reviewing it since I try to review almost every book I read, but it was hard for me to believe that anyone would take this book too seriously, so I just moved along.

I hate to be that dismissive of any text but this is a book, after all, that proposes the creation of a massive U.S. propaganda machine.  Bollinger doesn’t just want our government to help out a bit at the margins like it currently does; he wants the State to get under the covers, cuddle tight and become intimate lovers with the Press.  And then he wants the Big Press to project itself more, especially overseas, to compete with other State-owned or subsidized media enterprises. Again, it’s a propaganda machine, pure and simple.  In a new Wall Street Journal editorial today entitled, “Journalism Needs Government Help,” he argues:

To me a key priority is to strengthen our public broadcasting role in the global arena. In today’s rapidly globalizing and interconnected world, other countries are developing a strong media presence. In addition to the BBC, there is China’s CCTV and Xinhua news, as well as Qatar’s Al Jazeera. The U.S. government’s international broadcasters, like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, were developed during the Cold War as tools of our anticommunist foreign policy. In a sign of how anachronistic our system is in a digital age, these broadcasters are legally forbidden from airing within the U.S.  This system needs to be revised and its resources consolidated and augmented with those of NPR and PBS to create an American World Service that can compete with the BBC and other global broadcasters.

China’s CCTV and Xinhua news? Qatar’s Al Jazeera?  Really?!  As Jeff Jarvis rightly asks in his terrific response essay, “No American BBC,”: “In what sane world is the Chinese government’s relationship with news a model?”  Indeed, this is frightening stuff.  Has Bollinger not studied the Chinese system of state media meddling? Needless to say, it’s not pretty. And while I would agree that the BBC model shows that some State-funded media can be quite impressive and free of most meddling, that’s not been the case across the board. Continue reading →

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FTC Enforcement of Corporate Promises & the Path of Privacy Law

by on July 13, 2010 · 4 comments

Adam and I have been pretty hard on the FTC’s current leadership for pushing to dramatically expand regulation of online data use with little thought to the impact on ad-supported media, while in the next breath opening the door to dramatic expansion of direct government support of media, and all the while seeking sweeping new regulatory powers from Congress.

After all that complaining (and bashing their Soviet Realist-style statue, “Man Controlling Trade”), you might think we had it in for the agency. But as I’ve said repeatedly, we’re actually big fans of the FTC’s core consumer protection mission: holding companies to their promises. (Indeed, we want to make sure they stay focused on that mission, and have the staff, resources and technological tools to pursue it effectively—which might mean, as I’ve pointed out, increased funding rather than increased powers.) We’ve also repeatedly praised the FTC’s efforts to educate kids, parents, and Internet users in general about things like online privacy, advertising, spyware, user empowerment tools, online scams, etc.

But I don’t want to be accused of being only a fair-weather friend of the agency. So I wanted to point out a particularly good concrete example of the FTC doing what we talk about in the abstract: holding companies to their promises.  Grant Gross notes that the FTC sent a stern letter earlier this month to the company that is seeking to buy the subscriber info and photos and other assets of the now-defunct XY Magazine, which served primarily gay U.S. teens, warning them that the FTC would hold them to the terms of the privacy policy under which XY collected information from its subscribers.

This is a great example of how the FTC can effectively use its existing authority to protect consumers against clear harms involved in the disclosure of truly sensitive data, sometimes even prophylactically—in this case, outing around 100,000 gay youths and young adults—collected by companies that make unambiguous promises to protect users’ data. This incident also illustrates how privacy law can evolve in an organic fashion from a growing body of such well-justified preemptive warnings, enforcement actions brought against truly bad actors, and ultimately court decisions that decide whether the FTC has properly weighed the interests at stake. In other words, just because we don’t have a privacy code enforced by a Data Protection Authority as in Europe doesn’t mean our legal system doesn’t protect privacy!

Continue reading →

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Second Circuit: Pacifica Is Outdated, All Media Deserve Full First Amendment Protection

by on July 13, 2010 · 3 comments

The Second Circuit just threw out the FCC’s broadcast indecency rules—which had led to heavy fines for “fleeting expletives”—as “unconstitutionally vague, creating a chilling effect that goes far beyond the fleeting expletives at issue here.” What’s ultimately most important about this decision is not what the court did, but what it said: The Constitutional framework that has allowed broadcast censorship has been rendered obsolete by the rise of the Internet and parental empowerment tools for new and old media.

In short, the court utterly rejected the Supreme Court’s 1978 Pacifica decision—which gave the FCC great discretion in regulating indecency on broadcast radio and television in order to protect children who might be in the audience during daytime and early evening hours, citing the unique “pervasiveness” and “invasiveness” of broadcasting into the home.  The court fully embraced what we’ve been saying for years—neither rationale holds true anymore:

we face a media landscape that would have been almost unrecognizable in 1978. Cable television was still in its infancy. The Internet was a project run out of the Department of Defense with several hundred users. Not only did Youtube, Facebook,and Twitter not exist, but their founders were either still in diapers or not yet conceived. In this environment, broadcast television undoubtedly possessed a “uniquely pervasive presence in thelives of all Americans.”

The same cannot be said today. The past thirty years has seen an explosion of media sources, and broadcast television has become only one voice in the chorus. Cable television is almost as pervasive as broadcast….  The internet, too, has become omnipresent, offering access to everything from viral videos to feature films and, yes, even broadcast television programs…. Moreover, technological changes have given parents the ability to decide which programs they will permit their children to watch. (15-16)

Thus, the Second Circuit all but begged the Supreme Court to throw out Pacifica completely, but quickly noted that it is “bound by Supreme Court precedent, regardless of whether it reflects today’s realities” (17). Fortunately, the court was able to reach the same result on vagueness grounds. It’s worth reading this key passage to see what a consistent approach to the First Amendment would look like: Continue reading →

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The Seven Deadly Sins of Title II Reclassification (NOI Remix)

by on July 13, 2010 · 4 comments

Better late than never, I’ve finally given a close read to the Notice of Inquiry issued by the FCC on June 17th.  (See my earlier comments, “FCC Votes for Reclassification, Dog Bites Man”.)  In some sense there was no surprise to the contents; the Commission’s legal counsel and Chairman Julius Genachowski had both published comments over a month before the NOI that laid out the regulatory scheme the Commission now has in mind for broadband Internet access.

Chairman Genachowski’s “Third Way” comments proposed an option that he hoped would satisfy both extremes.  The FCC would abandon efforts to find new ways to meet its regulatory goals using “ancillary jurisdiction” under Title I (an avenue the D.C. Circuit had wounded, but hadn’t actually exterminated, in the Comcast decision), but at the same time would not go as far as some advocates urged and put broadband Internet completely under the telephone rules of Title II.

Continue reading →

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How America’s Hugo Chavez Fan Club Plans to ‘Reform’ Our Media Marketplace

by on July 13, 2010 · 5 comments

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[cross-posted from BigGovernment.com]

In the battle over media and communications freedom, no group poses a more serious threat to a free and independent press than the insultingly misnamed regulatory activist group Free Press. Along with their founders, the prolific neo-Marxist media theorist Robert W. McChesney and Nation correspondent John Nichols, Free Press has engaged in relentless agitation for a truly radical media and communications policy agenda, and their influence is now spreading throughout the Obama Administration.

The Free Press-McChesney blueprint for media “reform” reads more like a script for State servitude. On the regulatory side, they call for media ownership restrictions, “localism” mandates, “Net neutrality” regulations, price controls on broadband, advertising and copyright restrictions, and layers of additional regulatory edicts.  Once all that red tape smothers the life out the independent press and private communications providers, they plan to have the State step in become the primary benefactor of the Fourth Estate and high-tech infrastructure. For starters, McChesney and Nichols advocate a $35 billion annual “public works” program for the press modeled after the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal era. Their media WPA would include a “News AmeriCorps” for out-of-work journalists, a “Citizenship News Voucher” to funnel taxpayer support to struggling media entities, a significant expansion of postal subsidies, a massive new subsidy for journalism schools, corporate welfare for newspapers sufficient to pay 50 percent of the salaries of all “journalistic employees,” municipal government ownership of press and infrastructure, and many more bureaucratic programs. Continue reading →

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If We Ban Violent Video Games, Why Not Violent Theme Park Attractions?

by on July 12, 2010 · 8 comments

I’m hoping to get some input from readers as I look to finish up an amicus brief for the forthcoming Schwarzenegger v. EMA video game case. (Respondent briefs are due in mid-Sept and the State of California just filed its brief with the Court today). You will recall that the Supreme Court accepted the case for review in April, meaning it will be the first major case regarding video game speech rights heard by our nation’s highest court. It raises questions about the First Amendment status of games and what rights minors have to buy or play “violent” video games.  One section I hope to include in the brief I’m working on deals with how other forms of media content are increasingly intertwined with video game content. In it, I explain how video games are less of a discreet category of visual entertainment than they once were. I’d welcome ideas for other examples to use relative to the ones you see below.

I begin by discussing games that were inspired by major motion pictures, such as both the recent Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movie trilogies, for example.  I also note that many games were inspired by notable books, such as the LotR games being inspired by Tolkien, and The Godfather video games that were inspired by Mario Puzo’s novel of the same name. I also make mention of The Terminator movies starring California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, which inspired a wide variety of video games, many of which featured his likeness.

More importantly, I highlight how many video games are now inspiring movies, music, books, and comics, including: Prince of Persia, Max Payne, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, Doom, Final Fantasy, Halo, and Gears of War. The characters and storylines in the books, comics, and movies based on these games often closely track the video games that inspired them.  Increasingly, therefore, games are developed along parallel tracks with these other forms of content. Thus, to regulate games under the standard California proposes in this case raises the question of whether those other types of media should be regulated in a similar fashion.  Should every iteration of the original game title be regulated under the standard California has suggested if those books, comics, or movies contain violent themes?
Continue reading →

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You Might Quit Bragging About Your iPhone

by on July 12, 2010 · 2 comments

. . . when you realize how much data it can give up to law enforcement and phone thieves. Or maybe one of you smarties will write an app that wipes your iPhone clean, restoring your control over personal and private communications information.

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