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.)
In this week’s episode of the Surprisingly Free Podcast, I talk to Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University, general director of the Mercatus Center, and author of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution. We discusses how the internet influences and changes practically everything. The conversation broadly centers on how the web allows us to find, distill, and sort information as never before, which has profoundly affected people’s consumption of culture and creation of their own economies. During the podcast Cowen touches on Lost and Battlestar Gallactica, the iPad, books, the future of the publishing industry, old and new media, Facebook, Twitter, ChatRoulette, and his favorite things on the internet.
The Supreme Court recently announcedthat it will review a California law regulating the sale of violently-themed video games to minors. The case under review is Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association. In it, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a California law which prohibited the sale or rental of “violent video games” to minors. I’m inclined to agree with Julie Hilden when she notes that “it seems very unlikely that the Supreme Court took this case in order to proclaim, as the Ninth Circuit panel did, that minors do indeed have First Amendment rights — rights that extend far enough to reach ‘violent’ video games.” I hope that we’re both wrong and that the Court took the case to instead affirm the free speech rights of game creators and users (and yes, even minors), but the justices could have just left the Ninth Circuit ruling be and that would have been settled.
Anyway, let’s think this through here. What if the Supremes took the Schwarzenegger case to overturn the Ninth Circuit and to uphold the right of state governments to regulate the sale of “violent” video game content, however that’s defined. Let’s consider such a potential holding in light of two other free speech cases handed down over the past few years.
Over the weekend, I published an op-ed in The Des Moines Register encouraging the FCC to heed the lessons of the first national broadband plan, the one Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin sent to Congress in 1808.
Gallatin was a remarkable figure in the early history of the federal government, and his accomplishments include being the longest-serving Treasury secretary (1801-1812) to date. His report on the Subject of Public Roads and Canals, completed at the request of Congress, remains one of the seminal documents in the history of American infrastructure. It is a masterpiece of dispassionate policy-making and clear-headed writing.
Alas, the document is available nowhere online, and the only in-print copy I can find is published by the aptly-named Dodo Press. This is indeed unfortunate given the renewed interest in network infrastructure as a form of national technology. The NBP published in March by the FCC, despite its nearly 400 pages and thousands of footnotes, makes no reference to Gallatin or his plan. Continue reading →
PFF hosted an event last Friday asking “What Should the Next Communications Act Look Like?” and the folks at NextGenWeb were kind enough to make a video of the event and post it online along with a writeup. The event featured (in order of appearance) Link Hoewing of Verizon, Walter McCormick of US Telecom, Peter Pitsch of Intel, Barbara Esbin of PFF, Ray Gifford of Wilkinson, Barker, Knauer, and Michael Calabrese of the New America Foundation. It was a terrific discussion and it couldn’t have been more timely in light of recent regulatory developments at the FCC. Here’s the 90-min event video if you are interested:
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 →
In this week’s episode of the 
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.