I’m keeping tabs on who filed “major” comments (more than a 10-15 pages) in the Federal Communications Commission’s “Future of Media” proceeding (GN Docket No. 10-25). As I noted last week, The Progress & Freedom Foundation submitted almost 80 pages of comments (single-spaced!) in the matter, so it’s something I care deeply about and will be tracking closely going forward.
Incidentally, the general consensus of those who filed (especially if you count “minor” comments) is fairly overwhelming: Bring on Big Government! Seriously, I only found a handful of comments that object strenuously to government meddling in media markets or that raised concerns about the potential for the State’s increasing involvement in the journalism profession. Even many of the affected industries appear to be suffering from a bit of Stockholm syndrome here. Most of them just play up the good things they are doing but barely utter a peep about the dangers of federal encroachment into the affairs of the Press.
Anyway, for those of you who care to track the gradual federalization of media and journalism, I think what you see below is a fairly comprehensive listing of the major filings submitted thus far in the FCC’s “Future of Media” proceeding. I’ll try to add more as I find them. You might also want to track what was filed in the Federal Trade Commission’s workshops on “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age.” Finally, if you care to learn more of this issue, I’m hosting an event on the morning of May 20th to discuss these issues in more detail.
I have an op-ed on the FCC’s broadband re-classification plan on AOL today, paired with a counterpoint commentary from Megan Tady of Free Press. My piece focuses on how the plan will lead to FCC intrusiveness in almost every area of broadband. But “third way” labels notwithstanding, it is sheer folly to try to wrap a monopoly era regime around competitive broadband services. The FCC is about to embark on a lengthy legal battle that will cost tons of political capital while offering it very little chance of winning.
Bottom line: No matter what the information, the faster it is allowed to move and the easier it is for people, businesses and government agencies to link it together to produce value, the better it is for everyone. Until this week, even the FCC expressly understood and endorsed this approach.
Telephone service is about one-to-one connection. Broadband is about many-to-many interconnections. That’s why the FCC separated the two to begin with. Constraining broadband with rules that applied to another service in another era can’t help but end up as a policy disaster.
The Smoking Gun and Miami Herald report that a Miami International Airport TSA worker has been arrested for beating up a co-worker who joked about his endowment after observing the assailant walk through a whole-body imager or “strip-search machine.”
The FCC is toyingwith reclassifying broadband under Title II of the Communications Act. If the agency rolls back the regulatory clock in this fashion, it will be a huge step backwards for innovation, investment, and quality in this field. How is it that everyone suddenly has collective amnesia about the past that Title II gave us? Doesn’t anyone remember getting their fingers pinched in black rotary dial phones of the Title II regulatory era? I do. Here’s what else that regulatory era gave us: Stagnant markets. Limited choice. Lackluster innovation. What else would you expect when you have price controls, rate-of-return proceedings, state PUC meddling, protected markets, etc. And despite all this revisionist history about Title II “protecting consumers,” the past it gave us was viciously anti-consumer and pro-regulated entity.
Is that the future you want for the Internet and the digital economy? That’s what’s at stake in this fight. Just say NO to a Rotary Dial Internet!
Multiple media sources are now reporting that the FCC, contrary to reports from earlier this week, has decided to go ahead with an effort to change the classification of broadband Internet service from a Title I “information service” to a Title II “telecommunications service,” if only to salvage the proposed rulemaking on the open and transparent Internet. (See stories on The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post as well as Ars Technica.)
Those of us who aren’t on the FCC’s official leak list will have to wait with the rest of the rabble to get a look at just how the FCC proposes to effect this radical change in communications law. Will it apply to all broadband Internet–including cable, fiber, DSL, satellite, wireless and broadband over power lines? Will the FCC propose to regulate only as much as needed to get the jurisdiction the D.C. Circuit says it doesn’t have under Title I to implement the NPRM, or will they throw in some additional provisions to achieve other goals–such as the reform of the Universal Service Fund? Will state and local regulators get to share in the fun of telling ISPs how best to run their business?
The Progress & Freedom Foundation today filed comments in the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) “Future of Media” proceeding. Berin Szoka, Ken Ferree, and I urged the FCC to “reject Chicken Little-esque calls for extreme media ‘reform’ solutions,” and counseled policymakers to move cautiously so that media reform can be “organic and bottom-up, not driven by heavy-handed, top-down industrial policies for the press.”
Our 79-page filing covers a wide range of ideas being examined by Washington policymakers to help struggling media outlets and unemployed journalists, or to expand public media / “public interest” content and regulation. Among the major issues explored in our filing:
First Amendment concerns implicated by government subsidies;
The pitfalls of imposing new “public interest” obligations on media operators;
How advertising restrictions could harm the provision of media and news;
Taxes, fees and other regulations to be avoided;
The limited role in reform that public media subsidies can play; and
Positive steps government could take.
We note that as “With many operators struggling to cope with intensifying competition, digitization, declining advertising budgets, and fragmenting audiences, some pundits and policymakers are wondering what the ‘future of media’ entails. The answer: Nobody knows.” While this uncertainty has put concerned policymakers at the ready to “help” the press, we warn that: “There is great danger in rash government intervention.” Instead, policymakers should be “careful to not inhibit potentially advantageous marketplace developments, even if some are highly disruptive.” Marketplace meddling, or government attempts to tinker with private media business models in the hopes that something new and better can be created, are misguided. Moreover, “Our constitutional traditions warn against it, history suggests it would be unwise, and practical impediments render such meddling largely unworkable, anyway.”
A recent study by Cecil Bohanon and Michael Hicks at Ball State University’s Digital Policy Institute found that statewide cable franchising has increased broadband deployment.
Half of the US states have now enacted legislation that creates statewide cable franchising. These laws allow new entrants into the video business (principally the phone companies) to get permission to offer video from the state, instead of having to deal with local governments to get cable franchises. Previous research, much of it cited here, found that cable competition reduces cable rates and expands the number of channels available to subscribers. Local franchising often delayed or prevented new competitors from entering the market.
Since the same wires get used to transmit video, telephone, and broadband, Bohanon and Hicks reasoned that opening up entry into cable would also increase competition in broadband and hence increase broadband subscribership. And that’s precisely what their econometric study finds. After controlling for other factors, broadband subscribership is 2-5 percent higher in states that have statewide video franchising. Based on this finding, Bohanon and Hicks estimate that statewide video franchising increased broadband subscribership by about 5 million.
Their study covers the years 1999-2008. Maybe some of these 5 million would eventually have gotten broadband anyway. At worst, this study shows that 5 million subscribers got broadband sooner than they otherwise would have.
The study does not test whether the increase in broadband subscribership occurred because statewide video franchising sped up investment and deployment of infrastructure, or if it simply spurred competition in places where phone and cable companies already had the relevant infrastructure deployed. I don’t know how one would get the confidential data on broadband investment in order to test this. But given the large amount of new investment related to broadband, I’d be willing to bet that statewide franchising encouraged both new broadband deployment and more intense competition where infrastructure was already in place.
I’m recuperating today after wrist surgery #2 but I just had to say something about a hugely important proposal introduced today that would bring us one step closer to information socialism. No, I’m not talking about the discussion draft privacy bill released today by Reps. Boucher & Stearns (which Adam and I already commented on here) but about the amendment introduced today by Sen. Udall that would “require credit-rating agencies to divulge credit scores, free of charge, to consumers when they access their free annual credit report.”
Actually, there is an important analogy between the two bills: both will have populist appeal because they can claim to giving consumers a “right” to “their” information—but both would impose real costs that will ultimately be borne by consumers. On the privacy side, Adam Thierer and I have warned repeatedly that data collection is critical to the online advertising that supports the publishers of the Internet’s cornucopia of content and services. Everyone takes this for granted but few of us really think about the quidpro quo at work: users receive “free” content and services in exchange for seeing advertising and sharing data about their browsing habits, which makes advertising more relevant to them, more effective for advertisers, and therefore more profitable for publishers.
Unfortunately, a similar free lunch mentality is at work with credit scores. If we think about them at all, most of us probably resent and/or fear them. Yet credit scores, and the entire credit reporting system, are truly one of the wonders of information capitalism and a boon for consumers. Before they developed, lending decisions were far riskier because lenders didn’t really know whom to trust with their money. Thus they had to build in a risk premium into their interest rates to account for the fact that some users might default or fall behind on payments. This punished good borrowers and rewarded bad ones. Getting a loan was difficult, often required special connections, and was often arbitrary and thus sometimes downright discriminatory.
This situation was bad for everyone. While nobody likes being in debt, we often forget how radically empowering credit can be in allowing us to expand our opportunities in life. Continue reading →
Today, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, released its long-awaited online privacy bill discussion draft, requiring that users opt-in to certain types of online data collection. Berin Szoka and I issued the following statement in response:
By mandating a hodge-podge of restrictive regulatory defaults, policymakers could unintentionally devastate the “free” Internet as we know it. Because the Digital Economy is fueled by advertising and data collection, a “privacy industrial policy” for the Internet would diminish consumer choice in ad-supported content and services, raise prices, quash digital innovation, and hurt online speech platforms enjoyed by Internet users worldwide.
Before imposing prophylactic regulation, policymakers should first identify specific consumer harm that requires government intervention. They should next ask whether there are less restrictive alternatives to regulation, such as enhancing enforcement of existing laws, bolstering limitations on government access to online data, education efforts about online privacy, and promoting the development and uptake of technological empowerment solutions that allow users to manage their own privacy preferences.
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.
List of Major Comments in FCC “Future of Media” Proceeding
by Adam Thierer on May 10, 2010 · 8 comments
I’m keeping tabs on who filed “major” comments (more than a 10-15 pages) in the Federal Communications Commission’s “Future of Media” proceeding (GN Docket No. 10-25). As I noted last week, The Progress & Freedom Foundation submitted almost 80 pages of comments (single-spaced!) in the matter, so it’s something I care deeply about and will be tracking closely going forward.
Incidentally, the general consensus of those who filed (especially if you count “minor” comments) is fairly overwhelming: Bring on Big Government! Seriously, I only found a handful of comments that object strenuously to government meddling in media markets or that raised concerns about the potential for the State’s increasing involvement in the journalism profession. Even many of the affected industries appear to be suffering from a bit of Stockholm syndrome here. Most of them just play up the good things they are doing but barely utter a peep about the dangers of federal encroachment into the affairs of the Press.
Anyway, for those of you who care to track the gradual federalization of media and journalism, I think what you see below is a fairly comprehensive listing of the major filings submitted thus far in the FCC’s “Future of Media” proceeding. I’ll try to add more as I find them. You might also want to track what was filed in the Federal Trade Commission’s workshops on “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age.” Finally, if you care to learn more of this issue, I’m hosting an event on the morning of May 20th to discuss these issues in more detail.
Continue reading →