Last week there was another leak of the secretly negotiated Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). This time it was a copy of the of the entire latest draft. It seems to dispel some of the initial worries bloggers had written about, including customs searches of your iPod at the border, but also stokes other concerns. For one thing, the U.S. seems to be pushing for protocols to cut off copyright violators from their internet access.
In the most recent episode of the Surprisingly Free Podcast, I talk with Prof. Michael Geist of the University of Ottawa, who has been following ACTA more closely than anyone else. He explains that not only is the content of ACTA troubling, but the fact that it’s being negotiated in such secrecy.
This is the 5,000th post on the TLF. We started on August 14, 2004 with this post, so we celebrated our fifth anniversary last August. As Adam Thierer explained back then:
The idea for the TLF came about after I asked some tech policy wonks whether it was worth putting together a blog dedicated to covering Internet-related issues from a cyber-libertarian perspective. The model I had in mind was a “Volokh Conspiracyfor Tech Issues,” if you will. I wanted to bring together a collection of sharp, liberty-loving wonks (most of whom worked in the think tank world) to talk about their research on this front and to give them a place to post their views on breaking tech policy developments. It was to be a sort of central clearinghouse for libertarian-oriented tech policy analysis and advocacy.
At first, Tim Lee and I debated whether it even made sense to have that sort of narrow focus, but I think the passage of time and the rise of plenty of competition on this front shows that it was worthwhile. And I’ve been very pleased with the tag-team effort of all our TLF contributors and the way—without anyone planning it, in true libertarian fashion—we’ve sort of developed a nice division of labor on various tech policy issues.
Our traffic level is roughly in the same place as it was last summer: hovering somewhere around 2600 active Feedburner subscribers measured on a rolling basis (see the little red box at the top right-hand corner of the page under the banner) and our PageRank is still a healthy 7, putting us in the same league (logarithmically speaking) with the Volokh Conspiracy, our model, as well as popular sites like TechMeme, my daily first-stop for tech news. Here are a few key traffic statistics:
Please join us for this Progress & Freedom Foundation luncheon briefing on Friday, April 16, 12-2 pm in the Capitol Visitor Center, Room SVC 208/209 at E Capitol St NE & 1st St NE. I’ll be moderating a discussion of the growing powers of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and what it might mean for consumers, advertisers, media creators, and the Internet.
As I’ve discussed here, here and here, financial reform legislation passed by the House (HR 4173) and now under debate in the Senate would give the FTC sweeping new powers to regulate not just Wall Street, but also unfair or deceptive trade practices across the economy. This could reshape regulation in a wide range of areas, such as privacy, cybersecurity, child safety, COPPA, and child nutrition, affecting media online as well as offline. Unfortunately, as Adam and I have noted, there seems to be a disconnect at the FTC between concerns over the future of struggling media creators and efforts to step up regulation on a number of fronts, especially privacy. The FTC has also asserted expanded authority to regulate “unfair” competition in its lawsuit against Intel, based solely on the FTC’s Section 5 unfairness authority rather than traditional antitrust law. PFF has assembled a group of expert panelists—veteran FTC practitioners, scholars and insiders—to discuss these issues and more. Here’s our panel:
Jack Calfee, Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) & author of Fear of Persuasion: A New Perspective on Advertising and Regulation (1998)
Maureen Ohlhausen, Partner, Wilkinson Barker Knauer, Consumer Protection Law and Competition Law practices, & 11-year FTC veteran
Jim Davidson, Chair of the Public Policy group, Polsinelli Shughart PC
As required by rules instituted last year, members of Congress are posting their earmark requests online. And in a small improvement over past practice, the House Appropriations Committee is posting links to all those pages (in alphabetical order and by state). The Senate Appropriations Committee is doing the same.
So, great. You can go line-by-line and figure out what requests your member of Congress has put in. But what’s the total number of your members’ requests? What’s the total amount of his or her requests? Who requested the most earmarks, in dollars or in number? Where in your district is the money supposed to go?
HTML pages and PDF documents are very hard to work with and don’t allow us to answer these questions. The Earmarkdata.org project is asking Congress to produce information about what it’s doing in formats sites like WashingtonWatch.com can use.
If you haven’t already, please sign the petition at Earmarkdata.org And please tell a friend about this effort too.
John Schwartz of The New York Times called me two weeks ago and asked for comment about a potential controversy involving mobile phone provider Sprint and the charitable organization Catholic Relief Services (CRS). The facts were pretty sketchy at the time, but Schwartz told me that CRS was accusing Sprint of blocking Mobile Commons, the company that connects CRS and 100 other nonprofit organizations with text messaging networks, from getting a short code to create a charitable mobile donation program in the wake of the Haiti earthquake. Here’s the basic background that appeared in Schwartz’s March 24th article, “Catholic Charity and Sprint Tangle Over Texting“:
[CRS] wanted to try a twist on the technology: when people sent a text message to donate, they got a reply offering to connect them via phone to the charity’s call center. The group hoped that the calls could build a stronger bond with donors, and garner larger contributions as well. But just three days into the effort after the Jan. 12 earthquake, the charity got word that Sprint Nextel was demanding that the “text-to-call” effort be shut down. The charity had 40 days to abandon the feature or lose access to millions of Sprint customers. Sprint’s original motivations are murky; it said that an intermediary company had failed to properly fill out a form to verify that it was dealing with a legitimate charity.
It didn’t take long for the regulatory activists at Free Press and Public Knowledge to pounce and claim the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had to intervene to save our souls from the nefarious scum at Sprint. After all, you do know that Sprint hates Haitians, right? The company obviously wanted to see Haitians starve and not receive any support from charitable organizations.
No, seriously, come on! How asinine is this storyline?! Continue reading →
Are you a fellow Twitter addict who also monitors Internet policy and cyberlaw developments closely? If so, have you noticed that there really isn’t a good Twitter hashtag for this broad and growing issue set? The #FCC and #FTC hashtags have become catch-alls for a great deal of activity in this area, but they don’t really make sense for other Internet policy issues that those agencies don’t cover. For example, Sec. 230-related issues wouldn’t really fit in either of those. Neither would something about Internet governance, e-commerce taxation, or search engine policy concerns. And just using #Internet doesn’t work because it’s far too broad. #Cyberlaw is probably the best hashtag I’ve found to cover this arena, but it doesn’t get much traction and may also be too narrow since some users might not consider it applicable to digital economics.
So, I’d like to propose #NetPolicyas a catch-all Twitter hastag for Internet policy matters. It would be great way to keep track of breaking news, new papers, and upcoming events related to the Internet policy issues.
Short but very important essay here from Santa Clara University Law School Prof. Eric Goldman about calls to alter Sec. 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) to address concerns about online harassment. Generally speaking, Sec. 230 immunizes online intermediaries from punishing liability for the content that travels over their networks / services. Specifically, Sec. 230 stipulates that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” In other words: Don’t shoot the messenger!
As we’ve noted here before, it is probably not an overstatement to think of Sec. 230 as the very cornerstone of Internet Freedom, since it makes possible an online “utopia for utopias,” to borrow a phrase from our favorite modern political philosopher, the late Robert Nozick. Without Sec. 230, intermediaries would likely be forced to shut down many avenues of communication and would have to become deputized conduct and morality police for every cyber-street corner.
Goldman, America’s leading expert on Sec. 230-related jurisprudence, correctly notes that, “Frequently, § 230’s critics do not attack the immunization generally, but instead advocate a new limited exception for their pet concern.” He’s got that right. Indeed, we are increasingly hearing calls from numerous quarters these days to “tweak 230” for one pet concern after another. We’ve illustrated some of those concerns in this exhibit.
Regulatory advocates can be found for each of these issues who like to see the protections afforded by Sec. 230 scaled back by Congress or he courts. But Goldman rightly warns:
My good friend and mentor Robert Corn-Revere, a Partner at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, will be delivering what sounds like a terrific speech on April 5th at 4:00 at the George Mason University School of Law on “The First Amendment and the End of History: Does Media Convergence Mean the End of Regulation or is it Just the Beginning?” It’s a topic I careaboutdeeply and you’ll see how influential Bob’s thinking has been on my own by watching that video down below. Bob is one of America’s leading free speech scholars and a tireless defender of First Amendment rights. And he’s always entertaining when he steps to a podium to deliver remarks. Admission to the event is free but RSVPs are requested: iep.gmu@gmail.com. Here are logistical details:
Monday, April 5, 2010, 4 p.m.
George Mason University School of Law (Room 120)
3301 Fairfax Drive, Arlington, Va. (Orange Line: Virginia Square-GMU Metro)
Steve Forbes has an entertaining essay out today about the agenda of Free Press and its founder, the Marxist media scholar Robert McChesney. Forbes notes that McChesney has expressed a great deal of sympathy for the Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and has even defended some of his tactics to control the press. This leads to his fear that McChesney and Free Press will convince the Obama Administration to use similar tactics here in the U.S.:
Once the federal government starts subsidizing our own free press, how long until the feds start revoking broadcast licenses of government opponents and bringing pesky reporters up on charges of say, “corruption” or “subversion”? According to McChesney and the Free Press folks, it apparently can’t happen soon enough.
To be fair, I haven’t heard anyone from Free Press defending Hugo Chavez or his tactics. But I do wonder why the organization continues to associate itself with such a radioactive figure like Mr. McChesney. After all, Forbes isn’t making up anything about McChesney, who is an outspoken, and self-described, Marxist media theorist. McChesney really has expressed sympathy for Chavez and said that, “If [Venezuelan broadcaster] RCTV were broadcasting in the United States, its license would have been revoked years ago. In fact its owners would likely have been tried for criminal offenses, including treason.” Far more troubling are Mr. McChesney’s views regarding how to reform media going forward, which I’ve documented in past essays in more detail. (See, “Free Press, Robert McChesney & the “Struggle” for Media,” “What the Media Reformistas Really Want,” and “Socializing Media in Order to Save It,.”) One need look no further than this lengthy interview with McChesney that appeared in an online newsletter called “The Bullet” produced by the Canada-based “Socialist Project.”
The whole thing is quite troubling to read, but here are a couple of jaw-droppers that make it clear just how radical Mr. McChesney’s worldview and agenda are:
Congresswoman Diane E. Watson, who serves as Chair of the House Government Management, Organization, and Procurement Subcommittee, has just introduced new legislation proposing the creation of a “National Office for Cyberspace” within the Executive Office of the President. Rep. Watson’s bill, “The Federal Information Security Management Act of 2010” (H.R. 4900) amends the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) of 2002 in an attempt “to strengthen and harmonize the federal government’s efforts to ensure the integrity of its information infrastructure.”
It’s hard to argue against that goal, and I won’t here. Clearly, our government needs to get it’s own house in order when it comes to network and data security. Nonetheless, an “Office for Cyberspace” gives me pause. Although I always try to be careful with slippery slope arguments (per Eugene Volokh’s excellent advice here), I think there are good reasons to fear that any Executive Branch-level “Office for Cyberspace” would quickly come to take on a wide variety of other policy matters beyond just federal cyber-security issues. The Federal Communication Commission’s past and recenthistory of regulatory mission creep is not encouraging in this regard. The agency has always looked to grow its mission and powers, and it has often succeeded. Of course, to be fair, the fundamental ambiguity of certain clauses and phrases within the agency’s charter document– the Communications Act of 1934 — left the door open to creative readings of things like what was in “the public interest,” or what constituted “fair and non-discriminatory” practices.
If, by contrast, the powers of this new “National Office for Cyberspace” are tightly limited to the mission of simply ensuring that the federal government keeps its own house in order — and doesn’t try to regulate our digital houses at the same time — then perhaps we have nothing to worry about. But, I remain a bit paranoid about these things and fear that the old “Hands Off the Net!” dream dies a little more each day because of bills like this.
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 →
Last week there was another leak of the secretly negotiated Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). This time it was a copy of the of the entire latest draft. It seems to dispel some of the initial worries bloggers had written about, including customs searches of your iPod at the border, but also stokes other concerns. For one thing, the U.S. seems to be pushing for protocols to cut off copyright violators from their internet access.
As required by rules instituted last year, members of Congress are posting their earmark requests online. And in a small improvement over past practice, the House Appropriations Committee is posting links to all those pages (
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.