It appears that Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler is returning to a competition-based approach to communications regulation. Chairman Wheeler’s emphasis on “competition, competition, competition” indicates his intent to intervene in communications markets only when it is necessary to correct a market failure.

I expect most on both sides of the political spectrum would welcome a return to rigorous market analysis at the FCC, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time. The American Television Alliance (ATVA), whose FCC petition wouldn’t withstand even a cursory market power analysis, is sure to be among the displeased.

The ATVA petition asks the FCC to regulate prices for retransmission consent (the prices video service providers (VSPs) pay for the rights to provide broadcast television programming to pay-TV subscribers) because retransmission fees and competition among VSPs are increasing. Though true, this data doesn’t indicate that TV stations or broadcast television networks have market power — it indicates that legislative and policy efforts to increase competition among VSPs are working. Continue reading →

Ladar Levison on Lavabit

by on February 4, 2014 · 0 comments

Ladar Levison, founder of encrypted email service Lavabit, discusses recent government action that led him to shut down his firm. When it was suspected that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden used Lavabit’s email service, the FBI issued a National Security Letter ordering Levison to hand over SSL keys, jeopardizing the privacy of Lavabit’s 410,000 users. Levison discusses his inspiration for founding Lavabit and why he chose to suspend the service; how Lavabit was different from email services like Gmail; developments in his case and how the Fourth Amendment has come into play; and his involvement with the recently-formed Dark Mail Technical Alliance.

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On Saturday, C-SPAN aired a segment of The Communicators featuring me and Free Press’ Chance Williams. In the 30-minute segment, Chance and I discussed the future of net neutrality now that the FCC’s Open Internet rules are vacated. You can see the taping here or below.

I am speaking on a panel tomorrow at the Dirksen Senate Office Building at an R Street Institute event on patent reform. Here’s R Street’s description:

The patent reform debate has been painted as one of inventors vs. patent troll victims. Yet these two don’t have to be enemies. We can protect intellectual property, and stomp out patent trolls.

If you’re just tuning in, patent trolls are entities that hoard overly broad patents, but do not use them to make goods or services, or advance a useful secondary market. While there’s a place for patent enforcement, these guys take it way too far.

These entities maliciously threaten small businesses, inventors, and consumers, causing tens of billions in economic damage each year. Since litigation costs millions of dollars, businesses are forced to settle even when the claim against them is spurious.

Fortunately, with growing awareness and support, the patent trolls’ lucrative racket is in jeopardy. With Obama’s patent troll task force, the passage of the Innovation Act in the House, state legislation tackling demand letters, and further action in the courts, we appear to be closer than ever to achieving real reform.

Please join us for a lunch and panel discussion of the nature of the patent troll problem, the industries it affects, and the policy solutions being considered.

Featuring:

Zach Graves, Director of Digital Marketing & Policy Analyst, R Street Institute (Moderator)

Eli Dourado, Research Fellow, Mercatus Center

Whitaker L. Askew, Vice President, American Gaming Association

Robin Cook, Assistant General Counsel for Special Projects, Credit Union National Association

Julie Hopkins, Partner, Tydings & Rosenberg LLP

The festivities begin at noon. The event is open to the public, and you can register here.

In December, Reps. Upton and Walden announced that they intend to update the Communications Act, which saw its last major revision in 1996. Today marks the deadline to submit initial comments regarding updating the Act. Below is my submission, which includes reference to a Mercatus paper by Raymond Gifford analyzing the Digital Age Communications (DACA) reports. These bipartisan reports would largely replace and reform our deficient communications laws.

Dear Chairman Upton,

As you and Rep. Walden recently acknowledged, U.S. communications law needs updating to remove accumulated regulatory excess and to strengthen market forces. When the 1934 Communications Act was passed, there was a national monopoly telephone provider and Congress’s understanding of radio spectrum physics was rudimentary. Chief among the Communication Act’s many flaws was giving the Federal Communication Commission authority to regulate wired and wireless communications according to “public interest, convenience, and necessity,” an amorphous standard that has been frequently abused. If delegating this expansive grant of discretion to the FCC was ever sensible, it clearly no longer is. Today, eight decades later, with competition between video, telephone, and Internet providers taking place over wired and wireless networks, the public interest standard simply invites costly rent-seeking and stifles technologies and business opportunities.

Like an old cottage receiving several massive additions spanning decades by different clumsy architects, communications law is a disorganized and dilapidated structure that should be razed and reconstituted. As new technologies emerged since the 1930s—broadcast television, cable, satellite, mobile phones, the Internet—and upended existing regulated businesses, the FCC and Congress layered on new rules attempting to mitigate the distortions.

Congressional attempts at reforming communications laws have appeared regularly ever since the 1996 amendments. During the last such attempt, in 2011, the Mercatus Center released a study discussing and summarizing a model for communications law reform known as the Digital Age Communications Act (DACA). That model legislation—consisting of five reports released in 2005 and 2006—came from the bipartisan DACA Working Group. The reports addressed five areas:

1. Regulatory framework;
2. Universal service;
3. Spectrum reform;
4. Federal-state jurisdiction; and
5. Institutional reform.

The DACA reports represent a flexible, market-oriented agenda from dozens of experts that, if implemented, would spur innovation, encourage competition, and benefit consumers. The regulatory framework report is the centerpiece recommendation and adopts a proposal largely based on the Federal Trade Commission Act, which provides a reformed FCC with nearly a century of common law for guidance. Significantly, the reports replace the FCC’s misused “public interest” standard with the general “unfair competition standard” from the FTC Act.

Despite the passage of time, those reports have held up remarkably well. The 2011 Mercatus paper describing the DACA reports is attached for submission in the record. The scholars at Mercatus are happy to discuss this paper and the cited materials below—including the DACA reports—further with Energy & Commerce Committee staff as they draft white papers and reform proposals.

Thank you for initiating discussion about updating the Communications Act. Reform can give America’s innovative technology and telecommunications sector a predictable and technology-neutral legal framework. When Congress replaces command-and-control rules with market forces, consumers will be the primary beneficiaries.

Sincerely,

Brent Skorup
Research Fellow, Technology Policy Program
Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Resources

Digital Age Communications Act (DACA) Working Groups Reports.

JEFFREY A. EISENACH ET AL., THE TELECOM REVOLUTION: AN AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY (1995).

Raymond L. Gifford, The Continuing Case for Serious Communications Law Reform, Mercatus Center Working Paper No. 11-44 (2011).

PETER HUBER, LAW AND DISORDER IN CYBERSPACE: ABOLISH THE FCC AND LET COMMON LAW RULE THE TELECOSM (1997).

The war among the states to see who can lavish the film industry with more generous tax credits in their attempt to become “the next Hollywood” continues, and it is quickly descending into a classic race to the bottom. A front-page article in today’s Wall Street Journal notes that the tax incentive bidding war has gotten so intense that it is hollowing out the old Hollywood labor pool and sending it on a road trip across the America in search of tax-induced job activity:

As film and TV production scatters around the country, more workers…  are packing up from California and moving to where the jobs are. Driving this exodus of lower-wage workers — stunt doubles, makeup artists, production assistants and others who keep movie sets humming — are successful efforts by a host of states to use tax incentives to poach production business from California. […] 

Only two movies with production budgets higher than $100 million filmed in Los Angeles in 2013, according to Film L.A. Inc., the city’s movie office. In 1997, the year “Titanic” was released, every big-budget film but one filmed at least partially in the city. The number of feature-film production days in Los Angeles peaked in 1996 and fell by 50% through last year, according to Film L.A. Projects such as reality television and student films have picked up some of the slack. But overall entertainment-industry employment has slid. About 120,000 Californians worked in the industry in 2012, down from 136,000 in 2004, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The labor migration has arisen in part because California hasn’t competed aggressively on the tax-break front, officials and executives say, while states like Georgia have made efforts to grab a sizable chunk of the industry. More than 40 states and 30 foreign countries are offering increasingly generous and creative tax incentives to lure entertainment producers.

On one hand, hooray for labor mobility! But seriously, this stinks because this labor shift is taking place in a wholly unnatural way, with a complex and growing web of tax inducements leading to massive distortions in this marketplace. Continue reading →

The Internet is abuzz with news that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler favors a case-by-case approach to addressing Internet competition issues. It is the wisest course, and perhaps the most courageous. Some on the right will say he is going too far, and some on the left will say he isn’t going far enough. That is one reason Wheeler’s approach should be commended. Staunch disagreements about net neutrality and other Internet governance issues reflect the uncertainty inherent in a dynamic market.

Chairman Wheeler’s comments this week echoed Socrates (“I’m not smart enough to know what comes next [in innovation]”) and, to my surprise, Virginia Postrel (the Chairman favors addressing Internet issues “in a dynamic rather than a static way”). He recognizes that, in a two-sided market, there is no reason to assume that ISPs will necessarily have the ability to charge content providers rather than the other way around. The potential for strategic behavior on the Internet today is radically different than in the dial-up Internet era, and the Chairman appears prepared to consider those differences in his approach to communications regulation. Continue reading →

Last week, it was my great pleasure to be invited on NPR’s “On Point with Tom Ashbrook,” to debate Jeffrey Rosen, a leading privacy scholar and the president and chief executive of the National Constitution Center. In an editorial in the previous Sunday’s New York Times (“Madison’s Privacy Blind Spot”), Rosen proposed “constitutional amendment to prohibit unreasonable searches and seizures of our persons and electronic effects, whether by the government or by private corporations like Google and AT&T.” He said his proposed amendment would limit “outrageous and unreasonable” collection practices and would even disallow consumers from sharing their personal information with private actors even if they saw an advantage in doing so.

I responded to Rosen’s proposal in an essay posted on the IAPP Privacy Perspectives blog, “Do We Need A Constitutional Amendment Restricting Private-Sector Data Collection?” In my essay, I argued that there are several legal, economic, and practical problems with Rosen’s proposal. You can head over to the IAPP blog to read my entire response but the gist of it is that “a constitutional amendment [governing private data collection] would be too sweeping in effect and that better alternatives exist to deal with the privacy concerns he identifies.” There are very good reasons we treat public and private actors differently under the law and there “are all far more practical and less-restrictive steps that can be taken without resorting to the sort of constitutional sledgehammer that Jeff Rosen favors. We can protect privacy without rewriting the Constitution or upending the information economy,” I concluded.

But I wanted to elaborate on one particular thing I found particularly interesting about Rosen’s comments when we were on NPR together. During the show, Rosen kept stressing how we needed to adopt a more European construction of privacy as “dignity rights” and he even said his proposed privacy amendment would even disallow individuals from surrendering their private data or their privacy because he viewed these rights as “unalienable.” In other words, from Rosen’s perspective, privacy pretty much trumps everything, even if you want to trade it off against other values.  Continue reading →

Last night, I appeared on a short segment on the PBS News Hour discussing, “What’s the future of privacy in a big data world?” I was also joined by Jules Polonetsky, executive director of the Future of Privacy Forum. If you’re interested, here’s the video. Transcript is here. Finally, down below the fold, I’ve listed a few law review articles and other essays of mine on this same subject.

Continue reading →

Jack Schinasi discusses his recent working paper, Practicing Privacy Online: Examining Data Protection Regulations Through Google’s Global Expansion published in the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law. Schinasi takes an in-depth look at how online privacy laws differ across the world’s biggest Internet markets — specifically the United States, the European Union and China. Schinasi discusses how we exchange data for services and whether users are aware they’re making this exchange. And, if not, should intermediaries like Google be mandated to make its data tracking more apparent? Or should we better educate Internet users about data sharing and privacy? Schinasi also covers whether privacy laws currently in place in the US and EU are effective, what types of privacy concerns necessitate regulation in these markets, and whether we’ll see China take online privacy more seriously in the future.

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