Articles by Adam Thierer 
Senior Fellow in Technology & Innovation at the R Street Institute in Washington, DC. Formerly a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, President of the Progress & Freedom Foundation, Director of Telecommunications Studies at the Cato Institute, and a Fellow in Economic Policy at the Heritage Foundation.
I have embarked on a major new research project that I am calling “Media Metrics: The True State of The Modern Media Marketplace.” The goal of this project is ambitious: I hope to paint the most thorough and objective portrait of the true state of the modern media marketplace ever constructed. To do so, my PFF colleague Grant Eskelsen and I have spent months collecting and reproducing as many datasets, charts, tables and other information that we can get our hands on. I will be publishing individual installments online–some short, some long–discussing various trends and developments in the media marketplace. Later, I will pull it all together and create a massive online database for the public, the press, and policymakers to use as a resource.
Why am I doing this? For far too long in this country–especially in recent years–debates about the media, and public policies governing the media marketplace, have been based almost entirely on emotion, not evidence. Critics are fond of using a variety of subjective barometers to gauge the health of the media market. In a sense, that’s not really surprising since many of us feel a strong bond with media. It touches our lives in a variety of important ways. It informs and inspires on one hand and shocks and repulses on the other. Consequently, everyone fancies themselves a bit of an armchair critic when it comes to media.
But, in recent years, media criticism has been infused with an unprecedented level of raging emotionalism, so much so that it sometimes borders on mass hysteria. Many people—including a large number of regulators and public policy makers—argue that America’s media marketplace is in a miserable state. Some claim that citizens lack choice in media outlets, and that options are just as scarce as ever. Others believe that “localism” in media is dead, or that many groups or niches go underserved because of a lack of true “diversity” in media. Others argue that the market is hopelessly over-concentrated in the hands of few evil media barons who are hell-bent on force-feeding us corporate propaganda. And still others say that the quality of news and entertainment in our society has deteriorated because of a combination of all of the above.
It makes for good copy, but is any of it true?
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.. would free shipping for books be illegal! According to this IHT story, the French impose limits on price discounts for books in the form of restrictions on free shipping on book purchases. Amazon is apparently fighting the law. Good for them. Here’s the beginning of the story…
The online retailer Amazon.com said Monday that it would pay €1,000 a day in fines, rather than comply with a court ruling upholding French limits on price discounts for books. The company decided to pay the daily fine worth $1,500 rather than eliminate its offer of free shipping on book purchases, said Xavier Garambois, director of Amazon’s French subsidiary.
“We are determined to follow every avenue available to us to overturn this law,” Garambois said. The company appealed the ruling Friday. Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of the company, based in Seattle, was equally defiant in a weekend e-mail message to French customers. “As unbelievable as it appears, the free delivery of Amazon.fr is threatened,” he wrote in the French-language note. “France would be the only country in the world where the free delivery practiced by Amazon would be declared illegal,” the Bezos e-mail concluded, inviting consumers to sign an online petition. By Monday evening, more than 120,000 people had clicked in favor of maintaining free delivery.
[For some other silly French Internet proposals, see this recent essay by Jerry and this old piece by James.]
This morning in New York City, social networking website operator MySpace.com announced a major joint effort with 49 state Attorneys General aimed at better protecting children online. (Coverage at CNet, NYT and Forbes). At a joint press conference, MySpace and the AGs unveiled a “Joint Statement on Key Principles of Social Networking Safety” involving expanded online safety tools, improved education efforts, and law enforcement cooperation. They also agreed to create an industry-wide Internet Safety Technical Task Force to study online safety tools, including a review of online identity authentication technology.
Generally speaking, the agreement is step forward for online safety. Indeed, many of the principles in the agreement could form a potential model “code of conduct” that other social networking sites could adopt. In a report I authored for the Progress & Freedom Foundation in August 2006, I argued that it was vital for companies and trade associations to take steps such as this to avoid the specter of government regulation or censorship:
All companies doing business online… must show policymakers and the general public that they are serious about addressing [online safety] concerns. If companies and trade associations do not step up to the plate and meet this challenge soon—and in a collective fashion—calls will only grow louder for increased government regulation of online speech and activities. What is needed is a voluntary code of conduct for companies doing business online. This code of conduct, or set of industry “best practices,” would be based on a straight-forward set of principles and policies that could be universally adopted by [a] wide variety of operators…
In particular, this code of conduct proposal called for companies to make specific pledges regarding improved online safety tools, expanded education / media literacy efforts, and ongoing assistance to law enforcement regarding investigations of online crimes.
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A couple of corporations or trade associations have started blogs about technology policy that are worth checking out. Here’s a partially list of some of the ones I follow in my Bloglines account. I’m interested in hearing from readers about others that should be added to the list. Perhaps we should add a new section to our blogroll to help readers keep tabs on corporate tech blogs like these.
Google – Google Public Policy Blog
Cisco – Cisco High Tech Policy Blog
Cable (NCTA) – Cable Tech Talk
Verizon – Verizon Policy Blog
“Cable-TV Industry Girds for New Threats.” That’s the title of an article today from Ben Charny of the Wall Street Journal, who is reporting on what he’s seeing at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and how it is upending the traditional TV market:
“[A]s evidenced this week by the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas… thanks to the Internet becoming a bigger distributor of entertainment, and new gadgets and other developments that make it easier to show the Internet’s content on TVs. … As the Internet becomes a larger provider of video, and technology makers ease the flow of that content to television sets, it threatens the cable and satellite industries. Currently, the number of subscriber dropouts remains relatively small, according to cable and satellite operators, but anecdotal evidence suggests those affected by a souring U.S. economy are more inclined to keep their less-expensive Internet services than their cable-TV subscriptions.
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin was out at the show this week, too. Hopefully he was watching and listening so his outrageous regulatory “war on cable” can finally come to an end.
I just realized that I forgot to blog last month about the release of the Family Online Safety Institute’s (FOSI) “State of Online Safety Report 2008.” As Stephen Balkam, CEO of FOSI, notes in the preface, the report is “[an] attempt to take an international snap shot of the incredibly diverse and innovative attempts to keep kids safe online, while also respecting free expression.” It features chapters on 9 different countries, including the US, the UK, Australia, Germany, Mexico, Canada, Austria, Netherlands, and Belgium.
Each chapter was authored by an online safety expert from those countries. Stephen Balkam was kind enough to invite me to submit the chapter on the state of affairs in the United States and it is included as Chapter 1 in the report. My contribution is based largely on material pulled from my big PFF report,
Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods.
FOSI hopes to improve and expand the report in coming years to give analysts, policymakers, the press, and other interested parties an in-depth feel for the state of play in many other countries. But it already serves as a uniquely importantly resource for those who want a snapshot of online safety efforts internationally. Here’s more of what Stephen had to say in the preface of the report about the current state of global online safety efforts:
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Yesterday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, General Motors chief executive Rick Wagoner delivered an address on the future of automobiles and technology and hyped the concept of “autonomous driving.” “Autonomous driving means that someday you could do your e-mail, eat breakfast, do your makeup, and watch a video while commuting to work,” Wagoner said. “In other words, you could do all the things you do now while commuting to work but do them safely.”
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m no Luddite. Matter of fact, I’m obsessed with technology and A/V gadgets, and I have covered tech policy issues for a living a 3 different think tanks over the past 16 years. I love all things tech. But I love driving more. A lot more. I have been fanatical about my sports cars ever since I was a kid. From my first car–a 1979 “Smokey & the Bandit” Pontiac TransAm–to my 86 Mustang GT, to my 90 Nissan 300ZX Twin Turbo, my BMWs (two M3s and an 850i) all the way to my current 2005 Lotus Elise–I have been completely obsessed with cars and the joys of motoring throughout my life. And the idea that we’ll all one day soon be driving to work in the equivalent of personal subway cars makes me a little sad because it means the joy of driving might me lost in coming generations.
I wonder if my son will grow up with the same passion for motoring that I have, and that my dad had before me. (I’m certainly going to have something to say about it!) And I wonder if, a generation from now, “driver’s education” classes will consist of little more than downloading a user name and password for your computer-car.
On the upside, I suppose I could see the advantage of making the driving experience fully automated for all those idiots on the road who really do engage in risky behaviors in their cars, like “e-mail, eat[ing] breakfast, do[ing] your makeup, and watch[ing] a video while commuting to work,” as Wagoner suggests. I hate those SOBs. They give me nightmares because, at a minimum, I fear what they might do to my car when they are not looking at the road. Worse yet, I think of the danger they pose to pedestrians (like my kids). So, perhaps a Jetsons-mobile for these morons will be an effective way to reduce accidents and traffic fatalities.
But as for myself, I will pass on “autonomous driving,” thank you very much. I want to be fully in control of my motoring experience forever more. Especially behind the wheel of my beloved Lotus Elise!
I’m tired of making new year resolutions that I can’t live up to. So, this year I’ve decided to set some realistic goals for myself so I can feel better about my accomplishments at year’s end. Thus, in 2008, I resolve to…
OK, now I need to get busy living up to these goals. I feel good about my chances. I’m cracking open a Newcastle Nut Brown Ale right now and getting ready to sit down in front of the TV to play some Xbox with my kids. I think we’re splitting a bag of Doritos for dinner. Happy New Year!
I found Jaron Lanier’s provocatively titled Discover magazine essay “Long Live Closed-Source Software!” quite interesting, and I’m surprised others here (especially Tim) haven’t commented on it yet. Taking a look at the development of open source software over the past 25 years, Lanier concludes that:
Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven’t promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything, they’ve been hindrances. Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.
Before you write me that angry e-mail, please know I’m not anti–open source. I frequently argue for it in various specific projects. But a politically correct dogma holds that open source is automatically the best path to creativity and innovation, and that claim is not borne out by the facts.
The problem, Lanier argues, is that…
The open-source software community is simply too turbulent to focus its tests and maintain its criteria over an extended duration, and that is a prerequisite to evolving highly original things. There is only one iPhone, but there are hundreds of Linux releases. A closed-software team is a human construction that can tie down enough variables so that software becomes just a little more like a hardware chip—and note that chips, the most encapsulated objects made by humans, get better and better following an exponential pattern of improvement known as Moore’s law.
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Movie critic Richard Roeper of “Ebert & Roeper at the Movies” has a new video commentary up with some sensible thinking about the issue of regulating in-flight entertainment.
As I mentioned in this previous post, legislation has been proposed in the House of Representatives that would regulate “violent entertainment” shown on airline flights. Rep. Heath Shuler (D-NC) and several co-sponsors argue that a “Family Friendly Flights Act” is needed to protect kids from such fare while they are flying.
Roeper argues that “sometimes the content in these movies is a little too violent” and that the studios “should probably be a little more judicious in their editing.” But Roeper is generally against regulation and doesn’t think we need separate seating areas for kids on flights. He points out that adding another distinct seating section to airplane is just going to slow down boarding times. “It would be better if the studios themselves do a little bit better job cut[ting] the violent content so that kids don’t need to see people getting shot and car crashes and all that stuff, but let’s not get Congress involved.”
I agree. As I pointed out in an editorial for the
City Journal a few months ago, it would be a mistake to empower federal regulators to become “Long-Range Censors” since many better alternatives to regulation exist.
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