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.
The FCC has just issued its long-awaited report on Violent Television Programming and Its Impact on Children. Unsurprisingly, it recommends that the government should assume a great role in regulating the video content that comes into our homes. The agency concludes that: “We believe that further action to enable viewer-initiated blocking of violent television content would serve the government’s interests in protecting the well-being of children and facilitating parental supervision and would be reasonably likely to be upheld as constitutional.” (p. 15)
Ambiguity Defined
Ironically, however, the FCC’s report goes on to undercut its own argument for regulation again and again because of the stunning level of ambiguity surrounding everything they propose. For example, in the second paragraph of the report, the FCC notes that “A broad range of television programming aired today contains [violent] content, including, for example, cartoons, dramatic series, professional sports such as boxing, news coverage, and nature programs.” Is the agency saying such things could be regulated? They never tell us.
Or consider the endless number of questions raised by this paragraph on pages 20-21:
We believe that developing an appropriate definition of excessively violent programming would be possible, but such language needs to be narrowly tailored and in conformance with judicial precedent. Any definition would need to be clear enough to provide fair warning of the conduct required. A definition sufficient to give notice of upcoming violent programming content to parents and potential viewers could make use of, or be a refinement of, existing voluntary rating system definitions or could make use of definitions used in the research community when studying the consequences of violent programming. For more restrictive time channeling rules, a definition based on the scientific literature discussed above, which recognizes the factors most important to determining the likely impact of violence on the child audience, could be developed. For example, such a definition might cover depictions of physical force against an animate being that, in context, are patently offensive. In determining whether such depictions are patently offensive, the Government could consider among other factors the presence of weapons, whether the violence is extensive or graphic, and whether the violence is realistic. (p. 20-21)
Let’s try to unpack some of this because defining “excessive violence” is really the core of this debate.
Continue reading →
According to today’s Washington Post, the FCC’s report on televised media content will be out within the week, and you can expect a whole lotta regulatin’ to be goin on once it hits the Hill.
In their article, “FCC Seeks To Rein In Violent TV Shows: Agency Will Recommend Law to Regulate Broadcast And Basic Cable Content,” Washington Post staff writers Paul Farhi and Frank Ahrens report that:
The Federal Communications Commission has concluded that regulating TV violence is in the public interest, particularly during times when children are likely to be viewers — typically between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., FCC sources say.
…
The report — commissioned by members of Congress in 2004 and based on hundreds of comments from parents, industry officials, academic experts and others — concludes that Congress has the authority to regulate “excessive violence” and to extend its reach for the first time into basic-cable TV channels that consumers pay to receive.
Continue reading →
If you look back at all the writing we have done here on Net Neutrality (NN), it seems to me that the common theme of our collective opposition to regulation is that we just don’t know what we’re getting ourselves into. No doubt, we’re skeptics about most regulatory proposals, but with good reason. Our government does not have a very good track record when it comes to regulating communications or high-technology markets for the purposes of improving consumer welfare. In fact, just the opposite is usually the result. Consumers typically are on the losing end of grandiose regulatory schemes that are suppose to serve “the public interest.” As a century’s worth of communications industry regulation proved, regulation typically results in stagnant markets, lack-luster innovation and limited consumer choice.
That’s why yesterday’s new Notice of Inquiry about Net neutrality from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has me so worried. It tees up all the questions that we’ve been asking here for the past few years. The difference is, of course, that now the whole world is going to flood the agency with answers and many of them will entail regulatory action.
Just the way the FCC frames some of the questions in this Notice concerns me, especially in terms of the breadth of what the agency is investigating. Consider how the discussion kicks off:
Continue reading →
I think we can all agree that Don Imus is an ass and that his comments about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team were offensive and racist. He has rightly been universally condemned for his actions, and his employers — CBS Radio and MSNBC — have terminated his morning talk show program as a result.
But does his behavior justify something more in the form of a
regulatory response? Some people think so, including the Rev. Al Sharpton and Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (D-Mich.), the head of the Congressional Black Caucus. As this L.A. Times article notes, Rev. Sharpton and Rep. Kilpatrick argue that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) should sanction the CBS Radio stations that aired the Imus remarks. Rep. Kilpatrick has also suggested that the FCC should mandate diversity training for CBS Radio and MSNBC employees who allowed the show to be broadcast.
It goes without saying that any effort by the FCC to regulate hate speech is going to raise a number of sticky constitutional issues. As former FCC Chairman Richard E. Wiley tells the
L.A. Times: “Lets say there was a discussion of some minority issue, and somebody said something that somebody took offense to. You can see how very quickly it could get very complex constitutionally.” And as Tom Taylor, editor of Inside Radio, told the Times: “You’d have to build another building just for all the complaints” the FCC would receive, he said.
Continue reading →
I’ve spent the last 7 years closely monitoring the ongoing debate over media ownership in this country and what I find most intriguing about it is the inherent schizophrenia of the media criticism emanating from the political Left. That is, although we find ourselves in the midst of unprecedented explosion of media options and diversity, critics on the Left are still spinning gloom-and-doom stories about our modern media environment and the state of deliberative democracy. But they are doing so from two radically different perspectives.
This is the subject of a new article of mine that appears in the latest issue of the
City Journal entitled “The Media Cornucopia.” In the essay I note that:
This media cornucopia is a wonderful development for a free society–or so you’d think. But today’s media universe has fierce detractors, and nowhere more vehemently than on the left. Their criticisms seem contradictory. Some, such as Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich, contend that real media choices, information sources included, remain scarce, hindering citizens from fully participating in a deliberative democracy. Others argue that we have too many media choices, making it hard to share common thoughts or feelings; democracy, community itself, again loses out. Both liberal views get the story disastrously wrong. If either prevails, what’s shaping up to be America’s Golden Age of media could be over soon.
I go on to describe these two competing schools of Leftist media criticism, which I label the “scarcity-obsessed” critics versus the “information-overload” critics. I discuss the views of the various theorists who occupy each camp of thinking and explain how they have quite successfully used these competing theories of media criticism to spin reality out of the political dialogue about these issues. In the end, I conclude that: “What unifies the two schools of leftist media criticism, beneath their apparent opposition, is pure elitism. … Both liberal groups would love to put their thumbs on the scale and tilt the media in their preferred direction.”
Anyway, if you are interested in reading the entire essay, the folks at the
City Journal have posted it on their site here.
Rep. Barney Frank is continuing his effort to repeal the U.S. ban on online gambling, which he calls “one of the stupidest things I ever saw.” The law, the “Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act,” was passed during the last session of Congress. Now that he’s the chair of the House Financial Services Committee he certainly has a better chance taking this silly law off the books, but he still faces an uphill battle.
Back in October 2003, when I was still with the Cato Institute, my colleague Wayne Crews and I brought Rep. Frank to Cato to deliver some keynote remarks on this issue during an event we hosted. He was amazing and his speech that day remains to the most principled (and highly entertaining) thing I’ve ever heard anyone say on the issue to date. And, luckily, the video is still on the Cato website here. Make sure to check it out and listen to the excellent Q&A session in particular. Great stuff.
Since 2000, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has surveyed the marketing and advertising practices of major media sectors (movies, music and video games) in a report entitled Marketing Violent Entertainment to Children. (The reports can be found here). According to the agency, the purpose of these reports is to examine “the structure and operation of each industry’s self-regulatory program, parental familiarity and use of those systems, and whether the industries had marketed violent entertainment products in a manner inconsistent with their own parental advisories.” The fifth report in this ongoing series was released today.
Generally speaking, the latest report finds that things continue to improve in all three sectors with the greatest improvements coming in the video game sector. But the FTC argues that these industries still need to do more to improve their ratings systems and the enforcement of those systems.
Many of the FTC’s recommendations are unobjectionable in that they are basically suggesting these industries do a better job promoting and enforcing their own voluntary ratings and labeling systems. It’s tough to be against that, of course, but there are some interesting questions about what it means in practice.
Continue reading →
The proposed XM-Sirius merger continues to generate intense debate here in Washington. Broadcasters are aggressively pushing regulators to spike the deal, calling the proposed merger a “monopoly.” As I pointed out in my earlier essay on this, I just can’t buy that argument. I just don’t understand how anyone can honestly believe that satellite radio, terrestrial radio and digital music are not in fierce competition for our ears.
I recently stumbled upon two good essays that make the same point. One is by my former PFF colleague Randy May, who is now the president of the Free State Foundation. In his article, “Thinking ‘Siriusly’ About Satellite Radio Competition,” Randy argues that “the notion that satellite radio constitutes a discrete market for purposes of assessing the merger’s competitive impact seems problematical–and to defy common sense.”
Tim Farrar of TMK Associates agrees. In a new paper entitled “The Competitive Landscape for Satellite Radio,” Farrar argues that “the potential alternatives to satellite radio are, in essence, those technologies which provide (either live or recorded) in-vehicle audio content (i.e. talk, music, sports and information services such as news, traffic and weather).” He continues:
Continue reading →
My friend Steve DelBianco of ACT and NetChoice recently reminded me that the effort by state officials to impose a burdensome crazy-quilt of sales taxes on the Internet continues. Proponents call this effort the “Streamlined Sales Tax Project” (SSTP) by what it really is–as Veronique de Rugy and I argued in this 2003 Cato Institute report–is a giant sales tax cartel. The states basically want Congress or the courts to give them authority to impose parochial tax collection burdens on what it clearly national–sometimes global–commercial activity. And they want to administer it all together as one big cartel. (And you thought the Articles of Confederation were dead!)
Luckily, Congress and the courts haven’t caved to these demands and given state governments the right to ride roughshod over the Constitution and the Commerce Clause. But, in reality, the only thing that’s held back state and local efforts to impose such sales tax collection burdens on Internet vendors so far is an old 1992 Supreme Court decision,
Quill Corp. v. North Dakota and a handful of other legal precedents. Those cases made it clear that it would be unfair to impose tax collection burdens on out-of-state vendors. Instead, state and local governments could only require tax collection if the entity they sought to tax had a “nexus,” or tangible physical presence, in their jurisdictions.
Seems fair enough, right? Basically the court was just restating the old “No taxation without representation” motto upon which our country was founded. Well, apparently a lot of state and local officials aren’t comfortable with that notion because they have spent years trying to evade that sensible constitutional admonition. And in recent years they have been trying to get Congress to agree to toss
Quill and those other decisions (and the Commerce Clause) out the window so that they can adopt the SSTP and start taxing every Internet transaction is sight.
Continue reading →
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking and writing about the contentious issues surrounding social networking sites, age verification mandates and online child safety in general. I recently released a major PFF working paper on these issues (“Social Networking and Age Verification: Many Hard Questions, No Easy Solutions“).
One of the people who has had a great deal of influence on my thinking about these matters is information security expert Jeff Schmidt, the CEO of Authis, a Reston-based authentication / identification firm. Jeff has 15 years of experience in this field and has worked for Microsoft, Ohio State University, and several other small technology companies. He is also a founder and the elected Director of the InfraGard National Members Alliance, which is the private sector component of the FBI’s InfraGard Program. (InfraGard is an FBI/private sector alliance dedicated to improving information sharing between private industry and the government on matters of national security). Jeff helped the FBI create the InfraGard Program in 1998.
So Jeff knows his stuff, and that’s what makes what he has to say about these issues–especially age verification–particularly important. Luckily, some of the essays he has penned on this subject and shared with me in the past are now online for all to see here. I thought I’d provide some highlights of the key conclusions from his papers, which are listed below:
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.