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.
If you’re a video game fan then by now you’ve heard the troubling news that Sony has announced there will be yet another delay in the eagerly anticipated launch of its PlayStation 3 gaming console. As a headline in the London Times read: “This year’s must-have toy is cancelled for Christmas.” (Needless to say, that’s about the last headline you want to read if you’re in the Sony marketing or PR department!) The new delay will mostly impact European customers, but North American customers will apparently see fewer boxes shipping our way during this holiday season when the box is set to launch here.
As a video game fanatic and former business school student, I must say that this entire episode has turned into quite an interesting case study of how three major competitors go about launching major new business technologies / platforms. Microsoft has taken the “KISS” (keep-it-simple-stupid) approach with their new XBOX 360 and offered a unit without any digital HDMI connections or a built-in high-def disc drive. (A HD-DVD “sidecar” player is scheduled to be offered later this year but the price has not yet been announced). And MS even offers a bare-bones “core” model of the XBOX 360 without a hard drive for just $299, $100 less than its premium $399 unit.
As a result, the company was able to get its system on the market back in November of last year, a full year earlier than Nintendo and Sony’s new systems are due to hit store shelves. Millions of consumers, including some like me who grew tired of waiting for Sony’s PS3, have made the plunge and purchased a XBOX 360. This constitutes a huge advantage for MS in the platform wars. Some predict that 10-15 million XBOX 360s will be sold before Sony finally gets around to pushing out the PS3 in some markets.
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Peter Suderman of the Competitive Enterprise Insitute has penned a nice editorial on the regulatory threats facing MySpace and other social networking sites. In the essay he notes that “a mandatory [age] identification law would likely require the development of some sort of national identification system, and it would still be unlikely to be fully successful. ” He continues:
Moreover, calls to develop such an identification system would create the possibility for an array of unforeseen consequences, as there are inherent dangers in requiring minors to publicly register their identities. By creating a centralized ID database, such requirements would render minors’ personal information more vulnerable. Do parents really want their kids forced to give out personal data for public use?
Good point. Indeed, there are many dangers associated with requiring identify verification for minors before they get online, and policymakers must realize this becuase for many years they have worked hard to shield information about minors from the rest of society. There are various privacy laws on the books that tightly restrict the release or sharing of information about minors. So why change the rules for social networking? It seems to me like we’d be opening a major can of worms if we did.
Also, check out the outstanding summary of everything that’s been happening on the social networking regulatory front over at the 463 blog. And here’s a recent speech I did on the topic when I debate two state attorneys general at a major conference in D.C.
A reoccurring theme of many of my posts on this blog is the very real danger of policymakers–both here and abroad–attempting to extend traditional media content controls to new media outlets and technologies. My PFF colleague Patrick Ross has just released an excellent new report entitled “Do’s and Dont’s for Global Media Regulation: Empowering Expression, Consumers and Innovation,” which summarizes some of the most serious threats to new media that are developing in Europe, Australia and Canada.
Patrick’s new study builds on two other important papers he authored on Europe’s dreadful “Television without Frontiers” initiative, which Patrick has appropriately labeled “Content Regulation without Frontiers.” Patrick’s alternative vision focuses on achieving legal symmetry between old and new media by deregulating down instead of regulating up. He also warns policymakers about the dangers of continuing to distinguish between different types of content delivery or platforms, and to be careful not to discourage migration of content from one type of platform or device to another.
Anyway, read the whole study for more details.
Former Vice President Al Gore had some rather passionate things to say about democracy and the role of media in it during the recent Edinburgh International Television Festival. “Democracy is under attack,” he told the crowd. “Democracy as a system for self-governance is facing more serious challenges now than it has faced for a long time. Democracy is a conversation, and the most important role of the media is to facilitate that conversation of democracy. Now the conversation is more controlled, it is more centralized.”
Apparently, Mr. Gore wants us to believe that democracy is dying and that the blame for it falls on “controlled, centralized” media. I guess such apocalyptic rhetoric helps grab attention for your cause but, in reality, such comments are completely off that off-the-mark and bear no relationship with reality whatsoever.
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I realize this is not a gadget blog, and that I probably should not be using it to seek out personal advice but…
I’m about to upgrade my cell phone and to get one with better multi-media capabilities, especially so I can avoid carrying around both a cell phone and my MP3 player everywhere I go. I’ve been looking at this new Verizon “Chocolate” phone made by LG.
It’s getting mixed reviews, but it has a lot of nice features including expandable memory up to 2 GB, which is important because I want as much room for my music playlists as possible. (I wish cell phones could carry even more memory than that. I’ve already maxed out my 20GB Creative Zen player and looking to upgrade it too).
Anyway, here’s the one question I have not been able to get anyone else to answer for me about the Chocolate phone: Any idea if there is any screwy, ham-handed DRM issues to deal with on this phone? Are there any sites that look into this aspect of cell phone music players? I store most of my music in WMA but have some files in MP3. I just want an easy plug-play-and-transfer experience.
Any advice from TLF readers would be appreciated.
Oh brother, I have heard some pretty silly censorship tales in my time, but this one is a real doozy. Last week, U.K. telecom and media regulator Ofcom announced that, in the wake of an investigation prompted by the anonymous viewer’s complaint, it had pressured the children’s cable TV channel Boomerang to edit out scenes in two “Tom & Jerry” cartoons that were deemed to glamorize or condone smoking. “We note that, in ‘Tom and Jerry’, smoking usually appears in a stylised manner and is frequently not condoned,” reported Ofcom.
The complaint focused on two episodes–“Texas Tom” and “Tennis Chumps.” I seem to remember them from childhood, but my memory is a little fuzzy, so here’s a description from The Guardian: “In Texas Tom, Tom tries to impress a female cat by making a rollup cigarette while Tennis Chumps sees Tom’s opponent in a match smoking a large cigar.”
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There were many excellent keynote speeches and panel discussions during last week’s annual PFF Aspen Summit, and the videos for most of them can now be found online here. But I thought that TLF readers might be particularly interested in the very entertaining net neutrality debate that took place there. It featured the following cast of characters:
- Tod Cohen, Deputy General Counsel and Vice President, Government Relations, eBay
- David Drummond, General Counsel and Senior Vice President for Corporate Development, Google, Inc.
- Carolyn Brandon, Vice President, Policy, CTIA – The Wireless Association
- James Cicconi, Senior Executive Vice President, External and Legislative Affairs, AT&T
- Lawson Hunter, Executive Vice President and Chief Corporate Officer, Bell Canada and Bell Canada Enterprises, Inc.
… and it was moderated by Michael Gallagher a Partner at the law firm of Perkins Coie, LLP, and also an Adjunct Fellow with the Progress & Freedom Foundation. The discussion lasts about 1 hour and 20 minutes and it gets really entertaining toward the end when Mike Gallagher lets the panelists ask each other questions.
Again, just go to the following link and scroll down to the Tuesday 10:30am panel discussion and click on the title:
http://www.tvworldwide.com/events/pff/060822/archives.cfm
In case you didn’t hear, Democratic FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein made some provocative remarks last week at PFF’s annual Aspen Summit, especially on the subject of broadcast indecency enforcement. In his speech, Adelstein had some very interesting things to say about the debates over a la carte regulation and multi-cast must carry mandates (both of which he vehemently opposes) and media ownership regulation (which he strongly supports). But when he got the sensitive subject of indecency regulation, none of us there could have guessed what was coming.
Commissioner Adelstein took FCC Chairman Martin and the rest of the agency to task for their over-zealous enforcement of indecency regulations: “I don’t believe the Commission has provided broadcasters a coherent and principled framework that is rooted in commonsense and sound constitutional grounds,” argued Adelstein. “While we often spend most of our time taking about economic freedom, freedom from governmental intrusion into speech is just as important.” Adelstein then detailed some of the problems with the agency’s recent indecency rulings and concluded that “the Commission’s last batch of decisions dangerously expands the scope of indecency and profanity law.”
Importantly, however, Adelstein noted that he is still a believer in some underlying authority for the agency in terms of broadcast speech regulation. He didn’t bother justifying that outside of using the usual tagline about “protecting the children.” And he didn’t bother explaining why these unique speech constraints should only be imposed on broadcasters while all the kids are bolting to new media outlets.
Regardless, Adelstein pointed out that the FCC’s recent actions threaten to undermine the basic foundations of the FCC’s regulatory regime:
“the Commission’s careless approach endanger[s] the very authority we so delicately retained to enforce broadcast decency rules. . . if the Commission’s zeal leads it to overstep its statutory authority, the Commission could find its authority circumscribed by the courts. We may forever lose the ability to prevent the airing of indecent material, barring an unlikely constitutional amendment setting limits on the First Amendment.”
Of course, some of us are hoping (and predicting) that that’s exactly what will happen!
I’ve been sick as a dog and stuck in bed for several days now and just now had the energy to get back in front of my computer and catch up with the blog. And I must say, what I’m reading here in response to Hance Haney’s arrival at the TLF makes me sick in a different way because is so remarkably venomous and unfair.
Let’s start with some obvious facts. As I made abundantly clear in the very first “Welcome to the TLF” post on this blog two years ago, the TLF is a “technology policy blog” that focuses on “[the] dangerous trend of over-regulation of the Internet, communications, media and high-technology in general.” That’s it. Our focus is narrow and our intent is clear: Advancing the cause of liberty as it pertains to this very narrow set of public policy issues.
We have brought together a diverse collection of minds to advance that cause, and it is a group that most assuredly would not agree on several other policy issues out there. For example, not everyone here necessarily agrees with the Heritage Foundation’s position(s) on national security issues, or Cato’s on drug legalization, or PFF’s on certain copyright issues, but we invite technology policy scholars from those institutions into the fold because they have something thoughtful to say about tech issues from a shared, liberty-loving perspective.
So it should really be no different for Hance Haney. Hance has nothing to do with the intelligent design debate at Discovery and he will certainly not be saying anything about the issue on this blog. Hance is blogging with us because he has solid credentials in the field of technology / telecommunications policy and has been a long-time friend to many of the other TLF bloggers. (Moreover, I am sure that if Hance ever dared to even mention the term intelligent design on this site, many of you would respond with all the formidable intellectual weight you bring to every discussion here and have a damn good time doing so!)
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I wanted to take a moment to welcome Hance Haney to the Tech Liberation Front blog and introduce TLF readers to our newest contributor. Hance is the director of the Discovery Institute’s “Technology & Democracy” project and a frequent blogger on Discovery’s excellent “Disco-Tech” blog. He’ll be cross-posting many of his Disco-Tech essays here on the TLF now.
I first met Hance over 10 years ago when he was a staffer for Rep. Bob Packwood in the years leading up to the passage of the Telecom Act of 1996. For those who might not remember, Bob Packwood was about as principled as they come on communications, media and First Amendment issues when he was in Congress. Hance and I used to enjoy coming up with radical pieces of legislation that would gut heavy-handed telecom regs and cut the FCC down to size… and, amazingly, his boss would introduce every one of them! (Needless to say, Sen. Packwood and Hance didn’t make a lot of friends with the Big Government crowd in the Senate in those days!)
After leaving his Senate position, Hance worked with the U.S. Telecom Assoc. and Qwest Communications before finally landing at Discovery. As you can see from some of the blog entries he’s already posted here, Hance does solid research on the issues we care about and will make a fine contributor to the TLF.
Welcome aboard Hance!
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.