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.
From a story in today’s USA Today:
“A year ago, a 37-inch flat-panel model typically cost about $4,000. Now, some can be found for as little as $1,100, says television analyst Rosemary Abowd at Pacific Media Associates. From January to May, the most recent data available, average flat-panel prices tumbled more than 12%, she says.”
While this is stunning to me, it’s not nearly as amazing as the fact that, just a few years ago, most 40+ inch plasmas were going for over $10,000 bucks and couldn’t be found in most “big box” electronic retail stores. You had to go to high-end A/V shops to get them. Today, by contrast, when you walk into Best Buy and Circuit City and are surrounded by walls full of flat-panel displays, many of which are dipping below the $2000 price point as the
USA Today story suggests.
We’ve seen the same thing happen with other high-end electronics too, like progressive DVD players and surround sound receivers. I heard the other day that Circuit City is now going to be carrying Denon products, one the best names in the business of consumer electronics and previously only available at very high-end establishments. (I own a killer Denon upscaling DVD player that plays all my surround sound audio discs as well. I love it. Until you’ve heard Pink Floyd and The Flaming Lips in 5.1 surround, you haven’t lived life to the fullest!) Meanwhile, Best Buy now has their “Magnolia” mini-stores within many of their branches that cater to the truly high-end customers. They carry many of the high-end products I use in my home including my incredible Yamaha VX2600 surround sound receiver.
As a result, DVD players and A/V receivers that used to cost a month’s salary can now be had for a couple hundred bucks. Just amazing when you think about it. I have a closet full of “retired” consumer electronics gear that is now just gathering dust. It just makes me sick to think what I spent on all that stuff considering that the gear I’ve got in my living room now cost thousands less and provides a vastly superior audio and video experience.
(No policy angle to all this. I’m just consistently amazed by the wonders of capitalism.)
I’m consistently amazed with Microsoft’s XBOX 360 and XBOX Live Network, and not just because of the games I can play on it but because of everything else I can do.
I was reminded of that tonight when I got on the XBOX Live Marketplace to look for a new “NCAA Football 2007” game demo from EA Sports that I wanted to download and check out before buying the game. When I got to XBOX Live, however, the first thing I was greeted by was a notice about the latest “Artist of the Month.” So, I gave that a listen.
Then, my wife came into the room and said something about getting a babysitter sometime soon so we could go see a new movie. But she wasn’t sure what she wanted to see, so I pulled up the movie and TV previews page on XBOX Live and downloaded clips from “Superman Returns,” XMEN 3,” “A Scanner Darkly,” and several other movie clips… all in glorious 720p high-def with stunning digital surround sound. (Indeed, downloading all these high-def clips via XBOX encourages me to just wait for home release of the flix because they look much better on my home projector than they do at the theater!)
A short while after that, my kids came into the room so I decided to pull up something for them. I downloaded some clips from Pixar’s new movie “Cars” and then also downloaded a free version of the arcade classic “Frogger” for my daughter to try out. Here was a game that I pumped countless quarters into as a kid back in 1981, and now my daughter was sitting with me playing it for free 25 years later. On the sofa in our basement. With a wireless controller. On an 8-foot wide projection screen. My how times change!
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I find this eBay versus Google battle over payment services quite interesting. In case you missed it, eBay stuck it to Google this week by notifying the world that it would not allow Google’s new “Google Checkout” payment service to be used to clear transactions on eBay. A lot of people are up in arms about this claiming that eBay has excessive market power and that antitrust actions need to be considered (or at least threatened).
But I think there’s a different way of looking at this scuffle.
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Those wacky Chinese officials are at it again. Apparently they’ve grown tired of just pestering those curious critters who type “Tiananmen Square” or “Falun Gong” into their search engines. So, they’re upping the ante and going after anyone who reports on natural disasters, industrial accidents, or health and security hazards without prior state permission.
Yes, you read that right: Reporting the news will soon be a crime in China. According to this report in today’s Wall Street Journal, a new bill being considered in China’s Parliament would “make reports on the handling of and status of public emergencies without approval” or “issue false reports” punishable by fines of between $6,000 and $12,000.
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[This essay builds on Friday’s blog entry on “Social Networking and Child Protection.”]
At last week’s National Center for Missing and Exploited Children conference entitled “A Dialog on Social Networking Web Sites,” several law enforcement officials argued that expanded data retention mandates were needed to adequately police online networks and websites for potentially criminal activity. (In this case, child pornography or child predators were the concern, but data retention has also been proposed as a way to police online networks for terrorist activities among other things).
This push for expanded data retention was hardly surprising. In recent months, members of Congress and the Department of Justice have floated new proposals to require Internet Service Providers (ISP) and others (including search engines and social networking sites) to retain data on their customers and traffic flows for long periods (typically between 6 months and two years). These proposals mimic data retention laws that are being implemented in the European Union.
Let’s step back and consider this issue from two very different perspectives.
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Yesterday I spoke at a National Center for Missing and Exploited Children conference entitled “A Dialog on Social Networking Web Sites.” It featured dozens of industry, technology, law enforcement and government experts discussing how to protect children on social networking sites. I spoke on the final panel of the day on “The Public Policy Challenges of Social Networking” and was up against two state AGs: Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper. They both favored various regulatory measures to address concerns about online safety, including a complete ban on anyone under the age of 16 on social networking websites.
My response follows.
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If you thought the FCC’s regime of speech controls for broadcast television and radio was arbitrary and excessive, then just wait till we give similar authority to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to regulate video game content! That’s apparently what House Telecommunications Subcommittee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich) plans to do.
According to
Broadcasting & Cable magazine, he is preparing a bill to give the FTC greater authority to fine video game manufacturers if they contain objectionable content. Barton, you will recall, was the sponsor of the recently passed Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which raised the fines that FCC could impose on broadcasters 10-fold. Apparently, he wants to give the FTC greater powers because he is angry about the agency’s recent decision in the “Grand Theft Auto” investigation. He said that the FTC’s action “wasn’t even a slap on the wrist” and that millions of dollars of fines should have been levied.
It’s just more bad news for the video game industry and fans of the First Amendment. (Here’s my recent paper summarizing some of the other threats the industry faces).
On the First Amendment front, the big news coming out of Washington this week was that, well… your government still doesn’t really believe in the First Amendment! President Bush signed into law a massive increase in broadcast “indecency” penalties. The new law, called the Broadcast Indecency Enforcement Act, would boost the fines that the Federal Communications Commission could impose on television and radio broadcasters from a current maximum of $32,500 to $325,000–a 10-fold increase.
No surprise here, of course. It’s an election year and this sort of thing wins you brownie points with certain constituencies. While I don’t want to get into an extended legal analysis about why I think all this will eventually be struck down by the courts–see this essay for that discussion–I just want to point out, for the umpteenth time, the radically unfair and illogical nature of all this. Let’s just lay out the current state of affairs in terms First Amendment protection in America:
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This week I traveled to Brussels and, along with my friends at the Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA), co-hosted an interesting roundtable discussion entitled “Mission Impossible: Protecting Children and Free Expression in Our New, Digital Content World.” The focus of the day’s discussion was the same as previous ICRA roundtables that I have participated in and written about here before: What steps can we take to shield children from potentially objectionable media content without repressing freedom of speech / expression?
In addition to being the focus of much of my ongoing research at PFF, you might also recall that I wrote about a major summit on similar issues that took place in Washington, D.C. last week. That event, which was co-hosted by the New America Foundation and the Kaiser Family Foundation, featured keynote addresses from Senator Hillary Clinton among other important lawmakers and public policy experts.
This week’s Brussels roundtable featured a similarly impressive collection of interested parties from major European and American corporations and organizations, including: EU Commission officials, EuroISPA, NICAM (Netherlands Institute for the Classification of Audiovisual Media), Ofcom (UK communications / media regulatory agency), AOL Europe, ECO, MPAA Europe, Microsoft Germany, i-Sieve, Google Europe, Verizon, NASK, Cisco, Telefonica, the U.S. State Department, and several others.
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Each week seems to bring another exuse for me to pen an entry in my ongoing “Media DE-Consolidation” series. This week it’s the Tribune Co. According to a front-page story in today’s Wall Street Journal, the 160-year-old media / newspaper giant is considering spinning off its broadcasting group, which includes 26 TV stations (including my beloved WGN-TV in Chicago on which I watched countless Cubs games growing up). I find this interesting for two reasons:
(1) Most newspaper owners are making a push for the FCC to relax the newspaper-broadcasting cross-ownership rule so they can own both papers and stations in the same market. But this move by Tribune would signal a retreat by a major company in the opposite direction. So perhaps this will take the steam out of the dereg effort at the FCC.
(2) However, let’s not forget that the Tribune Co. long ago received waivers to hold papers and stations in key markets such as Chicago and Los Angeles and the resulting combinations certainly haven’t done anything to negatively impact media diversity in those towns. So, it’s difficult to see what harm would come from allowing others to combine newspaper and broadcasting operations.
Regardless, the push for media DE-consolidation continues and the Chicken Little media critics are nowhere to be found. Any time an operator even mentions the idea of buying more properties, the media critics go bananas and scream for government regulation. But when major operators start spinning off entire divisions, the critics don’t say a peep. They fail to appreciate how dynamic media markets are and how investors, consumers and technological change is the greatest check on market power, not ham-handed government regulations.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.