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 participated in a major conference yesterday sponsored by the New America Foundation (NAF) and the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) entitled “Beyond Censorship: Policies and Technologies to Give Parents Control over Children’s Media Content.” The event featured an impressive collection of lawmakers, regulators, corporate leaders and public policy experts who gathered to discuss, as the conference agenda stated, “who is responsible for protecting kids from inappropriate media–industry, the government, or parents armed with new technologies?”
I thought it might be worth transcribing a few of my notes here since others might be interested in what was said. I did the same thing in February after I participated in a similar conference that Stephen Balkam of the Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) hosted at Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. Incidentally, I’m going to be co-hosting a similar event with Stephen and ICRA next week in Brussels entitled “Protecting Children AND Free Expression in Our New, Digital Content World.” EU Commissioner Viviane Reding will be on hand to deliver a keynote address and then we’ll be hearing from many others on these issues.
What follows below is a brief summary of yesterday’s NAF / KFF discussion over the span of the 3-hour event.
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I’ve been spending most of my time blogging about First Amendment-related issues in recent months and have failed to cover media marketplace / ownership developments. Specifically, I haven’t kept up with my ongoing “Media DE-consolidation series,” which has highlighted downsizing or spin-offs at several companies, including: Knight-Ridder, Viacom, Disney, Clear Channel, and many others.
As part of this series, I’ve previously written about Time Warner’s potential coming crack-up, but now it appears imminent. In an amazing front page story in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Time Warner President Jeff Bewkes declares the death of “synergy.” More poignantly, Bewkes goes so far as to call synergy “bull—t”!
And so it appears that the biggest media mega-merger of all-time–and a deal that had hoards of Chicken Little critics declaring it represented “Big Brother,” “the end of the independent press,” and a harbinger of a “new totalitarianism”–is set to unravel.
What are we to make of this?
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I’m lucky enough to live in an area where broadband competition is rapidly intensifying–Fairfax County in Northern Virginia (McLean, VA to be exact). In recent years, the incumbent cable operator Cox Communications has beefed-up its network to offer phone service and high-speed broadband in addition to its growing video programming lineup (which how includes plenty of HDTV and VOD offerings). I’ve been a Cox cable subscriber for many years now and have been very happy with them. In fact, after 7 years with DirecTV prior to that, I’ve never thought about going back to satellite after switching to cable. (Of course, the superior high-speed broadband option that Cox offers had something to do with that.)
Meanwhile, regional telephone giant Verizon Communications has been aggressively deploying new fiber optic lines throughout many Northern Virginia neighborhoods and other Washington, D.C. metro communities in the hope of competing against Cox and Comcast in the race to deliver the complete “triple play” package (voice, video, data) to consumers. Last year, Verizon sent a team of contractors out to my neighborhood to dig up my front yard, lay new fiber lines and install a new box. And then, for reasons I still can’t quite understand, another team came back and dug up my yard again to install more lines and a different box! My wife wasn’t real happy about the mess this created (and all the grass that died as a result), but I just kept telling her that one day it would all be worth it.
And that day has arrived.
Earlier this year, Verizon began dispatching door-to-door salespeople to my neighborhood in an attempt to sign up new subscribers for their new “FIOS” (fiber optic-based) service. I felt sorry for the salespeople who knocked on my door because they had no idea I was going to shower them with a litany of technical questions based on my knowledge of communications markets. But they were always very informative and helpful. And they REALLY wanted my business. Unfortunately, however, they had no control over the pesky city and county regulators who were holding up deployment of FIOS service in the area. In particular, Verzion had to fight for the right to offer consumers video programming services in competition with cable.
Luckily for me, they finally got permission in Fairfax County. (Of course, Verizon and other telcos are still fighting for permission to offer video services in countless other communities across America. And federal legislation is pending that would expedite that process through the use of national franchises). After I received confirmation that Verizon would at least be able to offer me everything I already had in my Cox “triple play” bundle, I finally decided to pull the trigger and sign up for a one-month trial of Verizon’s FIOS service in my home.
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As I’ve written before, America’s increasingly heavy-handed, anti-free speech campaign finance laws threaten to eventually ensnare the entire Internet and our new innovative, bottom-up world of organic “we-dia” (WE-MEDIA). Blogs are already in their crosshairs and lawmakers will be targeting other technologies of freedom in coming years.
Want to know where we might be headed? Look at Singapore. They’ve got a long history of stifling political speech and now their drawing up a blueprint to quash dissent via alternative digital outlets.
Lee Boon Yang, Minister for Communications, Information and the Arts (and you thought the FCC was bad!) recently said that “Anyone, anywhere can blog anything, anyhow. We have adopted a light touch approach in dealing with the everyday use of the Internet.” Well, that sounds encouraging, but then… “However, during the election period when such free-for-all may result in undesirable situations, we cannot take a completely hands-off approach,” he said. “We will review our policies on the Internet and new media during the election period bearing in mind the changes taking place.”
According to this AFP story, Singapore has already been criticized by human rights groups and opposition parties for placing restrictions on political discussions on the Internet. The rules apparently already ban the use of use of podcasts and videocasts for advertising during elections.
Whether or not this all works remains to be seen. It’s one thing to regulate the signals being beamed out from a big broadcast tower. (After all, it’s pretty easy to find those towers and their programmers). Internet “broadcasters” are another matter, however, and enforcement will become a nightmare for the regulators as more and more people get online.
But that doesn’t mean the regulators won’t give it their best shot. And while lawmakers here in the States have given blogs and the Internet a reprieve for now, you’d be fooling yourself to believe that that’s the end of the story. Regulation expands. Always and everywhere.
I have an editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer today about a new federal effort to regulate MySpace.com and other social networking websites. Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick (R., Pa.) and several members of the newly formed congressional “Suburban Caucus” recently introduced H.R. 5319, the “Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA).” It would require schools and libraries that receive federal funding to block minors’ access to social-networking sites that allow users to create Web pages or profiles or that offer discussion boards, chat rooms or e-mail service.
If you’re interested, the entire editorial is pasted down below…
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Inevitably, almost all battles about Internet content controls become battles about the effectiveness of Internet filters. That’s because, from the start, many have held out hope that private filters can offer families, schools, libraries and others the opportunity to block objectionable content without getting government involved in the ugly business of Net censorship.
But there have always been filtering critics and, ironically, they come from two very different camps. On one hand, we often hear policymakers or pro-regulation activist groups lamenting the fact that filters are UNDER-inclusive, or miss too much objectionable online content. Indeed, rumors are that the Department of Justice is currently engaged in major effort to build a legal case against filters as an effective private blocking tool. If the government was able to successfully make such a case to the courts, it might help them undo a decade’s worth of jurisprudence that has been built upon the belief that filters offered a “less-restrictive means” of addressing objectionable content compared to vague, over-broad government content control efforts.
Cutting in the opposite direction, many librarians, free expression groups and others have long criticized filters on the grounds that that they are far too OVER-inclusive. These critics consider filters to be fundamentally flawed because they often block access to sites that contain important information. Early examples included filters that blocked access to breast cancer websites because they contained the word “breast,” or others that blocked access to Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey’s website because the word “dick” was blocked by the filter. Moreover, the critics of filter over-inclusiveness also point out that, despite their technical nature, filtering technologies are ultimately quite stupid and depend on the subjective values / morality of their creators. For example, if a filter maker decides that websites discussing homosexual issues were offensive to him, then anyone using his software wouldn’t be able to access those sites either.
These competing anti-filtering forces are still at war today. Not only is the DOJ trying to build a case against private filters, but new bills are being introduced in Congress and pro-regulatory critics are engaged in new efforts to question the effectiveness of filters. (They either want a government-approved filter or want online intermediaries to rid the Net of all content they find “indecent.”) Meanwhile, filters have again come under attack from the folks up at the Free Expression Policy Project (FEPP), which is part of the Brennan Center for Justice. They have just released a revised edition of their “Internet Filters: A Public Policy Report,” which mostly criticizes filters for their over-inclusiveness.
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Proving just how surreal the debate over Net neutrality has become, we now have many people telling us that it is “the Internet’s First Amendment” and that federal regulation is needed to “Save the Internet.”
Apparently, these folks have convinced themselves that, at least in this instance, government regulation is really no big deal and that it won’t threaten the future of the Internet. They want us to believe that the same people who have gave us Bridges to Nowhere and an endless string of unbalanced budgets are somehow now well-suited to manage something as complicated as the Internet and broadband networks. They imagine that lawmakers and bureaucrats will regulate
just enough to get the job done and help bring about some sort of idyllic Internet nirvana. Moreover, they apparently believe that policymakers will do all this without expansively regulating other online activities, commerce or speech.
How can smart people make this leap of faith? I really think Net neutrality supporters are caught up in a hopeless illusion about government regulation in this case. It all reminds me of a line from those rock-n’-roll sages Guns N’ Roses: “I’ve worked too hard for my illusions just to throw them all away.” (Yes, it’s true, I’m a bit of a head-banger at heart. Moreover, I just get tired of quoting Aristotle and Milton Friedman all the time.)
While it’s true that I am a skeptic about government regulation in almost every instance, I am still surprised about how many Internet-savvy people are willing to make this major leap of faith and put their trust in government without considering the unintended consequences of Big Government control.
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Wall Street Journal reporter Amy Schatz has an important story on B1 of the paper today providing further evidence of how a handful of media activists groups–and the one in particular–have co-opted the FCC’s broadcast indecency complaint process for the own ends. Schatz notes that the Parents Television Council (PTC) was responsible for the vast majority of complaints against a single CBS program “Without a Trace,” which the FCC recently slapped with a record $3.6 million fine in March.
The WSJ filed a FOIA request to examine the complaints for that program and found that “all but three appeared to originate as computer-generated form letters (from the PTC).” In other words, virtually every complaint was identical and originated with the PTC’s website. “Only 2% of the people who filed complaints, or about 135, added personal comments,” Schatz found.
These results are consistent with the findings from my paper, “Examining the FCC’s Complaint-Driven Broadcast Indecency Enforcement Process.” In that paper, I noted the influence of the PTC on the indecency complaint process and showed how the organization is essentially “stuffing the (complaint) ballot box.”
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Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) is making a major push this week to pass legislation through the Senate that would significantly increase fines for “indecent” broadcast programming. The bill, S. 193, which was originally introduced by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS), would hike fines against broadcasters that air obscene, indecent or profane material to a maximum of $325,000 per incident. (The current limit is $32,500 for supposed violations).
Such legislation makes good election year fodder for politicians, and it obviously appeases a base of potential voters who feel there is too much “smut” on TV or radio today. For both groups, the rallying cry here is: “it’s for the children!” But I want to ask both groups a serious question: Do you really think broadcast censorship accomplishes that goal today?
Seriously, look at these recent Bolt Media poll numbers. Almost 80 percent of 16- to 18-year-olds surveyed were unable to even name who the big 4 TV broadcasters are! (They are ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox just in case you don’t know). Meanwhile, the majority of respondents (85 percent) said they spend their free time on the Internet, compared to only 69 percent who said they spend their free time watching TV.
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In thinking about how much the communications and computing world has changed in just the last few decades, I’m always wondering how my kids will react when I tell them about how Dad used technology in the past. Case in point: “long-distance service.” My kids won’t even know what the heck that term means. And they will certainly laugh when I tell them how their grandmother used to impose a strict, time-limited plan on my calling activities to keep our phone bill down. (I used to have a girlfriend in high school who lived across an “inter-LATA” boundary which made my calls to her absurdly expensive even thought she was less than 30 minutes away. Once the monthly phone bill went over $100 bucks, my call privileges were severely curtailed by Mom!)
Anyway, what got me thinking about all this was this announcement yesterday by Skype that all US and Canadian-based Skype customers can now make free SkypeOut calls to traditional landline and mobile phones in the US and Canada. Sure, Skype isn’t a perfect substitute for traditional telephony. But it’s good enough for many. And its move will force other telecom providers to reconsider their current pricing plans and cut rates even further. One wonders how Vonage and other VoIP providers can survive in world of cut-throat competition.
Meanwhile, back in the surreal world of Washington, we continue to impose extensive regulations on various phone companies due to fears of consumer harm. Hmmm… let’s see, someone is providing free phone service to the world and regulators are still worried about consumer harm. Seems silly to me.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.