Articles by Adam Thierer

Avatar photoSenior 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.


E-Mail to Expire in the Year 2157?

by on February 3, 2006 · 2 comments

It’s not every day that we witness the death of a great communications technology. But that happened last Friday and nobody seemed to notice. Western Union posted this annoucement on its website a week ago:

“Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage.”

Some of us were under the impression that the telegram was already dead, but now we know for sure that it is. There was a time, of course, when the telegram was as hot as the Internet and e-mail are today. (Read Tom Standage’s great book “The Victorian Internet” for the complete history).

But the rise of the telephone effectively crushed the hegemony of the telegraph as a communications medium. (Ironically, as I pointed out in my old history of the telecommunications industry, Western Union actually passed up the opportunity to buy the Bell telephone patents for just $100,000 believing that the device was nothing more than a passing novelty! Talk about your missed opportunities.) As Mike Musgrove points out in his obituary for the telegram in today’s Washington Post, “Telegrams peaked in 1929 with 20 million messages sent. Last year, there were 20,000. The final one was sent last Friday.”

Overall, the life of the telegram as communications technology lasted from 1844-2006. That’s 162 years. Not bad. If e-mail lasts that long as a communications technology–and assuming a rough start date of around 1995 (when it really starting going mainstream)–then e-mail will die in the year 2157.

Of course, there are good reasons to believe that e-mail will be replaced by some other form of communications long before that. In light of the staggering pace of technological innovation we are witnessing today, I wouldn’t be shocked to see e-mail’s demise within my own lifetime. Once my grandkids are running around with microchip implants in their heads that allow instant telepathic communications, who needs to type out messages!

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A Friendly Conversation about Corporate High-Tech Engagement with China

by on January 23, 2006

(I recently engaged my former Cato Institute colleague and fellow TLF blogger Jim Harper in a dialog about the effectiveness of U.S. engagement with China in terms of broadening human rights and speech rights in particular. I’ve been doing some soul-searching about this recently and asked Jim to help me think through the issue (and the “engagement is good” theory) again. What follows is the transcript of our e-mail exchange. A condensed version of this exchange also appaers on CNET today. – – Adam Thierer)

THIERER: Jim, I must admit, in recent months I have really been struggling with the issue of U.S. corporate engagement / investment in China. In particular, I have been wondering if my long-held assumption is correct: that greater engagement by U.S. companies in China will really help achieve meaningful reforms for its repressed citizenry. I have always argued that investment by U.S. companies – – and technology companies in particular – – could help break down some of the legal barriers to greater economic and social / cultural freedom.

In recent years, however, the reports from the front have not been good. It does not seem the U.S. corporate engagement / investment has really done much to effectuate positive reforms in the post-Tiananmen era. It seems that the Chinese are just as repressive as ever, especially on the political / cultural front. Worse yet, we know that many large American corporate technology leaders have actually assisted the efforts of Chinese officials when they sought to repress speech and dissent. (Microsoft, for example, has made news recently by shutting down a journalist’s blog because of material that might be offensive to Chinese authorities. And Yahoo and Google are coming under fire for playing ball with Chinese officials too.)

Tell me my fellow libertarian friend, are you not also troubled by these developments? Are you still comfortable with our traditional position on the issue?

HARPER: I recall, a few years ago, being very concerned when I heard that Google had come to an agreement with the Chinese government so that their service would not be blocked there. I had a natural sense of revulsion at the thought that any company, much less one of the technology companies that are doing so much to improve life around the world, would get in bed with censors and despots. Google has never been as forthcoming about what exactly they do to appease the Chinese as I would like them to be, so I suppose I am still uncomfortable with it.

But I have come to believe that the best option for a company faced with this dilemma is to accept the ugly conditions some governments put on doing business in their countries. This is for a couple of reasons: There is strong evidence that refusing trade doesn’t help anybody. The U.S. trade embargo toward Cuba has been a dismal failure. We’ve had some level of trade restrictions with Cuba for more than 40 years and, if anything, it has helped Castro by pauperizing the Cubans, demoralizing them, and shielding them from knowledge about the benefits of freedom. Heck, if we had had trade with Cuba the last 40 years, a steady diet of fast food probably would have killed off Fidel by now…

Just as importantly, if you give them the communications tools that these companies provide, the Chinese people will evade government controls and get done what we want them to get done, censorship or no censorship. You don’t have to use words like “falun gong” or “Taiwan” or “free speech” to communicate about liberty and public issues. Before Vaclac Havel was the first President of a free Czechoslovakia, he was a playwright. His plays weren’t political polemics that tweaked the nose of the government and invited censorship (though he got in plenty of trouble). They were subtle critiques of life under the regime. Everybody knew what he was talking about. Freedom had been in the hearts of the Czechs for years when the Velvet Revolution officially delivered it. Technology and communications are enabling this on a broader scale in China. It’s working. You’ll see.

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Do Parents Have the Tools to Control TV Content?

by on January 20, 2006 · 3 comments

As James mentioned in his blog entry yesterday, the Senate Commerce Committee held yet another hearing yesterday about “cleaning up” content on broadcast TV, cable & satellite TV, and the Internet too. One Senator after another, as well as some of the typical media critics who get called to testify at these things, made the claim that parents are helpless in the face of all the media that bombards their kids these days. But what’s so troubling about such calls for increased media regulation / censorship in the name of “protecting children” is that it ignores the fact that parents have many constructive alternatives to censorship at their disposal.

Let’s start with some basics.

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Two New Editorials on A La Carte

by on January 18, 2006 · 2 comments

A la carte regulation continues to be a hot topic these days and I’ve recently penned two new editorials on the subject.

First, I have a piece in today’s National Review Online with the rather boring title “A La Carte Cable Concerns.” It’s a response to this piece by Cesar Conda in which he made they case for conservatives to support a la carte regulation.

Second, Ray Gifford and I penned an editorial on a la carte for the Rocky Mountain News last week as a counter-point to an essay by Brent Bozell and Gene Kimmelman. Our editorial can be found here.

For more background on the a la carte debate, read my PFF paper on the “Moral and Philosophical Aspects of the Debate over A La Carte Regulation” and this essay on “A ‘Voluntary’ Charade: The ‘Family-Friendly Tier’ Case Study.”

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Let’s hope the Blackberry patent dispute doesn’t take this long to resolve!

by on December 20, 2005

News.com reports that after more than 25 years of battling with Sony Corp. and others in court, Andreas Pavel has finally won the right to say that he was the man who invented the Walkman.

What blew my mind away when I read this is that I can distinctly recall getting one of those very first Walkmen for an X-Mas gift back in the early 80s. What a hunk of junk it was. It only received FM radio, and didn’t even do a very good job of that. They got much better in subsequent years, of course, until they were finaly replaced by portable CD players and now iPods and MP3 players. But, amazingly, this entire time, this Andreas Pavel guy has been engaged in a patent dispute about a long-dead technology. Amazing. Hopefully the Blackberry dispute doesn’t take this long to settle!

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Family-Friendly Tiering as Censorship

by on December 16, 2005 · 4 comments

In a previous column about “A La Carte as Censorship,” I noted how some regulatory activists were using a la carte regulation as a Trojan Horse to impose content controls on cable TV. In the last couple of days, “family-friendly” tiers have been “voluntarily” offered by the cable industry as a way to head off a la carte mandates and cable censorship in general. But it’s already clear that this won’t change things much since activist groups and lawmakers are jawboning for specific channels and content to be included or excluded from these tiers.

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Is Parental Responsibility Dead?

by on December 15, 2005 · 4 comments

Richard Huff, TV columnist for the New York Daily News, has a very entertaining column today entitled “Your Kids, Your Cable, Your Problem.” It’s basically an open letter to the parents of America who are calling for cable regulation or censorship.

“Stop looking for outside help from Congress or watchdog groups to clean up, clear up and make safe the programming your kids watch,” he argues. “If parents want to have a handle on what their kids watch, well, then, they’ve got to take control of the situation. Sorry, that’s the truth. Stop looking for someone else to blame.”

Huff makes a powerful case for parental responsibility over government nannyism and points out that if we give up and let the government play the role of surrogate parent, we will be making a serious mistake:

“The idea of limiting channel lineups is as crazy as the arguments being made to clean up TV in general. It’s born of the same mentality that requires the producers of a commercial with a car climbing the side of a building to warn viewers not to try it themselves. Here’s my advice: Get all the programming you can for the price you can afford. Give yourself options. And if you’re seriously concerned about blocking content, take control and use the tools at hand. The last thing you want is for someone else to make those decisions for you.”

Amen brother!

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A “Voluntary” Charade: The “Family-Friendly Tier” Case Study

by on December 13, 2005

After 15 years of covering communications and media policy in Washington, I have found that the most important book to keep handy is not any book of law or economics, but rather a good dictionary. That’s because I constantly need to reassure myself that I haven’t forgotten the true meaning of some words in the English language after hearing how they are used (and abused) by Washington policymakers.

Take the word “voluntary,” for example. It’s a fairly simply word that most of us learned very early in life. I didn’t really feel that I needed to look it up in my dictionary until I started working in Washington. Here in Washington, you see, “voluntary” appears to mean something very different that what we learned long ago in school. Consider this week’s announcement that the cable industry will “voluntarily” be adopting “family-friendly” tiers of programming.

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A La Carte as Censorship

by on December 9, 2005 · 4 comments

Need more proof that the a la carte debate has very little to do with economics and everything to do with content regulation? Well, here’s Parents Television Council’s Brent Bozell in the Los Angeles Times yesterday commenting on his desired outcome of an a la carte regulatory regime:

“Maybe you won’t have 100 channels, maybe you’ll only have 20. But good programming is going to survive, and you will get rid of some waste.”

Well isn’t that nice. Mr. Bozell is fine with consumer choices shrinking so long as what’s left on the air is the “good programming” that he desires. It just goes to show that, as I argued in an essay earlier this week, the fight over a la carte is really a moral battle about what we can see on cable and satellite television.

But is Mr. Bozell correct that a la carte “will get rid of some waste” on cable and satellite TV? As I suggest in my essay, it’s highly unlikely because one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. The networks that Mr. Bozell considers “waste” (Comedy Central, F/X, MTV, Spike, etc.) happen to be some of the most popular channels on cable and satellite today. And it’s likely to stay that way, even under an a la carte regulatory regime.

So, despite the crusade to “clean up” cable, people will still flock to those networks in fairly large numbers. And the channels that Bozell & Co. want everyone to get (religious and family-channels) could be threatened by a la carte if too few people choose to continue subscribing.

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CRS Report on Applying Indecency Regs to Cable

by on December 8, 2005

The Congressional Research Service (CRS), which is basically a small, non-partisan think tank within Congress, just released a new report on the “Constitutionality of Applying the FCC’s Indecency Restriction to Cable Television.” While trying his best to avoid any controversial statements on the matter, the report’s author Henry Cohen, a legislative attorney at CRS, concludes that “It appears likely that a court would find that to apply the FCC’s indecency restriction to cable television would be unconstitutional.” Cohen addresses the many different ways the courts might approach the issue, but points out that the government’s case will be weak in almost every respect.

This is an issue we have invested a lot of intellectual energy in at Progress & Freedom Foundation. If you are interested in our take on the constitutionality of the many ways in which Congress might seek to expand content controls to cable and satellite television, you might want to read the following 3 reports:

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