I released a short essay today regarding the impact of Howard Stern’s move to satellite radio ont he future of media regulation and First Amendment jurisprudence. Is attached below. Here’s the formatted Cato link.
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.
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AT&T is cutting another 7,000 jobs this quarter. Combined with earlier cuts, this means the once-proud king of communications will have cut 20% of its workforce this year. They have also bailed out of the residential phone market entirely.
In a piece earlier this year, I discuss how and why the end is coming for the company. I try to make it clear that, despite claims by AT&T that the regulators did them in, the company made a series of strategic business blunders over the past few years that sealed its fate. I received some very interesting responses to this piece, including a number of letters from AT&T employees largely agreeing with me that management had driven the company into the ground. Others bitterly disagreed with my analysis and held onto the view that public policy screwed them over. Anyway, read my piece and tell me what you think.
For those of you who have followed the ongoing saga of Internet taxation, you’re familiar with a hideous little creation known as the Streamlined Sales Tax Project or “SSTP.” As I detailed in this briefing paper last year, the SSTP is basically a giant sales tax cartel scheme. In the name of “tax fairness” and a supposed “level playing field,” some state and local officials would allow the extraterritorial taxation of interstate commerce via this Frankenstein monster of a tax collection scheme. Tax competition among the states would suffer as a result and consumers would be burdened with billions in new tax obligations. All this to get at the tiny amount of e-commerce out there, which still isn’t more than 2 percent of all retail sales in America!
The folks over at Progress & Freedom Foundation have just released a new report documenting just how costly this SSTP scheme would be. Take a look at their findings here.
Let’s hope Congress doesn’t give in to state and local pressures to erase the protections our Constitution provides for interstate commerce and vendors.
Broadcasting and Cable magazine is reporting that broadcasters are officially on notice to begin delaying live programs long enough to edit out any possibly “indecent” material. The magazine notes that the recent $550,000 record fine levied against CBS / Viacom for the Janet Jackson Super Bowl incident included a not-so-subtle suggestion that broadcasters start using delay techniques and technologies. Here’s the relevant language from the ruling:
“We urge each licensee to take reasonable precautions in the future, such as employing such delay technology to independently prescreen the network feed to prevent the broadcast of indecent programming over its licensed station.”
One wonders how live news shows will respond. I guess a five second delay isn’t a huge deal–and I know that many broadcasters already use such techniques–but I still find it troubling that this could mean the death of truly live TV and radio.
In a blog ealier this month, I mentioned how uneasy I was about municipal governments turning broadband or wi-fi into the next public utility, like local sewer or water service. There are many risks associated with such schemes, not the least of which is the potential for taxpayer bailouts when things go wrong.
Anyway, I just read a fine piece on this issue in MIT’s Technology Review entitled “Who Pays for Wireless Cities?” In particular, I would draw your attention to the excellent comments by Bill Frezza at the end of the story, with which I totally agree:
“The scenario is similar to that of the late 1980s, when municipalities considered offering cable TV services, recalls William Frezza, a general partner with Adams Capital Management in Cambridge, MA. Cable couldn’t survive as a low-cost public service, he says, and he finds public Wi-Fi equally misguided. He has read several dozen business plans from entrepreneurs looking to make money from public Wi-Fi. No model can succeed because the annual maintenance costs are likely to be exorbitant, he says. Moreover, he argues, performance will degrade as more users log on, which won’t necessarily stop municipalities from casting themselves as Wi-Fi service providers. “A town can make any argument it wants,” says Frezza. “It has as much money as it can pull out of its taxpayers.””
Attached is the text of a new Cato Institute newsletter I released today on the possibility of a congressional investigation into the “Rathergate” controversy. Fellow TLF blogger James Gattuso has also been sounding off on this in recent blogs. My take on it follows…
AP is reporting that Diebold touchscreen voting machines similar to those used in Maryland were found abandoned recently on a street and in a bar in Baltimore.
I’ve long had some doubts about the wisdom of electronic voting but hey, if I can use them while sitting on a barstool and downing a beer then I’m all for it!
Today’s National Journal Technology Daily (subscriber-only website) contains a very interesting People Section column by Sarah Lai Stirland entitled “Washington’s Silicon Square.” Stirland notes that, “California has its Silicon Valley, Boston has its Silicon Corridor and Scotland has its Silicon Glen. Now some lobbyists in Washington, D.C., are starting to refer to the downtown area around Franklin Square as Silicon Square.” Hewlett-Packard recently moved their government affairs office to that area and other tech giants like Dell, IBM and Microsoft also have offices in the area. Apparently, therefore, people have started to refer to the area as “Silicon Square.”
No offense to these fine companies, and the many talented people who work in these offices, but I regard this as an absolutely dreadful development. Is it really a sign of progress when the technology community now has such a substantial presence inside the Beltway that there is a small region named “Silicon Square”? After all, what exactly (besides a lot of legal paperwork) is being produced in and around “Silicon Square”?
The Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing today on media ownership regulation and I was invited to testify. Here’s the link to my testimony.
All the charts and tables you will see in the appendix of my testimony will appear in my forthcoming book “Media Myths: Making Sense of the Debate over Media Ownership.” I strongly encourage you to take a look at Ben Compaine’s excellent remarks when they are posted, as well as everything else he’s done on the issue. No one knows more about this issue than Ben.
Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has introduced an important new bill dealing with the digital television (DTV) transition and the vexing question of how to get the broadcasters to return their old analog spectrum. A hearing on the bill is scheduled for today.
The bill proposes a controversial new policy ($1 billion in subsidies for set-top converter boxes to help some households convert to DTV) to correct for a controversial old policy (the misguided giveaway of $10-$100 billion worth of free spectrum to the broadcast industry). While not the optimal policy approach, the new McCain bill offers a quick way out of the DTV industrial policy fiasco and will help free up massive amounts of valuable spectrum for other important wireless uses.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.