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.
As part of their continuing effort to censor political speech in America, several “campaign reformers” in Congress have won an important case in the U.S. District Court regarding FEC interpretations of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (“BCRA”).
I’m not going to go off on a rant about this disgusting piece of political censorship, but if you want to understand just how despicable this incumbent protection legislation really is, then I encourage you to read “Campaign Finance Reform: Searching for Corruption in All the Wrong Places” by Brad Smith and “Making the World Safer for Incumbents The Consequences of McCain-Feingold-Cochran,” by John Samples.
It just makes me sick to think that politicians can just throw around the word “corruption” so loosely and then ban all sorts of legitimate political speech and advertising before an election as a result. Amazingly, we now live in a country that affords more constitutional protections to Internet pornography than political speech before elections. While I’m happy the courts apply such strict scrutiny to other forms of speech, one wonders what our Founding Fathers would have thought about a state of affairs where you have an absolute right to view porn online but not see certain types of political advertising 60 days before an election. Bizarre.
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Every once and awhile I see or hear something that reminds me just how far removed our society and government now is from the limited government principles of our founding. A front-page story in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal on this ridiculous spat over the new Neilsen ratings system quotes Senator Conrad Burns (R-MT), who chairs the communications subcommittee, as follows: “It’s impossible to achieve a high quality of broadcasting if shoddy audience measurement practices are permitted to proliferate.”
I’m sorry, but why in the world are TV ratings system a pressing governmental matter? For the life of me, I cannot lay my finger on that portion of the Constitution that authorizes our government to do ANYTHING about “shoddy audience measurement practices” on television. I mean, come on, we’re talking about television!
It would be one thing if our government wasn’t accurately measuring our budget deficit (oh, wait, they don’t do that very well today), or the Social Security trust fund (oops, they don’t get that right either), or the number of WMDs over in Iraq (OK… I give up), but we’re talking about measuring television audiences here; hardly something that government should worry about, and certainly something it has no constitutional power to control.
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Excellent piece by Alorie Gilbert of CNET News.com today on the Oracle-PeopleSoft decision. Begins as follows…
“The U.S. Justice Department’s dramatic defeat in the Oracle antitrust trial underscores the unique character of software: It’s a fast-paced, dynamic industry that makes a lousy target for trustbusters.”
Amen to that.
Communications Daily (sorry, no link; it’s subscriber-only) reported today that FCC officials may be interested in auctioning off nationwide blocks of spectrum as part of the next round of spectrum auctions. The story quoted Bryan Tramont, chief of staff for FCC Chairman Michael Powell, saying that the FCC has learned from past auctions that there is “a huge transaction cost on constructing networks” by buying and patching together licenses in various cities: “This is not a local business, by and large.”
Bryan has it exactly right. While spectrum auctions were a huge leap forward from the old era when we just gave spectrum away or handed it out randomly through lotteries, the problem form the beginning with almost all the auctions was the way the wireless properties were aggregated for sale. The FCC, obsessed with the notion of smallness in communications, foolishly decided to carve wireless markets into tiny geographic chunks and auction as many licenses as possible. (The agency also imposed spectrum caps on the overall amount of spectrum one company could hold in a region.) Anyway, you can see the (feeble-minded) logic that was at work here: more licenses = more competition.
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I’ve recently read two very important columns on the regulation of online pornography that I want to bring to everyone’s attention. The first is a column entitled “Free Porn” by Professor Lawrence Lessig in this month’s Wired magazine that I find deeply troubling.
The second is a impressive new essay in
The New Atlantis entitled “The End of Obscenity” by Jeffrey Rosen. Rosen is the legal affairs editor of The New Republic, and a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School. Rosen’s essay is must reading for anyone still searching in vain for a way to censor online pornography. But let’s begin with Lessig’s new article.
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Brian Cooley of ZD Net had a very entertaining essay on Spam yesterday that is must-reading. I agree with every word of it and absolutely love the line about the grandmas on AOL and people in John Mellencamp videos. Click here (and scroll down a bit).
Make sure to check out Declan McCullagh’s excellent overview of the Bush record on technology policy. (Hey, it has to be an excellent article if he quotes me in it!) No, seriously, this is the best assessment of the Bush’s (non-)record to date. (And here’s my old piece on why these two candidates offer us a distinction without a difference on tech & telecom policy.)
Ray Gifford over at PFF brought this new FCC “Kids Zone” website to my attention.
It includes a goofy little mascot named “Broadband” (seriously, is that the best they could come up with?) who welcomes kids to the site and encourages them to learn about the exciting world of number portability and the Do Not Call list. (As Dave Barry might say, you can’t make this stuff up folks.)
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Communications Daily had a story in today’s (subscriber-only) edition about the top technology priorities for Congress as they return from recess. 4 of the top 5 priorities are all about expanding government intervention into the technology, Internet or media sectors:
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SHVIA (Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act) reauthorization: Re-imposes compulsory licenses (read: forced contracts and price controls) on broadcast programming redistributed over satellite networks.
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Indecency regulation: As the name implies, we’ll be getting a bill with increased fines / penalties for “indecent” broadcasts on radio or television. (The Senate version of the pending bill also has a section censoring “excessive violence” on television.)
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VoIP bills: Although early drafts of VoIP legislation looked good, a Senate mark-up of a bill sponsored by Sen. Sununu this summer ended in disaster when pro-regulatory forces included language largely gutting the bill by opening the door to state and local regulation.
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Copyright revisions / INDUCE Act: There’s apparently going to be a serious push to get the INDUCE Act through before the session expires. The bill would impose liability on technology providers if their service or products “induced” copyright infringement.
So, by my count, it’s Freedom 0, Regulation 4.
As I always ask: What ever happened to “Hands Off the Net“?
I just wanted to make folks in the southern California area aware of a fun event I am going to be co-hosting on Tuesday, September 14th out in L.A. on “The New Censorship Wave: How Real Is the Threat to Freedom of Speech and Expression?” It will feature a discussion with Penn Jillette of the magic / comedy team of Penn & Teller. Should be fun!
If you’re in that area and interested in attending, here is the info. It will be held at the Beverly Hills Hilton starting at 11:00.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.