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.
Yesterday’s 7-2 decision in Brown v. EMA [summaries here from me + Berin Szoka] was one of those historic First Amendment rulings that tends to bring out passions in people. You either loved it or hated it. But it’s sad to see some critics on the losing end of the case declaring that only greed could have possibly motivated the Court’s decision.
For example, California Senator Leland Yee, the author of the law that the Supreme Court struck down yesterday, obviously wasn’t happy about the outcome of the case. Neither was James Steyer, CEO of the advocacy group Common Sense Media, who has been a vociferous advocate of the California law and measures like it. What they had to say in response to the decision, however, was outlandish and juvenile. In essence, they both claimed that the Supreme Court only struck down the law to make video game developers and retailers happy.
“Unfortunately, the majority of the Supreme Court once again put the interests of corporate America before the interests of our children,” Leland Yee said in a post on his website yesterday. “As a result of their decision, Wal-Mart and the video game industry will continue to make billions of dollars at the expense of our kids’ mental health and the safety of our community. It is simply wrong that the video game industry can be allowed to put their profit margins over the rights of parents and the well-being of children.” Jim Steyer reached a similar conclusion: “Today’s decision is a disappointing one for parents, educators, and all who care about kids,” he said. “Today, the multi-billion dollar video game industry is celebrating the fact that their profits have been protected, but we will continue to fight for the best interests of kids and families.”
Mr. Yee and Mr. Steyer seem to be under the impression that the Court and supporters of its ruling in Brown cannot possibly care about children and that something sinister motivates our passion about the victory. Apparently we’re all just apparently in it to make video game industry fat cats and retailing giants happy! That’s a truly insulting position for Mr. Yee and Mr. Steyer to adopt. Perhaps it is just because they are sore about the outcome in the case that are adopting such rhetorical tactics. Regardless, I think they do themselves, their constituencies, and the public a great injustice by suggesting that only greed could possibly be motivating the outcome in this case. Continue reading →
The Supreme Court wasn’t playing games with the First Amendment today. With its 7-2 decision in Brown v. EMA, the Court has protected video game creators and players from unconstitutional restrictions on what we can produce and play.
Today’s decision ensures that video games have First Amendment protection on par with books, film, music and other forms of entertainment and will help block other regulatory efforts that are justified by blindly alluding to the rationale that “it’s for the children.” The decision fits nicely alongside an impressive and growing string of recent First Amendment cases from the Court that significantly raise the bar against legislative efforts to regulate freedom of speech and expression.
Quick background: In May 2010, the Supreme Court announced that it would review a California law regulating the sale of violently-themed video games to minors. The case was Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association, but the name of the case changed to after Jerry Brown became governor of California. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had struck down a California law which prohibited the sale or rental of “violent video games” to minors, but California appealed and the SCOTUS took up the issue. [Note: When we were still with the Progress & Freedom Foundation, Berin Szoka and I filed a big amicus brief with the Court in the case along with some folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.] By a 7-2 vote, the Supreme Court backed the Ninth Circuit and overturned the California law. Justice Scalia wrote for the majority. Justices Thomas and Breyer dissented.
You wouldn’t think that policymakers need to be reminded that technological progress raises living standards and creates new (and better) employment opportunities. Alas, some comments President Obama made in a speech last week seemed to link technology to job losses. “There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers,” he said. “You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.”
In an essay in today’s Wall Street Journal, one of my Mercatus Center colleagues Russ Roberts, a professor of economics at George Mason University, brilliantly deconstructs this logic and points out why technology doesn’t destroy jobs:
Somehow, new jobs get created to replace the old ones. Despite losing millions of jobs to technology and to trade, even in a recession we have more total jobs than we did when the steel and auto and telephone and food industries had a lot more workers and a lot fewer machines.
Why do new jobs get created? When it gets cheaper to make food and clothing, there are more resources and people available to create new products that didn’t exist before. Fifty years ago, the computer industry was tiny. It was able to expand because we no longer had to have so many workers connecting telephone calls. So many job descriptions exist today that didn’t even exist 15 or 20 years ago. That’s only possible when technology makes workers more productive.
My latest Forbes column notes how “Taxes On Talking Are On the Rise Across the U.S.” with levies on mobile phones and devices skyrocketing. I build my argument around data and arguments found in Dan Rothschild’s excellent recent Mercatus Center paper, which makes “The Case Against Taxing Cell Phone Subscribers,” as well as an important recent study by Scott Mackey, an economist and partner at KSE Partners LLP, which documents the growing burden of these wireless taxes and fees.
“Wireless users now face a combined federal, state, and local tax and fee burden of 16.3%, a rate two times higher than the average retail sales tax rate and the highest wireless rate since 2005,” Mackey finds. Mobile tax rates range from a high of 23.7% in Nebraska to a low of 6.9% in Oregon. 48 states have an average combined wireless tax rate above 11%. These burdensome taxes on talking just don’t make any sense, argues Rothschild. “There is no economic justification for these high tax rates: reducing cell phone ownership is not a public policy goal, cell phone use by one customer does not affect other customers or other people, and these taxes fall disproportionately on lower-income households.”
You can read my entire essay here, but also make sure to re-read Dan Rothschild’s guest post here at the TLF on the issue. It’s much better than my own treatment. For me, the key point is this: If the primary policy goal in this arena is to build out a first-class communications and data infrastructure and make sure all Americans have access to it, discriminatory taxes on wireless services and networks are highly counter-productive. Policymakers should hang up on the Talking Tax.
The European Commission has a new report out today on “Implementation of the Safer Social Networking Principles for the EU.” It’s a status report on the implementation of “Safer Social Networking Principles for the EU“, a “self-regulatory” agreement the EC brokered with 17 social networking sites and other online operators back in 2009. (Co-regulatory would be more accurate here, since the EC is steering, and industry is simply rowing.) The goal was to make the profiles of minors more private and provide other safeguards.
Generally speaking, the EC’s evaluation suggests that great progress has been made, although there’s always room for improvement. For example, the report found that “13 out of the 14 sites tested provide safety information, guidance and/or educational materials specifically targeted at minors;” “Safety information for minors is quite clear and age-appropriate on all sites that provide it, good progress since the first assessment last year; “Reporting mechanisms are more effective now than in 2010;” and most sites have improved Terms of Use that are easy for minors to understand and/or a child-friendly version of the Terms of Use or Code of Conduct; and many “provide safety information for children and parents which is both easy to find and to understand.” Again, there’s always room for improvement, but the general direction is encouraging, especially considering how new many of these sites are.
Unfortunately, Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission for the Digital Agenda, spun the report in the opposite direction. She issued a statement saying: Continue reading →
My colleague Cord Blomquist brought to my attention this amazing info-graphic, which depicts the stunning volume of activity unfolding every 60 seconds online. [Click on the image to enlarge it.] It appears the graphic was created by Go-Globe.com, a web design firm, although I’ve not been able to find the original. [Update: The folks at Go-Globe got in touch with me and sent me the original link. Thanks Go-Globe!] Cord found it in this collection of “35 Cool Infographics for Web and Graphic Designers.” I find this graphic especially interesting because it helps bolster the work I’ve been doing lately with Jerry Brito about the challenges faced by information control regimes. [See our recent essays on the topic: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.] Most recently, I put together a list of “Some Metrics Regarding the Volume of Online Activity” but I’d been searching for a really excellent visualization to help tell this story and this is probably the best one I’ve ever seen. Absolutely amazing numbers.
I enjoyed this Wall Street Journal essay by Daniel H. Wilson on “The Terrifying Truth About New Technology.” It touches on many of the themes I’ve discussed here in my essays on techno-panics, fears about information overload, and the broader battle throughout history between technology optimists and pessimists regarding the impact of new technologies on culture, life, and learning. Wilson correctly notes that:
The fear of the never-ending onslaught of gizmos and gadgets is nothing new. The radio, the telephone, Facebook — each of these inventions changed the world. Each of them scared the heck out of an older generation. And each of them was invented by people who were in their 20s.
He continues:
Young people adapt quickly to the most absurd things. Consider the social network Foursquare, in which people not only willingly broadcast their location to the world but earn goofy virtual badges for doing so. My first impulse was to ignore Foursquare—for the rest of my life, if I have to.
And that’s the problem. As we get older, the process of adaptation slows way down. Unfortunately, we depend on alternating waves of assimilation and accommodation to adapt to a constantly changing world. For [developmental psychologist Jean] Piaget, this balance between what’s in the mind and what’s in the environment is called equilibrium. It’s pretty obvious when equilibrium breaks down. For example, my grandmother has phone numbers taped to her cellphone. Having grown up with the Rolodex (a collection of numbers stored next to the phone), she doesn’t quite grasp the concept of putting the numbers in the phone.
Why are we so nostalgic about the technology we grew up with? Old people say things like: “This new technology is stupid. I liked (new, digital) technology X better when it was called (old, analog) technology Y. Why, back in my day….” Which leads inexorably to, “I just don’t get it.”
There’s a simple explanation for this phenomenon: “adventure window.” At a certain age, that which is familiar and feels safe becomes more important to you than that which is new, different, and exciting. Think of it as “set-in-your-ways syndrome.”
This morning, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released its eagerly-awaited “Future of Media” report. The 475-page final report is entitled, “The Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age.” [Here’s a 2-page summary and the official press release.] The report is a bit overdue; the effort was supposed to be wrapped up late last year. Comments in the proceeding were filed over a year ago. Here are some of the major ones. Also, here is the 80-page monster filing that I submitted with my former PFF colleagues Berin Szoka and Ken Ferree.
My first reaction after scanning the FCC’s final report is one of relief. For those of us who care about the First Amendment, media freedom, and free-market experimentation with new media business models, it feels like we’ve dodged a major bullet. The report does not recommend sweeping regulatory actions that might have seen Washington inserting itself into the affairs of the press or bailing out dying business models.
On May 26th, it was my great pleasure to participate in a panel discussion on “Growing Up with the Mobile Net,” which was co-sponsored by the Congressional Internet Caucus and Common Sense Media. It was a conversation about kids’ privacy, online safety, teen free speech rights, anonymity, and the possibility of expanding the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and implementing the so-called “Internet Eraser Button.”
I was joined on the panel by Jules Polonetsky, Co-chair and Director of the Future of Privacy Forum, and Alan Simpson, Vice President of Policy at Common Sense Media. And the session was very ably moderated, as always, by the supremely objective Tim Lordan.* We really unpacked the “Eraser Button” and “right to be forgotten” notion and thought through the ramifications. And the discussion about the extent of First Amendment rights for teenagers was also interesting.
The video for this 48-minute session can be found on the Congressional Internet Caucus YouTube page here and is embedded below.
Note: During the session, Tim Lordan claimed that he takes no position and that if anyone says he take positions on issues that he will slap a super-injunction on them. Well, I say Tim Lordan is brimming with positions and he’s letting them fly at every juncture. In fact, I’ve never met someone so full of controversial positions in my life as Tim Lordan! OK, so sue me Tim!
Over at his blog, our old TLF colleague Tim Lee has been discussing the AT&T – T-Mobile merger and the ways libertarians should think about antitrust more generally. In his latest post, he pushes back against a brief comment I posted on a previous essay. You can head over to his site and read that exchange and then see my latest comment. But I thought I would also post it here for those interested.
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Tim… My thinking on antitrust is very much shaped by the choice between ex ante vs. ex post regulation. How much faith should we place in sector-specific regulators to get things right through preemptive, prophylactic regulation versus allowing things to play out and then — on the rare occasions when intolerable monopolies over essential goods develop — letting antitrust regulators devise a remedy?
More than any other economic value, I care about experimentation. I am completely under the sway of the Austrian School of thinking about markets and competition as an ongoing experiment, an evolutionary journey, a discovery process. How are we to know if intolerable monopolies over essential goods will actually develop unless we let things play out?
As I argued in my critiques of the Lessig/Zittrain/Wu school of thinking, we need to be a bit more humble and have a little faith that ongoing experimentation and discovery will help us evolve into a better equilibrium. It’s during what some regard as a market’s darkest hour when some of the most exciting forms of disruptive technologies and innovation are developing. [I’ve elaborated more on this point in this lengthy discussion about Gary Reback’s recent book on antitrust.] Continue reading →
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.