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.
Details are starting to trickle out about the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) National Broadband Plan, which is due out tomorrow. Someone just posted the Executive Summary here. I haven’t had a chance to go through it all yet, but I’m looking forward to learning more about what the agency’s plans are on this front.
On Friday (again, before seeing any details), I offered some fairly mushy comments about the idea of national “plan” to the gang over at the excellent new site, FiveQsOnTech.com. The site has a great format: Five questions on technology and policy asked and answered (usually on tape) by technology policy wonks. I’m honored to be among the first couple of experts featured on the site, along with Markham Erickson of the Open Internet Coalition and Rob Atkinson of ITIF.
In the first 3 minutes of this second of the two videos I appear in, I offered some thoughts about “The Plan”:
http://www.youtube.com/v/sBRL2RfdMk4&rel=0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1
I somehow missed this excellent ITIF paper by Robert D. Atkinson and George Ou when it came out at this point last year, but George has just dusted it off, made a couple of updates, and re-posted it over at the Digital Society blog. Worth reading. It touches on a lot of the same case studies I have been documenting in my ongoing series, “Problems in Public Utility Paradise.” In particular, it focuses on the UTOPIA and iProvo fiascos out in Utah. Here’s a key takeaway from those case studies:
The lessons learned in Utah is that projected uptake models and deployment plans don’t always come to fruition, and when that happens the consequence is failure. For UTOPIA, the project was projected to reach 35% uptake rates by February 2008 but the reality was less than 17% uptake. UTOPIA had also hoped for 17% uptake from lucrative business customers but the reality was only 2 to 3 percent. Provo County’s iProvo was hoping for 10,000 subscribers by July 2006 with the assumption that 75% of those customers would subscribe to lucrative triple play services, but the reality was 10,000 customers in late 2007 with only 17% of those customers subscribing to triple play. Many consumers were quite happy to subscribe to existing broadband cable or telecom providers. The consistent theme in Utah was an overestimation of the uptake rates and the underestimation of competition from incumbent cable operator Comcast and telecom operator Qwest which led to consistent underperformance.
Ouch. For more details, see this old essay of mine about UTOPIA from 2008, and this piece from last Sept about iProvo. Not a pretty picture. As I say every time I pen a piece about the latest muni failure du jour, these case studies should serve as a cautionary tale about the dangers of grandiose, centrally planned broadband schemes. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Network-building is hard, and politicians usually aren’t that good at doing it.
Can we steer people toward hard news — and get them to financially support it — through the use of “news vouchers” or “public interest vouchers”? That’s the subject of this latest installment in my ongoing series on proposals to have the government play a greater role in the media sector in the name of sustaining struggling enterprises or “saving journalism.”
As I mentioned here previously, last week I testified at the FCC’s first “Future of Media” workshop on “Serving the Public Interest in the Digital Era.” (@3:29 mark of video). It was a great pleasure to testify alongside the all-star cast there that day, which included the always-provocative Jeff Jarvis of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He delivered some very entertaining remarks and vociferously pushed back against many of the ideas that others were suggesting about “saving journalism.” Jeff is a very optimistic guy–far more optimistic than me, in fact–about the prospect that new media and citizen journalism will help fill whatever void is left by the death of many traditional media operators and institutions. He had a lively exchange with Srinandan Kasi, Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of the Associated Press, that is worth watching (somewhere after the 5-hour mark on the video).
Nonetheless, Jarvis is a enough of a realist to know that it has
always been difficult to find resources to fund hard news, which he creatively refers to as “broccoli journalism.” This is what is keeping the FCC, the FTC (workshop today), and many media worrywarts up at night; the fear that as traditional financing mechanisms falter (advertising, classifieds, subscription revenues, etc) many traditional news-gathering efforts and institutions will disappear. Of course, while it is certainly true we are in the midst of a gut-wrenching media revolution with a great deal of creative destruction taking place, it is equally true that exciting new media business models and opportunities are developing. We shouldn’t over look that, as I argued here and here.
Anyway, a lot of different proposals are being put forth by scholars and policymakers to find new ways to finance news-gathering or “save journalism.” One of the ideas that has been gaining some steam as of late is the idea of crafting a “public interest voucher” or what Robert W. McChesney & John Nichols, authors of the new book The Death and Life of American Journalism, call a “Citizenship News Voucher.” And McChesney discussed this idea in more detail when he spoke at today’s FTC event on saving journalism. Continue reading →
“We’re from government and we’re here to help save journalism.”
That seems to be the hot new meme in media policy circles these days. Last week, it was the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) kicking off their “Future of Media” effort with a workshop on “Serving the Public Interest in the Digital Era.” This week, it’s the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) turn as they host the second in their series of workshops on How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age? Meanwhile, the Senate has already held hearings about “the future of journalism,” and Senator Benjamin L. Cardin (D-MD) recently introduced the “Newspaper Revitalization Act,” which would allow newspapers to become nonprofit organizations in an effort to help them stay afloat.
I have no doubt that many of the public policymakers behind these efforts have the best of intentions and really are concerned about what many believe to be a crisis in the field of journalism. But here are my three primary concerns with Washington’s sudden interest in “saving journalism”: Continue reading →
by Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka
We’re hoping that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has made some sort of mistake, because it’s hard to believe its latest findings about the paperwork burden generated by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulatory activity. In late January, the GAO released a report on “Information Collection and Management at the Federal Communications Commission” (GAO-10-249), which examined information collection, management, and reporting practices at the FCC. The GAO noted that the FCC gathers information through 413 collection instruments, which include things like: (1) required company filings, such as the ownership of television stations; (2) applications for FCC licenses; (3) consumer complaints; (4) company financial and accounting performance; and (5) a variety of other issues, such as an annual survey of cable operators. (Note: This does not include filings and responses done pursuant to other FCC NOIs or NPRMs.)
Regardless, the FCC told the GAO that it receives nearly
385 million responses with an estimated 57 million burden hours associated with the 413 collection instruments. A “burden hour” is defined under the Paperwork Reduction Act as “the time, effort, or financial resources expended by persons to generate, maintain, or provide information to a federal agency.” And the FCC is generating 57 million of ‘em! Even though we are frequently critical of the agency, these numbers are still hard to fathom. Perhaps the GAO has made some sort of mistake here. But here’s what really concerns us if they haven’t made a mistake. Continue reading →
Sorry to use the blog as a job board, but I wanted to let readers know that the Progress & Freedom Foundation (PFF) has a couple of positions we’d like to find good people to fill:
- Senior Economist: PFF is looking for a skilled economist (PhD-level preferred) with experience in the high-tech arena or network-related industries. Our senior economist would be responsible for assisting other PFF analysts on various projects and priorities, but would also be free to pursue other objectives.
- Vice President, Development & Outreach: PFF is looking for development director to oversee outreach to supporters and other third parties, and to help us grow the organization.
- President: Yes, you read that right! After less than 6 months on the job, I’m already tired of management and want to get back to full-time policy wonkery! If you know of someone who would make a great leader, has strong free-market credentials, and extensive experience in the field of high-tech policy and media/communications law, please let me know. I’m quite ready and willing to hand over the keys to someone else so I can spend all my time fighting the good fight to defend free minds, free markets, and free speech!
To apply, please send a resume and cover letter to Adam Thierer (athierer@pff.org). Or, if you have any ideas on good candidates, please let me know that, too.
But I Don't Love You, Elmo
I have decided what my swan song moment in the field of public policy will be. For some time now I’ve been considering retiring from the public policy world since I am really quite sick of political BS in Washington, but I’ve always wanted to go out in style. So, here’s what I plan to do to end my career next week. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has just announced that he will be delivering a major policy speech outlining how the agency’s new National Broadband Plan will benefit children and families next Friday at 10:30. According to the press release, the Chairman will be joined by Sesame Street’s Elmo when making the announcement.
So, here’s my plan… I will go to the event , rush the stage as Genachowski goes up with Elmo, grab Elmo, pull out a fake gun, put it to Elmo’s head, and then shout: “Stop regulating the Net and free speech rights now or the Muppet gets it!”
An ugly scene will no doubt follow in which several of my old friends at Common Sense Media, who are co-hosting the event, will try to talk me down from the cliff by asking me hand over the gun and to “think of the children.” But I’ll rush out the back door of the auditorium with Elmo in tow and escape in my getaway car. (I plan to live in mountains in rural Idaho and skim money off of the FCC universal service fund & the E-Rate program since I know how to rig the system from reading years of GAO reports on fraud and abuse of both!)
OK, so you get that this is all sarcasm, right? I don’t want to Secret Service showing up at my door on the grounds that I am threatening a Muppet. And I certainly don’t want to live in Idaho. But, seriously, what is the deal with politicians appearing with puppets? That’s always freaked me out a bit. I will never forget attending a congressional hearing about children’s television issues back in 1993 and watching a surreal exchange between Rep. Ed Markey and Lamb Chop, the sock puppet. Really, a woman with a sock on her hand (Shari Lewis) delivered testimony to Congress. No, seriously, it really happened. Check it out: Continue reading →
Today I am testifying at an FCC hearing on “Serving the Public Interest in the Digital Era.” [Speaker lineup here.] The purpose of the workshop is to explore:
- A brief history and overview of policies involving “public interest” requirements for commercial media and telecommunications companies;
- The state of local commercial broadcast TV and radio news and information; and
- The impact of media convergence and the emergence of the Internet, mobile technologies, and digital media on FCC media policy.
In my remarks, I focused on “Why Expansion of the FCC’s Public Interest Regulatory Regime is Unwise, Unneeded, Unconstitutional, and Unenforceable.” Down below I have attached my written remarks. Continue reading →
Very cool little video here by Jess3 documenting Internet growth and activity. Ironically, Berin sent it to me as Adam Marcus and I were updating the lengthy list of Net & online media stats you’ll find down below. Many of the stats we were compiling are shown in the video. Enjoy!
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=9641036&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1
- 1.73 billion Internet users worldwide as of Sept 2009; an 18% increase from the previous year.
[1]
- 81.8 million .COM domain names at the end of 2009; 12.3 million .NET names & 7.8 million .ORG names.
[2]
- 234 million websites as of Dec 2009; 47 million were added in 2009.
[3] In 2006, Internet users in the United States viewed an average of 120.5 Web pages each day.
[4]
- There are roughly 26 million blogs on the Internet
[5] and even back in 2007, there were over 1.5 million new blog posts every day (17 posts per second).
[6] Continue reading →
C-SPAN is really quite incredible when you think about it. When I was growing up in the 70s, there was nothing like it. Like most other Americans, my informational inputs about national news and politics were limited to what a couple of old white dudes in bad suits delivered each night around 6:30 on the three VHF channels I had access to. And no national newspapers were delivered to my small town in rural Illinois, so I had to rely on crummy local papers to fill the void via whatever national reporting they offered, which wasn’t much.
And then came C-SPAN. C-SPAN alone covers more political and civic-minded activity in the course of a week than most of us probably came into contact with in our entire lives just 30 years ago. Consider these data points, which Peter Kiley, Vice President of C-SPAN Networks was kind enough to help me aggregate. In the 2009 calendar year, C-SPAN provided the following amount of first run programming across their three channels:
- 8,438 overall hours of programming;
- 2,709 hours of House & Senate floor activity; and,
- 1,222 hours of House & Senate committee hearings.
Moreover, C-SPAN recently created the C-SPAN Video Library, which archives 23 years worth (1987-on) of fully searchable (and free) video content, including: Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.