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 I mentioned, I’m out in Vegas attending the Tech Policy Summit at CES today and tomorrow and trying to blog about some of what’s going on. Here’s my summary of panel#1 on broadband policy and panel #2 on spectrum policy. The third panel was on the future of copyright and content creation. The session was moderated by Declan McCullagh, Sr. Correspondent, CBSNews.com and Contributor, CNET News. The panelists included:
- Jim Griffin, President, Choruss LLC and Advisor to Warner Music Group
- Fred von Lohmann, Senior Staff Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Gigi Sohn, Co-founder and President, Public Knowledge
- Hank Shocklee, Creative Director and CEO Music Producer, Founder of Public Enemy and President, Shocklee Entertainment
- Michael Robertson, Founder, MP3.com
- Dave Allen, Co-founder and President, Pampelmoose and Co-founder, Fight
I have briefly summarized some of what each speaker said down below:
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As I mentioned, I’m out in Vegas attending the Tech Policy Summit at CES today and tomorrow and trying to blog about some of what’s going on. Here’s my summary of panel#1 on broadband policy and the pending national broadband plan.
The second panel was entitled “The Spectrum Grab and Innovation” and was moderated by Rob Pegoraro of The Washington Post. The panelists were:
- Dean Brenner, VP of Government Affairs, Qualcomm
- Michael Calabrese, VP, Wireless Future Program, New America Foundation
- David Donovan, President, Association for Maximum Service Television (MSTV)
- Joan Marsh, VP, Federal Regulatory Affairs, AT&T
- Craig Moffett, VP and Senior Analyst, Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.
- Janice Obuchowski, Founder and President, Freedom Technologies
I have summarized some of what the panelists had to say down below.
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I’m attending the Tech Policy Summit at CES in Las Vegas today and tomorrow. Lots of good discussions. The focus of the first panel, which was entitled, “Making Nationwide Deployment and Adoption of Broadband a Reality,” was what we should expect from the National Broadband Plan. This is particularly timely as the FCC just announced today it would be delaying the rollout of the plan.
This TPS session was moderated by technology journalist Steve Wildstrom. The panelists were:
- Susan Crawford, Professor of Law and Professor of Information, University of Michigan
- Neil Fried, Senior Telecommunications Counsel, U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce
- Anna Gomez, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information, NTIA
- Karen Jackson, Deputy Secretary of Technology, Commonwealth of Virginia
- Carlos Kirjner, Senior Advisor to the Chairman, FCC
- Andrew McLaughlin, Deputy CTO, Internet Policy, OSTP
Below is my summary of what each of the panelists had to say.
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Yo, tech policy geeks attending CES this week… The Tech Policy Summit team has put together a terrific “Guide to Tech Policy at 2010 CES.” [PDF here] Very handy for tech policy wonks! I hope to see some of you at some of these sessions and keynote addresses.
As I mentioned a few days ago, Tech Policy Summit has put together a terrific mini-summit with outstanding panels and speakers. I’ll be hanging out at their sessions most of time out there. If you see me, come chat. We’ll plan a spontaneous happy hour or late-night drinking session!
Over at Mashable, Ben Parr has a post (“Facebook Turns to the Crowd to Eradicate Offensive Content“) expressing surprise that Facebook has a crowdsourcing / community policing solution to deal with objectionable content:
Did you know that Facebook has a crack team of employees whose mission is to deal with offensive content and user complaints? Their ranks number in the hundreds. But while most websites have people on staff to deal with porn and violence, none of them have 350 million users to manage… Now the world’s largest social network found a way to deal with this shortage of manpower, though. Facebook has begun testing a new feature called the Facebook Community Council [currently invite-only]. According to a guest post on the Boing Boing blog by one of the council’s members, its goal is to purge Facebook of nudity, drugs, violence, and spam.
The Facebook Community Council is actually a Facebook app and tool for evaluating content for various offenses… The app’s tagging system allows council members to tag content with one of eight phrases: Spam, Acceptable, Not English, Skip, Nudity, Drugs, Attacking, and Violence. If enough council members tag a piece of content with the same tag, action is taken, often a takedown.
What Facebook is doing here is nothing all that new. Many other social networking sites or platforms such MySpace, Ning, and many others, do much the same. Video hosting sites like YouTube do as well. [See my summary of YouTube’s efforts down below]**
No doubt, some will be quick to decry “private censorship” with moves by social networking sites, video hosting sites, and others to flag and remove objectionable content within their communities, but such critics need to understand that:
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Great video here from the PBS News Hour featuring three tech visionaries debating the impact of the Internet and digital technology over the past decade, plus a look forward to the future. It features Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and author of the forthcoming book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” Esther Dyson, chairman of EDventure Holdings, which invests in technology startups, and Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster and consulting professor at Stanford University.
I like Esther’s line, “the Internet has given each of us the power that you needed three secretaries to have and an institution behind you.” It’s true. Even though many people complain about information overload, the Internet and digital technologies have also given us the unprecedented ability to gather and filter through massive amounts of information and then put that information to work for us. You really did need 2 or 3 people, or an entire institution behind you in the past to accomplish things that you can now handle yourself in just a few hours (perhaps just minutes) with your computer or smartphone. Progress is good.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/js/pap/embed.js?news01n3820qd5b
Free Press, the radical regulatory activist group founded by Marxist media scholar Robert W. McChesney, has never seen a media or technology regulation they don’t like, but their latest effort to have the feds halt innovation is shocking even by their standards. According to The Washington Post:
Free Press and other public advocacy groups are sending letters Monday to the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission calling for a probe of the “TV Everywhere” plan by cable, satellite and phone companies that brings television shows and movies to computers and devices, but only for those that subscribe to both television and high-speed Internet services.
Think about this. “TV Everywhere” is still in its cradle, having only just been launched recently. It will give multichannel video distributors a chance to find their footing as millions of consumers continue to “cut the video cord.” And it would provide consumers with ubiquitous access to content over the Internet while also ensuring that content creators are compensated for their programming.
OK, so what’s wrong with all this again? Why would we want federal antitrust officials throw a wrecking ball into this innovative new business model? Continue reading →
Looking forward to returning to the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this year in Vegas after missing the previous year’s show. If others are heading out, let me know. Perhaps I’ll try to schedule a meet-up one night with some fellow tech policy geeks like I did in past years. First round on me… so long as you’re a cheap drinker!
I’m really looking forward to the sessions that the Tech Policy Summit team is hosting at CES this year since they always put together great events. They have sessions on broadband deployment issues; spectrum policy; copyright and new media business models; and discussions with leading policymakers and FCC officials, including FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. Should be a great event and admission is open to all CES attendees. I’m going to try to do some live blogging or Tweeting from some of the sessions.
I’m also speaking on a panel about online child safety and parental control technologies at another event out there called the “Mommy Tech Summit & Exhibition.” As you might have guessed, it’s a mini-summit geared toward moms who want to learn more about these technologies. The panel discussions take place on Friday but the technology exhibits there will be open the whole time. That will give me a chance to get latest updates for my ongoing booklet on parental control technologies.
Anyway, hope to see some of you there. Those of you who want that free beer know how to find me!
It really is amazing how much the audio marketplace has evolved over the past decade. I’ve written about the growing “competition for our ears” here before, but over at the Radio Survivor blog, there’s an outstanding collection of essays about “The Decade’s Most Important Radio Trends” by several long-time industry experts. Dennis Haarsager of National Public Radio has a nice listing of all the entries over on his blog, which I have reproduced down below.
It just blows my mind to think that just 10 years ago I didn’t have satellite radio (now have 3 subscriptions); I didn’t have Pandora (my 8 different personalized channels are playing in the background on my computer non-stop); I had never heard a podcast (and now subscribe to several and have hosted one here on occasion); I didn’t have an MP3 player and had never burned any of my music (now have 3 players and my entire 25-year collection of CDs on all 3 devices); and I had never spent any time listening to music online (and now am quite in love with Lala and LastFM). Meanwhile, I am still listening to the old fashion radio quite a bit, including on a new HD Radio player in my house. You gotta love choice like that!
Anyway, read these essays for a fuller investigation into the state of the audio marketplace. I don’t agree with everything said in each of the entries but still recommend you check out the entire series:
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Over at Silicon Alley Insider, Gregory Galant has a wonderful post about “18 Awesome Tech Things We Didn’t Have 10 Years Ago.” It serves as another great example of the amazing technological progress we have witnessed over the past decade. He’s asking people for suggestions for what else should be on the list, so head over there and let him know. Seems like wi-fi technologies should be on there somehow. FiOS deserves a shout-out, too. And where’s Firefox & Chrome? Also, I’ll put in a special word for some amazing new home theater technologies: high-def flat-screens and projectors; media servers & Windows Media Center; BluRay; and 3 incredible gaming / media consoles (Wii, PS3, & XBox). Anyway, here’s Galant’s list:
Wikipedia
Gmail
Facebook
YouTube
Twitter
AdWords
Amazon AWS
RSS (started in ‘99 but didn’t catch on till the ’00s)
Meetup
iPod
Google Maps
Podcasts
Mint
Skype/VOIP
iPhone
Google Docs
Creative Commons
Flickr
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.