I’ll be live-tweeting today’s FTC event @TechLiberation here.
Articles by Berin Szoka 
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If you’re interested in supporting the cause of free markets and entrepreneurship in space, now is your chance! The Space Frontier Foundation (on whose board I sit) is wrapping up their annual fund-raising drive today (12/4) with a 1:1 donation matching program. More about the Foundation follows below in a letter from our Chairman, Bob Werb. If you are interested in supporting foundations work, today is the day to make whatever (tax-deductible) donation you can. Otherwise, you can follow the Foundation or get our NewSpace News feed on Twitter.
If you follow privacy policy, you won’t want to miss these two great events.
First, on Monday (12/7), the Federal Trade Commission will be holding the first of three “Exploring Privacy” roundtables at its conference center (601 New Jersey Avenue, NW). This all-day event (agenda) will include five panel discussions, and remarks by FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour, and David C. Vladeck, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. The lineups for all five panels look excellent. The FTC deserves great credit for trying hard to represent the broad spectrum of expert opinion on this profoundly important issue. PFF President Adam Thierer will be on on the Consumer Expectations and Disclosures panel (11:00?12:15), I will be on the Online Behavioral Advertising panel (1:30?2:45 p.m.), and the Cato Institute’s Jim Harper will be on the Benefits and Risks of Collecting, Using, and Retaining Consumer Data panel (9:15?10:45 a.m.). For those who cannot attend in person, event will be webcasted, and I will be live-tweeting key highlights (except for my own panel, of course).
Here are the comments submitted to the Roundtable. The second Roundtable will take place January 28, 2010 in Berkeley, CA with a third to follow in Washington in the spring.
Second, on Wednesday (12/9), Rob Atkinson of The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation will be moderating a debate about targeted online advertising at ITIF (1101 K Street, Washington, DC 20005, Suite 610). Rob is probably the single most thoughtful observer of this debate, and he’s put together a terrific panel that includes my sparring partner Jeff Chester, Howard Beales (whose excellent economic work I have cited heavily in my own writings about the benefits of one advertising), the FTC’s Peder Magee (one of the key organizers of the Exploring Privacy roundtable series, and also an exceptionally thoughtful and fair observer) and, if we’re lucky, CDT’s Ari Schwartz (a staunch defender of P3P).
After over five years of blogging (since August 2004), 20+ TLF contributors have authored over 4,700 posts—creating an enormous repository of writing that provides free-market, market-oriented, skeptical, bottom-up, decentralist, cyber-libertarian, and/or Internet-exceptionalist perspectives on technology, communications, media and Internet news & policy.
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The disabled have much to give thanks for this year—but contrary to common assumptions, it’s not for paternalistic government accessibility mandates, regulations or subsidies (see, for example, the FCC’s November 6 Broadband Accessibility workshop), but for the good ol’ fashioned private sector ingenuity that has made America great. Five broad categories of examples suggest how constantly-improving computing power and innovation can make life easier for many, if not all, disabled users—and how market forces empower the disabled along with everyone else.
Video transcription. Last week, Google announced “the preliminary roll-out of automatic captioning in YouTube, an innovation that takes advantage of our speech recognition technology to turn the spoken word into text captions.” Google uses the same speech recognition technology it refined with its free Goog-411 and Google Voice services to automatically transcribe video dialog (which can also be automatically translated using Google’s translation engine). Why? Not because of any government mandate, but because of some combination of three factors: (i) it’s an easy way for Google to invest in its “reputational capital,” (ii) the underlying technologies of transcribing videos make videos easier to use for all users, not just the hearing-impaired, and (iii) those technologies also make it possible to contextually target advertising to the verbal content of videos.
It’s worth noting that Hulu currently offers closed captioning for some of its television programming but notes that “closed-captioning data that’s used for broadcast TV isn’t easily translated for online use.” The online television clearinghouse promises to offer more closed-captioning soon. Perhaps they ought to license Google’s algorithmic transcription?
Voice recognition for direct consumer use—most notably, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, the latest version of the leading voice recognition software, which was released in summer 2008 but only recently seems to have really hit critical mass. Continue reading →
My PFF colleague Barbara Esbin has a great piece about why “FCC Could Mess Up Internet With ‘Net Neutrality’ Rules No One Needs” in a USNews point/counterpoint debate with Andrew Schwartzman of the Media Attack Access Project, who claims such rules “Would Keep the Web Free for Speech and Trade.” Here are her two best gems:
The FCC claims that broadband Internet markets are insufficiently competitive today to protect consumer interests. Yet a 2007 Federal Trade Commission report found no market failure and warned regulators to proceed with caution. The FCC acknowledges that broadband service providers face growing traffic volume demands that must be managed but claims that they have the potential—the opportunity, means, and motive—to act in an anticompetitive fashion when transporting Internet traffic across their networks. FCC detectives point to economic theory suggesting providers have incentives to act in an anticompetitive manner against competing providers of content, applications, or services. What is missing from this crime scene investigation is the body—the actual evidence that providers are behaving anticompetitively or are likely to.
And:
Lacking evidence that regulation is now necessary to combat either market failure or other consumer harms, the FCC is left to postulate a dystopian world without network neutrality rules. It claims that unless it acts now, we risk losing what we value most about the Internet. In other words, it creates what economists would call a “counterfactual.”
But we don’t need economic theory to tell us what a world without network neutrality rules would look like because we already live in that world. And in the real world, the fact is that the Internet ecosystem we have is functioning quite well to satisfy customer needs without the ministrations of the FCC. In fact, one might go so far as to say it functions as well as it does because of that.
Of course, regulatory advocates would insist that broadband providers aren’t really behaving themselves today, citing a handful of vastly exaggerated examples. But they would probably fall back on the argument that broadband service providers are just waiting to start behaving even more anti-competitively until the threat of net neutrality regulation has been removed.
It’s certainly true that government disciplines markets as much by the threat of regulation as the actual exercise thereof, but that’s especially true of antitrust laws: Even if we never see an antitrust suit brought against an ISP for anticompetitive behavior towards applications and content providers, antitrust laws would still play—indeed, have already played—a vital role in discouraging companies from engaging in the kind of behavior Andy Schwartzman worries about. That’s why PFF proposed relying on case-by-case antitrust enforcement rather than preemptive regulation with its 2005 DACA project.
Given the dangers of inviting further proscriptive government regulation of the Internet: “All we are saying, is give love antitrust a chance…”
Bob Barr, the four term Republican Georgia congressman turned ACLU activist and 2008 Libertarian Presidential candidate, has denounced Rep. Linda Sánchez‘s (D-CA) “Megan Meier Cyber Bullying Prevention Act” (H.R. 1966) in particularly harsh terms:
This legislation represents an exercise in overcriminalization and poor draftsmanship not often seen, even in the Congress. A term as broad and as vague as “intent to . . . cause substantial emotional distress to a person” invites constitutional challenge as being violative of the Fifth Amendment due process guarantee, as well as the First Amendment’s language protecting speech (including political and news media speech). Sending an e-mail or a blog, or even posting a Twitter message that might be particularly insensitive or even downright mean about another person, including perhaps a candidate for office or an incumbent, could land you in jail if Rep. Sanchez’ bill were to become law.
Barr touches on many of the key points Adam Thierer and I raised in the written testimony we submitted to House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on this subject back in September—summarized here. At the hearing, Sanchez declared her intention to revise the bill to incorporate constitutional criticisms. Stay tuned for an update on that front…
But as we noted in our testimony, the constitutional problems with criminalization cannot beeasily remedied, especially since Sanchez seems unwilling to limit her bill to cyberharassment of children by adults (such as allegedly happened in the Megan Meier case)—relying instead on existing cyberstalking laws (a much more narrowly defined crime involving “true threats”) to govern conduct among adults, and educational and counseling-based approaches to govern true cyberbullying among children.
Why we haven’t heard the last of Sanchez’s bill, the more serious threat is likely to be efforts to deputize online intermediaries to “deal with the problem” by chipping away at the broad immunity under Section 230 that has allowed the great flourishing of online content and services involving user generated content and participation. As we noted: Continue reading →
Great story in Wired about how Apple disrupted Microsoft’s mobile OS lead, again illustrating how quickly today’s leaders can, and probably will, become tomorrow’s laggards in the topsy-turvy tech biz.
And on the benefits of Apple’s heretical “closedness”:
The iPhone operates on a closed system, which can only run on Apple hardware, meaning third- party developers can produce apps and games that work exclusively with the iPhone Therefore, despite Apple’s questionable and controversial approval policy for iPhone apps developers can code one app that works with 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch devices which is less time consuming than developing several versions of one app for a variety of Windows Mobile smartphones. In turn, that spells out to a larger number of apps in the App Store, which enables Apple’s hardware to cater to a larger and broader audience.
This will be a busy week for those who follow privacy policy in Washington:
- Monday (11/16) 11 am: the coalition of 10 so-called “privacy advocacy” groups that recently demanded sweeping regulation of online data collection and use will be holding a briefing for congressional staffers on their demands in 2322 Rayburn House Office Building.
- Wednesday (11/17), 4 pm: A “bipartisan briefing for staff of Members on the Subcommittees” in 2322 Rayburn, followed by a Democratic staff briefing.
- Thursday (11/18), 10 am: The House Energy & Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications, Technology & the Internet and Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade & Consumer Protection will hold a joint hearing on “Exploring the Offline and Online Collection and Use of Consumer Information” in 2123 Rayburn.
The witness list for Thursday’s hearing has not yet been released, but reportedly includes Pam Dixon of the World Privacy Forum and Prof. Chris Hoofnagle of Berkeley Law, as well as three industry representatives (but no skeptics of regulation from outside of industry, who might ask “whether privacy advocates” really have consumers interests at heart). Dixon and Hoofnagle may well be the only two people on the planet who could rival Jeff Chester in their paranoia about online advertising.
So I suspect the hearing will consist largely of the two of them trying to dodge the question Adam Thierer and I keep asking: What’s the harm that requires government regulation? For them—and for David Vladeck—the new head of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection—the answer seems to be that no real harm need be established to justify regulation, whatever the cost to consumers of regulation, because “harm” may be defined by anecdote and in terms of “dignity interests”—a legal standard that has all the intellectual and factual rigor of a plate full of Jell-O shots (intoxicating and fun for parties but squishy with little real substance).
Adam and I will be raising this and other questions at the FTC’s Exploring Privacy workshop on December 7. I will be participating in the online behavioral advertising panel, and PFF President Adam Thierer will be participating in the consumer expectations/surveys panel. Check out my comments to the FTC for more on our perspective. Continue reading →
Why do (most) stores have walls? Because, obviously, walls are generally (at least in the developing world) a cost-effective technology for enforcing the value exchange that stores offer customers: products or services for customers’ cash. Open-air markets exist, but tend to be reserved for items cheap enough that the costs of theft fall below some “acceptable loss threshold.” All stores ultimately rely on employees and the police to chase down shoplifters.
Yet many valuable media products have long been simply given away by their producers in the implicit value exchange of advertising: newspapers, magazines, radio, television and online content/services for customers’ attention. It’s as if publishers set up a store with no walls and put up a big “steal this book!” sign inviting shoplifters in. Advertisers simply have to hope that their ads are interesting enough to catch the attention of readers/viewers/listeners—and, on the Web, maybe even get users to click on the ad! It should be obvious that the lack of any “enforcement technology” simply means that there will be less funding for this “free” stuff enjoyed by consumers—just as there would be fewer goods and/or higher prices if stores were prevented from discouraging or punishing shoplifting.
Ethicists could debate until the cows come home whether ad-blocking (or ad-ignoring) is morally tantamount to shoplifting—taking without “paying” (through attention)—but who cares? Whatever the morality of it, the important, and undeniable, thing is that those who ignore/block commercials are free-riding on the economic value created by those who don’t.
Enter Apple, which recently filed a patent application for a technology intended to ensure that users are seeing, and actually paying attention to, ads. Randall Stross, author of the excellent book Planet Google, hates the idea of “compelling attention” and suggests that it would so annoy consumers that it would cost Apple more in reputational capital than it’s worth. Stross may well be proven right in the marketplace (and, if so, fine), but does that make Apple’s proposal wrong? The brilliantly satirical “Secret Diary of Steve Jobs” calls the idea “evil,” and suggests that, in the pretended voice of Steve Jobs: Continue reading →
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