FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell will be interviewed by veteran tech reporter Declan McCullagh of CNET in a “fireside chat” on tech policy at TechFreedom‘s half-day symposium to introduce its first publication: The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet.
TechFreedom is a new non-profit, non-partisan think tank. Our mission is to promote the progress of technology that improves the human condition and expands individual capacity to choose. We advance the freedoms that make experimentation, entrepreneurship and investment possible, and thus unleash the ultimate resource: human ingenuity. On a wide variety of issues, TechFreedom will outline a path forward for policymakers towards a bright future where technology enhances freedom, and freedom enhances technology.
The Next Digital Decade brings together 26 thought leaders on Internet law, philosophy, policy and economics to consider the future of the Internet, from a wide variety of perspectives. This book is essential reading for anyone gazing toward the digital future. The symposium features authors from a selection of the ten organizing questions asked in the book. You can read, download or buy the book here.
Continue reading →
Please join us on January 19, 2011 in Washington, DC for the launch of The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet, a collection of 31 essays from 26 leading cyber thought leaders, including Tim Wu, Hal Varian, the Hon. Alex Kozinski, Stewart Baker, Jonathan Zittrain, Milton Mueller, Eric Goldman, and Yochai Benkler—as well as the TLF’s own Adam Thierer, Larry Downes and Geoff Manne.
This event will feature panel discussions of several of the book’s organizing questions:
- Internet Optimism, Pessimism & the Future of Online Culture
- Internet Exceptionalism & Intermediary Deputization
- Who Will Govern the Net in 2020?
The January 19 event will run from 12:30pm to 5:30pm immediately following the State of the Net conference in the same location: the Columbia B room at the Hyatt Regency (400 New Jersey Ave NW, Washington DC). The event will begin with lunch and end with a cocktail reception between 5:30pm and 7:00pm. Admission is free but space is limited so RSVP now!
Registered attendees will receive a free copy of the book, which can be read online or downloaded as a PDF, or purchased in hardcover. Free eBook versions are coming soon. To learn more about the book, check out the foreword and introduction, or the table of contents.
Visit NextDigitalDecade.com for details or follow us on Twitter or Facebook for updates!
If you happen to be in Vegas today (Thursday, 1/6) for the Consumer Electronics Show (or gambling or… whatever else floats your boat), join myself and fellow TLFers Larry Downes and Wayne Crews for an impromptu “Alcohol Liberation Front” happy hour starting about 5pm at Parasol Up bar at the Wynn Hotel (3131 Las Vegas Blvd).
If you’re walking over from the Convention Center (where I’ll be till 4 for the Tech Policy Summit), it’s just 1.1 miles along the strip (directions). I’ll tweet (@BerinSzoka) exactly where we wind up in the bar, or you can ask for the TLF gang at the door or email me (bszoka <at> techfreedom <dot> org).
TPS ends at 4pm and there are other event starting at 6, so I figure we’ll just wind up there in the 5-6/6:30 range.
RSVP on Facebook & see who’s coming!
The FCC’s order still isn’t out (just a news release in .DOC form), but the Commissioner’s accompanying statements are. Anyone interested in net neutrality regulation or the coming political, legal and constitutional fights over it must read the scathing dissents by Commissioners Rob McDowell and Meredith Baker.
Commissioner McDowell’s jeremiad about “one of the darkest days in recent FCC history” makes clear the utter impossibility of reaching a “compromise,” as Chairman Genachowski insists he wanted. Commissioner McDowell summarizes his dissent beautifully:
- Nothing is broken in the Internet access market that needs fixing;
- The FCC does not have the legal authority to issue these rules;
- The proposed rules are likely to cause irreparable harm; and
- Existing law and Internet governance structures provide ample consumer protection in the event a systemic market failure occurs.
The dissent runs just over 9 pages, but he includes a long appendix of his legal analysis. Here are Commissioner Baker’s key points:
- The importance of regulatory certainty
- There is no factual basis to support government intervention
- Consumers will not benefit from net neutrality
- The order may inhibit the development of tomorrow’s internet
- The Commission is miscast as the internet’s referee
- The Commission lacks authority to adopt net neutrality rules
- The Commission acts improperly as a quasi-legislative body
- The Commission has strayed from a pro-jobs consensus agenda.
Also check out statements from Chairman Genachowski, Commissioner Copps and Commissioner Clyburn. In the end, as Adam Thierer and I have warned, the FCC is heading down path towards “mutually assured destruction,” opening the door to endless regulatory battles among the Internet’s many players.
Last June, when the FCC was careening towards issuing net neutrality rules on its own authority, even on the heels of a tongue-lashing from the DC Circuit in the Comcast decision (holding that the agency lacked authority to impose net neutrality principles on broadband as a deregulated Title I service), Charlie Kennedy (a giant of telecom law who’s a partner at Wilkinson Barker and was an adjunct at the now-defunct Progress & Freedom Foundation) made a bold prediction in a PFF paper. That prediction was today, sadly, proven true with the FCC’s net neutrality proposal. Charlie wrote:
With no clear consensus to be “restored” and no compelling need to overturn the Commission’s de-regulatory classification of Internet access under Title I, there is simply no need for the FCC to undertake—let alone rush—this proceeding. The timing of the NOI’s release and the rapid comment schedule suggest that the agency is simply trying to ram reclassification through as quickly as possible so that the 112th Congress—which seems likely to be even more hostile than the current Congress to the imposition of net neutrality regulation by the FCC—will be presented in January with a regulatory fait accompli. If that regulatory endrun around Congress succeeds, it will be remembered for decades as a pivotal moment in the decline of the rule of law and the rise of a regulatory bureaucracy “freed … from its congressional tether,” as the D.C. Circuit rightly denounced the FCC’s jurisdictional over-reach in Comcast.
In essence, Genachowski is asserting that, despite what the pesky DC Circuit thinks, he already has the authority to impose net neutrality regulation—so reclassification of broadband from deregulated Title I to common-carriage Title II is unnecessary. Talk about an agency freed from its congressional tether! See you in court, Mr. Chairman! And while we duke this out in court, infrastructure investment will stagnate—and consumers will suffer. As Charlie predicted:
Reclassification under the “Third Way” will also be the beginning of the Internet’s “Lost Decade” (or more) of stymied investment, innovation, and job creation as all sides do battle over the legality of reclassification and its implementation. To paraphrase President John Adams: “Great is the guilt of an unnecessary regulatory war.”
And as Adam Thierer points out, so much for the democratic accountability of administrative agencies and the rule of law!
An important anniversary just passed with little more notice than an email newsletter about the report that played a pivotal role in causing the courts to strike down the 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA) as an unconstitutional restriction on the speech of adults and website operators. (COPA required all commercial distributors of “material harmful to minors” to restrict their sites from access by minors, such as by requiring a credit card for age verification.)
The Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee is pleased to report that even after 10 years of its release the COPA Commission’s final report to Congress is still being downloaded at an astounding rate – between 700 and 1,000 copies a month. Users from all over the world are downloading the report from the COPA Commission, a congressionally appointed panel mandated by the Child Online Protection Act. The primary purpose of the Commission was to “identify technological or other methods that will help reduce access by minors to material that is harmful to minors on the Internet.” The Commission released its final report to Congress on Friday, October 20, 2000.
As a public service the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee agreed to virtually host the deliberations of the COPA Commission on the Web site COPACommission.org. The final posting to the site was the actual COPA Commission final report making it available for download. In the subsequent 10 years it is estimated that close to 150,000 copies of the report have been downloaded.
The COPA Report played a critical role in fending off efforts to regulate the Internet in the name of “protecting our children,” and marked a shift towards focusing on what, in First Amendment caselaw is called “less restrictive” alternatives to regulation. This summary of the report’s recommendations bears repeating:
After consideration of the record, the Commission concludes that the most effective current means of protecting children from content on the Internet harmful to minors include: aggressive efforts toward public education, consumer empowerment, increased resources for enforcement of existing laws, and greater use of existing technologies. Witness after witness testified that protection of children online requires more education, more technologies, heightened public awareness of existing technologies and better enforcement of existing laws. Continue reading →
As I mentioned earlier, I’m attending the pii2010 conference (privacy, identity & innovation) this week in Seattle (18-19)! If you’re at the conference or in the area, I hope you’ll join me and my fellow TLFers Larry Downes and Carl Gipson for an “Alcohol Liberation Front” happy hour (cash bar) after the conference ends tomorrow, Wednesday the 18th at Kells Irish Pub at 1916 Post Alley–just a short walk from the Bell Harbor International Conference Center, where the conference will take place (Google maps walking directions). The conference reception wraps up at 7:30, so we’ll mosey on over to Kells by 7:45 for drinks and food.
Just look for the TLF sticker when you get there (or the conference badges)! Carl, Larry and I should all be there. Please RSVP on Facebook if you’re coming!
CNET has just run the guest column, “Just say no to Ma Bell-era Net neutrality regulation,” Adam Thierer and I wrote in response to “Just say no to fake Net neutrality” by Derek Turner (of Free Press), which decried the win-win-win compromise suggested by Amazon’s Paul Misener, just as Free Press has more recently denounced the compromise proposed by Google and Verizon.
We make a few key points:
- History demonstrates the dangers of regulatory capture, and the costs to consumers of regulation from lost investment and innovation.
- These dangers and costs far outweigh the purported benefits of regulation (in addressing a non-existent harm).
- Broadband markets are competitive enough to prevent the kinds of abuses advocates of net neutrality regulation fret about.
- Government could foster more broadband competition by deregulating spectrum and local wireline franchising.
I’ve been having a lively debate with the commenters on the piece, so feel free to join in! Unfortunately, we don’t seem to be getting much substantive engagement with our argument—just the usual mix of “These guys are just corporate whores!” and “Can’t you see the sky is falling?”
If you’re as fascinated as I am by the interplay of privacy, identity and innovation, I hope to see you at the pii2010 conference in Seattle, August 17-19! Organized by the folks who’ve put on the top-notch Tech Policy Summit since 2003, and co-sponsored by The Progress & Freedom Foundation (among others), this event offers a truly unique perspective on privacy—not just another policy food fight, but a true roll-up-our-sleeves, in-depth seminar on what to do about privacy, especially through technological innovation.
I’ll be on the “pii & Digital Advertising: Navigating the Regulatory Landscape” panel on the 18th at 10am, giving my usual talk about the need to be careful about the trade-offs inherent in privacy regulation. Check out the detailed agenda here.
TLFers Larry Downes and Carl Gipson will also be attending, so we’re planning a long-overdue “Alcohol Liberation Front” happy hour after the conference on August 18—details to be announced soon.
Check out the discussion around the #pii2010 hashtag on Twitter. And register today! Mid-August is supposed to be paradise in Seattle, and the week of the conference also happens to be Seattle GeekWeek, so there are a bunch of other events worth checking out in town before and after the pii2010 conference.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.