Articles by Cord Blomquist 
Cord Blomquist spends most of his time pining for the singularity. To pass the time while waiting for this convergence, he serves as the New Media Manager at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Before landing this sweet gig, Cord hocked policy writing for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, toiled in the halls of Congress, and even worked in a crouton factory. In college, Cord spent his hours studying political philosophy and artificial intelligence, resulting in an unhealthy obsession with Lt. Commander Data. All of these activities will, of course, be viewed as laughable when he is ported from this crude meatspace into the nanobot cloud.
As part of a 20 minute slide show produced by the New York Dept. of Criminal Justice, Elliot’s Spitzer’s administration has cited a well-known Internet hoax as a helpful resource for parents.
The site cited, Mothers Against Videogame Addiction and Violence (mavav.org) claims to be:
organization is dedicated to educating parents of the world’s fastest growing addiction and the most reckless endangerment of children today: Video Game Addiction and Violence in Underground Video Game Cultures
The site goes on to claim that:
Video game addiction is without a doubt, becoming this century’s most increasingly worrisome epidemic, comparable even to drug and alcohol abuse. All the while, the video game industry continues to market and promote hatred, racism, sexism, and the most disturbing trend: clans and guilds, an underground video game phenomenon which closely resembles gangs.
MAVAV is actually the creation of a New York design school student, a well documented fact that is easily uncovered by research. And by research I mean about 2 minutes Googling the farcical organization. Too great a burden for the NY DOJ.
The NY Justice Dept. report also contained a reference to several over-hyped stories of questionable reliability and is riddled with errors. In addition, the report claims that Seung Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer, was a Counter-Strike player, a claim that has since been shown to be unsubstantiated.
If this is the worst indictment that the insidious legal mind of Elliot Spitzer can produce, gamers might not have to worry about New York’s proposed regulation of video game sales.
Hat tip: GamePolitics.com
In a December 13th speech to The Free State Foundation, Senator Jim DeMint quotes Randy May in asking if the FCC should be renamed the “Federal Unbundling Commission.”
DeMint expands on the unbundling theme covering Open Access, A la Carte and Multicast Must Carry, and Net Neutrality.
My favorite quote:
Market regulation is no less than market manipulation, and we need to take that
power away from the government and put it where it belongs, in the hands of
consumers in the free market.
Check out this excellent presentation on the absurdity of the FCC’s telecom and cable agenda at the The Free State Foundation.
If only more members of Congress took this position on telecom issues!
During the course of promoting the recent paper I co-wrote with Eli Lehrer, I have come across the same question/complaint from gamers: Why have two adult ratings, both M and AO, when seemingly they perform the same role?
The answer is that they don’t.
The key difference between M and AO is that M is sold in stores like Best Buy and Wal-Mart, while AO is not. This is analogous to movies. While both NC-17 movies and X movies are only available to adults, X rated movies are definitely not sold in Wal-Mart. Though this isn’t an official ESRB stance, most every retailer, large and small will not carry AO games if it sells games to a general audience.
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Today, CEI released a new paper by my colleague Eli Lehrer and me. The study, entitled Politically Determined Entertainment Ratings and How to Avoid Them, covers how we rate television, radio, comic books, movies, music, and video games. After studying the evolution of the ratings system for each medium, the report makes the following recommendations:
1. Keep politics out of ratings systems.
2. Know the medium being rated.
3. If a ratings system collapses, it is not a cause for concern.
4. Ratings systems will never substitute for other social institutions.
To check out a full copy of the report, visit CEI’s website. This report is especially important considering the renewed call for meddling with the ESRB system from Congressmen Baca (D-CA) and Wolf (R-VA). Check out more on that at Gamespot.
Thanks to GamePolitics.com for the awesome write-up on the report today and thanks to the readers as well for the 35 comments at the time of this post, all of which I read.
I blogged about Greenpeace’s quarterly report on Green-Tech last week, noting that the way they display their data is manipulative, but turns out the data itself is deeply flawed.
John Timmer writes at ArsTechnica on just how poorly this quarterly report is researched:
The research in general appears lazy. Nintendo’s failing grade appears to be based entirely on this entry in the corporate FAQ, which briefly summarizes some of the steps the company has taken to protect the environment. Anything that’s not covered there is simply rated “No Information.” Similarly, all of the information on Microsoft originates from press materials and corporate statements on the company’s web site. Clearly, Greenpeace did not perform an exhaustive evaluation of chemical use through the manufacturing pipeline.
So, even if you think the shifting numbers on the graph aren’t misleading, it turns out that the whole study is pretty worthless. If an eco-friendly rating is based on cursory searches of the manufacturer’s own reports, then the best PR department wins, not the best practices. Greenpeace, along with many other environmental groups, refer to the all-PR approach to going green as”green washing.” Ironic that Greenpeace itself is now doing a bit of the scrubbing.
The front page of the Wall Street Journal Marketplace section today gave me some hope that my work and the work of many other libertarian geeks has had an impact. The WSJ concluded that while there are dominant forces like Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft in the online advertising field, that the dynamism of the market allows for upstart companies to grab their share of the $16.9 billion online ad industry.
Pointing out that markets are dynamic and that dominance is at best temporary and always under threat from competitors or future competitors seems like economics 101, but the job nonetheless needs to be done. Our collective memory seems to resemble that of a goldfish as many in the media believe that Google is, always has been, and always will be the dominant force in online advertising.
Of course, if market dominance really perpetuated itself, MITS would dominate the PC market. After all, in 1975 the MITS Altair 8800 outsold its closest competitor, the IBM 5100, two to one. This despite the 5100’s advanced cassette tape drive!
One would expect that after 30 years, having started in such a dominant position, MITS would control the entire high-technology world. Yet, somehow MITS lost this market dominance. Even the blue monolith of IBM lost to an outside player, an upstart named Apple.
More on the WSJ piece by my colleague Ryan Radia at CEI’s OpenMarket.org.
I don’t know the ins and outs of Wikipedian politics, but according to The Register, trouble is brewing at Jimmy Wales’s social knowledge project. The controversy surrounds the recently exposed mailing list of high-level wikipedians–the uber-editors of the encyclopedia–who have supposedly exercised their powers for the dark side.
To quell the outcry of any critics, I want to specify that I’m not one of the many wikipedia skeptics out there, but that may only be because I use Wikipedia in a very limited way. Typically, I use the wiki as a resource to refresh my knowledge of esoteric scientific terms when I run across them in articles. Just recently I looked up Apsis and Sidereal time when reading something about the recent downgrade of Pluto. But these entries are precisely the kind of thing that Wikipedia is best at. Most folks realize this and understand that the the more controversial the topic, the less reliable the Wikipedia entry.
But should we be concerned about the over-lords of wikipedia? In the short-term maybe, but in the long-term the mercurial market for web readership will render the ultimate verdict. Larry Sanger, a co-founder turned critic of wikipedia has founded Citizendium, a site that openly admits to expert editing of entries, in hopes to compete with the Wiki-wonder. Other wiki-challengers have cropped up including Helium, which also uses editors and uses an un-anonymous author model. Of course there’s the obviously conservative Conservapedia, for those who like their knowledge pre-biased. And we can’t forget about the old main-stays of the knowledge market like Britannica.com and Encarta.com, which serve up expert-written entries for free.
Competition will keep Wales’s Wiki honest, or it will fail to attract traffic and donations–left to slowly fade away in prominence and PageRank. But, since Wikipedia has only gained popularity in recent years, it’s safe to say that the public still finds wiki-wonderland useful, even if it’s not the democratic knowledge-workers paradise it was once made out to be.
Greenpeace has released the latest edition of its quarterly Guide to Greener Electronics. While I haven’t read the study in full and I don’t know exactly what goes in to determining the one through ten ranking that Greenpeace assigns to various famous tech companies, I did find their graph (see below) a little odd. Look how close together one to three are! Then look at the space between seven and ten–it’s half the graph! By making three numbers take up half the graph, a greening tech company can move quite a way across the “dial o’ green” if it moves from a seven to an eight, but a move from three to our doesn’t result in such a pronounced leap.
Adopting cleaner technology standards and practices is important, don’t get me wrong. But such a blatantly misleading graph makes me question the legitimacy of this entire quarterly report. Can we get some unbiased research into this area of tech please?
NOTE: Some comments have shown me that I wasn’t clear in the original post just how manipulative these graphs are with the data. It’s important to note that past graphs show a rank of 5 as the midpoint of the graph. The most recent graph shows a rank of 7 as the midpoint. This way, companies that have actually gotten greener appear to be back-sliding.
Scott Cleland over at The Precursor Blog is an ideological ally on many issues, most prominently, network neutrality. Scott has come out strongly against government intervention on a host of issues, but the Google/Doubleclick merger is not one of them. Last week Scott posted a long set of talking points supporting Senators Kohl and Hatch who have called for heightened scrutiny of the deal.
But the blackboard economics that are being applied to the deal just don’t relate to reality. A brief look at recent history should stem any worries that Scott and the incredulous Senators may have.
The history of the Internet is littered with former giants like AOL, AltaVista, and Lycos that lost significant market share or went bust because they couldn’t keep innovating. Yet these companies were also labeled monopolies or, more euphemistically, as “market dominant.” In 1999 the Motley Fool called Yahoo! “the dominant brand of the Internet.” Recently, Boston Business Journal recounted that “Lycos Inc., once one of the biggest Web portals on the planet, is now a shadow of its former self with a mere 70 employees in Waltham.”
The real competition to Google-DoubleClick may not even exist yet—Google itself was a grad student science project a decade ago. Startups can grow exponentially in a short time on the web. Look no farther than Facebook, a $10-billion gorilla today, that didn’t even exist four years ago.
Ultimately, concerns about online market consolidation are unfounded. They depict the web advertising market as static—yet the last decade has shown the dynamic nature of Internet commerce. How can one claim to find an iron-clad monopoly in a market that is best described as hyper-competitive?
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In Jerry’s post “Is Comcast discriminating against BitTorrent?” he points out the following about Comcast’s acceptable use policy:
In its acceptable use policy,1 Comcast reserves the right to take any measures it deems necessary to deal with subscribers who use too much bandwidth (although how much is too much is not clearly defined). But if the AP is right, this is targeting a specific application, not specific users.
Jerry is right that targeting specific users would be well outside of Comcast’s acceptable use policy when it comes to bandwidth hogging, however, Comcast can target and block individual users who are running servers, whether they be for email, websites, or file-sharing. Their acceptable use policy also includes:
Prohibited uses include, but are not limited to, using the Service, Customer Equipment, or the Comcast Equipment to:
followed by:
xiv. run programs, equipment, or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises LAN (Local Area Network), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited services and servers include, but are not limited to, e-mail, Web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and servers;
The policy later says in relation to prohibited activities such as this that:
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