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.
Government officials have an uncanny knack for deflecting blame they deserve onto others. The latest group on the receiving end of this blame game is The Lime Group, creators of the popular file-sharing service LimeWire. Rather than the government taking responsibility for its own utter incompetence in managing its network security and internal IT protocols, it’s found a convenient scapegoat.
Salon.com reports today that the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is reopening its investigation of services like LimeWere that allow consumers to distribute files online. Committee chairman Edolphus Towns (D-NY) and ranking Republican Darrell E. Issa have explained their renewed interest in LimeWire and other peer-to-peer (P2P) services, as Salon explains:
They cited press reports this year and last year of computer users making available the blueprints and avionics for Marine One, the president’s helicopter; more than 150,000 tax returns; 25,800 student loan applications; 626,000 credit reports and tens of thousands of medical files with names, addresses and Social Security numbers for patients with AIDS, cancer and mental illnesses.
Congressmen Towns and Issa don’t seem to realize that LimeWire is just one of hundreds of applications that allow end-users to share files with each other. To say that we should investigate these software applications for working as they were designed just plain misses the point.
The Pentagon’s leak of Marine One plans was entirely preventable had the proper limitations been placed on individual users machines—in this case a private contractor—something a high-school student working as an IT admin could easily do. Rather than looking at LimeWire as a place to lay blame, Congress should be asking for a full-scale investigation into the DoD and other agency IT managers, as they’re the dolts who allowed LimeWire to be installed on machines laden with sensitive data. This sort of policing and investigation into government incompetence is what the Oversight and Government Reform Committee is supposed to do.
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Here at TLF we often worry about government encroachment on the latest and greatest technologies. It seems that federal regulators want to control everything that has to do with our beloved and still largely free Internet—how data moves around, whether or not we can encrypt it, how long it is stored, who owns it, and how we can get their hands on it.
But even relatively low-tech means of communication are under attack too, or at least are rumored to be.
Lately there has been so much clamor over the Fairness Doctrine—an abandoned rule mandating equal time for all sides of controversial issues discussed on broadcast radio & television—that the Obama administration has stated publicly that the President is against reviving it.
Even so, the mascot of the anti-Fairness Doctrine crowd, Rush Limbaugh, has voiced his opinion in an op-ed in today’s The Wall Street Journal.
Mr. Limbaugh’s position is obvious: he doesn’t like the Fairness Doctrine. Not because he’s against fairness or thinks that liberal voices shouldn’t be heard, but because, as he puts it, “The dangers of an overly timid or biased press cannot be averted through bureaucratic regulation, but only through the freedom and competition that the First Amendment sought to guarantee.”
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From FoxNews.com:
“As the president stated during the campaign, he does not believe the Fairness Doctrine should be reinstated,” White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said.
If this is indeed the Obama administration’s official stance, the news couldn’t have come at a better time. Just last week FCC officials met with Rep. Henry Waxman’s staff to discuss resurrecting the Fairness Doctrine under a new name. Waxman, the head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has also been looking into “fairness” issues on the Internet—creating an expanded, Fairness Doctrine 2.0.
The American Spectator reported on this reanimation of the long-dead doctrine and brought us this great quote from a Waxman staffer:
“It’s all about diversity in media,” says a House Energy staffer, familiar with the meetings. “Does one radio station or one station group control four of the five most powerful outlets in one community? Do four stations in one region carry Rush Limbaugh, and nothing else during the same time slot? Does one heavily trafficked Internet site present one side of an issue and not link to sites that present alternative views? These are some of the questions the chairman is thinking about right now, and we are going to have an FCC that will finally have the people in place to answer them.”
It doesn’t seem that Waxman’s real concern is having an FCC that can answer questions, but an FCC that will ignore its obligation to uphold the Constitution and sacrifice our freedom of speech on the alter of “fairness.”
Of course, none of this has anything to do with fairness, but has everything to do with politicians controlling what we can say, write, or otherwise express.
If Congress is somehow able to dupe the American people into accepting such speech restrictions—and President Obama doesn’t block a Fairness Doctrine 2.0—we can look forward to websites being patrolled by federal fairness cops, radio stations being staffed by stop-watch-toting FCC agents, and a presidential appointee sitting on the editorial board of every newspaper and magazine that still chooses to publish.
Let’s hope the President takes his oath seriously and defends the Constitution. Our basic freedom to speak our mind—the most fundamental of all freedoms—may rely on Mr. Obama’s resolve.
Sirius XM Satellite Radio—the company born from the merger of Sirius Satelllite Radio and XM Satellite Radio—has “been working with advisers to prepare for a possible bankruptcy filing,” according to the New York Times.
Some may say that Sirius XM was never a fit business to begin with—many of their new subscribers came from the bundling of subscriptions into the sale of new automobiles—but it’s hard to say what might have been had federal regulators not delayed the merger for 18 months and then added insult to injury by subjecting them to seemingly arbitrary restrictions.
My colleagues Wayne Crews and Ryan Young wrote about this last year at Real Clear Markets noting the conditions that the merged company had to adhere to:
One condition of appeasement for the Sirius-XM merger is that they hand over 8 percent of their channels to noncommercial and “public service” programming. Internet radio does not face this requirement.
Another condition is that they freeze their prices for three years. Meanwhile, their competitors are still free to set their own prices to reflect changing market conditions.
A third condition is that XM-Sirius must introduce á-la-carte subscription models. If this were economical, they would have done this already.
The motivation for these conditions was just as absurd as the conditions themselves—regulators worried that the combined company might overcharge and otherwise abuse consumers. That’s right, regulators actually believed that consumers would just pay and pay for satellite radio if the prices were raised, rather than abandon the fledgling technology for competing technologies. Regulators thought this despite the fact that we have no shortage of alternatives. Traditional radio, iPods, streaming music on our cell phones, Pandora, Last.fm, CDs, MP3s, and the hundreds of other ways that music and talk entertainment can enter our ears.
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Julian Sanchez at ArsTechnica delivers some unsettling news about the state of free speech in America’s education system:
A federal court has rejected a former student’s First Amendment suit against school officials who punished her for calling them “douchebags” in a LiveJournal post. Right now, the scope of student rights to online speech is anything but clear.
This case centers around Avery Doninger, a grad of Lewis S. Mills High School, who called school administrators “douchebags” on her LiveJournal blog. Why? Because of the “possible cancellation of a repeatedly-postponed student concert,” according to Sanchez. Avery, a student council member, was barred from running for reelection because she dropped this D-bomb.
The Supreme Court has wrangled with the issues of campus speech codes in the past and has drawn some unclear lines—at least to this untrained, non-lawyerly mind—about where free speech begins and ends for students. Sanchez speak to this point as well, explaining the federal court’s difficulty with this decision:
Citing the blurry line between “on-campus” and “off-campus” speech in the Internet era, the court acknowledged that current law gives no clear answers to the question of where students’ rights to free online speech end and the authority of schools to enforce discipline begins.
It seems to me that the line should be clear. If you’re at school, you follow the rules. If you’re at a school event, like a football game or a debate tournament (that would have been me in school) then you follow the rules. But, if you’re on your blog at home, you get to say whatever the hell you want.
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Apple has announced it will be dropping DRM, completing the transition from its DRM-Free-For-a-Fee model to one where DRM music isn’t an option. As Ars reports, it’ll take until August to see all DRM’d content leave the iTunes store.
This seems to be the final stage in a trasition that started in February of 2007. That’s when Steve Jobs wrote his now famous “Thoughts on Music” memo. Since then we’ve seen Amazon.com open it’s DRM free store and, more recently, the RIAA change its tactics and declare its war on downloaders over. It seems that the music industry is slowly realizing how it must adapt to life in a digital world.
While music is learning its lesson, Hollywood seems to be willfully ignorant. The major studios remain staunchly pro-DRM and continue to fight even those activities that should be perfectly legal.
Viacom, Sony, Fox, Universal, Disney, and Warner Bros. law suit against RealNetworks is the latest example of Hollywood’s refusal to adapt. The studios are up in arms over RealDVD—software that allows consumers to copy DVDs to their personal computers. But RealNetworks CEO Chief Executive Rob Glaser seems determine to fight the Hollywood giants.
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I’m re-reading Tim Lee’s excellent and very long paper on network neutrality, “The Durable Internet.” It’s excellent partly because it’s such a long read—it’s exhaustive in addressing all the issues surrounding the neutrality debate.
With all the great writing—like Tim’s paper—available on the topic, I can’t understand why so many people who write about technology are still confused on the issue of neutrality. If neutrality is to be understood as some form of the end-to-end principle with a bit of marketing-speak slathered on top, then how can people continue to conflate it with something as basic as differing levels of service from ISPs?
The latest example is Dan Costa writing in the last print edition of PC Magazine. While Costa’s basic point is correct—he says it’s fair to charge people who use more bandwidth more money for their Internet connection—he seems to think it might be non-neutral. Sure, it’s non-uniform pricing, but it’s not a violation of net neutrality.
I agree with Costa that it makes sense to charge consumers for what they consume. To argue this is impermissible would be to argue against the basic principle of fairness. As Costa says in his column, “Can’t we all agree that my mom and I shouldn’t be paying the same price for broadband?”
The neutrality debate has become a confused mishmash of legitimate concerns over network management practices and the cries of folks who think broadband should be free, or the same low low price for everyone. I think it’d be great if everyone writing on the matter read Tim’s paper, read the other side of the issue over at places like Free Press, and started speaking sense on the topic.
For geek news gluttons, there’s more to say about Costa’s column, like the TOS of Sprint’s XOHM service, but I’ll leave that to the for those of you who don’t mind long windedness. (Like those of you who actually read Tim’s treatise on neutrality.) I talk more about Costa’s column at OpenMarket.org.
I’m in the mood for making bold predictions, so I predict (with fingers crossed) that we won’t see neutrality regulation passed in 2009. I want to say right away that this is more of a hope than a assessment of the regulation’s political chances, but it’s a hope worth sharing.
Over at OpenMarket.org, the blog of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, I have spelled out my reasons for thinking that neutrality regulation won’t pass and why I think market-enforced neutrality would be a much more robust system for keeping the Net thriving.
On the Google Public Policy Blog, Richard Whitt’s response to the recent Wall Street Journal article (of now considerable infamy) fails to mention one of the primary benefits of Google’s OpenEdge caching program. Whitt only mentions the following benefits:
By bringing YouTube videos and other content physically closer to end users, site operators can improve page load times for videos and Web pages. In addition, these solutions help broadband providers by minimizing the need to send traffic outside of their networks and reducing congestion on the Internet’s backbones.
What Whitt doesn’t say is that caching programs like Google’s have the potential to dramatically reduce the total traffic on tier one and tier two carriers (networks that peer, or exchange data without charge, with other networks). But this traffic reduction is one of the biggest benefits Google’s program provides to the rest of the Net.
How would OpenEdge do this? Let me explain using a bit of anecdotal evidence.
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The Washington Post reports today that Yahoo! has changed its data retention policy to anonymize user behavior information after 3 months, rather than its previous, much lengthier retention window of 13 months.
This move by Yahoo! is likely in response to both consumer demand for greater privacy protection and pressure from government regulators both in the US and in the EU. Google & Microsoft have recently tightened their own retention policies recently after experiencing similar pressure.
Yahoo! and other search companies may be experiencing pressure of a different kind under the Obama administration. Eric Holder, the President-elect’s nominee for Attorney General, has stated publicly that he believes existing privacy laws may have to change to accommodate law enforcement needs:
In some cases, changes to privacy laws may be required to recognize the new technological reality we now confront.
Speaking on data-retention specifically, in the same memo Holder said that:
Certain data must be retained by ISPs for reasonable periods of time so that it can be accessible to law enforcement.
These statements suggest that Holder may be in favor of a mandatory minimum length of time for companies to retain data, rather than mandatory maximums. This puts search engines, ISPs, and other web-based companies in the awkward position of trying to please two sets of regulators with completely opposite goals.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.