TLF contributors Adam Thierer and Braden Cox traveled to North Carolina this week to testify in opposition to age verification and parental consent regulations for social networking sites. The North Carolina legislation would require parents to provide proof that they were adults in order to approve their children’s use of social networking sites.
In this week’s podcast, we discuss the many flaws in such proposals. Age verification technologies are far from reliable, and the definition of a “social networking site” is far from clear. More fundamentally, it’s not clear how this proposal would protect children at all. There’s no way to prevent a child molester from registering as an adult and then creating accounts for their fictitious children. Braden and Adam make the case that parental involvement, not more government regulation, is the best way to protect children.
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Ars has a report on a new study showing that college students are shockingly prone to phishing if the email they receive appears to come from an acquaintance:
To generate a database of relationships, the authors used a publicly-available Perl module to crawl social networking sites, including Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, and LinkedIn. They selected Indiana students from this database and picked a target population based on the quality of the personal information that was obtained.
Test subjects received an e-mail with headers spoofed so that it appeared to originate from a member of the subject’s social network. The message body was comprised of the phrase “hey, check this out!” along with a link to a site ostensibly at Indiana University. The link, however, would direct browsers to www.whuffo.com, where they were asked to enter their Indiana username and password. Control subjects were sent the same message originating from a fictitious individual at the university.
The results were striking: apparently, if the friends of a typical college student are jumping off a cliff, the student would too. Even though the spoofed link directed browsers to an unfamiliar .com address, having it sent by a familiar name sent the success rate up from 16 percent in controls to over 70 percent in the experimental group.
Of course, men were far more likely to respond to emails from women than from other men.
Mark Blafkin is confused about my analogy between eminent domain and software patents, which probably means I didn’t explain the analogy very clearly. So let me see if I can be more explicit.
The way modern “redevelopment” projects work is that a large developer will go to a city and say “We would like to develop a new shopping mall/office park/apartment complex/whatever in such-and-such a neighborhood. But we’re only willing to do so if you give us control over all development within that neighborhood. We don’t want to worry about some other company building something in the neighborhood that we didn’t plan for.”
The city will then scrutinize the application, go through some legal technicalities such as declaring the neighborhood to be “blighted” (which, with enough ingenuity almost any neighborhood can be), and then sign a contract with the developer that essentially gives the developer a monopoly on development in the area. Any property owners who refuse to go along with the developer’s plans are removed using eminent domain.
Now, a company like Verizon will go to the patent office and say, in effect, “We would like to develop a new VoIP application. But we’re only willing to do so if you give us control over all development of VoIP applications like ours. We don’t want to worry about some other company building a competing product that we didn’t plan for.”
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I’ll wait to see the final proposal, but my initial reaction is that this is not a compromise worth having:
House Democratic officials say they are now working on compromise legislation that could allow hundreds of counties in 20 states to simply add tiny, cash-register-style printers to their touch-screen machines for the 2008 and 2010 elections, while waiting for manufacturers to develop better technology by 2012.
House officials said the compromise would ensure that all voting machines nationwide would have some kind of paper trail in 2008 through which voters could verify that their ballots were properly recorded and that could be used in recounts. Under the plan, New York, which has delayed replacing its old lever machines, would be the only state that would have to change its entire voting system by November 2008.
Adding cheap, easily-jammed printers to voting machines and then making fragile cash-register-style rolls of paper the official voting record is a just a horrible idea. Printers will jam. Those giant paper rolls will be a pain to deal with. Frustrated poll workers will have no choice but to continue the election on machines with broken printers. With a significant number of votes either never printed or stored on damaged paper tape rolls, it will be impossible to conduct a meaningful recount. Which, if the election is close, will mean endless litigation as the courts try to reconcile a legal mandate that the paper record be the official record with the bare fact that many of the votes were never recorded on paper. And then, of course, the failure of those crappy printers will be used as an argument against paper trails altogether.
Also, if the paper tapes aren’t expected to be a permanent solution, how much sense to does it make to force states to purchase them for one election? They might be cheap, but they’re not free. And it’ll be a non-trivial amount of work to install them and train poll workers to use them properly.
My sense is that states can still have a high-quality paper-based voting systems in place by 2008. If nothing else, Congress can allow states that really can’t meet the deadline to petition for a federal waiver. But if it’s really true that we can’t get high-quality, paper-based systems in place by November 2008, I would much rather have Congress leave the rules for 2008 unchanged and put good rules in place for the 2010 election than force states to install some kind of horrible frankenstein voting system for one or two elections.
Tom Lee says I’m missing the point about the iPhone:
But the point Ars is making is that the iPhone actually isn’t being subsidized by the contract fees. Consumers are buying the hardware at full retail price and being locked into a contract. This puts the lie to the carriers’ argument that early termination fees are in place to avoid losses over hardware subsidies — they charge the fees whether there’s a subsidy or not (and only one carrier will prorate this fee).
To paraphrase Yglesias, terms like “full retail price” and “subsidized” are a kind of accounting fiction. What matters is how many dollars come out of your pocket and how many end up in the pockets of AT&T and Apple. The label on the credit card bill, and exactly when the charge is made, just isn’t that important. Consider the following four scenarios:
Scenario 1:
- Apple charges $500 for an iPhone
- AT&T service costs $60/month
- Apple gets $5/month from AT&T for every iPhone customer.
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Yesterday, AT&T backed away from its strong opposition to any sort of open access regulations in the 700 MHz spectrum auction, backing a proposal by FCC chairman Kevin Martin to apply open access rules to one block of spectrum while leaving the other blocks unregulated.
In this week’s podcast, Hance, James, Adam, Jerry, and I discuss the politics and economics of the 700 MHz auction. We discuss what the rules will look like, whether there’s enough competition in the wireless market, whether Google will bid for the spectrum, and how recent developments affect Frontline’s proposal.
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
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This has to be one of the sillier critiques of the wireless industry I’ve seen:
Murray suggests that termination fees make competition between wireless carriers virtually nonexistent, as people are often unwilling to switch from one carrier to another until their contracts are fully expired. Worse still, the long lock-ins don’t always provide any proper consideration for consumers entering those contracts.
“We want lower consumer prices,” Murray said when referring to the $600 price of the iPhone. “Consumers don’t get a single dime of subsidy on the new iPhone, but it’ll still get them locked into a two-year deal or penalty to leave the carrier.”
It’s nonsensical to say there’s no competition because consumers only choose a wireless carrier once a year (or even once every two years). Most people don’t buy computers, cars, or major appliances more often than that, yet no one claims that makes those industries uncompetitive. If consumers get crappy service during their contracts, they remember this fact and switch to a different carrier at the end of the contract period. And consumers comparison shop before they sign a contract, so phone companies have as much incentive to keep their prices low in a contract-based system as they would in a system without contracts.
Moreover, the major carriers all give consumers the option to take a risk-free 14-day trial period on their phone. So I don’t see how you can possibly say consumers don’t know what they’re getting into. If they want to, consumers can get cell phones from all four national carriers, play with all of them for a week, and return the three they like least. Consumers aren’t being railroaded into anything.
The iPhone point also strikes me as especially silly. The iPhone is expensive because it’s a cutting-edge gadget that’s been on the market less than a month. The fact that some of the cost comes in the form of a 2-year contract, as opposed to an up-front sticker price, is beside the point. If you think the iPhone, 2-year contract and all, is too expensive, buy a different phone. There are plenty to choose from.
My blogging has been light the last couple of weeks because I’m busy finishing up a big study on eminent domain abuse in Missouri, which will be published by the Show-Me Institute. Obviously, most of that isn’t going to be relevant to a tech policy blog, but I have noticed an interesting parallel between the eminent domain debate and the software patent debate.
A bit of background: cities in Missouri (and in other states) have gotten used to a “clear cutting” style of real estate development in which the city council will declare an entire neighborhood “blighted” or in need of redevelopment, and then put out bids for a comprehensive re-development plan. Large developers submit re-development plans with price tags in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars specifying which properties will be demolished, what will be built in their place, and what kinds of tenants will be sought for the new buildings. Once a plan has been selected, the city will employ the power of eminent domain to help the chose developer seize the property of anyone who refuses to sell voluntarily (and “voluntarily” is a bit of a misnomer when property owners know their land will be taken whether they like it or not). Then the developer will bulldoze most of the old neighborhood and replace it with a shopping mall, condos, or whatever else was specified in the re-development plan.
Almost all of the redevelopment plans cities pursue are done this way. City officials are absolutely horrified at the thought of letting just anyone buy property in the development area and make improvements. After all, everyone knows that without a “master plan,” neighborhoods would descend into chaos. Besides, what incentive would a big developer have to start a major development project if some other guy could open a competing business down the street?
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Over the last couple of months, we’ve noticed that our best shows have been when we had a really smart guest like Randy Picker, Tim Wu, or Fred Von Lohmann and got into an issue in some depth. These episodes tended to run long, because there was too much to discuss in the 7 minutes or so we gave to each issue. So starting this week, we’re trying something a little bit different with the podcast. Instead of trying to cover three issues each week, we’re going to starting having a single guest and cover a single topic, in depth, for 15 to 20 minutes.
Our first episode in the new format is Scott Wallsten of the Progress and Freedom Foundation. You’ve probably heard the factoid that the United States ranks near the bottom among developed countries when it comes to broadband speeds and penetration. In this week’s podcast, Scott helps us dig into these numbers and explain why the United States isn’t doing as badly as is commonly supposed. And he argues that it’s silly to base complex policy decisions on a one-dimensional ranking.
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
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As is typical, Julian makes a point I’ve been trying to make for a while, only it sounds a lot more eloquent when he says it. In reply to Brian Doherty’s argument that those who decry commercialism while using the products of capitalism are somehow hypocritical, Julian says:
Certainly very few Burners would last a week in the Nevada desert without many of the products of commerce, but it just doesn’t follow that the desire for a temporary commercial-free zone is therefore somehow hypocritical or steeped in “performative contradiction.” It is perfectly coherent to be a thoroughgoing free-marketeer, to appreciate how deftly the price system harnessed the self-love of thousands of individuals, from lumberjacks and miners to carpenters and plumbers, in order to produce your local church—and yet still prefer that Starbucks refrain from opening up shop in the narthex. Having bought prophylactics at the corner deli in the evening does not forbid you from taking umbrage if your lover leaves a fifty on the nightstand the following morning. The most ardent capitalist will want a few spaces where she can feel confident that her neighbor’s friendliness is not the opening gambit in a pitch to sell her a T-shirt, even if she was happy to buy the one she’s wearing. We are entitled to happily engage the butcher, the brewer, and the baker on the basis of our respective self-loves while hoping for a little benevolence from our brothers, our bowling buddies, and our Burners.
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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.