This amazing video gives a few incredible statistics:

• 70% of Facebook users live outside the U.S.
• 550,000 Android devices get activated daily
• Twitter registers 300,000 new users daily — Lady Gaga is by far the most popular human being

And my favorite:

• 35 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute; that’s 2100 days of video added for every day in real time

Today, the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on “The State of Online Consumer Privacy.”

The push for online privacy regulation has real momentum, as proposed privacy legislation from numerous lawmakers, a Department of Commerce report proposing a compulsory Do Not Track mechanism to regulate business marketing practices, and the Obama Administration’s proposed “Privacy Bill of Rights” all indicate.

However, Congress should be very wary of such proposals. A politically defined Do Not Track regime risks undermining targeted advertising, impeding business transactions that occur between strangers, and stifling mobile ecosystems that are barely out of the cradle. Rattling consumers needlessly by encouraging them to opt-out of largely beneficial information collection is an especially unwise idea in our uncertain economic climate – especially when major industry participants are developing such mechanisms on their own.

The opportunity to undermine online marketing – wrongly called “surveillance” – appeals to some, but such privacy purists have no right to call the shots for anyone but themselves and those who agree with them. The right to use information acquired through voluntary transactions is no less important than the right to decide whether to disclose information in the first place.

Competitive pressures to secure our personal information include rivals who promise more security, capital markets and business partners (like upstream suppliers and downstream customers who demand information security as a condition of doing business). Like all other technologies, privacy-enhancing services – from consulting to liability insurance to network monitoring – benefit from competition. Contracts to surf anonymously while paying a nominal fee to an ISP, a notion noted recently in a Wall Street Journal piece, are merely one example of such market innovations.

In light of such pressures, the term “self-regulation”—heard often in hearings such as today’s—is a misnomer: no business has that luxury in free enterprise.

Market participants will make mistakes, but these pale in comparison to the mistakes made by government. Privacy regulation will grow so entrenched that it will preclude superior alternatives as it distorts the evolution of the digital marketplace. Attempts by politicians to define privacy are a dangerous business.

In this era of TSA body imaging, mass surveillance, the push for National ID, and ill-defined protections from governmental access to our mobile devices and cloud-stored data, what we really need isn’t for Washington to try and protect our privacy—we need Washington to allow it.

Rather than Do Not Track, a “Do Not Regulate” stance remains appropriate, for the sake of improved privacy.

The way Ben Kunz puts it in a new Business Week article, “Each device contains its own widening universe of services and applications, many delivered via the Internet. They are designed to keep you wedded to a particular company’s ecosystem and set of products.”

I like Ben’s article a lot because it recognizes that “walling off” and a “widening universe” are not mutually exclusive. If only policymakers and regulators acknowledged that. They must know it, but admitting it means acknowledging their limited relevance to consumer well-being and a need to step aside. So they feign ignorance.

Many claim to worry about the rise of proprietary services (I, as you can probably tell, often doubt their sincerity) but I’ve always regarded a “Splinternet” as a good thing that means more, not less, communications wealth. I first wrote about this in Forbes in 2000 when everyone was fighting over spam, privacy, content regulation, porn and marketing to kids.

Increasing wealth means a copy-and-paste world for content across networks, and it means businesses will benefit from presence across many of tomorrow’s networks, generating more value for future generations of consumers and investors. We won’t likely talk of an “Internet” with a capital-“I” and a reverent tremble the way we do now, because what matters is not the Internet as it happens to look right now, but underlying Internet technology that can just as easily erupt everywhere else, too.

Meanwhile, new application, device and content competition within and across networks disciplines the market process and “regulates” things far better than the FCC can. Yet the FCC’s very function is to administer or artificially direct proprietary business models, which it must continue to attempt to do (and as it pleads for assistance in doing in the net neutrality rulemaking) if it is going to remain relevant. I described the urgency of stopping the agency’s campaign recently in “Splinternets and cyberspaces vs. net neutrality,” and also in the January 2010 comments to the FCC on net neutrality.

Eventually the pro-business and pro-consumer cases for splintering and against artificial openness will prevail, because compulsion and deliberately ignoring free markets in infrastructure undermine communications wealth and content options despite the general view. The question is whether we recognize it now, or decades hence, long after other nations have embraced liberalized communications and bypassed us. Rather than a make-work “National Broadband Plan” like the one being presented to Congress this month, the FCC needs instead to act like Alfred Kahn at the old CAB, and present a case for turning out the lights and ratcheting down most functions over there, since airwave scarcity is increasingly disappearing (or created artificially by the agency itself) and since “public airwaves” don’t mean much in tomorrow’s world of limitless content access, customization and Everybody Tube broadcasting. The case for a ruthless, drastic purging of FCC’s involvement in and oversight of most things communications needs to be made rather than conspiracy in a make-believe, Emperor’s New Clothes broadband plan. The FCC is too much an impediment in too many important respects for the concrete plan in play to be one of adding rather than paring responsibilities. The FCC and a naive Congress are on a path toward turning America’s involvement in the Internet into the C&O Canal of Communications.

Capitalism is still too young historically for us to have had our John Locke for the digital age and its long and thin network (and intangible) properties. The short and fat stuff like houses and cars was far easier. Policymakers already destroyed the prospects of liberalization in the electricity industry by trying to mandate hyper-regulatory “retail wheeling” (same for all intents and purposes as net neutrality) in the name of “competition.” Forced neutrality has wrecked one industry. I hope we don’t do it again, but too many special interests gain from regulation. They don’t, for example, even seem to recognize the ways in which properly liberalized electricity grids would also have turbocharged communications liberalization.

Competition in access to content is only one part of the story; competition in the provision of infrastructure and devices drives communications wealth and free speech, too.

Today’s The Wall Street Journal Europe published an editorial that Alberto Mingardi of Istituto Bruno Leoni and I penned about the competition complaints brought against Google in Europe.

The EU Searches for a Monopolist, Finds Google

If policy makers set the terms in a primitive year like 2010, nobody will have to respond to Google.

By WAYNE CREWS AND ALBERTO MINGARDI

Google isn’t a monopoly now, but the more it tries to become one, the better it will be for us all. Competition works in this way: Capitalist enterprises strive to gain in profits and market share. In turn, competitors are forced to respond by trying to improve their offerings. Innovation is the healthy output of this competitive game. The European Commission, while pondering complaints against the Internet search giant, might consider this point.

Google has been challenged by a German, a British, and a French Web site, for its dominant position in the market for Web search and online advertisement. The U.S. search engine is said to be imposing difficult terms and conditions on competitors and partners, who are now calling regulators into action. Google’s search algorithm is accused of being “biased” by business partners and competing publishers alike.

Before resorting to the old commandments of antitrust, we should consider that the Internet world is still largely impervious and unknown to anybody—including regulators. We are in terra incognita, and nobody knows the likely evolution of the market. But one thing is for sure: Online search can’t evolve properly if it’s improperly regulated—no matter the stage of evolution.

While the exact form of “remedy” is anyone’s guess depending upon the petitioner and the whims of regulators, intervention would basically mean some kind of shortcut for Google’s competitors, such as regulatory guarantees of future search ranking or placement; limitations on future Google services that could undermine an emerging rival; oversight of certain pricing practices or advertising practices; coerced changes to the Google interface; or bureaucratic oversight of paid-vs.-unpaid search results. The net effect would be to rescue Google’s competitors from the requirement to compete, and to give them access to Google customers whom they didn’t conquer on their own merits.

Today’s search-engine capabilities help break down information bottlenecks, allowing ever-increasing access to countless HD-equipped Webcam broadcasters world-wide. Public policy is often schizophrenic, but using the language of monopoly to attack information services and communications is particularly perverse. Speech is the core freedom, and today’s competitive technologies, including search, vastly extend it for us all.

Google isn’t targeted by regulators in Brussels alone. It enjoys declining popularity in many capitals, from Beijing to Washington D.C. In the U.S., conservatives have been complaining about bias in Google’s search results, such as a purported deference toward Al Gore.

But so what? Let Google be the MSNBC of search engines. Somebody else can be Fox if we need it. It remains the case, as in the mid-1990s when Sergey Brin and Larry Page got started, that if you create a search engine, nobody can stop you. Nobody can stop Microsoft from creating one either. Oh, wait…

Everyone seems to think Google is theirs to regulate, that they have more of a right to prescribe Google’s algorithm or business policies than Google itself does.

In search, as in the media itself, competing biases are good; pretended or forced objectivity, not so good. The decisions about how to rank search or what to reveal in a search are properly a matter of Google’s own free speech, and it is not anyone else’s place or right to decide. Differences of opinion and preferences about rankings are properly to be dealt with by competition from Microsoft/Yahoo; the likes of Teoma, the “theory of everything” Steven Wolfram engine; or something we don’t know about yet being hatched in a dorm room. Other pressures include consumer demands, and Google’s own business partners. Monopoly leads to reduced demand, and if Google truly “monopolizes,” then its own business partners are hurt by its behavior and will defect.

The policy environment to foster is one that maximizes the possibility of rival search technologies emerging in response to inappropriate bias. Today’s approach is the opposite, to create a stunted search environment because everyone’s afraid or reluctant to create an aggressive new search algorithm—why invest, if marvelous success means regulation and confiscation? The search capabilities needed for tomorrow’s Internet won’t come to be if policy makers set the terms in a primitive year like 2010 and nobody has to respond to Google.

Various types of search already optimize for various types of biased results (or unbiased ones—bias or no-bias can itself be a competitive feature and will be unless regulators undermine the process). As centuries of experience with freedom of speech tell us, biases in information services are perfectly appropriate, perhaps even necessary in free societies. If regulators do not know this, they need to be removed from their jobs.

If a formal European Commission inquiry is set to start, it certainly needs to be a short one. Would that global recessions selectively dis-employed publicly funded regulators and academics who make a living by tearing down what others have created. Regulators rarely bring anything to the table but an appetite.

Mr. Crews is vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. Mr. Mingardi is director general of Istituto Bruno Leoni in Milan.

Clearly many groups contend there’s a “crisis” in journalism, even to the extent of advocating government support of news organizations, despite the dangers inherent in the concept of government-funded ideas and their impact on critique and dissent. 

Georgetown is hosting a conference today called “The Crisis In Journalism: What should Government Do,” (at which Adam Thierer is speaking), with the defining question, “How can government entities, particularly the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, help to form a sustainable 21st century model for journalism in the United States?”

We actually resolved the question of “What Government Should Do,” We actually resolved the question of “What Government Should Do,” in a manner that influenced the entire world, with passage of the Bill of Rights and its First Amendment. The Constitution was ratified by nine states on June 21, 1788.  Georgetown, your conference host, was founded January 23, 1789.  As far as I can tell, Georgetown didn’t hold a “Crisis In Journalism” conference that week, even though there was little national media industry to speak of and thus much more of a prevailing crisis situation than today, when you stop and think of it. 

Then the Bill of Rights was ratified on December 15, 1791–and still no Georgetown conference. Amazingly, at the time, our ancestors thought it appropriate for the federal government to establish a First Amendment and step aside, even though there were no TVs or radios, or Internet and websites, iPods, or stories broken by Twitter.  There wasn’t even an FCC yet to ponder a “sustainable 19th century model for journalism in the United States.” 

Media at that time barely existed compared to what we have today. Yet there was no crisis.  Nor is there a crisis today.

What this feigned crisis signifies is, on the one hand, pure indulgence of a wealthy society struggling with “creative destruction” in media; and, on the other, the desire for more political control of information flows and public opinion rather than enshrinement of the only condition appropriate to a free society—the preservation of competing biases.  These are ultimately far more important than pretended objectivity in both the preservation of our liberties and in the creation of “information wealth.”  Too often, the class interest of intellectuals is statism (continue reading Schumpeter for details, I’m not doing it here);  and the journalism industry, far from alone among myriad economic endeavors, is highly vulnerable to those same collectivist impulses. 

Convincing the public and policymakers that media is in crisis is essential for progressives to maintain influence now: while progressives long since successfully established government agencies with broad political control over communications, today they find themselves desperate to maintain that slipping control in the era in which media abundance undermines those agencies’ very reason for being.

Outrageous and demeaning calls for public funding of journalism, public spaces, information commons, artificial “crises” and other such manipulative indulgences draw their energy from the flawed premise that capitalism and freedom are inimical to civil society and the diffusion of ideas, when they are instead the prerequisites.  America established a First Amendment precisely because government and political machinery can threaten these precious values. Competition in creation of goods and services creates tangible wealth; competition in creation of ideas (including scientific research, yet another notion to discuss later) ultimately does the same and enhances liberties. Government funding removes the element of competition, on purpose.

This crisis is phony, except obviously for the specific businesses that are being upended.  Media, information, journalism, whatever it gets called, can only be irreparably damaged by censorship, the only crisis to which journalism is ever vulnerable.  But it also counts as censorship if progressives control information or succeed in funding it politically and prevent proprietary business models in the content, reporting and infrastructure of the future.  A Bailout for the First Amendment is catastrophic policy, even if it’s advocates’ stated goals are merely to make us all enlightened (somewhat left-leaning?) citizens.

(Hat tip to my colleague Alex Nowrasteh for helping me find ratification dates.)

Last week I received Public Knowledge’s press release and letter urging support of a “Bold National Broadband Plan.” I admire PK a great deal on several issues, but remain struck by the arbitrariness of demanding “national plans” for this-or-that technology. It occurred to me that if anybody were to actually ask me (so, don’t), I think I favor a National Elevator Plan instead. Too many Americans live in two-story homes, and/or have basements, yet have no easy access to the upstairs bathroom and Halloween decorations in the attic, or to the aunt living up there. They are forced to rely on outdated “stairs” technology. (And stairs are dangerous! So this is far more urgent than broadband! Show your outrage! Etc.!) So I ever-so-slightly tweaked the letter; this bold new campaign is meant to rectify this injustice and I hope you’ll sign on and spread the word.

Dear Friends: On March 17, the Federal Conveyance Commission (FCC) will deliver its “National Elevator Plan for America” to Congress. The purpose of the plan is to ensure that every American home has affordable access to fast and reliable elevators, which large companies and office buildings have unfairly and exclusively enjoyed for decades. Access to the second floor and basement is critical to ensuring that all Americans are able to fully participate in vertical rather than merely diagonal movement at home, not just in the workplace. We have been working for many months to ensure that our National Elevator Plan is a bold one. We have filed extensive comments, testified at three FCC workshops and met with FCC officials on numerous occasions during that time. Among other things, we urged the Commission to: 1) Promote policies that would give consumers more choice among elevators and escalators. 2) Ensure that universal service funds are used to increase access to elevators in rural areas. Not many of them asked for the elevators, but truly, what difference does that really make. 3) Refrain from using the plan to enforce intellectual property claims in digital button and display technology. Ensure that elevators are neutral and do not discriminate unfairly between floors. With just a month to go before the National Elevator Plan is delivered to Congress, we need your help to continue to advocate for affordable and robust vertical conveyance. Please sign on. Middle-Name Wayne President Public Conveyance, Inc.

At least that’s how my former colleague Tom Miller, now at the American Enterprise Institute, used to put it. Still another government/business funded report, this one called “Nanotechnology: a UK Industry View” reaches yet again the same conclusions about nanotechnology as the ones that pop out occasionally like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s “Nanotechnology White Paper” or the Food and Drug Administration’s “Nanotechnology.“

The conclusions always secure an open-ended role for political bodies to govern private endeavors, and since the business parties are so dependent on political funding, they have to go along with it, cut off from envisioning an alternative approach.

The reports say–brace for it–that governments should fund nanotechnology and study nanotechnology’s risks; and that they should then regulate the technology’s undefined and unknown risks besides. This approach, so different from, say, the way software is produced and marketed, assures that there will never be a “Bill Gates of nanotechnology” (or in another sector, a Bill Gates of biotechnology, as CEI’s Fred Smith often puts it). If every single new advance requires FDA medical-device-style approvals, this is an industry that cannot begin to reach its potential.

As for nanotech’s genuine risks, government exacerbates them since it pushes technology in lurching, non-market directions, all subject to future political rug-pulls, and since its funding model tends to indemnify companies for the hazards they create. Free enterprise actually requires disciplinary institutions like liability and insurance to evolve alongside to assuage investors and the public. Markets and capitalism should and do bring risky products to the fore (finanacial instruments, electricity, nuclear energy, behavioral advertising, cybersecurity for sensitive-information networking, emergent low-earth-orbit space touring), but government subsidies and indemnification can short circuit the disciplines that must emerge alongside.

As for the gray goo catastrophe scenario, in every other instance, enviromentalists say an organism needs an eco-system to survive, so I’ll leave it at that, since the scenarios are silly anyway, and since there’s no shortage of proposed solutions to the problem were it genuine anyway.

The govennment-picking-technologies model undermines economic liberty, innovation, wealth creation, national competitiveness (the endless and tiresome rationale for government R&D) and consumer benefits, and is itself the source of most risk, no matter how many white papers produced. Rather than picking the winning horses (or worse, as is the case now, actually being one of the horses), government’s legitimate role is to improve the track on which all the horses run; that means liberalizing the tax and regulatory environment within which nanotech entrepreneurs operate, for starters.

I remember debating these points over the pre-requisites for risk management and over governement’s stance toward technology with the Nanobusiness Alliance in Congressional Quarterly. Government’s proper stance is one of indifference or neutrality, since nanotech is one of many technologies competing for investment dollars; indeed we used to call it “chemistry.” To the extent it insists upon “promoting” technology, government should work tirelessly to remove barriers to private research. A recent Financial Times article noted that over 800 research institutes are involved. And that’s only in the UK. What this reveals is an industry crying out for consolidation into perhaps a few large-scale research enterprises. So antitrust liberalization should occur to political authories, for example, but you may rest assured that it has not. The same government-steers-while-the-market-rows dominates in the U.S.; nanotech funding is spread out not according to market pressures, but across dozens of congressional districts on purpose.

So the proposed Comcast/NBC merger was met with “skepticism” by Washington politicians. Will Comcast charge for content that was once free? Will it ensure that emergency programming gets through? These services and decisions about them are normal offerings that a concerned public expects; a merged entity ignores them at its peril.

The two firms’ CEOs respectively made assurances to lawmakers like 18-term term Chairman Henry Waxman. (Speaking of the lack of choice, this gentleman’s own constituents get to vote for him, but none of the rest of us have any say whatsoever–decade after decade–even though his laws impact us all).

But those assurances about programming aren’t what politicians care about, not really. This proceeding serves to help re-energize the old political campaign against what politicians laughably call “media consolidation.” (Here’s one of my defenses of so-called “media monopoly” in Communications Lawyer so no need to repeat it here now; I’m not an attorney but I play one at a think tank.)

Any antitrust intervention that relieves Comcast/NBC’s competitors of critical market impulses, of the driving need to respond to any potentially new superior service or slate of services, hurts the interests of consumers. These endless proceedings and delays–and before this one, those of Echostar/DirecTV, Sirius/XM and others–all directly harm consumer interests and the communications marketplace. There is too much tolerance of pointless FCC and Congressional interference in today’s media-saturated world, and too much tolerance of media competitors who properly should have no say whatsoever in whether or not a rival’s merger goes forward.

Basically, antitrust is about dismantling what others have created or hope to create, undermining large scale voluntarism and enterprise, and replacing it with even larger scale compulsion or prohibition. The (not “unintended,” as often claimed) result of this is to send the “free” market careening off into a direction it never would have taken, a direction in defiance of shareholder capitalism and market pressures. I wrote about this very problem in a letter in the Wall Street Journal last week.

The emergence of ever-greater competitive alternatives on the media horizon will be damaged by the destruction of wealth entailed in halting a productive merger. The merger, if it goes through, may or may not prove successful for the companies themselves. Regardless, it is precisely the market’s task to respond to this and future deals competitively, not leverage Washington to avoid having to engineer and sweat over such a response. To those rivals that might feel satisfaction at the barriers and future conditions put on this merger if it’s even “approved” (how is that even a term appropriate to free enterprise?): Political disapproval of Comcast/NBC makes it even easier to put others in the crosshairs next time.

The Washington, D.C., fight over “net neutrality” in some ways only scratches the surface of what’s really at stake in the question of government regulation of Internet service providers’ treatment of online content. The downside of permitting FCC and Congressional authority over cyberspace “neutrality” is hard to overstate.

A former colleague and friend, now at New Media Strategies, sent me a January 2010 article—“The Splinternet means the end of the Web’s golden age”—about the proliferation of non-compatible devices used online, and the shielding of much new content behind logins and passwords, like the way News Corp. “hides” Wall Street Journal content behind a paywall, and other perceived insults. The author doesn’t see the trend as reversible, but the tone implies what an ominous development this somehow is, as if all this abundance and customization is negative, and that caution is in order.

But the realities of pay models and splintering—like the fact that some journalists have families to feed and can’t write for free, that Google doesn’t see much of what’s on Facebook, and that I can’t stream your iTunes—have no metaphysical, free speech, or public policy implications. Emergent splintering online represents the beginnings of a groundbreaking expansion of the Web’s basic capabilities, not a curtailment. (Besides, many with pro-neutrality views have been upset with Google lately anyway.)

This hand-wringing and use of the term “splinternet” reminded me of a related speculation I’d made in Forbes nearly 10 years ago about the tailoring of networks and pipes. Disturbed by then-burgeoning calls for regulation of the Internet emerging from various quarters over issues like privacy, spam, porn and cyber-trespass, I called for a “splinternet” mindset then and put it as follows:

The Internet needs borders beyond which users can escape damaging political resolutions of [policy] battles, which are rooted in the Internet’s non-owned, common-property status. Conflicting legislative visions in a cyberspace populated by exhibitionists at one extreme and would-be inhabitants of gated communities on the other, reveal the basic truth that not everybody wants or needs to be connected to everybody else.

Infrastructure and communications wealth—even the innovations with names like “iPad”—will make this ability to choose more feasible than ever—without sacrificing access to content and ideas. My colleague Adam Thierer and I also described such undercurrents—which could become tsunamis—in the introduction to the book Who Rules the Net?

The situation on the ground now is that FCC planners fancy themselves guardians of the idea that all content shall be treated the same. They presume to decide for everyone else, here in 2010, that network properties henceforth cannot be proprietary, and that no content can experience—brace for this—“discrimination.” But why? And how would they carry out such goals? With the technological shakeups taking place in content, infrastructure, and devices, it’s vitally important to appreciate what possibilities regulations can shut off, what carnage it can inflict to wealth creation—including content creation; it’s urgent that we explore and permit ways of making the net more profitable, and internalizing the net’s “externalities” that otherwise inspire planners to think they can control it better (or “neutralize” it).

FCC regulation is no substitute for the proper alternative, which is precisely the confusing and sometimes infuriating emerging content, network and device proliferation we now see. The frenzy is a good thing. Indeed, today’s cyberspace, if it isn’t careful, might be merely one of many that our descendants surf that feature varying levels of openness and neutrality. As communications wealth expands, the content of networks, no matter how big they are or whether they are closed or neutral, can increasingly be “cut and pasted” among one another in complex commercial arrangements. Figuring out how to do that is itself a future business model. That is, businesses of tomorrow may profit from having presences across several such dedicated “cyberspaces” and “splinternets” the way they do now across magazines, TV, radio and the net in the advertising niche. And if Washington were to do its proper job and deregulate network industries like water, power, sewer, rail, gas (instead of trying to re-regulate telecom), infrastructure too could expand well beyond our imagining. Now that would be stimulus, in case such a thing were anyone’s goal.

In other words, the Golden Age isn’t even here yet as far as the Information Revolution is concerned. As societies get wealthier, and old burgermeister meisterburgers die off (still another hint to FCC and it’s agenda), and decades and centuries pass, the “capital-I” Internet, the one spoken of today with a reverent tremble, could become far more antiquated and incapable of optimally supporting the smart devices yet to be invented (3-D Internet? Hologram displays? DNA computing?). Public policy always forgets we are not immortal; that’s the only way today’s FCC-style planners can imagine themselves smart and visionary enough to assert that net neutrality is the right thing to do; or rather, to force others to do. They have the answers; you are just the people they do things to.

We no longer use the barbed-wire telephone network of the past; we no longer use 28K modems. The future could be one of content spewing across a bouquet of networks, bits and wires alike duplicated and redundant in ways not conceivable today; businesses not even in existence yet will profit and help you profit by maintaining various presences across these “cyberspaces.” At least as far as public policy is concerned, it’s Internet technology, not the physical net and its particular ownership structure and hardware and infrastructure assortment of 2010, that will matter decades and generations hence—whether or not such networks actually come into being. Put still another way, from the other end of the telescope, tomorrow’s world in which all the content of today’s Internet might, for all we know, easily fit locally on a handheld device will be a very different world from that of today.

To that world, neutrality has nothing to offer except destruction, especially if it keeps today’s inventory of hardware artificially dumb, as warned here to FCC in 2008.

If net neutrality wins, it would entrench for us an inferior and rather unresponsive husk, the C&O Canal of Cyberspace. Thanks FCC.

Comments I just filed to FCC on its proposed “net neutrality” commandments defend in depth the notion of customized networks, pointing out how achingly “dumb” it can be to interfere in any way with smart communications pipes, especially when “dumb” ones, the “background hum” of the net you might say, can easily proliferate alongside. The neutrality issue seems even more perverse given policymaker’s simultaneous demands today for smart grids for electric power. So guys: go home. Internets, splinternets and cyberspaces will be far better off without you. I’m just glad you didn’t lock things in at 28 kilobits per second.

You can put on makeup while driving, fiddle with your GPS and iPod or reach back to pinch your annoying kid in the back seat, but don’t get caught texting or making cell phone calls. I remember texting-while-driving once, passing a cop, seeing him spin out of his little perch — thinking he was about to pull me over — but he stopped someone else instead (who had a similar car….hmmm! Or maybe he was just irritated that I was driving a hybrid) Anyway, a new study claims that laws prohibiting against handheld cell phones don’t reduce crashes. The appropriateness of bans has been a debate raging for a long time now.

What always seems to be missing from the popular treatements is any analysis of what market pressures could influence people not to text while driving. In the extreme, on fully private roads in a libertarian society, the activity might be banned altogether. More concretely, on our public roads, automobile insurance companies could team with cellphone companies to discipline.

OK, I admit weekend laziness and that I could’ve gone and googled it, but it would be interesting to know if there are policies that might inhibit insurers from taking self-protective (and people protective) approaches to highway risk reduction that don’t involve the perverse option of speeding policemen blasting down the road. It would seem that carriers and insurers would have mutual interests here; The cell company doesn’t benefit from a dead carrier; the insurance company doesn’t want to pay for people who are needlessly careless or reckess.

Automobiles are increasingly electric in every aspect apart from how they’re powered; onboard monitoring systems can record accident data; maybe that could be (or is?) matched up with cell phone diagnostics on whether somebody was monkeying with the keys or touchpad simultaneously. You could be warned ahead of the time, before you purchase your policy, that you aren’t covered if you’re texting while driving.

It’s food for thought, especially if the laws against texting don’t work anyway. More importantly, all technologies bring risks, and we must always explore disciplines apart from lazy legislation. So far, I haven’t texted while riding my motorcycle, but I do have a little carrier for the Blackberry there on the handlebar.

According to a report by CNET’s Declan McCullagh, a draft bill in the U.S. Senate would grant President Obama “cybersecurity emergency powers” to disconnect and even seize control of private sector computers on the Internet.

Back in May, when Obama proposed a “cybersecurity czar with a broad mandate” and the administration issued a report outlining potential vulnerabilities in the government’s information security policies, I cautioned about the constant temptation by politicians in both parties to expand government authority over “critical’ private networks.” From American telecommunications to the power grid, virtually anything networked to some other computer would potentially be fair game for Obama to exercise “emergency powers.”

Policy makers should be suspicious of proposals to collectivize and centralize cybersecurity risk management, especially in frontier industries like information technology.  When government asserts authority over security technologies, it hinders the evolution of more robust information security practices and creates barriers to non-political solutions—both mundane and catastrophic.  The result is that we become less secure, not more secure.

Instead, the Obama Administration should limit its focus to securing government networks and keeping government agencies on the cutting edge of communications technology. As today’s news illustrates, the dangers created by such a broad mandate may come to pass.

Dan Rather actually made the following two contradictory statements in the same speech:

I personally encourage the president to establish a White House commission on public media.

and then:

A truly free and independent press is the red beating heart of democracy and freedom.

He’s right that the free press is a “watchdog on power.” But that’s not compatible with the idea that, as reported, “the government makes an effort to ensure the survival of the free press.” A press funded, promoted, propped up, subsidized by government is not a free press. Nor is it in any position to be a watchdog; it’s more likely to become a megaphone for the states preferred ideas and expansion of government in other spheres, like health care, energy, finance, telecommunications, scientific research and policy and so on.

Democracy as a concept and political system is not at stake, as Rather thinks, when a particular business model engaged in public communications and broadcasting suffers at a particular point in history. It’s been beaten to death, but everyone knows the transformative importance of the Internet and its role in making voices heard that never had a chance when Rather and his two rival channels dominated the news and airwaves for 30 minutes each evening.

We already have a Public Broadcasting System that takes taxpayer money; we have a Federal Communications Commission engaged in expanding its reach and intervention rather than — why not say it — yielding to the First Amendment and the blessings of competing ideas, content and broadband business models. Dan Rather is playing with fire in advocating marriage or co-habitation between the national government and media. It’s a dangerous idea. I once got riled up about issues like this in a paper I wrote called “Is the Internet Bad for Democracy?“:

Nothing in government’s legitimate scope qualifies it as a fountain of superior, purer information or a source of social cohesion. In fact, it’s more prone to corruption. Governments are well known for censorship and propaganda, or control, like the mandating of library filters and ratings for movies, music and videogames. Most fundamentally, [intervention] fails because it rests on the notion that capitalism and freedom are inimical to civil society and the diffusion of ideas, when they are, in fact, the prerequisites. We cherish a free press, dissent, and debate precisely because governments can threaten these values. We need markets to maximize output, including that of true and useful “public” information. The inclination of some academics and public servants to despise the commercial Internet grows tiresome, not just because they often occupy a stance parasitic with respect to the commerce they denounce, but because their notion of public spaces would enshrine a political rather than civil view of social interactions.

More restraint is in order when it comes to the Obama administrations intent to escalate “antitrust” enforcement against business and enterprise in America.

A skeptical interpretation of antitrust’s realities—up to and including recent campaigns targeting Intel, Google, XM-Sirius; and earlier campaigns against Microsoft and the AOL Time Warner merger, as well as rejected mergers like Echostar/DirecTV—is that antitrust often advances the well being of various species of political predators rather than consumers.

Antitrust is a form of economic regulation. And like all economic regulation, it transfers wealth from somebody to somebody else, often in response to special-interest urging. Partly in recognition of such shortcomings, many economic sectors like transportation and telecommunications were (partly) deregulated and liberalized during the last quarter of the 20th century. But antitrust regulation typically gets a pass. Even in the “new economy,” this century-old smokestack era concept is used to justify constraints and conditions imposed on vigorously competitive modern companies. Antitrust is wrongly seen as being in the public interest, as having a superior role to play in policing markets relative to the alternatives.

In antitrust cases, targeted companies’ rivals have a direct financial interest in the outcome. Appeals to antitrust as a public interest law do not change the fact that private motives of rivals, and even ambitious enforcers, are not simply lurking in the background, but running the show. The idea that antitrust helps consumers and that it has a role to play in the new economy deserves reexamination and challenge.

Under antitrust law, a laundry list of business practices (tying, bundling, discrimination, exclusive deals, and so on) are regarded suspiciously, some outlawed altogether. But business transactions are fundamentally voluntary, non-coercive dealings—unlike the forced antitrust interventions that rivals often seek. From this fresh perspective, one finds that even the most “despised” business behaviors—even collusion and mega-mergers—can be pro-competitive and pro-consumer. To the extent that antitrust regulation strikes down practices that have misunderstood or ignored efficiency justifications, especially in an information-based economy, individuals and society are made unnecessarily poorer.

The list of vilified business practices is long, but needn’t be, and we often try to explain why. If anyone cares about economic recovery and jobs, today’s aim should be to “deregulate to stimulate,” so a list of vilified trustbuster practices would be far more advantageous to consumers.

Even an economy in shambles shall not sway the elevation to Federal Trade Commission chairmanship of Jon Leibowitz, an interventionist-minded commissioner who, like all planners, knows better than others how markets should be structured.

In several important areas, his inclinations (judging from the cheers emanating from interest groups like PIRG and Center for Digital Democracy) lean toward substituting political “discipline” for what competitive markets offer.

He supports “opt-in” with respect to behavioral advertising, which we’ve often described as not-necessarily good for a lot of reasons. We’ll come back to this later.

He supports antitrust intervention with respect to firms like Intel (and watch out, Google), and favors destructive “conditions” on mergers. Nineteenth-century, smokestack-era antitrust, rather than withering, now seems dedicated to exploiting and hobbling large-scale transactions in ways that end up creating entities that would not emerge in free markets. Several mergers lately have resulted in such artificially constrained frankensteins, or suffered catastrophic delays. Thus “competition policy” (ha!) neuters the healthy competitive response to them that could have come about. (See my FCC comment on XM/Sirius in that regard.)

On “net neutrality,” we leap beyond whether markets are adequate to discipline errant behavior; here the starting point is the nominee’s doubt that even antitrust intervention is necessarily “adequate to the task”; thus the implication that new laws may be in order.

Let’s just take net neutrality for now. There are plenty reasons I think it’s an outrage to regulate price and access on networks and infrastructure; but just for the moment, the entire concept rests upon numerous (I often feel deliberate, in my less-charitable moods) misperceptions or misrepresentations about competitive markets and capitalism. These include but are not limited to the following: (Adapted from an FCC filing I made).

• Infrastructure companies and content companies are naturally and inherently at odds. • Competition requires political force. • Discrimination is bad with respect to network access, and such a thing as “non-discrimination” exists. • Net neutrality is itself not a form of picking sides (or discrimination, as it were) • Infrastructure companies should not control content; however, content companies, in conjunction with bureaucracies backed by legislation and regulation, should control infrastructure companies. • Government enforced net neutrality spawns “openness”; market impulses do not. • Communications flows (video, information, calls etc.) are maximized by neglecting, even blocking, the liberalization of and enforcement of property rights in grids. • Networks themselves cannot be regarded as a competitive unit in any sense: only the movement of bits from point A to point B on a pre-existing network counts as competition. Networks best exist as passive husks, not dynamic forms of infrastructure wealth created, managed and duplicated in response to price signals and broader economic forces. • “Market failures” matter, government failures do not exist (indeed, they are rarely acknowledged by the interventionist class). • Infrastructure companies’ interest lies in not selling services, in not exploiting gains from trade with content companies whatever petty transitory jealousies may exist. • Wall Street, rivals and consumers cannot react to discipline inefficient network management or generate new bandwidth infrastructure (I always call it “bandwealth,” but will remain passive. • Agencies like FTC and FCC are better equipped than capital markets and a global economy to discipline ill-managed networks. • Alternative, profit-driven modes of infrastructure organization matter less than regulating the mode that exists: User ownership of grids; liberalization of non-telecom network industries to enable wide-scale, cross-industry infrastructure consortia; “splintering” into and out of the public net by private carriers, all have little role to play and may safely be ignored. • Moreover, regulatory interference will not undermine these alternative modes of discipline, or alter technological trajectories and the future trajectory or health of communications wealth in any harmful way.

So it’s remarkable, to me at least, that at a time when the economy needs “stimulus,” that we may now be required to divert attention to contend with a new artificial, entirely man-made and unnecessary hindrance to the expansion of the communications sector.