Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
It may be a strange combination, but Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA), Rob Atkinson of the centrist Internet and Technology and Innovation Foundation and myself teamed up today on a piece in The Hill to denounce taxation of the Internet. Our conclusion: Congress should make the ban permanent. You can read the full text here.
The House, by the way, has already ignored our advice, and voted instead yesterday for a four-year extension. The action now moves to the Senate.
Stay tuned, of course.
Playspan dubs itself “The Game Industry’s First Publisher-Sponsored In-Game Commerce Network.” What does that mean? To put it more simply, welcome to Wall Street for World of War Craft.
In the pre-web world, what I like to call “The Before Time,” people’s puny brains used to be limited to thinking of products as physical objects or services to be performed in the physical world. No more! Commerce now extends into the virtual world and is no longer limited to our crude meatspace.
In all seriousness, it’s great that more people are becoming entrepreneurs, even if it is in the weird new business of selling shields, potions, virtual plots of land, or the occasional level 45 cleric. This should serve to remind us that there are markets in everything.
Online social networking sites are again in the news. Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said on Monday his office is investigating Facebook for allegedly not keeping young users safe from sexual predators and not responding to user complaints. Cuomo joins fellow AGs Roy Cooper from North Carolina and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut among activist AGs parading the horribles of social networking websites.
Law enforcement and industry efforts are important, but what’s the single most effective way to keep kids safe online? Education. And at least one state AG gets it, as Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum has this to say on online safety:
“While it is certainly important to have stronger laws against Internet sex predators and child pornography, education for Internet users of all ages is paramount,” said McCollum. “Parents and children alike must be more aware of the dangers often encountered online and understand and employ basic safety tips for surfing the Internet.”
Students everywhere are back in their classrooms and beginning to tackle familiar subjects like math, reading, science and social studies. But how many students will receive classroom education about the importance of Internet safety? Hardly any—even in light of a growing concern about the safety of chat rooms and social networking sites.
Unlike summer breaks of the past, where kids would anxiously yearn for the social scene of classrooms and hallways, today kids can easily keep in touch online all summer long. Social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Xanga allow teens to stay in regular contact with their classmates during summer vacation. Ninety-six percent of teenagers use some form online social networking technologies, which also include instant messaging and chat forums.
Yet there’s a surprising lack of online safety education in our nation’s classrooms. Only a few states require that online safety education be taught in school. Last year Virginia became the first state to pass a law that mandates the integration of internet safety into their regular instruction. Yet over half of school districts pursue a prohibition—not an education—strategy by banning the use of social networking sites while on school property, according to a recent study from the National School Boards Association.
Adam and I are heading down to North Carolina tomorrow to testify against a bill pending in the state legislature that would require anyone under 18 to have a parent’s permission to join a social networking site such as MySpace. Adam has written extensively about Internet safety. Here’s my take.
At first glance, that might seem like a sensible idea. But, as I keep pointing out to anyone who will listen, it just won’t work. How can a website be sure that someone signing up is really over 18? How can a website be sure that a person giving parental consent is really a parent? Experience and common sense suggest that education and prevention are a far better approach to Internet safety.
Indeed, a study published earlier this year in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine suggests that a lot of the advice we have been giving young people about Internet safety may be off the mark anyway. The researchers found no evidence that sharing personal information online increases the chances of online victimization, like unwanted sexual solicitation and harassment. Victimization is more likely to result from other online behavior, like talking about sex with people met online and intentionally embarrassing someone else on the Internet.
These findings are in line with earlier research by the University of New Hampshire that examined 2,500 cases where juveniles were victims of sex crimes committed by people they met on the Internet. The study found that these children, almost all teenagers, were not victims of strangers who had lured them into situations where they could be abducted or assaulted. In fact, just the opposite was the case.
On Wednesday this week (7/25; 11:00 a.m.), the Cato Institute will be having a policy forum on the dispute between the United States and the Caribbean island nation of Antigua and Barbuda over U.S. restrictions on Internet gambling.
The U.S. has lost a series of World Trade Organization rulings on its Internet gambling laws, and its intransigence threatens the viability of the WTO. Will the U.S. burn down an institution of free trade to protect American grown-ups from their own entertainment choices?
Register, watch the live webcast, or watch the recorded webcast here.
Betcha.com recently began offering a U.S.-based, P2P, honor-based betting service. Its FAQ claims that Betcha.com avoids the reach of domestic state and federal anti-gambling laws because, “Unlike any other betting venue on the planet, Betcha bettors always retain the right to withdraw their bets . . . . Therefore, they are not ‘risking’ anything. No ‘risk;’ means no ‘gamble.'” Will Betcha’com’s hack of anti-internet gaming laws work?
Ever since the “Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act” passed during the last session of Congress, Rep. Barney Frank has been pushing to repeal it. Good for him. It’s a silly law for reasons Radley Balko of Reason magazine pointed out during testimony at a hearing Rep. Frank hosted last Friday. The hearing was held by the House Financial Services Committee, which Rep. Frank chairs, and it was entitled: “Can Internet Gambling Be Effectively Regulated to Protect Consumers and the Payments System?” In his testimony, Balko, a former colleague of mine at the Cato Institute, made the moral case against the law:
What Americans do in their own homes with their own money on their own time is none of the federal government’s business. Take online poker, by far the most popular form of online gambling. Poker has enjoyed a surge in popularity over the last several years. The game is about as mainstream and uniquely American as baseball. Poker evolved from similar card games in the early 1800s, then flourished in popularity on Mississippi’s riverboats, winning over such iconic American aficionados as Mark Twain.
Today, most daily newspapers have a poker column, including the New York Times. The game saturates cable television. Until recently, even several of the Supreme Court justices held a monthly poker game. Online poker is merely a new evolution of the game, similar to the way Civil War poker games introduced the straight, and gave us variations like draw and stud poker. The Internet merely removes the geographic barrier preventing those who love the game from finding opponents of similar skill who are willing to wager similar amounts of money.
The Senate Commerce Committee’s hearing Wednesday on the Internet tax moratorium demonstrates the necessity of making the ban on state and local taxation of Internet access services permanent. Another temporary extension simply guarantees opponents another chance to overturn it down the road, and creates the possibility they can win new concessions in the meantime.
The hearing showed than opponents are still determined to gut the moratorium. Harley Duncan, the Washington representative of state and local tax administrators, rehashed the old argument that the moratorium is unnecessary, because “the economic evidence is that state taxation of Internet access charges has little or nothing to do with the adoption of Internet services by consumers or the deployment of services by industry.” And he cites a new Government Accountability Office conclusion that taxing Internet access is “not a statistically significant factor influencing the adoption of broadband service at the 5 percent level. It was statistically significant at the 10 percent level.” Even assuming this conclusion is valid, it still doesn’t mean anything. Because once states and localities are allowed to impose taxes on Internet access, they won’t hold the line at 5 percent.
The North Carolina social networking bill, S 132, passed the Senate yesterday and is on its way to the House. This bill should concern all e-commerce companies, not just sites like MySpace. The definition of a "commercial social networking site" could still encompass many different websites — and the trend is for including more social networking components to all sorts of sites. And as I said in a previous post, age verification just won’t work.
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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.
