We at The Progress & Freedom Foundation announced a series of eight upcoming policy events today, taking the place of our previously scheduled Sundance Summit. Beginning this month, the events will run through the summer in the nation’s capital. By moving these events closer to home in this manner, PFF will be better positioned to speak to legislators, policymakers, and tech policy press before Washington turns its attention to the midterm elections.
The series of events (which you can add to your calendar here) will include several breakfast and luncheon panel presentations and two half-day conferences. Covering such areas as communications and competition policy, digital property, digital media freedom and Internet freedom, the events will include:
- Tuesday, April 27: “Cable, Broadcast & the First Amendment: Will the Supreme Court End Must-Carry?” — A panel of experts will debate the future of “must carry” rules in the wake of a new challenge to their constitutionality by Cablevision, and what this decision could mean for other media. (RSVP here)
- Friday, May 7: “What Should the Next Communications Act Look Like?” — A discussion with key industry stakeholders about the future of the Telecom Act in the wake of the Comcast v. FCC decision and the looming battle over Title II reclassification of broadband. (RSVP here)
- Thursday, May 20: “Can Government Help Save the Press?” — This conference will discuss the FCC’s new “Future of Media” proceeding and debate what role government should play in subsidizing the press or bailing out failing media enterprises. (RSVP here)
- Monday, June 7: “The Future of Speech on the Borderless Internet” — A panel of leading cyberlawyers will discuss trans-national regulation and litigation of defamation, hate speech, indecency and political dissent. (RSVP here)
- Monday, June 21: “Sports Programming & the Challenges of Digital Piracy“— A discussion of the challenges that digital piracy, including unauthorized streaming, poses to professional and collegiate sports that have traditionally earned revenues from telecasts of games, bouts, etc. Continue reading →
The Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee is hosting their second annual State of the Mobile Net conference this Wednesday, April 21 at the DC Hyatt Regency (400 New Jersey Ave NW). The conference runs 12-5 pm followed by a cocktail reception. This conference and the larger State of the Net conference are probably the two best annual Internet policy events in DC, so I hope you’ll attend! This year’s SOMN includes a bonus: a “Growing Up with the Mobile Net” seminar coordinated by Common Sense Media, 9-11:45 am. I’ll be on the first panel of the morning on Kids’ Privacy on the Mobile Net: Is it PII or TMI? with:
- Amanda Lenhart of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, veritable goddess of cyber-sociological data (check out her terrific Social Media & Young Adults report);
- Phyllis Marcus, who handles childrens’ privacy and COPPA issues at the FTC (and is one of my favorite people there); and
- Alan Simpson, Common Sense Media, a tireless advocate for educating children & parents.
I can only assume Alan asked me to be on this distinguished panel panel to represent kids directly on account of my baby-faced-ness! Jerry Rubin famously said, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty”—so I’ve still got 3.5 months of trustworthiness to go! (Or perhaps he actually read the huge PFF paper Adam Thierer and I did last summer about COPPA and my recent post on the FTC’s recently announced COPPA implementation review or my testimony on Maine’s COPPA 2.0 law.) Anyway, the rest of the day looks great (so register here), including these sessions: Continue reading →
Friday, April 16: I’ll be moderating a PFF Capitol Hill briefing on Super-Sizing the FTC & What It Means for the Internet, Media & Advertising. My panel of FTC veterans and observers will discuss the growing powers of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). As I’ve mentioned here and here, financial reform legislation passed by the House and now pending in the Senate would give the FTC sweeping new powers to regulate not just Wall Street, but also unfair or deceptive trade practices across the economy. This could reshape regulation in a wide range of areas, such as privacy, cybersecurity, child safety, child nutrition, etc. The FTC has also asserted expanded authority to regulate “unfair” competition in its lawsuit against Intel. Register here for this 12-2 pm briefing in the Capitol Visitor Center!
Thursday, April 15: I’ll be participating in Capitol Hill briefing on Google’s proposed acquisition of AdMob, a leading in-app mobile ad network, which the FTC appears poised to challenge. (RSVP here.) Geoff Manne has probably done the best job debunking arguments against the deal but, sadly, couldn’t make the panel. ITIF’s Dan Castro will moderate a panel including (besides myself):
- Simon Buckingham, who’s expressed concerns about the deal on his Appitalism blog and accused Google of leveraging Google’s desktop search dominance into the high-end mobile market”;
- Lillie Coney of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), which never passes up an opportunity to denounce Google on privacy grounds;
- Jonathan Kanter, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, who represented TradeComet.com in their antitrust suit against Google and has also represented Microsoft in the past; and
- Glenn Manishin – Duane Morriss LLP, an antitrust lawyer who’s represented Google.
Tuesday, April 27: We just announced another PFF Briefing: Cable, Broadcast & the First Amendment: Will the Supreme Court End Must-Carry?, 10:00-11:45 a.m at Hogan & Hartson LLP (555 13th Street NW, Washington, DC). Continue reading →
Interesting upcoming event on April 21st at Georgetown University about “Digital Power and Its Discontents.” It’s described as: “A one-day conference exploring the ways digital technologies disrupt the balance of power between and among states, their citizens and the private sector.” Evgeny Morozov of Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, which is organizing the event, was kind enough to invite me to participate on the first panel of the day. And I see that my fellow TLF blogger Jerry Brito of the Mercatus Center will be on another panel. Other panelists include: John Morris of CDT, Micah Sifry of the Personal Democracy Forum, Mark MacCarthy of Georgetown Univ., Rebecca MacKinnon, Joel Reidenberg of Fordham Law, Amb. Philip Verveer, and several others.
The event will be held on Wednesday, April 21, 2010 from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the Georgetown University Mortara Center for International Affairs. (3600 N Street, N.W.) Go to the website to RSVP. You’ll find the complete agenda down below. It sounds like a terrific event. RSVP here.
Continue reading →
In a Cato@Liberty post, “Cell Phones and Ingratitude,” David Boaz reproaches the New America Foundation for today’s complaint-fest, “Can You Hear Me Now? Why Your Cell Phone is So Terrible”:
This is an old story. Markets, property rights, and the rule of law provide a framework in which technology and prosperity soar, and some people can only complain. I was reading some of Deirdre McCloskey’s forthcoming book Bourgeois Dignity this week. She points out that the average person lived on the equivalent of $3 a day in 1800. Today there are six and a half times as many people, but the average person earns and consumes 10 times as much, far more than that in the most capitalist countries. And yet some people, most leftist intellectuals, continue to ignore what McCloskey calls “the gigantic gains from bourgeois dignity and liberty” and to denounce the markets, economic liberalization, and globalization that have liberated billions of people from eons of back-breaking labor.
This is an event I’m not going to attend. I mean, like, they’re not even serving food!
A few weeks ago, I posted my thoughts on the outstanding new PBS Frontline program called “Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier.” Produced by Rachel Dretzin and Douglas Rushkoff, the 90-minute special touched on several themes we have debated here through the years including: (1) concerns about information overload and multitasking; (2) the role of computers and digital technology in education & learning; and (3) the nature and impact of virtual reality and virtual worlds on real-world life and culture.
If you missed the program, you’re in luck. The Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), in conjunction with the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), is holding a screening of the documentary this Thursday, Feb. 25th beginning at 10:00am. The screening will take place at the NCTA Theater, located at 25 Massachusetts Avenue, NW (near Union Station).
After the viewing ends, Rachel Dretzin will be answering some questions about the program. And the folks at FOSI were kind enough to ask me to be there to provide some commentary on the program along with Kathy Brown, Senior Vice President, Public Policy Development and Corporate Responsibility at Verizon.
They’re almost out of seats, so if you are interested you should RSVP right away to: events@fosi.org [All details here.]
This morning I spoke at a Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy event on, “The Crisis in Journalism: What Should the Government Do?” The panel also included Steven Waldman, senior advisor to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, who is heading up the FCC’s new effort on “The Future of Media and the Information Needs of Communities in a Digital Age; Susan DeSanti, Director of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission. (The FTC has also been investigating whether journalism will survive the Internet age and what government should do about it); and Andy Schwartzman, President of the Media Access Project. Mark MacCarthy of Georgetown Univ. moderated the discussion. Here’s the outline of my remarks. I didn’t bother penning a speech. [Update: Video is now online, but not embeddable and sound is bad.]
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What Funds Media? Can Government Subsidies Fill the Void?
1) Public media & subsidies can play a role, but that role should be tightly limited
- Should be focused on filling niches
- bottom-up (community-based) efforts are probably better than top-down proposals, which will probably end up resembling Soviet-style 5 year plans
- regardless, public subsidies should not be viewed as a replacement for traditional private media sources
- And I certainly hope we are not talking about a full-blown “public option” for the press along the lines of what Free Press, the leading advocate of some sort of government bailout for media, wants.
2) Indeed, public financing would not begin to make up the shortfall from traditional private funding sources
Continue reading →
Just a reminder about tomorrow’s Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy event on, “The Crisis in Journalism: What Should the Government Do?” It will be held at 9:30am tomorrow at the Newseum (Knight Conference Center) located at 555 Pennsylvania Ave here in Washington, DC. Breakfast will be served. (You can RSVP please by emailing: cbpp@msb.edu). Here’s the event description:
This roundtable discussion will bring together academics, government officials and industry leaders to consider the future of the journalism industry. Specifically, what does a future economic model for the journalism industry look like? What is the role of new media in modern journalism? How can news papers integrate web-based news into their business models? 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?
Mark MacCarthy of Georgetown Univ. will moderate the panel, which includes: Continue reading →
Glen Robinson, my favorite professor back at Virginia Law, will be giving a lecture about “Regulating Communications: Stories from the First Hundred Years” at George Mason Law School this Thursday (2/18) at 4 pm. You simply couldn’t find a better person to give that talk. Robinson isn’t quite old enough to first-hand stories all the way back to the birth of the Federal Radio Commission in 1926 and the FCC in 1934, but he started practicing communications law back in 1961, was an FCC Commissioner 1974-76, and has taught at UVA since 1976 (until finally retiring in 2008).
Reading about his long career is a bit like watching the British comedy series Black Adder: Somehow, like Rowan Atkinson’s character Black Adder, Robinson keeps popping up again and again at pivotal moments in communications law history—most notably, he worked to draft early anti-cable rules in the 1960s and voted for the FCC’s indecency prosecution against George Carlin’s “Filthy Words” monologue. But unlike Black Adder, who always happens to be at the right place at the right time, make the wrong decisions and foolishly learns nothing, Robinson sometimes made the wrong decision, but demonstrated that rare ability to rethink his approach and admit he was wrong—an intellectual honesty most famously exemplified by FA Hayek. Robinson grew to become among the most trenchant, and certainly the most sage, critic of the FCC’s constant evolution towards censorship and curtailing competition in the communications industry. His general skepticism about administrative regulation is perhaps the most thoughtful and refined you’ll find in academe—and not just in communications law. Continue reading →
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