Now, imagine how much worse this problem could get if government mandated that everyone had to be “verified” before they were allowed to visit a social networking site, however that ends up being defined. Such a mandate would exponentially increase the amount of personal information — especially credit card information — that was available to identity thieves. Age verification advocates often ignore this problem when making the case for regulation.
Worse yet, much of the information that would be made available via such mandates would be personal information about children, which makes for a very attractive target for identity thieves since those records are rarely checked until the kids get much older and start applying for things. At least most adults typically learn they have been the victim of ID theft shortly after it occurs, allowing them to take steps to deal with the situation. With kids, their records could be milked for years by bad guys without them or their parents ever knowing it.
When the history books are finally written documenting America’s failed experiment with broadcast industry content regulation, this past week may go down as a critical moment in the story. The obvious reason this week was so important was the Senate’s87-11 voteon Thursday to prevent the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from reinstating the Fairness Doctrine. But an equally important development this past week was the release of a new white paper by the radical Leftist activist group Free Press.
The Free Press, which was founded by the socialist media theorist Robert McChesney, doesn’t typically publish many things admitting to the failures of coercive government regulation. Nonetheless, in “The Fairness Doctrine Distraction,” a paper by Josh Silver and Marvin Ammori, the media reformistas at Free Press told their Big Government comrades in Congress and academia that it was finally OK to let go of at least this one old pet project of theirs. In their paper, Silver and Ammori note that, “The Fairness Doctrine put the federal government in the position of judging content and controlling speech” and “Reinstating the Doctrine will not result in greater viewpoint diversity in broadcasting.” They continue:
The Fairness Doctrine, while originally well-intentioned, is not wise public policy. [T]he Doctrine places the FCC in charge of determining what is fair in political speech — a difficult task in the best of circumstances. Placing the government in the role of monitoring and judging political speech will inevitably produce controversy that is impossible to resolve.
I applaud the Free Press for finally fessing up to the Fairness Doctrine’s many failings. This First Amendment-violating abomination should have never been allowed to be enforced by the FCC to begin with, but at least we can now all finally agree it should stay off the books for good.
Of course, the radicals at the (Un)Free Press weren’t about to let one of the Left’s old favorite regulations go so away without asking for something in return. One of the reasons that Silver and Ammori are suddenly willing to give their blessing to the Doctrine’s burial is because they want to get on with the more far-reaching agenda of micro-managing media markets using a variety of less visible regulations.
The most recent Radio Berkman episode, “Can you Keep a Secret?” explores the thorny questions about what should be deemed public in the first place, and what should be classified:
The government keeps secrets. We take that for granted. But should we? Some speculate that intelligence agencies and elected officials are a little bit trigger happy with the “Top Secret” stamp, and that society would benefit from greater openness. With the government classifying millions of pages of documents per year – in a recent year the U.S. classified about five times the number of pages added to the Library of Congress – a great deal of useful human knowledge gets put under lock and key. But some argue that secrecy is still crucial to our national security.
I look forward to seeing the film (when it comes out on Netflix).
What I found most interesting was the discussion of the essential trade-off in the relationship between the media and the state has always been between the media’s “independence” and its “responsibility” (~33:30 in). Even the staunchest critics of the national security state would probably accept that there are some stories in the media shouldn’t publish because they’d jeopardize the safety of Americans. But we all want the media to blow the whistle on the bad stuff that goes on behind a veil of secrecy. Drawing that line is a terribly difficult task. But it becomes even more complicated with the decline of traditional professional investigative journalism and the rise of blog/amateur journalism. Continue reading →
I’ve got a new PFF paper out today entitled, “Who Needs Parental Controls? Assessing the Relevant Market for Parental Control Technologies.” In this piece, I address the argument made by some media and Internet critics who say that government intervention (perhaps even censorship) may be necessary because parental control technologies are not widely utilized by most Americans. But, as I note in the paper, the question that these critics always fail to ask is: How many homes really need parental control technologies? The answer: Far fewer than you think. Indeed, the relevant universe of potential parental control users is actually quite limited.
I find that the percentage of homes that might need parental control technologies is certainly no greater than the 32% of U.S. households with children in them. Moreover, the relevant universe of potential parental control users is likely much less than that because households with very young children or older teens often have little need for parental control technologies. Finally, some households do not utilize parental control technologies because they rely on alternative methods of controlling media content and access in the home, such as household media rules. Consequently, policymakers should not premise regulatory proposals upon the limited overall “take-up” rate for parental control tools since only a small percentage of homes might actually need or want them.
If you don’t care to read the whole nerdy thing, I’ve created this short video summarizing the major findings of the paper.
And the document is embedded below the fold in a Scribd reader. Continue reading →
In December, the Fourth Circuit upheld the conviction and 20-year sentence of a man who downloaded pictures, drawings, and text emails depicting minors engaged in sexual acts. Receiving obscene depictions of “a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct” is prohibited by 18 U.S.C. § 1466A(a). The court held the statute constitutional on its face, and as applied to downloading materials from the internet.
Receiving via the internet, the court said, is unlike mere possession in one’s home, as is protected by the First Amendment and Stanley v. Georgia, but is rather trafficking in commerce and so can be constitutionally prohibited. Of course, it is very easy to inadvertently “receive” obscene materials through the internet, whether in one’s Spam folder or on a pop-up, but the court simply hoped that inadvertent access would not be targeted for prosecution, because the statute requires knowing access. Continue reading →
Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain has launched an interesting new project called “HerdictWeb,” which “seeks to gain insight into what users around the world are experiencing in terms of web accessibility; or in other words, determine the herdict.” It’s a useful tool for determining whether governments are blocking certain websites for whatever reason. Here’s Zittrain’s sock puppet video with all the details!
The website is quite slick and very user-friendly, and they’ve even created a downloadable Firefox button that will automatically check site accessibility while you’re surfing the Net.
The information gathered from this effort will be useful for the OpenNet Initiative that Zittrain and John Palfrey co-created (with others from Univ. of Toronto, Oxford Univ., and Univ. of Cambridge) and wrote about in their excellent book, Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering, which was one of my favorite technology policy books of the past year. The data collected will give them, and us, a fuller picture of just how widespread global filtering and censorship efforts really are. I encourage you to take a look and spread the word, especially to those in foreign countries who could probably use it more than us. (Of course, their governments will likely block Herdict once the word gets around!)
I was over at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the other day chatting with someone about various regulatory issues and Rush Limbaugh’s WSJ editorial came up. The person I was speaking with made a comment about how conservatives have really been energized and unified in opposition to the re-imposition to the Doctrine. I reminded them, however, that it wasn’t always the case that conservatives stood together in the fight over the Fairness Doctrine. In fact, when I first came to town almost 20 years ago, there were still plenty of conservatives who actually favored it. I was reminded of that fact when reading a new piece in Engage about “Broadcast ‘Fairness’ in the Twenty-First Century” by my friend Robert Corn-Revere. Bob is one America’s great First Amendment defenders and his new essay offers an excellent history of efforts to micro-manage speech on the broadcast airwaves over the years. In it, he reminds us that:
Given the recent vocal opposition to the Fairness Doctrine in the interest of preserving conservative talk radio, it is easy to forget that many prominent conservatives championed the doctrine before its demise. Phyllis Schlafly was a vocal proponent of the Fairness Doctrine because of what she described as “the outrageous and blatant anti-Reagan bias of the TV network newscasts,” and she testified at the FCC in the 1980s in support of the policy “to serve as a small restraint on the monopoly power wielded by Big TV Media.” Senator Jesse Helms was another long-time advocate of the Fairness Doctrine, and conservative groups Accuracy in Media and the American Legal Foundation actively pursued fairness complaints at the FCC against network newscasts.
Likewise, in our book, A Manifesto for Media Freedom, Brian Anderson and I note that some other prominent right-leaning politicians, such as Sen. Trent Lott, favored the Fairness Doctrine. Moreover, even though most of those conservative individuals and groups have now turned against the Fairness Doctrine, some Republicans still defend (or even seek to expand) the same underlying regulatory concepts that served as the foundation of the Fairness Doctrine. As Corn-Revere notes: Continue reading →
There was a hearing today in the House Energy and Commerce Committee on “Reauthorization of the Satellite Home Viewer Extension and Reauthorization Act,” which got into the sticky of issue of whether must carry mandates should be applied to satellite television (DBS) operators. My boss, Ken Ferree, president of the Progress & Freedom Foundation, testified in opposition to that notion. Here’s what he had to say about proposals that would require satellite operators to carry local broadcast TV stations from even the smallest markets:
Because Congress cannot repeal the laws of physics, there are only two ways in which a satellite company might comply with such a mandate: 1) it may add capacity (i.e., launch new satellites and build associated ground equipment), or 2) it may convert capacity currently used for other purposes to local television carriage in the most sparsely populated parts of the country. Neither approach makes economic sense. That is, these proposals, if they were to become law, would impose considerable costs on satellite operators while generating no appreciable revenue.
This week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a California video game statute as unconstitutional, holding that it violated both the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the federal Constitution. The California law, which passed in October 2005 (A.B.1179), would have blocked the sale of “violent” video games to those under 18 and required labels on all games. Offending retailers could have been fined for failure to comply with the law. It was immediately challenged by the Video Software Dealers Association and the Entertainment Software Association and, in August of 2007, a district court decision in the case of Video Software Dealers Association v. Schwarzenegger [decision here] enforced a permanent injunction against the law. The Ninth Circuit heard the state’s challenge to the injunction last year and handed down it’s decision this week [decision here] holding the statute unconstitutional. The key passage:
We hold that the Act, as a presumptively invalid content based restriction on speech, is subject to strict scrutiny and not the “variable obscenity” standard from Ginsberg v. New York , 390 U.S. 629 (1968). Applying strict scrutiny, we hold that the Act violates rights protected by the First Amendment because the State has not demonstrated a compelling interest, has not tailored the restriction to its alleged compelling interest, and there exist less-restrictive means that would further the State’s expressed interests. Additionally, we hold that the Act’s labeling requirement is unconstitutionally compelled speech under the First Amendment because it does not require the disclosure of purely factual information; but compels the carrying of the State’s controversial opinion. Accordingly, we affirm the district court’s grant of summary judgment to Plaintiffs and its denial of the State’s cross-motion. Because we affirm the district court on these grounds, we do not reach two of Plaintiffs’ challenges to the Act: first, that the language of the Act is unconstitutionally vague, and, second, that the Act violates Plaintiffs’ rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Here at TLF we oftenworryabout 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.
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.”
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
Here at TLF we 
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.