Building on what Braden said yesterday about education being the key to online safety… I just released a short new paper about “Two Sensible, Education-Based Legislative Approaches to Online Child Safety.” The paper focuses on S. 1965, the “Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act,” and H.R. 3461, the “Safeguarding America’s Families by Enhancing and Reorganizing New and Efficient Technologies Act of 2006,” or “SAFER NET” Act. These bills wisely adopt an education focus to online safety concerns instead of the same old regulatory approach that members of Congress usually recommend.
Both bills would require that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC):
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.
A few weeks ago, I outlined the amazing keynote address that Harvard University law professor Laurence H. Tribe delivered at PFF’s annual Aspen Summit. Now you can read it for yourself. PFF has just published the transcript of his speech, which was entitled, “Freedom of Speech and Press in the 21st Century: New Technology Meets Old Constitutionalism.”
Professor Tribe provides a 14-part indictment of new government proposals to regulate “excessively violent” content. But he also speaks more broadly about the importance of defending the First Amendment from attacks on many different platforms, and for many different types of content. Here’s one of my favorite passages from the concluding section of his remarks:
The broad lesson of this discussion of television violence is the centrality of the First Amendment’s opposition to having government as big brother regulate who may provide what information content to whom, whether or not for a price. The large problem that this exposes is that especially in a post-9/11 world, where grownups understandably fear for themselves and for their children and worry about the brave new world of online cyber reality that their kids can navigate more fluently than they can, it is enormously tempting to forget or to subordinate the vital principles of constitutional liberty. Even if, after years of litigation and expenditure, the First Amendment prevails, it can be worn down dramatically by having to wage that fight over and over and over.
Amen to that. And that, in a nutshell, describes what much of my research agenda at PFF has been focused on. It is a pleasure to add Prof. Tribe’s address to our growing body of research on the sanctity of freedom of speech and centrality of the First Amendment to our democratic republic as we continue “to wage that fight over and over and over.”
The Parents Television Council has a new report out this week about the supposed decline of the TV “Family Hour.” The City Journal has just posted my response to that PTC report here. It begins as follows…
__________________
Who Killed TV’s “Family Hour”? It’s not who you think.
by Adam D. Thierer
7 September 2007
The nonprofit Parents Television Council (PTC) released a report this week lamenting the supposed death of broadcast television’s “family hour.” Though neither the Federal Communications Commission nor Congress ever mandated it, 8 to 9 PM Monday through Saturday (Eastern time), and 7 to 9 PM on Sunday, have traditionally been devoted to family-friendly programming. But the PTC’s new report claims that these blocks of time are now “no place for children,” because “corporate interests have hijacked the family hour” and “have pushed more and more adult-oriented programming to the early hours of the evening.”
One might respond to this claim by questioning the PTC’s methodology, particularly its definitions of foul language. Simon Vozick-Levinson of Entertainment Weekly’s “PopWatch Blog” takes this approach, accusing the PTC of “cooking the numbers” to suit its cultural agenda. But I don’t want to engage in methodological nit-picking, since it quickly devolves into a subjective squabble about acceptable language and appropriate programming. Instead, I want to point out the fundamental flaw in the report’s premise. The family hour may well be dead—but parents, not broadcasters, were the ones who killed it.
AT&T announced an expansion of its excellent “Smart Limits” parental controls service that will provide parents with state of the art monitoring tools. Beyond restricting access to inappropriate content, AT&T’s new service lets parents set customized limits for each child according to age. Parents can also manage how and when kids use their phones, including limitations on the overall minutes used for messaging and downloads. They can even restrict who the child can contact with their phones.
The innovative new set of tools costs $4.99 per month. All the details about AT&T’s new service can be found here.
This is great news for parents who have been wary about getting their kids mobile phones, especially younger children. With tools like these, parents can feel confident that their kids are both safe and in touch at all times.
I’ve written much about the potential “chilling effect” associated with over-zealous FCC regulation of speech. Some people doubt that the FCC’s regulatory wrath is really so severe that media operators will censor important programs for fear of being fined afterward. But we know that that is exactly what happened with a 9/11 documentary last year when CBS decided to censor the remarks of firefighters under duress. Imagine that, firefighters were swearing as the disaster unfolded! But apparently we need to have history whitewashed for our benefit. Absurd.
Over at Huffington Post, Timothy Karr claims that “One attendee — a member of the Darwin-challenged Discovery Institute — sought to argue that the Internet be completely free of regulation” during the question and answers following Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt’s address to the Progress & Freedom Foundation’s Aspen Summit. That would be me. Actually, I make no such argument. There is a place for antitrust enforcement (provided it aims to protect competition, not competitors) and consumer protection. I draw the line at economic regulation, or competition policy, which tries to ensure that everyone who can afford to hire a lobbyist profits and no one who can afford to hire a lobbyist fails in the marketplace.
We took the podcast on the road this week and recorded at our Alcohol Liberation Front event on the last day of the PFF Aspen Summit conference. Giving us their reaction to Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote address are Cord Blomquist of CEI, James Gattuso of the Heritage Foundation, and Jeff Eisenach of Criterion Economics, as well as yours truly. Also, Adam Thierer of PFF and Hance Haney of the Discovery Institute discuss Lawrence Tribe’s address on tech policy and the First Amendment. In two weeks we’ll have another “Live from Aspen” podcast featuring Solveig Singleton, Jim Harper, and Bill Rosenblatt on copyright fair use.
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!
Progress & Freedom Foundation hosted its 13th annual “Aspen Summit” this week and, as always, it featured some of the leading thinkers in the field of technology and media policy. This year, we were also lucky enough to be joined by one of America’s leading constitutional scholars, Prof. Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard University Law School.
I invited Prof. Tribe to Aspen to deliver a keynote address on the future of the First Amendment in an age of rapid technological change and media convergence. It was an amazing speech and I thought I would share a few highlights from his address with you here. I hope to transcribe the complete address and publish it sometime soon. [Update 8/27: The video is now online.]
As video games have surged in popularity in recent years, politicians around the country have tried to outlaw the sale of some violent games to children. So far all such efforts have failed. Citing the Constitution’s protection of free speech, federal judges have rejected attempts to regulate video games in eight cities and states since 2001. The judge in a ninth place, Oklahoma, has temporarily blocked a law pending a final decision. No such laws have been upheld.
I’ve been doing a lot of writing on this subject in recent years and have pointed out that every single court that has reviewed the constitutionality of video game regulation has concluded that:
(1) Video games are a form of expression protected by the First Amendment.
(2) Not a single court in America has supported the theory that a causal link exists between exposure to video games and real-world acts of actual violence.
(3) Parents have many less-restrictive means of dealing with underage access to potentially objectionable games—such as the industry’s private rating and labeling system, third-party ratings and info, console-based controls, and the fact that they don’t have to buy the games in the first place! [See my paper and book for more details on all these things.]
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 →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.