This week I traveled to Brussels and, along with my friends at the Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA), co-hosted an interesting roundtable discussion entitled “Mission Impossible: Protecting Children and Free Expression in Our New, Digital Content World.” The focus of the day’s discussion was the same as previous ICRA roundtables that I have participated in and written about here before: What steps can we take to shield children from potentially objectionable media content without repressing freedom of speech / expression?
In addition to being the focus of much of my ongoing research at PFF, you might also recall that I wrote about a major summit on similar issues that took place in Washington, D.C. last week. That event, which was co-hosted by the New America Foundation and the Kaiser Family Foundation, featured keynote addresses from Senator Hillary Clinton among other important lawmakers and public policy experts.
This week’s Brussels roundtable featured a similarly impressive collection of interested parties from major European and American corporations and organizations, including: EU Commission officials, EuroISPA, NICAM (Netherlands Institute for the Classification of Audiovisual Media), Ofcom (UK communications / media regulatory agency), AOL Europe, ECO, MPAA Europe, Microsoft Germany, i-Sieve, Google Europe, Verizon, NASK, Cisco, Telefonica, the U.S. State Department, and several others.
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I participated in a major conference yesterday sponsored by the New America Foundation (NAF) and the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) entitled “Beyond Censorship: Policies and Technologies to Give Parents Control over Children’s Media Content.” The event featured an impressive collection of lawmakers, regulators, corporate leaders and public policy experts who gathered to discuss, as the conference agenda stated, “who is responsible for protecting kids from inappropriate media–industry, the government, or parents armed with new technologies?”
I thought it might be worth transcribing a few of my notes here since others might be interested in what was said. I did the same thing in February after I participated in a similar conference that Stephen Balkam of the Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) hosted at Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. Incidentally, I’m going to be co-hosting a similar event with Stephen and ICRA next week in Brussels entitled “Protecting Children AND Free Expression in Our New, Digital Content World.” EU Commissioner Viviane Reding will be on hand to deliver a keynote address and then we’ll be hearing from many others on these issues.
What follows below is a brief summary of yesterday’s NAF / KFF discussion over the span of the 3-hour event.
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As I’ve written before, America’s increasingly heavy-handed, anti-free speech campaign finance laws threaten to eventually ensnare the entire Internet and our new innovative, bottom-up world of organic “we-dia” (WE-MEDIA). Blogs are already in their crosshairs and lawmakers will be targeting other technologies of freedom in coming years.
Want to know where we might be headed? Look at Singapore. They’ve got a long history of stifling political speech and now their drawing up a blueprint to quash dissent via alternative digital outlets.
Lee Boon Yang, Minister for Communications, Information and the Arts (and you thought the FCC was bad!) recently said that “Anyone, anywhere can blog anything, anyhow. We have adopted a light touch approach in dealing with the everyday use of the Internet.” Well, that sounds encouraging, but then… “However, during the election period when such free-for-all may result in undesirable situations, we cannot take a completely hands-off approach,” he said. “We will review our policies on the Internet and new media during the election period bearing in mind the changes taking place.”
According to this AFP story, Singapore has already been criticized by human rights groups and opposition parties for placing restrictions on political discussions on the Internet. The rules apparently already ban the use of use of podcasts and videocasts for advertising during elections.
Whether or not this all works remains to be seen. It’s one thing to regulate the signals being beamed out from a big broadcast tower. (After all, it’s pretty easy to find those towers and their programmers). Internet “broadcasters” are another matter, however, and enforcement will become a nightmare for the regulators as more and more people get online.
But that doesn’t mean the regulators won’t give it their best shot. And while lawmakers here in the States have given blogs and the Internet a reprieve for now, you’d be fooling yourself to believe that that’s the end of the story. Regulation expands. Always and everywhere.
I have an editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer today about a new federal effort to regulate MySpace.com and other social networking websites. Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick (R., Pa.) and several members of the newly formed congressional “Suburban Caucus” recently introduced H.R. 5319, the “Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA).” It would require schools and libraries that receive federal funding to block minors’ access to social-networking sites that allow users to create Web pages or profiles or that offer discussion boards, chat rooms or e-mail service.
If you’re interested, the entire editorial is pasted down below…
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EFF reports that a California appeals court has thrown out Apple’s demands for Apple Insider and PowerPage to disclose their sources. As I wrote last year about a different but closely related case, I think it’s a little bit strange that mainstream media reports are describing these as “blogger” cases:
Yet upon closer examination, it’s hard to see what the fuss is about. If anything, the incident reveals more about mainstream journalists’ condescending attitude toward their upstart online competitors than it does about law or technology.
Think Secret is not a “blog.” It is a commercial, advertisement-supported online magazine. It’s run by a college student, and is therefore smaller and less polished than online magazines like Slate or Salon. But the First Amendment’s protections aren’t limited to slick publications with large staffs. Some of the Founding Fathers, after all, were prolific pamphleteers, hardly more polished than Think Secret.
The same is true of Apple Insider and PowerPage. They’ve been in business since before the term “blog” entered our lexicon, and their format is closer to online magazines than it is to blogs.
Not that it matters from a legal point of view. In its decision, the court makes it clear that the law makes no distinctions among journalists based on size or professionalism:
We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes “legitimate journalis[m].” The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here. We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish “legitimate” from “illegitimate” news. Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment, which is to identify the best, most important, and most valuable ideas not by any sociological or economic formula, rule of law, or process of government, but through the rough and tumble competition of the memetic marketplace.
The freedom of the press isn’t a special privilege that applies only to government-recognized journalists. Everyone who’s engaged in the collection and dissemination of newsworthy information is protected. There’s nothing new about any of this, but it’s good to see the courts affirm that the rules don’t change just because journalism is happening on the Internet instead of the printing press.
Inevitably, almost all battles about Internet content controls become battles about the effectiveness of Internet filters. That’s because, from the start, many have held out hope that private filters can offer families, schools, libraries and others the opportunity to block objectionable content without getting government involved in the ugly business of Net censorship.
But there have always been filtering critics and, ironically, they come from two very different camps. On one hand, we often hear policymakers or pro-regulation activist groups lamenting the fact that filters are UNDER-inclusive, or miss too much objectionable online content. Indeed, rumors are that the Department of Justice is currently engaged in major effort to build a legal case against filters as an effective private blocking tool. If the government was able to successfully make such a case to the courts, it might help them undo a decade’s worth of jurisprudence that has been built upon the belief that filters offered a “less-restrictive means” of addressing objectionable content compared to vague, over-broad government content control efforts.
Cutting in the opposite direction, many librarians, free expression groups and others have long criticized filters on the grounds that that they are far too OVER-inclusive. These critics consider filters to be fundamentally flawed because they often block access to sites that contain important information. Early examples included filters that blocked access to breast cancer websites because they contained the word “breast,” or others that blocked access to Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey’s website because the word “dick” was blocked by the filter. Moreover, the critics of filter over-inclusiveness also point out that, despite their technical nature, filtering technologies are ultimately quite stupid and depend on the subjective values / morality of their creators. For example, if a filter maker decides that websites discussing homosexual issues were offensive to him, then anyone using his software wouldn’t be able to access those sites either.
These competing anti-filtering forces are still at war today. Not only is the DOJ trying to build a case against private filters, but new bills are being introduced in Congress and pro-regulatory critics are engaged in new efforts to question the effectiveness of filters. (They either want a government-approved filter or want online intermediaries to rid the Net of all content they find “indecent.”) Meanwhile, filters have again come under attack from the folks up at the Free Expression Policy Project (FEPP), which is part of the Brennan Center for Justice. They have just released a revised edition of their “Internet Filters: A Public Policy Report,” which mostly criticizes filters for their over-inclusiveness.
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Proving just how surreal the debate over Net neutrality has become, we now have many people telling us that it is “the Internet’s First Amendment” and that federal regulation is needed to “Save the Internet.”
Apparently, these folks have convinced themselves that, at least in this instance, government regulation is really no big deal and that it won’t threaten the future of the Internet. They want us to believe that the same people who have gave us Bridges to Nowhere and an endless string of unbalanced budgets are somehow now well-suited to manage something as complicated as the Internet and broadband networks. They imagine that lawmakers and bureaucrats will regulate just enough to get the job done and help bring about some sort of idyllic Internet nirvana. Moreover, they apparently believe that policymakers will do all this without expansively regulating other online activities, commerce or speech.
How can smart people make this leap of faith? I really think Net neutrality supporters are caught up in a hopeless illusion about government regulation in this case. It all reminds me of a line from those rock-n’-roll sages Guns N’ Roses: “I’ve worked too hard for my illusions just to throw them all away.” (Yes, it’s true, I’m a bit of a head-banger at heart. Moreover, I just get tired of quoting Aristotle and Milton Friedman all the time.)
While it’s true that I am a skeptic about government regulation in almost every instance, I am still surprised about how many Internet-savvy people are willing to make this major leap of faith and put their trust in government without considering the unintended consequences of Big Government control.
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Wall Street Journal reporter Amy Schatz has an important story on B1 of the paper today providing further evidence of how a handful of media activists groups–and the one in particular–have co-opted the FCC’s broadcast indecency complaint process for the own ends. Schatz notes that the Parents Television Council (PTC) was responsible for the vast majority of complaints against a single CBS program “Without a Trace,” which the FCC recently slapped with a record $3.6 million fine in March.
The WSJ filed a FOIA request to examine the complaints for that program and found that “all but three appeared to originate as computer-generated form letters (from the PTC).” In other words, virtually every complaint was identical and originated with the PTC’s website. “Only 2% of the people who filed complaints, or about 135, added personal comments,” Schatz found.
These results are consistent with the findings from my paper, “Examining the FCC’s Complaint-Driven Broadcast Indecency Enforcement Process.” In that paper, I noted the influence of the PTC on the indecency complaint process and showed how the organization is essentially “stuffing the (complaint) ballot box.”
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Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) is making a major push this week to pass legislation through the Senate that would significantly increase fines for “indecent” broadcast programming. The bill, S. 193, which was originally introduced by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS), would hike fines against broadcasters that air obscene, indecent or profane material to a maximum of $325,000 per incident. (The current limit is $32,500 for supposed violations).
Such legislation makes good election year fodder for politicians, and it obviously appeases a base of potential voters who feel there is too much “smut” on TV or radio today. For both groups, the rallying cry here is: “it’s for the children!” But I want to ask both groups a serious question: Do you really think broadcast censorship accomplishes that goal today?
Seriously, look at these recent Bolt Media poll numbers. Almost 80 percent of 16- to 18-year-olds surveyed were unable to even name who the big 4 TV broadcasters are! (They are ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox just in case you don’t know). Meanwhile, the majority of respondents (85 percent) said they spend their free time on the Internet, compared to only 69 percent who said they spend their free time watching TV.
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I’ve been out in Los Angeles this week attending “E3,” the video game industry’s annual trade show. It’s the first time I’ve been able to attend the show and I am finding it very interesting. Indeed, as I walk the halls of the L.A. convention center and chat with gaming companies and gamers themselves, I am struck by several things:
(1) This is one heck of an innovative industry. There are some remarkably creative minds working in the electronic gaming sector. As a life-long gamer who was part of the “Pong” and “Pac-Mac” generation, I am just flabbergasted by how much more highly developed games are today (in terms of graphics, narrative and gameplay) than they were 30 years ago when I first started gaming. There was a moment in my life when I thought that games just couldn’t get much more sophisticated than Activision’s “Pitfall” or Atari’s “Adventure.” What a fool I was! Some of the massive multi-player online roll-playing games (“MMORPGs”) I saw at the show were just jaw-dropping in terms of their graphical detail and narrative sophistication. And all of the new high-definition titles for the X-Box 360 and PlayStation 3 are nothing short of stunning. Old favorites of mine like “Madden” football and “Gran Turismo” are now rendered in ultra-crisp 1080p HD resolution. There are moments during those games when you really think you’re watching a live feed from a real football game or road race.
And even the games which featured a more simple premise were exciting. Consider “Table Tennis” by Rock Star Games. The same company that brought us the infamous “Grand Theft Auto” is now producing a decidedly less controversial title based on the classic game of Ping Pong! If you think it sounds silly, wait till you play it. It is addicting in a “Tetris-like” fashion. I hope they eventually make it for my PlayStation Portable!
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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.