According to the BBC, the European Commission is apparently set to adopt formal rules guaranteeing a so-called “right to be forgotten” online. As part of the Commission’s overhaul of the 1995 Data Protection Directive, this new regulation will mandate that, “people will be able to ask for data about them to be deleted and firms will have to comply unless there are ‘legitimate’ grounds to retain it,” the BBC reports.
I thought Todd Zywicki, a senior scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, did a nice job on Judge Napolitano’s “Freedom Watch” show addressing the contentious question of whether government should be regulating food advertising in order to somehow make American kids healthier. Todd pointed out how the advertising guidelines currently being developed are anything but “voluntary” and noted that there are many causes of childhood obesity. Watch the clip here:
It’s rare when the entire Internet industry rises up with one voice. Perhaps that’s why the protest against the House of Representatives’ Stop Online Piracy Act and its Senate counterpart, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), is getting so much attention. In policy circles, usually one segment of the online industry is jockeying for favorable position against another. Today, with Wikipedia dark, Google taped over, and a host of other sites large and small raising awareness through home page notices, New Media is drawing its line in the sand against the most astounding government overreach into Internet regulation to date.
As if my earlier essay on why “We Need More Attack Ads in Political Campaigns” wasn’t incendiary enough, allow me to heap praise on this outstanding new oped by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen “In Defense of Big Money in Politics.” Few things get me more steamed than when Democrats and Republicans decry “big money” in politics and claim we need to aggressively clamp down on it. What’s even more insulting is when they say this is a smart way to encourage 3rd party political candidates and movements.
What’s really going on here is simple protectionism. The reason that today’s politicians want to regulate cash in campaigns is because the two parties already own the system. Believe me, as someone who has NEVER voted for a politician from either of the two leading parties, I would love for it to be the case that clamping down on campaign spending actually helped 3rd party candidates. Richard Cohen’s column explains why that certainly wasn’t the case with Eugene McCarthy’s historic 1968 challenge to Lyndon Johnson, which was fueled by “big money” contributions from a handful of major donors. Here’s how Cohen begins his piece: Continue reading →
My latest weekly Forbes column asks, “Why Do We Always Sell the Next Generation Short?” and it explores the dynamics that lead many parents and policymakers to perpetually write off younger generations. As the late journalism professor Margaret A. Blanchard once observed: “[P]arents and grandparents who lead the efforts to cleanse today’s society seem to forget that they survived alleged attacks on their morals by different media when they were children. Each generation’s adults either lose faith in the ability of their young people to do the same or they become convinced that the dangers facing the new generation are much more substantial than the ones they faced as children.”
What explains this phenomenon? In my essay, I argue that it comes down to a combination of “juvenoia” and hyper-nostalgia. University of New Hampshire sociologist David Finkelhor defines juvenoia as “exaggerated anxiety about the influence of social change on children and youth.” Once you combine such panicky juvenoia about new media and youth culture with a nostalgic view of the past that says the “good ‘ol days” are behind us, you get the common generational claim that the current good-for-nothing generation and their new-fangled gadgets and culture are steering us straight into the moral abyss.
Instead of panic and hyper-pessimism, I believe that the more sensible approach approach is patient parental engagement and mentoring. I argue that “quite often, the best approach to learning more about our children’s culture is to immerse ourselves in it. Should we worry about the content found in some games, music, or videos? Perhaps we should. Sitting down and consuming that content with our kids and talking to them about it might be the best way to better understand their culture and then mentor them accordingly.”
I enjoyed this new piece by Matt Welch over at Reason about the uses and abuses of the “if we can put a man on the moon” metaphor. “There’s no escaping the moonshot in contemporary political discourse,” Welch notes. Indeed, in the field of technology policy, we hear the old “if we can put a man on the moon, then we can [fill in the blank]… ” line with increasing regularity.
For example, just a few years ago, in the midst of the social networking “predator panic,” several state Attorneys General, led by Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, pushed aggressively for a mandatory online age verification scheme. At several points during the debate, Blumenthal, now a U.S. Senator, argued that “The technology is available. The solution is financially feasible, practically doable. If we can put a man on the moon, we can check ages of people on these Web sites,” he claimed. Of course, just saying so doesn’t make it true. As I noted in a big paper on the issue, online age verification is extremely complicated, likely even impossible, and history has shown that no technological control is foolproof. Moreover, attempts to impose authentication and identification schemes would have numerous trade-offs and unintended consequences, especially for online anonymity, privacy, and free speech. A subsequent report by the Harvard-based blue ribbon Internet Safety Technical Task Force (ISTTF) showed why that was the case. Continue reading →
I’ve never understood why so many people whine about “negative attack ads” during political campaign season. To me, attack ads are just about the only interesting thing that comes out of the early campaign / caucus period. Attack ads are usually chock-full of useful information about candidates and their positions and they typically provoke or even demand a response from the politician being attacked. They also attract increased media scrutiny and broader societal deliberation about a candidate and his or her views.
More importantly, these attack ads and the responses they provoke are far, far more substantive than the typical campaign ad puffery we see and hear. Most campaign ads are packed with absurd banalities ensuring us that the candidate running the ad loves their spouse, children, country, and God. Well, of course they do! Enough of that silly crap. It’s meaningless drivel. Give us more attack ads, I say! They are a healthy part of deliberative democracy and our free speech tradition.
Yes, we pretty much have. That’s the inescapable conclusion following the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic First Amendment decision in Brown v. EMA back in June, which struck down a California law governing the sale of “violent video games” to minors. By a 7-2 margin, the court held that video games have First Amendment protections on par with books, film, music and other forms of entertainment.
The folks over at ALEC asked me to explore what happens next and what steps state and local lawmakers can take in a post-Brown world if they wish to address concerns about video game content. My essay appears in the Nov/Dec Inside ALEC newsletter. You can read the entire thing here or via the Scribd embed I have placed down below the fold.
I argue that, going forward, this ruling will force state and local governments to change their approach to regulating all modern media content. Education and awareness-building efforts will be the more fruitful alternative since censorship has now been largely foreclosed. Continue reading →
I spoke at the MSU/Quello Center’s “Governance of Social Media” workshop on November 11. My talk runs 21 minutes and starts at 1:16:54 in this video. The Q&A begins at 1:41:00.
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.