Another MSM smear of Ron Paul…
I, for one, don’t know any Ron Paul supporters like that.
Inside the Beltway (Politics) 
This is the Ron Paul netroots campaign boiled down to its essence:
I love how 2/3 of the video is an homage to the endless Enterprise fly-bys in The Motionless Picture.
Hat tip: Threat Level
By Drew Clark
I got the news today from an insider: National Journal’s Technology Daily, which covered the tech and information policy on the inside for nearly nine years, is closing down in January.
I’m no longer a part of Technology Daily, having left in August 2006 to pursue another journalistic opportunity. But I was there from November 1998 until last year, serving as a senior writer for the publication and writing more than 2,400 stories for Tech Daily. When something that you’ve been a part of for eight of its nine-year-life dies, that affects you. It’s time for a moment of appreciation.
Blogs of condolences have already been posted by the 463, by Tech Liberation, and by Andy Carvin’s Waste of Bandwidth (which has the e-mail that went out to Tech Daily subscribers last night).
I can’t help but notice how debased the Google-DoubleClick merger discussion has become.
It started this morning when I read on Scott Cleland’s blog that C|Net journalist Declan McCullagh failed to reveal that his wife worked at Google in publishing his great article exposing Commerce Committee Joe Barton’s selective interest in privacy and merger issues.
So selective is Barton’s interest in privacy that he favored the USA-PATRIOT Act and the REAL ID Act. Now there’s a privacy hawk for you.
Now I discover that the Electronic Privacy Information Center has petitioned to have FTC Chairman Deborah Majoras recuse herself from any review of the merger because of her and her husband’s relationships with a law firm that represents DoubleClick.
Matt Lasar has put together a very entertaining article illustrating how “Faux Celebrity FCC Filings [are] on the Rise.” What he’s referring to is the fact that just about anyone can file comments with the FCC, even fake celebrities or dead historical figures.
The whole process has become a complete joke. Some of my research on the FCC’s indecency complaint process has illustrated how one group–the Parents Television Council (PTC)–has essentially been able to stuff the complaint ballot box at the FCC by filing endless strings of computer-generated complaints from its website. The PTC then fires off letters to the FCC and Congress that essentially say, “Look! Millions of Americans out outraged by the content on TV and are clamoring for regulation!” In turn, that nonsense gets included in the congressional record when legislation is introduced, and politicians claim “the American people have spoken” and are overwhelming in favor of regulation.
It’s all nonsense, of course, because the vast majority of those “complaints” were just the same PTC form letter. But the same games are at work in the debates over media ownership policy and Net neutrality regulation. Jerry Brito and Jerry Ellig have shown that, in the FCC’s Net neutrality proceeding, “Close to 10,000 comments were submitted to the FCC, yet all but 143 were what the FCC calls “brief text comments,” many of which were form letters generated at the behest of advocacy groups.” The same thing is at work in the media ownership debate. A couple of radical anti-media activist groups stuff the ballot box with computer-generated complaints. And the Washington Post recently ran a piece raising questions about how the public filing process is potentially being abused in the XM-Sirius merger fight.
But Matt Laser documents how truly absurd this process has become when the likes of Paris Hilton, Donald Trump, Joseph Stalin, and even Jesus Christ end up submitting “comments” for the “public record.” Here’s some of the highlights from Lasar’s writeup:
Via the 463, a great tech policy publication, National Journal’s Tech Daily, will be shutting down.
This is a loss, but it also represents progress. TechDaily was a subscription service that was quite expensive – more than a thousand dollars per year. (It won’t matter now if I reveal this to any TechDaily reporters, right? . . .) I long ago switched to TechLawJournal, coming in at $250 a year for reporting that serves my needs well. (TLJ reporter David Carney is a machine, people!) And, of course, there are dozens of resources that are completely free.
So, sayonara, TechDaily, and thank you.
Rep. John D. Dingell (D-MI), the House Energy & Commerce committee chairman, is complaining that the FCC isn’t fair, open or transparent. Exasperated political partisans frequently complain about process out of frustration when there is insufficient popular support for their point of view to prevail on the merits. That’s what’s happening here.
Overlooking the many unfortunate attempts lately to re-regulate the cable industry and a few other lapses, the FCC has been extraordinarily successful in terms of removing unnecessary regulation, and Martin deserves much of the credit. In the telecom space, network operators Verizon and AT&T are investing billions upgrading their networks to provide competitive video services as a result of the fact the Bush FCC allowed the Regional Bell Operating Companies into the long-distance market, deregulated last-mile fiber facilities, put DSL and cable modem services on the same deregulatory footing and prohibited cable franchising authorities from unreasonably refusing to award competitive franchises for the provision of cable services. As AT&T and Verizon attempt to capture video market share, the cable operators are ramping up their investment in competitive voice services.
Garrett M. Graff, an editor at large at Washingtonian magazine–and also the first blogger admitted to a White House briefing–has an excellent op-ed in today’s Washington Post asking the same question many of us on this blog have raised before: Why do we let politicians get away with joking about their tech ignorance? Graff provides many examples of how the President, presidential candidates, and leading members of Congress, often joke about their ignorance of the information technology industry and IT policy issues in general. And then he rightly asks: “So, why is it that we blithely allow our leaders to be ignorant of the force that, probably more than any other, will drive and define the nation’s economic success and reshape its society over the next 20 years? Is it because we’re used to our parents or grandparents struggling to program the VCR (yes, they still use VCRs) so that it doesn’t blink “12:00″ all the time, or because we think it’s cute that they grew up in simpler times?”
It used to be easy to laugh about some of this, but as Graff argues, the time for laughing about tech ignorance is over:
The big news this week in communications policy circles was the hullabaloo at the FCC over cable regulation. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin suffered a major setback in his attempt expand regulation of the video marketplace when he failed to get the votes he needed to impose new mandates on cable TV operators. Specifically, Chairman Martin was seeking to breath new life into an arcane provision of a 1984 law–the so-called “70/70” rule–that would have given him much greater regulatory authority over the day-to-day dealings of the cable market.
But the war certainly isn’t over. The day after losing that skirmish, Chairman Martin made it clear he would be pursuing other forms of regulation for the cable sector, including an arbitrary 30% ownership cap on the reach of any cable operator. And the Chairman’s crusade for a la carte mandates on cable will no doubt continue since it has been on his regulatory wish list for some time now, and many other groups support his efforts.
These cable TV regulatory proposals have always been fueled by the same two arguments: (1) cable TV operators have a stranglehold on market entry by new video providers and, (2) because of that, media diversity has suffered. For example, the New York Times editorial board opined this week that: “Twenty-five years ago, cable carriers promised to provide consumers with a wealth of new programming options. Today, the carriers and their packages of unwanted channels are obstacles to choice.” This is the same logic that animates Chairman Martin’s crusade against cable and the efforts of his pro-regulatory allies, most of whom are radical Leftist media critics.
But that logic is dead wrong.
As I mentioned yesterday, James Gattuso and I penned an editorial for National Review this week about the growth of FCC regulation and spending in recent years. In the op-ed, we also noted that, “For whatever reason, a disproportionate number of these [new regulatory proposals] have been aimed at cable television, so much so that press and industry analysts now speak of Chairman Martin’s ongoing ‘war on cable.'”
Today, the editors at National Review have chimed in with an editorial of their own on the issue entitled, “Pulling the Cable on Martin’s Crusade.” Specifically, the editors address what most pundits believe really motivates the Chairman’s crusade against cable: His desire to force cable companies to offer consumers channels on “a la carte” basis in an effort to “clean up” cable TV. “Martin should abandon this particular crusade,” the NR editors argue. “While we are sympathetic to parents’ desire to get the channels they want without having to buy access to racier fare, using economic regulation to restructure an industry is the wrong approach.” They continue:
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.