Miscellaneous

Yes, Anyone Can Be a Reporter

by Steven Titch on June 26, 2012 · 0 comments

In his syndicated column yesterday, Leonard Pitts, Jr. bemoaned the decision by the New Orleans Times-Picayune to cut back its print edition to three days a week, and attacked the sentiment, most recently expressed by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who might herself been quoting Matt Drudge, that the Internet allows “every citizen to be a reporter and take on the powers that be.”

Pitts immediately attacks the comment on the basis of its source, Palin. Then he wanders further from the point by conjuring the truly unpleasant conditions under which reporters, Picayune staffers no doubt among them, labored to ensure news got out in the weeks following Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of the Gulf Coast.

One night I had the distinct honor of sleeping in an RV in the parking lot of the Sun Herald in Gulfport, Miss., part of an army of journalists who had descended on the beleaguered city to help its reporters get this story told. The locals wore donated clothes and subsisted on snack food. They worked from a broken building in a broken city where the rotten egg smell of natural gas lingered in the air and homes had been reduced to debris fields, to produce their paper. Shattered, cut off from the rest of the world, people in the Biloxi-Gulfport region received those jerry-rigged newspapers, those bulletins from the outside world, the way a starving man receives food.

Yet nothing in this rather self-important prose tells us what’s so irreplaceable about printed newspapers as a platform for news delivery. Instead, we get a straw man.

Palin’s sin–and she is hardly alone in this–is to consider professional reporters easily replaceable by so-called citizen journalists like Drudge. Granted, bloggers occasionally originate news. Still, I can’t envision Matt Drudge standing his ground in a flooded city to report and inform.

One can say the same thing about Bill Maher, Keith Olbermann or Wolf Blitzer. Yet, come the next disaster, there’s no reason not to expect the same dedication from a handful of individuals who are driven to place themselves in the middle of an adverse, if not outright dangerous, event just to document first-hand what is happening. Only this time they have the cheap video cameras, battery operated laptops and cellphones with wireless Internet connections. The news will get out.

Continue reading →

0 comments

More disclosure needed: Why did the US government insist on retaining the International Telecom Regs?

by Milton Mueller on June 8, 2012 · 2 comments

In another blog post, I put the International Telecommunication Union’s WCIT into perspective. I ended that discussion with a question that no one else seems to be asking: should there be International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) at all? Why do we need them?

I don’t think we do need sector-specific international regulations. I think they can cause more trouble than benefit. To briefly explain why, I noted that every country has its own national regulations regarding interconnection, privacy, antitrust, consumer protection, and so on. Compatibility across platforms and services is much easier technically than it was in the 1930s and before, and tends to get worked out in the market through a variety of bridging technologies and nongovernmental standards forums. International telecommunications is a form of trade in services, and the WTO agreements already provide a sufficient regulatory basis for foreign or multinational providers to enter national markets and offer transnational services. Though not all countries are members of WTO, membership can be expanded and bilateral or regional agreements can supplement it.

Imagine my surprise when someone informed me that the Europeans were calling for the abrogation of the ITRs for exactly those reasons. Apparently they defended that position for years. But the European drive to get rid of the ITRs was opposed and eventually blocked by — wait for it — the United States of America! The US, I am told, argued that the existing treaty was essential because most of the world’s international communications were regulated by it.

That puts a dramatically new spin on the US’s current campaign to fend off an ITU “takeover” of the Internet. If revision of the ITRs are such a threat to the Internet, why did the US insist on retaining them? If the ITRs are retained, it is inevitable that they would have to be updated and revised. and yet now, the US government is warning us that the revision process poses a major threat to the independence and freedom of the Internet. Something is wrong with this picture.

Most of my information about this is second-hand, from sources that want to remain off the record. But there is proof that the US has defended the importance of the ITRs in an ITU list of documents that can be viewed here. There, in a depository of an ITU expert group that was preparing the grounds for the WCIT, one finds a document submitted by the US entitled the “Continued Critical Role of the ITRs.” Now if you click on the link that I have mischievously placed to that document, you will be taken to a closed, login-required page; before you can read that document, you have to be a TIES member. In other words, this is yet another example of the closed nature of the ITU process. There is another set of papers here that would be of interest in understanding why we even have the ITRs. But they, too, are locked inside TIES.

And that means, this is a job for WCITleaks! The U.S. government should release this document, and if it doesn’t, inside whistleblowers and other people with access to a TIES account need to leak it to us.

2 comments

Andrew Keen on the negative effects of social media

by Jerry Brito on June 6, 2012

On the podcast this week, Andrew Keen, a journalist and author, discusses his new book Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us. Keen believes that social media is causing us to lose our private lives and turning us into what he calls “the cult of the social.” Keen discusses the growing power of companies like Facebook and his concern about the future of privacy and data ownership; as well as possible market and government driven solutions to this problem.

Toward a Greater Understanding of Internet Activism through Public Choice, Economics

by Berin Szoka on May 7, 2012 · 1 comment

In the lead essay for the “Cato Unbound” symposium this month, I analyze recent political movements that have been aided by Internet-based communication by positing a set of questions,

Activists played important roles in bringing down dictators in the Arab world, stopping the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in Congress and electing Barack Obama—just to name a few examples. But how much did the Internet matter in making these watershed events possible? How effective is it likely to be in the future? And how would we measure whether activism “works” for society—not just the activists?

I respond to the concerns raised by Evgeny Morozov in his iconoclastic 2010 book, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (summarized in his short essay in TechFreedom’s free ebook The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet). In general, I suggest that we simply do not yet understand the Internet’s effect on activism well enough to make strong normative judgments about it. But applying Public Choice theory can help us understand how developments in communication technologies are changing the relationship between an individual and the group in social movements. A few highlights:

Social media lower organizational costs, especially of recruiting members, but also noticeability: “members’ ability to notice each other’s actions.” Even in 2003, there was little way to tell whether your friends actually followed through when you asked them to help join a cause. But today, it’s easy to encourage them to re-share material on Facebook or Twitter—and to “notice” whether they’ve done so.
Social media allows members of large groups—think Twitter followers—to be continuously bombarded with propaganda about the worthiness of the cause creating social pressures not entirely unlike those that can be generated in a face-to face group.
The Internet empowers large, dispersed groups (like dedicated Internet users) to organize against small but concentrated interests. As anyone who works in technology policy in Washington can attest, SOPA’s implosion made Congress more cautious—at least about Internet regulation, where fear of a digital activist backlash is greatest. Continue reading →

1 comment

The Kochs, Cato, and Miscalculation—Part III

by Jim Harper on April 20, 2012 · 9 comments

In previous posts about the battle for control of the Cato Institute, I’ve noted (Part I) that the “Koch side” is a variety of different actors with different motivations who collectively seem not to apprehend the Cato Institute’s value. Next (Part II), I looked at why the Koch side is fairly the object of the greater scrutiny: their precipitous filing of the original lawsuit.

My premise has been that the Koch side cares. That is, I’ve assumed that they want to preserve Cato and see its role in the libertarian movement continue. Some evidence to undercut that assumption has come around, namely, their filing of a second lawsuit—and now a third! [Update: Mea culpa—there hasn’t been a third lawsuit. Just a new report of the second one. I had assumed the second was filed in state court and thus thought this was distinct. I’m not following the legal issues, obviously, which matter very little.]

The Koch side may be “on tilt.” Lawsuit-happy, win-at-any-cost. We will just have to wait and see.

For the time being, I will continue to assume that the Koch side has the best interests of liberty in mind and explore the dispute from that perspective. I owe the world some discussion of Cato-side miscalculation—of course, there is some—but before I get to that in my next post, I think it’s worth talking about the burden of proof in the Kochs’ campaign to take control of Cato.

Only fringies will deny that the Cato Institute adds some value to the liberty movement. It does. The question—if preservation of liberty is the goal—is how well it will do so in the future. The central substantive issue in the case—there are many side issues—is how Cato will operate in the future.

Now, here’s a quick primer on public campaigns and the difference between the “yes” side and the “no” side. Continue reading →

9 comments

The Kochs, Cato, and Miscalculation—Part II

by Jim Harper on April 5, 2012 · 5 comments

Last week, I posted about the conflict between the Koch brothers and the Cato Institute, threatening to make that post first in a series. Never let it be said that I don’t follow through on my threats, sometimes.

Recapping: I believe the Koch brothers want what’s best for liberty, but the actions of the “Koch side”—an array of actors with differing motivations and strategies—may not be serving that goal. This seems due to miscalculation: the Koch side seems not to recognize how much of the Cato Institute’s value is in its reputational capital, capital which would be despoiled by a Koch takeover. I basically fleshed out an early point of Jonathan Adler’s on the Volokh Conspiracy.

But why is it the Koch side that gets the attention and not the Cato side? Continue reading →

5 comments

The Kochs, Cato, and Miscalculation

by Jim Harper on March 30, 2012 · 13 comments

It’s well known now that a long-simmering contest for control of the Cato Institute has bubbled over. On the last day of February, Charles and David Koch filed a lawsuit against the widow of former Cato chairman Bill Niskanen, Cato president Ed Crane, and Cato itself seeking to have Niskanen’s shares returned to Cato or granted to the remaining shareholders under the terms of a shareholder agreement. This would give the Kochs (one of whom participated in the founding of Cato) majority ownership, allowing them to elect a majority of Cato’s board. It would also position them to extinguish Crane’s shares so as to gain 100% control.

Cato disputes the Kochs legal positions, and it believes that their success “would swiftly and irrevocably damage the Cato Institute’s credibility as a non-partisan, independent advocate for free markets, individual liberty, and peace.”

The quote just above is from Cato’s “Save Cato” web page, but the more interesting commentary has been scattered by Cato staff and leadership across various blogs and outlets (e.g., Jerry Taylor, Gene Healy, Jason Kuznicki, Julian Sanchez, Jonathan Blanks, Justin Logan, Trevor Burris, Michael Cannon). There has been lots of commentary from many quarters, of course, led by Jonathan Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy. Really, there’s too much commentary to list.

A Facebook page dedicated to “saving” Cato has zoomed past 5,000 supporters.

Now it’s my turn. Putting my thoughts here on TLF is a stretch because I won’t be talking about tech. Think of this as the “liberation” part of Tech Liberation Front. The reason many of my colleagues and I do what we do here is because of both Ed Crane and the Kochs, and the institutions they have built and nurtured. Now these giants in the modern liberty movement are fighting.

That’s a shame for a lot of reasons. There is the overall cause of freedom, of course, our part of which is side-tracked and sullied by the dispute. We Catoites love what we do, fighting for freedom backed by thousands of highly engaged supporters. But don’t go all analytical and forget the hundred-plus Cato staff whose livelihoods and careers are under a cloud. That’s concerning and frustrating, especially for the people with children. Once or twice, I’ve let my colleagues know when I found their arguments overwrought. That personal dimension might be why.

Yes, Cato people are people. And so are Koch people. This is important to surface as part of the theme I want to focus on: miscalculation. Continue reading →

13 comments

Google Isn’t ‘Leveraging Its Dominance,’ It’s Fighting To Avoid Obsolescence

by Geoffrey Manne on March 12, 2012 · 4 comments

Six months may not seem a great deal of time in the general business world, but in the Internet space it’s a lifetime as new websites, tools and features are introduced every day that change where and how users get and share information. The rise of Facebook is a great example: the social networking platform that didn’t exist in early 2004 filed paperwork last month to launch what is expected to be one of the largest IPOs in history. To put it in perspective, Ford Motor went public nearly forty years after it was founded.

This incredible pace of innovation is seen throughout the Internet, and since Google’s public disclosure of its Federal Trade Commission antitrust investigation just this past June, there have been many dynamic changes to the landscape of the Internet Search market. And as the needs and expectations of consumers continue to evolve, Internet search must adapt – and quickly – to shifting demand.

One noteworthy development was the release of Siri by Apple, which was introduced to the world in late 2011 on the most recent iPhone. Today, many consider it the best voice recognition application in history, but its potential really lies in its ability revolutionize the way we search the Internet, answer questions and consume information. As Eric Jackson of Forbes noted, in the future it may even be a “Google killer.”

Of this we can be certain: Siri is the latest (though certainly not the last) game changer in Internet search, and it has certainly begun to change people’s expectations about both the process and the results of search. The search box, once needed to connect us with information on the web, is dead or dying. In its place is an application that feels intuitive and personal. Siri has become a near-indispensible entry point, and search engines are merely the back-end. And while a new feature, Siri’s expansion is inevitable. In fact, it is rumored that Apple is diligently working on Siri-enabled televisions – an entirely new market for the company.

The past six months have also brought the convergence of social media and search engines, as first Bing and more recently Google have incorporated information from a social network into their search results. Again we see technology adapting and responding to the once-unimagined way individuals find, analyze and accept information. Instead of relying on traditional, mechanical search results and the opinions of strangers, this new convergence allows users to find data and receive input directly from people in their social world, offering results curated by friends and associates. Continue reading →

4 comments

Rebecca MacKinnon on Internet freedom

by Jerry Brito on March 6, 2012

On the podcast this week, Rebecca MacKinnon, a former CNN correspondent and now Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, discusses her new book, “Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom.” MacKinnon begins by discussing “Net Freedom,” which she describes as a structure that respects rights, freedoms, and accountability. She discusses how some governments, like China, use coercion to make private companies act a as subcontractors for censorship and manipulation. She goes on to discuss a project she launched called Global Network Initiative, where she urges companies like Google and Facebook to be more socially responsible. MacKinnon believes technology needs to be compatible with political freedoms, and she issues a call to action for Internet users to demand policies that are compatible with Internet freedoms.

Courts, not FCC, Should Protect Free Speech against Mobile Service Shut-offs

by Berin Szoka on March 2, 2012 · 2 comments

Today, the FCC issued a Notice of Inquiry, responding to an emergency petition filed last August regarding temporary shutdown of mobile services by officers of the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) district. The petition asked the FCC to issue a declaratory ruling that the shutdown violated the Communications Act. The following statement can be attributed to Larry Downes, Senior Adjunct Fellow at TechFreedom, and Berin Szoka, President of TechFreedom:

What BART did clearly violated the First Amendment, and needlessly put passengers at risk by cutting off emergency services just when they were needed most. But we need a court to say so, not the FCC.

The FCC has no authority here. The state did not order the shutdown of the network, nor does the state run the network. BART police simply turned off equipment it doesn’t own—a likely violation of its contractual obligations to the carriers. But BART did nothing that violated FCC rules governing network operators. To declare the local government an “agent” of the carriers would set an extremely dangerous precedent for an agency with a long track-record of regulatory creep.

There are other compelling reasons to use the courts and not regulators to enforce free speech rights. Regulatory agencies move far too slowly. Here, it took the FCC six months just to open an inquiry! Worse, today’s Notice of Inquiry will lead, if anything, to more muddled rulings and regulations. These may unintentionally give cover to local authorities trying to parse them for exceptions and exclusions, or at least the pretense of operating within FCC guidelines.

It would have been far better to make clear to BART, either through negotiations or the courts, that their actions were unconstitutional and dangerous. Long before today’s action, BART adopted new policies that better respect First Amendment rights and common sense. But now the regulatory wheels have creaked into motion. Who knows where they’ll take us, or when?

2 comments

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →